In the vein of work by Charles Reznikoff and Muriel Rukeyser, PRO­TO­COLS: An Era­sure is Daniela Nao­mi Molnar’s book-length era­sure poem and lyric essay that con­fronts The Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion—the world’s most noto­ri­ous and influ­en­tial anti­se­mit­ic hoax, long exposed as pla­gia­rized fic­tion yet still cir­cu­lat­ed glob­al­ly. Rather than ful­ly erase this ​“zom­bie text,” Mol­nar redacts and re-voic­es it, trans­form­ing its fear, fan­ta­sy, and vio­lence into a rad­i­cal med­i­ta­tion on pow­er, grief, and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of lan­guage. What emerges is not tes­ti­mo­ny in the tra­di­tion of her pre­de­ces­sors but Molnar’s inge­nious con­tri­bu­tion to it: a tes­ta­ment to truth itself. The doc­u­ment remains vis­i­ble as evi­dence of how hatred per­sists, becom­ing a site of memo­r­i­al and remem­brance even as Mol­nar expos­es the psy­cho­log­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal pres­sures that shaped it. Affirm­ing life amid wreck­age, she urges read­ers to ​“ques­tion the basis of harm,” remind­ing us that ​“care is the sum of many hon­est ques­tions.” Draw­ing on Mar­i­anne Hirsch’s the­o­ry of post­mem­o­ry, Mol­nar wres­tles with the trans­mis­sion of trau­ma across gen­er­a­tions, trac­ing her family’s sto­ry — from con­cen­tra­tion camps to New York to the West­ern deserts — into med­i­ta­tions on belong­ing, respon­si­bil­i­ty, and how atten­tion might remake the world. We are not in a gar­den but a think tank: a mind before knowl­edge that para­dox­i­cal­ly keeps knowl­edge alive, where ​“all ideas have roots” in history’s soil, mak­ing space for peace as we wield the ghosts to shape a future.