When one reads the poem “Grains of Wheat” by Avrom Sutzkever (written in the ghetto of Vilna and here read and analyzed in English translation, see here for the full text in another English translation) and stumbles upon the line “As if protecting a baby -,/I run with the Yiddish word,” it is hard not to think of the poet’s firstborn child that was slaughtered in the ghetto the day after he was born; the child was alive just long enough for the mother of the poet to forget that her grandchild was doomed to be killed from the moment he was born, the same way as Herod once “killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region that were two years old or under” (Matthew 2:16). Maybe it is during this short time, during this split second of dissonance, that the poem is written, that the poem takes place. The poet may be unable to save his Jewish child but is now trying to save the Yiddish word (and all that is written with it and within it) with his written words.
Fortsätt läsa ”It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”