Etikett: english

I. B. Singer’s short story ‘The Last Demon’ appears on the surface to be exactly what it says it is: a (very) short story about a demon that is the last of his kind dealing with the quandary concerning what demons should do and why there even should be demons when ‘man himself is a demon.’ In much the same vein, Adorno once deemed it ‘barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz’—not impossible, as is often claimed, a reading later challenged or qualified. Primo Levi, in turn, said, ‘After Auschwitz, it is no longer possible to write poetry except about Auschwitz.’

“Chronicle of a Single Day” is a text from the volume Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto (written in the Warsaw Ghetto in August 1941 and here read in the English translation) whose recurring themes are hunger and confinement. The text in question is undoubtedly the most literary in this volume; it refers openly to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and nods to many other literary texts; the ramblings and wanderings of both the body and the mind of the protagonist make one think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, where the main protagonist Leopold Bloom is not starving, but is all the same, in Episode Four of the book, obsessed with items of food, with kidneys and other offal, and carries them around with him; much in the same way as this text’s protagonist figuratively speaking carries with him, and during his walks is confronted with, those who are already dead and those who are not yet dead (which seems, despite some allusions to former and present societal divides, like the mention of the ricksha-carried chair of the Judenrat, to be the only two categories of people still left); the flesh that already is or soon shall become grass (Isaiah 40:6).

Already in one of the first scenes of the film Unzere Kinder (which follows the newsreel prologue that depicts the harsh reality of Jews being mass-deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp and what happened to them and their belongings there), the children from the orphanage who belong to the very small number of surviving Polish-Jewish children protest and confront the two Kleinkünstler returning from exile in the Soviet Union, who are essentially playing themselves and in a sketch perform a sentimentalized version of the wartime events (“because that is not how it was”). This opens up the divide (in the context of the film) between the children who were forced to become survival artists (compare the quote from one of the boys, “It was my job to trick the German gendarmes”) and the returning artists who survived the war exiled deep into Soviet Russia.

This article examines a text about the declining morals and mores of the Jewish inhabitants of the wartime Warsaw Ghetto, presumably written on 4^th July 1942. It is derived from the “Street” section of Volume One of The Ringelblum Archive Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (published by Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma; Warsaw). The text is attributed to Stanisław Różycki, and its complete title in translation reads as follows: “4^th July. Warsaw, ghetto. A study [of] ‘Ulica’ [The Street]. The appearance and the social life of the street in the ghetto” (hereafter referred to as the Morality of the Street). The original text is written in Polish and described on the archive’s website as: “handwritten, notebooks, ink, Polish, 150×197 mm, 31 sheets, 31 pages”. In the transcribed English translation I am analyzing and quoting here, the text consists of around 8,800 words, including footnotes, spread over 19 A4 pages.

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.