Opinion: I’m a daughter of Holocaust survivors. These German students and I are learning about the power of listening
Recently, CNN reported that nearly 180 gravestones at two Jewish cemeteries in Cincinnati were vandalized. An investigation is underway.
Regardless of what such acts are called, the breathtaking rise in antisemitic incidents nationwide and globally is shocking yet also familiar. You don’t have to be a daughter of Holocaust survivors, like I am, to recognize these echoes from Germany in the 1930s; you don’t even have to agree that so-called anti-Zionism is the latest form of camouflage for antisemitism. The rabbi in my hometown, commenting on the cemetery’s desecration, told me that he has begun using the phrase “Jew hatred” in addition to antisemitism, as a way to “communicate more clearly what the problem is.”
I’m thinking about the practice of translation, not just the literal kind, from one written language to another written language, but also the metaphoric kinds, those expressions that stretch even more precariously across chasms of personalities and centuries and even species. Though I’ve been exploring a variety of these exchanges in my newest book about deep listening, the subject is also on my mind because I recently traveled in Germany, meeting with graduate students who have been studying and translating one of my previous books.
Much of my writing focuses on intergenerational trauma that can echo among cultures and histories — among descendants of victims as well as perpetrators. It’s gratifying and inspiring to witness someone wrestling with nuances of accuracy and clarity while searching for the most effective ways to express my ideas and images in their own language. Despite the challenges of poetry as “that which is lost in translation,” as described by late poet Robert Frost, and in keeping with the intent to consider the comprehension of a German audience, these budding translators weigh their choices.
The title of my poetry collection, “Gravity,” strikes several of them, including their professor, as limited in its German equivalent; they explain to me that the German term Schwerkraft lacks the more impressionistic and layered associations it carries in English. Instead, they are considering an entirely different choice for the German edition’s title, based on another poem from the book, “Beyond this Forest” or Jenseit dieses Waldes. Featuring a painting by Gustav Klimt from 1902, the poem depicts a moment in which I first learned that, once upon a time, Buchenwald —the name of the concentration camp in which my father was imprisoned as a teenager — was a word referring to something as innocent and serene as a beech forest.
Having been immersed in my highly autobiographical pages for two semesters, the students ask me questions that are respectful yet probingly intimate. How do I feel now about having been forbidden to learn German as a child? What is it like to visit the country after the death of my father, whose birth in Hamburg and incarceration in Buchenwald shaped so much of my complicated inheritance? What is it like to hear my poems recited in the vocabulary I had been told was, “the language of the murderers”?
Cacophonous with multiple tongues and accents, my childhood was a noisy place. To describe it as an environment in which we didn’t always understand each other would be an understatement. Although my mother’s own mother tongues were Polish and Russian, no one else in our family spoke a word of either. My parents kept Swedish as their secret language, the one from the country in which they had met and fallen in love as postwar refugees. German remained off limits. That left us with English to share — but I confess that we spent a lot of time yelling, trying to feel heard.
In Jewish tradition, rituals related to preparing a body for burial are considered among the most righteous acts of kindness, because they can never be repaid. As explained in an outpouring of grief and rage by the rabbi of my hometown community, desecration of burial sites represents the opposite of such righteousness — namely, behavior that can never be forgiven.
I often feel unable to manage my conflicting feelings about forgiveness when it comes to overt cruelty. I fully understand the desire to condemn a war, to criticize a government, to draw attention to injustice; I also share many of those goals. I have repeatedly deplored American invasions of foreign countries, starting with pacifist convictions I held at the age of eight during the war in Vietnam. And yet, even as a child I understood that I would not have been born if not for the successful liberation of Buchenwald by General George Patton’s Third Army in April 1945.
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In the aftermath of war — and maybe someday instead of war at all — we require quiet spaces in which to pay a deeper kind of attention to what needs to be understood. Can we find a way beyond the noise, beyond the shouting, beyond the forest? There is a poem in my collection called “Stones, again,” in which I describe the long years of loud arguing within my family and our struggles for reconciliation. Germany and Israel became the most improbable of postwar allies after painstaking decades of determined collaboration. Perhaps even more essential than speaking or hearing words of forgiveness, I believe we must work together as a human community to restore tombstones in a desecrated cemetery. This too will take generations of time and effort.
For now, I sit with the German translation students in silence. We listen for the smallest sound.
Despite the diversity ofopinions on how to tackle antisemitism, there's a widespread agreement that its rise is concerning. She noted that during her discussions with German students, several expressed differing opinions on the title of her poetry collection, pointing out that the German translation might not capture the same emotional depth as the original English title.
