Man, Mendel. Di Shtilkeit Mont [“The Silence Demands”: poetry]

This collection of Yiddish poetry is among the very first Jewish books printed in Poland in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which dispatched the country’s three million Jews to their death. The title of the volume is evocative of the poet’s mood, one of utter consternation, having returned home to a scene once teeming with Jewish life, now dominated by silence. “Arum un arum a beis-olom, a shtilkeit noch a shturm, ober di shtilkeit lozt nisht ruhen, zie mont, zie shreit, zie ruft tzu nekomo!” [“All around a cemetery, a silence after the storm, but the silence does not allow rest, it demands, it shrieks, it calls for revenge!”] (From the Foreword by N. Blumental)