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[After the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Yiddish poet and scholar Ber Kotlerman, who lives in Hallamish, Israel, wrote a number of poems in reaction to that horrific day. Below are two that have been translated into English by Jessica Kirzane, editor-in-chief of In geveb, an online journal of Yiddish literature.
To read the original Yiddish poems, as well as others Kotlerman has written which haven’t been translated yet, see this article.
Ber Kotlerman was born in Irkutsk, Siberia, in 1971 and grew up in Birobidzhan — the Jewish Autonomous Region on the Soviet–Chinese border, where Yiddish held official status. After earning an M.A. in journalism from Moscow State University in 1992, he made aliyah to Israel. Today he is Professor of Jewish Literature at Bar-Ilan University, where he directs the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies and holds the Sznajderman Chair in Yiddish Culture and Hasidism.
Kotlerman has authored more than a dozen academic monographs and edited volumes in English and Hebrew, along with four prose works and one poetry collection in Yiddish. His stories and poems have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Russian, Swedish, German, and Spanish. A Forverts story he co-authored with Alexandra Poljan in 2017, “Finally, Der Nister gets a gravestone,” won first place in the 2017 Rockower awards from the American Jewish Press Association.
Learn more about Kotlerman in this interview by French-Jewish journalist Macha Fogel.]
Sevenfold(A Lamentation)
Steel and iron, cold and hard and dumbForge your heart, oh man – and come!
— Ch. N Bialik, “In the City of Slaughter”
Tear your eyes away from the grey news streamSit on the floor and weep, and moan, and keenAt the sheer horror, obscene.For there, where once a flower bloomed in the field,A girl’s body lies, forlornAnd where an infant clapped its hands in gleeBlood-spattered dolls strewn between the ruined wallsWail without a sound, without a voiceAnd wait for someone to hear them…Forge your pain, your heart, foreverTo that fence, that watchtowerThat should have protected themFrom the slaughter.You — swear your ancient oath, be now their voice:Sevenfold.
Tishrei 5784
New Creation
At night, the moon whispers to my landthat somewhere at the eastern edge of all,in the dark, a hidden gentle arm enfoldsa newborn light in a dazed slumber.
The great universe waits in a soft,velvet dream until its edgeglows in sunrise-scarlet,until its substance takes formand hardens and the earth dividesfrom the heavens once again.
Day breaks and — a new creation.In this world there is no powerthat could suppress that shining hourof hope, of truth, of faith.
Motsei Simchat Torah, 5784
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