Preparing for the Nine Days...

As the nine days approaches, I commence a review of my learning of the events of the churban Beis Mikdash from the gemora and midrashim.

In recent years, though, I have found that poetry (both the kinnos and Yiddish poetry) helps to sharpen my emotional response to the time at hand. In particular, the writings of survivors of many of the major calamities that have befallen our people (i.e. the inquisition, the Holocaust, etc.) As we get closer to the 9^th of Av, I would like to share some of the most striking writings with you.

In Memoriam

Strangers’ eyes don’t see

how in my small room I open a door

and begin my nightly stroll among the graves.

(how much earth, if you can call it that, is enough to bury smoke?)

There are valleys and hills

and hidden twisted paths,

enough to last a whole night’s journey.

In the dark I see shining towards me

faces of epitaphs

wailing their songs.

Graves of the whole

vanished Jewish world

Blossom in the dalet-amos of my tent.

And I pray:

Be a father, a mother to me,

a sister, a brother

my own children, beloved kin,

real as pain,

from my own blood and flesh, be my own dead,

let me grasp and take-in

these destroyed millions.

At dawn I close the door

to the graveyard of my people.

I sit at the table and nod off

whilst humming a tune.

The enemy had no dominion over them.

Fathers, mothers, children from their cradles

encircled death and overcame him.

All the children, astounded,

ran to meet the fear of death

without tears, like little yiddishe ma’aselakh.

and they soon flickered in to flames

like small namesakes of G-D.

Who else, like me,

has in the nighttime his own

dead garden?

Who is destined for this as am I?

Who has so much dead earth awaiting him, as for me?

And when I die

Who will inherent my little graveyard,

And that shining gift,

an eternal yortzeit light,

forever flickering?

--Yaakov Gletshtein, 1961

--Translated from the original Yiddish by

--Avraham Chaim Bloomenstiel