BOOK OF YOLEK by Anthony Hecht (1923 – 2004)

Wir haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.*

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail, it doesn’t matter where to,
Just so you’re weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home;
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek, who had bad lungs, who wasn’t a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We’re approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day:
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal.

Martin Luther’s translation of John 19:7 (“We have a law, and by that law he ought to die.”)

There's a sort of "Groundhog Day" quality to this poem -- there's no escape from the month of August. Although August might mark the start of a relaxing camping trip, it is also a month for imprisonment or for liberation (albeit the latter comes too late for some).

The narrator still seems to be at the prison camp -- even though he says "His unuttered name will interrupt your meal," it is more likely the thought of Yolek interrupts the narrator's meals. Hecht conveys not only the immediate horror of a prison camp, but the lasting trauma that affects both prisoners and liberators.

As an aside, I recently read a review of a Canadian film called "Act of God," about people who have been struck by lightning. The reviewer said a particularly moving part of the film was an interview with novelist Paul Auster, who, as a boy at camp, witnessed the death of a 14-year old friend who was holding on to a barbed wire fence when lightning struck. A couple of elements -- the tragedy of a young life ended prematurely, the guilt of a survivor -- seem to be present in the poem, also.

I don't have an explicatory comment on this poignant poem as such, but I'm almost alarmed at this epigram from Luther. What's its application here? A theme of authoritarian inhumanity makes sense generally, or references to positivist rationalizations for what otherwise would be patently illicit and immoral.

But taking Luther and the Gospel of John out of context (?) in this manner is not warranted, in my view. Is Hecht explicitly using Luther to conflate Christianity with the auspices and causes of the Holocaust? Pfui. Even if we acknowledge for the sake of argument Luther's own complaisance at religiously justified executions, even though he himself was in danger of such a fate, that has bugger all to do with the Final Solution. Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann and the gang were literally as "Christian" as Aleister Crowley or L. Ron Hubbard.

Is it "Germanness" or German Christianity Hecht wants to evoke with the use of Luther? Same objection, but with less force.....

Then I did what MaryAnn herself might well have suggested I do right off, and it's an apt suggestion: go look at the text itself. John 19:7 in the King James reads (emphasis added):

"The Jews answered him, [Pilate] we have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God."

Circles within circles. Still, that's what the Christians say the Jews said!

Thanks for your comments, island time. Yes, this is one of the great Holocaust poems, which I used in my class this morning.

The author, Anthony Hecht, was 22 years old when his army division liberated a death camp. The memories stayed with him and caused him to have a mental breakdown at one point.

In this poem, the narrator (“you”) begins the poem while he is camping as an older adult. In the second stanza, he remembers his own childhood at summer camp.

That memory causes him, in the third and fourth stanzas, to imagine a Jewish Orphanage on August 5, 1942, when the Nazis came to round up the children and take them to a death camp. (This description is based on a real orphanage.)

The adult camper, in the rest of the poem, still remembers Yolek’s death after all these years, whether solitary or in crowds, even as he is sitting down to enjoy a meal.

The poem is a sestina, consisting of six six-line stanzas and one three-line envoi (or “send-off”). The six end-words are repeated in a prescribed order, as end words in each of the subsequent stanzas. The concluding tercet brings together all six of the end words.

It's heartbreaking to see how the end words "camp and "meal," for example, change context from stanza to stanza.

The envoi of this particular poem seems to be in the tradition of the Jewish admonition to remember the dead. But I’m not sure how the epigraph works in this poem and hope someone can add something.

Inkberrow, as I said below to islandtime, I had trouble with the epigram as well.

Perhaps he is noting the parallel between the Jews killing the innocent Jesus and the Christians killing the innocent children.

Perhaps he's reminding us that another law to to remember and honor the dead.

The poem at first moves us into familiar settings. Nature, childhood, camping, a fire cooked meal. A most sacred and memorable memory - the catch of a fish, the preparation and cooking of the meal. It can be a religious experience and deeply personal. That is why, to me, the poem resonates to a disturbing level. That food and the ritual meal which can be such a wonderful and meaningful part of life can be interjected, every time, by a memory of unwarranted murder. Is it wrong, the scarred melding of painful memory and meal? It just is - a part of the poets existence (or poets characters existence). I find that coals burning, flesh of the innocent fish, sacrifice of a life in flames draw obvious Holocaust parallels.

Perhaps the Martin Luther quote mirrors the poem (maybe stretching here). It is law, which is right - right? But in this instance we know it to be wrong. A law should be right and sometimes sacred, a meal should be enjoyable and sometimes sacred. Laws seem to be correct, but don't always ring true in the course of human events - a perfect and sacred meal can also be imperfect given the course of human events. Maybe the meal is perfect, a reminder of the memory that ought to be remembered. The young boy has a place at the table.

I read IT's response with some surprise, as my take was that the narrator was not of the camp but one who watched as others went that way. Further readings of the poem led me to think that, okay, IT has a point: how does this person know that this or that happened without having experienced the camp personally. It seems that Mary Ann has cleared that up, at least for me.

As for the troubling issue of Luther's incantation regarding the law and Inkbarrow's further elucidation of its origin, I am reminded from long ago studies in psychology and sociology that one of the most troubling aspects of the holocaust, beyond the apparent acquiesence of the victims to deprivation and death was the willingness of those who perpetrated the crimes, not the Hitlers and the Eichmans and the Mengles (sp?), but the 'gentleman officers' and the foot soldiers and the clerks and the like, to do as ordered, en masse.

It seems to me that the purpose of the poet, beyond reminding us of the holocaust and its reality, a worthy effort in its own right, is to tell us that the ghost who is the young, innocent and frail subject will visit us at our tables. It is not that the ghost will visit the narrator or the poet: that happens already. It is that the ghost will visit us, the readers.

The question is whether he visits us to remind us of what we must prevent, or as the icon of what we forgot and have since allowed to recur. That is to say, are we capable of rising above the law to morality, or are we insistent on obeying.

Take care,

Joe

Hi, SF, I think I may have to have a new rule that I don't post anything at the end of a long workday. (Of course, in that case, I shouldn't be posting now.) I re-read my post and I think it's a new personal best in confusing posts! I assumed the poem's narrator was, like Hecht, a soldier sent to liberate a prison camp, but I did a poor job of explaining that. I was trying to make a point that trauma (in the form of what is now called PTSD) could affect both prisoners and liberators, the narrator falling in the latter group.

The idea seems to be that even with the advance of decades since a horrific event, later generations still bear a moral responsibility for atrocities commited in their country's name; one cannot consider themselves excluded from the fatal commotion that had come before--there is no statute of limitations as to when no longer carries the blood stains and the culturally enscribed rationalizations that made the murder of millions a massive event performed both for the greater good and a fulfillment of an historical inevitability. There is no generational priviledge; whatever one tries to do in occupation, hobbies, lifestyle, the routines of contemporary life, on grand and smaller scales, echo the terror, whisper of one's connection to the evil that was perpetuated, implies without subtlty one's responsibility to change the culture to the true nature of a collective personality that made the unthinkable an historical fact we must confront.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day:
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal.

Hecht, though, is heavy handed in this delivery of what is history lesson and moral that would make for an easy round of applause; one can't argue with his politics or his sense of morality, but the parallelism he uses goes quickly from being an effective device to a trick used a few times too many. As with some other poems of his I've poured over, there is a smugness in his work I find grating, even on points I would otherwise agree without pause or reservation. Handwringing is what occurs to me, a routinely glum observation that humans are fully capable of being evil , dispicable bastards, and that the people who make such monstrosities possible are likewise horrible. This would make a fine speech,but it makes for a poem that wears it's morality like a loud suit of clothes.

Any thoughts on Hecht's epigraph from Martin Luthur, Ted?

An ironic counter point, I think, given the discussion that's already go on ; Luther believed in a higher order and a Higher Law , and was inspired to disregard Papal rule in pursuit of what he considered God's true nature and calling. Laws are written for the convenience of man's convenience, greed and fouler purpose, and the laws the ancient Jews obeyed to justify Christ's crucifixion, as well as the legal and moral right Nazi's claimed for their genocide were cruel, thin fictions that collapsed under historical weight. Hecht seems to want to set us for how consistently small minded we are in our variety of evasions and excuses for the horror we've done; the poem, obviously, reminds the reader that we cannot escape what we've done to one another; my problem with the poem isn't the moral, but the delivery in general--hammering, heavy, lecturing. It's a message without grace .

Hecht, though, is heavy handed in this delivery of what is history lesson and moral that would make for an easy round of applause; one can't argue with his politics or his sense of morality, but the parallelism he uses goes quickly from being an effective device to a trick used a few times too many.

Perhaps another problem might be the limitations he placed on himself by using the sestina form

MaryAnn:

Perhaps another problem might be the limitations he placed on himself by using the sestina form

That is the major problem, I think, since he's obliged by the sestina's requirements to repeat phrase and idea in conspicuous variations that extinguish the possibility of surprise. Good poets work through their metaphors and themes so that a premise they begin evolves into something larger later in the work--a reader, when the poems are succesful, gets an idea of how ideas are not fixed things, unchanging, but rather change when made to interact with a crucial "otherness" that conincide's a verse's codified vernacular. There can be, I think, some playfulness in the language that can make even the most baleful subject stick with you without cramming your face deep into the moralizing. Hecht's choice of sestina, though, coincides with intent. He obviousl didn't want his audience to miss his intended ironies and picked a form that would make interesting obfuscation difficult, if not impossible.

Hi, MA, Ted has explained the epigraph pretty much the same way I would have. Laws are inflexible and can lead to the sacrifice of an innocent young man (or boy), and in that regard there is not a lot of difference between how the Jews justified to Pilate what should be done to Jesus and how the Nazis justified what they did to the Jews. I don't see the epigraph as a condemnation of Martin Luther or Germany but as a condemnation of what happens when laws take the place of reason and compassion. Interestingly, what I think of as Hecht's ironic parallelism (e.g., how a walk in August might be a pleasure or a torture) extends to his epigraph. The irony of the parallel fates of a young Jewish boy and Jesus are similar ... and senseless.

Hi, Ted, You present some good arguments against the use of the sestina, but I wanted to add that as sestinas go, Hecht did a good job. For instance, I read the poem for the first time without realizing it was a sestina, although generally the recurrent words and the circular/repetitive nature of the rigorous form will make it readily apparent. I admired how Hecht's modest modifications ("1942," "to," "too" and "tattoo" are all variations on one of his six repeating words) went a long way to alleviate some of the redundancy.