Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
A Well in the Field
Shepherds had dug a well in the field
but herds of others encircled it.
They left, roaming the mountain trails,
the shepherds who had dug it.
Oh, oh, oh! Desert oases . . .
the lanes of the herd…
Kol Hakavod!
At noon in the kasbah
When the souk was packed
I’d be walking around
My chest toned and hard
And they’d all be saying: What a guy
And as I walked down the alleyways
From every window…
Memorial Service
Crags in the mountains facing us
are like bereaved mothers
who long ago altered their image:
dew does not slake them,
the sun does not gild them.
—How terrible their silence
and where can we flee?—
A…
The Language of the Third Reich
People are forever quoting Talleyrand’s remark that language is only there in order to hide the thoughts of the diplomat (or for that matter of any other shrewd and dubious person). But in fact the…
If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz)
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering…
Hope against Hope: A Memoir
The death of an artist is never a random event, but a last act of creation that seems to illuminate the whole of his life under a powerful ray of light. [ . . . ] Why are people surprised when poets…
Blood from the Sky
The only garden left in our walled-up town was the old cemetery, whose earliest graves dated back to the thirteenth century. It was densely overgrown. Picking one’s way to its remoter corners meant…
Bread for the Departed
He felt a gnawing sensation. He knew it was hunger. Nothing in his mouth since morning except for those slops, the slops from the Judenrat kitchen, a watery soup that was almost free, just fifty…
I Do Not Feel at Home Here
I went to see to my sister in Berlin.
She wants me to consider moving in.
Her husband’s passed away now, a schlemiel,
He left her too much money in his will.
Her residence is filled with precious…
A Convoy from the Village
He remembers well how for the first time in his life he tried to cross the big street in Baghdad. With one hand his mother held onto him and with the other she held her long and wide cape, looked…
The Zulu and the Zeide
Harry was the only person who knew that he and his father had quarrelled shortly before the accident that ended the old man’s life took place; this was something that Harry was to keep secret for the…
Musicians and Watchmakers
“Act dumb,” Otilia advised me. “Change the subject.” To help me understand what she meant, she illustrated by relating a conversation she had had with a neighbor. It was December, when a great deal of…