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 Letter to Feffer
From other friends—poets, creators,
who are dear to me always,
I step away today,
Feffer,
and turn to you!
The battles still rage
on our literary planet
but it’s time to consider
the creative…
Two Fatherlands
O, if through thy eyes, like through sea waves,
My love could sail like a ship,
Long ago with full sails I would have boldly
Struck to your heart, like to the Holy Land.
If you light up for me in…
Yom HaKippurim
Do you know who turns and returns?
Do you know the meaning of Atonement?
Do you know who watched for you by night,
Late, and in the early morning light?
Do you know who verges on Atonement?
Do you…
Bolted Room
Dark, bolted room.
Thick air soaked with fear and danger.
Fabius Lind—eye to eye
With a bewildering woman.
Fabius Lind is small and trembling,
The woman is big and growing—and pouring out
Odors of a…
Encyclopedia of the Łódź Ghetto
A group of people living together under extreme coercive conditions without the conscious intent of forming a community of common fate created forms that were only possible on the basis of the ghetto…
Call to Arms
Vilna ghetto partisan leader Abba Kovner publicly predicted the Final Solution weeks before the Wannsee conference finalized the Nazis’ plans to systematically murder millions of Jews.
East End My Cradle
Anti-Semitism in my infancy, had its compensations, for being confined practically to children (I speak of anti-Semitism not as a subjective attitude but in its…
A Letter to the Polish Premier
I take the liberty of addressing to you my last words, and through you to the Polish Government and the Polish people, to the Governments and the peoples of the Allied States—to the conscience of the…
Country Fair
The small town resounded with whistling and shouting. The smell of stewing, the smell of frying, the smell of boiling.
Mr. Dykhes had sold all his defective soap to the army.
Mus…
Still, Still
Still, still, let us be still.
Graves grow here.
Planted by the enemy,
they blossom to the sky.
All the roads lead to Ponar,
and none returns.
Somewhere father disappeared,
disappeared with all our…
Shards
Now, when my vision turns in on itself,
My shocked eyes open, all their members see
My heart has fallen like a mirror on
A stone and shatters, ringing, into splinters.
Certainly, not every shard is…
You’ll Return with God’s Help
You will come back.
You will, with God’s help, come back
With a far-off, alien look.
(I’m preparing myself,
I already know,
I’ve seen how they come back.)
You will sit in your regular chair, unsure
A…