Birds Are Drowsing

Leah Rudnitsky

ca. 1942

Birds are drowsing on the branches.
Sleep, my darling child.
At your cradle, in the field,
A stranger sits and sings.
Once you had another cradle
Woven out of joy.
And your mother, oh your mother
Will never more come by.
I saw your father fleeing
Under the rain of countless stones.
Over fields and over valleys
Flew his orphaned cry.

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Creator Bio

Leah Rudnitsky

1916–1943

Yiddish poet Leah Rudnitsky was born in Kalwarija, Lithuania, lived in Kovne (Kaunas), and settled in 1939 in Vilna, where she worked in Yiddish journalism. Ultimately confined to the Vilna ghetto, Rudnitsky wrote poems reflecting the grim circumstances of Jews living under Nazi persecution; she was also a partisan. Her most famous poem, “Dremlen feygl” (Birds Are Drowsing) commemorates the death of Jews slaughtered at Ponary forest, outside Vilna. Rudnitsky perished, possibly in the camp at Majdanek.

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