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“May an unforeseen disaster
Overtake your worthy master,
The wagoner, Reb Benjamin,
And strike at you along with him.”
The horse was saying
to the whip and neighing,
“Did you ever
Hear of such a…
Hush little baby. Forty-six years now
the night has rocked itself in my empty cradle
Now a gray head is rocked to sleep with the same tune:
Standing at the cradle’s head
No angel with two white wings…
Come, let us hide ourselves in caves,
in stony crevices, in graves
where stretched full length on the hard ground
we lie, backs up and faces down.
We shall not record, we shall not say
why we’ve…
(Written at the end of 1939 in Havana—with thoughts about Poland)
Our poor nest eternally atremble
in the wind.
What will happen now, in bloody storm,
mayn kind?
Now, in bloody storm . . . ?
The…
Jews, let us be cheerful!
It won’t be long, don’t fear—
The war will soon be over.
Their end is very near.
Cheerful, don’t you worry.
Don’t go around so sad.
Have both hope and patience—
Bear things…
Inspired by the Warsaw ghetto uprising, this hymn became the anthem of the Vilna partisan fighters and many other Jewish efforts to resist the Nazis.
And thus it came to pass, and this was the beginning . . . Heavens tell me, why?
Tell me, why this, O why? What have we done to merit such disgrace?
The earth is dumb and…
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…
A lion drew his final breath,
And animals were bereft by his death.
There was no one to rule the realm,
So everyone wanted to take the helm.
When the animals realized their quandary,
They discussed…
Rabbi Levi Yitskhok’s drayman—the one who wore
tales and tfiln as he smeared the wheels
of his wagon with tar—
turns up in the shape of a bunch of Jews
hanging around their houses,
washing the car
(w…