Can there be poetry after Oct. 7? A new collection shows how
The coffin of Yagev Buchshtav, one of the hostages taken captive during the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. Photo by Getty Images
By Jeffrey K. Salkin September 3, 2024
The German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno famously said in 1949, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Had he lived to see the horror of Oct. 7, would he have said the same about the Hamas terror attack?
With this deep, gashing wound still fresh in our souls — especially in the wake of this weekend’s discovery that six hostages who had spent nearly 11 months in Gaza were murdered — I find myself asking: Can verse possibly contain the pain of that day and its aftermaths?
A new book by Rachel Korazim, one of Israel’s preeminent Holocaust educators, suggests that poetry after Oct. 7 is, in fact, necessary and sacred.
I have long been a fan of Korazim. She is particularly beloved at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where she has taught for many years, and where she presented many of these new poems — by a number of Israeli authors and many of them originally posted on social media — to standing-room only crowds.
The anthology, Shiva: Poems of October 7, includes both the original Hebrew verses and elegant English translations on facing pages. It is not only a book of poetry, but an extension of the scroll of Lamentations, which Jews chanted just weeks ago on Tisha B’Av.
As Walt Whitman might have said, the title alone contains multitudes.
“Shiva” has several meanings here — all of them powerful and interconnected. The word comes from the Hebrew for the number seven, and the massacre of course occurred on the seventh day of October. “Shiva” also refers to the seven-day period of intense Jewish mourning after the death of a close relative.
For the Jewish people, the mourning period for shiva b’October has not ended, it is a shiva that is constantly renewed and extended, as six new families in Israel now begin sitting shiva for the latest group of victims.
What makes the poems in Korazim’s collection particularly sacred is not only their poignancy, their pain, or the flashes of irony and even occasional dark humor they contain. Many of these poems are poems of protest — a prayerful protest.
Protesting — who, or what? Let’s start with God.
The poets wonder: Where was God on Oct. 7?
An excerpt from “Kaddish” by Assaf Gur:
Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba
And no one came
Many thousands called to Him on Shabbat morning
Crying His name out loud
Tearfully begging Him just to come
But He had ceased from all His work…
The poem begins with kaddish, the prayer associated with mourning, but which is actually a litany of praises for God. So where was this praiseworthy God on that Black Sabbath of the Hamas attack? Alas, Gur suggests with bitter irony: It was the day of rest, so God had “ceased from all His work.”
Elsewhere, in the poem “Strong As Death” by Shlomit Naim Naor, we read that “God is hiding in a cellar, bereft of prayer, trembling for his deeds, his whole being is a scream.”
The poet is playing off classic Jewish literature “God hiding in a cellar” is an echo of H.N. Bialik’s “In The City of Slaughter,” written after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, where the poet sardonically describes Jewish men hiding in cellars, watching Jewish women being raped.
The protests in Korazim’s collection extend from God to Jewish holidays. “Where is Moses?” by Astar Shamir addresses Passover 2024.
No, thanks. We’re not OK [b’seder]
We‘re not continuing as usual
We’re not planning the Seder
As though it were the normal April festival of freedom
We won’t celebrate the Exodus from Egypt
We aren’t free, we are all captives
We won’t drink four glasses of wine
We won’t read the Haggadah reclining and intoxicated.
How is this Pesach different? [Mah nishtanah]
He hasn’t yet delivered us from their hands…
Notice the deft punning here. In colloquial Hebrew, you say “Ani b’seder” to mean “I am in order, I am OK.”
Not this year. No one is b’seder; no one is OK, and that challenges the very premise of the Passover Seder, the festive meal of redemption.
What makes these poems different from earlier generations of Jewish protest poetry is that the subject of the protests is not only a seemingly absent God, but an apparently absent or deleterious Israeli army and government. In “Mom is Always Right,” the poet Itay Lev offers a biting critique in the most personal terms:
Mom said that when I grow up there will be no army.
Mom was right.
I haven’t yet grown up and already there was no army.
It wasn’t there when I heard the screaming outside.
It wasn’t there when I saw dad so scared and stressed…
I think of the famous song written after the 1973 Yom Kippur War: “I promise you, my little girl, that this will be the last war.” That has been the eternal promise by Israeli parents to their children: this will be the last war, there will be no more fighting, there will be no more army — because there will no longer be a need for an army.
The promises came ironically true. On Oct. 7, it took hours or even days for the military to respond, as terrified kibbutz residents and refugees from the Nova music festival hid in bomb shelters.
So, can there be poetry after Oct. 7? In “After it is all over,” Avraham Sharon says “A new language must be created.”
For things impossible to describe
In words permitted in human language…
As years go by
A language as yet uncreated will be created
Because it will be impossible to contain everything
With only a break
With only a scream
With only silence…
We will need a new language, Hebrew and English both, because our existing words cannot hope to contain everything we feel after Oct. 7.
Korazim’s Shiva is a labor of love. We are indebted to the translators — Michael Bohnen, Heather Silverman and Korazim herself — for their elegance and sensitivity to language and nuance. This book illustrates the mandate of modern Israel — to continue and to extend Jewish literature and culture into our time.
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