Two stirring poems about Oct. 7 by Ber Kotlerman
The author, a Yiddish literature professor at Bar Ilan University, wrote the poems soon after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023
Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images
[After the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Yiddish poet and scholar Ber Kotlerman, who lives in Hallamish, Israel, wrote a number of poems in reaction to that horrific day. Below are two that have been translated into English by Jessica Kirzane, editor-in-chief of In geveb, an online journal of Yiddish literature.
To read the original Yiddish poems, as well as others Kotlerman has written which haven’t been translated yet, see this article.
Ber Kotlerman was born in Irkutsk, Siberia, in 1971 and grew up in Birobidzhan — the Jewish Autonomous Region on the Soviet–Chinese border, where Yiddish held official status. After earning an M.A. in journalism from Moscow State University in 1992, he made aliyah to Israel. Today he is Professor of Jewish Literature at Bar-Ilan University, where he directs the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies and holds the Sznajderman Chair in Yiddish Culture and Hasidism.
Kotlerman has authored more than a dozen academic monographs and edited volumes in English and Hebrew, along with four prose works and one poetry collection in Yiddish. His stories and poems have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Russian, Swedish, German, and Spanish. A Forverts story he co-authored with Alexandra Poljan in 2017, “Finally, Der Nister gets a gravestone,” won first place in the 2017 Rockower awards from the American Jewish Press Association.
Learn more about Kotlerman in this interview by French-Jewish journalist Macha Fogel.]
Sevenfold
(A Lamentation)
Steel and iron, cold and hard and dumb
Forge your heart, oh man – and come!
— Ch. N Bialik, “In the City of Slaughter”
Tear your eyes away from the grey news stream
Sit on the floor and weep, and moan, and keen
At the sheer horror, obscene.
For there, where once a flower bloomed in the field,
A girl’s body lies, forlorn
And where an infant clapped its hands in glee
Blood-spattered dolls strewn between the ruined walls
Wail without a sound, without a voice
And wait for someone to hear them…
Forge your pain, your heart, forever
To that fence, that watchtower
That should have protected them
From the slaughter.
You — swear your ancient oath, be now their voice:
Sevenfold.
Tishrei 5784
New Creation
At night, the moon whispers to my land
that somewhere at the eastern edge of all,
in the dark, a hidden gentle arm enfolds
a newborn light in a dazed slumber.
The great universe waits in a soft,
velvet dream until its edge
glows in sunrise-scarlet,
until its substance takes form
and hardens and the earth divides
from the heavens once again.
Day breaks and — a new creation.
In this world there is no power
that could suppress that shining hour
of hope, of truth, of faith.
Motsei Simchat Torah, 5784
