My friend the writer
Christina Sanantonio and I have been having a conversation about writing about
loss. It’s a conversation that started
right after the suicide of the novelist David Foster Wallace. I posted two blogs
about his death and the deaths of writers in general and what they mean to us,
and Christina wrote me a long letter about how we use or don’t use language to
talk about loss. She said that, after
her brother died unexpectedly, she felt that the language available to her was
inadequate to express what she felt about his death. Here’s a part of what she wrote:
I felt such a great expanse of void between the sense of
reality that my grief had laid bare and the experiences of others who had not
known despair that I felt I was living in a parallel universe -- alone. The
weight and loneliness of my small burden was enough to keep me tottering, and
often looking longingly into inky voids. I found myself thrust into a
universe where few could speak my language, the complex and limited
language of loss.
In trying to explain this
feeling, she went on to wrote about Primo Levi, the Holocaust survivor and
writer who, like David Foster Wallace, apparently took his own life. Primo Levi talked about the frustration of trying
to write about loss and suffering, especially the loss and suffering so many
experienced in the Nazi camps. He felt
sometimes, Christina wrote, that we needed a new language, a language of the lager, a language of the concentration
camps. Common words for “cold, pain,
hunger,” according to Primo Levi, could not convey what the people experienced
in the camps. Reflecting on what Primo
Levi wrote about the inadequacy of language and what she herself experienced
following her brother’s death, Christina wrote that “We ache for a language
that doesn’t exist.”
What Christina wrote about her loss
and about Levi’s sense of the failure of language touched me. I’ve spent the last 30 years trying to find
words to describe what my parents went through in the concentration and slave
labor camps in Germany during World War II and what those experiences made me
feel. Since I was a child, I had heard
the stories my father told about what happened to him and my mother. He told me about how he was picked up during
a round-up in his village in Poland, and how he was sent to Germany and spent
four years in the concentration camps there.
He told me how my mother was captured by the Germans when they came to
her house; how they killed her mother, her sister and her sister’s baby; how my
mother survived the killing by breaking through a window and hiding in the
woods near her home; and how finally the Germans captured her and took her to
Germany as a slave. My father told me
how, in the years my parents spent under the Nazis, they both saw terrible
things. They saw the normal pain and
suffering of being prisoners under the Nazis, and they saw floggings, hangings,
stonings, shootings, castrations, and rapes.
In one of my poems, “Looking for Work in America,” I wrote that my
father “knew death the way a blind man/knows his mother’s voice.” The same was true for my mother.
For the last thirty years,
I’ve tried to find words to describe my parents’ experiences. In my poems and my lectures about my parents,
I write or talk about the things I heard about, but no matter how powerful the
original event described by my mother or father I seldom feel that I can really
describe it, explain it, bring it out of the past. I can’t bring it out of memory into this
life. Despite my best efforts, I’m
finally left pushing around some words, trying to find some way to convey what
I felt as a child hearing my parents’ story for the first time. Sometimes, I think I have almost succeeded,
most of the time I know I’m not even close.
One of the things I’ve
tried to do to bring my parents’ experiences out of memory is to use the sort
of language they used. People who read
my poems or hear me speak remark on the simplicity of my language and the
story-like quality of my poems. What I’m
trying to do is to capture the way I first heard the stories. My parents had very little education. My
father was an orphan and a farm boy in rural Poland; he never went to
school. Even as an adult in America, he
could barely write his name. If he were
asked to write his name on a check or a Christmas card, he would become
embarrassed. My mother had a little bit
more education. She spent about two
years off and on in a rural school in eastern Poland. She could write her name, do sums, read a
prayer book or a newspaper. I’ve tried
to use the sort of language that my parents’ used. It was a language free of emotions. When my
parents told me many of the stories that became my poems, they spoke in plain,
straightforward language. They didn’t try to emphasize the emotional aspect of
their experience; rather, they told their stories in a matter-of-fact way. This
happened, they’d say, and then this happened:
The soldier kicked her, and then
he shot her, and then he moved on to the next room. I’ve also tried to make
the poems story-like, strong in narrative drive to convey the way they were
first told to me.
For me the poems that work
best are the ones with my parents’ actual language. Those words, for me, are the real thing. In one of my poems, my mother says to me, “If
they give you bread, you eat it. If they
beat you, you run”; in another poem, my dad tells me what he said to the German
guards who beat him and tormented him, “Please, sirs, never tell your children
what you’ve done to me today.” There are
bits and pieces of their words scattered through my poems, and when I read
those words out loud my parents are there with me. My parents’ words are a kind of magic for me.
But how does one convey this magic
to other people?
I think sometimes that all I can do
is read my poems out loud and show people how the poems effect me. I guess what happens then is that my words
become like my parents’ words. I become
my father and mother for that moment in the poem. Sometimes this touches people, conveys the
magic to them.
I’ve seen this happen in some of the
poetry readings I’ve given. I was
recently giving a reading/lecture, and when I got done, I took questions. There were some of the usual questions about
where in Poland my parents came from and why I wrote poems rather than
memoirs. Then, a person in the back
stood up and didn’t say anything. He
looked like he wanted to say something, but he just stood there. I don’t know if the person even had a
question. Maybe he just wanted to show
how much he felt my parents’ lives, or maybe the loss I talked about somehow
reminded him of a loss he experienced and couldn’t talk about and still can’t
talk about. For me, that was a moment
filled with magic. My parents’
experiences had somehow survived my translation of them into the word of my
poems, and by another miracle, the poems had spoken to another person and
touched him with their loss. A miracle.
For me one of the central images of
the Bible is the image of the Tower of Babel.
It represents in my eyes the moment when humanity became trapped in
language that would not communicate what we needed to communicate. What happened at Babel was a second fall
from grace. Our lives became chained to a
language that doesn’t convey what we feel or what we mean. Although we have this deep need to say what
we feel, we often can’t explain it to ourselves or to other people.
Sometimes our words fail us, and
sometimes other people fail us. They
can’t bring themselves to listen to our stories of loss. It’s hard to take on that burden. To show you this, I want to tell two
stories. The first is about my father in
the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
The second is about my mother and me and a poem I wrote about her
experiences.
My father used to tell a story about
a friend of his in the camps who made love to a woman and contracted VD. He came to my father and asked him what
should he do. My father looked him in
the eye and said, “Go to the river and drown yourself.” His friend thought he was joking, and he went
to another friend who told him, “Tell the Germans what you did.” He did and they killed the woman; and then
they beat him and castrated him and killed him.
Fifty years later, when my father was telling me this story, he still
didn’t know what he could have said to his friend to save him from what
happened.
And thirty years after writing my
first poems about my parents, I’m still not sure I get their experiences right
no matter how much I try. One of the
first poems I wrote about my mother is called “Cattle Train to Magdeburg.” When I wrote it in 1978, I was trying to
capture what had happened to her when the Nazis first put in the boxcars and
sent transported her from her home in eastern Poland to Magdeburg, Germany, a
clearing center for slave laborers sent to Germany. My sense of what had happened was based in
part on what my parents had told me about that experience and what I imagined
the experience was like.
Here’s the poem:
Cattle Train To Magdeburg
She still remembers
The long train to Magdeburg
the box cars
bleached gray
by Baltic winters
The rivers and the cities
she had never seen before
and would never see again:
the sacred Vistula
the smoke haunted ruins of Warsaw
the Warta, where horse flesh
met steel and fell
The leather fists
of pale boys
boys her own age
perhaps seventeen
perhaps nineteen
but different
convinced of their godhood
by the cross they wore
different from the one
she knew in Lvov
The long twilight journey
to Magdeburg
four days that became six years
six years that became forty
And always a train of box cars
bleached to Baltic gray.
This poem was first published in
Charles Fishman’s anthology Blood to
Remember: American Poets on the
Holocaust in the early 1990’s. When
I showed it to my father, he couldn’t read it because he couldn’t read English,
and when I showed it to my mother, she wouldn’t read it. That was all in the
past, she said. She didn’t want to think about the war and what her life was
like in the camps.
In 2002, a Polish version of Language of Mules, my first collection
of poems about my parents, was published, and I showed a copy to my mother.
Since my father had died, she’d become more willing to talk about her
experiences in Germany. So she took the book and opened it up; the first poem
she saw was “Cattle Train to Magdeburg.” She read it straight through and told
me what she thought. She said, “That wasn’t the way it was at all,” and then
she started telling me what I got wrong in her story about being taken to the
concentration camps in Germany. This was
wrong and that wasn’t like that. She
wanted me to know all the things I got wrong.
Despite my best effort to find language to describe her experience, I
had failed her and failed her experience.
As I suggested earlier, sometimes our words fail us, and sometimes we
fail other people, the ones who want to share their words of loss with us.
My mother’s response to my poem led
me to write another poem. It’s called
“My Mother Reads ‘Cattle Train to Magdeburg.’” It’s the Prologue to my recent
collection of poems about my parents, Lightning
and Ashes. The language in this poem
is pretty much the way my mother gave her reaction to my poem. After she finished speaking, I took up a
legal pad and wrote what I remember her saying.
Here’s the poem:
My Mother Reads "Cattle Train to Magdeburg"
She reads it through and says
“That’s not how it was.
I couldn’t see anything
except when they stopped
the boxcars and opened the doors
And I didn’t see
any of those rivers,
and if I did, I didn’t know
their names. No one said,
‘Look, look this river
is the Warta, and there
that’s the Vistula.’
What I remember
is the bodies being
pushed out—sometimes
women would kick them out
with their feet.
Now it sounds terrible.
You think we were bad women
but we weren’t. We were girls
taken from homes, alone.
Some had seen terrible things
done to their families.
Even though you’re a grown man
and a teacher, we saw things
I don’t want to tell you about.”
If she were still alive and I were
to show her this second poem, I’m betting she would say the same thing she said
after I showed her the Polish version of the earlier poem, “That wasn’t the way
it was at all,” and I know she would be right.
Christina
Sanantonio said, “We ache for a language that doesn’t exist.” We all want this language. Christina wants it so she can tell me and
other people how much his death means to her.
Primo Levi wanted it so that he could tell you what hunger and snow and
wind meant to a man standing through a six-hour roll call with other prisoners
in Auschwitz. We want others to
understand what we have suffered and what we have lost. This is the “ache” that Christina talks
about. It is a part of language as sure
as the word “the.” We ache for a
language that doesn’t exist so that we can tell someone what we need to
say. And even when we feel that there is
no point in struggling with words to capture what we need to say, we still have
to try. No matter how hard it is to tell
someone something, no matter how much we misunderstand what someone is telling
us, no matter how hard it is to get beyond the Babel we’re caught up in, I
think we need to try.
Will
it change the world? Make anything
different? Better?
We can only hope.
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