SOURCE: "The Holocaust and the Bible in Israeli Poetry," in Modern Language Studies, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, Fall, 1994, pp. 63-77.

[In the following essay, Jacobson examines biblical allusions in Israeli Holocaust poetry.]

Although the destruction of European Jewry in World War II took place outside of the Land of Israel, Israeli culture has been greatly preoccupied by this historical event. Zionism was a movement founded in Europe with the purpose of saving the Jews of the Diaspora from gentile anti-Semitism. For Jews engaged in the Zionist enterprise in the Land of Israel during and immediately after World War II, Hitler's genocidal attack on the Jews of Europe grimly confirmed their conviction that Diaspora Jewry was doomed and that the only viable alternative for Jews was the development of the Land of Israel into a sovereign Jewish state. As Dina Porat observes, the events of the beginning of the War were already enough to confirm this Zionist conviction:

The suffering of Polish Jews, the largest community in Europe, in the ghettos appeared to the Zionists as proof confirming their predictions that diaspora Jewish life would end catastrophically. The contrast between the destruction of European Jewry and the constructive efforts in Palestine to build a homeland seemed ample confirmation of Zionist assumptions. Tragically, it was a far stronger confirmation than the Zionist movement had wanted or needed.¹

At the same time, as Tom Segev has noted, even if the Zionists were powerless to stop the Nazis' program of genocide, the destruction of European Jewry put Zionism in a position of defeat, for "the Zionists were unable to convince the majority of the world's Jews to come to Palestine before the war, while that was still an option."² This failure of Zionism was experienced on a particularly painful level by the many Jews who had emigrated from Europe to the Land of Israel before the War and had to come to terms with the fact that their grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends were among the victims of the Holocaust. For those mourning such personal losses the issue was how to live with a sense of guilt for having saved themselves in time by emigrating to the Land of Israel and having failed to influence or help their loved ones to do the same.

The Jews living in the Land of Israel in the years since the end of the War have related to the Holocaust not only as an historical event of the past. Living representatives of that period, the survivors, flooded the Land of Israel in the years immediately before and after the establishment of the State in 1948. From 1946 until 1951, so many Holocaust survivors emigrated from Europe to the Land of Israel that almost one quarter of the population of Israel in 1951 were Holocaust survivors.³ Eventually, Israel became the country with the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors relative to the Jewish population.⁴ The living legacy of the Holocaust survivors has continued with the birth of a second and third generation of descendants of the survivors, who are personally affected by their forebears' sufferings.

Those Jews who were in the Land of Israel during World War II, as well as those born after the War, initially had an uneasy relationship with the survivors of the Holocaust. As Tom Segev observes, the Jews of the pre-State Zionist settlement period had developed an image of the fighting, native-born sabra as the ideal to replace the Jew of the Diaspora, who was seen as weak and defenseless, and the survivors of the Holocaust were viewed as seriously falling short of that ideal. Not only were the survivors viewed as flawed, but their very presence was seen as a threat to the Zionist program to liberate the Jews from what Zionism saw as the negative qualities of Diaspora Jewish life:

The sabra represented a national ideal, and the Holocaust survivor its reverse. Moreover, the survivors threatened that ideal at a time when sabras were still fighting their parents' generation for preeminence in Israeli society. The country fostered the sabra image, seeing in it the fulfillment of the Zionist and labor movement dreams of national renewal and return to a "healthy" social structure. Yet most people could not live up to this ideal. They had not lived long in the country, and many had not yet rid themselves of their "Diaspora mentality." Holocaust survivors imposed on earlier immigrants a past that many had not yet succeeded in putting aside, and their disdain of the survivors often reflected a desire to distance themselves, to deny what they themselves were. The survivors forced the Israelis to realize that the vision of the "new man" was not to be. Most came as refugees, not as visionary Zionists.⁵

Segev quotes the account of Yoel Palgi, who when he returned to the Land of Israel in 1945 from a paratrooper mission in Hungary found that his fellow Jews viewed the victims of the Holocaust in derogatory terms:

Everywhere I turned .. . the question was fired at me: why did they go like lambs to the slaughter? Suddenly I realized that we were ashamed of those who were tortured, shot, burned. There is a kind of general agreement that the Holocaust dead were worthless people. Unconsciously, we have accepted the Nazi view that the Jews were subhuman.⁶

In his collection of essays Masot beguf ri'shon (Essays in First Person) the Israeli survivor novelist Aharon Appelfeld (1932-) conveys his painful sense on arriving in his early teens in the Land of Israel in 1946 that the survivors had been fit into a national myth that called into question their political sagacity, as well as their moral character.

The days of the eve of the War of Independence were days of great excitement. Modest words and lofty words were mixed together. Expressions and slogans were created without much thought: the expression "destruction and revival" was festively adopted, and connected with it were notions of cause and effect, rebuke and justification, mourning followed by celebration. In short, it is practically a law, the slogan proclaimed, that on the ashes of one period will rise another period. The application of the interpretation swooped down on us and without mercy established parallels: exile—redemption, Zionism versus assimilation, the guilty as opposed to the blameless, the wise as opposed to the naive. There was a terrible transparency to these analogies.⁷

As Dina Porat puts it, the survivors were suspected of having engaged in morally compromising acts to save their lives during the War:

Slowly, the suspicion developed [among Jews who had not experienced the Holocaust] that those who survived had perhaps managed to do so because they had been unwilling to sacrifice themselves in the struggle against the Nazis. . . . Comparisons were often made between the Zionist image of a productive person, imbued with universalistic humanistic values, who worked for the common good, and the survivors, who seemed, at first sight, to be the polar opposites of that ideal type.⁸

One kibbutz Passover Haggadah went so far as to blame the deaths of the victims on their passivity:

Hitler alone is not responsible for the death of the six million—but all of us and above all the six million. If they had known that the Jew has power, they would not have all been butchered .. . the lack of faith, the ghettoish-exilic self-denigration . . . contributed its share to this great butchery.⁹

Even though, as Porat notes, the heroism of the survivors in their role of courageous illegal immigrants and soldiers in the Israeli army often belied their image as "the polar opposites" of the ideal Zionist type, Israelis who had not experienced the Holocaust continued to have a problematic relationship with that period. This difficulty of connecting the experience of national rebirth in the establishment of the State of Israel with the experience of defeat in the Holocaust apparently was one reason why in the early years of the State the Holocaust played a very small role in the consciousness of Israelis. Porat writes that during this period.

it seems as if all talk of the Holocaust and its survivors disappeared from the Israeli scene. The Holocaust was not taught in schools, nor was it a topic of research at the Hebrew University (the only one in Israel at the time). In drama and theater, the Holocaust was hardly mentioned; and when it was, it was mostly as part of the background. In both poetry and fiction, other topics shaped the agenda.¹⁰

Aharon Appelfeld describes this period of public avoidance of the Holocaust in Israel as one in which both the survivors and those who had not been in Europe during World War II tacitly agreed to refrain from talking about an historical event that seemed to be too horrible to contemplate:

And just as the [survivor] witness could not continue to stand in the space of this terror, neither could the Jew who had not experienced it. A kind of secret covenant was created between the survivor witness and the one to whom, as it were, this testimony was directed, a covenant of silence....¹¹

As many scholars have noted, the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961-62 made an important contribution to Israeli identification with all Holocaust survivors and victims, whether or not they participated in armed struggle. The opportunity the survivors had to tell their stories to the nation when they testified in the trial broke what Appelfeld has characterized as "the covenant of silence" between the survivors and Israelis who did not experience the Holocaust.¹² In an article that appeared in the Israeli daily Ma'ariv at the time of the Eichmann trial, two native-born Israeli writers, the prose writer Moshe Shamir (1921-) and the poet Dalia Ravikovitch (1936-), made revealing comments indicating how deeply affected they were by the Holocaust on a personal level. In his comments Shamir notes that his relationship to the Holocaust is most problematic precisely because his "normal" life and that of his fellow Israelis is so radically different from that of the evil years of World War II:

But when the Eichmann trial took place in the early 1960s—there was the great, dramatic, and shocking contrast between the world that this trial evoked and the experience of our lives today, when people traveled to hear the trial in their private Volkswagens, with German gasoline—this contrast, for me at least, made concrete for the first time in an actual personal experience the fact of the great distance between my life and that conflagration. The power of the testimonies of death in the trial in the context of our life of dolce vita caused me, more than anything else, to feel for the first time the subject of the Holocaust as my personal problem.¹³

In her comments Ravikovitch asserts that the suffering of the Holocaust has strongly influenced all Israeli writers, even a writer like herself who as a third-generation resident of the Land of Israel did not have any first-hand experience with that tragic event:

The Holocaust gave us a feeling of disintegration, even if this disintegration gave a new color to our literature. The Holocaust is like a hand grenade that exploded and each of us received his personal piece of it in his body. And this piece is hidden also in most of our poems. Unconsciously, therefore, the subject of the Holocaust is the central subject in our literature, even to the point that love poems become horror poems and children's poems cannot distract them from unfortunate maturity.¹⁴

It has been a central tenet of Zionism that the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel in the twentieth century constitutes a restoration of the sovereign existence of the ancient Israelites in the Land of Israel in biblical times. This tenet has often led Israelis to see themselves as reenacting the Bible. In the context of this close identification with the Bible it is not surprising that Israeli poets have so frequently published poems that allude extensively to the Bible. These poems assume the likelihood of discerning analogous relationships between contemporary Israeli and ancient Israelite events. Among those Israeli poets who have identified with the destruction of European Jewry in World War II, several have written poems about the Holocaust with extensive allusions to the Bible. In these poems biblical expressions and images serve as emotionally powerful vehicles to express the poets' visions of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The effect of such poems is to assimilate the Holocaust experience to the Bible and thereby establish for the poets and their readers a more direct connection with the destruction of European Jewry in World War II. In so doing, they follow a trend in Jewish Holocaust literature noted by Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi:

It can be said, then, that even though both internal and external forces had eroded the links between Yiddish and Hebrew literature and the literary and religious traditions which had reflected and shaped collective responses to catastrophe over the centuries, most of the writers who have appropriated the subject have also appropriated the classical forms, as if these provided access to an otherwise unintelligible and inarticulable experience.¹⁵

Even as Israeli poets appropriate biblical imagery to write about the Holocaust, however, the very gap that they sense between their world and that of the Holocaust is paralleled by the gap that they sense between what the Bible teaches about reality and the reality of the Holocaust. This drives them to the effort characterized by Robert Alter as "standfing] the [biblical] sources on their heads, borrowing images, symbols, and situations for the expressive needs of a very different kind of poetic voice."¹⁶

The poet Amir Gilboa (1917-1984) emigrated from Eastern Europe to the Land of Israel at the age of twenty, two years before the outbreak of World War II. His parents, two brothers, and four sisters all died in the Holocaust. His situation as an emigrant to the Land of Israel who lost family members in the Holocaust was, as we have seen, not unique. In many European Jewish families it was members of the younger generation in their late teens and twenties who were adventuresome enough to move to the Land of Israel, often leaving behind their parents and siblings in Europe. By the time they became fully aware of the Nazi threat to their families, those who had emigrated to the Land of Israel were powerless to help them.

Two poems by Gilboa based on biblical allusions reflect the ways that life in the Land of Israel feels so distant from life in the Holocaust. Despite that distance Gilboa, who mourns the death of his immediate family in World War II, is driven to imagine in one poem that the spirit of a member of his family visits him in Israel, and he is driven in another poem to imagine himself in Europe at the time of the War, possibly capable of changing the course of history.

In his poem "Penei Yehoshua'" ("The Face of Joshua")¹⁷ the speaker imagines seeing the face of his dead brother Joshua in the moon.¹⁸ Consideration of Gilboa's relationship with his brother may shed light on the significance of this poem. In her monograph on Gilboa, Eda Zoritte notes that Gilboa had been very close to his brother Joshua. The image of the brother Joshua able to follow the speaker to Israel has added poignancy when we consider that the brothers shared a strong commitment to Zionism in their youth. Together with another friend the two brothers established the local branch of a Zionist youth group in their town. As the older brother, Joshua acceded to their father's pressure to abandon his Zionist activities and learn the family trade of tailoring. Gilboa, in contrast, defied their father and insisted on emigrating to the Land of Israel in order to fulfill his desire to be a Hebrew writer in Zion.¹⁹

Western folk belief has often contained the image of the restless ghost of a person who was murdered before his or her time or whose life work was unfinished. The best known literary expression of this image is in the first act of Hamlet, in which Hamlet's father's ghost appears to him to reveal to him that he was murdered.²⁰ Having been dealt an untimely and unjust death by the Nazis, the speaker's brother Joshua appears to him in the form of the face people often discern in a full moon. In this case the face that the speaker sees is that of the biblical hero Joshua. Gilboa has apparently drawn on an expression that appears in a talmudic interpretation of a passage describing the beginning of the transition of power from Moses to his successor Joshua. In that passage God commands Moses, "Give him [Joshua] some of your authority (mehodkha) . . ." (Numbers 27:20). According to the talmudic interpretation the reason the biblical passage reads "some of your authority," and not "all of your authority" is that Joshua was less honored than his predecessor Moses, to such an extent that the elders of the generation in which the transition took place made use of the contrast in strength between moonlight and sunlight to state, "The face of Moses was like the face of the sun; the face of Joshua was like the face of the moon" (Baba Batra 75a).²¹ In an analogous way, as he appears in Israel the speaker's brother's honor would be considered by other Israelis to be tarnished, for he did not fight during World War II in the Zionist spirit of armed self-defense:

And Joshua above looks at my face. His face of gold
beaten. Cold dream. Embalmed dream.
And at my feet the sea strikes eternities on the shore.
I am sick of longing for him. It seems I am about to die.
But I must, I must wait alive
forever.
My brother above, his face rising in a cloud
To recount my footsteps in the washed away sand.
The sea strikes and withdraws. Strikes and withdraws.
Warring forces of nature conditioned by law.
I. In the wind. Another. Flee. Far.
Joshua too now rests from wars.
That he gave in inheritance to his people,
but a grave he did not dig for himself
in the mountains of Ephraim.
So night after night he goes out
to meditate in the heavens.
And I am sick, it seems about to die
barefoot in the sand of a cold moon
at the edge of the water
and roaring in me, roaring in me the end
striking my death at my feet
wave after wave—

upon much life
it will be extolled and glorified. 

The association of the moon with Joshua's face is significant, as Hillel Weiss suggests, in terms of the image of the moon's symbolic death and renewal in the monthly cycle of waning and waxing, which parallels the rhythmic coming and going of the waves of the sea.²² Like the moon, the dead brother Joshua is regularly resurrected and continually returns to haunt the speaker. As the speaker stands on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, he compares his brother Joshua to Joshua of the Bible. The life and death of his brother, the Holocaust victim, stands in marked contrast to the life and death of the biblical Joshua. Joshua led the ancient Israelites in many battles with the residents of Canaan, and their victories gave him the power to divide the land of Canaan, granting an inheritance (hahalah) to each tribe. When he died, the Bible recounts, Joshua was buried in the mountains of Ephraim (Joshua 24:30). The speaker's brother Joshua also experienced war, not as a victorious fighter, but rather as a defeated victim. The rest granted him after his defeat as a young victim of the Nazis was very different from that of the biblical Joshua, who was buried at the age of one hundred ten after a long and successful life. The speaker's brother did not have the benefit of being buried in the Land of Israel, and because he lacks the sense of personal completion that the speaker feels as a resident of Israel, "night after night he goes out / to mediate (lasuah) in the heavens," a description reminiscent of Isaac, who "went out to meditate (lasuah) in the field" (Genesis 24:63) in the period between his near sacrifice by his father Abraham and his marriage to Rebecca. Joshua is an actual victim, without the sense of divine purpose that accompanied the binding of Isaac, nor is he about to experience the blessings of marriage that Isaac eventually was granted. What is left from the speaker's brother Joshua's life is the memory of the struggle for Jewish survival in Europe in World War II, and what has followed his life is the continuing struggle for the survival of Israel in which the speaker participates.

There is a particular irony in the speaker using expressions that play on references to the Song of Songs. As Arieh Sachs notes, the original Hebrew for "I am sick of longing for him" ('ani holeh nehiyyato) is based on the expression "sick with love" (holat 'ahavah) in Song of Songs 2:5; 5:8, and the original Hebrew for "much life" (hayyim rabbim) in the context of the sea water imagery in the poem alludes to the expression "many waters (mayim rabbim) cannot quench love" in Song of Songs 8:7.²³ The pain of the speaker is reinforced by the ironic contrast between the unbridgeable gap separating him from his dead beloved brother and the celebration of union in love that is so central to the Song of Songs.

The speaker's longing for his unjustly murdered brother evokes in him a nearly overwhelming preoccupation with his own mortality. The poem is largely about the tension between his sense of the arbitrary cruelty of humanity's mortal condition and his acceptance of this reality. Indeed, the victimization of his brother and the mortal limitations of humanity stand in marked contrast to the sense of control of their fate that Israelis have felt they share with the victorious Joshua. There are, the speaker suggests, natural and historical forces that set limits to the possibility of human accomplishments. The lines 'The sea strikes and withdraws. Strikes and withdraws. / Warring forces of nature conditioned by law" connect the reality of the Holocaust and the forces of nature and contrast them with the heady self-confidence of Israelis identifying with Joshua's conquest of Canaan. The Hebrew terms used to refer to striking and withdrawing (makeh venasog) have military associations. The waves of the sea reflect a static, eternal rhythm of aggression and acquiescence in which the Holocaust victims were caught. As an Israeli who believes in his country's ability to assert power and who feels uncomfortable facing the necessity at times to acquiesce when his country cannot successfully assert power, the speaker must come to terms with this alternative reality of the defeat of the Holocaust victims at the hands of forces beyond their control.

The speaker can only accept human mortality when he is able to see the death of his brother and his own ultimate death as events that cannot be changed. By associating this healing acceptance of reality with the Joshua story, Gilboa points to the larger national question of how to make peace with the past limitations on Jewish power in Europe and the present limitations on Jewish power in Israel. At the end of the poem the speaker internalizes the wave-like reality of his mortality, and just as the believing Jew confirms the reality of God's power in the traditional Jewish memorial prayer, the Kaddish, so the speaker makes use of words from that prayer, "it will be extolled and glorified" (yitromam veyitgaddal) to declare his acceptance of the ultimate victory of death.

A person in the position of Gilboa undoubtedly experienced a tremendous sense of frustration at not being able to save his family from destruction at the hands of the Nazis. Gilboa captures that sense of frustration in his poem "Bamatsor" ("Under Siege").²⁴ In the poem the poet's desire to bridge the geographical and chronological gap between his existence in the Land of Israel and the European Holocaust is represented by the speaker travelling back in time to the period of the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians. The use of a biblical scene to represent the Holocaust is in keeping with the trend among Israeli poets to assimilate the Holocaust experience to the Bible as a way to connect more directly with that experience.

In the beginning of the poem the suffering of the people is captured by selected concrete images of hand-to-hand combat, walls crumbling, and a little girl scurrying about, but holding back any cry of fear. When the speaker sees the horrifying image of a man who has been blinded screaming he calls out, like a viewer of a suspenseful movie, to one of the central characters of the period, the prophet Jeremiah, to do something to prevent the disaster: he requests that Jeremiah assassinate Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylonia, before that enemy of Judea can be victorious:

The hand of each man is against his neighbor
and wall after wall crumbles.
Little Daliah scurries about,
no one is with her
and she doesn't cry.
Who's this facing the sun
screaming.
Aie, already not eyes in
his burning sockets.
Jeremiah, Jeremiah
take what I have been saving
the pistol
and for God's sake
a small bullet
in Nebuchadnezzar's heart
will be praised.

The speaker's decision to call out to Jeremiah is significant. In the period leading up to the destruction of the First Temple, Judea, under the leadership of King Zedekiah, rebelled against the rule of the Babylonians. Jeremiah opposed the rebellion, because he believed that the Babylonians had been sent by God to punish the people of Judea. He advised the king to submit to Babylonian rule, for rebellion against Babylonia was counter to the will of God and therefore would not succeed (Jeremiah 27). Jeremiah's position that the people could not succeed in militarily overthrowing their rulers represents in the poem the relative weakness of the Jews in their confrontation with the genocidal Nazis. The prophet's approach is problematic for an Israeli when applied to the Holocaust because it suggests divine sanction for the power of the Nazis and because it eliminates the possibility of military victory over one's enemy.

The image of the blinded man alludes to the biblical account of the fate of King Zedekiah following the failure of the rebellion against Babylonia. Nebuchadnezzar executed Zedekiah's sons in front of him, then blinded him and sent him off to captivity in Babylonia (Jeremiah 39). This image of children being killed before their parents can be seen as a reflection of the Holocaust experience. It is this scene that arouses the speaker to urge Jeremiah to reject his passive response to evil and to undertake the only violent response that could stop the disaster. The speaker tries to hand Jeremiah a pistol so that the prophet can assassinate Nebuchadnezzar. Since the readers know that such an event did not take place, just as efforts to assassinate Hitler failed, they conclude that this is a futile cry, the cry of frustration of the poet who was in effect as far from the Holocaust in Europe as he was from the period of the Bible. The readers must conclude that neither the theological justification of evil that leads to acceptance of the victims' fates nor the drive to overcome one's enemies by means of violence could work when applied to the Holocaust.

Dan Pagis (1930-1986), who actually experienced the Holocaust as a child, approaches the gap between the world of the Holocaust and the world of "normal" existence following the Holocaust from a perspective different from that of Gilboa. Pagis is preoccupied with his own sense that the world he lived in during World War II and the world he has lived in since the war are radically different. The transition of the survivors from one world to the next after the war is captured in Pagis's "Ararat" ("Ararat"),²⁵ in which he portrays the Holocaust as analogous to the Flood in the days of Noah (Genesis 6-9):

When all the survivors of the Ark burst onto dry land
And in the muddled joy
chattered, roared, shouted for prey
cried to be fruitful and multiply,
and above their heads the rainbow hints
there'll never be another end—the end came
for the fish with no worries that lived
off the disaster like flexible profiteers:
now on the surface of congealing earth
with unruly fins they were caught
with mouths wide open, they drowned in the air. 

The world of the Holocaust is presented as analogous to the destructive waters of the Flood, which provided an unnatural atmosphere in which human beings could not survive for long. Those who are fortunate enough to survive the Holocaust leave their refuge enthusiastically, driven to resume a normal physical life of eating and sexual reproduction. In the biblical Flood story the only animals to survive were the fish, who could swim in the water. Similarly, a kind of corrupt humanity emerged in the Holocaust, perhaps a reference to the Nazis themselves, to their collaborators, or to others who profited monetarily from the war. As long as the flood-like, corrupt world of the Holocaust persisted, those people thrived. Once the dry land of rational morality emerges, like fish who are deprived of water, this corrupt humanity cannot survive, and so they die "drowning in air."

Pagis's use of the Flood story to represent the transition from the Holocaust world to the post-Holocaust world is significant in terms of what he has omitted from the Bible. After this Holocaust Flood there is no covenant between God and humanity. The rainbow, which was the sign of God's solemn promise after the Flood never to destroy the world again, now only "hints / there'll never be another end," and yet the deaths of the fish contradict that hint. People are essentially on their own after the Holocaust, with no divine help. Those irrevocably corrupted by the war cannot survive in the post-Holocaust world, while those who resisted corruption at least can return to fulfilling the physical drives of food and sex, although it is not clear they can go much beyond that into the realm of the spiritual.

In two poems, "Edut" ("Testimony") and "Edut 'aheret" ("Another Testimony"),²⁶ Pagis explores the ways that the events of the Holocaust radically undermine basic assumptions about the nature of humanity underlying the account of Creation in Genesis 1. In the testimony in the first poem the speaker focuses on the biblical statement that God created humanity "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27). For the speaker the gap between the characteristics and fate of the Nazi victimizers and those of the Jewish victims of the Nazis was so great that it is difficult to conceive of both types of human beings as created by the same God. The speaker begins by rejecting the commonly held assumption that the Nazis had moved beyond the bounds of normal human behavior and had somehow turned themselves into amoral monsters:

No no: they definitely were
human beings: uniforms, boots.
How to explain? They were created
in the image. 

Ironically, the speaker is forced to conclude that if the Nazis were human beings, then he and his fellow victims were of a different category of humanity:

I was a shade.
A different creator made me. 

And he in his mercy left nothing of me that would die.
And I fled to him, floated up weightless, blue,
forgiving—I would even say: apologizing—
smoke to omnipotent smoke
that has no face or image. 

The victory of the Nazis over the victims suggests that the former were created and protected by a demonic God who gave them power and the capacity for great cruelty. They were the human beings who, according to the Bible, were created "in the image of God" (betselem 'elohim, Genesis 1:27). A different God must have created the victim in His image, which the speaker considers to be as substantial as "shade" (tsel, a Hebrew word made up of two out of three letters of the Hebrew word for image, tselem). The God of those whose bodies were turned into smoke in the crematoria did not help them, presumably because He too is no more powerful or substantial than smoke. Sadly, the victim is so degraded by his experience that he somehow feels the need to apologize to this powerless God who did not save him.

In the second poem it is not the speaker who offers the testimony. The speaker begins the poem by turning to God, who although He is eternal appears to share humanity's inability to comprehend the injustices of the Holocaust. According to Deuteronomy, when the local communities in ancient Israel found a legal case to be too difficult to resolve, they were supposed to turn to the central legal authorities:

If a judgment be too wondrous for you to decide between blood and blood, between law and law, or between blow and blow—quarrels in your gates—you shall rise and go up to the place which the Lord your God will have chosen and come to the levitical priests, or the judge of that time. . . . (Deuteronomy 17:8-9)

Now that after the Holocaust God is as confused as humanity, His only recourse, the speaker asserts, is to pay closer attention than He had before to the suffering of the Holocaust victim:

You are the first and you remain the last.
If a judgment be too wondrous for you between law and law
between blood and blood,
listen to my heart hardened in the law, see my affliction.

God, according to the speaker, must not only face the suffering of humanity during the Holocaust. He must also face the testimony of His partners in creation, the archangels Michael and Gabriel, who confess that it is God and the angels who are guilty for having created human beings capable of the evil of genocide:

Your collaborators in creation, Michael, Gabriel,
stand and confess
that you said: Let us make man,
and they said: Amen.

Avner Treinin (1928-), a native-born Israeli writer who did not experience the Holocaust directly, looks at the gap between the Holocaust and the "normal" world of existence in a more abstract way not colored by Gilboa's mourning for his family and Pagis's traumatic experiences during World War II. In his poem "Ketonet 'ish hamahanot" ("The Coat of the Man of the Camps")²⁷ Treinin explores that gap by creating a contrast between the Holocaust and the original story of Joseph in the Bible (Genesis 37-50). In the Joseph story, what appears to begin as a tale of tragic conflict between siblings is seen by the end of the narrative as a part of God's plan to save Jacob and his family from famine by having Joseph rise to power in Egypt. The speaker, however, can discern no meaningful divine plan in the events of World War II, and so the Joseph story must be retold in a radically new way:

And the brothers were not jealous
of the coat of stripes,
in which they too were dressed
when lowered from the tracks.

And he did not dream and he did not interpret
and from the sheaf he did not rise,
and no kid was missing
when it was dipped in blood.

And their father did not recognize it,
for he had many sons of old age,
and he merely mumbled, "A wild beast"
and to see them he did not return.

In the Holocaust there were no special heroes like Joseph: all Jews, regardless of social status, were reduced to the same fate of annihilation in the concentration camps. The special "coat of many colors" (ketonet hapassim) by which Jacob singled out Joseph has been transformed into the "coat of stripes" (also called ketonet hapassim in the poem) that was the uniform of the Jews imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps. Joseph's coat of many colors that was dipped in the blood of a kid to cover up his brothers' crime of selling him into slavery has become the millions of Jewish victims' prison uniforms stained by their own human blood. This Holocaust world overwhelmed by the shedding of human blood could find no one to decipher the mysteries of human fate, as Joseph had done when he interpreted the dreams of his fellow prisoners and of Pharaoh. God Himself is portrayed as even more overwhelmed and helpless than Jacob was in the Joseph story. Jacob recognized Joseph's bloody coat when the brothers showed it to him and concluded that a "wild beast" (hayyah ra'ah) had devoured his beloved son. God, in contrast, cannot recognize the special qualities of any individual Jew: too many have been killed. The Nazi "wild beast" (hayyah ra'ah) is beyond God's control, and so unlike Jacob who was eventually reunited with his beloved son Joseph, God will never again see the victims who were killed.

The poets whose works I have discussed push biblical analogies to the Holocaust as far as they can go. Each time they do so, there is a disjunction between the biblical world view and the reality of the Holocaust. Joshua, the Holocaust victim, is the opposite of Joshua, the victorious warrior, with whom Israelis have identified. The faith in God's providence that underlies the prophecies of Jeremiah and the story of Joseph is not applicable to the Holocaust. The destruction of the Holocaust is radically different from the destruction of the Flood in Noah's time. Unlike the Flood in Noah's time, the Holocaust cannot be seen as a justified act of divine punishment. There is no rainbow covenant after the Holocaust to reassure the survivors that such destruction will never happen again, and it is unclear that the victims and those who actually profited from World War II can possibly live in the same world. The very concept of humanity embodied in the biblical story of Creation is difficult to accept in the aftermath of such extreme crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis. Nevertheless, despite this disjunction between the biblical world view and the Holocaust, when writing poems about the Holocaust these poets are drawn to make use of biblical allusions as important sources of images that can help them to articulate that which cannot be adequately said in the language of everyday speech.

¹ Dina Porat, "Attitudes of the Young State of Israel toward the Holocaust and Its Survivors: A Debate over Identity and Values" in Laurence J. Silberstein, ed., New Perspectives on Israeli History: The Early Years of the State (New York and London: New York University Press, 1991) 158-159.

² Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993) 514.

³ Dina Porat, "Attitudes of the Young State of Israel" 166.

⁴ Arye Carmon, "Holocaust Teaching in Israel," Shoah: A Journal of Resources on the Holocaust 3. 2-3 (1982-83): 22.

⁵ Tom Segev, The Seventh Million 180.

⁶ ibid. 183.

⁷ Aharon Appelfeld, Masot beguf ri'shon (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1979) 88-89. Appelfeld portrayed this experience in his novel Mikhvat ha'or (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1980). For a more detailed discussion of the issues Appelfeld had to deal with as a Holocaust survivor writer see David C. Jacobson, "Kill Your Ordinary Common Sense and Maybe You'll Begin to Understand': Aharon Appelfeld and the Holocaust," AJS Review 13 (1988): 129-152.

⁸ Dina Porat, "Attitudes of the Young State of Israel" 162.

⁹ Quoted in Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983) 102.

¹⁰ Dina Porat, "Attitudes of the Young State of Israel" 166.

¹¹ Aharon Appelfeld, Masot beguf ri'shon 20.

¹² Aryeh Carmon, "Holocaust Teaching in Israel" 23. See also Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 239-241; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million 11.

¹³ Quoted in Jacob Robinson, He'aqov lemishur: yehudei 'eiropah befnei hasho 'ah le Or ha 'emet hahistorit umishpat Eichmann byrushalayim lefi hanohag habenle'umi, trans. Zevi Bar-Meir and Aryeh Mor (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1965) 126.

¹⁴ ibid. 127.

¹⁵ Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980) 106.

¹⁶ Robert Alter, "A Poet of the Holocaust," Commentary (November, 1973): 60. For my analysis of other Israeli Holocaust poems not included in this essay that draw on biblical imagery see David C. Jacobson, Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century Hebrew Writers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), chapter 6. The poems analyzed there are by Amir Gilboa, Abba Kovner, and Dan Pagis.

¹⁷ Amir Gilboa, Kehullim va'adummim (1963; reprint, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1971) 344. The English translation is mine.

¹⁸ Arieh Sachs, in an interpretation of the poem, points out that "the dedicatory note to the volume [Kehullim va'adummim] reads: 'With me are my father and mother Haim and Frieda and my brothers and sisters Bella and Joshua and Brunia, Moses and Sara and Esther' (slaughtered members of his family who appear in many of the poems and often in terms of their biblical namesakes)." See Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, Ezra Spicehandler, ed., The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself (New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965) 143.

¹⁹ Eda Zoritte, Hahayyim, ha 'atsilut: peraqim biyografiyyim ve'iyyunim bamarkivim haqabaliyyim-hahasidiyyim shel shirat 'Amir Gilboa' (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988) 37-42.

²⁰ See the interpretation by Arieh Sachs in Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, Ezra Spicehandler, ed., The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself 144.

²¹ ibid. 143.

²² Hillel Barzel, 'Amir Gilboa': monografyah (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1984) 118-119.

²³ Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, Ezra Spicehandler, ed., The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself 143, 144.

²⁴ Amir Gilboa, Kehullim va'adummim 217. The translation by Stephen Mitchell is from Ariel 33-34 (1973): 6.

²⁵ Dan Pagis, Shahut me'uheret (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1964) 44. The translation is mine.

²⁶ Dan Pagis, Gilgul (Ramat Gan: Massada, 1970) 24-25. The translation of "Edut" by Stephen Mitchell is from Dan Pagis, Points of Departure (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981) 25. The translation of " Edut'aheret" is mine.

²⁷ Avner Treinin, Har vezetim (Jerusalem: Agudat "Shalem," 1969) 52. The translation is mine.