Concluding the Course

This last activity concludes our course on aspects of the Holocaust as seen through eleven poems that we chose in the hope that we could open a few avenues of approach to this difficult period in history.

Thinking back to the difficulties I encountered in constructing the three lessons, I without doubt would focus on the difficulty of choosing the poems we used from the vast number that have been written and published in so many anthologies. This is also the reason that included in the bibliography list at the end of each lesson are several suggestions for wider reading along these lines. So many poet survivors and victims left much testimony in poems that are available for people interested in pursuing this avenue further. We thank you for taking this journey with us through the three lessons, and it is our fervent hope that the materials provided have opened up new ways of approaching trauma in general and the Holocaust in particular. We wish you interesting new insights with any further reading you undertake and congralute you for completing the course.

Selected Bibliography

Holocaust Poetry

• Alter, Robert, “Introduction”, in The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. xi – xvi.
• Anissimov, Myriam, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist (Woodstock, NY :The Overlook Press, 2000).
• Eshel, Amir, “Eternal Present: Poetic Figuration and Cultural Memory in the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Dan Pagis, and Tuvia Rübner”, in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 141-166.
• Levi, Primo, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1992).
• Levi, Primo, If This is a Man and The Truce (London: Abacus, 1987).
• Symborska, Wisława, “The Poet and her World”, in Poems: New and Collected, 1957-1997 (Orlando: Harcourt, 1998), pp. xiii-xviii.

Holocaust in General

• Brenner, Michael, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
• Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland* (New York : Harper Perennial, 1993).
• Buruma, Ian, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014).
• Engel, David, “Patterns Of Anti-Jewish Violence In Poland, 1944-1946”, in Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 26 (1998), pp 43 – 85.