A Poet’s Lament for Poland’s Lost Shtetls

One of the foremost figures in post-World War II Yiddish literature, Chaim Grade is best known for his works of fiction. But in the 1930s he began his literary career—in the then-Polish city of Vilna—as a poet. He wrote the poem “Jewish Towns of Poland” in Paris in 1947; in it, the evidently Jewish speaker travels through what had by now become a judenrein country. To great effect, Grade populates the shtetls with biblical figures, as in the following excerpt, from a new translation by Julian Levinson:

Jewish towns of Poland, you blazed in my heart and my memory,
Like the places in the Holy Land that lit up the pages of Torah.
My childhood years were barefoot steps over a river that passed my home, which became my Jordan.
And now every wall I see is a ruin of the Western Wall,
And as once in Bethlehem, a lament rises from the streets of Krakow. . . .

Dear [Matriarchs] from the Yiddish Bibles, Rachel and Leah of the women’s prayers,
You sat on the porches with all the women of the town.
Angels who accompanied Jacob, where will you find peace?
You have become orphaned guests, condemned to wander and beg.
And you, Patriarchs from Canaan, once at home in this land of the Poles,
You who stood like a divide between barman and drunken peasants,
The way back to heaven has been closed off to you
Because you walked along our streets, wearing our clothes.

The heavens no longer recognize you, and you gaze out, terrified, from
A trampled hedge, from a ruined gate,
Like a pious old Jew from a tiny village,
Who wakes from his Sabbath nap to find the world has turned upside-down.
The boys no longer stroll with girls on the riverbank,
And no longer do buses avoid the town on Sabbath,
The uncircumcised sit like honored men at the doors of Jews,
They have torn the siding from the stores,
The holy books thrown away, the wooden synagogue destroyed.

Read more at In geveb

More about: Arts & Culture, Chaim Grade, Holocaust, Poetry, Poland, Polish Jewry, Yiddish literature

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF