Yesterday I mentioned in passing the Holocaust poetry of Chava Rosenfarb; today, I turn your attention to that of Paul Celan—who approached similar themes and experiences in very different ways. Born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in a part of Romania that is now in Ukraine, Celan spent the war years in the forced-labor camps; his parents were murdered. He settled in Paris after the war, wrote poetry in German, translated literature from a variety of languages, and drowned himself at the age of forty-nine. Neil Arditi reviews two new translations of his work, and examines his poem “Psalm.”

Celan knew what it was to sing “above, O above/ the thorn.” . . . “Psalm” draws not only on the image of God forming man out of clay in Genesis but also, most crucially, on Psalm 103:15: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.” To the beauty and brevity of that flourishing, Celan adds an uncanny vulnerability: body and soul exposed, proffered like the reproductive organ of a flower to a godforsaken sky.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.