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The Poet Reflects on His Legacy


Martin Herskovitz,
Israel

Legacy
My mother survived the Holocaust. Her Mother, Father, all 4 Grandparents, and 6 of her 7 siblings did not. Her response as a Survivor of the Holocaust and to the destruction of her family was as one mundane yet heroic. She chose to go on living. She married my father and raised a family in a world that heretofore had gone insane. But because she has chosen to do little to compensate for or even just commemorate the dead beyond bearing children, it is these children that are her response to the Holocaust. And if it seems that every Second Generation organization uses the word Legacy, maybe it is because of this fact. Because to be a Second Generation means that we are recompense of a generation lost and the needs of the unsated have been funneled into ours. There may be no better word for a life meant to fill the void left by the Holocaust than the word Legacy:

When I get older
I will start to build a legacy
Out of the grey mists of the past (When I Get Older)

Much has been written about the children of Holocaust Survivors being Memorial Candles, that we must grieve in lieu of our parents who cannot. As someone who bears my mother’s Father and Grandfathers name, I am all too aware of this role. But for me the more significant role is that I represent the future after the Holocaust. If my mother’s role after the destruction of her family was to continue living, then I feel I have to go one step further, to add significance to these lives. So in many ways, who I am and what I do with my life is not totally up to me but in many ways is determined by my family history. The Holocaust is not only our past, it has also formed the person who is Martin Herskovitz in the present and moreover it represents, in part, my destiny in the future. As a child of a Holocaust Survivor, the legacy that I build now, is inextricably linked to the Holocaust:

It has etched upon my soul
Vistas of sensitivities
That I was borne to tell
But fear. (Legacy).

I would like to describe my struggle to build a legacy as a second generation. This means for me overcoming boundaries to connect up with my past, and trying to repair the part of me that is damaged in the present. I will describe these struggles in the only way I know how, via the poetry I have written.

Part one: Connecting up with the Past
Memories

Ironically, though I feel the need that my contribution as a human being must be connected to the Holocaust, I have been told almost nothing about my Mother’s experience during the Holocaust in both work camps and concentration camps. My Mother fears these memories:

The paths not taken are not overgrown with green
But alleyways of blackest cinder
Or burrows of swirling dusts,
Barbed and spiny.
And when memory allows
My mother travels these passages
And bows her head against the raining blows. (History)

And yet I seem to have knowledge of the destruction, if few details, as if the knowledge was planted within me without ever being taught:

How did I know about the Holocaust
Amidst the silence.
Or was the knowing enciphered on my soul
Trickling, in time, to my consciousness.
An awareness that is never taught
Can never be unlearned,
Can never be forgotten. (Eclipse)

As a result I feel driven to represent a legacy without really knowing details of the actual events that comprise that legacy. So my foremost duty is to try to create a history of a past without memories:

When I get older
I will try to remember
what my mother has forgotten” (When I Get Older).

If my parents’ response to the trauma of the Holocaust, to begin the family anew, required them to repress the past:

The bonfire in the grove burnt the photographs well
As he stood over the curling pictures, prodding them deeper into the flames
The nitrate smoke burnt his eyes.
He sat in the clearing till the embers died down, then freed, left for America
His spare set of shoes now in the shoebox. (Photographs)

Or just simply disdain:

My father has put away the pictures from before the war
And he can't find them.
But I think that he put away the pictures so he won't find them. (Photographs)

Or replace them with other, happier memories:

Better we should take pictures of our wonderful grandchildren,
Not blurry and in color.
Let's finish the roll and in an hour we'll have new pictures.
Much better. (Photographs)

Then it is my job to unearth these memories and revive them.
My role as a second generation, is to continue my parents’ testament to thrive in the face of oblivion, but to accomplish this not by discarding the past but embracing it, synthesizing the past within my present.
Often the task of reviving a history that no one wants to remember frustrates me and seems beyond my capabilities:

I am not a god who can create a family
out of motes of dust (Photographs)

This is my struggle to build out of a name here, a snippet of a story there and photograph there, an entire history:

Some of us have only names
Names are good for reading at memorial services
and putting on bronze plaques in the synagogue
next to a flickering bulb
which is almost as good as mourning
Some of us have stories without names.
Names have been removed from the story like fangs
so that it can no longer hurt the storyteller.
So I am destined to tell the story over and over again
unsatisfied. (Names and Stories)

Nothing for me typifies the wasteland of knowledge about my family as much as the lack of names. Over my lifetime I have accumulated all sorts of names and nicknames which attach themselves to specific periods in my life. For me, living means the accumulation of names. The fact is that for each of my relatives that died in the Holocaust there is but a single name demonstrates more than almost anything how inanimate they are for me and how much I wish it were different:

And his father probably called him Mordkhe
like my father sometimes calls me.
His sister and brothers called him, perhaps, Moti
Except for the baby sister who called him Momo even after she grew up….
And his children certainly called him Tati
As did his wife
Except late at night, alone in the bedroom
She would maybe call to him with Yiddish familiars
In a soft erotic lilt. (Names)

This is my first role as a Second Generation to bridge over the lost generation of the Survivors and reclaim the past abandoned. But by creating a past from the fabric of imagination with but a patch here of reality, I feel the artificiality of the process. Am I creating a history about a fantasy figure that had no basis in reality? If the only way I can create a history with any vibrancy is by using abstractions, is this not a lie? :

Or do the dead know to lift the tears
from the page on which they have fallen
and carry them, in cupped palms
to their proper page. (Names and Stories)

I believe that they do and therefore my initial response to my parents disdain of the past:

You have to put the past behind you
if you want to go forward (Photographs)

is at first doubt:

After 45 years of all sorts of directions,
I am beginning to doubt their words.

And then a belief in a new way to connect to the past:

But when we whisper their names
and cry tears of longing that they have yet to know
Then the warmth of the tears caresses their foreheads
and they blink open their eyes,
astonished
and stir themselves, loosening their limbs,
to fly down to our dreams. (Tears)

Mourning
But my job does not end reanimating my relatives’ reality and connecting to the past. In many ways it only just begins because by giving them substance, by reviving their names I have now to grieve for them. They have never been mourned. I imagine them jealous for mourning:

Amid the mourners' wails
my grandparents hold their faces earthbound
To catch some of the tears deemed for others.
Tears they have never known for
All died with them except for a few. (Unmourned)

Or maybe silent in anticipation:

The souls of the dead lie dormant
under the filmy wrapping of the years
in anticipation for us to rouse them
like a child hidden beneath a blanket waits to be discovered. (Tears)

It is all well and nice to say I will grieve for my relatives in my parents’ stead. But they knew them, I did not. It is one thing to remember them and give them some sort of form but it is another to mourn them. To mourn requires there to have been a relationship, closeness or even just a face to go along with the name, but I cannot mourn them:

They long to be mourned
But I who have never known their embrace, cannot.
But I know their pain and their sorrows are interred in me
This too is a link
And it will have to suffice, as yet
It is a time of mourning
And I sit among the unmourned. (Unmourned)

And again:

I will find no source of tears
With which to weep.
I will be silent not turbulent
Sere and rigid
In the valley of a thousand stones
I will be yet another
Shiny and smooth, unfissured. (Mourning)

My failure to mourn makes me feel that I am wanting, not able to fulfill a duty, a failure that requires atonement:

Yom Kippur Eve
I shut myself up in the bedroom and
take out the photographs
From before the Holocaust…
Some of the names I knew and forgot
And some I never knew
Because my Mother stopped talking
And the next few middle of the nights I heard her in the hallways
And the rattling of the tea kettle in the kitchen
So I don’t want to ask her again
I just take out the pictures now
And prop them up on my bed
To ask for their forgiveness that I haven’t mourned so well. (Yom Kippur)

If I cannot mourn the person then at least I can mourn the absence of mourning. It is like the Hasid who no longer knows the Rebbe’s prayer but knows the story of the Rebbe praying and this story should suffice. I cannot mourn but I can tell my of longing to mourn. This is my way of grieving.

Part Two: Healing the Relationship

Drawing Close
Grieving is not only a link to those that were killed in the Holocaust; it is a way of creating a connection to my parents.
I often think that my thoughts about being unable to mourn my relative is in actuality an expression of my inability to maintain an intimate relationship with my parents.
Like the child in the following poem, who wanders the street to find her mother’s child who was “lost” during the war, my search for the relatives is a way of connecting ourselves up to an emotionally distant parent. The child is more wanting to be found than actually looking. And the missing person in the title is both the child lost during the war and the child in us who felt missing from our parents emotional world and let to wander to find our own way:

Missing Persons
She would sit alone in her room
Practicing her alphabet until her mother came home
From cooking all day for the Yeshiva
And wait for her to lay on the couch
A damp towel draped over her eyes.
I'm going outside,
She'd announce.
And go out in the neighborhood
To find her sister who Mother said
Was lost in the war.
"It doesn't matter
If I'll know who she is,"
she'd say to herself,
As she looked expectantly at the faces of strangers,
waiting to be found.
"She'll recognize me." (Missing Persons)

It is clear from my writing that I am searching for a connection. I say that I am looking to create a legacy from the Holocaust experience, that I wish to connect with my Grandparents, Uncles and Aunts. And maybe that is so, but maybe, I am looking just to connect up with my mother. But that is hard. So I go the long way about, hoping that through her history, through her loved ones, through the places that she lived, I can draw close to her. My parents’ love and attention seems too fleeting and too erratic to be risked directly, to be asked for. I felt too often unworthy of love:

Perhaps if she hadn’t said so often
“Get out of my sight”
and I would banish myself to the farthest reaches of the back yard
busying myself with silly solitary games
counting the minutes until it was safe to draw near again. (Dreams)

As a result I am too unsure of my relationship, afraid to be abandoned:

When I was five I was afraid that the Snow Queen
Whiteness and ice
Would kidnap me to her Arctic castle
While other kids were afraid of vampires and monsters
Who howled and roared
all violence and blood
I was terrified of her cold blue eyes and her kisses of frost
That could freeze my heart. (Snow Queen)

And the distance that I feel is not so much one created from the geographical distance that has existed between us since High School but an emotional distance between a child who feels that, contrary to Robert Frost, Home was somewhere that I had to deserve and that I was never quite deserving of love:

My mother fed me out of love,
Out of love she clothed me,
Tucking my shirttail in my pants.
Out of love she first showed concern
then tried to transform,
and when that failed she sent me away out of love
so that elsewhere I might grow. Once away I would never return to her
For while she acted out of love
I have never felt within her love. (Out of Love)

My fear of not being deserving of love caused me to deny my need and embrace instead solitude and self-sufficiency:

Her mother away
The child spoke on the phone
And her voice cracked
I miss you
And through the crack poured out
The vulnerability and the fear
As if she might fall
But quickly recovering
She straightened
Closing the rift
Smiling with glistening eyes.
It reminded me of children past
Tutored to be impervious
Criss-crossing the cracks
With layer upon layer
Till nothing would show
Sturdying the wall
Against the churning inside
And eyes that would not glisten. (Vulnerability)

As a Second Generation I am uncomfortable expressing these feelings because they are an indictment to my parents and my parents do not deserve to be indicted. They have suffered too much pain and it is not their fault that the Holocaust destroyed something within them. Despite the fact that I do not blame them, these words will cause them even more pain. And I regret that. But these feeling burn within me and I know they existed then because they exist in me now in my most intimate relationships:

You say I don’t love you
I love you no different than my parents
loved me.
Isn’t that love?
Neither of us knows.
Love has no formula
That can be held to the light.
I have what I felt
When my parents cared for me as they could
Is that love?
Or are they impaired
Am I impaired
So that what I grasped was too full of holes
to be anything real.
You say I don’t hug you.
I will hold you.
You say I don’t care enough or care too much.
I will care more or less.
You say I shout
From now on I will whisper.
The problem isn’t proving to you that I am able to love
But believing it myself. (A Love Poem)

I must bring up these feelings despite the fact that they wound. Because if I feel at times that I am incapable of love, then the corollary to this fact is I was not loved so well as a child. But if I can heal myself and feel the love inside of me then I can connect up with my parents’ love that exists but I am too impaired to attach my self to it:

Beneath the silence I found pain
And beneath the pain…
I had never journeyed beneath the pain
For I had thought it eternal,
The sorrow never-ending.
But as I grew older I learned that there
Is no pain that can not be overcome
And there can be an end to sadness
So I immerged beyond the pain
To search for love beneath. (Beneath)

My path to intimacy cannot start with them. Although I dream of parental intimacy, of a love that is not contingent, I know that it is not to be:

And yet the dream endures
I know,
Even though I can never recollect it.
For I wake
And beneath my heart is a hollow place
Where the dream has been
And flown. (Dreams)
There is too much pain and guardedness. But if I am able to create love in my own life then maybe I can look further inside myself and find within me, my parents’ love. The paradox being that in order to feel my parents’ love I have to heal myself and that requires me to deal with my rage and anger and to call up feelings that will hurt. The first step in healing is opening myself up to intimacy in my own life.

I have had no great test to endure
As Abraham prevailed the fire and the wrath.
Only the silent binding to the altar
The resoluteness of his sacrifice
Despite my quiet tears.
I am deemed to be symbol
allowed no pain.
So I remain in the field
Distant, apart
Until Rebecca leads me to the tent
And lays my head upon her breast
and I sleep. (Isaac)

But in my own life I long for intimacy that I pine for yet at the same time flee:

I have known but amplitudes of love
Weaving in and out of intimacies
Cresting up then down
Turning back then away. (Out of Love)

Feeling lonely yet shirking intimacy when it is proffered:

I longed for intimacy to turn the corner,
but when it came by I shivered at the closeness
that, like gossamer, passed through my substance,
but would not cohere. (Love Anew)

Is not love and intimacy the ultimate test of my worth? If I open myself up to intimacy am I not opening myself up to the ultimate risk that - Here I am, Love me, Care for me. What will happen if I plead and they turn away. I cannot risk this, so I cannot draw near, only love from afar:

I cannot contain your needs
when you are near me...
Go from me
so that I can love you
The distance shelters me
and allows me
my stealthed love. (Intimacy)

I end up with safe non-threatening but also non-fulfilling relationships:

I yearned for reticence past
to feel its enervated coolness within my embrace.
I sought love anew
and found but love's decay. (Love Anew)

And again:

I am weary of following.
I had wanted a home of fireplaces and dinnertimes
And 10 pm chats after the kids have gone to sleep.
I dream no longer
And home is just a place that I am too tired to leave,
But I will follow no more. (I Will Follow No More)

It is as if there is something in my core that prevents me from love:

There is a kernel of fear and anger within
That I dare not touch
I must dodge and slip by
Because if I face it head on
It will cleave
And release the demons
Abbadon and Sama-el
Of Anger and Sadness
to trample my soul.
So the kernel remains
And it burns, to ignite times of
Implacable rage
And it hums, to dissonate the
Music of my soul.
And it sends out its web
To sheath my heart
In shrouds of inconsolability. (Kernels)

And I feel incapable of love:

To search for love beneath,
And found but silence once again.
Not the mute silence of denial,
But a jealous silence.
Silence like a vessel that
has yet contained
waiting to be overfilled
waiting to cascade.
A weary silence,
Enervated by years of rage and sadness
Despairing of change.
A lonely silence
Searching for a tether in the maelstrom
Of a world disjointed.
I had plunged ahead beyond the pain
Hoping to find love
and found but a void waiting to be filled. (Beneath)

This is where I am now, trying to fill the void,
Trying to overcome my own neediness so I can deals with the needs of other.
Trying to find love in the many peculiar ways it is proffered:

my mother was busy the whole visit
packing up the leftovers
so I hardly had a chance to say goodbye
Hurry home before the dairy products spoil
was the last thing she said as she closed the door
I stood in the parking lot
laden with Tupperware
feeling alone
The next day I sat hunched over her reheated soup
my hands on both sides of the bowl
my fingers warmed by the porcelain
the steam rose about my face.
as I waited for the soup to cool.
It has taken too much of a lifetime to learn
to live in a family
where you eat soup
instead of saying goodbye. ( Farewells)

And again:

At the bus stop he pointed at me in recognition
Came by and shook my hand, his silver-framed glasses askew.
"Let me finish my say then you can speak," he said.
"May God bless you three blessings
That you join in the building of the third Temple,
That you live to see your children and grandchildren under the wedding canopy
That all your enemies be vanquished.
I am mentally ill,
Please give me some money so I can go to Yehezkel’s grocery
And buy some food." Which I did.
Some would dismiss this incident but I have not.
You see, my mother stood on the frozen muddied ground of Auschwitz,
Whose cursed soil petrified generations of lives
And I like to think that now God sends his peculiar messengers to bless me,
And resuscitate my soul. (Blessings)

Trying to maintain hope in my ability to change :

Hold, the moment never seems upon us
Ever we move our own way
And I have loved too briefly
Our kisses bitter with haste,
with circumspect
Hold, and I will come to love. (Hold)
And again:

When I get older,
I can start to imagine being someone
I hadn’t imagined before
But in the meantime
Leave me to sit on the park bench
between my parents
Eating sandwiches out of waxed paper bags. (When I Get Older)


Hoping that the pain that has started to be healed in me be continued in the generation to come:

To Yaakov
Asleep in my arms yet not at peace, claws the air and stirs calling my name but does not wake.
I wonder what demons he has that threaten his sleep,
to make him cry aloud.
I wish I could banish those who wound his soul
To clasp him near and force them into the night forever.
But tomorrow he will wrestle his demon again
As did his namesake Jacob long ago
A disquietude visited upon the generations.
I had wished him to be a charmed being
His life untarnished by bitterness, his laugh unblemished
But now I fear that he has not been spared,
That I have bestowed not only my features but my fears and passions as well
So now I wish him a child with joyous eyes.

This is my legacy of present and future, mourning and hope, sadness and healing. It is the story I was born to tell and no longer fear.