“For Not Lost Is the Hope”

My teen and I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum last week. Just a few days after a deadly white supremacist march in our neighboring state of Virginia, it was healing to see hundreds of people in the museum’s galleries, learning about how the politics of hate can infect and impact a society. (Read the USHMM’s response to Charlottesville.)

I was especially moved by the Yiddish poetry of resistance. Some of these poems survived the Nazi genocide of European Jews.

My own Jewish family left France, Romania, and Germany in the early 20th century and immigrated to the United States. Though they were all in the U.S. by the 1920s, I wonder about extended family — aunts, uncles, cousins, who stayed behind.

This poem is giving me hope today.

For Not Lost Is the Hope

By Yitshok Katsenelson

Yiddish to English translation by Dr. Sarah Moskovitz

For not lost is the hope of a tree,

even when already cut and felled

it grows again

and blooms

without an end—

The sprouting will not stop.

And when the root gets old amid the dust

and if

the root has ceased

to live deep in the earth—

it only has to sense a bit of water in the depths

to bloom again…

Read the rest at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.

For more poetry of the Holocaust, visit Poetry in Hell: Warsaw Ghetto Poems from the Ringelblum Archives.

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