Keeper of Accounts

by Irena Klepfisz

Book by Klepfisz, Irena

Genres: Poetry, Judaism

97 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Irena Klepfisz is a Lesbian author of Jewish descent, academic and activist.

She was born in the Warsaw Ghetto and was 2 years old during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Her father, Michał Klepfisz, a member of the Jewish Labour Bund, was killed on the second day of the uprising.

Klepfisz escaped with her mother to the Polish countryside where they survived the Second World War by hiding and concealing their Jewish identities, aided by Polish peasants. After the war, the remaining family moved briefly to Łódź before moving to Sweden in 1946. Irena and her mother moved to the United States in 1949.

Klepfisz attended City College of New York, and studied with distinguished Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, a founder of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. She graduated CCNY with honors in English and Yiddish.

In 1963, she attended the University of Chicago to do graduate work in English Literature. Irena Klepfisz received a Ph.D. in English in 1970.

She currently teaches at Barnard College in New York City

Source: wikipedia.com

Reviews

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very important work by Irena Klepfisz. Unforgettable. She begins with poems from the point of view of monkeys in captivity--the huge ache of confinement, the pain inflicted, the harsh images: "i did not move/just sucked my breath." There are the "Work Sonnets" about the endless time we spend working, as if in cages and people hoping they will not do this grind forever. The third section in the book is entitled "Urban Flowers" in which flowers become emblematic. They become mnemonic devices--some survive to flower again but others can be poisonous.
Then stories of specific lives, the poet's life, and how they avoid being discovered as Jews. In a visit to a Shaker Village, she and her mother learn the group is dying out because they had no children, yet having a child means hope for her mother--life. The poet herself is childless.
The great lament "Bashert" is in this section: "These words are dedicated to those who died" followed by "These words are dedicated to those who survived." Finally, she gifts us with her excellent and poignant narrative of her own survival, beginning with wandering and hiding in Poland with her mother after her father and other relatives and friends were killed in the Warsaw Uprising. Irena Klepfisz herself was born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. Her mother and Irena as a toddler were able to flee after the uprising in 1944 and hide their Jewish background by posing as Christians, a common story. We then hear the story of why her book is named Keeper of Accounts.
Finally in the great poem "Solitary Acts," dedicated to her Aunt Gina, lying in an unmarked grave in Warsaw, she writes about how people, including her aunt, don't want to be forgotten. "Such will to be known can alter history." but also "Gina they hate us still." It is a great book and very worth reading.
However connected I feel to these poems and stories, I am also angry at all the Holocaust deniers. How could they know of these stories and deny? How can they continue to hate? But they do.
(from "Solitary Acts")
So much of history seems
a gaping absence at best a shadow
longing for some greater
definition which will never come
for what is burned becomes air
and ashes and nothing more.

So I cling to the knowledge of your
distant grave for it alone
reminds me prods me to shape that shadow.

Thank you for this book, Irena Klepfisz.

[Ching-In · Rating 4 out of 5]

I particularly admire the use of fragments and caesura.