(Author: Egonne Roth, Vol. 73, No. 3, Chanukah 2018)
It is exactly 70 years since the South African Jewish poet Olga Kirsch decided to leave her homeland and make aliya. She arrived in Israel in November 1948. It is also seventy years since her second collection of Afrikaans poetry, Mure van die hart (Walls of the heart), was published, to great acclaim, in South Africa. The collection marked her as a Jewish poet, not simply because of her heritage or name, but due to the content of several poems.
When Olga Kirsch, not yet twenty years old, wanted to publish her first collection of Afrikaans poetry, her mother advised her to use a pseudonym – “With the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the strong antisemitic feelings of many of its supporters, they will know you’re a Jew and that will be the end of your career.” To her credit, Olga decided not to follow this advice, and to its credit, the Afrikaner community accepted her, while fully acknowledging that she was Jewish. For many readers, it may have seemed a pure biographical fact that Olga was Jewish and that her Jewishness was not always visible in her poetry. However, she demonstrates many of the characteristics that various writers demand of Jewish writing.
Baal-Makshoves, writing in Yiddish in 1918, made this beautiful statement: “Jewish writers live and breathe between two languages, even as the bridegroom is escorted to the bridal canopy between two parents.” Olga would instinctively have understood this statement: she lived in an Afrikaans community, while English was spoken at home and Hebrew was the language of worship in the little synagogue in Koppies, Orange, Free State, where she grew up. During her life she wrote in all three languages: English, Afrikaans and Modern Hebrew (in which there are eight poems extant).
Jewish literature often stands in contrast to ‘normal, nationalistic’ literature. The latter is closely based on a connection between a specific place and its language, whereas Jewish literature is lived between at least two languages, Hebrew and the language of the Jewish author in the Diaspora; as well as between the land of habitation and the place of Jewish imagination. “Next year in Jerusalem,” remains the dominant Jewish refrain – in die jaar wat kom sien ons Jerusalem” (in the coming year we shall see Jerusalem) as Olga expresses it in her sonnet Heimwee. In each volume of Afrikaans poetry that Kirsch published Jerusalem, the Jewish homeland etc. is present. It is for this reason that the critic Hilda Grobler, in writing about Geil Gebied (1976), titled her review “Moeë Jodin ‘stotter’ oor vaderland” (Tired Jew ‘stutters’ about fatherland). She was the only reviewer who ever referred to Olga Kirsch in this derogatory manner.
Olga Kirsch grew up in a kosher home, where she and her siblings attended cheder where Tenach, Talmud, and Biblical Hebrew were taught and where they heard from an early age the Shabbat blessings and Zemirot, Jewish liturgical songs on Shabbat and the Jewish religious holidays. For each of these festivals there are many songs that Jewish children grow up singing and as music played an important role in the Kirsch home, this was especially true for the Kirsch children. Many of these songs are very rhythmic – a factor that may have influenced the development of Olga Kirsch as a poet. Her poetry has often been described as lyrical and musical.
Kirsch wrote some strongly Jewish poetry in Afrikaans, all of which has been published, but among her unpublished English poetry is some of her most moving Jewish work. The passion for and joy at the establishment of a national Jewish homeland finds no stronger expression in the Kirsch oeuvre than in the manuscript called “Nevertheless”. To fully appreciate this epic poem one should look briefly at her sonnet “Die wandelende Jood” (The Wandering Jew), first published in 1946 in the second edition of Standpunte, an Afrikaans literary journal, and also included in her second volume of Afrikaans poetry, Mure van die hart, (1948).
The Wandering Jew
O Daughter of Babylon, you who will be destroyed, happy is he who revenges on you what you have done to us God condemned his people to the fire, machine guns, gas chambers and the grave. he gathered them into church and barn and with white lime and the f lame punished them And a few arose from the destruction ill and broken, with eyes that carry death’s stark oblivion and again travelled through strange lands to the maternal womb. Resumed the centuries old pilgrimage with shuffling feet and bent shoulders. But at the end of the road one turned them away with indolent eyes. Will God in wrath smash the gates to pieces that my tired people may once again enter in.1
The act of ‘keeping in remembrance’, a central tenet of Jewish life, is also central to this sonnet. In its first stanza, the horrors of the Holocaust are evoked in stark images and by mentioning the church, its role in the persecution of the Jews is implied. In the last stanza, the poem also invokes the post-war rejection of the survivors by most countries: “But at the end of the road / one turned them away …” [“maar aan die einde van die pad / het een hul weggewys …”]. In 1946 the full facts about this page in European history were only beginning to emerge, and little had as yet been written about it in literary terms. Olga’s drawing attention to it in a country that had in some quarters been supportive of Nazism was remarkable and fearless. The third stanza alludes to the refusal by the British authorities to allow survivors of the Holocaust to enter Palestine. Olga was thereby potentially alienating herself both from those who had supported the British and from Christian Afrikanerdom. It is possible that when the poem was first published many of her readers did not fully understand allusions which any Jew would easily identify.
The long epic poem Nevertheless was written twenty years later, when Olga had been in Israel for eighteen years. She submitted it to the socialist Zionist journal Jewish Frontier in New York but the editors chose to publish only a section under the name, “Poems of Independence”. It appeared in April, 1966. The poem’s strong sense of immediacy derives from Olga’s decision to write in the first person plural, as though the immigrants’ story was her own, and her use of an urgent verse rhythm that at times can make a reader feel breathless.
Here I present the whole poem with some contextualisation and analysis.
“… and if the Almighty had not brought forth our fathers from Egypt, we and our children and our children’s children should still be in bondage … Therefore it is incumbent upon us …”
The epigraph has been drawn from the liturgical song Dayeinu (It would have sufficed us), which is part of the Pesach seder liturgy. The poem continues, mutatis mutandis, in the way that Dayeinu continues:
Therefore it is incumbent upon us
To tell how we came to this land,
How the little ships slipped through the
twilight
And the dinghies through the darkness.
How we jumped, stumbled and went under
How hands raised, steadied and directed us,
How the last wave’s surge
Carried us up shelved shingle
Which some kissed
Wiping salt lips
Chilled, bladder pricking with fear
Of searchlights and shots from the dark
We struggled through dunes
Huddled in trucks
Swayed and swung by winding ways
To our hide-out
We fed and bedded down
Slept like the dead
Woke to a leaping sun
And it was evening
And it was morning
One day.
This opening section of the poem begins as the conclusion of Dayeinu starts: “Therefore, it is incumbent upon us,” though Olga combines that liturgical injunction with the divine command “To tell how” (Haggadah means, essentially, “telling”). The narrative of the Torah exodus is replaced by fragments of tales that she had heard in the streets and cafés of Tel Aviv. Connecting these stories to the exodus from Egypt through the use of liturgical language functions to sanctify and legitimise the ingathering of the Jews in modern times. The line “Of searchlights and shots from the dark” immediately invokes the Holocaust stories about the camps with their large searchlights; of hearing shots in the dark and the terror it evoked. Olga also used the image of the searchlight in her first published collection, Die soeklig, in which she responded to the Second World War and the young men who fought in it. There she did not specifically focus on the war against the Jews, but on war in general, where the searchlight combs the sky for an enemy plane. By the time she wrote Nevertheless, she had access to survivor and other personal accounts of what had transpired. Her husband Joe Gillis had arrived just after the establishment of Israel; he was taken ashore illegally, as Haifa was still under blockade by the British navy. A recording exists of him telling of his experiences, and section I of Nevertheless reads in many ways like a dramatized version of his story. The contrast in the images used in the last two lines of the main stanza, “Slept like the dead / Woke to a leaping sun”, affirms the change in the lives of these new immigrants: They were coming from a place of death to a place of life. The sad irony of the reality that awaited them is suggested in later sections of the poem. Section I ends with a reference to the first chapter of the book of Genesis, verse 5: “Vayehi Erev, vayehi boker, yom echad” Olga translates these words exactly from the Hebrew, rather than using the generally rendered translation (“It was evening, it was morning, the first day”). In this manner she continues to tie modern history to the Biblical story, thereby further legitimising history in terms of the Torah.
II
And it is incumbent upon
To speak of the city besieged,
Her streets snarled with barbed wire wall to wall,
Of the rubbish and the rubble
The sniping and the silence
And the running bent double,
Of hunger, thirst and stench
Of violence
Where now serenely trees descend the steep
And gutted truck and armoured car and jeep
Wheels tendered towards a narrow track of sky
Lie rusting under paint.
The annual wreath shrinks dry
And slips awry:
Bab-el-Wad.
The images in section II are strictly those of the War of Independence. It opens with a description of the destruction of Jerusalem in 1948, using powerful images to build a portrait of the city in crisis. In contrast, nearly twenty years later, the valley of Bab-el-Wad (Arabic for ‘valley gate’) that joins the capital to the coastal plain is quiet. Yet the traveller is not allowed to forget the war – the remains of battles fought to get essential supplies of water, food, and medicine to the Jews in the city are still evident. Haim Gouri wrote a poem in honour of these battles, in which he had been a soldier. After Shmuel Pershko set the poem to music, it became part of the Israeli canon and is sung regularly at memorial ceremonies. Olga would have known this song, which was first recorded and made popular by Yaffa Yarkoni in the early fifties. Ironically, some of those who died in the battles to control Bab-El-Wad were survivors from the Holocaust, who had only been in the country for a very short time.
Dr Egonne Roth is a South African-born academic now living in Nahariya, Israel. She taught English for academic purposes first at the Western Galilee College in Acco and later at Ort Braude College of Engineering in Karmiel. She obtained an MA in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University in 2010 and her PhD in 2017. The central part of her dissertation, Olga Kirsch: A life in poetry, was published by Naledi this year in both an Afrikaans and an English edition. She would welcome any additional information on this subject, in which regard she can be contacted at eeeroth@hotmail.com.
The destruction of Jerusalem, 1948
III
Because we bred them up for death
Having no choice
Because the mind cannot remember
Tones of the voice
Because the sombre photo fades
And how they looked in other moods evades Memory;
Because time makes them merely graves,
Stiff groves of stone
And monuments by busy ways
Standing alone
Therefore we must recall while yet we may
That they were supple, gay and strode the streets
In motley uniform,
Liked a revolver bobbing at the hip
Could sing and dance all night
Grew drooped moustaches and ferocious beards
Wrote songs and journals sad beyond their years
Because they knew themselves bred up for death
Having no choice.
In section III, the young soldiers who defended Israel are honoured and remembered. The section opens with the lines, “Because we bred them up for death / Having no choice” and ends with a variant of the opening line: “Because they knew themselves bred up for death / Having no choice.” The two lines hold this section together with the sad message that those able to fight had no choice but to be prepared to be sacrificed in defence of their country. The speaker implies that doing so was what they were born for and that they knew there was no alternative. The repetition of the word “Because” at the beginning of several lines emphasizes that there is something that we must do in response to their sacrifice: “we must recall while yet we may”. Again and again Kirsch calls her readers to remember.
IV
Then suddenly one day rumour was truth:
The camp-loudspeaker crackled and rapped out
“At tent ion, at tent ion all, important announcement!”
We raised our heads to listen where we were,
Working or lounging, it wasn’t the hour for news.
And the voice read: “His Majesty’s’ Government
Having regard to recent developments
Announces the immediate release
Of refugees in Cyprus. Ships will be sent …”
Then the voice broke off and shouted
“Free, we are free”
And hoarse, ridiculous and out of tune
Began to sing Hatikva. Into the noon
Empty square we rushed, in sun and dust
We laughed, we wept, we shouted
Hugging each other, flinging the children up
And swinging them down till even those who doubted
Calling it all a ruse joined in the joy.
And yet, we feared the end of being pent:
Passive inhabitants of huts and tents
And cast habiliments
Kept creatures, eaters of donated bread,
How should we work and earn
And keep a roof overhead?
But we took courage, straightened up the camp
And bundled our belongings, and the
ships came
Cageless this time and we went on board
In early light, the mountains still in mist,
We wearers of the lucky numbers.
And the ship stood off churning and
turning slow
And the island shifted angle, altered shape
And we who had watched it grow
Now saw it shrink
And slip beneath the brink
Till nothing was but peaked and leaping sea
Even the gulls gone
Then we lay on deck
And the day passed slowly like a fast.
At last
Toward dusk there came a sudden shout of “Shore”
And those who had trodden the land and been rounded up
And those who had glimpsed it distant lifting like mist
And those who had only heard of it, crowded the rails
Clambered on davits and stanchions,
And the ship leaned landwards and the mountain rose
Calm to a calm star and we saw the quay
Thickened with people. Then the engines ceased
And the wind’s tumult and we heard a cry
Strident and thin and high as of circling birds
—
From our own throats it rose and voices ashore
Roared answer, and the drifting ship bumped home
And we descended.
But not we alone:
Also the dead descended pressing, pressing.
And the ship stood off churning and
turning slow
In Jaffa on a Saturday night
They’d stretch an awning wall to wall
To span a narrow site.
They’d sling up strings of blinking lights
Set out some chairs and tables – scrawl
A price-list on a board and call
The place “Cafe”.
And in the dusk
Came vendors of a hundred grams
Of sunflower seeds in paper twists
And tough boiled corn served in the husk
And tall balloons strung from the wrist.
Came languid couples pushing prams
And boisterous bands of girls and boys
And lonely souls who turned their backs
To chew, perusing fly-flecked toys
And plumbers’ fittings dulled with dust.
And round the tables where the throng
Sat chatting in a hundred tongues
A single voice would start a song
And all those throats would take it up
Glasses rap out a rapid rhythm
Bystanders clap, feet stamp the dust
Till breath gave out or someone thrust
A shutter back to shout for quiet.
Silent awhile they’d sit but soon
A pensive voice would hum a tune,
A melody not melancholy
But merry in a minor key.
Song followed song, in laps and prams
Sleeping asprawl the babies lay
Nobody rose to go to bed
Though Sunday was a working-day:
The living, living for the dead.
Section IV, much longer than any of the first three sections, falls naturally into distinct segments. The opening line comes a little as a surprise, as it takes the reader until the ninth line to confirm that he has been transported from Israel back to Cyprus. The story told in this section begins in the camps on Cyprus, when survivors of the Holocaust – “we wearers of the lucky numbers” – finally hear that they are free and will be taken to the land of Israel. In the first stanza of this section, the poet describes the prisoners hearing the news of their release and that they are to be taken to Israel. Their celebration is spontaneous. But, even as the survivors are filled with joy at the prospect of freedom, they are also fearful and unsure whether they will be able to adjust to the challenge fending for themselves in a strange new nation.
In the following stanza, the poet again opens with an adversative conjunction (bringing the story to Haifa where they finally arrive to a crowd waiting to receive them, answering their “strident and thin and high” cry, that sounded like the birds circling above the boats, with a roar of welcome from the shore. Though the name, Haifa, is not specified, the description (“the mountain rose / Calm to a calm star”) informs a reader who knows the geography of exactly where they landed. This arrival stands in contrast to the arrival in section I, when they had to swim for their lives and were still very frightened of “searchlights and shots from the dark”. This time, they are welcomed. But the speaker does not allow the reader to forget that, even on this happy occasion, feelings of sorrow and loss are also present, for “Also the dead descended” – and the alliteration strengthens their presence.
From Haifa the action moves to a description of the night life in Jaffa. The songs being sung at an improvised café by already established immigrants bring a calm and rest after the description of the cries and roar at the arrival scene in Haifa. Notwithstanding the “hundred tongues” that the citizens of the young nation speak, they sing as one voice, a collective voice that contrasts with hoarse and false singing that erupted on Cyprus. The final line of the Jaffa-segment – “The living, living for the dead” – allays the final line of the previous segment: “Also the dead descended pressing, pressing.”
V
Strange to be an immigrant
To wander through the centre of the town
Watching the people pass, not a face known
Everyone going somewhere, you alone
A nobody going nowhere.
Strange to be an immigrant
To wander through the suburbs of the town
Ringing at doors, asking for odd chores,
Pitied, invited in and given a drink
Making it last to let your eyes take in
The table with its starched and glossy cloth,
The ancestors enlarged in oval frames:
Grandmother neckless, hefty, grandfather mild
And bearded to the eyes; the heavy chairs
The sideboard tiered and windowed, all that attests
To settledness.
For they promise you things will improve but home is a hut
And work is a few days a month breaking stones for the roads
And you cannot go back or elsewhere and you dare not look forward:
Grim to be an immigrant.
In section V Olga describes not only her own feelings of dislocation, but also of those who, like her, were new immigrants. The first five lines appear to be a description of the speaker herself, aware that here in her new homeland she has no known identity. Line 6 repeats the first line, “Strange to be an immigrant”, but now the action moves away from the centre of the city to the periphery, where only informal, if any, employment would be available. Knowing the poet’s background, the reader realises that she is not describing her own life, but is giving voice here to immigrants from Europe, who have lost everything, including their families in the war. Olga had the possibility to return to South Africa; they have no such option. Their sense of desperation is reflected in the portrayal of them going from house to house asking for odd jobs from the vatikim, those who had lived in the land since before the war and were able to bring their personal belongings, such as furniture and photographs, with them. The situations of the two groups are in sharp contrast: One is established and secure; the other lives in temporary huts, occasionally working at the same backbreaking job that had killed many in the camps, such as breaking stones for roads. This desolate image of their lives leads to the powerful culmination of this section in the last line: “Grim to be an immigrant.”
VI
Sometimes at night I watch you slip
Along your deep sleep’s secret river
Your hollowed hand, your eddied hair
Your leaf-like eyelids barely quiver.
A child is such a tender thing
So slow to grow, so swift to wither.
The peaceful stream down which you come
This easy slumber is the sum
Of tributaries none can number:
Children are meant to be cherished.
Wrenched from us then how they perished
Feeding like starved cats on garbage
Furtive, alert
Gaunt and befouled
Hunted and haunted.
Clutching each other
Clinging to fables?
Faded with fevers
Dulled beyond wonder
Terror or hunger
Sinking at last
None can tell where
Callously cast
Rotting naked to air
Thus perished the tender
The cherished, the fair.
Soap, lampshades, coats
Veldhuren
Slave labourers unto death
Diggers of their own graves
Targets for idle shooting-practice through
The guard-room door. Smoke scrolling heavenwards
Offerings to what gods?
Such grief, such rage, such outrage
Who shall appease?
Though we have built museums: raised monuments
Enrolled their names on parchment and on stone
Though for their peace perpetual tapers burn
We are not eased
Nor are their souls appeased.
Therefore we teach their tale as history
(The children come from school with frightened eyes)
Track those who hunted them, attend their trials
And give our evidence, weeping and weak
With probing of old wounds; we pilgrimage
To those low huts and open oven doors
Seeking release from dreams, crowd certain plays
And films and at the climax of the chase
A thousand rise like one and roar like a thousand.
Therefore at times we tell survivors’ tales:
… Mengele held a weekly mass inspection.
We stood before him naked having first pinched
Our cheeks and bitten our lips to give us colour.
He strode between the rows flicking his cane
Against his gleaming boots. Time and again
He stopped and pored into some prisoner’s eyes.
And the sole will to live strove in those eyes
To hold his gaze. If they flickered the stick twitched
Meaning annihilation …
… Three years we lived in the ghetto and one in the forest
Fig ht i ng a s pa r t isa n s – u si ng t he ammunition
We’d bought in the ghetto-years from Germans and others.
Perilous work and the penalty death on the spot
Yet many attempted it.
Once, having bought some stuff
And hidden it under my shirt I was hurrying home
(That was the bad part, getting back to the ghetto)
Walking in mid-street, wearing the yellow star
As Jews were forced to, when somebody shouted my name
And I saw running towards me openarmed to embrace
The old professor whose favourite I had been
Before our studies were stopped. I had only one thought:
What if they search me now? And I gripped his wrists
And I flung the old man from me and
I fled …
… It was in ’forty. I was already here,
A cable came from my son who’d been left behind
Saying he might get to Italy, asking advice.
And I consulted many and most agreed
That with Italy occupied, moving could mean no gain.
And 1 cabled him saying “Stay” and the boy obeyed.
And this was the sum of our wisdom – Those who escaped
To Italy stayed alive but my boy was caught …
And life goes on – but the memorial season
Quickens a grief that neither time nor reason
Can quite annul and with it outrage – rage None can assuage.
Only the siren can speak for us, only the siren
Moaning at morning – mounting by semitones
Climbing and climbing and climbing and smiting the sky
Wailing and wailing, assailing the world and prevailing
Stilling the cities, the villages, tillers of fields
Suddenly failing, falling by quarter-tones
Sliding to silence beside an affrighted horizon:
Only the siren can speak for us – having no words.
T here is an element of st ream of consciousness in the writing of this section. The nar rator describes her own child peacefully sleeping and remarks that this is how it should be, for “Children are meant to be cherished.” Yet, in reality they are often not cared for so tenderly, and the narrator takes the reader to the conditions in the camps and ghettos of war-time Europe in harsh descriptive language. To a reader today, in the era of real-time war reportage, such descriptions are no longer as frightening or abnormal, given our media saturation of shocking images in which women and children are always the most vulnerable to violence and chaos. The last eight lines link the present with the past, lifting the whole poem out of its temporal specificity and making it part of the greater Jewish story. In these lines, the poet piles up alliteration after alliteration until the rhythm becomes like an accelerated heartbeat – the sensation that one may experiences when sirens wail as still regularly occurs in Israel.
VII
And I carried you on wings of eagles
And I brought you unto Me
Not so, for we arose and left our dead
Their corpses and their ashes and we fled
Those precincts going westward, always westward
Slowly for weakness. Word was in the air
Talk of the land and longing to be there
Quit of these miseries. West we went and south
Seeking the sea – stealing to stay alive
And killing sometimes. Many turned aside
To seek old habitations and abide
And some found ruins or neighbours hostile-eyed
Guarding their former doorways. Southward still
Cumbered with children, with the old and ill
Till sudden sight of sea from the last slope
Sent us careering downward wild with hope
Of what? For by the shore were other camps.
On eagles’ wings … On the decks of derelict tramps
Serried by night to breathe – buried by day
Within their foetid depth we made our way
Across the Mediterranean harried – worried,
Wanted in no port, wanting only one
And steering for it. Then, in sight of land
The grey ships closing in, the grim command:
“We are about to board you – do not
resist.”
Meeting the boarding-party with a hail
Of bolts and bottles, fighting tooth and nail
Kicking and butting, clinging to the rail,
Clubbed, disentwined, transshipped and made to sail
For Cyprus. And the end another camp.
And you brought … yes, into this narrow land
Of many vistas, Lapping sea and sand
Bleaching at noon, dominion of the sun
Whose lustre gilds the thistle and makes dun
The summer months. Land of the olive tree
Whose twisted limbs and silver filigree
Fill valleys where the ancient armies marched.
Land where the wilderness flint-littered, parched
Falls to the date, to grain, to low-clipped vines
That stretch in parallel converging lines
To the blue-shadowed hills; of groves and pines
And pointing cyprus. Land where sprinklers arch
Like whirling girls their arms above the field
And valley, plain and terraced mountain yield
Bountiful crops: A blessed land as promised.
And I carried you on wings of eagles
And I brought you unto Me
Yes
Nevertheless
The opening two lines of this section are drawn from Exodus 19:4, bringing this long poem back to the opening use of the Haggadah and closing the poetic cycle. The quotation is immediately followed by a denial, indicating that the speaker is not convinced that it was God who brought the Jews out of Europe, because she continues: “for we rose … we fled … we went …” – the emphasis is on the initiative taken by the survivors of the camps. There was no easy passage home for them, since at their former houses the neighbours were “hostile-eyed”, nor was the passage to Palestine easy, “For by the shore were other camps”. The survivors were not “carried … on wings of eagles” but on dirty, barely sea-worthy ships with no safe passage guaranteed. Yet finally the speaker does acknowledge that the Almighty brought them to the land of their dreams, which is described in agricultural and natural images as a bountiful and blessed land. Exodus 19:4 is repeated at the end of the section, followed by the final word, “Nevertheless”, drawing the previous positive descriptions into question. The homecoming at the end of the journey did not guarantee either safety or peace. The dichotomy that the poet experiences expresses the dichotomy that many of her Jewish readers experience: the struggle of faith in the light of history.
In this long poem, Kirsch is unequivocally a Jewish writer rooted in the writings and history of her people. The poem is both poem and liturgy; spoken both in a private and a choral voice, a communal voice, an echo of the voice of history. It reminds one of the communal chanting heard in many synagogues. In the Koppies synagogue, the chanting had often been led by Olga’s father, Sam, who had a strong cantorial voice. His father before him had acted as cantor in the Lithuanian village of Plunge. In this poem Kirsch continues to tread the complex and ambivalent path of “a Jewish poet in any of the languages of the Diaspora, sensitive to the interlacing of exile and sacredness, religion, language and art” (John Hollander p6). This is Hollander’s description of the nature of Jewish writing in general, but it is also applicable to Kirsch’s work.
Olga Kirsch may not be one of the great writers within the Jewish tradition, but she wrote with the consciousness that she was part of the Jewish people, part of an ancient tradition and that she represents this tradition within the Afrikaans canon. It is surely time that she be remembered, both as the only Jewish voice in Afrikaans literature, and as part of the broader Jewish literary heritage.
NOTES
1 Die Wandelende Jood // O dogter van Babel, jy wat / verwoes sal word, gelukkig / is hy wat jou sal vergeld / wat jy ons aangedoen het // God het sy volk veroordeel tot die vuur, / masjiengeweer, gaskamers en die graf. / Hy het hul saamgeskaar in kerk en skuur / en met die witkalk en die vlam bestraf. // En enkeles het uit die puin herrys, / krank en geknak, met oë wat die dood / se starre niksheid dra en weer gereis / deur vreemde lande na die moerderskoot. / Die eeue-oue pelgrimstog hervat / met skuifelende voete en geboë / skouers. Maar aan die einde van die pad / het een hul weggewys met trae oë. // Sal God in toorn die poorte stukkend slaan / dat my moeë mense mag binnegaan? (Mure van die hart, 1948)
