Yisroel Shtern wrote in Yiddish. During the Second World War he and all the other Jews from Warsaw were imprisoned in the ghetto. Yisroel Shtern died there in 1942.
His poem was preserved despite the destruction of the ghetto and the attempt to destroy all the Jews. It was buried in a milk can with other writings, not all of them poems. These writings by many people form what is now known as the Ringelblum Archive, Ringelblum being the name of the far-sighted man who insisted on documenting for posterity what was happening to Warsaw's Jews, and who also found a way of securing the archive for future generations. To which I belong.
After the Nazis had emptied the ghetto of its Jews, they erased it. No buildings remain. When the war ended, one or two survivors returned from the camps and rescued this milk can and one other from the places where they'd been buried. A third one was lost because the Chinese embassy was built where it was hidden. Presumably it was discarded. I believe the contents of the two milk cans are now kept in the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
The poems from the Ringelblum Archive have been translated from Yiddish. They can be found online at https://thesongremains.org/writers.
A phrase about man in an old holy book
by Yisroel Shtern
Though Springtime, there was rain and snow,
and above the columns of night
grief clambered like a cat and terrorized all the roads.
I sat alone, leafing through an old holy book.
Then a phrase transcending generations shimmered
through my home like a crown, a proud phrase though old,
but I did not move towards this dream
with a silver platter, with bread and with salt.
And the phrase did not flash like lightning during my sleep,
and in the morning it did not sit by my head
with daggers of judgment and punishment aimed at my eyes;
it didn’t gnaw like sulfur permeating my days.
I arose Spring-like with the day’s dance,
wrote joy with my stick in the warm sand.
Woe did not drip into my breakfast repast
when a bloodied Jew came sliding along the wall
Leaden and blind like a cloud, unable to locate his house;
when laughter curls itself into the hairs of the brutes;
when my street hightails it swiftly and small as a mouse.
And in the park trees stand like hunters’ guns…
Neither the morning nor the afternoon was ashamed.
And the sun towered golden in town.
And neither in the sun, nor in the tree, nor in me did burn
the old-holy-book-phrase: “Man is formed from God”…
In memory of Dr. Sarah Moskovitz and her work with survivors of the Holocaust.
