- Paperback
- 96 pages
- ISBN 978-1-905512-63-8
Publisher Five Leaves Publications
Introduction by George Szirtes, winner of the TS Eliot poetry prize
Reznikoff’s subject is one people’s suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government’s record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.
Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff’s own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust themselves.
He lets the terrible history unfold – in history’s own words.
“…Reznikoff is the quintessential poet of New York City and one of the key figures in Jewish-American poetry. A writer of astonishing insight and unsurpassable charm, his poems endeavour to make visible much that usually goes unnoticed.”
— Publisher’s Weekly USA
Charles Reznikoff was born August, 1894, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II. He was a blood-and-bone New Yorker, a collector of images and stories who walked the city from Bronx to Battery and breathed the soul of the Jewish immigrant experience into a lifetime of poetry. He died in 1976; one year after this book was first published in the USA.
Reznikoff’s subject is one people’s suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government’s record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.
Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff’s own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust themselves.
He lets the terrible history unfold – in history’s own words.
“…Reznikoff is the quintessential poet of New York City and one of the key figures in Jewish-American poetry. A writer of astonishing insight and unsurpassable charm, his poems endeavour to make visible much that usually goes unnoticed.”
— Publisher’s Weekly USA
Charles Reznikoff was born August, 1894, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II. He was a blood-and-bone New Yorker, a collector of images and stories who walked the city from Bronx to Battery and breathed the soul of the Jewish immigrant experience into a lifetime of poetry. He died in 1976; one year after this book was first published in the USA.
