The items are in the Muzeum Ziemi Kępińskiej im. T.P. Potworowskiego (T.P. Potworowski Museum of the Kępno District). More information about Muzeum Ziemi Kępińskiej can be found at the website of the Town Council in Kępno.
Yonia Fain, illustration to "The Hunchback."
Abraham Sutzkever, a Yiddish poet, uses shofar in works describing the Holocaust. This following poem refers to Sutzkever's return to Vilna immediately after its "liberation."
Resurrection (Tchais h'misim)
I searched for the Shofar of Messiah
In specks of grass, in scorched cities,
To awaken my friends. And thus spake
My soul of bones:
See, I glow
Inside you,
Why look for me outside?
In specks of grass, in scorched cities,
To awaken my friends. And thus spake
My soul of bones:
See, I glow
Inside you,
Why look for me outside?
And in my great
Forged rage,
I ripped my spirit from my body
Like a sharp horn
Of a living animal
And began to blow:
Tekiya,
Shevorim.
Come to life, the world is now free.
Leave your not-being in the graves
And leap out with blessing.
See how pure
The stars are rocking for your sake!
But the earth — like a river —
Flowed away with grass and stone,
And human words I heard:
— We don't want, go away, your earth is foul!
Forged rage,
I ripped my spirit from my body
Like a sharp horn
Of a living animal
And began to blow:
Tekiya,
Shevorim.
Come to life, the world is now free.
Leave your not-being in the graves
And leap out with blessing.
See how pure
The stars are rocking for your sake!
But the earth — like a river —
Flowed away with grass and stone,
And human words I heard:
— We don't want, go away, your earth is foul!
— From the punishment of living we were once freed!
— We don't need your time,
Your blind limping time,
And not the stars —
Our non-light glimmers brighter!
— Reality, that's us,
Vanish, cursed dream!
Gambled away, played out is your war.
— We don't need your time,
Your blind limping time,
And not the stars —
Our non-light glimmers brighter!
— Reality, that's us,
Vanish, cursed dream!
Gambled away, played out is your war.
Only one, with a voice unheard
Like the blooming of a forest, called to me,
Yearning: Redeem me, destined one — —
Like the blooming of a forest, called to me,
Yearning: Redeem me, destined one — —
— Who are you, that your command should be heard?
And grass language answered me: God.
I once lived in your word.
I once lived in your word.
Moscow, 1945
The following story is from the collection, Where the Stars Spend the Night (1975–1989).
The Hunchback
It happened and then happened again when the starry sieve of the autumn night kept sifting over and over in the narrow ghetto streets who is to live and who is to die: to live — twenty-four hours, maybe less: to die — an eternity, maybe less.
The starry sieve is pulled over the narrow streets. An unseen hand shakes it. Sons of man tumbled by scoops, innocent, falling in sighing silence —sifted into an empty, overturned sky.
Here and there, prayers drill. The shimmer of their words, emptied of crying and congealed.
A split voice, like a stone talking in its sleep, seeks refuge in the cranny of my ear:
"Old fellow, how can you go crazy?"
It is the Hunchback Kheme. The only hunchback left in our kingdom.
When did we meet? Ah, I remember: when both of us swam among thousands into the stone veins of the narrow streets.
It was his majestic hump that drew me to him then. You might have thought that, still alive, he was carrying his tombstone on his own shoulders.
The hump was only the form. I soon realized that here, form and content are not twins but a perfect unity.
I was drawn by his name: Kheme. Where did they cook up such a curious name?
At our first verbal pingpong in the stone veins of the narrow streets, when I asked if he was born in this city, Kheme hissed without blinking his tongue:
"I'm transplanted from another planet."
And though I was used to his demonic paradoxes and his trenchant dicta, cutting to the bone (I wrote them down on relics of scrolls, locked my treasure between earth and sky, but later lost the key), caught in the starry sieve of that autumn night, I was stunned by the revelation of his question: How can you go crazy?
I stroked his hump for luck:
"Why, all of a sudden?"
Kheme turned around and butted me with the point of his hump like a billy goat with his horn:
"Till now, I believed that everything my eyes see is a delusion, a dream. When I saw a pair of children's shoes in the mouth of a dog, running to find a barefoot child, or when I saw a cherry tree hanging on the gallows, or a shadow waking with a start and not finding its owner — to all this I had a chant of denial: a dream, a dream, a dream. Now, at this late hour, I've lost the power of denial, I see that the dream is bleeding."
A blue old man, over his head a Torah scroll in a mantle of sparks, cut his way through the hordes of people. Some believed the old man would save the Torah scroll. Some — that the Torah would save the old man. Both the former and the latter were sifted more and more through the starry sieve of the night.
Kheme shrank. His tombstone started sinking. In his tattered rags, he looked like a thousand-year-old feathered owl. The pupils of his eyes turned into incandescent rings:
"Every end is a beginning. Now is my great beginning. But it all depends on you: You must anoint me a madman. With the power of madness I will drive the enemy crazy and we will all be saved. No serpent was ever poisoned by its own venom."
A thought somersaulted in my head: only the impossible can still make sense. I lay my hands on his mop of hair and anointed him a madman.
Incandescent, anointed, Kheme pulled a Shofar from under his jacket and blew into it such a howl as if he were joined by all the breaths left over from the annihilated ones.
Suddenly, the starry sieve of the autumn night collapsed. The conquerors of the city went out of their minds and bit through each other's throats.
The above are from Sutzkever, A. A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft5q2nb3z7;brand=eschol.
According to the site: "Abraham Sutzkever is one of the great Yiddish poets, was born near Vilna in 1913, and spent his early childhood in Siberia. He returned to Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," and lived there between the two World Wars, where he became a poet, lived through the Holocaust, saw the humiliation and destruction of his people and city, was active in the cultural life of the ghetto (1941/43), saved cultural treasures from the Germans, fought as a partisan in the forests, and was flown out of German occupied territory to Moscow in the middle of the war.
"In 1947, Sutzkever emigrated to Israel, where he still resides, and has since become the country's foremost Yiddish poet, never forgetting "Jerusalem of Lithuania" and the annihilation of his people in Europe. In Tel Aviv, he founded the Yiddish literary quarterly Digoldene keyt (The Golden Chain) in 1948, which he still edits today (130 issues have been published). The quarterly has given renewed life to worldwide Yiddish literature for nearly half a century, publishing the surviving Yiddish writers from Europe, the Americas, the Soviet Union, and Israel. Sutzkever has received many awards, including the literary prize of the Vilna Ghetto Writers' Union and the prestigious Israel Prize. His poetry and fiction have been translated into many languages, including Hebrew, French, English, German, Russian, Polish, and Japanese."
