Holocaust Poems: A Gentile's Perspective - Softcover

These poems are part of my attempt as a Gentile to deal with the Holocaust, ultimately a doomed effort. Perhaps I am driven by a kind of survivor guilt as one who by the accident of the time, location and ethnicity of my birth in one sense was completely unscathed by the Holocaust, but whose world became inescapably haunted by it. And there is always that terrifying, unanswerable question of what role I would have played if I had been born a German instead of an American. I offer these poems for whatever value they may have to survivors, perpetrators, bystanders like myself, and the generations that follow who must grapple with this history. I have been encouraged by the responses of readers, especially those whose stories I have nervously and presumptuously used, and by editors who have published some of the poems. “Not I,” “Metamorphosis,” “Watching a Holocaust Drama on Television,” “Lodz, USA,” and “Ethnic Cleansing” appeared in Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide. “January 27, 1945” appeared in ORIM: A Jewish Journal at Yale.