GOT, MAYN BRUDER: Glatshteyn's Holocaust Theologies

• In Event: The Yiddish Primary Source: Reappraisals and New Directions

Abstract

Writing through the 1940s, as news of the war filtered into the United States, Yankev Glatshteyn and a community of Yiddish writers in New York composed a vast quantity of poetry and prose in an attempt to come to terms with the destruction of their European homes, largely absent from the history of “Holocaust Literature” as a genre. One of the most striking aspects of this literature is its intense focus on the theological implications of the events: like those survivors experiencing crises of faith, whose writing would become the basis for much of Holocaust Theology, these authors were deeply concerned with the religious implications of the Holocaust. Unlike the reflective literature of the post-war period, however, these writers are unable to conceive of the Holocaust as either a discrete historical event, or as distanced in time, and thus seem unable to settle on a specific interpretive position.

Yankev Glatshteyn’s wartime poetry engages continually with, but is unable to settle on a single theological position, vacillating between pleas against silence, anger-filled indictments, and a kind of sympathy, bordering on pity. It is this third position that this paper will explore, through a close comparison of two poems, that figure God in intensely human terms. These poems are not interested in attributing blame, or asking for explanations. Instead, they offer an alternative model of theological response to the Holocaust, posing the question of what we may owe to God not as a humans to the divine, but as one person to another, existence depends not on our survival, but on our compassion.


This paper offers one example of a complex and troubled engagement with God emergent from this contemporaneous Holocaust literature through a case study of the poetry of Yankev Glatshteyn, exploring the ramifications of the odd claim made by Roskies and Diamant that with his 1946 collection SHTRALNDIKE YIDN, Glatshteyn became “a theologian, not merely a poet of the Holocaust” (119), and opening a space in which to rethink the early reception history of the Holocaust within America, and the American Jewish community of the mid-twentieth century.

Author

• Sean Sidky, Indiana University