The Eleventh Lost Tribe: Poems of the Holocaust - Hardcover

Louis Daniel Brodsky

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568090412 ISBN 13: 9781568090412

Publisher: Time Being Books, 1998

Synopsis

The Eleventh Lost Tribe, Brodsky's fourth book of poems devoted to the Holocaust, asks the reader to confront the dispossessed lives of ghetto dwellers, death-camp survivors, Jews prescient or desperate enough to have fled Europe prior to being captured and slaughtered, and, finally, children of the Shoah's refugees or orphans of those who perished in it.

Exposing the gritty existence of characters Brodsky has resurrected from his imagination, the book's four sections implore the reader to follow on a quest not so much for historical fact as emotional truth, in search of a better understanding of our incredulity and outrage over the Holocaust.

Although no sane design can be applied to the irrationality of the German wartime psyche, Brodsky has given order to the narrative formed by these characters, grouping them by their proximity to the actual smells and sounds, obscenity and corruption of death. While no one can know the depths of horror experienced by those who were about to inhale the gas or be incinerated in the ovens or shot at point-blank range, Brodsky suggests that those who survived carry just as devastating and palpable an insight into death for having to live with their memories.

This book brings those memories to life through the eyes of camp survivors, refugees, and their children, revealing scars so deep that nothing can alleviate their debilitating pain, ultimately rendering these victims the waking, walking dead, the wandering ghosts from another lost tribe -- the fated eleventh -- comprising these misbegotten spirits, those who died, and all of us now assimilated into the aftermath of the Holocaust.

About this title

About the Author:

Brodsky is the author of fifty-five volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Éditions Gallimard) and twenty-three volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and seven books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, The Faulkner Review, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Ball State University's Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.

Review:

The Eleventh Lost Tribe is a thoughtful meditation on the post-Auschwitz human condition. The collection sensitively explores the limits of language and the enormity of loss for the generations who come after the Holocaust. The Shoah is history, but as Louis Daniel Brodsky's gifted poetry shows, the event continues to live in the lives of succeeding generations. ---- Alan L. Berger, Raddock Family Eminent Scholar in Holocaust Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz, Florida Atlantic University

It's as though the Holocaust still lives within him, within these angry, defiant poems, not as a subject to write about, but bone of his bone, nerve of his nerve. ---- Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew

About this edition

• Publisher: Time Being Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1568090412
• ISBN 13: 9781568090412
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 105