KENNETH SHERMAN
The Necessity of Poetry:
Anthony Hecht's "The Book of Yolek"
A
NTHONY HECHT WAS A WITNESS to the Holocaust. He served
with the U.S. 97th infantry and participated in the liberation of
Flos enburg, an annex of Buchenwald. It was in Flossenburg
that Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged, only days before the camp
was liberated . In a conversation with Philip Hoy, Hecht revealed the
shocking nature of his experience: "When we arrived...prisoners were
dying at the rate of five hundred a day from typhus. . . .The place, the
suffering, the prisoners' accounts were beyond comprehension. For
years after I would wake shrieking."
So it is not surprising that the Holocaust is a persistent subject in
Hecht's oeuvre.
It
provides the ironic conclusion to "It Out-Herods
Herod. Pray You. Avoid It" and is the central concern of the much–
anthologized "More Light! More Light!" In my opinion, "The Book of
Yolek," which first appeared in
The New Statesman
in 1982-thirty–
eight years after the initial shock-is one of the most powerful Holo–
caust poems ever published .
The Book of Yolek
Wir Haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soli er sterben.
"
The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail.
It
doesn't matter where
to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining da y.
*
We have a law and according to the law he must die.
Editor's Note: "The Book of Yolek," from
The Transparent Man,
copy–
right © 1990 by Anthony Hecht. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc.
