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PARTISAN REVIEW
again and again. Verse comes from the Latin
vertere,
which means, "to
turn around." And turning around, one looks again, reconsiders. Once
we have read "The Book of Yolek" and know its import, we turn back
to the first stanza and are discomforted to see that even though we are
fishing and camping in some arcadia, those "coals that fume and hiss"
are ominous. We know too that one of our end words, "camp," is sud–
denly charged with the significance of its disturbing historical double,
and that the last phrase of the stanza, "declining day," is preparing us
for a descent into Night.
From the beginning of the poem we are faced with the fact that the
innocence of the present has been contaminated with the crimes of the
past. We can no longer take the language at face value. History has
imbued it with a disquieting, connotative presence. And it is not only
words that are doubling, but intonation as well. The opening phrase of
the second stanza can be heard not only as a mild, introductory state–
ment, but also as an injunction-"You remember." For that of course is
the moral intent of the poem: to prohibit forgetfulness . And what is it
we are remembering? We have moved from the present of the first
stanza to the reader's childhood summer spent at camp . We are still free
to get lost "on a Nature Walk," which seems "worlds away" from the
"terrible walk" Yolek and his fellow orphans will later be forced to
take. We are still "peacefully" leading an idyllic existence, sitting before
a bonfire, and feeling slightly homesick. But the stanza ends with the
portentous line, "No one else knows where the mind wanders to ."
Hecht is preparing us for a major leap-across an ocean-to a different
sort of home and camp.
In his perceptive study
The Great War and Modern Memory,
Paul
Fussell uses the phrase "irony-assisted recall" to account for the trig–
gering mechanism that allows war's survivors and witnesses to remem–
ber disturbing incidents. To assist in bringing forth those memories,
what is required, according to Fussell, is the application of "a paradigm
of ironic action." Where the mind wanders to, then, is not so much a
place as a thought: How incredible to think, Hecht insinuates, that on
that very day ("The fifth of August,
1942")
when you were a child at a
summer camp, another child was being forced to walk to a "special
camp." This ironic awareness links us to Yolek and thrusts us into an
anti-world where the safety of home and the certainty of our daily meal
are forever shattered. The adjective "special" adds to the poem's ironic
baggage, for it calls to mind the host of Nazi euphemisms: "final solu–
tion," "special treatment," and "prompt deployment unit"
(Ein–
satzkommando)-the
name given to the death squads.
