Every year, January is the month in which I do most public readings of texts related to the Holocaust, as January the 27th is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. At the University of Essex the Procession of Light is a fixed part of Holocaust Memorial Week, where I always read a poem at the end of the procession. I stand at a lectern placed in front of the Lakeside Theatre and look out on the paper lanterns placed on the small square in front of it. Procession participants and passers-by then gather in a semi-circle around the lanterns.
This year I read Testimony by Tuvia Ruebner, in Rachel Tzvia Back’s translation from the Hebrew which is in the Poetry of the Holocaust anthology. I chose the poem because the word yes appears several times in the final stanza as a promise of remembering the terrible suffering and an acknowledgement of the effect of that terror when we think about it here and now:
in my day I exist in order to say
to their nighttime voices yes, yes to their weeping, yes
to the lost in their house of abeyance, to the falling from its wall’s shadows
on the fear in my voice saying yes
in the emptiness.
For the first time since a few years I also read Guus Luijters’s Song of Stars in one go at the Wivenhoe Bookshop Shed. The book-length poem in eleven sections shows us the short life of Sientje Abram from Amsterdam who was deported and murdered in Auschwitz in September 1942. There was a small but very engaged audience in the Shed. They asked me to also read out a few pages at the end of the book containing the names of the other 331 children from Sientje’s Rapenburger Street who were all killed. People were moved by the reading, in particular one woman who said that she much prefers listening to poetry being performed than reading it because of her dyslexia.
The Wivenhoe Bookshop also welcomed me in February, not for a performance but to put my Taglines on show in their gallery space Over the Sofa.
Photo by Sue Finn ©️ 2023
The frames were hanging there the entire month and the sheer colourfulness of the whole display cheered me up in this winter month, and I hope it did the same for other people. I got some lovely comments about the work and people especially appreciated the wit expressed in the poems. The chapbook with texts and photos is still for sale – please contact me if you would like to order one.
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