Counting the Holocaust
Review by Tryst Editor

What is history, which forgets more than it remembers?—"Lament for Federico Garcia Lorca"

Chopin's Piano is divided into four major sections, plus a prologue and an epilogue. In the prologue, “Chopin's Piano,” by the same title as the book begins with this epigraph:

On September 19, 1863, fourteen years
after Chopin's death, Russian soldiers
in Warsaw hurled his piano to the street
from a fourth-floor window

The epigraph and the poem establish right away that this book will not entirely be about the Holocaust. The idea of the book, as a whole, is about how war seeks to destroy the very things that we revere: Creation in the form of art, music, poetry, painting, life, where the sacred becomes the profane.

The first section of the book, Toledo contains two poems, “ Toledo ” and “Lament to Federico Garcia Lorca.” What I want to note here is the richness of descriptions and language in both poems with a vibrancy to match the interior subjects of the poems. In particular this part of the poem where the narrator is describing, “a monstrance in the shape of a small cathedral,” I could actually feel the crowded images pushing against the structure of the poem:

There were a thousand and one ivory columns, each
with its inset marble    its tiers of virgins   and inlaid crosses encrusted
with emeralds and rubies     and there were rings weighed down
with perfectly cut gems    and sparkling necklaces
made to mimic the vaulted crosses

But I have to say, “Lament for Federico Garcia Lorca,” took my breath away. I could actually sense the pulse, the tempo and the passion of the poet to his subjects. In my favorite part, “Seville : Flamenco Dancer,” the dancers fairly leap off the page. These are some of the most gorgeous lines of poetry I have read and are, not surprisingly, reminiscent of Lorca. The virtuoso skill with which Fishman exhibits his knowledge of music, dance and poetry is established. Fishman is a veteran of the poetic craft, no doubt.

we could feel the music pulse in them     we could see how they stamped
and savored every note    we could hear how the words to the song
welled up in them     how each fractured note rose from the soles
of their feet     how they split each phrase into dark syllables and blood
We could see the torn words lift from them     like bits of still-burning ash
We thought they might die of their song     but then they grew quiet
and only the sob of guitars remained

The second section of the book, Counting the Holocaust was painful. Permit me to cite the entire poem, “Counting the Holocaust”:

He tried to get a handle on the Holocaust:
let others immerse themselves in questions
of time and intention    

He would leave the Nazis to history  
the endless litany of camps to architects
and statisticians    

Let the professors tussle over Hitler's evil
genius   the altruism of Schindler   the German
muse of Goldhagen

He wanted to know one thing only —
what six million of anything added up to . . .
and so he counted:

grains of uncooked rice   until the gallon jugs
he dropped them into filled his kitchen   un-
matched contact lenses  

newly-minted pennies   then soda pop bottle caps
battered shoe boxes   abandoned valises   and six
million periods in 12-point Gothic type:

thirty-seven hundred and four unconsumed
pages     He was counting the Holocaust   and he
kept counting.

This is one of the poems I have been mulling over the past three months. Six million is a number, but in terms of lives, I am still counting but my mind can neither fathom, nor accept such an indignity to the human spirit. Six million doesn't even begin to factor in the exponential number of lives that were affected afterwards. If you multiply six million by six million families who were affected, and then multiply that number by six million descendents, we are still working with numbers that are absolutely beyond the scope of understanding. These are not my hyperboles, but a fact that if one life alone is enough to affect generations of family members and their friends, imagine six million. As it was written, when God promised Abraham, “ I will bless you greatly, and I will multiply your seed greatly like the stars of the heavens, and like the sand which is on the seashore" ( Genesis 22:17), we have never been able to count the grains of sand, or the stars of the heavens because they are beyond our scope.

Furthermore, the poem feels distant, almost clinical, told from the third person character; i.e., we don't know who this “he” is. But upon closer examination, the inclusion of familiar things like soda pop bottle caps, battered shoe boxes, gallon jugs, valises, contact lenses—the relics of human objects, touched by lives that used them. These artifacts that we're all familiar with and have, at one time another, used them, cherished them as sentimental belongings; in other words, they have value and serve as the symbolic representations for the dead. The portent of this particular poem, I believe, is the nexus of Chopin's Piano. That and this line, “What is history, which forgets more than it remembers?" I don't think I need to explicate this line more than what it offers, but I think it bears noting that unless we keep remembering, keep reminding ourselves, our children and their children I can't see any other way to prevent history from repeating itself; I can't see any other way to prevent the David Irvings of this world from spreading their disease of lies and deceptions, thus allowing the future to commit more atrocities.

Then, the third section of the book, and equally disturbing, dwells on the accounts of the victims in Hiroshima. While the poems in here were just as compelling as the poems in the first two sections, I wasn't as affected by the dire descriptions. Part of my reasoning is that the bombs killed and disfigured many people, but the victims weren't directly tortured, humiliated, dehumanized by the “killing machine”; that is, man. This doesn't imply that the poems in this section are any less skillful. I trust every reader will agree differently.

Lastly, the fourth section, At a Place of Burning, perhaps more than anything is a revisitation of the first three sections, but the poems seem to take place in more recent times. I don't have a good handle, overall coherence for this section, but I would say the poems here act as a winding down process, (the pace seems slower), to the epilogue which ends on the poem, "A Child of the Millennium" of hope:

What Jake is best at has nothing to do with genocide
or the acid tides of history      He travels in realms
where tenderness is a face that brushes his face
He feels the strength of those around him      and their love
and time ticks at his wrist like the gentlest rain      His eyes
are the most translucent lakes, his smiles tiny suns
that shine a clear light on the living.

Chopin's Piano is not a book for poets and poetry lovers only. This is a book that should be read in schools, in libraries, in museums, and in the sanctuary of our homes. It's a book that should be carried around in the halls of academia; it's a book that should be absorbed carefully and then discussed amongst scholars, teachers, musicians, artists, attorneys, architects, bakers, doctors, inventors; and, let us not forget, the survivors, because this is a book about all of these people from all walks of life who made up the Holocaust victims. In a sense, we the living, are also survivors of the Holocaust: Who among us does not know a friend, or a friend of a friend, or have a relative who died, or suffered in the camps? I tell you, the gravity of World War II is like a meteor that hit the earth and created a crater so large that it affected the world's environment for millennia—shifted weather, tectonics, landscape and its inhabitants. The only difference between the analogy I offer and the Holocaust is that man created this chaos, this horrible destruction of human life.

When I first read Chopin's Piano, I fell into a deep vault of despair; it's as if I couldn't escape my feelings of disorientation. It was the same feeling I walked away with when I toured Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial site, outside of Munich . You have to understand I don't seek out these things—I don't want to, but I can't look away, either. Recalling an entry dated, April 25, 2001, I wrote: What it must have felt like to stare out of those same bleak barrack windows from where there would be no escape doesn't even begin to describe the depths of human pathos…I feel a terrible urgency to leave Munich. And again, that same feeling haunted me when I read Chopin's Piano. I wanted to weep but there was no place eternal enough to displace that grief, and who would understand, or care. I wanted to put the book down, and several times I tried, but it compelled me to stay, to stay and witness; it asked me to be brave, to embrace all of it. There are plenty of other historical books I've read on the Holocaust, but the documentary style, clinical approach those books offer doesn't necessarily splice the soul like an honest book of poetry will. Chopin's Piano is that book; its poetry sings, it weeps, it accuses, it forgives and it heals. This is truly the best book of poetry I have read in years; it is so telling and beautiful. For this and for every reason I can think of to read poetry, I am indebted to Dr. Fishman and truly honored to have had the opportunity to review Chopin's Piano.

*****

Charles Adés Fishman directs the Distinguished Speakers Program at Farmingdale State University. He created the Visiting Writers Program at Farmingdale State in 1979 and served as director until 1997. He also co-founded the Long Island Poetry Collective (1973) and was a founding editor of Xanadu magazine and Pleasure Dome Press (1975). He was founder and coordinator of the Paumanok Poetry Award competition (1990–97) and series editor for the Water Mark Poets of North America Book Award (1980–83), and he has also served as associate editor of The Drunken Boat and poetry editor of Gaia , Cistercian Studies Quarterly , and the Journal of Genocide Studies . Currently, he is poetry editor of New Works Review ( www.new-works.org ). In 1995, he received a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
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