Susan Cohen
October 18th, 2023
Californian Poets: Part VI
Susan Cohen
Six Translations
By Rajzel Zychlinsky
translated from Yiddish by Susan Cohen
My Child Knocks
My child knocks with closed eyelashes
on the gate of the world.
It is the month of Kislev—
the willows shiver in frost
and the starry cold is scented.
The heart of my child knocks:
Open!
At the street corner
I met up with the eighth moon.
With Jewish eyes I look
into the moon’s face:
–my child, the blood in your veins is the sap
of belief and pain,
purified by the rivers of the Bible
and by the shores of the Nile.
So, my mother in a shtetl in Poland
prayed in a synagogue.
The synagogue was of wood
six hundred years old
and the bones of my grandfathers
shone light in the valley.
The synagogue was burned,
the valley trampled over.
On the effaced tombs
only shadows hover.
I place my steps slowly.
I walk easily as a light-beam,
as a wanderer in the desert
who has found a spring.
My child knocks with closed eyelashes
on the gate of the world—
the sky is still full of stars and promises
the way it once was above Jacob’s tent.
(Kazan, 1943)
Rajzel Zychlinsky
translated from Yiddish by Susan Cohen
I Cannot Protect You
I cannot protect you, my child,
from fearful dreams.
Am I permitted to hide the path
followed by generations
who weep inside your dreaming?
Your cot—a little wooden ship
on black waves of hate—
I touch your head with my lips,
and outside, the street quiets.
(Kazan)
Rajzel Zychlinsky
translated from Yiddish by Susan Cohen
Here Germans Lived
Here Germans lived.
In these homes—
the ground swayed and swayed.
Together with the graves.
Here Germans drank
wine from our Sabbath goblets—
and dispersed our bones
over all the fields of Europe.
The clock here struck
the sticking hours—
when in the gas chamber
my mother closed her blue eyes.
Trees rustled,
the sun shone,
when my people were consumed
in the ovens of Majdanek and Oświęcim.
Why did you not rain sulfur
—envoy of God?
Why did you not hail stones
here, over German heads?
Why did you not rain tears
at least for one Jewish child?
With blood, why did you not wail
over the German towns?
(Poland)
Rajzel Zychlinsky
translated from Yiddish by Susan Cohen
Dear Neighbors
Buy, buy, dear neighbors,
buy this little piece of earth.
Cheap, dirt-cheap!
You will build a house here,
dig a well,
and plant a garden outside the window.
No specter will terrify you;
my mother will not return from the gas chamber,
her grandchildren either.
And I will also not come back here,
with my tear.
I take only a stone—
that felt my mother’s tread.
In foreign, homeless nights
it will be a pillow for my head.
(Poland)
Rajzel Zychlinsky
translated from Yiddish by Susan Cohen
We Live On
We live on, upon the earth
that swallowed our blood and tear.
It will be a green springtime—
our bones finely ground ash.
We live on, a handful surviving for Kaddish.
We eat bread made from the fields,
drink water from a well.
The sun is merciful,
it touches us with a beam…
We lead our children by their small hands,
past ruined homes, ruined walls,
past dead islands of dead childhoods.
The wind romps happy and free.
We live on. Snow falls on us.
We meet white trees, yes, we see.
We drink the twilight with dark eyes,
and speak mutely to small, gray birds.
Rajzel Zychlinsky
translated from Yiddish by Susan Cohen
Two Stones
The river near our house
began
in the eyes of my brother—
quiet and gray.
Quiet and gray flows the river,
two stones consider me;
these are the eyes of my brother—
already stripped—of terror and hope.
Author Bio:
Rajzel Zychlinsky was born in 1910 in Poland. She won early praise for her poetry and her first book appeared in 1936. She escaped to the Soviet Union in 1939 where she and her husband had a son. She returned briefly to Poland after the war, settled in New York City in 1951, then moved to California for her final years. Before her death at the age of 90, Zychlinsky published seven collections of poems in Yiddish and received Israel’s Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature. Though she knew five languages, she chose to continue writing only in the language spoken by millions who died in the gas chambers, including her sister, brother, and mother. These poems all appeared in Silent Doors (1962) and were written during and shortly after the war. Translated with permission of Marek Kanter.
Susan Cohen is the author of two chapbooks and three full-length collections: Democracy of Fire (2022), A Different Wakeful Animal (2016), and Throat Singing (2012). Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Verse Daily, and won the Rita Dove, Red Wheelbarrow, Terrain,org and other prizes. Her translations of the work of Rachel Zychlinski can be found in Asymptote, Loch Raven Review, Los Angeles Review, and Women’s Voices for Change. She lives in Berkeley, California.