(FT) Publishers cloth. 8vo. 144 pages. 24 cm. First edition. In Yiddish. inscribed in Yiddish on first page by the author. On verso of title page: For the sanctification of God's name. Between his 1939 book of Yiddish poetry, Yung Grin Mai (Young Green May) and his caustic novella, A Cat in the Ghetto, lay the Holocaust: Skaryýsko-Kamienna, where Rachmil Bryks was born in 1912; Lodz, to which he was deported; Auschwitz, which he survived, and, ultimately, New York where he died in 1974, though later interred in Jerusalem. A Cat in the Ghetto, recently republished by Persea Books, first appeared in 1952 under the more unnerving title Oyf Kidesh Hashem, meaning, In Sanctification of the Name, but expressing, also, the pious euphemism for martyrdom. Like fellow survivor Yehiel De-Nur, who, writing under his camp name and number Ka-tzetnik 135633, called the gas chambers the inner sanctum of the Temple of Auschwitz, Bryks displays and proclaims like a 20th-century prophet. In his novellas, the tattooing needle of Auschwitz trails a thread tied, at one end, to the Book of Lamentations, which sanctified the destruction of a Jewish way of life in mourning the loss of a symbolic Temple, thereafter endlessly transformed.
Bryks took the litany of Lamentations as inspiration for the secular litany of his ghetto experience between 1939 and 1944. (Compared with the ghetto years, Auschwitz occupies a brief place in his collected works, which also include a novel, The Paper Crown, and stories from the beginning of the war. ) But whereas younger writers like these sacrificed everything to render literature true to experience, Bryks, writing in a very native Yiddish, clung fast to his roots in the Book of Prophets, Sholom Aleichem, the midrash, the folktale and the megillot. Bryks, who in photographs resembles a Polish vaudevillian, considered himself a survivor of neither the Holocaust nor the Shoah, but rather as one passed over by the Khurbn, which came only for the Yidn. In his essay My Credo, he wrote, I want to emphasize that our Khurbn period includes also the spiritual khurbn in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era the destruction of the Jewish word, the slaughter of Yiddish writers, actors, artists, teachers and others engaged in the field of Yiddish culture. According to his daughters, the mamaloshn was the only tongue tolerated in their home on New York Citys Upper West Side, where, in contrast to the tortured linguistic contortions of German-language poet Paul Celan in Paris, Bryks wrote steadily at the kitchen table by day and met Isaac Bashevis Singer, Itzik Manger and Avrum Reisen for tea at the Garden Cafeteria. (From A Yiddish Cat Still Laughing After Hot, Black Fire by Daniel Elkind; published March 11, 2009, issue of March 20, 2009; Jewish Daily Forward) . Subjects: Short stories, Yiddish. Light wear to covers, very good condition. (HOLO2-97-18-JU) XX
