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The Eleventh Lost Tribe: Poems of the Holocaust
The Eleventh Lost Tribe Poems of the Holocaust Author:Louis Daniel Brodsky The Eleventh Lost Tribe, Brodsky's fourth book of poems devoted to the Holocaust, asks the reader to confront the dispossessed lives of ghetto dwellers, death-camp survivors, Jews prescient or desperate enough to have fled Europe prior to being captured and slaughtered, and, finally, children of the Shoah's refugees or orphans of those wh... more »o perished in it. Exposing the gritty existence of characters Brodsky has resurrected from his imagination, the book's four sections implore the reader to follow on a quest not so much for historical fact as emotional truth, in search of a better understanding of our incredulity and outrage over the Holocaust. Although no sane design can be applied to the irrationality of the German wartime psyche, Brodsky has given order to the narrative formed by these characters, grouping them by their proximity to the actual smells and sounds, obscenity and corruption of death. While no one can know the depths of horror experienced by those who were about to inhale the gas or be incinerated in the ovens or shot at point-blank range, Brodsky suggests that those who survived carry just as devastating and palpable an insight into death for having to live with their memories. This book brings those memories to life through the eyes of camp survivors, refugees, and their children, revealing scars so deep that nothing can alleviate their debilitating pain, ultimately rendering these victims the waking, walking dead, the wandering ghosts from another lost tribe -- the fated eleventh -- comprising these misbegotten spirits, those who died, and all of us now assimilated into the aftermath of the Holocaust.« less