September 2007 Jewish Currents

“The Book of Yolek” first appeared in The New Statesman in 1982. Anthony Hecht had served with the U.S. 97th infantry and participated in the liberation of Flossenburg, part of the Buchenwald concentration camp complex. “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension,” he told an interviewer. “For years after I would wake shrieking.”

Poet Laureate of the U.S. Library of Congress (1982-4), Hecht won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1968 volume, The Hard Hours, which detailed his World War II memories — memories that contributed to a nervous breakdown in 1959.

Hecht taught at Smith, Bard, Harvard, Georgetown, and Yale, and won many notable literary awards. An interesting analysis of “The Book of Yolek” by Kenneth Sherman in Partisan Review can be found here.

Naturally, I love my children. A little less naturally, I find that I also love a particular five-year-old I never met, who died in the Holocaust almost unnoticed.

Anthony Hecht (1923 -2004), the late U.S. Poet Laureate, memorialized this child in his masterly sestina, “The Book of Yolek” (from his 1990 collection The Transparent Man, reprinted in his Collected Later Poems).

[The sestina, an intricate verse form created by 13th-century Provençal troubadours, is a thirty-nine-line poem consisting of six six-line stanzas and one three-line envoi (or “send-off”). The six end-words in the first stanza are repeated in a prescribed order as end-words in each of the subsequent stanzas. The concluding envoi brings together all six of the end-words. — Editor]

Hecht told little Yolek’s story simply, hauntingly, and timelessly. He accomplished this partly through the choice of his sestina’s end-words: “day,” “to,” “meal,” “home,” “walk,” and “camp.” These six simple words carry connotations both innocent and dark. Critics have noted and praised this duality, as well as Hecht’s unpretentious language and restrained voice of moral authority.

But overlooked within the otherwise transparent lines is another layer of meaning, a hidden meaning that may take your breath away. Hecht chose his end-words not only for their poignancy and dual connotations.

He chose them also for their final letters: y,o,l,e,k, and p. Taking advantage of the sestina’s repeated-end-word structure, he placed these six letters at the end of each stanza’s six lines, secretly spelling Yolek’s name. In the style of many Jewish liturgical poems of remembrance, Hecht created a name-acrostic at his poem’s right-hand margin. He did this with a solemn and loving purpose. He sought to bury the boy as honorably as he could.

Hecht read about Yolek in the 1940s. He published the sestina in 1982, after
forty years with the memory. The poem’s end-words, the bones of every stanza, couldn’t have been chosen late in the compositional process.

Like the memory, the composition hinged on the name. The “p” has a related significance, suggesting the Hebrew letter peh. On a traditional Jewish gravestone, a peh appears at the upper right, standing for the Hebrew word poh, meaning “here.” The decedent’s name appears further down. Painfully absent from our world, Yolek is hauntingly present in the sestina’s lines. With the name as a starting place, Hecht gave Yolek a resting place.

The sestina form’s strict pattern of word repetition was first employed to communicate a lover’s unremitting devotion. The six terminal words, deployed in a varying and prescribed order, create echoes usually heard as romantic. Hecht instead crafted his sestina to communicate unremitting grief and mourning, as well as love.

In the year before he died, Hecht and I exchanged several letters. His responses were gracious but evasive. The graciousness came as no surprise
after contemplating the poem itself, along with several published interviews with him and the essays in his collections Melodies Unheard and Obbligati. Nor did the evasiveness really surprise me, considering the subtlety of the sestina’s construction and the evident sacredness of the memory.

“I’m deeply touched by your very kind letter,” he wrote, the handwriting revealing (to my eye) a steady mind and unsteady hand. “Like you, I have children who, but for the good fortune of the time and place of their birth, might have perished like Yolek.”

He would write nothing explicit about the acrostic. I’ve deferred writing about it myself, not wanting to desecrate a sacred memory with unsacred commentary. But we can’t know the poem’s full power without speaking of the buried name.

Below is Hecht’s sestina; below it is my tribute to him. In Hecht’s poem, the acrostic is most easily seen in the envoi, where Yolek’s name is spelled from top to bottom, right to left, using the final letters of the end-words. Every time I read it, it’s like meeting the ghost of the poor child, unknown yet beloved.

The Book of Yolek

Wir haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.*

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail, it doesn’t matter where to,
Just so you’re weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home;
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn’t a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We’re approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal.

*(We have a law, and by that law he must die.)

Anthony Hecht

Receiving Yolek

to the memory of Anthony Hecht

The simple genesis — an unuttered name.
Then thoughts of the interrupted meal he left
Combine with difficulty drawing breath,
Composing muted, otherworldly music.
It underscores a grim, unbidden wish
To seize the memory, to reimagine why.

They line us up like soldiers. Some kids ask why
And some get hitted. Soldiers read our names
Beside a truck. One says “Now make a wish”
And laughs. One says “Now take a hand, your left,
And hold the next one’s shoulder.” And loud music
Comes from the truck, with puffing smoke, like breath.

You picture him at riflepoint, and note you breathe
More slowly, helplessly, and don’t know why
You hear a strain of unrelenting music
Conflate with recollections of the name.
The telling fell to others, yet he who left
The broken story shares an author’s anguish.

I think when I was three I maked a wish,
Shutted my eyes and taked a hurting breath,
And blowed until no little flame was left —
The others helped. I got my wish! Know why?
’Cause we all blowed and laughed and singed my name!
(I wished for blowing help and laughing music.)

The ashes vanish, but imagined music
Yokes unspoken torment with the warmest wish —
The composition with the unraveled name.
Each scattered letter is a buried breath,
Like the unfledged, innocent, initial Why
That triggers others, till almost none are left.

One teacher in the other school I left
Lined up with us at every Friday music.
He laughed a little when I asked him why
We sing for shabbes, and when I said I wish
We’d sing real quiet and then hold our breath
That’s what we did. Oh, now I heared my name.

An unheard music whispers who and why
Hebraically — with a final wish of breath.
We’re left with exodus and another name.

Jeff Balch

Jeff Balch is a freelance writer and public library staffer. He has written for many publications in the Midwest, as well as for national outlets including the Washington Post and National Public Radio. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife and children who are roughly Yolek's age.