Poets From Canada

"What intrigues me in human nature is precisely the thing that defies gender and sexual difference, heredity and upbringing. If my character is male, then I must try to immerse myself in his masculinity in order to inhabit him completely. The same is true if my character is female...I believe that in a successful literary work the writer rises above her inner censor and transcends the confines of gender; that in such a work it makes little difference if the female characters are depicted by a male or a female writer. In such a work the writer, whatever his or her actual gender, is a feminist. In such a work the female writer is faithful to her own essence and the male writer sees his female characters as autonomous beings, similar to himself and yet different. Such a work would make us realize that we all have an equal share in our common humanity. That, at least, would be my ideal."

"It seems to me that there is an inherent difference between being a Yiddish writer and being a writer of any other language. The difference is both psychological and linguistic. The Yiddish language, written with the Hebrew letters of the Bible, automatically places every Yiddish text within the context of Jewish history, of Jewish national and religious experience, and so endows it with a near-sacred quality. The mystical power that Jews ascribe to the Hebrew letters seems to influence the texture of even the most secular Yiddish works, endowing them with an additional lustre. As a result, the relationship between the Yiddish writer and her public is imbued with a sense of spiritual and intellectual connection."

"I feared to approach the world that I had lost. I was terrified of plunging once again into the abyss of suffering, of reliving the reality that had nearly destroyed me. I wanted to enjoy my life, to relish every moment. I had learned its value at great cost. I wanted to forget the nightmare. I deplored the fact that my memory was so vivid and would not allow me to forget. And I felt too weak, too incompetent, in the face of the enormity of what I had to describe. How could I encompass and give life to all those who populated my memory? Was not the novel too elegant and too polished a literary form for such a story, was it not too detached from any lived reality, too much a game of cleverly concocted plots? In writing a novel about the Holocaust would I not end by sinning against a reality that was impossible to encompass? Was I capable of recreating the specific atmosphere of those nightmarish days, assuming that it was possible to recreate it in the first place? As time went on, it became increasingly clear to me that no one, not even the most gifted writer, would be able to capture the true atmosphere of the ghetto. Even if the writer succeeded in writing a masterpiece, it would not, it could not, be the real thing. At the same time, it never occurred to me to consider any form but the novel as a vehicle for what I wanted to say. Only the novel seemed to have the necessary scope."

"Like most writers, I wanted to be read. But I also wanted the rest of Canada to know what I and millions of other Jews like me had lived through during those terrible war years. I wanted the non-Jewish world to recognize our pain, and I wanted to memorialize our vanished past and our lost communities. And so, I found myself once again face to face with the need to find a translator."

"a pair of eyes whose gaze spoke the language of stubbornness and determination. (chapter 1)"

"The family archives were filled with piles of documents reflecting not only the growth of the Zuckerman clan, but also that of the Jewish community in Lodz. And while still a gymnasium student, Samuel had liked to sneak into the cellar and browse among the dusty papers; he was drawn to them not so much by their content as by the breath of generations gone by that reached him through them. At that time, however, he had been too busy with his own growth, with his own pulsating young life, to summon patience for a serious study of his origins. Then he had been merely proud to be so deeply rooted in his city, and it was sufficient for him to know that he could prove the fact at any time. (chapter 1)"

"Nevertheless, I hold to my old romantic belief that writers of all times and places belong to a noble fellowship; that although they are the voices of their own cultures and languages, they transcend these boundaries. This belief helps me surmount my doubts as I reach out in my foreign language of English to the hearts and minds of the people among whom I live. I want to be accepted as an equal by my literary peers in this country, to be recognized as a writer who is both Jewish and Canadian. I want to come in from the cold."

"I will say no more about the horrors of the concentration camps. They are indescribable and untranslatable."

"I do not see myself primarily as a translator, although I have in fact, with the help of my daughter, translated much of my own work. Nevertheless, when I reflect more deeply on this subject, I realize that my entire life has been a process of translation. I have been translated from my birthplace in Europe to my present home in North America. I have written three novels, one collection of short stories, four books of poetry, three plays, many essays and travelogues. Yet, without translation, all of these would have been relegated to the graveyard of those few libraries that still contain books in my language, or to the bottom drawer of my own desk. This is because the language in which I write, Yiddish, has fewer and fewer readers and writers. Translation represents to me my literary future. It makes me think that not everything I write will be totally lost, even if things do inevitably get lost in translation."

"What happened after this - that is, after the amazing flowering of Yiddish culture and literature between the two world wars - was a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, when the world experienced the trauma of the Second World War and the Jews of Europe faced mass extinction. Sadly, this too is the history of Yiddish - and it is my own personal history as well. Because my own fate as a writer was so closely dependent on the fate of that beautiful, piquant, tragic language, Yiddish."

"Barukh is beside himself: "You are not the boss of my life, do you hear? I am a human being, just like you. Just like you!" he shouts, his voice growing increasingly louder the smaller he feels inside. "You will not curse me! No! I've heard enough curses in my life.""

"Even in the concentration camps, even by the glare of the crematorium flames, there were those who wrote. We were like those humming birds who sing most beautifully when in captivity"

"I respect all definitions of art, but I cherish most the definition which states that art is an expression of the desire to communicate on the most meaningful level."

"I think that books lacking such an introduction are like houses that one enters directly from the street, still wearing one's shoes and galoshes, still wrapped in the mood of outdoors. But an introduction to a volume of poetry functions like the anteroom to a house, a vestibule where one may shake off the burden of daily routine, where one may take off one's coat and boots, catch one's breath, pause for a minute to absorb the atmosphere of the dwelling one is about to enter."

"Liberation was announced through loudspeakers. They spoke of freedom. No one believed, or disbelieved. No one danced for joy. Even a smile seemed more like the grimace of thirsty lips. On the 8th of May 1945, the day the War was officially over, I was taken to the hospital, located in what had once been the dwellings of the SS guards. There I fought with the fever for my life, and won. However, the person who won that fight, the person who survived the camps was someone else. I had died in the concentration camp."

"I live there a peaceful, idyllic life—and a life full of contentment. When I consider where I live now, and where I have lived, I cannot believe that I am the same person, that I am the same Yiddish writer and Holocaust survivor who has been asked here to address you on the subject of her life and work. Because neither my life nor my work has been bucolic, idyllic, peaceful, or full of contentment."

"On my voyage back into the Ghetto, I wanted to take with me all the questions that had tormented me after the liberation. Why had the world learned nothing from our suffering? Were the Nazis only the most extreme example of the urge to do evil, or was the drive to destroy inherent in human nature? The Nazis were, for me, the most obvious channel through which the poison of hatred could flow freely—but the poison itself, where did it come from? What was its source? In writing about the Ghetto, I wanted to find that source. I wanted to discover the essence of our humanity, to touch upon the source, upon the core of the human soul and see it reflected in the soul of the Ghetto Jew, who had stood stripped of every shred of artifice and pretense necessary to leading a normal life. There, in the Ghetto, humans had faced humans without any embellishments or illusions. They had faced the brutality of their fellow human beings, as well as the knowledge of what that brutality meant to their own destinies. It was as if the dams of a river had opened within me and I became pregnant with the idea for my book. And so it was, that by the time I arrived in Montreal, I was doubly pregnant: pregnant with my daughter, who was born in Canada, and pregnant with my novel, which was born here as well, but many years later, when my daughter was already grown and my son was an adolescent. I called this novel about the death of the Jewish community of Lodz The Tree of Life."

"one’s style, one’s method of writing—these, I believe, truly reveal the face of one’s soul."

"Writing is good therapy."

"I was a high-school student when the war broke out. In February of 1940, I, my parents, and my sister, along with the entire Jewish population of Lodz, were herded into a ghetto established in the slums of Lodz, an area called Baluty. The ghetto was encircled by a barbed-wire fence, so that not one Jew managed to escape during all the years of the ghetto's existence. There we subsisted on a starvation diet, labouring for the Germans, and in constant terror of deportation to the death camps of Chelmno and Auschwitz."

"The crowd was in good spirits, convivial and singing, and for a while the troubles of the world seemed far away."

"I was never a Sunday scribbler. Writing was never a hobby for me, a pastime to while away the hours. On the contrary, it was as necessary to me as life itself; it was a refuge, a substitute for living, a confrontation with myself, a form of confession - but always it was a necessity that allowed me to feel that my life had an accompanying motif, an underlying melody. Writing often gave me moments of such ecstasy as can only be experienced by lovers; it gave me instances of such intense spiritual forgetfulness that I truly believed that I and the cosmos were one, so that through the simple act of breathing the air in my room I felt that I was inhaling the universe itself. Clasped within the bosom of this universe, my physical self simply ceased to be. Rare moments these, but blessed."

"The more strongly I felt the urge to write, the weaker I felt in face of the enormity of the subject. I feared it, and this fear hovers over me to this day, whenever I try to write on the subject of the Holocaust."

"Each writer nurtured the hope that his or her voice would be heard. It was a drive to raise oneself above fear through the magical power of the written word, and so to demonstrate one's enduring capacity for love, for singing praise to life. Even in the concentration camps, even by the glare of the crematorium flames, there were those who wrote."

"Now the storm was over, and the world was in no hurry to come and put its arms around us. It did not rush to soothe our wounds with balms of brotherhood. Nations did not open their hearts, countries did not open their borders to let us in. Even the gates of those countries which had just freed themselves from the Nazi yoke and which should have understood us best in our homelessness and desolation were closed to us. No one wanted us. Perhaps the sight of us would have prevented them from forgetting the nightmare that had just passed. The world wanted to forget."

"Foolish, foolish Edith Sitwell sang a solo of her auntie, her rich auntie and her trumpet, such a trumpet as old ladies give to stranger- folk to blow in."

"We ask Thee not for quietness and rest, But for the ecstasy of endless quest; That Chief Adventure, questing for the truth, That radiant wholesomeness, immortal youth."

"During periods of creative work she lived in another world."

"I will be strong! then let the billows roll Far o'er my head--they cannot hurt my soul; Deeper the swell, the higher soars the crest-- I reach my haven on its boundless breast."

"The landscape, like a painted picture shone, Lined as an atlas in the window frame,In form, in character, for aye the same, But many moods writ each its tale thereon."

"It was 1967...The speech forcefully critiques colonization and calls on Indigenous people to “grab the white man’s instruments of success” to rise again. “Dad and the whole family were very nervous... To stand up and tell the truth in such a profound way, he had no idea how the public would take that.”... After his father finished speaking, there were a few seconds of stunned silence. Then the audience rose to their feet and filled the stadium with about 10 minutes of deafening applause. “He began to cry because he was so touched." He helped bring shameful parts of Canada’s history out of the shadows and inspired young Indigenous leaders... George’s address was so revolutionary, his daughter Amy George recalls, she feared he would be killed for delivering it.,, “Some people did get very angry, too. When we were walking off the field at the stadium, some people were saying ‘You’re nuts!’ and they were throwing bottles and empty cups at us,” she says. There hasn’t been much improvement in how Canada treats First Nations since George’s speech, says his grandson Rueben George."

"My nation was ignored in your history textbooks – they were little more important in the history of Canada than the buffalo that ranged the plains. I was ridiculed in your plays and motion pictures, and when I drank your fire-water, I got drunk – very, very drunk. And I forgot...Oh Canada, how can I celebrate with you this centenary, this hundred years? Shall I thank you for the reserves that are left to me of my beautiful forests? For the canned fish of my rivers? For the loss of my pride and authority, even among my own people? For the lack of my will to fight back? No! I must forget what’s past and gone... Oh God in heaven! Give me back the courage of the olden chiefs. Let me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me again, as in the days of old, dominate my environment. Let me humbly accept this new culture and through it rise up and go on... I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedoms of our great land. So shall we shatter the barriers of our isolation. So shall the next hundred years be the greatest in the proud history of our tribes and nations."

"When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed his way of life, I was called lazy. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority... Oh God! Like the thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success — his education, his skills — and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society."

"Chief Dan George of the Burrard tribe, who was best known for his role in the 1970 movie Little Big Man, died today in his sleep at Lions Gate Hospital. He was 82 years old. Besides his successful acting career, Chief Dan George was also known as an eloquent spokesman for native rights and the environment... He said he was impressed by the progress that Indians had made in his lifetime, noting that he himself, as an old man, had become more forward and bold... Some of our people stand and wait and don't talk for themselves, he said, but this is becoming a thing of the past. The younger Indians consider themselves equal to the white man. ... He said he was proud to see Indians who saw that film walk out of the theater and walk up to a white man and shake him by the hand. That's what they've got to do, you know - believe in themselves and try to fit in."

"We paid, we paid, and we paid until we became a beaten race, poverty stricken and conquered. But you have been kind to listen to me, and I know that in your hearts you wish you could help. I wonder if there is much you can do, and yet there is a lot you can do. When you meet my children in your classrooms, respect each one for what he is: a child of our Father in heaven and your brother."

"I knew my people when they lived the old way. I knew them when there was still a dignity in our lives, and a feeling of worth in our outlook. I knew them when there was unspoken confidence in the home, a certain knowledge of the path we walked upon. But we were living on the dying energy of a dying culture—a culture which was slowly losing its forward thrust. I think it was the suddenness of it all that hurt us so. We did not have time to adjust to the startling upheaval around us. We seemed to have lost what we had without a replacement of it. We did not have time to take this 20th-century progress and eat it little by little and digest it. It was forced feeding from the start, and our stomach turned sick."

"And today, when you celebrate your hundred years, oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land. For I have known you when your forests were mine; when they gave me my meat and my clothing. But in the long hundred years since the white man came, I have seen my freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea. The white man's strange customs, which I could not understand, pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe."

"I look forward to hearing Chief Dan George's Lament for Confederation read again and again during 2017. Let's revisit this honest and accurate piece of writing penned by an Indigenous leader who all of Canada proudly recognized and embraced. His uncompromising response to the centenary is an indication of the integrity of his character and resolve in who he was."

"Can we talk of integration until there is social integration? Unless there is integration in hearts and minds, you only have a physical presence and the walls are as high as the mountain tops."

"How I began to write is different than how I became a writer. They are two different things. Many people write but they do not become writers. To become a writer is a job. It involves planning and it affects all parts of your life. Even what you eat—being a writer means not eating food with too much rich sauce to avoid taking a long afternoon nap! It’s like being a professional athlete. And a writer must choose between being a sprinter who writes a book, and being a writer who creates an oeuvre. If you want to create an oeuvre, you have to be careful not to put all your energy into the first book. You have to have a vision for the long term..."

"The dictionary doesn’t have individual contributions. It’s like building a cathedral. The workers are unknown. But one of the things I tend to do is suggest that it might be interesting to have examples of things that aren’t from France. If it’s a wind, which we worked on recently, does it always have to be the mistral? What about the winds of elsewhere? How about zephyrs or siroccos? In French, there exists an enormous variety of classifications, proverbs, and witticisms about winds. There are winds that push ships as well as winds that come from the gut—the noisy, bodily winds of Rabelais. All shadings have to be in the dictionary."

"They were human beings who had a life, who had a lineage, who had parents, who had children, who had lives. They were not poor or rich. They were people and these people had humanity. So it was important that someone who knew them write about the event…"

"It's not often you see your city falling down in front of your eyes. People are screaming in pain all around you. Children are running in the streets. Some people start talking about the end of the world. But writing, for me, was as important as taking care of the injured."

"Poetry translates our values."

"In retirement, it's easy not to notice budget deviations."

"Poetry is a metaphysical blend with images of life, landscapes and noble delights of feelings and emotions. With a soul of power, the poet is dedicated to writing in his highest thoughts."

"Act on what you can control, what's yours."

"Nothing can be done to change the past. Let's live in the moment, the future is ahead of us."

"Our story is part of one of the greatest national treasures. It is appropriate to consider it at the level of the culture of a people. Never too much effort will be made for the knowledge of history."

"Often, by picturing the worst that can reasonably happen, one realizes that the situation is not as catastrophic as imagined."