The Book of Yolek

The epigraph is a quotation from the gospel of John, chapter 19, verse 7. Hecht presents it in the German translation by Martin Luther, first published in 1522. He has a reason for choosing this version of the text. Luther was known to be antisemitic, and this text, as well as other passages from the gospel of John, have been used over the centuries to justify antisemitic beliefs and hostile actions against Jews. The antisemitic interpretation of the passage is that Jewish people were responsible for Jesus’s death; therefore, they deserve retribution. The notion that Jews are the enemies of Christianity contributed to the antisemitism in Germany that eventually led to the Holocaust. Hecht alludes to this discomforting truth simply by using John 19:7 as an epigraph without further comment.

In a letter dated September 1, 1989, Hecht clarifies the structure of the poem. “It is an interior monologue, and the speaker’s mind wanders in the course of the poem, turning from personal recollection to matters of which he has read” (quoted by Jonathan F. S. Post in A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 12). In other words, the speaker is not looking back at events he personally witnessed at the camp. He is not himself a Holocaust survivor; he is an informed, reflective individual who knows what happened in the Holocaust and is haunted by it. The many references to “you” and “your” are therefore not addressed to another person; the speaker is referring to himself. In the final stanza and the envoy, however, the “you” might also be taken to have a more universal meaning, meaning everyone, including the speaker and the reader.

Much of the force of the poem comes from the repetition of the terminal words, especially “meal,” “walk,” “home,” “camp,” and “day,” which start out signifying innocent pleasures, sights, and events but metamorphose as the poem progresses into depicting something sinister, monstrous, and terrible. Although sestinas can often be somewhat static, given their structure and the necessity of repetition, in this sestina, Hecht overcomes the problem by telling a story. The story gives the poem momentum and carries it forward, even if it is, at the same time, repetitive—a fact that also accounts for its power.

The first stanza presents a benign summer scene. No shadow falls upon it, other than those cast by the approaching sunset, with its “deep bronze glories” (Line 6). We could be reading a poem by Wordsworth, extolling the beauty of nature. The same might apply to the following stanza, a romantic look back at childhood, and summer camp. This stanza contains just the barest hint of a turn in the thought, as the memory also includes getting lost on a walk and thinking a lot of home. But the memory, nonetheless, is a peaceful one, as Line 7 states.

The turn in the thought happens quite abruptly, in Stanza 3, with its precise date. At first the details are mundane: “It was the morning and very hot” (Line 14). Then the occurrence of the end-word “home” changes in meaning. It now refers to an orphanage for Jewish children, with its hint of disruption of family and deprivation. The terminal word “meal” now radically changes its meaning. The meal is “bread and soup” (Line 17), a sharp contrast to the “grilled brook trout” (Line 2) in Stanza 1 and the “corn roast” in Stanza 2 (Line 9). Moreover, this meal, unlike the others, is never to be finished, since the children are forced out of the home and made to walk.

The end-word “camp” now acquires a new, sinister force. In Stanzas 1 and 2, it was entirely benign, referring first to the camp the speaker had set up in the hills and then to a child at summer camp. Now the word forms the end-word for two successive lines, the final line of Stanza 3 and the first line of Stanza 4. In each case the camp referred to is a Nazi concentration camp. The reader is now plunged into the terrifying world of the Holocaust.

The remainder of the poem is dominated not only by the descriptions of the camp and the cruel fate suffered by five-year-old Yolek, but also by the fact that the speaker/narrator cannot get these events out of his mind. He is haunted by the memory of what he has read about it. At the end of Stanza 4, the end-word “home” continues its sinister metamorphosis. Now it refers to the camp itself as Yolek’s “long home” (Line 24), which likely means death and also the boy’s final physical “home,” where his incinerated remains will be scattered or buried. (That incineration is to be his fate is strongly suggested by the “smell of smoke” [Line 34] that the camp emits, likely from the crematoriums or funeral pyres.) Although not an end-word, the meaning of the word “smoke” here is radically different from the smoke that might have arisen from the “bonfire” (Line 9) in Stanza 2.

In Stanza 5, the return of August suggests a kind of cyclical reenactment of the tragic events the speaker is describing. They may be in the past, but the past is not over; it lives on in the speaker’s mind. In this stanza, the end-word “walk,” like the other end-words, has taken on a different meaning from the casual and innocent walks described in Stanzas 1 and 2. It is now explicitly described in the last line as “that terrible walk” (Line 30).

The word “walk” continues its metamorphosis in Stanza 6. In the first line it seems to have returned to its original meaning, as the narrator contemplates an occasion in the future when he might be taking “a silent, solitary walk / Or among crowds” (Lines 31-32). It soon becomes clear, however, that this walk will be very different because he will be unable to stop the thoughts coming to him of the camp and Yolek’s horrifying death. Yolek will always be with him, the speaker states, wherever he happens to be. More than likely, the reader, responding to the intensity of the story told, finds that he or she is included in the phrase “Wherever you are, Yolek will be there too” (Line 35). Speaker, reader, and the not-departed spirit of Yolek thus join in mournful remembrance.

This is reiterated in the envoy, in which Yolek takes on the quality of the prophet Elijah. In Jewish custom, at Passover, Jews must put out a cup of wine for Elijah too and leave the door open, hoping that he may join them. This is a symbol of hope, since the return of Elijah is said to signify the imminent arrival of the messiah. The allusion to Elijah in the context of Yolek, however, might appear ironic, since the ghostly appearance of Yolek rekindles the memory of a great evil rather than a hope for redemption from it. Another view might be that the linking of Yolek and Elijah is at once a reminder of past sorrow and evil and also a comfort and reassurance that the suffering of an entire people will not endure forever.