21 pages • 42 minutes read
Anthony HechtThe Book of Yolek
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Sestina
The sestina originated in medieval France. It is thought to have been invented by Arnaut Daniel, a late-12th century Provencal troubadour. (A troubadour was a composer and performer of lyric poetry and song.) Dante (1265-1321), one of the greatest of Italian poets, wrote sestinas. The form reached England in the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century, when both Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, renowned poets of their time, wrote sestinas. The form then disappeared in English literature for two centuries before returning in the 19th-century Victorian period, when poets such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Daniel Gabriel Rossetti used it to good effect. Swinburne even wrote a double sestina titled “The Complaint of Lisa,” which at 78 lines is twice as long as the standard 39-line sestina. In the 20th century there have been many notable sestinas in British and American literature. In addition to Hecht, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, and Marilyn Hacker wrote sestinas.
In his capacity as a literary critic, Hecht has commented on the nature of the sestina, which involves the repetition at the end of every line of the terminal words of each line of the first stanza, although in a different order. Hecht wrote that sestinas “tend to be dramatically static. They present a frame of mind, sometimes an interestingly disturbed frame of mind but usually an obsessed one, which tends to harp on the same sad theme, varying it in certain ways but never departing from it, bound to it by the shackles of those six terminal words” (Melodies Unheard: Essays on Poetry and Religion, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, p. 77). The fact that the end-words in the first stanza of the sestina are repeated six times over the course of the poem lends itself, Hecht wrote, to “a monotony that best accompanies a dolorous, despairing, and melancholy mood” (p. 66). However, Hecht praised Bishop’s two sestinas, “A Miracle for Breakfast” and “Sestina,” as having overcome these twin difficulties of monotony and stasis. The former poem does this, Hecht says, because it tells a narrative, which moves the poem along and creates variety. He does not mention that he accomplished a similar thing, although with very different subject matter, in “The Book of Yolek.”
Historical Context: The Warsaw Ghetto
During his World War II war service, Hecht observed the horror of a Nazi concentration camp with his own eyes, but when he came to write “The Book of Yolek,” he turned not to his own memories of Flossenbürg camp but to an account he had later read of events in the Warsaw Ghetto in August 1942.
The German authorities had established the Warsaw Ghetto, separating it by a wall from the rest of the city, in 1940. Warsaw was the capital city of Poland, and it had a large Jewish population. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were confined to the Warsaw Ghetto; they were malnourished and lived in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. Thousands died.
The story Hecht read was titled “Yanosz Korczak’s Last Walk.” Written by Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa, it appeared in Anthology of Holocaust Literature in 1973. Korczak was a Polish Jewish doctor, author, and educator. From 1911 to 1942 he ran a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. From the early days, he became known as an enlightened educator, allocating rights, responsibilities, and duties to the children and allowing them a say in how the orphanage was run. After the ghetto was established, Korczak did everything he could to provide for the increasing number of orphans whom he took into the home and tried to keep everything running normally.
The Germans began the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto in late July 1942. The deportees were sent to the Treblinka concentration camp, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw, where they were killed. Korczak had opportunities to escape, but he and his staff elected to stay and look after the children for as long as they could. On August 5, 1942—the exact date that appears in “The Book of Yolek”—German forces ordered Korczak, his staff, and the children to leave the building. Nearly 200 children assembled outside, where Korczak and his assistants tried to help them stay calm. Then they were all ordered to walk through the ghetto to a deportation site, where they boarded trains that took them to Treblinka. They were likely murdered the same day they arrived at the camp.
Hecht did not mention any photographs from the ghetto, but there is a famous photograph taken during the time of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, which shows a young boy, about the same age as Yolek, standing with other Jews in the street with his hands up, while SS officers look on and one of them points a gun in his direction. The boy looks frightened. Although Hecht likely invented the name Yolek, and the boy in the photograph has never been identified by name, it is easy to imagine Yolek looking something like this unfortunate little boy, who probably has only a few hours, or a day, to live.
