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.
Themes
From Happiness to Horror
The speaker/narrator traverses a number of different moods in the memories he invokes and the story he tells. At first, he experiences a kind of unclouded happiness as he describes a walk he once took in the summer, perhaps typical of many such walks. He is away from his home environment and out in nature, camping in the hills. He appears to be alone and enjoying the solitude. He takes time to appreciate nature, and the phrase “deep bronze glories” (Line 6), about the sunset, suggests a fitting end to a rich and rewarding day. Any perceived glory, however, is soon to be obliterated, as the beauty of nature and the fond memory from childhood (Stanza 2) give way to the ugliness of human evil. Happiness withers away and horror takes its place. Although the events the speaker recounts also played out in summer, the season has lost all the charm it earlier had. August 5, 1942 was a midsummer day—like the day in Stanza 1—but it was marked by oppressive heat: “It was the morning and very hot” (Line 14), which is reemphasized in Line 29: “The quite extraordinary heat of the day” (Line 29).
The reversal from happiness to dismay and horror can also be seen in one of the key end-words: “meal.” In the first two stanzas, the speaker recalls nutritious, enticing meals, eaten either alone or in congenial company, but these are forgotten as the focus shifts to the never-to-be finished meal of “bread and soup” (Line 17) that the children are served in the orphanage. The end-word “camp” undergoes a similar transition, and the line “The regulation torments of that camp” (Line 26) makes it clear that the torment was routine; it was a deliberate part of the way the camp was designed and run.
Eventually, as the three-line envoy shows, horror takes up a permanent place in the mind and can reveal itself at any time. Even during pleasant, happy moments, such as when the speaker (or anyone) sits down for a meal, the thought of Yolek, and all the horror associated with his death, may enter the mind and trouble it.
A Single Tragedy to Underscore Millions
The word “murder” does not occur in the poem, but the penultimate line, “they killed him in the camp they sent him to” (Line 38), makes it crystal clear what happened to Yolek. The story the narrator tells is actually about a pogrom, since there were about 200 children from the orphanage who were sent to their deaths in the historical incident on which “The Book of Yolek” is based. (The term “pogrom” reflects antisemitic massacres/genocides.) Hecht’s decision to focus on one boy and give him a name gives the story greater emotional force. Relevant here is a saying attributed to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin (although there is no evidence that he ever said it), “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.” In other words, it is easier for people to respond emotionally to the loss of a single individual, particularly if they know something about him, than to a much larger loss of life if that larger loss is presented to them solely by an abstract number. In the poem, the speaker not only humanizes Yolek by giving him a name and an age, he adds two more small but telling details about him that bring him alive as an individual. First, he had “bad lungs” (Line 22), and second, Yolek does not walk, he “shamble[s]” (Line 24) between the guards. To “shamble” means to move awkwardly, with a slow, shuffling gait, which conveys in one word Yolek’s reluctance, his confusion, his fear. Mass murder is thus made personal, as experienced by one poor little boy with bad lungs who has scarcely seen five summers. The humanization of Yolek is the exact opposite of what the Nazis did to their Jewish victims. They dehumanized them. When the Warsaw Ghetto was destroyed following a Jewish uprising in 1943, the German authorities issued a report that referred to Jews as “lice” and “rats.” Their removal was referred to as a “cleansing action.”
Distressingly also, the telling detail that Yolek had “bad lungs” (Line 22) would have done nothing to save him. On the contrary, it would have made him an even more likely target for immediate killing. The Nazis had no time for sick Jewish children, although they had no time for healthy ones either. They murdered young children because they were considered useless, since they were not old enough to work. Older children and adolescents who could be put to work sometimes had a better chance of surviving, at least in the short term.
The Relentlessness and Circularity of Memory
Memory is at the heart of the poem. In Stanza 1, the narrator/speaker, as he turns things over in his mind, is likely recalling a summer walk he once took. In the following stanza, another memory surfaces, this one from his childhood. Then, after he has started to tell the story of Yolek, he begins Stanza 4: “How often you have thought about that camp, / As though in some strange way you were driven to” (Lines 19-20). The story has a hold on him and he cannot forget it, especially during August, the same month when the events took place. “You will remember, helplessly, that day” (Line 33), he states; there is something compulsive about the memory; the speaker cannot stop it entering his mind. In a kind of ironic reenactment of the way that Yolek’s meal was interrupted on that sad and tragic day, Yolek will interrupt a person’s meal, whether that of the speaker, or anyone. Yolek, then, is not gone. This is his posthumous life, entering the minds of others and troubling them with his terrifying story. As William Faulkner famously put it in his novel Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Because the memories of Yolek are strongest in August, there is a relentless circularity about them, as if they play out in the mind in an endlessly recurring loop. The implication is that the Holocaust will never be forgotten as long as Yolek’s story is told; it will lodge itself in the collective memory as an indelible stain on human history: “Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too” (Line 35).
