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The Abandoned |
A Life Apart from Life |
by Evelyn Ripp ©2010, Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-935232-18-6, 200 pp |
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Like so many survivors of the Holocaust, Evelyn Romanowsky Ripp's first memories are of a world that is lost forever, destroyed amid savage brutality. Her home town, Lachva, is only a small speck on most maps, yet it was the center of a vibrant Jewish life before the war. Its pre-war life is described here with great charm, evoking a lost age, a lost world.
In 1942 that world came to an abrupt and vicious end. With great feeling, Evelyn Ripp tells the story of the Lachva ghetto. Her poems tell much more, starting with the line: "I've been silent so long." She is silent no more. All those interested in Jewish history will be grateful to her for her words and verses.
Sir Martin Gilbert, Historian
Foreword A Word of Explanation Prose A Life Apart From Life Poems Why I Write Lawlessness German Invasion Gretchko Grandfather¹s Tears New Decrees No One Escaped Children in the Ghetto Grandpa Escaped Murder Ghetto Uprising, I See Germans Shooting Premonition of a Twelve-Year-Old No Shoes The Pripet Marshes We Escaped Hunted Mosquitoes The Pripet River Kirush Fireflies Blitzkrieg June , Nioma Defying the Odds Begging Stepanetchko Winter, Trees Stealing Potatoes Hunger Won Out Back in Lachva, Final Solution Displaced Persons: Camp Föhrenwald, Memories of My Father Learning ³American² The Power of Fear The World Stood Silent Haunted In Place of Them Reparations Shoah Legacy Visitations Postscript In One Moment I Was Robbed Summing Up Confronting God: A Monologue Past Present Past Perfect Sabbath Afternoons Childhood Memory Credo Faded Photographs Talk Therapy Dichotomy Untitled Support Group Motherpoem First Day of School I Want to Be Free Aftermath Elizabeth Sarah, July , Reunion: Lachva Ghetto Survivors, Israel, June l Thanksgiving, Monument at Moriah Fragments of Memory The Red Dress Photographs Prose Lachva Revisited Poems The Mass Grave Lachva Now The Old Cemetery Partisan Pisarevitch Photographs Maps
Why I Write
I've been silent so long, Now I'm obsessed. Language is wanting, But I must struggle To put it in words.
I write to justify my survival Summoned by the millions who died. I write to testify, To take the world, and God, to task For their silence. I write to search for answers, For release and for repair, Lest my grief spill over.
I See Germans Shooting
I see Germans shooting And I see the slain A bloody stampede Children knocked down T r a m p l e d My baby cousins Cheva, Friedka, Niusia and Dovik A human tidal wave Streaming toward the ghetto gate Tearing it off its hinges Spilling out over it Into the open market square Into SS machine gun fire My mother and older sister are there Then I don't see them any more
Father never let go Of my little sister's hand I ran by myself Somehow We took the same path We met
Visitations
Memories come pouring forth At night, As if only darkness befits that Horrid source, Which has irrevocably dimmed my life. Waiting for sleep in my bed, Nightclothes drenched in cold sweat, They Come gliding through the wall And hover overhead, Ghosts Of my murdered family. R e l e n t l e s s Voices In the quiet of the room Compel me to pay heed to them.
Summoned thus, My fragile psyche's undermined, Even as I long for dawn And light.
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It is clear from the outset that Evelyn Ripp writes to bear witness -- to record the sordid truth in all its tragic, yet often bittersweet detail. Truth and honesty are hard won. Both require extraordinary courage to face unbearable pain in the service of history and humanity.
As human beings our wish is to hide, to protect our selves from what we know, to protect our families from what we saw and felt. We work to block, to forget, to hide, and when forgetting is impossible, we silence ourselves. We lock the pain deep in our psyches and hearts and bear it alone -- hopeful that silence will quiet it -- or, at least contain it. But, the Shoah pain in its breadth and scourge cannot be contained.
Evelyn Ripp's The Abandoned recounts in searing detail the horrors of Nazi brutality toward an innocent people. We wish to turn away from such vast a horror. But Ripp forces the reader to feel the cruelty, and to be repelled and terrified each step along the way. With excruciating honesty, the writer reveals that life so that we ache, feel assaulted, and are filled with rage, yet rendered powerless. Ripp's gift lies in her choice of detail, her willingness to tell stories that touch us most profoundly: fathers sleeping with axes under their pillows, the killing of a young man for his eyeglasses, the heartbreak of a mother's and sister's disappearance, the call for people to present themselves before firing squads, the steady and systematic destruction of a town. All of this called forth from the life of an eleven-year-old girl. We are forced to live beside the children for two years in the forest, foraging for food with them, and then she startles us with childish play in the midst of deprivation.
As readers, we are threatened then empowered by a spirit that is vulnerable, and by the writer's enduring love of beauty, humor, compassion and the life force that celebrates small victories and occasional kindness. We are grateful to the Christians who hid Jews, and we revel in the ghetto's resistance and uprising: its will to destroy itself rather than face extermination. Together with her, we are terrorized by nightmares, long to buy a Red Dress, rail at God Where were You when gold teeth/Were ripped from jaws/When women and children were shot/And buried half alive, feel the survivor's guilt My joy is joy confined, and againWe ran for our lives/Under German fire/They fell/And I go on/I wake tormented/I live in place of them.
And later, But for the record, There will always be In the convex mirror Of the Shoah, The likeness of me, Eyes bursting toward Heaven, Mouth pried open By a scream.
Joan Cusack Handler, Psychologist and Poet
Like so many survivors of the Holocaust, Evelyn Romanowsky Ripp's first memories are of a world that is lost forever, destroyed amid savage brutality. Her home town, Lachva, is only a small speck on most maps, yet it was the center of a vibrant Jewish life before the war. Its pre-war life is described here with great charm, evoking a lost age, a lost world. In 1942 that world came to an abrupt and vicious end. With great feeling, Evelyn Ripp tells the story of the Lachva ghetto. Her poems tell much more, starting with the line: "I've been silent so long." She is silent no more. All those interested in Jewish history will be grateful to her for her words and verses.
Sir Martin Gilbert, Historian
Poetry is not the conventional genre for describing the Holocaust, but here it is used with great skill and passion. The reader will long remember these beautiful poems. The Abandoned: A Life Apart from Life is an important contribution to Holocaust literature and I highly recommend it.
Dr. Stephen M. Berk, Professor of Holocaust and Jewish Studies
Evelyn Ripp's poetry takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look down. The immediacy and intimacy of Evelyn's poems humanize the statistics, helping us to understand her experiences and to empathize with her attempts to integrate them into her still-haunted life today. This volume makes an excellent addition to any high school or university course on the Holocaust and will enrich the background of any adult interested in this subject.
Karen Shawn, Ph.D., Educational Consultant, American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters' Museum
Evelyn Romanowsky Ripp allows us a glimpse of the inner life of a survivor. Her poetic wonderings about God's absence/presence and remembrances and evocations of people and places are the underpinnings of this book and of her life -- to learn to "at once, remember and forget."
Dr. Gloria F. Waldman-Schwartz, Professor, York College and The Cuny Graduate Center
Evelyn Ripp came to the United States from a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany in 1946. After settling in New York City, she eventually graduated from Hunter College in New York, received an M.A. in Russian from New York University and an M.A. in English from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. She has taught both Russian and English.
Today, Evelyn's primary avocation is passing on some sense of the reality of her Holocaust experiences to adults and students through speaking engagements and poetry readings. Evelyn has two married daughters and six grandchildren and lives with her husband, Norbert, in northern New Jersey.
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