Pożegnanie Jidyszlandu

In Canto VI of his Shoah epic poem Dos lid fun oysgehargetn yidishn folk [The Song of the Murdered Jewish People] Itzhak Katzenelson describes orphans in the Warsaw Ghetto at the end of the winter of 1942, half a year before the ghetto’s liquidation. His description of a two-year-old girl, who had seen horrors in reality which her grandmother could not see in dreams, surprisingly moves from the girl’s “serious eyes” to “Jewish seriousness” (der yidisher der ernst) which is like “a Holy Scripture for the world”. The article comments on several translations of this passage: the Polish, English, French and two German ones. All translators interpret “der yidisher der ernst” – against the author’s actual intention, according to the argument presented – in the context of the Shoah and its significance for the non-Jewish world rather than as the last tribute to the perished Yiddishland and Jewish uniqueness among the nations. It is suggested that the main source of the problem is not the word’s polysemy but rather Katzenelson’s exalted last vision of “true Jewishness”.