Doppelgänger Poem by gershon hepner

Once the story has been told
leaving what has happened cold,
the story takes a living form.
Despite the words that keep it warm
it freezes and, congealed, assumes
the fate befalling bones in tombs,
existing only as a tale––
a shadow of the words that fail
to tell what really once occurred,
truth’s Doppelgänger, the absurd.


Sarah Boxer (NYT, “Giving Memory its Due in an Age of License, ” October 28,1998) discusses a symposium held in Boston to celebrate Elie Wiesel's 70th birthday, entitled “The Claims of Memory”. Shlomo Breznitz, a psychology professor at the New School University in Manhattan, said that he needed half a century of reflection before he could write about his experiences as a child who was placed into an orphanage by his parents when they were taken to Auschwitz. “I remembered the way I told it, not the way it happened. It is something which has a beginning, a middle and an end. The original is covered hopelessly by the reproduction. Once we write it, it is frozen forever.”

10/28/98