On The Anniversary Of The Ghetto Theater Poem by Abraham Sutzkever

I

… We walled ourselves in
And live apart.
From your freedom outside, do not smile at us,
Do not pity —
For us, even death can blossom into wonder.

How can we sit together
With you in one place?
Your hatred for us will poison you like mice,
Our wounds — love will heal.

As long as the outside is yours —
Ours is the ghetto, here we will lie
And from God's heart, we will knead a redeemer
And polish a melody …

II

Perform, Jewish actors, in tatters and in walls,
Where life shrivels like hair that caught fire,
When red drops of your loved ones are seething on stones,
And the alleys convulse like half-slaughtered hens
And cannot arise, fly away, flee…
Perform, friends! Let us think: it's a shtetl of yore,
They celebrate a wedding at an autumn graveyard
With Jewish singing and dancing light,
In a joyous circle around the bride and groom!
Perform! From your mouth, let Yiddish sound,
Pure and clean as the ghost of a slaughtered child,
Harsh and hoarse as the voice of our rifle and gunpowder,
Performing tomorrow
Over the rooftops…

And you, melancholy fiddlers,
Who stole out at night
Into the lurking outside,
Shuffling past houses,
Evading patrols,
Creeping to your ruined old home
And digging up your fiddles
Planted before your march into the ghetto —
You play too!
Pluck out the deepest tones!
Let them carry above your bones
And stray far, where a Jew still shimmers…
Where a heart still trembles, waiting for good tidings.
Let them carry over fields, over front lines,
Pure and clean as the ghost of a slaughtered child,
Harsh and hoarse as the voice of our rifle and gunpowder,
Performing tomorrow
Over the rooftops…

Vilna Ghetto, December 31, 1942