Burning Memories: Sacrifice and the Historical Unconscious

In winter 2009 I accidentally came across a eulogy that I wrote in 1970 for my then best friend, Zvika, who was killed by Egyptian fire at the Suez Canal. I received the news of his death at midnight and hitchhiked through the night to reach the funeral from my army base near Eilat. I sat to write my farewell to him in his family home in the Kibbutz where we grew up. One of the lines in my eulogy said: ‘For many years Zvika and his mother represented the Shoah for me. On hearing the word, I immediately visualized them singing ‘Brothers, the shtetl is burning’, a song that always sent shivers down my spine. Its dramatic melody, coupled with its violent images and terrible helplessness, moved, upset and alerted me to a mysterious danger. Both the text and the melody were written by Mordechai Gebirtig, a Galician poet who was killed by the Nazis in 1942.  Gebirtig’s poem, known as ‘The shtetl is burning’ was written in 1938 about a pogrom that took place two years earlier in a small Polish town. It describes the total destruction by fire of the town. The refrain says ‘And you stand by lame, without offering help, without trying to extinguish the burning fire, the fire of the city’. When I started reading what I wrote so many years ago, I did not remember this image of Zvika and his mother singing, and the song of the burning shtetl had all but escaped my memory. Yet, reading my eulogy triggered an avalanche of memories. Read more