The subject of Aunt Bird, a collection of poems by Yerra Sugarman, is the last year of the life of her aunt in the Kraków ghetto during Nazi occupation of Poland (Four Way Books, 2022). This aunt was the youngest of her mother’s sisters, in her twenties at the time of her death. Ms. Sugarman’s mother, herself a Holocaust survivor, told a few stories but otherwise spoke little about her lost family members. Having never met this aunt who had died at least 10 years before her birth, Ms. Sugarman has created a picture predicated on the sparse facts she was able to uncover, but the rest has been left to her empathic imagination. The poems in the collection reach for what a single woman in her twenties might have thought, felt and experienced as she confronted Nazi cruelty and the increasing likelihood that she would not survive. The book’s title, Aunt Bird, derives from the English translation of her aunt’s Yiddish name, Feygele, meaning “little bird,” the affectionate diminutive for Feiga, or “bird.”
The book is a collection of impassioned poems about the lost hopes of a spirited, once-vital young adult. This would have been a time when Aunt Bird, but for the war, should have, like any young person, been weighing and anticipating her possibilities in life, not death. To underscore this point, the young aunt is described by her niece as a flesh-and-blood girl barely at the cusp of womanhood, experiencing adolescent sexual desire and the guilt associated with it, and a youthful spirit of questioning and resistance for which she also blames herself:
…a short breath of a girl
A girl who blamed herself for kissing
a boy beneath a tangerine moon
and for believing in anything (23)
That the poet’s mother did not reveal much information about this younger sister was consistent with the reluctance of some Holocaust survivors to re-live the traumas of the past in the telling; to burden their children with the possibility of nightmares and guilt; or leave them with the onus of protecting their parents from distress. However, parental reticence in such matters often had an effect on the second generation that was opposite to the one intended, failing in many instances to circumvent what is now classified as “intergenerational transmission of trauma.”
Yerra Sugarman is the author of Forms of Gone, which won PEN American Center’s PEN / Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and The Bag of Broken Glass, poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, The Nation, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, New England Review and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. Born in Toronto, she lives in New York City.
Photo: (c) Pamela Lischin
In Aunt Bird, we are not told how or when its author’s inspiration arose, whether as a threshold effect or as a sudden awakening; or if in either case Ms. Sugarman had been affected by her mother’s unwitting signs of grief. We do know that whatever Ms. Sugarman may have absorbed in her own childhood about the life of her mother’s younger sister did have an enduring impact, even if it did not find expression in the form of poetry until decades later.
So it happened that Yerra Sugarman, an accomplished poet, began in recent years to comb through websites and Shoah databases seeking information on this lost aunt, a woman whose life and premature death warranted recognition. From documentary sources Ms. Sugarman uncovered records of Aunt Bird’s birth in a small village in Poland, a Jewish shtetl, and learned of her “resettlement” in the teeming ghetto of Kraków mandated by the Nazis after overrunning Poland in the fall of 1939. The date of her death appears to have been 1942, close to the time when systematic mass executions commenced in full force across Eastern Europe.
The proximal cause and details of Aunt Bird’s death remain unknown, except that she died somehow and somewhere amidst the chaos of the ghetto and not in a concentration camp. Aunt Bird’s death in absentia encompassed the lack, not only of her remains, but of a known final resting place — an indignity that precluded proper mourning:
I have nothing to see her with—
my aunt, whose life is a ripped page. (3)
In Aunt Bird the poet is composing a soulful portrait of a young woman caught up in an historically unprecedented maelstrom of evil. In so doing she intends to give Aunt Bird not only respect for her death but a voice for her life.
Now, I try to bring you back to life and harvest the words
on your tongue. (9)
There is another goal, one that is more ambitious: learning how to make a better world by distilling spiritual sustenance from the natural light that can still be found everywhere. To this end, Ms. Sugarman’s healing objectives are given wishful expression by the aunt she never knew:
Tell me how to be a woman who revises this world
and makes food from light. (9)
The poet, approaching seventy years of age when many of the poems in this collection were written, has discovered the depth of her identification with her youthful subject. At times their personae appear to be conjoined:
(I share a skin with her now.
Her life unleashed
from time’s body. … ) (15)
Ms. Sugarman also feels, viscerally, the macabre, funereal life of the ghetto, as Aunt Bird must have done:
When she woke, the war still raged
and the sky hardened into rock. …and the world stuck in her throat like a bone— (24-25)
In Aunt Bird, such potent imagery abounds, namely, the expression of desperation and anxiety using metaphors of bodily injury or choking:
That grief clambered up and down her throat (33)
And:
Yiddish words were crushed like bones. (45)
Or:
A voice can be like flesh, lit by the brightness of its wounds. (53)
Most of the book traverses a narrow path between mute shock and a struggle to find words to convey dwindling shards of hope. Aunt Bird understands her position but never fully reconciles with its finality. So intermittently she
…pretends she is waltzing pressed to the bosom
of a different time when she could replace panic with song. (68)
In a subsequent poem Ms. Sugarman attributes to Aunt Bird a bedrock faith in the value of living:
She knows something will always drag to the ground
the chambers of her body.
But she still believes in living
with every breath’s rise and fall. (73)
Later the poet asks, directing the question to her readers and to the world at large:
Am I wrong to believe in redemption
when there are events that scorn us, (80)
But Aunt Bird knows that God has abandoned her to her fate; her universe is poised to implode. From the warmth of a loving family in an ordered, protective shtetel, Aunt Bird finds herself imprisoned in a world of tumult and fear. In such a world, survival is a matter of conjecture, and one must find a way to live knowing that each new day may be one’s last.
The Biblical magnitude of suffering is revealed in the famous sentence scratched into a wall at the Mauthausen concentration camp: Wenn es einen Gott gibt muß er mich um Verzeihung bitten, translated to: If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness. Here Ms. Sugarman takes this smoldering sentiment a step further, giving to her doomed aunt the perspective of a malevolent God deconstructing the world into a state of entropy:
And she dreamt God unhinged the constellation
and whisked away the stars. Uncreating. Uncreating. (24)
Despite Aunt Bird’s shifting moods and the changes in format from poem to poem, there is a unifying consistency: The changes feel more like quarter-tones. Also, the voice that is given to Aunt Bird becomes recognizable; it always “sounds” like her, evoking the hypothetical words and phrases Ms. Sugarman has composed for her aunt, the ones through which we have come to know her intimately. Somehow the poet has managed to create a coherent narrative from a paucity of hard facts.
The most important comment to make about Aunt Bird is that its words, rhythms, and muted laments are extraordinarily moving, whether as the gems of individual poems or in the haunting entirety of the whole. The contribution of Yerra Sugarman also gives new life to the work of first-generation Holocaust poets, such as Abraham Sutskever, Nelly Sachs and others.
It seems natural that Aunt Bird should conclude with a poem titled Kiddush, a word referring to a prayer of gratitude for the peace and sanctity of the Sabbath, a tradition that stirs the most primal of Jewish memories. A partial, major-minor level of healing has occurred over the course of the book and can be gleaned from the poet’s evolving readiness to experience joy, whether her own or that which she would have wished for her murdered aunt. Toward the beginning of Aunt Bird Ms. Sugarman writes that
…the language of joy was penniless, a vagrant. (36)
But in the book’s concluding verse, the poet implores God and history to remember her Aunt Feiga Maler, and to ease her sorrowful legacy beyond what she has achieved in these poems:
Tell me how I can keep from falling
how to turn grief into a green stem sprouting
so it is not just a stem, but joy. (103)
Robert C. Abrams, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. At Weill Cornell he maintains a clinical practice devoted to psychiatric conditions in older adult patients, and at the affiliated medical college he is engaged in research in old-age depression, psychoses and dementia, as well as elder abuse. Since 2016 Dr. Abrams has been a frequent contributor of film reviews and other essays to the Arts and Media blog of the British Medical Journal/Medical Humanities. He is also the author of Staring Night: Queen Victoria’s Late-Life Depression, published by International Psychoanalytic Books, Inc., New York, 2020.