Gershon Karen's Selected Poems - Essay Example

The second stanza of Gershon Karen's poem is a reflection of the author’s lineage and the life she is doomed to live. This serves as a challenge for the reader to try and relate the author’s events with that of a historical event. It is here that the reader is curious as to which race in history is known for martyrdoms? If the first of the reader’s guesses are the Jews, then this answer is conveyed in the latter parts of the poem.

One cannot help but sympathize with the state of the hopelessness of the author in the second stanza. This is evidenced in the lines: ‘nothing serves me to assuage the agony of our age.’ The second part of the poem which is at the beginning of the third stanza also emphasizes the hopelessness of the author that her life will not become better with time. We get to know of her obsession with redemption from the life she is living at that time.

Short terse and compact lines compel the reader to sympathize with the author’s situation. The reader can feel the sorrow and agony of someone in despair from the use of such short and emotional lines. The reader also is constantly in question as to who is the cause of much misery to the author but a good historical background may serve well to inform the reader that the setting of the poem was in Nazi Germany, where the Germans oppressed the people of Jewish origin.

From the line, ‘The Jew of ghetto crawls,’ the reader is given a distinct image of the deplorable living condition of the Jews as they were living in the Holocaust. 2The reader sympathizes with the author for the horrors that she experiences of her teenage years after reading the following stanza: “Like every living Jew I have in imagination seen the gas-chamber the mass-grave the unknown body which was mine and found in every German face behind the mask the mark of Cain I will not make their thoughts my own by hating people for their race.”

Gershon says that ‘Here and there a Jew lifts an individual face, a man for the sake of his gifts damned he stands before his fate.’ From this stanza, the reader can get an idea that the author believes that her race was being persecuted for their being a superior race. That the Jews had innate gifts or talents from birth that was the cause of their persecution by their enemies. Read More