My Post-Holocaust Second Generation Voice: History/Memory/Identity

J. J. Steinfeld

My Post-Holocaust Second Generation Voice: History/Memory/Identity

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Prince Edward Island poet, fiction writer, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld’s twenty-fifth book and ninth poetry collection, My Post-Holocaust Second Generation Voice: History / Memory / Identity: New & Selected Poems, has been published by Ekstasis Editions (Victoria, BC). In his latest poetry collection, Steinfeld continues to confront themes that are interwoven for him with the Holocaust and its unending effects on history, memory, and identity, on the victims of the Holocaust, on all Holocaust survivors and their descendants, on subsequent generations. Surrounding it all, is the need to remember, to never forget. 
 

With poems such as “Small Preposterous Planet, Wouldn’t You Say?” (“Barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz / the philosopher Adorno declared, declared in the same language that Kafka used. / Auschwitz is mine, created me, / makes me write word after word / in protest to the wordlessness of death / makes me sit quietly in a room in Charlottetown / writing this poem, longing to undo Auschwitz / undo my essence, transform the gas chambers and crematoriums / into swaying trees and colourful clouds of God’s breath”), the unflinching poems in My Post-Holocaust Second Generation Voice: History / Memory / Identity invite the reader to join the writer in his mind-and-heart poetic journey through the past, present, and with hope for the future.

Book cover - My Post-Holocaust Second Generation Voice: History / Memory / Identity