Ben Barkow worked for 30 years in London’s Wiener Holocaust Library, 20 of them as its Director. This, together with his upbringing as a German boy in 1960s and 70s London––and his family’s silence about their Jewish heritage and sufferings during the Nazi era––underpin this poetic reconstruction of two generations.
In a series of linked poems, he explores the lives of his grandparents and their siblings and those of his parents. By directly going up against Adorno’s famous dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric, he probes the limits of representation in the context of the overwhelming need to let the suffering of the victims speak. Implicitly he articulates the haunting and haunted reality of a life lived in the long shadow of the Holocaust.
“Barkow’s work achieves this doubling: making strange and pushing aside. Juxtaposing the stark beauty of rural England with the sheer evil of the death camps, taking us from California to the Holy Land and back again, it begs questions about the universality of the Holocaust and the capacity of poetry to bear all this meaning.” Zoë Waxman, University of Oxford
Ben Barkow is a Trustee of Holocaust Centre North, has served as its Chair and currently chairs the Academic Advisory Board of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, charged with creating a national Holocaust memorial adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. He has served as Director of the Wiener Holocaust Library from 2000 until the end of 2019. He is the author, editor and translator of a number of books relating to the legacy of the Holocaust.
Poetry After Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde by Ben Barkow will be published on the 9th of December 2024. Orders will be dispatched shortly after.