About Where Lightning Strikes
Publication History & Awards
Excerpt: 3 poems
Discussion Questions
Alexandria Constantinova Szeman
Alexandria's Tweets on Writing & Publishing
Alexandria's Tweets About Everything Else
About
Where Lightning Strikes:
award-winning Poems on the Holocaust
The poems in this collection revisit the classic themes that have inspired poets for generations: love, passion, betrayal, doubt, loyalty, despair, faith, and survival — this time in the context of the period before, during, and after the Holocaust with its systematic persecution and extermination of the majority of European Jewry by the Nazi regime.
In this collection, victims are given voices. In "First Day of German Class" a young, teenaged girl unfamiliar with the Nazis and their atrocities in Germany and other Nazi-occupied territory develops a crush on the handsome and enigmatic SS Officer who passes out the yellow Stars of David they must now wear, like a brand, to identify and isolate them from the rest of the population. In the author's first Holocaust poem, "Cutthroat: A Player Who Plays for Himself" — excerpted in The Kommandant's Mistress — a female inmate forced into sexual servitude by the Kommandant of the camp considers suicide as an escape from her personal bondage and from the camp, even as she alternately pities or condemns those "weak enough" to "go to the wire" (grab the electric fence), offering her own suggestions for suicide to "escape" the intolerable situation. "Survivor: One Who Survives", the title poem of Szeman's dissertation, also mentioned in her first novel as one of Rachel's poems/books, explores the life of a woman who "survived" her experiences in the camps but is having difficulty "living".
Other disturbing yet lyrical poems trace the Holocaust from the perpetrators' perspective. We hear Albert Speer's musings about which "path" to take in the dramatic monologue "Learning the New Language", in which he initially claims not to understand the "new language" that everyone in the Nazi-regime is speaking, but then begins to practice some of the words himself. A guard in the Warsaw Ghetto bitterly complains in "The Dead Bodies That Line The Streets" about all the unburied, dead bodies "lying around" who watch his every movement, whisper behind his back, and generally prevent him from doing his job effectively and from sleeping well. Early, unnamed versions of Max, of The Kommandant's Mistress, appear, isolated and morally confused in "Dead: Out of Play Though Not Necessarily Out of the Game", where he momentarily sees an inmate as a fellow human being. A younger SS officer finds himself disconcerted and alarmed after he is unexpectedly attracted to one of the female inmates when he sees her dancing ballet to the music floating from his office window in "White on White".
In the camp itself, one of the Sonderkommando, who were in charge of guiding the Jews to be exterminated into the gas chambers, gives "instructions" to a new member of this chosen group on how to survive the camp, in the grim yet spiritually philosophical "On the Other Hand". Nursery rhymes and children's songs take on a deadly, mesmerizing meaning in the stunning, award-winning "Lager-Lieder (Camp Songs)". The true story of Auschwitz-survivor Anna Ornstein, who was in the camp as a young girl with her mother, is transformed from Anna's own stories and related in the disturbing yet moving poem "Sofie and Anna".
Haunting depictions of abusers' and survivors' lives after the war appear in works like "Those Who Claim We Hated Them", where the narrator insists — not always convincingly — that he, his family, and his colleagues held no contempt whatsoever for the Jews, and only did what was politically and morally required of them so that they themselves might survive the Nazi regime and the War. In the collection's title work, "Where Lightning Strikes", a survivor of the camps who now holds a Professorship likens his encounter with contemporary anti-Semitism to a tree's being struck by lightning: swift, unexpected, brutal, devastating, but terrifyingly and sadly illuminating.
All of the poems in this collection have been previously published in literary and university journals, and many of the poems in this collection have been awarded prizes, including University of Cincinnati's Elliston Prize (anonymous competition; 1983, 1984, 1985), Michigan State University's The Centennial Review Michael Miller Award for Poetry (1985), and The Isabel & Mary Neff Fellowship for Creative Writing (1984-85). Several poems were part of her dissertation, Survivor: One Who Survives (University of Cincinnati, 1986). Along with her non-Holocaust poetry collection, Love in the Time of Dinosaurs, this volume, Where Lightning Strikes, was unanimously accepted for publication by all outside readers of UKA Press in 2004.
Szeman's work speaks to us with clarity and resonance.
Her themes, though set, in this collection, around the Holocaust, are universal, encompassing the perpetrators', victims', and survivors' perspectives equally insightfully. Though the line-breaks are syllabic — imitating the arbitrary rigidity of the Nazi persecutions as well as of the concentration camps' operations — the language flows passionately over the artificially imposed line-breaks and formal stanzas. The poems' many fans often state that, despite the fact that they may have been initially wary of the subject matter, they were enthralled and shaken by poetry which so clearly, simply, and memorably portrays such complex and harrowing events in human history. As powerful, unsettling, and lyrical as her first novel, The Kommandant's Mistress, these poems will take you on a compelling, chilling, and unforgettable journey into the lives, hearts, and minds of all those who were victims, perpetrators, and survivors of the Holocaust.
Prose sections explore the poems' inception, writing, and revisions, in addition to the creative process itself; while discussion questions guide groups, teachers, and students in a deeper exploration of the work.
Publication
Acknowledgments
& Awards
Journals
- Black Warrior Review (University of Alabama)
- Centennial Review (Michigan State University)
- Chicago Review (University of Chicago)
- Colorado-North Review (University of Northern Colorado)
- Cornfield Review (Ohio State University at Marion)
- Dark Horse
- Jeopardy (Western Washington University)
- Jewish Currents
- The Kenyon Review (Kenyon College)
- Literary Review (Fairleigh Dickinson University)
- MSS (State University of New York)
- Nebo (Arkansas Technical University)
- New Kent Quarterly (Kent State University)
- Ohio Journal (Ohio State University)
- Red Cedar Review (Michigan State University)
- Sidewinder (Texas College of the Mainland)
- Wisconsin Review (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh)
- Writers' Forum (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs)
Books
- Survivor: One Who Survives (Ph.D. dissertation, original poetry, University of Cincinnati, 1986)
Awards
- The Centennial Review Prize for Poetry (Michael Miller Award) for best poem published in 1984 (Michigan State University) 1985
- The Isabel & Mary Neff Fellowship for Creative Writing (University of Cincinnati) 1984-1985
- Elliston Prize, First Place (anonymous competition; University of Cincinnati) 1985
- Elliston Prize, Second Place (anonymous competition; University of Cincinnati) 1984
- Elliston Prize, Grand Prize (no other prize awarded) (anonymous competition; University of Cincinnati) 1983
Excerpt from
Where Lightning Strikes
Learning the New Language
Cutthroat: A Player Who Plays for Himself
Bone-on-Bone
He was capable of tossing off quite calmly,
between the soup and the vegetable course,
"I want to annihilate the Jews in Europe."
Albert Speer
It has repeatedly surprised me, in later
years, that scarcely any anti-Semitic remarks
of Hitler's have remained in my memory.
Albert Speer
With a formal bow, the manservant announces
dinner and, filled champagne glasses in hand, we laugh
ourselves into the dining hall. Margarete is
seated opposite me at table; she smiles and
shows me her crossed fingers: the rumor is there are
great things in store for me. I cross mine, smile back, then
greet my dinner companions. At long last, the one
we've been expecting enters, wearing a tie that
doesn't quite match his jacket. He goes to the head
of the table and sits down. Like children, we knock
our silver against the china, set the crystal
down too heavily, but he never scolds. Between
the soup and vegetable courses, he begins to
speak. I lean toward the sound, but the words elude me.
I ask the old man beside me to interpret:
he nods, mumbling something incoherent. Meanwhile,
Margarete chats with a uniformed man on her
left. My head spins from all the alcohol and the
efforts to decipher. I concentrate instead
on my salad, pushing the onions to the side,
chewing in silence. With a great scraping of chairs,
the others stand, lifting their champagne. Then someone
nudges my elbow, guiding my hand toward my own
filled glass: I raise mine as well. Margarete shows crossed
fingers again. We drink. The new words spark in my
glass: its stem is slender, cool, hard. Later that night,
at home, undressing for bed, Margarete chatters
in the brand new way and my fingers tremble on
my shirt buttons. I go to the window. Outside,
the snowman the children built, turned to ice, lies on
his side. New snow covers his mouth and eyes. His scarf
flutters, trying to shake off the smothering and
glittering white. I whisper him one of the new
words. The glass against my forehead is smooth, cold, hard.
Cutthroat: A Player Who Plays For Himself
(Auschwitz 1944)
No one is capable of understanding you who
is not capable of doing the same…himself.
Pablo Picasso
* * *
In cramped and humid cattle-cars, gold stars glimmer
on coats, shirts, dresses, while shadowed heads drift and sway
in the tracks' rhythm. Children fall asleep and dream
about thick winter soup, studded with turnips and
potatoes. A boy bumps into the waste-bucket,
overturning it, and dozens of hands cover
raw noses, muffling the curses. In a corner
a girl leans her head against the boards. At last the
train screeches to a halt, then wood scrapes on wood as
the doors open. Los! Los! Aussteigen! the voices
shout as people tumble out into the darkness.
One of the uniforms barks at her bluer eyes.
* * *
No. It's a dream. I only dream that the German
officer comes over to the line of women
standing motionless against a bloodied wall, his
boots gleaming in the red clay, his baton butting
cold and hard against my jaw, his eyes on me, his
Sie sind alle Huren, the mud's choking sounds as
he strides away, stepping over all the bodies.
Yes, a dream. It must be a dream I feel nothing.
* * *
I lie. It's no dream. It is not even a nightmare.
But I've learned how to escape. When they go to the
showers scream, This one's my brother, or That one's my
child. Run up to embrace them. The soldiers will point
their guns. Pretend you don't see them. Weep. Beg. Cover
their hands with your desperate kisses. They'll snarl, Toller
Jude! Pretend that you are. March. Salute. Then grab
anything close to you wearing swastika.
* * *
One girl finds a way out. The German officer
keeps her in his special place, gives her cognac
and champagne and caviare. She says nothing when he
slides over her. He doesn't mind her silence, her
stillness. Afterward, he falls asleep and she walks
anywhere she pleases, even out among the
rest of them. They won't speak to her. Some spit. Soldiers
call out to her but she only knows German in
dreams. She used to dream of grassy fields, towering
sunflowers, Jan's callused hands and soft lips. Now she
dreams dark bread, potatoes, bits of greasy butter,
his face, his hands, his mouth, his panting sweating weight.
* * *
I lie. It's not that difficult. And it's not that
painful. Besides, any time it could end. Just choose
a day to caress the woven steel fence. That will
do it. Or when the guards in the towers call to
you, don't turn around. Or perhaps they'll say nothing,
but you'll feel the freedom they give you. Or the dogs
will run to greet you, their mouths open wide. The way
doesn't matter. No nightmare's worse than our waking.
Your blood be upon your
own heads; I am clean.
Acts 18:6
Yes, I heard. They told me at a dinner party.
They wept as they shook their heads, pale moths fluttering
around your extinguished flame, while I drank myself
sick in the corner. We would have protected you
from interrogation, punishment, betrayal.
There I stood, surrounded by your orphans, shoulders
hunched, eyes wide, like lonely-eyed deer in a snowdrift,
awaiting some unmistakable sign, some hope,
some reassurance, some No, it was not in vain.
All these years, with nothing to be forgiven but
our falling asleep in dark confessionals, or
spending whole summers without praying, or stealing
a few innocent kisses from the village girls.
We were like dancing fawns, skirting their world, but you
were always the braver one. Now, I'm confused. I
have something, I'm sure. I can't sleep. My wife says I
just waste time. But I was thinking of you again
tonight. How could you, of all people? What was it
that made you bite down on the silvery capsule
leaving us with the bitter taste in our mouths? Why
didn't you take us with you? When the moon slipped from
behind the dark clouds it reminded me that soon
your eyes might meet mine again, like they did that long
ago night over the stilled body. Both of us
hid then. Now I'm the only one left. My wife calls
to me, Come away from the window on such a
dark night; it isn't safe, Albert. It isn't right.
I don't listen. I don't want to. Sometimes I think
I want the pain of bone on bone — unbearably
fierce. And as strong — almost — as things I used to feel.
RockWay Press, LLC Logo © 2004, 2012 by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman.
Wet-plate Collodian Photograph of Cathedral Rock © 2004 by Robert J. Szabo. Used with artist's gracious permission.
Web-site Updated: Tuesday 1 May 2012
