Liz Marlow

The Interview

Chaim Rumkowski was certainly a controversial figure. What drew you to making him a recurring character in your poems?

Since my maternal great-grandparents’ brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews all perished during the Shoah, I am drawn toward writing about the subject. I stumbled upon Chaim Rumkowski while researching potential places where my family lived before and during that time period. When I first began reading about Rumkowski, I had recently had four people close to me die within a few months. That caused me to become obsessed with death—particularly what people go through to avoid it. During that time, I was intrigued by Rumkowski’s betrayal of the Jewish community to save himself and his family.

Although Rumkowski was complex in being both a victim and perpetrator, I saw and continue to see Rumkowski as someone who enjoyed having power over people’s emotions and whether they lived or died. As the most collaborative Judenrat Chairman of a Nazi ghetto, at first glance, he seems naïve in embracing the phrase “Arbeit macht frei” or “work sets you free” by establishing 120 factories in the Łódź Ghetto and standing at a podium in front of all the parents in the ghetto, asking them to give up their children to the Nazis without a fight. However, as a sexual predator of women and children, I believe that he made the “Give Me Your Children” speech (what he is most known for) because he lacked empathy for parents and children. Once I got past his evil, I wanted to understand how he became the man that many survivors wrote about in their accounts and explore that in my writing.  

What requirements does the persona poem place on the poet, ethically and aesthetically? 

Ethically and aesthetically, empathy is the most important requirement for writing a persona poem. Whether writing about a hero or villain, a character is boring without empathy. Trying to understand a villain helps create a complex character, which encourages the audience to connect with the villain and their victims. Ethically, since Chaim Rumkowski was a person who really existed, I had to read a great deal about him before I began drafting the poems. This is important when writing about any historical figure.

The cliché “write what you know” is particularly important when drafting a persona poem. Though I obviously never met Chaim Rumkowski (he died in Auschwitz after the Łódź Ghetto was liquidated, and I was born decades later), I have met evil people, some of whom I knew before they revealed how terrible they were. What’s interesting about abusive people is that there is something likable about them. If they were completely evil, they would not get close enough to anyone to be able to abuse them. To write an aesthetic persona poem, the poet has to remember that an evil person is not completely evil. Similarly, a good person is not perfect. We are all flawed.

Poem titles take on a lot of responsibility in your work. “6,000 Corpses from the Siedlce, Poland Ghetto Arrive at Treblinka” is perhaps the most striking example, as nothing else in the poem directly alludes to the tragedy referenced in the title. What informs your idiosyncratic attitude to titles? 

I got the idea of my long titles from James Wright, since many of his long titles contain information necessary to fully understand his poems. If I pack a lot of information into a title, then I am not using space in the poem for exposition. This also forces the reader to see the history necessary to understand the poem. Whereas a reader might choose not to read footnotes or endnotes or feel the need to reread the poem afterward. 

Including the historical background in a title allows me to contemplate the situation’s nuances as well as how the event is relevant now. With “6,000 Corpses from the Siedlce, Poland Ghetto Arrive at Treblinka,” I knew that I wanted the poem to deal with the cosmos. There is a phrase from the Talmud that many people know from watching Schindler’s List, “To save a life is to save the world.” Since Jews were forced to wear badges with stars during World War II, I thought of all those lives—each one a world, a galaxy of descendants—dead on the train, while non-Jews heard it or watched it pass in the distance. 

What role does examining the traumas of the past play in the present, both historically and poetically? 

We live in a tumultuous time. We live in a time when BIPOC are mistreated and anti-Semitic acts of violence are increasing every year. White supremacists tend to use some of the tropes from Nazi and Stalinist propaganda to this day, and politicians around the world occasionally use anti-Semitic verbiage (whether intentional or not). I wish that these poems were not relevant, but the fact is that when constituencies elect problematic leaders who do not stand up against violence, it continues. Their lack of immediacy in addressing hate crimes emboldens racists to use hate speech and/or commit acts of violence against minorities. According to a recent study, nearly half of Americans cannot name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during World War II. I wish that more people knew of the history these poems are about. Perhaps if more people read this history and listened to survivors’ testimonies, they would change their viewpoints regarding violence against minorities. 

“Gellah’s Badge” and “Chaim Rumkowski on His Exodus from a Russian Shtetl to Poland” are important poems to me, because they deal with history that I do not think many people know about. Even though a lot of Americans have seen Fiddler on the Roof, I am not sure how many realize how much that history is connected with the Shoah. Large numbers of Russian Jewish refugees migrating to other parts of Europe fueled anti-Semitism that had existed since the Crusades. It is important for readers to know that the Shoah did not exist in a six-year bubble of time, that decades and centuries of anti-Semitism contributed to the Shoah. To deal with these historical events in a way that readers empathize with, I needed to focus on the trauma of it, the emotions that occur with oppression. In a history book, far too often, the human voices of a tragic event are left out. However, to stop racist acts of violence, we need access to more victims’ voices.  

Given the weight and importance of your themes, how do you avoid preachiness and didacticism?  

My first creative writing teacher had a rule: we had to avoid preachiness. We also were not allowed to turn in poems that were directly about politics. From her, I learned early on that a description of an event is a better tool for persuading readers than a simple explanation of my political ideology. If a poem is about a specific event, the only argument is how well the poem portrays the event itself rather than how to interpret it. My politics become moot when readers bring their own political connections to their interpretations of my poetry. 

Similarly, if I let a very matter-of-fact historical note or epigraph tell of an actual event, then I do not have to rely on explaining the event’s significance. The event is significant because the poem is in the voice of someone experiencing the event. If I describe oppression in a detailed, tangible way, I am allowing readers to bring their own experiences to the poem and connect with a character involved in the event. I prefer using details in a persona poem for letting a victim of an important event describe one aspect of the event to get at why the event is important. 

You often capitalize parental figures, such as “Father”, and certain worldly objects, such as “Moon”, and reference God as “G-d”. What is your naming strategy in poetry? What do you feel the difference is between “father” and “Father”, “God” and “G-d”?

In Judaism, we leave the “o” out of G-d, because to spell His name out completely would make it a holy text. Meaning, if I were to print out a document that includes His full name, I would need to bury it if I wanted to discard it. Similarly, erasing His name from a computer screen would be disrespectful. 

I liked using “Mother” and “Father” as the names a teenager would use for their parents as opposed to “my mother” and “my father,” because the capitalization allowed for more than one meaning. For example, many people associate Mother Earth with Mother, whereas, they would not especially do that if I said, “my mother.” Similarly, many people (particularly Christians) frequently associate the use of “Father” with G-d. 

Regarding the capitalization of “Moon” in “Chaim Rumkowski Remembers Meeting a Girl Made of Sweet Kugel,” since I had capitalized “Earth” to refer to our planet rather than soil, I wanted to stay consistent. On NASA’s website, they advise writers to capitalize “Moon” when referring specifically to our moon but to leave it lowercase when referring to any moon. However, in general, consistency is most important in a poem to keep any sort of capitalization (or lack thereof) from being distracting.

Although your poems explore significant human concerns and specific historical situations, your approach is subtler and more metaphorical. You tend to focus on the tangible minutia of landscape and experience, instead of making sweeping statements. Can you tell us about your process of using the little things to examine bigger issues?

The number of Jews who died in the Shoah—6,000,000—is an overwhelming number. It is as overwhelming as a field filled with ant hills. If I narrow it all down to one day and one person’s point of view—the person who orchestrated people marching off to their deaths and witnessed Nazis refill the ghetto with others—then I am allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. I never want to tell a reader how to feel. However, I want to describe an event or a victim’s experience in such detail that a reader cannot help but feel empathy towards a victim.