What Is Lost by Yehiel Poupko

In What is Lost Rabbi Yehiel Poupko provides reminders of the memories of what could be but cannot be lost—in spite of Theodor Adorno’s pronouncement that “It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.” The ashes of those Holocaust victims of the most horrific brutality, imaginable and unimaginable, cover these poems, and the memories of those who lost everything except their souls saturate every line and word.  No order can ever be brought out of this chaos and the loss of six million lives, but, like David, the poet pours out his lament to a God who hears and to anyone who picks up this book of riveting poetry.  What is lost?  Certainly not the promises of the Torah, the questions about and the assurance of God’s presence, and memory, that as Poupko writes, “makes home of ruins.”  These poems are, finally, a blessing to those who question and adore.

–Jill Baumgaertner, Poetry Editor, The Christian Century

Those of us who know Yehiel Poupko as a profound rabbinic thinker and courageous interfaith leader now have a glimpse into the expansiveness of his soul. Struggling between faith and doubt, rage and grief, Poupko the poet allows himself to be led into territory where Poupko the theologian would not dare to venture. Like some of the great Yiddish poets of the Holocaust, he turns Jewish and Christian imagery against themselves. The result is outrageously exhilarating, prayers for an age of apocalypse. “O that/I had wings,” the poet cries out. But these beautiful poems are his wings, and they take us with him on a flight of the soul.

–Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow, Shalom Hartman Institute