Kaddish

Writing from a mass grave to his living wife, a poet who was murdered by Nazis in 1944 reports on what happened to him, and the role of poetry and beauty when confronted with evil.

In Kaddish, Romanian poet Radu Vancu assumes the identity of the murdered Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti, taking as his starting point the notebook that was found with Radnóti’s body when it was exhumed in 1946. Vancu imagines Radnoti addressing his wife in these poems — remembering their time together, but also conversing and joking with the dead around him (including his close friend, the violinist Miklosz Lorsi, who was executed just a few days before him), and invoking such historical figures as Dante, Shelley, Borges, Freud, Schumann, and Oppenheimer. Vancu's imagined mass grave is a place of bones, torture, and blood, but it also becomes the ground from which poetry emerges in its most stunning and powerful capacity: to find beauty despite the horror and to be able to resurrect the dead. The book is bilingual (Romanian and English) on facing pages.