Dora / Lora
“The alphabet sings only / to me,” confides Larissa Shmailo; elsewhere she writes, “I AM YOUR LOGOS, THE WORD MADE FLESH.” Shmailo is an alchemist of words, manipulating rhyme and cadence and all the tricks of form in her quest to produce gold. Whether she’s channeling Anna Karenina in the #me, too era, voicing Icarus’s post-mortem report, or exploring her own family connections to kapos and crematoria, Shmailo’s Dora/Lora explicitly confronts the question of how one can write poetry after Auschwitz. Astonishing, confounding, and deeply moving: in these poems, Shmailo conjures gold from the unlikeliest of substances.
—Katherine E. Young, author of Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards, poet laureate emerita, Arlington, VA
Dora/Lora is an audacious and brutally honest book by one of the most honest and fearless voices on the American literary scene. It takes unimaginable courage to even try to comprehend the incomprehensible – let alone to write about it now, of all times. Larissa Shmailo’s prose, as “unadorned and unperfumed” as the utterings of a Sybil, heroically strives to connect vantage points, which, like dead stars, are impossible to connect with any finality. Her unyielding poetry, crisp, laconic, and masterful, refuses to remain trapped and wrapped in itself. The book opens a gate to compassion and, hence, if not to forgiveness, then to freedom.
—Irina Mashinski, author of The Naked World
In Dora/Lora, Larissa once again pushes the boundaries of poetry offering surprises in the pause between comedy and heartbreak.
—Elizabeth L. Hodges, author of Witchery
This rupture of heart, love’s sharp scalpel will cut mine apart.” With torture, starvation, beatings, and disfigurement, what has changed? Shmailo follows what her father told her, “‘Keep breathing,’ he encouraged me in difficult times! ‘Keep breathing.’” As you read this bravely written book, “Keep breathing.”
—Gloria Mindock, editor of Červená Barva Press
In 1996, I answered what I deemed a serendipitous advertisement from Elie Wiesel, the famed Nazi hunter and author of the Holocaust memoir, Night. He was seeking an assistant; why not me? Armed with this poem, I set out.
Came time for the interview, I was disappointed to find that I would be meeting with Wiesel’s wife. I spoke of my relatives’ experience and read my poem.
Mrs. Wiesel was silent for a moment. She then cocked her head and said deliberately: “If your parents weren’t Jewish, what were they doing in the camps?”
I was taken aback by what I thought was the ignorance of the question. “Like many Slavs, they were slave labor in the camps,” I replied.
Mrs. Wiesel paused and asked again: “If your parents weren’t Jewish, what were they doing in the camps?”
The interview came to an uncomfortable close. Bimbo! I thought. So uneducated as to the variegated makeup of the camps: Slavs, disabled people, homosexuals, French resistance. If only I could have talked to Wiesel himself; surely that fabled man would understand the poem.
I never heard from the Wiesels but a question had been planted: What were my parents doing in the camps? What did Ukrainians do in the camps?
Primo Levi, the chemist suicide, wrote in his Holocaust memoir, Survival in Auschwitz (renamed by the English publisher from the Italian title, Se queso è un mom, “If This Is a Man”) that the camp overseers, the Ukrainian kapos, were often crueler than the Germans as they sought to curry favor with their masters. And Mrs. Wiesel had recognized me as Ukrainian American. Was my family less than heroic in the camps?
All the books I had read so voraciously flooded back: The Diary of the Lodz Ghetto; Night; Levi; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Tadeuzs Borowski’s autobiographical short stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (the original title in Polish is Pożegnanie z Marią, “Farewell to Maria”). How Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning became my guiding philosophy—how moved I was by his zazen sight of a bird in the concentration camp, how it recalled a larger and more benevolent universe and inspired Frankl to choose a humane response to the inhuman milieu surrounding him. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s story read countless times. And the films: Sophie’s Choice, written and directed by Alan J Pakula, in which a mother must choose which one of her two children shall live, and which one shall die at the selection, and Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List; Cabaret and the chilling rendition of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” The heroism of the gentile helpers; surely my family ranked among them?
A darker writing took shape at the turn of the 21st century:
Kalinivka, Prmysl, Dora
Kalinivka
Kalinivka, Kalinivka: The ground over the mass graves is hard, the soft grass grows. The Ukrainian Guard, boy and girl, make love, happy to be alive. In the Ukraine, collectivized, they walked on corpses. And the Germans alone protest, her father tells the girl. Siberia, purges. Like the Irish, their parents collaborate; Hitler fights the Russian and English masters of their rural lands. Now here, Kalinivka. The mass graves crack with green life. 1941 is forgotten in the summer of ’43. She is 19, pregnant soon.
Prymsl
By 1943, the ghetto holds the few not deported, living in tunnels, basements, caves, the hiding ones, the ones who know. All the rest to camps in Poland, Germany, or dead. The boy no longer likes the girl, but through her, he got his Kapo job. Even his mother says, marry. Have a child. The female Kapo bears a boy through the camps, Prymsl, through the unknown tombs of Poland, the unmarked graves, the walls marked with Jewish blood, the bloody broken nooses, the dark rain. She wants the boy to marry her, he makes excuses, says, the Germans won’t permit. That the child will die soon after the war, that she will beat her head upon the grave until it bleeds, that sorrow is unknown. The death of the Jewish children is unseen. Poland is always green.
Dora
Germany, Harz Mountains. The Germans turn now, now SS. The war is failing. Fewer the slaves to command, the girl, heavy with child, translates, working, starving, carried in rail carts for miles to build the V-2s. A rachitic Jewess cleans the barracks, the boy’s eye turns, with pity, with lust; he gives her bread. From Erfurt to the extension camp, Buchenwald’s new Dora, Nordhausen. Here they spare the rope to hang. All are hungry, the Germans too. The Allies bomb the industrial camp. Liberation. Rows of corpses, the eternal rows, line Nordhausen. The Germans are forced to respect the dead. Kalinivka, Prymsl, the unseen dead, now here in respectful symmetry, no longer piled in heaps, but rectangular, marked. The flowers grow, the burghers sing, “After every December, there comes a new spring.”
There came a day when denial popped like a soap bubble, quietly, imperceptibly. My mind simply nodded assent: “Oh.”
Since writing this book. I have learned not to judge my family. I don’t know much of anything, for all the reading, of what I would do to survive. Don’t judge my family—you don’t know either.
