The Tragedy of Bukovinian Jewry in Moses Rosenkranzˊs Reception

Abstract

Abstract. In recent years, there has been an increasing scientific interest in the German-language literature of Bukovyna, which until the 1980s, for various reasons, remained out of sight of literary critics and became a kind of "virgin land" for Ukrainian scientists. The reason for this interest was translations of works by Paul Celan, Rosa Auslander, Zelma Meerbaum-Eisinger, Alfred Gong, Gregor von Rezzori, Georg Drozdowski, etc., which appeared in Chernivtsi publishers.

Ukrainian translations of the works of the German-language writer of Jewish origin Moses Rosenkrantz, done by the Chernivtsi scholar and translator Peter Ryhlo, were included in the collections "The Lost Harp. Anthology of German-Language Poetry of Bukovyna" (2002, 2008) and "German-Language Poetry of Bukovyna. Time of the Phoenix " (2008).

Most Bukovinian German-speaking authors during the Second world war experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, which led to the almost total extermination of the Jewish community in Bukovyna. They lost their relatives in those terrible times, or they became victims of the bloody Nazi machine. Those who remained alive tried to convey the terrible images of the Disaster and express their own experiences in their works.

This article attempts to analyze the poetic reflection of the tragedy of the Holocaust in Bukovyna in the lyrical works of M. Rosenkrantz. The writer created several poems dedicated to the theme of the extermination of Jews. For the research, we selected poetry included in the collections "Visionen" ("Visions") (2007), "Bukowina. Gedichte 1920-1997" ("Bukovina. Poems 1920-1997") (1998) and "The Lost Harp" (2008), where the writer vividly depicted the terrible pictures of Shoah that he had to go through, his own emotions and impressions of what he saw: "Eine Allee" ("Alley"), "Klage" ("Complaint"), "Ausklang" ("Last Chord"), "Die Blutfuge" ("Bloody Fugue"), "Ein Ungeborener" ("Unborn"), "Angst" ("Fear"), "Dorfpogrom/Östlich" ("Rural Pogrom"), "Mein Amt" ("My Duty").