Yiddish poet and Holocaust refugee Rajzel Zychlinsky created hauntingly beautiful poems from the ashes of war.
Now 88 and living in a Walnut Creek nursing home, she still manages to find poetry in even the most confining circumstances. On a recent Thursday afternoon, surrounded by the distressed cries of fellow residents, she focuses her attention on a cardboard cutout of a buffalo pasted to a wall opposite her bed.
“I am enchanted by the buffalo,” the Polish-born writer muses. “If I would be able to touch it, to see it, I would write a poem.”
One of relatively few living Yiddish poets, the widely published Zychlinsky has been writing since the 1920s. She says she hasn’t penned a poem since moving to California from Brooklyn just over a year ago. Still, nothing excites her more than talking about poetry — other’s or her own.
Her eyes, shaded by a red cap, noticeably light up when she picks up “God Hid His Face,” the most recent collection of her poems and the first full volume translatedinto English. With gnarled hands, she raises a magnifying glass and slowly reads aloud: