Black bread

by Blu Greenberg

The Holocaust was - and remains - an incomprehensible event in human history. Only through the stories of survivors - the minutest detail, the retelling a single moment of that horrorcan one begin to fathom the enormity of it. Only through fragments of their memories can one dimly comprehend the separations, the indignities, the pain, as well as the courage, caring and life affirming impulses of those who lived and died inside that whirlwind. Many of the poems in this book are based on vignettes that survivors shared with the author, and Greenberg lovingly dedicates this book to them. But this book is not only about survivors' lives and memories. It is also about the life and emotions of an American born Jew, a woman whose awareness of the Holocaust came much after the historical event. Like so many others who grew up on safe shores far distant from the cataclysm, Blu Greenberg was internally transformed by knowledge of the event. She calls it the Holocaust factor, a consciousness that