From "Song of Songs"

Cross Currents, Fall, 2004 by Jay Ladin

Love is strong as death
Craving as the grave

The following is an excerpt from The Book of Anna, a series of long narrative poems interspersed with prose diary entries written in the voice of a fictional poet, Anna Ach Asher. Asher, a Czech-German Jewish concentration camp survivor, is writing in mid-'50s Prague. Asher's mother was a concert pianist, and was killed in a separate camp, after mutilation of her hands; her father abandoned the family when she was young. The poems of The Book of Anna subject voices from many strata of Jewish experience to the emotional and theological acid bath of the Holocaust. In "Song of Songs," a poem written as a sequence of eight therapy sessions between Asher and a psychoanalyst named Dr. Solomon, Asher rewrites the Biblical Song of Songs and its traditional rabbinic interpretations to tell the story of three older Jewish women who gave their lives to ensure that Asher, then a 15-year-old girl, would survive the camps. The sensuous imagery Asher quotes simultaneously expresses her love for those women, her rage at the God she sees as having not only permitted but enjoyed their deaths, and her resistance to the therapeutic perspective (she calls it "consciousness macht frei") represented by her psychoanalyst. In recounting the attempts of the women--a prostitute, a physicist and a rebbetzin (a rabbi's wife)--to make sense of the camps and to instill in her a desire to survive them, Asher x-rays the values each represents.