Kaddish: Before the Holocaust and After

Recipient of the Sophie Brody Award (2022) for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature, for works published the previous year in the US, presented by the American Library Association (ALA). Kaddish is the first and only poetry collection to have received the Sophie Brody Award.

Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, is recited in a time of deep sorrow. In it, the sacredness of the Almighty One is affirmed. In her new gathering of sixty poems, award-winning author Jane Yolen gives us a feminist view of Biblical themes and personalities such as Eve, Sarah, David and Goliath. The poems then morph into those about the Holocaust and after. Yolen’s unflinching and stark record of the many death camp horrors serve as reminders of that era’s brutality and the unrelenting suffering visited upon an innocent people. Knowing means remembrance, Yolen writes–as each poem becomes a memorial, a teaching, a warning for our and future generations. Her book concludes: … no Jew truly escapes/that time, those places, /unscarred, unscathed./I have no numbers on my arms, /But I have studied the charts, /the cities, the deaths, /till I know them by heart.