A Suicide Mission
RIEMER, JACK
BOOKS Two Young Women Take Different Paths to Martyrdom A Suicide Mission The Testing of Hanna Senesh by Ruth Whitman, with historical background by Livia Rothkirchen Wayne State University...
...Ruth Whitman's book of poems tells Senesh's story in a fresh way, "from the inside," imagining what she must have felt and thought during the last five months of her life: while she trained for her parachute drop into Hungary, while she hid in the woods, and when she was captured and awaited her execution...
...How to write about a twenty-three-year-old facing death, and not be maudlin...
...The total effect is simply riveting...
...For poetry that holds our attention from the first page on and that brings to life one of the key figures who gave light to our people during the Holocaust, Ruth Whitman deserves our praise...
...What makes this book of poems unique is that Whitman understands Hanna Senesh, not just as a patriot and not as a plaster saint, but as a twenty-three-year-old woman...
...The voice of Hanna takes hold of the reader by the end of the book...
...The story of Hanna Senesh's martyrdom has been told so often that it is hard to believe that anything fresh remains to be said...
...And she creates a poem in which the two of them, both so young and in love, communicate...
...He too was caught and imprisoned by the Nazis after parachuting into Hungary...
...My circle of fire— a kiss— moves on your ceiling, its borrowed light speaking to you and your circle comes yellow as a yolk a buttercup moving across my wall, speech of the sun with my fingers, press it against I try to translate: I want to grasp it my breasts until each syllable of light our sun-shadows our two worlds of reflected fire no longer separate Each poem in this book is carefully crafted and as moving as this one is...
...Although she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, she never revealed the information they wanted, and they executed her in 1944...
...Yoel Palgi was Senesh's companion on the fatal mission...
...She imagines them signaling to each other across the cell yard by means of mirrors...
...When we see her this way, the loss we feel is even greater...
...Whitman understands that Senesh had the drives, dreams and confusions of anyone that age, and Whitman gives her a believable voice, with the doubts, fears, hopes and aspirations of a real human being...
...It was a suicide mission...
...They were not permitted to communicate with one another in jail, but Whitman imagines what they might have said...
...Toward the end of the Second World War, Senesh volunteered to be part of a resistance group that parachuted back into Hungary to help Jews escape...
...We see her in a way we had not seen her before—as a young person just groping her way from adolescence into adulthood, as a young woman in love with life and in love with Yoel Palgi and as a true heroine...
...BOOKS Two Young Women Take Different Paths to Martyrdom A Suicide Mission The Testing of Hanna Senesh by Ruth Whitman, with historical background by Livia Rothkirchen Wayne State University Press, 1987.115 pp, $7.50 Reviewed by Jack Riemer This book takes a short time to read and a long time to recover from...
...Jack Riemer is the rabbi of Beth David Congregation in Miami...
...Somehow, Whitman has managed that feat...
...In 1939, as a young woman, Senesh left her native Hungary and went to Palestine, while her mother remained in Budapest...
Vol. 13 • April 1988 • No. 2
