O the Chimneys
by Nelly Sachs
Summary
This is a selection in English of Nelly Sachs's poems, together with her verse play Eli, and it is the usual door into her work for readers who do not have German.
Sachs wrote about the murder of the European Jews. She wrote about very little else after 1945. The title poem takes the smoke rising from the crematoria and makes it a body of the dead moving through the air, and that transformation, of unbearable fact into image that can be looked at, is what she does throughout.
The poems are short, unpunctuated in places, and built from a small recurring vocabulary of dust, sand, smoke, stars, hunters and the hunted. She reaches constantly for Jewish mystical tradition, and the reading experience is closer to liturgy than to lyric. Individual poems can feel slight in isolation and accumulate enormous weight when read in sequence.
Be honest with yourself about what you are picking up. This is not difficult in the sense of being obscure, but it is relentless, and there is no relief in it and no narrative to carry you. Read a few pages at a time. Read them slowly. Sachs is one of the very few poets who wrote directly about the camps in the years immediately afterwards and produced something that does not collapse under the weight of its subject. Others tried and were defeated by it. That is why she is still read, and why a slim selection like this one carries more than its length suggests.
Historical Context & Significance
Nelly Sachs won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, shared with the Israeli novelist Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and the prize honored her body of work rather than this or any single book. She was the sixth woman to receive it, and the citation praised her lyrical and dramatic writing for interpreting Israel's destiny with touching strength. On the night she remarked that Agnon represented Israel while she represented the tragedy of the Jewish people.
She survived because of a rescue. In 1940, a week before she was due to report to a camp, she escaped from Berlin to Sweden with the help of the novelist Selma Lagerlöf, a long standing correspondent who had interceded with the Swedish royal family before her own death that March. She lived the rest of her life in Stockholm and died in 1970.
This English selection, translated by Michael Hamburger and others, appeared in 1967.