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Murray Silverstein: Dante in Auschwitz, Ulysses in Hell
“The world is going to hell.” “Going?”
—overheard in a café
Within the flames are spirits, each one here / Enfolds himself in what burns him…
—Dante, INFERNO, xxvi, 50-51
Making your way through hell, you come upon flames
that, like flickering tongues, begin to speak.
You being Primo Levi, an Italian Jew in Auschwitz,
and you being me, yesterday, at home in my comfortable chair,
asking, why did poet Dante place Homer’s Ulysses in hell?
I’m reading If This Is a Man, Levi’s account of his year
in Auschwitz, the chapter, “The Canto of Ulysses,”
in which, on a sunny day, crossing the death camp’s plain,
lugging a pot of what was called soup, Levi recites
his schoolboy Dante to Frenchman Jean, who’d said,
“Help me, please, to feel human again.” And so,
that sunny day in Auschwitz, me in my comfortable chair,
the Inferno. “Why that passage came to mind,”
Levi writes, “I cannot say. Who is in that fire?
I wanted Jean to know, to become, the two of us,
if for a moment, men again.” I am Ulysses,
says the flame, that complicated man. Why am I
in hell? Because, says Dante (to Levi to Jean
to me in my Oakland chair), I altered my course,
did not return to Ithaca and Penelope, no,
the Odyssey’s a lie. I sailed instead into unknown seas.
Seeking to know what cannot be known
and still be a living man, I arrived at . . . .
Auschwitz. A word he didn’t yet know.
Whispers in the boxcar, “Where are we going?”
No one knew. No one yet knew how to know.
The storm that swirls in God’s dark heart,
our poor boat tossed, and sank, my crew & I all lost.
Why this passage came to mind a sunny day
in the death camp, reader, you tell me. What I know
reading it, trembling in my American chair:
Where are we going? Whispers; no one knows.
No one now knows how to know—retributions
without end, system collapse, the insects, the seas,
this master race of clowns…words can embody
but cannot say—Dante in Auschwitz, Ulysses
in hell—only that, making our way through hell
we come upon flames, and, to be human, try to speak.
Oakland, 2025
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Murray Silverstein
Red Studio (2024) is Murray Silverstein’s third book of poems from Sixteen Rivers Press. A practicing architect for forty years and coauthor of four books on architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press), Silverstein lives in Oakland, California.
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“no one knows.
No one now knows how to know—retributions
without end, system collapse, the insects, the seas,
this master race of clowns…words can embody
but cannot say”
True, true, true.
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Yes, Murray has described our age perfectly.
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I would like to begin my comment by wishing all those who are about to celebrate Hanukkah to have a happy fest. Let the light shine. I carry Auschwitz in my DNA and Gaza in my heart, Trump’s racist deportations in my tears, the Hutus and Tutsis are my worst nightmare come true – and so on, for ever. And I remember flatlining during my ten-hour tumour operation (on 26 December will be my 25th birthday) that in those minutes, when I was dead, I met the divine light and unconditional love. It wasn’t Christian, it wasn’t Jewish, it wasn’t Muslim… it just was. Didn’t have a name, didn’t have favourites. That’s what ‘unconditional’ means. This experience and new knowledge changed my life.
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Thanks, Rose Mary!
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Amazing Rosemary! I believe in that light.
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On a more positive note, John Edward Simms writes: “In all of the wonder of Creation, to me the most amazing is the profound choice of Faith. Some extremists seem to forget that it IS a choice. The prophet Mohammed said there can be no compelling in religion. Jesus ate with sinners and was condemned for it, then sent his followers out to spread the word. It was an invitation. Later people made it a command. I absolutely believe in God. In other countries, the word is Dios, Dieu, Allah, the IS, Yahweh, and many others. My personal favorite is Logos. Are any of those words less or more than the others? I don’t think so. I have come to the realization that standing outside and feeling the light breeze and the warm sun on my face rejuvenates my soul, clears my mind, and reminds me that we are all part of this astonishing Creation, undeserved and often under-appreciated.
Take a moment to feel the sun. Repeat as needed.”
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Ponder the ethical and moral responsibilities of poetry in the face of absolute atrocity and ongoing human suffering. Does it have any reason to carry on (a rhetorical question)? I believe Murray Silverstein’s and John Guzlowski’s poems here (and many others) demonstrate how poetry can turn our attention to atrocities as part, but not all of the human condition.
Poetry can bring hope, healing, inspiration and love to the broken world we have to mend over and over. At least, that is my wish and belief.
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Beautifully said, Jim. Thank you.
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I’m with you in this Jim. I seek and need poetry every day in my life. This has only become more so as time has passed.
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I will read again, wanting to read it again, not wanting. So much to fear, to contemplate, feeling the earth tipping under our feet because we did, didn’t, could, couldn’t ?
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Yes. All of those.
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I am speechless. Such amazing, sad, incomprehensible pondering. All of this cast in terms I’m afraid to give praise that I might further condemn the whole human race to hell. Its become a preoccupation for me of late—whether we’re worthy of anything else.
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Sometimes, we must speak of the unspeakable.
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brilliant.
here’s another poem about Auschwitz.
Kafka Dreams of Auschwitz
Kafka dreams he’s in an oven.
Flames exploding around him.
His skin blackened & his eyes
blind with pain.
He wakes up. The bed
is wet with his sweat.
He wonders about the oven.
How strange it was.
Like that crazy fable
from those German writers,
the Brothers Grimm,
The Iron Stove.
Will a princess come
and save him from the flames
bring him joy and childhood dreams
or will the Germans
burn him into a toad?
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Powerful. Thank you, John.
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I give poetry readings about my parents and their experiences in concentration and slave labor camps. Half the students at these readings know almost nothing about the camps. Often, before I start, a teacher has to do 4-5 minutes of background.
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If we don’t remember, we will repeat history.
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Hannah Arendt, who wrote the Origins of Totalitarianism, called the concentration camps and their kin, “holes of oblivion”: places to erase individuals and even their memories. Writing after Auschwitz can restore the humanity of those erased individuals. Today’s attempts by some to deny history are also holes of oblivion.
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OMG. You nailed it, Jim. Thank you.
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We ARE repeating history.
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