Hannah Senesh and back to poetry at last

When we got back from our Michigan trip, a great deal of work had piled up in the interim. I had two interviews to do via email with THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE BOOKS HAPPEN and the zine KNOT. Many questions to answer, a day for each interview. Amazon had asked me via Knopf to write an essay about poetry, especially for a lay audience. So I did. Then I had promised Linda Stein a 5000 word essay about the heroism of Hannah Senesh. Hannah Senesh was the bright daughter of an affluent and assimilated Jewish family in Budapest. In the equivalent of high school, she encountered anti-Semitism. Then in spite of high grades and being gifted, she could not enroll in any college because she was Jewish. That sparked an interest in Zionism, not shared or encouraged by anyone in her family. She prepared to emigrate. It was a lonely and difficult choice. Once in Palestine, she enrolled in an agricultural school. When she graduated, she went to work on a kibbutz. After a couple of years, she began writing the short intense powerful poems many of us know. She struggled with the knowledge of what was happening to Jews in Europe and joined the Haganah, a paramilitary organization. Soon she enrolled in the Palmach, a more militant part. When the British realized they could use the Jews with military training in their fighting, she joined the British Army with many other Palestinian Jews. After training in wireless and as a paratrooper, she volunteered to go in a group of Jews to be dropped behind enemy lines. The British did not expect them to survive, and all 16 of them knew the odds were against them. Only one of them did make it and left a moving remembrance of Hannah’s bravery and leadership. They parachuted into what was then Yugoslavia where she joined the partisans until she could manage to cross into Hungary, now occupied by the German Army. She was captured in Hungary and tortured for three days but would not give up the wireless codes of any information. She was tried as a spy and executed by a German firing squad, refusing a blindfold, defiant to the end. This is a brief summary of her life and actions. Linda Stein is mounting a traveling exhibit about women heroes of the Holocaust. She asked me to write about Hannah Senesh since I’m familiar with her poetry and had written an introduction to her collected diaries. Since I sent off the essay, I have written two poems and started a third. I had not written any poetry since two days before we went on our 2200 mile trip. it felt wonderful to be back to it. A friend, Dan, has been writing poetry seriously and we had our first mutual session of exchanging poems and critiquing them. That also felt good.It remains unusually and unpleasantly cold for March, but the snow is slowly, slowly, slowly receding. We finally have patches of bare ground. This Monday, the first crocuses opened near the diningroom, striped lavender with gold anthers. Then the next day, deep purple species crocuses opened on the south side of the house. These first flowers give me great pleasure. I heard the first geese flying north yesterday.