Budapest 1944
For my father
In the unswayable darkness
a tree shivers at night.
By the sweeping light of noon
an old grip holds.
At the shaking of the spirit
a half moon touches ground.
Hand over hand, body over body
wisdom never makes it home.
Page after page, book after book
bruised apples make the sauce.
Mouth to water, glass to table
truths get put down.
The ocean knows the sun
goes only so deep.
The melting of the snow
freezes memory to that place.
And a generation passing down colors
colors the icicles of spring.
In memory of Elie Wiesel
This week, we revisit the poetry of Howard Altmann in a work that honours the writer’s father, approaching his 92nd birthday on 1 June this year, and commemorates his fellow Hungarian and Auschwitz survivor, the Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel.
Mr Altmann, Sr, born and raised in a small town outside Budapest, Nagykálló, was interned in four concentration camps, beginning with Auschwitz, and, like Wiesel, he lost literally hundreds of his relatives. One of Wiesel’s sisters, who was in Auschwitz at the same time as the poets’s father, died there. Altmann, Sr emigrated to Canada in 1948, where Howard grew up before moving to New York.
The poem’s stark title refers to the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944. The occupation began in March, and, during April and May, some 500,000 Jews were rounded up for deportation.
Inescapability is engrained in the poem’s structure, which seems to be a series of halted cycles. Each six-line stanza contains three smaller cycles, paired, and pared, in simple, potent sentences. It’s as if a small surge of regeneration were begun, only to stall. Life still struggles to flourish, but “an old grip holds”.
In the first stanza, sibilance arises from the repeated S’s of unswayable, shivers, sweeping, shaking, spirit, a snake-like hissing in that “unswayable darkness” that noon and moonlight fail to ameliorate. Altmann favours symbols and archetypes, and is asking us to think of a more ancient Fall in this stanza. The tree represents the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and it’s also the metaphorical tree formed by the human generations. All the same, it retains a hint of realism, a whisper of movement in the lifeless, trembling leaves of an ordinary urban tree. The scene is desolate, cold, blighted.
Words like “grip”,“sweeping” and “shaking” include connotations of physical violence and domination. “Grip,” as noted above, has physical and psychological dimensions: it’s also a word that suggests the small, frantically grabbed travel-bag of the deportee . “Sweeping” evokes menacing human and mechanical actions – the neighbourhood “sweep”, the relentless searchlights of the camps. The times are out of joint and nature itself seems wrenched from redemptive routines when “a half-moon touches the ground”. Perhaps, again, there’s a literal dimension to the image: we may glimpse some terrestrial object, a personal possession like a protractor or pair of spectacles that has dropped and broken in the debris of massacre.
From the tree and the nocturnal-diurnal imagery of the first stanza, there’s a shift in the second to the human body. Do we see some potentially hopeful handing-on of ideas, or are rigid bodies moving without volition? Images of escape initially may come to mind. But the “grip” of hands proves lifeless, and any transference implies further wounding: “Wisdom never makes it home.”
Pages and books in this stanza suggest knowledge, perhaps sacred, or historically essential. However, the apple symbolism, continued from the first stanza, reveals the fruit to be “bruised”. The sauce-making ought to transform the bad apple into the palatable, but it merely conceals it. Water itself loses its innocence.
In a note to the poem, Altmann writes that “the apple ‘should be’ true but it is rotten” and suggests an interpretation in which the apples and their “iconic red colour hint (s) at, however obliquely, the color of blood (once again, innocence transformed) as the psychological “handing off” of history as it drips down to the next generation.” In such an interpretation, connotations of food and pleasure are quickly dispelled.
Stasis continues in the final stanza. Sunlight is impotent at a certain depth of the ocean. The icicles are ominously shaded. The “generation passing down colors” is still gripped by suffering.
The play on “colors” and the closeness of the parts of speech, with only a line break separating the two homonyms, is particularly effective. Again, abstraction is undercut, and there’s a connection of the noun with those “colors” that nations and ideologies fly to assert identity and power.
Forward movement is possible, perhaps, only in the images and the words themselves as they mingle and suggest connections, and construct a poem. Words are not frozen by time and place, though that can be one of their dangers, as poets and historians know. The end of the second stanza, ambiguous though it is because of the double meaning of “put down”, at least reminds us of the responsibilities and the possibilities of historical witness. “Mouth to water, glass to table/truths get put down.” That truth continues to be recognised and “put down” in the sense of being recorded is a still-surviving hope.
• Budapest 1944 is from Altmann’s planned new collection, Notes in the Dark.
