Dora/Lora (Poetry)
Dora/Lora is an audacious and brutally honest book by one of the most honest and fearless voices on the American literary scene. It takes unimaginable courage to even try to comprehend the incomprehensible – let alone to write about it now, of all times. Larissa Shmailo’s prose, as “unadorned and unperfumed” as the utterings of a Sybil, heroically strives to connect vantage points, which, like dead stars, are impossible to connect with any finality. Her unyielding poetry, crisp, laconic, and masterful, refuses to remain trapped and wrapped in itself. The book opens a gate to compassion and, hence, if not to forgiveness, then to freedom.
—Irina Mashinski, author of The Naked World
EXCERPT:
In 1996, I answered what I deemed a serendipitous advertisement from Elie Wiesel, the famed Nazi hunter and author of the Holocaust memoir, Night. He was seeking an assistant; why not me? Armed with this poem, I set out.
Came time for the interview, I was disappointed to find that I would be meeting with Wiesel’s wife. I spoke of my relatives’ experience and read my poem.
Mrs. Wiesel was silent for a moment. She then cocked her head and said deliberately: “If your parents weren’t Jewish, what were they doing in the camps?”
I was taken aback by what I thought was the ignorance of the question. “Like many Slavs, they were slave labor in the camps,” I replied.
Mrs. Wiesel paused and asked again: “If your parents weren’t Jewish, what were they doing in the camps?”
The interview came to an uncomfortable close. Bimbo! I thought. So uneducated as to the variegated makeup of the camps: Slavs, disabled people, homosexuals, French resistance. If only I could have talked to Wiesel himself; surely that fabled man would understand the poem.
I never heard from the Wiesels but a question had been planted: What were my parents doing in the camps? What did Ukrainians do in the camps?
Primo Levi, the chemist suicide, wrote in his Holocaust memoir, Survival in Auschwitz (renamed by the English publisher from the Italian title, Se queso è un mom, “If This Is a Man”) that the camp overseers, the Ukrainian kapos, were often crueler than the Germans as they sought to curry favor with their masters. And Mrs. Wiesel had recognized me as Ukrainian American. Was my family less than heroic in the camps?
All the books I had read so voraciously flooded back: The Diary of the Lodz Ghetto; Night; Levi; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Tadeuzs Borowski’s autobiographical short stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (the original title in Polish is Pożegnanie z Marią, “Farewell to Maria”). How Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning became my guiding philosophy—how moved I was by his zazen sight of a bird in the concentration camp, how it recalled a larger and more benevolent universe and inspired Frankl to choose a humane response to the inhuman milieu surrounding him. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s story read countless times. And the films: Sophie’s Choice, written and directed by Alan J Pakula, in which a mother must choose which one of her two children shall live, and which one shall die at the selection, and Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List; Cabaret and the chilling rendition of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” The heroism of the gentile helpers; surely my family ranked among them?