This article offers a comparative reading of two 20th century poems, each preoccupied with Jewish catastrophe: Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik's "Beʿir haharegah" ("In the City of Slaughter"), and "Engführung" ("The Straitening"), written by poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. Drawing on some of the recent developments in affect theory, the article asserts that these two modern accounts of Jewish ḥurban share a fundamental characteristic that speaks to the mechanism of poetic reenactment: an experiential reconstruction of the walk to and within the sites of destruction, which turns the readers of the poems into active participants in this experience. Such performative reading, which exceeds the rigid confines of mere representation, pushes constantly toward active and visceral interaction between reader and text, in the course of which questions of memory, belonging, and collective and subjective identity, are raised and reexamined. The artistic experience of destruction thus acquires constructive power, as literature becomes an active agent of memory, freeing the historical event from its rigid facticity and transforming it into an ongoing occurrence, taking place here and now, over and over again.