Jiří Weil’s documentary prose poem, iLamentation for 77,297 Victims/i is a literary monument to the Czech Jews killed during the Holocaust. A remarkable Czech-Jewish writer who worked at Prague’s ...Jewish Museum during the Nazi Occupation and after – he survived the Holocaust by faking his own death – Weil wrote his Lamentation while he served as the museum’s senior librarian in the 1950s. Remarkable literary experiment opening new ways how to write about the undescribable combines a narrative of the Shoa, newspaper style accounts of individual lives destroyed by the Holocaust, and quotes from the Tanakh, each having a specific and powerful effect.
Smoke from nearby factories shrouds a countryside as flat as a table, a countryside stretching off to infinity. It is covered by the ashes of millions of dead. Scattered throughout are fine pieces of ...bone that ovens were not able to burn. When the wind comes, ashes rise up to the sky the fragments of bone remain on the earth. And rain falls on the ashes, and rain turns them to good fertile soil, as befits the ashes of martyrs. And who can find the ashes of those from my native land; there were 77, 297 of them? I gather
