Translated by Araon Kramer

The Last Lullaby is the culmination of Araon Kramer's fifty-year devotion to translating the poetry of the Holocaust. The full horror of the genocide and the sublime of those who resisted are given voice on these pages. Placing each group in its historic and literary context with comprehensive introductory essays, Professor Kramer presents works mostly unavailable in English—until now. For the very first time, readers can become familiar with poets who experienced the horrors of the ghettos and the death camps and survived: Soviet poets; American poets who were forever transformed by the Holocaust. Kramer also introduces the 1944 Terezin opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis. The Last Lullaby is a testament to the richness of a half-annihilated language that, in the pain of its survivors, was made more beautiful than ever before. Unlike most other translators, Kramer insists on maintaining the music of the original Yiddish, the often "folkish" cadence and rhyme that, he believes, are a precious part of these poems' legacy.