Fembio Special: European Jewish Women
Selma Merbaum
(Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger [incorrect name by which Selma Merbaum became known])
born on February 5, 1924 in Czernowitz, Bukovina in Romania
died on December 16, 1942 in the Mikhailovka concentration camp, Ukraine
German-language poet, victim of the National Socialists
100th birthday on February 5, 2024
Biography
Selma Merbaum — she never had the double name 'Meerbaum-Eisinger’ — is often referred to as the second Anne Frank, as they both had a passion for writing, experienced the cruelty of the Holocaust, and died in concentration camps. However, while Anne died when she was 15, Selma was just beginning to write poetry at the same age. She fell out with her mother, moved out of her parents’ home in 1939 and went to live with her grandmother Henie Schrager. Just 15 years old, she had already decided in favor of independence.
Selma came from a family of modest means. Her father met with an early death the year she was born; her mother married Leo Eisinger three years later and continued to run the haberdashery she had run with her brother-in-law until deportation in 1942.
Czernowitz was a lively city located in the multi-ethnic region of Bukovina. Romanian was spoken at school, while Selma primarily spoke German at home, with friends and in the Zionist youth movement Haschomer-Hazair. She also enjoyed reading Heine, Rilke, Verlaine, Tagore and Klabund's adaptations of Chinese poems. After the so-called Russian year at a Yiddish school, Selma remembered her roots and turned to Yiddish. These influences are unmistakable in her own texts as well as in her adaptations of French, Romanian and Yiddish poetry.
Although her poetry does indeed serve to document the fate of a young Jewish woman under Nazi terror, the depth and sensitivity of her poems are transcendent. In Blütenlese (in English: Blossom Vintage/The Reaping of Blossoms), dedicated to her friend Leiser Fichman from the Zionist youth group and the only surviving volume of her poetry, the 58 poems reveal a tomboyish liveliness and spontaneous love of life, gentle dreaming and a suffering in a voice that speaks with great authenticity and poetic power. Her poems are infused with every experience of nature and every sigh of amorous erotic longing, every sense of loneliness and every feeling of resignation or of rebellion, and they are penned with a clarity and tender intensity that are impossible to resist. In that fleeting moment of experiencing and writing, she is the spring and the night, the rain and the wind, the withered leaf and the scent of lilac itself, swaying to nighttime lullabies.
Selma survived the Czernowitz ghetto, but not the Holocaust. She died of typhus in the Mikhailovka concentration camp at the age of 18 – only her poems still sing her song.
(Text by Imke Lode from 1993, updated and corrected by Marion Tauschwitz in 2015)
(Translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.)
Please consult the German version for additional information (pictures, sources, videos, bibliography).
Quotes
It is poetry whose intensity moves you to tears: so clear, so beautiful, so light, and yet so full of foreboding. (Hilde Domin)
If you hold the rights to one or more of the images on this page and object to its/their appearance here, please contact Fembio.
