While I Am Drawing Breath

The experience of living in the Chernovtsy ghetto under the Nazis remains a dark undertow of all the poetry Ausländer wrote, though she rarely addresses it explicitly. The hardships of a life in hiding, the constant fear of Nazi terror, the horror of the concentration camps are all present in many of the poems. Other poems speak indirectly of the mother for whose sake she endured these hardships. Her late poetry, represented in this collection, brought her prizes and acclaim, and established her extraordinary simplicity as a distinctive voice in German poetry.

'There were two ways to respond to that unbearable reality,' wrote Rose Ausländer thirty years later, remembering the Czernowitz ghetto under the Nazis. 'Either one could despair entirely, or one could occupy a different, spiritual reality [...] while we waited for death, there were those of us who dwelt in dreamwords - our traumatic home amidst our homelessness. To write was to live.'

Ausländer, who died in 1988, was recog-nised as on of the truest poets of post-War Germany, a woman and a witness in whom the dark and the light, the ashes and the hope, are so finely balanced that we hold our breath as we read.