Poetry review – SONG OF THE YELLOW ASTERS
Charles Rammelkamp reviews a moving and important posthumous collection by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, translated from the German by Carlie Hoffman
Song of the Yellow Asters
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger
World Poetry Books, 2025
$22.00, 176 pages
ISBN: 978-1-954218-44-4
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a cousin of Paul Celan, the famous Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor, grew up in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) and was deported to the Mikhailovka forced-labor camp in Transnistria during World War II, where she died of typhus at the age of eighteen. During her short life she wrote fifty-seven poems, all in pencil, which she hand-bound in a collection named Blütenlese (“Harvest of Blossoms”). Meerbaum-Eisinger entrusted the book to a friend, Elise Schachter-Keren, before she was deported in 1942.
Carlie Hoffman, whose own poetry (One More World Like This World, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, among her works) deals with the oppression of women, has translated thirty-seven of Meerbaum-Eisinger’s poems from German to English in Song of the Yellow Asters. A masterful essay called “Our Life Can Sing: On Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Song of the Yellow Asters,” in which Hoffman describes the poems, traces Meerbaum-Eisinger’s influences and themes, and provides historical as well as literary context, follows the translations. Her poems, Hoffman writes, are ‘rooted in a rich folkloric tradition: fairy tales, cradle songs. And pan flutes resonate throughout.’
The poems were all composed over the course of two years, from September, 1939, to December, 1941. Most of the poems are short, between four and sixteen lines, but some, like “I Am the Way to Wrack and Ruin” (Ich bin der Weg gen Untergang), are over a page. The German and the English versions are on facing pages.
Despite the generally melancholy mood throughout, initially there’s a kind of muted optimism in her effusive praises of nature, though the very first poem, “Song” (Lied), composed on Christmas Day, 1939, begins, “Today you hurt me” (Heute tatest du mir weh.), but she goes on to write:
Today is beautiful.
Beautiful as snow-covered hills
doused in sunset.
Hoffman tells us that Selma was in love with a young man named Leiser Fichman, but she goes on to describe Song of the Yellow Asters as a love letter to the beauty of the natural world. In “Song,” Selma also writes, ‘Today you brought me pain.’ (Heute warst du mir ein Schmerz.), clearly feeling rejected by Fichman. The poem ends:
Today you hurt me.
Today you told me: go.
I went.
This situation seems to be alluded to again, a year and a half later, in “Red Carnations” (Rote Nelken):
I am afraid. The darkness of each sultry night oppresses me.
It is so quiet, and I’m smothered by the heavy splendor of deep silence.
Why aren’t you here? I’ve toyed, I know—forgive me.
I’ve gambled with my happiness—it broke apart—forgive me
It hurts to be alone. So come here, I’m waiting.
We’ll laugh our way to new happiness, so believe me and return—
there is so much laughing waiting.
Nevertheless the poet does continue to revel in the natural beauty around her in so many poems – “Wilted Leaves” (‘Suddenly my steps don’t echo / but whisper faintly, softly’), “A Stroll” (‘The fields are dark brown clods / and here and there, bits of yellow green, / and little sparrows, stupid and cheeky and bold…’)> Similarly, “Chestnuts”, “Dried Leaf,” “Spring,” “Afternoon,” “Late Afternoon,” and so many others all brim with optimism, the beauty of nature.
The title poem, Den gelben Astern ein Lied, composed in June, 1941, reads:
They gaze at me brightly through the rain,
a brightness replacing the sun for me.
My blazing yellow smile rain’s sorrow can’t swallow.
Laughing, they bow down into the green
where their pure and fresh notes
accompany me—
I place my song at their feet
because today brings me joy.
Joy and grief continue to alternate in her verses. The “Night Shadows” section includes poems titled “Grief” and “Song of Longing,” but then in “Lullaby for Myself,” she expresses more optimism – ‘I sing and I sing and I sing myself a song, / a song of hope and happiness…’
By the end of the collection, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger seems to have become more pessimistic. The relationship with Leiser Fichman continues to trouble her young heart. The penultimate poem in the collection, “Untitled,” composed December 23, 1941, two years after she confesses that she has been hurt by his rejection, reads:
Don’t you feel it when I cry for you?
Are you really so distant?
You are life’s beauty, my only one
for whom I endure: my loneliness.
Meerbaum-Eisinger had asked Elise Schachter-Keren to give the poems to Leiser Fichman. Fichman later returned the poems to Schachter-Keren for safekeeping. Two years after Selma’s death, which Fichman never knew about, he was on a boat headed for Palestine that was torpedoed in the Mediterranean, dying along with rest of the crew.
The final poem, dated December 12 1941, eleven days prior to the cri de Coeur of “Untitled,” is titled “Tragedy” (Tragik) and reads almost like a premonition:
The hardest thing: to give yourself away
while knowing no one needs you.
To give yourself completely and realize:
I will fade like smoke and vanish.
Fortunately, thanks to Carlie Hoffman, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger has not faded and vanished. Her poems certainly add to the important work of Holocaust literature.
Feb 23 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger
Poetry review – SONG OF THE YELLOW ASTERS
Charles Rammelkamp reviews a moving and important posthumous collection by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, translated from the German by Carlie Hoffman
Song of the Yellow Asters
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger
World Poetry Books, 2025
$22.00, 176 pages
ISBN: 978-1-954218-44-4
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a cousin of Paul Celan, the famous Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor, grew up in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) and was deported to the Mikhailovka forced-labor camp in Transnistria during World War II, where she died of typhus at the age of eighteen. During her short life she wrote fifty-seven poems, all in pencil, which she hand-bound in a collection named Blütenlese (“Harvest of Blossoms”). Meerbaum-Eisinger entrusted the book to a friend, Elise Schachter-Keren, before she was deported in 1942.
Carlie Hoffman, whose own poetry (One More World Like This World, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, among her works) deals with the oppression of women, has translated thirty-seven of Meerbaum-Eisinger’s poems from German to English in Song of the Yellow Asters. A masterful essay called “Our Life Can Sing: On Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Song of the Yellow Asters,” in which Hoffman describes the poems, traces Meerbaum-Eisinger’s influences and themes, and provides historical as well as literary context, follows the translations. Her poems, Hoffman writes, are ‘rooted in a rich folkloric tradition: fairy tales, cradle songs. And pan flutes resonate throughout.’
The poems were all composed over the course of two years, from September, 1939, to December, 1941. Most of the poems are short, between four and sixteen lines, but some, like “I Am the Way to Wrack and Ruin” (Ich bin der Weg gen Untergang), are over a page. The German and the English versions are on facing pages.
Despite the generally melancholy mood throughout, initially there’s a kind of muted optimism in her effusive praises of nature, though the very first poem, “Song” (Lied), composed on Christmas Day, 1939, begins, “Today you hurt me” (Heute tatest du mir weh.), but she goes on to write:
Today is beautiful.
Beautiful as snow-covered hills
doused in sunset.
Hoffman tells us that Selma was in love with a young man named Leiser Fichman, but she goes on to describe Song of the Yellow Asters as a love letter to the beauty of the natural world. In “Song,” Selma also writes, ‘Today you brought me pain.’ (Heute warst du mir ein Schmerz.), clearly feeling rejected by Fichman. The poem ends:
Today you hurt me.
Today you told me: go.
I went.
This situation seems to be alluded to again, a year and a half later, in “Red Carnations” (Rote Nelken):
I am afraid. The darkness of each sultry night oppresses me.
It is so quiet, and I’m smothered by the heavy splendor of deep silence.
Why aren’t you here? I’ve toyed, I know—forgive me.
I’ve gambled with my happiness—it broke apart—forgive me
It hurts to be alone. So come here, I’m waiting.
We’ll laugh our way to new happiness, so believe me and return—
there is so much laughing waiting.
Nevertheless the poet does continue to revel in the natural beauty around her in so many poems – “Wilted Leaves” (‘Suddenly my steps don’t echo / but whisper faintly, softly’), “A Stroll” (‘The fields are dark brown clods / and here and there, bits of yellow green, / and little sparrows, stupid and cheeky and bold…’)> Similarly, “Chestnuts”, “Dried Leaf,” “Spring,” “Afternoon,” “Late Afternoon,” and so many others all brim with optimism, the beauty of nature.
The title poem, Den gelben Astern ein Lied, composed in June, 1941, reads:
They gaze at me brightly through the rain,
a brightness replacing the sun for me.
My blazing yellow smile rain’s sorrow can’t swallow.
Laughing, they bow down into the green
where their pure and fresh notes
accompany me—
I place my song at their feet
because today brings me joy.
Joy and grief continue to alternate in her verses. The “Night Shadows” section includes poems titled “Grief” and “Song of Longing,” but then in “Lullaby for Myself,” she expresses more optimism – ‘I sing and I sing and I sing myself a song, / a song of hope and happiness…’
By the end of the collection, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger seems to have become more pessimistic. The relationship with Leiser Fichman continues to trouble her young heart. The penultimate poem in the collection, “Untitled,” composed December 23, 1941, two years after she confesses that she has been hurt by his rejection, reads:
Don’t you feel it when I cry for you?
Are you really so distant?
You are life’s beauty, my only one
for whom I endure: my loneliness.
Meerbaum-Eisinger had asked Elise Schachter-Keren to give the poems to Leiser Fichman. Fichman later returned the poems to Schachter-Keren for safekeeping. Two years after Selma’s death, which Fichman never knew about, he was on a boat headed for Palestine that was torpedoed in the Mediterranean, dying along with rest of the crew.
The final poem, dated December 12 1941, eleven days prior to the cri de Coeur of “Untitled,” is titled “Tragedy” (Tragik) and reads almost like a premonition:
The hardest thing: to give yourself away
while knowing no one needs you.
To give yourself completely and realize:
I will fade like smoke and vanish.
Fortunately, thanks to Carlie Hoffman, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger has not faded and vanished. Her poems certainly add to the important work of Holocaust literature.