mph. So how does a culture advance when their future appears almost as scary as their current living situation, and they fear their past and future? Life may go on for the lucky few, but the future of it is unknown to them. Their future appears bleak because their present feels worse: And time will drill you quietly/ Like a cricket caught in a fist. These lines in the poem clearly illustrate the predicament being explained. In Sutzkevers opinion, time becomes another enemy, quietly driving a person sick with despair. The cricket is a perfect simile to represent the Jewish people because the cricket has nowhere to go, and is encompassed by darkness in the fist. If it is held there long enough, it will die from suffocation, if it is finally released, it will fear recapture and the society that presumed dominance over it.Sutzkevers poem reflects the bitter darkness and gloom that the Holocaust embodied. Through these dark images, the reader perceives a sense of frustration, not only pertaining to the Jews' situation, but also with the importance of time in relation to their memories. The reader is left with a sense of dread for the Jewish people, portraying their freedom as just an extension of their current predicament. Even Sutzkevers title, How? echoes the doubt he feels about overcoming the oppression of his people, realizing the difficulty of the journey ahead. Even Sutzkever does not know how liberation can be perceived with the dark gloom of the pasts memories haunting the Jews. These dark memories are not forgotten by time by the Jewish people, allowing Sutzkevers imagined survival to appear bleak and tedious; the pain and gloom of the bitter experiences overshadow their hopeful freedom in the future. Luckily, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and current audiences feel the distress and anguish of the author and his people, but know that Jewish people were able to survive their persecution, and grew strong because of it, des...
