The Metaphor of the Jewish People in the English Poetry by Rose Ausländer on the Example of the Poems “The Forbidden Tree” and “The Clinic”

Abstract

The article examines the image of the Jewish people in English poetry by Rosa Ausländer. Born in 1901 in Austrian Chernivtsi, a German-speaking poet changes the language of her writing after survuvung through the Holocaust and for almost ten years writes in English during the emigration in New York. The main motives of this period are the search for a new identity, the experience of having lost her mother and rethinking the horrors of the Second World War and its consequences for the Jewish people and for Europe in general English poetry written by Rosa Ausländer between 1947 and 1956 was published by Helmut Braun in 1995 in a collection tittles “The Forbidden Tree”. The program poem under the same title depicts a tree from the Garden of Eden maimed by the Nazis, the roots of which, in spite of everything, are strong and “vigorous”. In the poem “The Clinic” the surface motive is the rapid pace of life in the megalopolis, which also belongs to the leading motives of this period of writing and the life of the poetess. However, the images of “impersonal names”, a sense of distrust to state institutions, long waiting for the unknown and a reference to the typical image of the phoenix often used by Ausländer give the reader implicit indications of the Shoah's traumatic experience. In the poetry of Rosa Ausländer, the phoenix remains a symbol of hope and rebirth for the Jewish people.