Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (Ed. Jürgen Serk) Ich bin in Sehnsucht eingehüllt. Gedichte (Wrapped in Yearning: Poems) Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, October 2005, 144 pp. ISBN 978-3-455-04790-4 The fifty-seven poems published here are those of a mere schoolgirl – but what a schoolgirl! The first was written shortly after her fifteenth birthday, the last when she was seventeen, one year before her death at the hands of the Nazis. They are, as the title of the collection conveys, largely elegiac in tone, fin de siècle in atmosphere. We read of wilted leaves, silent snowfalls, a piano with a missing key, the cool black boat of night, an old acacia drizzling stillness through its leaves. So, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was a well-brought up, genteel young Fräulein, given to tasteful versifying? Nothing could be further from the truth. The daughter of Jewish hucksters, she grew up in a tenement consisting of one large room and a kitchen without running water. Her homeland was Bukovina, that extraordinary ethnic melting pot of Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Armenians, Tartars, Jews and Gypsies, and a number of famous personalities. Among them were the poet Rose Ausländer, the psychologist Wilhelm Reich, and Selma’s own distant cousin Paul Celan. The young girl herself was outgoing and boisterous. Did her melancholy verse show her sense what lay ahead? At all events, after the Luftwaffe had bombed the capital Czernowitz and the Gestapo had established its headquarters in the city’s Ringplatz, she abandoned the persona of the world-weary nature poet and uttered, in ‘Poem’, her magnificent cri de coeur: ‘I want to live. I want to laugh and lift loads and want to fight and love and hate …and want to be free and breathe and scream. I don’t want to die. No! No. Life is red. Life is mine.’ On 16 December 1942 she died of typhoid fever in the unendurably harsh conditions of the labour camp. After the war a school friend carried her poems to Israel, where later still her old maths teacher gathered them together and published them at his own expense. Written in pencil with tiny lettering on loose leaves tied together with cord, they end with the words: ‘What is hardest of all …is to know that you are superfluous …that you are dissolving into nothingness like smoke’. But superfluous she was not. These poems cry out for translation.