The Book of Anna is composed of narrative poems and prose diary entries written in the voice of Anna Ach Asher, a fictional Czech-German Jewish concentration camp survivor writing in mid-1950s Prague. The poems utilize the language and imagery of sacred Jewish texts—the Biblical story of Tamar, snatches of Talmudic disputation, the sensuous imagery of the Song of Songs, mystical texts related to the creation of golems, psalms traditionally recited to celebrate Sabbath—to tell the story of Asher’s concentration camp experiences.
“. . . imagination rules, wedding poetic forms to unflinching meditations on human suffering, terror, love, and unbearable loss. Despite the ubiquity of evil and death in his poems, there is, in Yeats’s words, ‘a gaiety transfiguring all that dread.’”—Herbert Leibowitz
