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BOOK REVIEW: TANAIS

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Book review: ‘Holocaust in Crete’

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How does one mourn a double tragedy, an irony-laden incident from more than seven decades ago in which  a group of people bound for almost certain death — Jews aboard a ship taking them to Nazi slave and death camps — experience death from an unexpected but no less lethal source — a British submarine whose captain apparently didn’t know that the ship he targeted was full of civilians?

How does one mourn the virtual extinction of an entire people, the small but ancient Jewish community of Crete, whose nearly 300 members perished aboard the German merchant vessel Tanais, torpedoed on June 9, 1944?

The recognized poet Iossif Ventura, one of the very few survivors of Crete’s Jewish community, seeks to answer these questions in this narrative poem which serves both as a memorial to the tragic demise of his people and a celebration of its long, vibrant and unique life.

Harshly realistic and softly surrealistic by turns, Kyklonio & Tanais is both a dirge and a love song. It sails unflinchingly through the waves of pain and grief that the poet feels over the loss of his culture while gazing back fondly on a warm people who managed to blend Jewish and Greek heritage into an embracing and seamless whole.

With a sure-handed translation by Elisabeth Arseniou that respects and perhaps even enhances the poet’s lush imagery and hypnotic rhythm, Kyklonio & Tanais also provides the original Greek version of the poem for those interested in, and capable of, reading the poem as originally composed.

While the long narrative poem might not be a literary form that many modern readers would readily consider, Kyklonio & Tanais could serve as an excellent introduction to this venerable and effective means of storytelling.

The story it tells — a tragic tale of the Holocaust and of a colorful and now vanished culture — is nothing less than compelling.

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