Shema

“Shema”
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
-Primo Levi, 1946
The poem "Shema" refers to the Jewish prayer “Sheme Yisrael” - “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”
Levi, Primo. “Shema.” Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust, edited by Milton Teichman and Sharon Leder. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1994. p. 488
Questions for Discussion:
1. The poem divides the world into two realms: what are they?
2. How does the speaker significantly use religious invocation?
3. How does the speaker chronicle the dehumanization of people in Auschwitz?
4. What does the speaker suggest is the relationship between the individual and collective humanity?
5. What does the speaker implore individuals to do? What is their moral responsibility to the Jewish people?
6. How does the poem balance religious faith with the presence of human evil? What does the speaker suggest is the answer if all humans are
one?