The Banished Prince in the Forest Hears Laughter
The banished prince is in a forest.
It’s night and cold: he lies beneath a tree.
Since he’d once acted wrong he feels embarrassed
until he falls asleep, and dreams that he
is back at home and reunited
with his father who’d expelled him, and
then wakes, by this dream much excited,
and hears a sound he cannot understand.
It is laughter, that’s so loud the trees
all tremble and the leaves do not stop shaking.
The ground is moving under him and he’s
afraid that he’ll be swallowed while it’s quaking.
He had been banished by an angry father,
and wonders if this could explain the puzzle
of what had just occurred, while feeling rather
regretful that he’s such a great schlimazel.
However, nothing happens to him after,
until a stranger in the dawning light
appears. He asks him: “Please explain the laughter.”
He answers: “That’s the day replacing night.”
The story on which this poem is based on a tale by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, cited by Rabbi Norman Lamm in a 1973 essay on Tisha B’Av, in which he discusses Exod. R. 43:6:
Moses spoke up: “Master of the Universe, this calf would be just right to assist You.” The Holy One: “How could he assist Me?” Moses: “You cause the wind to blow and he may bring down rain. You cause the sun to shine and he may do the same with the moon. You cause the trees to grow and he may cause the plants to sprout.” God: “Like them, Moses, you seem to be led astray by the calf.” Moses: “So the thing isn’t much. It eats grass and at the same time may be slaughtered. Why then should you anger blaze forth against Your people? (Exod.32:11)
Lamm suggests that Moses is “introducing at this crucial juncture of Israel’s history a touch of humor!….[I]n an exquisite merging of humor and grief, he exposes the absurdity of sin and the absurdity of punishment….That is the laughter that we await: the laughter of the day that takes its revenge on the night; the joy of justice as it defeats evil in its final blow…..the laughter that will herald the conquest of suffering, the end of evil, and the beginning of redemption.”
Rabbi Nahman’s story seems to have prophetically anticipated the story outlined in a review by Julie Orringer of Mala’s Cat: A Memoir of Survival in World War II by Mala Kacenberg (NYT Book Review, 1/3/22):
In the woods outside Tarnogrod, Poland, in October 1942, an orphaned 14-year-old Jewish girl and her cat hide in the shadows between fallen tree trunks while a pair of SS men lounge nearby, taking whiffs of forest air, eating biscuits, drinking wine, singing victory songs and gloating over the jewelry they’ve collected from their victims that day: “Yes, they will be lovely presents for our wives.” Finally the SS men mount their horses and ride off, not knowing they’ve been watched, not imagining that the person who saw them was recording everything in her mind to be documented later, and surely not conceiving the thought that occurs to this solitary girl as she hears them singing: “I felt like taking some branches and hitting them on the backs of their heads. I felt like hitting them many times — one for every person they had killed or tortured.”
The observer is Mala Szorer (the future Mala Kacenberg), whose six-year fight for survival is the subject of her recently republished memoir (the more aptly titled original, “Alone in the Forest,” was published by CIS in 1995). Despite the difficulties that inhere in Holocaust memoir — we believe we know this history, and its subject matter defies language — “Mala’s Cat” is fresh, unsentimental and utterly unpredictable. (It is not in any real way about a cat, though cat lovers won’t be disappointed: You, too, will be satisfied by the cleverness, resourcefulness and fidelity of Mala’s feline companion, Malach, whom she fancies to be her guardian angel.)
