PerfectlyWritePoetry: The Jewish Poet of Sri Lanka

Friday 16 October 2015

The Jewish Poet of Sri Lanka

The great swaths of immigrants currently flooding Europe will soon learn that they’ll make and re-make their lives a dozen times over before finding some sense of place, let alone a sense of peace.

This is part of the refugee experience and sadly is very often how artistes are made. It most certainly helped to shape prize-winning poet Anne Ranasinghe (neé Anneliese Katz) whose parents were murdered by the Nazis after they sent her to safety in England on the Kindertransport.

Born in Essen, Germany, she went on to study midwifery but later changed careers to concentrate on writing. But what must be described as a novel twist in a familiar plot emerged when Ranasinghe met and married a Sri Lankan doctor, Don Abraham Ranasinghe. She then emigrated to Sri Lanka where she helped to raise her husband’s three children from a previous marriage as well as the four they had together.

Anne Ranasinghe took Sri Lankan citizenship in the fifties and has now lived there for 60 years. So it is little surprise that the Holocaust along with a sympathetic look at others’ alienation and minority persecution are frequent subjects in her poetry.

Anne Ranasinghe is an overseas member of Israel’s English language poetry society, Voices Israel and fellow members are delighted that her life story is being broadcast throughout October on Caesarea Al HaGal on Channel 98 each Monday at 3:30 p.m. and again on Thursday at 10:00 p.m.

"Auschwitz from Colombo

“Colombo. March. The city white fire
That pours through vehement trees burst into flame,
And only a faint but nearing wind
Stirring the dust
From relics of foreign invaders, thrown

“On this far littoral by chance or greed,
Their stray memorial the odd word mispronounced,
A book of laws,
A pile of stones
Or may be some vile deed.

“Once there was another city, but there
It was cold - the trees leafless
And already thin ice on the lake.
“It was that winter
Snow hard upon the early morning street
And frost flowers carved in hostile window panes -
It was that winter
“Yet only yesterday
Half a world away and twenty-five years later
I learn of the narrow corridor
And at the end a hole, four feet by four
Through which they pushed them all - the children too
Straight down a shaft of steel thirteen feet long
And dark and icy cold
Onto the concrete floor of what they called
The strangling room. Dear God, the strangling room,
“Where they were stunned - the children too -
By heavy wooden mallets,
Garrotted, and then impaled
On pointed iron hooks.
“I am glad of the un-echoing street
Burnt white in the heat of many tropical years,
For the mind, no longer sharp,
Seared by the tropical sun
Skims over the surface of things
Like the wind
That stirs but slightly the ancient dust”.