Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

 

Volume 13 Number 3, December 2012

___________________________________________________________________

FELIX NUSSBAUM: SELF-PORTRAIT WITH JEWISH IDENTITY CARD, 1943.

 

If it weren’t for the identity card marked JUIF-JOOD

he holds up with his left hand and the Magen David

with a capital J inside on the right breast of his coat

he might have come across as someone who could be

played by Peter Lorre; the collar of his coat pulled up

about his ears, his grey-green fedora and his furtive eye,

their alert fearfulness. His nose is straight, ending

in a pointed tip. His lips sit relatively low. They are

closed.  Is there a hint of a smile? Safe for another day?

 

His face is gaunt and he hasn’t shaved for a day or so,

but his hair, what can be seen under the fedora, is neat,

trimmed and short.  Beyond the cement wall behind him,

a tree, its branches cut (for fire?), reaches to where it was chopped.

One of its lower braches, white with blooms, was pardoned

and though the there are dense dark clouds in the sky

there’s a clearing of blue.  That he would die the following year

in Auschwitz, aged 39, was to be expected.  “Even if I perish,”

he said, “do not let my pictures die, show them to the public.”

 

 

- Per Brask