In My Post-Holocaust Second Generation Voice: History / Memory / Identity, J. J. Steinfeld continues to confront themes that are interwoven for him with the Holocaust and its unending effects on history, memory, and identity, on the victims of the Holocaust, on all Holocaust survivors and their descendants, on subsequent generations. Surrounding it all, is the need to remember, to never forget.

Through the powerfully evocative poems of history, memory, and identity such as “The Memory Travellers” (“Wandering through time and uneasiness / the awkwardness of being and recollection / …fumbling with words and descriptions, listening to the dead / the dead so voiceful, articulate as death camps / and dark hiding places to be revisited in nightmares / and reveries even when the sun might be brightest / the voices of the dead louder than the living / the living defined by their witnessing memories”), to “Second Generation” (“Faded, frightening map in hand, / I locate a shortcut through a darkened woods / on the way to a small community library / and I imagine a place that might have been Poland / might have been a far-off darkness and syntax / my long-dead parents then young / one held in life-denying captivity / the other hidden in anguish’s incomprehension”), to “Dreaming the History of Tattooed Numbers,” (“During another dream about dreaming / I see in the future / where forgetfulness / threatens memory and history / pursues dreamlessness / all because of the tattooed numbers— / curse those who did the tattooing / remember those who were tattooed.”), the unflinching poems in My Post-Holocaust Second Generation Voice: History / Memory / Identity invite the reader to join the writer in his mind-and-heart poetic journey through the past, the present, and with hope for the future.

Acclaimed poet George Elliott Clarke, in the opening paragraph of his essay “The Holocaust Witness as Absurdist: J. J. Steinfeld’s Ironic Ire” (from J. J. Steinfeld: Essays on His Works, Edited by Sandra Singer, Guernica Editions), captures with insightful literary and historical precision the background of Steinfeld’s lifelong intergenerational trauma that created the author’s Post-Holocaust Second Generation voice:

“German-born, the son of a mother who survived the extermination industry that was Auschwitz, and of a father who lived because he’d secreted himself in the Polish forest. The Prince Edward Island-based poet J. J. Steinfeld realizes that his birth was charmed: he came into a European world that had just shot and gassed, or bombed and incinerated, tens of millions of human beings, and some six million simply because they were Jewish. Thus the only son has made it his singular mission—or crusade—to remind his readers, whether they welcome his Cassandra cries or not, that those Jews were human beings who were pillaged, tortured, savaged, and slain, and that they were killed like vermin by a lofty civilization that decided it would liquidate a nation of cultured and intellectual outcasts via assembly-line massacre...[J.J. Steinfeld] looks back at the red flame and white lime of the Auschwitz slaughterhouse; but he examines, in the here-and-now, signs of collective amnesia regarding the wholesale extirpation of European Jewry.”