21 pages • 42 minutes read
The Book of Yolek
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Symbols & Motifs
Walk
The end-words of each line serve as recurring motifs. They are all simple, monosyllabic words that radically change their meaning according to context, from benign to horrifying. The pleasant walk that the speaker takes in Stanza 1 is very different from the “terrible walk” (Line 30) that Yolek and the children are forced to take. This contrast can also be seen in the different words that are used to describe the person’s gait. In Stanza 1, the speaker refers to his solitary “saunter” (Line 2). A saunter is a leisurely stroll, but in Stanza 4, Yolek “shamble[s]” (Line 24) out of the orphanage, flanked by armed guards. A saunter and a shamble are poles apart in meaning.
Camp
Like “walk,” the word “camp” is a recurring motif that takes on sharply opposing meanings. In the first two stanzas, a camp represents something entirely benign. As so many schoolchildren learn, summer camp is an opportunity to experience nature directly, to engage in new activities, and make new friends. Telling tales round the campfire, including scary ghost stories, is a time-honored enjoyment. But the tale of Yolek that begins in the next stanza (Stanza 3) reveals a horror of a different nature in part because it happened in real life. The story is true. The occurrence of the end-word “camp” in two successive lines (Lines 18 and 19) marks the sudden transition from enjoyment to fear, from relaxation to coercion. The word has taken on a meaning that the narrator, in his youth at summer camp, could never have imagined.
Home
The word “home,” like the other end-words, has different connotations as the poem progresses. At first, home is the familiar, secure base that a person may comfortably leave for a while as he or she explores other regions, either alone or in a group. Home is where one belongs. This meaning is evoked again in Stanza 6, about remembering the terrible “fifth of August 1942” (Line 13) even when you are “safe at home” (Line 32). In between, home becomes first an orphanage, which suggests a sad backstory, and then a “long home” (Line 24), which in context means Yolek’s last or final home—in death—many decades before it would have come to him naturally. The two meanings applied to home in the poem come together in the envoy, which envisions the narrator sitting down for a meal at home—an ordinary, familiar much-repeated event at home—and Yolek will enter the home too, with all the dreadful associations that his name and ghostly presence evoke. Home thus becomes at once a place of comfort and of deeply disturbing thoughts.
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