Not The Dead Praise God Analysis

Jacob Glatstein was a journalist, a story writer and a poet. He wrote about the Holocaust, poems such as Smoke, Not The Dead Praise God and many more. His writing was affected by his upbringing and as Langer says his "egocentric" view of the world as "the most natural and therefor the truest and the most human mode of perception". (l.langer 653-660). He fills the poems with images that make the reader see, hear, and feel. Jacob Glastein deals with his own beliefs and reality throughout his poems and raises his conflicts with God in the Holocaust. He manipulates the reader with the words and images he uses to tackle him with the issues of the Holocaust and God.

Glatstein's sense of disappointment with God's role in the Jewish lives is manipulated by his words Not the dead praise God / the Torah was given for the living. I can infer that the massive death and destruction of the Jewish people in the Holocaust ended the bond between God and his people, the Jewish people. In a way, by these words he justifies his separation from God and from his upbringing. Glatstein's struggles with "the mighty God" and the lack of God's responsibility in the Holocaust. Therefore he presents God as a sensitive issue.
Glatstein's sensitivity with God is a complex. On one hand, the terror and horror of the Holocaust and on the other hand, his background, his family
He struggles with his difficult privilege of being Jewish. He tries to challenge God and even criticizes God. He has mixed feeling about the whole concept of God, but he doesn't lose faith. He successfully does it with vivid images and strong words. The use of contrasting words like ray-world, goodness-dark, and the use of nature in his poems shows his extreme feelings. He plays with images from the Torah and the Judaic belief to emphasize and illustrate his lack of understanding of the whole horrific Holocaust and God's role in