Focused on the poetry of Eva Paddock, the lesson explores how lyrical language becomes a medium for articulating memory, trauma, and the reconstruction of identity. Through close reading, listening to authorial recitation, individual written reflection, small-group interpretation, guided discussion, and worksheet-based textual analysis, students engage in varied working methods that foreground metaphor, voice, and the relationship between poetic form and historical experience.
Course of the lesson
Step 1
Introduce the class to the story of Eva Paddock through an article, photographs, and a short film.
Provide students with the historical and biographical context in which her poems were written. Explain that in the introduction to her 2000 volume Reinventing Identity, she wrote:
The writings started as stream of consciousness. Words dropped onto the page from emotions raised in therapy. The resolution of those emotions, via insight and expression, was the context of my first pieces. They were metaphoric, full of allusions with little personal association. I did not consciously relate the images to my own experience. These mind-wanderings were entirely private. I had no thoughts of them being other than a journal.
After some months, it occurred to me that what I was writing was, maybe, poetry. Recognizing that I didn’t have any definitions, any experience, any “theory” of what poeticism is, I reverted to type, intellectualized it as essential inquiry, and signed up for a poetry writing class. In the class I learned that what I was writing was, maybe, poetry. In our shared readings, where we reacted and responded to each others’ weekly offerings, I learned that people in the group found the poems powerful, and that they evoked in them emotional responses to their own life situations for which my poems became metaphor.
Briefly discuss with students what they understand from this statement about the origins and purpose of her poetry.
Step 2
Divide the class into three groups.
Give each student a printed copy of one poem. In addition, provide each group with a digital link to the same poem (accessible via phones or school computers, depending on school regulations and availability).
Ask each group to familiarize themselves thoroughly with their assigned poem by engaging with it twice. They may choose one of the following approaches:
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Listen to the poem read aloud by Eva Paddock (via the provided link).
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Select one group member to read the poem aloud to the group.
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Read the poem silently, with each student working individually.
Afterwards, ask each group:
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Which method did you choose?
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Why did you choose it?
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How did this method influence your understanding of the poem?
Step 3
Distribute a worksheet to each student.
Ask students to complete the worksheet individually first. Then instruct them to compare and discuss their answers within their groups, identifying similarities and differences in interpretation.
Step 4
Ask each group to present the main highlight of their work.
This could include:
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A key theme they identified
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A particularly powerful image or metaphor
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A question that emerged during discussion
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A disagreement that led to deeper understanding
Step 5
Return to Eva Paddock’s life story and place it explicitly in its historical context (Holocaust survival, post-war silence, trauma, late testimony).
Emphasize that for many Holocaust survivors, speaking about their experiences was neither immediate nor natural. For decades, silence was common.
Quote:
Like so many others I “forgot the past” for sixty years. But a nagging discomfort grew to an intensity I was unwilling (actually unable) to tolerate and immediately on retirement I looked for help.
Discuss with students:
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Why might survivors have remained silent for so long?
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What role can art and poetry play in processing trauma?
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How does knowing her biography influence your reading of the poems?
Final Step – Summary and Closing
Ask whether any students would like to read the poems aloud to the whole class. Encourage each group to choose one representative so that all three poems are heard again in plenary.
Display (hang) all three poems in the classroom.
Thank students for their participation.
Homework
Ask students to take a photograph that visually illustrates or interprets the poem they worked on.
They should be prepared to briefly explain in the next lesson:
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Why they chose this image
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Which line or idea from the poem it connects to
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What meaning they intended to convey
First poem: Liverpool Street Station
Liverpool Street Station
July 29, 1939
The train stops.
Two hundred “British Refugee Committee”
Labeled children
gather up
Aisles fill with knotted, pushing travelers
Eager to get off their twenty-four hour caged hotel
Prague to London via ferry and Southampton.
The children get off the train fast
I sit and wait for spaces in the mob
For room through which to pass
For quiet before the unknown
Knapsack as ballast I reach the door and
See far below two metal grilled steps.
The hand-rail is high and slippery
I lower myself to step two
But the platform stares.
It demands a jump
Too far for me.
Sixty years later I stare back
Resolved with deep breath, tightly held,
Minding the gap
I leap and
Alight the train
Second poem: Number 639: The British Refugee Committee
Number 639: The British Refugee Committee
639: A label hangs around my neck.
Fleischmann. The British Refugee Committee
Destination Liverpool Street Station.
A brown broken label, with a missing piece
and a misspelled word
hangs on my neck.
639: this brown broken label with a missing piece
and its misspelled word,
in its imperfect whole, identifies me.
It hangs around my neck.
and holds me in its thrall:
Such evidence of conflict in reason,
such pure dichotomy,
such unbelievable oppositions,
such diversities of meaning.
So much illogical logic.
Pure evil and so much good.
How can all rest so in one?
But on my label, they do.
639 is my number, my label.
My brown, wrinkled label with a missing piece
and a misspelled word,
In its imperfect whole, bears witness
It hangs still on my soul
But I am here to honor and celebrate us all.
Third poem: Judaism 101. Temple Israel
Judaism 101. Temple Israel
I joined the class to learn to be a Jew.
How can this be true with a Gabbi Grandfather,
leading a home where Mother prayed at Shabbat every Friday?
(But not in my lifetime)
How can this be true, a kindertransport child at four,
my label, as on luggage, round my neck?
6 3 9 my number.
How can this be true, at sixty three
a life lived happily, in Methodism, Nothingism, Unitarianism?
I joined the class to learn what is a Jew?
The How, the Why, the Where and When
Those ultimate Jewish questions waiting always to be answered
For me, why now, these questions long dormant, fast asleep,
deep-hidden in the soul?
In class, these questions, focus of us all,
point for answers not to the head, but to a different place
where voice of heart and head together,
ponder loud, unhidden, unbidden, unashamed, and awake.
I joined the class and I have learned
Jew I am, and much confirmed, affirmed
by history, birth and world events I find my questions gone, exempt.
Mechanics missing? Rules and Laws, the Language?
Sure a part of what I need for Torah reading, depth of meaning,
But non-essential, I now know, for life of spirit or believing.
Temple sitting, celebrating, eating all, communicating,
Each a piece of Jewish Living, setting silver, mitzvot giving,
But in the inner landscape only, is the garden of our being.
Growing answers we are seeking, bearing fruits of life-long living.
In appreciation of Deborah Eisenbach-Budner