A rabbi’s poetic wrestling with faith after the Shoah

This collection of poems by Yehiel Poupko, rabbinic scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropoli­tan Chicago, is a window into the soul of a descendant of victims of the Shoah. Readers are privileged to listen in as he struggles to make sense of unfathomable cruelty and irresolvable doubt.

What Is Lost is divided into two parts, with a prologue and epilogue that also consist of poems. The prologue sets the tone. Its opening poem, “Picnics,” offers a view from the poet’s mother’s nursing home window: a riverbank in Pittsburgh, with its abandoned steel mills. They stand “skeletal” as harbingers of death—both hers and others that will haunt the book. Poupko inserts what appears to be a profession of trust into the last stanza:

blessed are You Lord our God
Who in His goodness nourishes the world