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| T4: A Novel in Verse by Ann Clare LeZotte, Houghton Miffl in Company 2008. Hardcover |
Do you even know what T4 is?
I didn’t. So the first good reason to read T4: A Novel in Verse by Ann Clare LeZotte is to educate yourself on this rarely discussed atrocity of Nazi Germany. From 1939 to 1941, the Nazis interned and “euthanized” disabled members of society in a medical extermination program known as Tiergartenstrasse 4.
To remember World War II and put it into perspective.
We’ve just passed another Veteran’s Day on November 11. And may I be so personal as to ask how you celebrated? I hear Macy’s was having an awesome sale. Of course, it’s nice to sleep late but that’s not the point. The point of Veteran’s Day is made clearly in T4. As in almost every literary work about World War II, just as the reader reaches a point of near-total despair, the Allied forces prevail. We don’t have to go through the painful mental exercise of imagining a world in which Hitler still lives; and we have veterans to thank for that.
It’s been too long since you read an epic poem.
When I first cracked open T4, it took me all of two seconds to shut it and put it aside. I don’t like poetry. But the cover kept calling me back. “Donna, open me, open me, please.” Oh, bother. “Okay,” I said, but if you don’t entice me in four lines, I’m shelving you!” T4 was shelved about half a dozen
times in total. No, it didn’t entice me in four lines – it doesn’t rhyme! But how could I turn away when I read, “They said, ‘specialist children’s wards,’ but they meant children-killing centers. They said, ‘final medical assistance,’ but they meant murder”?
Ann Clare LeZotte – get to know her.
LeZotte’s poems have been published in the New Republic and in notable poetry reviews. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the MacDowell Colony, VCCA and Yaddo, and has won the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. LeZotte, who describes herself as completely deaf, is a powerful voice of the experience of silence, now and for the future.
You have the time.
I know, I’m busy too. I’m eagerly awaiting winter break so I can catch up on my last 12 issues of The Atlantic. Set T4 by your bed or on the breakfast table and in less than an hour’s reading your world will be widened by the historically based account of a 13-year-old deaf girl in Nazi Germany who recognized, while it was happening, the single moment in her life that was the “dividing line between my childhood and whatever came next.”
T4: A Novel in Verse by Ann Clare LeZotte, Houghton Miffl in Company 2008. Hardcover ISBN 9780547046846, 108 pp., $14.00.
