ABSTRACT
Peretz Markish’s wartime play An oyg far an oyg (An Eye for an Eye) and his postwar drama Der ufshtand in geto (The Ghetto Uprising) are among the earliest dramatic representations of the Holocaust to have appeared on stage outside the ghettos themselves. In both plays Markish was subject to the vagaries of the official Party line on literature, and was forced to tread carefully given the strictures imposed upon him from above and his own troubled history with Soviet literary critics. The connection between the sword and book remained an integral dimension of Markish’s agenda. He did not believe that action was independent of words; the sword and the pen always went hand in hand. Both An oyg far an oyg and Der ufshtand in geto are concerned with the necessity of taking up the sword in defence of Jewish life, and with the power of the poetic word to inspire that fight.
