Zapisi sa Svačke: Dina Greenberg

Shadow-self, kolaž Dine Greenberg

My time in residence at the DHKP provided me the rare gift of time, an intensive period of creative exploration and spiritual reflection. This period immediately preceded a very challenging, self-imposed research agenda for a three-month Fulbright project in Kosovo where I would explore the role ethnic Albanians played in aiding Jewish people transiting the former Yugoslavia during the Holocaust. And so, with the remarkable assistance of a local guide, I walked the streets of Zagreb — once home to a thriving Jewish community — and heard the occasional stories of survival and also the much more prevalent stories of those starved and murdered in places likeJasenovac and Bergen Belsen. For me, Jewish history was inescapable and, without planning, I began to write a series of poems that directly and tangentially pierce the gossamer veil that separates the living from the dead.

The poem, “I am an Only Child,” is one written during my residency. Once I produced a draft that felt satisfactory I realized there were elements I wanted to incorporate through visual art. The collage you see here includes photographs I took while visiting Jewish memorial sites in Zagreb. Often the angle of the sun produced stark shadows and my image — my shadow-self — appeared elongated and ghostly. But for the grace of God, I thought. Am I flesh and blood or merely a shade?

Dina Greenberg

16 December 2025

Pjesma s kolaža:

I am an only child

she said and I also

understood that she is orphaned

though she didn’t say so

I felt that moated

longing in her downturned lids

her bloodline and how she

held their ragged passage

fingering only the edges

as though to insinuate vermin

whose archaic weight

is not lost

on us

I know

without knowing

each silted crevice

where the traps are set

again, and then again

the chosen people