“I was a year old,” Rivka Miriam says, “and my father would hold me in his arms and throw me up and down and I laughed and laughed and laughed. Each time he threw me up he’d yell in Yiddish ‘Rivkela Rivkela where’s Savta?’ ‘Killed.’ ‘Rivkela Rivkela where’s Miriam?’ ‘Killed.’ ‘Rivkela Rivkela where’s Chaim?’ ‘Killed.’ He’d say all the names and I’d laugh and laugh. I was a year old, I feel I absorbed it from the start."

Rivka Miriam’s disciplined, imagistic poems speak in the voice of this child. Born in Jerusalem in 1952 to the Yiddish writer Leib Rochman, Rivka Miriam is named for her grandmother and aunt, both of whom perished in Treblinka. Considered a yeled peleh or prodigy, she flourished in the salon-like atmosphere of her childhood home, and began to write poems about her ancestors, often sounding like a resurrected Holocaust victim. “I was not born. / I was restored to life,” reads an early poem.

My Yellow Dress, the poet’s first book, was published when she was 14 and earned her the never-quite-escapable label of “Holocaust poet.” These Mountains, translated with aesthetic alertness by Linda Stern Zisquit, shows us how insufficient and misleading that label is. There are no boxcars or bars of soap in these poems; almost nothing on the referential level points to the experiences of her parents and grandparents. It is reverence for life, not reference to death, that Rivka Miriam achieves. The simple structure and even tone of these poems stands in sharp contrast to the histrionics of most “Holocaust poetry.” (Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust is an important exception, which, significantly, was drawn from testimony offered during the trials of Nazi criminals.) In her two most recent books, Miriam does write about her murdered relatives: her pregnant aunt, her uncle, her great-uncle (“who ran wrapped in a tallit and yelled ‘Redemption!’”). Reading these harrowing poems makes one realize how oblique the rest of the poems are.

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