Dignity Featured Artist Lyn Davidson

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Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome poet Lyn Davidson with “In the Synagogue, Somewhere in Central Europe,” a powerful ekphrastic poem inspired by Jews Praying in the Synagogue on the Day of Atonement (1878) by Maurycy Gottlieb. Moving forward through time, Lyn explores the history of European Jews and confronts the deadly poison of antisemitism that sought to erase their identity and destroy the prosperity, community, and belonging reflected in Gottlieb’s painting, created little more than half a century before the Holocaust.

“We rolled and unrolled our seasonal burden of words/ under the lozenged lights./ We ate the red clumps of sweet strawberries,/ drank the blue sky.

God blinked.

Honeyed light became searchlight./ The thunder of boots pinned breath against the walls.”

As a tour guide, Lyn responds viscerally to the past. Her imagery is rich and yet distilled, revealing truth the way Gottlieb revealed life in warm light and telling shadow. Storytelling is central to her work, and she is among those entrusted with keeping history alive for future generations. The poem breathes with memory and witness. We taste the strawberries, hear the thunder of boots and the squeal of tires, feeling the fragility of a world on the brink of disappearance. Lyn reminds us: buildings can be rebuilt and restored, but lives lost to hatred or to time cannot be replaced.

Read “In the Synagogue, Somewhere in Central Europe” in Synkroniciti’s Dignity, Vol. 8, No. 3, available for $7 here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/. 

Lyn Davidson is a multilingual journalist, poet, and tour guide based in San Francisco, Prague, and Mexico City. In November 2025, she created and led a historical walking tour called Prague Through the Eyes of Its Poets, in celebration of the city’s annual Den Poezie event.

Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The Jewish Literary Journal, and Poetry Super Highway. “In the Synagogue, Somewhere in Central Europe” derives in part from her experiences as a tour guide in Prague’s Jewish Quarter.

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