Such is life! But I miss the routine of translating and writing for this newsletter, and I miss the community it’s allowed me to build. Wherever you are, thanks for being a part of this.

Before we dive into today’s poems, I have a few brief announcements.

I’m thrilled to say that my poetry collection, Invocation, will be published by Slant Books on February 9. I’ll be sharing more details about this over the coming months, so please keep your eyes out. The photo on the book’s cover is "Ruins of the great synagogue, Dukla, Poland,” by Jason Francisco.

I’m also happy to say that I’ll be in Portland, Oregon, next week, giving a talk about Yiddish language and culture at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education on October 22, at 6 pm. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you!

And finally, since I was last writing and translating regularly on here, AI seems to be everywhere, whether in reality or just in “the discourse.” Inspired by Stephen Bradford Long’s “pro-human pledge,” I’d like to be totally clear: I do not use AI in any way for my translation or writing. There are many reasons for this, and I hope to find the time to write about them soon. But please know that when you read something I have written or translated, you are reading the product of a human consciousness and a human process; nothing with my name on it is created or edited by an LLM. If this ever changes, I’ll be totally transparent about how and why.

Onwards!

I’ve translated the poet Anna Margolin (1887-1952, pen name of Rosa Lebensboym) a number of times for this newsletter, so I won’t repeat myself; you can find some of my earlier writing on Margolin’s life and work here and here, and by using the newsletter’s search function. As is my custom, I’ll comment briefly after the translations. Both of these poems have the same name, and are taken taken from Margolin’s 1929 collection Lider.

Autumn

In the hot sharp sheen of the deep wild garden,
where pale willows hang, and cloud-dark pines,
where tulips flame like gold and garnets;
in the sun-drenched, sun-drunk garden,
the locust forges autumn.

A hasty, frosty song ascends the young grasses,
and pounds among the blooming treetops,
sun-soaked birds blaze and sway.
In the quiet, quivering, burning grasses,
autumn screams. 

Autumn

Autumn falls on the city and me. 
Dark heart, keep silent, and wonder:
See, a naked bough with a leaf
blooms from asphalt, tender as a lily. 

Weighty autumn. Weighty steps. I am old.
My dark heart, curse nothing, believe in wonders:
somewhere in a city, in a world,
I bloom like a lily. 

It is too easy to believe that you are just one thing: either old or young, wild or tame, growing or dying, acting or being acted upon. With these poems Margolin offers us an alternative, paradoxical vision. She is old, and at the same time she is blooming like a lily; even in autumn, even from the city’s concrete that exists to control or to annihilate any undomesticated life, a branch can blossom.

It is not so much that anything is possible, that “wonders” can occur. Better to say, from the world of these poems, that anything is happening, already, and wonders surround us imperceptibly, beyond the limits of our reason. The world exists in paradox and uncertainty, and we know almost nothing of cause and effect. Does the changing season act on the locust, or does the locust demand, with its musical labor, that the season must change?

I’m fascinated by the work the word “somewhere” does in the second-to-last line of this second poem. “Somewhere in a city, in a world….” What does that say about our relationship to the possibility of miracles? Are they accessible to us, or are they always elsewhere, in an undisclosed location, beyond what we can ever experience? Is Margolin saying something a little bit like Kafka’s (in)famous statement, that “there is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for us” — that wondrous vitality is possible, but only somewhere else?

I read it a little more hopefully, in part because she has already commanded both us and her heart to “see” the miraculous branch growing, against all odds, against the proper season, from concrete. It is right before our eyes! The life that transcends reason is already happening “somewhere,” which means that it could be anywhere. Even here, even now.

Margolin is a poet who writes often from the anguish of the world’s instability and absolute uncertainty. But here I think we find a more hopeful vision. The uncertainty of existence can be agonizing and despairing, but it also offers us tremendous freedom. In the natural world around and within us, in the so-called artificial environment of the city, even in our own trajectories toward death, we see that nothing is solid and fixed; life emerges at all times, wildly and beyond the constraints of logic, at every season, with causes and conditions we cannot begin to understand.

(Do you know the philosopher Lev Shestov? And if so, can you tell that I’ve been reading him lately?)

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Autumn Grasses in Moonlight, Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891):

Since I last posted , I’ve had some big changes: I now work full-time as the program manager for Yetzirah, the only national literary non-profit dedicated to supporting Jewish poets and Jewish poetry, an organization you might, if you’re a reader here, be interested in following or supporting. I’m glad to say that I’ve recovered from the bout of covid that stopped me in my tracks about 14 months ago. And, not to bury the lede too much, but I’ve become the father of a perfect baby boy.

Amidst all those personal transitions, as the world continues to burn, it seemed like the right time to dive back into sharing Yiddish poems. I’ve missed putting these translations and comments together, and I’ve missed the conversations they invited. I started this post by saying thank you, and I really meant it: your reading this newsletter means a great deal to me.

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So, without further ado, here’s a strange and timely poem by Melech Ravitch, whom I’ve shared and discussed a number of times before. Since you can find biographical info about Ravitch in those posts if you’re interested, let’s get straight to the poem, which was written in 1934; the Yiddish below comes from Ravitch’s career retrospective Lider fun Mayne Lider, published in Montreal in 1954.

Inside New York’s Statue of Liberty  

I am a man of flesh and blood and bone,
my soul is love, laughter, and tears —
and you? Woman, empty iron giant,
with a torch raised in your hand,
you are a golem-woman with tin skin
mounted upon a skeleton of steel — — 
your tin lips have never kissed bread.
Your iron ribs have never rocked a man in bed, 
and — — I love you with a young love, fiery and tender,
for thirty years of youth and manhood I have yearned for you,
awaiting your first glance.

I am a poet, a wanderer, a Jew,
the steps to my soul are my poem's shaky stanzas
and the steps to yours — unique among a million minds— 
to your head, to your consciousness— a hundred iron steps. 
Hollow is your soul, cold in winter, hot in summer, 
as in every structure made of tin.
Of course it is so wondrous and magnificent
to wander through your soul's steps with hundreds of others, to grow weary,
to sing within you a glowing and human-pulsing love song,
to you! — Whose veins of steel and wire 
circulate electric light instead of blood,
because you are only a golem, monument to freedom — symbol — — 

and because you are a golem, symbol, freedom's monument,
I write this love poem with hands that tremble in youth's fervor,
with gleaming eyes, with simmering blood,
and please believe me, woman, if I pressed my lips against your tin walls,
and against the proud walls of your throat — and kissed them secretly,
so that no one would see and say: perhaps he is a poet, and is totally disturbed — — 
that love would flow out of the purest heart, 
and this poor, earnest poem is a love poem, 
because never before have I known love like this, 
no other woman has ever been like you — 
like freedom — whose symbol you, 
once and for all eternity, have claimed the right to be.

Your torch aims 
toward New York — but your light burns
in every region of the world.
Some bless you and some curse you,
some esteem you and some detest you,
some revere you and some mock you,
and I — I have a simple love and faith.
Because curses and hatred are just wind, just dust. — 

Oh, it is true, you lady, you freedom, today you are a fallen woman,
and perhaps — perhaps because of this my love for you is so tender and deep — 
in your tin belly, you tin symbol,
you are pregnant with the new redeemer of all worlds —  
they may laugh at you, they may curse you,
you, but you will birth that new redeemer in light and faith,
you will raise him in your hands — your son — 
as you raise your torch today, over all men. — 

And those who are weeping will laugh,
and those who now curse
will weep.
United, 
guided by a child,
freedom, beloved, yours, only yours, only your son
will be the world's redeemer;
a son of the spirit of all who are in love with you!

Oh, may the breath of this love poem — conceived in love for you — 
be one part of the spirit that will fill your womb. 

I love this poem’s ambivalence and strange eroticism.

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that Ravitch never lived for long in the United States: he spent some time in New York City in the late 1930s, when he was also moving between Mexico, Argentina, Australia, and elsewhere after leaving his native Europe, before he settled permanently in Montreal in 1941.

So what is the Statue of Liberty here, to this poet who chose never to become an American? It is a contradiction: the ultimate symbol of freedom, alive with electricity and worthy of devotion, and at the same time an empty monument, a vacuous and hollow ideal, waiting for a messianic future. Above all, the Statue is a golem: animate and inanimate at once, a mass of raw materials brought magically to life by the power of human faith and creativity, both monstrous and potentially capable of protecting the most vulnerable in its midst.

But Ravitch’s Statue of Liberty is not just any golem. She is a golem Virgin Mary: a spirit will impregnate the Statue, “the spirit of all who are in love with you,” and the son she bears will redeem the world.

The poem ends with a prayer that this poem itself might be part of the force with which the Statue conceives her son. It’s a daring and beautiful move: if the Statue is a kind of Virgin Mary, then the Jewish refugee poet wants to become a kind of God, whose holy spirit can impregnate a statue of iron and tin and bloodless electricity, ushering in a messianic era of unity and freedom.

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I’m curious how you read the tone of this poem, which is hard for me to pin down. Ravitch is skeptical of the American democratic project and its symbolism, even as he holds onto belief in that symbolism’s redemptive power.

This is a much more ambivalent poetic vision of the Statue of Liberty than the best-known one, by another Jewish poet. For Lazarus, the God-like Statue embraces “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” while for Ravitch, the hollow statue awaits the God-like power of those same huddled masses, whose erotic love of freedom is necessary to bring her empty ideal into reality.

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Robert Rauschenberg’s 1963 lithograph, Statue of Liberty:

I often find myself taken by Ravitch’s melancholic mysticism, and by his idiosyncratic, sometimes anti-human relationship to animals and to the natural world, all of which is apparent in this poem and in the earlier ones I’ve shared.

I won’t repeat the biographical info from my previous posts about Ravitch, but this newsletter from the Yiddish Book Center has a nice tribute to his life and career.

So, without further ado, let’s dive right in! This poem was written in 1961, and was taken from Ravitch’s 1969 collection Iḳer shokhaḥti: lider un poemes fun di yorn 1954-1969 (Post Script: poems from the years 1954-1969).

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Dear Sister, When I Die

Dear sister, when I die,
quietly following that final call,
wrap me in soft, green linen,
and give my body away to the flames.

I want to abandon my bones and sinews,
my whole form, like this, 
through dark smoke to blue heights,
and to become like the blue sky.

Returning my body freely
at just this hour
will free the soul
to live again for an eternity.

And again, in the cycle of reincarnation,
again, prepared for a new return,
to become again a ring 
within the rings of endlessness.

Yes, a ring within rings, again, again—
though not to return as a human, not that,
but a secret-filled deer in the forest,
an albatross by distant shores.

O, dear God, when I die,
I implore You, I curse, I bless,
incarnate me again thousands of times,
but never as a human. 

You ask: why? You mean: do I want
to hide secrets from you now?
It's simple. God, the human is Your greatest
mistake, O You mistake-less God. 

Dear sister, when I die,
quietly following that final call,
wrap me in soft, green linen,
and give my body away to the flames.

Another elegiac, enchanting, death-haunted poem by Melech Ravitch. Death-haunted, I say, but also obsessed, through death, with life, and with life’s endless possibility.

This poem is really a prayer, both to a sister and to God. It’s worth noting how un-Jewish the poet’s request to his sister here is: cremation is traditionally prohibited in Judaism, and became even more taboo after the horrors of the Holocaust’s crematoria. The poet’s request that his body be burned places this poem in a distinctly unorthodox theological territory.

This unorthodoxy is even more striking in the context of a poem about the soul’s eternal life, since certain kabbalistic traditions maintain that someone who is voluntarily cremated has forfeited any future possibility of resurrection.

So the poem’s celebration of cremation is very clearly divergent from traditional Jewish belief. But what should we make of the paradoxical description we find here of an infallible God who has made a colossal mistake in creating humanity? From one perspective, this might seem like an almost heretical idea. But it puts me in mind of the flood narrative in Genesis, when a genocidal God resolves to wipe humanity out. Here’s Genesis 6:5-7:

The LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the LORD regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened. The LORD said, “I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created—men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.”

How can it be heretical for a 20th-century poet to say that the creation of humanity was God’s terrible mistake, when God says the same thing in the most canonical text of them all?

If we read Ravitch’s rejection of humanness in the spirit of this Genesis passage, we still find one significant divergence: God, in the biblical narrative, decides to kill not just humanity, but the animal world in all its diversity as well. Ravitch does not go so far. For him, animals are the only creatures worth reincarnating as. The human being is a dead end, and having been a human once Ravitch wants never to be one again. But this stance on creation is actually more compassionate than God’s: both God and Ravitch see humanity as a mistake, but God alone includes the non-human world in his violent judgement.

Perhaps this is one way to understand Ravitch’s contradictory “I curse, I bless,” when he begs God to return him to life as an animal. He curses humanness, and blesses animality; he curses the life he has had, and blesses life itself.

The paradox of this poem, of course, is that it is a poem about (among other things) the desire to be incapable of poetry. Animals do not write poems. It is only because of the humanness the poet renounces that he can find a beautiful form to express that renunciation.

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(By the way, does anyone reading this with more scholarly chops than me know if Ravitch had a sister? The YIVO encyclopedia mentions brothers, and though I haven’t done a very deep dive, none of the sources I looked at online refer to a sister. I’m wondering if this sister existed only in the world of poetry, or if she lived in Ravitch’s biography as well.)

Today’s art pairing: Gustave Courbet’s 1865 “The Deer” - “a secret-filled deer in the forest.”

And so, because I wanted to share what I was reading and writing and thinking about with other people, and to push my skills as a translator, and because Yiddish poetry was a consolation to me in that difficult time, I began this substack. I would translate poems for it on days I didn’t teach, which is how I was able to maintain that original pace of (at least) one new poem each week.

Much has changed since then. I’m not, mercifully, as aimless as I was; I have invigorating projects and commitments. All this means, though, that I can’t stick to the pace I once kept for this newsletter. So first of all, an apology, especially to those of you who became paying subscribers when I was sending poems and essays and hosting events more frequently than I am now: I’m sorry that the number of posts here has diminished.

And second of all, a request: Over the next month or two, I’ll be experimenting with new formats for and approaches to this newsletter. If you have suggestions or feedback about sustainable ways to keep sharing and celebrating Yiddish poetry and culture here, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

And third of all, gratitude: when I started this newsletter, I sent it to a couple dozen friends and family members I thought might be interested. I had no “platform,” no “following.” It’s hard for me to believe that these posts are now read by hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people around the world. Thank you for being a part of this; your reading and your support mean a great deal to me.

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If you weren’t deterred by that wall of text, I’m excited to introduce a new poet today: Moyshe Kulbak. (Per contemporary conventions, I’m writing his name as Moyshe, although in his Lithuanian Yiddish dialect it would’ve been pronounced Meyshe.)

Another Yiddish poet with great hair.

Kulbak (1896-1937) was born in Smorgon, in what is now northeastern Belarus. The town’s wikipedia entry includes this tantalizing, contextless sentence, which raises many more questions than it answers: “Smorgon is known as the place where a school of bear training, the so-called ‘Bear Academy,’ was founded.”

It’ll be hard for me to stop wondering about this Bear Academy, but regardless: Kulbak received a traditional yeshiva education, and began to write Hebrew poetry during World War I. After the war, he moved first to Minsk and then to Vilna, where his first poetry collection was published in 1920 to great acclaim.

After a stint in Berlin, and several more years in Vilna, where he played an important role in that city’s Yiddish cultural scene, and became a beloved teacher in the local Yiddish gymnasium, Kulbak moved to Minsk in 1928. He continued writing, focusing especially on long poems, drama, and fiction, until September 1937, when he was arrested on false charges of espionage, one of many Minsk artists and intellectuals persecuted in a wave of Stalinist repression. After a month of imprisonment, Kulbak was executed on October 29.

Kulbak with his wife, Zelda, and son Ilya -
photo courtesy of Eilat Gordin Levitan’s remarkable resource.

Though most of his work is still untranslated (except into Russian, after his official post-Stalin rehabilitation,) there are some great English editions of some of his fiction.

Both of the short poems below are taken from Shirim (Poems), his first book, published in Vilna in 1920.

[Untitled]

I have seen Yiddish words like small flames, like small flames,
like sparks, risen from dark ore.
I have felt Yiddish words like white doves, like white doves.
The doves coo and coo in my heart.

[Untitled]

I walk around, around, around
for a year, or two, or three, or it could be more:
I turn up uninvited everywhere, everywhere,
and everywhere is welter and waste...

It's welter and waste,
and desolate,
and horribly boring,
brrr! ...

The first of these two poems opens Kulbak’s debut poetry collection, functioning as a kind of epigraph. How moving, over a hundred years later, to think of the young poet, then in his early 20s, choosing these lines about the Yiddish language to introduce his work to an audience of Yiddish readers.

What is Yiddish here? It is elemental: its words are sparks and small flames, casting light and heat. It is also, therefore, dangerous. Yiddish has a real power, and if you’re not careful you can get burned. And Yiddish is an animal. There’s so much symbolism, of course, in the identification of Yiddish words with white doves, but I’m thinking beyond the obvious association of doves with peace, and with the story of Noah, to the fact that doves, unlike many species of bird, can be both wild and domesticated. Doesn’t that capture something about language, about poetry, about words themselves? These creatures at the border between wildness and domestication, tamed and untamed at once, capable of flight, singing in our bodies….

What to do, though, with this second poem, this odd piece of writing? My use of the phrase “welter and waste” here is a nod to Robert Alter, who uses it in his translation of the first line of Genesis, though it originates in Wallace Stevens’ “The Planet on the Table.” I chose this phrase in order to invoke what I see as Kulbak’s reference to a biblical, primordial state of desolation.

Wherever the poet goes, everything he finds is empy and inchoate. He wanders and wanders, and seems to find only an uncreated creation. I don’t quite know how to read this poem, but it reminds me of a comment I came across recently, in Claire Schwartz’s interview with Hélène Cixous. Schwartz says that “For [Edmond] Jabès, the word—a mark on the blank field of the page—distances us from the primordial nothingness of creation, but also touches the void by displacing the thing in the world to which it refers. Negating as it asserts, the word ceaselessly renews its relationship to nonexistence, becomes strange to itself.”

I had to read that out loud a few times to start to get a handle on it, but I take it to mean that language simultaneously erases and channels absence, emptiness, nothingness. Kulbak finds emptiness everywhere, and turns to language in order to make something real. But the words he finds, the poems he crafts, even as they create, still reenact the desolation whose place they take, whose emptiness they fill.

What’s with that brrr! at the poem’s end, though? Perhaps it’s the poet letting go of language in response to the desolation he finds, and reverting instead to a pre-verbal expression of embodied experience. Or maybe it’s just a young poet reveling in the newfound freedoms of post-World War I writing. If you have any thoughts about it, I would love to hear them.

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Today’s art pairing: Harold Edgerton’s 1973 “Bullet through Candle Flame”

Today we’ll look at another poem by Jacob Glatstein, whom I’ve written about a number of times, and whose 1961 poetry collection provides this newsletter’s name. I won’t repeat his biography here - you can find its outlines in the first post I wrote about him, now a year and a half ago - but I did want to share a brief anecdote from Ruth Whitman’s introduction to her 1972 Selected Poems of Jacob Glatstein, which is out of print. This story features Glatstein alongside some of the other Yiddish poetry personalities we’ve come to know here.

One afternoon, [Glatstein] came into the cafeteria [on East Broadway, where Yiddish writers liked to hang out] and found the poet Anna Margolin and the poet-critic Noah Steinberg having an argument. Anna Margolin, a woman with a very free life style, had a “deliciously cruel” manner of caressing the hand of her victim while she told him killing truths about his work. Steinberg had just published some poems in… a socialist paper. Margolin, stroking his hand, was telling him how terrible the poems were. She called Glatstein over to their table and asked him if he didn’t think Steinberg’s poems were garbage. Glatstein, embarrassed, said, “well, I wouldn’t call it great poetry.” Anna said to Steinberg, “see, Glatstein doesn’t like it either.” And Steinberg retorted, “Yes, I can take it from Glatstein, but who are you to criticize me?” Anna stopped caressing his hand, and taking up her unfinished glass of tea, tossed it in his face. Without a word he lifted the pitcher of water from the table and poured it over her head. Some of the warm tea fell on one leg of Glatstein’s trousers, while the cold water from the pitcher wet his other leg.

Reuven Iceland, Anna’s lover, was working nearby…. She called him to her rescue. He burst into the cafe, threatening to kill Steinberg. Steinberg, a very large man, took the threat calmly. He said, “I wouldn’t start a fight if I were you—I could kill ten like you.” Iceland was startled. “How can you do that?” he asked. “Because I eat carrots every day.” And Steinberg pulled a carrot out of his pocket and started munching it. He offered a carrot to Iceland, who took it as a pledge of peace, and the four poets sat down to eat and drink together.

The high drama of Yiddish writers! Insults, violence, a Popeye-like commitment to the masculinity of vegetables…. But note Steinberg’s response to Margolin’s criticisms: “Yes, I can take it from Glatstein, but who are you to criticize me?” Surely a deep misogyny underlies this comment. But it also speaks to the tremendous esteem with which the Yiddish literary world saw Glatstein, even from a relatively young age.

On a different note, before we get into today’s poem, here’s a bit of recent Yiddish music - from Yossi Desser’s “Yiddish Chanukah Carols” album - to help you stay in the holiday spirit.

The poem below is taken from Glatstein’s 1953 collection, Dem Tatns Shotn (Father’s Shadow.)

Revelation

God is revealed to us in an intelligible frame. 
In the benevolence of nourished sheep,
in the goodness of a Eugene Debs,
in the lightning flash of an unexpected rhyme.
God finds His frame.

I write these aphorisms down
and sing them like a pious liturgy
until I sense their meaning, their taste.
God is revealed to us in a golden frame.

Evening slashes with the chill of steel
and mines through night as if it were black earth.
Before my eyes a valley of darkness
is plowed by glowing threads.
The sky clouds over with dozing hens.
Fireflies quickly flash codes. 
I see it all through the eyes of a grateful pagan.
I am quiet. A niggun purifies within me:
Everything depends on you.
On the goodness of your chilly hands.

I go, and an echo of footsteps escorts me.
My own voice is unheard.
At a crossroads, I say:
Here I will dream into the day.
I lie down and listen.
It's too dark even for a revelation. 
Perhaps I'll hear a divine rustling,
through the night and my fear. 

A voice calls from a vacant window.
Come home. Hurry.
I wait. Don't be late.
The loyal voice quivers.
God finds his frame.
A lamp like a bright bell slashes the darkness.

I referred to this as “a poem for Chanukah,” even though it has nothing explicit to do with the holiday. What I had in mind was this poem’s theme of revelation in a time and place of darkness, a time and place in which revelation seems as distant and impossible as spring does in the depths of winter. I think of this as the exact theme of Chanukah. “It’s too dark even for a revelation,” Glatstein writes. And yet, nevertheless, God is revealed. “Perhaps I’ll hear a divine rustling, / through the night and my fear.” I love that word, “rustling,” to describe the sudden and unexpected and impossible presence of divinity, of transcendent illumination, despite and within illumination’s absurdity. It suggests to me a tiny sound, easy to miss, the scarcest stirring of motion, the kind of thing we might ignore if we notice it at all.

But isn’t that what art can do—can allow us to see and to feel the minuscule revelations we would otherwise pass by, or dismiss as inconsequential? And isn’t that the miracle we’ve been reenacting on Chanukah—the idea that the frailest light source against the most overwhelming darkness can, irrationally and literally incredibly, cast an infinite brightness?

God is revealed, according to this poem, in the friendliness of cared-for sheep, in the craftsmanship and beauty of poetry, and in the benevolence of important American socialist Eugene Debs. (Fun piece of trivia: the call sign for The Forward’s Yiddish radio station, WEVD, was named in memory of Debs.) I love that this poem offers such different possible arenas for revelation: God can be found in animality, in art, in politics; God is not limited to one area, to grandeur, or to what we habitually and reductively refer to as “religion.” “A voice calls from a vacant window.” Even from what seems to be abject emptiness, revelation can be found.

Of course, the world is a pretty dark place. This is true around the winter solstice, and it’s true in times of war, and it’s true in general; all you have to do is look around. Darkness is everywhere.

But so is light. “Glowing threads” plow the pitch-black valley. The darkness, with all its fear and despair and loneliness, is still real. But somehow, through art and through ritual, we can find those little scraps of light, as Glatstein describes in this poem. And even if they’re not enough, miraculously, for just a moment, they can be enough. That’s the miracle of Chanukah, and I hope that we can all continue to find some glimpses of a light to slash the darkness when everything looks bleak.

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Today’s art pairing: Milton Avery’s 1957 “White Moon”

Hofshteyn was born near Kyiv, Ukraine, and came from a family of artists. He was descended from Pedotser, the stage name of Aron-Moyshe Kholodenko, a violinist and composer who was one of the 19th century’s great klezmer virtuosos; his younger sister, Shifre Kholodenko, was also a renowned poet and translator; his cousin Osher Shvartsman, was a highly influential modernist Yiddish poet, particularly known for his war poetry, and became a Soviet icon after dying as a hero in the Red Army, in 1919.

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Hofshteyn himself had a complicated relationship to the communist regime. He supported it at first, moving to Moscow in 1920, writing for the communist Yiddish press and leading the realist Yiddish theater movement. But in 1924, Hofshteyn — who had been educated in Russian and Hebrew — publicly called for the teaching of Hebrew in Russia. Hebrew had no place in Soviet ideology, and after being what we might anachronistically call “cancelled,” Hofshteyn moved to Palestine for several years, struggling for work there, before returning to Kyiv.

Along the way, Hofshteyn had befriended many leading Yiddish artists, like Marc Chagall. I mention this so I can share these cool illustrations Chagall did for Hofshteyn’s 1922 poetry collection Troyer (Sadness):

Despite his pro-Hebrew heresy, Hofshteyn rose through the ranks of the Soviet cultural world: he represented Yiddish in the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, and in 1940 became an official member of the communist party.

It didn’t last long. Astute readers might have noticed that death year, 1952, and connected it to the other Yiddish poets we’ve discussed here who also died then. Hofshteyn too was executed on August 12, 1952, one of the victims of the so-called Night of the Murdered Poets, killed in Stalin’s post-war purge of Jewish cultural leaders. He was arrested four years earlier, in September, 1948—not long after he had sent a telegram to Golda Meir, “about the need to revive Hebrew in the USSR.”1

I keep thinking about this telegram, and everything it represented. 24 years after losing his livelihood because of a countercultural, dissident commitment to the Hebrew language, and while Stalin’s repressions were only increasing, Hofshteyn refused to surrender his allegiance to the oldest and most universal language of the Jewish people. He wasn’t stupid, of course. He had to know what he was risking. But some things—a culture, a language and everything it contains—he must have thought worth dying for.

Today’s poem was written in 1944—I took the Yiddish from Hofshteyn’s collection Ikh Gloyb (I Believe), published in New York in 1945.

Ukraine

From smoke, from rupture, from ash, from shame,
I see: you raise your mangled hand,
your blood-coated head rises,
I can see your countenance! Oh, it lives, it lives.
Your gaze, still childish, now shows a mother's pain,
and the joy that follows danger shines,
the understanding that follows bewilderment,
like water in spring, from underneath ice—
I see: your body rises up, your form,
on which your torn clothes barely hang,
and the filthy rags fall from your frame—
you're visible, a grown child, a wife,
a body bright with beauty, gleaming
through shame, through derision, through the foe's violence.
It's a young and sure and unadulterated strength
that still becomes, that purifies without end, and laughs,
and soon will heal the agony, the shame—
It's Ukraine, my home,
Ukraine, my nation. 

The last two newsletters I sent out were responses to war, to trauma, to catastrophe. I was looking for poetry that could feel adequate to this terrible moment of violence in Israel and Gaza, and I found it in poetic responses to the Holocaust.

But the Middle East is not the only place where civilians are being attacked, even though the headlines have largely shifted away from Ukraine. It struck me how little attention was being paid to that terrible, ongoing war, especially after October 7, and I started thinking about what Yiddish poems might be meaningful responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since so many great Yiddish poets were Ukrainian, and last year was not the first time, of course, that Ukraine has been brutally attacked by a neighboring country, it was not so hard to find a poem that was explicitly suited to this moment.

This poem for Ukraine, by Dovid Hofshteyn, written for a very different war, has apparently become a popular piece of cultural resistance. It’s easy to see why: the poem begins in the wartime degradation of smoke and ash and shame. That first line is about as desolate as it gets. But up from that despair, the bloody visage of the nation rises, “bright with beauty,” ready to heal itself.

In general, as a matter of both principle and aesthetic instinct, I’m not a big fan of nationalism: it tends to lead to destructive politics and cliched art. Nevertheless, I find this poem moving, even inspiring. Its repetitions of “I see” ground us in the poem’s tactile imagery, forcing us away from the abstractions into which many nationalist poems with similar themes fall away.

There’s one particular moment, lost in translation, that I love most of all here. The original poem is written in loose rhymes, and towards the end, Hofshteyn gives us the almost-rhyme of קראַפֿט, kraft, power or strength, with לאַכט, lakht, laughs. If a rhyme is a kind of implicit argument of kinship between two words or two ideas, then Hofshteyn is subtly suggesting here that a deep relationship exists between laughter and power, that laughter is a form of strength, even against the most destructive violence.

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Today’s art pairing: Untitled, a 1941 painting by the Ukrainian-American Janet Sobel

I know that many of my readers continue to be personally impacted, directly or indirectly, by the terrible violence and fear unfolding in, and rippling out from, Gaza and Israel. (But note how I too fall into euphemisms: “personally impacted.” What does that actually mean? And what would be better to say? I confess that I’m not sure. Distressed? Distraught? Grieving?) I hope you’re hanging in there, and finding ways to care for yourself. I hope that I only have good things to find apt poems for soon.

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But in the meantime, here we are. For a different and challenging Yiddish literary perspective on this war and its context, I recommend Shachar Pinsker’s new translation of Avrom Karpinovitsch’s 1951 short story “Never Forget,” published recently in In Geveb. It describes a Holocaust survivor who, just days after arriving in a nascent Israel, is thrown into the fight for Israel’s independence. No spoilers but, as Pinsker writes, “This sto­ry rais­es ques­tions of trau­ma, mem­o­ry, and vio­lence, of revenge and empa­thy, with­out giv­ing clear answers.”

In the meantime, if you’re in the mood for a change of scene, and want a little bit of kitschy Yiddish levity, here’s a clip from the 1982 Yiddish musical movie, Az Men Git Nemt Men. I’ve shared another song from this once before here, I think, but it remains a good palate cleanser in the midst of some unavoidable heaviness.

For today’s poetry installment, and in my continuing quest for poems that can respond meaningfully to this moment, we return to to Jacob Glatstein. His words provide the name for this newsletter, and I’ve already shared poems of his here, here, and here. This poem, “God is a Sad Maharal,” was first published in his 1943 collection Gedenklider (Remembrance Poems.) I’m sure I don’t need to clarify what that year means in the Jewish 20th century, what then-current events Glatstein was responding to.

I’ll say more about this after the poem, but if you’ve never heard of the “Maharal” before, this is a traditional Hebrew acronym for Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the 16th-early 17th century rabbi famous for, among other things, creating the legendary Golem of Prague.

God is a Sad Maharal

God is a sad Maharal.
A beam of His goodness
falls on a dark world.
He sits beside the well of His wonder
and throws in heavy stones.
Listen. He is unhappy.
Golem-like punishment is out of His control— 
it has overpowered Him.
Every sigh is warranted.
Every scream blazes in the empty sky.
Eternity charges towards the most deranged finale.
God is a sad Maharal.

God is a sad Maharal.
The sound of the shofar
inspires Days-of-Awe-trembling in the woods.
The heart of the Great Punisher
is broken and bitter.
Not even He created so much brokenness.
He feels ashamed and minuscule,
like every terrified Jew.
Silently He'll sneak into the synagogue.
Wrapped in a tallis He will stand
in the vestibule, like a penitent,
and He will tear the dark heavens apart with His weeping.

A wind blows an autumn shiver.
A tree sways.
A leaf falls.
God is a sad Maharal.

The Maharal was, in that early modern way, many things: a mystic, a theologian, a Talmud commentator, a mathematician. He was also, the legend goes, the creator of the Golem of Prague, a humanoid figure he brought to life from clay, using his mystical powers and esoteric learning. Different versions of the story exist, but this golem protected Prague’s Jews from antisemitic violence, until the Maharal removed its lifeforce, and stored its body in the attic of the synagogue. (Where it remains, perhaps, to this day—if you find yourself too quick to dismiss this as a legend, you might be interested in the debate around this golem’s historicity that still occurs in some Jewish communities.)

So what does it mean that God is a sad Maharal? On the most basic level, God is a creator, like the Maharal; they both use the esoteric secrets of existence to fashion life out of clay or dirt. That’s what we are, after all, according to certain Jewish traditions: mystically enlivened earth.

But unlike the Maharal, at least depending on the particular legend, God’s golems—us—are absolutely out of God’s control. God creates us, and we create a brokenness that God could not conceive of. You don’t have to believe in any God to empathize with the grief of a God who made humanity, and then had no choice but to look in horror at the suffering we cause.

Glatstein did not, however, write: “God is a Sad Creator.” There’s something fascinating and subversive about this metaphor’s comparison of God to an actual, historical human being. Maybe it’s just about the story of the Maharal making his golem. Or maybe there’s more to it than that; I’m really not sure. If anyone has ideas, especially anyone with more of a background in the Maharal’s life and teachings, I’d love to hear them.

Regardless, like all metaphors, this one cuts in both directions. God is a kind of Maharal, and the Maharal is a kind of God. Yes, of course, that’s true because of their shared creative capacities. But we can also extend it further: God is like a sad human being, and a human being, in turn, is like a sad God. This poem makes me think of Emerson’s quote: “A man is a god in ruins.” And here we are, we ruined gods, making a ruin of this world.

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(A closing note: I don’t have much that’s smart to say about it, but I absolutely love and am very moved by this poem’s image of God sneaking into the back of the synagogue, not even entering all the way or joining the congregation, and tearing heaven apart with his weeping prayer. Why can’t or won’t God enter all the way into the synagogue?)

Today’s art pairing: Marc Chagall’s 1933 “Loneliness”

I won’t be following my normal format today and sharing an essay. Instead I’ll just offer translations of two poems by Aaron Zeitlin (1898-1973), whom I’ve written about several times in this newsletter. Zeitlin was traumatized by the murder of his entire family in the Warsaw ghetto, and the first of these poems was written in 1942, while the war was still underway.

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I often turn to his writing in times of anguish and extremity because Zeitlin has an exceptional ability to articulate the spiritual core of his grief and his despair, and to find a kernel of hope not despite that grief and despair but within it.

Dust

Night. I ceased asking.
Paths rest.
Stars teem.
My questions drowse
exhausted
in a speechless stable.
The metal moon
glows cold.
A treetop
holds still.
I sit,
bow my head to my knees:
the effort is over--
is day worth the effort?
Somebody's born, somebody's destroyed----
Somewhere there is an answer!
The stars promise.
I believe. I believe.
But I won't ever hear the answer.
Dust will I become,
dust.

Martyrs, Become Children

I listen to the night,
the Jewish night,
and hear how it calls out:
dead ones, become incarnate.

Do not become the disappeared,
do not abandon the earth.
Find mothers and be
reincarnated as children.
Stay here, become
the earth's new founders,
redeemers, child-bearers,
bright sparks 
to kindle God on earth.
Let your voices rise
within new lives,
let your deaths enter
into new lives,
be purified like wine.
Do not leave
in a blind death-night,
martyrs, become children!

There are still spots available in my four-week, online Introduction to Yiddish Poetry class. No knowledge of Yiddish is required. You can find details here. If you’re already a paying subscriber to this newsletter, please feel free to ignore the sliding scale and pay whatever you’d like.

From Jakob Steinhardt’s Elegies of War woodcuts:

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I’ll keep this preamble relatively quick. In the last installment, I introduced the poet Rokhl Korn with her poem “Elul.” You can check that out, if you missed it, for some information about her life, or head to her entry in the YIVO Encyclopedia if you want to go a little bit deeper. And I love this speech Korn gave in Montreal, in 1977, wonderfully translated by Mikhl Yashinsky. There she discusses her poetic origins, and muses on the nature and origins of poetry in general. Poetry, for Korn, “is a magical transporter through time and space because it manages to contain the present, the past, even the future.”

Korn in 1970, via the Jewish Women’s Archive

There are too many highlights from Korn’s speech to share here; I’ve tried to select excerpts, and just ended up copying and pasting the whole thing, so I encourage you to check it out for yourself. (Ok, another highlight, because I can’t resist: the poet “sets words as witnesses to the eternal struggle between justice and injustice, between purity and impurity. At the same time, the poet is the executor of an estate, who comes to collect the debts that the people owes to itself.” Amazing stuff!)

We’ll look at another poem by Korn today, but before we take off on that “magical transporter through time and space,” I have an exciting learning opportunity to share.

On four Thursday evenings, starting 10/26, from 7:00-8:30 pm EST, I’ll be teaching an online Introduction to Yiddish Poetry course. If your reading here has piqued your interest, and you’d like to spend some time talking about Yiddish poetry together via Zoom, I’d love to have you there. No knowledge of Yiddish or cultural background is required.

Together we’ll read and discuss great Yiddish poems and writers, exploring the themes, contexts, and concerns of modern Yiddish poetry and their meaning for our own lives and labors.

The cost is $90-180, on a sliding scale. If you’d like to participate but the lower range of this would be prohibitive, please email me; no one will be turned away. And if you’re already a paying subscriber to this newsletter, please feel free to ignore that scale and pay whatever you’d like.

To register, please send payment to my paypal (djkraft13@gmail.com) or venmo (@danny-kraft-1) — in the payment message, include the email address where you’d like to receive the link, recordings, and other information. Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions, or head over to my website for more details.

Now, without further ado, let’s get into today’s poem. It comes from the same 1948 book, Heym un Heymlozikayt (Home and Homelessness) that included “Elul.” But while “Elul” was written in 1943, when Korn was a refugee in Fergana, Uzbekistan, this poem was written between 1939 and 1941, when World War II had already broken out, but the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union had not yet forced her to flee her home.

Dream

For H. Leivick - With Deepest Admiration

In wintry, white nights,
when sharp winds howl and weep and laugh,
the moon slashes a new path through the snowy void
with her pointed horn,
so that I won't get lost on way home
from distant world-journeys.

I stand before my old, straw-covered house a long time
and throw a bale of hay under the rotting fence,
for bending does and brown hares
chased by hunger from the deep forest.

My tear falls—and starts to blossom
the dry, rustling branches of the antlers
on the lean deer-heads, 
and blooms with snowy stars,
like thorns that flower white each spring.

I stand and wait—
maybe nearby will glow the amber-gold gaze
of my cat, who ran into the woods 
in those days when I abandoned my home, 
and nobody has seen her since.

I stand and wait—
maybe the shadow of my grandmother Chaya will slip through
when she goes with her footstool and pail out to the barn, 
to milk her cow, Flower, the faithful one,
who trusted no one else
until her death.

I stand and wait—
perhaps he will suddenly arrive here from the other world
with his winking, grinning eyes, 
one pitch-black and the other dove-gray,
on a night-quiet rendezvous
with a young, hot-blooded woman.
And against him will come my aunt Dvoyre,
blocking his way with her wide shawl
that flies around her shoulders like a dark stream.

I stand and wait—
I hear some kind of chase , a howling, a scream,
the forest at night is so vast and near—
perhaps it is running up to my grandfather's house
to reclaim the three pine trees?

Shh, someone calls to me, someone knows on the windowpanes,
I remember my father's thin hand—
he holds his bearskin coat wide for me:
"child, come in, day breaks and you are cold."

I am so small, and the coat—just look, how big it is!
He smells so good, I can't recall what that smell is from,
I want to remember...
But on the gray eyelash of the sky
the pale yellow tear of the sun already hangs
and drips onto the thin, fresh tracks
of doe and hare
who look for summer and grass
in the sad, snow-covered paths—
and in my dream,
which comes to meet them.

Another poem I find extraordinarily moving. (And it’s dedicated to H Leivick, whom long-time readers will recognize as the author of the very first poem I shared here, the one that kicked off this whole project.)

I’m thinking again of Korn’s idea that poems are “magical transporter[s] through time and space.” We see that here, as the dead come back to life and the poet inhabits, both briefly and through her eternal words, her “old, straw-covered house,” built by her grandfather. But to “time and space” I would add that the poem transports us through the borders between the dream world and the waking world, between conscious experience and the realm of the unconscious.

The poem is a dream, of course—that’s its title. But the borders of its dreamscape are porous. By the end of the poem the doe and the hare seem to me to have an objective existence as they look to forage through a long winter. They belong to the world of wakefulness, things and hunger and logic’s exigencies, as they leave the forest to find food. Nevertheless, they are swept into the immaterial world of the poet’s dream.

That closing gesture hits me every time. Where do the doe and the hare look for food? In the snow-covered paths that winter renders barren, and in a dream. Suddenly the distance between dreaming and wakefulness collapses: these creatures can move in and out of each as they search for sustenance.

I’ve heard it said by a few different people that art is a form of public dreaming. In the case of this poem, that’s literally true. In the dream, as in the poem, a tear’s falling can cause antlers to bloom. In the dream, as in the poem, creatures can leave the woods to forage through your consciousness.

We’re not so different from this hare and this doe. We, too, leave the snowy paths of our mundane lives to look for sustenance in the dream world artists offer us. How do they do it?

Korn offers us a clue into her own process through this poem’s refrain: “I stand and wait.” She does not rush into activity or interpretation. She simply waits, and listens, and is open to whatever might come, however strange or frightening or irrational it reveals itself to be. Korn discusses this as well in the 1977 speech I mentioned above. To be a poet, “One must be patient. One must wait.”

In that speech Korn also describes her rural childhood: “I would sit on the daybed in the kitchen and look through the window on the snow-covered expanse, and especially at the orchard, with its small, young sour cherry trees, their crowns just barely peeking out over the fallen snow which had formed a fortress around our house. And I would read a dark calligraphy etched into the white snow, the tracks of wild animals that had emerged from the forest to pay us visits in the night: foxes, hares, does, and sometimes even a wild boar.”

The “dark calligraphy” of the nocturnal animal tracks against the white snow: Korn’s language, even in prose, is vivid and precise. In adulthood she recalls her child’s sense of reading the magical, otherworldly writing left for her by non-human creatures. In this poem, she invites us into that experience of a child’s dream-like communion with “does and hares.”

Children dream and daydream shamelessly. But as Freud puts it: “the adult, on the other hand, is ashamed of his daydreams and conceals them from other people; he cherishes them as his most intimate possessions and as a rule he would rather confess all his misdeeds than tell his daydreams. For this reason he may believe that he is the only person who makes up such phantasies, without having any idea that everybody else tells himself stories of the same kind.” (That’s from Freud’s 1907 talk turned essay, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in a 1930 translation by Melvin Rader.)

I’m not interested in going into Freud’s whole theory of the relationship literary art and dreams, daydreams, reveries here. But I do think that, at least in this passage and its relevance to Korn’s “Dream,” he’s on to something essential. She has the courage to refuse any shame for continuing her childhood reveries into adulthood and publicizing them, and she has the artistry to make those reveries beautiful. We don’t need Freud’s fancy theories to connect poetry to the experience of childhood daydreams; we find that in the poem itself, when Korn returns to the people she remembers and to the physical sensations of being a little girl, engulfed by her father’s giant coat.

She stands and waits and lets the visions come, and invites us onto the “magical transporter” of her poem so that we, too, can join her at the junction of dream and waking reality.

(As always, there’s so much more I want to say about this poem. Korn remembers how her father smelled when she was young, and “can’t recall what that smell is from,” and “wants to remember.” I love this moment of crystallized tension between memory and forgetting. And the incredible strangeness and lucidity of her images: “the gray eyelash of the sky.” What a poem!)

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Today’s art painting: Edouard Manet’s 1870 “Effect of Snow on Petit-Montrouge”

Before we get to her life and work, though, here’s something on a bit of a lighter note. You probably weren’t expecting Jimmy Buffett to come up in this newsletter, but as he died last week, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share this Yiddish adaptation of his classic novelty song, “Why Don’t We Get Drunk And Screw.”

Thanks for indulging me in a little levity, before a return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Rokhl Korn was born Rokhl Häring in what is now Ukraine, in 1898. In her late teens, she began writing in Polish—the language of her upbringing—for Zionist and socialist newspapers, and only around age 20 did she start to learn Yiddish. It always amazes me when a writer can so thoroughly master a language they come to in adulthood; in Korn’s case, she began to study Yiddish after anti-semitic violence in Poland prompted her to eschew the Polish language. Her husband, Hersh Korn, was her Yiddish tutor. From then on she published widely in Yiddish literary journals, and released her first poetry collection, Dorf (Village), in 1928.

Poet Rokhl Korn, around 1930.

Along with her husband, daughter Irena (born 1922), and extended family, Korn was largely insulated from the first two years of World War II: they lived east of the German-occupied zone, while the Soviet-Nazi truce still held. But in 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Korn and her daughter were forced to flee as far as Uzbekistan. The two of them were the only members of their family able to escape the German onslaught: Korn’s husband, mother, siblings, and their entire families were all murdered.

Korn followed her daughter to Moscow, where her daughter enrolled in medical school, and after the war they returned briefly to Poland, then moved to Stockholm, Sweden, and in 1948 emigrated to Montreal, Canada. But Korn never stopped writing, and her poetry became a living testament to the losses she had suffered. As Seymour Levitan put it, “During and after World War II, homelessness became a major theme in her work. She now felt the obligation to speak for the Jewish people destroyed in the war. She saw herself as an eternal debtor to those who perished.”

She died in Montreal, in 1982. Her many books of poetry and prose—I haven’t mentioned the short stories or works of memoir she wrote—form one of the most vital and enduring bodies of work in modern Yiddish. For more information, a great resource on her life and writing is this website maintained by Montreal’s Jewish Public Library.

Today’s poem is called “Elul,” which is the Hebrew month in which we now find ourselves, traditionally a time of introspection and spiritual preparation for the High Holidays. She wrote this in 1943, while living as a refugee in Fergana, Uzbekistan, and published it in her 1948 collection, Heym un Heymlozikayt (Home and Homelessness).

Elul

The narrow path to the little earthen mound
is likely overgrown with nettles and grass,
but autumn strolls among the graves there,
as if searching for the silent heart of the world.

The gray stone bends down more,
as if it wants to lay an ear down to the earth,
to hear from the depths a sound, a sigh, a word,
everything its solitary fate is to interpret.

And perhaps, perhaps this will be the word
that on that hot summer night
extinguished itself like a star on your lips, father,
when only you and death, together, were awake.

And perhaps this word was appointed to me,
to me, the eldest daughter of barely eleven years,
and should have taught me through tears, through blood, through poetry,
to grow into the raw soil of a new reality.

But on that hot summer night I was
so tired from play, from sun, from wind,
that morning had only just awoken me 
when everything already said, "orphan," instead of child.

It is so quiet around me here in this desert country,
the autumn day withers in the sand,
and the swaying humps of the long camel train 
carry my gaze off to the open sky's edge.

The Elul wind still waits there for me,
fruitlessly searching for my footsteps in the grass.
Six thousand miles between me and that small earthen mound,
and a border lined with death and blood.

It’s a devastating poem of grief and longing and displacement. Elul, in addition to being a month of introspective preparation for the High Holidays, is also a traditional time to visit the graves of one’s parents. Korn’s father died of tuberculosis when was about 10 years old. But as a refugee, thousands of miles from his grave, the closest Korn can come to being where he is buried is imagining the desolate wind that blows through the overgrown grasses there.

Or maybe the closest she can come is not imagining the grave, but writing it, and her absence from it, in poetry. For Korn, here as in so many of her post-Holocaust poems, writing the world she has lost becomes a way of reinhabiting that world, even as it is lost forever. Home and Homelessness—two seemingly opposite poles of experience—is the title of the book from which this poem comes. But in between home and homelessness is a liminal space where home is both present and absent at once. Korn creates that space through her art. Between home and homelessness is nothing more or less than her poetry.

And this poem leaves us with a border; it refuses to end on a stable image. Borders, after all, while claiming to be fixed and secure demarcations of space, are in fact the most unstable spaces. They are liminality incarnate, betweenness as political and cartographic fact. Poems, too, are a kind of borderland, between the poet’s consciousness and the reader’s, between the poet’s inexpressible inner world and the possibility of articulate, outer experience.

That’s how I think of Korn, above all: as a poet of borders, of liminality, of raw and honest and excruciating in-betweenness. In this poem, she faces “a border lined with death and blood.” Her family, and the rituals with which she wishes she could mourn them, and her father’s dying word, that could have guided her into this harsh new world, lie over that border. Her body cannot go there, but through her art she smuggles herself across.

But there are borders in time as well as in space. More than any physical border, the line that separates us from the past can seem the most insurmountable. And again, Korn’s art smuggles her across the border that separates her from her youth; it brings her back precisely to that liminal moment when she transitioned from being “a child” to “an orphan.”

The contemporary poet Mihee Kim writes that “We seek out words that traverse time, beyond mortal boundaries.” Yes: that seeking brings us to poetry. In Rokhl Korn we find such words. Her poems carry us with her past the borders of our narrow selves, and our binary experiences of here versus there, of then versus now, and of home versus homelessness.

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Today’s visual art pairing: Gustav Klimt’s 1902 “Birch Forest 1”

I’m excited about this evening’s session on how Yiddish poets grappled with anti-black racism in the US. We’ll meet at 7:00 pm EST through this zoom link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/7327506079

If you have any questions, please let me know. I’m looking forward to seeing you!

-Daniel

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I’ve written a little bit about Margolin already, discussing the misogyny with which she was received, the violent eroticism of her religious visions, and more, when I shared her Mary cycle of poems last summer.

(Margolin at 16, courtesy of Wikimedia commons)

If you’re just tuning in, however, here’s a biographical overview: Margolin was born Rosa Lebensboym in 1887, in what’s now the Belarusian city of Brest.

(Digression alert: I say “what’s now” because when Rosa Lebensboym was born there, Brest was in the Lithuania region of the Russian empire. The city changed hands a few times from World War I until 1921, when it became part of Poland until World War II, and then changed hands a few times again: Nazi Germany, the Red Army, Soviet Belarus, etc…. To complicate things further, Jews never called the city Brest. Its Yiddish name was Brisk, and it was known across the world as a center of rabbinic scholarship; traditional Jews still talk about the Brisker approach to Talmud study. When I worked for the Judaica division of Harvard’s library, a big part of my job was standardizing hundreds of years of bibliographic references, changing now-nonexistent places like “Brisk, Lithuania” in the library catalog to their modern names. It was fascinating, tedious work, charged with obscure and contentious histories!)

Lebensboym moved several times in childhood and adolescence, living in Odessa, Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), and Warsaw before moving to New York in 1906, where she joined that city’s Yiddish literary community and began writing poetry, fiction, and journalism for Yiddish newspapers like the anarchist daily Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Free Voice of Labor).

But Lebensboym didn’t seem to want settle down. She moved back to Europe, living in London, Paris, Warsaw again, and Tel Aviv, getting married and having a son, leaving her husband and son in Palestine, and returning to New York in 1913.

(The signed title page of Margolin’s only poetry collection.)

She used a number of pen names, but published all her poetry as Anna Margolin. All her poetry: just one book Lider (Poems), in 1929, plus scattered poems in newspapers and journals. And then she went silent. From 1932 until her death 20 years later Margolin lived as a recluse, suffering from poor mental and physical health, eventually never leaving her apartment.

But that one book of poems! What a book it is, what a mark it’s made, what a haunting presence it’s had on my consciousness. I’m excited to share another of Margolin’s poems today; it’s one I’ve returned to many times.

First, though, a brief reminder, and a piece of ephemera.

The reminder: the next Zoom discussion for paying subscribers will be this coming Tuesday, 8/29, at 7:00 pm EST. We’ll explore the ways that Yiddish poets presented and responded to American anti-black racism and white supremacy. How did Yiddish poets in America, mostly left-leaning immigrants from Europe, use their verse as a way of reacting against the racial violence they encountered here? It’ll be a fascinating program that I’m really looking forward to, and all paying subscribers will get a zoom link.

And the ephemera, to lighten the mood: a 1932 newspaper ad for the Tomche Tmimim Lubavitz Kosher Wurst Factory, Inc.

“Good news for American Orthodox Jewry,” the ad proclaims: “the students of the great Lubavitch Yeshiva ‘Tomchei Tmimim,’” a mystically-inclined rabbinical seminary, “have opened a wurst factory” on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Delicious! I love these small moments of cultural convergence. At last, if you found yourself lamenting the challenge of finding good sausage made by mystical rabbinical students, your day had come!

(Thanks to Eli Rubin for sharing this on twitter, or whatever twitter’s supposed to be called now.)

But without further ado, here’s Anna Margolin’s poem. It’s one of the first poems in her book, from the opening section, called “Roots.”

In Streets

Here a word of fear, and there a word full of regret.
Here I wept, and there I rested, suffering.
You have converted every street into Golgotha,
down every street my blood runs.

Here I wept. The walls dully
thundered a harsh decree against the weak and lost.
So many lords and ladies watched 
the way a woman walked in tears, through twilight.

Was prayer and was fury, regret.
And now the last terror-filled note cries out
from life, sinking into the dust.
Nevertheless, O God, O Torturer, I believe:
with dying fingers I will lightly touch a star,
will hear an infinitely deep and caring word.

In the introduction to her bilingual Margolin collection, Drunk from the Bitter Truth, Shirley Kumove quotes from a letter that Margolin wrote: “I haven’t ever been able to be secular even though when I was very young I was a flaming anarchist. I have always talked to God, and in times of sorrow, I admit I have given God hell.”

It’s an illuminating passage: for Margolin, secularism isn’t an ideology, a value system, a philosophical claim about the world. It’s an impossibility! Some people talk about being unable to believe in God, regardless of how they try, but Margolin’s experience is the opposite: she can’t not believe, no matter how much she suffers, no matter how absurd or disquieting belief might be.

Margolin was not, by any means, an orthodox believer. She was less Moses, more Job, “giving God hell” when God deserved it. And in this poem we find an expression of her anguished, honest, ambivalently consoling faith.

“You have converted every street into Golgotha,” the poem’s speaker says. It’s an astonishing, horrifying image: every place is the archetypal site of the deepest pain and despair. It’s also a daring image for a Jewish poet writing in a Jewish language, appropriating Christian mythology in her search for the perfect metaphor. Or perhaps better to say reappropriating: according to Christian tradition, Golgotha is the location where Jesus was crucified, but the etymology comes from the Hebrew/Aramaic for skull.

Margolin’s bleak vision is of a world in which anywhere one goes is Golgotha, that place where the innocent suffer unto death. And, most daringly of all, it’s God’s fault. That, at least, is how I read the “You” in this line’s “You have converted,” since this poem contains no other second person addressee than God. This isn’t theology; Margolin isn’t theorizing about God, or recounting her experiences with divinity. No: this is anguished prayer, is fearless accusation, a new round in the human-divine wrestling match that begins in the book of Genesis.

You, God, Margolin is saying, have transformed all of life into the scene of infinite anguish. You are the supernal “Torturer.” When we consider the ways that Margolin suffered because of her physical and mental health, and when we consider the vast and petty suffering that takes place all around us and within us, every day, how can we fault her for saying this? It’s a striking illustration of the claim in her letter, that she has “given God hell.”

But the poem ends, somehow, in faith. “Nevertheless,” Margolin believes that her “dying fingers… will lightly touch a star,” that she will graze transcendence. Despite the endless despair God causes, she believes that “an infinitely deep and caring word” awaits her.

In this poem Margolin expresses a relationship to God that goes beyond categories of belief and disbelief, a faith profound enough to contain even its rejection. Like Job before her, Margolin’s refusal to deny the terrible reality of human suffering, and the role that any God must be playing in that pain, brings her to the brink of revelation. And also like Job, she expresses her anguished prayers and accusations in beautiful, enduring poetry.

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Today’s art pairing: Frida Kahlo’s 1946 “The Wounded Deer.” I don’t have the clearest articulation of why this painting jumped out at me as a partner to this poem, except to say that they are both honest, idiosyncratic expressions of suffering, and of the ways that suffering can find a form in mysterious, transcendent beauty. Just as for Margolin the reality of suffering transforms the whole world into Golgotha, I have the sense seeing this painting that for Kahlo, the whole world is a hunting ground, and every human is, in potential or in actuality, God’s prey.

To commemorate this dark anniversary, I shared a poem last year by Peretz Markish, one of that night’s murdered writers, and I’ll return to him again today, with one of his better-known poems, a true favorite of my own. I won’t rehash the biographical background from that post, except to reiterate that a young Markish had great hair — he’s in the center of this 1922 photo, leaning against the table:

The picture above shows the men behind Di Khalyastre, “The Gang,” an avant-garde interwar Yiddish journal in Warsaw. Some of its publications were illustrated by Marc Chagall, like this cool cover page:

You can also find Chagall’s sketched portrait of Markish here.

Last year’s post about Markish includes more about his life, and this piece by Rokhl Kafrissen is a great read about the dynamics of commemorating the Night of the Murdered Poets.

I want to be explicit that, when we talk about this kind of state-sponsored genocidal violence, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” as the saying goes. In 1952, at the age of 57, Markish, a Ukrainian-born poet, was murdered by Stalin; a few weeks ago, the Ukrainian poet Victoria Amelina was murdered by Putin’s genocidal war machine. It’s easy to commemorate the past’s atrocities, but harder to acknowledge the ways that those atrocities continue.

Before we get to our poem, I’m excited to announce the next Zoom discussion, for paying subscribers. On Tuesday, 8/29, at 7:00 pm EST, we’ll meet to explore the ways that Yiddish poets presented and responded to American anti-black racism and white supremacy. How did Yiddish poets in America, mostly left-leaning immigrants from Europe, use their verse as a way of reacting against the racial violence they encountered here? It’ll be a fascinating program that I’m really looking forward to, and all paying subscribers will get a zoom link.

Below is Markish’s great poem בראָכשטיקער, or “Shards.” Written 75 years ago, it describes an existential predicament that — like the authoritarian violence which took its author’s life — feels quite contemporary.

Shards

Now when my vision turns in, towards itself, 
it is a rupture, how my eyes open and everything they are
sees that my heart has fallen like a mirror on a stone,
and with a crash has shattered into pieces.

It is certain that each shard will not be free
to serve as witness for me, not until my destined end.
Do not crush me, my Judge, You, Time,
until I can recover every scattered shard.

I will try to collect them, piece by piece—
to join them again, until my fingers split and bleed—
But no matter how skillfully I put them back together, 
I will always see myself in them, ruined and broken.

Now the answer comes to me in grief,
in the agony of fusion. I understand ferociously
the pain of wanting to see myself — whole — in a mirror
whose shards are scattered across the seven seas.

What an incredible image for the agonizing sense of self-estrangement, of inner collapse, of psychic dispersal, that modernity brings. The poet looks inside himself and sees that his heart “has fallen like a mirror on a stone.” What’s left of his spiritual life, of the mirror that once enabled him to see himself clearly? Just jagged shards scattered across the world.

The way this newsletter normally works, I write a sort of mini-essay here, sharing some reflections that I hope will help you to find these poems as meaningful and as vital as I do. But sometimes my love and awe for a poem makes it hard to think of anything to say, beyond: Wow, I really love this poem.

This is one of those times. But can’t love be a helpful hermeneutic in itself? I’ve been sitting here, trying to come up with something smart to say, when perhaps “I love this poem” is the most honest response I can give, and “let me try to say why” is the most helpful commentary.

So why do I love this poem?

The great Russian modernist Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in her diary: "my difficulty (in writing poems—and perhaps other people's difficulty in understanding them) is in the impossibility of my goal, for example, of using words to express a moan: ah—ah—ah.” (This is Ilya Kaminsky’s translation of the Russian.) This is a helpful description of what poetry can do — or, given the impossibility Tsvetaeva identifies, of what poetry can’t do, but does anyway.

When I read much of Markish’s poetry, and this poem in particular, I find the great moan, the inarticulate sense of spiritual homelessness, that I feel as a modern Jew and a modern person, expressed in ways I couldn’t have imagined or anticipated. I know I’m not alone in this. Towards the beginning of Ulysses, the character Stephen Dedalus, a sort of stand-in for James Joyce, watches a dog exploring the beach. The “dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life.”

Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce, Peretz Markish, me, maybe you — we’re sniffing around, looking for something that we lost before we were born. Markish’s metaphor for this existential experience is the broken mirror that he knows he can never make whole, even as he must keep trying, with bleeding fingers. Or really we should say that Markish uses two metaphors, layered on top of each other: the first is his heart, and the second is the shattered mirror his heart has become. There is the inner integrity he is looking for, and the broken pieces it leaves behind. And then the compulsion to restore them, the impossible compulsion.

“The pain of wanting to see myself — whole — in a mirror / whose shards are scattered.” Do you know that pain? I want to suggest that it’s an essential part of being a modern human. Maybe it was an essential part of being a pre-modern human too, but I wouldn’t know.

So why do I love this poem? I love it because it makes both intelligible and beautiful a psycho-spiritual experience of fundamental rupture, and of the need to make that rupture whole, with the twinned certainty that this is a need I can never fulfill. This poem gives me language for my experience, which is to say: it makes me legible to myself.

I am genuinely curious to ask: do you find your own experience reflected in this poem as much as I do? And of course, I haven’t even touched on the third stanza about the Judge, Time, and the shards serving as witnesses…. I find this chunk of the poem resonant and haunting and elusive, and I’d love to hear what you make of it in the comments below.

(Side note - for a few reasons I found the Yiddish of this poem exceedingly difficult, one of the most challenging I’ve worked on for this newsletter. Yiddish readers, do you agree that the language here is particularly hard, or have any thoughts on my translation?)

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Today’s art pairing: an incomplete tile panel, likely from around 1430, produced by the Damascus workshop of Ibn al-Ghaibi al‑Tawrizi:

I mentioned that Halpern was trained as a commercial artist; this training began at a young age, when Halpern’s father recognized his artistic aptitude. But it didn’t begin so auspiciously. The story goes that, when Halpern was around 11 years old, his father arranged for him to do some trial work with a local sign painter named Naftoli. This Naftoli assigned young Moyshe-Leyb to paint a stereotypical Turk, wearing green pants and smoking a pipe, as an advertisement for a tobacco shop. Instead of his assignment, Moyshe-Leyb—ever the non-conformist—painted a pipe-less Turkish man dressed in ragged, multi-colored pants.

“Well, that’s how I imagine a Turk,” Moyshe-Leyb explained, and suggested that if the pipe was so important, they could borrow a real one from the tobacco shop and attach it to the painting.

Halpern’s apprenticeship with Naftoli did not, apparently, last long. But he did develop into a gifted artist, about which you can read a little bit more here.

I’m particularly taken by descriptions of the furniture he fashioned for his family’s Bronx apartment. One acquaintance recalled his furniture as “bizarre… all of it stylized, grotesque.” From what I’ve seen, that description doesn’t seem so fair, but you can find Halpern’s son recollecting some of his father’s DIY furniture adventures here:

Halpern was born in 1886 in the small town of Zlotshov, which was the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now Ukraine. I say this as background for today’s poem, which is one of his better-known and more studied works. I took the Yiddish below from his 1924 collection Di Goldene Pave (The Golden Peacock), a book that was published with some very cool illustrations:

Zlotshov, My Home

Oh Zlotshov, you, my home, my city
with your church steeple and synagogue and bath,
and with your women at the market,
and your unleashed little Jews
like dogs who go after a peasant coming down
with a small basket of eggs from Sasiv mountain—
life in spring awakens in me
my poor scrap of longing for you—
my home, my Zlotshov. 

But when I remember, with longing,
that wealthy Rappaport, and how he walks
with his fat stomach into synagogue,
and pious Shaye Hillel,
who could sell even the sun and its shine
like a sow in a sack—
that is enough to blow out my longing for you
within me, just like a light—
my home, my Zlotshov.

How does the story go about that fop:
One evening, for so long without a rest,
he watched angels circle the sun,
until a drunk gentile with an ax
struck him beneath his tailcoat,
and it almost killed the poor man—
the gentile with the ax is my hatred within me
for my grandfather, and because of him, for you—
my home, my Zlotshov.

Your earth is a witness that I am not inventing this.
When my grandfather had my mother
evicted from the house by the police,
my grandmother, with her legs spread,
smiled almost as sweet as honey,
like a gentile girl who stands between two soldiers—
so let my hatred within me be cursed,
as it reminds me of her and of you—
my home, my Zlotshov.

Like a group of naked Jews in a bath
around a man who's been burnt, in a circle
they shook their heads and stroked their beards
around the thrown out packs
and rags and junk in sacks,
around the pieces of the broken bed—
my mother weeps, even now, within me,
as she did then, beneath your sky, in you—
my home, my Zlotshov.

But wondrous is our world:
a horse and cart over the field
can take a person to the train,
which flies like a demon over the fields, away,
until it brings them to a ship with steerage,
which takes them off to New York, downtown—
and this is truly my one consolation,
that I will not be buried in you—
my home, my Zlotshov. 

There’s a vague and pervasive shtetl-nostalgia for many American Jews. Blame Fiddler on the Roof, perhaps, or the inadequate compensations American assimilation offers for the loss of our past. This poem begins with Halpern’s nostalgic longing for Zlotshov, his home-shtetl, but quickly turns to recall the painful realities of life there, Zlotshov’s (and Halpern’s family’s) brutality and hypocrisy and poverty, before rejecting nostalgia completely.

(Incidentally, did you know that in early modern Europe, nostalgia was considered a curable disease? Doctors prescribed particular treatments for it, which could include a return to the place for which one was nostalgic. It seems strange to us now, perhaps, to pathologize and try to medically cure nostalgia, but is it any stranger than prescribing antidepressant drugs for the treatment of grief?)

Spring incites Halpern’s nostalgic longing, but honest memories extinguish that longing like a candle. And suddenly, shockingly, Halpern’s tone towards his hometown shifts from yearning to hatred. I love this poem in part because of hoew jarring I find that turn, every time I read it. The homesickness for an idealized, imaginary shtetl is seemingly safe American-Jewish emotional territory, so the beginning of the poem seems familiar, even comfortable. But we feel the first tremors of discomfort with that strange, destabilizing comparison of Zlotshov’s Jews to unleashed dogs. By the time we get to “the gentile with the ax” we can’t hide the from the discomfiting honesty of this poem’s recollections, and by the time that gentile’s hatred becomes Halpern’s hatred for his family and for his hometown, we’re in uncharted territory.

A lesser poem would see “the gentile with the ax” as a purely external force, a victimizer of Zlotshov’s Jews. But Halpern’s uncompromising brilliance demands that he not see himself as psychically distinct from those forces of violence: “the gentile with the ax is my hatred within me.” The Zlotshov he’d been homesick for never existed in isolation, and the brutality it contained cannot really be escaped, because it is a part of him forever.

This poem puts me in mind of scholar Svetlana Boym’s theories of nostalgia, a feeling which she divides into two types. There’s “restorative nostalgia,” which wants to recreate an imagined past, and “does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition.” (Make America Great Again, etc….) But there’s also “reflective nostalgia,” which “thrives in… longing itself.” She writes: “Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.”

Halpern is presenting us, I think, with a complicated sort of “reflective nostalgia.” Longing transforms into hatred, and hatred transforms into the “one consolation”: that death will be an eternal escape from Zlotshov, with no possibility of ever returning. Indeed, as Boym puts it: “While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one’s homeland with paranoid determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion.”

I am the kind of person who is chronically, often depressively, nostalgic, and I find this poem helpful for the ways it so forcefully turns that nostalgia on its head. Not that art should be therapeutic to be worthwhile, but I experience this poem as a sort of therapist grabbing me by the shoulders, trying to shake me out of my nostalgic fantasies, forcing me not to look away from all the savage truth and pain nostalgia serves to mask.

There’s a political aspect to this as well, as authoritarian nationalism based around “restorative nostalgia” continues to ascend here in the US, in Israel, and in so many other places. Halpern shows us, with unavoidable clarity, the violence that restorative nostalgia hides, and that nostalgic nationalism threatens.

But even with that violence, and with the relief of his escape, Halpern and Zlotshov are always connected.. His mother weeps in him, and she weeps in Zlotshov, which—by the transitive property—suggests that some part of him overlaps with some part of his hometown. Although the refrain of “My Zlotshov, my home” has taken on a bitter irony by the poem’s end, it is so bitter precisely because it is also still true. We can never really escape where we come from, or what we yearn for, even as we’re glad to never have to go back there again.

Boym gestures towards this ambivalence, as well, and considers it a necessary personal and political stance towards nostalgia. She writes: “The imperative of a contemporary nostalgic: to be homesick and to be sick of being at home—occasionally at the same time.” In Halpern’s poetry we find a model for this contradiction. He hates Zlotshov even as he longs for it; he’s comforted that he’ll be buried far from his hometown, even as he can never really leave his hometown behind.

Within the losses of the modern world, may we all find ways to be as honest about the tensions of our own nostalgia, and may that honesty about the past enable us to build a more livable and life-affirming future.

And today’s art pairing: Anselm Kiefer’s 1989 Lot’s Wife:

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(A common theme, long-time readers of this newsletter might notice: Yiddish modernists beginning their careers in languages like German or Russian or Polish, and only later writing in Yiddish.)

But unlike some of his colleagues in New York’s Yiddish literary scene, Halpern never really adjusted to America. In verse and in life he remained a non-conformist. The Yiddish writer Mani Leib reflected: “we, his friends, like all other Jewish immigrants, also bore the fear of this wondrous unknown called America. But somehow we . . . gave in, adapted ourselves, ‘ripened’ and gradually became . . . real Americans. Not Moyshe-Leyb. He could never compromise or bend.”

Impoverished and often depressed, Halpern struggled to fit in. He was trained as a commercial artist, but had a hard time keeping employment; as Ruth Wisse puts it, “he failed to find steady work in the small factories, manual trades, or editorial offices where most of the other [Yiddish writers] eventually made their living, and this economic precariousness, which continued practically without interruption until his death, contributed to his image as a troubling nonconformist, and to his artistic distance.”

That’s a dry description, but here’s a representative anecdote. Halpern worked briefly as a presser in the garment shop run by one Yitzchak Bloom, in the Bronx. Benjamin Harshav writes that “Bloom later described the poet ‘standing with a hot heavy iron in his enormous hand, pressing a pair of trousers and reciting verses of a new poem to himself.’ Suddenly, the smell of burning cloth would interrupt Halpern’s inspiration. The big Moyshe-Leyb would stand forlorn like a guilty child. His career as a presser thus came to an end.” It’s hard to be a luftmensch in America.

In 1919, Halpern married Rayzele Barron. Their son, Isaac Halpern, became an influential physicist. There’s more to say about Halpern’s life beyond this brief introduction, and I plan to say more in upcoming newsletters. He died in 1934, of a heart attack. The poem below is taken from a 1954 printing of his collection In New York, originally published in 1919.

Memento Mori

And if Moyshe-Leyb, the poet, should say
that he saw death in the waves,
as someone sees himself in a mirror,
and it was right in the morning, around ten--
would anyone believe Moyshe-Leyb?

And if Moyshe-Leyb welcomed death 
from afar, with a wave, and asked how it's going?
precisely when thousands of people
are in the water, wildly rejoicing?--
would anyone believe Moyshe-Leyb?

And if Moyshe-Leyb swears, with tears in his eyes,
that he is drawn towards death
just as a yearning man is drawn at evening
to the window of a woman he has sanctified--
would anyone believe Moyshe-Leyb?

And if Moyshe-Leyb should paint death for them
not gray, not dark, but color-rich and beautiful,
as death appeared around ten o'clock,
there, far away, between sky and waves--
would anyone believe Moyshe-Leyb?

In a critical essay on Halpern, our friend Jacob Glatstein—from whom this newsletter takes its name—writes that Halpern “wanted to play out his own truth—the fear of a premature death. This fear was the most authentic in him, so much himself as his own polished word.”

Well, I don’t completely understand what that means. But I take it to suggest that the fear of an early death was an essential aspect of Halpern’s life, as near to him as his art was, and that he couldn’t help but express this fear, because it was inextricable from his experience of himself. Of course this fear came true, with his fatal heart attack at the age of 46. Should we see this as coincidence, or as a kind prophecy: life imitating art imitating the artist’s deepest terrors?

What Glatstein calls “fear of a premature death” is all over this poem, obviously, but it’s not just fear: there’s a yearning, an erotic desire for death. Death not as abstraction or absence or cessation of being, but as a vision, something as clear and palpable as the poet’s own reflection in a mirror. We turn to poetry in part in order to experience something new, and never before reading this did I think of death as a specter floating above the ocean on a beautiful summer beach day, “color-rich and beautiful.”

It’s a strange “Memento Mori,” isn’t it? Halpern doesn’t seem to need to be reminded of death, because it’s right before him, “not dark” and dazzling. (I don’t know enough to say anything smart about this, but I’ll note that this poem was first published a year before Freud began to write about “the death drive.”)

And the poem finds power and energy in its odd, conditional tone. Moyshe-Leyb isn’t, after all, describing his visions of death. Instead he’s wondering about what would happen if he were to attempt a description. Would he be believed? I believe him already. But it’s an unusual stance for a poem to take. I love the humanness and vulnerability of this stance: poet not as a confident seer, but as a tentative one, wondering aloud how his visions will be received. And in a way I can’t quite pin down (so as always I’d love to hear your thoughts) that makes the visions all the more compelling.

What a different poem this would be if, instead of asking questions, it pronounced: “I, the poet Moyshe Leib, saw death….” It doesn’t invite me as intimately into its images, or into the consciousness of the one who wonders how I’ll receive them.

But this poem’s questioning stance also signals the poet’s profound loneliness. Imagine, for a moment, how you would feel if you saw death on the waves while you sat at the beach, surrounded by people enjoying a wonderful morning. You’d also worry about whether to tell them, and what they would say. Within a crowd of vacationers, you’d feel—aside from death’s looming companionship—entirely alone.

This isn’t only Halpern’s predicament. It’s all of ours. In a culture which wants to flatten out our idiosyncrasies, and reduce our visionary imaginations, our fears of death, our unassimilated wildness into a pathology or an occasion for consumerism, I find it hard not to identify with this poem. Will anyone believe us if we reveal our true selves, with all our weirdness and irrational desire and terrors? How will we be received? Thank God we have art in which we can play out these questions, and see them reflected before us, and feel a little less alone.

Today’s art pairing: James Ensor’s 1888 painting, “Masks Confronting Death”

Tomorrow evening, 6/15, at 7:00 pm EST, we’ll come together on zoom to discuss women in Yiddish poetry. I’ve really enjoyed these subscriber discussions, and I hope to see you! If you have any questions, please let me know. We’ll use this link:

Danny Kraft is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

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The poem below is one of Leyeles’ best-known, and one of my favorites. It was published in his 1947 collection A Yid Afn Yam, “A Jew on the Sea,” but the particular text below is taken from an earlier anthology of Yiddish poets, published in New York in February, 1943. I don’t know exactly when Leyeles wrote this poem, but I mention that anthology because I’m fascinated by the idea of America’s Yiddish readers coming across this poem, and of Leyeles himself drafting it, alongside the still-breaking news of the catastrophe befalling Europe’s Jewish civilization. It makes me wonder: how is this poem a response to the Holocaust while it was still ongoing, and how is it a criticism of the cultures of Christian Europe which perpetrated or allowed that genocide?

Before we get into the poem, though, a quick reminder: Tomorrow, Thursday evening, June 15, at 7:00 pm EST, I’ll host the next zoom chat for paying subscribers. Our theme will be women’s poetry in Yiddish. Each of these zoom discussions has been wonderful, filled with lively conversation from diverse participants, and I’m looking forward to this next one. All paying subscribers will receive a zoom link later today, but if you’d like to come and aren’t able to afford the subscription, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

The God of Israel

The God of Israel is not rich.
I've seen the Sistine Chapel,
Notre-Dame, the Cologne Cathedral.
The eye revels in them, the eye is pleased.

The God of Israel is stingy.
He does not want to fill his museum with statues,
with paintings and drawings, altars, palanquins,
purple robes, three-tiered crowns.
He does not want to live in a palace.
The Jewish museum does not have much to show.
A Chanukah lamp, a curtain, a scroll,
a spice box, a tefillin bag, a yad,
a menorah, a Torah crown, implements for circumcision,
and ancient, ancient-past-ancient handwriting.
Another manuscript, and another manuscript, 
rolled up, bound up, tied together,
letters in love with letters.

What does the God of Israel want?
What does the God of Israel demand?
The God of Israel is a just demander.
The God of Israel is a harsh demander.
The God of Israel is a stingy demander:
seek for yourself, learn for yourself, suffer for yourself--
for your and for my own honor.

Back in a gray-gray past he took two heaps of letters
threw them from a mountaintop,
scattered them across the paths of the world.
They glittered with words,
they flamed with sentences,
and since then--
for thousands of years we search for them,
for thousands of years we gather them,
for thousands of years we interpret them,
and there is still no end
for the letters, for the sentences, for the words.

Another manuscript, and another manuscript,
rolled up, tied up, bound together--
letters in love with letters. 

As is so often the case in this newsletter—why else would I pick the things I pick?—I love this poem, and my declaration of love is perhaps the most important thing I have to say about it. In a culture that habitually denigrates so much of what refuses to be commodified, isn’t a declaration of love for a Yiddish poem in itself a worthwhile gesture in itself? But it’s also a poem about love: about language as love, and poetry as love’s manifestation.

I read this poem as theology and ars poetica at once. The Jewish God wants not gaudiness, not external displays of beauty, but simple ritual objects and the humble, handwritten manuscript, which is itself already an artifact of love: letters entwined with letters in an erotic dance. And similarly: simple letters are as worshipful as a vast cathedral.

How could a poet not be smitten with this poem? How could anyone who, against our culture’s increasing disrespect for language as something real, believes that language deserves attention and dignity, and is, or at least can be, an experience of numinous creativity?

(I want to add here that my wife reads this poem in a totally opposite way. She sees it not as celebration of the Jewish God’s “stinginess,” but as criticism. Letters in love with letters, she says, but where’s the human touch in that self-referential relationship? Still, I think that this poem is celebrating the relative austerity and simplicity of Jewish life, and the central role text and language play within it. But it’s a worthwhile other reading, and as always I’d love to hear your thoughts.)

When I lived in Jerusalem I would walk down to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and marvel at the sights and smells and sounds there: incense and oil and the sweat of pilgrims, weeping and chanting, icons and mosaics on the walls. I felt viscerally like an outsider in that Christian shrine, but also felt, if I’m being honest, a vague sense of envy. What Jewish spaces are as sensually rich as that? Where is the synagogue that rivals the great architectural achievements of Christianity?

Of course there are a number of compelling answers to these questions. But Leyeles’ answer is distinctive, and important: Jewish manuscripts, Jewish texts, Jewish texts about texts, along with the humble ritual objects found in any Jewish home, are our Sistine Chapel. All the beauty and desire one could find in the great works of Christian art are present in Jewish language, and because Jewish language interprets more Jewish language, forever and ever, then unlike the Sistine Chapel, the cathedral of Jewish language is unlimited in space or time. For thousands of years letters have continued their erotic dance. Language—which does not need to be consecrated, because it is itself already sacred, gleaming and flaming as God spills it from God’s hands—never ends.

Something a little different for this art installment - a Jewish protective amulet of sorts, from 19th century India, courtesy of the Magnes Collection at UC Berkeley. Letters in love with letters!

Born in Belarus in 1887, Dropkin—like many poets of her generation—received both a Jewish and a secular education, and began writing in Russian before switching to Yiddish. She emigrated to New York in 1912, and died there in 1956. Along the way, she lived for a few years in West Virginia and here in Virginia, a sojourn I’ve begun to research with the help of the good folks at the Library of Virginia, so hopefully I’ll have some more to say about that soon.

Dropkin wrote just one book in her life, 1934’s poetry collection In Heysn Vint, “In a Hot Wind.” It’s a wonderful book. She also published short stories, and was a great painter as well, but her greatest achievements were in poetry. As scholar and translator Kathryn Hellerstein writes, “The explicitly sexual imagery and themes of Celia Dropkin’s poems redefined the ways modern Yiddish poetry could depict relationships between women and men. Beautifully crafted lyrics, Dropkin’s poems undo the poetic conventions implicit in their very forms and, with their anger and passion, call into question societal assumptions about love.”

I also like Sheva Zucker’s distillation of Dropkin’s work: “Poetry of the head is not for her. She is a heart poet.”

Celia Dropkin - photo courtesy of John Dropkin

So I hope you enjoy this belated Mother’s Day poem, taken from 1934’s In Heysn Vint.

First, though, on Thursday evening, June 15, at 7:00 pm EST, I’ll host the next zoom chat for paying subscribers. Our theme will be women’s poetry in Yiddish. Each of these zoom discussions has been wonderful, filled with lively conversation from diverse participants, and I’m looking forward to this next one. All paying subscribers will receive a zoom link, but if you’d like to come and aren’t able to afford the subscription, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

My Mother

My mother, at 22 years old
a widow left with two small children, 
modestly decided 
never to become anyone's wife again. 
Quietly her days and years passed,
as if illuminated by a stingy wax candle. 
My mother never became anybody's wife again
but the many days and years and nights of sighs
from her young and loving existence
did I grasp with my child's heart;
I soaked them deep into myself.
And my mother's hot, hidden longing
flowed freely into me
as if from an underground spring.
Now it gushes openly from me,
my mother's hot and holy,
deeply hidden desire.

You see what I mean about how astonishingly contemporary Dropkin’s eroticism seems even today, almost a century after this poem was published. And what a poem it is: so rich and so deep in its deceptive simplicity. I read this, and much of Dropkin’s writing, as a kind of proto-confessional poetry, separated by a generation and a language from the midcentury writers in English who made that “confessional” label famous.

But I don’t want to make too reductive a comparison between Dropkin and what we now think of as American confessional poetry. The differences between them are significant, and are helpful in clarifying Dropkin’s unique power (and confessional poetry’s limitations, though that’s not the point today.)

In her poem “In Those Years,” Adrienne Rich criticizes confessional poetry. “We found ourselves / reduced to I,” she writes, while meanwhile history rages. Dropkin refuses this diminishment; she refuses to reduce herself to the narrow borders of her ego and experiences. Yes, she speaks in “My Mother” of her own biography and of her mother’s, and of the ways that her mother’s repression transform into her liberation. But she isn’t “just” speaking of her own, limited life. She gestures, through herself, beyond herself, to the 20th century’s feminist revolutions, and to the (halting, resisted, inconsistent but nevertheless significant) movement towards what we might now call sex-positivity.

We can also distinguish between Dropkin’s poetry and the confessional movement’s often implicit, and implicitly Christian, sense of shame. “My Mother” is a subtly but unmistakably Jewish poem. As Sheva Zucker writes, “The image of the wax candle begrudgingly lighting her days is an implicit allusion to the lighting of the Sabbath candles. The unspoken contrast between the begrudging wax candles and the hoped for spiritual satisfaction derived from blessing the Sabbath candles, one of a Jewish woman’s most important mitsves (commandments), suggests that this tradition is not a source of joyous spirituality for the mother but rather of unnatural physical privation.”

Hidden in this poem, in other words, we can find a feminist critique of traditional Judaism’s limiting views of femininity, a critique which precedes by several decades the scholars and activists who are known for developing it.

But Dropkin celebrates her desires. Her mother’s longing, once hidden, is now free to express itself without embarrassment or indignity. What an amazing idea this poem presents of the ways that repressed experiences are inherited, not in the mind but in the body.

And so much hinges on that adjective in the second to last line of the poem, הייליק, holy, to describe the desire that is passed on to her. That adjective’s presence is a radical argument in itself. Rather than rejecting religion or sacredness, seeing these purely as categories that caused her mother’s repression, Dropkin reclaims them. She does not throw the implicit Shabbos candle away, but lets it cast its light on lust, on desire, and lets lust and desire in turn cast their holy light backwards through time on her mother’s suppression.

Backwards through time, but forwards as well: to insist that a woman’s once-stifled lust is not just legitimate but holy is a radical and provocative claim, in 1934 as in 2023. I described Dropkin as a sort of proto-confessional poet, but maybe it would be more accurate to describe the confessional poets as wannabe Celia Dropkins, writers who toyed with but could never fully embrace—as she could—the transcendent power of their nominal transgressions.

Alongside today’s poem, here is Miriam Schapiro’s 1991 painting “Agony in the Garden.”

First, though, here’s a neat piece of Yiddish ephemera I stumbled on recently: a 1925 ad soliciting donations for the “world library” of Jewish religious books at Poland’s great Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, which was once the largest yeshiva—a traditional seminary for Jewish talmudic study—in the world. “Donate books,” the ad exhorts, in order to meet the yeshiva’s goal of collecting 100,000 volumes.

When the Nazis occupied Lublin, they turned the yeshiva into a military police headquarters, and jubilantly burnt its renowned library in Lublin’s market square. History repeats itself in odd ways: in 2003, the yeshiva’s building was transferred back to Poland’s Jewish community, and when Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the yeshiva was transformed into a makeshift refugee center to house hundreds of Jews who had fled from the war. It’s an interesting glimpse into the vibrancy of pre-war Ashkenazi culture in Poland, and into the ways that culture persists beyond the chaos of the 20th century to become a force for good in the 21st.

But without further ado, here are two more poems by the late, brilliant Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, the last great Yiddish poet of her generation. (I am still dealing with the same substack formatting bug that’s messing up my Yiddish typing here, so apologies for that - the perils of writing from right to left on platform designed for English!)

Recollection

They remember how I used to write poems,
to cry poems,
to silence poems
on the red cobblestones.
They remember me by the barbed wire fence,
my young skin
tattooed by barbed prongs,
to see a small thread of the sunset,
of my own setting in the final sun.
I sang then
and my song 
was our sun.

דערמאָנונג

זיי געדענקע װי כ'פֿלעג שרײַבן לידער,
װיינען לידער,
שװײַגן לידער
אױפֿן רױטן ברוק.
געדענקען מיך בײַם שטעכלפּלױט,
פֿון שטעכלשפּיצן אױסגעטאַטויִרט
מײַן יונגע הױט,
צו זען אַ פֿעדעמל פֿון זונפֿאַרגאַנג,
פֿון אייגענעם פֿאַרגאַנג אין לעצטער זון.
געזונגען האָב איך דמאָלט
און מײַן ליד-
געװען איז אונדזער זון.

To Tell

To tell 
means to set out again
and to arrive at the abyss
of yesterdays.

To tell
means to be watchfully awake
like an owl
that swallows the radiance
from night. 

To tell
means going blindly to a fight
and remaining with wounds
and with sleepless
nights.

דערציילן

דערציילן
מיינט װידער זיך לאָזן אין װעג
און קומען צום תּהום
פֿון נעכטיקע טעג.

דערציילן
מיינט װערן זעעװדיק װאַך
װי אַ סאָװע,
װאָס שלינגט דאָס ליכט
פֿון דער נאַכט.

דערציילן 
מיינט גיין צו אַ בלינדן געפֿעכט
און בלײַבן מיט װוּנד און מיט
שלאָפֿלאָזע
נעכט.

The last two poems I shared by Basman Ben-Hayim spoke elliptically about her traumatic wartime experiences, but here we find them more explicitly discussed. Recall that she began to write poems while imprisoned at the Kaiserwald concentration camp, and would recite them in the evenings to boost the morale of her fellow prisoners. “I sang then / and my song / was our sun” references this time. A lot of other poets would write a line like this, describing their art-making as the sun, and I’d roll my eyes at the hubris.

But here’s no hubris: if anyone has earned the right to claim that her poetry was the sun, it’s Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim. In the context of this poem, and of her life, this is the perfect image for art’s capacity to cast a sudden illumination onto the darkest of circumstances, and for that sudden illumination, however inadequate and fleeting it is, to be, somehow, enough. Not enough to save the world, to end the war, to convince a genocide’s perpetrators and accomplices of their victims’ humanity. Much as I want to be idealistic about the power of art, I don’t want to be naïve. But enough to help a traumatized and starving person make it through another cold night, another brutal day. And isn’t that itself a miracle?

We find in Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, and in the origins of her poetry writing, an incredible example of Jewish spiritual resistance to the Holocaust. There’s an odious trope in Holocaust historiography that sees Jews as passive victims, shamefully submissive, and thereby complicit in their own murders. Bruno Bettelheim, the Austrian-born Jewish psychoanalyst, (in)famously wrote that, “Like lemmings, [millions of Europe’s Jews] marched themselves to their own death.” Certainly this is historically inaccurate, and says more about Bettelheim’s psychology than it does about anything else. But the standard response to this trope, at least as I’ve seen it, is to point to instances of Jewish armed resistance, to the many camp and ghetto uprisings and partisan units in which Jews fought.

Basman Ben-Hayim, along with countless other Jewish artists of all kinds, offers a different, though no less vital, model of resistance. Against the dusk that had enveloped Europe, her poetry became a sun.

But in the second of these poems, “To Tell,” we see the toll this takes on her. Increasingly I think that the idea of “closure,” which people sometimes talk about as a need or a goal after grief, is a kind of pseudo-psychology. This poem insists that to remember the past is to return to that past; to tell of one’s traumas is to reinhabit them.

I wanted to put these poems together in part because I think there’s a complicated interplay across them between day and night, and light and darkness, and that this dynamic suggests the impossibility of closure. During the war, she created a sun that could cast the night and its darkness away. Later, retelling her experiences transforms her into “an owl / that swallows the radiance / from night,” and brings her back, again and again, to the abyss.

Poetry written in response to catastrophe, this suggests to me, is a double-edged sword. It can illuminate the worst experiences, and it can plunge the writer into those experiences’ darkness. What, then, is the role of poetry, or of any art, in responding to trauma and suffering? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Felix Nussbaum’s “Prisoners in St. Cyprien,” 1942. Nussbaum, a German-Jewish artist, escaped from the train transporting him from the St. Cyprien concentration camp to Germany, and lived in hiding until he was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in 1944.

Rivka Basman (she later added Ben-Hayim, her husband’s surname, after his death) was just a teenager when the Nazis invaded her native Lithuania, and murdered her father and eight year old brother. After two years in the Vilna Ghetto, she was sent to be a slave laborer at the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Latvia.

(photo courtesy of the Jewish Women’s Archive)

And there, incredibly, she began to write poetry. No “art for art’s sake”: she started writing in order to inspire her fellow inmates; each evening, she would recite a poem she had written that day, hoping to boost the morale of the women with whom she was incarcerated and enslaved. She smuggled her poems out of the camp by rolling up the paper on which they were written and hiding it beneath her tongue.

When the war ended, Basman spent two years in Serbia, where she married her husband, fellow survivor Mula Ben-Haim. I say “fellow survivor,” but Basman didn’t like to use that language to describe herself. She didn’t survive the Holocaust, she insisted; the person she had been before the Holocaust was killed, and she, this nominal survivor, was somebody else. In Serbia she helped to organize underground networks smuggling Jews into Palestine, and in 1947 she and her husband moved there as well.

Aside from stints in New York, where she studied English and comparative literature at Columbia, and in Moscow, where she taught the children of Israel’s diplomats, and secretly supported Yiddish writers, she spent the rest of her life in Israel. There she became a central figure in the country’s Yiddish literary scene, serving as head of the Union of Yiddish Writers, and writing prolifically. Her last poetry collection was published in 2020, when she was 95 years old.

It seems fitting to me, as well, that I’m sending this out just a few days after the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, because Basman’s poetry can’t be separated from the spiritual resistance against genocide in which her writing began. (Below is a Yiddish poster commemorating the armed resistance in the Warsaw ghetto.)

Some have called her the last great Yiddish poet. I understand why, but that seems to me too fatalistic—who knows what the future of Yiddish writing may bring? Certainly, though, she was the last great Yiddish poet who was born and raised in the Ashkenazi civilization which Nazism destroyed; she was the last living literary link between pre- and post-Holocaust Yiddish culture.

If you’d like to read more about her life and poetry, I enjoyed this piece by Rokhl Kafrissen, and drew many of these biographical details from the Jewish Women’s Archive. I’ve been moved, over the past few weeks, by this beautiful bilingual musical setting of a passage from Basman’s poetry:

Below are two of my favorite poems of hers. Because of a minor bug, there may be some formatting issues with the Yiddish below; if that’s the case, thanks for your understanding.

The Kinship Between Yiddish and Hebrew

How to explain
the kinship
between Yiddish and Hebrew?
Perhaps it is how deeply Yiddish breathes
into a Hebrew word,
warms the letters,
softens their steps.

And then, when Yiddish
recounts her tears
to Hebrew,
both languages pray
the same prayer
to God.

די קרובישאַפֿט צװישן ייִדיש און עברית

די קרובישאַפֿט 
צװישן ייִדיש און עברית
?װי אַזױ דערקלערן
אפֿשר, װי טיף עס אָטעמט
,ייִדיש אַרײַן אין אַ העברעיש װאָרט
,דערװאַרעמט די אותיות
.שענק זיי אַ װייכערן טראָט

און דאַן, װען ייִדיש 
דערציילט פֿאַר עברית
,אירע טרערן
תּפֿילהן ביידע לשׂונות
די זעלביקע תּפֿילה
.צו גאָט

Fire-Sparks

The river that has borne our dreams away
is not the same.
A star comes to immerse itself
and finds a stranger.
From whom can we demand our blooming childhood
with wild strawberries like drops of blood
in a forest in Lithuania--
there is no path without graves,
there is no night that does not burn with memory,
and we write down with fire-sparks:
an uneffaced remembrance should remain
as there remains in running streams 
a splinter of light,
a vestige,
a name.

פֿײַער־פֿונקען

דער טײַך װאָס האָט פֿאַרטראָגן אונדזערע חלומות
.איז ניט דער זעלבר
אַ שטערן קומט זיך טובלען אין זײַן פּנים
.געפֿינט אַ פֿרעמדן
בײַ װעמען מאָנען אונדזער קינדהײַט אַ צעבליטע
מיט פּאָזעמקעס װי טראָפּנס בלוט
--אין װאַלד אין ליטע
,ניטאָ אַ װעג װוּ ניט פֿאַראַן קײן קברים
,ניטאָ אַ נאַכט װאָס פֿלאַמט ניט אין זיכּרון
מיט פֿײַער־פֿונקען מיר פֿאַרשרײַבן׃
אַ זכר ניט פֿאַרמעקט זאָל בלײַבן
װי ס'בלײַבט אין לױפֿנדיקע שטראָמען
,אַ שפּליטער שײַן
,אַ שפּאָר
אַ נאָמען.

“There is no path without graves,” Basman writes. And of course this is true of the Lithuania her poem references, the Lithuania of her childhood, most of whose inhabitants were murdered. But it is also true for all of us, everywhere we go. The large, lovely park nearest to my house, where I run and walk a few times a week, was the site of a Civil War battle that killed thousands of people in the span of just 20 minutes. You wouldn’t even know, if you were driving by. From a certain perspective, the whole world is an unmarked grave.

It can feel—it is—overwhelming. But isn’t that why we turn to art? The great writer and literary theorist Kenneth Burke described literature as “equipment for living,” and we see that in Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim’s work. She turned to poetry in order to enable herself and those around her to continue living, within the most hellish circumstances (un)imaginable.

I love this second poem because it acknowledges the extent of human suffering, and refuses to surrender to it. Yes, it’s true, a river has borne our dreams away. Sometimes, now that I’m getting older, I recall with nostalgia the idealism and hopefulness of my youth, and I think of this opening line. It’s a comfort, in itself, to have such feelings named with clarity and beauty. And it’s a comfort, too, the note on which this poem ends: the waters rush and sweep our dreams far from us, but even so, something of them can never be entirely erased. The names and vestiges of all our long gone dreams persist within the current that has stolen them, and cast a light which Basman’s poetry calls on us to notice. That light, the poem suggests, is always there for us, as long as we are willing to do the work of remembrance. Who knows what it can still illuminate, what it can let us see?

In the first of these poems, Yiddish’s tears allow it to unite with Hebrew in prayer; here, too, remembering what is lost enables something new to arise. I love the personification of these languages. Personification, but maybe I should also say deification, because I read Yiddish breathing into Hebrew as an echo of God breathing into the first human, in one of the Genesis creation stories. If my reading there is not too much of a stretch, it’s a radical revision of the objectively understood relationship between Yiddish and Hebrew. Yiddish, historians would tell us, originated thousands of years after Hebrew, but in the imagination of the poet this language breathes a new and gentle life into its timeless Hebrew words.

What do you think of these poems? As always, I look forward to hearing your responses, either here in the comments or by email.

Today’s art pairing is an untitled painting by the Roma Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka (1933-2013).