The Surviving Word
A Treasury of Yiddish Verse.
by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg.
Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 378 pp. $10.00.
Of all literary forms, poetry is notoriously the most difficult to translate from the language in which it is written. Of all the languages of Europe, Yiddish—for reasons of its very structure and origins—is notoriously the one which least lends itself to translation. A Treasury of Yiddish Verse in English would thus appear to be a doubly doomed enterprise.
Theoretically, the conclusion may be irresistible. The book under review disproves it decisively. Indeed, it does more. It suggests that the singularity of Yiddish literature is so extreme that Yiddish poetry in translation is actually more directly available and comprehensible to the reader who doesn’t know the language than the classics of Yiddish prose.
How can this be? Well, it is relatively easy to point out that while the three greatest figures of Yiddish prose—Peretz, Mendele Moicher Sforim, and Sholem Aleichem—had all died before the end of the First World War, much of the best poetry in this collection is of a later date, and a few of the most impressive poets represented in it are still at work today. (One of the surprises of the anthology for me was to realize just how much of an American rather than European affair Yiddish poetry always has been, from the earliest days of the radical “sweatshop poets” onward.) Simply in being our contemporaries, or near contemporaries, the poets have an advantage over their prose predecessors. Again, it is tempting to remark that lyrical-reflective verse (and there is practically no other kind in the anthology) is always intended in its original language of composition to come straight from the writer to the reader. It is “from the heart,” as people used to say; whereas any work of prose, whether in fiction or autobiography, is bound to be clumsier and less direct in its expression of emotion, burdened with a mass of more or less external detail.
But of course we know quite well that it is in large part the relative indirection and dilution of prose, its necessary preoccupation, whatever its ultimate concerns might be, with social and material facts—of dress, furniture, manners, social institutions, and the rest—which enable it to “carry” so much better in translation than poetry. Usually, when we read a novel or story in translation, it is just because of these aspects of the work that we are able to find our way about it; in their similarity to what we already know, they provide us with our first footing into the author’s private, inward world. Except in the case of Yiddish. For the society which the classic Yiddish prose writers present to us—that of a community which had all the most important and distinctive attributes of peoplehood, but none of its privileges or powers, and no hope of ever acquiring them—is so unlike any we know today, that it becomes in itself a source of strangeness, a further obstacle to our understanding; what we should most easily recognize turns into a source of puzzlement and distance.
If that were all! But, strange in its living forms, a terrible and incomprehensible fate overtook the world of Eastern European Jewry. In the face of so complete a catastrophe, one might be all the more inclined to feel that only the poet could still find words, could still make an utterance—but to whom? For now we see what the “advantage” of being more contemporary has portended for the Yiddish poets. The survivors among them have not only had to endure, like so many others of all nationalities in our century, the traumas of war, revolution, migration, and political terror; they have had to witness the literal doing to death of the community which produced them and their language and contained its memories. The poets have been left only to say Kaddish, as it were, for all that has been murdered—their own past and future among the rest. To write poetry in the language is to evoke the dead, to speak of the dead and to them; not to us, who hear the poets’ words only in translation.
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These painful general considerations will, I hope, do something to indicate just how large is our debt to the editors of the present anthology, and to their band of devoted translators, whose names include many well-known contemporary American poets. Perhaps the simplest and most effective praise one can give to the anthology as a whole is to say that in its intelligence and seriousness of conception it fully measures up to the standards set by the Treasury of Yiddish Stories which Messrs. Howe and Greenberg presented to us more than ten years ago. Like the earlier anthology, this one is preceded by a long, informative, and passionately written introduction, in which,, having briefly evoked the circumstances of the Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe and the United States at the time when poetry in the language first began to be seriously written, the authors then go on to describe the swift, successive emergence of schools of poetry in the different countries, and to analyze the characteristic styles and subject matter of many of the individual poets.
In reading an anthology of almost any kind, and still more in reviewing it, one is always inclined to look for similarities and common themes among the contributors, and thus fail to do justice to their individuality. I can only plead that there are special reasons in this case which warrant such an approach. Though the subjects of the poems vary as widely as their forms, rhythms, and tone, it is also true that there are several themes which wind inseparably in and out of one another and which recur insistently from poet to poet. As one might expect, they can all ultimately be considered explorations of one inevitable, inescapable theme: that of the tragic uniqueness and mystery of the Jewish fate in this century and those which preceded it.
Which is to say (and it’s as well to be quite explicit about this, in order to ward off the sort of misunderstanding common among those who combine a total lack of intellectual curiosity about Jewish social and cultural history with the belief that they are nevertheless authorities on the subject)—a characteristic stance of the poets, however grief-stricken it may be, is one of challenge and anger. These emotions are directed in part against history and mankind in general, and in part against the Jews themselves for having allowed so much suffering to have happened to them; frequently they are turned into a fierce argument with the God of Israel. As the editors eloquently put it: “In the desolation of memory, Yiddish poets find themselves turning back to the old Jewish God, not so much the God of orthodoxy, or even the God their fathers had worshipped, but a God inseparable from Jewish fate, a God with whom one pleads and quarrels. It is as if, in a depopulated world, there must at least be someone to talk with: some figure or force, even if projected through images of denial and in accents of reproach, in whom the sheer possibility of meaning continues to reside.”
Let one example suffice of the dignity and directness with which the quarrel can be conducted. Here is a short poem, entitled “Smoke,” by Jacob Glatstein:
From the crematory flue
A Jew aspires to the Holy One.
And when the smoke of him
is gone,
His wife and children filter
through.Above us, in the height of sky,
Saintly billows weep and wait.
God, wherever you may be,
There all of us are also not.(Translated by Chana Faerstein)
It is perhaps hardly surprising that an image which is almost obsessive in the anthology is that of the boy Isaac bound to the altar—bound and not redeemed. There must be more than a dozen poems by various hands, many of them written well before the final catastrophe, which either touch upon the story or treat it directly and at length. They range in manner from Itzik Manger’s folk-like song which portrays the father and son and their servant making their way across the landscapes of Poland to Mount Moriah:
“Daddy, where are we going now?”
“To Lashkev—to the Fair.”
“Daddy, what are you going to
buy
At Lashkev—at the Fair?”“A soldier made of porcelain,
A trumpet and a drum;
A piece of satin to make a dress
For mother who waits at home.”
* * *
Eliezer sits on the driver’s seat
And casts an anxious look.
“Sad and lovely,” the poet says
“Are the roads of the Holy
Book.”(Translated by Leonard Wolf)
—from that, to the impassioned dialogue of H. Leivick’s “The Book of Job” in which even the sheep that is substituted for Isaac finds its voice:
Why did you leap so lightly from
the altar
And thrust me on it with such
violence?
Why? One victim dragging the
other to
His death. Why are you dumb?
Speak.
Forget that I’m a sheep. Tonight’s
The kind of night when even
a sheep
No less than man is privileged to
speak;
To murmur against death and call
For justice.(Translated by Leonard Wolf)
But the lesser or subsidiary quarrels, too, are given memorable expression. Both before and after the Holocaust the poets rebel against “the crippled Jewish life” that Eastern Europe had represented.
I speak:
“Dear fly,
Sing something of your far-off
land.”
I hear her weep—She answers:
May her right leg wither
If she plucks a harp
By strange waters,
Or forgets the dear dung heap
That had once been her
homeland.(Moishe Leib Halpern, translated
by Nathan Halper)
They rebel against their separateness as Jews from the triumphant and powerful cultures open to others.
I am ailing, Mademoiselle.
Like the century, I’m ailing.
I who once made an amazing
Leap from my father’s threshold.
Daring, young rage, impudence.
Bits of Blok, Schopenhauer,
Cabbala, Peretz, Spinoza,
Rootlessness and sorrow, sorrow.(M. Kulbak, translated by
Nathan Halper)
They rebel, in the words of the editors, “against the domination of the national-social theme.”
Heir of Shakespeare, knights and
shepherds,
Gentile poet, you are fortunate.
Yours is the earth the fat pig
walks on,
Giving pasture to him. and your
Muse.
If you but pause on a branch,
your twitter
Will gain replies from all the
far places.
* * *
I—unneeded, a poet among Jews,
Growing, like wild grass, from
a soil not ours,
My sires, wanderers with dusty
beards,
Who feed on the grit of fairs and
old tomes.(Mani Leib, translated by
Nathan Halper)
They rebel against a world whose physical beauty appears to have no moral correlative.
No matter how beautiful this tree,
How beautiful the plow—
The quiet glitter of the steel,
The supple branch, the rocking
bough—
Beauty is only for the eye!
Let Him really show a miracle.
Let Him hand out justice.(Jacob Glatstein, translated by
Nathan Halper)
But, as the reader of the quotations given above will doubtless already have noticed, the anger of the poets, their demand for a justice that is never granted, does not exclude an unforced, unillusioned tenderness which the anger can never finally overwhelm. The created world of plants and animals; the narrow, poverty-stricken lanes and alleyways of townlets in Eastern Europe, and the roaring streets of the Lower East Side of New York; the memories of past generations; the once-despised and now-vanishing language in which the poets write; the unforgiven God—all these are lyrically and sometimes humorously evoked, brooded over with affection and intimacy, celebrated with a due degree of both modesty and pride. A striking feature of the anthology as a whole, however, is the absence from it of those uneasy, shifty ironies of mood we find in so much other verse of our time in other languages. The poets bring tenderness and anger together, yearning and despair, but relatively few attempts are made to pass off a violent alternation or see-saw between them as a sign of maturity. In qualification it must be added that the unity of tone of many of these poems is achieved at the cost of an over-explicitness of comment or questioning inside the poetic structure, with a resulting loss of rapidity and force, and a noticeable conventionality in the use of metaphor.
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For many Jewish intellectuals, much of the time, it is not so much hard to be a Jew, as the old Yiddish saying went; it is merely embarrassing. And the embarrassment springs less directly from their relationship as Jews to the world at large, than from their relationship to themselves, to what is still Jewish within them. They have no religion, they don’t speak Yiddish, their connection with Jewish institutions of any kind is altogether marginal. And they are hardly able to imagine themselves wishing it were otherwise. They have much more important and exciting things to think about; bigger issues to engage them; other, bolder identities and more compellingly central traditions to wrestle with. Jews, Jewishness, the Jewish past are small, provincial, parochial concerns; the smallest and the most arbitrary with which they can be accused of having any connection.
Yet the terrible Jewish fate of a generation ago remains an unexpungeable fact—no, not of their consciousness, but of their unconscious. They refrain from thinking about it, from reading about it, the historians among them zealously refrain from studying it;1 but it remains revelatory of what they most dread about the nature of that “larger” society in which they are so anxious to participate as fully as anyone else. (But not as their kinsfolk finally did in Europe!) Furthermore, as if to show them just how intricate and never-ending are the corridors of history, they are now confronted with the drama of the Jewish fate in Israel today: a drama which involves the destinies of many peoples and which raises some of the profoundest questions it is possible to ask about the bonds which keep men together in communities in the modern world.
Hence the embarrassment. How can they bring their meager, formless Jewishness into relationship with such tragic and far-reaching events? Why does the world insist on taking so much notice of what they know to be inconsequential and devoid of interest? The felt disproportion is intolerably awkward—intellectually, morally, emotionally, in every way.
The anthology will not diminish embarrassments of this kind among those who feel them. (And I don’t exclude myself from their company.) But the book should suggest that the terms in which we pose such questions to ourselves are utterly beside the point; that the most provincial thing about us is not what is left of our attachment to the Jews, but our desire to be at that “center” which, in the end, only Jews (and perhaps colonials) imagine to be a possible or desirable place of habitation. In this connection readers of COMMENTARY may remember the tormented reflection of the Yiddish poet-protagonist in the story, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America”2 by Cynthia Ozick (herself one of the translators in the present volume): “Suppose it turns out that the destiny of the Jews is vast, open, eternal, and that Western Civilization is meant to dwindle, shrivel, shrink into the ghetto of the world—what of history then?”
The truth is, we simply cannot tell; and it is the crassest Philistinism to suppose otherwise. The poets in this anthology, writing in their murdered “Jargon,” show us irresistibly that the world is indeed that unimaginable sphere of which Pascal spoke, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.
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1 See Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Toward a History of the Holocaust,” COMMENTARY, April 1969.
2 November 1969.
