In an autobiographical sketch, written in 1904, Saul Tschernichowsky wrote of his ancestors: “And so I begin with the mythology of our family, which is very rich in heroes of the spirit as well as in men of might.”
“The heroes of the spirit” is a poetic exaggeration. One man in the ancestral roll of honor is credited with the composition of an exegetic work and with the making of an artistic Menorah. But the “men of might”—and this is rather unusual in the family-tree of a Hebrew poet—are real. One of them saved his life by sheer sang froid during the massacres by the Cossacks in 1768: he hid in a haystack and uttered no cry when the spear of a Ukrainian ruffian pierced his foot. The brother of Tschernichowsky’s grandfather lived to be more than 113 years old and celebrated the occasion of his second bar mitzvah. The strength, health and courage that ran in his family were to be the characteristics of a poet who looked upon mankind and nature sub specie mythologiae.
His father led the life of an honest, Orthodox and unsophisticated Jew in a Crimean village. His mother, warmhearted, gay and beautiful, loved Russian literature and Russian songs. It was with these immediate ancestral strains that the poet wove the mythology of his family and recreated the mythology of nations in his lifework. His birthplace, his education, his early reading and his intimate association with a Greek girl in the most formative years of his youth stimulated his uncommon love for Hellenic literature and directed his work and that of his followers into epic channels.
He was born in 1875 and spent the first fourteen years of his life in the village of Mikhailovka in the border country between the Ukraine and the Crimea. A variety of nationalities inhabited, and still inhabit, this part of Russia: Tatars, Greeks, Russians, Germans and Jews. Ancient burial mounds dating back to the times of the Scythians dot the wide steppes. And before the Scythians, the Greeks had founded flourishing colonies here in the sixth century B.C.E. Thus, from his earliest years, the poet was exposed to the breadth of his native landscape and to a centuries-old tradition of ethnic variety.
Fortunately for his later development, Tschemichowsky was spared the pedagogical amenities of the heder and the rigors of the yeshivah. He learned Hebrew the modem way, first from his father, then from private tutors who held small classes in the outlying districts of Russia. Such instruction was not conducive to scholarship or to a wide acquaintance with the sources of Hebrew learning—the Bible, the Talmud and the Hebrew legal codices. The first Hebrew book to attract his attention was not a theological treatise but an adaptation of Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars. And the first Hebrew book that actually captured his imagination was the popular collection of Jewish legends, En Ya’akob.
Indeed, Tschemichowsky was never to attain erudition in Hebrew. But what he lacked in knowledge he more than made up for by keen philological intuition. He, more than any other contemporary, pushed back the frontiers of the ancestral language of the Jews. If the sciences of botany, zoology and medicine owe him thousands of neologisms, the art of poetry is indebted to him for a fresh diction. His linguistic achievements alone entitle him to a prominent place in the history of Hebrew literature.
Hebrew was not his mother tongue nor was it the first language he learned to read and write. Unlike most Hebrew writers, who acquired the language of their native land at a mature age, he learned Russian as a child and knew how to read it when he was barely five. He read Russian poetry and world literature in Russian translation: the Iliad and the Odyssey, sundry plays of Shakespeare, the adventure stories of Jules Verne, the historical novels of Dumas père, the mystery stories of Eugene Sue. The latter three he outgrew quickly, but Homer and Shakespeare left an indelible impression on his mind. As a mature poet he spent years in translating the Iliad and the Odyssey, Macbeth and Twelfth Night.
As the first translator of Homer into Hebrew he inaugurated an era of classical translations which within the last half-century has enriched Hebrew literature with the outstanding exemplars of Greek philosophy and poetry. Thus, a cultural task, long overdue, was given initial impetus by Tschernichowsky. (In the Middle Ages Plato and especially Aristotle—a prominent influence in the development of Jewish philosophy, theology and mysticism—had been known to Jewish scholars only in Arabic adaptations or Hebrew paraphrases, synopses and translations from the Arabic. The renewed interest in Shakespeare led to a crop of translations from other English and from American literature. These eliminated to a certain extent the preponderant influence of the German and Russian classics on Hebrew literature and substituted for it a new cultural factor that was to be developed further by Hebrew writers in America.)
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Tschernichowsky’s education followed an unusual course. He attended a girls’ school because there was no boys’ school in his native village, then he went to commercial schools in Odessa, and finally, toward the end of the century, traveled to Heidelberg to study medicine. At Heidelberg he also attended the lectures of Kuno Fischer on modem philosophy. While legend, myth and historical romance had nurtured his youthful imagination, the natural sciences developed a latent sense of realism, which showed to great advantage in his larger poems. Nor was his poetical output harmed by abstract and abstruse meditations.
The wooded and hilly surroundings of the university town provided further stimulation. Later his fleeting student loves in Heidelberg resulted in an output of a large number of love poems. But this sort of poetry, lyrical in its inspiration and import, could not serve to realize the epic gifts of the poet. Tschernichowsky’s love poetry was puerile at its weakest, lighthearted and devoid of passion at its best—not unlike that of the medieval Hebrew poet Immanuel of Rome, whom he valued so highly and to whose life and work he devoted a popular monograph.
It was not in Heidelberg but in Lausanne that Tschernichowsky received his doctorate. He then returned to Russia and practiced medicine in the provinces. In 1907 he was arrested as a political suspect for no good reason, as so often happened under the Czarist regime. Six weeks spent in the unfamiliar company of prisoners resulted in a charming idyll on the origin of prisons. While one of the prisoners mends a broken spoon—hence the title “The Broken Spoon”—a poetically minded prisoner suggests that the boy who caught a butterfly showed adults the way to bully the weak. But philosophically, the prisoner then concludes that the whole world is a prison and all mankind its prisoner: for wisdom is prisoner of the senses; beauty, the prisoner of time; and truth, a slave of class warfare and industrial development. . . .
In 1910 Tschernichowsky went to Petersburg (Leningrad) and on the outbreak of the war in 1914 he volunteered for the army. He spent two years at the front, then returned to the capital where he held a prominent post in a military hospital. After the advent of the Bolsheviks he did not cease to practice medicine. To the great pogroms in the Ukraine at the close of the First World War he reacted as a poet should react, giving vent to his feeling of frustration in a powerful poem, “Let This Be Our Revenge,” and in a cycle of sonnets, “On the Blood.” In passionate verses the poet envisaged a spiritual rather than material revenge, expressing the hope that the blood of the Jews would flow back upon the pogromists and poison their very existence. To find some peace of mind after this, he spent the first postwar years translating Homer and Plato.
In 1922 he left Russia for Berlin and lived there until 1931. During these years he traveled widely in Europe and in the United States. Many honors came to him after he settled in Tel Aviv in 1931. The Finnish government awarded him the Order of the White Rose for his translation into Hebrew of Kalevala, the Finnish epic; the Greek Academy of Arts and Sciences presented him with a handsome diploma for his translations of the Greek classics; the city of Tel Aviv made him an honorary citizen.
But the Jews forgot that the poet could not live by honors alone. Tschernichowsky suffered intermittent privations during the last twenty years of his life and supported his wife and daughter only with difficulty. His fame as a poet did not enhance his medical reputation. People distrusted the skilled hands of a physician who fashioned verses. Thus, toward the end of his life, he could write sincerely and literally “I Claim Nothing As My Own.” Yet he rarely complained in private and demanded nothing in public.
The unceasing flow of his work till the very end of his life is eloquent testimony to his robust creativity. To the fratricidal strife in Palestine in the years immediately preceding the Second World War he reacted with numerous poems reiterating his belief in the invincibility of the Jewish people in general and of the Jewish settlers of Palestine in particular. The best of them is undoubtedly the short lyric “See, Oh Earth,” a memorial to our sacrifices in blood and to the wasted flower of Jewish youth. And in a ballad, the grotesque distortion of humanity that goes by the name of Nazism was metamorphosed into the figure of a wolf that forces the whole of mankind into a bestial mold.
In 1943, a few weeks before his death in Jerusalem, Tschernichowsky wrote the melancholy poem, “Distant Stars of the Sky,” in which as in a final resumé, he reminisced about his native village and invoked in turn the stars of Karelia calling to him from among dark pines; the stars of the Ukraine playing on an ocean of wild grass and colorful rye; the stars of the Crimea whose mysterious murmur sea and forest and rock long to hear; the stars of the Mediterranean, worshipped as gods of old; the stars of Palestine which witnessed the past glory and present misery of the Jews, and the stars of the tropics and the stars of the pampas. Then in a final stanza he fused the personal and the cosmic themes into a half-lyrical, half-mythical adieu to the earth and to the stars. Thus, before his physical death the poet took spiritual leave of the earth in unobtrusive sadness and without regret.
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In all the boldness of profundity and innocence myths attempt to penetrate the impenetrable. If the creative powers of Tschernichowsky were roused by myths it was because the texture of his personality—a mixture of depth and innocence—corresponded in some way to that of an ancient myth-maker. The myths of Babylonians, Egyptians, Jews and Greeks as well as myths of Finns and Slavs flowed into his poetry in such profusion that they outweighed all other elements. Tschernichowsky may be justly called the only mythological poet in the history of Hebrew literature.
But is not a mythological poet in Hebrew a paradox foisted upon the Jews by an ironic fate? Is not pagan mythology the antithesis of the rigorously ethical monotheism that has served as the ideal guide of the Jews for more than three millennia?
Like all ancient peoples, the Jews found their myths in the dim beginnings of nationhood. The stories of creation, of Cain and Abel, of the sons of God who married the daughters of men, and of the Deluge, were the common mythological stock of the restless tribes that roamed the Fertile Crescent. The deciphered texts of Ras Shamra, which date back to 1400 B.C.E., have thrown a flood of light on the Canaanite pantheon, which—it can now be stated with certainty—closely resembles the Homeric. This does not take away in the least from the purity of monotheism. On the contrary: it enhances the religious genius of the Jews, who alone among ancient peoples knew how to transform humble myths into monotheism.
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As a Jewish poet Tschernichowsky anchored himself in Jewish tradition. But he was forced by the nature of his poetical endowment to choose that segment of Jewish tradition which harked back to the very beginnings of Jewish nationhood. Such was the strangeness and novelty of this inflection of Jewishness that to many it did not seem Jewish at all. Tschernichowsky knew better. In a lovely lyric, “Mine Is a Song,” he affirmed with great poetical vigor that the blood of the conquerors of Canaan flowed in his veins. And in a youthful poem, “Before the Statue of Apollo,” he drew a parallel between Apollo, the god of light, music and poetry, and the God of the Hebrew conquerors of Canaan. He pointed with brilliant insight, in the last lines of the poem, to the cause of divergences between Hellenism and Judaism:
I kneel to thee, the noble and the true,
Whose strength is in the fullness of the
earth,
Whose will is in the fullness of creation,
Whose throne is on the secret founts of
being.
I kneel to life, to beauty and to strength,
I kneel to all the passionate desires
Which they, the dead-in-life, the bloodless
ones,
The sick, have stifled in the living God,
The God of wonders of the wilderness,
The God of gods, who took Canaan with
storm
Before they bound him in phylacteries.
Translated by Maurice Samuel
The poet grasped intuitively what the scholars confirmed at a later date: that the pagan Greeks and the early Hebrews had wide areas of culture in common. He did not hesitate to identify himself with the worshippers of Tammuz-Adonis, Bel and especially the Semitic Venus, Astarte. He was even moved to compose a cycle of liturgical sonnets to the sun, which in their perfection of form and their pagan homage to the forces of nature have no equal in Hebrew literature. The austere lines seem carved by a master sculptor who, overwhelmed by the beauty and warmth of light, translates his religious awe into religious art.
Yet these sonnets to the sun were inspired by a Prophetic text (Ezekiel 8:16) and a Mishnaic tradition: “Our fathers when they were in this place turned with their backs toward the Temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east, and they worshipped the sun toward the east” (Sukkah 5:4). Perhaps Tschernichowsky overworked his romantic attachment to the remote past. If he did, it was but the enthusiasm of a lover who has found his world in the object of his affection and tapped, almost inadvertently, a forgotten source of poetry and emotion.
From Semitic mythology it was only a step to the young mythological world or other peoples. His vast work of translation, which includes the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, the Greek epics, the Finnish epic Kalevala and parts of the Icelandic Edda, is neither an accident nor the result of economic exigency: it was a basic necessity of his poetic personality. Almost accidentally, he became the most prolific instrument of culture in modem Hebrew literature. Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Anacreon’s poems, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Twelfth Night, Goethe’s Reineke Fuchs, Longfellow’s Hiawatha and Evangeline—not to mention smaller single poems from many ancient and modem literatures—owe their Hebrew versions to him.
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If the myth was Tschernichowsky’s favorite theme, the idyll was his favorite form. It may be said without undue exaggeration that he was the father of the Hebrew idyll just as Theocritus was the father of the Greek idyll. There is indeed a close relationship between these two poets, separated though they are by more than two millennia. Both modeled themselves on Homer. Both borrowed from him the hexametric dactyl for their idylls and both observed and depicted the details of everyday life as he did. But whereas Homer dealt with gods and heroes, Theocritus and Tschernichowsky preferred simple folk and simple talk, the joys and sorrows of rural life, the influences of the seasons on man and nature.
The life of Jews in rural southern Russia was Tschernichowsky’s thematic innovation in the idylls. Before him, Hebrew writers had confined themselves to the traditional urbanism of their people as the obvious subject matter. Only to history did they go for rural themes. Tschernichowsky was the first modem Hebrew poet to celebrate his native district. And he had the power to lift segments of life from regional obscurity to the status of literature. In longer idylls such as “Circumcision” and “The Wedding of Elka,” he described traditional practices and ceremonies, the abundant Jewish life of the villages in southern Russia, with Homeric abandon and the skill of an accomplished craftsman.
About twenty years elapsed between the composition of “Circumcision” and that of “The Wedding of Elka,” yet both exhibit a startling similarity in ideas and imagery, milieu and meter. In “The Wedding of Elka” the art of the Hebrew idyll reached perhaps its greatest flowering of form and content. As folklore alone, it presents a subject of unusual interest to the sociologist and cultural historian. Here is a traditional Jewish wedding with all the trimmings: the ceremonious preparations, the ritual dances, the foods, the meals, the gifts. And in the earlier idyll, “Circumcision,” Tschernichowsky captured the melancholy mood of the Russian steppes, their grasses and flowers, beasts and birds, all unknown to the ghetto Jew and to the ghetto literature before him.
Only the novelist Mendele Mokher Seforim had as unsophisticated an attitude toward nature as Tschernichowsky. And there was indeed a bond of friendship between the novelist and the poet. One of the latter’s finest nature poems, “Charms of the Forest,” was dedicated to Mendele in gratitude—and perhaps in payment of a debt. For Tschernichowsky owed Mendele his style. He did for Hebrew poetry what Mendele had done for Hebrew prose by enriching it with talmudic idiom. Thus Tschernichowsky became the personification of a living paradox: for though he was the most Biblical personality in modem Hebrew literature, he used post-Biblical language to depict the lives of rural characters in south Russia.
Tschernichowsky loved to show Jews in their patriarchal simplicity amid idyllic landscapes. Such Jews he found in his native village and in ancient Judea. And from these two sources he drew an inexhaustible array of primitive, unsophisticated characters. While he transformed the lives of contemporary Jews into poetic idylls, he exploited episodes in the history of the ancient Jews, such as the encounter of Saul with the witch of Endor and the tragic debacle on the hills of Gilboa, in ballads.
In a long poem with a medieval background, “Baruch of Mayence,” Tschernichowsky created the type of a robust Jew who, having suffered at the hands of the Crusaders, sets fire to his town in revenge and heaps curses of deuteronomic vigor on the murderers.
Accursed be thou for ever, cruel race!
Accursed for ever be thy evil name!
The wrath of God shall dwell with thee
for ever.
The blood that thou hast sacrificed, the
tears,
The moaning of thy victims, shall arise
In one wild flood against thee, and the
sound
Shall be a horror in the stormy night.
Translated by Maurice Samuel
In two ballads, “The Last of the Kuraiza” and “The Last Khazar,” he chose as heroes to represent Jews men who fought against fate and slavery with weapons in their hands.
Tschernichowsky was constitutionally unable to depict the attenuated Jew of the Diaspora. The centuries of oppression that have affected all Hebrew writers did not break his back nor shatter his proud dignity. On the contrary, they seem to have stimulated his love of liberty. Hanukkah, the reminder of Jewish heroism, and especially Passover, the festival of liberty, play a prominent role in his poetry.
Not all the products of Tschernichowsky’s muse share the excellence of the idylls and the perfection of the sonnets. In the ten volumes of his collected works (from which his later poems, stories and translations are absent) there can be found weak love poems, immature stories that rarely rise above the reportorial, and a play, Bar Kohba, in which both hero and sage make flat and honing speeches in tedious iambic pentameters. Yet Saul Tschernichowsky remains an artist of distinction. He widened the range of form in Hebrew letters and he enriched poetic expression with a metric virtuosity that only Auden has equaled in modem English poetry.
Toward the end of his life, he produced a poem unique in its blend of scientific material and poetic imagination, “The Golden People.” It was a bold effort to interpret life in non-mythical terms. It probes the origins of prehuman existence, but dwells with special fondness on “the golden people,” the bees—who are merely exemplars of human behavior; the cruel laws of the beehive and the mating flight of the queen-bee are duplicated in the wars of nations and the flights of love and imagination. Against the background of the highly organized, almost totalitarian society of the bees, the poet paints the friendship of Father Anthony, a bee-lover, and a young Jewish pioneer. The Russian as well as the Palestinian landscape contributes its share of charm to this poem. Thus a triple motif, richly orchestrated, runs through it; and in spite of its tedious scientific nomenclature and monotonous enumeration of mineral and plant varieties, “The Golden People” attests to the sublime maturity of an aging poet. It was an attempt, perhaps, to embark on a new poetic course.
For all his greatness Bialik, the only other Hebrew poet with whom Tschernichowsky can be compared, marks the end of a road with his attachment to a dying past and lyrical longing for a nationalist future. He wafted a brilliance of literature over the shattered youth of his contemporaries in the disintegrating talmudic academies and over their burning hopes for a resuscitated Palestine. It was Tschernichowsky who marked out a new road by his attachment to a vigorous past and by his epic insight into the healthy elements of Diaspora Jewry. Bialik caught the imagination of his contemporaries and has overshadowed the immense importance of Tschernichowsky. But the future historian of Hebrew literature will have to say, after all due evaluation of the respective merits and flaws of the two poets, that the Jews produced one major poet toward the end of the nineteenth century, and his name was Tschernichowsky.
