“In Sich”
Fun Mein Gantzer Mea (Of All My Labors).
by Jacob Glatstein.
CYCO Book Publishing Co. 393 pp. $7.50.
From the moment some forty-five years ago that a group of Yiddish writers known as Die Yunge began to proclaim the need for literary cosmopolitanism and aesthetic individuality, which for them meant primarily a break from traditional folksong rhythms and social didacticism, Yiddish poetry in America has been characterized by a high level of achievement. The work of Die Yunge appeared at a time when American poetry was reaching a brilliant climax, and since themes of deracination and experimentalist techniques could be found in both, it was sometimes assumed that the American poets had significantly influenced the Yiddish. But this seems very doubtful. Yiddish writers have almost always been more dependent on the past of their own culture, even when rebelling against it, than upon alien contemporaries. Though often borrowing devices from other literatures, they have usually remained indifferent to the deeper intentions behind these devices and have continued to go their own, essentially Jewish, way.
Both the traditionalists and iconoclasts among the Yiddish writers have never really enjoyed the possibilities for literary experiment that other writers have. When, for example, Die Yunge rejected the social themes of much Yiddish poetry written earlier in this country, it was a rejection more vehement in tone than assured in content. Individuality, eccentricity, and estrangement could of course be found among many Yiddish poets; but simply because they wrote, because they had to write, in Yiddish, they could not abide with personal impulses and problems. It was their fate to return to those themes of collective destiny which neither a literary program nor a private wish could remove from their consciousness.
In the early 20’s another group of poets called the In Sich, or Introspectionist school, tried still harder to discard the “provincialism” of early Yiddish poetry. These writers turned deliberately to free verse and to subjects, such as cosmopolitan isolation, that were not at all unique to Jewish experience; yet with time they too found that their rebelliousness counted for very little beside the fact that they were unavoidably caught up in the tragedy of Yiddish as a culture. So imperious is this fate of Yiddish writers that there seems almost no point in asking whether its literary consequences were good or bad.
One of the best In Sich poets, Jacob Glatstein, began by writing modernist verse that displayed motifs such as the difficulty of sustaining a personal self in the modern city and the pain of inescapable transience in human life. Not only was the early Glatstein free from Jewish sentimentalism and apologetics; in naming his first book Jacob Glatstein he flaunted his claim to uniqueness, his desire to be considered not as a “spokesman” but as a poet. Soon enough, however, and one suspects almost before he knew it, Glatstein was returning to the perennial subject—the great overarching subject that is both the glory and the curse—of Yiddish literature: the nature of Jewish survival, the meaning of Jewish identity, which is to say, the problem of justice.
Now, a good many years later, Glatstein is an acknowledged major figure in Yiddish literature—a superb poet, fine critic, and author of discursive prose narrative—who has recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday by publishing a volume of collected poems. In terms of craft, whatever it was that made him seem revolutionary within the Yiddish tradition thirty-five years ago remains revolutionary: his use of the first person singular not as a convention of the lyric but as a means of direct personal revelation, his capacity for writing long “unpoetic” lines which bring to Yiddish poetry a rare cognitive power, his avoidance of folk rhetoric, his gift for dramatizing reflective materials within compact stanza forms, and his readiness to subordinate the melodic line of his verse to the thrust and urgency of his thought. All of this undoubtedly makes him a “modern” poet who has helped enlarge the area of technical possibilities open to later Yiddish poets; but if one examines his work as a whole, one must conclude that Glatstein has always stood close to the center of the Yiddish literary tradition. He is a poet who has quarreled, as all Yiddish poets must, with God and fate. He has celebrated, yet not idyllicized, half-forgotten places and vanished styles of life. He has written out his despair over the incomprehensibility of the martyrdom. And in the end, what else can a Yiddish poet do?
In Glatstein’s earliest poems, which now hardly seem as startling as when they first appeared, one finds a young writer struggling to affirm his choice of self-consciousness. Bits of childhood memory, associations of words, emotions of “quiet youthful unrest,” sounds of the city at night, notations of things seen, syntactical plays and variations—these come together in tentative structures, mainly with the purpose of creating surprise and freshness. As it now seems, however, the early work is less an achievement than an announcement.
The achievement comes a bit later, in the mid-20’s. Here, in poems collected in Glatstein’s second volume, one finds the long reflective lines that led the Israeli critic Benjamin Hrushovski to speak of his verse as “tantamount to slow, weighty, well-considered speech.” The description is excellent, particularly because it moves from aspects of technique to a sense of the poet’s intention and tone. Through his long and lingering lines—sometimes, to my inexpert ear, tending to collapse into prosiness—Glatstein is able to give his verse more intellectual body and greater dialectical tension than the traditional Yiddish lyric could generally allow. By encouraging both the phrase and the line to follow not the lulling metronomic beat of the traditional lyric but the autonomous movement of a particular argument or emotion, Glatstein encompasses in his poetry what modern American critics sometimes call “the problematic” and Yiddish has less portentously labeled chochma.
Nor does his growing expertness appear only in reflective poems. In poems such as “Twilight” Glatstein has mastered the lyric that does not blatantly “sing” (harder to do in Yiddish than in English), and in a magnificent poem called “Evening Bread” he establishes complete control over the dramatic vignette: an “I and a she and another she” share the evening meal, tense with pain, passing the knife from hand to hand. “She takes the knife and looks at me and her, / Two dead guests sitting silent at the table / And from the heart of her the sharp knife sings / A song of peril at evening bread.”
At this stage of his development Glatstein’s virtuosity is so exuberant that he is driven to try his hand at almost every poetic genre except the long verse narrative. And it is astonishing at how many he succeeds: a curious dialogue in which as a sheer tour de force he mimics the posture of Chinese theater while infusing the poem with attitudes that can only be called Jewish; a brilliant pictorial vignette that recalls the early Wallace Stevens; clever symbolist lyrics which embody, with new assurance, the personal themes of his earlier work. And all the while Glatstein’s Yiddish becomes stronger, simpler, and more fluent, being neither inflated with that gassy rhetoric which is often a curse of Yiddish writing nor collapsed into the diminutive quaintness which is another curse.
The poet that we have here—roughly speaking, until 1933—is a distinguished writer, but he is not yet Glatstein at his most troubled or best. Once the agony of the European Jews begins, Glatstein becomes, in the most serious sense of the term, a national artist. Not an apologist or propagandist, but a writer for whom there can no longer be a choice of subject matter. In whatever form, his poems now compose themselves into a sustained threnody. With a terrible ferocity he bids “good night . . . to the big stinking world” and returns in spirit to the “ghetto,” to the kerosene lamps, trailing gaberdines, “the eternal October.” This is declamatory poetry, and we have been trained during the past few decades to distrust the poetry of statement, to say nothing of the poetry of imprecation at which Glatstein also excels; but I can only say that, whatever the judgment of some hypothetical and unexcited eternity, these poems, even when they verge on the strident, are written with enormous skill and power. In the original Yiddish, they are simply not to be denied.
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Since the martyrdom cannot itself form a poetic subject, Glatstein falls back upon a major strategy of Yiddish writing: the quarrel with God. It is a remarkable strength of Yiddish culture that even for the skeptic God remains a living force, a vital power, within the world for which he writes. Perhaps even more so than for the believer; since the skeptic struggles and suffers and, horrified by the world, must constantly renew his quarrel with a God in whom he does not believe. The skeptical Yiddish poet has no one else to talk to, and that is why in Glatstein’s poems God is apostrophized, caressed, denounced, and excoriated: they are on good terms, this modernist poet and the traditional God, because they owe each other explanations.
“The Torah we received at Mount Sinai / And at Lublin we returned it. / Corpses do not praise God . . .” begins one poem. “Who will dream of you / Who remember you?” he taunts God in another poem. And then, in a spasm of reconciliation, he sees God as a lonely old Jew (“The God of my disbelief is lovely . . .”) and thinks of him as a defeated companion: “There He sits, my friend, clasping my arm / And sharing with me his last bite of food.”
It is extraordinarily moving to watch this poet struggle from poem to poem, knowing in advance that each response must fail and exhausting himself in speaking to a God who does not answer. With what is surely the saddest and most authentic of responses, he ends still another poem by murmuring: “Loving, precious and holy Name / Never have we learned to understand.” And beyond that there is only his “Ghetto Song,” an incomparable lyric in which a father, in some nameless ghetto, muses over a sleeping child.
At roughly the time he was writing these poems of anger and sorrow, Glatstein was also composing his masterwork: a group of dramatic monologues spoken by the Hasidic sage, the Bratzlaver, to his scribe. Marvelously free and rich in their Yiddish, loving and easy in tone, these poems form an implicit balance to the poems about the martyrdom.
Criticism of poetry without citations in the original is a dubious thing; the only alternative is testimony. Though he lives in a country where only a handful of people know his name and fewer still his work, Glatstein is a poet who ranks with such celebrated American poets as Robinson and Frost. As a craftsman he is more agile than any recent American poet except Eliot and Stevens; he is not so predictable in tone as Robinson, or in manner as Frost, or in scope as Marianne Moore. If Glatstein wrote in any language but Yiddish, critical studies and translations would now be under way. As it is. . .
The least, then, that can be said by one reader living beyond the circle of Yiddishism is that his work has provided so rare an experience that I wish simply to express my gratitude to Jacob Glatstein.
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