The story of how the manuscript of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the Soviet Union is drab compared to the odyssey of a recently published collection of strange, curious, and perhaps very important verse by Chaim Lensky¹—a Soviet Hebrew poet who vanished in a Siberian labor camp in 1942. It took eighteen years for Across the River Lethe to reach its destination in Israel, where it was finally issued in 1960. Two earlier collections of Lensky’s work—both assembled from manuscripts that had reached periodicals in Israel circuitously and piecemeal over a period of fifteen years—had already been published, but Across the River Lethe was prepared in completed manuscript by Lensky himself.

Lensky never sent his manuscripts directly to his editors or to his literary friends in Palestine—Israel. From Leningrad, where he was making his living as a steel-worker, he would enclose them—his poems and also communications to editors—in letters to his sister in Tel Aviv. She would then forward them on to the addressees. Later, the station of Siberia was added: from there Lensky dispatched his poems to his wife in Leningrad, and she, disliking all poetry and especially these Hebrew manuscripts which had landed her husband in trouble, nevertheless dutifully passed them on to his sister in Tel Aviv with the same precise instructions her husband had formerly given. The poet ran two risks: the lesser one that his manuscripts might be intercepted by the censor and never reach their destination, and the greater risk that once they did appear abroad, they would in time come to the attention of the Soviet secret police, with obvious consequences to himself and perhaps also to his family. He took every precaution to reduce the lesser risk and circumvent the censor. Yet his passion to establish his literary identity in public was so profound that he seems never to have thought of using a pseudonym.

If he was only half-aware of the dangers involved before his arrest in 1934, he could have no doubt of them afterward. The edifice of charges against him was based on the simple fact that he was a self-professed Hebrew writer. The mere possession of Hebrew manuscripts, books, and newspapers even today serves to establish a prima facie case of affiliation to a “Zionist conspiracy.” How Lensky ever endured as a poet under the circumstances of labor servitude, and produced and passed on Hebrew manuscripts under the watchful eyes of his wardens and surrounded by informers among his fellow inmates (an inevitable corollary of these circumstances), we shall never know. But we may some day learn more of the high courage of his friends in Leningrad or Moscow to whom he had in 1940 entrusted the manuscript of Across the River Lethe, having used a brief respite between internments to assemble and revise his scattered poems. It could not have been easy for them to keep faith with Lensky in the years 1948-53 when cherished collections of private Judaica were burned by bibliophiles for fear that their lifetime hobby might become incriminating evidence against them of anti-state activity.

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What kind of poetry does a man write under such conditions? Lensky’s was not the verse of martyrdom or protest. His occasional self-deprecatory and self-pitying exclamations are the style of Russian lyricism. But there is a constant awareness of his actual surroundings: traces of prison argot; a casual detail that exposes the condition of labor servitude in which he lives. He is rudely aroused from his sleep—he had pulled his blanket over his head, in violation of a rigid prison rule; he never quite empties his cup of coffee, there is so little time before muster for the day’s work. Prison labor was his only environment, and the place-names attached to some of his poems trace a map of his Siberian travail, from camp to camp, including the harshest of them all, Gornaya Shoraya, on the Mongolian-Soviet frontier.

Yet what makes Lensky’s verse seem strange, and even curious, at first reading, is that it is not obsessed by the circumstance of his imprisonment. He treats that circumstance as the ordinary decor of his life, except that his sharpened sensibilities transcend the drab and oppressive, and absorb every glint, sound, and scent of the Siberian landscape. One thinks of Thoreau in reading Lensky’s celebrations of nature, though Lensky celebrates not only nature, but man himself. He is not given to striking metaphors—but occasionally his thought takes on a transcendental flavor. Thus, he has been felling trees in the Siberian forest, and notes that the snow dust rising from their crowns as they stagger to the ground is “like a curtain dropping on a Shakespearean tragedy.” The trees were being felled to lay railway tracks through what had been virgin forests.

Often his images are rooted in Jewish ritual and require the same kind of deciphering for the uninformed as the complicated folklore allusions of the poetry of Yeats or Dylan Thomas. Nor, in these poems, does he treat the Communist oppression which had victimized him as an apocalypse. He sees it, rather, as a Jew, in historic procession, in the Byzantine tradition, but without any suggestion of esoteric mysticism. Unlike Pasternak, who in Moscow was making his agonized escape toward Russian orthodox ritualism, Lensky retained a simple faith in the seasons of history and the survival and triumph of man, with a compensatory irony constantly overlaying his profound compassion for the human condition.

Only in his nostalgic poetry of the shtetl, in which he recalls that unique way of life in its penultimate phase, is his usual irony lacking—the shtetl poems of Lensky are all compassion, almost Hasidic in this respect, and reminiscent of Yessenin’s warm verses about the Russian peasant.

We know that Lensky was a voracious reader of German poetry, from Goethe through Rilke, and of Russian poetry from its 19th-century beginnings to Mayakovsky; his astounding memory stored away all he read. Yet his own verse technique is simple, showing little of these influences. Lensky seized on everything that came to him from Palestine, but could not of course keep up with the dynamic development of the language that was taking place there. Thrown back on himself, he created a vocabulary that went beyond Bialik, whom he admired, and which expressed his unique condition, that of a Hebrew poet, in penal servitude, where Hebrew could neither be read nor heard. The results of his solitary efforts paralleled, intuitively, the evolution of Hebrew in Palestine. His is probably the richest working vocabulary of any contemporary Hebrew poet, with not an obsolete word in it. But because he had to mine his vocabulary, he kept his verse techniques conservative. He uses a simple four-line stanza and, occasionally, the sonnet form. His extraordinary statement might have been less lucid, had he not restricted himself to a technical simplicity. The poetry of Chaim Lensky thus becomes for us an important human triumph, one gauge of a man’s power to endure and celebrate life in the most constricting circumstance.

Lensky was not the only Hebrew writer to persevere under Soviet oppression. Hebrew literature is produced even today clandestinely in the Soviet Union. Several other manuscripts, although none of Lensky’s literary distinction, have already been published in Israel. Others are in safekeeping there, including a collection of short stories which are, in my opinion, of a very high order, surpassing even Babel and dealing with the same period. The reason they cannot be published, even pseudonymously, is that they contain material that would inevitably betray their authorship.

Across the River Lethe receives an added importance from its preface and postscripts, which include a concise evaluation of Lensky’s poetry and certain essential data by the book’s distinguished editor, Shlomo Grodzensky, an Israeli literary critic and publicist. Grodzensky was among the first to focus critical attention on Len-sky. The preface by A. Kareev, who was associated with Lensky in Leningrad and is now an active critic and editor in Israel, includes some valuable reminiscence of the poet. Y. Saaroni, also a Leningrad friend, recalls the Leningrad circle of Hebrew writers who, at odds on almost everything, were united in their passion for Hebrew. They met in secret to read each others’ work and converse in the language, and they finally drew police suspicion to their intimate gatherings. They were a strange conglomeration: Shin Russi, an incorrigible Stalinist; Albert the Georgian, a student of Hindu mysticism; Lensky, a self-professed anarchist, politically passive, concerned with nothing but Hebrew linguistics; a Gentile, who became an expert in Hebrew; and Shimon Boneh, the eccentric who was seized and sentenced for founding, among the intellectual elite in the Komsomol, a school of “New Leninism” which proposed to substitute the dictatorship of the peasantry for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

At this time, Lensky shared a room with a friend in one of Leningrad’s outlying slums. He had noticed secret agents tailing them, and on a frosty winter night he invited one of them to join him for some tea—which the embarrassed agent rejected. Then, one midnight, there was the knock at the door. They had come to arrest—Lensky’s friend. The poet was disappointed; he had already steeled himself, but his turn had not yet come.

A one-time prison comrade of Lensky’s in Siberia tells of his meeting with the poet in Marinsk. Lensky was regarded with something like reverence by the intelligentsia and politicals for his vast knowledge of Russian and German poetry. It was he who, in the absence of reference books, settled disputes involving literary matters. Lensky’s former fellow-prisoner now lives in Israel, and there is strong reason to believe that his pseudonym conceals a one-time Cominterm agent, chief of the Communist apparatus in Palestine, and later in Spain. Last year, after years of Siberian exile, he returned to Israel, penitent—and religious.

Alexander Zarchin, the inventor of a desaltination process (which might, if successful as predicted, miraculously and cheaply reclaim the Negev), knew Lensky during his brief respite in Moscow in 1940 between imprisonments. He believes that Lensky and he were the victims of an entrapment. They had been invited to have their snapshot taken with two other Hebrew-speaking friends; this snapshot was later placed before Zarchin as evidence that he had belonged to a “conspiratorial cell.”

Across the River Lethe ought to be translated, I think, into many languages—with still another introduction, by Ignazio Silone. There is an affinity between Silone and Lensky—their faith in the eventual triumph of man over evil. And the Italian humanist, whose priest in A Handful of Blackberries is reluctant to baptize a Jewish child entrusted to his keeping because he cannot further deplete a people decimated in the millions, would understand perhaps better than most Lensky’s seemingly eccentric martyrdom for Hebrew, which he called “my southern tongue.”

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¹ Me'ever N'har Halaytay (Across the River Lethe), Am Oved Publishers (Tel Aviv).