Un vu bizt du geven . . .?—“And where were you when we needed you?”—asks a plaintive old Yiddish song. The question might be asked of Yiddish itself. Why did we not appreciate its wonders decades ago, when it was still a living tongue?
That the Gentile world once viewed Yiddish, by and large, with hostility and condescension comes as no surprise. What is often forgotten, however, is that Yiddish had few friends among influential segments of the Jewish community of Eastern Europe where most of the speakers of Yiddish lived until the Holocaust. Zionists viewed it as unworthy even of comparison with the holy tongue, Hebrew, while the Orthodox barely tolerated it on purely pragmatic grounds as the language of the uneducated and of womenfolk, of whom no learning was expected. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, worldly Jews regarded Yiddish as a major impediment to the cultural advancement of their backward coreligionists. Yidish—a mise zakh; poilish iz unzer shprakh: “Yiddish is an ugly thing, Polish is our language,” proclaimed a semi-serious ditty from a prewar Warsaw cabaret.
But the linguistic assimilation of the Jewish masses proceeded slowly. For the bulk of Eastern Europe’s Jews, Yiddish was not, in the contemptuous term, der jargon but mame-loshn, “mama’s language,” and its emotional pull remained strong. Like it or not, those intent on reaching the mass of Jews, on establishing their presence oif der yidisher gas, “in the Jewish community,” had to do it in Yiddish.
It was the Jewish Socialist Bund and the Jewish labor movement that understood this most clearly and gradually became the most important and faithful champions of Yiddish language and culture. Following the Revolution of 1917, the Communists, too, extended their patronage. (In contrast to the Bundists, however, their friendship proved opportunistic and worse, culminating in the total suppression of all Yiddish institutions in the aftermath of World War II, and the mass murder of Yiddish writers in 1952.)
No wonder, then, that those who chose to write in Yiddish gravitated both to secularism and to the political Left. Isaac Bashevis Singer recalls that his father, a rabbi in Warsaw, “considered all the secular [Yiddish] writers to be heretics, all unbelievers—they really were, too, most of them.” In Eastern Europe, a great many identified with radical groups, including the Communists. And in America, as Zishe Landau, a Yiddish poet, aptly noted, much of Yiddish verse was little more than “the rhyme department of the Jewish labor movement.”
Even as the horrors of Nazi persecution of the Jews were gradually becoming known, these militantly secular Yiddish poets, with some notable exceptions, eschewed “parochial” Jewish concerns, avoided religious subject matter, and proudly proclaimed their universal human allegiance. Thus, Berish Weinstein, a native (like me) of the Polish city of Rzeszow, wrote in America about Harlem and rural blacks (and, when appropriate, about Jesus and the Virgin), but not about his kith and kin, not about the Jewish God of his Rzeszow ancestors and mine.
In their art, many of the Yiddish poets outside the USSR voluntarily observed the commandment which their colleagues in the Soviet Union obeyed by compulsion: literature was to be “national in form and socialist in content.” In writing, according to this doctrine, the national form was, simply, one’s native language; otherwise there was little or no room for diversity, for individual ethnic or religious worries and hopes, fears and aspirations, no specific values, no collective memories. Stripped of language, one body of literature was pretty much like any other. That, indeed, was one reason why, long before World War II, Soviet Yiddish literature began rapidly to lose readers: there was little specifically Jewish about it. And the same has proved true in the United States, where secular Yiddish schools, theaters, and newspapers have all but disappeared, while, by contrast, religiously and ethnically distinct Jewish institutions, from synagogues and yeshivas to summer camps and English-language publications, continue to thrive. It turns out that of the various components of a cultural legacy, language may well be the least durable.
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Un vu bizt du geven . . .? The wonderful blessings denied to Yiddish when it still boasted millions of speakers and a vibrant literature come to it now, nearly too late—after the destruction of East European Jewry in the Holocaust, after the forcible liquidation of Yiddish in the Soviet Union, after the near-obliteration of Yiddish among the younger generation of American and Israeli Jews.
Yiddish-language courses now earn college credit at major universities. Scholarly investigations in Yiddish lexicography, doctoral dissertations on aspects of the Yiddish novel, entire sessions on Yiddish language and folklore at academic congresses, international conferences devoted solely to Yiddish (and at Oxford, of all places), the first Nobel Prize ever awarded a Yiddish author—the cup runneth over. And now most recently in The Penguin Book of Yiddish Verse and American Yiddish Poetry: An Anthology we have two luxuriously printed collections of Yiddish poetry—with mame-loshn originals and facing English renditions lor those whose culturally deprived backgrounds preclude an adequate command of der jargon—proudly released by a leading commercial publisher and one of our major university presses.1
The editors of both these new volumes are painfully aware that their efforts, along with Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, published less than twenty years ago, may well become that poetry’s memorials. Thus, we read in the introduction to The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse:
There is still, after World War II, some brilliant work done in Yiddish, more in poetry than in prose; but for the most part it is now a literature of survivors, displaced and aging. By the end of the 20th century its historians will evidently be faced with the melancholy task of acknowledging its termination, since almost nowhere today are there young writers for whom the use of Yiddish remains inevitable, spontaneous, organic.
The editors of American Yiddish Poetry are more specific. Already in the 19th century, they write, Yiddish had become an “externalized object of Jewish self-hatred,” and “The movement of the young, bright, and successful away from Yiddish again left the language mostly to lower-class readers of limited culture and thus reinforced the vicious circle.”
Although Yiddish went on to experience a decade or so of euphoria in the period between the two world wars, the end was to come with terrible swiftness:
The base of Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe, with its historical foundation, institutional network, and millions of native speakers, was destroyed by Hitler and Stalin. A third of the Jewish people perished in the Holocaust, but the destruction of Yiddish was total. Stalin killed Yiddish writers; Hitler killed Yiddish writers and their readers alike.
But the editors are also frank to recognize that even without Hitler and Stalin, the future of Yiddish was hardly bright. “We must admit,” they continue,
that the trend toward assimilation was overpowering everywhere; in Soviet Russia after the Revolution, in Poland, France, England, Argentina, and the United States. The attempt to create a modern, cosmopolitan, autonomous culture in a separate Jewish language with no state of its own was doomed to failure.
Both these anthologies, let it be said from the outset, are more than impressive; both are products of herculean labor; both are magnificent collections of verse with translations that range from competent (if at times excessively free) to splendid; and both are heartily recommended to lovers of Yiddish and to devotees of poetry generally. Both volumes are also supplied with long and informative introductions that outline the history of Yiddish and of Yiddish writing generally.
In addition to all these virtues which they display in common, American Yiddish Poetry offers two extra benefits, a discussion of Yiddish versification and a brief description of Jewish American painters and sculptors. The introduction to this volume is also the more satisfactory of the two in recognizing the degree to which “modern Yiddish literature was written in the genres, forms, and conventions of Russian (and through it, European) literature.” An awareness of this fact—hardly surprising considering that nearly all of the poets in both volumes were born and educated in Russia or in Poland—helps us to understand many otherwise puzzling features of the aesthetic creed of Yiddish poets, whether in Europe or in America.
As for the Penguin anthology, it is a rich and varied feast. It offers work by thirty-nine poets, but devotes most of its space to six, of whom only one, Abraham Sutzkever, a highly inventive craftsman, is still alive and active in Israel, where he also edits a Yiddish literary journal. The other five include two poets who lived in the United States, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Jacob Glatstein (both are also featured in American Yiddish Poetry); two from the Soviet Union, Moyshe Kulbak and Perets Markish, both victims of Stalin’s terror; and Itsik Manger, master of the deceptively simple folk song. Markish began as an Expressionist. Glatstein, an intellectual modernist, is usually identified with the Introspectivist school. Kulbak’s verse forms—and also his early preference for rural subject matter—link him with the Russian Sergei Yesenin. As for Halpern, his blend of the comic with social protest and, particularly in his later work, mellow reflection and intricate imagery defies simple characterization. The Penguin anthology also offers a sample of Morris Rosenfeld, the foremost American Yiddish “sweatshop poet,” a school that goes unrepresented in American Yiddish Poetry.
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The editors of the Penguin anthology note in their introduction that “men like Glatstein and Glants-Leyeles knew [American literature] well, reading Pound and Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens.” American Yiddish Poetry is more emphatic on this point. “From an American perspective,” the editors declare, American Yiddish poetry “must be seen as an unjustly neglected branch of American literature, a kaleidoscope of American experience and art entombed in yellowing, crumbling books, in the muteness of its own dead language.” And so indeed it should be considered. Still, even such quintessentially American poems as A. Leyeles’s “The Madonna in the Subway” and “Manhattan Bridge” may also have foreign roots, as they strongly resemble two poems by the Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky (“The Girl from Woolworth’s” and “Brooklyn Bridge”) written after his visit to the United States in 1925. And the intricate structure of Leyeles’s “A Sonnet Garland” may have been suggested in part by medieval Hebrew poetry and even Hebrew prayers.
My own favorite lines by Leyeles are his metapoetic vision of the divine origin of writing in “The God of Israel,” which is included in American Yiddish Poetry; the translation, as is mostly the case throughout this book, is by the editors.
In a gray-gray once-upon-a-time,
From a mountain-top into a
valley,
He dropped two handfuls of
letters,
Scattered them over the roads of
the earth.
They sparkled with speech,
blazed with sayings,
And since then—
For thousands of years we seek
them,
For thousands of years we save
them,
For thousands of years we
explain them,
And there is no solution on earth
For the letters, the sayings, the
words.Another manuscript and another
manuscript
Entangled, bound, locked
together—
Letters in love with letters.
Leyeles and Glatstein may have been the greater Yiddish American poets, but H. Leivick (pseudonym of Leivick Halpern, 1888-1962) was arguably the one with the wider popular following. “Sublimated suffering, messianic fervor, a mystical tone, and a naive humanism, combined with a Neo-Romantic musicality of harmonious verse lines that were imbued with Russian Symbolism, marked the voice of his poetry,” write the editors of American Yiddish Poetry. Both anthologies feature “On the Roads of Siberia,” a very characteristic short poem. Here is Cynthia Ozick’s rendition in the Penguin anthology:
Even now
on the roads of Siberia
you can find
a button,
a shred of one of my shoelaces,
a belt,
a bit of broken cup,
a leaf of Scripture.Even now
on the rivers of Siberia
you can find
some trace:
a scrap of the raft
the river swallowed;
in the woods
a bloodied swatch dried stiff;
some frozen footprints
over the snow.
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What sorts of other delights are to be found in these two books? In what follows I shall try to give some sense of both the range and the quality of the verse represented in them.
As mentioned earlier, religious motifs are rare in Yiddish poetry, despite the fact that the vast majority of the poets had a traditional religious upbringing. But here is “To be a Jew” by Aaron Zeitlin, in Robert Friend’s translation:
Being a Jew means running
forever to God
even if you are His betrayer,
means expecting to hear any day,
even if you are a nay sayer,
the blare of Messiah’s horn;means, even if you wish to,
you cannot escape His snares,
you cannot cease to pray—
even after all the prayers,
even after all the “evens.”
(Penguin)
The concerns of most Yiddish verse, when not ideological, are earthy enough. Zishe Landau’s “In the Tavern” may not conform to the stereotype of Yiddish poetry, but it is not all that uncommon. The English rendition is Irving Feldman’s:
Like broken-down actors who
never made it,
they croaked away in hoarse
falsettos,
while the night surrendered its
hours
faster than the slowpoke clock
could count.There before three full steins,
three men sat,
the “kid” among them sixty if a
day.
Six beggars the eyes that kept
looking at me
while the trio gabbed their
anecdotes, stories, jokes—
about all the girls who came to
them crawling
and all those guys they used to
push around.
That squeaking of a rusty wheel
was their lies,
and that old horse in heavy
harness
the wanton laugh lugging their
voices out.
God, don’t punish me for what
I’m saying—
but that’s how a husband sees
his old wife:
tired out and seedy.
(Penguin)
There is some erotic verse. Here is a short sample by J.L. Teller (Judd Teller), a well known English-language American writer and journalist featured in both anthologies as a serious Yiddish poet:
Excited pillows torture
A girl’s raw nipples.
Her mouth is as hard as rock
And wet with first fog.
The temples beat tom-tom,
Hot and blunt.
And hands—like nettles—
Sting the naked body.
(American Yiddish Poetry)
Some of the more sensual poetry is written by women, which at the time scandalized both critics and the reading public. Celia Dropkin’s “Adam,” translated by Grace Schulman:
I met you on the way,
young Adam,
fondled,
soothed by women’s hands.
Before we kissed
you begged me,
your face a pale
gentle lily:
“Don’t bite. Don’t bite.”
I saw your body
covered with teeth marks.
Frightened, I bit.
You widened your nostrils,
breathed life into me
and drew near:
a seething horizon to a field.
(Penguin)
There is even cheerful and playful verse, of which this excerpt from Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s The Golden Peacock (1924) is a fine illustration. The translation appears in American Yiddish Poetry:
So I ask my dear wife
How to finish the affair
Of my little booky—
Says she: Let happiness leave on
a train
And wave back with a hanky.
Says I: Hanky-panky—
Says she: Booky-shmooky—
And asks me whether I’d like
With my coffee a cooky.
Says I: Cooky-shmooky—
And tell her to put a case on my
pillow
And not to play hooky.
Says she: Hooky-shmooky.
And tells me to repair her shoe
By hook or by crooky.
Says I: Crooky-shmooky.
So she jumps up, and points at
my head:
I am bald and spooky.
Says I:
Spooky-crooky-hooky-cooky
hanky-panky-booky-shmooky.
So we laugh together—
Laugh so nice.
Till she closes my eyes—
Closes my eyes.
And rocks me with a song of rain
and light,
Rain and light,
That you sing to little children
at night,
Children at night.
In the arena of history, Jacob Glatstein was among the first Yiddish poets to see the still barely perceptible Nazi menace. In his 1938 poem, “Good Night, World,” he called, in defiant despair, for a return to the only fortress the Jews then had, the traditional (and, in his view, deformed) Jewish way of life:
Good night, wide world
Big, stinking world.
Not you, but I, slam the gate.
In my long robe,
With my flaming,
With my proud gait,
At my own command—
I return to the ghetto.
Wipe out, stamp out all the
alien traces.
I grovel in your dirt,
Hail, hail, hail,
Humpbacked Jewish life.
A ban [anathema—MF], world,
on your unclean cultures.
Though all is desolate,
I roll in your dust,
gloomy, Jewish life.
(American Yiddish Poetry)
Some years later, as the facts of annihilation became known, Glatstein wrote “Without Jews,” an outcry of pain and anguish which, as the editors of the Penguin anthology rightly note, inverts many familiar passages from the Jewish prayerbook and traditional kabbalistic beliefs about the divine presence. The translation is Cynthia Ozick’s:
Without Jews, no Jewish God.
If, God forbid, we should quit
this world, your poor tent’s light
would out.
Abraham knew You in a cloud:
since then, You are the flame
of our face, the rays
our eyes blaze,
our likeness
whom we formed:
in every land and town
a stranger.
Shattered Jewish skulls,
shards of the divine,
smashed, shamed pots—
these were Your light-bearing
vessels,
Your tangibles,
Your portents of miracle!
Now count these heads
by the millions of the dead.
Around You the stars go dark.
Our memory of You, obscured.
Soon Your reign will close.
Where Jews sowed,
a scorched waste.
Dews weep
on dead grass.
The dream raped,
reality raped,
both blotted out.
Whole congregations sleep,
the babies, the women,
the young, the old.
Even Your pillars, Your rocks,
the tribe of Your saints,
sleep their dead
eternal sleep.Who will dream You?
Remember You?
Deny You?
Yearn after You?
Who will flee You,
only to return
over a bridge of longing?No end to night
for an extinguished people.
Heaven and earth wiped out.
Your tent void of light.
Flicker of the Jews’ last hour.
Soon, Jewish God,
Your eclipse.
(Penguin)
Glatstein was not alone in his rebellion against an unjust God Who failed to protect the people of His covenant. Here is another reckoning with God, by Kadya Molodovsky, a leading American poet, in Irving Howe’s English rendition. It is entitled, with bitter irony, “God of Mercy,” a common appellation in the prayerbook:
O God of Mercy
For the time being
Choose another people.
We are tired of death, tired of
corpses,
We have no more prayers.
For the time being
Choose another people.
We have run out of blood
For victims,
Our houses have been turned
into desert,
The earth lacks space for
tombstones,
There are no more lamentations
Nor songs of woe
In the ancient texts.God of Mercy
Sanctify another land.
Another Sinai.
We have covered every field and
stone
With ashes and holiness.
With our crones
With our young
With our infants
We have paid for each letter in
Your Commandments.God of Mercy
Lift up Your fiery brow,
Look on the peoples of the
world,
Let them have the prophecies
and Holy Days
Who mumble Your words in
every tongue.
Teach them the Deeds
And the ways of temptation.God of Mercy
To us give rough clothing
Of shepherds who tend sheep
Of blacksmiths at the hammer
Of washerwomen, cattle
slaughterers
And lower still.
And O God of Mercy
Grant us one more blessing—
Take back the divine glory of
our genius.
(Penguin)
One possible, grisly verdict in such an imaginary court of justice, in which God sits in the dock of the accused, is announced in the closing lines of Itsik Manger’s “The ‘Lovers of Israel’ at the Belzhets Death Camp.” The translation is Leonard Wolf’s:
Trembling and feverish, Reb
Meirl of Przemyslan
Waits, leaning on his old stick.
“Gentlemen,”
He says, “Let us in unison callTo God, ‘Creator of worlds, Thou
art mighty and great,
But we Galician Jews forever
erase
Your name from the list of true
Lovers of Israel.’”
(Penguin)
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Of Yiddish poetry created during the Holocaust, little, understandably, survives. A moving exception is Abraham Sutzkever’s “The Lead Plates at the Rom Press,” based on a plan of the Jewish underground in Vilna to use the lead from the printing plant that for generations had produced editions of the Talmud (and, latterly, secular books as well) to make bullets. Isaiah’s prophecy was to be reversed: plowhshares were to be beaten into swords. Here are the last two stanzas in Neal Kozodoy’s English rendition:
Letter by melting letter the lead,
Liquefied bullets, gleamed with
thoughts:
A verse from Babylon, a verse
from Poland,
Seething, flowing into the one
mold.
Now must Jewish grit, long
concealed in words,
Detonate the world in a shot!
Who in Vilna Ghetto has beheld
the hands
Of Jewish heroes clasping
weapons
Has beheld Jerusalem in its
throes,
The crumbling of those granite
walls;
Grasping the words smelted into
lead,
Conning their sounds by heart.
(Penguin)
Sutzkever is, appropriately, the last poet in the Penguin anthology. His meditative 1974 poem from a diary may be read as a melancholy reflection on the future legacy of Yiddish poetry itself. The translation is Cynthia Ozick’s.
Who will last? And what? The
wind will stay,
and the blind man’s blindness
when he’s gone away,
And a thread of foam—a sign
of the sea—
and a bit of cloud snarled in a
tree.Who will last? And what? A
word as green
as Genesis, making grasses grow.
And what the prideful rose
might mean,
Seven of those grasses know.Of all that northflung starry stuff,
the star descended in the tear
will last.
In its jar, a drop of wine stands
fast.
Who lasts? God abides—isn’t
that enough?
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A final note.
“I write for myself, but I publish for the money,” Alexander Pushkin remarked some 150 years ago. The writing (like, to an extent, the reading) of poetry may be a sublime activity, but translation, editing, and publishing are mundane pursuits. Both these admirable anthologies are also unfortunately marred by scores of garbled transliterations of Yiddish versions of Slavic proper names and, especially, names of cities, towns, rivers, and the like. This is no meaningless quibble: many a reader of the English renditions will thus be prevented from looking them up in, say, the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Similarly, readers may be puzzled by the use in translation of Yiddish forms (often diminutives!) of otherwise familiar Hebrew proper names. And old habits and geographic enmities apparently die hard: Aba Shtoltsenberg’s poem “A beizer vinter”—an angry, furious, nasty winter—becomes, in the Penguin anthology, “Galician Winter.” This is not the first occasion on which I have had to defend the honor of my native Galicia in the pages of COMMENTARY. Shame on the editors and the translator (which, in monosyllabic Yiddish, is, simply, feh).
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1 The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, edited by Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Rhone Shmeruk, Viking, 719 pp., $29.95. American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, University of California Press, 813 pp., $55.00.
