The decline of Yiddish in America among all Jews except the Hasidim has had important consequences, some of which have only gradually come to light. Initially, the sacrifice of Yiddish, the internal vernacular, was a relatively small price for European Jewish immigrants to pay in return for English, which gave them direct access to the material and spiritual opportunities of America. Jews, after all, have managed innumerable linguistic adaptations throughout the millennia, and while Yiddish enjoyed a longer history and fostered a richer culture than most other Jewish languages, it was only one of several Diaspora vernaculars created by Jews and subsequently, in altered circumstances, abandoned. In the modern period, wherever political emancipation promised civic equality, Jews learned and adopted the local language, always more responsive to the carrot than to the stick, to the proffered opportunity than to any punitive measures against them. Nowhere was the carrot more enticing, the promise more golden, than here in America.
Only a false nostalgia for the bad old days would suggest that the adoption of English was not worth the risk to Yiddish, or that linguistic assimilation was a cultural mistake. Nevertheless, now that American Jews have become Anglicized, one can afford to recognize the debit side of the ledger. The abandonment of Yiddish within a single generation meant the loss, not of some antique property, but of a highly developed contemporary resource, the national storehouse of consciousness and expression. Though the loss of Yiddish is often mourned sentimentally, as if some beloved grandmother had died leaving one last anecdote unrecorded, its decline is actually of more immediate and personal consequence. Yiddish is the crucible in which most of the modern Jewish experience was forged. The complexities of the Jewish encounter with modernity are recorded in Yiddish folk and formal culture and in the language itself. Without Yiddish, descendants of European Jewry are without their 19th and early 20th centuries, bereft not merely of the traditional past but of the setting of their own immediate experience.
It so happened that among the immigrants to America were many budding Yiddish writers who would use their vernacular to interpret their individual and communal reorientation, and in doing so, bring their literature to new heights of excellence. But by the time they were at their best, much of their natural audience had become actively indifferent to Yiddish, and their children even more so. Modern American Yiddish culture was left without heirs, and the heirs without a culture.
There was something remarkably raw in the immigrant dedication to the future, an abandon not usually associated with the Jews, but characteristic of them nonetheless. No one captured this hard streak in the American Jewish immigrant character more effectively than the Yiddish poet, Moishe Leib Halpern (1886-1932), who was both its exponent and victim. An uncompromising realist, Halpern recognized that the pragmatism of the Jews seeking refuge in America was the necessary cost of their legendary national talent for adaptability. Yet he recoiled from the coarseness of the immigrant struggle for survival. He did not share the immigrant optimism, the faith in a better future as a reward for present hardship. As a writer, one of that select group of immigrants for whom the native language was indispensable and non-negotiable, Halpern saw in the weakening of Yiddish his own personal doom for which there could be no social compensation. Frayed by the practical difficulties of eking out a Yiddish writer’s living, and progressively estranged from the society of transplanted Jews, Halpern exposed the most painful and desperate aspects of making a new home, both for those who successfully managed the feat and for those, like himself, who did not.
To some degree, of course, all the Yiddish writers in America were sooner or later affected by the evaporation of their language. The greater persistency and intensity of Halpern’s sensitivity to the problem derived, as he was aware, from the circumstances of his childhood. Long before he came to America, an earlier process of uprooting and adaptation had already organized his contradictory feelings about belonging and estrangement. His coming to New York at the age of twenty-two followed a previous period of disorientation which foreshadowed his immigrant life.
Moishe Leib Halpern was born in 1886 in the Galician market town of Zlochow, which had been under Austrian rule since 1772, and which comprised about 10,000 inhabitants, just over half of them Jews. His father, who came from a family of merchants in Odessa, ran a local general store. In raising his only son, this traditional Jew embarked on an unusual plan. Having sent the boy to cheder and to a local Polish school, he then took Moishe Leib, at age twelve, to Vienna where he enrolled him in a course of applied art so as to guarantee his professional independence. Though the boy showed talent as an artist and sign painter, he thwarted his father’s design by gravitating to literature. He began a study of German verse and took his own first tentative steps as a German poet. Halpern also frequented the Vienna catés, where the arguments of the Jewish socialists and Zionists successively won his allegiance.
By the time he returned to Zlochow, at the age of twenty, he was effectively without a career and a cultural stranger to his birthplace. His boyhood friends could not follow his political arguments, delivered as they were in German or in an impossibly Germanic Yiddish. Having strong literary ambition themselves, they persuaded him that as a would-be writer he was wiser to use his native Yiddish tongue, which was anyway evolving into a lively artistic medium. Somehow the cosmopolitan finish of Vienna did not suit the indigenous cultural ferment of his birthplace, and it was he rather than his provincial school chums who gave way. He turned back to Yiddish and submitted his first poems in that language to the Galician Yiddish press.
But there was a second area of expectation in which Halpern could not comply. Some of his contemporaries were already in uniform in the Austrian army, where he would also have to serve. Rather than submit to induction, he set out for America, arriving in New York in the latter part of 1908. He had found himself a stranger in his home, and was now twice a stranger in the city of Jewish ingathering.
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Halpern’s arrival in America coincided with a great cultural upsurge on New York’s Lower East Side. He became associated with a movement of fledgling writers called Di Yunge, the young, in deference to their audacity and innovativeness. These were young men from a diversity of backgrounds and from various cities, towns, and villages that spanned the map of Eastern Europe. Coming together in the common insecurity of immigrants and with the common ambition of becoming great writers, they stimulated one another in comradeship and competition. Most of them were without special training or profession, and the regular jobs they found to support themselves—in small factories, as house painters, newsvendors, paperhangers, waiters, even shopkeepers—eventually drained the energy required for steady writing. But there were enough among them who succeeded in bringing fame to the designation, Yunge: Mani Leib, the handsome lyricist from the Ukraine; Zishe Landau, poet, scion of a Polish rabbinic family; Reuven Iceland, poet, one of the chief chroniclers of the group; David Ignatoff, energetic novelist and short-story writer from the hasidic heartland of the Ukraine, who edited the group’s first major publications; Joseph Rolnick, an unassuming, evocative poet of moods and landscapes; I. I. Schwartz, the most learned Jew among them, epic poet and gifted translator; Joseph Opatoshu and Isaac Raboy, experimenters in long and short forms of fiction; H. Leivick, escapee from a sentence of lifetime exile in Siberia, poet and dramatist; Moishe Nadir and Moishe Leib Halpern, from neighboring towns in Galicia, the mischievous rebels within this movement of self-declared rebels.
The group—actually, like most literary groups, an informal cluster of like-minded writers who would soon go their individual ways—was overtly rebellious only in its initial phase. Its members opposed the national and social orientation of the work of their predecessors, the commercial impulse of the Yiddish press, and the sense of communal responsibility that was expected of Jewish writers in a Jewish language. Like knights of a medieval romance, or like the Symbolists whom some of them acknowledged as models, they vowed to serve di sheyne literatur, belles-lettres, with pure aesthetic passion and undivided loyalty. Preferring (for the most part) poetry to prose, they turned from the public spirit of Yiddish writing to subtler, intricate explorations of the individual self in all its moods.
Although most of the young writers originally subscribed to this mild aestheticist position, they were caught up before long by local and international events, and they responded, no less than the mass of their fellow immigrants, to pressures from the very movements they had tried to resist. Several of the Yunge had been members of anti-czarist revolutionary organizations before coming to America. When the revolution of 1917 appeared to actualize their youthful dreams, they were inevitably affected, and in some instances moved to political alignment with Communism. Three almost simultaneous events—the eruption of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration—in one way or another claimed the allegiance of them all.
Halpern was generally less sociable than his literary colleagues and everyone who met him in the early immigrant years commented on the solitude which seemed particularly pronounced in him. His fellow poet, Mani Leib, recalled that “we, his friends, like all other Jewish immigrants, also bore the fear of this wondrous unknown called America. But somehow we . . . gave in, adapted ourselves, ‘ripened’ and gradually became . . . real Americans. Not Moishe Leib. He could never compromise or bend.” Though he contributed to the group’s many publications and little magazines, he was slightly apart from the others, the lone wolf, or, as the play on his name suggested, the brooding Lion, Moishe Leib. Almost alone among his fellow writers he failed to find steady work in the small factories, manual trades, or editorial offices where most of the others eventually made their living, and this economic precariousness, which continued practically without interruption until his death, contributed to his image as a troubling nonconformist, and to his artistic distance.
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Moishe Leib Halpern’s poetry was as distinctive as he. Against the general mood of literary quietude and resignation, of nostalgic reminiscence and submissiveness, Moishe Leib was strident and mocking, equally impatient with the past and the present. His verse sought out the disjunctive rhythms and the coarsest idioms of everyday speech. His images were shabby or grotesque. His first book, In New York, published in 1919, which established his reputation as one of the most interesting voices in the post-classical phase of Yiddish literature, took for its setting and subject the new world—the metropolis ironically reinterpreted as a modern garden of Eden.
The grass in this paradise can be seen only under a magnifying glass; its trees have scarcely seven leaves; the watchman throws you out before you have even done any wrong, and no birds sing.
Is this to be our garden now
Just as is, in morning’s glow?
What then? Not our garden?
The book opens with this guarded celebration of morning and concludes with a phantasmagoric epic, “A Night,” in which the horrors of World War I storm the poet’s consciousness until they elicit from him a broken series of dirges.
The range of contents of In New York, from romantic lyrics and dramatic narratives to parodies and apocalyptic visions, confirmed not only Halpern’s artistic maturity but the sudden authority of the new American Yiddish literature. Beginning in 1919, and largely because of Halpern’s work, the tide of influence in Yiddish poetry flowed mostly outward, from America to Europe, reversing its earlier direction.
In the same year Halpern married a young woman whom he had courted for several years, and for whom he continued to feel a lifelong, if not exclusive, affection. During the war, he had somewhat isolated himself by his firm stand against conscription, attacking even those Jews who joined the Jewish Brigade of the British army. But in 1922, in the golden afterglow of the Russian Revolution, when the Communist daily newspaper, the Freiheit, began publication in New York, Halpern entered upon a brief, heady period of popularity. From the first issue of April 2, he was a regular contributor, with a ready forum for his poems, incidental essays, occasional theater reviews, and literary criticism.
The association with the Freiheit did not solve Halpern’s financial worries because the newspaper paid little and irregularly. As its featured poet, however, Moishe Leib enjoyed a wide audience and an acknowledged importance. He was sent on Freiheit-sponsored lecture tours to Detroit, Boston, Toronto, Winnipeg, Cleveland, and Chicago, speaking on the question of a proletarian literature and trying to drum up subscribers. With the help of admirers in Cleveland he put out his second book, Di Goldene Pave (“The Golden Peacock”), in 1924. These poems, far more aggressive in tone and explicit in their social criticism than the earlier works, were praised or condemned, depending almost entirely on the political orientation of the reviewer. In Warsaw, a literary column sponsored by the influential weekly, Literarishe Bleter, asked leading Yiddish writers to name and discuss their favorite author. Moishe Leib Halpern figured prominently among the contributors’ nominees—indeed, it was rumored that the frequent appearance of his name in this column was the newspaper’s main reason for suspending the series, since its editors did not share the enthusiastic opinion of their contributors.
By the mid-20’s relations between Halpern and the editors of his own newspaper, which had grown increasingly strained, reached the point of mutual repudiation. As Soviet authority exerted ever greater control over local American activities, the Freiheit was expected to toe the party line, and its contributors were put under similar pressure to conform. Halpern’s poetry was becoming so complex that the “proletarian” readership for whom it was ostensibly intended complained of its incomprehensibility. On his speaking tours, Halpern said exactly what was on his mind. With some regret and some relief, he was dropped. This left Halpern without any steady income, and, in a period of polarization among the various Yiddish newspapers and cultural organizations, without a base of support. With his wife and three-year-old son, he moved to Los Angeles in 1927, but was back in New York before the year was out. He was caught in political limbo between the Left whose militancy he was among the first to recognize and repudiate, and the anti-Communists, whom he could not join because to do so would smack of careerism and “selling out.”
In 1929, when the Freiheit’s condoning of the Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron shocked many of its supporters into rebellion, a new nonaligned weekly, the Vokh, was briefly launched. Despite the inclusion on its editorial board of such well-known writers as H. Leivick and Lamed Shapiro, and despite a host of prestigious regular contributors, of whom Halpern was one, the paper was never able to achieve financial stability and folded after a year. Halpern, plagued by poverty and ill health, both of which he camouflaged as long as he could, died suddenly after an undiagnosed stomach ailment on September 2, 1932. His death, in the throes of the Depression, and against the background of European political dangers, touched off a moment of anguish that had Moishe Leib at its center but encompassed much more. Once he was dead, beyond the squabbles of Jewish cultural life, it was easy to recognize his marvelous talent. At the same time, his death, as if momentarily exposing the dreary backstage of art, revealed the pitiful isolation of American Yiddish writers, the ugly effects of Communist dogmatism on Jewish intellectual life, and the weakness of Jewish culture in America once it was no longer receiving fresh infusions of European immigrants. The shock of Halpern’s death momentarily illumined both the unexpected achievement and its impermanence, like a comet’s bright flash.
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By the time of his death, Halpern’s image as a poet had achieved an almost autonomous life, much as Sholem Rabinovitch’s fictional self-representation as Sholem Aleichem had done in the preceding generation. He was the smart-aleck immigrant, Moishe Leib, restless as a wolf and stagnant as a bear in his new surroundings, pursued by memory, spurred by a rage of conscience, and claimed by a talent that stuck to him as doggedly as cow manure to a bare foot. Though his language was startling and occasionally crude, Moishe Leib himself was discomfitingly familiar: he was the unassimilable element in the process of self-adaptation, the coarse particularism that could not be smoothed over, the mocking disclosure that the masquerade of refinement was uglier than what had gone before, and doomed to fail besides.
For most of the Yunge, poetry was a means of transforming their harsh and often degrading circumstances into something of intrinsic worth. Yiddish, a language heretofore associated with the rough prosaic task of daily survival, would be their instrument of purification, the inner flame of the poet’s aesthetic heat burning away the dross of experience to create perfect expression, a still life of distilled beauty. With the naive folk song as one model of purity, and the rarefied idealism of Russian mystics like Fyodor Sologub as another, the poets tried to bring their private perceptions and visions to sublimated expression.
Always in opposition, Moishe Leib reinvented himself instead as a street musician, drowning out the humiliations of immigrant life with his own raucous, aggressive ditties:
Children laugh in sport and fun
But I don’t want to be undone
Shake a leg, kids! Hop on by
One more punch then, in the eye.
One more spit!
In spite of it
With one jump everything is quit.
Inured to all with an evil name
From my pocket I pinch some bread
And swig from my flask, down from my head
The sweat pours and my blood’s aflame.
So as if to break
The drum, I bang
And then I make
The cymbals clang
And round and round about I spin—
Boom! Boom! Din-din-din!
Boom! Boom! Din!—(Translated by John Hollander)
The disharmonious drummer, recklessly uncouth, tears away at every false façade, especially at the romantic idealizations of his contemporaries.
Chief among Halpern’s targets was the ubiquitous nostalgia for the old country, the gilded memories of home. Actually, before World War I, Halpern’s first major published work had been a ten-part poem tracing the voyage of a young man In der fremd (“Away From Home”) and using sanctified images of Polish Jewry to cushion the encounter with the great stone city. But even as this poem was being celebrated as a masterpiece of the new exilic literature, Halpern turned against his erstwhile source of solace. The ruinous scope of World War I, with its destruction of so many home communities, opened in Halpern a new range of anger. While others began to invoke forgotten grandmothers in idyllic landscapes, and as popular Yiddish culture settled into sentimental longing for “Mayn shtetele Belt,” Halpern recreated his shtetl, Zlochow, as a den of hypocrisy, where the local pious man would sell the sun with its shine like a pig in a poke, and parents would expose their own daughter to public humiliation because of an indiscretion (whose issue is the angry speaker of the poem). It was as if Halpern were deliberately resharpening the original satiric edge of the 19th-century Yiddish literature, and recalling the restrictive harshness of traditional Jewish society against which the immigrant generation had rebelled.
Paradoxically, though these poems were attacked for their callousness, Halpern’s rough images were a better instrument of commemoration than the pastel reminiscences they mocked. The freshness of his antipathy made the shtetl come artistically alive, endowed its petty villainies with the ring of actuality. It was the elegy that Halpern hated, the hushed respect that comes into being only after its subject has died. In a not unusual poem by Halpern, a man watching a prostitute undress for him is sourly reminded of the way his grandfather used to pull his shirt over his head in the bathhouse, even though he had been given buttoned shirts that could be taken off less dramatically. The introduction here and there of these original, irreverent analogies were small, deliberate acts of sword-crossing within a general literary atmosphere of pious enshrinement.
The provocative nature of Halpern’s verse sometimes obscured its emotional and thematic profundity:
Evening sun.
And, in evening cold, all the flies
In the corners of the panes are numb,
If not already dead.
On the rim of a water glass, the last
Is alone in the whole house.
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.—(Translated by Nathan Halper)
Despite the reduction of everything—of the globe and the journey across it, of the poet and his poetic tradition, of the Jewish exile and the eternity of Jewish longing—an unexpected compassion stirs. Diminished, corrupted, and almost extinct, a parody of former grandeur, the Jew and the poet still sing of their yearning. The swollen rhetoric must be deflated by Halpern’s impious effrontery before feeling can once again emerge.
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If the prettification of a national past provoked him to mockery, the denial of contemporary social reality stirred Halpern to even greater rage. He had no consistent, discernible social philosophy, but from the flow of his sympathies and antipathies a line of argument emerges. The acknowledged tyrant over earth’s creatures is the stomach. People, no less than mice, go to great lengths to protect their rations. It is therefore necessary, in any judicious assessment of the human condition, to recognize the daily marketplace scramble for “onions and cucumbers and prunes.” The crudity of this struggle is admittedly disheartening to aesthetes and other idealists. But as long as it remains the basis of life, the primacy of matter over spirit cannot be gainsaid. This is as close as Halpern comes to an outright endorsement of Marxism.
Halpern’s fierce independence precluded any fixed loyalty to system or party. There were times when he blistered like Mayakovsky, hurling insults at the goddamned intellectuals with their white hands and at the cowardly enemies of the great experiment of dictated social equality. His poem on the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchists whose trial for murder was used by the Communists as a rallying point against the American system, is exceptionally poignant, an expression of genuine outrage. There were also poems like “A Striker Song,” echoing the old sweatshop complaints of oppressed workers against their bloodsucking bosses, which were set to music to be sung at union rallies.
But essentially, Halpern looked up the skirts of every orthodoxy. The Russian Revolution was an accident. “Had Lenin been the father of a child, or better yet of five children, as he was himself one of five, the Czar would still be ruling Russia.” This certainty, based on Halpern’s exceptionally powerful instincts of paternal love and responsibility, gives the lie to historical determinism. Though Halpern enjoyed his reputation as a “proletarian poet,” and took pride that the landlord’s painter, sent in to touch up his apartment, knew of his work, he had no confidence in the proletariat as such, scorning anyone who could make a virtue or accept the harness of steady labor. All absolute claims are comical, whether human or divine. In “The Tale of the World,” a great king ordains the conquest of all the world, only to discover that it is far too large to fit into the royal palace:
The courtiers, meanwhile, hold that the world
Should be kept out there under guard.
But the king has turned a deathly gray,
Fearing the world will get wet some day
When the rain falls hard.
But the plow in the field,
And the cobbler’s leather sole,
And the mouse in his hole,
Laugh till they cry,
Laugh till they nearly die.
The world’s still there, outside.—(Translated by John Hollander)
Reality defies metaphysical or political systematization, and the spirit most authentically attuned to life must be duly profane.
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Halpern’s resistance to the accepted sentiments and postures of his time comes to sharpest expression on the national question, not so much because of Halpern’s identification as a Jew, which was forever touched by irony, but because of his passionate distrust of the “goyim.” His unkind views of Christians were disturbing to every segment of the Jewish readership: to those with faith in American tolerance who did not want to be reminded of religious divisiveness, and to those preaching the international brotherhood of workers. But for Halpern, the pretense of brotherliness where none existed was a particularly corrupting form of self-deception. It required, first, a falsification of the past; then, a willful stupidity in the present. What is more, it was inevitably accompanied by self-hatred, of which the modern Jew already had more than his fair share.
In his own case, the poet traced his encounter with hostile Christianity back to childhood incidents, such as the special treatment he was accorded by his Polish classmates:
A golden cross was thrust at me to kiss
A second classmate smeared a cross over my
back.
And when my youthful heart could tolerate no
more,
The teacher noted it, and turned me out the
door.
Halpern acknowledges that after this and similar incidents he went out into the world and learned that Jesus brought his blood as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind. But even so, he could not learn to love those pious folk whose faith in Jesus’ blood expresses itself in the pursuit of his.
Eventually Halpern’s intuitive rebellion evolved into a philosophical distaste for Christianity’s justification of suffering and death. Christianity is seen to be doubly deceitful: theoretically, because it falsifies the absolute distinctions between life and death; practically, in its violent exercise of the religion of love. Some of Halpern’s poems poke gentle fun at Christian spirituality, as when Jesus speaks to the children, explaining that all in the world is his—with the single exception of them. Elsewhere, in poems like “The Jewish Blacksmith,” the Christian is the wanton and stupid murderer of the Jew, refusing his civil companionship and repudiating his assistance:
He’s got himself an alehouse where he whoops
it up and drinks
He’s got himself a churchhouse where he suppli-
cates and stinks
And that’s all he needs—that lout, my neighbor.
Appalled by such blunt characterization of European peasantry, the Communists accused Moishe Leib of fomenting pogroms, a charge that seemed only to fuel his attack. His style grew more crabbed, but his aim remained sure:
In the Soviet Union . . . no sooner does the rooster crow than someone must begin worshiping the red divinity, blessed be he, because otherwise no one is allowed to hang around with his hands in the mud—like the Israelites in Egypt. There is only this difference: there, they kneaded children into the walls, whereas in Sovietland you have only to reshape yourself. You become a new Adam—without even a figleaf. For the robust goyim this is surely a piece of good luck, but for our kind . . . well, I’ve heard that they skulk around with their hands over their genitals, more atremble now before the puniest little Gentile than they ever were before.
This was Halpern with his gloves off, striking out in both directions at once. Seeing matters plain, “without even a figleaf,” he recognized under the revolutionary camouflage the persistent hold of despotism and anti-Semitism, and the modern forms of Jewish enslavement and self-enslavement.
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Outside the tiny island of his wife and son, Halpern did not make his peace with very much, least of all with himself. Unfortunately, his reputation as an upstart and rebel itself became something of a cliché, so that even his most attentive readers did not note the deepening strain of pessimism that went along with the increasing difficulty of his later work. The similes and metaphors which had always been an important feature of Halpern’s style began to take on a life of their own, growing homerically, and overshadowing narrative or thematic development. At the same time the poems came to be set out along a line of rational argument, with prepositions and conjunctions—although, because, despite, notwithstanding, but, if only, yet—like so many signposts, pretending to guide the poem to its firm, logical, inevitable conclusion. The tension between the reasoned form of the discourse and the wild density of its images, between the homey, old-world stock of references, and the bleak, modern situation to which they were applied, heightened the anxiety of this poetry, as if it were straining to achieve clarity against an overwhelming emotional tide.
Indeed, there seems little doubt that Halpern was struggling for clarity. To those who told him they could not understand his latest work, he answered with incredulity but tried with rough patience to explain. Many of these poems take the form of exhortations, public lectures, notes of advice to his son, where within the thickets of private allusions he warns against war, mourns poverty, and decries its corresponding evil, petty greed.
But the futility of this effort was also his theme. Halpern had been drawn to Yiddish in a milieu of cultural vitality, when writers were prized, perhaps not with sufficient critical detachment, but personally, for what they represented to particular segments of emerging modern Jewry, and to the emerging image of a modern Jewry with a literature of its own. It was within this nurturing atmosphere of literary relevance that Moishe Leib matured, only to find that he had overshot the mark. His dazzling complexity was lost on his fellow American Jews, who grew plainly pragmatic under the pressure of local and world events.
Who was responsible for this failed opportunity? Halpern saw that the widening gap between the artist and his natural constituency could be attributed to the artist. He made merciless fun of the poets who want “the words they sing to be as delicate as the church carvings of the Middle Ages, and as pure as the yearning of a flutist in the evening.” When he turns to the housepainter sitting beside him in the subway and asks whether this is what he too wants, the man moves nervously away. Halpern speculates that had he asked the painter whether he wanted a hot bath after work, the man would have known how to respond.
Nevertheless, Halpern understood from his own failed experiment as a public poet that however he might frame his questions, he was beyond the reach of the housepainter. Yiddish had developed a high culture at the moment when its speakers were riveted, as never before, to the struggle for survival. In America, the comic impotence of Yiddish before the hegemony of English cast the language into the role of “the little Jew” within Judaism itself. To put one’s faith in Yiddish was to play the fool, to withstand the reality of acculturation. As one of the chief chroniclers of the immigrant marketplace, Halpern knew the revealed helplessness of his language, and with it of his writing. He quotes a fictitious uncle who says that “if he were a diplomat, he would demand that all declarations of war henceforth be issued in Yiddish only. This would fairly guarantee lasting peace in the world.” In the foreground of this self-mocking statement is the powerless Yiddish utterance. In the background, less humorously, are the actual nation-states, with all too much power for their evil ends.
Despite his grim appraisal of the fate of the poet in modern times, of Yiddish among the Jews, and of Jews among the Gentiles, Halpern stayed almost free of self-pity. The energy of his anger and hatred gave wings to his imagination, made him endlessly inventive. Halpern sharpened the teeth of American Yiddish literature. Having cut himself loose from Jewish pieties, he did not seek shelter among any of the alternate orthodoxies, whether aesthetic or political. In a sense his work reflects the energy of the immigrant generation that went out “on its own” with all the impudence and improvisation of those with nothing to lose.
Unlike English writers like Abraham Cahan, whose work undertakes to interpret the Jewish immigrant to the non-Jews, Halpern was unshackled by any external constraint. In him one can find the boldness and self-reliance that was so much in evidence among immigrant Jewish businessmen, but so little manifest in their cultural spokesmen. There are those who found him too aggressive, arguing that his joy in combat ruined the finer judgment required of art. What makes Halpern unusual, even among the aggressive Jewish writers, is that his opposition to others remained appreciably greater than his antagonism toward his own.
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Note
For the English reader, the best examples of Moishe Leib Hal-pern’s poetry can be found in A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969; Schocken [paper], 1976). The Golden Peacock, edited by Joseph Leftwich (Robert Anscombe & Co., 1939), contains some translations of Halpern by the Canadian poet A.M. Klein. Ruth Whitman’s Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry (October House, 1966) includes three poems by Halpern with the Yiddish text and facing translation. Individual poems by Halpern have appeared in COMMENTARY (November 1947, October 1949, and June 1950, translated by Jacob Sloan), and in the Kenyan Review (Winter 1979, translated by Kathryn Hellerstein).
