So outlandish is the look of our poems - H. Leivick thinks of the Yiddish poets

H. Leivick is the Russian among the American Yiddish poets.  The Russian Symbolist; Dostoevsky.  The Dostoevsky comparison comes from his biography.  A dirt poor Ukrainian Jew with a painful but serious yeshiva education, he became a socialist radical enough that he was exiled to Siberia – for life! – at the age of eighteen.  He escaped, eventually, crossing, Siberia, Russia, Europe and the Atlantic to his new life in New York City as a wallpaper hanger and Yiddish poet.

Maybe it is too easy to make a poem on that subject interesting.

from “On the Roads of Siberia” (1919)

On the roads of Siberia
Someone may still uncover a button, a lace
Of my torn shoe,
A leather belt, a shard of a clay mug,
A page of a holy book.

His remnants are on the other side of the world.  His parents are buried “In a small town in a Russian field.”  “What am I doing here, in New York’s Hester Park?” (from “The Sturdy in Me”).  Another poem answers that question:

from “Here Lives the Jewish People” (1923)

I walk for hours in the streets of the Jewish East Side
And imagine in the fiery whiteness before my eyes
Fantastic gates, soaring columns,
Rising from all the dilapidated stands
Upward, to the far and empty New York sky.
Gates – on all their cornices
Glowing, sparkling signs, inscribed:
Here lives the Jewish people.

A glimpse of Leivick’s mystical side, a visionary side.  Years ago I read two of Leivick’s plays, The Golem (1922), a philosophical portrait of the legendary monster, and Shop (1926), a piece of well-detailed union propaganda, both with strong Modernist elements – the political play climaxes in modern dance! – but otherwise not seeming like they were by the same author.  The poems reconcile the differences, or show how many different Leivicks there are.

from “Yiddish Poets” (1930s?)

When I think of us – Yiddish poets,
A sorrow grabs me – sharp, acute;
I want to scream to myself, to pray –
And just then the words grow mute.
 So outlandish is the look of our poems –
Like stalks the locusts have possessed;
One comfort: get disgusted with yourself,
Slink on God’s earth, an alien guest!

The American Yiddish Poetry anthology has facing-page Yiddish, in Hebrew characters, so mostly useless to me, but here I can look at the original lines and laugh at the metaphor.  Here is another good one from the poem:

Sometimes, like frazzled cats, dragging
Their kittens around, distraught,
We drag our poems between our teeth
By the neck through the streets of New York.

The alphabet, the poems, are literally “outlandish” in America.  Leivick never shakes the sense that he is a refugee.  The first poem in his first book is “Somewhere Far Away,” where “a prisoner” searches for the road to “the forbidden land.”  The last poem in this anthology ends with an attempt at closure, a long piece of Yiddish Whitman called “To America” (1955), in which he again mourns “the evil lot / [that] has scattered all Yiddish poets over New-Siberias,” but now accepts his Americanness, and sees himself on America.  “You too, America, walked close with [Abraham and David], / You too, have absorbed in your heart God’s commandment and blessing.”

If I were to write a poem titled “Yiddish Translators” it would be effusively thankful but would also include a polite, urgent request for a Collected Poems of H. Leivick and a number of other American Yiddish poets.

It is said that the golem lives everywhere and in all times - the golems of H. Leivick and Dovid Frishman

Writers use the golem story for all sorts of purposes. He's a blank slate, created from nothing, so the author can inscribe anything he wants on the golem.

In H. Leivick's verse play The Golem (1922), the poor golem is a sort of existentialist, tormented by his inability to understand his purpose, even though he is specifically created to save the Jews of Prague from the blood libel. But that is not what he means, exactly:

"You don't see who I am? I'll be another.
Beware of looking at my face, my features.
I am condemned to lie here on the ground.
I do not want to lie here any longer.
I am repelled, disgusted by my flesh,
Revolted by my glassy, bulging eyes,
By my own muteness, by my dark sign language...
The moment has come. See, I repel
Myself as I would repel any worm..."

The whole play is like this. I can guess how it would work on stage - abstract sets, flashing lights and sudden plunges into darkness, bizarre electronic music. Tough stuff.

In the long climactic scene, in which the golem is sent on his mission (destroying the false evidence of the blood libel), he experiences some kind of Walpurgisnacht, as in Goethe's Faust. The golem is taunted by CAVE SPIRITS and debates an INVISIBLE FORCE. The final crisis is shared with the YOUNG BEGGAR, who represents idealism or something, and Christ, I mean MAN WITH BIG CROSS. I was not expecting him, but I didn't expect Byron to show up in Faust, Part II either, yet there he was.

In Leivick's play, the golem is psychologically damaged by his heroic feat, so his deactivation, a standard part of the golem story, is perhaps merciful. Dovid Frishman* lets the golem stick around in his 1922 story. Just barely - he nearly drowns, but is rescued, and now "[i]t is said that the golem lives everywhere and in all times."

Frishman's golem story reminds me of Frankenstein, assuming that Victor had not behaved so strangely after he created his monster. Rabbi Leyb creates the golem to be the perfect student. Bu the golem cannot resist the rabbi's granddaughter Eve, who possesses a different kind of knowledge:

"Eve was holding and wiping a huge sacred tome. She stood there absorbed for a minute. Good Lord! Why so many books? Why does a person need them? Eve stood there, pensive. Her granddad was simply crazy! He had taken a long, blossoming life of seventy years and inundated it in such nonsense. Why, for one long minute, the dear, radiant world with the golden sun was a thousand times dearer and smarter than all these tomes put together."

Eve doesn't win the argument, but neither does the rabbi. The mind-body dualism is never resolved, even after the golem tries to solve his dilemma by, I love this part, writing his memoirs.

Many golems for many purposes.

The Leivick play and Frishman story are in Neugroschel's anthology The Golem. That brick golem is from the streets of Prague; the charming plump one is from one of many Prague paintings by the artist Natalia Povalyaeva.

* Who is Dovid Frishman? Who knows? His collected works, mostly in Hebrew, runs to six volumes, but this story is the only thing I can find in English. It's good; maybe there's more.

The machines make noise; they make noise - some Yiddish socialist agitprop

So greed is bad, I think we all more or less agree about that. What's a fellow to do about it? Be less greedy, I suppose.

Or reform society from the ground up. Every Yiddish writer I have considered here - to my knowledge, actually, every one I have read - was a socialist of some sort, and many were some variety of Communist. The degree of radicalism varied a lot, but in the face of brutal poverty, an oppressive Russian state, a materialistic America, and so on, all of the writers ended up on one side. Or, to be more precise, all of the literary writers.* There seems to have been a lot more disagreement about Zionism than about the redistribution of property.

H. Leivick's play Shop (1926) is first-rate agitprop by one of the Communist writers. Jewish garment workers in a Lower East Side factory go on strike, and win. The good people more or less get their way, the bad people do not. At the end of Act II, the workers sing the "Internationale."

What keeps the propaganda interesting is exemplified in the songs in Act I: two flighty young things come to work singing "Yes, sir, that's my baby \ No, sir, don't mean maybe," while an older woman sings a traditional Yiddish sewing song. The play's politics are idealized, but the characters and setting have some reality of their own, and are allowed to argue back a little.

Shop works in a lot of dancing, too; it would probably be a lot more enjoyable to see than to read. At first, it's all social dance - workers on break play music and form couples. The play ends, though, this way:

"The pattern of the dance is transformed into something which welds the people with the machines. Severe and inhuman from the start, it changes increasingly into a storm. Hands outstretched and faces like fire. At its greatest heat, as the dance reaches ecstasy, screams and whistles are suddenly heard from the street."

Purely modernist, there. This is after the workers have won the strike, too; a joyous moment turns into something more complicated, or skeptical. Here's the very end:

"The shop is alone. The machines make noise; they make noise."

* This is vaguely related, apparently, to why I haven't come across any early female Yiddish writers. The few women who were fortunate enough to be educated and had the temperament to write did not want to waste their time with literature. Rosa Luxemburg and her kindred spirits were going to change the world.