In honor of Mother’s Day, which—here in the States—fell this past Sunday, I’m delighted to share one of my favorite poems by Celia Dropkin, “My Mother.” I really imagined that I had shared a whole bunch of Dropkin’s poems here already, but it turns out that I only touched on her briefly, in the second installment of this newsletter, now over a year ago. So if you’re new to Dropkin, you’re in for a treat. She’s one of my favorite poets to read and to teach, a remarkable writer whose candor—especially about eroticism, as you’ll see below—makes her work feel astonishingly contemporary.
Born in Belarus in 1887, Dropkin—like many poets of her generation—received both a Jewish and a secular education, and began writing in Russian before switching to Yiddish. She emigrated to New York in 1912, and died there in 1956. Along the way, she lived for a few years in West Virginia and here in Virginia, a sojourn I’ve begun to research with the help of the good folks at the Library of Virginia, so hopefully I’ll have some more to say about that soon.
Dropkin wrote just one book in her life, 1934’s poetry collection In Heysn Vint, “In a Hot Wind.” It’s a wonderful book. She also published short stories, and was a great painter as well, but her greatest achievements were in poetry. As scholar and translator Kathryn Hellerstein writes, “The explicitly sexual imagery and themes of Celia Dropkin’s poems redefined the ways modern Yiddish poetry could depict relationships between women and men. Beautifully crafted lyrics, Dropkin’s poems undo the poetic conventions implicit in their very forms and, with their anger and passion, call into question societal assumptions about love.”
I also like Sheva Zucker’s distillation of Dropkin’s work: “Poetry of the head is not for her. She is a heart poet.”
Celia Dropkin - photo courtesy of John Dropkin
So I hope you enjoy this belated Mother’s Day poem, taken from 1934’s In Heysn Vint.
First, though, on Thursday evening, June 15, at 7:00 pm EST, I’ll host the next zoom chat for paying subscribers. Our theme will be women’s poetry in Yiddish. Each of these zoom discussions has been wonderful, filled with lively conversation from diverse participants, and I’m looking forward to this next one. All paying subscribers will receive a zoom link, but if you’d like to come and aren’t able to afford the subscription, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
My Mother
My mother, at 22 years old
a widow left with two small children,
modestly decided
never to become anyone's wife again.
Quietly her days and years passed,
as if illuminated by a stingy wax candle.
My mother never became anybody's wife again
but the many days and years and nights of sighs
from her young and loving existence
did I grasp with my child's heart;
I soaked them deep into myself.
And my mother's hot, hidden longing
flowed freely into me
as if from an underground spring.
Now it gushes openly from me,
my mother's hot and holy,
deeply hidden desire.
You see what I mean about how astonishingly contemporary Dropkin’s eroticism seems even today, almost a century after this poem was published. And what a poem it is: so rich and so deep in its deceptive simplicity. I read this, and much of Dropkin’s writing, as a kind of proto-confessional poetry, separated by a generation and a language from the midcentury writers in English who made that “confessional” label famous.
But I don’t want to make too reductive a comparison between Dropkin and what we now think of as American confessional poetry. The differences between them are significant, and are helpful in clarifying Dropkin’s unique power (and confessional poetry’s limitations, though that’s not the point today.)
In her poem “In Those Years,” Adrienne Rich criticizes confessional poetry. “We found ourselves / reduced to I,” she writes, while meanwhile history rages. Dropkin refuses this diminishment; she refuses to reduce herself to the narrow borders of her ego and experiences. Yes, she speaks in “My Mother” of her own biography and of her mother’s, and of the ways that her mother’s repression transform into her liberation. But she isn’t “just” speaking of her own, limited life. She gestures, through herself, beyond herself, to the 20th century’s feminist revolutions, and to the (halting, resisted, inconsistent but nevertheless significant) movement towards what we might now call sex-positivity.
We can also distinguish between Dropkin’s poetry and the confessional movement’s often implicit, and implicitly Christian, sense of shame. “My Mother” is a subtly but unmistakably Jewish poem. As Sheva Zucker writes, “The image of the wax candle begrudgingly lighting her days is an implicit allusion to the lighting of the Sabbath candles. The unspoken contrast between the begrudging wax candles and the hoped for spiritual satisfaction derived from blessing the Sabbath candles, one of a Jewish woman’s most important mitsves (commandments), suggests that this tradition is not a source of joyous spirituality for the mother but rather of unnatural physical privation.”
Hidden in this poem, in other words, we can find a feminist critique of traditional Judaism’s limiting views of femininity, a critique which precedes by several decades the scholars and activists who are known for developing it.
But Dropkin celebrates her desires. Her mother’s longing, once hidden, is now free to express itself without embarrassment or indignity. What an amazing idea this poem presents of the ways that repressed experiences are inherited, not in the mind but in the body.
And so much hinges on that adjective in the second to last line of the poem, הייליק, holy, to describe the desire that is passed on to her. That adjective’s presence is a radical argument in itself. Rather than rejecting religion or sacredness, seeing these purely as categories that caused her mother’s repression, Dropkin reclaims them. She does not throw the implicit Shabbos candle away, but lets it cast its light on lust, on desire, and lets lust and desire in turn cast their holy light backwards through time on her mother’s suppression.
Backwards through time, but forwards as well: to insist that a woman’s once-stifled lust is not just legitimate but holy is a radical and provocative claim, in 1934 as in 2023. I described Dropkin as a sort of proto-confessional poet, but maybe it would be more accurate to describe the confessional poets as wannabe Celia Dropkins, writers who toyed with but could never fully embrace—as she could—the transcendent power of their nominal transgressions.
Alongside today’s poem, here is Miriam Schapiro’s 1991 painting “Agony in the Garden.”