Erotic Crucifixion

Celia Dropkin and J.L. Teller

This week is a double-header: “Suck it Out” by Celia Dropkin and “***” by J.L. Teller, side by side. Yes, those asterisks are the name Teller gave to his poem. I’m calling this installment in our Yiddish poetry journey “Erotic Crucifixion” because of that title’s obvious value as clickbait, and also because it sums up what I find so astonishing and fascinating about these poems. More on that below, but first, two biographical notes:

Celia Dropkin was born in Belarus in 1887, where she started writing Russian poetry as a child. After emigrating to America in 1912, she became active in New York’s Yiddish avant-garde, and from 1920 onwards published in many of the leading Yiddish modernist journals. Kathryn Hellerstein, in the Jewish Women’s Archive, writes: “her poems of sex, love, and death shocked and seduced her contemporaries, who acclaimed her as a leading woman poet.”

Here’s an awesome 1923 group portrait of her with the “In Zikh” crew - the so-called “introspectivists” - an influential group of avant-garde, New York-based Yiddish writers. I got this photo from yiddishkayt.org

Dropkin only published one book during her lifetime, 1934’s In Heysn Vint (In a Hot Wind). She died in 1956, and three years later her children published a posthumous, expanded edition of her work, from which this poem comes. 2014 saw a deserved resurgence of interest in Dropkin’s writing, when Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon published a wonderful, bilingual selection of her poetry.

Judd Teller - J.L. Teller - was born Yehuda Leib Teller in the Ukrainian city of Tarnopol, in 1912, and came to America eight years later after surviving the privations of World War I. From a young age, while still in Europe, he was recognized as a Talmudic prodigy, but left the world of the traditional yeshiva to become a poet, journalist, psychologist, and Jewish communal leader. 

I should admit that I am totally fascinated by Teller, although I don’t think many people read him anymore. This obituary gives a sense of his activities and influences, but doesn’t mention his poetry, which combined his interest in literary modernism with his deep knowledge of Judaism, psychoanalysis, and more. 

It also doesn’t mention one of my favorite parts of his biography: in the 1930’s, Teller served as a go-between for the New York Jewish mafia and the mainstream Jewish communities, as they discussed how to respond to the rise of Nazism. To put it simply: the Jewish mob wanted to kill American Nazi activists, and Jewish communal leaders were concerned about repercussions. Teller helped the two sides negotiate, and the Jewish mob settled for attacking Nazi meetings and rallies, while stopping short of lethal violence.

Anyway, the poem below comes from Teller’s 1934 collection, Miniatures.

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Suck it Out - Celia Dropkin

You swell, I swell,
within us swells the God
who transforms everything into wreckage,
who knows of nothing as forbidden.

Nail my hands up,
nail my feet up to a cross.
Burn me and be burnt,
claim all my passion.

Leave me full of shame,
suck it out, cast it away,
and grow estranged, estrange yourself
on your own solitary path.

*** - J.L.Teller

Maybe this is God
that grows on my body?

Your small, sharp teeth
crucified God.

God is the myth
of white conscience.
It gleams at dawn like snow on every roof.

But now it is night.
Stars: silent, quick,
the steps of rabbits.

Your freckles are dense
and thrill me like the smell of the sea.

God is not young.
It tires him, the smell of the sea.

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Aren’t these strange and wild little poems? I find them provocative alongside each other because they both take up the image of crucifixion in such unexpected and arresting ways. For Dropkin the crucifixion becomes an erotic metaphor, as she begs and/or commands the poem’s subject--a lover, presumably--to nail her, Christ-like, to a cross. Pretty incredible that something so subversive was published in Yiddish almost a hundred years ago.

And for Teller, the crucifixion becomes--well, I’m not sure what it becomes for him. It is at least ambiguously erotic, I think. I’ve been trying to map out the structure of his poem, and it’s not so clear to me. But I’m haunted by the opening word, “maybe,” a foundation of uncertainty and contingency.

“Maybe this is God
that grows on my body?”

I like poems that begin with a question. It’s an open, vulnerable stance to take, and in this case the poet doesn’t seem to know much more than we do. But on the literal level, something is growing on the poet’s body, and it might be God; someone to whom the poet is speaking has crucified God with their teeth. And then, what about the myth of white conscience, which is also God, and which has also--if we follow the poem’s logic--been crucified by “your” teeth? 

The questions add up. For me, at least, this poem is full of fruitful mysteries. I’m inclined to read it as a description of an erotic encounter, refracted and expressed through the imagery and dream-logic of Teller’s mythical, God-haunted subconscious. 

There’s so much more I want to say, and I haven’t even touched on Dropkin, but I’m approaching my self-imposed word limit. Edward Hirsch writes that Dropkin here “merg[es] the crucifixion of Jesus with sadomasochistic sex,” which seems to me correct, but not adequate. As I see it, this poem, and the crucifixion metaphor, is not just about sadomachosistic sex, but about the exquisite vulnerability of all erotic desire. 

I think that what Dropkin is showing us is that eros is both excruciatingly vulnerable and transcendent, glorious, like Jesus on the cross, who is--according to much Christian thought--simultaneously exalted and degraded through his bodily vulnerability.

In fact this is an idea I see in both Teller’s and Dropkin’s poems. That when one desires or is desired, loves and is loved, one participates in some way in godliness. But contrary to what we might assume, the godliness of desire is not simply good or transcendent—it is also contingent and terrifying, participating like Jesus in ecstasy and suffering at once. What a daring and subversive way to think about both eros and Jesus, especially for Jewish writers in a Jewish language.

We’ll stop there for now. Please tune in next time, and until then, a zisn peysakh - a happy Passover!