After a week’s hiatus, we turn today to Aaron Zeitlin (1898-1973). You can expect to see more of his poetry in this space, because I love him dearly, and have been spending a fair amount of time working through his collected writings.
Before we get going, however, a little bit of a palate cleanser. The last installment of this newsletter was pretty heavy, and today’s will be no lighter; another reckoning with the Holocaust is in store. So I thought I would offer a break from all this suffering, and start today’s newsletter with a delightful, ridiculous piece of Yiddish kitsch, to bring a little levity into the mix before we get back into some industrial strength despair.
Towards that end I am happy to present, with no context, a clip from 1982’s Yiddish disco classic, Az Men Git Nemt Men:
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
I’ll put all my cards on the table and say that I think Zeitlin is one of the greatest Yiddish writers of all time, and deserves a spot near the top of any Jewish literary pantheon.
Zeitlin’s life and writing were overwhelmed both by the Holocaust, and by the lineage of Jewish mysticism which he inherited through his father, the major journalist and mystical writer Hillel Zeitlin. Aaron Zeitlin was born in Belarus, but moved to his beloved Warsaw in 1907, where he established himself as a respected writer. In 1939, he left Poland, and left his wife and son, for what he thought would be a brief stay in Manhattan, to oversee the production of one of his plays in New York’s Yiddish theater.
A few months later, of course, the Nazis invaded Warsaw. Zeitlin spent the war in America, writing and worrying, feeling keenly his distance from the people he most loved. By 1942, his entire immediate family had been murdered, and the civilization he loved, the culture to which he belonged, was destroyed.
News traveled slowly from Europe to America. Here’s a gut-wrenching telegram he sent in the aftermath of the war, desperate to find any information he could about the fates of his family members, from whom he had not heard in years. I’m grateful to the scholar Sam Glauber-Zimra for sharing this, and other pieces of Zeitlin’s archive, on facebook:
Zeitlin spent the rest of his life in New York, and served a professor of Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, writing in Hebrew and Yiddish all the while. His Yiddish poetry, in particular, is a challenge to understand: he often wrote in a language he referred to as “kabbalistic Yiddish,” dense with Hebrew and Aramaic words, and with allusions to mystical texts and liturgies.
His friend, the Nobel prize winning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, said that Zeitlin’s “greatest vice was literature,” that he was “a veritable spiritual giant.” Reading his poems, one can’t help but agree.
Through his poetry Zeitlin reveals himself as a deeply traumatized and haunted man with an exceptional mastery of Jewish religious literature, trying to find a way to express and give meaning to his trauma through the theological-literary framework he has inherited. Trying to find a way, though he knows it impossible, to exorcise the ghosts of his murdered family and friends.
I Did Not Merit
I left in time, God hid
those agonies from me—
why, why did I leave Poland?
I did not merit to walk the path of flame
together with my people,
and it pains me like a sin beyond forgiving—
the guilt of living,
and of writing rhymes.
The guilt will poison me
unless I follow one of three structures
which want to hide me from my guilt,
which wait, which fervently call out my name.
The first is holiness, the second is insanity,
the third is suicide.
But suicide is too strong for someone as weak me.
My tiny self cannot participate in holiness.
I cannot even lose my mind.
This short poem guts me. Here, as elsewhere in Zeitlin’s writing, we find some of the most brutal reckonings in all of literature with the Holocaust’s legacy. The Holocaust’s legacy not in the abstract or the collective, not as it relates to “the Jewish people,” but as it relates to a solitary individual whose world has been irrevocably destroyed, and who must nevertheless find a way to continue living within the destruction.
Zeitlin reminds me often of Gerard Manley Hopkins. A strange comparison, perhaps, but both are masters of rhyme and of other technical structures in their poetry, and use those structures to give shape to an unbearable intensity of emotion and despair, as refracted through a mystical worldview. As Zeitlin writes in a footnote to a later poem, the formally and thematically complex “Messiah, Son of Majdanek,” “I have tried to restrain the tempest within me with doubled formal structures.”
Again, though, I find myself left silent before the intensity of this poem, before the raw human suffering which it conveys. Hopkins said of his “terrible sonnets” that “if anything was ever written in blood, these were,” and I think the same could be said for so much of Zeitlin’s Holocaust poetry. Written in blood, and in smoke and ashes.
This poem is all the more devastating for its relative simplicity. Zeitlin eschews the kabbalistic technicalities he uses elsewhere in favor of a direct, intimate description of his predicament: three possibilities—suicide, religiosity, and insanity—offer to rescue him from his suffering, but all three possibilities are impossible.
Where, then, can the poet turn? What can he do, how can he find a way to live? How can he continue living and writing after the Holocaust? And yet, how can he not? These questions remain, and remain unanswered.
Or perhaps the artful asking of them is itself an answer. One of my favorite of Zeitlin’s poems is called “A Dialogue Between Me and My Despair,” and in some sense that would be an apt title for so many of his poems. Zeitlin’s collected poems runs almost a thousand pages long, and most of these were written after the murder of his family.
I don’t want to fall into cliches here, which it’s easy to do when talking about the resilience of art in the face of unimaginable suffering. But many ideas become cliches precisely because they express such earnest and fundamental truths, and I think that in Zeitlin’s life and work we find an example of astonishing spiritual and artistic perseverance. Zeitlin’s art did not conquer or silence his suffering—how could it have?—but neither did his suffering conquer or silence him. Perhaps his writing enabled him to continue living when the world became an unlivable place.
As I wrote above, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Zeitlin’s poetry, so I’ll share more of it in the future; there’s so, so much more to be said about him. I also have a translation of one of his poems in a recent issue of the magazine Anglican Theological Review.
Thanks, as aways, for reading. I’m glad to be sharing this conversation with you.
He continued desperately searching for any and all information regarding what had happened to his family beyond the end of the war — in 1946, H. Leivick went to the American occupied zone to tour the DP camps as part of a delegation and was asked by Zeitlin to find out what he could. He found where his nephew, David, had been buried after dying at Gauting Sanatorium. And happiness that there was even a physical grave to visit is absolutely heart-breaking.
From Leivick’s account: “Aaron Zeitlin specifically asked that we might find out all it is possible to discover in the camps about the fate of his family. I cannot forget a single sentence of Zeitlin’s in his letter which he gave to me en route, — sentences which follow me the entire time. From them, from the phrases, it is clear to me that Zeitlin already knows everything about the fate of all of his relations.”
(Zeitlin also wrote about his father Hillel for ‘Der Tog’ in 1952, which is available on the NLI’s ever-expanding collection of digitised issues.)