In today’s newsletter, I’m happy to introduce Itzik Manger, one of the most well-known and beloved Yiddish writers of the 20th century.
First, though, I want to thank those of you who became paying subscribers to Di Freyd Fun Yidishn Vort, after I introduced the option last week. I’m extremely grateful, and it really does mean a lot to me. Your support enables this project to be sustainable, so if you’ve found this newsletter meaningful and are able to subscribe, I’d really appreciate it. But either way, thanks—as always—for reading, and please feel free to be in touch!
Back to Itzik Manger: Manger was born in 1901, in the town of Czernowitz. It’s hard, sometimes, to contextualize these eastern European communities. When Manger was born there, Czernowitz was in the Austro-Hungarian empire; in 1918, it became part of the Kingdom of Romania, until 1940, when the USSR invaded and declared that Czernowitz was Ukraine. Today it’s the Ukrainian city of Чернівці́—Chernivtsi—not far from the Romanian border. (When I worked for a year in an academic Judaica library, a big part of my job was standardizing European place names in our catalog—not always, or often, a simple task.)
Tshernovits (the city’s Yiddish name) has an outsized significance in the history of Yiddish culture, and of Jewish literature. A few of modern Judaism’s greatest writers came from the area—Paul Celan grew up in Czernowitz, and the Hebrew poet and scholar Dan Pagis was born nearby. In 1908, the city was home to “the first international conference in support of the Yiddish language.” Attended by many leading writers, educators, and activists, the Czernowitz conference was a pivotal movement in the development of modern Yiddish culture.
The point, for our purposes, is that Manger was born into an exceptionally rich incubator for Jewish literature and culture. He started writing poetry as a young man, influenced by Yiddish folk song traditions and by broader European music and literature, and first came to prominence while living in Bucharest. In 1927, Manger moved to Warsaw, where the “Romanian poet with thick, disheveled flowing hair, blazing eyes, and a lighted cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips”1 was hailed as a dazzling new literary talent.
For the next decade Manger was astonishingly prolific, and developed a huge reputation: he published many collections of poetry, included two books of poems inspired by and adapting the Hebrew Bible; started a literary journal; edited an anthology of folk songs; wrote several plays, and the lyrics to Yiddish music theater productions and films; wrote a history of 500 years of Yiddish literature, and an autobiographical novel; on and on.
But in 1938, Manger was forced to leave Poland. He settled in Paris until it fell to Germany, when he fled to England, and stayed there (unhappily) for about a decade. He returned to Paris, travelled to Montreal and New York, and in 1958 settled in Israel, where he died in 1969.
The year before his death, Manger became the inaugural recipient of his namesake honor, the Itzik Manger Prize, which until its cessation in 1999 was the world’s most prestigious Yiddish literary award. (The other two Manger Prize recipients I’ve profiled here are Aaron Zeitlin and Kadya Molodowsky.)
The existence of the Itzik Manger Prize is a testament to his status as one of modern Yiddish’s most respected and beloved writers. As the critic and essayist Shloyme Bikl wrote, “Like no one before him and no one since, Itzik Manger in his poetry expressed in a highly refined and artistically highly serviceable manner the entire scale of feelings and moods of Jewish folk poetry over all generations.”
The poem below is one of Manger’s better known, and for good reason. He wrote it in 1958, while preparing to emigrate to Israel. It’s seen many publications, and the edition below is from a fascinating 1961 anthology calledארץ ישראל אין דער יידישער ליטעראטור—The Land of Israel in Yiddish Literature. A reader recently suggested that I include recordings of these poems, so here is Manger himself reading this one:
I’ve Wandered Foreign Lands for Years
I’ve wandered foreign lands for years,
now I’m off to wander through my home.
One pair of shoes, one shirt on my back,
the stick in my hand—without it, what would I be?
I will not kiss your dust, like that great poet,
though my heart is also full of song and pain.
What would it mean to kiss your dust? I am your dust.
And who, I ask, can kiss himself?
I’ll stand in awe before Galilee’s blue,
wearing my ragged clothes,
like a wandering prince who finds his blue
when blue has been his neverending dream.
I will not kiss your blue, but only like a silent
shmoneh esreh will I stand—
what would it mean to kiss your blue? I am your blue,
and who, I ask, can kiss himself?
I’ll stand before your vast desert in contemplation,
and will hear the camel-clop of generations past
cradling wares and Torah on their humps,
along the sand; and the ancient wandering-song
that quivers over the white-hot sand,
dies away, remembers itself, and never wants to fade.
I will not kiss your sand. No, ten times no.
What would it mean to kiss your sand? I am your sand,
and who, I ask, can kiss himself?
shmone esrei - also known as the Amidah, this prayer is the center of traditional Jewish liturgy
As I said above, Manger wrote this poem when he was in his late 50s, preparing to emigrate to Israel. It feels to me in some way like an older, wearier man’s revision of Peretz Markish’s youthful reveling in homelessness. After a lifetime of wandering, Manger isn’t settling down, not exactly. He’s eager to arrive in some place like home, though he knows he’ll never leave his wandering behind.
I’m fascinated by the ways this poem subverts some of the classic claims of Zionism. As the refrain of one exceedingly cheesy nationalist Israeli pop song goes, “after two thousand years, [Israel is] the end of my wandering.” Nope! Manger says. Even (or maybe especially) in Israel, the wandering never ends. You can take the Yiddish poet out of the diaspora, but you can’t take the diaspora out of the Yiddish poet.
Without my walking stick, Manger asks, “what would I be?” Without the means and the symbol of my itineracy, I’d be nothing and no one, or at the very least I wouldn’t be myself. It’s an implicit rebuke of much Zionist ideology which claims that Jews can only fully become themselves when they leave their itineracy behind, and trade it in for a rooted life in Israel.
I read this poem as Manger’s insistence that, even as he moves to Israel, he hasn’t fully accepted Zionism: his emigration is not the end of a diasporic identity, but is instead that identity’s relocated continuation.
The “great poet” Manger’s referring to here is presumably Yehuda HaLevi, the medieval Hebrew poet and philosopher whose 12th century pilgrimage to the land of Israel ended with his death, and is shrouded in myths and questions. But Manger sets up a contrast between his and HaLevi’s relationship to the promised land. Where, and what, is the land of Israel? For HaLevi, it is a geographical territory, and demands reverence as something distinct from one’s body, one’s life, oneself.
But for Manger, the self and the land of Israel are not distinct: he is the dust, the water, the sand on which he walks and at which he gazes. His pilgrimage is ultimately towards himself.
I’d like to flesh out a little bit of what I see as the radical consequences of this idea. If Manger is, in some way, the land of Israel, then it means that the particular holiness of Israel is not confined to the borders of a nation-state, or to any physical territory. Instead, Manger bears the promised land within him through the world. If he is Israel’s earth, then when he lives in Warsaw, Israel can be found there. The chosen land is wherever he chooses to wander; because a human life is the promised land, the promised land can be anywhere.
But I don’t think he’s making these claims only about himself, or even only about Jews and Israel. This poem forces me to reflect on the ways that we carry our homes within us, on the ways that our lives themselves are somehow the homelands we yearn for. Perhaps it would be easier if this weren’t true. Then, like Yehuda HaLevi, we could have a tangible destination. We could arrive somewhere, and wander no more.
It’s more challenging, I think, to see oneself as indistinct from one’s promised land. Are we there yet? In one sense, yes; we’ve been “there” all along. And in another sense, we’ll never get “there,” because there’s no homeland beyond where we’ve always been—beyond who we’ve always been.
We’re condemned to wander through our lives, and to try to find our homeland in our wandering. But the poem also enables us to flip this formulation around: condemned, yes, but we’re also blessed that we ourselves constitute the homeland we’ve been looking for, the place we’ve been thinking is somewhere far away, and maybe somewhere we need borders and a military to protect.
Against the rise of ethnonationalism in Israel and around the world, Manger’s poem is a helpful and challenging reformulation of what it might mean to claim a homeland.
You might’ve noticed that I’m including some visual art in these newsletters. A friend and reader—thanks, AL!—suggested that I incorporate paintings that seem to me in some loose way resonant with my selected poem(s). Going forward, I’ll be including visual art after each poem. I’d love to hear your thoughts about whether and how these paintings interact with the poems, as I’m making these pairings by instinct and feeling. Below is R.B. Kitaj’s “Kennst Du Das Land.”
It’s not too late to sign up for the upcoming online classes I’ll be teaching through the Drisha Institute. On the evening of October 31, I’m giving a talk on “Yiddish Poetry as Holocaust Theology,” and starting in mid-November I’m teaching a five-session Yiddish poetry translation workshop, for anyone with a basic ability to read Yiddish literary texts. I’d love to see you there, and I’m happy to answer any questions.
https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/manger_itsik