In October, I introduced Kadya Molodowsky with her wonderful, strange, haunting poem, “My Children.” That poem had a great response, so I’m bringing her back today with the timely poem below.
I won’t spend too many more words on her biography—if you’re interested in going deeper than the very brief overview I provided in the fall, the Jewish Women’s Archive has a great write-up—but I will say briefly that Molodowsky is perhaps best known today as a Holocaust poet. For good reason! Her Holocaust poems are devastating and beautiful, among the most artful and heart-rending poems in post-war Yiddish. I’m sure I’ll share some here soon.
But just as the Holocaust threatens to overshadow all of modern European Jewish history, so too do Molodowsky’s Holocaust poems sometimes threaten to overshadow the rest of her oeuvre. I’m glad to share this short, seasonal piece—thanks to Beruriah Wiegand for introducing it to me—which fits neither into Molodowsky’s Holocaust poetry, nor into the feminist poetry for which she’s also well known.
(Molodowsky in 1970, photo by Arnold Chekow and taken from the National Yiddish Book Center’s website)
You’re welcome, of course, to skip down to the poem. First, however, I have an extended digression: I thought I’d share a curious instance of Yiddish in the American counterculture.
The story I’m thinking of begins with potatoes. More specifically, with a classic Yiddish folk song:
It’s a fun listen, and the lyrics are pretty straightforward:
“Sunday: potatoes. Monday: potatoes. Tuesday and Wednesday: potatoes. Thursday and Friday: potatoes. Shabbos: a treat, potato kugel. Sunday: potatoes again…. Bread with potatoes, meat with potatoes, lunch and dinner: potatoes. Potatoes again and again….”
You get the point. And there’s a lot we could find interesting in this song: the centrality of the potato to the Ashkenazi Jewish diet, a Jewish ability to laugh at one’s poverty, perhaps an argument for Jewish-Irish cultural kinship.
But I’m wondering today about the strange, unexpected afterlife of this song in the 1960’s New York counterculture. And thinking specifically about this trilingual adaptation, by avant-garde rock band The Fugs (whom an FBI file described as the “most vulgar thing the human mind could possibly conceive.")
The second verse is a Yiddish translation of the first, which is of course an English version of our beloved Yiddish potato folk song. Instead of “potatoes,” we find “nothing,” gornisht. And delightfully, in the Fugs’ song, they’ve retained the original’s Shabbos variation, so that their version gives us a “gornisht kigele,” a “nothing kugel.”
What should we make of this? What does it say about the place of Yiddish in New York’s counterculture? How did this song come to be at all, especially alongside the Fugs’ obscene and anarchic proto-punk? I have no clue. I have, well, nothing smart to say about this. But I’m fascinated by the song’s existence, and I thought that you might find it a fun digression as well.
Before we get into today’s poem, one more brief thing that I did want to mention again: On Tuesday, 1/31, at 7 pm eastern time, I’ll be giving an informal talk on the history of Yiddish literature for paying subscribers. If you’ve ever wondered where Yiddish came from, how it became a literary language, and how it developed into the incredible poetry I’ve been sharing, this is your opportunity! I’ll send a zoom link to paying subscribers before the 31st, so if you’d like to join us I hope you’ll consider a membership option. (And if you’d like to come, but aren’t able to pay the subscription fee, please let me know as well and I’m happy to include you!)
The poem below was written in 1932, and is taken from a 1936 printing of Molodowsky’s collection Dzshike Gas (Dzika Street).
January
It's January.
(I dream of ambrosia and red poppies far away beneath the snow.)
I walk together
with the moon,
with the night,
and with the snow,
which whitens all my thoughts.
On thin stems
my cigar smoke rises
and remains hanging before my eyes
like a straggling bird.
It's January.
My green beret brightens like new leaves.
I remember:
it's late in winter,
late at night,
and the shadows of my feet on the snow
drag along like a clock's heavy hands.
They mark: it's later still,
still later.
It's January.
(I dream of ambrosia and red poppies far away beneath the snow.)
Ambrosia and red poppies. It’s a strange and vivid image, activating several senses at once and combining realism and fantasy. But the Yiddish is even stranger: what I’ve translated as ambrosia, following my trusty Beinfeld-Bochner dictionary, is the Yiddish פֿייגלמילך, faygelmilkh, “bird’s milk.” A mythical substance that exists only outside the laws of nature. The poet dreams of wildflowers and of magic, hidden by the snow.
I love this poem’s seemingly effortless ability to create a dark and snowy January mood, to enter me into “a mind of winter,” a state where consciousness turns cold and shadowy and snowy white. The only color is the poet’s bright green hat, a manufactured herald of spring. In this poem January is not just a month, but is a state of mind, a way of being and thinking and feeling that will, I think, be recognizable to anyone who’s experienced—who’s endured or enjoyed—a northern winter.
When I first read this I thought it was a lonely poem. And it is, but it’s a companionable sort of loneliness: the poet has no human community here, but is accompanied by the night itself, by the snow, by the winter moon. That captures something I’ve felt as well: a loneliness that transcends itself, and in doing so becomes a kind of solitary intimacy with the world in its austerity. I’m struggling to describe this, but maybe you know what I mean. A sense that my own inner solitude can recognize and be recognized by the solitude of the winter world outside, so clearly recognized that the inner experience and the outer nature find a kinship with each other, and neither are alone.
I find myself longing for this kind of real winter. As I write this, it’s 61 degrees Fahrenheit, here in central Virginia. No shadows on the snow; no dreams beneath the snow; no snow. I can’t stop thinking of this poem by Linda Gregg (which I’ve taken from Sean Singer’s lovely newsletter), and I’m now comparing it with Molodowsky’s:
Although you can’t win, can you? If I lived again in a place where it were “absolutely winter” I’d probably be dreaming of spring right now, and casting the bright green leaves of my wardrobe, or the poppies of my imagination, against the late, dark shadows on the snow.
For this week’s art pairing, here is Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s 1841 “Nichiren in Snow at Sukuhara.”