Memento Mori

by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern

Moyshe-Leyb Halpern! Something about him—the joy and freedom and melancholy of his idiosyncrasies, his sheer wildness—incites me to exclamation points. Born in 1886 in the town of Zlochow, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is today Western Ukraine, Halpern moved to Vienna at age 12, and there began to write poetry in German. At age 20, he made the move to Yiddish, and a year later, in order to escape conscription into the Austrian army, he emigrated to America.

(A common theme, long-time readers of this newsletter might notice: Yiddish modernists beginning their careers in languages like German or Russian or Polish, and only later writing in Yiddish.)

But unlike some of his colleagues in New York’s Yiddish literary scene, Halpern never really adjusted to America. In verse and in life he remained a non-conformist. The Yiddish writer Mani Leib reflected: “we, his friends, like all other Jewish immigrants, also bore the fear of this wondrous unknown called America. But somehow we . . . gave in, adapted ourselves, ‘ripened’ and gradually became . . . real Americans. Not Moyshe-Leyb. He could never compromise or bend.”

Impoverished and often depressed, Halpern struggled to fit in. He was trained as a commercial artist, but had a hard time keeping employment; as Ruth Wisse puts it, “he failed to find steady work in the small factories, manual trades, or editorial offices where most of the other [Yiddish writers] eventually made their living, and this economic precariousness, which continued practically without interruption until his death, contributed to his image as a troubling nonconformist, and to his artistic distance.”

That’s a dry description, but here’s a representative anecdote. Halpern worked briefly as a presser in the garment shop run by one Yitzchak Bloom, in the Bronx. Benjamin Harshav writes that “Bloom later described the poet ‘standing with a hot heavy iron in his enormous hand, pressing a pair of trousers and reciting verses of a new poem to himself.’ Suddenly, the smell of burning cloth would interrupt Halpern’s inspiration. The big Moyshe-Leyb would stand forlorn like a guilty child. His career as a presser thus came to an end.” It’s hard to be a luftmensch in America.

One of Halpern’s Self-Portraits

In 1919, Halpern married Rayzele Barron. Their son, Isaac Halpern, became an influential physicist. There’s more to say about Halpern’s life beyond this brief introduction, and I plan to say more in upcoming newsletters. He died in 1934, of a heart attack. The poem below is taken from a 1954 printing of his collection In New York, originally published in 1919.

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Memento Mori

And if Moyshe-Leyb, the poet, should say
that he saw death in the waves,
as someone sees himself in a mirror,
and it was right in the morning, around ten--
would anyone believe Moyshe-Leyb?

And if Moyshe-Leyb welcomed death 
from afar, with a wave, and asked how it's going?
precisely when thousands of people
are in the water, wildly rejoicing?--
would anyone believe Moyshe-Leyb?

And if Moyshe-Leyb swears, with tears in his eyes,
that he is drawn towards death
just as a yearning man is drawn at evening
to the window of a woman he has sanctified--
would anyone believe Moyshe-Leyb?

And if Moyshe-Leyb should paint death for them
not gray, not dark, but color-rich and beautiful,
as death appeared around ten o'clock,
there, far away, between sky and waves--
would anyone believe Moyshe-Leyb?

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In a critical essay on Halpern, our friend Jacob Glatstein—from whom this newsletter takes its name—writes that Halpern “wanted to play out his own truth—the fear of a premature death. This fear was the most authentic in him, so much himself as his own polished word.”

Well, I don’t completely understand what that means. But I take it to suggest that the fear of an early death was an essential aspect of Halpern’s life, as near to him as his art was, and that he couldn’t help but express this fear, because it was inextricable from his experience of himself. Of course this fear came true, with his fatal heart attack at the age of 46. Should we see this as coincidence, or as a kind prophecy: life imitating art imitating the artist’s deepest terrors?

What Glatstein calls “fear of a premature death” is all over this poem, obviously, but it’s not just fear: there’s a yearning, an erotic desire for death. Death not as abstraction or absence or cessation of being, but as a vision, something as clear and palpable as the poet’s own reflection in a mirror. We turn to poetry in part in order to experience something new, and never before reading this did I think of death as a specter floating above the ocean on a beautiful summer beach day, “color-rich and beautiful.”

It’s a strange “Memento Mori,” isn’t it? Halpern doesn’t seem to need to be reminded of death, because it’s right before him, “not dark” and dazzling. (I don’t know enough to say anything smart about this, but I’ll note that this poem was first published a year before Freud began to write about “the death drive.”)

And the poem finds power and energy in its odd, conditional tone. Moyshe-Leyb isn’t, after all, describing his visions of death. Instead he’s wondering about what would happen if he were to attempt a description. Would he be believed? I believe him already. But it’s an unusual stance for a poem to take. I love the humanness and vulnerability of this stance: poet not as a confident seer, but as a tentative one, wondering aloud how his visions will be received. And in a way I can’t quite pin down (so as always I’d love to hear your thoughts) that makes the visions all the more compelling.

What a different poem this would be if, instead of asking questions, it pronounced: “I, the poet Moyshe Leib, saw death….” It doesn’t invite me as intimately into its images, or into the consciousness of the one who wonders how I’ll receive them.

But this poem’s questioning stance also signals the poet’s profound loneliness. Imagine, for a moment, how you would feel if you saw death on the waves while you sat at the beach, surrounded by people enjoying a wonderful morning. You’d also worry about whether to tell them, and what they would say. Within a crowd of vacationers, you’d feel—aside from death’s looming companionship—entirely alone.

This isn’t only Halpern’s predicament. It’s all of ours. In a culture which wants to flatten out our idiosyncrasies, and reduce our visionary imaginations, our fears of death, our unassimilated wildness into a pathology or an occasion for consumerism, I find it hard not to identify with this poem. Will anyone believe us if we reveal our true selves, with all our weirdness and irrational desire and terrors? How will we be received? Thank God we have art in which we can play out these questions, and see them reflected before us, and feel a little less alone.

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Today’s art pairing: James Ensor’s 1888 painting, “Masks Confronting Death”