Miriam Ulinover: Two Poems
Today’s featured poet is the relatively little-known Miriam Ulinover (1890-1944). As a traditionally religious woman, she is unique among writers featured in this newsletter, and distinctive among modern Yiddish poets.
Ulinover was born Manya Hirshbein, and spent most of her life in the industrialized Polish city of Łódź, a stark contrast to the traditional shtetl which formed for the subject and setting for much of her writing. At the age of 15, Sholem Aleichem himself encouraged her to write and, like many modern Yiddish poets, she first wrote in local non-Jewish languages (in her case, Polish, Russian, and German) before switching to Yiddish.
At 22 years old, in 1912, she married Wolf Ulinover, who came from a Hasidic family, and together they had two daughters. A few years later, Miriam Ulinover’s Yiddish poems began appearing in Łódź’s periodicals, and soon she was widely published in Warsaw literary journals as well, where in 1922 her only poetry collection, Der Bobes Oytser (Grandmother’s Treasure) was published by a religious press.
Though she never published another book, she worked on and likely completed several other poetry manuscripts—her literary friends and her journal publications attest to many more poems—all while raising her children and maintaining an informal salon in her Łódź home, which was frequented by other writers interested in traditional religious life.
But Łódź was occupied by the Nazi military in September of 1939, and Ulinover was incarcerated along with her family in the city’s ghetto. It seems that she maintained her literary gatherings through the deprivations and brutalities of the war, and—though sources disagree on this—she may have continued writing prolifically. But in August, 1944, Miriam Ulinover and her family were deported to Auschwitz, and murdered in the gas chambers. Her single book, and various poems from journals, survive her; her manuscripts are lost.
Editions of Ulinover’s poetry exist in Hebrew and in French, but she’s still largely untranslated into English, aside from a few journals, academic studies, and anthology selections. It’s a shame, because she’s wonderful! Though she was popular in Poland, and esteemed by many critics, their esteem was often misplaced: she was sometimes considered, by her detractors and her proponents, to be an innocent folk poet, an uncritical repository of small-town Jewish life. Natalia Krynicka, editor of the French-Yiddish edition of Ulinover’s work, writes that “although the book was a success, the critics let themselves be misled by the apparent ‘authenticity’ and ‘folk simplicity’ of Ulinover’s shtetl lyrics, and tended to regard them as merely autobiographical.”
The title itself of Ulinover’s book, Der Bobes Oytser (Grandmother’s Treasure), plays into this, and the poems center around a dialogue between a traditional shtetl grandmother and her young granddaughter. Most readers assumed that these were memoirist recollections of Ulinover’s own family life, when in fact the poet described her grandmother as “a Jewish aristocrat” who bore little resemblance to the subject of the poems.
The poems describe and, through their folkloristic, sometimes archaic diction and structure, also enact a pre-modern and pious Jewish world. But despite her reputation as a naïve recorder of this world, as Kathryn Hellerstein writes, “Ulinover’s poems are… far from naïve. They emerge from a fully modern sensibility, which seeks deliberately and self-consciously to preserve the folk diction, sayings, and customs of pre-modern Jewish life in Poland.”
As you’ll see in the poems below, Ulinover’s writing (in Hellersteins’s words, again) “delineates a tension between the tradition invoked and the modern speaker.” Both of these poems were taken from Der Bobes Oytser. Even if you’re not a Yiddish reader, take a look at the desigs of the pages; you’ll have a sense of the folky aesthetics which Ulinover simultaneously perpetuated and subverted.
Shabbos Terror
Everywhere and silent lay
a sleepy Shabbos peace,
and through the air was fluttering
a Shabbos melody.
Suddenly a cold wind blew,
a wailing rose and grew and grew:
a Jewish man murdered his wife,
with the Shabbos challah knife!
Havdole-Wine They all drink havdole wine, so I take a sip as well. Earnestly, grandmother tells me: "child, dear, I'm warning you, if a girl drinks at havdole she will surely grow a beard, as is written in the row of sacred books there on the shelf." Terror grasps me when I hear her, and I touch the tip of my chin. Thank God, it's still soft and feminine, but now sharpened by my fear. (note: if you're unfamiliar with havdole, it's a ritual and liturgy marking the end of the Jewish Sabbath, and it involves consecrating and drinking wine)
These are pretty distinctive, wonderful poems! Maybe you see what I mean about Ulinover’s folkloristic, pseudo-naivete.
In “Shabbos Terror,” I’m fascinated by the tremendous tension between this short poem’s two stanzas. The first half of the poem is indeed an uncritical portrayal of traditional Jewish piety: the air hums with a peaceful nigun. But the second half explodes this sentiment, with the last things we’d expect from such an old-world Sabbath. Yes, that’s the entire poem; doesn’t it leave you wanting more? But Ulinover’s refusal to provide us with a fuller story, with anything like characterization or plot to contextualize this horrible act, gives the poem its particular power.
Hellerstein credits Ulinover with the invention of a genre, “the literary folk poem,” and I see that here. It’s as if we’re reading a modern feminist’s poem subverting the norms and cliches of traditional religious life, exposing the barely-contained and gendered violence that undergirds the structures of traditional piety, and at the same time celebrating that piety while overhearing village gossip. When I read this poem, and other poems by Ulinover, I have the uncanny sense that I’m at once inside and outside the gone world of the premodern shtetl, that I’m both critical of and able to celebrate that world’s pieties, and both complicit in and horrified by its crimes.
How astonishing that the murder weapon in this poem is none other than the challah knife, that symbol of domesticity and heimish comfort.
The second poem, “Havdole-Wine,” is based on the well-attested folk tradition that women who drink wine at havdole will grow facial hair. (Well-attested and, indeed, an active concern in some orthodox Jewish communities today.)
There are a number of plausible and worthwhile readings of this poem, and it’s clear to me here why some readers have seen Ulinover’s presentation of the shtetl as uncritical and naïve: the speaker of this poem, the young girl, is terrified by her grandmother’s pre-modern admonition. But I think that something more complicated is going on here.
It’s noteworthy that the girl, in the first place, decides to subvert the expected gender roles around the havdole ritual. Rather than passively accepting her place as an outsider to havdole, as someone who has no right or ability to participate in its ceremony, she takes a sip from the havdole cup without asking for permission. I read this as the poem’s speaker’s subtle, proto-feminist claiming of her place in Jewish ritual.
The grandmother’s immediate intervention is about more than facial hair. If the traditional boundaries of Jewish life collapse, the grandmother seems to be saying, the traditional boundaries of your identity will collapse with them. You will be transformed into a different kind of creature; you will be, in some small but significant way, unrecognizable to yourself, changed from the person you thought you were and thought you would inevitably become.
And in some sense, the grandmother isn’t wrong. Modernity in general, and Jewish modernity in particular, has brought new opportunities for freedom and autonomy and liberation from oppressive constraints, both gendered and otherwise. This is a great thing! And at the same time, the grandmother’s warning has, in some metaphorical sense, come true. In choosing new forms of autonomy, we are all forced to ask ourselves: who am I, and where do I fit in? These questions often have no easy answers. If the old categories of identity which my ancestors relied on are now obsolete for me, how should I understand myself, and how should I live?
This is why I love Miriam Ulinover’s poetry. In her seemingly archaic portrayals of the past, she is prescient about the future; through her folk-poetry of a vanished world, she captures something essential about a new world’s formation. Born in 1890, when Jewish modernity in Eastern Europe was suddenly and often violently developing, her writing characterizes the complexities of that modernizing process with exceptional charm and sensitivity. And, it needs to be said, as a victim of the Holocaust’s industrialized gas chambers, Ulinover’s life ended in one of Jewish modernity’s brutal apotheoses.
For all of these reasons, I’ve come to see Ulinover as a quintessential writer of the modern Jewish experience, in its upheavals and tensions and opportunities and catastrophes. I hope that she finds more translators and readers, which her poetry would well deserve.
In conversation with today’s poems, I highly recommend taking a look at the work of contemporary Israeli artist Nechama Golan.
I also want to thank those subscribers who tuned in to Sunday’s zoom discussion. We had a wonderful time chatting about Yiddish culture, and I’m looking forward to the next one, which I’ll schedule soon! Stay tuned for more info; all paying subscribers will receive a link.