I’m glad to be back today after a holiday hiatus!
Before we get to our poetry, I’ve got a few pieces of exciting news. But first, autumn’s well underway here in Virginia, so I wanted to share one of my favorite pieces of recent Yiddish culture, singer-songwriter Daniel Kahn’s setting and tradaptation of Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman’s “Harbstlid.” This song never fails to move me, and I hope you enjoy:
For today’s announcements: I’m introducing a paid option for this newsletter. Finding poems, translating, and writing about them takes time and labor, and if you’ve benefitted from this project at all I’d be deeply grateful for your financial support.
I’ll be keeping things pretty much the same as they’ve been, and am planning for now to put little behind a paywall. But subscribers will receive—in addition to my extraordinary gratitude—the opportunity to participate in monthly discussion groups, which I look forward to facilitating. These will be based around some of the poems I post here, but will also be ways for us to build virtual community around Yiddish culture and poetry. And there’s an additional subscription tier for “founding members,” who will get to participate in regular book giveaways.
Thank you for considering becoming a paid subscriber. As always, I appreciate you tuning in.
I’m also thrilled to share some online teaching that I’ll be doing, 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.
Today’s poem comes from Kadya Molodowsky (1894-1975), whose criticism, fiction, autobiography, drama, and especially poetry earned her a reputation as one of the 20th century’s major Yiddish writers.
(This photo is from the National Library of Israel)
Molodowsky was born in what’s now Belarus, and received an education in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian from her family and from private tutors. Like every poet in this newsletter, she was an immigrant; her displacement was an essential part of her life and writing. By 1935, when Molodowsky and her husband moved to New York, she had lived in Warsaw, Kyiv, Odessa, Paris, and a host of smaller towns in Poland and Ukraine. Such were the exigencies of European Jewish life in and after World War I. From 1948-1952 they lived in Tel Aviv, before returning to New York City, where Molodowsky remained until the year before her death.
She was a prolific writer and editor, who published six poetry collections and founded several journals. Scholar Kathryn Hellerstein describes “the central question of Molodowsky’s early poetry” as: “How can a woman writer reconcile her art with the culturally dictated, specifically Jewish precepts of womanhood”; she is also known for many of her later Holocaust poems.
The poem below is not one of her regularly anthologized pieces, but it is one of my favorites. It’s taken from Molodowsky’s 1946 collection, Der Melech Dovid Aleyn Iz Geblibn (King David Alone Remained).
Since I’m in a seasonal mood today, I’ll preface this poem with Marc Chagall’s painting “Autumn in the Village”:
My Children
I saw today, through a cloud of falling snow,
my children—two by two.
They circled me, my children,
clutched at my dress, and raised their grievance:
“Play with us. We’ll ring around the rosie,
you’ll be in the middle,
tell us why you kept us from the living world.”
I gave them cookies and told each of them to eat.
I offered an excuse, that I lost their address.
Four of them. The youngest girl was still a pipsqueak.
She brushed her hair, put on a Purim cap.
They clapped their hands and danced and ran in circles,
happy that the dream had introduced us.
My oldest son then suddenly
began to speak a storm of words.
“I’m nothing now. I was not, and won’t ever be.
I don’t know the tastes of joy, of suffering.
I go down sometimes into strange worlds,
hear their sound and sometimes hear
your voice’s echo.
Why did you not entrust me with
my destined portion
in your world of tears and melody?
I see sometimes the way
my unborn thought flutters in front of me,
how it trembles among all the heavens.
Who cares about your poetry, about music and choruses?
Behind your poems swarm our withered souls.
You’re not the ultimate purpose,
not the beginning nor the final meaning.
Why should I be sentenced to this uncreated world?
Fires glow in me, and are not lit.
Sorrows weep in me, and have no prayer.
The entryways of unknown journeys call to me.
Why did you condemn me to this purgatory?”
His words lit up and warmed the snow.
My eyes were full of tears.
My youngest daughter had mercy
and laid her forehead on my knee.
“I don’t mind,” she said,
and I recognized my smile in hers.
“I don’t yearn for the world,
and never mind about its happiness.
I’d probably have been a mess like you,
fighting with everyone, angry for years.
And where’s the pleasure in always scraping that pen along?
I don’t mind that I wasn’t born.”
I wanted to kiss her, but in my hands
I held only cold, melting snow.
I wanted to embrace her at my knee
but couldn’t find her tiny head.
The cloud of falling snow thickened.
My children disappeared into that gray.
I heard only their little footsteps,
like small bells in a whirlwind.
And I hear them now, at night, in the quiet hours.
I will admit that I’ve struggled to write something about “My Children” more than I have about any other poem in this newsletter. I keep stopping and starting, erasing my notes, feeling wholly inadequate to respond to this poem and to the ways it moves me. There are many reasons for this, including my own identity as a man—who am I to comment on this poem? But I think about it often, and so I wanted to share; “My Children” has been a meaningful companion for me in grappling with my own losses. I find a resonant, almost overwhelming, clarity and beauty in the honesty of its ambivalences.
You might have noticed that I use the word “ambivalence” a lot when talking about poems. Hopefully I’m not just repeating myself, but I’m drawn to poems that illuminate and render beautiful the kinds of contradictory, human situations we all know well, rather than forcing them into neat and single-faceted categories. I described this when I wrote about Aaron Zeitlin’s paradoxical faith a few weeks ago. It seems to me that we live in a culture that constantly insists we be one thing: ecstatic or depressed, religious or secular, on and on; we’re assailed by a pressure to cram ourselves into tidy, binary categories.
But that’s not my experience of being human. I suspect it’s not yours either. And I turn to poems often for the unique ways that they articulate the paradox, the messy contradiction, of being alive.
Molodowsky had no children. Anna Fishman Gonshor writes: “She was a very private person. Her autobiography is silent on her childlessness, as are her essays. Only in her poetry does she reveal the deep emotion and tension she felt as she confronted modernity head-on and made choices which would shape her life.” But Molodowsky surrounded herself with children for much of her adulthood. For many years she was best known as a writer of stories and poetry for children; she was a kindergarten and elementary school teacher in Poland and Ukraine, and during and after World War I worked in homes for Jewish child refugees.
The “now” of that last line—איך הער זיי איצט—seems to reach through time, into an endless present. I have the sense that the poem’s “now” is eternal, and that the faint frail chime of those children’s footsteps is somehow audible at every moment, if I could only find a way to hear it.
(And speaking of the present moment: though the poem derives power from its ambiguity, I read the speaker’s childlessness as a choice—one which the poem complicates through the children’s monologues, but refuses simply to condemn. Another profound ambivalence! I don’t want to speculate about Molodowsky’s biography, or to overstep the bounds of this poem by reading into it what isn’t there. But the courageous honesty of this poem does suggest a political argument, I think, in defense of women’s autonomy over their bodies and their lives.)
In an earlier poem, another of my favorites, Molodowsky writes:
“I do not write a poem. I try
to find a word for my blood,
which cries in my body.”
Those are the opening lines of מאַרש, “March”; it’s one of my favorite openings of any poem in any language. Molodowsky presents poetry writing not as an abstract or intellectual process, but as the struggle to manifest, through language, her embodiment itself, in all its vulnerability and vitality.
What does it mean to devote one’s life to such a struggle? What are the stakes? And how do the roads not taken linger as ghostly presences within the lives we build? “My Children” is about these questions. There is such sadness here, but there is also, I think, a quiet exultation in the fact that the the art of poetry can make possible an encounter, however fleeting, however quickly it melts away, with what is lost.
Maybe that’s why I love this poem so much, even though on the most literal level it describes experiences that are inaccessible to me. Loss is universal, and every choice forecloses other possibilities. “My Children” reveals this to us, with exceptional clarity and honesty: beauty and sadness, love and grief, overlap in the experience of caring for what must fade away. And what is gone is never really gone, but accompanies us along our paths, a fact which at once deepens and alleviates our sorrow.