Peretz Markish

Home and Far From Home

By popular request, at some point soon I’ll be sending out more poems from Margolin’s Mary cycle, after sharing the first two last week. Thanks, everyone, for your feedback.

But I realize that I haven’t included any Soviet Yiddish poets in this project, and wanted to use this week and next as an opportunity to change that. Friday, August 12, is the 70th anniversary of the “Night of the Murdered Poets,” when 13 Soviet Yiddish writers and cultural activists were executed after a sham trial, on false charges that they had engaged in counterrevolutionary activities and attempted to weaken the Soviet Union. So it seemed like an auspicious time to share the work of some of the murdered poets from that awful moment in history.

I’ll write more about all this next week—I’m a little crunched for time today, because I’m in the process of moving, so all my spaces and routines are disrupted for now, my books packed away, etc.—but I’m happy to introduce Peretz Markish (1895-1952), arguably the most important Soviet-Yiddish poet. He also arguably had the best hair of any modern Yiddish writer, as the 1922 photo below shows.

Markish was born in small-town Ukraine, served in the Russian army during World War I, and afterwards moved to Kyiv, where he started publishing poems and attracting attention for his verse. In 1921 he arrived in Warsaw, where he joined the avant-garde literary group Di Khalyastre (the Gang), along with Melech Ravitch and others. Markish wrote on a number of themes, including pastoral poetry, and was also an outspoken believer in Soviet communism. Some of his writing in Warsaw was secretly underwritten by the Soviet embassy.

In 1926, he settled in the Soviet Union, where he was exceptionally prolific in poetry, drama, and prose. Much of his writing from this time is more propaganda than art—can his 90 page paean, “Poem About Stalin,” published in 1940, really be worth reading, except as a historical curiosity? His Soviet orthodoxy served him well, until it didn’t. He was head of the Soviet Yiddish Writer’s Union, and received the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize. In January 1949, his fortunes changed, and he was arrested along with other Soviet Jewish leaders on charges that he was a counterrevolutionary Jewish nationalist. For the next three years he was tortured and incarcerated until his execution in the basement of Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison.

I’ll write more about all this next week, when I’ll hopefully be settled into our new house. For now, let’s dive into one of Markish’s best-known poems, from 1919.

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[Don’t Know Whether I'm Home]

Don’t know whether I'm home
or far away—
I'm running!...
My shirt unbuttoned,
no reins on me,
I'm nobody's, I am abandoned,
no beginning and no end....

My body is froth,
it smells like wind;

my name is: "Now."
I throw my hands out
and they strike the edges of the world,
I let my eyes wander
and they drink up the world from top to bottom.

With open eyes, with an unbuttoned shirt,
with hands spread wide—
I don't know whether I have a home
or have a far away,
whether I am an end or a beginning...

---

This poem revels in its freedom. Am I home? Do I even have a home? The poem asks, and answers: I have no clue. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” Janis Joplin sings, and here Markish celebrates that he is homeless, maybe bodiless, nearly nameless, and thereby free to find an intimate connection with the edges of the world, with existence’s extremities.

I’m inclined to read this poem’s homelessness on several overlapping levels. First, there is Markish’s biography: he has left the orthodox Judaism of his childhood behind, served in the military, moved to the big city of Kyiv, watched the Russian empire fall. Amidst these upheavals he could become a Zionist, a communist, an American, each of which is a competing claim about home. Where should he live, where does he belong? Previous generations of Russian Jews had clear answers to these questions, but suddenly Markish has a host of possible homes before him.

And second, I see a kind of Yiddish displacement behind this poem. Markish began writing in Russian as a teenager, but unlike Russian, Yiddish has no homeland, no nation-state. Where, then, is the home of the Yiddish poet? Does a home exist for a stateless minority language?

Of course this opens up to a third level, and its bigger questions about Jewishness: where is a Jewish home? Is it in a place (Israel, diaspora, etc…) or perhaps a time (the messianic future, the pre-exilic past), or maybe in the traveling, immaterial home created by the study of sacred texts? Markish’s poem has no answer, and neither do I.

We could also think about an aesthetic homelessness that opened up in the aftermath of World War I. If a poetic form is a kind of home (and of course the word stanza, which comes from the Italian for room, suggests this) then the collapse of so many received artistic forms, in poetry and beyond, is a kind of home-leaving. Abstract paintings were suddenly possible, as were radically new structures for poetry. What, then, is a formal home for a work of art, and does such a home exist anymore given the upheavals of modernist aesthetics? (Although Markish did write some of my favorite sonnets in Yiddish—maybe that’s an email for the future.)

But finally, I think that this poem speaks to the displacements we’ve all experienced in the modern world. I love that line, “My name is: ‘Now…’” which for me is a highlight of the whole poem. Our names—emblems of our lives and our identities—are not the past, not anymore. They exist—we exist—only in and as the present moment, separated from what came before and what comes next.

For the young Markish this fact seems to be exhilarating. But I see it also as profoundly sad, perhaps because I’m looking in hindsight through the destruction caused by the Soviet “freedom” for which Markish was so eager, and through the terrible alienations of our own American “freedom.”

Ultimately I think this poem captures something about the freedom modernity promises, especially to the young: the possibilities it offers of coming from nowhere and therefore belonging, at least potentially, anywhere.

But I do think it’s a young person’s poem. What happens when the young Markish grows up and is tired of not knowing whether he’s homeless or at home anymore? What happens when he just wants somewhere he can call his own?

I realize that I’m projecting myself into this, and not at all subtly. As I said in the start of today’s newsletter, I’m in the process of moving to what I hope and plan will be a long-term home, so these questions are very alive for me. What can make my new house feel like home? Will it be possible for me to know, as in Markish’s poem, whether I’m home or far away, in this new place where the paint is drying and the furniture is heaped in the centers of the rooms? How long will it take for me to answer this poem’s questions, and what if the answer is—as I suspect it would be for the speaker of this poem if he returned to its topic decades later—that no matter where I find myself, it’ll never entirely feel like home at all?

I’m thinking of lines from John Moreland, one of my favorite singer-songwriters: “This life will make you cold and leave you mad, make you homesick for a home you never had.” In one way or another I think we’re all homesick for a home we’ve never known. Maybe this is a condition of our alienated 21st-century modernity, or maybe it’s a condition of being human. But I’m grateful that this poem points me towards the creativity that can be found in the uncertainty itself.