To America by H Leivick
With a guest essay by A.S. Lange-Robertson
Today we return to one of Yiddish poetry’s greats, H Leivick. This newsletter began back in April with a translation of his “Yiddish Poets”—you can head to that post if you’d like a refresher on his remarkable biography—and I’m delighted today to share a later and longer poem of his, a poem I love and admire tremendously, even as I’m perplexed by it. It’s a complicated, honest, ambivalent paean to America, and it makes explicit Leivick’s debt to Walt Whitman.
An incredible photograph, from 1910—here is a younger Leivick, in shackles in a Moscow prison, a few years before escaping the Czar’s penal colony and embarking for America:
What could America mean to an old radical like Leivick? How does it meaning change? I wasn’t sure how to answer these questions with any kind of authority, so I turned for help to a wonderful Yiddishist I’ve met online, A.S. Lange-Robertson, a writer, translator, and artist living outside of Glasgow, Scotland. Lange-Robertson’s understanding of Leivick’s life and work is remarkable, and she graciously agreed to write this newsletter’s essay contextualizing the poem’s portrayal of America within Leivick’s changing relationship to his adoptive country.
The poem below was written in September, 1954; it’s the final poem in Leivick’s 1955 collection, A Blat Oyf an Eplboym (A Leaf on an Apple Tree). It’s also the longest poem I’ve translated for this newsletter!
To America Forty-one years already I have lived within your borders, America, and borne within myself the blessing of your freedom, a freedom sanctified by Lincoln's sacrificial blood, and by Walt Whitman's hymns. Look, how bizarre: I'm still searching, even today, for an answer to my contradictions, to my life's unrest, and I ask: why have I not yet sung to you in happiness, in praise, in pure transparent admiration, as befits your great expansiveness, your states, your roads, your prairies and your mountains and your valleys. And more: for my narrow walls, sometimes in Brownsville and sometimes on Clinton Street, sometimes in Boro Park, sometimes in the Bronx and in the Heights, and more than anything: for all my walks on East Broadway, the East Broadway which even today exhilarates me with its familiar sensations as soon as I set foot on its pavement. Forty-one years already I have lived beneath your skies, for more than thirty years I've been your citizen, although until today I have not found within myself a single word or way to illustrate my coming here, and my blossoming on your land, in ways as wide and revelatory as you are, America. As soon as I found avenues to speak to you, I tamed my words, restrained them, bound them in constricting knots, hid all my world and all my life beneath concealed locks, distant from your open spans. Now I confide in you: when I stepped off that ship forty-one years ago, and touched your earth, I wanted to fall and kiss you. Yes, yes, I wanted to, I should have, and I didn't.... On your sanctified earth I then began, in my father's memory, to write guilt- and longing-poems, and I said to my father's visage: "accept belatedly the kisses which, since childhood, I wanted to give you, and should have, and always was ashamed to give you..." in your greatness, you certainly will not decide, America, to say that you are more, better, closer in lineage to me than my father. Perhaps you'll say: "I am not more, but am I any less?" In fact I deeply want to hear you say this, because if I hear this, it would be a balm for my heart, and I want to be able, even in my life's dusk, to disclose all my locked-up confessions about you, America. I say it again: I've tried to do this through hundreds of allusions in verses and rhymes, through flare-ups of tragic dialogue, through a rising and falling curtain. I have searched many times for a way to tear away the curtain from my heart, to become intimate with you, America, even half as intimate as I am with the little graveyard in Chervyen, where my bygone parents lie in their distant days, those distant days destroyed by flood of the first World War; as I am intimate with the glowing snows in Vittim, that little village in the Irkutskt-Yakutsk wastelands of Siberia; as I am intimate with Isaac's path up Mount Moriah, and with Mother Rachel's grave; with David's prayers and with Isaiah's blazing prophecy; with Hersh Lekert's ascent to the gallows, and with the sunrise dance at Ein Harod. I have tried, and clearly it is my fault, not yours, that thirty years ago, beneath your skies, I was so deeply sad, and I lamented that I bore my Yiddish poems anxiously through your streets and squares, holding them tightly in my teeth, as a solitary cat carries her kittens, searching for a resting place in a cellar. When I think of my brothers, Yiddish poets, their fate encloses me, and I want to pray for them, for their luck, and suddenly my words all grow silent. Certaintly it's my fault, and not yours, even now, after the passing of those thirty years, that my heart grieves with a new elegy: today, still more than it once was, a cruel destiny banishes all Yiddish poets in a new Siberia, and casts our poetry-ship towards a bedlam of storms, a bedlam of storms even within your waters, America, a deadly danger; and in this deadly danger I search for the brave poem of a brave captain, even today. This brave captain will not, even today, betray his destined poem.... You see, I'm cruel to myself when I say: certainly it's my fault, when instead of "certainly" I could say, "maybe, probably." I'm being careful not to place even a little blame on you, America. God in heaven is himself a witness that you don't deserve to feel completely innocent, completely white as snow.... You see, right now you should have helped me, should have made it easier for me to find those words which bear a closeness, a joining, and a farewell. A joining with all your beauty and with all your breath; a farewell? The greater the joining, the easier it is to imagine the moment of farewell. It can occur within your borders, and it can occur far away, distant from your borders; it can lift me and bear me to those wondrous places where I walked when I was young with father Abraham, around Beer Sheva, and with David around the gates of Jerusalem; it can bring me to today's heights in a new Jerusalem. You too, America, have walked beside them; you too have taken to heart God's blessing and command to be a land flowing with milk and honey, to be as numerous as the sand by the sea and the stars in the sky, to prophesy freedom, as your founders dreamed you might. O, may the dream of Walt Whitman and Lincoln be your dream today! In these days of my old age, when I stand in the lucid presence of this or that radiant farewell, I remember again that moment when, forty-one years ago, I came to your shore, America, and I wanted to and I should have fallen to your earth and kissed you, and--baffled, bewildered, I didn't do it-- grant me permission to do it now, exactly as I stand, embraced by the blazing light of closeness and farewell, America. two quick notes: Hersh Lekert was a Jewish revolutionary socialist; he was executed in 1902 after attempting to assassinate the governor of Vilnius, Lithuania. Ein Harod is a historic kibbutz in Israel.
To accompany the poem, here is Ben Shahn’s 1950 painting, Voting Booths:
And here is, as promised, a guest essay by Scotland-based writer, translator, and artist A.S. Lange-Robertson.
From the time of his arrival in America after escaping Siberia, Leivick did not always find the country to be “Di Goldene Medina,” the golden land of lore. There were, he tells us in the first poem of his first collection (“Somewhere Far,” in 1919’s Lider), “treasures kneaded into the earth,” but both those treasures and the road which leads “to the forbidden land” are concealed from the poem’s prisoner, who seeks them.
This thread wends its way through the volume, and the closing poem of Lider, “Rainbow,” provides a counterpart to the first poem. We now find the prisoner, having departed his “home-land” for his “own-land,” going to America. Rather than receiving a true freedom, he remains a prisoner, but one of himself and of a new land. There is not only no “Goldene Medina” — there isn’t even always enough work.
His second volume of poetry, In No Man’s Land (1923, the year of his naturalization as a citizen), seems to make its first comment on America with its title. Leivick’s America, specifically his New York, is frequently a place of alienation, romantic frustration, hostility and lonely death. “A Stride” presents us with a fragmented version of the immigrant poet — only part of him initially arrives — the “blessed” Leivick. There also arrives a shining version, who illuminates him. But left behind are the beaten alter-ego, lying in darkness, and the broken and reassembled “cursed” Leivick — who shortly lands on the shore to stand beside his blessed double. This fragmented self and psyche is untenable, irreconcilable, and he collapses as sand, into the sand.
The main body of In No Man’s Land builds to a fevered pitch, culminating in “Here Lives the Jewish People,” which consolidates many of the book’s images and depicts the frenzied, “burning” Jewish existence on the Lower East Side. There are references throughout to long working hours, poor living conditions, and a yawning abyss between the rich and the poor. The sign on the imagined gates, which glows red by night, is one of celebration and warning; the immigrants’ American ghetto is both their protection and yet another prison.
His personal “prison-like nature” — that is to say, that within him which keeps him unfree in America — comes in part as a reaction to America’s reception of immigrants, and specifically Jewish immigrants. They live in ghettoes and are bound to exploitative bosses, to shops, to their machines. This is reflected in some of Leivick’s realist plays of the 20s and is also present in poems such as in the cycle “Songs of Destruction,” (c1922, collected in Naye Lider, 1932), where a double image appears of Leivick and his father, the New World Jew and the Old World Jew, both striking themselves — alongside an Old World antisemitic slur (“Zhid”) and one from the New World (“Sheeny”). America is not so different from Pre-Revolutionary Russia, he seems to say with this, and he and his own circumstances are not so different from his father and his.
“A Letter from America to a Distant Friend” (c1927, published in Di Royte Velt in 1929 and collected in Naye Lider) is a sustained meditation on America, composed not long after Leivick became a citizen. Looking back on his early experiences in America, this poem is perhaps the clearest counterpoint to “To America.” America is here presented as a land of contradictions which has “much broken” him, which creates a sense of purpose: “A wedding and a wake together.” And the pain of being an immigrant in America — spiritual, cultural and physical —is in clear evidence: Songs and language are forgotten and fingers are sewn over.
In Leivick’s America, the golden peacock, messenger and herald of Yiddish culture, is plucked and devoured. Ascendant is an entirely sort of bird. The immigrant’s uncertainty and isolation is captured with a cliff that threatens to fall away beneath his feet and with a bird of prey which threatens to consume him and his children. In the “kite,” of “Letter from America,” it is difficult not to see the American eagle.
The factories and boarding houses share the features of the Russian prisons described in his poems and autobiographical prose — locked doors and corridors, chained steps, a bellowing boss instead of a guard. The Yiddish poets, seen here entering their basement sanctuaries in the other half of the image from “Yiddish Poets” where they emerge, are New York’s conscience, as were the revolutionaries of 1905. (This image of the poets, their basements, and their poems like kittens in their teeth recurs in “To America.”) But like their political counterparts, they are held captive in factories or buried underground rather than in prisons and dungeons. New days, Leivick’s poetic proxy tells his friend (and the reader), “are forged like links.”
Morris Rosenfeld, a leading member of the previous generation of immigrant Yiddish poets, appears in Leivick’s poetry as a half-spectral figure of rage and helplessness. The “hungry” machines of America, the younger poet tells us in an echo of the elder’s work, are fed with both fabric and flesh. There is also the possibility of a fatal despair — the poet who throws himself down the stair recalls the fate of fellow Yiddish writer Moyshe Varshe, who took his own life 1912.
This idea of sacrifice on the altar of America has deep resonances in Leivick’s work; the Akeydah, the binding of Isaac, is an image to which Leivick returns with particular frequency. In a pair of poems (“Be Ready, Daniel, For War'' from Songs of Paradise and “Daniel Goes to War” from I Was Not in Treblinka, 1945), Leivick again compares the precarity of Jewishness in America to that in Russia. He also plays out a new, profane, version of the Akeydah, not on the command of God, but of America, delivering his son to be sacrificed for a country which “seeks the Shylock in you.” Here Leivick casts himself as Abraham, leading away an Isaac who “do[es] not even ask where the lamb is” — unlike in the Biblical narrative, there is no innocence, and he knows that he is the sacrifice.
In 1946, Leivick toured the displaced persons camps of the American Zone of Europe, and his experiences in the DP camps bleed over into the first section of his next poetry collection, A Leaf on an Apple Tree (1956). His attitude towards America, in spite of what he perceived as America’s —and specifically Jewish America’s — failure towards Holocaust survivors, is visibly shifting; while Leivick “believes like a DP” in the coming of the Messiah, unlike the DPs, “New York” is printed in his passport: a home.
As the collection moves forward, we see further this evolution in his treatment of America. His room in his Washington Heights apartment is described as an “ark,” where he sees a rainbow and finds a battered, but still living, dove. All of these images, scattered throughout his work, build to the paean “To America” at the close of A Leaf on an Apple Tree, marking a symbolic cessation of the hostility which Leivick and America seemed to bear towards each other. Significantly, this attitude comes at a time when the Yiddish world is narrowing. In part, it may occur because there is no option remaining to him but a treaty, however uneasy.
Leivick wrote in “Letter from America” that “[...] everything in the world wants to be beloved and dear, [...] everything in the world wants to be kissed, like a face.” These lines were printed in Di Royte Velt, edited in part by Leyb Kvitko and Itsik Fefer — two of the victims of Stalinist purge of 1952. While America may continue to threaten assimilation and loss, in 1954 Leivick finds himself in a world where the revolution he once worked for has executed its poets and gutted its Jewish culture. Israel, as well, is not a solution for Leivick, as he says in an interview that year that his health and age prevent him from seriously considering aliyah.
This image of everything wanting to be loved and kissed, though, finds its echo in “To America” nearly thirty years later, with Leivick’s declaration that he should have kissed the ground and will do so now. He was, he says, ashamed to do so before. This mirrors the language which he once used to speak of his by turns loving and abusive father:
Carry on your hand all of my touches,
Carry on your lips my kisses,
Which I wanted and should have
And was always ashamed to give you.
(from “Father-Legend”)
He overtly pairs his father with the country itself in “To America,” superimposing this fraught familial relationship on to his relationship with the country. Who, he asks, ought he to honor more, the place he has come from or the place he is and will be?
Leivick, over the course of his career, partially comes to terms with the worst of his father’s actions by declaring that his father had been ashamed to kiss him and he to kiss his father in return, both recognizing the love and acknowledging the violence. He makes a similar declaration to his adoptive home. The past cannot be undone, only understood for what it is and accepted. A truce can be called.
Whitman did not succeed in once and for all elevating the common man, nor did the death of Lincoln undo or end the racism and class division Leivick sees in the streets of New York. Nevertheless, Leivick writes that America has been sanctified and purified by Whitman and Lincoln —two Moshiach Ben Yosefs , harbingers of the messianic era, clearing the way for the final redemption of the Moshiach Ben David. America, he seems to tell us, fits into the Jewish people and they into it. It is not Leivick’s father, nor the land of his father — but with this poem paralleling the two, after more than forty years, he pulls America into himself and himself into America, contradictions, complexities and all.
This is not, by any means, a comprehensive or complete examination of Leivick and his rather complex relationship with America. For an extensive treatment of symbolic Judaism, as well as race and social justice in America, in the work of Leivick and his contemporaries, with specific reference to “Letter from America to a Distant Friend,” see Amelia Glaser’s recent book, Songs in Dark Times. For more about Di Yunge, the group with which Leivick was loosely associated in his first years in New York, Ruth Wisse’s A Little Love in Big Manhattan is indispensable. No full English-language biography of Leivick currently exists, but one can find a very detailed critical overview of his life and career in Charles Madison’s Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers and an account and analysis of his time and work while being treated for TB in Denver in Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium: 1900-1970 by Ernest B. Gilman. Sarah Ponichtera’s “The Fragmented Self: Individualism in Yiddish Introspectivism” is also a necessary read on this topic.
In Yiddish, the most exhaustive consideration of Leivick and his work is Shmuel Charney’s critical biography H. Leivick: 1888-1948. Charney’s analysis of doubles and doppelgängers in Leivick’s poetry and drama is drawn upon here.
Thanks, A.S. Lange-Robertson, for your guest contribution on this topic!
I’ve just scheduled, and I’m really looking forward to, a paying-subscribers-only Zoom discussion in December. I’ve also held the first book giveaway for Founding Members of this newsletter—the lucky winner is Mr. Noam Freshman of Brooklyn, New York. After chatting with Mr. Freshman about his background and reading interests, I sent him a new copy of a classic Sholem Aleichem collection, including Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman sequence and Railroad Stories.
What an amazing poem. Beautiful translation and fantastic essay!