Malka Heifetz Tussman was born into a Hasidic family in northwestern Ukraine, at the end of the 19th century. Different sources give different years—1893? 1896?—but she was born in the spring, and later claimed May 15 as her birthday. The second of eight children, Tussman was educated in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, and at the age of eight became the first Jewish student in her local Russian public school. She immigrated to the United States in 1912.
A few things Tussman shares with nearly all the poets we’ve surveyed here: a multilingual upbringing and education, and emigration at a young age. But unlike most of her generation of European-born, American Yiddish poets, Tussman did not settle on the east coast. Instead she moved first to Chicago, then to Wisconsin, and afterwards to California, where she spent most of her life. On arriving in America, she quickly learned English, and fell in love with the poetry of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. Later she would translate some of the English language’s best modern poets, including Auden and Yeats, into Yiddish.
I love this photo of her. Doesn’t she seem downright cool, almost intimidatingly so?
In Chicago, Tussman met and married the cantor Shlryme Tussman, and their first of two sons, Joseph, was born in 1914. I mention him in particular because he had his own distinguished and fascinating life as an education reformer, a political activist within academia, and the chair, for many years, of UC Berkeley’s philosophy department.
Malka Heifetz Tussman first started publishing Yiddish stories and poems in 1918, in New York’s leftist Yiddish press. From a young age, however, she had written poetry in Russian, and beginning in 1914 she contributed to Chicago’s English-language anarchist newspapers, when Chicago was a hotbed for American radicalism.
In Wisconsin, and especially in California, Tussman was well known as both a Yiddish writer and a Yiddish educator. She published many essays and poetry collections, and in 1981 was awarded the prestigious Itzik Manger Prize. She died in Berkeley, in 1987, having “served as a bridge between generations of Yiddish poets from Eastern Europe and American-born Jewish poets.” Among the influential Yiddishists she mentored were the poet/translator Marcia Falk, and Kathryn Hellerstein, whose studies of female Yiddish writers are a must-read for anyone interested in this subject; she also mentored younger Yiddish poets, including Rokhl Fishman.
Tussman’s early poetry was strictly formal—she mastered the sonnet corona, for example—before she switched to writing in free verse. Avrom Sutzkever, one of the greatest modern Yiddish poets, whom we’ll surely look at here soon, said of Tussman that “everything she touches turns to poetry.” I don’t think any writer could ask for a better blurb.
And isn’t this a delightful photo of her and her husband Shleyme? (Photo courtesy of Ben Sadock, via In Geveb)
The poem below comes from her 1977 collection Haynt iz Eybik, (Today is Eternal).
To Spite
You say:
"You are a Jew and are a poet
and you never write poems
about the Holocaust.
How is this possible for a Yiddish poet
when vast,
so vast is the destruction?"
Simple:
to spite the annihilators.
To spite them I will not weep in public,
to spite them
I will not set my sadness down
on paper.
(A disgrace to set
"sadness" down on paper.)
To spite them
I will wander through the world as if
it were mine.
Of course the world is mine!
Who else's?
If I am obstructed,
if my paths are blocked,
it would still be mine.
What--it wouldn't be mine?
To spite them I will not weep
even if
the space of my world, God forbid,
becomes no bigger than the space
my sole takes up on it,
it would still be
mine!
Oh,
mine after all.
To spite them
I will marry my children away,
so that they will have children.
To spite the wicked ones who procreate
within my world,
and constrict it
for me.
Tussman was not really a Holocaust poet, and here we see one explanation for why: to refuse to write about the Holocaust is to spite its perpetrators. It’s an incredible gesture of resistance, and I love that one word line: “Simple.” In a quiet protest against genocide, she refuses to grant her oppressors the victory of letting them define her life and her art. Regardless of what is done to her or said of her, she will never relinquish her place in the world, and will claim it “as if” it is always hers. Cliché as the word “inspiring” might be, I find this model of inner, spiritual defiance and dignity deeply inspiring.
The more I think about it, though, the more I’m also confused by this gesture. Sometimes, depending on my mood, this poem reads a little bit like—and I apologize for comparing something so weighty with something so trite—a country song I once heard in which the singer explains that he’s over his ex, completely over her, and to show just how over her he is he will act in public as if his heart is not broken. Listening to the song, of course, we understand that it’s a lie: he only brags about how over her he is because he isn’t over her at all.
Of course Tussman never claims to be “over” anything. How could she? But a poem about the refusal to weep for the Holocaust, and about the refusal to address the Holocaust in writing at all, is still a way of orienting the poem around the Holocaust and its grief, just as a stupid country song about refusing to be heartbroken is still about heartbreak.
I’d call it a kind of negative poetics, in a way that’s analogous to negative theology. For Maimonides, the preeminent Jewish negative theologian, God cannot be described, because God is entirely incomparable with any describable thing. Only by refusing to ascribe characteristics to God can we can accurately describe God’s indescribability.
Something similar, I think, is happening here in Tussman’s poem. The scholar Jonathan Jacobs writes that “Maimonides’ negative theology was a strategy for preserving the utter and complete uniqueness of God while also not being rendered utterly silent and inarticulate in regard to God and divine attributes….” So too is Tussman’s refusal to write about the Holocaust “a strategy for preserving the utter and complete uniqueness of [that genocide] while also not being rendered utterly silent and inarticulate….”
What could the word “sadness” mean, after all, when her sadness as the destruction of European Jewish culture is so far beyond anything else that the word sadness points to? To put it into words would be “a degradation.” For many Jewish poets, theological content became a way of responding to the Holocaust. (You might’ve seen that I just taught a class on this for Drisha.) But for Tussman here, I’d argue that she eschews theological content, and instead embraces the theological form of Maimonides’ via negativa, in order to express the inexpressible.
After forgetting about it for a while, I am trying to get back to my self-imposed word count for these pieces, so I won’t say too much more about this! But I want to be clear that I think the kind of “negative poetics” this poem enacts—its manner of explicitly refusing to articulate what cannot be articulated, and thereby rendering the subject all the more powerful in its absence—is relevant not just to the Holocaust, and not just to poetry, but to any attempts to describe or to grapple with trauma.
How can a traumatic experience, something that is by definition beyond words or meaning, be put into words? This is the paradox of this poem. Only by rejecting words for her grief, and for the enormity of the Holocaust’s destruction, is Tussman able to find the words she needs.
Two other things that fascinate me about this poem: the first is the opening address. Who is the “you” to whom the poem speaks? It begins in the middle of a conversation, but how striking that it’s not a conversation with “him” or “her,” and is rather directed in the 2nd person. It’s hard for me not to feel, when I read a poem addressed so immediately to “you,” that it’s really talking to me, and here this has the effect of pulling me right into the poem’s concerns and tensions and implicating me in them, as if Tussman were reaching through time to speak directly to me.
And second, I love the energy of the enjambments here, which are typical of Tussman’s later writing. The line breaks give me the sense of a momentum that is both wildly propulsive and carefully contained by the poet’s craftsmanship, and I’ve tried to retain Tussman’s relationship between syntactical meaning and line in my translation here.
I’ve enjoyed pairing these poems with visual art; here is Maurycy Gottlieb’s 1875 drawing, “Dancing Chasidim.”
Thanks, as always, for reading, and—also as always—feel free to be in touch. If you find this newsletter worthwhile, I’d be grateful if you could share it with others, and/or consider becoming a paid subscriber.