Two More Short Poems by Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim
Two weeks ago, I used this newsletter to remember the life and poetry of Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, the great Yiddish poet poet who died on March 22, at the age of 98. I won’t repeat her biography here—you can click the link above if you missed that installment, or want a refresher—but I was gratified by the response it got, and I’m excited to share two more of her poems today.
First, though, here’s a neat piece of Yiddish ephemera I stumbled on recently: a 1925 ad soliciting donations for the “world library” of Jewish religious books at Poland’s great Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, which was once the largest yeshiva—a traditional seminary for Jewish talmudic study—in the world. “Donate books,” the ad exhorts, in order to meet the yeshiva’s goal of collecting 100,000 volumes.
When the Nazis occupied Lublin, they turned the yeshiva into a military police headquarters, and jubilantly burnt its renowned library in Lublin’s market square. History repeats itself in odd ways: in 2003, the yeshiva’s building was transferred back to Poland’s Jewish community, and when Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the yeshiva was transformed into a makeshift refugee center to house hundreds of Jews who had fled from the war. It’s an interesting glimpse into the vibrancy of pre-war Ashkenazi culture in Poland, and into the ways that culture persists beyond the chaos of the 20th century to become a force for good in the 21st.
But without further ado, here are two more poems by the late, brilliant Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, the last great Yiddish poet of her generation. (I am still dealing with the same substack formatting bug that’s messing up my Yiddish typing here, so apologies for that - the perils of writing from right to left on platform designed for English!)
Recollection They remember how I used to write poems, to cry poems, to silence poems on the red cobblestones. They remember me by the barbed wire fence, my young skin tattooed by barbed prongs, to see a small thread of the sunset, of my own setting in the final sun. I sang then and my song was our sun. דערמאָנונג זיי געדענקע װי כ'פֿלעג שרײַבן לידער, װיינען לידער, שװײַגן לידער אױפֿן רױטן ברוק. געדענקען מיך בײַם שטעכלפּלױט, פֿון שטעכלשפּיצן אױסגעטאַטויִרט מײַן יונגע הױט, צו זען אַ פֿעדעמל פֿון זונפֿאַרגאַנג, פֿון אייגענעם פֿאַרגאַנג אין לעצטער זון. געזונגען האָב איך דמאָלט און מײַן ליד- געװען איז אונדזער זון. To Tell To tell means to set out again and to arrive at the abyss of yesterdays. To tell means to be watchfully awake like an owl that swallows the radiance from night. To tell means going blindly to a fight and remaining with wounds and with sleepless nights. דערציילן דערציילן מיינט װידער זיך לאָזן אין װעג און קומען צום תּהום פֿון נעכטיקע טעג. דערציילן מיינט װערן זעעװדיק װאַך װי אַ סאָװע, װאָס שלינגט דאָס ליכט פֿון דער נאַכט. דערציילן מיינט גיין צו אַ בלינדן געפֿעכט און בלײַבן מיט װוּנד און מיט שלאָפֿלאָזע נעכט.
The last two poems I shared by Basman Ben-Hayim spoke elliptically about her traumatic wartime experiences, but here we find them more explicitly discussed. Recall that she began to write poems while imprisoned at the Kaiserwald concentration camp, and would recite them in the evenings to boost the morale of her fellow prisoners. “I sang then / and my song / was our sun” references this time. A lot of other poets would write a line like this, describing their art-making as the sun, and I’d roll my eyes at the hubris.
But here’s no hubris: if anyone has earned the right to claim that her poetry was the sun, it’s Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim. In the context of this poem, and of her life, this is the perfect image for art’s capacity to cast a sudden illumination onto the darkest of circumstances, and for that sudden illumination, however inadequate and fleeting it is, to be, somehow, enough. Not enough to save the world, to end the war, to convince a genocide’s perpetrators and accomplices of their victims’ humanity. Much as I want to be idealistic about the power of art, I don’t want to be naïve. But enough to help a traumatized and starving person make it through another cold night, another brutal day. And isn’t that itself a miracle?
We find in Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, and in the origins of her poetry writing, an incredible example of Jewish spiritual resistance to the Holocaust. There’s an odious trope in Holocaust historiography that sees Jews as passive victims, shamefully submissive, and thereby complicit in their own murders. Bruno Bettelheim, the Austrian-born Jewish psychoanalyst, (in)famously wrote that, “Like lemmings, [millions of Europe’s Jews] marched themselves to their own death.” Certainly this is historically inaccurate, and says more about Bettelheim’s psychology than it does about anything else. But the standard response to this trope, at least as I’ve seen it, is to point to instances of Jewish armed resistance, to the many camp and ghetto uprisings and partisan units in which Jews fought.
Basman Ben-Hayim, along with countless other Jewish artists of all kinds, offers a different, though no less vital, model of resistance. Against the dusk that had enveloped Europe, her poetry became a sun.
But in the second of these poems, “To Tell,” we see the toll this takes on her. Increasingly I think that the idea of “closure,” which people sometimes talk about as a need or a goal after grief, is a kind of pseudo-psychology. This poem insists that to remember the past is to return to that past; to tell of one’s traumas is to reinhabit them.
I wanted to put these poems together in part because I think there’s a complicated interplay across them between day and night, and light and darkness, and that this dynamic suggests the impossibility of closure. During the war, she created a sun that could cast the night and its darkness away. Later, retelling her experiences transforms her into “an owl / that swallows the radiance / from night,” and brings her back, again and again, to the abyss.
Poetry written in response to catastrophe, this suggests to me, is a double-edged sword. It can illuminate the worst experiences, and it can plunge the writer into those experiences’ darkness. What, then, is the role of poetry, or of any art, in responding to trauma and suffering? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Felix Nussbaum’s “Prisoners in St. Cyprien,” 1942. Nussbaum, a German-Jewish artist, escaped from the train transporting him from the St. Cyprien concentration camp to Germany, and lived in hiding until he was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in 1944.
