Two Poems by Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim

Remembering the late, great poet

On March 22, just a month ago, the great Yiddish poet Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim died in Israel. She was 98 years old, and was—as others before me have described her—the last living Yiddish poet of her generation, and so it seems both right and necessary that this first newsletter installment after a Passover hiatus be dedicated to her.

Rivka Basman (she later added Ben-Hayim, her husband’s surname, after his death) was just a teenager when the Nazis invaded her native Lithuania, and murdered her father and eight year old brother. After two years in the Vilna Ghetto, she was sent to be a slave laborer at the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Latvia.

(photo courtesy of the Jewish Women’s Archive)

And there, incredibly, she began to write poetry. No “art for art’s sake”: she started writing in order to inspire her fellow inmates; each evening, she would recite a poem she had written that day, hoping to boost the morale of the women with whom she was incarcerated and enslaved. She smuggled her poems out of the camp by rolling up the paper on which they were written and hiding it beneath her tongue.

When the war ended, Basman spent two years in Serbia, where she married her husband, fellow survivor Mula Ben-Haim. I say “fellow survivor,” but Basman didn’t like to use that language to describe herself. She didn’t survive the Holocaust, she insisted; the person she had been before the Holocaust was killed, and she, this nominal survivor, was somebody else. In Serbia she helped to organize underground networks smuggling Jews into Palestine, and in 1947 she and her husband moved there as well.

Aside from stints in New York, where she studied English and comparative literature at Columbia, and in Moscow, where she taught the children of Israel’s diplomats, and secretly supported Yiddish writers, she spent the rest of her life in Israel. There she became a central figure in the country’s Yiddish literary scene, serving as head of the Union of Yiddish Writers, and writing prolifically. Her last poetry collection was published in 2020, when she was 95 years old.

It seems fitting to me, as well, that I’m sending this out just a few days after the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, because Basman’s poetry can’t be separated from the spiritual resistance against genocide in which her writing began. (Below is a Yiddish poster commemorating the armed resistance in the Warsaw ghetto.)

Some have called her the last great Yiddish poet. I understand why, but that seems to me too fatalistic—who knows what the future of Yiddish writing may bring? Certainly, though, she was the last great Yiddish poet who was born and raised in the Ashkenazi civilization which Nazism destroyed; she was the last living literary link between pre- and post-Holocaust Yiddish culture.

If you’d like to read more about her life and poetry, I enjoyed this piece by Rokhl Kafrissen, and drew many of these biographical details from the Jewish Women’s Archive. I’ve been moved, over the past few weeks, by this beautiful bilingual musical setting of a passage from Basman’s poetry:

Below are two of my favorite poems of hers. Because of a minor bug, there may be some formatting issues with the Yiddish below; if that’s the case, thanks for your understanding.

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The Kinship Between Yiddish and Hebrew

How to explain
the kinship
between Yiddish and Hebrew?
Perhaps it is how deeply Yiddish breathes
into a Hebrew word,
warms the letters,
softens their steps.

And then, when Yiddish
recounts her tears
to Hebrew,
both languages pray
the same prayer
to God.

די קרובישאַפֿט צװישן ייִדיש און עברית

די קרובישאַפֿט 
צװישן ייִדיש און עברית
?װי אַזױ דערקלערן
אפֿשר, װי טיף עס אָטעמט
,ייִדיש אַרײַן אין אַ העברעיש װאָרט
,דערװאַרעמט די אותיות
.שענק זיי אַ װייכערן טראָט

און דאַן, װען ייִדיש 
דערציילט פֿאַר עברית
,אירע טרערן
תּפֿילהן ביידע לשׂונות
די זעלביקע תּפֿילה
.צו גאָט

Fire-Sparks

The river that has borne our dreams away
is not the same.
A star comes to immerse itself
and finds a stranger.
From whom can we demand our blooming childhood
with wild strawberries like drops of blood
in a forest in Lithuania--
there is no path without graves,
there is no night that does not burn with memory,
and we write down with fire-sparks:
an uneffaced remembrance should remain
as there remains in running streams 
a splinter of light,
a vestige,
a name.

פֿײַער־פֿונקען

דער טײַך װאָס האָט פֿאַרטראָגן אונדזערע חלומות
.איז ניט דער זעלבר
אַ שטערן קומט זיך טובלען אין זײַן פּנים
.געפֿינט אַ פֿרעמדן
בײַ װעמען מאָנען אונדזער קינדהײַט אַ צעבליטע
מיט פּאָזעמקעס װי טראָפּנס בלוט
--אין װאַלד אין ליטע
,ניטאָ אַ װעג װוּ ניט פֿאַראַן קײן קברים
,ניטאָ אַ נאַכט װאָס פֿלאַמט ניט אין זיכּרון
מיט פֿײַער־פֿונקען מיר פֿאַרשרײַבן׃
אַ זכר ניט פֿאַרמעקט זאָל בלײַבן
װי ס'בלײַבט אין לױפֿנדיקע שטראָמען
,אַ שפּליטער שײַן
,אַ שפּאָר
אַ נאָמען.

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“There is no path without graves,” Basman writes. And of course this is true of the Lithuania her poem references, the Lithuania of her childhood, most of whose inhabitants were murdered. But it is also true for all of us, everywhere we go. The large, lovely park nearest to my house, where I run and walk a few times a week, was the site of a Civil War battle that killed thousands of people in the span of just 20 minutes. You wouldn’t even know, if you were driving by. From a certain perspective, the whole world is an unmarked grave.

It can feel—it is—overwhelming. But isn’t that why we turn to art? The great writer and literary theorist Kenneth Burke described literature as “equipment for living,” and we see that in Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim’s work. She turned to poetry in order to enable herself and those around her to continue living, within the most hellish circumstances (un)imaginable.

I love this second poem because it acknowledges the extent of human suffering, and refuses to surrender to it. Yes, it’s true, a river has borne our dreams away. Sometimes, now that I’m getting older, I recall with nostalgia the idealism and hopefulness of my youth, and I think of this opening line. It’s a comfort, in itself, to have such feelings named with clarity and beauty. And it’s a comfort, too, the note on which this poem ends: the waters rush and sweep our dreams far from us, but even so, something of them can never be entirely erased. The names and vestiges of all our long gone dreams persist within the current that has stolen them, and cast a light which Basman’s poetry calls on us to notice. That light, the poem suggests, is always there for us, as long as we are willing to do the work of remembrance. Who knows what it can still illuminate, what it can let us see?

In the first of these poems, Yiddish’s tears allow it to unite with Hebrew in prayer; here, too, remembering what is lost enables something new to arise. I love the personification of these languages. Personification, but maybe I should also say deification, because I read Yiddish breathing into Hebrew as an echo of God breathing into the first human, in one of the Genesis creation stories. If my reading there is not too much of a stretch, it’s a radical revision of the objectively understood relationship between Yiddish and Hebrew. Yiddish, historians would tell us, originated thousands of years after Hebrew, but in the imagination of the poet this language breathes a new and gentle life into its timeless Hebrew words.

What do you think of these poems? As always, I look forward to hearing your responses, either here in the comments or by email.

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Today’s art pairing is an untitled painting by the Roma Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka (1933-2013).