Today’s featured poet is Aaron Glanz-Leyeles (1889-1966), who also wrote under a number of pen names, including A. Leyeles, the name under which today’s poem was first published.
Like most American Yiddish writers of his generation, Glanz-Leyeles was an emigrant from Europe. Born not far from Warsaw, and a descendant of the great Talmudic scholar Yom Tov Lipman Heller, the young Glanz-Leyeles received both a traditional Jewish education and an education in a Russian imperial school before moving to London in 1905, and to New York four years later, where he studied English literature at Columbia University.
It’s hard to do justice to the breadth of his interests and influences. As an educator, he co-founded the first Yiddish language school in New York, on the Lower East Side, and traveled around the continent to found Yiddish schools in Sioux City, Iowa, Rochester, New York, and Toronto and Winnipeg, Canada. He served as director of something called the Jewish National Radical School in Chicago, which my quick internet searches didn’t turn up much information about, but it sounds pretty neat.
And speaking of radical: Glanz-Leyeles was a prominent activist for socialist territorialism, a movement to establish Jewish autonomy somewhere other than the land of Israel. You might be familiar with Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which imagines that Alaska has become a territory of refuge for European Jews. It sounds fantastical, but Glanz-Leyeles was part of an attempt to make it happen. In 1911, he helped lead a delegation to the governor of what was then the District of Alaska, in an (unsuccessful) attempt to create a Jewish immigration center there, and perhaps to establish part of Alaska as a Jewish territory.
I won’t try to cram all the fascinating trivia about Glanz-Leyeles’ life into this post, as I’m hoping to share more from and about him soon. But as a writer, he was a prolific essayist, playwright, and poet, whose greatest influence today is probably in his literary theory and criticism. I’ve mentioned the In-Zikhistn before, the “Introspectivists,” the most important modernist Yiddish literary group in New York, whose flagship member was Jacob Glatstein. Glanz-Leyeles was, we could say, the chief theoretician of this group, who helped to shape its literary manifesto and its principles. He was influenced by his study in the literature of various languages, and brought daring new forms into Yiddish poetry—I don’t know whether he wrote the first Yiddish villanelle, but he certainly wrote the first Yiddish villanelle I’m familiar with.
Expect more about him in future weeks. But today’s poem, “Worms,” comes from his 1922 collection, Yungharbst, “Young Autumn.”
As a matter of historical curiosity, however, here is the header for the table of contents from his 1918 collection, Labirint (Labyrinth.) What an odd, viscerally incongruous thing, to see those swastikas alongside Hebrew letters; it’s a relic of a time when the swastika was an elegant and exotic design.
But a quick reminder, before we get to the poem: On this coming Monday evening, 3/27, at 7:00 pm EST, we’ll have an informal Zoom discussion and reading about New York City in Yiddish poetry. I’m really looking forward to this: we’ll consider Yiddish poems that present New York as a place, a character, an idea, and chat about New York as a historic Yiddish literary scene. All paying subscribers will get a Zoom link - it would be great to see you there!
Worms
Worms surround me.
Worms.
Large.
White.
Pale.
Seethe around me with their fat, soft, loose bellies.
Quiet and mildew-moist.
They do not consume me.
They wrap me up from every side,
impurify me with their moist, cold, sticky skin,
pile themselves on top of me,
grow stronger,
multiply,
swarm,
grow lustier,
until I choke and suffocate on the white, sticky, soft assemblage,
until my death arrives.
-------------------------------------------------------
Where is he, the eternal one, the inescapable, waiting at every intersection, the dark one,
all-powerful
watchman?
I,
the atom,
who lives so that he might be glorified,
I,
the atom, who holds in a speck of marrow
all his worlds and his ambitions,
I–
sentenced to death since my first day,
who breathes daily the scent of my own rot,
would like to see him
face to face!
I love this poem. I absolutely love it. It’s bizarre, morbid, viscerally disturbing, unsettlingly sexual (the lusty worms?), and obsessed at once with death and with God, who may in fact be the same thing. What’s not to like?
And the leap, the wild turn, between “until my death arrives” and “Where is he”—the shocking transition between the poem’s sensual portrayal of death and its search for divinity—jars me every time I read it.
In paraphrase, it’s a fairly uninteresting poem, even a boring and conservative one: the poet imagines being a body consumed by worms, and out of that imagining he seeks to know God intimately, and to come before the presence of divinity. From that description, it sounds like any memento mori poem that concludes with a turn towards religious belief.
But the poem itself is so much more daring, from the very beginning. I love a poem that can start with such a simple and assertive declaration: װערים אַרום מיר, worms surround me. There’s no fancy rhetoric here, just a confident statement of the situation in which we find ourselves in the poem, and in which we’ll all find ourselves in actuality, sooner or later. Those worms multiply, and the short lines together with such sensuous language create a fast-paced, almost overwhelming experience. We feel what it is to be be swarmed by these worms; our claustrophobia as readers deepens with the claustrophobia of the poem’s predicament.
A question: when does the speaker of this poem die? On a first read, it seems that he is already dead and buried when the poem begins; why else would worms surround him? But the first half of the poem culminates in his death. How should we understand this? Frankly, I’m not quite sure, but I’m also not quite sure how much a rational understanding of the timeline matters here. As it is, the trajectory from the poem’s first line through the end of its first section gives me the unpleasant feeling of being buried alive.
And then “the eternal one,” God, or maybe here the angel of death, or maybe God is the angel of death—yes, where is he? Everywhere and nowhere at once, this poem suggests. Lurking at every intersection, watching over our every move, and yet somehow nowhere, entirely inaccessible, as distant as can be.
It’s an incredible poem to me because it captures so succinctly and with such concrete, embodied language the basic contradictions of being human. On one hand, we are always dying. But at the same time that we journey inevitably towards becoming worm-food, as this poem so disturbingly shows us, we also contain in our bodies, and in every moment of our lives, infinity. “In a speck of marrow” we hold “all [God’s] worlds.”
If you’ve noticed a commonality among many of the poems that I’ve shared here, and I’m sure I’ve said this before, it might be that they all embrace, rather than flee from, the paradox of being human, which is the paradox of living and dying at once, and the paradox of being, as Jewish tradition teaches, simultaneously created in the image of God and nothing but dust and ashes. I find that expressed in this poem with uncommon clarity, and in uncommonly tangible language. The same poet who, in almost the same breath, is consumed unto death by damp, white worms, demands to see divinity face to face. What a wild, honest paradox it is.
For today’s painting pairing, here is “Hare with Forks,” by Chaim Soutine (1893-1943):
Great post, thank you. I had only known his poem 'Der Got fun Yisroyl' which is a favorite of mine.
I was born in Amherst mass and my dad just told me upon sharing Worms: "Yiddish culture and language were dying in the second half of 20 th century in the US, until the revival movement, with the center in Amherst MA, breathed a new life in it. I knew a lot of people there who were instrumental in giving it the second life." Curious if you've done a post to that effect