Yiddish Poets by H Leivick

To kick off this newsletter of Yiddish poetry in translation, below is H Leivick’s poem, “Yiddish Poets,” translated from a 1932 edition. H Leivick (1888-1962) was the pen name of Leivick Halpern, who was for a time among the most beloved and respected Yiddish writers in the world.

His biography seems mythic, cinematic: after abandoning the orthodox Judaism of his upringing for revolutionary socialism, Leivick was sentenced to hard labor in Siberian exile. As the great scholars and translators Benjamin and Barbara Harshav write, “in 1906 he was arrested by the Tsarist police. He refused the services of a famous Russian defense lawyer and declared at his trial: ‘I will not defend myself. Everything I have done I did in full consciousness. I am a member of the Jewish revolutionary party, the Bund, and I will do everything in my power to overthrow the Tsarist autocracy, its bloody henchmen, and you as well.”

In 1913, Leivick’s revolutionary comrades managed to smuggle him out of Russia, and he lived the rest of his life in the United States, writing prolifically.

Wondrously, here is a recording of Leivick himself reciting this poem.

Yiddish Poets - H Leivick

When I consider us, Yiddish poets,
such grief engulfs me
that I want to scream to myself, and to beg,
and suddenly my words grow silent.

Our poems seem grotesque,
like ears of corn devoured by a swarm of locusts.
Our consolation is to find ourselves repulsive
and to slink across God’s earth like strange, alien guests!

The blood of our word on cold fingers,
from cold fingers to colder cement--
O laughable, shameful poet,
trapped in four shameful walls!

And when a neighbor comes to us,
up from the cellar or down from the attic,
he recognizes his mute tongue within us
and avoids our ceremonies.

And we, like childish and love-drunk knights,
like Don Quixote, past all bounds,
are the companions only of our trembling
and, lonely, tremble over every letter, every word.

Sometimes, like agitated cats
dragging disoriented kittens out of harm’s way,
we hold our poems in our teeth and drag them 
by their necks through New York’s streets.

When I consider us, Yiddish poets,
such grief engulfs me that I want to scream 
to someone near me, and to beg,
and suddenly my words grow silent.

---

Leivick is writing here about the particular marginalization of Yiddish poetry, but what he says of Yiddish poets could also be said of anyone: when we really consider ourselves, and our alienation from even the people closest to us, aren’t we all sometimes overwhelmed with grief? Who hasn’t now and then felt like an unwanted guest on earth?

Maybe I’m projecting here, and should just speak for myself. But I love this poem, partly because some aspect of myself which I would prefer to stifle or ignore identifies with Leivick’s isolation. For Leivick the poet is alone, unwanted, shunned by his neighbors, able to bear nothing but deformed fruits. Worst of all, perhaps: when he is most desperate to speak, to scream, to cry out for a different life, he cannot find even a single word. 

Certainly I’ve felt all of this at various points in my life, and maybe you have too.

It sounds bleak, and it is, but it isn’t only that. There is also, I think, a kind of covert joy hidden beneath this vision of the Yiddish poet’s alienation. The fact that this poem exists is in itself a triumph, a paradoxical triumph, over the poet’s loneliness, and over the silences that stalk him. Leivick has found a way to write about, to communicate, his inexpressible grief. In describing his loneliness in verse he makes himself a little less alone; the poem transcends the isolation which the poem describes. Leivick’s art conquers his suffering, even as the art and the suffering persist side by side.

A question I have about this poem: in what ways is it “a consolation… to find ourselves repulsive?” I feel a psychological resonance there, but I can’t put my finger on it or articulate it. It’s not dissimilar, maybe, from the fact that Kafka understood his Metamorphosis to be a comedy.

Well, I promised myself that I would keep these little comments short, no more than a couple hundred words, so I’ll cut off my rambling here, but I’m grateful that you’ve read this far. It’s now about 90 years since this poem was first published, and I wanted to start my newsletter of Yiddish poetry in translation with it because I love that image of the poet as a stray cat dragging its kitten through New York City. The poet as an animal nurturing the poem in its vulnerability, protecting it through an inhospitable landscape. Keeping it safe.

And that’s what we’re doing with this newsletter. Bearing these Yiddish poems through this online city, and finding a way to keep them alive.

I’ll send another translation of a Yiddish poem out next week. I’m looking forward to sharing these. Please, feel free to be in touch.