Zlotshov, My Home

Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's Anti-Nostalgia

My last post introduced the brilliant and eccentric Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, and today we’ll revisit Halpern with another great poem. I won’t rehash the biography I introduced there, but I’d like to add another anecdote about his stubborn idiosyncrasy.

I mentioned that Halpern was trained as a commercial artist; this training began at a young age, when Halpern’s father recognized his artistic aptitude. But it didn’t begin so auspiciously. The story goes that, when Halpern was around 11 years old, his father arranged for him to do some trial work with a local sign painter named Naftoli. This Naftoli assigned young Moyshe-Leyb to paint a stereotypical Turk, wearing green pants and smoking a pipe, as an advertisement for a tobacco shop. Instead of his assignment, Moyshe-Leyb—ever the non-conformist—painted a pipe-less Turkish man dressed in ragged, multi-colored pants.

“Well, that’s how I imagine a Turk,” Moyshe-Leyb explained, and suggested that if the pipe was so important, they could borrow a real one from the tobacco shop and attach it to the painting.

Halpern’s apprenticeship with Naftoli did not, apparently, last long. But he did develop into a gifted artist, about which you can read a little bit more here.

I’m particularly taken by descriptions of the furniture he fashioned for his family’s Bronx apartment. One acquaintance recalled his furniture as “bizarre… all of it stylized, grotesque.” From what I’ve seen, that description doesn’t seem so fair, but you can find Halpern’s son recollecting some of his father’s DIY furniture adventures here:

Halpern was born in 1886 in the small town of Zlotshov, which was the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now Ukraine. I say this as background for today’s poem, which is one of his better-known and more studied works. I took the Yiddish below from his 1924 collection Di Goldene Pave (The Golden Peacock), a book that was published with some very cool illustrations:

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Zlotshov, My Home

Oh Zlotshov, you, my home, my city
with your church steeple and synagogue and bath,
and with your women at the market,
and your unleashed little Jews
like dogs who go after a peasant coming down
with a small basket of eggs from Sasiv mountain—
life in spring awakens in me
my poor scrap of longing for you—
my home, my Zlotshov. 

But when I remember, with longing,
that wealthy Rappaport, and how he walks
with his fat stomach into synagogue,
and pious Shaye Hillel,
who could sell even the sun and its shine
like a sow in a sack—
that is enough to blow out my longing for you
within me, just like a light—
my home, my Zlotshov.

How does the story go about that fop:
One evening, for so long without a rest,
he watched angels circle the sun,
until a drunk gentile with an ax
struck him beneath his tailcoat,
and it almost killed the poor man—
the gentile with the ax is my hatred within me
for my grandfather, and because of him, for you—
my home, my Zlotshov.

Your earth is a witness that I am not inventing this.
When my grandfather had my mother
evicted from the house by the police,
my grandmother, with her legs spread,
smiled almost as sweet as honey,
like a gentile girl who stands between two soldiers—
so let my hatred within me be cursed,
as it reminds me of her and of you—
my home, my Zlotshov.

Like a group of naked Jews in a bath
around a man who's been burnt, in a circle
they shook their heads and stroked their beards
around the thrown out packs
and rags and junk in sacks,
around the pieces of the broken bed—
my mother weeps, even now, within me,
as she did then, beneath your sky, in you—
my home, my Zlotshov.

But wondrous is our world:
a horse and cart over the field
can take a person to the train,
which flies like a demon over the fields, away,
until it brings them to a ship with steerage,
which takes them off to New York, downtown—
and this is truly my one consolation,
that I will not be buried in you—
my home, my Zlotshov. 

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There’s a vague and pervasive shtetl-nostalgia for many American Jews. Blame Fiddler on the Roof, perhaps, or the inadequate compensations American assimilation offers for the loss of our past. This poem begins with Halpern’s nostalgic longing for Zlotshov, his home-shtetl, but quickly turns to recall the painful realities of life there, Zlotshov’s (and Halpern’s family’s) brutality and hypocrisy and poverty, before rejecting nostalgia completely.

(Incidentally, did you know that in early modern Europe, nostalgia was considered a curable disease? Doctors prescribed particular treatments for it, which could include a return to the place for which one was nostalgic. It seems strange to us now, perhaps, to pathologize and try to medically cure nostalgia, but is it any stranger than prescribing antidepressant drugs for the treatment of grief?)

Spring incites Halpern’s nostalgic longing, but honest memories extinguish that longing like a candle. And suddenly, shockingly, Halpern’s tone towards his hometown shifts from yearning to hatred. I love this poem in part because of hoew jarring I find that turn, every time I read it. The homesickness for an idealized, imaginary shtetl is seemingly safe American-Jewish emotional territory, so the beginning of the poem seems familiar, even comfortable. But we feel the first tremors of discomfort with that strange, destabilizing comparison of Zlotshov’s Jews to unleashed dogs. By the time we get to “the gentile with the ax” we can’t hide the from the discomfiting honesty of this poem’s recollections, and by the time that gentile’s hatred becomes Halpern’s hatred for his family and for his hometown, we’re in uncharted territory.

A lesser poem would see “the gentile with the ax” as a purely external force, a victimizer of Zlotshov’s Jews. But Halpern’s uncompromising brilliance demands that he not see himself as psychically distinct from those forces of violence: “the gentile with the ax is my hatred within me.” The Zlotshov he’d been homesick for never existed in isolation, and the brutality it contained cannot really be escaped, because it is a part of him forever.

This poem puts me in mind of scholar Svetlana Boym’s theories of nostalgia, a feeling which she divides into two types. There’s “restorative nostalgia,” which wants to recreate an imagined past, and “does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition.” (Make America Great Again, etc….) But there’s also “reflective nostalgia,” which “thrives in… longing itself.” She writes: “Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.”

Halpern is presenting us, I think, with a complicated sort of “reflective nostalgia.” Longing transforms into hatred, and hatred transforms into the “one consolation”: that death will be an eternal escape from Zlotshov, with no possibility of ever returning. Indeed, as Boym puts it: “While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one’s homeland with paranoid determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion.”

I am the kind of person who is chronically, often depressively, nostalgic, and I find this poem helpful for the ways it so forcefully turns that nostalgia on its head. Not that art should be therapeutic to be worthwhile, but I experience this poem as a sort of therapist grabbing me by the shoulders, trying to shake me out of my nostalgic fantasies, forcing me not to look away from all the savage truth and pain nostalgia serves to mask.

There’s a political aspect to this as well, as authoritarian nationalism based around “restorative nostalgia” continues to ascend here in the US, in Israel, and in so many other places. Halpern shows us, with unavoidable clarity, the violence that restorative nostalgia hides, and that nostalgic nationalism threatens.

But even with that violence, and with the relief of his escape, Halpern and Zlotshov are always connected.. His mother weeps in him, and she weeps in Zlotshov, which—by the transitive property—suggests that some part of him overlaps with some part of his hometown. Although the refrain of “My Zlotshov, my home” has taken on a bitter irony by the poem’s end, it is so bitter precisely because it is also still true. We can never really escape where we come from, or what we yearn for, even as we’re glad to never have to go back there again.

Boym gestures towards this ambivalence, as well, and considers it a necessary personal and political stance towards nostalgia. She writes: “The imperative of a contemporary nostalgic: to be homesick and to be sick of being at home—occasionally at the same time.” In Halpern’s poetry we find a model for this contradiction. He hates Zlotshov even as he longs for it; he’s comforted that he’ll be buried far from his hometown, even as he can never really leave his hometown behind.

Within the losses of the modern world, may we all find ways to be as honest about the tensions of our own nostalgia, and may that honesty about the past enable us to build a more livable and life-affirming future.

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And today’s art pairing: Anselm Kiefer’s 1989 Lot’s Wife: