A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 9780804793971

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A Q u e s t i o n o f Tr a d i t i o n

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture ed i ted by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

A Question of Tradition Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987 Kathryn Hellerstein

stan f ord u n iversit y press stanf o rd, calif o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Published with the generous support of the University Research Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hellerstein, Kathryn, author. A question of tradition : women poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 / Kathryn Hellerstein. pages cm--(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-5622-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Yiddish poetry--Women authors--History and criticism. 2. Jewish poetry--Women authors--History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. PJ5122.H45 2014 839'.114099287--dc23 2014007330 isbn 978-0-8047-9397-1 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard.

To the memory of my parents,    Mary L. Feil Hellerstein and Herman K. Hellerstein,      who taught me the tradition      To my husband,        David Stern,          with whom I hand down tradition          And to our children,            Rebecca and Jonah,              who renew the tradition.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

1. The Idea of a Literary Tradition

15

2. Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

43

3. Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland

103

4. The Folk and the Book: Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

169

5. The Art of Sex: Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

243

6. Prayer-Poems against History: Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

323

Conclusion

395

Appendix: Letters from Women Poets to Ezra Korman, 1926–1927

401

Bibliographic Essays Celia Dropkin Anna Margolin Kadya Molodowsky Malka Heifetz Tussman Miriam Ulinover Roza Yakubovitsh

409 409 412 414 418 421 423

Notes

427

Works Cited

471

Index

487

Acknowledgments

I have been working on A Question of Tradition for some twenty-five years, and during this period, a number of foundations have offered me generous support. The National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers (1987); the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation (1994–1995); the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation (1994–1995); the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (CAJS) at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) (2003 and 2005); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1999–2000). I wish to express my deepest appreciation to all of these foundations for their support. During this same period, I have also incurred many debts of gratitude to individuals. The first group of these are the Yiddish poets whom I have been fortunate to meet and discuss my work with: the late Malka Heifetz Tussman, my teacher and mentor, who originally gave me the idea for this book; Rivka Basman Ben-Haim; and the late Hadassah Rubin. I am fortunate to have discussed this project along the way with many people, whose insights and responses kept me going. I thank my friends: Ann Greene, Mimi Gross, Lisa Katz, Rita Mendes-Flohr, Ruby Rain, Carol Vlack, Barbara Von Schlegell, and Linda Zisquit, and the members of the Philadelphia Women Writers Group—Cynthia B ­ aughman, Deborah Burnham, Carolyn Daffron, Ann de Forest, Adele Greenspun, Emily Harting, Molly Layton, Carolyn Raskin, Karen Rile, and Jeanne Murray Walker. I am deeply grateful to colleagues around the world who answered my questions or shared their expert knowledge and critical acumen in response to my lectures or essays that comprised earlier versions of parts of this book: Hamutal Bar Yosef, Dan Ben-Amos,

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Acknowledgments

S. Z. (Shlomo) Berger, Yael Chaver, Marcia Falk, Robert and Molly Freedman, Amelia Glaser, Nili Gold, Fern Kant, Natalia Krynicka, Lori Lefkovitz, Catriona MacLeod, Shulamit Magnus, Barbara Mann, Goldie Morgentaler, Kenneth Moss, Avraham Novershtern, Simon Richter, Lawrence Rosenwald, David Roskies, Moshe Rosman, Ellen Spolsky, Michael Steinlauf, Karolina Szymaniak, Jeffrey Tigay, Liliane Weissberg, Chava Weissler, Beth Wenger, Shira Wolosky, and Sheva Zucker. I especially want to acknowledge those who read drafts of this work and offered valuable criticism: Deborah Burnham, Anita Norich, David Stern, Chava Turniansky, and Bethany Wiggin. My dear friend and teacher John Felstiner encouraged me in this project over the years; I am extremely appreciative. I continually learn from my students, especially in my course at Penn on women and Jewish literature. I found particularly valuable responses by the graduate students in the course on women Yiddish poets that I taught at Columbia in 2007, as well as by the doctoral students in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Penn.Parts of this book appeared in earlier forms, as articles, and I am grateful to the editors of the volumes in which they were published: Lewis Fried; Gabriella Safran and Benjamin Nathans; and Sheila Jelen, Michael Kramer, and Scott Lerner. I am indebted to Mimi Gross and the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation for finding and granting me permission to use the beautiful 1927 drawing by Chaim Gross for the cover of this book. The children and families of a number of the poets in this book were of great assistance to me, graciously sharing their memories and knowledge, and encouraging me in my work on the women Yiddish poets. I am deeply grateful to Joseph Tussman (z"l); Ben Litman (z"l); Edith Schwarz; Anne Heilman (z"l); John Dropkin (z"l); and Ruth Dropkin. I am also grateful to Isaac (Ying) Halpern and to the late David Rosenthal, a student of Kadya Molodowsky in Warsaw. I am indebted to the librarians, archivists, and staff at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; at the Jewish National Library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and especially at Penn’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, where I benefited tremendously from the expertise of Seth Jershower, Arthur Kiron, Judith ­Leifer, and Bruce

Acknowledgments

Nielsen. I am also grateful to the librarians and staff at the Krauth Memorial Library at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. The publication of this book could not have happened without the technical assistance of many people: Tresa Grauer, Kay Kodner, Leslie Rubin, and Gabriella Skwara. I thank the anonymous readers for Stanford University Press for their constructive criticism, and also press editors Norris Pope and Mariana Raykov. I am especially and deeply grateful to the academic editors of the Jewish History and Culture series at Stanford University Press, Aron Rodrigue and Steven ­Zipperstein, for their warm support and faith in this book. My own family has played a crucial role in the making of this book. Long ago, my late aunt and uncle, Drs. Marjorie and Earl Hellerstein, helped me build my Yiddish library. My late in-laws, Dr. Kurt and ­Florence Stern, taught me much about traditional Judaism. My siblings, David, Jonathan, Daniel, Susan, and Beth, as well as their spouses and children, have kept me on track with their humor and companionship. My dedication of this book to my parents, husband, and children speaks for itself. My loving gratitude to them is beyond words.

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A Q u e s t i o n o f Tr a d i t i o n

Introduction

This book is about tradition. But even more than tradition itself, it is about the questions surrounding tradition. The tradition I focus on in this book is that of Yiddish poetry written by women. Yet there are many questions pertaining to this particular body of work, including: Do these poems constitute a tradition of poetry? Did women poets write with an awareness of creating within or outside of a tradition? And perhaps, most important of all, of what does this tradition consist? And what value or profit lies in using it as a critical category? As a critical category in modern literary cultures, tradition is ubiquitous. The notions of tradition in both T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s 1983 book, The Invention of Tradition, have gained wide currency, if not acceptance. Both Eliot and Hobsbawm have accustomed us to the understanding that every tradition is invented and serves a purpose. Eliot argues that tradition and modern poetry are mutually dependent: Poetry invents the tradition from which it emerges, because the dead inform the living, and the living reformulate the dead.1 Accordingly, the traditional writer transcends time by means of a historical sense, and the value of an individual talent is attributed to its context. The poet, Eliot says, “is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”2 Hobsbawm provides a broad definition of what he calls “invented tradition” as it relates to group or national identity: “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate

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Introduction

certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with . . . a suitable historic past.”3 Concepts of literary and national tradition such as these also pertain to the study of modern Yiddish literature. For example, the Israeli scholar Chone Shmeruk discusses Itzik Manger’s 1935 adaptations of biblical characters in his Khumesh-lider (Bible Poems) in terms of Eliot’s idea of the necessary reciprocity of the past and the present in poetry. Shmeruk also identifies the source of Manger’s reinvented archaic verse forms: scholarly studies of Old Yiddish literature in the late 1920s.4 Eliot’s and Hobsbawm’s notions of tradition deeply inform my discussion throughout this book. Eliot’s notion of a modern poet’s relation to tradition has led me to ask whether or how texts of Jewish religious practice, which defined women’s roles in Jewish life, are manifest in both Old and Modern Yiddish poetry by women. Hobsbawm’s definition of tradition also brings me to the very different question of how poetry written by women in the twentieth century was received by their male colleagues at the moment when these male poets and critics were inventing a modern tradition for Yiddish literature. In considering these questions of tradition in Yiddish poetry written by women, I hope to uncover the purposes for which tradition was invented, how this invention enabled women to write Yiddish poetry, and to what degree it is still a useful critical category. To a large extent, this is a book about a book: Ezra Korman’s 1928 anthology of women Yiddish poets. In Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology), Korman collected Yiddish poems by seventy women writers who published between 1586 and 1927. The earliest figures printed their poems within an all-encompassing religious context; the poets in the late nineteenth century reflected the emerging ideas of Jewish nationhood; and the twentieth-century poets composed in the milieu of radicalism, modernism, and historical trauma. From Korman’s collection, one might assume that in 1928 women poets held an accepted place in Yiddish literature. In fact, his volume was the first and only collection ever to be compiled in Yiddish to highlight the work of women poets and to suggest that they wrote within a tradition.5 In chapter 1, I discuss Korman’s anthology at length and particularly the problems it raises about the idea of a tradition of women writers in Yiddish. I revise Korman’s premise by showing the many discrete

Introduction

strands of tradition in which women poets participated. Literary culture in Yiddish was never monolithic, but the most prominent and influential writers and critics were men; women writing poetry in Yiddish were often unacknowledged. By studying key women who wrote poetry from many different perspectives, we can better understand how literary tradition played out its role in modern Yiddish culture. The poets I present in this book wrote in a range of styles under many influences and on many subjects. Yet there is much to be gained by looking at how these women poets wrote in Yiddish about the particular experiences of women and, invariably, about the experiences of Jewish women. Even when some of these women wrote as though they were not Jewish, they made a statement about Jewishness just by writing in the Jewish language of Yiddish. In this book, then, I do not try to define a single tradition within these works. Instead, I will show how multiple female voices wrote about being Jewish women poets. If there was a repeated strategy common to many, though not all, of these poems, it was the use of “­sacred parody,” a term I have borrowed from David Roskies’s important book, Against the Apocalypse (1984). The classical example of sacred parody in Jewish literature, both in Yiddish and in Hebrew, is the anti-prayer, that is, a literary work that uses the religious conventions of prayer to deny the very efficacy and value of prayer. A writer will thus deny God’s authority by writing an anti-prayer addressed to that very God. Roskies’s particular interest is the subversive use of sacred parody in Jewish responses to national catastrophe, which deny the very existence of a meaningful tradition by using traditional forms. But women poets use this mode not only subversively but also constructively to reconstitute in a secular literature such devotional traditions as Yiddish tkhines, supplicatory prayers for women. Poems written in Poland in the 1920s by Kadya Molodowsky, Miriam Ulinover, and Roza Yakubovitsh, as well as poems written in America from the late 1940s onward by Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman, exemplify the strategy whereby lost or obsolete devotional traditions are reclaimed in poems that seem to reject tradition but actually reinvent it. Many of these poems place this dialogue with tradition into the voices of women protagonists, signifying the poets’ interest in the various ways that gender changes and shapes Jewish poetry.

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Introduction

However, poems of sacred parody form only one of many threads in the rich tapestry of poetry that women wrote. Some poets, for example, Rokhl Korn, Celia Dropkin, and Anna Margolin, wrote poetry unconnected to sacred parody or, it seems, to any form of traditional Judaism. Korn’s poems of the dorf (country village) raise issues of class and religious identity by evoking relationships between Christian peasants and the few Jews who lived among them. Many of Korn’s village poems, as well as her poems of the city, depict characters who encounter problems particular to women, such as pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, sisterhood, and abortion. Dropkin’s erotic poems rarely mention Jewish themes or images, much less social or political issues. But in their unabashed sexual explicitness these poems allude to traditional Jewish strictures governing women’s modesty against which Dropkin rebels. When Margolin’s modernist poems borrow tropes from classical Greek, Roman, and even Christian cultures, the poet often places these allusions and references within a rhetoric of devotion, whether to pagan deities or to some version of the Jewish God. Moreover, these poems repeatedly raise questions about women’s lives, their places in Jewish culture, and their forms of creativity. Not all poems written by women can be understood from a single perspective. Over the past twenty-five years, many scholars have published studies of poetry in Yiddish by women from a variety of critical perspectives. Building on this earlier work, this book is the first to consider a major corpus of women poets, both premodern and modern. Most previous scholarship has focused on women writers in the modern period. The first essay published in English on women poets in Yiddish, Norma Fain Pratt’s overview of the careers of some fifty women writers, appeared in 1980.6 My articles on women poets began to appear in 1988.7 In 1990 Avraham Novershtern published the first serious article on Anna Margolin as a modernist.8 Shortly thereafter, two collections—Sokoloff, Lerner, and Norich’s Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (1992) and Baskin’s Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (1994)—included essays on women Yiddish poets and writers by Anita Norich, Dan Miron, Janet Hadda, Norma Fain Pratt, and me, as well as a translation of a 1913 essay by Shmuel Niger.9 Sheva Zucker published articles on individual women poets between 1991 and 1996.10 In 1994 Irena Klepfisz published two

Introduction

important essays that took a feminist critical approach to focus on gender politics in the Yiddish language and culture as well as on a number of women prose writers’ involvement in the Bundist, socialist, and communist movements before World War II.11 More recent writers have focused on modernism in the poetry of both Margolin (Barbara Mann and Naomi Brenner) and Rikuda Potash (Yael Chaver); the reception of the work of Esther Segal and Ida Maze (Rebecca Margolis); and gender and sex in the poetry of Tussman (Aviva Tal) and D ­ ropkin (Kathryn Hellerstein).12 In subsequent articles of my own, I have considered the poetry of Molodowsky, Ulinover, Yakubovitsh, Korn, and others in the context of Jewish tradition. Works of scholarship that treat female premodern or Old Yiddish writers include Chava T ­ urniansky’s groundbreaking article on the girl-poet Gele (known by only this single name) and her definitive critical edition and Hebrew translation, Glikl: Memoirs 1691–1719, Chava Weissler’s foundational book on the tkhines, Devra Kay’s study of a tkhine collection, and Jerold Frakes’s extensive edition of Old Yiddish texts.13 Neither these works nor the significant monographs on topics related to women Yiddish writers, both modern and premodern—for example, Janet Hadda’s psychoanalytic assessment of suicide in Yiddish fiction and Naomi Seidman’s book on cultural gendering of literature in Hebrew and Yiddish—deal primarily with poetry.14 The eminent books on modernist Yiddish poetry—Ruth Wisse’s A Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988) and Chana Kronfeld’s On the Margins of Modernism (1996)—considered primarily male poets. Perhaps the major achievement in laying groundwork for the reclamation of women Yiddish poets has been the publication of editions of their works, either in translation or in Yiddish, in recent decades: two volumes of poems by Rokhl Korn (Generations, edited by Seymour Mayne [1982], and Paper Roses, translated by Seymour Levitan [1985]); a scholarly edition of the Yiddish poems of Anna Margolin’s Lider, edited by Avraham Novershtern (1991); English translations of poems by Malka Heifetz Tussman (With Teeth in the Earth, translated by Marcia Falk [1992]); a Yiddish-English bilingual edition of poems by Rukhl Fishman (I Want to Fall Like This, translated by Seymour Levitan [1994]); a Yiddish-French bilingual edition of poems by Celia Dropkin (Dans le vent chaud, translated by Gilles Rozier and ­Viviane Siman [1994]); my own English-Yiddish bilingual edition of Kadya

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Molodowsky’s poems (Paper Bridges [1999]); Natalia Krynicka and Batia Baum’s bilingual French-Yiddish edition of Miriam Ulinover’s poetry (A grus fun der alter heym: lider [2003]); Shirley Kumove’s bilingual English-Yiddish edition of Anna Margolin’s poems (Drunk from the Bitter Truth [2005]); and Goldie Morgentaler’s English edition of Chava Rosenfarb’s selected poems (Exile at Last [2013]). Along with these books of poetry, four translated collections of Yiddish prose writings by women have appeared: Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Frieda Forman, Ethel Raicus, Sarah Silberstein Swartz, and Margie Wolfe (1994); Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, edited by Sandra Bark (2003); Arguing with the Storm, edited by Rhea Tregebov (2008); and The Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Frieda Johles Forman (2013). Through their cumulative presence, these disparate works of scholarship and translation have given rise to the question of whether or not there actually is a tradition of women’s poetry. The single attempt to address this question directly is an ambitious, lengthy 2008 essay in Hebrew by Avraham Novershtern, “The Voices and the Choir: Yiddish Women’s Poetry in the Interwar Period.” In his essay, Novershtern raises many questions, but for our concerns, the most pertinent is his questioning of the use of women’s poetry as a critical category. Did this construction mean anything to the women when they were writing their poetry? Is this category useful today to appreciate and understand the poetry? In exploring these questions, Novershtern makes several valuable points. He refutes the idea that women poets were stifled or that their writing was suppressed. Indeed, he argues that not only were women not excluded from the Yiddish literary scene but also that their general reception was positive and that women’s writing contributed to the “the variegated nature of the national literature and culture even though its actual dimensions were more modest and limited.”15 Novershtern also argues that women writers did not view themselves as women writers; and he claims that gender is not a central theme in most women writers’ poems and that they were more concerned with modernism or politics. In Novershtern’s view, each woman poet was a singular voice that had little in common with that of any other woman poet. Accordingly, he asserts, it is pointless to try to find a common

Introduction

denominator among these poets on the basis of gender. In Novershtern’s view, attempts by contemporary feminist scholars to identify a women’s tradition in Yiddish poetry only perpetuates the misconceptions and stereotypes held by male Yiddish critics who dismissed women writers, an acknowledgment that Novershtern makes, even though he believes that they were positively received. Novershtern is certainly correct that there is no single tradition of women’s Yiddish poetry, no sole common denominator among women poets, and that the perspective of gender is not the only way to look at these poets. But the fact that there is not a single rubric for poetry written by women does not mean that looking at these poems from a gendered perspective or within the category of women’s experience is not valuable. The point of literary criticism is not to reduce poetry to a monolithic, quantifiable entity but to reveal its richness and multiple possibilities. The category of gender is not an end in itself. It is a means to reveal and discuss difference. The real question is not whether there is a single common denominator to all these poets and their works. Instead, the key question is: What were the many different ways to write about Jewish women’s experiences? Novershtern’s assertion that women poets did not regard themselves as such is contradicted by evidence in six letters written to Ezra Korman in 1926 and 1927. Responding to Korman’s inquiries or invitations to submit work to Yidishe dikhterins, the anthology of women poets he was assembling at that time, four poets in Poland (Rokhl Korn, Miriam Ulinover, Roza Yakubovitsh, and Kadya Molodowsky) and two in New York (Malka Lee and Anna Margolin) each expressed an eagerness to participate and revealed her personal acquaintance with the other poets, familiarity with the poetry of other women, and a sense of herself as a woman poet.16 Novershtern tends to couch his argument in the hierarchical terms of centrality and marginality, of the major and the minor, which do not allow for a deep look at the poetry itself. As we all know, margins shift—the major can become the minor, and vice versa. None of these hierarchies is stable. Besides, what is the utility in judging these poems and their place within the larger space of Yiddish poetry before these poems have actually been read and studied? Few of them have. The point of this book is to look at as many poems as possible in order

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to assess the variety and breadth of this corpus of writing in its details. Only when we have a sense of the full range of these poems can we begin to make generalizations about them. As we will see, women poets did not write exclusively about being women, but they returned repeatedly to the experiences of being female and to the problems of expressing these experiences in Yiddish poetry. In this book I describe a world in which women found many different ways to write about themselves. Although categories of feminist criticism and gender theory have informed my work, this is not a theoretical book. Rather, my focus is an extended reading of poems and poets. The book is divided into six chapters, organized both thematically and by individual poets. In each chapter, I address three questions: How did Yiddish poetry represent and interpret the roles and lifestyles that traditional Judaism assigned to women? How, in turn, did ideas about women’s sexuality and gender shape poems that women wrote? And, finally, how did the ways that the women writers responded to these questions in their poems change the very notion of tradition in modern Jewish literature? In chapter 1, “The Idea of a Literary Tradition,” I argue for the centrality of women in the articulation of a modern literary tradition of Yiddish writing by American Yiddish poets and critics in the first part of the twentieth century. This concept of a Yiddish tradition, expressed in literary anthologies and manifestos of literary movements, centers, first, on establishing a heritage and historical continuity for Yiddish from the fifteenth or sixteenth century through the twentieth; and, second, on articulating a set of secular literary values that are distinct, yet not severed, from religious and folk sources. Through a comparison of two anthologies—Moyshe Bassin’s Antologye: Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye (Anthology: Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry, 1917) and Ezra Korman’s Yidishe dikhterins (Yiddish Women Poets, 1928)—I maintain that the idea and the fact of women as writers played a key yet vexed role in the development of the idea of tradition. In a dialogue between these two anthologies, I highlight the ambivalence of Jewish textual tradition toward women as sexual beings, women in their demarcated gender roles, and women as readers and writers of Yiddish. The contradictory terms of this ambivalence come into stark contrast within Bassin’s and Korman’s anthologies, which, although defining the his-

Introduction

torical development of Yiddish poetry and attempting to establish a canon, repressed or sequestered writings by women. Chapter 2, “Old Poems in a Modern Anthology,” picks up on the assumption initiated by Bassin and developed by Korman that the modern idea of a Yiddish literary tradition requires an acknowledgment of premodern textual roots. Although both anthologists began their collections with devotional poems, dating back to the fifteenth century (Bassin) and the sixteenth century (Korman), individually they strove to distinguish between these archaic works and the post-­Enlightenment idea of literature that the twentieth-century poets embodied. For Korman in particular it seemed essential to dissociate the old-fashioned religious poems, which reeked of the oppressive shtetl world and especially the association of Yiddish itself with women’s devotions, from the poems of revolution and secularism in the new century. Also in chapter 2, I address the implications of Korman’s ambivalent inclusion in his anthology of four premodern women poets by focusing on the texts and what they reveal about the writers. In readings of six premodern Yiddish poets—Royzl Fishls; two young sisters, Ele and Gele; Hannah Katz (Khane Kats); Rivke Tiktiner; and Toybe Pan—I consider how verse-prayers by women frame the place of women poets in modern literary tradition. An analysis of these six poets reveals the variety of roles that women played as writers, readers, and publishers of Yiddish literature before the modern era. In the subsequent chapters of this book, I investigate the possibility of constructing several literary traditions through a consideration of modern “secular” poetry by women in the context of the premodern devotional Yiddish poems discussed in chapter 2. This investigation makes explicit some of the implications inherent in Korman’s decision in his anthology to frame the twentieth-century women poets with the premodern poets. Prefacing modern poems with those of a previous era, Korman stresses the different concerns of poetic form and purpose. At the same time, this juxtaposition allows the cultural and societal issues of women’s lives and women’s roles as writers to surface as reiterated themes. A significant number of the modern poems explicitly or implicitly respond to traditional Jewish texts and other devotional sources with a noticeable attention to gender. And often the poets express such gender concerns in the context of the tension that runs

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throughout Jewish literature between individual and collective responsibilities of the Jewish writer. Despite the range of genre, time, and place, and an array of distinctive voices, the writers of the premodern poems assume a faith in God and an unambiguous identification with the Jewish people in the arc of sacred history. In contrast, the women poets of the twentieth century struggle with the idea of lifting a post-Enlightenment individual from the gravitational pull of responsibility to the Jewish community. ­Although this struggle to establish an individual Jewish voice in relationship to the collective is central to the rise of modern Yiddish literature, it becomes explicitly gendered in poems written by women, whether textually or sexually. By “textually” I mean that some poets directly invoke the popular Yiddish devotional texts associated with women as poetic sources, which they either reject or adapt in their secular poems. By “sexually” I mean that other poets, seeking to define their work as purely secular, appear to eschew the devotional model that they nonetheless invoke through an emphasis in their poems on sexuality. By focusing on poems by women and some of their male contemporaries, from the 1920s onward, I examine the intersections between various modern poems and traditional sources. The complex interactions between the modern literary texts and the devotional models shaped the ideas of Yiddish poetic tradition. In chapter 3, “Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland,” my discussion turns to a consideration of four women poets in Poland in the decade after World War I whose poetry expressly rejected the tenets of Jewish tradition and asserted the new values of political revolution, aesthetic modernism, and feminism. Yet even as they severed connections to tradition, the poems of Kadya Molodowsky, Dvore Fogel, Rikuda Potash, and Rokhl Korn reconfigured the ways that Jewish women related to texts and validated the subjectivity of women in Yiddish poetry. The chapter frames this discussion by comparing Ezra Korman’s ideological approach in anthologizing work by Molodowsky, Potash, and Korn with the poets’ own representation of their work. In chapter 4, “The Folk and the Book: Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh,” I examine two women who appropriated the devotional mode and its traditional texts for women for modern and

Introduction

modernist poetry in Poland in the early 1920s. Ulinover’s deliberately archaic language and Yakubovitsh’s dramatic monologues of biblical women contributed to an unusual statement of the modern. With an urge to preserve the ephemeral oral culture of the Jewish folk, and particularly of women, Ulinover created a new cultural artifact, the literary folk poem. Through the dialogue between a modern granddaughter and her old-fashioned grandmother, Ulinover introduced a specifically female voice into modern Yiddish poetry. Roza Yakubovitsh focused on “women’s topics”—girlhood, marriage, motherhood, barrenness, widow­hood—in the concrete imagery of the modern lyric to convey the physical and emotional experiences of girls and women living out roles they occupied in a traditional culture. Especially in her biblical monologues, Yakubovitsh rewrote the canonical models for Jewish women’s lives to create a powerfully gendered Jewish literary form. Chapter 5, “The Art of Sex: Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin,” focuses on two poets whose work linked sexuality with poetic creativity. This chapter moves from Europe to America to consider women poets identified with modernist movements in New York—Di Yunge and Introspectivism—in the 1920s and 1930s. Tensions between the sensual and the procreative aspects of sexuality provided these two poets with tropes that freed their work from the devotional models sought by Ulinover and Yakubovitsh, their European contemporaries. Placing the poems of Dropkin and Margolin into the context of their lesser-known contemporaries (women poets Fradl Shtok and Berta Kling and male poets Zishe Landau, Reuven Iceland, and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern), I consider how the explicit sexuality of these modern women poets in New York conjured up the apparently erased Jewish tradition. In chapter 6, “Prayer-Poems against History: Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman,” I consider the post-Holocaust work of two prolific poets in America. Molodowsky and Tussman shared an approach to writing secular poetry that engaged the question of prayer through a distinctive concern with gender. I examine how each poet depicted Jewish women in traditional and untraditional roles—as ­lovers, mothers, daughters, workers, and writers—as a response to the destruction of Jewish culture in Europe. Here I argue for the importance of gender in understanding the crisis of tradition and creativity

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Introduction

faced by Yiddish poets writing after the Holocaust. Both Molodowsky and Tussman summoned metaphors of sexuality, gender, and prayer in order to assert their determination to continue writing poetry in Yiddish. Molodowsky depicted the poet as an aging woman who tells stories and blesses the candles to perpetuate Jewish tradition. In contrast, Tussman shifted her focus from the sexually charged relations between women and men and between mothers and children to those between a poet and God. She addressed the struggle to write by combining prayer with erotic desire and thus reinvented tradition as a source for continued creativity in Yiddish. The book concludes with an appendix and six bibliographic essays. The appendix presents letters written to Ezra Korman in 1926 and 1927 by women whose poetry he was considering for inclusion in Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye. These letters reveal the involvement of these poets in the making of Korman’s anthology and the degree to which they identified as women writers. The bibliographic essays expand upon scholarly and other resources for the central figures discussed in chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6: Celia Dropkin, Anna Margolin, Kadya Molodowsky, Malka Heifetz Tussman, Miriam Ulinover, and Roza Yakubovitsh. Every book has a story, and I will tell the story behind this book. I first encountered Yiddish poems written by women in 1978 or 1979, when I sat across from my teacher, Malka Heifetz Tussman, at the round dining-room table in her Berkeley apartment on Henry Street. A doctoral student at the time, I was struggling to translate one of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s bitterly irreverent poems for my dissertation. Malka, who had her own sense of dark humor, grew suddenly annoyed with what she called Halpern’s “vulgarity” as well as with my slavish concerns with the academic categories of literary study—modernism and Jewish American literature. She fixed me with her gaze and said, “Du darfst nit nor leyenen di lider fun Halpernen. Di froyen—mayne fraynt—Kadya Molodowsky, Tsilye Dropkin, Rokhl Korn—hobn azoy sheyn geshribn lider af yidish. S’iz geven zeyer shver far unz ale—keyn ‘dikhterins,’ nor take poetn—aroystsugebn unzere lider” (“You need to read more than the poems of just Halpern. The women, my friends Kadya Molodowsky, Celia Dropkin, Rokhl Korn, wrote poems in Yiddish so beautifully. It was extremely difficult for us all—not ‘poetesses’ but poets—to publish our poems”).

Introduction

Malka sent me to the low shelf near the radio where she kept her books of poetry, and I pulled out a thick, blue-bound volume, Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye. Malka leafed through the book until she came to the first of Molodowsky’s Froyen-lider (women-poems). She pushed the open book across the table. “Leyen!” she commanded me. “Read!”

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O n e   The Idea of a Literary Tradition

In 1928, Ezra Korman (1888–1959), a poet, teacher, and literary critic, published a volume of Yiddish poems by women, Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology).1 Clothbound, lavishly illustrated, and replete with introductions, notes, and bibliographies, this book collected poems by seventy women who published between 1586 and 1927. The earliest figures represented in Korman’s anthology wrote popular devotional poetry in Krakow and Prague. The postHaskalah poets in the late nineteenth century wrote on national and social themes, adapting metaphorically the images and conventions of devotional literature. The modern poets of the 1910s and 1920s composed lyrics in America and in the Soviet Union under the influences of cosmopolitan modernism and socialism. From the evidence of Korman’s collection, a reader might conclude that in 1928 women poets occupied an acknowledged and significant place in Yiddish literature and that there existed unambiguously a tradition of women writing poems in Yiddish. In fact, Korman’s anthology set out to argue the case for such a tradition. But he was shouting into the wind. Only a decade earlier, Korman’s contemporaries—the Yiddish modernists in the United States—had engaged in their own attempt to establish a literary tradition for Yiddish poetry. Anthologies were their tools. In his Antologye: di yidishe dikhtung in amerike biz yor 1919 (­Anthology: Yiddish Poetry in America until 1919), published in New York in 1919, Yunge poet Zishe Landau (1889–1937) asserted the criteria for a consciously modern and aesthetic Yiddish poetry in revolt against the didacticism of national and social poetry. One year later, the newly self-proclaimed Introspectivist poets Yankev (Jacob) Glatshteyn (1896– 1971), A. Leyeles (1889–1966), and Nokhem-Borekh Minkoff (1893–1958)

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published In zikh: a zamlung introspektive lider (In the Self: A Collection of Introspectivist Poems), an anthology advocating an even more radical challenge to the poetic use of language, form, and individual voice. In each of these works, the editors selected poems to challenge the late-nineteenth-century conventions of the labor poets, with the belief that Yiddish poetry must serve the collective good of the Jews. As innovative as these collections were, they focused on poetry of the contemporary moment, published as the 1920s commenced. Several years into that decade, Ezra Korman decided to compile an anthology of his own. Although he had been an advocate of avant-garde poetry in Europe, the anthology on which Korman modeled his Yidishe d ­ ikhterins was not one of the modernists’ manifestos but rather a historical anthology of 1917, compiled by the poet Moyshe Bassin (1889–1963). The deluxe two-volume Antologye: Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye (Anthology: Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry) represented poets in Yiddish from 1410 through 1910, in what Bassin claimed was a strict chronological order.2 Bassin’s anthology was successful enough that it came out in a second edition in 1922.3 In contrast to the modernist anthologizers’ arguments for artistic individuality, Bassin emphasized the collective obligation of the Yiddish poet. A comparison of Bassin’s and Korman’s collections of Yiddish poetry shows how anthologies defined competing literary traditions for a newly self-conscious Yiddish poetry. Each work established a heritage and historical continuity for Yiddish from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries, and they also articulated secular literary values distinct, yet not severed, from religious and folk sources. Taking Bassin’s collection of mostly male poets as the model for his anthology of women poets, Korman sought to elevate and augment the place of women within Yiddish literary history, counteracting the trend among his contemporaries to contain or diminish writings by women. In the tumultuous literary environment of Yiddish New York in 1917, where writers sought out the new and the modern, Bassin’s anthology looked backward in order to define a literary tradition for avant-garde writers. Through scholarly collecting, he endeavored to establish the historical continuity of Yiddish writing from earlier periods to his present moment. The first volume of Bassin’s two-volume anthology encompasses Yiddish poetry from 1410 through 1885. This

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

volume begins with the opening poem, “Shabes-lid” (Sabbath Song), by Reb Zelmelin, who died around 1456, and continues through the folklike poems of A. M. Sharkanski, who immigrated to the United States in 1887. In an intellectual atmosphere where the religious and folk roots of Jewish culture aroused ambivalence if not outright antagonism among his fellow immigrants, Bassin complicated the idea of a straightforward chronological tradition by including religious and folk materials alongside secular belles-lettres. The first volume of the anthology contains three parts. In part one, Bassin offers a selection of Yiddish prayers. The second part contains folksongs, which, as Bassin explains in his introduction, are universally considered “the oldest form, the root of poetry,” although in Yiddish, he asserts, they are predated by fifteenth-century written verse—acrostics, devotionals, and love poems. By claiming that these obscure printed devotions and popular folksongs are its sources, Bassin argued that the secular Yiddish poetry of the nineteenth century (included in the anthology’s third section) was contiguous with the religious and folk past, even as it proclaimed its difference from those premodern genres. The scholarly apparatus—a glossary of archaic Yiddish words found in the poems and bibliographic and linguistic notes on the poetry—strengthens these claims of contiguous distinction. The second volume of Bassin’s anthology presents the modern period in a single, chronological sweep. It begins in the 1890s with the labor poet Morris Rosenfeld and ends with poems by Moyshe Bassin himself, who was 28 years old in 1917. Both volumes included biographical notes on individual poets, portraits of the poets by S. Zagat, and decorative illustrations by Y. Likhtenshteyn and Zuni Maud. Bassin’s opening remarks to the first volume indicate that he intends his anthology to be as inclusive and representative of all the kinds of Yiddish poetry as possible, although he stopped short of including “every single person who has ever jotted down a couple of verses.”4 His collaborator, Ber Borokhov (1881–1917), developed the anthology’s thesis even more explicitly in his brief but scholarly introductory essay. There, Borokhov argued that Bassin’s anthology would ensure that the “Yiddish muse” would not be left “orphaned” and “vulnerable” to the works of “mere dilettantes,” for it would present the “classical” tradition of Yiddish poetry. By stressing the idea that each individual

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poet has a place in the overall development of a collective Yiddish tradition, Borokhov contradicted the Yunge ideal of individualism in the poetic voice. In Borokhov’s view, a poet’s intent, however individualistic or even iconoclastic, was subsumed by the writer’s participation in promoting the overall good. Borokhov’s idea of the Yiddish poet’s accountability to the Jewish people contrasted with the discriminating modernist ideas of a Yiddish poetic tradition that were circulating well before 1917 and would soon be formalized by Di Yunge and Introspectivist anthologies. Such an emphasis on the cultural collective corresponds to the labor poets’ socialism and Jewish nationalism, ideologies that the modernist poets rejected. The idea of literary tradition that Borokhov stated and that Bassin’s anthology embodied was a political and nationalistic statement about the purpose of Yiddish poetry. In this scheme, poetry served the greater ends of peoplehood and national culture. This emphasis stood in opposition to the ideas of poetry that were driving the avant-garde poets of that moment. These three anthologies—namely, those edited by the Yunge poet Landau, by the Introspectivists Glatshteyn, Leyeles, and Minkoff, and by the literary historian Bassin—represented few women poets. ­Landau included two, Fradl Shtok (1890–ca. 1952) and Celia Dropkin (1887–1956). The 1920 Introspectivist anthology featured eight male poets and no women,5 although the first issue of the In zikh journal (also published in 1920) began with two poems by Celia Dropkin, the sole woman writer published there.6 From 500 years of Yiddish writing, Bassin included a total of nine women poets: Gele (born 1702), Yehudis (pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn) (1869–?), Roza Yakubovitsh (1889– 1942), Zelda Knizshnik (1869–?), Anna Rappaport (1870 or 1876–?), Paula R. (pseudonym for Pearl Rozental Pryłucki) (1876–1941), Sarah Reyzen (1885–?), Roza Goldshteyn (1870–?), and Fradl Shtok (1888– 1952). From this list, a reader might conclude that just one woman wrote poetry before the late nineteenth century and that only eight others had written poetry after that. It was to address this misconception that Ezra Korman began work on his anthology in 1925 or 1926, Yidishe dikhterins, which assessed the actual contribution of women poets to Yiddish literature.7 A contemporary of Landau, Glanz, and Bassin, all of whom had come to the United States before 1910, Korman remained active in the literary

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

scene in Kiev, Warsaw, and Berlin until he immigrated to the United States in 1923.8 Korman himself was a teacher,9 a literary critic,10 a bibliographer, a translator, a poet,11 and the editor of two previous anthologies of Ukrainian Yiddish poetry, focused on the theme of revolution.12 In his first American anthological effort, though, Korman shifted his agenda from the politics of the Russian Revolution to the sexual revolution. Was it with irony or adulation that Korman modeled his anthology of women Yiddish poets on Bassin’s anthology? Although one might be tempted to view Korman’s collection of women poets as a radical correction to Bassin’s male-dominated canon, one might also see it as a tribute and an enriching supplement to Bassin’s tradition-building. In his introduction, Korman states his intention to establish the place of women poets in the tradition of Yiddish writing, but he does not claim to be original, and in copious footnotes he credits others whose recent works had brought to light literate and literary women. Seeking to ground contemporary Yiddish culture in a ­centuries-long history of Yiddish literature, these publications included the first literary encyclopedia of Yiddish literature by Zalman Reyzen in 1914 Warsaw (Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur un prese [Lexicon of Yiddish Literature and Press]); scholarly essays, such as Max Erik’s 1926 “Brantshpigl: Di entsiklopedye fun der yidisher froy in zibetstn yorhundert” (Brantshpigl: The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Woman in the Seventeenth Century);13 and Shmuel Niger’s 1913 article “Di Yidishe literatur un di lezerin” (Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader). In Korman’s eyes, Bassin’s 1917 historical anthology proved a 500-year legacy and shared with these works the assumption that Yiddish writing of the early twentieth century would gain legitimacy in the view of modern world literature if it could prove its roots in a medieval past. Korman followed this model. By discussing at length the textual and bibliographical variants of the oldest poems, which his anthology shared with Bassin’s, Korman acknowledged his debt to his predecessor and marked his collection as part of an anthological tradition.14 Korman’s anthology resembles Bassin’s anthology in its massiveness, its chronological span, its format, and its apparatus. But Korman improves upon Bassin materially. The first edition of Bassin’s anthology was visually impressive; the book was bound in boards and imprinted with a stunning, folklike, four-color graphic design by Y. Likhten-

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shteyn. Korman’s anthology was even better. It was clothbound, in dark blue with gilded lettering; the blue dust jacket matched the endpapers, and it was imprinted with black graphics by Todres Geler in the style of Russian Formalism. Because Korman used higher-quality materials than Bassin, Korman’s binding remains sturdy today, whereas the Bassin volumes are now extremely fragile. The Bassin volumes featured S. Z ­ agat’s sketched portraits of each poet. But Korman, utilizing the more advanced and expensive printing technology of zincography, tipped in photographs of each modern poet as well as facsimile reproductions of significant pages from some of the original books of poems. Examples included the first and last pages of Toybe Pan’s seventeenthcentury poem (a prayer for God’s mercy in time of plague), along with a variant version of that poem, and a photomontage of title pages of modern poetry books.15 Although Bassin’s anthology had an alphabetical index of authors at the end of each volume, Korman’s opened with an eleven-page table of contents at the beginning of the book and ended with separate alphabetical indexes of the authors, their poems, and a list of their pseudonyms. Whereas the total texts of Bassin’s “A Few Words,” Borokhov’s introductory essay, and his concluding “Linguistic and Bibliographic Comments” on the poems consisted of only 18 pages in the two volumes, Korman’s introductory essay alone was 38 pages long, including footnotes. His 35-page section of biographies and a bibliography of 232 titles established the scholarly heft and depth of Korman’s volume. Divided into two main sections, “Sources” and “Literature,” Korman’s bibliography lists books of poems by individual writers; anthologies; handbooks; collections and periodical publications; studies and literary histories; articles and reviews; a bibliography of Old Yiddish literature; and translations of Yiddish poems by women into Hebrew, English, and Polish. With this bibliography, Korman accomplishes several tasks. First, by documenting the sources for all the writers in his anthology, Korman establishes his own credentials and the validity of his research. Second, he shows how widely published these poets were in their contemporary culture. Third, he establishes the range of the audience for works by these women poets, as they appeared in anthologies, specialized collections of literary movements, political and literary journals, daily newspapers, and even a short-lived weekly jour-

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

nal for women titled Froyen zshournal-vokhenblat (Women’s JournalWeekly).16 These various works were published both in the centers of Yiddish culture, such as New York, Montreal, Warsaw, Vilna, Moscow, Kiev, and Lodz, and in more remote places, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cape Town. Fourth, Korman provides an invaluable tool for future readers of Yiddish literature long after most of the ephemeral publications, such as newspapers and journals, have been discarded along with many of the Yiddish books themselves. We can read the bibliography for a portrait of the book’s own time, when women generally lagged behind men in the publication of books. For instance, Korman lists thirteen books of poems by individual writers17 and 126 entries under “collections and periodical publications.” These two lists show that by 1928 women poets had published a relatively small number of books, but they had contributed more prolifically to periodicals.18 In contrast, during this same period, a much larger number of poetry books had been published by men. Although many of the younger male modernists had published two or more books of poems,19 their female counterparts had as of then published no books. Two of the women whose poems regularly appeared in the American Yunge and Introspectivist journals—Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin—published only a single volume of poetry each during their lifetimes. Other women who had brought out one book were prevented by economic or political circumstances from publishing another. Korman describes manuscripts of second books by two women poets in Poland—Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh—as completed but not yet in print. Expected to appear after 1940, these two manuscripts vanished during the Nazi occupation of Poland.20 ­Although women poets actively wrote and published, they were less visible on the literary scene than men. The introduction to Yidishe dikhterins set forth Korman’s ideological position. By presenting modern Yiddish poetry by women (or “the modern women-poetry” [der moderner froyen-dikhtung]), alongside examples of the works of women writers ( froyen-­farfasterins) who wrote in what he called variously and somewhat inaccurately ­Yidish-taytsh (Judeo-German) or di eltere yidishe literatur (Old Yiddish literature),21 Korman hoped to show the parallel between the nascent vernacular Jewish literature in the sixteenth century, which marked

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the beginning of a new epoch of Jewish life, and the current period, in which the buds of that early period had blossomed. Yet although Korman emphasized the creativity of women, old and new, his introduction was at the same time ambivalent and contradictory. Korman explicitly denied that a continuous poetic tradition of women poets existed, even while he implied a line of influence between the early and later periods. He considered the Yiddish poetry of the early modern period for, and presumably by, women as “immeasurably huge and incomparable,” and he thought that modern poetry by women was a mere “thin thread” continuing that heritage that still affected the new women poets. Korman argued that Old Yiddish literature had an abiding influence over the modern poets because no single, great modern voice had appeared to restructure the relationship of the new to the old. Significantly, although Korman stated that the old literature of women in Yiddish outweighed the new, his selections in the anthology reversed this judgment: the sixty-six modern poets vastly outnumber the four examples of the premodern writers. Korman considered contemporary women’s literature a positive development for the growth of Yiddish literature and culture in general, asking, “Who can prophesy what our future female creativity bears within itself and for the literature?”22 The language of this question suggests that the unique creativity of women corresponds to the processes of biological productivity. In the verb trogn mit (to carry, to bear), in a general sense and specifically in relation to childbearing, Korman drew an analogy between the making of poems and the making of babies, both of which are froyen-shafung (women’s creation). Curiously, this analogy attempted not only to characterize women’s poetry as having a special nature that distinguished it from poetry written by men but also to stereotype and thereby limit it. Feminist literary theorists of the latter part of the twentieth century have explored the complexities in likening writing to pregnancy, but in 1928, when Korman’s volume was the first compilation of Yiddish poetry by women as an entity unto itself, this analogy served as a point of departure for a critic to classify poetry by women in either elevated or deflated terms.23 In keeping with his moment, Korman seems to do both. In the introduction to Yidishe dikhterins, Korman emphasizes the typical characteristics of women’s poetry to establish that a lineage ex-

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

isted. In the first part of his introduction Korman discusses the literature af yidish-taytsh (in Judeo-German), dating from the Sefer mides (Morality Book, published in 1542) and the Mayse bukh (Book of Tales, first published in Basel in 1602) through the eighteenth century. Korman cites the translations and compendiums that enabled women to study and pray, such as the Taytsh khumesh (the translation of the Penta­ teuch into Yiddish, first published in Prague in 1608), the Tsene-rene (Yiddish translation and elaboration on the Pentateuch, the first known edition of which is Basel, 1622), and the tkhines (supplicatory prayers in Yiddish, some of which were composed by women for the significant moments in their lives—blessing Sabbath candles, childbirth, immersion in the ritual bath, and visiting family graves—first published in the sixteenth century).24 Korman also deals with other works created by Jewish women, such as musar-sforim (ethical treatises), composed and translated by women; tfiles and droshes (prayers and sermons), which, like some of the tkhines, were composed in rhymed verse; and even lyrics and poems, “which the pens of women possessed.”25 Within the context of this Yiddish devotional literature for and by women, Korman places the four yidish-taytsh poets of his anthology: Royzl Fishls, Toybe Pan, Gele, and Khane Kats. His bibliographic information on these poets, along with his detailed discussions of their poems, argue that the publication of such Yiddish writings signaled the creativity of Jewish women in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.26 In contrast to such expressiveness by Jewish women in Old Yiddish literature, Korman explains, women were largely absent from the Yiddish literature of the Haskalah because the Enlightenment “brought with it only half a liberation” and “barely affected the life of the Jewish woman, who remained but a mute witness.”27 Only with the secularism of the 1890s did a new literature by women emerge, as women joined social and national political movements and acted in the newly established Yiddish theater in Poland and Russia. Korman describes the tension between the modern and the traditional. Initially, he states that Yiddish culture seemed unaffected and simply absorbed the voices of modern women, whom he characterizes as “nayveltike” (of the newworld) women along with traditional ones. Soon, though, the modern voices dominated the traditional, causing both cultural pain and joy, as Yiddish-speaking women cast off the tkhines’ old pieties: “Thanks to the

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girls, women, and mothers who were actresses and political activists, the matriarchs dimmed and slipped into the shadows, leaving the modern Jewish woman with sighs, tears, and a new kind of pleasure that had been, up to this time, as foreign to her as the foreignness of idolatry.”28 Such figurative language as “shadows” and “tears” to describe literary change makes apparent Korman’s contradictory embrace of a movement simultaneously toward and away from women’s tradition. On the one hand, his phrasing suggests that modern poetry by women could come into existence only because the familiar biblical matriarchs of the tkhines and Tsene-rene drew back when actresses and activists took the spotlight and introduced Jewish women to the foreign pleasures of secular “idolatry.” On the other hand, with the new women’s regretful “sighs” and “tears,” Korman implies that their very ability to find a voice and even to conceive of writing secular poems in Yiddish was predicated upon their knowledge of the obsolete devotional literature that their grandmothers read. The dependence of the young, secular revolutionary poets on the older religious literature against which they actively defined themselves is a paradox that extends both throughout Korman’s historical introduction to his anthology and within the language and structure of many Yiddish poems by women. This paradox provides a gendered example of the ways that, from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, modern Yiddish literature reappropriated the past, at once subverting and reclaiming it. This paradox has been aptly described by David Roskies as “sacred parody.”29 Korman makes his argument that poetry in Yiddish by women “progressed” from a collective to an individuated discourse between 1888 and 1927 by placing specific women writers into the context of their male contemporaries. For example, Korman discusses Roza Goldshteyn, whose first poem appeared in Yudishn folks-blatt in 1888, in terms of the contemporary labor poets David Edelstat, Morris Vintshevski, Shimen Shmuel Frug, and Morris Rosenfeld. Korman emphasizes the way Goldshteyn’s work was typical of the times in its nationalist and socialist themes: “The disappointing belief in the earlier gods and the intellectuals’ turn to the Folk after assimilationist ideology proved bankrupt—these are the themes and motifs of Yiddish poetry of this period.”30 Arguing that these themes made the history of Yiddish literature seem linear and “progressive,” Korman condescend-

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

ingly compares the Yiddish poetry of 1888 with the “improvements” evident in 1927. For example, after disparaging the nineteenth-century male poet Shimen Shmuel Frug as “a cantor without a cantor’s desk,” Korman criticizes the sentimental Jewish nationalism of Roza Goldshteyn’s poems for being like Frug’s. In one of Goldshteyn’s poems, “Di yidishe muze: Elegye” (The Jewish Muse: Elegy), he tells us that the muse, depicted as the embodiment of the Jewish people in exile, provided the poet with a diasporic sorrow as inspiration. In Goldshteyn’s words, although this orphaned, homeless “klog-muter” (lamenter) wanders the world, “A staff in her hand, on her shoulders—a bundle,” nonetheless, “in her eyes there burns a fire, / A fire of life and strength.”31 From the vantage point of 1927, Korman passes judgment on the earlier poets who wrote sentimentally in the collective voice on nationalist themes. Korman grudgingly acknowledges a margin of “improvement” in Yiddish poetry of the 1890s, where he notes a change from the collective first person to “the personal ‘ikh’ [I]” of the poet. He highlights Anna Rappaport’s poems, written and published in America from 1893 onward, which reflected the conflict between the two possible destinations to which Jewish poets could emigrate: the golden land of America and the promised land of Erets Yisroel. Calling her “the modern Deborah, celebrating America in song,” Korman praises Rappaport’s poems for imbuing the collective experience of immigrants with the immediacy of a personal “I.” By describing the individuality of this 1890s poet in terms of her service to the Jewish collectivity, Korman strengthens his case that women writers occupied a legitimate place within Yiddish literary tradition. Korman furthers his argument for progress by comparing modern Yiddish poetry with modern Hebrew poetry. For example, he contrasts the 1906–1907 works of Paula R. (pseudonym for Pearl Rozental Pryłucki) with those of Yehudis (pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn), who wrote after the failed 1905 revolution in Russia and the second wave of pogroms. Their verse, like that of Goldshteyn and another poet, Zelda Knizshnik, was characterized by “ideal language and colors” that expressed individual moods and feelings in terms of the collective. Korman declares that because Yehudis wrote “not about herself, but in the language of the majority,” her poems show the in-

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fluence of Bialik’s famous 1904 Hebrew poem “In the City of Slaughter,” written in response to the Kishinev pogrom. Despite Yehudis’s communal concerns, Korman praises her poems for revealing a greater sense of self than those of her predecessors. He claims that Paula R., Yehudis, and Knizshnik heralded a new age of deepened individualism, just like their male contemporaries Yehoash, Avraham Leissen, and Avraham Reyzen, whose poems had developed what Korman called, “individual lyricism and intellectual singularity beyond the tears of Morris Rosenfeld.” As an example of such progressive individualism among the women poets, Korman quotes Yehudis’s lines that praised the new and castigated the old-fashioned nationalism in Yiddish poetry: Enough! Don’t write old-fashioned poems— They are not yours . . . They’ve had their day! They can’t revive. Your poem now rings false.32

Despite his appreciation of Yehudis’s new poetic self, Korman criticizes the complex relationship in modern women’s poetry between an individual voice and the folk tradition. A woman poet who alluded to or imitated the conventions and tones of folk poetry, he argues, sought to hide her individuality behind the tsnies, the old-fashioned, religious modesty or virtue of Jewish peoplehood. As an example, Korman offers mixed praise to Paula R. for the new tone she introduced into Yiddish poetry through the folk motif: “In the disguise and modesty [tsnies] of folk-language, one can afford to speak to the world about one’s own feelings and experiences and, with that popular virtue, cover oneself as if with a veil.”33 By depicting a poet’s allusion to Jewish collective culture through the figurative use of the term for feminine sexual modesty, Korman judges such modesty as a weakness in the poems of Paula R. However, this weakness promised strength, because, he asserts, a good poet would learn to use the folk medium effectively to express her “own feelings and experiences” without the need for “a veil.” For Korman, then, the individual voice of the modern woman poet was necessarily connected to the collective voice of the Jewish people. In poetry by women, the new should retain a recognizable connection to the old. The best poetry would keep these two forces in balance.

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

In contrast, Korman unequivocally praises Roza Yakubovitsh, who began writing in Poland in 1910, for her simultaneous respect for what he refers to as the patriarchal knowledge of Jewish suffering in the Dias­ pora and for the revitalizing lessons of personal rebellion in biblically themed poems, which we will examine in chapter 4.34 He mentions Sore (Sarah) Reyzen, Yakubovitsh’s contemporary, as one whose later lyric poems show signs of possessing “the personal I.” Yet what Korman values most is the unveiled personal “I” of the modern poet. What he means becomes clear in his discussion of the originality of Fradl Shtok’s poems. Shtok came from Galicia and began writing in America with a sense of high culture in her literary form and content. According to popular belief, Shtok introduced the sonnet and the sonnet cycle to Yiddish poetry.35 Her diction and quality of imagination were innovative, and her poems adopted the concept of reyner dikhtung (pure poetry) developed by the Yunge poets Mani Leyb, Zishe Landau, Reuven Iceland, and Joseph Rolnik. Korman praises her poem “Baym yam” (By the Sea) for its “individual poetic vision” and the “personal ‘I’” and characterizes her sonnet sequence as daringly erotic and bitter. It is, however, the poems of Miriam Ulinover, which we will also discuss in chapter 4, that Korman maintains achieved the ideal balance between the traditional folk and the modern personal voices.36 Praising this European poet for her innovative style and substance, he considers “her poems, written in a folk-like, romantic tone, and wrapped in a thin veil of naive folk-mysticism,” to be “approaching the classic.” Korman writes that Ulinover’s poems, which evoke a modern woman’s memories of her shtetl grandmother in Der bobes oytser (My Grandmother’s Treasure), are “a monument to the Jewish woman of the past . . . making luminous the customs and obsolete ways of Jewish life of more than one hundred years ago.”37 When Korman emphasizes the cultural distance that the Jews of 1928 had traveled from the traditional ways of Jewish life, he finds a safely modern perspective as a critic from which to extol these poems by Ulinover. Her tales, maxims, and utterances of an elter bobe fun iber hundert yor, a great-grandmother, more than 100 years old, was “the poetic inspiration [for the] first self-possessed woman poet in the new Yiddish literature.”38 Only by declaring his own firm modernity and faith in the progress of progress, believing that recent poetry is

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better than earlier poetry, could Korman express an appreciation for what he described as Ulinover’s particularly female poetic achievement. His assessment points to the central question of how poetry by women fits into his idea of a Yiddish tradition. He calls Ulinover the first “self-possessed” woman poet in modern Yiddish because she found her “poetic inspiration” in “her great-grandmother.” With this praise, Korman claims that the “muse” of Yiddish poetry is situated as much in the oral traditions of women’s lives, and in the collective nature of their lived customs, as in the modern world where individualistic notions of love and beauty vie with socialist-nationalist ideologies. That the religiocultural tradition possessed by women in Yiddish was integral to modern Yiddish poetry distinguished Korman’s idea of poetic tradition from the revisionist and implicitly male ideas of poetic tradition expressed by Landau and di Yunge, by Glatshteyn and the Introspectivists, and by Bassin and Borokhov. According to Korman, even the most modern Yiddish poetry must acknowledge its origins in the old-fashioned devotional literature for and by women. In Korman’s dialectic between the collective and the individual, the traditional and the modern, we see how his tenets as an anthologizer imitated those of Bassin. Borokhov’s introduction to Bassin’s anthology spells out the idea of a literary tradition as placing individual writers into a collective effort to serve the Jewish nation and people. Similarly, Korman’s introduction, in addition to valuing the typical in the individual, adds two other types of collectivity to the national and folkloric qualities of these poets: the religious and the female. These particular types were especially sensitive points for Korman’s contemporaries. To be sure, interest in women was not altogether absent from the Yiddish literary scene. In the 1910s, a discussion arose about the role of women in Yiddish literature, and Korman’s anthology represented a response to this discussion as well as to Bassin’s anthology. This interest in women and culture first took form in Russia and Poland in the projects of Yiddishists, linguists, folklorists, and ethnographers. Expeditions by Noah Pryłucki’s Warsaw group, the S. Ansky Vilna Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, and the Ethnographic Commission of the YIVO Institute in Vilna recorded folklore and gathered artifacts in order to preserve the manifestations of a Yiddish culture vanishing with the changes brought by modernity.39 In addition, scholars such as Max

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

Weinreich, Max Erlich, and Bassin’s introducer Ber Borokhov were rediscovering Old Yiddish print literature. These projects sparked some interest in women as readers and writers of devotional Yiddish texts. In 1913, Shmuel Niger (pseudonym for Shmuel Charney, 1883–1955) published a scholarly monograph discussing the influence of women readers on Yiddish literature from the late sixteenth through the midnineteenth centuries. In “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin” (Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader), Niger challenged the Haskalah bias against Yiddish as a medium for learned and literary writing the association of Yiddish with femininity.40 Works in Hebrew, the language of liturgy and Scripture, written and read almost exclusively by educated men, were valued more highly than those written in the Yiddish vernacular presumably for a female audience. Yet even as he championed the vernacular in which works were written for those unable to read Hebrew, Niger himself showed ambivalence about Yiddish writing. Invoking a phrase that often appeared on the title pages of early Yiddish books, he asked, if “literature in Yiddish was originally composed for women and ignorant men,” then how could such an audience be the only source for the profound maxims and jokes of Yiddish?41 Even worse, Niger worried that the secular worldliness of modern Yiddish literature might be compromised by an acknowledgment of its origins in the Yiddish devotions that had enabled women to read sacred texts translated and adapted from Hebrew.42 Niger’s analysis of the devotional literature argued that the female readership influenced the content and form of the Yiddish writings in their “womanly matter”; their lack of analysis, law, and interpretation; and the predominance of stories, legends, and morals—all features that would have supposedly appealed to the female readership.43 Demonstrating how these “feminine” features of content and form penetrated into the worldly, nonreligious “belletristic” Yiddish literature of the sixteenth century,44 Niger’s ambivalence became downright contradictory. By characterizing the stories of the aggadic tradition as “womanly,” in contrast to the laws of halakha, Niger feminized both the rabbinic tradition of Midrash and the early belletristic Yiddish writings. Niger claimed that these complex narrations had been the source of modern Yiddish literature, yet he spurned them for their association with women.

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The second manifestation of this new interest in women took the form of a popular concern with the growing number of women poets and writers who had begun to submit work for publication. The increase in the number of aspiring women writers led men to reexamine the role of women in modern Yiddish literature.45 This assessment eventually culminated in Korman’s anthology, but before that, on October 30, 1915, Aron Glanz (later known as A. Leyeles)—who became one of the founders of Introspectivism—wrote an article in the New York newspaper Di fraye arbeter shtime (The Free Worker’s Voice) titled “Kultur un di froy” (Culture and Woman).46 In it, Glanz complained of the monotony and redundancy of recent poetry and philosophical writings,47 which he blamed on the absence of “Woman” from the creative scene. Transferring the terms of Marxist analysis from class to sex, Glanz blamed the lack of male originality on modernism’s overemphasis on the individual. The advent of women poets, he predicted, would give male poets a context, a counterpart to whom to respond, and help Man “find his real place, find himself.” Great poetry, Glanz suggested, emerges not from the renegade, isolated individual but from the one who is conscious of how his or her work fits into the larger cultural tradition, which itself changes with the addition of new work. Yet in this call to arms, Glanz set forth a paradox: On the one hand, he urged women to find their original voices in poetry; on the other hand, he summoned this womanly originality and independence for the sake of men: “Woman must be what she is! Then she will be able to be great, to create a new world for us, and become a blessing for us men.”48 Anticipating the theories of empowerment attributed to the female role in reproduction by French feminist critics of the 1980s, Glanz based his theory of women’s creativity on inherent sexual attributes— the concreteness of menstruation, childbirth, nursing, and motherhood—as a model for what he called intuition and “the generosity of creation.” Where later feminist theorists found empowerment, however, Glanz’s initial metaphor of poetic creativity as sexual reproduction limited the possibilities for women’s writing. His model provided only a culture of sexuality, not any sort of temporal, literate culture, as a context for potential poetry by women. The men poets, Glanz intimated, had come to a standstill—to what he called their “impo-

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

tency”—over a period of time. To their history men needed to add the component of a new sexual context. But for the women, Glanz provided no history, no past. Accordingly, without a conscious past, thus lacking an awareness of literary tradition, a woman poet would not write good poetry. For Glanz, what Yiddish literature lacked in 1915 was the felt presence of cultural creativity by women. With the essentialism of his sexual metaphor, Glanz argued that women’s writing would revive the male-dominated, stagnant, overly rational Yiddish poetry of the day by adding to the cultural mix the intuition naturally inherent in all women.49 Yet his complaint that women poets had not yet found their own artistic identities and modes proved hypocritical: When he actually encountered them, Glanz famously discouraged the original contributions of women, as suggested by his harsh review in Der tog of Fradl Shtok’s 1919 volume of short stories. The review, all but silenced her.50 Like Niger’s 1913 essay on women as readers of Old Yiddish devotions, Glanz’s 1915 analysis of how women could reinvigorate poetry by men reveals an ambivalent appreciation for women writing poetry in Yiddish. It was this ambivalence that Korman reacted to and reiterated in Yidishe dikhterins. The critical responses to Korman’s anthology revived such ideas about women writers. The tone of a review by Melech Ravitch in Literar­ishe bleter, the leading Warsaw literary weekly, was mocking and suggestive. The October 19, 1928, review began, “My dear, patient, infatuated, polygamist, Ezra Korman!”51 Discrediting Korman as an editor by attributing to him personal, sexual motives in his literary judgment and choices, Ravitch also discredited the poets themselves. Perhaps his viciousness was due to professional envy of Korman. The poet Kadya Molodowsky, in her response to an earlier review of women poets by Ravitch, mentioned that he had stated in print his own intention to publish an anthology of Yiddish women poets, “and with pictures!”52 In any case, Ravitch asserted that an editor’s ideal “principle is not to want to be original, but to include a poet’s best-known poem, as long as it is also his best” (emphasis mine), and thus he argued for the conservative role of an anthology, which should represent and perpetuate a canon established by popularity and fame. Ravitch designated the poet worth anthologizing with the masculine pronoun zayn (his). “His” poems

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should already have achieved some fame, for they would be “well-known poems.” According to this logic, an unknown poet, who may well have been a woman poet, had no place in an anthology. Conversely, there was no justification for an anthology of unknown poets. What Ravitch most objected to in Korman’s anthology, though, was the idea of a women’s tradition within Yiddish poetry, as such a tradition would bring the devotional literature dangerously close to the secular, politically correct Yiddish poetry that Ravitch himself wrote. Niger’s November 1928 review of Korman’s Yidishe dikhterins was somewhat more balanced in tone. Published in the “Bikher velt” column of Literarishe bleter, Niger’s review, “Froyen-lyrik” (WomenLyric),53 differed from Ravitch’s in its recognition that “women’s poetry now occupies an acknowledged place in Yiddish poetry.” Yet, despite this affirmation, Niger could not resist the urge to belittle froyen-shafung, the creativity of women, commenting that the fortyodd women in Korman’s anthology who began to publish poetry after World War I “might have been able to do more useful things.”54 Like Glanz in his 1915 article on women and culture, Niger’s review attributed to the female writer a sensibility distinct from that of the male writer. Claiming that the new “women’s poetry” was “still too young” to be able to boast of great and ripe talents, Niger nonetheless remarked on the “gifted Yiddish women poets, [whose] chief virtue is that they are women in their poetry.”55 Like Glanz, Niger argued that the woman poet contributed a necessary femininity, a softness and gentleness, to counteract the harshness of the war years. Yet Niger saw limitations in this benefit, because for him the poems by women constituted a (female) collective rather than a group of strong, individual voices. Like the Yunge and Introspectivist critics, Niger defined an advanced literary style by the degree to which the individual voice could elevate itself above the collective. Consequently, he judged that “women’s poetry” lacked the “artistic universalism, in which we sense more the personality of the poet than the collective to which he belongs.” “Sincere and straightforward,” this “group poetry, a type of folklore of the female sex . . . conveys a sense of the feminine disposition.”56 By preserving “that element of feeling, that intimate tone,” which “has become such a rarity in male verses since the war,” women poets could provide Yiddish culture with what

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

contemporary men poets no longer possessed. In naming the role of women’s poetry as subservient to men’s creative endeavors, Niger equated the “­eternally-womanly” with the “eternally-lyrical” and thereby circumscribed the definition of poetry by women.57 These critical responses to Korman’s anthology in the most prestigious literary weekly, Literarishe bleter, published in Warsaw and Vilna, reveal the inability of the men who were defining a Yiddish literary tradition in their own image to accept the work of women on its own terms. The inventors of this modern tradition resisted new literary work by women because, it seems, they sensed a threat to the modernity of their own achievements when Yiddish was associated with women. In the culture of religious Judaism that valued Hebrew and Aramaic—languages available almost exclusively to men—as the sacred tongues of Jewish law, prayer, and lore, the Yiddish language was perceived as the medium for a literature written only for “women and men who are like women in not having much knowledge.”58 Not wanting to be like women in any way—a fear augmented by European anti-Semitism, which had conventionally cast Jewish men in a feminized role59—the modern Yiddish critics disparaged the works of their female contemporaries. Although Korman’s contemporary critics were unable to accept the possibility that women could hold a legitimate place in a Yiddish poetic tradition, readers today can evaluate how Korman’s selections of modern poets changed the image of these women from Bassin’s earlier anthology. The second volume of Bassin’s anthology, covering 1890–1917, contains ninety-five poets, most of whom were writing in the United States. Of these, eighty-seven are men and eight are women. Of the men, thirty-two poets are represented by four or more poems, and fifty-five are represented by three or fewer poems. Of the eight women poets in volume 2, only one, Fradl Shtok, is represented by more than three poems. Zelda Knizshnik and Yehudis have three poems each; Sarah Reyzen has two; and the rest of the women writers (Roza Goldshteyn, Anna Rappaport, Roza Yakubovitsh, and Paula R. [Pearl Rozental Pryłucki]) are each represented by a single poem. ­Although one must take into account that, as of 1917, many books of poetry by women had not yet appeared and other women poets had not yet published anything,60 this list nonetheless reveals that Bassin represented women poets as minor and marginal, both in the number

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of writers selected and how many of their works were published. The limited number of women poets and the narrow range of poems suggests that Bassin’s ideas about uniformly “feminine” poems conformed to the ideas articulated by Glanz, Niger, and Ravitch, who reduced women’s poetic style to the private, vague, conventional, intuitive, romantic, and appropriately emotional. Korman, in contrast, presented the same eight women chosen by Bassin (along with fifty-eight other modern poets) but gave a more varied and interesting view of their works. The one exception, Shtok, was represented similarly in both volumes, with twelve poems in ­Korman and eleven poems in Bassin. In mere numbers, for example, Korman represented Knizshnik with eleven poems, as opposed to Bassin’s three; Yehudis with seven poems to Bassin’s three; Goldshteyn with five poems to Bassin’s one; Rappaport with three poems to Bassin’s one; Yakubovitsh with ten poems to Bassin’s one; Paula R. with three poems to Bassin’s one; and Reyzen with fourteen poems to Bassin’s two. The types of poems each anthologist selected underline the difference between each editor’s ideas of what poetry by women was and should be. Consider how Bassin and Korman present two poets who are essentially unknown today. The first of these, Zelda Knizshnik, was born in Vyazin, Vilna Province, in 1869. By the time of Bassin’s anthology, she was 48 years old. Although Bassin lamented that “Yiddish poetry possesses very few women poets, and it is truly a shame that only a small part of Knizshnik’s poems in Yiddish were published,”61 the three lyrics that he chose to include by Knizshnik all depend on rather conventional romantic tropes for sentiments of desire, wanderlust, and passion.62 Korman’s choice of eleven of her poems presents a fuller sense of Knizshnik’s poetic range and her more distinctive voice. As this larger selection shows, the tropes in Knizshnik’s poems play as often on the imagery of traditional religious life as on romantic poetic conventions. Thus, in addition to the three sentimental poems “Unter shlos” (Under Lock and Key), “Volkns” (Clouds), and “A shpetige royz” (A Late-Blooming Rose), which Bassin included in his anthology, we find in Korman’s volume poems with titles such as “Kapores” (Atonement), “Un ven dayn neshome” (And When Your Soul), and “O, heylike boyre” (Oh, Holy Creator).

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

For example, in one poem on a religious theme, “Mayn letste likht” (My Last Candle), Knizshnik takes on the dramatic persona of a male yeshiva student who is left in the dark when his poverty and his loss of faith keep him from lighting another candle. This image of an unlit candle allows the poet to speculate ironically on whether or not the student will become enlightened. The device of the dramatic persona and the densely Hebraic diction of this speaker, who edges ever nearer to the door that will release him from the gloomy house of study and prayer, give the poem the edge of a wit more engaging than the vague wanderlust in Knizshnik’s “Volkns” (Clouds), which Bassin had also included. Moreover, with the male persona and “masculine” H ­ ebraic diction, the poem disguises its female writer, as though she were testing the limits of “women’s poetry.” Through the persona of the light-seeking yeshiva student, the poet demonstrates that she too has become enlightened. The same surprising counterintuitive approach is present in “Kapores” (Atonement), where Knizshnik adopts a religious trope to exhibit an unexpected pity for “a small white rooster” that will serve as the symbolic scapegoat in the ceremony of atonement performed before Yom Kippur. Along with the rabbi, who is about to slaughter the rooster, this “silent sacrifice / Looks into the prayer book, too; / Slaps with his bright wings.”63 Knizshnik’s last poem in the Korman selection, “Mayn man iz in amerike” (My Husband Is in America), presents another dramatic persona: a wife and mother who has stayed at home, alone, as her entire family left der alter heym, the Old Country. Again, Knizshnik plays on this character’s predicament as the ironic embodiment of the ultimate homelessness of a solitary woman, dependent on her relationship to family to define her existence. In all three poems, Knizshnik challenges the truisms of her culture: that men, not women, become enlightened; that living creatures exist primarily to play a role in religious law and custom; and that women are defined only by their familial and social roles. By including these poems, Korman shows how Knizshnik’s imaginative and poetic range extend beyond the clichéd and sentimental idea of what women could or should write. The second poet, Yehudis, was, like Knizshnik, born in 1869 in Minsk. Bassin included three of her poems, all of which are spoken in a personal voice: “In a vinkl fun mayn hartsn” (In a Corner of my Heart), “Di nakht

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iz tif, di nakht iz shvarts” (The Night Is Deep, the Night Is Black), and “Breyte himlen, erd a groyse” (Ample Heavens, Earth Enormous).64 On the basis of these poems alone, one would consider ­Yehudis to be a predictably “female” poet, relying on conventional tropes of the seasons and the diurnal cycle to express romantic themes. Even in these poems, though, Yehudis exhibits a more daring nonconformity. In “Di nakht iz tif, di nakht iz shvarts,” her persona speaks of embracing her child in sleep at the same moment that she is tempted by and then despairs of her illicit passion in a “youthful dream” of her lover.65 Her poem of romantic ennui, “Breyte himlen, erd a groyse,” speaks first in a generalized voice of dejection but breaks, midstanza, into rebellious individuality. However, even as Bassin allowed Yehudis’s bold voice to be audible, his limited selection of poems emphasized a misleading similarity between her voice and Knizshnik’s, as in the metaphor of a locked door that imprisons desire. In the poems Bassin includes, Knizshnik writes, “Under lock and key remains / A restrained desire”;66 similarly, Yehudis writes, “In a corner of my heart / My youth is deeply hidden: Locked away from the years / With a rigid lock, an old one.”67 In Bassin’s representation, these two poets sound very much alike. In contrast, Korman represents Yehudis with seven poems that show a far greater range of imagery and voice. At the center of one such poem is the trope of the womanly craft of weaving, suggesting an analogy between the way that women create a life and how they shape a poem.68 Korman included Yehudis’s daring attack on a kind of ­poetry she considered old-fashioned, made in a literary epistle, “Tsum dikhter” (To the [male] Poet), which she addressed to her contemporaries. The collective voice in this poem of artistic protest has the bravado of political poems of the revolution. Although Yehudis does not transcend the hackneyed forms of political poetry, her poem reveals a public voice, distinguishable from the private voice of the “poetess” and the “feminine lyric” that dominated Bassin’s selection. Korman’s presentation of Yehudis works against this stereotype. By contrasting the Bassin and Korman selections of these two poets, we see how the choice of poems can color the way a poet appears in an anthology. We can turn next to the intriguing poet Roza Yakubovitsh. The ten poems with which Korman represents Yakubovitsh emphasize a strong personal voice speaking from a religious context. His presentation of

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her poems makes her stand out, in sharp contrast to both Goldshteyn and Anna Rappaport, whose protest poems were sometimes bombastic and to whom Korman gave less emphasis.69 In contrast, Bassin presents these three poets in equal measure, with one poem each, and Yakubovitsh is undistinguished among them. Yakubovitsh’s single poem in Bassin, “Tsu mayn tatn” (To My Father),70 while interesting in that the speaker sees God personified in her father’s piety, does not convey the full range of this poet’s achievement. Yakubovitsh’s work has a genuine modernity and expressiveness that even Yehudis’s spirited assertions lack. For example, she places the persona of one poem, “On a statsye” (Without a Station), in the midst of a struggle between a young woman’s desire and the morality imposed on her by Jewish society. Yakubovitsh presents this struggle through the extended metaphor of a railroad train—a symbol of the modern world that recurs throughout Yiddish literature.71 In the distinctive voices of characters playing the stock roles of traditional Jewish women, such as the kale (bride) and the akore (barren woman), Yakubovitsh dramatizes the conflict between what an individual woman wants and the religious or social strictures that limit her achievements. The best of Yakubovitsh’s poems, from the series Biblishe motivn (Biblical Motifs), speak in the voices of legendary biblical women, such as Rachel, Hagar, Miriam, Esther, and Shulamit. In these poems, Yakubovitsh effectively interprets the biblical texts as she fleshes out each ancient character in modern terms, an approach that draws on European literature and foreshadows the better-known Khumesh lider (Bible Poems) by Itzik Manger in the 1930s.72 Yakubovitsh’s poems, which Manger may have read, combine knowledge of rich literary techniques: traditional Jewish biblical interpretation, in Hebrew and Yiddish, with the Western European love lyric and dramatic monologue. Korman’s generous selection of Yakubovitsh’s poems reveals her to be a compelling, accomplished writer who developed beyond her predecessors, Knizshnik and Yehudis. Yakubovitsh’s treatment of religious themes fleshes out the implications of Knizshnik’s poems and distinguishes her from ­Yehudis’s antireligious, polemical strain, as well as from the aestheticism and eroticism of her modernist contemporaries. The one poet that both Bassin and Korman present amply is Fradl Shtok, whose apparent sudden silence after 1927 inspired later specula-

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tion and legend.73 In the context of both anthologies, Shtok stands out as an innovator in verse forms, enriching the meters and stanzas of Yiddish poetry. The musicality of her poems is evident in the sixline strophes of a love song, “Serenade” (Serenade).74 Yet the lyric’s euphony contrasts with its conclusion, which depicts a murderous eroticism: And if the night In its blue cloak Abandons wood and vale, And softly cries With tears of dew And crystal shards, Then tear my heart Out of my breast And wash it in the dew— And with your lips Suck out of me My quiet “Oh.”75

In “A vinter echo” (A Winter Echo), the connotations of sweetness in the diminutive nouns naming the lover give way to a metaphor comparing marriage to burial: Burning kisses now are born Within his heart for his chosen— And, landing on red little lips, Immediately are frozen. Then a frisky little horse Overturns the sleigh— A snowy, stony canopy Buries their wedding day.76

In another poem, “Farnakhtn” (Dusks), Shtok transforms the quietude of dusk into a portentous atmosphere and the singing nightingale of Romantic poetry into a stinging bee, and thus she subverts the expected literary convention.77 Shtok’s sonnet cycle, which Malka Heifetz Tussman claimed was the first to be composed in Yiddish, was an innovation both for Yiddish poetry and for the subgenre itself.78

The Idea of a Literary Tradition

Shtok imports into Yiddish the formal as well as the thematic tradition of European love poetry since Petrarch. At the same time, she distorts the very conventions of that love poetry, as in the sonnet, “Vi beyz bistu mayn fraynd” (My Friend, How You Are Evil), in which a Yiddish Salome cuts out the tongue of her lover. The female persona controverts courtly convention in sonnets that most unconventionally declare love in the form of resentment and Eros as rage.79 Both Bassin in 1917 and Korman in 1928 recognized Shtok as one of the groundbreaking modernist poets in America. In Bassin, Shtok was the only substantial woman poet of the moment, but in Korman, Shtok was one of a good number of strong, modern voices. Although Korman placed Shtok’s poems chronologically, between the generous selection of Yakubovitsh’s work and an extremely small group of poems by Rivke Rozental, her poems resonate with those of her American modernist contemporaries, Anna Margolin and Celia Dropkin. Bassin could not have known the work of Celia Dropkin. She began to write in 1917 but had not yet published poems in Yiddish. However, Landau’s 1919 Antologye of Yunge poets includes two of Dropkin’s poems, “Mayn vayse shney printsesin” (My Snow-White Princess,” dated 1917 in Dropkin’s 1935 book In heysn vint) and “Kh’hob zikh gezen in kholem” (I Saw Myself in a Dream)—one a spring poem, mourning the death of winter, and the other the narration of a suicidal dream. With them, Landau places Dropkin at the cutting edge of modernist Yiddish poetry. Dropkin’s poems join eroticism and morbidity in a combination that became her trademark. These were also the qualities of the single poem by Fradl Shtok, “Du trogst dos harts” (You Carry Your Heart), with which Landau concludes his volume, allowing a woman to have the final word on Yiddish poetry in 1919. Dropkin’s and Shtok’s poems stand out in Landau’s anthology. The erotic innuendo in their themes of death, adultery, and betrayal; their radical attitudes; and their shocking imagery suggest that for the avantgarde anthologist, women wrote only about sex and death. In the context of Korman’s volume, however, these subjects are presented among a great variety of topics addressed in Yiddish poems by women. Bassin expressed no explicit poetic ideology to explain the relationship of the secular to the religious, nor did he define the place that women poets occupied in the larger tradition of Yiddish poetry that

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his anthology sought to establish. Yet his selection of poems by women implies a definition of “women’s poetry” as romantic, private, domestic, and secular. Korman, in contrast, states a poetic agenda in his introduction that favors the modern and the secular over the religious but, in fact, the poems he includes transcend these limitations. His selection shows that modern women could write all kinds of Yiddish poetry—the romantic, private, domestic, and secular poetry that their contemporaries expected of them but also modernist, public, political, erotic, and religious poems. Women could write poems in forms and with themes that violated the clichés about women and the ideological boundaries of modernism. Moreover, although Korman argued strenuously against any historical relationship between Yiddish devotional verse and post-Enlightenment poetry by women, his juxtaposition of these two bodies of material superseded his protestations. Whereas Bassin’s anthology had set out a historical survey of Yiddish poetry through five centuries, in which he relegated religious poetry to the premodern past and in which poetry by women played a small role, Korman’s anthology, ostensibly modeled on Bassin’s, argued in the end for a connection between the religious and the modern in Yiddish poetry, which he located most centrally in writings by women of his own day. Literary anthologies of the 1910s and 1920s played an important role in the way that modern Yiddish writers developed a sense of their literary tradition. In the end, we can see two kinds of anthologies. On the one hand, the modernist collections of the Yunge and Introspectivist movements documented the present moment. On the other, the historical anthologies of Bassin and Korman gazed into the past to determine how Yiddish literature could continue into the future. Even as Korman modeled his anthology on Bassin’s, however, he transformed the project of constructing a tradition. Although Bassin was most innovative when he juxtaposed the newly rediscovered Old Yiddish texts and folklore with modern belles-lettres, his book languished in conventional notions of women as readers and as writers. Such unexamined beliefs about women as literary players reflected the activities that women were thought to perform in society. Literary critics, despite their intentions to stir up the status quo, reiterated these hackneyed categories of the domestic, the private, the emotional, and the sexually procreative to describe and proscribe women’s writing. In his decision

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to compile an anthology solely of women poets, Korman began to question the unstated assumptions about gender in Bassin’s anthology and beyond. The poets and the poems Korman chose to include in his anthology expanded and complicated the image of what kinds of women could write poetry and what kinds of poetry they would write. Korman’s anthology did not make a large impact when it was published. In the cultural climate of its day, this serious compilation of works by women received more scorn than praise and failed in its effort to make women a major part of Yiddish poetry. When, in 1940, Bassin published a second monumental anthology, Amerikaner yidishe poezye (American Yiddish Poetry), it was clear that he had learned nothing from Korman: of the thirty-one poets Bassin included, only one was a woman.80 Eschewing the historical framework of his 1917 collection, Bassin arranged the poets in his second anthology more or less chronologically, but he provided no dates for the poems. Rather than arguing for a tradition of poetry, Bassin’s 1940 anthology featured the poets’ personal histories. The dates of each writer’s birth, immigration to the United States, and first publication were printed beneath a full-page photograph at the beginning of each selection of poems. The one woman poet included, Anna Margolin, was allotted the same number of pages as each man, but such “equality” was all but meaningless when those 13 pages in a 601-page volume were supposed to represent all women Yiddish poets in America. Whatever aesthetic or programmatic criteria guided his exclusion of all women but Margolin in 1940, Bassin resorted to a tellingly gendered metaphor in the introduction to this work. Here, Bassin extends his earlier feminine personification of Yiddish poezye into a full-blown trope of the conflict between the traditional and the modern within a Jewish marriage. Under [the Yunge poets’] rule, with a reserve of technical and intrinsic forms, together with a healthy sense of the well-chosen word, Yiddish verse blossomed, and it seemed that Yiddish poetry had found her improvement. Although the match between the “Old” and the “Young” appeared to be predestined [bashert], this “couple” did not have a harmonious life [ gut-lebn] between them. Domestic tranquility [sholem-bayis] was missing. Her old-fashioned headkerchief [­shterntikhl ] did not please him, the little householder [balebel] and

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his contemporary, secular attire [haynt-veltlikher hilekh] did not please her, the daughter of good family lineage [yikhesdike tokhter]. And so a feud developed.81 (Italics in Bassin’s original.)

In this characterization of the beginning of modernism in American Yiddish poetry, in 1908, Bassin personifies Di Yunge modernist poetry as an enlightened husband, wearing dapper, secular clothing, lured toward modernity—and pulling away from a more old-fashioned Yiddish poetry, which is figured as the maskil’s pious, archaically dressed, ­tradition-bound wife. In this depiction of Yiddish literary history, Bassin reverts to clichés about ignorant Jewish women clinging to religiosity and about the Yiddish language as the scorned medium of women’s devotions. It is the well-dressed, worldly husband who will liberate Yiddish from this discordant marriage and spawn a modern poetry. Beneath the humor in his extended metaphor lay the very assumptions that kept Bassin from including more than one woman poet in his anthology. Had he, in 1940, learned from Korman, the way that Korman in 1928 acknowledged what he had learned from Bassin’s 1917 anthology, Bassin would have been compelled to include more women poets in Amerikaner yidishe poezye. Korman’s was a work before its time. By joining early Yiddish devotional poems by women with modern women’s poetry in one substantial volume, Korman suggested that women occupied a significant place within Yiddish literary history. At the same time, Yidishe dikhterins asserted that women’s writings comprised an alternative tradition. Such a tradition flew in the face of the secularization, individualism, and empowerment advocated by men who sought to establish the validity of Yiddish as a world literature in the early twentieth century. By invoking a connection between oldfashioned texts of women’s devotions and modern poems, Korman’s anthology reminded his contemporaries of the unsettling association of early Yiddish with femininity discussed by Niger and raised unwelcome memories of anti-Semitic stereotypes that feminized Jewish men. This foregrounding of women writers threatened to undermine the modernity of Yiddish literature and reflected the larger cultural ambivalence toward women in general and as readers and writers of Yiddish in particular.

Two   Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

Keeping in mind Moyshe Bassin’s 1917 Antologye: Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye, Ezra Korman began his anthology of women poets with premodern writers in order to postulate the existence of a tradition of women’s Yiddish poetry. Like Bassin, who grounded his selection of modern Yiddish poetry by men in poetry dating from the fifteenth century, Korman dedicated the first section of Yidishe dikhterins: A ­ ntologye to the work of four premodern women poets whose devotional poems were printed in Yiddish between 1586 and 1800. These writers provided Korman with a “usable past,” evidence of a weighty tradition that could legitimate the work of present-day women writers. In the subsequent sections, Korman presented sixty-six women poets who published mostly secular, that is, nondevotional poems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning in the second section of the book, Korman highlighted and emphasized the identity of each woman writer in order to convey modern ideas about individual poets and autonomous art as they applied to poetry in Yiddish by women. He did this by including biographies, bibliographies, and photographs relating to the lives and works of these poets. Yet the particularization of each poet presented Korman with a problem. For premodern Yiddish poetry, which he saw as the foundation for its modern continuation, no photographs, portraits, or even biographies of the poets existed. The only evidence of each woman’s life was the text that she had published, of which only one or two copies had survived the centuries, plus the name that she had inscribed into the body of that text. To document the existence of these women poets, Korman included photostats of the texts themselves—their title pages, the variant printings, and the first and last leaves of three of these four authors’ works.1

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The problem, however, went deeper. By opening his anthology with what he called poets of “der elterer yidisher literatur” (Old Yiddish literature),2 Korman projected a modern construct of the writer onto Yiddish writers of a previous era, a projection that was complicated by the fact that these writers were women. Whereas the modern Yiddish poet was learning to write as an individual, against or outside Jewish tradition, the premodern Yiddish poet spoke for the collective Jewish people and in a dialogue with Jewish tradition. Korman himself sensed the problems implied by his juxtaposition of premodern with modern women poets, which he tried to address in a disclaimer early in his introduction: “It is not our inclination to compare the influence of woman and her works in Old Yiddish literature with that of modern women’s creation. The first is immeasurably great and incomparable. Our purpose is only to mention the legacy and indicate the great beginnings of the present in the past.”3 By mentioning a legacy but refraining from an explicit comparison, Korman exhibited a reluctance to establish a direct lineage between devotional writings of the past and secular Yiddish poems of the present. Indeed, he even asserted that the achievements of modern women poets were meager in comparison to those of the writers of Old Yiddish literature. If one were to look at the awakening of our modern women’s creation as at a continuation of that which existed in the past, this new beginning is but a thin thread in our heritage—barely perceptible and but minimally challenged to express its own powers. . . . No single great personality has yet moved beyond the environment that has affected her strongly or has had an influence upon the entire literature.4

Calling the rise of modern women poets “but a thin thread in our heritage,” Korman claimed that women in premodern Yiddish literature had a much bigger impact on their culture than modern women had on theirs. He aggrandized the old and diminished the modern with an emphasis that belied the actual proportions of his anthology. This discrepancy between Korman’s claim that the importance of pre­modern women poets in their time outweighed that of the modern women poets in theirs—and the actual representation in numbers of poems in his collection, in which the sixty-six modern writers far outnumber

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

the four premodern writers—points to an ambivalence about the very project of the anthology. As many scholars have shown, the earliest women poets emerged from a complex bilingual tradition of Jewish texts in Europe in which the sacred Hebrew (and Aramaic) literature of classical Judaism—the Bible, the Talmud, and the liturgy—coexisted with a vernacular literature of devotion and belles-lettres in Yiddish.5 The devotional literature included translations of the Bible and commentaries, dating as early as 1382; and tkhines, Yiddish supplicatory prayers for women, first published in book form in Amsterdam in 1648 and reprinted in Western and then Eastern Europe into the nineteenth century.6 These devotional works were written mostly by men. The audience for these works consisted of both women, the vast majority of whom were never taught Hebrew, and the many men who may have been able to read Hebrew—the “sacred tongue” or loshn koydesh—phonetically, but had a limited understanding of what they read. Yet such devotional writings existed among a rich and varied body of other writings in Yiddish, including drama, secular and religious epic poems, morality texts, fables, guides to customs and conversations, debates, satires, tales, and travel guides, written and published over four centuries and across a broad geographical area.7 In all these early Yiddish writings, the individual Jew was defined primarily by his or her role in the community and service to God; consequently, the Yiddish poet too was in service to the communal and the sacred. Yet each of the women writers whom Korman included qualified this generalization in a different way and asserted her own individual voice. By including four premodern poets, Korman tried to resolve the contradiction between his desire to ground modern Yiddish poetry in premodern traditions and his stated belief in the lack of a direct connection between the two bodies of work. In other words, Korman was creating a tradition that he believed did not really exist. At the same time, by juxtaposing the premodern poets with the modern, Korman encountered a second paradox: Although each premodern poet subsumed her writerly individuality to a collective or communal purpose of devotion, she simultaneously asserted an exceptional individuality in the very fact that, as a woman, she wrote and published poetry at all. This tension in the premodern works between the individual writer and the project of communal redemption echoes the tension that Korman

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personally confronted as a Yiddish poet with revolutionary leanings in Ukraine after the Bolshevik Revolution. When the new order brought not a promised deliverance but only further suffering to the Jewish population, the Yiddish poet who had turned away from Judaism to ally himself with the greater political cause turned back to the Jews in his poetry. The anthology reflects the anthologizer’s own anxieties. The four premodern women writers in Korman’s anthology (Royzl Fishls, Gele, Khane Kats, and Toybe Pan), and a fifth poet I discuss in this chapter (Rivke Tiktiner), were all exceptional figures in their time and, to Korman’s twentieth-century eye, appear to be anomalies. Although premodern Yiddish literature aimed at an audience dominated by women, few women wrote and published, and even fewer of their printed works survived the centuries. We know their names only because they identified themselves within their poems. Even there, they did so traditionally by naming themselves as daughters or wives of men. Royzl Fishls, the daughter of Yosef Halevi (Joseph Levi), published a verse introduction appended to a translation of the psalms into Yiddish in Krakow in 1586. Gele, the daughter of a printer, published a prayer in Halle, Germany, in 1710.8 Though hundreds of miles and 114 years apart, each woman composed and printed her poem to help sell a devotional book.9 Gele’s approximate contemporary in Amsterdam, Khane Kats (Hannah Katz), daughter of Yehude Leyb Kats and widow of Yitskhok Ashkenaz, who may have been a printer or a rabbi, published and likely wrote a tkhine for a woman to recite while lighting the Sabbath candles; an adaptation of a Hebrew prayer, “Ma Toyvu,” for recitation in the synagogue; and a sermon to instruct the women of a synagogue congregation.10 Rivke bas Meir Tiktiner, born into a family originally from the town of Tykocin (Tiktin) near Bialystok, lived in Prague until her death in 1605.11 She wrote an ethical guide for Jewish women, Meynekes Rivke (Rebecca’s Wet Nurse), the oldest extant Yiddish-language book written by a woman, published posthumously in two editions (Prague, 1609 and Krakow, 1618), as well as “Eyn ­simkhes toyre lid” (A Simhat Torah Song), published in Prague in 1650.12 A ­ lthough it was printed posthumously, Tiktiner’s song was likely sung in the synagogue gallery by women while the men prepared the congregation’s Torah scrolls for the ceremonial procession during the Simhat Torah service celebrating the concluded and re-

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

newed reading of that sacred text. Finally, Toybe Pan, wife of Jacob Pan and daughter of Leyb Pitsker, who lived in late-seventeenth-century Prague, wrote the undated “Eyn sheyn lid naye gemakht, b’loshn ­tkhine iz vardin oys getrakht” (A Brand-New Beautiful Song, Composed in the Tkhine-Tongue). In writing this poem, she took on more than the role of firzogerin (women’s prayer leader), which probably was the case with Rivke Tiktiner as well.13 Pan’s poem suggests that she acted more like the sheliekh tsiber, the man who led the synagogue service and spoke to God on behalf of all its congregants. Like Queen Esther, whom the poem invokes, Pan begs God to rescue the entire Jewish community of Prague from both the plague and the threat of political scapegoating.14 Her poem reveals a woman poet who became an exemplary individual in order to serve her community.In these roles she was at once an exception and an example in her community. In an attempt to forestall skepticism from his modern readers, who might well have looked askance at a secularist’s inclusion of devotional works, Korman justified his decision to include premodern writers in the anthology of women Yiddish poets by opening his introduction to Yidishe dikhterins with the explanation: “It was the distinct intention of the compiler to present in this anthology, together with modern ­women’s poetry, also several examples of the work of women authors who created in Yiddish-Taytsh [Judeo-German].”15 Korman went on to explain that the vernacular writings in Yiddish-Taytsh arose in the context of a Jewish culture that primarily valued the sacred literature composed in loshn koydesh, the holy tongue, or Hebrew and Aramaic. The rise of the vernacular allowed “the common person and in particular the common woman” to participate in “new creative possibilities.” Such “creativity in Yiddish-Taytsh” established a “new intellectual strength in Jewish life” that allowed for “Yiddish folk literature” to develop.16 Alluding to a 1913 Yiddish essay by Shmuel Niger (“Di Yidishe literatur un di lezerin” [Yiddish and the Female Reader]) and a 1923 English monograph by Solomon B. Freehof (Devotional Literature in the Vernacular), Korman summarized the influence of Jewish women as readers and writers in Old Yiddish. The Jewish woman, as it is known, played a great role in the creation and education of this [Old Yiddish] literature. Her influence lies in

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language and style, in content and form, the imprint of her spirit and character. She was also its prime reader, from the past almost to the present. In the older literature the more educated woman, or female scholar (lamdante), herself also took a direct part in her own works.17

Korman’s assertion—that both the common Jewish woman as reader and the educated lamdante as writer influenced premodern Yiddish literature—furthers his argument that women writers are important. That he considered a woman writer’s influence to be embedded in her “language and style, in content and form” supports his project of bringing these archaic poems into print again and bolsters his idea of a literary tradition that includes works by women. “Through her tkhines, prayers, and requests,” Korman declares, the woman reader and writer of Old Yiddish spoke “not only to the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ but also to the heart and mind of her contemporaries. Through this instinct slumbering within her, as within the entire Jewish people, she expressed the dream of a generation . . . with the heartfelt language of her creations.”18 This last statement also reflects Korman’s own secular values, which were informed by the socialism he embraced in Ukraine and which were typical of Yiddish writers in 1928. Reasoning that the prayers written by women in Old Yiddish addressed the issues of Jewish peoplehood and national culture, “the dream of a generation,” as well as the God of the biblical patriarchs, Korman suggested to his 1928 readers that the writings of the Old Yiddish poets could be interpreted less as evidence of religious sentiment than as an expression of a cultural nationalism that resembled their own. As a result, Korman anachronistically attributed to the women poets in Old Yiddish a generational “historical mission,” which was to create “a new [vernacular] literature for a people” who had “already succeeded” in giving the world a body of writings that were, “in the way of historical development, conserved and frozen in a language no longer accessible to the entire people.”19 Describing classical Hebrew literature (the Bible, the rabbinic writings of the Talmud, and the liturgy) as “frozen” in an archaic language and revitalized for the general populace only in the vernacular of the Old Yiddish ­writers, Korman disparaged the traditional system of religious education and ­erudition and even, by implication, the secular Zionist revival of Hebrew as a modern

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

language in the early twentieth century. Yet by characterizing them as a generation of dreamers and reformers, Korman attributed to the premodern Yiddish writers the same literary goals that he himself possessed as an anthologizer of women Yiddish poets. Korman’s critical strategy was driven by an unintentional paradox that reflects his ambivalence about the idea of tradition proposed by his anthology. The terms with which he described the premodern writers echo the twentieth-century political language of revolution and communal responsibility. At the same time, Korman took great pains to distinguish between the premodern and the modern Yiddish poets in the anthology. Denying an intention “to compare the influence of Woman and her works in Old Yiddish literature with that of modern women’s creation,” Korman declared that “the first is immeasurably great and incomparable.” Rather, he desired only “to recall the legacy and to indicate the great beginnings in the past” and stressed that the “the awakening of our modern creations by women” is but “a thin thread” of continuity that is “still barely perceptible” and “hardly competitive.” ­Although “modern women’s creation” was “influenced by the [old] literature . . . no single great personality” had yet transcended this influence and made her mark on “the whole literature” (Korman’s emphasis).20 The samples of Old Yiddish women poets in his anthology thus represented a vast literary tradition that had once had a powerful effect on Yiddish culture, in contrast to the sixty-six modern women poets, whom Korman saw as exemplifying the tentative first stage of a new, nascent tradition. Still, observing that this “new beginning” and these “fresh energies” were “a sign of growth,” Korman asked, “And who can prophesy what our future woman-creation carries within itself (trogt in zikh) and for the literature? It is a branch like all others of our great Yiddish/­Jewish literature, and as such it deserves serious consideration and its own place within that literature.”21 He speculated: “And if it strikes closer to the roots of its own origins, without a doubt, its value and its new contribution (baytrog) will emerge and rise up, and it will again enrich Yiddish literature, as did its distant forebears.”22 Juxtaposing the metaphor of pregnancy, in the verb trogt in zikh and the noun baytrog, with the language of messianic hope (prophecy, roots), Korman predicted the eventuality that, later in the twentieth century, Yiddish poetry by

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women would influence future literature—if it drew its strength from a source that corresponded to the roots of the premodern devotional writers. Only with such a foundation in the traditions of the Jewish people would women’s poetry find significance. Despite the reverse proportion of old to new in the anthology and his own denials of the works’ similarities or connections, Korman drew the thin thread of new modern writings tightly around the old devotions. At the same time, he strove to dignify the Old Yiddish literature for women against contemporary cultural views that disparaged women as readers, seen, for example, in the portrait of the protagonist’s mother, “a learned woman,” in Sholem Abramovitsh’s famous fictional autobiography.23 Footnoting the then-recent Yiddish scholarship on Old Yiddish literature, Korman deployed Niger, Erik, Freehof, and Shulman to justify his praise of the devotional literature in Yiddish for and by women.24 Without these scholars, Korman argued, “[o]ur great bibliography” would have remained virtually unknown. Citing examples of the Sefer mides (Izna, 1542), Mayse bukh (Basel, 1602), and “other religious and secular works,” Korman claimed that this “froyen literatur” had been “buried in the dust of archival libraries, inaccessible to the reading public and also even to literary researchers and historians.”25 With the intention of disinterring these dusty books, Korman included in his anthology a list of the published works of “women’s literature,” which included Taytsh-khumesh (Prague, 1608) and the Tsene-rene (first ed., Lublin-Krakow, early seventeenth century; first known printing, Basel, 1622). In addition, he listed the tkhines as well as works written, published, and translated by women: musar-sforim (ethical treatises), prayers and sermons, “and even poems and long poems that belong to the pens of women.”26 But he emphasized that, despite the presence of some rhyming prayers and sermons and “even” lyric and long poems (lider un poemes), verse by women was the exception, not the rule.27 Although Korman strongly emphasized the important role that early Yiddish literature for women played in the formation of Yiddish and Jewish culture in the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, his introduction did not include qualitative analyses of the old texts in his anthology. Korman was most concerned with establishing the fact that the literature existed in the first place and in determining the originality and authenticity of the works.

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

My own project picks up where Korman left off. More than eighty years after his anthology appeared, with the benefit of subsequent scholarship in Yiddish and gender studies, we are now in a position to read these poets qualitatively and analytically. In the remainder of this chapter, I hope to show how, by reading these poems closely, they illuminate the lives of the women who wrote them. In addition to treating the four poets Korman included—the printers Royzl Fishls and Gele and the liturgical poets Toybe Pan and Khane Kats—I will attempt to complete Korman’s project by adding Rivke Tiktiner’s “Eyn simkhes toyre lid.” These readings will serve as the basis for my presentation of twentieth-century Yiddish poems that share aspects of the devotional in chapters 3 through 6. What first strikes a reader now upon approaching these Old Yiddish texts is their pragmatic nature. The notion that a poem serves a purpose in the social or material world runs counter to contemporary ideas of what a poem should be. Yet these occasional poems resemble many works printed in the languages of Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Korman was well aware of the Yunge and Introspectivist poets’ rebellion against the ideological poetry of the late-nineteenth-century labor poets, which often served pragmatic or occasional purposes. His readers would have expected a poem to provide aesthetic, musical, and emotional expressions, but the devotional Yiddish poems by women had a different aim. Two are advertisements for books or for themselves; the other three are prayers for individual or communal recitation. None of them fit into the conventional Western genres of belletristic poetry. Nonetheless, they are poems. Although composed within the conventions of advertisement or prayer, each of these poems conveys a distinct authorial voice that distinguishes it from the others. The stock phrases, biblical or liturgical quotations, and conventional forms do not obscure each poet’s particularity. We see from these early poems that women wrote in different genres and in distinct voices, reflecting different degrees of learnedness and experience. There was no single type of poetry by women. However, like a tkhine through which an individual woman may express a larger communal purpose of devotion, even as she petitions God privately, these poems transmit to varying degrees the sense of

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both a particular woman writing at a specific moment and the community within which she wrote.28 When we read one of these “functional” premodern Yiddish poems, we encounter the individual writer. And because that writer intended the poem to serve a purpose in her society, her audience plays an unarticulated role in our reading as well. Yet the multitudes of women who may have recited that poem as a prayer remain nameless. The name of the premodern woman poet, inscribed in her poem, encompasses the voices of her readers; her name is a metonymy for the community of readers.

Royzl Fishls The first Yiddish poem by a woman, presented by Korman, is Royzl Fishls’s “Mit hoylf gots yisborakh” (With God's Help, Blessed Be He), published in Krakow in 1586 as the rhymed foreword to a book of Yiddish translations of the Psalms.29 Royzl Fishls, whose exact birth and death dates are unknown, was the daughter of a printer, Yosef Halevi of Krakow. After his death in 1586, Royzl Fishls used his printing press in Krakow to publish a volume of the Psalms translated into Yiddish verse by Moyshe Shtendal of Hannover.30 She composed “Mit hoylf gots yisborakh” to serve as a rhymed proem to Shtendal’s translation. The poem itself carefully catalogues these titles and names. As we shall see, their enumeration articulates the poet’s familial and literary heritage. Before we turn to a reading of Royzl Fishls’s poem, however, let us look at Korman’s meticulous effort to prove the validity of its female authorship. In a passage followed by a lengthy footnote, he documents his bibliographic source: “Royzl Fishls’ poem—the rhymed introduction to the translation of Psalms by Moyshe Shtendal—was brought to us according to the text reprinted in Shulman (p. 24). This Psalm Book was noted by Steinschneider in the Bodleiana Catalogue on page 189, number 1280. There he transcribes her name: ‘Royzl R’Fishls, Vishls.’”31 Acknowledging that he took his text of Royzl Fishls’s poem from a 1913 Hebrew volume by Eleazar (Elias) Shulman,32 Korman cites “Staerk-Leitzman, Juedisch-deutsch Bibeluebersetzungen, Frankfurt 1923, 207–13” as a source for other examples of Shtendal’s translation

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

of Psalms, and he quotes Shulman’s presentation of the title page as a justification for his own editorial decisions in Yidishe dikhterins: “This Psalm Book nicely translated into the Yiddish language beautifully clear and very entertaining thereby to be read by women and girls, printed in the year that we count three hundred and forty six under the powerfully mighty King Stefan (may he be praised) in the capital city Krakow.” In note number 25, Shulman presents six lines that appear to have originated from Royzl Fishls. There it is said: “­Betokh hashir yavo gam eyze dvarim al yekhisah” [In the middle of this poem will come also those matters on her lineage]. According to the construction of the poem, these lines cannot come in the middle of the poem, and one must interpret this “betokh” [in the middle] as a mistake instead of “besof” [at the end]. This is why we placed these lines at the end of the poem. 33

Korman explains his reliance on Shulman’s reproduction of the text of the title page of Moyshe Shtendal’s “beautifully clear and very entertaining” translation of the Psalms by stating that, along with Royzl Fishls’s poem, Shulman included a statement of its audience of women and girls (far vayber un far meydlikh); the Hebrew calendar publication date; and the name of the ruler of Poland, King Stefan (Stephen Báthory [1533–86]). As further evidence of the veracity of Royzl Fishls’s poem, Korman cites its listing in Steinschneider’s catalogue of Hebrew books in the Bodleian Library.34 Although Korman explicitly regrets his inability to view or photograph the original document for his book, he does not mention that Bassin had cited Royzl Fishls’s poem in his headnote to an excerpt from Moyshe Shtendal’s psalm translation and had erroneously called Royzl Fishls “Moyshe Shtendal’s wife.”35 Bassin’s headnote on Shtendal was most likely Korman’s initial encounter with Royzl Fishls’s poem, and it must have been here that Korman discovered that Fishls was a publisher. Bassin, to be sure, had not printed Royzl Fishls’s poem, which Korman did. He also corrected Bassin’s misidentification of her as Shtendal’s wife.36 Korman’s source for his text of Fishls’s poem is not entirely clear, and it appears to be a secondhand rendering. Yet even at this remove from the original, Korman took liberties with the text. As he acknowledges, he reversed the order of the crucial lines, in which Royzl Fishls states

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her lineage by placing them at the end (bsof ), rather than in the middle (btokh), as Shulman had done. A recent scholarly edition of the text has shown, however, that Shulman, not Korman, was correct, and this edition also indicates other mistakes Korman made.37 Korman abbreviated Royzl Fishls’s poem and made the writer seem more like a twentieth-century poet than like a woman of the late sixteenth century. By concluding the poem with Fishls’s declaration of her name and her lineage, Korman drew attention to the poet’s individuality. Such emphasis on the poet’s specific personhood gave the poem a shape more recognizable to a modern reader. Perhaps Korman even had in mind certain modernist poems that famously named their authors.38 The lines missing from Korman’s text stress the poet’s assumption of her readers’ piety and her own ease with the role of the devotional poet, qualities distinctly not amenable to Korman’s American audience in 1928. In these lines, Royzl Fishls even likens herself as printer and writer to King David, the reputed author of the original book of Psalms. In all this, Royzl Fishls presents herself as a mediator between the translation of the Psalms and its Yiddish readers. I have constructed the following English translation by interleaving lines from the Yiddish text in Korman’s anthology with Frakes’s 2004 scholarly edition, placing Frakes’s corrections in boldface:39 Royzl Fishls, “Mit der hilf gots yas.” (Krakow, 1586) With God’s help, blessed be He, I have begun this with good intention: And with the help of God, blessed be He, I hope to bring it to completion:40 At this time to present in Yiddish this book of godly psalms. In the expectation that with them God shall be praised [loved] and sung: That is to say, by either woman or man. As King David, peace unto him, has done:41 (lines 1–6 in both Korman and Frakes)

The poem opens with a couplet acknowledging God’s help as the poet undertakes the twofold project of writing her poem and of publish-

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

ing Moyshe Shtendal’s Yiddish translation of the Psalms. Royzl Fishls then explains that her purpose in publishing the Psalms in Yiddish is to enable both men and women to sing their praise of God. Royzl Fishls likens her readers’ act of devotion—praising God by reciting the Psalms—to the act that King David himself performed when he, as legend has it, composed the Psalms. With this trope, Royzl Fishls juxtaposes the biblical poet-king David and the reader of both her Yiddish poem and Shtendal’s Yiddish translations of the Psalms, and she reflects the traditional notion that Jewish history follows an unbroken continuum from the Hebrew Bible to the present day. In the next ten lines of the poem, Royzl Fishls elaborates upon the character of King David and his impact on the sixteenth-century Yiddish reader. As Frakes notes, Korman omitted these lines, either deliberately or, more likely, because the source from which he took the text did not include them:42 Especially when one comes to understand it: It will go straight to each person’s heart: Each one will come to know how King David, peace unto him, began it. And how difficult it was for him. And how many friends revolted against him. And how they all disgraced him: And should it continue in the future, as in the past, Pious people [will] desire [that] this stand: And your evil council shall thus be conquered. And your evil thoughts changed. (not in Korman; lines 7–16 in Frakes)

In these five rhymed couplets, the poet commends the book to her audience, explaining that when the psalms are understood, they will pierce the hearts of their Yiddish readers. Reading the Yiddish translations of the psalms, the readers will learn the origins of King David (vi Dovid hamelekh olev hashalom zakh hot ongefangn) and the difficulties he overcame—the many friends who rebelled against or betrayed him and how he struggled against his illicit passions and betrayals. Royzl Fishls expresses the hope that Shtendal’s translations of King

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David’s Psalms will teach the Yiddish readers—pious people, whom she addresses directly in the second-person plural possessive pronoun ir (your)—to conquer bad advice that others give them and reverse their own wicked thoughts or memories. With these lines, Royzl Fishls asserts her belief in the power of literature: Those who read David’s psalms in Shtendal’s Yiddish translation will renounce their own evil ways. Whether or not Korman omitted these lines intentionally, which I doubt, their absence enables the poem to skip over the moral example that King David presents in the psalm and jump to the drama of the authorship of Royzl Fishls’s own poem. In the next three couplets, Royzl Fishls begins to explain why and how she came to write her poem. Lo, I have endeavored. This I want to let the people know: How I come to this Psalm book, [you] may wonder. It was given to me because I was forced to wander. So I found this Psalm book in the Holy Community of Hannover In that selfsame hour: (lines 7–12 in Korman; lines 17–22 in Frakes)

Although the compressed syntax and ellipses leave the poet’s meaning somewhat ambiguous, Royzl Fishls appears to announce her intentions in the publication of this particular edition of the Psalms. She may be describing the immense effort she has made (hob ikh mikh g­eflisn) to find and publish Shtendal’s translation of the Psalms in order to educate or losn visn (let know) the people (di loyt), that is, her readers. Or she may be saying, somewhat less ambitiously, how hard she worked on this project and why she happened to pick this text rather than another to publish. The phrasing of lines 19–20 (9–10 in Korman) is equally ambiguous in Korman’s version, because it is not clear whether in line 9, ­andrey (­others) (andern, “other” or “second,” in Frakes) refers to di loyt (people) in the preceding couplet or to dem tehilim (this Psalm book), meaning Shtendal’s rather than another translation. Frakes’s redaction, which substitutes the second-person-singular imperative verb meyn (to believe, think) for Korman’s dative first-person pronoun mir, clarifies the mean-

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ing: Royzl Fishls tells her reader to think otherwise about how she got hold of and published the book of Shtendal’s translations of the Psalms, which presented itself to her when she was forced to wander. However awkward the phrasing may be, perhaps because the poet desired to rhyme andrey with vandrey (vandern, “to wander”; Frakes), Royzl Fishls’s lines convey to her reader the provenance of the text she is publishing.43 Lines 21–22 explain how, in the course of her wanderings, Fishls found Shtendal’s translation of the Psalms tsu kehile kedushe Hannover (to [or in] the Holy Community of Hannover), the famous Jewish community in the capital city of the duchy of Luneburg-­ Calenberg (later the duchy of Hannover). These couplets suggest that the poet actually traveled to Hannover from her home in Krakow, Poland, and there found the Yiddish text of the Psalms that she will publish. They do not, however, explain why or how Royzl Fishls made this long journey and found Shtendal’s Yiddish Psalms there. In the next two lines, Royzl Fishls presents even more detail about the psalm book she is publishing. The Rov Moyshe Shtendal translated this into Yiddish. Brought [Thought] it into the rhyme and melody of the Shmuel-bukh: (lines 13–14 in Korman; lines 23–24 in Frakes)

The poet presents the name of the translator of the psalms, Rov Moyshe Shtendal, the rabbi who translated the Hebrew Psalms into Yiddish. It is not known whether or not Shtendal lived in Hannover or in Krakow, where Royzl Fishls published this book in 1586. However, much like a twentieth-century publisher promoting his or her wares, Royzl Fishls makes clear that Shtendal’s translation is first-rate and appealing, because he has set it “in dem raym un nigen fun Shmuel Bukh,” into the rhyme and melody of the Shmuel bukh, a popular epic poem based on the biblical and midrashic tales about the heroic King David. Although this verse epic was probably composed in the late fifteenth century, it was first published in 1544; most likely, Royzl Fishls’s readers in 1586 were familiar with it.44 The scholar Max Erik noted that Moyshe Shtendal’s translations of the Psalms had no actual formal connection to the 12-stress lines of the heroic (“nibelungisher”) strophes of the Shmuel bukh. It seems likely that Royzl Fishls mentioned this popular work as an advertising ploy to popularize her own publication.45

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Lines 25–27 further develop Fishls’s promotion of this translation of Psalms, making it clear that Shtendal’s work is contemporary and that he has taken the popular audience of the day into account in its preparation. In the expectation that it shall be lovely to read. For men and women and the pious girls. That to them it will be very meaningful: (lines 13–17 in Korman; lines 23–27 in Frakes)

Omitting any preposition, the phrase, “men and women and the pious girls” (manin un froyen un di frumen meydlikh) is a variant of the dedications that often appeared in early Yiddish prefaces and on title pages to designate the intended audience of Yiddish devotional literature.46 In lines 23–27, then, Royzl Fishls alludes to the century-old Shmuel bukh and current tkhines, both well-known works of entertainment and devotion, to demonstrate her up-to-date knowledge of popular Yiddish literature and her effort to make Shtendal’s Psalms appealing. In the subsequent two couplets, the poet states her own role in the production of the book. Here in my own hand I have written out. The entire work and nothing was left out: And with care considered it. And brought it into print: (lines 18–21 in Korman; lines 28–31 in Frakes)

Ensuring that her readers know exactly what she has done to bring Shtendal’s translation to them, Royzl Fishls states that she has “written out,” or “copied over” (iber shribn), the text with her own hand, making sure not to omit anything (dos es iz nisht drinen geblibn). Having considered or looked over the text with careful attention (un hob mikh bidakht), she has brought it into print (un in den druk gibrakht). These lines attest to the quality of Fishls’s work as a copyist, editor, and printer. In the final three couplets in Korman’s version, the poet presents her signature, that is, her name and her lineage. I, Royzl daughter of Reb Fishl is what the people call me. She does this [because] her father (of blessed memory) cannot:

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

The Rov Reb Yoysef Levi is his name, of the Levite clan. These are all the servants of blessed God, to the last one: And Our Teacher the Rov Yehudah Levi (peace unto him), his aged father,47 He dedicated fifty years to the yeshiva in the Holy Community of Ludmir. (lines 22–27 Korman; lines 32–37 Frakes)

When Royzl Fishls gives her name as “Royzl bar Fishl,” she denotes with the abbreviation of the Hebraic bas reb (the daughter of Mister . . .) that her father’s name was “Fishl.” This assertion makes unclear the different name the poet attributes to her father in the following couplet, “Harov reb yoysef levi” (Rabbi Mr. Josef Levi). Perhaps “Fishl” was the nickname of the Rov Reb Yoysef Levi, for, according to Royzl, her father was a Levite, fun der levim gishlekht. Although the modern word ­geshlekht means “gender” or “sex,” in her sixteenth-century Yiddish the word denotes “tribe” and refers here to one of the Twelve Tribes of ­Israel, the tribe of Levi, whose descendants, the Levites, served the priests in the Temple of Jerusalem. In the final couplet of Korman’s version, Royzl Fishls presents her paternal grandfather, Yehudah Levi, who, according to the poem, taught for fifty years at the famous yeshiva in the Jewish community in the Polish town of Ludmir. Korman ends Royzl Fishls’s poem at the point where she asserts her name and her lineage, but Frakes’s 2004 edition concludes the 1586 poem with nine more lines. Praised be beloved God. He who chose the Levites And sanctified them. Therefore is their memory not forsaken. So I thank and praise God That He numbers me among that tribe And hope that he will again take pity on me. He does not forget the cry of the poor: I pray that He may support me As King David, peace unto him, was the son of the pious Jesse. (omitted from Korman; lines 38–47 Frakes)

In this final section, Royzl Fishls addresses God, praising Him for having chosen and honored or privileged the Levites, as a result of which

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their memory is preserved. She proceeds to thank God further for making her a member of the Levite tribe and expresses hope that God will continue to take pity on her because he “does not forget the cry of the poor.” Suggesting that she numbers herself among the poor whom God remembers, Royzl Fishls concludes with the implicit argument that God should be even more certain to remember her because she is the offspring of her Levite father and grandfather, in the same way that King David was the son of his father Jesse. We can posit Fishls’s intent in these lines by considering that in Deuteronomy God decrees that the Levites, to whom he grants no territory of their own in the Promised Land, will serve the Kohanim, the descendants of Aaron, in their priestly duties and subsist on tithes and portions of the sacrifices. In her poem Royzl Fishls mentions her family’s Levite lineage to explain her poverty. Furthermore, she suggests that, because the Levites served God by assisting the Kohanim in the Temple, so she, in publishing the Yiddish translations of the Psalms, serves God by assisting their author, King David. Through this analogy, the poem depicts Royzl Fishls’s work in a Yiddish print shop in 1586 Krakow as a task that connects her directly to the arc of sacred history. At the same time, this analogy offers a mixed metaphor: As a publisher, she is a Levite serving God indirectly through the Kohanim; but as a poet, she is a colleague of King David, psalmist and progenitor of the messiah. One can see why Korman might have omitted these concluding lines, which are restored in Frakes’s edition. The complexity of Royzl Fishls’s argument linking her lineage as a Levite to King David obscures her identity as a woman poet, the identity that Korman wanted to emphasize. However, even the lines of Royzl Fishls’s self-naming, with which Korman ended the poem, present a conception of a woman poet that was alien to the idea of a modern Yiddish poet in a modern city in an environment that stressed individuality. Royzl Fishls fills her poem with names: her first name; the names of her father and her grandfather, both of whom were teachers and rabbis; the name of the translator of the Psalms; the name of the legendary author of the Psalms; the names of the Jewish communities of Hannover and Ludmir; and, of course, the name of God. Teachers, rabbis, translators, and now the author of this poem all mediate between the sacred text and the community. They are educators, disseminating knowledge through texts.

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

By writing her name into her poem’s catalogue of men’s names, Royzl Fishls, a woman, establishes her authorship by joining the tradition of textual interpreters. That Royzl Fishls does not draw attention to her womanhood in these lines suggests that to her, a daughter following in the professional footsteps of her father was not exceptional. A century later, the memoirist and businesswoman, Glikl bas Judah Leib (Glikl of Hameln), as depicted by Chava Turniansky and Natalie Zemon Davis, was typical of German Jewish women in a culture that expected women to work.48 Royzl Fishls’s involvement in the production of religious literature may not have been common in Eastern Europe, but it also was not unique. Chava Weissler has established that a significant number of tkhines were written by women, often from rabbinical families who were, in effect, following in the professional footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers.49 And although Royzl Fishls does not invoke her matriarchal lineage, she invites women and girls, as well as men, to read and find their own meanings in the Hebrew Psalms, which she has made comprehensible to them in the Yiddish vernacular. In a parallel gesture, Korman aimed to make Royzl Fishls’s poem accessible to the Yiddish readers of 1928 so as to connect them to the tradition of women writers in Yiddish.

Gele More than a century after Royzl Fishls’s poem and some 430 miles northwest of Krakow, Gele, the young daughter of a printer, published a single poem, “Tfile” (Prayer), in the German city of Halle, which she appended as a colophon to a prayer book for which she had set the type for both the Hebrew and Yiddish texts.50 Serving the same purpose as Royzl Fishls’s earlier proem, Gele’s colophon was intended to promote the sale of the book she had produced.51 Gele’s poem, which Korman placed third in Yidishe dikhterins, reveals the literacy and literary skill of a young girl. This poem gives evidence of a young early-eighteenth-century Jewish girl, confident in her abilities to read, write, and master the craft of typesetting for a letterpress. Gele was not the only girl taught to set type. Through the colophons of Hebrew books printed in Poland and Germany in the seven-

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teenth century, Chava Turniansky has identified several girls who were zetserins (typesetters).52 Some girls of that era were, it seems, taught to read Yiddish in its Hebraic letters and thus would have been able to read and (if so trained) to set the letters of Hebrew technically, even if they did not understand the words. As Turniansky relates, two exceptional young sisters, Ella (Ele) and Gella (Gele), daughters of a printer, Moshe ben Avrom Ovinu, were precociously skilled typesetters who could also write in Yiddish. Moshe ben Avrom Ovinu, whose generic name (Moses, son of Abraham our Father) identified him as a convert to Judaism, appears to have come from Nikolsburg in Moravia. He became a Yiddish printer, at first working for other printers in Amsterdam and Dessau and later setting up his own press in Halle.53 According to Korman, Moshe ben Avrom Ovinu compiled his own prayer book, which he titled appropriately Tfile leMoshe (Moses’s Prayer).54 He trained both of his daughters in his craft; each printed her own words in the colophons of books that she herself had set. According to Turniansky, “In both cases these were typographically quite complex sidurim [prayer books] in loshn-koydesh [Hebrew and Aramaic] with a Yiddish translation, and both young typesetters disclosed there in rhymes [information] about themselves and their work.”55 At the end of the prayer book Tfile l­eMoshe, which appeared in Dessau in 1696,56 Ele, the elder daughter of Moshe, composed the following rhymed lines: Ele, “Di taytshe oysyes hob ikh gezetst” (These Yiddish Letters I Have Set) (Dessau, 1696) These Yiddish letters I have set with my hand. Ele daughter of the Honorable Rabbi Moshe from Holland. My years are no more than nine. I am the only daughter among six children. Therefore if you should find an error, This text was set by a child, remember.57

After acknowledging her own work as typesetter in the first couplet, the young poet presents her name in the traditional way, as the daughter of her father. Although she states that he came from Holland, it seems that his origins were in Moravia, but he trained as a printer in Amsterdam. The young poet deliberately though imperfectly rhymes the un-

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

stressed last syllable of holand (Holland) with the stressed hand (hand). In the second couplet, Ele declares her age (9 years) and her place in her family (the only girl among six children), rhyming her age (nayn) with her unique status as a girl (aleyn, “myself” or “only”). In the final couplet, Ele addresses her reader to apologize for any errors in the typeset text, excusing them because of her youth. The modest tone of these lines belies the achievement that they describe—a 9-year-old girl setting type for a Yiddish translation of an entire Hebrew prayer book (an exacting process of fitting small blocks, each holding one backward letter, into a frame to copy precisely in reverse each line of the original text that, when printed, will read correctly from right to left).58 Ele’s mastery of the conventions of nomenclature is as impressive as her self-presentation. She demonstrates her acquaintance with the conventions of the rhymed colophon, in which printers sign their work, indicating that even a 9-year-old girl could learn the formulaic language of the profession and adapt the conventions to her own terms. The closing couplet reveals Ele’s verbal inventiveness. By ending the poem with the rhyme of gefint (find) with kind (child), the typesetter wittily makes sure that a reader can find her as well as her typos. Fourteen years later, in 1710, Ele’s younger sister, Gele, following the example of her elder, composed and appended a longer poem of her own to a “new edition of the same sidur”59 for which she set the type at the family printing press in Halle, Germany. Turniansky points out that this edition of Tfile leMoshe is bilingual, containing both loshn k­ oydesh (Hebrew and Aramaic) prayers and their Yiddish translations, and Frakes asserts that Gele set both the Yiddish translation and the Hebrew prayers.60 Gele’s poem is longer and more developed than the poem of her older sister. Although my translation follows Korman’s lineation of the poem into rhymed couplets, I have added the final eight lines according to Chava Turniansky’s critical edition of the Yiddish text.61 Gele, “Dize sheyne naye tfile” (This Beautiful New Prayer) (Halle, 1710) This beautiful new prayer from the beginning to the end: I have set all the letters with my own hand: Gele, daughter of the Rov Reb Moshe the Printer And my mother Mistress [Meres] Freyde daughter of the Rov Reb Yisroel Kats, of blessed memory.

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She bore me among ten children, may they live, I am a maiden, not quite twelve: Do not be surprised that I must labor. The gentle and dainty daughter of Israel has sat in Exile forever: One year departs and another commences. And we have not yet been granted Redemption: We shout and we pray to God every year. If only our prayers should before the Blessed Name appear. How nicely I must keep quiet and still. I and my father’s house must hardly speak at all: However all of Israel shall come to its end. So to us it shall also happen: Then as the verse does mention. All people shall rejoice who mourned Jerusalem’s Destruction. And those who in the Exile suffered such great sadness. They will again with the Redemption have great gladness. Amen, and may it be His will. Dear readers, buy this Prayer for one small coin. Otherwise we’ll have no other income in this world. Because it pleases well the Blessed Name. And this is our share from all our labors. May the Lord, God of Israel widen our borders. And, according to our needs, may He give us bread and clothing. To make a great nation live and, with it, our children and offspring. And may He grant us peace with all our brethren in Israel. Amen, may it be His will. (1–30)

Unlike Royzl Fishls’s poem, which presents the author’s name near the end of the text, Gele’s poem begins with the poet’s presentation of her work and herself. In the opening couplet Gele proclaims her work and announces her role in the making of it: “This beautiful new prayer,” both sheyne (beautiful) and naye (new). Although to Gele’s eighteenth-century readers, the word tfile (prayer) would refer primarily to the title of the

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

prayer book, Tfile leMoshe, for which her poem serves as the colophon, it might also refer to the poem that Gele herself is composing. Interpreting the line to mean that Gele called her own poem a tfile, Korman titled Gele’s poem “Tfile,” even though no such title is visible in the photographic facsimile of the original printed version.62 In this opening line, then, Gele doubly celebrates both of her accomplishments—her work as typesetter of the second edition of the prayer book, which her older sister had printed fourteen years earlier, and her own poem. Although the tone of this line might strike the modern reader as proud or braggardly, Gele invokes the descriptive sheyne naye as the stock advertising phrase that appeared on the title pages or colophons of many Old Yiddish devotional texts, whether or not they were actually “new” compositions. In the second line, the speaker declares herself the typesetter of the tfile—the prayer book and the poem—rather than its author: “I have set all the letters with my own hand.” Gele thus follows the conventions of both the colophon, in which the typesetter identifies the dates of beginning and completing the printing of a book, and the title page, on which the typesetter advertises that book.63 Gele applies these conventional forms to her own composition, the poem that she has composed, in both the sense of writing it and of composing or setting the text in movable type. By emphasizing her work as a typesetter more than as a writer, Gele shows that she values the craft of presenting a text to the public as much as if not more than the art of creating a text. Although this set of values contrasts with a postromantic emphasis on individual creativity, Gele presents in these lines a clear sense of both herself and her pride in craft and work. Gele’s expression of her identity continues in the second couplet, where she presents her name and her lineage. Like Royzl Fishls, Gele gives her name in relation to her ancestors. But whereas Royzl Fishls identified herself as the daughter and granddaughter of learned men, Gele defines her name in terms of the names of both her father, Moshe the Printer, whom she identifies in terms of his profession, and especially her mother. By including her mother’s name, “Mistress Freyde,” and the name of her mother’s deceased father, the Rov Reb Yisroel Kats—whose family name, Kats, an abbreviation of the Hebrew words kohen (priest) and tsadik (righteous man), denotes a prestigious priestly family—Gele establishes her legitimacy as a Jew, through matrilineal

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descent, and thus shows herself fit to write a prayer for other Jews to read. The fact that Gele mentions her maternal grandfather and not her paternal grandfather may be explained by the likelihood that her father was a convert to Judaism, as scholars have suggested. In the third couplet, Gele continues to give specific personal information about her family, her status in that family, and her status as a young girl in the Jewish community. By naming her mother, Gele establishes her own place within the immediate family as one of ten children, in contrast to her older sister, Ele, who, when she composed her poem in 1696, at age 9, fourteen years earlier, was one of only six children. Gele also establishes that she is an unmarried maiden (eyn bsule) and still only 11 years old (nokh etvos unter tsvelf yorn). In the fourth couplet, Gele informs the reader that despite her youth and sex, she, like all Jews, must work, because “the daughter of Israel” has long been in exile. In the fifth stanza, she explains how long that exile seems to her. Along with all the Jewish people, Gele awaits messianic redemption. Because the years pass and the messiah tarries, Gele grows impatient. It seems to her that her family’s and community’s prayers should reach God, and this effort gives her all the more reason to publish the prayer book and compose her own prayer. Yet, even though Gele identifies with the collective Jewish frustration of waiting for the messiah—mir shrayen un mir betn—she writes that she and her family must keep quiet. Although Israel Zinberg claimed that the silence imposed on Gele and her family referred to “the fact that her father was not born of Jews,” these lines most likely refer to the specific problem that Gele’s father faced.64 According to Marvin Heller, “Moses ben Abraham Avinu,” who had worked as a printer in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Frankfurt am Oder, settled in Halle where, after approximately 1706, he was “employed at the press established by J. H. Michaelis.” When his employer fell ill, “Moses ben Abraham Avinu, assisted by his large family, would print independently, including the unauthorized Talmudic tractates and the prayer-book Tefilah le-Moshe, which contained the prayer Aleinu, recently prohibited by royal decree. As a result, the press was closed, the typographical material and equipment seized, and Moses ben Abraham incarcerated.”65 From Heller’s account, it seems, then, that the publication of the prayer book that Gele helped make and in which she published her

Old Poems in a Modern Anthology

poem brought on the crisis that ended her father’s career. With this situation in mind, we read with great poignancy Gele’s statement. Paraphrasing der posek, the biblical verse, Gele demonstrates her knowledge of the Bible and concludes her prayer with the standard Hebrew phrase: “Amen, and may it be His will.”66 Although this phrase usually signals the end of a prayer, Gele’s poem does not end here. Rather, she adds an appeal that her readers will purchase the prayer book she has printed. Dear readers, buy this Prayer for one small coin. Otherwise we’ll have no other income in this world. Because it pleases well the Blessed Name. (22–24)

With this rhymed triplet, Gele combines her roles as publisher and prayer-composer. She implores her readers to buy both the prayer book Tfile leMoshe and her own prayer-poem by appealing to their pity for her family’s need to make a living and to the quality of the prayer book and of her prayer. Gele asks her readers to buy the prayer (book) for any or all of these three reasons: because it is such a pleasing work, may His Name be blessed; because the prayer (book) itself pleases God; or because the readers’ purchase of the prayer (book) will please God. Korman ended his anthology’s version of Gele’s poem with this appeal to her readers. However, the actual colophon continues for another five verses. And this is our share from all our labors. May the Lord, God of Israel widen our borders. And, according to our needs, may He give us bread and clothing. To make a great nation live and, with it, our children and off spring. And may He grant us peace with all our brethren in Israel. Amen, may it be His will.67 (25–30)

Turniansky questions whether the last nine lines (22–30) of the poem are actually Gele’s.68 The problem with determining the authorship of these lines is the fact that lines 22–24 are in hebraicized Yiddish and lines 25–30 are in a more sophisticated register of Hebrew than the Yiddish body of the poem. Because of this difference in diction,

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the anthologizers of this poem (Bassin in 1917, Korman in 1928, and Zinberg in 1935) did not agree about the authorship of these last lines, a fact that may explain their variant presentations of the poem.69 ­Korman ended his text of Gele’s poem with the word gefelt (pleases) in line 24; Bassin included only the first twenty lines of the poem; and Zinberg followed Bassin’s example and ended his quotation of Gele’s poem with groyse freyd (great joy; in my translation, rejoice).70 Furthering the notion of a different author for these concluding lines is the facsimile photograph in Korman’s anthology of the original printing of the poem, where a horizontal printed or scored line in the page separates the five lines following the word gefelt from the rest of the text. An alternative reading, however, could argue for attributing the last five lines to Gele. In fact, these lines follow logically from the end of the advertisement, in that they call the sale of the prayer book “a share from all our toils.” Moreover, these lines connect the printer’s work and livelihood to the blessings that God ought to bestow on the entire Jewish people: God should widen the geographic and metaphorical borders or limits of their lives, provide food and clothing to the Jews, make their “great nation” thrive for this and future generations, and grant peace among all Jews. Even so, the logical placement of this invocation and request, the learned tone of these lines, suggests a voice more mature than that of Gele. One can imagine that the girl’s father or mother stepped into the print shop as she worked and handed Gele these lines to set in type. If the family’s status in the community were a problem, because Gele’s father was a convert to Judaism, or because of the problems in his publishing business, then the wish in the penultimate line for “peace among all our brethren in Israel” may reflect tension between Gele’s family and the community. The question of what makes up the text of the poem is an important one, because if the 11-year-old Gele did indeed compose these Hebrew verses, she would have been able to both read and write loshn koydesh (Hebrew and Aramaic) as well as Yiddish and thus possessed more than mere technical skills for typesetting text in the holy tongue. Such a highly educated girl would tell us much about gender roles and literacy in the eighteenth century. It is more likely, though, that, as Turniansky asserts, girl typesetters of this period were able to spell out Hebrew words without understanding the meaning of the texts they

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set.71 If these lines were composed by an adult, perhaps one of Gele’s parents, they would express the complexity of Gele’s father’s situation as a convert within the Jewish community of Halle.72 Whether or not Gele wrote these final lines, Korman’s omission of them from his anthology results in a poem that seems modern. It brings to life the distinctive voice of a young girl who wrote and published a Yiddish poem in 1710. Such an indisputable fact of a girl’s authorial identity would have significantly confirmed Korman’s claim that women poets were important to Yiddish literature.

Khane Kats Far from Halle, in Amsterdam, the center for Hebrew and Yiddish publishing at that time, Gele’s approximate contemporary, Khane Kats (daughter of Yehude Leyb Kats and widow of Yitskhok Ashkenaz, both of whom were rabbis and teachers), published and apparently wrote three rhymed verse compositions: a prayer for a woman to recite on the Sabbath; an adaptation of the Hebrew prayer, “Ma Tovu” (How Goodly), for recitation in the synagogue; and a sermon to instruct the women of a synagogue congregation.73 Whereas the authorship of Royzl Fishls’s and Gele’s poems seems clear, because each inscribed her name and lineage into her stanzas, Khane Kats’s role is more ambiguous. According to Devra Kay, the booklet containing these three poems as well as a penitential tkhine (which was first printed elsewhere and attributed to another woman, Beyle Hurvits) initially appeared in late-seventeenth- or early-eighteenth-century Amsterdam, with the information on the title page that “the book has been produced Al yad ha-almone Khane (literally, “by the hand” of the widow, H ­ annah).74 Kay argues that although this phrase “usually denotes a printer rather than an author,”75 these roles were at the time not distinct from one another. Authorship thus denoted a range of activities, including translations, adaptations that reworked old material into new material, and original compositions.76 Kay reasons that Khane Kats was likely the author of “Ma Toyvu,” which recasts into the language of the tkhines a new version of the Hebrew synagogue prayer, and that if she also wrote the rhymed couplets of the title page and the lengthy sermon,

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“Eyn hipshe droshe” (A Sermon), she may well have written the Sabbath prayer “Tfile l’shabes” (A Prayer for the Sabbath), which follows the same verse form.77 According to Korman, Khane Kats was a learned woman who was well acquainted with midrash and Gemara as well as the Hebrew liturgy. Korman calls her “the writer and sermonizer,”78 who sought through her sermons (Korman claims that she wrote four!) to inspire in her audience of men and women a purer and more pious spirit. In her sermons, Kats warned women against the sin of loshn-hore, speaking ill of another person, especially at weddings, circumcisions, and in the synagogue, where the sin was “all the greater.”79 Kats also wrote about other “womanly weaknesses,” Korman tells us, such as looking in the mirror and walking in public with one’s own hair immodestly uncovered.80 Here is the poem, translated from Korman’s presentation: Khane Kats’ “Tfile l’shabes” (A Prayer for the Sabbath) (Amsterdam, 17th/18th century) Dear God, your praises I will tell. The Creator of all souls. For this we thank You, choosing us To be Your own beloved folk. With pride we affirm and extol Your worth, Our God, Who created Heaven and Earth. Sweet drinks to quaff, good food to eat. And all the pleasures to appreciate. The Holy Sabbath a woman must honor and hold. She is then favored with husband and child. In riches and dignity to grow old. So I keep the dear Holy Sabbath well and good. With sweet delicacies and excellent food. That which we prepared yesterday, Dear God, let us enjoy today. When the beloved Holy Sabbath with Paradise compares Then we shall deserve This World and the Next for all our years.

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And the beloved Messiah shall guide us by the right hand. And bring us into the Holy Land Amen, may Thy will be done.81

The nine rhymed couplets of this poem (the fifth of which Korman places in three lines) make for a succinctly revealing prayer. It resembles one type of the tkhines, the supplicatory prayers in Yiddish that women recited while performing the rituals of the three positive commandments for women—khale, nide, and hadlokes neyres (or hadlokes haner)—known by the acronym KhaNeH (Hannah).82 These laws commanded women to take out a portion of dough while making the Sabbath loaves, thus commemorating the priestly sacrifices in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem as well as the destruction of Jerusalem (khale); to observe the laws of ritual purity in marital relations (nide); and to light the Sabbath and holiday candles (hadlokes neyres). According to the Mishnah, a woman’s failure to perform these commandments could result in death during childbirth.83 There are many types of tkhines: prayers for each day of the week; Yiddish renditions of the normative Hebrew liturgy; special prayers for fast days, the Jewish New Year, and the Day of Atonement; prayers to be recited at life-cycle events, such as pregnancy, childbirth, and burial (because women were not permitted to recite the Mourners’ Kaddish); and other ­tkhines stemming from kabbalistic mysticism, for recitation at folk religious practices (such as the making of wicks for Yom Kippur candles) and at annual cemetery visits to ask the dead to intercede on behalf of the living.84 Khane Kats’s prayer falls into the category of the tkhines for the Sabbath, which, recited weekly, convey information about Jewish culture through the intimacy of a woman praying for her family members’ well-being as they celebrate the day of rest.85 The poem opens in the first rhymed couplet by praising God for having created all living beings and, in the second couplet, with an explanation of why one thanks God—because God has chosen the Jews to be his own people. The third couplet praises God further for his creation of the heavens and the earth. In the fourth couplet, the poet describes the benefits of the Sabbath: good food and drink and all the pleasures in which one delights. In the fifth stanza, Kats tells of the wealth, honor, and long life that a woman brings to her husband and

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children if she observes the Sabbath properly. In the sixth and seventh couplets, we hear the voice of a specific woman, an ikh (I) who promises that, because she wants to bring all these good things to her family and herself, she will therefore strictly observe the Sabbath. Charmingly, she describes how on Friday her preparation of the good, sweet food will allow her and her kin to eat well on the Sabbath, the following day. The poem concludes in the last four lines with a didactic communal lesson made personal: If we observe the Sabbath, the Sabbath will become like a Paradise, and we will become good enough to enjoy both this world and the world to come, entering Paradise when we die. Furthermore, if we keep the Sabbath, the messiah will come to carry us back to the Land of Israel. Khane Kats’s poem is typical of the tkhines in that it brings together the praise of God’s greatness; the commandments that one must follow; personal wishes for the prosperity and well-being of one’s own family; and the promise of messianic redemption, if only a Jewish woman obeys the religious laws. However, in contrast to many Sabbath tkhines, Kats’s poem does not address the commandments of lighting the Sabbath candles or of removing a portion of the khale (hallah) dough.86 Instead, it focuses, in stanzas 4, 6, and 7, on the good food the woman has prepared for her family, emphasizing that she has cooked gestern (yesterday), that is, on Friday, so as not to work or light a fire hayt (probably haynt or heute, “today”), that is, on the day of rest. In contrast to the candle-lighting tkhines, to be recited on Friday evening, this prayer emphasizes the pleasures of the Sabbath table on Saturday morning, after synagogue. Moreover, unlike other Sabbath tkhines, Kats’s prayer does not invoke the punishments that the Mishnah says will befall a woman if she disobeys the commandments. Instead, Kats extols the rewards a woman will receive on earth and in heaven (after both her death and the messianic redemption) for her ability to acquire, prepare, and serve delicious food to her family on the Sabbath. Like most tkhines, Kats’s poem was intended to be recited by an individual woman, yet it was composed in deliberately general terms and thus could be uttered by any Jewish woman celebrating the Sabbath. Although the poem conveys a sense of particularity through its celebratory tone and acknowledgment of a woman’s achievement within

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the religious laws that frame her life, it actually reveals little about its author. Even if it meant to express its author’s personal gratitude and hopes, Kats’s “Tfile l’shabes” was published with the intention that any woman could recite it at the proper moment and that it would apply to the lives of all Jewish women. Published, it was a marketable text that could teach all good Jewish women the proper way to behave on the Sabbath. In this generalized individuality, Khane Kats’s prayer differs from Gele’s colophon prayer and Royzl Fishls’s proem. Each of the last two works identified the particular writer in terms of her name, her family lineage, her place in society, and her professional work as the printer who had produced the text before her audience. In contrast, Kats’s speaker presents herself as an adherent to religious observance. God is her audience, and her creative obedience to His law is the product she offers Him. Kats’s speaker is particular yet anonymous.

Rivke Tiktiner Rivke Tiktiner’s “Simkhes toyre lid” develops this idea of a generalized individuality. Instead of writing a poem in the first-person singular to be recited by any Jewish woman, Tiktiner composed a hymn that was likely sung by a group of women in their separate section of the synagogue while the Torah scrolls were being dressed for the hakafot, the seven ceremonial processions on Simhat Torah in which men carry the scrolls around the main part of the synagogue.87 The poem’s appearance in two columns on the printed page, consisting of a verse followed by a large blank space that leads to the word “Hallelujah,” suggests a call and response, in which a firzogerin, or female prayerleader, might have chanted each line, after which the other women responded, “Hallelujah!”88 Throughout the forty rhymed couplets, the voice speaks only in the first-person plural mir (we), addressing God familiarly as du (you, in the second-person singular) or occasionally referring to the deity in the third-person singular er (he). Tiktiner uses the first-­person singular ikh only when she quotes God speaking directly to the Jewish people. Although Tiktiner presents this song through a communal

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speaker, she deliberately identifies herself by spelling out her name in the text, according to the convention of the acrostic signature, which was first established by the medieval authors of piyyutim, Hebrew liturgical poems composed between the mid-sixth and late eighth centuries ce.89 Tiktiner adapted this classical Hebrew form into a vernacular Yiddish poem for women. The initial lines of the poem’s first twentytwo rhymed couplets form an abecedarian acrostic, which is followed, in the second half of the poem, by a second acrostic that spells out, in eighteen couplets, the author’s name, “Rivke, bas Moreynu haRov Reb Meyer, z"l” (Rivke, daughter of Our Teacher the Rabbi Reb Meyer, of blessed memory; z"l, pronounced “zal,” is the acronym for the Hebrew zikhronov l’vrakha, of blessed memory). According to Frakes, Rivke Tiktiner, whose father was from ­Tykocin (Tiktin) in northeastern Poland, lived most of her life in Prague, where she probably died in 1605.90 She was also the author of Meynekes Rivke (Rivke’s Wet Nurse), a manual of ethical behavior for women, written after 1581 and first published in Prague in 1609 and Krakow in 1618.91 Tiktiner’s “Simkhes toyre lid” was printed twice in Prague in 1650, about a century after her death—once as the third item in a booklet and once by itself.92 The prosodic form of Rivke Tiktiner’s poem determines its content and structures it according to three formal elements: (1) the alphabetical and name acrostics, which determine the letter that begins the initial line in each couplet and thus influence the words and the content of the couplet; (2) the end rhyme that binds each couplet into a unit of syntax and logical sense; and (3) the refrain “Hallelujah!” repeated after each line, which thus makes the line a discrete unit within the couplet. Both orally and on the page, the song is propelled forward by the relentless progression of the alphabet and the author’s name at the beginning of each couplet. Simultaneously, this forward motion is interrupted and even impeded at the end of each line, where the rhyme and the repeated refrain create a pounding rhythm that stops the eye and the voice. My translation, based on Frakes’s edition of the poem, aims to convey the semantic integrity of each couplet and hint at the rhyme scheme, although I have not attempted to replicate the acrostics that shape the poem.93 I consulted a translation by Devra Kay, in which the translator aimed for comprehensibility for a modern reader.94 To this

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end, Kay compressed, elided, or paraphrased some lines and couplets to fit the meaning into modern syntax and unrhymed quatrains, but she did not indicate either the acrostics or the couplet rhymes. Despite its imperfections, the prosody I have attempted echoes the syntactic and logical rhythm of the original so that the stop and start of the voice come across to the modern reader. Rivke bas Meyer Tiktiner, “Eyn simkhes toyre lid” (Prague, 1650) To be sung on Simkhes Toyre over the Seyfer Toyre. One God, You are God of my soul     Who created me complete and whole. You created Heaven and Earth     Your praise is thus forever earned. You were and will forever be     You have created us so simply. You hold all within your might     So we praise You day and night.  You can help our need and pain     So we praise You, God, alone. Your Commandments true and pure     So we thank you well and sure. She who withstands all temptation     You will free from Gehenna’s damnation. Eternal Life, You console us.     Just as You have promised us. You bring to life and cause to die     Thus Your praise is heard on high. You hunt down your enemy     In Gehenna he must stay. Against You no one can conspire     The rebel melts like wax in fire. Eternally on Your throne abide     From even the pious Your prize You hide. Mighty are You, our only God      You help all who pray for good.  There is no God like unto You      Thus Heaven and Earth endure.  Sapphire and precious stone      Show no brilliance against Your shine. 

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

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In eternity He conceals His light      Friends in Heaven’s Realm to illuminate.  Guide us into eternity      Exiled may our sorrows be.  With His crown He has adorned us      Embracing all the Laws of Moses.  He comes to help with heavenly sword      All then follow His true road.  When He calls with smoldering wrath      Heaven and Earth tremble at His voice.  The Messiah’s shofar with one great call      Will awaken the righteous, one and all.  He will comfort His beloved slaves      All the righteous who have served.  He will spread a glorious feast      For those who have obeyed Him best.  From all four corners of the world      He brings the scattered and exiled.  The Host will gather us home to Him      Salvation when the Messiah will come.  Hear, Jerusalem, He gathers His far-flung sheep      All who in Exile suffered harsh punishment.  All this will become true here      As our prophets have written bold and clear.  We’ll see the souls of pious children shine      As in Isaiah it is written down.  The pregnant women, children, common folk      Will join together in one fellowship.  Amongst us He’ll divide His great goodwill      All our days He wants us to fulfill.  God (bless His Name) will heal us whole      Rejoicing, dancing, youths and maidens whirl.  How spacious for us grows the righteous way      When they are shamed that self-same day.  They will be judged, old and young      We swiftly will pay for their wrong.  “I will increase you like the holy sheep      Exile will seem but a dream in sleep.  On the paths of truth I will show you what I own      Into a joyous cry I’ll change your moan. 

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

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I will set you, Jewish children, on the righteous ways      And lengthen all your days.  For brass I will bring you the purest gold      For iron, I’ll bring you silver to behold.  I will gather you up as the sun begins to fall      One must not delay too long a good meal.”  God will raise up every single Jew      Into Your light we will go.  Praising our own God, thus we will      He who has created us all. 

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

(1–80)

With tremendous energy, the speaker proclaims her faith in God and creates a collage of biblical quotations and paraphrases of conventional praise to locate her belief within the sphere of knowledge and rewards that the worshippers in her synagogue will enjoy. The poet connects the children of her synagogue with the souls of those mentioned by the Prophet Isaiah, as she foretells the divine redemption that approaches. By enumerating pregnant women, girls, and boys rather than the generalized Jewish people or the Jewish congregation made up of men, Tiktiner makes the coming salvation particularly relevant and even immediate to the worshippers reciting it in the women’s section. Because the poem brings the women and the “common folk” into the liturgical chant, it builds to its climactic penultimate couplets, where God himself speaks in the first person. God promises to “lengthen all your days” and to replace the brass and iron of the implements of the Jews’ daily life with precious gold and silver, as He gathers the Jews into his shelter “when the sun begins to fall.” With a tone of urgency, God promises not to tarry in this salvation, for “One must not delay too long a good meal.” In the concluding couplets, the poet promises that “God will raise up every single Jew” because she and her congregants are “Praising our own God” as they sing her Simkhes Toyre song. In these lines, Rivke Tiktiner’s celebratory song for the holiday cleverly empowers its singers to bring on the messianic salvation with their very singing of the poet’s words to praise God. Despite the promise of an immediate salvation that will result from the singing of this song, and Tiktiner’s inscription of her own name into the final eighteen couplets that state this promise, Tiktiner’s poem

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conveys, ultimately, a generalized message. It does not reveal the person of the author or details of her particular moment. Instead, the poem depicts the ideal version of how she and all the worshippers in Yiddish should act in the ongoing present moment of Exile in order to bring on the messianic future. The poem is important because it exemplifies the norm of worship, in which Jews, women and men, subsume individual identity to the communal identity of peoplehood. That a woman wrote and circulated such a normative poem in the sixteenth century provides evidence of the exceptional nature of her authorship. By writing a song for ­women’s communal recitation, Rivke Tiktiner provides a text for women’s worship that resembles Hebrew prayers for men. In the absence of a liturgical Yiddish text for women to sing in the synagogue celebration of the recommenced reading of the Torah on Simhat Torah, Tiktiner wrote one. By composing this communal prayer for women, Tiktiner altered the canon of liturgical practice and brought women’s voices into the synagogue service. She translated conventional words of Hebrew prayer into the “women’s language,” Yiddish, and created a collective voice for women behind the mekhitse, the partition that separates the women from the men during the liturgical celebrations that take place in the synagogue. Yet by composing a song for women to recite publicly and communally in a holiday service, Rivke Tiktiner claimed an authorship that was alien to the modern idea of an individual Yiddish poet promoted in Korman’s anthology. Although Korman stated that he could not find a copy of Rivke Tiktiner’s poem, the choral quality of its liturgical voice would have made this work seem out of place in Yidishe dikhterins. However, Korman did include and even highlight a poem intended for a very different kind of communal recitation in the synagogue, one that a woman wrote a century later. I devote the rest of this chapter to that poem.

Toybe Pan More than a century after Rivke Tiktiner, Toybe Pan composed a prayer in verse, meant to be sung in a communal liturgical setting. In contrast to Tiktiner’s poem for the holiday of Simhat Torah, Pan’s

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“Eyn sheyn lid naye gemakht beloshn tkhine iz vardin oysgetrakht” (A Brand-New Beautiful Song, Composed in the Tkhine-Tongue) is a prayer for a specific historical moment rather than for a holiday on the liturgical calendar. Toybe Pan, the daughter of Reb Leyb Pitsker and wife of Reb Yankev Pan, most likely lived in Prague in the late seventeenth century. Her poem consists of fifty rhymed quatrains, each ending with a refrain as a fifth line, Foter kinig (Father King). The title of the poem is a rhymed couplet that announces the poem’s originality and its language. The first half of the title, “Eyn sheyn lid naye gemakht” (literally, “A beautiful poem newly made”) advertises the poem according to the conventions of the day, as both aesthetically pleasing and original. The second half of the title, “beloshn tkhine iz vardin oysgetrakht” (literally, “was invented in the language of the tkhine”) designates both the language of composition, Yiddish rather than Hebrew, and the genre of the ­tkhines. Beneath the title stands a third line, “Bnign adir ayom vnora,” to the tune of “Adir ayom vnora.” A second variant edition of this poem gives a different epigraph, “Benign akeyde” (to the tune of “Akeda,” the Binding of Isaac).95 The first song was sung on Saturday evening, after the end of the Sabbath.96 The second song I have not found. The title and epigraph indicate that Pan, in composing this poem, made the traditional new. Although the title links Pan’s poem to the women’s realm of individual prayers in Yiddish, the epigraph, indicating the melody to which the poem should be sung, suggests a communal recitation of the poem. Communal prayer in turn suggests the domain of men, because the traditional Jewish prayer community is defined as a minyan, a quorum of ten men, and the melodies cited are Hebrew liturgical poems (piyyutim) sung in the synagogue. Moreover, the refrain of the poem, “Foter kinig,” which in itself suggests communal performance or public recitation, is a Yiddish translation of a familiar Hebrew prayer, “Avinu Malkeinu” (Our Father, Our King), which is chanted in the Yom Kippur liturgy and on fast days.97 The references to “Adir ayom vnora” and the tkhines suggest that Pan’s poem unites women’s solitary Yiddish prayers with men’s communal Hebrew prayers. Pan expands the prayer community to include both women and men. In this way, Toybe Pan, like Royzl Fishls, combines male and female traditions.

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In the fifty stanzas of this poem, Pan addresses God, begging him to be merciful and to stop the terrible plague afflicting Prague’s Jews. Using the familiar form of “you” (du) to address God, typically used in tkhines, she speaks in the voice of the collective “we” (mir), rather than the more typical individual “I” (ikh). Rather than request the conventionally generalized messianic redemption of the Jews, which will take place at some unspecified point in the future, Pan hopes for a delimited and concrete salvation, one bound to the worldly present as experienced by the speaker and her community. In this sense Pan’s poem is a public prayer to be sung in the synagogue, during communal worship, although it is written in the language of daily life and of private women’s prayers. From the start, the poem conveys in conventional language an urgency that is anything but conventional. The opening lines praise God as merciful and ask him to listen to the prayer that follows. But the invocation depicts a God of both mercy and anger, a God who can stay his fury and overlook the sinful nature of the speaker and her community. Lord God, You are the very merciful one. Therefore bend Your ears to hear us. May You turn your fury away from us. And not search out our many sins:   Father King. Day and night we will pray to the Blessed Name. That He shall accept our plea. And hear our prayer. And grant us all our requests:   Father King. (1–10)

By naming God as both angry and merciful, Pan signals the extreme danger in which the plague places her and her community and the urgency with which she writes her prayer. The situational specificity becomes clearer in stanzas 3–4. Since You knew how distressed we are. And now are entrapped in calamity and anguish. May You, dear Lord God, acknowledge our prayer.

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And let nothing happen to us:     Father King. Bring help to us in good time. Dear Lord God, fight for us. Let us escape from the plague. Let us find grace and mercy:     Father King. (11–20)

Stanza 3 elaborates on the request of stanza 2 that God hear the speaker’s prayer and respond, by stating that “we” are in a state of “calamity and anguish.” The urgency of stanza 4, “Bring us help in good time,” makes explicit the circumstances requiring the prayer, “Let us escape from the plague.” Stanzas 5 and 6 begin to particularize the general situation of the plague and locate it in the concrete experiences of individual people. Help us in our great need. And don’t let any more die this kind of death. And obscure the Angel of Death That no one shall die this kind of death:     Father King. Merciful, beloved God, make the plague cease. To You we plead, young and old. That we shall soon see that it is getting better. No one will need to be carried out [as a corpse]:     Father King. (21–30)

In stanza 5, the generalized request, “Help us in our great need,” focuses, in both lines 2 and 4, on the physical particularity of the terrible death of the plague: “And don’t let any more die this kind of death.” By repeating this phrase before and after the request that God conceal or obscure the Angel of Death, Pan bridges the distance between God’s power to create or destroy life and man’s mortality. Stanza 6 again repeats the request, “make the plague cease,” but specifies the requesters: “young and old.” With this phrase, we see that Pan speaks not for an abstract community of “the Jewish people” but rather for a particular population at the present time. Rather than request the salvation of all

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Jews at some unspecified point in the future, Pan demands an immediate and concrete future for her community: “That we shall soon see that it is getting better.” Defining her demands even more specifically in the next line, “No one will need to be carried out [as a corpse],” Pan communicates a concern not with spiritual salvation but rather with a desire that the members of her community avoid the most painful physicality of death: that they not become corpses. This line reflects both the poet’s fear of death and the customs associated with death and burial. In ever-increasing detail, the poem reveals specific events and practices in Pan’s community during the plague. In stanza 7, the poet tells how a person infected by the plague is isolated in a sick house until he or she inevitably expires. In subsequent stanzas (8–11), she describes the help given to the plague victims by khameysh ananshim, the Five Men (perhaps a benevolent group), who put themselves at risk to make sure that no one has been forgotten; by frume vayber (pious women); and by other communal organizations that perform many good deeds for the stricken. How nicely Five Men walk around. And look everywhere And let no one be neglected These five men, they themselves stand [in danger?]. The Blessed Name will give them good wages:     Father King. Pious women also all the time Do many good things for the sick people. Many associations all the time. They are willing to do many good deeds. May God protect them from all suffering:     Father King. (36–45)

A fifth line makes each of these stanzas deviate from the four-line norm of the poem. Such variants might suggest a printer’s error—that one line was mistakenly broken in two or that the fifth line was imported erroneously from another poem.98 However, each fifth line here seems a deliberate addition: In stanza 8, the fifth line rhymes with the preceding

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couplet, and in stanza 9, all five lines rhyme. Moreover, in both cases, the extra line adds to the meaning of the stanza by blessing those charitable souls whom the poet has described: “May God grant good wages” to the Five Men, and “May God protect from all suffering” the pious women and the aid associations. Stanza 10 sums up and reiterates the blessings of the extra fifth lines in the preceding strophes, and stanza 11 draws a moral lesson from these examples, quoting the proverbial Hebrew saying, “Tsedoke t­ atsil memoves” (Charity protects one from death), and then adds yet another example of the generosity of the community’s members, the important rich men (ashirem khashuvem). These men are so important that the poet designates them with a Hebraic phrase, and emphasizes how they themselves (zelber) walk through the town dispensing help. Many good things are done. May the Blessed Name acknowledge this. And those who give a lot of charity. May the Blessed Name extend their lives:     Father King. Charity protects you from death, as it is written. Important rich people they themselves go around. And to do good deeds whatever is possible. Dear Lord God do not leave us longer in this pain:     Father King. (45–55)

Stanza 11 ends with yet another entreaty to God, “do not leave us longer in this pain,” as though the poet has summoned all the examples to justify to God that he should make good on the proverb that “charity protects from death” and come forth and save the community from the plague. In the subsequent stanzas, Pan reveals her knowledge of Hebrew liturgy, quoting directly from the penitential prayer “Shalosh Esrei Middot” and other sources to persuade God to stop the plague (­stanzas 12–14). She tells how the entire community, “young and old,” prays fervently that “the distress turn away from big and small” (stanza 13). Alongside the quotations from prayers and the assurances that all the Jews are praying, Pan employs repetition and refrain to strengthen

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her argument with the rhetorical tools of prayer. She appeals to God’s mercy by describing the “Wailing and great lamenting / When someone is carried out [dead]” and comments that “the greatest pain is / That he shall not be buried in the cemetery” (stanza 15) because internment of plague victims inside the city was forbidden by law. Following the literary tradition established by other devotional writings, Pan’s poem invokes examples from sacred history to persuade God to intervene in the present moment. In stanzas 17–22, the poem alternates between examples from the Tanakh and the current plague in order to convince God to rescue the Prague community from its duress. In stanza 17 the poet invokes the example of Sodom, the city that God intended to destroy for its evil ways but was willing to spare if Abraham could find ten righteous men within it (Gen. 18:22–32). In Sodom you wanted to find ten righteous ones. And you wanted to let no evil happen. And here, thank God, are many righteously pious, very devout: Dear Lord God, let no more distress come to us:     Father King. (81–85)

To persuade God to stop the plague, Pan pleads that if he were willing to show mercy to the people of Sodom, how much more so should he pity the Jews of Prague, among whom number far more than ten “righteously pious, very devout” people? If Abraham could convince God to save Sodom for the sake of ten innocents, then why shouldn’t Pan be able to convince God to save the Jews of Prague? In this way Pan both interprets current events in the terms of sacred history and also likens her own role of spokesperson for her community to that of the biblical hero Abraham. The analogy suggests the ease with which Pan, a woman writing a poem in Yiddish, assumes the authority of speaking to God for the general good. In stanzas 18 and 19, Pan further describes the sufferings of Prague’s Jews, and in stanza 20, she dramatizes the present situation in terms of a metaphor from the time of the Temple in Jerusalem. Stanza 18 asks God to consider the community’s prayers and to have mercy. Dear Lord God, consider this prayer[s] all the time. And have mercy on us all today.

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Consider the charity and the benevolence done here today. For the merit of this may you accept our prayer:     Father King.99 (86–90)

When he considers “this prayer,” God should have mercy on (der ­baremen) Pan and her community. In bestowing mercy, not only should God consider Pan’s prayer, but he should also take into account the tsadoke and gmiles-khessed, the charity and the benevolence, or, literally, the interest-free loans given by Prague’s Jews, whose good deeds should make even more compelling the merit, or zkhus, of Pan’s prayer. This line of argument reveals the authority with which Pan speaks for her community as one who knows its financial dealings and institutions. In contrast to these meritorious actions of charity and interestfree loans, stanza 19 posits generalities that take the argument in a different, somewhat ironic direction. If we have committed sins. For this we shall repent. Not sinning anymore is a good atonement. Lord God we fall at your feet:     Father King. (91–95)

Admitting the possibility that members of the community have sinned, Pan assures God that the sinners will both repent and cease from their wicked actions. The irony falls in the third line of this stanza, where the poet asserts that nimer ton iz eyn gute bos (not sinning anymore is a good atonement). In contrast to the deliberate and material good deeds of the wealthy—giving charity to the needy and loaning money without a financial profit—the act of simply stopping the commission of sins appears to Pan to serve well enough as atonement for past sins. Stanza 20 culminates the irony: Having acknowledged in stanza 19 that members of the community might indeed have sinned and now are repenting, Pan now states even more directly the lack of virtue among the members of her community. Although some of the people are not so pious. Dear Lord God, one could not sacrifice the incense in the Temple. Without that stinking resin, “Devil’s Filth.”

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Dear Lord God, help us in this need:     Father King. (96–100)

Although some members of the community are impious, Pan posits an analogy that argues for the virtue of the community as a whole, not in spite of but indeed because of those imperfect elements. With the phrase toyvls koyt (devil’s filth), Pan conjures up the ancient Temple, where the priests burned incense for sacrifice, combining it with the khalbone, the foul-smelling galbanum resin, called toyvls koyt in Yiddish. Rashi, among other rabbis, noted that perfume with a bad smell must be included in the ketoret, or incense sacrifice, and used this as an analogy for the need to bring together in Jewish fasts and prayers wicked as well as good people. Stanza 20 conveys both Pan’s wit and her learnedness, for she has, it seems, read Rashi and other rabbinic commentators.100 Stanza 21 further evinces Pan’s acquaintance with rabbinic literature, particularly with Midrash. In the times of King David The Angel of Death ran around in the street. And you took mercy upon them. So, too, now, may no more people die:     Father King. (101–105)

Reminding God of the midrashic story of how he saved the sinful of Jerusalem from the Angel of Death running wild in the streets in the time of King David, Pan demands that he show comparable mercy to the Jews of Prague.101 This segment ends with stanza 22, in which the poet pleads with God that no matter how sinful the Jews of Prague may be, he should save them from the terrible plague. Young and old, we repent. Just stop the plague. Even if, God forbid, we become entirely sinful. May You give us a free gift [matones khinam] of salvation:     Father King. (106–110)

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Casting aside her earlier arguments based on merit and good deeds, the poet now begs God to save the Jews of Prague from the plague as a matones khinam, literally a “free gift,” unearned grace granted by God. The reason for this desperate request becomes clear in stanzas 23–25, where the poet explains the political danger faced by her community and invokes the emperor, the empress, and the prince. In the introduction to his anthology, Korman points out that Pan was all too conscious “that in time of plague, the blame for the plague is thrown onto the Jews” and that because this plague falls “before Pesach,” that is, near Easter, a season in which pogroms often took place, there is great danger that a “false accusation” of the Jews and even, perhaps, “an evil decree from the Emperor” would be forthcoming.102 The fear that the emperor might “believe all the evil spoken about us” is audible in stanza 23, where Pan asks God to consider well the good deeds of learning Torah that the Jews are engaged in, “So that we shall find grace and mercy in the Emperor’s eyes.” Dear Lord God, please consider. The good acts of learning that are being done. So that we shall find grace and mercy in the Emperor’s eyes. So that the Emperor should not believe all the evil spoken about us:     Father King. (111–115)

The tone of concern grows stronger in stanza 24, where the poet makes clear the hierarchy within which the Jews are living: The heart of the Emperor lies in Your hand Dear Lord God, may You help him soon. And may You give him in his heart. That he shall be merciful to the unfortunate community:     Father King. (116–120)

Although the Jews must endure the whims of the emperor’s “heart,” that mighty organ lies in the hands or “might” of God himself. Therefore Pan asks God to intervene with the emperor on behalf of the Jews to change the political climate in which the Jews live. This request may be seen as a reversal of the kind of requests for intervention that ­occur in tkhines, where a woman may ask one of the biblical Matri-

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archs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, or Leah, to intervene with God on behalf of the Jews. In such a tkhine, the woman praying assumes a more comfortable and direct connection to the female legendary figure than to God himself, believing that the Matriarch can influence him better than the supplicant. In stanza 24 of Pan’s poem, though, the speaker addresses God directly to intervene with and influence the more distant and dangerous emperor. Appealing to the God of Mercy to act with divine justice, this Jewish woman finds the deity more accessible than the Austrian king. Even though the poet states that God is more powerful than the emperor—Dos harts fun den kayser iz in dayner givelt (The heart of the Emperor lies in your hand)—the stanza carries a hint that she fears the emperor’s ability to harm the Jews. Pan’s lines reveal her greater confidence in God’s control of the emperor than in any human attempt to negotiate with the gentile ruler to protect the Jewish community. Declaring loyalty to the “dear” emperor, the supplicant offers what appears to be a patriotic blessing. May the Living God grant our dear Emperor a hundred years to live. With the Empress and with the young prince and with all that belongs to him. And all who speak well of the unfortunate community. Let no illness come into their houses:     Father King. (121–125)

Although these lines state the poet’s wish that God protect the emperor, his wife, and his son from the plague and grant them long lives, they also make clear that the poet will pray only for those who “speak well” of the beleaguered Jewish community, that is, for those who will protect it from the false accusations. Stanza 26 contrasts the present situation of Prague’s Jews with the power they held in ancient times. We have neither Temple, nor priests anymore. Who always used to defend us. And entreat God for us. Dear Lord God, accept our prayer:     Father King.

(126–130)

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In the past, the Temple in Jerusalem and its priests interceded with God for the sake of the Jewish nation. Now, when the Jews have lost these symbols of power and are subject to the emperor and to antiSemitic accusations, it is the woman poet who must entreat God to accept the community’s prayer. Stanza 27 states that God, as he has always done, will be merciful to the helpless Jews. When we relied upon the Blessed Name. He never abandoned us in our need. He will remember his scattered sheep. And will soon lift the punishment from us:     Father King. (131–135)

The phrase, zayne far shpreyte shof (his scattered sheep) refers back to the liturgical allusions in stanza 16 that frame the present calamity in terms of a tradition and offer comfort and salvation. Stanza 28, however, reverts to the merciless present moment, the moment that rises up and threatens to overwhelm the poem. Dear Lord God how we are in need. Never was Death so terrible. Dear God, let no one die before his time. May You take pity on your poor children:     Father King. (136–140)

Mitigating the anguish, Pan reminds God of his covenant with the Jewish people through the biblical Patriarchs. Dear Lord God, remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the elders. And uphold Your oath. When Israel is in great need. You will relieve her of all her pain:     Father King. You promised Abraham. When Isaac was lying bound on the altar. That You would hold your hand over us. For the sake of Jacob the elder:     Father King. (141–150)

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Alluding to God’s reiterated covenant with Abraham after the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, these stanzas argue that by helping the Jews of Prague in the present, God will fulfill what he swore to the Patriarchs in the past. Pan reinterprets the covenant in Genesis according to the Prague Jews’ needs. When God stays Abraham’s knife from Isaac’s throat, he promises Abraham many descendants and sovereignty over the Land of Israel as a reward for his obedience in offering up his son (Gen. 22:15–18). In stanza 29, Pan reminds God to keep his word to help the Children of Israel whenever they are in distress. In stanza 30, she suggests to God the analogy that the Prague Jews in the grip of the plague are victims, much as Isaac was a victim on the altar. Now is the moment, she implies, when God should make good on his promise that Abraham will have political and national power in the world: “I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore; and your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes” (Gen. 22:17).103 In stanzas 31–35, Pan attempts to justify her writing a communal poem for women and men to recite together. By mentioning the two months of Adar in the Hebrew calendar during a leap year and explaining that the present year is a leap year, Pan reminds God that Jews customarily celebrate Purim in the second Adar. The month of Adar approaches. In the beginning, there was a great distress, And afterward, a great joy came out of it. May You now in this time also remember. And let all the sicknesses cease:     Father King. (151–155)

Asking God to recall that ancient Adar in Shushan, which began in “a great distress” and ended with “a great joy,” the poet begs God to apply that paradigm to the present Adar in Prague. In this Adar we also have great suffering. Soon from this shall come a great joy. From the “Small Purim” a great celebration shall come. And, Dear Lord God, let all the sicknesses cease:     Father King. (156–160)

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Compounding this mention of the leap year’s doubled month of Adar, the poet promises God that for his intervention, Prague’s Jews will celebrate a kleyn purim or Purim Katan, a second, “small” or “minor” Purim, to commemorate the community’s hoped-for salvation from the plague.104 I will return to these stanzas shortly. The poet then goes on to explain why she, rather than the community’s cantor or rabbi, entreats God for salvation. We pray to You, Merciful Father. Relieve us of our distress. As we are so heavily burdened Dear Lord God, save us from this pain:     Father King. Because this year is a leap year. Alas, our Cantor has died. And since our dear Rabbi is [also] dead, We are, God forbid, nearly starved. May we inherit many good things:     Father King. When our dear Rabbi was in this world, He stood before us. Then the suffering came upon us. God took him away from us. Let much health come to us:     Father King. (161–177)

In stanza 34, Pan states the community’s loss of its authoritative leaders, the cantor and the rabbi, and in the first line appears to attribute the cantor’s death to the leap year (iber-yor) of the plague, citing a superstition about bad luck brought by a leap year.105 The rabbi, she says in the next stanza, has also died. Echoing the reference (in stanza 26) to the priests who once “defended us” or, literally, “stood up for” the Jews (der ale mol tut far unz shteyn) before the destruction of the ancient Temple, Pan explains that before the plague the rabbi too had stood before the congregation, perhaps to defend them from adversity (iz er gevezn far unz geshtelt). Now that the plague has taken him as well, the poet herself, Toybe Pan, must step in to ask for God’s help.

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In light of these losses, Pan uses the biblical story of Queen Esther to justify why she speaks to God on behalf of the community. In stanzas 31 and 32, she alludes to the two months of Adar that occur during a leap year; in stanza 33, she notes that the current year is a leap year and that apparently she is writing the poem during the second month of Adar. As we saw in connection with the cantor’s death, leap years were also considered to bring bad luck. During a leap year, the holiday of Purim falls in the second month of Adar. It is Pan’s mention of Purim that brings to mind Queen Esther’s legendary heroism in persuading King Ahasuerus to save the Jews from Haman’s plan to destroy them. In the Scroll of Esther, when the queen discovers Haman’s plot to annihilate the Jews of the Persian kingdom, she risks her own life by approaching King Ahasuerus to reveal the plot to him. This story resonates powerfully when we consider how Pan herself appeals to God for the same end and suggests that she too takes on risks comparable to those of Esther by speaking on her own initiative. Although Pan does not explicitly compare the Jewish queen’s persuasive words and her own, the analogy lies close to the surface in these stanzas. In the story of Esther and the observance of Purim, Pan finds canonical support for her own unorthodox action of writing a poem that addresses God on behalf of her community in a crisis and suggests that a woman—in this case, Toybe Pan—might change the destiny of her people. The Prague crisis posed political as well as physical dangers to the Jews. Like the Megillah’s Esther, who approaches the king with political acumen to save the Jews, Pan addresses the problem of Jews at the mercy of a gentile ruler. The poet asks God to consider the Jews’ “good acts of learning” as insurance against the emperor believing malicious accusations that the Jews had caused the plague (“So that we shall find grace and mercy in the Emperor’s eyes. / So that the Emperor should not believe all the evil spoken about us” [stanza 23]). Like Esther, Pan requests mercy for the Jews, although she addresses God rather than the gentile ruler. The poet asks God to ensure that the emperor “shall be merciful to the unfortunate community” (stanza 24), and she prays for the long life and health of the emperor, the empress, their son, the prince, and “all who speak well of the unfortunate community, / Let no illness come into their houses” (stanza 25). According to the Scroll of Esther, a woman must not address the king unless invited. In Jewish

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Prague, women prayed to God privately, individually, and often silently. By advocating publicly and politically on behalf of her entire community, like Esther, Pan moved beyond the customary roles of Jewish women.106 Pan takes a moral lesson for the community from the death of the righteous rabbi. When the Blessed Name wants to punish Israel. He lets the Righteous go to Paradise ahead of time.107 So that he shall not be met with the distress. May the Blessed Name lift the pain from us:     Father King. How nicely he lived out his years in joy. And gave a lot of charity in his day. And did many good deeds. May his merit be of help to us for all time:     Father King. From what he did, may we also benefit. In the Other World may he defend all of Israel. And pray. His merit shall be of help to us for all time:     Father King. (178–192)

Reminding her listeners of the rabbi’s righteous behavior, Pan asserts that his death was God’s punishment to the community, yet she expresses hope that the rabbi’s death will help the Jews of Prague survive the plague. She asks God to let the community benefit from the rabbi’s presence in the Other World, where he may “defend all of Israel / And pray.” In the next stanza, suddenly, climactically, Pan addresses the dead rabbi directly, using the singular imperative, and describes to him how innocent children died painfully from the blisters characteristic of bubonic plague. She commands the rabbi to intervene in heaven for the sake of these suffering children and then goes on to characterize the young dead as takhshitim (jewels)—toddlers and older children who know how to read and pray. Cry out to the angel with force That he will lift the plague from us. And especially for the sake of the children, those who die in blisters.

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May You, dear Lord God, take pity on us:     Father King. Jewels of two or three years. Also those who can read and pray. Lord God of Hosts Take away from us all evils:     Father King. (193–202)

Because the two lines describing the children are unanchored fragments, they convey a sorrow beyond grammar. The epithet for God, Eyl sheday tsvoes (Lord God of Hosts), taken from Hebrew liturgy, intensifies the force of stanza 40 and contrasts with the more intimate Germanic Yiddish translations of epithets, such as the refrain Foter kinig (Father King). The climactic stanzas 33–40 describe in specific terms the devastation that the plague has wreaked on the Jews of Prague, killing the community’s religious authorities as well as the innocent small children. Spelling out the details of these losses, Pan explains why she is impelled to take over as spokesperson for the community. Stanzas 41 and 42 develop Pan’s expression of sorrow in terms that reveal her learnedness. All the gates are closed except the gate of tears. Dear Lord God hear our prayers. Take our tears into Your flask.108 And rescue Your people:     Father King. With these tears erase our sins. You are our Father and we are Your children. We praise You and all that is Yours. Dear Father do not forsake Your children:     Father King. (203–212)

Stanza 41 commences with Pan’s Yiddish translation of a Talmudic Hebrew proverb, Ale torn zenen tsu on di torn fun trern (all the gates are closed except the gate of tears).109 Pan summons this proverb, which recurs in the mid-eighteenth century in at least one tkhine, by Serl bas Yankev Segal of Dubnow,110 to express the extremity of her sorrow at

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the deaths of the children. The third line of stanza 41—Nem unzere trern in dayn logl anayn (take our tears into your flask)—quotes or paraphrases another Hebrew source, Psalms 56:9, where David asks God to “put my tears into Your flask.” In her effort to convey to God the depth of her distress at the deaths of the children in her community, as well as of the rabbi and the cantor, Pan uses the rhetorical strategy of quoting authoritative traditional texts. Unlike a modern poet, who might strive to express the strength of her feelings through an original phrase, Pan recasts the well-known phrases of traditional texts to give her individual emotions the weight of collective experience. The words expressing the grief of a legendary figure such as the biblical David, although great themselves, have accumulated a collective weight through their repetition in rabbinic and liturgical texts. Thus the words of the individual David become words for, and of, the many generations of Jews. When Pan in seventeenthcentury Prague wants to convince God of her own deep feelings, which are also a metonym for the feelings of the community for which she speaks, she adapts David’s biblical words into her Yiddish meter and rhyme. In this way, Pan is able to move her reader or her ideal listener—God—to remember how David beseeched him in Psalm 56, “when the Philistines seized him in Gath,” and perhaps to persuade God to help the Jews of Prague as he helped the imprisoned David. Moreover, without a trace of hubris or self-consciousness, by quoting David’s psalm in this way, Pan implies an analogy between David the psalmist and herself, Pan the poet. In her grief for the Jews of Prague, Pan assumes the role of the psalmist; she, like David, prays to God for redemption from duress and thus writes herself into the sacred Jewish traditions and texts. Pan’s assumption of authority as a writer in taking on the role of David repeats her similar assumption of the role of communal spokesperson like Queen Esther. There is a difference, though. In the earlier stanzas, where Pan alludes to Esther and the Purim story, she takes as her model the individual woman, Esther, who speaks to a gentile man, King Ahasuerus, on behalf of all the Jewish people of Shushan. Pan transforms this situation in terms only of the intended listener—she, the individual woman, speaks to the Jewish God rather than to a gentile king on behalf of the Jews of Prague.

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Of course Esther’s problem is how to stop a human evil, Haman, whereas Pan’s problem is how to stop a medical epidemic. But Pan appeals for help in resolving a political problem as well: the likeliness of the emperor to heed the libels blaming the Jews for the epidemic. Pan also takes on the role of the psalmist. Like King David, she addresses God directly and speaks for her own individual grief as well as for the collective sufferings of Prague’s Jews. Summoning tradition to give authority to her particular woman’s voice, Pan thereby invokes her learnedness to appeal to God on behalf of the community, the Jews of Prague. In stanza 42, Pan alludes to another biblical verse with the verb mek op (erase), which is a translation of another classical Hebrew verse. With these tears erase our sins. You are our Father and we are Your children. We praise You and all that is Yours. Dear Father do not forsake Your children:     Father King. (208–212)

In the logic of the metaphors of stanzas 41 and 42, God hears the prayers of the speaker and her community only through the Gate of Tears, which is the only gate that is still open. Hearing their prayers through their tears, God will place these tears or prayers into his flask (Yiddish logl; Hebrew nod) and, in doing so, will have the means by which to rescue the Jews of Prague from the plague. Pan’s summoning of tears as a means of prayer resonates with another Yiddish prayer by a woman during roughly this same period. As Chava Weissler discusses at length, the learned Leah Horowitz (ca. 1720–ca. 1800) in Bolechow, Galicia (in southern Poland), was the author of Tkhine of the Matriarchs, in which tears figure prominently. Horowitz instructs women to pray “with copious tears,” which are “redemptive,” in that “redemption will come because of the merit of righteous women, because redemptive tears are more common among women than men.”111 As Weissler shows, these tears had kabbalistic significance for Horowitz. When Horowitz instructs her women readers to “pray and weep about the exile of the Shekhinah and not for the sake of the needs of this world” (Weissler’s emphasis), Weissler, citing Moshe Idel, shows that “weeping was a technique of both theosophical contemplation, that is, of

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envisioning the hidden nature of the Godhead, and theurgical manipulation, that is, of bringing about changes in the relations among the sefirot so as to influence earthly life.”112 In contrast to Horowitz’s insistence that women weep and pray for messianic redemption and not for “the needs of this world,” Pan’s whole poem focuses on the material needs of her community: the recovery of health and the survival of a possible political crisis in this “transitory world.”113 Although Horowitz’s Tkhine of the Matriarchs seems to have been intended to teach and reform relatively comfortable Jews at a moment of relative communal and political stability, Pan’s poem expresses the needs of a community in dire crisis. Now, in the first line of stanza 42, Pan asks God to use these tears, stored in his flask, to erase the sins of the community. She goes on to invoke a standard metaphor, also drawn from the liturgy, of God as father and the Jews as his children. There is a strange power in the transition from the actual children who have died from the plague in stanza 40 to the traditional metaphor of God as the father and the Jews as his children. By placing the metaphor after the shocking example of children killed by the plague, Pan infuses the conventional figure with a vivid urgency. Thus the last line of the stanza, where Pan pleads, “Dear Father do not forsake Your children,” doubly refers to the actual children who have perished and to the entire Jewish community of Prague. The penultimate section of the poem offers praise to God. This praise begins in stanzas 43 and 44, which draw on standard phrases and figures. We see that from You and Your great grace Comes everything that happens to us. To no one else do we turn. Dear Lord God listen to us soon:     Father King. Dear God, You sit in the Seventh Heaven. May You give great attention to your poor sheep. From the throne of judgment may You rise And may You sit down on the throne of mercy. And may You give us joy out of our calamity:     Father King. (213–223)

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These stanzas also echo the High Holiday liturgy. The phrase zibetn gereykht (seventh heaven or kingdom) refers to the highest sphere of heaven, where God resides. The phrases mides din (attribute of judgment) and mides rakhmim (attribute of mercy) are rabbinic terms that symbolize the two aspects of God, justice and mercy. In the Yom Kippur liturgy, prayers appeal to God to turn from his harsh justice to his kind mercy. Pan’s language makes literal the idea that God is a king who rules from the distinct thrones of justice and mercy. Moreover, these lines in stanza 44 repeat the same motif that Pan used in stanza  12: “On the Throne of Mercy may You sit.” With the verbs oyfshteyn (stand up) and zetsn (sit down), Pan envisions God’s physical action as he changes thrones in order to save the Jews of Prague with mercy and transform their calamity into joy. Stanzas 45 and 46 further amplify Pan’s request that God turn strict justice into mercy. Dear Lord God, no person can run away from You. Because You can find him so easily. If he is a wicked man, he can repent. The Blessed Name shall acknowledge our prayer:     Father King. Indeed, You do not desire the wicked man to die. When he repents, he has no need/sorrow. With the righteous, You are strict. Dear Lord God, relieve us of all pain:     Father King. (224–233)

In the first two lines of stanza 45, the poet affirms that God is just and all-powerful; He can find anyone who does wrong and tries to escape from Him. But the rest of stanza 45 emphasizes that God’s mercy will prevail, for if the runaway—individual—has sinned, he can repent and such penance will call forth God’s beneficence, allowing God to hear the prayer of the repentant, which is like the prayer of Pan for the Jews of Prague. Stanza 46 develops the image of the merciful God even further. Pan persuades God to assert his merciful aspect by stating, “You do not desire that the wicked man die.” Reiterating the ability of the wicked to repent and God’s strictness with the righteous, Pan repeats her re-

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quest, that God “relieve us of all the pain.” Indeed, the last line before the refrain “Father King” in nearly every stanza in the poem voices a request that God hear the prayers and relieve the pain and suffering of the Jews of Prague. This repetition of theme and rhetorical stance, if not always of exact phrases, strengthens the poem’s argument by the simple force of assertion. The poem seeks to soften God’s strict justice into mercy with its pious nagging, a form of feminine devotional persuasion. The argument of the poem culminates in stanzas 47 and 48. Therefore we entreat You with our whole hearts. Rescue us from these sufferings. And lift the plague from us. And keep on protecting us from all evil/unclean things:     Father King. All the angels in Heaven shall make prayers for us. And the Blessed Name shall receive their prayer. May our entreaty come true for us. And may all the sicknesses be allowed to cease:     Father King. (234–243)

The signal of the argument’s culmination is the term of logic derum (therefore), which appears only once earlier, in stanza 1. Because God is merciful, as the poet has taken such pains to establish in the preceding stanzas, the poet and the Jews of Prague (“we”) will “therefore” pray “with our whole hearts.” The logic of sincerity and need will compel God to rescue them from their sufferings, lift the plague, and protect them from all evil or unclean (treyfe) things. In stanza 48, the poet asserts that all the angels in heaven will pray for the Jews of Prague and that God shall accept their prayers, so that their requests for the plague’s cessation will come to pass. The final two stanzas of the poem, stanzas 49 and 50, turn to the composition of the poem itself and its author. I will cease my godly song. May the Blessed Name let all our entreaties come true for us. And shall protect us from all the pain. And shall soon lead us into the Holy Land:     Father King.

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If someone wants to know who made this song. Toybe wife of The Honorable Rabbi Jacob Pan conceived of it. Daughter of The Honorable Rabbi Leyb Pitsker, of blessed memory. May the Blessed Name protect us all:     Father King. (245–253)

In stanza 49, after the poet announces her intention to end the poem, to “cease my godly song,” she sums up her final request of God: that he make the community’s entreaties come true in a material way, givern; that he protect the Jews of Prague from all the pain of the plague; and that he lead them into the Holy Land. Unlike Leah Horowitz, whose deeply spiritual Tkhine of the Matriarchs required women not to pray for concrete benefits in this world, Pan’s prayer makes no apologies for emphasizing the material. With the single perfunctory line in the penultimate stanza attending to the hope for the messiah, Pan implies that before the Jews of Prague can worry seriously about the messianic future, they must contend with the plague. In stanza 50 Pan signs her name to the poem she has written. Like Royzl Fishls’s last lines, Pan’s follow the conventions of the times. With modesty, she precedes her name with the phrase, Ven emets velt visn ver dos lid hot gemakht (if/when someone wants to know who made this song). However, it is with artistry that she “makes” this final stanza, for she ensures that her name, her husband’s, and her father’s are placed into carefully rhymed couplets, in keeping with the rest of the poem. Here is the concluding stanza in Yiddish: Ven emets velt visn ver dos lid hot gemakht. Toybe eyshes khmhorer [an abbreviation for kvod moreynu hareynu harav reb] Yankev Pan hot es der trakht. Bas khmehr’r [a variant of the previous abbreviation] Leyb Pitsker z"l. HaSh’Y [hashem yisborekh] zol uns bahitn al. (249–252)

The first couplet rhymes gemakht (made) and der trakht (conceived of or thought up), whereas the second couplet rhymes the abbreviation z"l (zikhronov l’vrakha), pronounced “zal,” with the word al (meaning “all”). These rhymed pairs summarize the story of the poem and its making: The poem was both made ( gemakht) with all the craft

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and skill of an artisan and invented, conceived of, or thought through (­dertrakht) by Pan. Both the craft controlling the form and the intellectual acuity that determined the meaning were the work of the woman Toybe Pan. Like Royzl Fishls, Pan presents her lineage according to her husband and her deceased father, defining herself as a writer by her connections to her closest male relatives, who also were learned men. She thus places herself into the flow of a patrilineal Jewish tradition, as she takes on the normatively male role of speaking for the community in her poem. The second rhymed couplet links the past with the present, the dead with the living, because z"l, the standard phrase that follows the name of the deceased, connects the dead to the divine will and to the ability of the living to remember him or her. The rhyme of z"l with al, where al refers to all those still alive, all those who have survived the plague thus far and for whose sake Pan has written her poem, brings together the dead and the living under the protection of “Father King.” Pan’s poem, “Eyn sheyn lid,” presents the extraordinary example of a woman who takes upon herself the role of a spokesperson for the entire Jewish community of Prague. Pan takes on this role because the men who ordinarily perform these tasks—the rabbi and the cantor—have died and there seems to be no one else left to speak to God on behalf of the Jews of Prague. In this way, Pan resembles Royzl Fishls and Gele, who also took on roles usually ascribed to men, printer and publisher. While not unique, these three women appear to be exceptions in their learnedness, in their literacy, and in the ability and ease with which they performed the activities and assumed the authority necessary to compose and lead prayer, publish books, and write poems. In contrast to Khane Kats’s modest prayer for lighting the Sabbath candles, intended for private recitation in the home and filled with gratitude and hope, Toybe Pan’s “Brand-New Beautiful Song, Composed in the Tkhine-Tongue” presents a searing argument to God. And although both Yiddish prayers were apparently intended for public communal recitation or singing, Pan’s work differs from Rivke ­Tiktiner’s “Simhat Torah Song,” which was composed to enable women to accompany from behind the mekhitse, the partition dividing the women’s section from the men’s in a synagogue. Linked to the sacred calendar and the annual repetition of prayer and celebration

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at the end of Sukkot, Tiktiner’s song is as timeless and eternal as the messianic salvation she invokes. In contrast, the collective crisis that occasioned Pan’s poem grounds this prayer in a specific historical moment and a singular Jewish community. The particularity of the plague in Prague in this poem conveys the exceptionality of the woman who took over as prayer leader when the men could no longer pray. It is no wonder that Korman presented Pan’s work as a centerpiece in Yidishe dikhterins, in his effort to create a usable past for the modern women poets in his anthology. Although the Yiddish moderns were learning to write as Jews who could express their individuality in a worldly or secular mode outside the strict borders of traditional life, the premodern poets spoke for the Jewish people from within those borders. Even as a spokeswoman for the community, though, Pan stood out as a distinctive and individual poetic voice. She expanded the role of the firzogerin from the leader of women’s synagogue recitations to that of the royal petitioner and poet who, like Esther and David, spoke with daring authority. Toybe Pan was the perfect example of a premodern woman poet compelled by the desperate circumstances of her people to write a masterpiece to change the larger world, even the gentile world, in which she lived as well.

Th re e  Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood

in Interwar Poland

Burning Bridges: Revolutionary Poetry in Kiev and Warsaw Ezra Korman’s politics and revolutionary poetry of the early 1920s do not explicitly anticipate his anthology of women poets less than a decade later. Indeed, one would not expect from these early works that this poet and anthologizer would subsequently argue for a connection between modern poetry and premodern devotional poetry by women. In 1921, seven years before he edited his anthology of women poets, Korman edited and published a slender volume titled In fayerdikn doyer (In Fiery Duration), in which he gathered recent Yiddish poetry of Ukraine. Korman characterized this poetry as “revolutionary” in form and subject. He collected the works of these avant-garde Yiddish poets immediately following the devastation of pogroms suffered by the Jews of Ukraine, perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists; the pogroms came after a series of dislocations and destructions of Jews and their communities during World War I.1 When he departed Kiev for the United States, Korman stopped in Berlin and, in 1923, issued a second, expanded edition of this anthology under a new title, Brenendike brikn (Burning Bridges), with Structuralist and neofolk illustrations by A. Mintshin and Yisakhar-Ber Rybak.2 In a hostile review of the 1921 edition in the New York Yiddishlanguage daily Der tog, the critic Shmuel Niger had asked, “What do longing and sorrow and thoughts of death have to do with revolutionary lyric?”3 Korman responded to Niger’s complaint in his preface to the anthology’s second edition, saying that “longing and sorrow and thoughts of death” belonged in revolutionary poetry as much as “­pogroms belong in a revolutionary era, as much as death bursts into

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full bloom from human life.”4 This poetry, the anthologist wrote, reflected the borders between the old and the new, the shtetl and the city. It also responded to the catastrophes that had recently befallen the Jews of Ukraine and Poland and, indeed, all of Europe following World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution.5 For Korman, revolutionary poetry would join the past to the present; yet paradoxically, the “fiery generation” used this poetry to burn the bridges that connected them to aspects of the very tradition they aimed to destroy. Korman’s own language reflected the ambivalent status of Yiddish poetry’s relationship to tradition. In his introduction to both editions, Korman argued that a new generation of Yiddish poets must demolish the bonds between their current lives and the Jewish cultural past. Like his contemporary, the Soviet Yiddish writer, critic, and literary historian Yekhezkl Dobrushin—who decried the love poetry couched in folkloric language written by the Yiddish poet David Einhorn and the deeply biblical eroticism of the Hebrew poet Khayim Nakhman Bialik—Korman stated that the only way to provide a future for Jewish poetry was to disconnect from the past.6 Yet, in order to describe this Yiddish poetic revolution against Jewish tradition, Korman invoked biblical allusions in Hebraic diction. For example, metaphorically characterizing the poet David Hofshteyn as a revolutionary, Korman described Hofshteyn as being able to “brekhn di lukhes” (“break the Tablets of the Law”) of Yiddish poetry, like Moses when he saw the Golden Calf. There was deliberate irony in Korman’s language. By choosing the Hebraic lukhes (tablets) rather than the Germanic gebotn (commandments), Korman relied on the weight of the same canonical Hebrew traditions of Judaism that he urged revolutionary poets to eschew. His metaphorical language thus inadvertently expressed the secular principles of revolutionary Yiddish poetry in terms of the sacred narrative of the Ten Commandments. In other words, Korman described the contradictory relationship of the new poets to Jewish tradition in the language of tradition. On the one hand, he called the aesthetics of those older poets obsolete; their “realistic descriptions or romantic obfuscations” of shtetl piety were “bound and knotted in an old-fashioned Jewish, small-town manner” that no longer offered viable material for poetry.7 On the other hand, he extended biblical metaphors to proclaim that the younger

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Ukrainian Yiddish poets Hofshteyn, Peretz Markish, Leyb Kvitko, and Asher Shvarts­man, though “rooted deeply in the people,” nevertheless breathed new life into the “dry bones” (otsmos hayafvoshes) of a doomed Jewish culture: “So they poured new might and impetus, fresh juice and lust into the ‘dry bones’ of the prejudiced body” (hobn zey arayngegosn nayem mut un ipet, frishn zaft un lust in di “otsmos ­hayafvoshes” fun dem farurteyltn guf).8 By invoking the messianic resurrection in the Valley of the Dry Bones with a quote from the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, Korman’s ironic metaphor endowed the revolutionary Yiddish poets with the powers once inherent in the sacred tradition. Korman’s metaphors of the sacred also excoriated the poetry of the preceding generation. Castigating Einhorn as a poet “on the border between old and new Yiddish poetry,” Korman characterized his writings as “yidsh-religiezn khosn-toyre-lid” (Jewish-religious bridegroomof-the-Torah poetry).9 To punctuate the futility of this poet’s revival of the obsolete past, Korman quoted Einhorn himself, “geshtorbn iz der alter bal-tfile” (the old prayer leader is dead).10 These all but untranslatable Hebrew terms—“khosn-toyre” (bridegroom-of-the-Torah) and “bal-tfile” (prayer leader)—refer to specific roles men take in synagogue rituals. Notably, on Simhat Torah, the khosn-toyre is called up to bless the reading of the concluding passage of the Torah itself, which tells of the death of Moses. Strangely, Korman piled on even more scorn by calling Einhorn’s poetic style “zayn shvakher froyen-lire” (his feeble women’s lyre).11 This effeminizing of religious Jewish men, especially of the Torah’s own “bridegroom,” calls to mind a prevalent cliché of European anti-Semitism, which Korman seems to invoke to strengthen his argument against tradition. Moreover, it hardly predicts the great effort Korman would soon undertake to retrieve the old devotional rhymes of women and juxtapose them with modern poetry in Yidishe dikhterins. Korman described in more metaphors heavy with Hebraic diction the Yiddish poetry that preceded his anthologized revolutionary poets as a temple (heykhl) that “for all too long smelled of the sin-suffering, of the dead spirit and rigor mortis.”12 With the wine offerings “evaporated” (opgevept), “and without fire” (un on fayer)for the burnt offerings, the “old smoldering altars” (alte tliendike mizbeykhes) in this figurative sanctuary—a mere shadow of Solomon’s and Herod’s ancient Jerusalem Temples—were tended by a doddering “quorum of priests” (minyen

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kahonim) who had served their time and finished their prayers.13 Because the Jews of Ukraine had undergone an unprecedented level of violence after World War I, Yiddish poetry demanded metaphors that undermined the classical basis of Judaism. Korman thus decried Yiddish poetry that still could “wind itself up in the old prayer shawl the color of a small-shtetl sky [inem altn tales fun kleynshtetldikn himl-kolir] at the time of the greatest world-cataclysm ever seen on Earth.”14 In place of this old poetics, Korman called for “the new categorical imperative of Yiddish poetry” that would provide “‘the broader stride,’ the mighty tearing and unmeasured leap” to develop Jewish culture and prevent the Jews from being buried by what he figured as “the falling bricks of the shot-down walls.”15 In this new situation, modern Jewish culture could no longer maintain the sacred Jewish ruins (di yidishe khurves).16 Asserting that the past must be discarded, Korman’s very diction encapsulated the revolution of poetry: The Marxist phrases (e.g., “categorical imperative”) pushed aside the Hebraisms (lukhes [tablets], khurves [ruins]) that sum up all of ancient Jewish history, from Moses receiving the Law on Mount Sinai to the destructions of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Although in his prose the jargon of the new political messianism supplanted the traditional metonymns of covenant and exile, Korman himself continued to rely on the same traditional language that he sought to destroy. Korman’s politics and revolutionary poetry of the early 1920s do not explicitly anticipate his anthology of women poets less than a decade later. Yet, in his ambivalence to tradition and his paradoxical use of traditional language to express that very ambivalence, one can see a thread of continuity between his early and subsequent works. Korman criticized both traditional Jewish life and the poetry that described it in the previous generation. He characterized “our old primitive social poetry by A. Reyzen” as “deploring social injustice too weakly,” and he contrasted it with the protest lyrics of the previous decades: the “strong” poetry of 1921 by Hofshteyn, which elevated “our being”; and Markish’s “great and weighty” lines.17 Quoting Hofshteyn, Korman proclaimed that the new Yiddish poets of Ukraine had formed their poetry in the “great sufferings of ‘the twentieth fire-forged century.’”18 With lofty mixed metaphors, Korman depicted how “the multiple storms in the sea of humankind” had forced these poets to “smelt”

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their poetry in the chaos of war and revolution, civil war and pogroms. As a poetic response to these crises, Korman explained, the Yiddish poets of Ukraine twisted the contradictory forces of pain and might, doubt and hope, fallenness and elevation into a single, savage tangle.19 From these grand assessments, Korman focused on the innovations of style and form that distinguished the revolutionary poets from their predecessors. He explained that the precise imagery, nuanced language, sound- or wordplay, inventive rhythms and stanza forms, and avoidance of conventional end-rhymes of the Ukrainian Yiddish poets Hofshteyn, Markish, Kvitko, and Shvartsman inspired “a circle of younger poets” to gather around them and follow “the commandments of the new Yiddish poetry.”20 With erudite pretentiousness, Korman characterized as stellar the poetry by the new Ukrainian Yiddish poets, using the Latin phrase “Per Aspera ad Astra” (by hardship to the stars). To write great poetry out of the extremities of their historical moment, Korman declared, the new generation of poets must burn all the “bridges between the present and the future of all people and universalism.”21 Korman’s own tradition-laden prose, however, belied his call for such a universalist literature. Indeed, one can also read in the work of four women poets a counter­ response to Korman’s call that Yiddish poetry burn the bridges between the present and the traditional Jewish past. Kadya Molodowsky, Dvore Fogel, Rikuda Potash, and Rokhl Korn, who published poetry in Kiev and Warsaw, experimented with degrees of rupture from the past. Molodowsky’s early work deliberately invoked the language of Jewish tradition, but it simultaneously reflected the progressive political climate. The poetry of Fogel, Potash, and Korn appeared to set forth new, secular pathways. In fact, though, Molodowsky’s tradition-based poetry of the 1920s represented a radical revision of the old prayers and sacred texts that in essence redefined the notion of secularity.

Molodowsky in Kiev and Warsaw: Religion and Revolution Kadya Molodowsky was the only woman poet to appear in the second edition of Korman’s revolutionary anthology Brenendike brikn (Burning Bridges). She was twenty-seven years old at the time of publication

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in 1921. Molodowsky was from the White Russian town of Bereza Kartuska, and she was caught in Ukraine behind the shifting warfront during the last years of World War I. In the summer of 1916 she traveled to Odessa to continue her studies in the new field of modern Hebrew pedagogy when her teacher, Yekhiel Halperin, relocated his Froebel Courses, based on the early childhood educational philosophy of the nineteenth-century German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), to Odessa from Warsaw.22 In 1917, after he moved the school again to escape the chaotic political situation following the Bolshevik Revolution, Molodowsky traveled north in an attempt to return to her hometown of Bereza Kartuska. Stranded in Kiev, Molodowsky tutored privately and worked in a home for displaced children. She survived the Kiev pogrom of 1920, and that same year she made her literary debut.23 According to her autobiography, serialized decades later in Svive (Surroundings), the journal she edited in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, Molodowsky began to write poems as a child. In Kiev, she was discovered by three well-known fiction writers—David Bergelson, Yehezikel Dobrushin, and Der Nister (pseudonym for Pinchas Kahanowitch)—who published two of her poems in Eygns (Our Own), a collection of local authors.24 Much later, Molodowsky acknowledged Bergelson as having taught her how to revise her poems and present them in public.25 In 1921, before she returned to her hometown with her husband Simche Lev, later to settle in Warsaw, Korman published three of her poems in his anthology of revolutionary poetry. The three poems that Korman published are in keeping, in their rebellious tone and thematic upending of traditional Jewish ideas, with the revolutionary style of the eleven other poets in the anthology, all of whom were men.26 Although Korman did not draw attention to Molodowsky’s gender, he placed one of her poems in each of the anthology’s three sections, and concluded the volume emphatically with her longest poem, “Groye land” (Gray Country). When Molodowsky placed this poem and the other two—“Fun fintster” (From Darkness) and “Afn beys-oylem” (At the Cemetery)—into her own 1927 book of poems, Kheshvndike nekht (Nights of Heshvan), as parts of two different cycles, they took on a much different meaning. As framed in Korman’s anthology, Molodowsky’s rebellious young voice ruptures tradition and generational continuity. In Kheshvndike nekht, however,

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the poems fit in with Molodowsky’s central concern, which was to show how the lives of Jewish women are bound to a tradition from which the speaker struggles to free herself. Consider, for example, “Fun fintster,” as it appeared, centered on the page, in Korman’s Brenendike brink. The poem begins by expressing a woman’s rebellion, as its triumphant speaker announces her emergence from “darkness, from hiding”:27 From darkness, from hiding I emerge— And broad is the stride Of small feet, And strong the knock Of a slender fist. (1–6)

Bursting out of the darkness, striding confidently toward the light and knocking her fist hard on the closed door of possibility, the speaker points to her female body, with its “small” feet (kleyne fis) and “slender fist” (shmoln foyst). Then, repeating the opening two lines, the speaker builds on the idea that a woman who is powerless can become powerful by emerging from obscurity in order to lead the way for her generation: From darkness, from hiding I emerge— And stride With broad steps at the head of my generation (7–10)

Evoking imagery of traditional piety in both the ritual laving of the hands before blessing the bread and the blessing recited over the Sabbath candles, the speaker proclaims that she will transform the old symbols and customs into a new, secular context. Washing her hands repeatedly, this woman utters no blessing over the handwashing; and, again without a blessing, she lights the candles, for what she calls “the world’s holiday,” namely, “the world’s,” not God’s: And I wash my hands And I wash, And for the first time lift up My eyes to the sun,

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And I kindle the candles For the world’s holiday, The candles that, for generations, I piously kindled. (11–18)

In order to draw attention to the universalization of enlightenment, she reverses the order in which these rituals are actually performed: usually the woman blesses the candles and then ritually washes her hands in preparation for the Sabbath meal. The speaker names the need for both ritual and hygienic cleansing by repeating the phrase, “And I wash” (un kh’vash), and the repetition gives urgency to the act of cleansing. Instead of blessing the candles “piously” in the traditional way, with head bowed and hands covering the eyes, this speaker stares up at the sun before she lights the candles in a defiant gesture that disrupts ritual order. Her gaze breaks through the domestic boundaries of the women’s commandments, as the speaker, confronting the great light of the natural world, places the ritual lights into a universal context. By implying that the sun, rather than divine light, is the proto­ type for her candles, the speaker invokes the secularizing force of the Enlightenment. By lighting the Sabbath and holiday candles, the speaker represents the collective experience of Jewish women that spans generations: The candles that, for generations, I kindled piously. (17–18)

In these lines, Molodowsky summons the tradition out of which the Old Yiddish poets wrote, a tradition that defined the individual voice by its relationship to the collective identity of the Jewish community or of Jewish women in particular, as in the use of the first person plural (mir, we) in Khane Kats’s “Tfile l’shabes” (A Prayer for the Sabbath), Rivke Tiktiner’s “Eyn simkhes toyre lid” (Simkhes Toyre Song), and Toybe Pan’s “Eyn sheyn lid naye gemakht beloshn tkhine iz vardin oysgetrakht” (A Brand-New Beautiful Song, Composed in the Tkhine-Tongue). Yet in contrast to this “mir,” in the premodern poems, Molodowsky repeats the first person singular, “ikh” (I), six times in eighteen lines, to emphasize the individuality and particular-

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ity of the speaker who separates herself from the traditional community. Significantly, this emphasis on the individual speaker does not keep the speaker from identifying with the collective: Molodowsky’s speaker strides “in kop fun dor,” as a leader of her generation. But here Molodowsky articulates a new idea of collectivity: By replacing “the Jewish people” with “my generation,” Molodowsky demonstrates how the traditional concept of Jewish collectivity has been replaced by a secular rhetoric. Dividing “my generation” from the continuum of  a sacred history predicated on the Jews as a people chosen from the nations, the poem obscures that history behind the immediacy of the present moment. With this image of herself leading her people, Molodowsky’s speaker recalls the didactic admonitions of Royzl Fishls’s proem, ““Mit hoylf gots yisborakh” (With God’s Help, Blessed Be He) and Gele’s colophon, “Tfile” (Prayer), as well as the implied firzogerin, the female prayer leader in Rivke Tiktiner’s and Toybe Pan’s liturgical poems. And like the premodern poets, Molodowsky foregrounds the female gender of the speaker with reference to the roles determined by religion and society. In the preceding lines, Molodowsky had highlighted her gender through the mention of the women’s commandment to light the Sabbath and holiday candles. In contrast, the poem’s final metaphor presents a gendered image of work: And I stride steps of light, And dye in holiday dyes The threads of ambition, That I weave out And weave in. (19–23)

Recasting Jewish tradition, the speaker changes the candles’ holy light into the substance of her forward stride. The metaphor evolves: walking becomes weaving, and light ambition, as the speaker strives to recreate the whole cloth of existence. Molodowsky thus transforms the imagery of women’s religiosity and domesticity into that of manufacturing and the labor movement. Weaving, which was originally a woman’s domestic occupation, became, in the urban factory setting, a class-defined trade. With the metaphor of dyeing and weaving thread

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into fabric, Molodowsky imbues a traditional occupation of women with the ambition or triumph of the progressive, revolutionary generation. Significantly, she ends the poem with the action of the individual speaker, who weaves out of and into the fabric of the new daily life the threads dyed in the bright hues associated with the holy days. The speaker associates those brilliant threads with nitsakhon, which in Hebrew means “triumph,” but in Yiddish it also means “ambition.” In Molodowsky’s poem, the word sounds hubristic, as if the woman speaker were boasting of a triumph. However, because the Yiddish word can also mean “ambition,” it suggests an intention to continue such movement and making. The exuberant energy of “Fun fintster” as it appeared in Korman’s 1923 anthology was diminished when Molodowsky revised the poem and placed it at the end of an eleven-poem sequence in her 1927 collection, Kheshvndike nekht, as “Bloyen baginen” (At Blue Dawn).28 She eliminated the title and reduced the poem from twenty-three to fourteen lines by joining some lines together and deleting the repetition of “kh’vash / un ikh vash” (I wash / and I wash). The most significant change she made, though, was in lines 17–18, “Di likht, vos doyres-lang / Hob ikh getsundn frum” (The candles that, for generations, / I piously kindled), where Molodowsky changed the emphatic repetition of “ikh” (I) to the impersonal pronoun, “men” (one), which renders the verb passive: “di likht vos doyres lang / hot men getsundn frum” (The candles that, for generations, / Were piously kindled). No longer is it “I” who lit the candles piously for generations, but a generalized group of Jewish women from whom the speaker distinguishes herself. The more mature Molodowsky separated the speaker from the previous generations of women candle-lighters, and thus she has edited both personal and cultural history to simplify a Jewish woman’s ambivalent transition from religiosity to secularity. In her own book of 1927, Molodowsky dated “Fun fintster” as having been originally written in 1920. The changes in the 1927 version temper Molodowsky’s poetic voice. Its longer verse lines join together the abrupt lines of the earlier version and indicate a change in her sense of prosody. In her book, Molodowsky made “Fun fintster” the eleventh and last poem in the sequence, “In bloyen baginen,”29 and emphasized the metaphor of weaving to place the poem into a

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new narrative. Imitating the form and content of folk-art ballads of the American Yiddish poets Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Mani Leyb, the ninth poem of the sequence “In bloyen baginen” tells a tale of “seven women” by a well, spinning “Ten threads, white on white” and “Whispering the story, never-ending.”30 With this mock folk ballad as her context, the speaker of the revised “Fun fintster” (now without a title) celebrates her liberation from the folk-bound female storytellers by the well who spin monochromatic thread and tell stories only in whispers. In contrast to the folklike spinners of the ninth poem, the speaker of the eleventh poem, the revised “Fun fintster,” dyes those white threads in the bright colors that she will weave into the cloth of her newly loud voice. The metaphor of weaving changes in this new context. Whereas in Korman’s revolutionary anthology, the labor connoted urban factory work, in Molodowsky’s book, weaving signifies a Yiddish woman poet’s craft. In Korman’s anthology, Molodowsky’s poem presented a spokeswoman for a generation’s enlightened, political rebellion against religious antecedents. The same poem in the poet’s own book, slightly revised, advocates a new kind of poetry that a woman can write. The second poem by Molodowsky that Korman includes, “Afn beysoylem,” triumphantly proclaims generational hubris.31 The speaker enters a cemetery reluctantly and tries to awaken the dead by knocking on the graves of the “hunched grandmothers” and “gray grandfathers”: Little mounds, quiet little mounds, patted down, I set down my step, Unwillingly So I knock Even more . . . Are you sleeping there, hunched grandmothers? Are you saying something, gray grandfathers? How does a dead person lie so long, Lie and be silent, And not say Anything? . . . (1–11)

As she awakens the dead grandmothers and grandfathers—tradition incarnate—the speaker announces that her arrival will undo the permanence of death and bring life to the graveyard. This description of

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interacting with the dead alludes to the customary pre–Yom Kippur visits by women to the family graves to petition the dead for blessings. Molodowsky’s speaker, however, threatens to resurrect her dead, not to revive tradition. She will rather rebuke tradition, as she upends the grave markers and ridicules the mourners: I will come! Then the graveyard will have fun! I can’t rest, Lie, be silent. Drowsing hands, stiffened feet, Who ordered you, dead ones, Not to stir? I will come, I’ll stir up the graveyard, Will run And overturn the tombstone, Mock the mourners, And with my feet Kick dirt on the grave and dance on it— And back to grass and snows, And back to wind and flare! (12 –26)

By infusing life into the cemetery, the speaker asserts the energy of the revolutionary generation. But she stops short of actually awakening the dead. Rather, she will disrupt the reverence and solemnity that her culture imposes upon death and the traditions of the past, as represented by the grandparents. Instead of messianic ideology, whether religious or political, the poem voices an insistence on living in this world, a life defined as much by the forces of nature as by society. In the last four lines, the speaker dances on the graves in a reversal of the toytn-tants (death dance) as a gesture that renews nature’s dominance over social conventions. Molodowsky’s toytn-tants celebrates life as expressed through the natural world—the liberating “grass and snows,” “wind and flare.” Strangely, Nature does not redeem; in the 1927 revision of this poem, Molodowsky cut the final two lines. In the sequence “In bloyen baginen,” where “Fun fintster” is the eleventh poem, “Afn beys-oylem” serves as the untitled third poem. In the 1927 version, Molodowsky

Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland

replaced the imagery of grass, snow, wind, and flare with a generalization: “un aroysrufn di yunge un di shtarke” (And call up the young and the strong). She concludes the poem by repeating the line “ikh vel kumen ot vet hulyen der beys oylem!” (I will come and, then, won’t the graveyard have fun!).32 While the platitudinous generalization and refrain harness the later version to Korman’s political revolutionary idea, the paganism implied by the earlier version’s nature imagery leads to the tension between nature’s sexual energy and the confinements of Jewish law. It’s as if, in 1927, Molodowsky had tamed and politicized a poem that had initially expressed a theme she would later develop— that of the conflict between women’s traditional roles and individual desires, a theme that would surface even more explicitly in the works of other women poets in America. Molodowsky’s third poem in Korman’s Brenendike brikn, “Groye land” (Gray Land), is a quasi-pastoral ode to the maternal womb, or “mother-lap,” of Molodowsky’s native Belarusian landscape.33 The poem opens with a childhood memory: Oh, gray land, With mounds of wadding on the fields of sky! In your flat lap Of brown sand I picked, in childhood By the familiar fence, The dry little pitchers Of thorns, And on a thin thread Nestled small crowns Of wild peas That grow darkly on the ground. (1–12)

Addressing the “gray land” repeatedly throughout the poem, the speaker recounts her relationship to this place in the past, a place now far away. The longing in this poem is neither idealized nor conventional: the speaker recalls that as a child she picked dried thorns, not flowers. The imagery of thorns and seeds, the remains of blooming, and the metaphors of empty pitchers and dark necklaces fashioned from weeds raises expectations for a poem about deprivation. Instead,

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by figuring the gray land itself as a mother’s lap, the clouds in the “fields of sky” as the cotton wadding of bedding, and the fence as familiar or homey (baym heymish ploytl ), the poem transforms what might seem to be alien or hostile aspects of the landscape into what the speaker most misses. Rather than domesticate nature, these metaphors convey the speaker’s intimacy with an inhospitable place: Oh, gray land! With dull sounds of the dusky gentiles On your hard fields Near pitted roads I sucked in the air, Sipped and rose up Just like a water-leaf That stretches, stretches, stretches Up Out of the marshy mother-lap, Out To the bare world, To the naked sun, To the distant blankness. (13–26)

The inhabitants of this place are “di tunkele areylim,” the dusky male gentiles; they are denoted by the Hebraic word, “areylim,” literally, uncircumcised males. This pejorative term as used in Yiddish, instead of the more general Hebraic “goyim” (gentiles, or literally, “nations”) or the Germanic “poyerim” (peasants), emphasizes the child’s awareness of a foreignness that is both cultural and sexual.34 Yet it is exactly this alien and resistant quality of the gray land that nourishes the girl. In contrast to the hard soil that resounds with the peasants’ chopping and the pitted roads on which they travel, it is the land’s “zumpik ­mutershoys” (marshy mother’s lap, bosom, or womb), from which the girl grows, like a water lily or a reed, reaching up “To the bare world, / To the naked sun, / To the distant blankness” in a desperate growth that requires her to gasp and suck at the air. Inhospitable as this gray place seems, it provided the speaker enough sustenance to develop.

Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland

Even as she grows away from it, the land pulls the speaker back. The poet’s metaphors convey tensions between the human and the natural, the Jewish and the gentile elements of that land: Familiar bands tugged after me: The small feet of a hare Straying among the rye, The twigs of an old tree, Of a barren woman, The footpath On the flat peasant fields, The murmuring wire That connects With the world. (27–36)

The “heymish vikelekh” (familiar bands, or swaddling cloths) that bind the speaker to the land are traces of natural life connected to human society—the footprints of a hare in the rye fields and the twigs of an old tree, which she likens to “an akore,” the Hebraism for a barren woman. As the hare eats the grain, a product of human labor, so too the infertile woman is classified and condemned by the human construct of Jewish law. The speaker is also bound to the place of her origins by the traces that people leave on the land: the peasant footpath (di steshke), denoted here with a Slavic noun, and the “murmuring wire” of the telegraph. Placing the Slavicism di steshke immediately after the Hebraism an akore, Molodowsky’s Yiddish draws attention to the uneasy coexistence of Jewish and gentile cultural presence on the land. While the footpath connects the peasants’ homes to their fields, the telegraph wire connects this remote land to the world beyond. The path and the wire are synecdoches for the moment of change when the speaker juxtaposes age-old agricultural work with a new form of urban communication. This contrast is lost in the 1927 revision, where Molodowsky replaces the wire with the more generalized phrase, “And our gray and yellow sky.”35The earlier version’s wire that connected the gray land to the world leads to the speaker’s present situation of exile from that land: Oh, gray land! When the southern sun

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Hotly stained me With graceful colors And when my neck was brown As Lithuanian soil, Then I heard the sobbing wind That rocked itself on a tip Of your willows. (37–45)

Years after she left her childhood home in Belarus, the southern sun of Ukraine still “stains” the speaker the color of the Lithuanian earth itself, “lite-erd.” And there, years later, in Odessa by the Black Sea and in Kiev on the Dnieper River, the speaker hears the sounds from her native north—the wind sobbing in the willow branches. The pathetic fallacy of these lines reverses the expected associations of the sun with happiness and the wind with sadness: with a counterintuitive nostalgia, the speaker longs for that sobbing wind. Exiled from this gray land, the speaker remembers how much she once wanted to leave her home: Oh, gray land, In the crooked square Between two humble villages, When low to the ground The train used to thread through The harsh voice of its wheels, Trembling, I used to await What approaches from there, What departs from here. (46–54)

When the train passed “Between two humble villages,” it was “The harsh voice of its wheels” that informed the speaker of the possibilities for escape: “What approaches from there, / What departs from here.” Now that she is long gone, she regrets that she left: And lo, When my bones are already hard And in every land I have squandered a springtime,

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To the brown plain Into the lowly lap I return Shaking the dust From my clothes. (55–62)

The lines “Un yeder land / Hob ikh a friling shoyn farkoyft” are enigmatic and possibly an untranslatable idiom. In context, they mean something like “in every place I’ve been, I’ve sold, spent, relinquished, or compromised my springtime, freshness, and innocence.” Although the speaker has been away from home for many spring seasons and has lost her innocence, she still longs to return to “the lowly lap” of her gray motherland,. Molodowsky’s emphasis on the gendered aspect of home—the maternal lap or womb of the land, the tree like a barren woman— combines with the imagery of darkness that pervades the poem, and Molodowsky plays on the various registers of this symbolism. She characterizes the motherland with a trope of female reproduction, and thus allies the place with the natural, rather than the cultural, aspects of womanhood. In contrast, the shades of darkness with which she depicts the place are conveyed through words that connote the constructs of religion and class. The refrain hammers home the point that the land the speaker longs for is “gray” (groy). In line 12, the Hebraic adverb khoyshekhdik describes the condition of the wild peas growing on the ground. In the creation story (Genesis 1:2), the Hebrew word ḥoshekh (Yiddish, khoyshekh) denotes the primordial darkness that God separates from light; in Yiddish, the word bears the connotations of that original darkness’s chaos. In line 14, the Germanic tunkele (dark, obscure, dim), describes the gentile men (areylim) who work the fields. Molodowsky deliberately chose the awe-inspiring, biblical valences of khoyshekhdik to characterize the humble vilde arbelekh (wild peas), and the familiar tunkele to characterize the alien areylim, in order to make the extremes of darkness and light blend into the gray landscape of her home. Yet the very language with which Molodowsky evokes the half-light of this remembered place blurs the distinctions that Jewish tradition imposes between Jew and gentile and the separation of Jewish culture from nature. In the speaker’s memory, the girl she once

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was perceived her world with innocence as she wandered through what the speaker now acknowledges was a threatening and implicitly sexualized landscape, beyond the boundaries of the Jewish home and the Jewish town. The telegraph wire and the railroad connect the twilit past with the present moment, in which the poet has burst from oppressive darkness into political and cultural enlightenment, as one sees in the first two poems, “Fun fintster” and “Afn beys-oylem.” In “Groye land,” the modern woman softens the revolutionary dichotomies and replaces ideology with the work of a poet’s memory and imagination. Molodowsky’s use of Hebraisms is far more subtle than Korman’s binary use of Hebraic words in his introduction to characterize the disposable past. Accordingly, he seemed to be modifying his revolutionary rhetoric when he placed Molodowsky’s poem at the end of ­Brenendike brikn: Korman punctuated his anthology of Ukrainian Yiddish revolutionary poetry with a poem that is not about Ukraine at all, and with a poet who was not Ukrainian. Moreover, Molodowsky’s poem is not revolutionary in the sense that revolution advocates overturning the markers of the past and disrupting conventions and platitudes. Molodowsky’s nostalgic ode to the place she came from is revolutionary, however, in the feminized imagery that conveys the conventions of looking back. She literalizes the cliché of the “mother­ land” with her repeated use of phrases referring to a mother’s lap or womb ( flakhn shoys, 3; mutershoys, 22; niderikn shoys, 59). Thus she melds the nationalist abstraction with an evocation of the actual earth, land, and soil and, through these metaphors, an actual mother. As she likens the girl’s growth in that landscape to a water plant growing from a swamp, Molodowsky connects the development of a girl into a woman with the processes of the natural world. Molodowsky depicts this maternal earth that gave the girl life and nurtured her as a place that does not acknowledge borders or claims of ownership by nations. Although the fields resist the peasants’ hoes and spades, the “swampy lap” is fertile and generous to the girl. By replacing the political metaphor, “Motherland,” the personification by which Russia and later the Soviet Union were known, with the metaphorical “mutershoys,” Molodowsky creates a complex commentary on nationalism and gender. With “mutershoys,” she alludes to the patriotic personification and the clash of European nationalisms

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(including the German Fatherland) of the Great War that trapped her in Ukraine for its duration. In the violent years of the war that men fought and Molodowsky lived through, the slogan “motherland” lost any connotation of gestation or nurture. With mutershoys, the maternal lap or womb of the land, Molodowsky restores the idea of “mother” to the landscape from which the war kept her. While it connects her to the landscape, the poem signals the girl’s disconnection from Jewish culture. The only human figures in the landscape are the gentile men working in the fields. Molodowsky leaves out of the poem any mention of the girl’s home or family, her shtetl or its Jewish inhabitants. With these choices, Molodowsky revises the idea of “homeland” for a displaced Yiddish poet and removes from it any traces of the Jewish present and past. The subtlety of this gendered and culturally emptied poem contributed a nonpolitical voice to the revolution of Korman’s 1923 anthology. Although she was constantly on the move during her life in Eastern Europe, it was exactly this question of how the Jewish past shaped the present lives of Jewish women, rather than revolutionary themes, that preoccupied Molodowsky as she assembled her first book of poems in Warsaw. After marrying Simche Lev in Kiev in the winter of 1920– 21, Molodowsky and her husband traveled north to their families in Lekhevitsh and Bereza Kartuska in Belarus. Making their way westward, sometime around 1923, they stopped in Brest-Litovsk to work in a home for children displaced by the war, and then continued on to Warsaw.36 Molodowsky lived in Warsaw until she emigrated to the United States in 1935, with the exception of a brief period in which she joined her husband in Paris where he was studying.37 She taught children in the elementary school of the Central Yiddish Schools Organization (known by the acronym TsIShO), and she taught Hebrew to young women workers in an evening community school. Molodowsky also became active in the Yiddish Writers’ Union located at Tlomatske Street 13. There she encountered the writers Israel Joshua Singer, his younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer, Melekh Ravitsh, Aaron Zeitlin, Joseph Opatoshu, Nakhman Mayzel (editor of the weekly literary journal Literarishe bleter), Peretz Markish (whom she’d known in Kiev), Moyshe Kulbak (from Vilna), Rokhl Korn (from Pshemishl), and such famous visitors from America as Sholem Asch and H. Leyvik.38

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In 1927 Molodowsky published her first book of poetry, K ­ heshvndike nekht, with the prestigious Farlag B. Kletskin, which had offices in both Warsaw and Vilna. In this book, Molodowsky presents a sensibility informed by the experiences of many different kinds of Jewish women— young, irreverent modern women, poor working-class women, and the most devout traditional figures. Each of the book’s twelve poetic sequences consists of lyric poems linked by an underlying narrative. The speaker in these sequences places herself “in the early middle-age of a woman,”39 but, as she moves through the landscape of Jewish Eastern Europe, she assumes the roles of teacher, traveler, lover, daughter, and an empathetic observer of “all impoverished women who scour burnt pots.”40 Throughout the book, the narrator contrasts her modernity with the roles decreed by Jewish tradition for women. At the same time as she struggles to free herself from it, she confirms her connection to that tradition. Unlike the exuberant rebellion against the dead past in the poems “Fun fintster” and “Afn beys-oylem” included in Korman’s Brenendike brikn, Molodowsky’s eight-poem sequence “Froyen-lider” (WomenPoems) poses a more nuanced question about the process of modern change, asking how a woman writer can reconcile her art with the culturally dictated, specifically Jewish precepts of womanhood. The hyphenated title of the sequence, “Froyen-lider,” links the words “women” and “poems,” leaving ambiguous whether these are poems about women, poems belonging to women, or poems that are women. Six of the eight poems in the sequence are spoken by a woman whose solitary nocturnal dreams, thoughts, and visions provide the occasion for her words. At the beginning, she dreams of generations of her female ancestors, while at the end, she evokes a vision of her deceased mother. In the middle poems, the speaker reflects upon the consequences of her illicit intimacy with a man who is not her husband. Then follow two poems that address, without an explicit “I,” the generalized situation of women who, married or longing to marry, barren or pregnant, find comfort in the order of Jewish belief and in the course of nature. In contrast to these women, the speaker herself remains ambivalent, estranged from the familiar comforts and resisting the powerful draw of the tradition. Seasonal imagery prepares for an uneasy closure: the expected progression of nature is disordered, as the

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narrative leaps from autumn to summer, to spring, and then to autumn again, omitting winter. In “Froyen-lider I,” the generations of women preserve their blood like “a guarded wine” (a vayn a gehitn) for their descendants. In “Froyen-lider V,” the speaker keeps “a guarded place” (an ort an ­opgehitn) near herself for her husband, at the expense of guarding or cherishing “some peace and place for” herself (far mir hob ikh nit ­opgehit keyn ru un ort). By repeating the adjectives gehiten and opgehitn and the past participle opgehit, Molodowsky draws attention to a religious meaning of these words, “to observe holy days,” that resonates throughout the sequence. This repetition unearths a metaphor of ritual observance, in which observance changes from literally obeying the halakhic or Jewish legal restraints on the female body to figuratively observing the rituals of a romantic love that stands outside of Jewish law. The speaker discovers, though, that she has only transferred the observance of ritual from one domain to another, each controlled by an authority or power implicitly male. As a result, she must continue on her “difficult, long way” to seek “a place,” that is, to observe a ritual, for herself. Molodowsky presents the conflict she experiences through the intertextual dialogue within “Froyen-lider” between the Hebrew liturgy and her own Yiddish verse lines. She infuses this dialogue with imagery of sex and nature as forces that rebel against the religious laws and societal codes that control women’s sexual natures. The closing lines of “Froyen-lider I” make explicit a metaphor of life and text: And why should this blood without blemish Be my conscience, like a silken thread Bound upon my brain, And my life, a page plucked from a holy book, The first line torn?41 (15–19)

Earlier in the poem, the narrator’s dream vision of “the women of our family” who have carried to her “a pure blood across generations,” like kosher wine, and of the agune, the abandoned wife who obediently renounces her sexuality, evokes the sacred texts of prayer and law that govern the ritually correct way of living. This woman’s pure blood is both the figurative bloodline of family heritage and the more

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literal blood of menstruation, made “pure” by the second of the three positive commandments enjoined to women, namely, niddah, the laws of family purity. Using a simile that likens this blood of her women ancestors to a binding thread, which in turn evokes the straps of the phylacteries (two small leather boxes containing prayers, worn by observant men during prayer), the speaker asks why women’s lives must be bound into the book of Jewish law. Yet the very language of the poem binds the sacred law into the poet’s Yiddish protest against it, with a string of Hebraic words, from mishpokhe (family) to sefer (holy book). From this sacred volume, the sefer from which the page of the speaker’s life has been ripped, come all the words of ritual purity and sexual restriction—kosher (ritually pure), tsnies (modesty), agune (abandoned wife), and tume (impurity). The sefer is the text to which the melodies (nigunim) of the generations (doyres) of women’s lives is set. With the metaphor of the sefer page, Molodowsky makes the speaker’s life a part of the written Hebraic tradition of sexuality that binds women’s desires and dreams (khaloymes). The speaker’s life, composed from the words of the sacred text, has been ripped from its binding, and its first line is farrisn— smudged or torn—making the page ritually impure. This damaged page of a modern woman’s life calls for a new book and a new binding—the Yiddish poetry that Molodowsky writes. Molodowsky returns to the question of traditional Jewish answers to women’s lives in “Froyen-lider VI” by modeling her poem on the genre of the tkhines for the Matriarchs. While such tkhines served a variety of occasions and were written in styles ranging from simple and sentimental to sophisticated and learned, they all invoked the four Matriarchs in Genesis—Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah—to serve as examples for the suppliant and to intercede with God for her sake. The primary mode of the Matriarchs’ tkhines established an analogy between the speaker of the prayer and the Matriarchs, through whom she addressed God. Whether a tkhine of the Matriarchs was learned and complex or simple and modest, its direct address to the biblical characters presupposed an active connection between the timeless sacred narrative of the Bible and the immediate life of the woman offering her prayers in response to a concrete situation in the actual world.42

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Molodowsky’s 1927 poem “Froyen-lider VI” (Women-Poems VI), following the general form of a tkhine of the Matriarchs, lists each of the four Matriarchs alongside the types of contemporary women. Molodowsky reiterates the problems and situations that tkhines traditionally depict as the challenges that Jewish women always face— marriage, poverty, fertility—but focuses on the subject of sexuality by using servant girls, prostitutes, humiliated brides, and barren wives as her protagonists. By narrating rather than praying, Molodowsky’s speaker maintains a distance from the Matriarchs and questions the efficacy of prayer. There is an ironic parallelism between “Froyen-lider VI” and “Froyenlider I.” As her ancestral specters “came” to the speaker of the first poem, bearing their pure blood “like a guarded wine,” so the biblical Matriarchs appear to the many unhappy women in the sixth poem. In the first poem, the mothers’ gifts burden, restrict, and anger the speaker; but in the sixth, the Matriarchs offer genuine comfort to women. Mother Sarah comes to “poor brides who were servant girls” either with pitchers full of sparkling wine or small goblets of her tears, as God has decreed. Sarah also appears bearing honey to prostitutes who dream of marriage, as if to sweeten the unlikelihood that their dreams will be fulfilled. Mother Rebecca brings fine linens to the “high-born” but impoverished brides, whose ragged dowries embarrass them before their mothers-in-law, as a gesture to reinstate their social standing. To those who are barren, the Matriarch Rachel—who herself had trouble conceiving and “bore Jacob no children” (Gen. 30:1) until “God opened her womb and she conceived and bore a son . . . Joseph” (Gen. 30:22–24)—carries exotic remedies and the hope that God will intervene for them, too. Traditionally, when tkhines address the Matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel are summoned, and Leah usually is not.43 By summoning Leah at the end of her poem, Molodowsky treats ironically the “feminine” sentimentality conventionally associated with the tkhines. In her poem, the suppliants to Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel are prostitutes, would-be brides, and barren wives—all of whom, like the grand­ mothers and the agunah in “Froyen-lider I,” are defined by their sexual relationship to men. The women who appeal to Leah, however, are solitary figures. In Genesis, Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel, tricks Jacob into marrying the elder daughter Leah, who, in contrast to the

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“beautiful” Rachel, has eyes that are rakot (“weak” or “soft”) (Gen. 29:16–17). God pities Leah because her husband does not love her, and He allows her to bear Jacob six sons and a daughter (Gen. 29:31–30:25). According to the Tsene-rene, the seventeenth-century Yiddish translation, adaptation, and commentary on the Hebrew Bible (which remained in print through 1939 and was the most widely known version of the Bible in Eastern Europe), Leah’s eyes were “weak” or “soft” because she wept at the thought that she might have to marry Jacob’s wicked twin, Esau.44 In contrast to Leah Horowitz’s eighteenth-century Leah, who is a co-conspirator with her sister Rachel to intercede with God and change Jewish history, Molodowsky’s Leah covers her eyes in the face of a modern alienation that has no biblical precedent. Molodowsky modeled her poem on the tkhines of the Matriarchs to explore the question of how Jewish texts can comfort women who do not fulfill traditional female roles. By ending the poem with Leah’s mute gesture, Molodowsky indicates the ambiguity of such consolation: To those who cry at night in solitary beds, And have no one to share their sorrow, Who talk to themselves with parched lips, To them comes Mother Leah, quietly, Shielding both eyes with her pale hands.45

In the end, the poem’s attention to the unloved, weak-eyed Matriarch Leah emphasizes the untenable isolation of a modern woman. Whereas in “Froyen-lider VI” Molodowsky placed women unvalued in traditional Jewish society uneasily within the culture of devotion, the seventh poem in the sequence puts all women at the mercy of nature. This poem depicts the irrepressible procreative urge of the spring season as a force against which the childless woman has no defense. These are the spring nights When up from under a stone, a grass blade pushes forth from the earth, And fresh moss makes a green cushion Under the skull of a dead horse, And all of a woman’s limbs beg for the hurt of childbirth. And women come and lie down like sick sheep

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By wells to heal their bodies, And their faces are black From long years of thirsting for the cry of a child. These are the spring nights When lightning splits the black earth With silver slaughtering knives, And pregnant women approach White tables in the hospital with quiet steps And smile at the yet-unborn child And perhaps even at death. These are the spring nights When up from under a stone, a grass blade pushes forth from the earth.46 (1–18)

In the first half of the poem, lines 1–9, the season’s arrival corresponds to unstoppable growth, as grass pushes up from beneath a stone, moss covers a horse’s skull, and a woman craves the pain of childbirth. ­Although this female desire is, as lines 2–5 suggest, part of the natural order, the figurative language of lines 6–9 leads the reader to question what exactly Molodowsky means by “natural.” The simile in these lines compares women who “lie down,” as if to have sex, to “sick sheep” that approach a well for a cure. The ambiguous syntax allows line 7, “By wells to heal their bodies” (Bay krenetses af heyln zeyer layb), to modify both “women” and “sick sheep,” and leads to what appears to be a comment on women as instinctual, animalistic, and needing a cure. The well, or krenitse, at which the sheep seek a cure, echoes the mutershoys of the Belarusian landscape in Molodowsky’s 1923 “Groye land,” published in Korman’s revolutionary anthology. The well, connoting the female body’s source of life, sexualizes the supine women. Yet this is a sexualization associated with the sick sheep and horse’s skull, two images of animal mortality that counteract the force of birth and growth. The “black faces” of the women suggest the distortion of either illness or effort and further develop the comparison to ewes. Thus, the animal-like aching of a woman to bear a child is at once determined by and lies outside the bounds of nature. The second half of the poem (10–18) repeats the opening lines and seems to begin again. Here, though, the imagery of spring is v­ iolent.

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The lightning, likened to ritual slaughtering knives (­khalofim), connects the women/sheep figure of the first half with the earth itself. The repeated adjective, shvartse (black), referring earlier to the women’s faces and now to the earth, compounds the metaphor. The lightning, compared to the extremely sharp knives required for ritual slaughter, intensifies the metaphor. Women wanting to bear children are like sick sheep with black faces, and also like the fertile earth, while the earth split by lightning is like a sheep waiting to be slaughtered by a kheylef (ritual slaughtering knife). Sex, illness, and Jewish ritual slaughter constitute the same phenomenon. In “Groye land,” the mother-like yet alien earth gave comfort and life to the girl remembered by the homesick poet. In “Froyen-lider VII,” the speaker perceives the “slaughter” that the “lightning” of Jewish law can impose on that maternal earth. The alliteration of shvartse (black) and shvangere (pregnant) develops the idea that childbirth heals. The black faces of women sick with childlessness are transformed into the cure itself, from illness to pregnancy. This alliteration provides a transition from the pastoral, biblical world, where women are like animals for slaughter and wells provide cures, to a modern city, where women give birth in hospitals. Yet despite the “white tables,” the women’s smiles, and their “quiet steps,” the hospital provides no ultimate cure for the dangers inherent in what women cannot avoid. Their longing for pregnancy and the possibility of death are ever present, even as the season urges the grass blade to push up under a skull. Just as there were no Jews visible in the maternal landscape of “Groye land,” so are there no men visible in “Froyen-lider VII.” The absence of the men who impregnate the women in this poem suggests that, in Molodowsky’s scheme, creativity is woman’s work and connects her with the rituals of slaughter, sacrifice, and procreation. The end of the sixth poem, where the fecund matriarch Leah gestures toward isolated, childless women, prepares for the insistence in the seventh poem on the necessity of pregnancy. Together, the poems exclude the dramatic speaker of “Froyen-lider” for whom conventional female fertility seems nearly impossible. Yet the speaker is engaged in a creative act that requires no man, as she observes and records the fertility of other women. She acts in words, which themselves are the form of

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life encoded in poetic form. By placing the eighteen lines of this poem on page eighteen of Kheshvndike nekht, Molodowsky makes a numerical pun on the number eighteen, which in gimatria spells out khay (hai), the Hebrew word for “life.” The poem becomes a metaphor for childbearing, which is itself a metaphor for creation in general. With this metaphor, Molodowsky suggests that poetry can take the place of childbearing. The exchange between the labor of womanhood, as decreed by nature and culture, and the labor of composition makes the very writing of “Froyen-lider” a revision of women’s work. In “Froyen-lider VII,” where the dramatic “I” is subsumed by a narrative voice distanced from the fertility it reports, the poet is at work, making metaphors. In the final poem, “Froyen-lider VIII,” the poet speaks of the insomnia she suffers when she recalls her mother’s life and her own: Nights when I’m awake And one by one my past days come To place themselves before my eyes, My mother’s life comes to me.47 (1–4)

As her vision opens, the speaker confronts her own past day by day, in contrast to her view of her mother’s whole life. In this poem, the speaker stays awake to encounter the vision of her dead mother, while earlier in the poem sequence, dreams of her grandmothers haunted her sleep. In contrast to the first poem, where the repetition of zogn (to say) signaled a dialogue between the dead women and the speaker, in “Froyen-lider VIII” mother and daughter do not speak to each other. Like the matriarch Leah in “Froyen-lider VI”, the mother remains a mute presence. Yet her silence speaks to the poem’s narrator and dramatizes the consequences of prayer. As “Froyen-lider VI” recasts a tkhine of the matriarchs, so VIII glosses the Shema, one of the two central prayers of the Hebrew liturgy: And her emaciated hands Wrapped in modest nightgown sleeves Are like a God-fearing script on white parchment And the words of Hamapil are angry Like fiery coals quenched by her quiet plea,

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And they shrivel her mouth Like a withered plum. And her tears come drop by drop like a stingy drizzle. (5–12)

The image of the mother’s withered hands wrapped in the modest sleeves (tsniesdike arbl ) of her nightgown recalls the generations of women in “Froyen-lider I” who brought their blood in modesty (in tsnies) to the sexually rebellious dreamer. In “Froyen-lider VIII,” this modesty is located in the actual garment in which the mother sleeps, a fact that underlines the extremity of the speaker’s transgression of adultery in the earlier poems. The contrast between mother and daughter intensifies in the comparison of the mother’s dried-out hands in the nightgown sleeves to the letters of “a God-fearing script on white parchment.” It is apparent from the poem’s dramatic setting that the “God-fearing script” spells out the words of the bedtime prayer, Hamapil, which a Jew recites before sleeping. In a visual pun, Molodowsky likens the mother’s two hands (in Hebrew, yad), cupped against her nightgown, to the doubled yud, the two Hebrew letters written to abbreviate the Ineffable Name that a God-fearing person utters twice in the most memorable lines of the Shema. This embodiment of God’s name in the mother’s flesh aggrandizes the mother’s virtue and expresses the daughter’s anguish for her sin. The tension between the Hebrew prayer and the Yiddish poem comes forth when the mother recites the Hamapil (Hamapl in Yiddish), the benediction, “who maketh bands of sleep to fall”48 in the Kri’at shema ‘al hamittah (Krishme, in Yiddish), which is recited before going to bed. In the poem, these words grow angry as they emerge from the mother’s mouth. This anger is ironic, because the prayer Hamapil requests a peaceful sleep and good dreams; it asks God to maintain the distinction between the sleep of the night and the sleep of the dead, and praises Him for bringing light to the eyes and to the world. This irony makes the reader reevaluate the prayer’s request; it suggests that God’s answer is not adequate for the mother’s piety. In the complex syntax and imagery in these lines, the words and spirit of praying contradict each other, for the words of devotion shrivel the flesh and silence the mouth that utters them. The words of

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the prayer replace the mother’s words that would express her grief. All she can do is weep. The comparison of the mother’s mouth to a “withered plum” and her tears to “a stingy drizzle” connotes the Hebrew calendar’s autumn month of Heshvan, which, in the title sequence, Kheshvndike nekht, makes a woman long for a fertility to correspond to the rainy season ritualized in the Hebrew calendar. The “stingy drizzle” recalls another scriptural passage (Deut. 11:13–21) in the Shema, recited not at bedtime, but in the morning, in which God threatens to withhold the rains from the Land of Israel. While morning will come for the speaker, it will not arrive for the mother, despite her modesty and obedient piety. In the imagery of the Shema, the poet’s pious mother is likened to the arid earth from which God has unjustly withheld the rain. In this figure, the mother’s mouth, shriveled from the words of God’s commandments, cannot emit her own voice. In the second half of the poem, the daughter is still unable to fall asleep, even though she has conjured the image of her mother reciting Hamapil as a surrogate for her own inability to pray: And now that I myself am a woman, And walk, clad in brown silk With my head bare And my throat naked, And now that my own life’s misfortune has hunted me down Like a crow falling upon a chick, Often my room is lit up all night, And I hold my hands, reproaches, over my head, And my lips recite a quiet, simple Plea to God. And tears come drop by drop like a stingy drizzle. (13–24)

The sleepless daughter rehearses the differences between herself and her mother. In contrast to her mother’s “modest nightgown sleeves,” the adulterous daughter wears a low-cut “brown silk” dress and does not cover her hair, as a married woman should. Instead of reciting the prayers for falling asleep, she stays up all night in her lighted room. Comparing the misfortunes of her life to a “crow falling upon a chick,” the daughter emphasizes how nature’s predation has determined her

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life, in contrast to the laws and prayers that have determined the mother’s life. While both mother and daughter are subjected to forces larger than themselves, the culture of obedience crushes the mother into ­silence. In contrast, the daughter, while weeping the same ineffectual “stingy drizzle” of tears as her mother, fashions a voice to recite her own “simple / Plea to God.” In “Froyen-lider” Molodowsky depicts the tradition of prayer as obsolete, but she acknowledges it as the source of her poetic voice. In the second poem of another sequence, “Opgeshite bleter” (Fallen Leaves), the speaker considers a prayer book of tkhines while joining prayer to nature with the word bleter (leaves), which refers to both a tree’s leaves and the pages of a book: Before me—an old sider [prayer book] With yellowed leaves bent at the corners, Marking tkhines [women’s prayers] about dew and rain, Marking the Binding of Isaac And Nimrod’s fiery limekiln. Tears fell quietly there And made the pages soft, As soft as a heart grows with prayer. Fingers that followed the prayers beginning “May it be Thy will,” Darkened those lines recited each seven times. And who will now, Godfearing, Carry the prayer book under her arm? And who will turn the yellowed leaves?49 (1–13)

An earlier poem in the sequence established the speaker as a woman lulled into forgetfulness and senselessness by the dark autumn night, yet whose “white arms / Will awaken, aroused.” Now, her hands hold “an old prayer book / With yellowed leaves bent at the corners.” The corners of the pages have been bent to mark the women’s seasonal petitions for dew and rain, as well as the prayers centered on Abraham’s obedient near-sacrifice of his son Isaac and on the midrashic testing of Abraham by King Nimrod—all of them prayers that rehearse and confirm God’s covenant with the Jewish people.50 The pages of this prayer book bear the physical evidence of its use, for the act of praying

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has softened them with tears and darkened them as fingers traced the printed lines. In turn, the prayers have softened the hearts and marked the lives of those who prayed. The book this woman holds is an artifact that calls forth in the speaker her memory of others praying. Yet the prayer book records the ways of prayer that women no longer observe: “And who will now, Godfearing, / Carry the prayer book under her arm? / And who will turn the yellowed leaves?” Inferring that there is no one left to pray from the sider, the speaker, in answer, tentatively offers herself. But instead of keeping the customs of prayer, she will preserve the book as an object: Perhaps I shall carry it to my green-covered table, Place it in the middle, And when a drought falls upon my heart, Take the prayer book to my burning lips.51 (14–17)

As if to celebrate the Sabbath or a holiday, this modern woman will carry the sider to her own table, which, in contrast to the yellowed leaves of the book and of the autumn season, is bedecked in a verdant “green.” The green cover of this table, connoting spring, contrasts with the customary white holiday cloth and signals the woman’s redefinition of tradition. On her table, the sider will remain closed until the woman raises it up according to the decree of her heart rather than to the decreed order of prayer. Even then, the woman will not open the book to recite prayers. Rather, in a gesture at once pious and iconoclastic, she will raise it to her lips. A traditional Jew, having concluded praying, often kisses the sider upon closing it and before placing it back on the shelf. But this speaker’s kiss is more sensuous than reverent. She brings the book to her lips as if to quench her thirst for both spiritual comfort and bodily satiation. If the “green-covered table” suggests a table set for an unconventional Sabbath or holiday meal, then the sider is sustenance in an unexpected way. The woman’s arms, beneath which she will carry the prayer book to the table, are the same “aroused” white arms mentioned earlier in the sequence,52 and her burning lips are the same as the lips that “bloom” with the “unfinished word[s]” that come to “land on my dress like butter­

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flies” in the “attentive fields” of the soft blue and green countryside, which is mentioned in a later poem.53 When she raises the prayer book to her lips, the kiss seals the distance between the modern secularist and the women who, in the past, once prayed. For the modern woman, who listens for an answer from fields “attentive to my speech” and into whose “mouth comes the scent of fields and bees, / And words clear as stars,” traditional Jewish prayer is obsolete.54 Yet she implies that her poetry is a new form of prayer. This generalization is apparent from the conflation of three texts in the poem’s alter sider: a book of Yidddish tkhines for women; the standard Hebrew siddur for men; and the Tsene-rene, biblical stories and midrashim translated into Yiddish for women.55 From the speaker’s point of view, these prayers and sacred tales stand in contrast to the new story of an individual’s choice, the story of a woman’s singular desire to appropriate tradition to her own ends. In the poem’s final line, the old prayer book remains closed, as do the lips of the woman who saves it. The pious gesture, from which piety has been removed, recalls Molodowsky’s secularization of lighting the Sabbath candles in her poem, “Fun fintster,” which appeared in Korman’s 1923 revolutionary anthology. In that poem, Molodowsky invoked religious practice simply to flout tradition. But by the time of her 1927 book, her thinking had become more complex, and she reconfigured religiosity to fit the secular form of a modern poem, rather than simply mocking or rejecting it. When the protagonist of Kheshvndike nekht needs to pray, she writes her own prayers. The three poems of the sequence “Tfiles” (Prayers), which Molodowsky dates as written in 1922, address God. In the first, the speaker pleads for God’s protection: Don’t let me fall Like a stone that drops on the hard ground. And don’t let my hands become dry As the twigs of a tree When the wind beats down the last leaves. And when the storm rips dust from the earth Angry and howling, Don’t let me become the last fly Trembling terrified on a windowpane. Don’t let me fall.56 (1–10)

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This initial series of similes compares the speaker to what God should not let her become—a dropped stone, twigs stripped by the season, a last surviving fly trapped at a window pane. The latter image calls to mind “Di mayse mit der flig” (The Tale of the Fly), a 1921 political satire by the American Yiddish modernist Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, which Molodowsky likely had read and to which she may have been responding.57 In Halpern’s poem, in a starving village a fly buzzes annoyingly around the nose of a frustrated demon, whose tears instigate a Jewish miller’s suicide and the deaths of the gentile peasants. Molodowsky strips the fly of its comic aspect and makes it a cautionary metaphor for a woman who can pray for redemption only in nature, outside the boundaries of Jewish tradition. This catalogue of negated similes is enclosed by the twice-repeated line nit loz mikh untergeyn (Don’t let me fall). After this repetition, the poem unfolds what appears to be a positive request: I have so much prayer, But, as a blade of Your grass in a distant, wild field Loses a seed in the lap of the earth And dies away, Sow in me Your living breath, As You sow a seed in the earth. (11–16)

This request qualifies itself in two ways. First, a narrative statement precedes it: kh’hob azoyfil gebet (I have asked so much). Upon examination, this statement does not follow from the earlier lines, where the speaker has asked only that she be kept from falling, aging, and surviving for too long—or, to state these requests more positively, that she be sustained in a season of growth. Second, between this narrative statement and the actual request in the penultimate line, the poet unfolds the simile of the dying blade of grass. The syntactical complexity of this figure turns it back upon itself, so that it comes to signify God as much as the speaker. The action she asks God to take, to impart to her dayn lebedikn otem (your living breath), is enclosed by two clauses of similes. First the act is likened to the dropping of a seed on the earth by a blade of grass. Although that blade of grass belongs to God (a groz dayns), the syntax alters the order of comparison. If the poem

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ended with the imperative request, it would seem that the poet is likening God to the blade of grass, His living breath to the seed, and herself to the earth’s lap. In this ordering of likeness, the poet figures God as an ephemeral, dying aspect of nature and herself as the eternally receptive earth, ready to be replenished. Such a simile for God seems to diminish the One whose might and grandeur traditionally defy comparison, as the conclusion of the Shema prayer states, quoting Exodus 15:11: Who is like Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like Thee, glorious in holiness, Awe-inspiring in renown, doing wonders?58

The final line of the poem corrects this reversal by restating the simile more clearly—vi du farzayst a kerndl in dr’erd (As You sow a seed in the earth)—depicting God as the power behind the perpetuation of life. This shift is subtle but essential, for in the former simile, the poet has revealed a central doubt. This doubt replaces the absolute authority of the God to whom the prayer is addressed with the uncertain authority of the prayer’s author (in the second poem of “Tfiles”:) I still don’t know whom, I still don’t know why I ask. A prayer lies bound in me, And implores a god, And implores a name. (1–5)

These lines amplify the doubt and uncertainty implied by the complex simile of the grass and the earth at the end of the previous poem. The first of the paired repetitions, ikh veys nokh nit (I still don’t know), urgently presses the speaker’s wavering faith in prayer. The second of the paired repetitions, un bet zikh tsu (And asks of ), emphasizes the reversal in a tfile ligt bay mir gebundn (A prayer lies bound in me). The syntax of this line transforms the speaker into a passive object (mir) of the prayer (a tfile) that becomes an active subject of the verb ligt (lies). Bound within the speaker, the prayer speaks for her, imploring a got (a god) and a nomen (a name) to take over her voice and will. In

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“Tfiles I,” the concluding simile reduced God to a tiny part of His own creation and then reestablished His authority as the causal power of creation. In “Tfiles II,” the metaphor reverses the roles and transforms the prayer into the request and the “I” into the medium for the prayer. As if the prayer speaks through her, the voice continues: I pray In the field, In the noise of the street, Together with the wind, when it runs before my lips, A prayer lies bound in me, And implores a god, And implores a name. (6–12)

From the initial statements of not knowing, the poem has moved into a narration of the act of praying, which specifies the settings of the ­action—the countryside and the city, the silent field and the noisy street. The catalogue of places where this supplication can occur culminates, as setting gives way to occasion: mit vint tsuzamen, ven er loyft mir far di lipn (Together with the wind, when it runs before my lips). The enclosing prepositions, mit and tsuzamen, couple the voice of prayer to the wind running before the lips of the speaker who is the prayer’s medium. This coupling makes the wind at once a force of nature outside the speaker and the breath originating within the speaker herself. It seems that both blasts of air—the wind and the breath—pray without deliberation or intention, but by dint of what they are. The poem closes on a note of doubt, as the final lines repeat lines 3–5. The prayer has em­ powered the passive speaker only to address an unknown, almost arbitrary god, a deity that is itself an enigmatic aspect of language, a name. This sequence of substitutions—of nature for God, of language for human spirit and nature, of language for God—leads to the ascendancy of narrative over prayer in the final poem of the sequence: I lie on the earth, I kneel In the ring of my horizons, And stretch my hands With a prayer

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To the west, when the sun sets, To the east, when it rises there, To each spark That it show me the light And make my eyes bright, To each worm that glows in the darkness at night, That it shall bring its wonder before my heart And redeem the darkness that is enclosed in me. (1–13)

In these lines, the speaker describes the physical act of worship. Significantly, she prays not to God but to the earth and its horizons. The image of the sun rising and setting at the edges of the speaker’s world suggests that the earth, like her spirit, is permanently dark, despite the sun’s departure and return. Yet conversely, if this synechdoche holds, then the speaker’s spirit will, like the processes of nature, enlighten itself. The poem, which began as a direct entreaty in part I, moves through doubt in part II, and concludes by narrating the speaker’s other actions in part III. The divine listener, master of nature, has been replaced by nature itself, for the sun and the glowing worm, not God, will redeem her from her inner darkness (oyslayzn di finsternish). God’s “living breath” (lebedikn otem) of part I becomes “the wind running before my lips” in part II. From the speaker’s direct entreaty to God in part I, the poem changes to a description of her uncertainty about the recipient of her prayer in part II, and, in part III, to a narration of the act of praying without God and outside of the Jewish community. The progress of the modern poem thus appears to write God out of its prayer. It is worth noting how far Molodowsky’s tfile of a woman alone in nature has traveled from the early-eighteenth-century “Tfile l’shabes” by Khane Kats and “Tfile” by Gele, both of which confirmed the centrality and certainty of the worshipper’s stance within the Jewish people and the arc of Jewish history. Although in Kheshvndike nekht, Molodowsky also included strong poems with a predominant feminist bent that would have fit into Korman’s Brenendike brikn—such as her sequence, “Oreme vayber” (Poor Women), a depiction of “all impoverished women who scour burnt pots”59—her most revolutionary poems are those that rebel against a religious tradition they cannot disavow. “Froyen-lider” and “Tfiles”

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develop the sexualized nature imagery of “Groye erd” by subverting the sacred in a way that did not burn bridges, as Korman would have it in his Kiev and Berlin anthologies, but rather by reconfiguring the connection to tradition. The strongest poems of Molodowsky’s 1927 book dramatize the modern woman poet’s negotiation between the natural forces that determine women’s sexuality and the Jewish textual tradition that regulates how women live in society. The books that Molodowsky published in Warsaw in the 1930s— Dzshike gas (Dzshike Street, 1933) and Freydke (1935), as well as the poems she wrote for her young students, Mayselekh (Tales, 1930)— continued to embrace the task of writing secular poetry. In these poems, the poet contended with the conflict between politics and aesthetics that characterized the urban poverty of interwar Warsaw. In her poem “Dzshike gas,” for example, Molodowsky asks how it is possible for a woman who notices the beauty of spring days “like golden saffron, / Fragrant with starflowers,” and who still measures time according to the Hebrew calendar, to write poetry in the dire economic and political circumstances of Dzshike Street, where “All the roofs ring with despair, / Tables with hunger, / And the barefoot with the ‘Internationale.’”60 In the crowded Jewish neighborhood of Warsaw, the people surrounding this “lady singer” chastise her because “She hangs around here all the time / And braids our misery into rhymes. / Yesterday she should have gone into the street with us and seen / The twenty-year-old man flogged to death / In Dzshike Number Ten.”61 Although she claims not to have “a single word with which / To answer” the charge that she is oblivious to human suffering and political persecution, Molodowsky in her poems written in the 1930s created strong female characters who survive the difficult circumstances of Jewish life in interwar Poland. For example, in her famous children’s poem “Olke,” a girl escapes poverty and a difficult family with the blue parasol of her imagination; and in the sixteen-part poeme (narrative sequence) “Freydke,” the “heroine,” a single mother, “could have been a daring sailor,” or astronomer, or builder, but instead supports her young daughter by peddling eggs on the street.62 Although Molodowsky’s poetry of the late 1920s set out in this political direction, Korman did not represent her with these progressive poems in Yidishe dikhterins. Reversing his rejection of Jewish tradi-

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tion in Brenendike brikn, Korman, now living in Detroit, represented Molodowsky with variant versions of the poems that contend with religious tradition—“Froyen-lider I, II, VI, VII, VIII” and “Opgeshite bleter II, IX”—as well as “Otwock I,” from a sequence about the months Molodowsky spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the resort town of Otwock, near Warsaw. He ended his selection with another ostensibly autobiographical poem, “A matseyve ” (A Tombstone), which recounts a “cold” and “tired” daughter’s imagined journey from the city to her mother’s shtetl grave where, “by the silent mound of earth,” the speaker will stand alone, as her “lips . . . quietly and sadly curve,” calling out, “Maminke, maminke mayne.”63 Gone is the exuberance of the 1923 poem, when the girl in the cemetery overturned gravestones and woke the dead into a brilliant new world. It seems no accident that the anthologist chose “A matseyve” for Yidishe dikhterins. The last line’s intimate, graveside lament, “Mommy, my mommy,” echoes Korman’s dedication of his anthology of women Yiddish poets to mayn muters ondenk (To my mother’s memory).64 Even more telling is the fact that “A matseyve” is the initial poem in an eponymous sequence that ends with “Groye land,” the poem with which Korman had concluded Brenendike brikn. This evidence suggests that Korman selected poems by Molodowsky for Yidishe ­dikhterins according to an agenda that had changed from privileging the revolutionary to preferring poems by women that reflected back upon the traditional culture that he had dismissed. This elegiac tone and reversal of interest may have resulted partly from Korman’s departure from Europe and his immigration to the United States, where his new vantage point afforded new value to the traditional. With the publication of Kheshvndike nekht, Molodowsky established her reputation in the Yiddish literary world. This book received some twenty, mostly appreciative reviews in the Yiddish press, including one by Shmuel Niger, the famous critic who had attacked Korman’s Brenendike brikn in print in 1923.65 Her second book, Mayselekh, the children’s poems, was awarded a prize by the Jewish Community of Warsaw and the Yiddish Pen Club in 1930.66 Her third book, ­Dzshike gas, published in 1933 by the press of the leading Warsaw literary journal, Literarishe bleter, received one negative as well as three positive reviews in Warsaw and New York. One of the positive reviews, by

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Rokhl Korn, writing from her hometown of Pshemishl for Literarishe bleter,67 cited Dzshike gas as a book that stepped out of the margins of existence to which women had been conventionally assigned and addressed the central issues of Jewish life in Poland after the Great War. Korn concluded the review by lauding Molodowsky as one of the “women writers” by nature “closest to reality,” for her portrayal of the “true,” “brilliant joy” waiting to be revealed from “beneath the hunger and need of Dzshike Street.”68 Nakhman Mayzel, the editor of Literarishe bleter from 1925 to 1938, praised Molodowsy as a “subjective poet” who had produced poems empowered by the “objective fact of Warsaw Jewish poverty.”69 Sh. Niger, writing in the New York paper Der tog, noted that just as Molodowsky’s poems in Kheshvndike nekht transcended their Jewish themes and the poet’s own gender, so, too, the “social motif” of Dzshike gas did not limit her as a social versifier but gave her the platform to be a “true poet” who was socially aware.70 In contrast, the review by H. S. Kazdan, in the Bundist Vokhnshrift far literature, kunst, un kultur, complained that the book was too aesthetic and kept Molodowsky’s poems from being what we would call “politically correct.”71 Molodowsky had anticipated such ideological attacks on her poetry as well as the negative reception of other women poets. In January 1930, she published a satirical article in Literarishe bleter protesting the literary category of froyen-dikhtung (women’s poetry) and the empty generalizations about how women write. In the article she quoted “a prominent Yiddish poet,” who had said of one woman poet, “She writes, in general, like all women poets.”72 Such cliches were in the air even before Korman published Yidishe dikhterins.73 On June 3, 1927, Molodowsky had published an article in Literarishe bleter in which she protested a belittling review of a group of unnamed women poets. In her parodic piece, “Meydlekh, froyen, vayber, un . . . Nevue” (Girls, Women, Wives, and . . . Prophecy), she objected to the critic and poet Melech Ravitch’s “Meydlekh, froyen, vayber—yidishe dikhterins” (Girls, Women, Wives—Yiddish Poetesses), which balanced metaphors of gentile romantic chivalry with chaste Jewish virtue (tsnies); flirtation with seduction; and pregnancy with infertility and miscarriage.74 She also expressed her reservations about the category of a “special ­women’s poetry,” which she claims was made up by men writing for

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newspapers, in a letter she wrote to Korman in September 1927, in which she nonetheless suggested which of her “Froyen-lider” he might include in Yidishe dikhterins.75 A year later, Melech Ravitch’s outrageous review of Korman’s anthology began, “My dear, patient, infatuated, polygamist, Ezra Korman!”76 Discrediting Korman as an editor by attributing to him personal, sexual motives in his literary judgment and choices, Ravitch also discredited the poets themselves. Perhaps his viciousness was due to professional envy of Korman, disguised as a critical attack. Molodowsky, in her response to Ravitch’s 1927 anonymous group review of works by individual women poets, mentioned that Ravitch had stated in print his own intention to publish an anthology of Yiddish women poets, “and with pictures!”77 In her 1930 article “Encounters,” Molodowsky satirized the arbitrary groupings of women poets by critics, newspaper editors, and anthologizers through a series of imagined encounters by women poets whom she regarded as opposites—the urbane modernist Anna Margolin and Rokhl Korn, whose poems celebrated country life; Miriam Ulinover, whose poems depicted the archaic piety of a shtetl grandmother; ­Esther Shumiatsher, who used images from Christianity and Islam; Sarah Reyzen, a poet of conventional domesticity; the sensualist Celia Dropkin; Khane Levin, a Leninist revolutionary; and Molodowsky herself. By identifying each poet through images and phrases typical of her poetry, Molodowsky parodied the parodies of the works of these writers. She depicted her own “encounter” with Khane Levin “on a newspaper literary page ” through the extended metaphor of pages torn from a book, in a parody of her own poem, “Froyen-lider I.” From between her fingers spill out “holy pages torn from an old prayer book,” while Khane Levin, in a parody of one of her poems, carries a photograph of Lenin and a gun.78 When Levin threatens Molodowsky with the gun, the pages, now transformed into “the Book of Exodus,” “fanned out . . . and set down between us a white, paper path.”79 With this anecdote, Molodowsky made the point that poetry connected women poets, despite all their differences and varieties. The fact that they all appeared in print, whether it was in the poetry section of a newspaper or in an unbound sacred text, was no excuse for critics to lump women poets together.

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Avant-garde and Social Poems: Dvore Fogel, Rikuda Potash, and Rokhl Korn Dvore Fogel Not all women poets in the 1920s wrote about revolution or the struggle between Jewish tradition and modern secularism. Some were drawn to the high modernism that dominated the literary scene throughout Europe.80 I will treat this modernist movement in Yiddish poetry by women first by examining works by two poets—Dvore Fogel and Rikuda Potash—and then by considering the early poetry of Rokhl Korn, who was influenced by modernism, social consciousness, and feminism.81 According to her biographer and Polish translator, Karolina Szymaniak, Dvore Fogel was born on January 4, 1900 in the Galician shtetl of Bursztyn into a well-off family of teachers and community workers, where Polish was the household language. Her father, a headmaster in the Baron de Hirsch School, taught Dvore Hebrew, and her first writings were in Polish and Hebrew. During World War I, Fogel’s family fled to Vienna, where she attended Polish and German gymnasia and graduated from the latter. In 1919 she began her studies at Jan Kazimierz University in Lemberg and received her doctorate in Krakow in 1926. Her dissertation was on the “epistemological meaning of art in Hegel’s philosophy and its modifications in the work of the Polish philosopher Jozef Kremer.”82 As early as 1918, she began to publish in Polish, Hebrew, and Swedish journals on subjects that included art criticism and theory and corresponded with writers such as Bruno Schultz.83 Only in 1928 did she begin to publish in Yiddish, which may be the reason Korman did not include her in Yidishe ­dikhterins.84 Thereafter Fogel published two volumes of poetry in Yiddish, Tog ­figurn (Day Figures, 1931) and Manekinen (Mannequins, 1934), as well as a prose montage, Akatsyes blien (Acacias Blossom, 1935). At the start of World War II, Fogel stayed in Lemberg, and even though she had a chance to escape into hiding, she remained in the Lemberg ghetto with her elderly, ailing mother and her six-year-old son, Asher Josef, until the August 1942 Nazi “Action” when she and her family were killed.85

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In 1931, when Kadya Molodowsky visited Lemberg (Lvov, in Polish), Fogel published a newspaper article about her and translated one of her poems for the literary page, Literatura Nauka-Sztuka, in the Polish newspaper Chwila.86 Fogel’s article presented Molodowsky’s works “as an example of her theory of modernist poetry,”87 but Fogel’s own poetry adhered to a rigorous aesthetic derived from the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, the Greek-born painter and sculptor, and those of other Surrealists that referred to the Classical Greek and Roman foundations of Western European culture. While Molodowsky adapted the language of women’s prayer, folksong, and political protest to establish a strong, individualistic lyric and narrative voice, Fogel suppressed all such markers of individuality with the weight of a cerebral impersonality that reflected her education in philosophy and aesthetics. This abstract framework made her poetic style difficult and its apparent objectivity quite distinct from the style of other Yiddish poets at time. “Figurn-lider I” (Figure-Poems I), which opens her 1934 book, Mane­ kinen, (Mannequins), exemplifies Fogel’s aesthetics: When days cannot be different From exactly these The rectangle is the figure of our life. The rectangle is from the soul’s sweet monotone: When there is one street for all the days Begun in the house where one lives And concluded in the same house When the sun hangs on the other side. The rectangle is the soul of refusal: A gray train and its cars pass stations with one kerosene lantern Gray pots and blue hang on green plaster walls, A gray pot, a blue, a gray . . . Above streets where the mist blooms train-cars filled with milk cans travel And in rooms stand walls and tables And by the walls and table figures with glassy eyes[.] 88 (1–15)

Describing a scene from the point of view of a person gazing through the rectangular window on a train, the poem uses an affectless voice to present images without connection to each other. The rectangle

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(rekhtek) of “the figure of our life” is comprised of “the soul’s sweet monotone.” Within the stable geometric shape of the rectangle, each day begins and ends in the same place, which is the house where one dwells. But the dwelling place and those living there lack character and interaction. The days pass without connection, like a train passing through a station, when one can glimpse only the single lantern and the alternating gray and blue pots on a green wall. Another train, perhaps, passes over a bridge above mist-filled streets, pulling along cars filled with milk cans. The milk in these cans does not feed people. And the people who dwell in the streets are themselves disconnected from one another, as they are glimpsed through the rectangular windows of their houses from the train’s rectangular window. Even the act of looking is unanchored. In this visual poem about modern disaffection, the eyes of the people observed in their houses are “glassy” and cannot see beyond the window frames. As the rectangular window frames the vision of life, in the spirit of modernist art, it both reveals and obscures, providing no information about the observer who looks through it. There is no “I” in this poem. The disconnection of images, the lack of a first-person speaker, and the message of modern anomie, along with the objectification of the anonymous dwellers in the houses, presents a voice and approach to poetry that is the polar opposite to Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider I.” Where Molodowsky’s language invoked Hebrew prayers and laws, ­Fogel’s repetition of the German word rekhtek (rectangle) connects her poem to paintings, such as de Chirico’s cityscapes, where vast, empty piazzas are streaked with slanting light, or where, as in Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure) (1914), the silhouette of a distant passenger train crosses a bridge supported by concrete pillars forming three huge, dark rectangles.89 But it is Fogel’s evocation of women in “Ferd un torsn” (Horses and Torsos) that provides the strongest contrast with Molodowsky’s poetry. By dedicating this poem to “the painter Giorgio de Chirico,”90 Fogel made explicit her debt to Surrealist art, and the poem’s disrupted syntax imitated the painting’s visual dislocations: It’s a misunderstanding that they hold their eyes open Tragic horses in the pictures of Chirico And not naked holes: eternal eyes of sculptures.

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Down to the earth fall horse-locks Of brown stone and white marble Exactly like Doric and Ionic capitals. But their legs are four solid columns. Near them old temples for idols Are like aged oaks With stumps for walls and blind body-torsos. Oh, helplessness of old temples Of torsos with arms hacked off Of blind horses with locks of curling manes. In hairdressers’ windows the wax dolls Smile as blindly as antique torsos That come from a distant world With a tragic resolution: to pass away . . . And cannot pass away: Torsos with two blind eyes. Dolls with a moveable heart Wear glazed pupils beneath India-ink brows And a smile in Chameleon-brand carmine And faces of smiling porcelain. At the same time, at Broad Street Number Fifteen Pink dolls present Living breasts like round apples And sadness like yet another squandered happiness.91 (1–27)

Like its title, the first two stanzas of “Ferd un torsn” evoke a composite of de Chirico’s recurrent motifs of sculptural horses, temple ruins, and the armless torsos of ancient Greek statues. The poem calls these images of broken might “helpless,” and then turns to the modern city street. There, the fractured imagery is female: Wax mannequins in the windows of beauty salons “Smile as blindly as antique torsos / That come from a distant world / With a tragic resolution: to pass away.” The truncated mannequins evoked here consist only of a stylized head, neck, and shoulders for modeling wigs and hats.92 Like the falling horses and broken sculptures in de Chirico’s paintings, these beauty parlor mannequins are “Torsos with two blind eyes,” which seek to but

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“cannot pass away.” The poem’s gaze then turns from these sculptures to actual women, either on the street or in a beauty salon, who seem to be living versions of the show window mannequins—“Dolls with moveable hearts.” Despite their beating hearts, these women are not fully alive: their eyes are glazed or glassy beneath eyebrows painted as if by a brushful of India ink, and their mouths are carmine stamps in porcelain faces frozen in a smile. The only figures that are more than lifelike are the prostitutes—“Pink dolls” in a house on Broad Street, whose “Living breasts” are “like round apples,” and who present “sadness like another squandered happiness.” Depicting living women as versions of the mannequins advertisng fashion and as body parts (breasts) separated from the whole, Fogel employs the techniques of Cubism and Surrealism to fragment the human experiences that objectify women. Fogel structured the book Manekinen in three dated sections: “Manekinen (Mannequins) 1930–1931,” “Trink-lider (Drinking Songs) 1930–1932,” and “Shund-baladn (Rubbish/Melodrama Ballads) 1931–1933.” Her hyphenated title for the opening sequence of poems, “­Figurn-lider” (Figure-Poems), offers a contrastive echo to Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider” (Women-Poems). While Molodowsky’s poems argue against an objectification of women through the restrictions placed on their sexuality by Jewish tradition, Fogel’s poems depict without comment the lifeless objects that replace women in the windows of urban commerce—mannequins. Molodowsky’s poems plumb the emotions and subjective experience of women struggling against the rabbinic strictures fashioned by generations of men. In contrast, Fogel’s poems describe the contorted physical appearances of women—in beauty parlors and in brothels—who attempt to please the gaze of men by imitating the mannequins through which modern society represents them. Molodowsky’s female ancestors have cheeks like still-ripe apples, hands like Hebrew letters, and lips like withered plums; Fogel’s women have blind eyes, china faces, and breasts like round apples. They are torsos, without arms, the fragments of a past pagan glory. The apple-like cheeks in Molodowsky’s poem connote an abandoned wife’s youth and fertility, wasted by the rabbinic laws that forbid her to remarry. In contrast, the apple-like breasts in Fogel’s poem are figures for a sexuality that will lure men to prostitutes in

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order to acquire and consume them. This shared trope embodies opposite aspects of a feminist anger at the commodification of women’s sexuality. In these poems of 1930–1931, Fogel mentions nothing Jewish and gives no hint of an interest in the lineage of women within the tradition of prayer, the central concerns of Molodowsky’s poems. Unlike Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider,” where Hebraic words play a purposeful counterpoint to the Germanic elements of Yiddish, Fogel’s diction omits virtually all Hebraic words and, instead, imports from French, German, and Greek such words as manekinen (mannequins), rekhtek (rectangle), and tors (torso). While Molodowsky’s poems call up and contend with Jewish textual tradition, Fogel’s ignore or erase any trace of the Jewishness of Yiddish. For Molodowsky, Yiddish is a Jewish language that contains the struggles of the modern Jewish poet. Fogel, in contrast, deliberately replaces the Jewish cultural referents with modernism’s Classical foundations. With the pagan imagery in her poems of 1930–1931, Fogel reiterates what Jacob Glatstein, Arn Glants-Leyeles, and N. Minkoff, the leaders of Introspectivism, the New York Yiddish modernist movement, had called for in their 1919 and 1921 manifestos: to make Yiddish a language among the nations.

Rikuda Potash In 1934, the same year that Fogel’s Manekinen appeared in Lemberg/ Lvov, Rikudah Potash (1906–1965) published her first book of poems, Vint af klavishn (Wind on Piano Keys), in Lodz, just before emigrating to Palestine. Like Fogel, Potash’s poems in this book grew from the cultural world beyond Judaism and interwar modernisms, both Jewish and more generally European. While Fogel’s poems evoked tropes and imagery of ancient Greece and Rome, Potash’s poems called forth Christological referents. Through these contrasting cultural lenses, both poets attended to the problems of women, As Yael Chaver argues, Potash’s early poems spoke with an “I” that was “profoundly aware of its role as poetic voice” as “a modernist issue,” and at the same time spoke from the viewpoint “of a modern Jew” who avoided the “stereotypically ‘feminine’ concerns that Yiddish literary critics . . . tended to identify in poetry written by women.”93 In her study, Chaver shows

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how Potash’s early poems were profoundly influenced by her modernist contemporaries, especially by the Yiddish/Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, who published his first expressionist poems in his journal Albatros in 1922, a year after Peretz Markish’s expressionist dirge “Di kupe (The Heap)” had appeared in Kiev.94 Chaver demonstrates this influence in her analysis of the Christological imagery that pervades Potash’s poems in which “Christian imagery of blood and suffering”95 convey the experience of a Jewish woman. Chaver takes as an example the poem “Ikh bin a kinigin” (I Am a Queen), in which the speaker tells her mother that she has replaced di kroyn fun khabers bloye (“the crown of blue cornflowers”), which her mother had placed on her girlhood head, with di kroyn fun shvere nekht (“the crown of hard nights”) and a kroyn fun yesurim (“a crown of suffering[s]”), which she cannot remove from her head.96 Chaver argues that this crown of sufferings refers to the crown of thorns Jesus wore at the crucifixion, an image Potash had adapted from Uri Zvi Greenberg’s 1922 poem “Uri Tsvi farn tseylem” (Uri Zvi before the Cross).97 Yet the fact that she dedicated this poem to Miriam Ulinover,98 a poet we shall discuss in the next chapter, who had befriended the younger woman in Lodz, suggests that Potash may have had in mind another model for “Ikh bin a kinigin,” namely, Ulinover’s poem “Ester hamalke” (Esther the Queen). In that poem, also published in 1922, when Potash’s first poems appeared,99 the image of a crown figures prominently as a shtetl girl imagines herself in the role of the biblical Queen Esther, who saved her people from destruction. It seems, then, that Potash took as models both Greenberg’s male persona with its Christian referents and Ulinover’s female persona with its reinterpretation of the Book of Esther to evoke a daughter’s dialogue with her mother. This alignment of Potash’s poetry with contemporary Jewish poets, whose works summoned the cultural tropes of Christian and Jewish tradition, brings into focus Potash’s difference from the objectification in Fogel’s poetry and the religious and political questioning in Molodowsky’s. When Korman included four poems by the 22-year-old Potash in Yidishe dikhterins, he introduced her work to an international audience. While these early poems did not evince features of the avantgarde, they conveyed the confrontation of a young Jewish woman with an unsettling modernity. “Dayn valise” (Your Suitcase) is a love poem

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to a man who seems to have left for another country after a passionate visit with the speaker: Your suitcase can look Only sad. Into it you’ve thrown All the good and all the bad. You did not bring it empty, Empty you won’t take it back. In it lie bundles of joy, In it lies my glance. On a pale piece of paper I packed my glance for you: Throughout your long, hard journey It will accompany you. Your suitcase can look Only sad. Three sleepless nights, four—with dreams. That’s what you have in your suitcase.100

(1–16)

Although her lover will depart with a suitcase as full as it was when he arrived, the speaker has added to his possessions of “all the bad and all the good,” her own “bundles of joy” and her “glance” (blik). This glance or gaze is a metonym for the poem itself, which will accompany the lover on his long and difficult journey. Preserved in the poem that she has slipped into his suitcase, her glance will also remind him of the intangible baggage that he carries within—the week of sleepless and dream-filled nights they spent together. This memory of the lovers’ pleasurable or anxious wakefulness is what the traveler possesses ( farmogstu) in his suitcase. It is also what she, the speaker, will keep after his departure. The second poem in Korman, “Ven tsugn geyen op” (When Trains Depart), continues the theme of the lover’s painful departure by focusing on the train station and the train: When you traveled away, and in the station So many passengers with their distant worlds Stared at you weirdly,

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Like a three-year-old child, you opened your eyes in wonder And led them into a distant country, Where you had not yet been. The buffets with moody girls You did not enjoy, Did not even buy, Nor pay, And your cigarette dozed in your fingers. Long black trains arrive And whistle the eternal restlessness of everything. They depart like the quiet evening hours in winter. Bundles, baskets, suitcases Tell so much about the empty boxes of luck . . . And you with empty hands That forgot their companion, the oaken walking stick, Set off on your journey with closed eyes— Neither your dozing hands, Nor you yourself Know the loneliness That arrives When trains depart.101 (1–24)

Imagining her lover on the train after he has embarked, the speaker pictures him sitting alone in the café car, not eating and not even looking at the “moody girls,” as his cigarette smolders in his fingers. She observes that the luggage loaded onto the train and sitting in the station, the “bundles, baskets, suitcases, / Tell so much about the empty boxers of luck.” Her “luck” is that she is excruciatingly aware of her loss. The lover’s “luck” is that, because he has forgotten his oaken walking stick, his hands are leydik (idle and/or empty). And, as he “sets off on [his] journey with closed eyes,” he is as oblivious as the “threeyear-old child” he resembled at the opening of the poem, oblivious to the loneliness that envelops the speaker as he departs. In contrast to the train crossing the bridge in the modernist scene of Fogel’s poem, “Figurn-lider I,” the train station and the departing train in Potash’s poem are laden with feeling. In contrast to Fogel’s glassy-

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eyed people glimpsed through the double frames of the train and the house windows, Potash depicts the “moody girls” and the oblivious lover through the lens of her emotions. In addition to the differences between Fogel’s and Potash’s depictions of people, their evocation of inanimate objects points to the contrasting styles of their modernist poetry. While the milk cans on the train in Fogel’s poem convey a visual image rather than a semantic meaning, in Potash’s poem, the oaken walking stick that her lover has forgotten is a synecdoche for the speaker herself whom, she fears, he has also forgotten. In contrast to Fogel’s stringent erasure of meaning from the visuality of her poems, Potash infuses the imagery in her poems with symbolism and uses the descriptions to express the speaker’s emotion, which contrasts with the indifference of her surroundings. Through the alienation of the city and the train station, and the implied fragmentation of sexual relations, both poets speak to the concerns of the modern urban writer and reader. Notably, each omits from her Yiddish poems any hint of Jewish tradition. This absence of the cultural framework that defined Molodowsky’s poems, even as her poems questioned or subverted the tradition’s assumptions, gives Fogel’s and Potash’s poems a modernist aura that belies the Jewish language in which they were written. In her third poem in the Korman anthology, “Dos dinstmeydl” (The Servant Girl),102 Potash investigates the roles that class and gender play in the writing and reading of poetry: When the servant girl served a glass of tea, His eyes still rested on the white paper. He swiftly raised his eyes And said: —Wait, have you ever heard a poem? She burst out laughing. And soon, quietly sad, said: —I know, a poem— And he read familiarly. Her hands, sprinkled with black flecks That still smelled of the boiling pot, Rejoiced, And her apron with the green stripes straightened itself out. But her eyes strangely twinkled and sparkled with little flags,

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Looking all around in wonder. The incomprehensible poem was Like a silent caress in a cinema-picture, When people love each other on the linen-screen. And when he finished, She didn’t laugh any more. Soft, good, red weeping looked out from her eyes. Her mouth wanted to say something, But she soon returned to the kitchen And dunked her hands into a bucket of hot water. The incomprehensible poem Buzzed in her ears Like a leftover fly in the winter. (1–27)

Potash depicts the class differences between the employer and the servant, the cultured man who has just written a poem and the simple girl. Only partially comprehending the poem he reads her, the ­naïve girl is not able to articulate her understanding. Instead, she responds with a simile that compares the feelings the poem arouses in her with those she experienced when she watched actors embracing on a movie screen. Cinema, it seems, might be the new art form that can stimulate the imagination of a servant girl for whom poetry is inaccessible; yet the girl’s response to the poem indicates her capacity to be moved, and the poem affects her like the cinematic moment of love. But in a world where poetry is a man’s work and cooking, serving, and cleaning in the kitchen are the work of a woman, the man’s act of reading the poem to the girl hardly crosses the boundaries of gender and class. In the end, the poem stays with the girl like cinematic eroticism, but the pleasure is vexed and bothersome, buzzing like a fly that has outlived its season. Potash’s persistent fly points back to Molodowsky’s “last fly / Trembling terrified on a windowpane,” (“Tfiles I”). But if Molodowsky uses the fly as a metaphor to convey the desperation of a woman praying outside the boundaries of her society, Potash’s fly is a comic analogue for the inefficacy of male bourgeois poetry. In this poem about a superannuated male poet who ineffectively reaches out to a woman reader, Potash advocates a new kind of poetry written by a woman, one that both a simple servant girl and a sophisticated

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reader can understand. This new poetry will reach beyond di fonelekh (the little flags) of literary pretentiousness and political bombast, and Potash’s poem exemplifies the principles it puts forth. The fourth poem by Potash that Korman included, “Prostike fliterlekh” (Ordinary Details),103 also comments on the inequity between women and men, servants and middle-class householders, in a country village: The cows have mooed out “Go-od ni-ght” From the rich tenant farmer’s stable And across the way, from an upstairs window, through the cracks A mother’s voice resounded: —Perhaps “he” wants it like this— Then the sky above wrapped itself up in the evening, And the whole yard whitened all the panes with snow. By the pump, buckets full of long water-fringes Accompanied the water-carrier’s steps. Two servant women met in the road. One said to the other straightaway: —It’s really winter, too bad— And both sniffed with their noses, Grumbling and pointing to the cracks in the window . . . And the blood in them boiled strong, All at once curses poured out of their mouths Upon the fat householders, Because a father dies honorably, In silence.— And pouring out vehement oaths upon all Whom the world endowed with possessions, They raised a shout Bitter with anger To “Him,” Who lives forever. (1–24)

In this poem, Potash focuses on the two servant women whose greetings on the road quickly turn to anger as they overhear through the cracks in a window how a woman, a mother, speaks obsequiously to a man, whom she addresses in the third person as “he.” As their blood begins to boil, old-fashioned curses pour from their mouths to condemn the householders who enjoy their comforts while, it seems, somewhere

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an honorable father dies in silence. Pouring out oaths on all whom the world has endowed with wealth, the women cry out bitterly to “Him” who lives forever. That the servants’ curses are denoted by the Hebraic word kharomes and that their angry prayer reaches the eternal God mark the poem subtly with implicit Jewish concerns. (In contrast to their absence from her early poems, Potash’s interest in Jewish themes surfaces more explicitly in the poems of her 1934 Lodz book.) By contrasting the servants’ anger with a God who neglects to intervene in order to correct injustice and class inequities, and in depicting the tense coexistence of Jewish householders and peasants inhabiting the Polish countryside, Potash joins with her modernist poetics the social agenda of the interwar revolutionary poetry anthologized by Korman. Like Korman, who described revolution through biblical metaphors in his introduction to Brenendike brikn, Potash depicts the anger of the working class in terms of their belief in a God, whom they curse. Such poetry casts its revolutionary and modernist form in terms of religious tradition. This concern with class, gender, and tradition connects Potash to another poet from a Polish Jewish farming family, Rokhl Korn.

Rokhl Korn In 1928, a year after Molodowsky’s Kheshvndike nekht and the same year as Korman’s Yidishe dikhterins appeared, Rokhl Korn (1898–1982) published Dorf (Village), the first of the eight books of poems that she wrote over her long career.104 According to a letter she wrote to Korman early in 1926, which accompanied several of her “not-yet published poems,” Korn, like Rikuda Potash, first published poems in Polish in 1918. In 1919, however, the poet decided to write in Yiddish, after her husband introduced her to what she called the “terra incognita” of Yiddish literature.105 Korn’s translator, Seymour Levitan, explains this choice as a response to the anti-Semitic post–World War I pogroms. Although this was a decidedly political act—Korn’s husband had to teach her to read and write in Yiddish106—her early poems are neither expressly political nor urbanely modernist. They do not wrestle with the textual traditions of Jewish culture, as do Molodowsky’s poems, yet they are “Jewish” poems in quite a different way. The poems in Dorf commemorate, in what Levitan calls “cinematic” close-up focus,

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the people and landscape of the Polish farming village Podliski, in East Galicia, where Korn had a solitary childhood in a Jewish family that had “owned and managed farmland for several generations.”107 Of the seventeen poems in the first section of Dorf, which Korn dedicated “to the memory of my father who died young” (tsum ­ondenk fun mayn yung-geshtorbnem tatn), one describes her father’s premature death; seven are love poems and nine are about sick children and women, presumably in Warsaw, suffering in the aftermath of World War I. Most of the twenty poems in second section of Dorf evoke the village life of Rokhl Korn’s childhood. Korman included six of Korn’s poems from this volume in Yidishe dikhterins, although several appear as variant texts. Korman’s selection of Korn’s poems emphasized the themes of sensual love and country life. “Dir” (To You) is a love poem that conveys the speaker’s love for her gelibter man (beloved husband) through the metaphor of planting and harvest:108 I’m soaked through with you, like earth with springtime rain, And my fairest day hangs By the beating pulse of your first word, Like a bee by the blossoming branch of lindens. And I am above you, like the promise of abundance at the time When the wheat stands up straight with the rye in the fields And lays itself out with the hope of greenness Across the swept floors of granaries. From my finger-tips drips faithfulness on your tired head, Like yellow honey— And my years— Fields on which your feet step, Become fat and swollen From the ache—of loving you, Beloved husband. (1–15)

The speaker figures her love for a man through lush imagery of nature. While Korn opens the poem with the archetypal likening of the female speaker to the receptive earth and the male listener to the lifegiving rains, she varies and reverses the dynamics of the sexes in her

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sequence of similes, so that the female is active and the male is passive: the woman’s “fairest day” hovers “By the beating pulse of your first word, / Like a bee by the blossoming branch of lindens.” The speaker likens herself to “the promise of abundance” but goes on to describe her presence in the man’s life as such a harvest even before the wheat and the rye are ready to be cut. After the harvest has finished and the granary floor has been swept clean, her presence foretells the fertile sprouting of the next year’s plantings. With this omnipresence, the woman extends the power of her love for the man to nourish him with getrayshaft (faithfulness, devotion), and she drips like honey on his head, as if anointing him. The poem concludes by returning to the opening figure of the woman as the receptive earth: the speaker likens her years to “Fields on which your feet step,” which she imbues with the physical sensations of pregnancy, as they “Become fat and swollen / From the ache—of loving you, / Beloved husband.” We can see how Korn developed as a poet within the year 1928 by comparing the variant versions of another of her poems, published first by Korman as “Zumerdiker regn” (Summer Rain) and later in Korn’s own book, Dorf, under the title “Regn” (Rain): Like unmarried girls, the meadows full of grain Stand overripe And wait for the singing in-laws Who have still not come Because of the mournful, overcast rainy days. With abashed, corncockle-eyes,109 they look Into the summer sky That has put on over its young, blue head A gray cap of a great-grandmother [kupke] And weep about the fields’ sad luck. In barns [kamers] still hanging from the time of the first hay, The scythes sharpened and gleaming with a bride-groom’s lust and joy, And watch for the first blessed smile of the sun, That will call them to the wedding dance [khupe-tants] Over the ripe brown full meadows.110 (1–15)

In the context of Korman’s anthology, this poem appears almost sentimental and, through its Hebraic diction, “Jewish.” The poem develops

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an extended metaphor, which likens the ready fields that are kept from the harvest by an unseasonable summer rain to unmarried girls who weep while awaiting their delayed bridegrooms. The metaphor then compares scythes hanging unused in the barn to bridegrooms waiting for their wedding dance—both will be released to harvest the fields when the rains stop and the sun comes out. In the Korman version of this poem, the diction is heavily Hebraic, using words associated with Jewish wedding traditions that Korn uses to convey the disrupted harvest. Only in the extended metaphor do humans appear in the poem: The unmarried girls, the expected arrival of the in-laws, and the impatient bridegrooms are but the vehicle for the tension caused by the summer rain and the ready grain for those who work the land. In contrast, “Regn” (Rain), the version of the poem in Korn’s book Dorf, gives the poem a political dimension by dramatizing the social issue of the farmer’s hungry children: Like unmarried girls, the meadows full of grain stand overripe And wait for the singing in-laws Who have still not come Held up by the turnpikes of overcast rain-days. Fields look with abashed corncockle-eyes into the summer sky That has put on over its young, blue head A gray great-grandmother’s cap And holds the sun under the broad apron of the clouds. In the barn hang scythes gleaming and ready And sickles sharpen the small mice-teeth With longing for the first handful of grain— Every day, the farmer walks to the field, Tests the hardness of the young kernels with his teeth, Lets his eyes go toward the pasture in the eastern side of the sky Seeking a bit of sun. And the children, who already taste the flavor of bitter putrefied bread, Run after their father with their beseeching eyes And ask quietly, worriedly: “Still nothing?” “Nothing!”111 (1–20)

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In the later version, Korn diminishes the metaphor of the delayed wedding to two lines in the first stanza, replaces much of the Hebraic diction of the poem with Slavic words, and adds a final stanza of action and dialogue between the farmer and his hungry children. By restraining rather than developing the metaphor likening the ripe grain-fields full of pink wildflowers to unmarried girls, red-eyed from weeping, Korn turns the focus of the poem away from a Romantic pathetic fallacy, which imbues the natural world with human feelings, to focus on how the natural phenomena affect actual people and even the mice in the barn who also go hungry when the harvest is delayed. The image of “small mice-teeth” that await the first handful of grain prefigures the image of the balelbos, the Jewish farmer who tests the ripeness of hard grains with his teeth every day, as he waits for the skies to clear so that the harvest can begin. The teeth of both the mice and the farmer anticipating the harvest prepare for the image of the farmer’s hungry children, whose mouths have eaten spoiled bread (tukhle broyt), and who understand that the delayed grain harvest means they will have no fresh bread. While Korman’s version of this poem ends with an expectation of the weather’s shift before the harvest, which is figured as a Jewish wedding, the Dorf version of the poem suspends the farmer and his children in uncertainty. The children ask with beseeching eyes whether the eastern sky has brought sun, and the father answers in the negative with one word, “Nothing!” (nishto!). With this stark ending, Korn undermines any Romantic perceptions of nature and exposes the predicament of people who have no control over the elements of nature upon which they depend for sustenance. A third poem from Korn’s Dorf included in Korman’s anthology is “Kheshvn” (Heshvan). Its variant versions again confirm the differences between Korman’s presentation of Korn’s poetry and Korn’s own representation of it. Here is the version of Korn’s “Kheshvn” that appeared in Korman’s anthology: The fresh, black slices of earth Lie humble and tired opposite the autumn sun, Like the women lying-in after their first childbirth, Who smile quietly despite their pain And are ready to become mothers again.

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Crows112 come together for the banquet, Stroll with numbered, minute steps, Seek with black, clever eyes dug-up worms And nod their heads, like old aunts Chewing ginger cake with blue gums: “Never mind, you will live to see pleasure again in the spring.”113

In contrast, consider the version of “Kheshvn” that appeared in Korn’s book, Dorf : The fresh, black slices of earth Lie humble and tired opposite the autumn sun, Like the women lying-in after their first childbirth, Who smile quietly despite their pain And are ready to become mothers again. Crows come together for the banquet, Stroll with numbered, dancing pace, Seek with black, clever eyes dug-up worms And nod their heads, like old mothers Chewing pieces of ginger cake with their blue gums: “Never mind, the pain is like the white dew And soon you will live to experience pleasure, soon Even before the swallows with their sharp tails Shear the first wool of the spring sky.”114

The imagery in both versions of Korn’s poem echoes Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider” to the point that it seems as if Korn had deliberately taken Molodowsky’s women in childbirth (“Froyen-lider VII”), the crow hunting down the chick (“Froyen-lider VIII”), and the old aunts (“Froyen-lider I”) in order to rework them into a poem focused on the cycle of the seasons. Yet, despite this similar imagery, Korn’s poem couldn’t be more different from Molodowsky’s. While Molodowsky presents women literally, Korn uses the young woman’s first childbirth and the old women who eat ginger cakes during the birth as similes. And where Molodowsky uses nature imagery figuratively—the grass growing next to the horse’s skull, the crow devouring a chick—to convey the experience of women, Korn presents nature imagery literally, to show how the seasons actually affect the land. While Molodowsky’s subject is

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women within Judaism, Korn’s appears to be the rhythms of women’s lives within the workings of nature. Thus, in the Dorf version of “Kheshvn,” Korn embellishes the nature imagery at the end by adding to the quoted dialogue of the figurative alte mames (the old mothers) two poetic lines about the return of the swallows in the spring. In contrast, in the Korman version, the figurative women are di alte mumes (the old aunts), who gum their ginger cake and speak in dialect: “Never mind, you will live to see pleasure again in the spring” (nishkoshe, ets’t derlebn nakhes nokh tsum friling).In both variants of the poem, the crows, likened to old, toothless aunts or mothers witnessing a younger woman endure the pain of childbirth, have the last word. In the Korman version, the poem ends with the dialect one-liner that the old women say to the young woman, while in the Dorf version, Korn makes the simile more distinct and poetic by elaborating the metaphor of nature. We can only speculate on whether Korn sent Korman an earlier version of the poem for Yidishe dikhterins, which she then softened in revision for her own book Dorf, or whether she shortened the book’s originally longer version for Korman’s anthology. Whatever the history of the poem, the variant in Korman’s anthology draws attention to the generations of women, as the young woman in labor listens to the old women put the pain of childbirth into the perspective of a long life. This emphasis on women literalizes the vehicle of the simile. As the figurative language becomes literal, it overtakes the poem and draws attention away from the poem’s purported subject—the autumnal month of Heshvan—to its actual subject—the lives, relationships, and customs of women. Korn’s “Heshvan” thus enters into a dialogue with Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider” and brings to the examination of women’s lives within Jewish tradition a deliberately secular perspective within the forces of the natural world. In other poems in Dorf, Korn addressed the subject of women’s sufferings and lives directly. This is clear even from their titles: “Yorn fun a froy” (A Woman’s Years), “Kranke kinder” (Sick Children), “­Shvester” (Sisters), “Kranklid fun yunge mames” (Sick Song of Young Mothers), “A fertsikyerike froy” (A Forty-Year-Old Woman), and “Di alte mame” (The Old Mother). In the second section of Dorf, where most of the twenty poems evoke the village life of Rokhl Korn’s childhood, three

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narrate the situations of the village’s gentile women: “Di alte Hanke (The Old Woman Hanke), about the death of the gentile midwife and the Jewish woman she delivered; “Di tokhter” (The Daughter), about a daughter who returns to the village pregnant by a man in the city where she had worked; and “Der mames treyst” (The Mother’s Consolation), about a mother and her 24-year-old son. The topic that Korn treats most frankly in these poems is the sexual life of women. In “Shvester” (Sisters), Korn dignifies the humanity of those women rejected by social mores by depicting a woman forced to earn her livelihood as a prostitute, as Molodowsky did in “Froyenlider VI” but without the biblical Matriarchs as intermediaries: Bend your head down to my shoulder, Sister, See, I caress Your long snakes of hair, And I stroke your pale cheeks, Wrinkled From purchased kisses, Your feverish eyes Flame in the deep caves, Your head is heavy with tiredness. And evening rays of sun bleed, And evening rays of sun weave Around your bowed forehead Veils of forgetfulness. So, forget, when evening comes, So, forget the night and darkness, So, forget, that pale, unpainted lips Must laugh With loud whore-sounds. Meanwhile it’s good to rest And to cradle your slender hands In your orphan lap, Shriveled from lust In the long nights. To extinguish in the deepest depth, How souls not born

Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland

To the light beseech And how your entire being longs For a child’s first cry. But the hours run out, Like the blood from open wounds, Hours unwind from life The licentious thread of destiny. It’s night, it’s already night, My sister.— Listen, the owl calls from the ruins. You have tarried in dreams, The purplish-red ash of shame Is not yet strewn on your cheeks, Not yet combed and not yet braided Your long snakes of hair.115 (1–41)

Because the noun shvester can denote both the singular and the plural, “sister” and “sisters,” the title retains both meanings; it thus simultaneously addresses the poem’s interlocutor and describes the relationship between speaker and listener as reciprocal and collective. The sisters are bound by kinship; they could exchange roles, in the dramatic situation and in the rhetoric of the poem. Echoing countless Yiddish lullabies, as well as Bialik’s famous Hebrew poem “Take Me Under Your Wing” and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s Yiddish imitation of Bialik, “Dertseyl” (Tell), the speaker invites her shvester (sister) to “Bend your head down to my shoulder.” It soon becomes clear that this “sister” is a prostitute: the speaker offers her comfort and empathy as she strokes the woman’s tangled hair and cheeks made pale by “purchased kisses.” The speaker urges the woman to forget momentarily the work to which she must soon return, signaled by the approaching darkness (hoyshekh). This work of lust (tayve) requires the woman to suppress her desires for the natural course of sexuality—pregnancy and childbirth. As she dreams, resting her tired hands in her “orphan lap / Shriveled from lust / In the long nights,” the speaker urges the woman to put out of her mind the terrible irony: her sexual work requires that she not bear a

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child. The abortions she endures cause the woman an anguish that the speaker articulates with alliterative predicate phrases, vi es betn zikh (how they beg) and vi es benkt (how it longs): Vi es betn zikh neshomes / Nisht geboyrene tsum likht / Un, vi s’benkt der gantser nefesh / Nokh an ershtn shray fun kind ” (How souls not born / To the light beseech / and how your entire being longs / For a child’s first cry). However, this acknowledgment of the woman’s dilemma cannot change the fact that, as time passes, she has no choice but to resume her sexual occupation. By comparing the passing hours to blood running from open wounds and to the unwinding of the thread of a licentious or ownerless destiny, the poet evokes the physical effects of aborting a fetus. With the phrase Hefkerdike goyrl-fodem (licentious thread of destiny), Korn names the woman’s fate as the inevitable result of her unbridled sexual life. At the same time, though, the Hebraic phrase alludes to the rabbinic laws governing abandoned (hef ker ) possessions and suggests that, because the woman has sold her sex in order to survive, she has relinquished her mastery or ownership of herself. Without preaching, the phrase invokes traditional Judaism’s moral judgment against the prostitute and simultaneously answers that condemnation with empathy. Furthermore, the very physicality of these similes brings into focus the dramatic situation of the poem. The speaker has offered the woman comfort at the very moment that she has witnessed an abortion performed. Thus, the woman’s “orphan lap” (or “womb”) (­yosemdiker shoys) seems a cruel reversal, as the quality of orphanhood shifts from the aborted fetus to the woman’s own body, which she has orphaned by terminating the pregnancy. This situation makes all the more wrenching the poem’s end, where the woman’s desire to bear a child proves to be a deceptive dream. Although the owl calls from the ruins as night falls that it is time for the prostitute to return to her work, the speaker leaves open the possibility that she will not. Still unkempt from the ordeal of the abortion, the woman may choose not to apply the rouge or comb her hair to make herself a sexual commodity. The expression of sisterhood that the speaker’s comforting poem represents may yet help the woman to find another way. Although there is no invocation of the Matriarchs to intercede on behalf of this woman, or any explicit Jewish content in this poem, its key words, like those of Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider,” are not

Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland

Germanic or Slavic, but Hebraic: khoyshekh (darkness), yosemdiker (­orphaned), tayve (lust), neshomes (souls), nefesh (creature, being), shoen (hours), hefkerdike (abandoned), goyrl-fedem (destiny-threads), khurves (ruins), and khalomes (dreams). With the first and the final two Hebraisms, which are alliterative—khoyshekh (darkness), khalomes (dreams), and khurves (ruins)—Korn contrasts the ruins of a woman’s life and possibly those of the Jewish community where the woman once lived, which was destroyed by the violence of World War I, with the dreams that have all too briefly cleansed her of the shameful acts she must perform in her role as a prostitute. The word khurves alludes to the destruction of the First and Second Temples, which the prophets and later the rabbis blamed on the sinful Israelites’ and Jews’ prostitute-like betrayal of God. With deliberate irony, Korn applies this word’s sacred echoes to the life of an actual woman in interwar Warsaw, stripping the word of its blame and reaching out to her sister, woman to woman, beyond social strictures and traditional values. In contrast to the plight of the urban Jewish prostitute, who must abort a child conceived from the sexual work she must do in order to survive, Korn depicts an exemplary life—that of the village’s gentile midwife in “Di alte Hanke” (Old Hanke): No one taught her her trade, old Hanke— When the last day slipped down From the string of time She gave birth to her own children without help And with her own teeth bit through the rope of veins and blood, Because she could not pay the Babke (midwife) With an apron116 full of hard grain and with a quarter bushel of potatoes. And perhaps the knife-stabbing pain That distorted her body Like a willow in an unexpected storm-wind, Untwisted the hard whips of her overworked, black fingers And made them soft and motherly for other women’s aching. From then on, when she went into the field with her scythe, A panting little thing of a gentile boy came to call her: “Come quick, Hanke, quicker, my mother needs something urgently from you.”

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Then she felt for her shears hanging from her belt on a little cord, And left her sheaf standing unbound to be blown by the wind, Its tall stalks of corn like hair on end in wild fear. In the black nights of Heshvan, she Was led by the eye of a lantern in a masculine hand To the open cottage keeping watch with its windows and doors, And where the mother’s hoarse shouts Covered the terrified and open eyes of the children, Like a sheet of blood. And when the nails of a woman who was giving birth for the first time Dug into Hanke’s withered flesh with a wild beast’s hatred, She only shrugged her hump a bit on one side Like a small woolen scarf And her narrow, blue lips From somewhere as if from the deep well of her heart Produced buckets full of caressing words, That she had never learned at her own children’s cradle: “Nu, quiet now, quiet, I’ll raise your head a little higher. Maybe you’ll find it easier, sweetheart, But you must help yourself, with your own strength, You must . . .” And when Hanke’s eighty years submitted to the restfulness of death, Like garden-beds to winter snow, The tiny village church grew suffocatingly hot From all the candles lit in her memory: For every child’s little head that her hands had touched first— A little yellow flame wept with white drops. And, in that humble little church Mixing their flames together with all the others, Three candles, three Jewish ones that my mother had kindled.117

In an idiom as rich in both the Slavic and the Hebraic aspects of Yiddish diction—the former, babke (midwife), podelek (apron), mamunye (mother), khate (cottage), pyeshtshendike (caressing), sluzshenko (sweetheart), dushne (suffocatingly hot), tserkve (little church); the latter, kheshvndike (Heshvan), snoe (hatred), koykhes (strength), zikorn (memory)—Korn brings together in this poem Jewish and Christian women through the common lot of motherhood. The poem argues that, from

Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland

the pain that she suffered when as a young mother she could not afford to hire a midwife for herself, Hanke developed an extraordinary ability to help all other women in the village and countryside deliver their babies. When she died an old woman, all these women honored Hanke by filling the village church with votive candles in her memory. And even the poet’s mother crossed the boundaries of religious difference and prohibitions to light “dray likht, dray yidishe” (three candles, three Jewish ones). By entering the village church, the poet’s mother broke cultural and religious taboos from both Jewish and Christian perspectives. Yet as the poem depicts this mother “kindling” “Jewish candles” within the Christian sanctuary, Korn combines the practices of the two religions into a beautiful, hybrid form, just as she did with the poem’s Slavic and Hebraic words. The Christian votive candles merge with both the yizker-likht, candles that Jews light on the anniversary of a death, and the Sabbath candles lit by Jewish women every week. That the speaker of the poem relates how “suffocatingly hot” (duzshne) the tiny village church became suggests that she entered the church with her mother, despite the religious and cultural prohibitions. With both “Shvester” and “Di alte Hanke,” Rokhl Korn presented politically feminist poems that argued for unity and connection among all women who were bound by the consequences of their sexuality. It is significant that Korman did not include either “Shvester” or “Di alte Hanke” in his anthology, Yidishe dikhterins. While in 1921 he had called for revolutionary Yiddish poetry to burn the bridges to the past and promote universalism for the future, by 1928, it seems, Korn’s idea of a feminism that would break down the distinctions of religion, culture, propriety, and class that separated Jews from Christians, chaste women from prostitutes, and midwives from aborters may have appeared too revolutionary for Korman’s anthology of women Yiddish poets. Despite his wish to represent the works of women poets in all their varieties, Korman may have thought it unwise to expose such a raw sense of sisterhood that would redefine the sphere inhabited by Jewish women. Maybe he found it too threatening himself. Or perhaps he was unable to recognize this type of universality. Although Korn’s poems of sisterhood and motherhood echoed Molodowsky’s poems of daughterhood, and while Potash’s modern-

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ism grew from cosmopolitan sources that corresponded to some degree to those of Fogel, there was no formal or organized movement of women Yiddish poets in Warsaw, Lodz, or Lvov. Yet these poets knew and respected each other’s work. It may even have been the “forced” juxtaposition of their works on the literary pages of the Yiddish press—which Molodowsky satirized in her article, “Encounters”—that brought their poems together. A number of these poets were personally acquainted. Molodowsky and Korn were friends in Warsaw in the late 1920s, and continued their friendship after World War II when Molodowsky lived in New York and Korn in Montreal. Korn reviewed Molodowsky’s K ­ heshvndike nekht in Literarishe bleter in 1928. Molodowsky published Korn’s poems in her journal Svive in the 1950s and 1960s. Molodowsky also met Fogel during a reading tour she made in 1931 in Lemberg/Lvov; Fogel documented this meeting in a Polish-language newspaper article. And before she departed for Tel Aviv in 1934, the young Rikuda Potash was mentored by Miriam Ulinover in Lodz. Yet despite their personal acquaintance and even friendships, and although Korman’s 1928 anthology brought all these figures (with the exception of Fogel) together between two boards, it seems that these poets did not explicitly seek to foster connections between their works. It was enough to be writing poetry at all.

Fou r   The Folk and the Book Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

Kadya Molodowsky, Dvore Fogel, Rikuda Potash, and Rokhl Korn all wrote poetry that derived from and complicated the desire to burn bridges between a religious cultural tradition and a new secular, modernist, and political literature in Yiddish. In contrast, two women in Lodz during the 1920s wrote poetry that explicitly maintained the connection between the old and the new. It was for precisely the apparent “piety” of their poems that Korman featured both Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh in his 1928 anthology Yidishe dikhterins. A ­ lthough Ulinover’s poems were misunderstood by her contemporaries and Yakubovitsh’s were ignored, these two so-called pious poets published their poems in the same pages as did the avantgarde Yiddish poet Moyshe Broderzon. Their modern depictions of traditional characters anticipated the biblical poems that made Itzik Manger famous in Warsaw in the 1930s. In their distinct ways, both Ulinover and Yakubovitsh created contemporary female personae steeped in traditional Judaism but who were not exactly “traditional” themselves. Ulinover invoked the religious wisdom of a fictional shtetl grandmother in archaic folk-Yiddish, which was mediated by the persona of a granddaughter, while Yakubovitsh recast the voices of biblical women in the modern form of the dramatic monologue. By presenting these religious and folkloric materials through faux-naïve disguises, Ulinover and Yakubovitsh showed how the question of tradition required a complex answer in the early 1920s.

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Miriam Ulinover Miriam Ulinover was born Mania Hirshbeyn on February 22, 1888 in Lodz, Poland, and she perished in Auschwitz soon after August 18, 1944.1 She received a traditional Jewish education but completed her studies in a Jewish folkshul and a secular mitlshul; the latter was likely taught in Russian or German in the multicultural milieu of Lodz.2 Encouraged at age 15 by the great Yiddish writer Sholem Rabinovitsh, better known as Sholem Aleichem, Ulinover began to write poems and stories in Polish, Russian, and German.3 From 1915 on, her poems began to appear in the Yiddish literary journals of Lodz.4 Her only book of poetry, Der bobes oytser (My Grandmother’s Treasure), was published in Warsaw in 1922.5 Although she prepared a second book manuscript titled Shabes, its publication was prevented by the Nazi occupation of Poland. Only a few poems from that manuscript survived the war, because they were included by Korman in Yidishe dikhterins.6 Until the 2003 publication of Natalia Krynicka’s edition of Ulinover’s poems (in Yiddish, with French translations by Batia Baum), most Yiddish critics and scholars accepted at face value the surface ­naïveté that Ulinover created in her poems. She used folklike tetra­meter quatrains and simple, idiomatic, and often archaic diction for the central character of her book, the pious grandmother, whom the poems place in dialogue with the granddaughter.7 Ulinover’s poems are, however, far from naïve. They emerge from a fully modern sensibility that sought deliberately to preserve the folk diction, sayings, and customs of premodern Jewish life in Poland, while offering a critical view of their efficacy and relevance. In Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider,” a modern woman struggles against her traditional foremothers. Ulinover, in contrast, presents, in the two sections of her 1922 book (the eponymous “Der bobes oytser” [My Grandmother’s Treasure] and “Kale yorn” [Bridal Years]),8 a female character who defines herself against and within the traditional wisdom of an elderly grandmother. As the narrator of these episodic poems grows from a girl into a young woman, she simultaneously expresses her harmony and conflict with the grandmother’s folk- and faith-laden explanations of the problems of life in an old-fashioned shtetl. Com-

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

pared to the inanimate female mannequins described by the dispassionate observer in Dvore Fogel’s poems, the character of the grandmother in these poems by Ulinover serves as a talkative, story-telling muse for the mediating narrator. As Krynicka shows in her introduction, this grandmother was Ulinover’s fictional invention. Born in the city of Lodz, Ulinover lived only briefly in a shtetl during the year 1905, after her parents divorced and she and her mother stayed with her maternal grand­ father in the town of Kusheptis.9 Krynicka points out (in French and Yiddish) that Ulinover’s actual grandmother was “a sophisticated, aristocratic Jewess—the very opposite of the grandmother character in Der bobes oytser.”10 Moreover, in this book, Ulinover deliberately chose to write in a folkloric stanza and an archaic idiom. Her first publications, in the 1915 Lodz journal Di yetstike tsayt: zamlung fun milkhome-literatur (The Present Time: Collection of War Literature), were poems describing atrocities during World War I and written in a modern style that echoes the ironic realism of Avraham Reyzen. 11 For example, “Dos mame-kindele” (Mother and Child), a vignette in lineated prose with arbitrary enjambments, describes a young mother’s dilemma when she is trapped with her infant on the fourth floor of a burning building:12 Shrapnel, a flying piece of fire entered the fourth Floor and from it grew a pillar of fire that Cut off from the outside world the mother and child. The great European war intruded upon The small room with the single Exit and sent a hot pillar of fire up the old wooden Attic ladder. Every moment could bring with it a death. Every moment assigned red burns, Holes burnt out of flesh, agonies crowded with Shouting to heaven. But meanwhile, how quiet it was. Silently in the attic window, a young Mother’s head bowed halfway out with her Child at her heart. Below, in the terrible human-turmoil, where every

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Person struggled with his own life’s Peril, no one heard the sudden, terrified Woman-shout.13 (1–19)

Unable to summon help from the street below, the desperate mother finally decides to throw a lange vikl-kishn (long swaddling pillow) out the window to cushion the fall of her baby. The poem concludes as the baby lands on the ground—dray shrit (three paces) away from the pillow (52). Alongside the compressed realism of “Dos mame-kindele,” another of Ulinover’s early poems shows the capricious deadliness inflicted by war in a style that intimates the prosody in Der bobes oytser. The poem is written in an epigrammatic shorthand that depends on the ironic end-rhyme in every line of the diminutive suffix of nouns (-ele), an effect impossible to reproduce in translation, although one can see it from this transliteration: Gelofn Blime-Brokhele In terkishn shaltikhele Bakukn—a kaprizele— Dem zelner mit dem shpizele. Arayn in dem gevimele; Der mark a blutik bimele, In hertsl shoyn a shpizele— Geshtorbn dos kaprizele.14 (Curious in her Turkish shawl, Blime-Brokhele ran To take a peek, on a whim, At the soldier with his spear. Straight into the whirlwind— The market—a bloody stage— A spear in the heart— Her whim is dead.)15

By repeating the diminutive form at the end of each line, the poem flattens the woman, her old-fashioned garb, her whimsical curiosity, the chaotic “stage” of an urban battle, and the spear that kills her, thus diminishing the pointless murder to a meaningless singsong. Despite these contrasting styles—one a narrative vignette, the other

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

written as a bitter nursery-rhyme—each of these war poems depicts a woman who succumbs to the war’s violence, such as a fire caused by shrapnel or a soldier’s random act. Whether the woman attempts to escape from the catastrophe or inadvertently places herself in its way, these poems present women as helplessly caught in the grip of fate. Both this focus on disempowerment and the studied naiveté of the Blume-Brokhele poem anticipated the substance and style of Ulinover’s mature poetry. In that work, she shifted from realism to an oblique presentation of reality through the character of a shtetl grandmother offering women’s folk remedies to a granddaughter who is at the mercy of the modern world. Ulinover’s belief that memory and poetry can preserve an ephemeral oral tradition stemmed from a new phenomenon in pre- and interwar Jewish Eastern Europe: the ethnographic expeditions that documented such customs. When Jews of the towns and villages, driven by economic, social, and political forces, began to disperse to cities or emigrate abroad, prominent Yiddish writers began to collect the cultural artifacts of Jewish folk life, such as songs, stories, jokes, curses, proverbs, carvings, fabrics, gravestones, and customs. This collecting was initiated early in the century by the Yiddish writers I. L. Peretz and S. Ansky, the song-collectors S. M. Ginzburg and P. S. Marek,16 the collector of Jewish proverbs Ignatz Bernshteyn,17 the cultural leader and ethnographer Noah Pryłucki, and the YIVO Ethno­graphic Commission. As World War I displaced huge portions of the Jewish population and destroyed centuries-old Jewish settlements in Poland, the Ukraine, and Galicia,18 this mission to collect Yiddish folk culture as it vanished at the advent of modernity became an urgent call for cultural salvation and survival. In 1915, Peretz published an appeal to Polish Jews to document the devastation and violence of the war. At the same time, Ansky wrote an account of the destruction of Galician Jewish communities. Both were in effect demands that Jews write their own history in order to forestall the full erasure of their culture as well as to counteract the falsehood of official accounts of their life.19 While Ulinover’s poems stemmed from a corresponding urge to preserve the ephemeral oral culture of the Jewish folk at this treacherous historical moment, her work differed from the ethnographic expeditions. Instead of gathering materials using scientific methods of

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the relatively new field of ethnography, or aiming to write a nationalist counterhistory, she created a modern cultural artifact—the literary folk poem—as a means of preservation. With deliberate purpose, she set this new literary form into the voice of a girl and placed that girl into dialogue with di elter-bobeshi aleyn fun iber hundert yor! (My greatgrandmother herself, over a hundred years old!).20 By choosing to use a girl’s point of view to record the folk culture of girls and women that spanned three generations, Ulinover tapped into cultural material and situations inaccessible to men. The dialogue between the girl interlocutor and old woman allowed her to assert a specifically female voice into modern Yiddish poetry. To be sure, Ulinover’s literary folk poem also invoked the premodern tradition of women’s devotional literature. She explicitly drew the grandmother’s lore from the Tsene-rene (the so-called women’s Bible) and the tkhines and reassessed it through the eyes of the girl narrator. In this way, Ulinover anticipated Korman’s anthological juxtaposition of old devotional poems with modern secular poetry. Ulinover’s poetry also anticipated Kadya Molodowsky’s 1927 sequence of poems, “Froyen-lider” (Women-Poems). In fact, a 1921 Warsaw literary collection, Naye himlen: literarish zamlbukh (New Skies: Literary Miscellany), contained a section called “Froyen-lider,” in which two of Ulinover’s poems appeared alongside works by four other women poets—Roza Yakubovitsh, Paula R., Shoshana Tshenstokhovska, and Mirl Erdberg.21 It cannot be determined whether Molodowsky had Ulinover’s poems or this miscellany in mind when, six years later, she called her sequence “Froyen-lider.” Ulinover’s dialogue between a modern granddaughter and a traditional grandmother could be construed as a model for the granddaughter’s ambivalent challenge to “the women of our family” in Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider,” a poem I discussed in chapter 3. While Molodowsky’s speaker protests that the Hebrew texts of biblical law should not frame a modern life as it did for previous generations of women, Ulinover’s speaker reveals a more nuanced evaluation of the grandmother’s words, recalled in the midst of an uncertain modern life. Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider” take as their prooftexts the written literature of the Hebrew Bible, liturgy, and law. The prooftexts for ­Ulinover’s poems are the girl’s own memories of the grandmother’s

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

folk sayings, even though we can see, as the book develops, that the grandmother is more learned and literate than she seems. In its response to the war’s devastation, Der bobes oytser retreats from the present day to what Krynicka calls “the mythical shtetl.”22 Published by a religious printing house in Warsaw, the book deliberately invoked traditional Jewish texts in a way that contrasted with the modernism of other contemporary Warsaw publications. It also echoed, perhaps unknowingly, the mock-traditional appearance of Sikhes Kholin (Small Talk), a 1917 Moscow collaboration between the Lodz poet Moyshe Broderzon and the Russian Jewish modernist artist Eliezer Lissitzky, which parodied a medieval Jewish chronicle in the form of a Scroll of Esther.23 Where Broderzon and Lissitzky intentionally and mischievously recast the sacred as secular, the archaic material form of Ulinover’s book unwittingly contributed to a literalist misreading of the poems. The dust jacket of Der bobes oytser, designed by Yosef Zaydnbaytl, depicted a Havdallah spice box and a Kiddush cup set within a border of carved wooden columns and flowers. Inside, the font used for the poems consisted of large square letters such as those used in a handwritten Torah scroll, and only the recto of the pages (like the recto of the Talmud’s folios) were paginated in Hebrew letters, as was the date of publication, which was written in traditional form: 5628. The poems themselves, divided into two cycles, “Der bobes oytser” (My Grandmother’s Treasure) and “Kale-yorn” (Bridal Years), bear titles reflecting devotional life—“Havdole vayn” (Havdalah Wine), “Di khales” (The Hallahs), “Der alter sider” (The Old Prayer Book), “Baym taytsh-khumesh” (Reading the Yiddish Bible), and “Ester ­hamalke” (Esther the Queen). Each of these poems, however, describes a tension between the tradition invoked and the modern speaker. The deliberate anachronism of the book’s appearance and the poems’ subjects and language suggests a statement of the modern, which U ­ linover’s con24 temporaries overlooked. The two halves of the book present two different attitudes toward tradition. One recalls, with vexed longing, a vanished life; the other presents that life as restrictive. Ulinover structured the first section of the book, Der bobes oytser, according to a submerged narrative and retrospective chronology. The section is framed by the narrator’s

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­ eparture from her shtetl as a grown woman and her difficult life after d that departure. In between, Ulinover traces this woman’s growth from childhood to maturity through the speaker’s memories of her grandmother and her wisdom. In the untitled opening poem, the narrator depicts the legacy— “dos yikhes brivele” (the note of pedigree)—her grandfather gave her when she departed from her “beloved shtetl”: When from my beloved shtetl I took my leave forever, My grandfather accompanied me As far as the river; The spring sun had risen, The sky shone blue and bright, Where the road split, my grandfather Entrusted me with a note. Since then, I’ve lost that letter, And wander unhappily: A joke—to be so far from home Without my pedigree! Who knows, maybe it’s lying somewhere Covered with sand and dust, Who knows, maybe my ancestors Are being blotted out . . . The spring sun—mild, quiet— Edges toward the west— My longing swells and rises, I’m so sad, I could die— Where is the note of pedigree, Of our old house and family?25 (1–22)

The poignant question, “Where is the note of pedigree?” articulates the experience of displacement and cultural confusion that defined the lives of modern Jews, including the women writing Yiddish poetry in Poland during and after World War I. If Jews, in leaving the shtetl for the city and traditional life for modernity, had literally or figuratively misplaced their genealogy, how could they know their identi-

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

ties in the present and the future? Without the document in which a grandfather’s hand has outlined the ancestry of the oves (Hebraic, “fathers”), modern Jews lost their cultural inheritance. The loss of this text leaves its young protagonist unmoored from the grandfather’s culture, but Ulinover’s poem replaces this lost cultural document with the grandmother’s lore. By presenting an oral folk tradition of women as a source for cultural identity, Ulinover offers a viable alternative to the primacy of the patriarchal texts that previously dominated Jewish culture. While the grandfather’s precious document of family pedigree could be lost because it existed only in writing, the grand­mother’s orally transmitted sayings and stories can survive as long as the granddaughter remembers and retells them. Ulinover shows that the oral folk tradition of women—which had never before been valued or transcribed for future generations—is, paradoxically, a more enduring legacy and source for identity than a perishable document on paper. The second poem, “Puter-broyt” (Buttered Bread), exemplifies the grandmother’s countertradition: When onto the floor I drop bread-and-butter, Then starts the head-shaking of Grandmother: “A sign, my darling, my dear child, a sign, Your bridegroom goes hungry, without food or wine.” Oh, if only I could see Grandmother shaking her head Whenever I let drop my butter-and-bread, My grandmother’s charm, her wrinkled-up brow, Or hear her dear, homely sense of it now!26 (1–8)

Ulinover sets up a deliberate contrast between the first and the second poems in terms of time, place, action, and speaker. Both poems center on accidents: In the first, the speaker mislays her grandfather’s precious genealogy; while in the second, she drops a piece of buttered bread. Whereas the speaker of the first poem has long since left the shtetl, the second poem’s speaker is a young girl still in the shtetl. While the recollected grandfather of the first poem accompanied the speaker only as far as the river, in the second poem the grandmother seems to be, as the poem opens, very much present and alive.

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An enormous gap in time and place breaks this eight-line poem in half. In the first two couplets, the girl drops the buttered bread on the floor, an act the grandmother interprets as a sign of the cursed state of the girl’s future bridegroom. This interpretation forces the girl to look into her own future and to evaluate the consequences of her present actions as she realizes the value of food (on account of its scarcity) and the uncertainty of a life that will cause her future husband to go hungry in an unknown place. At the same time, the grandmother’s interpretation prepares the girl for a fate that she cannot escape—a match decreed by heaven. In the second half of the poem, the narrator brings us into the girl’s future, which corresponds to the present moment from which she speaks. Through the syntax of conditional possibility, the speaker reveals how far removed she is now from her grandmother. In the moment she speaks, the speaker longs to see the grandmother’s “wrinkled-up brow” again because, in her present life, she continues, literally or figuratively, to drop precious bread and butter. But the grandmother is no longer present, and the girl, now a woman, must provide her own interpretation of such losses. The simple language, the child’s perspective, and the comic depiction of an old woman belie the poem’s grave power. In contrast to the grandfather, who gave the gift of a written document and then vanished from the speaker’s life, the grandmother is an ever-present entity in her imagination. Recalling the grandmother’s oral wisdom enables the speaker to understand the meaning of her own life, even after the grandmother herself has become only a memory. The third and fourth poems, “Havdole vayn” (Havdalah Wine) and “A segule” (A Remedy) establish that the grandmother’s oral wisdom, while drawn from the grandfather’s Hebraic texts, alters and even replaces that written tradition in order to be relevant to the granddaughter’s life. 27 That these two poems were, according to Krynicka, the first ones Ulinover wrote in Yiddish, is significant: Here, Ulinover shows how the grandmother’s interpretation of Jewish tradition gives order to a young girl’s understanding of her place in the world. By contrast, Ulinover’s first published poems, which dealt with World War I, explored the disruption of that order. In “Havdole vayn,” the grand-

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

mother recasts a liturgical moment into a folk practice that teaches the young granddaughter the order of her world: Everyone drinks from the Havdalah cup, So I sip a drop of wine, too. Fondly, earnestly, Grandmother says: “Dear child, I’m warning you That drinking from the Havdalah cup Will give a girl a beard— That’s what is written down In the shelf of Holy Books there.” I collapse in terror, I touch the tip of my chin: Thank God! . . . Still soft and girlish . . . But sharp, pointed in fear.28 (1–12)

As is customary for Ulinover, this poem opens in medias res, as the speaker, a young girl, stands among the other members of her shtetl family during the Havdalah ceremony. This ritual marks the end of the holy Sabbath and the beginning of the workweek. Elements of the ritual include the father’s blessings over wine, a container of fragrant spices, and the flames of a braided candle. When the speaker joins the other members of her family as they pass and sip from the goblet of wine, her “great-grandmother . . . over a hundred years old”29 speaks up, “fondly” and “earnestly,” to tell her that an unmarried girl who drinks Havdalah wine will grow a beard, and gestures toward “the shelf of Holy books there,” implying that the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic texts are the sources for this belief.30 Terrified, the girl touches her chin to see if a beard has already begun to sprout yet she finds it “still soft and girlish.” Her expression, “Thank God,” can be taken either as an expression of gratitude to God or as a colloquialism that has nothing really to do with God. What she does find is that now her chin is “sharp, pointed in fear.” Living fully within the traditional world, the speaker trusts the folk authority of the grandmother, who herself relies upon the authority of sacred texts that, as we learn in a subsequent poem (“Der alter sider”

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[The Old Prayer Book]), she can read (unlike most shtetl girls born in the mid-nineteenth century). At a time when her own sexual role has yet to be realized, the narrator of the poem has been transfigured by the grandmother’s counsel. Although not physically changed by the ceremonial wine, the girl has been transformed by the grandmother’s words from a comfortable member of the community into a girl who doubts her worth and fears for her future. Just as the Havdalah wine divides the Sabbath from the week, the sacred from the quotidian, the grandmother’s warning points to the divisions between the sexes. It’s as if by drinking the wine of separation (Havdalah means “separation”) the girl, made monstrously male, will break down the differences between women and men and thus undermine the social order that is predicated on sexual difference. A beard on her chin will drive off her potential bridegroom; she will not marry and not have children to continue performing the Havdalah ceremony decreed by the sforim, the Holy Books on the shelf. What is the speaker’s attitude toward the grandmother’s wisdom and teaching? Beyond a simple nostalgia for the lost folk culture of her childhood, the poem subversively questions the gender roles demanded by society. The poem threatens to turn the girl into a male and reconfigure the traditional boundaries between the sexes. The grandmother’s voice of warning echoes the secular political prophesying of the Yiddish Labor Poets (David Edelstat, Morris Rosenfeld, Morris Vintshevski) in the 1890s and 1900s, as well as the New York modernist Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s mockery of those earnest proselytizers. For example, Edelstat predicts victory for the workers’ revolt against oppressive capitalists, while Halpern’s character “Moyshe-Leyb der poet,” who appears in his famous 1919 poem “Memento Mori,” redirects the vision of revolutionary redemption into a lone aesthete’s vision of a personified “Death on the waves” at Coney Island. In contrast, di bobe in Ulinover’s poems trumpets fears and warnings in the domestic rather than the national realm and focuses on the life of a particular shtetl girl rather than on the collective future of the Jewish people. In this shift from the national to the domestic, from the collective to the individual, from the secular to the religious, and from the male to the female, Ulinover gives validity to an otherwise unheard voice in modern Yiddish poetry.

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

In “A segule” (A Remedy), the grandmother educates the narrator with folk knowledge embedded in a pun, a strategy that helps preserve one more piece of her oral tradition: Sometimes, when an infection Shows up on a girl’s eye, My grandmother picks from her Makhzor A wondrous remedy: “When hunger stalks the city, Dear child, protect your eyes, By feeding barley to a doe To keep you safe from sties.” Grandmother, do you maybe have More cures in your book of prayers? Perhaps you can protect my eyes From big, hot tears? 31 (1–12)

The girl’s eye infection is an untergang, a major calamity. Rather than seeking an ointment to cure the eye, the grandmother looks into her Makhzor (High Holidays prayer book) for a vunderzang, literally, a “miracle-stalk” or a “miracle-song.” Ulinover makes clear that while the prayer book’s cure for the medical problem is a “treasure” inasmuch as it preserves tradition, such folk logic also cannot be taken literally. The compound word vunderzang puns on the nouns zang (a stalk of wheat or barley, or an ear of corn) and gezang (singing, chant).32 While it may be more likely to find a magical chant in a prayer book, rather than a stalk of grain, it seems that Ulinover actually intended vunderzang to refer literally to a miraculous stalk of grain, because that image anticipates another pun in the poem between the words gershtndlekh and gersht; gersht(n) denotes both a grain of barley and a sty on the eyelid. This second pun, the key to the grandmother’s advice, is anticipated by yet another set of punning words, hindl and hersht: “Shpayz mit gershtndlekh a hindl ven in shtot a hunger hersht— veln, kind-leb, dayne oygn eybik zayn bahit fun gersht.”

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These lines read in a more literal translation: “Feed a doe with barley grains When in the city a hunger reigns— Then, dear child, will your eyes Be always protected from sties.” (5–8)

While hindl can be read as the diminutive for di hun (hen), the shared Germanic aspects of English and Yiddish indicate that dos hindl is the diminutive for di hind (doe).33 Moreover, the verb at the end of line 6, hersht (hershn), “to rule or reign,” sounds like the noun der hirsh (stag), as well as der hirzsh (millet, a grass cultivated for its grain). Both puns amplify the poem’s central pun on vunderzang. Puns serve, however, as more than verbal play in this poem. The grandmother’s folk-religious remedy for the granddaughter’s eye infection would not work if gersht didn’t mean both a grain of barley and a sty on the eye. Her pun is the cure: the first meaning cures the second. The final stanza of the poem conveys the poem’s penchant for double entendres, not just puns, even further. Long after the grandmother has healed her sore eye, the girl, now grown, asks for an even more powerful remedy to avert the sorrows of life. This stanza depends on the very way that Yiddish builds verbs, adding prefixes or adverbial complements to roots in order to change their meaning. In line 8, at the end of the second stanza, the verb bahit means “keep or guard,” and the grandmother assures the listener that the pun will protect (bahit) her eyes. In line 11, the verb farhitn (to avert, stave off) indicates a more preemptive remedy for the sorrows of life that even the grandmother’s Makhzor (High Holidays prayer book) cannot provide. In all these poems, the narrator’s folk naiveté masks a skepticism that is both crucial to the poems’ modern perspective and keeps the poems from being merely nostalgic. The granddaughter’s doubts about the grandmother’s traditional wisdom increase in “Di khales” (“The Hallahs”), where the grandmother offers a folk interpretation of one of the central commandments enjoined upon Jewish women, the baking of the Sabbath bread, during which a woman throws a piece of dough into the fire. In “Di khales,” the grandmother urges

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

the girl to knead the dough for the braided loaves, lest she end up unmarried, an unfortunate fate the poem calls “a gray braid,” which is what an unmarried woman would have. As the granddaughter runs to the kneading trough, she grabs her head anxiously, wondering why the town baker’s female apprentice, who bakes hallahs every week, remains unmarried: “Whoever is lazy braiding hallahs, Will end up plaiting a gray braid”— My grandmother chases me to the trough, I silently grab my head: And the yellow bakery girl? Every week—a wagonload Of nicely braided Sabbath bread— She remains an old maid!34 (1–8)

Whether the “yellow bakery girl” is sallow from hard work or attractively fair-haired, or both, the young narrator questions the veracity of the grandmother’s proverb, for the evidence before her eyes undermines its logic: despite the wagonload of braided loaves, which the woman produces every week, she remains unmarried, and yet her braid is not yet gray.35 In the play on the words meydl and moyd, Ulinover exposes the young speaker’s dilemma. The word meydl —grammatically the diminutive of moyd in the same way the Engish cognate “maiden” is of “maid”—means “girl,” although here, hyphenated with beker (baker), it might not refer so much to the youthfulness of the female as it does to her subservient role as an apprentice or a helper, beker-moyd, as a shuster-yung is a shoemaker’s apprentice. Alone, the word moyd is archaic and connotes a woman’s moral disrepute and sexual availability. In Ulinover’s poem, that connotation is less prominent than the idiom that Yiddish shares with English, of the “old maid,” the aging spinster, which is what the narrator worries that she would become. The presence of meydl and moyd at the ends of lines 5 and 8 in this short poem draws attention to the poles of female existence between which the narrator hovers, uncertain where she belongs in the world.

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The girl’s uncertainty about sexuality comes to the fore in the poem “In hoyf ” (In the Yard): Summer morning—five o’clock The yard is wide awake— Lively and full of cheerful noise; It’s chicken-feeding time. A small boy follows a small girl To the hens’ feeding-place— He gives her a delicate kiss, He gives her a sweet pat. The girl can’t budge from where she stands, Not knowing what to do . . . Blood rushes to her face— The yellow chicken stares . . . If the girl’s own young red hen Looks eagerly at her— Every one of that hen’s eggs Will have a “drop of blood”!36 (1–16)

Feeding the chickens in the early morning, a small girl is set upon by sexual feelings that are instigated by the aggressive affection of her small boy companion. The girl is afraid that, if she blushes when her favorite hen is eating grain, the eggs will be spotted with blood and therefore unkosher. This fear is rooted in the pun between the Yiddish verbs esn (to eat) and zikh aynesn (to look eagerly at someone). The similarity between these two verbs conflates the hens’ eating and the girl’s sexual feelings. Even though the grandmother is not literally present in this poem, the folk traditions are. Thus, the girl knows that her blush will have ramifications for both nature and her community. By responding to the boy’s sexual advances, even with an inadvertent blush, the girl worries that she will be guilty if the hen produces eggs that are not kosher. As if to explain the liturgical sources for the grandmother’s folk wisdom, Ulinover follows “In hoyf ” with “Der alter sider” (The Old

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

Prayer Book), a poem that depicts how her grandmother herself received an education: In one hand the old prayer book, tuition fee in her other, And hanging from its string, the dangling pointer— As a child, my grandmother used to run quickly into the kheder To repeat the alphabet, with the boys, in order. Everything would have been fine; but the boys would hit her— A girl’s voice yowling can carry high as heaven. Once long ago she nearly fainted, nearly perished From the blows and benevolent-slaps, what a horror! But therefore a young wife is put in an ample chain, With the same old prayer book, only now without a pointer, To lead the way through the entire shtetl to the yard of the shul. How the new wife proudly takes up marching! The other wives—struck dumb—bashful, silent, stare At her mouth that does not rest from the Sabbath-prayer, As she, together with the congregation and the cantor, Draws near the Shekhine, praying, chanting. In the shul an envious flurry, sweating, and brow-wiping, As wives, poor things, can only turn the pages . . . She flares up and throws herself afresh into the prayer: For she’s right at home, in childhood, in the old siddur!37 (1–20)

”Der alter sider” is not a folk poem. Unlike the other poems in the sequence, which take the form of an unmediated dramatic situation with a dialogue between the grandmother and the granddaughter, the speaker in “Der alter sider” narrates the grandmother’s girlhood story in the authorial third person. While most of the other poems are composed in a quasi–folk ballad quatrain (alternating four- and three-beat lines, rhymed xaxa), “Der alter sider” is in six-foot rhymed couplets. These longer lines and the poem’s narrative stance allow the speaker to comment on the grandmother’s life with a dramatic irony that also sheds an indirect but telling light on the granddaughter’s own life. While the tuition fee and pointer in the first couplet allude to stereotypical accounts of a shtetl boy’s education, echoing both H ­ askalah memoirs and Sholem Aleykhem’s short stories, the second couplet startles the reader by telling that the person being educated was di bobe

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(my grandmother). The poem emphasizes the unusual situation of a young girl taught to read the Hebrew liturgy with the ironic use of keseyder (in order), which refers at once to the alphabetical sequence of the letters that the students memorized and the unorthodox presence of a girl in the boys’ classroom. The next two couplets further develop the disorderly nature of the girl’s education. Everything would have been fine; but the boys would hit her— A girl’s voice yowling can carry high as heaven. Once long ago she nearly fainted, nearly perished From the blows and benevolent-slaps (mitsve-petshlekh), what a horror! (5–8)

Despite the comic overstatement that the meter and rhyme lend lines 5–8, we learn that nothing, in fact, was “in order” for the girl. The violent teasing she suffered at the hands of her male schoolmates may have comprised her education. Although the boys’ acts are euphemized as mitsve-petshlekh (benevolent-slaps), the poem conveys the severity of their effect, as the girl cries out and nearly faints, a severity stressed by the exaggerated diction describing her reaction—shir geven geshtorbn and oy geven a khurbn! (nearly perished; what a horror! [literally, “Oh, it was a destruction”]). Later, the grandmother, no longer a girl but grown up and married, reminds the whole town of her hard-won literacy when, as a young wife, she proudly leads the way into the synagogue, carrying the same old prayer book from which she learned to read. In a telling image, she is attached to the prayer book by an “ample” chain, which literally prevents the book from falling but also figuratively keeps the wife attached to the devotional life. Women’s prayer books often had purse-like ­covers with chains attached to them as holders, but this chain alludes to di goldene keyt (the golden chain) of Jewish culture, a chain that links Jews with their collective past and simultaneously burdens them with responsibility and (for women) restriction. The pointer (tayter) with which, as a girl, she kept her place on the page, is missing now that she is a married woman. This pointer, with all its phallic symbolism, is what shows boys the way into devout manhood through literacy; a pointer is what girls and women lack. Whether the young, literate wife, who is different from most other women by virtue

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of her education, does not need a pointer to show her the way in life and devotion, or whether she loses her way when she adds her voice to the men’s prayers, Ulinover seems well aware of the social, cultural, and sexual disorders in store for the literate woman. Without a pointer, the young wife is relegated to the women’s section of the synagogue. Yet her knowledge lets her participate in prayer as fully as all the men: The other wives—struck dumb—bashful, silent, stare At her mouth that does not rest from the Sabbath-prayer, As she, together with the congregation and the cantor, Draws near the Shekhine, praying, chanting. (13–16)

Although the grandmother’s literacy distinguishes her from the other women, the young wife, praying along with the men, is selfconscious—as are the women enviously watching her. Perceiving their confusion, she “flares up” and plunges into her prayer as if to show how comfortable she is in taking on this male role. The poem turns on the irony that by virtue of her education, by feeling “at home . . . in the old siddur,” this young wife is as incongruous among women as she was when she was a girl learning among boys. Refusing to relinquish what she knows, this woman has no place in the sexual segregation of traditional Judaism. Alien to the boys she studied with as a child and to the men whose voices she now joins in prayer in her new status as a wife, and to the other women in the synagogue, the grandmother is an outsider to every sector of her society. In this narrative, Ulinover dramatizes a point made by historians of Jewish women’s education, such as Naomi Seidman and Iris Parush, that traditional Jewish practice stymied girls and women socially, culturally, and religiously.38 But the poem complicates this claim by suggesting that the grandmother’s Hebrew also anchors her Yiddish folk wisdom in the normative Judaism of the grandfather. In fact, the grandmother’s “old prayer book,” like the grandfather’s “genealogical document,” is another lost artifact that the speaker inherits only through oral transmission. As she records the grandmother’s account of her education, the granddaughter’s modern Yiddish poem replaces that old prayer book. As the repository of tradition, the grandmother is what the poet

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inherits. In “Antiklekh” (Rarities), Ulinover narrates the story of three sisters dividing their inheritance, using the same third person, long lines, and rhymed couplets that she used in “Der alter sider”: Some time ago, three girls, beautiful as gold, Divided up valuable rarities into thirds: I have a shtern-tikhl, a headkerchief—bragged one— Checkered and flowered from great-grandmother. I have a tsiter-nedele, a brooch—the second proudly announced, Bejeweled with diamonds from great-grandmother. But the third girl laughed quietly to herself And quietly opened the alcove’s little glass door: “Only I possess the most precious rarity— My great-grandmother herself, over a hundred years old.”39 (1–10)

This ten-line poem begins like a long-ago fairytale, with three girls, “beautiful as gold,” coveting each other’s treasures. The first girl brags about the shtern-tikhl she has inherited, the traditional head-covering for a pious married woman. The second girl gloats over her diamond brooch. The third girl, however, boasts that she owns something far more valuable: the very source of the folk tale and its tradition, the grandmother herself. This old woman’s voice is the true rarity that Ulinover preserves and passes along in her poems. Throughout the section “Der bobes oytser,” Ulinover develops the themes of the tradition inherited from the grandmother, as she presents scenarios and shtetl characters upon whom the grandmother opines. The theme that repeatedly surfaces, however, is the impact of the grandmother’s wisdom upon the life that the speaker now lives. In “Di shabes-likhtlekh” (The Sabbath Candles),40 Ulinover does not make it clear whether the granddaughter remembers her grand­ mother’s advice, or whether the grandmother speaks in the present moment to the married granddaughter: Now that you’ve become a wife, Till one hundred and twenty years— Make sure you have Sabbath candles And candlesticks, two pairs.

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

On “short Friday,” little wife, Remember even then To light the candles at sunset, Don’t transgress the time! Bless God with the Sabbath lights Pray quiet, intense prayer; Cover your eyes as is required, But just don’t singe your hair. And if ever you must leave your house As the week draws to its end— Remember to bring with you The candles on the road. Then you can stay in an empty field, Alone in open space . . . Just drip the Sabbath wax around Outside to form a fence.41 (1–20)

This poem provides the key to the grandmother’s wisdom. The grandmother instructs the new bride to light two sets of Sabbath candles on time, even on the shortest Friday of the year. The primary reason to be punctual in performing this act is to obey God’s commandment. But the second reason for lighting the candles, according to the grandmother, is that with the Sabbath candles, a woman can make herself at home wherever she is. Lighting the Sabbath candles, a woman has the ability to define Jewish space inside her house and away from home, even on the road, in an empty field. Dripping the wax of the Sabbath candles, a woman can define a sacred and safe area around herself. This is the power that Jewish tradition gives women to protect themselves in alien circumstances. They can transform their obedience to traditional Jewish laws into an instrument that ensures their own survival in an uncertain and dangerous world. In subsequent poems, as the speaker’s present situation becomes even more precarious, the grandmother seeks to offer comforting folk wisdom to connect the speaker to traditions from which she is ever more removed. But the very act of reminding her only makes the granddaughter feel more alien and bereft. In “In der fremd” (Away from

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Home), after the speaker complains to the absent grandmother about the poverty and hunger she suffers in the alien world, the grandmother blames her for not performing Tashlikh, the Rosh Hashanah custom of throwing breadcrumbs into moving water as a way of symbolically casting off the sins that now fill her pockets.42 In “A brivele der boben” (A Letter to My Grandmother),43 the speaker recalls the grandmother giving her “Ten needles, seven skeins of yarn, / A shears, a thimble,” and the advice that she should mend her own clothes, rather than let a tailor do so, in order to remain independent.44 Whereas such autonomy might serve her well in the tight community of the shtetl, the speaker ironically realizes that in the city self-sufficiency results in extreme loneliness: “Each and everyone lives for himself alone.” When she hiccups in “Der shlukerts” (The Hiccups), the speaker recalls the grand­mother’s interpretation of hiccups as a sign that “Somewhere, dear child, far or near, / The name of your grandmother / Is mentioned for a whole day today.”45 Remembering this adage, the speaker fears that her grandmother has died, and her loneliness intensifies. In “Dayn lebn” (Your Life), the speaker perceives the fragility of her beloved grandmother’s life and how precarious is the continued life of folk tradition.46 Thus, in “Dos yagde-flekel” (The Berry Stain),47 the grandmother explains away the berry stain on a hallah cover by saying that once the season changes, the apparently permanent stain will vanish: “When autumn grieves the breast With its last embrace— Berries vanish from the world, Leaving not a trace. Then, dear child, before the dawn Your stain will disappear, On a heavy, threatening day— I, your grandmother, swear.” ... Outside cold winds are blowing, Drawing frozen breaths of air— My stain has long since disappeared, And my grandmother—not there!48 (13–24)49

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

Grandmother, it turns out, was right: the berry stain vanished from the hallah cover in the wintertime. However, the seasonal shift signifies a chill more severe than the weather: Not only has the stain disappeared. So has her grandmother. A pair of poems near the end of “Der bobes oytser” narrates the story of the grandmother’s death. But in that narration, these poems reiterate how deeply connected the grandmother is to the larger community. Thus, in “Di tsavoe” (The Last Will),50 the grandmother instructs “my shtetl” not to mourn, but rather to accept her death as it accepts a leaf falling from a tree and to “Read my Last Will / Tomorrow without sadness.” In that tsavoe tsetl (last will), the grandmother directs her survivors to disassemble her deathbed, and with its parts to build both a cantor’s omed (pulpit) in the synagogue and her own kvure-bretl (burial board). Even in death, the grandmother plans to perpetuate the religious tradition that grows ever more remote from the granddaughter. Ulinover ends the poem with a final farewell to the shtetl in lines that echo the grandmother’s final words: Gut-nakht af mayn bobes shtetl / un a gutn tomed! (Good night to my grandmother’s shtetl / And a good eternity!). 51 Although the grandmother has died, she continues to live in the speaker’s memory. One of the last poems in the section, “Dos ringl” (The Little Ring, one of Ulinover’s earliest publications),52 recalls the grandmother’s gift of a ring and the accompanying admonition: “Never shall you take it off, Not in joy, not in need, Except for when you’re going to wash Before you eat a piece of bread.”53 (1–4)

The speaker wears the grandmother’s ring, as instructed: I wear, I wear the little ring, Your small pebble of blue— Washing for bread, Grandmother dear, Is not the problem, though . . . But eating’s forbidden, Grandmother dear, Even if the fast disturbs; And thus my slender finger Has shriveled up.

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But this is why I’ve cherished Your ring like my own eyes— My feet have not drifted To where the moneylender lives!54 (5–16)

Citing the law that decrees that a fast must not be broken simply because the faster is disturbed or uncomfortable, the speaker explains why she has not removed the ring to wash for bread: she has no food for which to wash. Even in such poverty, though, the speaker refuses to pawn the ring. Because she treasures the grandmother’s gift and words so literally, the speaker starves: To part from this little ring My heart will not endure . . . Narrower, narrower becomes my life, And the ring—loose.55 (17–20)

The past was a time of relative prosperity, when at least there was enough bread to bless, and the grandmother could not have anticipated the hunger and suffering that diminish the speaker in her present world. With terrible irony, the poem shows how ambivalently the speaker holds on to the grandmother’s inheritance: she keeps the ring, but it is so loose on her emaciated finger that it could be lost at any moment. Ulinover ends the section on a more positive note. In “Gut-vokh” (Good Week), the speaker returns to the end of the Sabbath, a moment with which the book began. But in this poem, instead of the grandmother warning the girl that she will never find a husband, the speaker, now a married woman, lights the Havdalah candle to commence the workday week. Although she dreads the coming week, she finds comfort and strength in the “dead / Grandmother” who “unwinds” “From the shadows” and instructs her, “‘Now in the dark hour of the Sabbath, / Throw in the first spark!’” The memory of these words enables her to find the strength to go on: Laugh, my heart, oh laugh all the more deeply, Follow my grandmother’s intent— And the whole week will be Strong and valiant!56 (21–24)

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This act, though, raises questions: Why does the woman perform this ceremony, rather than her husband? Has he disappeared? Has she replaced him? The poem suggests that the grandmother’s “treasure” should inform the lives of modern Jews and give life to modern Yiddish poetry. Yet Ulinover resists a formulaic sense of continuity. Even if a poem ends with optimism and faith, it still reflects a disrupted reality in which women take over the preservation of tradition from men. In the second section of the book, Ulinover further complicates the problem of tradition as the story of a modern woman reflecting on her shtetl girlhood continues. In “Kale yorn” (Bridal Years), Ulinover shifts the narrator’s focus from the grandmother as repository of tradition to the girl herself and her alienation from that traditional life even as she lives it. As the girl becomes aware of her emerging sexuality, she becomes distinct from shtetl culture. The opening poem of this section, “Vald meydl” (Forest Girl), depicts the girl among the trees, cut off from her contemporaries: I carry on a love affair with a slender tree, Lost in thought, I sit on my sapling quietly. My beloved has needles, he will not stick me, Or else I’ll break a thousand twigs vengefully! . . . Girls in a group walk by with their grooms-to-be, They gape and laugh at me sitting in the tree; They mock and call: “Come, join us on our stroll, Without a bridegroom—you will lead us all!” They laugh and call, they shout and echo— Until, little pine tree, I fall out of you! Then I count my bones, making sure I still have them all . . . Little forest, your very own bride is reborn whole! Like lucky people, the trees breathe and sigh, And rustle the “Blessing for Danger Escaped,” for me.57 (1–14)

Unlike the other shtetl girls who stroll through the woods with the boys to whom they are betrothed, the speaker of the poem declares that her beloved is the pine tree in which she perches. Ulinover thus

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sets up a dialectic between shtetl culture and the natural world, with her narrator caught between the two. Although she is more at ease away from other Jews, the girl imposes the values of Jewish culture onto nature, until they mingle in the poem. The girl speaks to the tree in cadences of the love poetry from Song of Songs 2:9: Nodlen hot mayn libster, mikh vet er nisht shtekhn (My beloved has needles, he will not stick me). After she falls from the branch, the trees recite the traditional a goml-bentshn (blessing for danger escaped). Unlike the woman in Molodowsky’s “Tfiles,” who can pray only in nature, Ulinover’s girl projects the act of prayer onto a personified aspect of nature. Although she is not ready to conform to the role of a bride, this girl resists such societal expectations by choosing what she wishes from the tradition. Ulinover further dramatizes the disjuncture between the modern woman poet and traditional Jewish culture through the repeated trope of the girl-speaker reading sacred texts. Two poems in Kale-yorn depict situations in which a girl attempts to imagine her life through the biblical stories she has read but only ends up transgressing them. In contrast to the poems in which the speaker remembered her shtetl girlhood through her grandmother, the speaker in Kale-yorn inevitably chafes at the limitations imposed by shtetl life. For example, in the second poem in this section, “Baym taytshkhumesh” (Reading the Taytsh-khumesh), Ulinover links nature explicitly to women’s devotional reading of the Yiddish translation of the Pentateuch: Oh, what a nice matchmaker Eliezer is! Oh, what gold and silver He throws at her feet!— No, girls, enough of reading In the Taytsh-khumesh: There’s something chasing me Out into the night. Longing is pellucid, The darkling night is dim— Leap at happiness, sisters, Burst into silvery laughter!

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Suddenly, the evening Sets shadows into verses . . . Messengers might be waiting For us, too, in the field! Far off, the distance trembles, Twitches, flashes, and calls— I see golden jewelry Glistening in the air . . . Leap at happiness, sisters, Burst into silvery laughter: Rebecca’s star will glow Through the entire night.58 (1–24)

With her friends, also young girls, the speaker reads aloud the story of Isaac courting Rebecca through Abraham’s messenger Eliezer (Gen. 24:22–27). Recounted in the vernacular translation of the Pentateuch, this narrative arouses in the speaker a “longing” that draws her away from the text and out into the evening. There, the homiletic resonance of the taytsh-khumesh 59 transforms the shadowy landscape into verses (shures), Eliezer into a shtetl shadkhn (matchmaker), and the moon and stars into the jewelry with which Isaac betroths Rebecca. Interpreting the biblical story as an analogy for the hopes and desires of a generation of Jewish girls, who believed what they read in the holy books, the narrator celebrates the possibilities in the girls’ future when she cajoles them to “Leap at happiness.” The promise put forth by the sacred text is both transient and recurrent, like the moon and stars in “the night.” Yet despite the hopes that the traditional story continues to arouse in the girls, the poem also implies a doubt that such aspirations can be realized when one walks out into the world. The cautionary speaker mediates between the modern reader of Ulinover’s poem and the innocent readers of the taytsh-khumesh evoked by that poem. In contrast to the actual taytsh-khumesh, which posited a direct analogy between a devotional reader and the Matriarchs in order to guide the former into a spiritual life exemplified by the latter, Ulinover’s poem delineates the distance between a reader of modern poetry and the traditional readers of devotions.

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Similarly, in the third poem, “Ester hamalke” (Esther the Queen), set in a synagogue on Purim, during the reading aloud of the Scroll of Esther (Megillah), Ulinover’s “marriageable”60 girl of “Kale-yorn” assumes the dramatic persona of the biblical Queen Esther, in order to understand the socially decreed status of bride that she hopes to attain even though she lacks a khosn (bridegroom). Purim provides this poetic loner, who has shown that she prefers trees to boys, with the opportunity to imagine herself in a different role and a different world: When the grogger knocks and rattles, Words can’t be heard, it seems— I won’t allow you people To chase away my dreams! My skirt, plain calico, Swaying to and fro— Turns into actual Crimson frill and bow. The thin red ribbon Looped around my braid Will with royal scarlet Crown my head. Somehow, my face grows Charming and dark . . . Like Esther the Queen!— A still smile in my heart. And I blossom forth in beauty, And my dream comes true— I am the queen, the queen! I wink, that’s all I do, And now the king bequeaths me Half the kingdom’s land— I am Queen Esther Beneath the purple band.61 (1–24)

Ulinover predicates this poem on the same deliberately constructed naiveté that conveys the contrast between the folk culture of a shtetl

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grandmother and the urbane literary culture of her readers. Whereas her contemporary Moyshe Broderzon wrote a Purim poem, “Ikh, a purim shpiler” (I, a Purim Player), from an explicitly avant-garde stance62 (probably just before he returned from Moscow to Lodz in 1918),63 Ulinover all but silences the modernist voice. Broderzon’s dramatic persona is an avant-garde Jewish poet riding the turmoil of revolutionary Russia with a cynical eye to both religious tradition and current ideologies. Ulinover’s speaker, in contrast, is a maiden who appears to be part of a seamless, premodern traditional shtetl culture. Unlike the fractured form of Broderzon’s purim-shpil, “Ester ­hamalke” is written in ballad-like, trimeter rhymed quatrains and takes place supposedly while the Megillah is being chanted in the synagogue. As Ulinover’s narrator speaks her lines, the noise of groggers, whirled to drown out the sound of the evil Haman’s name, threatens to drive off her fantasy of herself as Queen Esther. Yet, in her imagination, the speaker’s calico skirt becomes a swath of royal crimson and her plain red hair ribbon turns into a regal scarlet and purple band. As she envisions her own face transformed into the “charming and dark” visage of the exotic Esther of the Megillah, the speaker herself “blossom[s] forth in beauty.” Alienated within her environment, alone in the crowd, this speaker, who in other poems has defined herself as a plain Jane without a suitor, exults in the status that her daydream imparts to her, as “The king now bequeaths [her] / Half a kingdom” out of his love for her. In this poem, the synagogue reading of the Megillah provides the speaker with the occasion to transcend her life by exercising her imagination. This act of imaginative reading (or listening to a text being read) brings the speaker close to the act of imaginative writing, that is, the act of the Yiddish poet who encounters and transforms the traditional text. Here, the purpose of reading tradition is not to illuminate Jewish sacred history but to shed light on the speaker’s world. This girl lives in an old-fashioned Jewish town, but she is no less estranged from her community and its noisy celebration than is Broderzon’s urbane young man from his. Despite its evocation of a moment in a shtetl synagogue that seems unified by a tradition uninfluenced by modernity, Ulinover’s “Ester hamalke” calls into question the place of the Yiddish poet in modernity.

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Unlike the eighteenth-century poet Toybe Pan, discussed in chapter 2, who spoke confidently, if unconventionally, for the Jewish collective, Ulinover’s narrator negotiates an uneasy relationship between her desires and the community’s expectations. When the congregation’s Purim noisemakers, or groggers, drown out the villain Haman’s name, they threaten also to overwhelm the girl’s dream of her own power, suggesting that an individual who dares to imagine is as destructive and dangerous to the Jewish people as one who would annihilate them. Even though she dreams herself into the traditional story, Ulinover’s speaker transgresses that tradition in the very act of imagining. In her dream, the girl escapes the shtetl, which has not provided her with a bridegroom, by marrying a gentile king. Like the biblical Esther, the girl, in her dreams, marries a gentile king, but she does this to escape the shtetl culture. And unlike Queen Esther, the girl does not rescue the Jews from Haman but only acquires beauty, wealth, and power for herself. Neither cynical nor sophisticated, Ulinover’s girl in her shtetl synagogue, like Broderzon’s Purim player in Moscow, poses a threat to the reigning orthodoxies when she attempts to speak out as a Jewish artist.64 In the Kale-yorn poems, the customs and practices of shtetl society either correct or limit the imagination of such a young girl who might wish to picture her future in the glorified terms of the biblical Rebecca and Esther encountered in the Yiddish translations of the Bible. “Far der tir” (Before the Door) depicts the humiliation of a girl of marriageable age when she overhears a discussion of a possible match for her: When the day’s so hot, Thirst makes us ill— I’m sent out to the brewery, To the tavern on the hill. I linger there a while, Chatting by the door . . . Underneath my shawl, A foaming bottle of beer. I purposely delay, It’s too hot to leave; I feel how my cheeks flame . . . I’m picture-pretty, I believe!

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And, grown girl that I am, I’m ready for a match; But they’re discussing the dowry, Not me, alas, alack! Shhh! From the other side of the fence Someone scoffs out loud— Under my cloth, in mockery, The beer shoots out.65 (1–20)

Sent to the tavern to fetch a bottle of beer, the speaker lingers there, reflecting upon the fact that she is now old enough to marry, which makes her blush and feel pretty. But when she overhears her match being discussed inside the tavern, she is appalled to realize that the arbitrators consider the dowry rather than her own desires. To make this realization worse, the girl hears a joke made at her expense, and spills the beer that she has been sent to fetch. The phrase, shist aroys (shoots out), animating the spilled beer with a sexual implication, contrasts the girl’s helplessness with this “mocking” ejaculation: she becomes painfully aware of how, within the shtetl custom of arranged marriage, she cannot be an active agent. Eavesdropping in the doorway of the tavern, an alien space, she apprehends the great distance that lies between her sense of herself and her culture’s perception of her. This vulnerable girl on the threshold of womanhood must relinquish her subjectivity to her culture. As the narrative of Kale yorn develops, the girl contends with the contradictions between her emerging self and the limits imposed on a girl’s identity by the shtetl. Yet even as the speaker tries to escape from the constrictions and expectations of traditional culture, she binds herself back into it. Within “Dos royte kleydl” (The Red Dress), the narrative shifts from the girl’s point of view momentarily to her grandmother’s. The girl recalls how, when she wanted to sneak outside to play in the summertime, the red dress she wore beckoned to her blind grandmother, who “spied with all her might.”66 “To my dear grandmother, nearly blind, / My dress winked like red poppies.” In contrast to the wise grandmother of the first section of the book, the blind grandmother in this poem inhibits the girl with her love. Yet the girl

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is ambivalent: she wants both to break free from and to be restrained by the grandmother. In the final stanzas, the girl’s affection comes through: I used to lose myself in play, drawn Outdoors, gaping after every cart, Weaving myself into a small tree— My grandmother sat in the door, missing me . . . Until, far off, a butterfly Huge and red, appeared before her eyes— Beaming into her half-dead gaze, So, blind as she was, she’d come meet me.67 (13–20)

With the image of the “huge and red” butterfly, which is how the halfblind grandmother perceived the granddaughter’s red dress, Ulinover portrays the young girl’s simultaneous empathy for the old woman and her eagerness to escape the scrutiny of tradition. Elsewhere, Ulinover uses household metaphors to evoke the sexual anxiety of a girl of marriageable age in the traditional community. In “Dos tirl” (The Small Gate), the house, readied for a visit from the girl’s future in-laws, is a metaphor for the girl’s body, ready to be deflowered: In our little house, all is suitably fit, One might as well invite future in-laws to visit! My father—an expert, a multiple crafter— Allows no missing shingle, no broken rafter. The shutters outside click closed just fine, No cracks interrupt the chimney’s straight line. There’s one little thing that won’t let him feel right: The small gate, the small gate will not close tight! The snap lock possesses a broken heart Just like its surface—rusty and black . . . When opened, the hinge creaks hideously hoarse, The whole household shudders in fear and remorse! ...

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A beautiful morning with blinding sunlight— Clumsy hands yank at the small gate . . . I stand there, flushing deep to the bone, Matchmakers . . . they tear open that small gate of mine!68 (1–16)

The girl and her family get the house ready for a visit from the matchmaker and the parents of her potential bridegroom. Despite her father’s meticulous craftsmanship, his ability to mend every crack and blemish in the house, he still cannot fix one thing: the small gate (dos tirl ), with its rusty hinge and broken lock. When the matchmaker and, presumably, his clients approach, the speaker is mortified at their clumsy attempt to force the gate—until they tear (tseraysn) it open. The poem perfectly captures the girl’s fear of the matchmaker, of her own imperfections, and of her terror of the sexual act she will soon face once the match has been made. “In beker-shtub” (In the Baking-House) depicts another aspect of the girl’s anxiety at being trapped by her traditional home. This poem narrates the dilemma of a baker’s daughter anticipating a match. ­Although her parents weep and laugh with joy at the prospect of marry­ ing her off, the girl herself is apprehensive: A match is in the making— What exceptional luck! Mother weeps from joy, Father, bursting with pride, Laughing, tells a joke: His lovely little daughter, Charming, fresh, and brown, Is like that darling roll On the white baking table Just fragrantly set down! . . . Today with moist eyes She moves quietly, as before, Between father and mother— Tidy and unhurried In every girlish stir.

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But her eyes wander, Dejected and dark, To an apprentice of her father . . . From one baked good to another . . . Her pain is silent and black. Soon to be cut in two A fond, familiar dream . . . Who disobeys a father?— But her heart continues baking In that baking home.69 (1–25)

The father compares his “Charming, fresh, and brown” daughter to a “darling roll, / On the white baking table / Just fragrantly set down!” The daughter, though, moves “Quietly between father and mother” “with moist eyes,” and gazes, “Dejected and dark” at “an apprentice of her father . . .  / From one baked good to another . . .  / Her pain is silent and deep.” Because of the arranged marriage to another man, the girl will have to relinquish her “fond dream” of a match to the ­baker’s apprentice; she understands that she must “obey a father.” Going from her father to the chosen husband, she understands that her desire for the apprentice is, like the fresh-baked roll, “Soon to be cut in two.” Severed from her parents, her home, and her own idea of what her life should be, the girl’s “heart continues baking / In that baking home.” Even as she protests it, the girl is unable to escape the fate decreed by her parents’ choice of her husband. For Ulinover’s shtetl girl, sexual relations are inevitably difficult, whether they are anticipated in an arranged match or experienced outside of marriage. Ulinover depicts a number of unfulfilled love encounters in the subsequent poems of Kale yorn. In “Iber nakht” (Overnight), sex and love seem to transform a girl into a woman and her tangled knot of hair into beauty, but in “Af shvomen” (For Mushrooms), the girl contemplates suicide on the anniversary of her beloved’s departure on a journey from which he has not returned. Nature saves the girl by reminding her of the leap year in the Jewish calendar and the relativity of time: As the “pine trees rustle quietly” in the “green forests,” she asks whether “maybe, maybe there’s still time? / Maybe he’ll come?

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Might he, indeed, appear / If this year is in fact a leap year?”70 In the ironic “Brivelekh” (Little Letters), the speaker writes her lover saying that she misses him. When he finally replies, he responds not to her longing, but rather by complaining about the cost of postage: I sent you a letter, saying I’m aching with regret; I’ve been waiting for your answer— For months yet. Finally, your letter arrives, You write . . . you write that you’ll Have to pay double the postage, A punishment of the mail!71 (1–8)

Without commenting upon the speaker’s unstated but palpable disappointment at the lover’s unfeeling complaint, Ulinover underlines the difficulty of romantic love in a traditional context. Her criticism of arranged marriages develops in “Dos bagegenish” (The Encounter), where the speaker describes an accidental meeting with her beloved in the street: Walking proudly through broad streets, You stop in front of me, You stare, you call out in surprise: “This girl’s hair’s gone gray!” “You silly fool! A big mistake— You’ve stopped in error: I’ve just been baking hallahs, rolls— My braid is covered with flour! “You silly fool! I’m rather dark. My raven hair is deep black-brown . . . I’ve just been plucking geese and hens, I’m covered with down! “Take note, I have prepared for him, My destined one, the very best” (And I laugh right in your face With joy so desolate.)—

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Oh, what great festivity! Countless guests fill the room! “Dear,” I say to you, “it’s time To entertain the bridegroom! . . . ” The one thing I suppress from you: Ach, my heart’s great pain, That you were not decreed, not you To be bridegroom of mine!72 (1–24)

Disrupting the sense of time and place, the poem opens with the beloved—“You”—exclaiming in surprise at the speaker’s gray hair, as if she had suddenly grown into an old maid. Turning the lover’s comment into a joke, the speaker explains that her hair only looks gray from the flour and feathers of her energetic bread-baking and chickenplucking, which she is doing to prepare for her wedding. The irony of the poem is disclosed when its last lines reveal that the “beloved” whom the girl has met on the street is not the man she was “decreed” to marry. All her work has been to prepare for her arranged wedding to another man. Ulinover thus delineates the tension between what a girl wants for herself and what the traditional culture decides she will have, determining her destiny. Nor is love, or sex, any easier within marriage, as Ulinover shows in “Baynakht” (At Night): You go out for a late-night stroll, You walk the roads you want— Over your shoulder, you command That the chain be set . . . The door is chained. Alone, I keep A vigil, closed up tight; My goosebumps rise and, terrified, I am alone at night. Never ending, without end, The dark begins to flow, Pouring itself together With my terrifying fear . . . Between the walls, I stay alone— Oh, a long time until dawn!

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My head between my naked arms, I conceal my sobs. Sometime again, it will grow light, A reddening sun will burn— Then, before you, I will Chain this door of mine!73 (1–20)

In this sexually charged poem, the husband, taking a walk at night, instructs his wife to chain the door. The wife, terrified to be left alone, experiences such a degree of fear and grief at his desertion that she determines to keep the door chained to prevent him from entering when he returns. The poem exposes the discrepancy of sexual power within a traditional marital relationship through metaphor, as the husband, free to walk wherever and whenever he wants, demands that the wife stay locked in the house. Abandoned and sexually vulnerable, as she weeps with her head in her “naked arms,” the wife changes her fear into anger and she also transforms the protective act of locking out possible intruders, or lovers, into an aggressive act of withholding herself from her husband. In the course of the poem, the husband who has left her becomes a trespasser; the wife embraces her solitude. By converting the wife’s enforced passivity into an act of resistance against the roaming husband, Ulinover challenges the traditional assumptions about the dominance of husband over wife in sexual relationships. Ulinover repeats the device of a composition—a song or letter—to convey the modern poet’s vexed relation to tradition through the interactions between the sexes or the generations. In the folksong-like “Dos lid fun koymen-kerer” (The Song of the Chimney Sweep), she reverses the sexual dynamics: the filthy chimney sweep, who cannot have the pristine girl he desires, leaves his song in the chimney to haunt her as she enjoys the fire that his work made possible. The ironies of unsatisfied love intensify in “A brivl” (A Note), when the disillusioned speaker leaves her shtetl because “No glance of the eye, no passionate glance, / Should I expect from you!”74 Just as she is about to depart, the man she loves hands her a note to take to his beloved in a distant shtetl beyond the reach of rail and post. As the speaker travels off, hurt by his obliviousness to her love for him, she decides to “drown”

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or “burn” “Your passionate love letter.” But when she “throws [her] self ” at the letter, it emits “a magical white gleam” that informs her that it will survive “fire and water” and is literally indestructible. This persistent and misdirected love note stands in counterpoint to the grand­father’s yikhes brivl (letter, note, or pedigree) in the volume’s first poem. There, as the reader will recall, the speaker mourned the accidental loss of her grandfather’s letter of family lineage in her travels; in this poem, she cannot rid herself of this misdirected love note. In “A heymish brivl” (A Letter from Home), the speaker remembers how, as a girl, she taught Brayne, her family’s cook, to write the alphabet. Now, far from home and unhappily married, she receives a letter from the family’s former cook, in which Brayne explains how she is now “Comfortable and fine” and has “signed her engagement contract” all by herself. The poem’s irony lies in the speaker’s predicament: She once taught the cook to read and write, but now her life has been surpassed in happiness by her former pupil, the servant. This poem again subverts power relationships, though here they are determined by class and age, not gender. Although the granddaughter, the spurned lover, and the unhappy wife may all be different personae, the device of the brivl in these poems points to Ulinover’s constant concern as a poet with the difficulty of transmitting the important messages of legacy or love in a changing modern world. The final three poems of Ulinover’s book return to the poverty and sorrow of the speaker’s present life. In “Di mame” (My Mother), the speaker reflects upon the “darling little dress / My mother made for me” and the mother’s instructions that she “wear it in good health / But take good care of it!” by mending it carefully if it should tear. The irony comes in the final stanza: I am healthy from head to toe, Mama! The dress, too, is still new; But I must not make whole again The mourner’s rent for you!75 (13–16)

Despite the fact that the speaker is healthy and her dress still new, now that her mother has died, she is forbidden to sew up the traditional tear in the dress made by the mourner as a sign of grief. The poem

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plays on the tension between the mother’s instructions and the laws and customs of Jewish tradition. Although in the speaker’s childhood the mother controlled the world that both she and her daughter inhabited, now neither she nor her grown daughter has any control. The daughter cannot keep her mother alive; nor, by mending the dress, can she bring her mother back to life. The poem centers on the chronological rent that separates a girl’s understanding of her mother’s adage from the grown woman’s realization that the object of maternal wisdom has been taken over by the ritual symbol of loss. The same disconnection between traditional instruction and present life appears in “Erev peysakh” (Passover Eve).76 In this poem, a tension arises between the speaker’s inner life and the demands of the Jewish calendar, law, and custom. Her solution is to reinterpret the demands of the law: Weeping in sadness, she can claim that her eyes are watering because she chops the Passover bitter herb, the maror. In “Mazkir neshomes” (Commemoration of the Dead), the final poem in the book, the speaker stands isolated in the overflowing synagogue during yizkor, the memorial service recited at the end of the Passover week: Oh, the synagogue is crowded, Oh, what a huge throng, And in my heart Such heaviness and regret. Such deep anguish, Such a rigid pain, I want, father and mother, To commemorate you again. In the good place where From affliction you lie free— I will come invite you To my wedding day . . . Everyone will make a fuss, But not, my parents, you! To me will be sung An “Oh, Merciful God” . . . Strangers will weep At the singing, oh . . .

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As your graves grow damp With the evening dew . . . A gray stone will Press upon your tombs— Now, among the Jews, I commemorate you.77 (1–24)

Standing in the crowded synagogue, the speaker memorializes her dead parents. She swears that later, following shtetl custom, she will go to the cemetery, “where / You lie free from affliction,” to invite them to her wedding day. On that day, she predicts her sorrow at their absence as she listens to the cantor sing “Eyl moley rakhmim” (Oh, Compassionate God). Only after she has properly remembered her parents will she be able to proceed into her future life. In the present moment, though, as she stands “Among the Jews,” she bears the burden of commemorating the dead. “Mazkir neshome” concludes the book with the promise to remember, rather than with the image of gravestones sealing the dead in the earth. Ulinover thus emphasizes the need for the living to continue to engage with the dead, and the modern to continue to relate to the traditional. We now come to understand the recurrent motif of brivlekh (small letters), tsetelekh (notes), and bletelekh (pages) throughout the book. These small letters, notes, and pages, passing from hand to hand messages of genealogy, love, and prayer, are figures for Ulinover’s own poems. Printed in archaic fonts and spellings, rife with folk idioms and colloquial usages, Ulinover’s poems transform the grandmother’s orally transmitted folk interpretations of the old prayer book’s wisdom. They become missives to remind her readers that women’s interpretations of Jewish traditions were as enduring as the ancient texts from which they came and yet as ephemeral as a maternal voice. By dramatizing the grandmother’s (and mother’s) voices in her poems, Ulinover makes memory work in a powerful way. Far from nostalgic, these evocations of the past expose both regret for what is lost and hope for what can be retained. That retention, though, does not impart uniformity or wholeness to the past or present. The grandmother’s explanations of adversity and accident lent comfort to the difficult cir-

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cumstances of Jewish life in past generations, but Ulinover’s poems grant these explanations a questionable power to influence the evermore harrowing situation of the present. Although positively received by her contemporaries, Ulinover’s work was explicitly praised in a limited way. Like other Yiddish literary critics in Lodz, Warsaw, Czernowitz, and New York, the Hebrew writer David Frischmann, in his introduction to Der bobes oytser, lauded the “authentic” Jewish folk character of Ulinover’s poems. He praised her “poetic talent” as “so vigorous, so genuine, and so—Jewish!” in contrast with modernist Yiddish poets who, “more European than Europe,” wrote poems like “lotus-blossoms from the Ganges.” Instead, he wrote, Ulinover’s poems were like “a fragrant silver spice box inherited from a grandfather”; they came directly from traditional Jewish culture and, evincing no influence by modern European literature, spoke with the “voice of the people” as “simple as life itself.”78 Tuvye Kats, writing in the Czernowitz labor Zionist paper Arbeter tsaytung, and Yankev Shatski, writing in Warsaw’s Polish-language Jewish journal Nasz Kurier, similarly assumed that the naïve narrator was literally Ulinover; and, after the war, Yiddish writers continued to perceive Ulinover as naïve. Even Kadya Molodowsky, writing in her “Great Jewish Women” column in Forverts in 1955, conflated the poems’ persona with Ulinover herself. From the 1920s on, Ulinover was active in the Yiddish literary life of Lodz. She attended Yitzkhok Katsenelson’s well-known literary gatherings and hosted her own, where she encouraged younger writers from traditional backgrounds, including women poets. After 1922, ­Ulinover’s poems became popular in both modern and traditional circles. Two were set to music, and several were reprinted in the publications of both the Beys-Yakov religious girls’ school and the secular Yiddish folkshuln in Vilna and New York. Through the 1930s, Ulinover continued to publish new poems in Lodz and Warsaw journals. She grouped her new poems in sequences, titled “Khelem lider” (Poems of Chelm), “Lider fun dem alef-beys” (Poems of the Alphabet), “Biblishe motivn” (Biblical Motifs), and “Khumesh lider” (Pentateuch Poems).79 Ulinover extended her method of reinterpreting tradition to include, along with oral folk traditions—such as the tales about the wise fools of Chelm—the sacred texts

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themselves. Through the filter of the Taytsh-khumesh and the Tsenerene, Ulinover’s poems brought new life to the biblical stories by setting them in a shtetl context. This method likely influenced the younger Warsaw poet Itsik Manger, who produced in 1935 and 1936 the far more famous works, ­Medresh Itsik (The Midrash of Itsik) and Megile lider (Scroll of Esther Poems). Although Manger did not acknowledge her influence, it seems likely that Ulinover’s epigrammatic, contemporary reinterpretations of well-known stories from Genesis served as a model for his signature poems, which recast the Patriarchs and Matriarchs as shtetl characters and wittily implicated secular readers in their problems. Consider, for example, Ulinover’s 1924 “Lots vayb” (Lot’s Wife): She wanted to see God’s fire— Was petrified in salt; Between Zoar and Sodom She stands to this very day. And a sallow, old cook, Too lazy to walk to the shop When she has everything she needs For her cooking except for salt— Creeps over to Lot’s petrified wife To scrape pieces from her flesh. Such is the custom to this very day Between Zoar, between Sodom.80 (1–12)

In this brilliant poem, Ulinover recounts the Genesis story of Lot’s wife: When fleeing to Zoar with her husband and daughters, she disobeyed God’s command by looking back at the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gemorra. God punished her for this act by transforming her into a pillar of salt (Gen. 19:26). Drawing on the folk tradition that the salt pillar stands “to this very day” between “Zoar and Sodom,” the poet puns on the geographical place name, Zoar (or, as in Gen. 19:30, “Mitsoar” [from Zoar]) and the Yiddish idiom mitsar zayn (to grieve or be brought to grief). Ulinover thus sums up the calamity resulting from this wife’s legendary disobedience and brings it into the present moment. Citing the prepositional phrase as if it were the place

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name, Ulinover indicates the naiveté of the semiliterate, sincerely pious women who read the Tsene-rene; she also slyly suggests that they are like the actual readers of her poem. The second and third stanzas go on to show a lazy old woman who finds it easier to scrape salt from the body of Lot’s petrified wife than to return to the store to buy the one ingredient missing from a dish she is making in her kitchen. This image reduces the miraculous to the ridiculous. But the image of the shtetl cook scraping salt from Lot’s wife also embodies the way that the punishment penetrates the daily life of Jews—both the old woman in her kitchen and those who eat her cooking: “This is the custom to this very day / Between Zoar, between Sodom.” The repetition of tsvishn (among, between) brings the suffering, like the custom, from the legendary region to the present day. From Lot’s curious wife down to the lazy cook, Jewish women share a legacy of salt and grief. Ulinover reminds her actual, urbane readers of the Warsaw Ilustrirte Vokh (Illustrated Week), where the poem appeared, that the plight of women is simultaneously age-old and immediate. Although she continued to publish poems through 1939, Ulinover’s work slipped from its moment of fame in the 1920s. Her work resurfaced only after the Holocaust, when her role in the Lodz Ghetto became known. From 1940 until the spring of 1944, in defiance of the increasing Nazi dehumanization of the Jews, Ulinover held literary gatherings in her home. She nurtured and sheltered other poets and writers alongside her two daughters and their young children. On August 18, 1944, during the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto, U ­ linover was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered.81 In 1975, a facsimile edition of Der bobes oytser, which included skillful Hebrew verse translations of the poems, was published in Jerusalem by Mosad HaRav Kook, the major religious publishing house (named after the famous chief rabbi Abraham Yitshak Kook).82 This edition reprinted the original 1922 foreword by Frischmann, as well as a note by Dov Sadan, professor of Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University. While this edition succeeded in bringing her poems into print again, it perpetuated the impression of Ulinover’s work as archaic, antiquarian, and religious, obscuring the brilliance and tragedy of Ulinover’s modern vision of the inevitability of loss.

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Roza Yakubovitsh Roza Yakubovitsh shared Miriam Ulinover’s commitment to writing poetry on traditional Jewish themes. Her poems were published alongside Ulinover’s in the “Froyen-motivn” (Women’s Motifs) section of the April 1918 Yugnt: Zamelheft far shener literatur un frayen gedank (Youth: Collective Book for Fine Literature and Free Thought),83 as well as in other Lodz and Warsaw literary journals of the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Ulinover, who briefly enjoyed renown, Roza Yakubovitsh seems to have been little-known in her own day and later was all but forgotten. She published one slim collection of poems, Mayne ­gezangen (My Songs), in Warsaw in 1924. According to the 1928 autobiographical note in Korman’s Yidishe dikhterins—drawn from a letter Yakubovitsh wrote to him accompanying her poems and a biographical note for inclusion in the anthology84—she also completed a second book, Lider tsu got (Poems to God), as well as a zamlen noveln, a collection of novellas or short stories.85 Although individual poems from this manuscript appeared in the Warsaw paper Haynt between 1935 and 1939, Yakubovitsh’s second collection of poems never was published. At least eighteen of her poems appeared in Warsaw Yiddish journals and anthologies between 1910 and 1939, as well as a play, articles, and book reviews. She published numerous other poems and short works in journals and anthologies in Lodz and Lublin, among other places.86 According to her autobiographical account quoted by Korman in Yidishe dikhterins, Yakubovitsh was born in 1889 in the shtetl of Prashnits in the Plotsk Province of Poland. Yakubovitsh’s father, Reb Yisakhar-Berish Groybart, was the rabbi of Prashnits87 and ran a house open to “all sorts of wanderers, converts to Judaism, Persian and Yemenite Jews, who came to the State of Poland to seek help.” In her father’s house, Yakubovitsh wrote, “the wellspring of Torah and study was never silenced. Under the influence of long conversations with my father, who would tell the children spirited stories of the Jewish past, and taught us with agony all that happened to them on the roads of exile, I learned how to think and feel.”88 Unlike most modern Yiddish poets, Yakubovitsh lived most of her life in shtetls—Prashnits, Sherlets, Bendin, and Kalish—rather than

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

in the urban centers of Polish Jewish life and Yiddish culture such as Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow. She attended a Russian school in Sherlets and a Polish school in Bendin, where she also studied Hebrew and first encountered Yiddish literature through a man named Yankev-Ber ­Zayonts.89 Married, she settled in Kalish, where she stayed at least through 1928. She described her husband as a student of Torah who, under Roza’s influence, became so interested in Yiddish literature that he published a journal, Bendiner Vort (Bendin Word).90 She stated that her first poem was published in 1910 in I. L. Peretz’s Warsaw collection Yudish and that, as of 1928, she had completed her unpublished second manuscript. After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Yakubovitsh fled to Lodz, where she briefly shared a ghetto dwelling with Miriam Ulinover.91 Later, she was transferred to the Warsaw Ghetto, where she perished in 1942.92 While Yakubovitsh and Ulinover shared what was considered at the time a retrograde summoning of Jewish traditional texts and customs in their poetry, their works differed significantly. Ulinover transmitted the grandmother’s folk-religious tradition in a pseudo-naïve folk style in order to write about the challenges facing a Jewish woman confronting modernity. Yakubovitsh, too, invoked religious scenarios and texts in order to reveal the Jewish tenets of modern Yiddish ­poetry and, simultaneously, to expose the differences between the modern and the traditional. In contrast to Ulinover’s folk-based style, however, Yakubovitsh employed a variety of literary forms to express the connection to religious customs, the most notable of which was a sequence of six dramatic monologues spoken by biblical women. In these poems, as well as in her other work, Yakubovitsh focused on the stages in women’s lives—girlhood, marriage, motherhood, barrenness, widowhood—in light of the cultural meanings given them by Jewish tradition. More explicitly than in Ulinover’s poems, Yakubovitsh presents Jewish tradition as one that imposes restrictive norms on women’s choices and their behavior, but like Ulinover, Yakubovitsh emphasized the role of women as agents of preservation and innovation. In her book, Yakubovitsh used dramatic monologues to work her way back toward tradition and its values from a blatantly modern stance. Yakubovitsh opens Mayne gezangen with an untitled poem of rebellion, beginning with the phrase, “Mit pasn goldenem” (With

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golden rays), in which a traditional Jewish grandfather restrains a girl who wants to find her own voice and write poetry: With golden rays the red of morning thrusts the day against me And wakens me from my long sleep in the alcove of my house, And from tired repose, my thoughts begin to stir freely And, taking wing, fly out through the barred door. Behind, my grandfather’s shout follows: A Jewish child must guard Grandfather’s house from within—and a woman’s voice is shameful! Ah, see, the night has changed itself into grand day, I go and stretch forth my rested hands to the creating.93 (1–8)

The grandfather shouts out the commands and restrictions of a traditional Jewish life that would keep a girl at home, observant, and quiet (“a Jewish child must guard / Grandfather’s house from within—and a woman’s voice is shameful!”), but the speaker’s free thoughts lead her to ignore and then escape the old man’s voice. As the girl follows her liberating thoughts outside into the great day, dem groysn tog, into which the night has transformed itself, she stretches out her hands tsum shafn (to the act of creating). With the stock symbols of enlightenment and revolution—the dark night that changes into a bright day, the sun that awakens a youthful mind, the escape outward from an oppressive house into the world—Yakubovitsh conveys the eager promise and energy of the creative act. In contrast to the affectionately portrayed grandfather in Ulinover’s poem, who bestowed a precious genealogical document, the grand­ father in Yakubovitsh’s poem is a harsh reminder of the restrictions imposed on women by Jewish tradition. When the grandfather’s dunning voice follows Yakubovitsh’s speaker out the door as she escapes, the tension between these two acts cues the reader to expect that Yakubovitsh’s poems will argue for the total renunciation of Jewish tradition. Yakubovitsh, however, complicates this expectation as she develops her rebellious tone and the theme of liberation. In the untitled poem beginning, “Oh, my freedom,” the speaker summons the freedom that will let her voice be heard: Oh, my freedom, come to me, in night’s silent span, When, light as a soap bubble, my workday melts away, Then my soul begins to dream, to dream of you alone,

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

And nothing can confine it or restrain. For your sake, spirit’s freedom, I have thrown aside Blood-relatives and playthings and every pleasure in life, To let my young voice raise its shout higher than the sky. I’ve driven off the peace and calm in my mother’s devoted eyes. Oh, my freedom, I have choked, like birds without their young, My anguished longing for a glance from my only one— Return to me, oh my freedom, grant, for all the dreams That I have sacrificed for you, a shadow’s gleam.94 (1–12)

In the first quatrain, the speaker summons “my freedom” from the night to release her from the confinement of her workday and to transform drudgery into laykhter zayfnbloz (light soap bubbles). The second quatrain, however, undermines this exhilaration, as the speaker reminds her freedom that she has renounced family, friends, the small pleasures of life, and her mother’s peace of mind for a chance to shout “higher than the sky” in her own voice. While the grandfather in the preceding poem reminded her of the traditional silencing of women’s voices, here the speaker boldly spells out the cost she herself has paid for breaching this silence. In the third quatrain, however, the speaker regrets what she has geopfert (offered up, sacrificed) to gain her freedom and her voice: “all my dreams,” and even the gaze of her beloved, which she has dershtikt (strangled) like birds that have lost their offspring. As a result of attaining freedom and enabling her poetic expression, the speaker herself feels entirely isolated. Repeating the first line of the poem, she summons freedom to return to and grant her at least a shotnshayn (a shadow’s gleam). While this poem initially seems to be a celebration of liberation from traditional life, by its end, the girl has enumerated the losses incurred by one seeking enlightenment, freedom, and a voice. This tension between freedom and tradition develops in a poem in which the focus shifts from the speaker’s own voice to her rebellious sexuality. As if to contradict her regret for having sacrificed her mother’s warmth for freedom, the speaker now longs for that freedom. When her mother tries to keep her away from the man she loves, the daughter rebels against the restraint of propriety: Still fragrant from our night of love is your discreet caress, And I still feel transfigured by your heroic hands,

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But Mama said I should become A stranger to you now . . . And I come and go before your window—where I’m forbidden to be— My hip-belt laced and my hair concealed, But stronger than my mother’s words, my blood cries out in me, I shall return to you!95 (1–8)

The sixth line, Der lendngartl tsugeshnirt un tsugedekt di hor (My hip-belt laced and my hair concealed), shows the girl pacing before her beloved’s window wearing a special belt (lendngartl) and a headcovering. Since lend(n) denotes “hip(s)” or “loins,” and gartl “belt” or “girdle,” the line suggests that either the speaker has figuratively girded her loins, gathering courage to disobey her mother’s orders, or that she is wearing an undergarment that will restrain her sexuality, a kind of chastity belt, as she tempts herself by passing repeatedly in front of her lover’s window. At the same time, the wayward girl’s concealed hair implies both a disguise and a modesty imposed by the traditional practice requiring married women to hide their hair from the gaze of men. Despite the mother’s warnings and the garb within which society demands her sexuality be contained, the girl’s “blood” cries out and makes her declare her determination to return to her lover. The book’s next two poems, “Dos dinstmeydl” (The Servant Girl) and “Di shilerin” (The Girl Student), describe the expectations and disappointments of two young women and expose the cruel difference between what a girl desires and what the world brings her. The servant expects her beloved to visit her on the Sabbath, but despite her preparations, he does not show up until after she has returned to the drudgery of the workweek and is no longer free to receive him. In the second poem, the student, trapped indoors by her homework, is tempted by the glories of nature to go outside and play. As soon as she finishes her lessons, she runs out, but the inevitable approach of night forces upon her the knowledge that she has missed her chance for pleasure. Both poems dramatize how little control a young woman has over either the fulfillment or the frustration of her desires. The servant and the student are both the opposites of the passionate young woman in the book’s previous poem, who flaunted society in order to seek out her lover.96

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In the following two poems, Yakubovitsh presents the situations of women in gender roles determined by Jewish tradition—first, the bride, and then, the barren woman. In “Fun kale-sider” (From the Bride’s Prayer Book), Yakubovitsh celebrates the traditional preparations of the bride—embroidering bed linens, sewing garments—as liberating forces for her pure heart:97 I tore open the bolt Of my parents’ door, And as if on wings, Ran through fields to you; I have prepared countless Sashes and ribbons, And fabrics light as air To adorn myself for you; I’ve embroidered this pillowcase With thread of silvery gold, And every tender needle prick Is tender as a maiden’s ornament And every little button glows Like the light of the Ophir, Because in every little stitch I’ve sung praise of you! It’s only a shame that I did not Decorate my heart before, But—come, my little apron Is holy white for you!98 (1–20)

Echoing Ulinover’s Kale-yorn, this dramatic monologue criticizes the practice of arranged marriages. This speaker addresses her bridegroom, spelling out for him her careful handiwork in preparing her trousseau—embroidering pillowcases and sewing buttons on garments. She compares her stitches to the biblical accounts of the precious gold and woods that Solomon imported from the land of Ophir to decorate the Temple, as well as to the luminous beauty of the “queen of Ophir” in Psalms 45.99 Although the bride has infused every act of this work with praise for her intended, she confesses that she regrets that she has not also “decorated” her heart. Whether this phrase refers to the girl’s

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lack of actual feeling for the bridegroom or to her regret that she has spent too much time preparing the material goods for the wedding and none on her own feelings, the poem ends on a bittersweet note, as she exclaims that her “little apron” is “holy white for you!” Although the bride thus happily assures the groom of her virginity, the poet implicitly questions whether that is a positive value: If a young girl must embellish her prosaic “heart” to come to terms with her emotions, and must sublimate them in the busywork of preparing a trousseau, then how can she be prepared for the actual demands of married life? In a second dramatic monologue, “Di akore” (The Barren Woman), Yakubovitsh portrays the dilemma of a childless woman in a society that condemns those who cannot conceive. Yet she complicates this portrayal by turning the wife into a pregnant widow: Silently I prayed with tears: That I should be a mother, That I should not be compared To a barren stone, That in your eyes, beloved, I should still have charm. Until great God in heaven Gathered up my silent cry And let me have A child—a crown. Meanwhile, you have departed Into eternity. How, then, does it help me That I will be a mother soon, Since you cannot see God’s miracle, this child of mine!100 (1–16)

The speaker tells how she has “prayed with tears” that God would allow her to conceive a child. Fearing that her society would compare her to a “barren stone,” she alludes to a law that permitted a husband to divorce a wife who failed to bear a child within a certain number of years.101 The poem turns on an irony: when the woman finally discovers that she is pregnant, her husband has died. With the mention of God implicitly and explicitly, Yakubovitsh emphasizes both the piety

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

of the woman speaking and the cruelty of the God to whom she prays, who has made her simultaneously a mother and a widow. She will have a child, but has no husband to acknowledge her “charm.” What is unstated but implied is how, without a husband, both the mother and her child will suffer. This dilemma dramatizes and criticizes the impossible situation in which women found themselves if they attempted to adhere literally to the demands of traditional Judaism. In both its form as a dramatic monologue and its ironic transformation of the barren wife into the pregnant widow, Yakubovitsh’s poem draws on a tradition of Yiddish folksongs, composed and sung by women. According to folklorist Itzik Gottesman, there are three types of women who speak in these folksongs: the barren woman (akore), the widow (almone), and the deserted wife (agunah). Placed on the edges of the social norm by Jewish law and custom, these unfortunate women all protest their fates. For example, in one anonymous song in the Romanian dialect, a childless woman asks: I would truly like to know, What is my great sin? What sins have I committed To be cursed with no child? The name “Mother” is a great marvel. Blessed is the mother who hears this word. I am cursed with no children. I am not worthy to hear “Mother.” What is the worth of a tree That has no branches and no fruit? It lies on the ground and withers. It is only to be pitied.102 (1–12)

Echoing the folksong’s lament, that the akore’s inability to bear children destroys her family, Yakubovitsh’s poem shows that the woman’s pregnancy has come too late. Although her unborn child will perpetuate her dead husband’s family lineage, the akore who is now an almone has still not managed to please her husband. Yakubovitsh’s emphasis on the individual woman’s desire to please her husband, rather than on the community’s concern with the continuity of lineage, underlines the

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modern focus of the poet. The weight given to the subjective experience of a woman who must live within the boundaries of Jewish law makes Yakubovitsh’s poetry modern and at the same time serves to balance the revolutionary rejection of tradition that was prevalent in Yiddish literary circles in the 1920s. By interpreting Jewish law and custom through a particular woman, Yakubovitsh recasts a type of Yiddish folksong as a modern poem. In “Tsum zoyg-kind” (To the Nursing Child), Yakubovitsh uses a metaphor of Jewish ritual to describe the distinctively female experience of suckling a newborn baby: I breathe in like air your tender baby stirrings , When you rest on my uncovered heart, I drink in the shine of your eyes like Kiddush wine, As you, you suck at my life’s overflow. Your boundless trust shines from your eye to me, How helpless you are, my little child— And I weep in the middle of the night.—Outside, owls wail And rob me of my maternal rest.103 (1–8)

Comparing a mother’s perception of her child’s gaze to the drinking of Kiddush wine, Yakubovitsh depicts a woman’s physical pleasure and emotional turmoil. The speaker focuses on the pleasure and power she receives from her child’s tiniest stirrings as it sucks at her breast. Yet when she sees the umbagrentst fartroyen (boundless trust) in the child’s gaze as it nurses, her pleasure in her own abundance turns suddenly to fear. At that moment, the speaker realizes how helpless and vulnerable her child is and how difficult it will be to protect that child from the outside world, evoked in the synecdoche of the wailing owls. With this terrifying knowledge, the new mother cannot sleep. This kind of specific, exact depiction of women’s physical and emotional experiences in their traditional social and sexual roles are rare in Yiddish poetry. In the light of male critics, such as Melech Ravitch, who argued that female particularity weakened Yiddish poetry written by women, in fact Yakubovitsh’s poems in the voices of a mother nursing an infant, a woman unable to bear children, now widowed, and a bride unhappy in an arranged marriage exemplify a new phe-

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

nomenon. These poems are dramatic monologues, a form that allowed for Yakubovitsh to express intimate female experiences that excluded the male gaze, and to gender the poems’ subjectivity as female. When Yakubovitsh evokes ordinary experiences from the subjective perspective of a dramatic speaker, she eschews cliches and generalizations, even while she allows for a critical view of the conventions that shape women’s lives. Just as Ulinover particularized and grounded the grandmother’s proverbial sayings in the remembered experience of the girl speaker, so Yakubovitsh grounds in concrete language the physical and emotional experiences of girls and women living out the roles they occupy in a traditional culture. Subsequent poems in the book offer a counternarrative to the poems spoken by women in traditional Jewish roles. Starting with “Di shrek” (The Fear)104 and the untitled “Es hot getsankt dayn tate zikh mit maynem” (Your father fought with mine),105 and ending with “Ikh hob gemeynt dir alts avektsugebn” (I meant to give everything away to you),106 these linked dramatic monologues tell of ill-fated love affairs between a young Jewish woman and an unacceptable suitor, who may be either a gentile or a Jew from a family of higher status and therefore unsuitable for her. In “On a statsye” (Without a Station), the love affair ends when the girl departs alone from her home and her lover on a train bound for an unknown destination from which she can never return.107 Several poems in the book address the speaker’s father in an attempt to reconcile a girl’s modern uncertainties with her traditional roots. In “Tsu mayn tatn” (To My Father), the father is a rabbi, whom the speaker depicts studying the Holy Writ before dawn and praises for his spirituality. Most of all, she thanks him for imparting to her a profound sense of the historical connection between the difficult present moment she inhabits and the biblical past.108 In two other poems, both called “Af keyver oves” (At My Ancestors’ Grave), the speaker again addresses a dead father. These two poems mourn and commemorate the father. The repeated titles of the two graveside poems have a double significance: the phrase indicates both the graves of a particular family’s ancestors and the legendary tombs of the biblical Patriarchs and Matriarchs in the Holy Land. In the first of these graveside poems,

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the speaker addresses an ancestor in the familiar second-person singular, du (you): Your grave is silent on darkening roads: A solitary gravestone of clay grows pale, Not a tree blossoms, and no branches turn green, No birds come here to seek a home. Only the parchment of torn Torah scrolls rustles, A spark of kiddush-hashem reddens, The mists of the synagogue’s melancholy Darken fearfully around your fine golden brow. Your last breath is silent. No one remains In the house to take over the tradition, Your nightly stars flickered, A wind gust extinguished your eternal light. Now I see your grave . . . after passionate roads I come to recover my breath now with your calm, Not a tree blossoms, and no branches turn green, But this place is holy: the Shekhinah rests here.109 (1–16)

This monologue takes place after a pogrom has devastated a Jewish town. In the first stanza, we learn that the only sound the poem’s speaker hears near the solitary gravestone is the rustling of the torn parchment of desecrated Torah scrolls. The grave marker itself is of impermanent material—clay or lime (laym), rather than stone. Instead of light at this juncture of “darkened roads,” the speaker sees the reddening glow of kiddush-hashem, the blood spilled by Jews who died as martyrs for the sake of sanctifying the Name of God. The mists of the destroyed synagogue’s melancholy or, literally, fearful blackness (moyre-shkhoyres) darken around the “golden brow” of the deceased. In the second stanza, as the speaker explains her sorrow at this death, the identity of the deceased expands from a familiar person to a personification of Jewish tradition. The speaker states that the final agony or breath (gsiseh) of the deceased has grown silent. This silence expresses the absence of an heir to perpetuate the tradition (masore) of studying the Torah. In this desolate place, even the nightly stars flicker rather than shine steadily, and the synagogue’s symbolic Eternal Light (tomed-likht) has been extinguished by the wind. The Hebraisms gsiseh,

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

masore, and tomed-likht accrue with those in the first stanza—kiddushhashem and moyre-shkhoyres—to signal that the speaker mourns not a single victim but the entirety of a destroyed and abandoned Jewish tradition. In the last stanza, however, the speaker transforms the despondency of the poem’s first half into a more positive note. In order to “recover [her] breath,” she returns to the graves of her ancestors after traveling the “passionate roads” described in the previous poems. For her, this desecrated site of Jewish prayer and study retains its holiness. Here, in the ruins of traditional Jewish life, the feminine emanation of God’s spirit, the Shekhinah, rests. This last image combines the mystical tradition with the women’s custom of visiting the cemetery. In the second poem titled “Af keyver oves” (At the Ancestors’ Grave), the speaker addresses the dead with more particular emotion and intimacy: Death delivered you of everything, Your smile, which constantly, Ceaselessly reproached, Your mournful glance, which told me Tales of two thousand years ago. Death robbed you of everything, Except for my belief in you. It pursues me from year to year to your silent grave, To cool my heated brow on your cold stones And lay my most heartfelt letter To which there comes no answer, But which you read, I know, O dear dead!110 (1–13)

Again addressing the dead in the intimate du, the speaker states that death has taken away everything from the deceased, “Except for my belief in you.” She recalls how the beloved dead would reproach her with his smile and teach her with a mournful glance that communicated the two thousand years of Jewish history in the Diaspora. All that is left is a belief that compels her to return annually to the gravesite. Again alluding to the women’s custom of visiting ancestral graves to petition the dead, the speaker derives comfort from cooling her face on the gravestone and leaving a brivl, a written note or petition to the

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dead. Although she never receives an answer, her belief that the dead read her requests gives her strength. Whether or not they were composed as particular commemorations or yortsayts, the two poems at ancestral graves function structurally in Yakubovitsh’s book. They set up the concluding sequence that gives voice to the biblical characters of Ruth, Rachel, Hagar, ­Miriam, Shulames, and Esther. Even though the graveside poems have asserted that no one remains to continue the study of Jewish tradition, the masore, Yakubovitsh’s placement of the six biblical dramatic monologues after these graveside poems shows how a woman poet can revive the “dead” tradition in a modern literary form. The tradition is dead to her for two reasons: First, the patriarchal laws that silence a woman’s voice and prevent her from marrying the man she desires have proven to be inadequate for a modern woman; and second, the Jewish fathers who perpetuated that law have now been literally destroyed by pogroms and war. By dramatizing the characters of biblical women,111 Yakubovitsh sought to rehabilitate the Jewish tradition of her fathers and reorient it as a matriarchal tradition formulated in modern Yiddish poems by a woman. Yakubovitsh may have composed these poems as a belated answer to I. L. Peretz’s 1910 call that Yiddish writers should “go back to the Bible . . . the most reliable point,”112 and thus infuse their works with “tradition”113 and “Yiddish and Hebrew”114 in order to write “as . . . human being[s]” “on a Jewish path.”115 It seems, however, that she had something else in mind. Earlier, in her autobiographical poems, she had used the form of the dramatic monologue to give voice to the subjective experience of girls and women living within Jewish tradition. Those poems, composed in the voices of a servant girl, a student, a reluctantly matched bride, a passionate rebel, a barren woman, and a widow, focused on the inner conflicts imposed on girls and women by Jewish law and custom. In contrast, in the group of biblical poems, the dramatic monologue gives voice to the women whose stories were first narrated by men in the biblical text that has defined tradition. In these dramatic monologues, Yakubovitsh comes into her own, fusing a modern poetic form with the text most essential to the making of Jewish tradition.

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

Yakubovitsh’s poem “Rut” (Ruth),116 presents a dialogue between Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor of a barn that could just as easily take place in the Polish countryside as on the outskirts of ancient Bethlehem. The poem opens with a description of Ruth’s nighttime approach to the barn through the yet-unharvested fields, but it soon portrays the emotional and sensual interiority of the character: On Boaz’s fields, stirring before the harvest, The stalks murmur in night’s stillness. Walking from Bethlehem, a girl’s figure Approaches the barn with slow steps. Whether it is a winnowing breeze or she, Who holds in her breath at Boaz’s feet, A breeze blows cool, and Ruth, how she glows And approaches her master, without his knowing:117 (1–8)

As Ruth walks through uncut stalks to the barn where the harvested grain is threshed, time collapses. The distant view of the “girl’s figure” shifts to the immediacy of Ruth holding her breath at Boaz’s feet. In the syntactic structure of the phrase “Whether . . . or” (Tsi . . . tsi ), conflating the image of the breeze (vintl) with Ruth’s breath, the poem joins the external and the internal. The setting and the character become indistinguishable, despite even the opposite actions of the breeze that winnows the grain and the woman who “holds in her breath.” As the breeze “blows cool,” Ruth “glows. The contrast of temperatures heats up the sensual tension. With such devices, Yakubovitsh guides the reader into Ruth’s point of view. The poet emphasizes the figure of Ruth further through dialogue. In the biblical scroll, Ruth enters “softly” and says nothing until Boaz, startled awake, asks, “Who art thou?” (Ruth 3:9). In Yakubovitsh’s poem, however, it is Ruth who first speaks: You ordered your young men in the field, “Let the girl gather what she pleases,” And here in the field I have gathered, gathered, I have also stayed here all night! Boaz, oh, master, for your goodness and fairness Here, in the field, I grant you my youth.118 (9–14)

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By having Ruth initiate the dialogue, Yakubovitsh gives her an authority and agency that she lacks in the biblical text. In the Bible, Ruth follows the instructions of her mother-in-law, Naomi, to wash, anoint, and dress herself and then go to the threshing floor, where she is to keep herself hidden from Boaz until he finishes eating and drinking. Then, when he lies down, she is told to “uncover his feet” and recline until “he will tell thee what thou shalt do” (Ruth 3:1–4). With the last clause and the following verse, the traditional text emphasizes Ruth’s obedience both to her mother-in-law and to Boaz: “And she said unto her, ‘All that thou sayest to me, I shall do’” (Ruth 3:5). Where the biblical Ruth obeys and reacts, Yakubovitsh’s Ruth acts. She reminds Boaz of the orders he gave to his harvesters to allow her to glean the barley in the fields. She states that, as a consequence, she has “gathered and gathered” and now has stayed the night in the barn. Ruth does not wait for Boaz to tell her what to do. She grants him her “youth.” While the poem allows Boaz indirect authority through Ruth’s account of her response to him, it diminishes the authority of Naomi, who merits only one mention: Boaz leaps up: Oh, God our Protector, It’s not long since you came from Moab, You, gathering sheaf after sheaf in my garden, Remaining true to Naomi! Our God stands by you, our God stands by you, I swear to you, tomorrow you’ll become my wife, But meanwhile, remain here, stay!119 (15–21)

As Boaz jumps to his feet and replies to Ruth, he frames his reiteration of her deeds—arriving from Moab, gathering sheaves, and remaining true to Naomi—with a threefold invocation of God the protector, who stands by Ruth. But unlike the biblical Ruth, who followed Naomi in order to adopt her mother-in-law’s home, people, God, and place of death(1:16–17), Yakubovitsh’s Ruth is already protected and accompanied by God. Promising to marry her the next day, Boaz entreats her to stay the night. Stripped of the Bible’s concern with a kinsman’s obligation to a widow and the protection owed her (3:12–13), Boaz’s invitation to

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Ruth—“remain here, stay”—conveys an eroticism made explicit in the final stanza: Quiet again in the fragrant barn, Quietly, somewhere, a fire lights and expires, But Boaz doesn’t rest—let the night pass away, His luck watches over him here, oh it watches, At his feet stands Ruth with her joy, deeply hidden, And waits for the morning.120 (22–27)

Yakubovitsh expands a single biblical verse into a six-line stanza: “And she lay at his feet until the morning; and she rose up before one could discern another” (Ruth 3:14). Where the biblical episode concludes with Boaz’s words to Ruth and his gift of barley (3:14b–15), the poem ends as the sleepless Boaz and joyous Ruth wait patiently and expectantly. The phrase tif farborgn (deeply hidden) refers ambiguously both to Ruth’s joy and to Ruth herself, hidden from all but Boaz. Evoking the characters’ sensory experience, the stanza brings the reader into the interiority of both Boaz and Ruth, who are poised on the brink of change as a fire ignites and extinguishes “somewhere” (ergets). Yakubovitsh removes the biblical characters from any framework of societal obligation—Naomi’s instructions to Ruth and the levirate laws that Boaz espouses—in order to portray with a recognizable modernity the characters’ sensuality, especially the woman’s. With this emphasis, Yakubovitsh reaches out to the conventions of both modern literature and Yiddish devotional literature. Modern literature reveals itself in the shifting of the third-person narrative point of view from the long view of the landscape to Ruth’s breathing and emotions, in the cropping of the narrative to focus on mood, in the characters’ liminality, and in the poem’s open ending. The conventions of Yiddish devotional literature come forth, surprisingly, in the focus on the story’s sexual implications, a focus seen especially in the Tsene-rene. This so-called women’s Bible, Rabbi Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Yanow’s 1622 compilation of biblical texts and rabbinic commentary in Yiddish translation, was so popular among Eastern European women that it went through at least 210 editions and remains in print today.121 With its combination of moral-

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ism, mysticism, legend, exegesis, and prayer, as well as a direct appeal to the emotions and contemporary experiences of the seventeenthcentury reader, the Tsene-rene does not hesitate to comment on matters of sexuality. While the figure of Ruth in the Tsene-rene is generally a woman of great modesty,122 the Tsene-rene explains Ruth 3:7 in explicitly sexual terms: Boaz ate and drank and his heart was happy within him (3:7), from Torah and prayer. He came to lie down at the edge of a pile of grain. Stealthily she came, uncovered his feet, and lay down. The Sages say that the words, his heart was happy, ( . . . from tov—“good”), mean that after eating he felt desire for a wife, who is called tov, as the verse says: . . . He who has found a wife, has found goodness (Mishlei 18:22).123

Later, when Boaz awakens to find Ruth at his feet and “grows frightened,”124 the Tsene-rene quotes “Our Sages” as the source for the following dialogue: He touched her head to see if she had hair. Then he said: “This is no demon,” for a demon is hairless. “Who are you?” he asked. “A woman,” she answered. “Have you a husband?” he asked. “No,” she said. “Are you clean?” he asked. “I am clean,” she replied. The Sages say that there were three in the world whom the evil inclination wished to seduce: one was Yosef, the second Paltiel, and the third Boaz. In Boaz’s case, too, the evil inclination came to him, spoke to him the entire night, and said, “You have no wife and she no husband. Why did she come to the granary, if not because she wished a husband? It is no sin, for she is not married.” Then Boaz swore, by God, that he would not touch her. In this way he conquered his evil inclination.125

All these passages are narrated from a male point of view, that of Boaz, a perspective further consolidated by a number of stories about shrewish or licentious women, all of which teach that “if a woman is pious, she is without peer, and if she is wicked, she is also unequalled.”126 In these ways, the Tsene-rene presented the story of Ruth in both a moralistic and misogynist fashion. In reclaiming Ruth, Yakubovitsh interpreted Peretz’s call for Yiddish poets to “go back to the Bible” in two ways. On the one hand,

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

she grounded the modern poem in the biblical story and in the devotional sources in order to connect the experience of contemporary Jews with these centuries-old traditions. On the other hand, she also subverted the Tsene-rene’s Yiddish translation of medieval rabbinic interpretation and unbound it from the latter’s misogynist presentation. By reinterpreting Ruth in these ways, Yakubovitsh taught contemporary readers to reconsider the relevance of biblical characters to secular Yiddish literature. Along with the form of the dramatic monologue that Yakubovitsh imported from European literature, she also applied the literary notion of romantic love to her recreation of biblical women and the modern passionate girl. We see such love at work in the monologue “Rokhl” (Rachel), which follows “Rut” (Ruth) in Mayne gezangen. Romantic love, which grew out of the medieval conventions of courtly love with its assumptions of individual choice, extramarital sex, and overpowering passions, was foreign to traditional Judaism, where marriages were arranged, adultery condemned, and passion considered the work of the Evil Inclination. By applying the conventions of romantic love to the Matriarch Rachel, Yakubovitsh extended the analogy of sympathetic feelings evoked in the tkhines of the Matriarchs to reach from the devotional into the secular world. Assuming the voice of Rachel, Yakubovitsh undermines the supplicatory mode of prayer. Rather than addressing the Matriarch, the poet impersonates her: From palms and olives, shadows descend over wells. The daughters of Bethlehem come there to water the sheep And fragrant, blossoming, turn homeward with songs, Flowing into the twilight glow of day. But Leah, my sister, stays seated, alone and pale. No messenger comes to her in the darkening field, Her stars in soft, heavenly air give no light. O, she loves Jacob, and he chose beauty, Me, Rachel, the youngest! O, tearful sister, do you remember? How, for my sake, he rolled the stone from the well, How he sold himself as a slave for my sake, And he tends the camels of Laban with joy For my sake—

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Today I bestow him upon you! I bestow upon you the one destined for me, my only desire, O, Leah, my sister, You don’t know how great my offering, forever                   when I part from him, You don’t know how great my offering When I leave my happiness—127 (1–21)

This poem joins two separate episodes from Genesis, both elaborated upon in the Tsene-rene, in which Rachel allows her elder sister Leah to lie with Jacob. The poem’s conjoined narrative reveals Rachel’s conflicted feelings of rivalry with and sympathy for her sister. The first episode is the story in Genesis 29:14–30, where Laban tricks Jacob the  bridegroom by substituting the elder for the younger daughter in the marriage tent. The commentary on these verses in the Tsene-rene elaborates as follows: Jacob had given certain signs to Rachel so that he could be certain that she would be his bride. But when Rachel saw that they were taking Leah to lie with him, she realized that her sister would be humiliated if she did not know the passwords, and therefore told them to her. As a result, Jacob was deceived and did not recognize Leah until morning.128 Although the eighteenth-century author Sarah Rebecca Rachel Leah Horowitz’s tkhine had retold this same story, it followed the lengthier midrash in order to extrapolate a message of I­ srael’s redemption from Rachel’s kindheartedness. In contrast, Yakubovitsh’s “Rokhl” adapts the Tsene-rene’s abbreviated version of the story with a modern emphasis on the emotions of the characters and the sympathy between the two sisters. The second episode on which Yakubovitsh’s poem draws is Genesis 30:14–21, in which Rachel, the barren but beloved wife, grants Leah, the fruitful and unloved wife, a night with Jacob. Rachel trades her husband’s sexual favors for the mandrakes that Leah’s son Reuben has found in the field. The Tsene-rene again adapts a midrashic passage to comment on this episode: Reuven, Yaakov’s eldest son, found dudaim (mandrakes) in the field (30:14). He brought them to his mother Leah. Ramban and R’ Bechaye write that this was a type of herb with a fragrant smell. Rachel said to her, “Give me the mandrakes of your son,” because she wanted to

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have children [and they promoted fertility]. Leah was angered, and answered, “You have taken away my husband; will you take my mandrakes as well?” Rachel answered, “In return for the mandrakes he will lie with you tonight, although he ought to have lain with me.” Because she was contemptuous enough to sell marital relations with a tzaddik, she was adjudged unworthy of lying next to him in death, in the Cave of Machpelah.129

The source of this tale in Bereishit Rabbah, the classical collection of rabbinic midrashim, or interpretations, of the book of Genesis, emphasizes the gains and losses of birthright among the tribes of Israel that resulted from the sisters’ trade.130 In contrast, the T ­ sene-rene version highlights an angry dialogue between the sisters to reveal their mutual jealousy. As punishment for both the base nature of her exchange and the tenor of the sisterly dialogue, the Tsene-rene concludes that Rachel was denied eternal union with her husband in death. The last lines of Yakubovitsh’s poem emphasize this finality, as Rachel protests, “You don’t know how great my offering, / forever when I part from him.” By casting the poem as a dramatic monologue in Rachel’s voice, Yakubovitsh endows the sisters’ relationship with emotional nuance, in contrast to the Tsene-rene’s moralistic didacticism. Rachel’s exclamation is filled with the contradictory emotions of her empathy for the unrequited Leah and her joy at having been chosen by Jacob. ­Rachel appeals directly to Leah, “O, tearful sister, do you remember?” and recounts the hardships that Jacob chose to endure in his love for her. Like Jacob, Rachel herself will choose to undergo a trial for love, which is her love for her sorrowful sister, when she exclaims, “Today I bestow him upon you!” This act combines both instances of Rachel’s conflicted generosity in the Tsene-rene. Yakubovitsh’s Rachel protests even as she gives. Stating that Jacob is “the one destined for me, my only desire” (mayn eyntsik bashertn, mayn eyntsik bagertn), Rachel divides the sacred purposefulness that the traditional sources attribute to her acts. The very rhyme of bashertn (destined one) with bagertn (desired one) points out the duality of the poet’s vision. In the penultimate line, the poem retains from the midrashic sources a trace of divine purpose: Rachel calls the personal sacrifice that she makes for her sister Leah a korbn, a prescribed sacrifice to God, hinting at the

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sacred ramifications of the love story. Yakubovitsh’s Rachel balances the divine control of Jewish history against the individual passions of romantic love. By collapsing the two Tsene-rene stories together, Yakubovitsh creates a Rachel divided by a modern ambivalence. This Rachel comforts her unloved sister Leah by sacrificing her own love for Jacob. At the same time, she resents that she must make this sacrifice of romantic love for the sake of a fecundity that will determine the future of the chosen people: After this exchange—and after Leah bears Issachar, ­Zebulun, and Dinah—Rachel gives birth to Joseph and Benjamin (Gen. 30:22–24). Rachel’s internal conflict extends beyond her character to the dissonance between modern individualism and the traditional, nation-centered laws of Judaism. While Rachel’s love for Jacob subverts the law of the firstborn, her love for her sister reaffirms it. Wanting to conceive children, as the tradition decrees, Rachel compromises her personal love for Jacob. Her sons, the fruits of that compromise, will further the covenantal history of the people. Yakubovitsh draws the dramatic monologue of her secular poem from the tkhines that address the Matriarchs, but she reverses the traditional roles of the one who prays and the one who is prayed to. Instead of asking the Matriarch to pray to God on her behalf, the poet lets one Matriarch speak to another in the voice of a modern woman. This ventriloquism makes Rachel’s ordeals comprehensible—not so much to God but more to a reader who has left the traditional world that the Matriarchs represent. In three subsequent other poems, “Hogar” (Hagar), “Miryam” (Miriam), and “Shulames” (Shulamit), Yakubovitsh continues to transform the women of the Bible from minor characters into major dramatic figures with whom a modern reader can identify. Thus Hagar, the gentile maidservant whom the barren Sarah gave to Abraham to impregnate and then banishes, finds a voice to assert her own sacred destiny: So what, that the Lady drove me into the desert. I still feel the holy quiet When the duke of the tribe of Abraham Aroused me to a sunny vigil

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Between bright haystacks and sheaves, When he swore to me: You, Hagar, are Chosen to bear a mighty tribe! In the shadow of his camels The light of his forehead still beams, When he gave me a worldful of blessings— So what, that the Lady drove me into the desert. Night falls, and the vulture descends to the carcasses, The stars above ask: Where do you carry your sorrow, Hagar? I know not where and to whom My thirst will drag me, But I am not alone in the night here, I carry the fruit of his life under my heart, And I drink the memories of love—131 (1–18)

Dismissing the banishment by her jealous mistress Sarah, Hagar exultantly recalls the sexual pleasure she shared with her master Abraham and his promise that “You, Hagar, are / Chosen to bear a mighty tribe!” Hagar’s bravado continues in the second stanza despite her solitude in the desert, among vultures and stars. Hagar admits that she does not know “where and to whom / My thirst will drag me,” but she is “not alone.” But what gives her courage is not the presence of God, as in the Genesis account, but the fact of her pregnancy: “I carry the fruit of his life under my heart, / And I drink the memories of love.” By setting the poem in the moment before God appears to comfort Hagar, Yakubovitsh emphasizes how impending motherhood can literally redeem a woman. Yakubovitsh denies the conventional meaning attributed to the story of Hagar in order to argue for the resilience and validity of a servant impregnated by her master and exiled by her mistress. The predicament of a woman seduced and ejected from society echoes the poems by Rokhl Korn and Rikuda Potash that depicted impoverished prostitutes in interwar Warsaw. But where Korn’s and Potash’s poems called for empathy and social solutions for these women, Yakubovitsh romanticizes the outcast: Hagar finds the strength to survive within her own physical condition of pregnancy and her memory of having been loved. In this way, the gentile Hagar, pushed beyond the m ­ argin

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of Jewish society, shows greater endurance than the barren Jewish woman in “Di akore” who became simultaneously pregnant and a widow. By stripping Hagar’s dramatic monologue of the divine presence, Yakubovitsh gives agency to a woman who trusts only in human action and love. In “Miryam,” Yakubovitsh again employs the image of pregnancy to describe the state of mind of Moses’ and Aaron’s sister at the moment after the Children of Israel have crossed the Red Sea and the waters closed over the Egyptian chariots: The Red Sea rests pensively. At its crystal center, Where the slave struggled with his master, The happiness of redemption from adversity trembles piously. The Red Sea rests fortunate, soaked through with maternal joy Like a woman resting blessedly after childbirth. Who would have predicted that a fallen people, forged in chains— Would now stride free as a man pursuing his goal! The expanse, illumed far and wide by the sun-gaze of Moses And the inspired noise of the people, drifts like happiness: The sea has vanquished the rider and the horse! Faith plays and sings on small drums and cymbals, And Miriam spreads her arms, lifted aloft by winds, Toward the land decreed by God!132 (1–13)

The narrator describes Miriam’s perception of the placid waters parted for the Children of Israel and now closed over the Pharaoh’s army, with a simile likening the sea to a woman “resting blessedly after childbirth.” Keeping us within Miriam’s point of view, although referring to her in the third person, the poem reveals how she comes to realize exactly what has happened, as she marvels (in indirect speech), “Who would have predicted that a fallen people, forged in chains—/ Would now stride free as a man pursuing his goal!” She then looks out over the brilliant expanse occupied by her just-rescued people, hearing their “inspired noise” and seeing the powerful light emitted by the “sungaze” of their leader, her brother Moses. Line 10 paraphrases the biblical Song of the Sea, where Miriam praises God: “And Miriam sang unto them: Sing ye to the lord, for He is highly exalted: the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the

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sea” (Exod. 15:21).133 Yakubovitsh’s Miriam, though, attributes this victory to the sea alone: “The sea has vanquished the rider and the horse!” By omitting God and by giving the power of victory to the sea and her brother Moses, Yakubovitsh recreates Miriam as modern and secular. In this recasting of the biblical character, Yakubovitsh has deliberately situated her in the moment before she leads the women in song and dance. In line 11, Yakubovitsh writes that “Faith plays and sings on small drums and cymbals,” and the poem ends by describing Miriam as she raises her arms to the wind and looks toward the “land decreed by God.” But belief in the divine is only one part of this narrative. More than being a psychological portrait, Yakubovitsh’s characterization of Miriam dramatizes the very act of composing a poem. By situating Miriam at the juncture of trauma, memory, and reflection, Yakubovitsh reenacts a moment of creation in words that connects the miracle-inspired sacred song of Miriam with the work of the modern woman poet. The modern writer’s recognition of the biblical characters’ contemporaneity culminates in Yakubovitsh’s dramatic monologue in the voice of Shulames, the beloved woman and countervoice in the Song of Songs. In “Shulames” (Shulamit), Yakubovitsh paraphrases the biblical text in order to tell a modern story, as Shulames dreams of her lover’s voice: I sleep, and my heart awakens in me . . . I hear your voice full of regret, It sounds lovely to me, as a harp song, It calls me to your door. (1–4)

In her dream, the lover calls to Shulames, inviting her, in the imagery of Song of Songs 2:12, to “come with me / Into the field, where our garden blooms.” But unlike the biblical lover, his voice is “full of regret,” and his absence disrupts the order of Shulames’ world— “At night, a sunrise dazzled me”—and disturbs her with the knowledge that “He’s gone, your friend, he’s gone .” As in Song of Songs 3:1–3, Shulames, seeking him, wanders in the night and is reprimanded by “two watchmen” who shout, “where are you going, where / You pretty young woman, you?” In Song of Songs 3:4, the speaker “found

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him whom my soul loveth; I held him and would not let him go.”134 However, in Yakubovitsh’s poem, she continues to wander and ask anxiously: “Who of you has seen my friend? He comes—the whole world shines Streaked with fresh morning-red? With loins wonderfully formed, And from his mouth, each breath is light, His face, forever young, is crowned With every woman’s love, His curls are full of dew?” (21–28)

With these questions, she becomes increasingly desperate: The royal city is still asleep . . . I call my friend, I swear to God: Whoever knows him, tell him that I’m sick with longing, that I am sorry, And tell him, that my love is burning Desolate as the Burning Bush, There is no sea so great I cannot cross! (29–35)

Eventually, the lover arrives, and Shulames rejoices. But in Yakubovitsh’s poem, that reunion neither fulfills nor invokes love. Instead, Yakubovitsh’s poem ends with Shulames’ warning to her “women friends”: Be quiet, my friends, I swear to you, Daughters of the land, By the stag in the field and the young hind, By the wellspring’s gush and the wind of the steppes Rising from all four corners of the earth: You must not arouse love! (50–55)

This last line alludes to Song of Songs 8:4—“I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, why should you awaken or stir up love, until it please?” Significantly, Yakubovitsh incorporates the midrashic glosses and changes the interpreted line from a warning against adultery and

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Eve’s childbirth pangs (8:5) into a warning about romantic love itself. By revising rabbinic concerns about women’s sexual and reproductive lives into a statement about romantic and erotic love, Yakubovitsh sounds a note of rebellion against the traditional Jewish milieu in which she lived. Love has the fragrance of God’s name And burns on mightily and more, Like the distant hurricane, Like life and like death!135 (56–59)

Here, again, there is an allusion to the Song of Songs, but in this case the biblical text has been completely changed. Love may look divine, possessing the “fragrance of God’s name,” but it is dangerous, burning “Like the distant hurricane / Like life and like death!” The traditional interpretations of the Song of Songs allegorize the erotic poem—the woman seeking her beloved represents the Children of Israel longing for God. By comparing love to “the Burning Bush,” which burns without being consumed, Yakubovitsh intensifies Shulames’ sexual desire and transforms the biblical poem into an anthem to a modern woman’s passion. Moreover, God does not appear in the Song of Songs at all. Here, Yakubovitsh introduces God into the biblical story and displaces Him at the same time. This warning of the danger of love could apply as easily to the dangers of writing poetry. With it, Yakubovitsh advances the argument she has developed throughout her book: that a woman’s voice, sounded in poetry, can offer an alternative story for Jewish women who previously knew only how to recite the sacred texts of prayer and the Tsene-rene. In this revised narrative, a modern woman, unmoored in her passionate individuality from scriptural, legal, and grandfatherly scoldings, can find the framework she needs to define herself in the Yiddish poet’s gendered rereading of biblical women. “Ester” (Esther), the final poem of Mayne gezangen, extends the struggle with traditional limits into a historical context. Yakubovitsh’s Esther is a passionate individual with a strong sense of political responsibility to the Jewish people. She must act in a smart and politic way to save her people, even if that means subjugating herself to the power

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of the gentile king. This poem reenacts the situation of the rebellious young women in the earliest poems of Mayne gezangen, who wanted to flee the patriarchal home for the sake of sexual and romantic love. In “Ester,” Yakubovitsh reworks tradition through the protagonist’s rebellion. She returns the biblical Esther to the ancient Persian setting of the Scroll of Esther: Purple and gold-weave, raised on alabaster beams, Blow beneath mother-of-pearl walls, In the king’s house the joy is coming to an end: The Zoroastrian praise-songs still resound. In the garden of desire, I am embraced by the quiet longing For Mordecai’s little house, where I knew my rest, Where I read branded on stone tablets, Engraved onto boulders, how my people arrived. A secret occurs; who breathed it into my heart? Who reminded a mother of her lost child? My people, I know, now requires my help, The city of Shushan, I see, is wrapped in darkness; Go, Mordecai, man of the people, let everyone know; From all the synagogues let a shout of pain rise to God, And I—with a womanly smile will go and beg for mercy From the King, Ahasuerus, falling at his feet.136 (1–16)

Unlike Ulinover’s “Ester hamalke” (Esther the Queen), a shtetl girl bound up in dreams, Yakubovitsh’s character dramatizes how she will act in the world to effect change. In the Bible, Mordecai commands Esther to “go to the king and . . . appeal to him and . . . plead with him for her people” (Esther 4:8).137 In her terror at approaching the king unbidden, the traditional Esther takes full measure of the danger in Mordecai’s reminder that she cannot escape her identity as a Jew: Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace. On the contrary, if you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter, while you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis. (­Esther 4:13–14)138

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

When Yakubovitsh’s Persian Esther translates these feelings into a statement of her responsibility to her people, she draws on the Yiddish devotional texts. Like a woman reciting a tkhine that appealed to biblical figures in recognizable, everyday terms, Yakubovitsh’s Esther describes how alien she feels in the king’s palace, how she longs for her Shushan Jewish home and feels like a mother to her farlozn (lost) people, whose exile from Jerusalem to Persia is recorded in a new set of covenantal stone tablets. This tkhine-reciting Esther is modeled on the Tsene-rene, where a sixteenth-century Esther prays to God on the third day of the Jews’ fasting, before she approaches the king unbidden.139 With the queen’s supplications, the Tsene-rene makes explicit Esther’s connection to the covenant of the patriarchs and links the Diaspora story to the central Hebrew tradition. Her prayers in the Tsene-rene invoke biblical narratives and characters: the Patriarchs; the trials of Mishael, Azariah, and Daniel; Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers; and the Binding of Isaac. As a result, the Esther of the Tsene-rene resembles not the Bible’s circumspect Esther but the seventeenth-century Toybe Pan, who entreated God to save Prague’s Jews in Yiddish verses sung to the melodies of Yom Kippur prayers. The resemblances circle back upon each other. As the reader will recall, Toybe Pan had compared herself, as she begged for divine help, to the biblical Esther pleading with ­Ahasuerus! Interpolating dramatic action—Esther places the crown on her head before beginning to pray and says “these words with tears in her eyes”—the Tsene-rene appeals to sentiment and alludes to the conventions and tenor of the tkhines. Like the Tsene-rene, Yakubovitsh presents an Esther modeled upon contemporary literary sources, which include, ironically, both the Tsene-rene and modern Yiddish poetry. Her poem echoes other freerhythm modern Yiddish poetry of the late 1910s and early 1920s in its use of the dramatic monologue genre, and metrical and stanzaic form, six- and seven-beat lines with varying numbers of syllables, arranged in quatrains, rhymed a-b-b-a.140 Yet like the Tsene-rene, Yakubovitsh makes her character appeal to the contemporary world of her readers. The poet evokes the Jewish queen’s state of mind and spiritual dilemma through Esther’s own sensuous description of concrete things. These descriptions in the Yiddish poem remind the modern reader

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that the Scroll of Esther itself contains lavish imagery—the purple and gold cloth, the alabaster pillars, the mother-of-pearl walls (Esther 1:6).141 In addition, Yakubovitsh reminds her Polish Jewish readers that, like them, Esther lives in the Diaspora, surrounded by the religion and poetry of the gentiles. The Persian king’s palace resounds with “­Zoroastrian praise-songs.” The pagan worship evoked by this phrase leads Esther to remember the history of her own people in the next lines, where she “long[s] / For Mordecai’s little house . . . [and] read[s] branded on stone tablets . . . how my people arrived.” In the image of the “stone tablets” and the phrase “how my people arrived,” the speaker is not referring to the Ten Commandments and the forty years of wandering in the desert but rather to the historical explanation for how Esther herself came to live in Persia—how the destruction of the first Temple in Jerusalem resulted in the Jews’ exile in the Diaspora. By choosing to use the neutral Germanic term tovl (tablet) in the circumlocution vi s’iz mayn folk dergangen (how my people arrived [on foot, after some difficulty]),142 and in her avoidance of the religious Hebrew terms lukhes ha-bris (Tablets of the Covenant) and goles (Exile), Yakubovitsh makes it seem that, after years in the king’s harem, Esther has forgotten the story of the Jews. Esther longs not for Zion but for the quotidian “little house” of her uncle Mordecai. That modest refuge connects Esther to the arc of Jewish history. There, she “knew [her] rest” and there, too, she read the chronicle of her people. The inscribed stone tablets, which she once read in the Jewish home of Mordecai, collapse into a single, potent image both the commandments that God gave Moses and the chronicle of the exile of the Jews from Jerusalem—the event that historically brought Esther to the king’s garden. The realization that she belongs to that history, and an intuitive, inner voice, lead Esther to act: “A secret occurs; who breathed it into my heart? / Who reminded a mother [repeatedly] of her lost child?” This strange question about a mother and her lost child makes sense only if we hear it as an echo of the Tsene-rene, where Esther likens the Jews in Persia to a woman in labor: “We are like a woman in the severest throes of childbirth. Help us out of our plight and remove it from us.”143 But while, in the Tsene-rene, Esther will deliver the Jews from Haman, as God will help a woman deliver her child, Yakubo-

Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh

vitsh’s Esther—an orphan and, according to rabbinic tradition, never a mother144—comes to understand that what she must do for her people is more complicated. She will not fulfill the biblical commandment to bear children, nor will she pray in the Jewish way. Unlike Esther of the Tsene-rene, who addresses God directly and repeatedly (“O great God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God of Benjamin my father”; “I beg you, my God, hear my prayers”; “then remember, Master of the World”), Yakubovitsh’s Esther instead commands “Mordecai, man of the people” to lead all the Jews in solemn prayer to God. She herself must prepare to prostrate and supplicate before the gentile king—in short, to take on the more dangerous task of a woman subverting the will of a man, and of a Jew who must confront gentile political power. Speaking for her people, but apart from them, Esther, in her singular act, represents still another version of the modern Yiddish woman poet, whose voice comes out of, but remains apart from, the tradition. Yakubovitsh’s “Ester” explores the power of a woman who stays within Jewish tradition and yet can overturn kingdoms, change history, and rescue her people. Ulinover’s observant Jewish woman is, in the end, at a loss in the modern world, finding her way and a home for herself only within her revived memories of her grandmother’s folk wisdom. In contrast, Yakubovitsh’s modern woman rewrites the biblical and Yiddish devotional depictions of the traditional models for Jewish women’s lives. In this rewriting, Yakubovitsh presents the ability of Jews to change and survive through a particularly Jewish and particularly female literary power. In contrast to the Old Yiddish poets of chapter 2, who were exceptional in their literacy and still spoke from within religious textual tradition on behalf of their communities, Ulinover and Yakubovitsh took the traditional material of the folk, the book, and the liturgy to establish and develop the individual voices of modern poetry. Writing in Yiddish in interwar Poland, these two poets attempted to connect their poetry to the Yiddish devotional traditions of premodern women. By adapting the language and forms of those traditions, Ulinover and Yakubovitsh responded to the modern concerns of cultural displacement and urbanization as well as the resulting poverty and alienation experienced by Jews during and after World War I. These devastating circumstances negated the strength of communal identity and belief embodied in the

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women’s prayers of earlier times. However powerful their individual voices and however promising their approaches, Ulinover’s and Yakubovitsh’s attempts to renew the premodern women’s tradition failed to reach beyond their own brief moment or to forestall the unimaginable destruction of culture and language in the following decade.

Fi v e   The Art of Sex Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

It is not surprising that Ezra Korman included poems by Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin in his 1928 anthology, Yidishe dikhterins. Like their modernist contemporaries, the male poets of Di Yunge and Introspectivism, Dropkin and Margolin wrote poems that expressed individuality and aestheticism; shook off obligations to political ideology; and experimented with the disruption of language and form, influenced by Russian Acmeism and German modernism. But their writings differed from those by the men in that they advanced a new idea of poetry altogether—one that markedly announced the author as a sexual female. Like their contemporaries, Dropkin and Margolin chose to write in Yiddish, rather than in the non-Jewish languages of their European educations—Russian, German, or Polish—or in English, the language of their new home. This choice made sense in America, with its considerable Yiddish-speaking audience and press, Yet, although they rarely invoked traditional Jewish prayer, text, or custom, the frame of reference for the poetry of Dropkin and Margolin was as much Jewish as it was Western Civilization writ large, as much the Megillah as Rilke. The inherent Jewishness of the Yiddish language challenged these women modernists, alongside the men in the Yiddish literary avant-garde, to fashion poems that transcended culture and expressed the fragmentation and urgency of their moment. Both Dropkin and Margolin were among the very few women represented in the anthologies and miscellanies of the New York modern­ist movements, Di Yunge and Introspectivism. For example, Zishe Landau’s 1919 Yunge anthology included one poem by Celia Dropkin as well as one by Fradl Shtok.1 Following the example of

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Landau’s 1919 collection of distinctive modernist poems, Anna ­Margolin ­edited a slender anthology, Dos yidishe lid in amerike—1923 (The Yiddish Poem in America), which she described as a collection “not of poets, but of poems . . . the best of the year.” 2 Margolin’s collection included (out of twenty-two poets and forty-three poems) only two poems by women—Celia Dropkin’s “Di royte blum” (The Red Flower) and Malka Lee’s “Shtoyb” (Dust)—and, oddly, omitted her own work.3 In his substantial 1927 Modern Yiddish Poetry: An Anthology, Samuel J. Imber sought to “offer to those uninformed or misinformed a glimpse of the modern poetical works of Yiddish literature, a literature hidden from them by the barriers of the Hebrew alphabet and by the slight strangeness of the misjudged language of the ghetto.”4 In this effort to enlighten an English-literate American audience, Imber presented transliterated Yiddish texts and prose translations of 166 poems by 77 poets, including 8 poems by 5 women—Celia Dropkin, Rokhl Korn, Anna Margolin, Fradl Shtok, and Miriam Ulinover.5 But as of 1928, when Korman’s anthology went to press, neither Dropkin nor Margolin had published a volume of her own poetry. In this chapter, I argue that the rebellious, apparently non-Jewish poetry of Dropkin and Margolin can be seen to advance a specific idea of Yiddish literary tradition and the place of a woman poet within it. Dropkin’s poems challenged the cultural ideas that women should be tsniesdik (modest) and that their sexual purpose was reproductive. Placing an unbridled female sexuality at the center of her poems, Dropkin suggested that within it lay a woman poet’s creative p ­ owers. Margolin, in turn, challenged the notion that a woman poet was subject to a narrowly defined cultural Jewishness through her sexualized vocabulary of paganism and Christianity. In different ways, both Dropkin and Margolin took to task the notions of what Yiddish poetry should be and how women poets should write. To clarify, in the following discussion I do not assume that the poetry of Dropkin and Margolin is literally autobiographical. Rather, through my readings, I argue that within each collection of poems lies a submerged narrative about the figure of a woman poet. In the contentious, secular Yiddish literature that established itself in the 1920s and 1930s, the Yiddish critics—almost all male—defined

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poetry by women as a separate category. In both daily papers and literary weeklies published in Europe and America, critics grouped women poets together and characterized their work as instinctual, emotional, sentimental, and ultimately anonymous. In chapter 1 we saw how Aron Glanz’s 1915 New York editorial urged women to enrich an overly cerebral Yiddish poetry with their intuitive and emotional talents.6 In Warsaw, in 1927, Melech Ravitch published a review of several books of poems by women that attacked them for not being the peace­makers and homebodies of Yiddish literature that he thought they should be.7 And in Warsaw, in a 1928 review essay, the New York writer Shmuel Niger discussed froyen lirik (women’s lyrical poetry). With faint praise, Niger characterized “the many gifted Yiddish women poets” as those whose “chief virtue” is that they “are women in their poetry,” expressing not individuality but rather the “feminine disposition.” Niger called what they wrote froyen lirik, “a group-poetry, a type of folklore of the female sex.”8 It was exactly the connection between ideas of traditional “femininity” and modern Yiddish poetry about women that Dropkin and Margolin sought to disrupt.

Celia Dropkin Celia Levine Dropkin was born in Bobroisk, White Russia, in 1887,9 and she was raised in a Russian-speaking, middle-class home. She graduated from a Russian gymnasium in the neighboring city of Novosybko and then taught in Warsaw. She began to write poetry in Russian at age 10. At 17, in Kiev, she was encouraged by the Hebrew novelist Uri Nisan Gnessin (1881–1913) to continue writing. When the passionate friendship between the two was curtailed by Gnessin’s ill health, Celia married Shmaye Dropkin, a Bund activist. Before their first child was born in 1910, Shmaye escaped the government authorities and fled to New York. In 1912 Celia joined him with their son, and during a series of moves—from Harlem to Brooklyn and then to Bloomfield, Virginia, Fall River, Massachusetts, and finally back to Brooklyn—they raised five children.10 In New York, Dropkin continued to write poems in Russian but began to translate them into Yiddish in 1917. Dropkin soon published

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her poetry in the avant-garde miscellanies published by the Yunge and Introspectivist movements11 as well as in the more established publications Tsukunft and Forverts. Despite her acclaim as a leading woman poet, only one book of Dropkin’s poems appeared in her lifetime: In heysn vint (In the Hot Wind), published in 1935. After her death in 1956, Dropkin’s five surviving children published an expanded edition of her poetry that included her short stories and her artwork. This book was also titled In heysn vint (1959).12 From the beginning, Dropkin’s poems challenged tsnies, the traditional Jewish code of modesty that controlled women’s sexual behavior. In “Mayn mame” (My Mother), Dropkin named tsnies explicitly: Twenty-two years old, A widow with two small children, My mother modestly [tsniesdik] decided Never to become anyone’s wife again.13 (1–4)

Although line 3 is the only place that the word tsnies appears in her ­poems, Dropkin’s use of this word resonates throughout her work. This poem reveals that what the speaker received from her widowed mother was not the code of modesty suggested by a decision not to remarry, but rather the shpritsn (spurting out) of tif-farbahaltener bager (deeply hidden lust): Her days and years continued quietly, As if lit by a meager wax candle. My mother became wife to no one, But all the daily, Yearly, nightly sighs Of her young and affectionate being, Of her longing blood Seeped into me. I knew them with my child’s heart, I absorbed them deeply. And like an underground spring, My mother’s concealed, seething longing Flowed freely into me. Now out of me, into the open

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

Spurts my mother’s seething, holy, Deeply hidden lust. (5–19)

Characterizing this lust (bager) as both “holy” (heyliker) and “seething” (zudiker), the poem’s last line exposes the contradictions that tsnies (modesty) forced upon women who subscribed to traditional values. Rather than her mother’s good, Jewish modesty, the daughter has inherited the lust that this modesty suppressed. Recognizing the paradox, the daughter depicts both the modesty and the lust as part of the same “holy” phenomenon. As a member of the new generation, the modern daughter writing this poem about her traditional mother literally expresses, that is, presses out into the open, the sexual desire that traditional modesty had forced into hiding. The metaphors that figure lust as an underground spring (untererdishn kval ) that flows and spurts from the speaker (oysgegosn, shpritst) call to mind both the forces of nature and the fluids of the female body. Such generous moisture extinguishes the stingy light emitted by the wax candle at the poem’s beginning—an old-fashioned source of illumination and an allusion to the ritual Sabbath and holiday candles lit by a traditional woman. This wetness and this openness signaled a new kind of poetry, one whose expression of explicit female sexuality was unlike any other poetry in Yiddish. Dropkin’s frank eroticism asserted the pleasure and pain of sexual experience from a woman’s point of view. Undermining idealized notions of motherhood and modesty, Dropkin’s “Mayn mame” challenged the attitudes toward women’s sexuality depicted by both traditional Judaism and her male contemporaries. Dropkin’s poetry also served as a response to depictions of women as objects of desire by men like Zishe Landau and Reuven Iceland, whose sexually provocative poetry depicted the alluring physicality of women’s bodies as one aspect of their modernist agenda. Landau, one of the founders of Di Yunge and the editor of the 1919 modernist anthology discussed in chapter 1, was a lifelong friend of Dropkin.14 He published voyeuristic, lusty poems that depicted his sexual fantasies about the wives of his associates and women he saw on the elevated train. He also wrote about an episode of groping in a movie theater. Not one to camouflage his lust, in “Mayne zelikaytn” (The Pleasures of

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the Soul, or, literally, My Pleasures), the middle-aged Landau described “What gives me pleasure now” (10) as Women around thirty and older, With pasts. They know what it is to sleep with a man. They were active in the Movement. Now they begin to thicken And have miseries with corsets And doubts about Their contraceptive devices (Which sometimes fail), But what good, moral husbands they have.15 (18–27)

Despite its translated title, this soulless poem reads like a sociological sampling of a generation of former political activists, whose careless pregnancies must be “taken care of” by knowing men. In another poem, “In el” (On the El), Landau evoked the pleasure aroused on a speeding train by the women passengers—grobe vayber zitsn azoy fray / un breyt tsushpreyt di fis (Fat women sitting so freely / their legs spread wide) and un andere—eyn fus tsum tsveytn tsugedrikt / un di lipn azoy din (And others—leg pressed tightly against leg / and lips so thin), whose reyakh, vos zikh trogt fun zey (scent, that comes from them) makes him both sleepy, like fresh-mown hay, and wakeful, like the cry of a child at night.16 “In kinematograf ” (In the Cinematograph) depicted a man distracted by a girl fidgeting with her slender fingers and tiny feet. As he gingerly embraces her, her “plump limbs” yield, her hair falls across his face, and he murmurs a derisive line from his friend’s poem (mayn khavers lid): vi eybik narish zaynen dos di froyen (How eternally foolish women are).17 Similarly, Reuven Iceland, whom Landau called his khaver (comrade, friend), equated disembodied sexual parts with fruit and imbued inanimate objects with sexual powers.In “Shtil-leben I” (Still Life I), Iceland describes a meal for two, which evolves into a seduction: Bread and cheese and honey on the simple table. The tea summons goldenly In two thin glasses. And green, cool, and fresh,

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

The water pitcher winks, covered with dew. On an edge, the handkerchief of a woman. And nearby, a small, clever hand On a slender verse-volume, In wine-colored silk.18 (1–9)

In the first line, the “Bread and cheese and honey” lie on the “simple table,” and the speaker imagines them actively inviting him to partake in what, as it soon becomes clear, is a sexual encounter: The woman to whom the beverages summon the speaker is herself rendered as a compendium of disembodied objects, as in a still life. “The handkerchief of a woman” is juxtaposed with “a small, clever hand” resting “on a slender verse-volume.” Only the hand of the woman, swaddled in silk the color of wine, can quench the speaker’s thirst. However, the woman evoked here is intelligent—the erotic power of her klug (clever) hand comes from the book of poems on which it rests. In “Shtil-leben II,” the poet sets aside the eroticism of intellectual refinement and animates a fruit bowl by likening grapes and apples to women’s breasts and femininity, and brown pears and an orange to men’s virility and wisdom: Like cool, full breasts, with a hidden fire, Heavy grapes lie near long, Brown, manly pears. Womanly, wanton, devoured by redness, Two apples cling to a cold Orange shining full of wisdom. Dull as golems, two bananas stare. Greedy as a girl after a first kiss, A cherry rips itself red from the stem.19 (10–18)

Humorously he evokes the clumsy hunger of a dummy, a golem, or yokels with the metaphor of two bananas, and a girl’s virginity with a cherry. The poet counts on the reader to associate bananas with a phallus to emphasize the greed and voyeurism of horny young men. Playing on a bilingual association of the cherry with the hymen, Iceland depicts the girl’s ambivalent desire: Even as the girl “greedily” breaks away

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from her first kiss to maintain her virginity, the cherry breaks away from its stem, depicting the girl’s inevitable (and desired) loss of virginity. Iceland dedicated Fun mayn zumer (From My Summer), the 1922 volume in which the “Shtil-leben” poems appeared, to his lover and longtime companion, Anna Margolin, crediting her influence upon most of the poems in the book.20 As evident in their letters, he nurtured her poetry and person throughout their relationship.21 Both Iceland and Margolin, it should be noted, were married at the time to other spouses. In his metaphorical “still life,” Iceland brought together the history of European visual art and the practice of free love in Yiddish New York, a practice typical among the New York Yiddish modernists.22 The poems in Dropkin’s 1935 volume fall into overlapping thematic categories: nature poems infused with sexual tension; sexual poems infused with the voices of children and natural imagery; poems about her children sharpened by a sexual edge. It is this unabashedly subjective and sexual expression that readers then and now have most remarked upon in Dropkin’s poems. For example, in “Di tsirkus dame” (The Circus Lady), Dropkin depicts a woman who wants to be destroyed:23 I am a circus lady And dance among the daggers Set in the arena With their points erect. My swaying, lissome body Avoids a death-by-falling, Touching, barely touching the dagger blades. Holding their breaths, the people are staring at my dancing, And someone sends a prayer to God for me. Before my eyes, the dagger points Gleam fiery, in a circle, And no one knows how the falling calls to me. I grow tired, dancing between you, Daggers of cold steel. I want my blood to heat you through and through. You, unsheathed points, I want to fall on you.24 (1–17)

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

The speaker of this dramatic monologue identifies herself as a tsirkus dame, a circus lady. Significantly, Dropkin does not call this speaker the conventional Yiddish terms—froy (woman), vayb (wife), meydl (girl)—nor does the title make explicit her profession, tantser (dancer). Rather, the word dame (lady), connoting both French and German, conveys a sense of class and culture other than what one would expect of a typical Jewish woman. Pairing dame with the tsirkus (circus), which connotes disrepute, Dropkin places this speaker as far from Jewish tsnies as possible. This poem is hardly typical of Niger’s froyen lirik. Indeed, Dropkin’s character might shock even the adulteress of Molodowsky’s “Froyenlider,” who “one night laid my head down near” a man other than her husband and later, in penance, drops to her knees “like the petrifaction of Sodom.”25 While Molodowsky’s character betrays her husband, Dropkin’s circus lady performs her sexuality before the innumerable members of an audience. She dances “among the daggers / Set in the arena / With their points erect” (tsvishn kinzshaln, / Vos zaynen oyfgeshtelt af der arene / Mit di shpitsn aroyf). Directing the reader at once to experience the speaker’s point of view and to observe it lasciviously, the speaker characterizes her activity as both dangerous and seductive, as Mayn boygzam laykhter guf / Maydt oys dem toyt fun faln, / Barirndik koym, koym dem sharf fun di kinzshaln (My swaying, lissome body / Avoids a death-by-falling, / Touching, barely touching the dagger blades). Referring to her body (guf) as swaying (boygzam) and lissome (laykhter), the speaker shows that she is aware of how she appears to an observer and thus places her subjectivity outside herself. At the same time, the verb maydt oys (avoids), the repetition of koym, koym (barely), and the noun sharf (blade, edge), which is also an adjective meaning “sharp,” emphasize the precariousness of the speaker’s actions from the inside. The second stanza develops the tension between the outside and the inside perspectives of the speaker. The speaker juxtaposes a description of what the people dort (there) in the audience are doing, Mit a farkhaptn otem (holding their breaths), staring at her dancing, and beseeching God for her sake, with what she sees Far mayne oygn (before my eyes)—Di shpitsn in a fayerdikn rod (the points in a fiery circle). Line 12 deepens the inside point of view, shifting the danger

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of that fiery circle into desire: Un keyner veys nit, vi mir vilt zikh faln (And no one knows how I want to fall). The final stanza complicates her self-destructive desire with worldweariness and exhaustion: Mid bin ikh fun tantsn tsvishn aykh, / kalte shtolene kinzshaln (I grow tired, dancing between you, / Daggers of cold steel). One expects that when the dancer grows tired, she will stop dancing. But the final lines of the poem dictate otherwise: Ikh vil mayn blut zol aykh derhitsn, / Af ayere antbloyzte shpitsn / Vil ikh faln (I want my blood to heat you through and through. / You, unsheathed points, / I want to fall on you). The closing repetition of ikh vil (I want) articulates a craving that will lead to an action ambivalently desired. These lines echo the indirect construction of line 12, vi mir vilt zikh faln, an idiomatic variant that also means “I want to fall,” but that suggests the passivity of desire by placing the “I” in the dative, as the indirect object of the verb (mir). The sentence thus suggests not that “I want to fall,” but that some unstated force wants to make me fall. The point is that the speaker expresses a desire in language, syntax, and phrasing that resist the enactment of that desire. This resistance in the poem’s grammar points out the tension between tsnies and sexual desire, between how custom decrees a woman should comport herself and what she may want to do, between what society decrees a woman should say and what a poet wants to write. Dropkin’s poem depicts a woman’s sexual expression as a public performance—a cross between a striptease and Salome’s dance. In fact, Salome, the New Testament character, was an object of fascination for immigrant Jewish writers and artists, both male and female, testing the limits of cultural tradition to draw metaphors from the Christian Bible. Dropkin’s exotic dancer is a detextualized Salome, who performs not at the king’s or devil’s bidding but for an audience at the circus and for her own pleasure. The sword of Herod’s executioner becomes, in Dropkin’s poem, the daggers on a stage; they aim not at the prophet’s neck but at the dancer’s own body, and not by the king’s command but by the dancer’s desire. Like her dancer, Dropkin removes the female sexual voice from the contexts of both Jewish and European culture. If the dancer wants to impale herself, she does so to shock her audience and to pleasure herself. If the dancer falls on the daggers, she will silence herself in either

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death or consummation, or both. One could read this desire to fall as a capitulation to the male. However, in the poem, the lady does not fall; rather, she says what she wants. It is this articulation of desire that allows the lady to keep on dancing. Even so, she herself becomes enticed by the daggers’ danger. As a sexually charged object of the male gaze, the woman artist must resist succumbing to her own art, which can kill her. Yet such an exhausting exhibition, Dropkin seems to say, such a skillful show of sex is the only way a woman artist has to command the attention of her audience.26 In contrast to the phallic daggers in “Di tsirkus dame,” Dropkin’s other poems figure the male physiognomy as “a filthy, red worm”; a “stone-cold idol”; and as the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, bitten many times, by many women’s teeth.27 Transposing the sexual power of women and men, Dropkin’s “Odem” (Adam) presents the male body as the object of a woman’s dangerous appetite. In the first two sections of the original version, a woman speaker addresses Adam. The speaker characterizes her interlocutor as a young man, indulged and fondled by “many” female hands. The speaker, traveling along the road of her life, af mayn veg, characterizes their encounter as one of unambiguous sexual consumption: 1 Spoiled, Stroked by many women’s hands, You were the one I met on my way, Young Adam. And before I had placed my lips on you, You begged me With a face more pale and tender Than the tenderest lily: —Don’t bite me, don’t bite me. I saw that your body Was entirely covered with teeth marks, So tremblingly, I bit into you. 2 Above me, you flared Your narrow nostrils, And drew nearer to me, Like a hot horizon to the field.

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3 He: When shall I come to you again? She: When you are longing. He: And you? Won’t you be longing? She: Don’t worry about me,    I am used to living with images,    You will remain forever alive to me,    And even if you never again open my door,    You will not hide from me.28 (1–24)

At the onset, the poem retells the creation of a man through a woman’s sensuality, but because the name odem in Yiddish is also a noun denoting “man” in general, it suggests that Adam’s predicament is the archetypal condition of all men. The image of biting alludes to Eve, who (in Gen. 3:6–7) bites the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil and determines what she and Adam will know of sexuality (and thus of mortality) by opening their eyes to their own nakedness. Yet in Dropkin’s poem, the speaker is neither the first woman, Eve, according to Genesis, nor the first female, the demon Lilith, according to the rabbinic authors of the midrash. Many other women have handled this Adam. Despite the allusion of the title, Dropkin’s speaker cannot be unambiguously identified as a character in the biblical narrative. She transcends the sacred texts of Judaism and offers her story as an alternative archetype of how women gain knowledge and sexual experience. Recasting Genesis, Dropkin reorients the role that the primordial woman played in co-opting the man. Whereas the Eve of Genesis tastes the forbidden fruit and then gives it to Adam to eat, the speaker in Dropkin’s poem merges the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge with Adam himself. Rather than succumbing to Eve’s enticement, Dropkin’s Adam becomes the fruit with which the biblical Eve tempts him. Through this merging of the object and the subject of temptation, Dropkin’s woman speaker alone comes to possess the knowledge of good and evil. Against traditional interpretations of Adam as the victim of Eve’s disobedience, Dropkin makes Adam himself the tempting object of a transgressive desire. His repeated plea, “Don’t bite,” echoes, perversely and weakly, God’s command in Genesis 2:16–17 forbidding Adam and Eve to bite into the fruit of knowledge: “Of every tree of

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

the garden thou mayst freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”29 Compressing both the forbidden fruit and the forbidding God into Adam, Dropkin effectively places man and God at the mercy of  the woman speaker. At the same time, as she prepares to take a bite, the  woman’s own desire for that taste undermines her expression of power: She becomes tremulous, “a fartsiterte.” Whether in trepidation or uncontrollable passion, or both, her trembling reverses the relationship of power between the sexes. Adam’s nostrils flare with breath, in the second part of the poem, and he positions himself above the woman. In their coupling, his nearness becomes oppressive, a quality that Dropkin brings out with the simile of the horizon on a hot day. From the overturning of conventional power earlier, the poem reverts to archetypal gender metaphors—the woman as earth, the man as sky, and the dominance of sky over earth. Yet in contrast to the archetype, this woman/earth is not fertile, and this man is not a sky full of seminal, life-giving rains. Instead, he is the horizon, the neutral meeting of earth and sky. By focusing on the neutrality of the horizon, rather than the complementary qualities of earth and sky, Dropkin stresses the irony of how, in the sexual act, the powerless young Adam acquires only an apparent power, an ambiguous dominance. By replacing the traditional foci of power in the Genesis story— God’s decrees and Adam’s dominion—with female-centered sensuality, Dropkin undermines traditional readings that rationalize woman’s service as the procreative vessel for humanity, at the mercy of God and man. The poem also rejects the biblical explanation that blamed Eve’s disobedience for the pain of childbirth, an attribution that persisted from Genesis through rabbinic literature into tkhines of the late nineteenth century. Dropkin thus appropriates the biblical story for a new agenda of eroticism. “Odem” ends with a third section, a dialogue between a man and a woman, which does not follow directly from the narrative in the ­earlier sections yet is crucial to understanding the poem. This postcoital conversation reveals the psychological dynamics between the sexual partners. “He” asks questions to continue the relationship: “When shall I come to you again? Won’t you be longing for me?” “She” rebuffs

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him and subversively establishes her power over him. The next encounter will be initiated by his desire, not hers, for she tells him that they will meet again in the future ven du vest benken (when you are yearning). In contrast, she will find satisfaction whether or not she ever sees him again, because she is “used to living with images” (Ikh bin shoyn tsugevoynt tsu lebn mit geshtatltn). But rather than serving as ghostly substitutions, these geshtaltn or images are the product of the poet’s imaginative work. Contradicting their apparent insubstantiality, the images that the woman makes from her sexual experience provide her with the materials to make her art. While the first two sections of “Adam” revise the Bible’s originary narrative of the sexual power of men over women, this third section takes that revision a step further to demonstrate that a Jewish woman poet must reverse traditional sexual power in order to write poetry in Yiddish. Read together, Dropkin’s poems “Odem” and “Di tsirkus dame” can explain why the women Yiddish poets in America wrote with an open sexuality that severed their poems from the texts of traditional Jewish culture with which their contemporaries in Poland, such as Ulinover and Yakubovitsh, continued to engage. Undermining the very laws and customs that its biblical allusions imply, “Odem,” like “Di tsirkus dame,” flouts the notion of tsnies (modesty) and asserts how essential women’s open sexuality was to the writing of poems in Yiddish. A complementary strategy in Dropkin’s poetry is to draw a parallel between motherhood, nature, and poetic creativity. While the link between motherhood, the female body, and nature may have been conventional in early-twentieth-century European and American poetry, Dropkin renewed these themes in Yiddish with an innovative sexualized diction. Out of these generative poems grew her most modernist poems about the writing of poetry. For example, in the untitled poem beginning with the line Du host tif oyfgeakert mayn frukhtbare erd (You plowed my fertile soil deep), Dropkin employed the metaphor of agriculture to depict human sexual procreativity: You plowed my fertile soil deep And sowed it. Tall stalks grew out, love-stalks, Their roots deep in the soil And golden heads to the sky.

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

Above your sheaves, a red poppy Burst into gorgeous bloom. You stood, suspicious, And thought: Who sowed that poppy? As a breeze passed through, You leaned back To make way for it. As a bird flew by, You accompanied it with your eyes.30 (1–14)

The speaker recounts to a man their sexual history, likening herself to a field and him to the farmer who plants his seeds deeply in its fertile soil. From this cultivation, the speaker describes “tall stalks” (Hoykhe zangen), “love-stalks” (libe-zangen) that grow out of the earth with “roots deep in the soil / And golden heads to the sky.” An intrusion interrupts this cultivation as a bright red poppy shoots its ostentatious bloom above the golden wheat stalks. The surprised farmer wonders suspiciously who sowed it. Receiving no answer from the flower or the field, he makes way for a breeze and watches a bird fly past. Although the farmer owns the field and supervises his planting, he cannot control the winds and birds that carry other seeds to the soil. Likewise, although a husband may believe that he possesses his wife and the children with whom he impregnates her, he cannot stop the natural forces of passion that may implant other seeds. In contrast to the active, art-making speakers in “Di tsirkus dame” and “Odem,” the woman narrating “Du host tif oyfgeakert mayn frukhtbare erd ” (You plowed my fertile soil deep) depicts herself as the passive recipient of men’s seed. By nurturing those seeds as they grow into plants, the woman makes a poem in an act that, while quiet, is not passive. The woman creates a work of unexpected beauty—the red poppy that grows among the “love-stalks.” The form of this poem is a free-verse sonnet with fourteen lines of irregular metrical length, rather than the conventional iambic pentameter. Instead of a sonnet’s regular pattern of end rhymes, this poem repeats end words, such as erd and farzeyt; end rhymes, mon and geton; and partial rhymes, zangen, durkhgetrogn, and durkhgefloygn, in an irregular order that defies the expectations of a sonnet’s quatrains or of a

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couplet, octet, or sestet. In contrast to this disruption of the expected, the final rhymed couplet—durkhgefloygn, oygn—closes the poem with irony. As the farmer/husband gazes in puzzlement after the bird that may have planted the poppy’s seed , the poet knowingly rhymes the bird’s act of flight (durkhgefloygn) with the farmer’s eyes (oygn). This rhyme winks at the reader who, unlike the farmer/husband, knows that poetry requires such cross-fertilizations in order to elude the deadening control imposed by money, possession, and convention, even as it depends upon these societal underpinnings for its existence. We can read this as either a justification for extramarital love within a marriage or an exposition of the creative process of a woman poet. As a wind- or bird-sown seed may result in a child fathered by a man other than the woman’s husband, so too might a modern Yiddish poem emerge. The metaphor connecting biological progeny and poetry continues in Dropkin’s many poems about being a mother to her children.31 Some of these poems, like “Mayn meydele” (My Little Girl) and “Tsu a tokhter (Estern)” (To a Daughter (To Esther)), did not appear in the 1935 In heysn vint, but were collected only in the 1959 posthumous edition, published by Dropkin’s five children.32 However, the fourth section of the 1935 edition, “Hel bloye kareln—mayne kinder” (Bright Blue Beads—My Children), includes ten poems about her children. Within each of these poems, Dropkin sets up a conflict between the speaker and the outside world that she resolves through her feelings for her children. As well as showing her relationship to sons and daughters, these poems reveal the speaker’s desire to be a child again, as in “Ikh tulye tsu mayn heysn shtern” (I Nestle My Hot Forehead):33 My hot forehead nestling On my child’s tender skin, I don’t want to think about anything, So I stay quiet as a pin. My problems fall away When my head presses on her skin, I let my quiet tears flow, And with them flows my sin. Quiet tears are falling, falling, Happy tears, redemptive tears,

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Now my feverish brow is cooling, And I return to my childhood years.34 (1–12)

The twice-stated physical contact of resting her “hot forehead” on a daughter’s flesh leads the speaker to find solace from her problems: she can stop thinking, remain silent, and weep, until her “problems fall away” and her “sin” flows off with her tears. Holding her daughter close, the speaker is cleansed of her sins. Thus purified, her regret becomes “Quiet tears,” “Happy tears, redemptive tears,” which allow the speaker to “return” to her “childhood years.” Her maternal intimacy enables the speaker to return to the sinless child she once was. As the speaker in “Mayn mame” soaked up and exuded her widowed mother’s suppressed sexual desire, so the mother in this poem absorbs her daughter’s innocence to return her to her own childhood. In “Ikh tulye tsu mayn heysn shtern,” the speaker reverts from the celebration of sexuality in “Mayn mame” to the idea that a woman’s expression of sexuality is a sin that can be redeemed only through motherhood. The poem, though, undermines this platitude with irony: the physicality of cooling her hot brow on her child’s body invokes the sensual pleasures of the sinful sex the speaker sought to escape. This kind of unsettling sensuality runs through many of these motherhood poems. Most blatantly, the speaker in “Tsu mayn zun, velkher hot mir geshenkt hel bloye kareln” (To My Son, Who Gave Me Bright Blue Beads) delights in her 19-year-old son John’s gift to her because the cool beads make her feel modne yung (strangely young).35 Although she does not know tsi ikh volt nokh veln / vern vider yung (whether I would/ Again want to be young), she takes an almost flirtatious pleasure that ikh ken nokh gefeln / a yingl fun nayntsn, vi du (that I can still appeal / To a boy of nineteen, like you).36 More subtly, the poem “Rozeve fodem” (Pink Thread) connects its speaker as a mother with her stance as a poet and as a sexual wellspring. This poem charges a task of maternal nurturing and domestic responsibility with an implied sexuality and pits a woman’s domestic work against her artistic work: When, a restlessness steals into my heart, into my house, And I cannot sit still anywhere in my house,

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Then from somewhere I take out The white dress of a child, Half-embroidered with pink thread. The pink thread entwines my soul with silence, I sit and sew, counting my stitches, And ask in the silence of the house: Oh, my terrible restlessness, Where are you hiding, where? When I hold this dress of a child in my hands, Half-embroidered with pink thread, Pink thread scares you, as sunshine scares a mouse, All at once, peace comes into my heart, my house.37 (1–14)

The poem opens with the speaker’s problem: she is overcome by umru (unrest, restlessness), a feeling that intrudes into both her “heart” and her “house.” Setting up an analogy between her heart and her house, the speaker erases the boundary between her inner and outer realms of existence. The speaker responds to this restless feeling’s illicit entry by taking up a half-finished piece of embroidery, a child’s white dress. Dropkin chooses this particular object because it embodies two aspects of a woman’s role—the domestic, womanly art of decorative sewing and the maternal art of nurturing. Significantly, the poem keeps the relationship of the speaker to the child undefined and neutral, as the child is kept out of the poem altogether: Dropkin modifies the word for dress, kleyd, with the adjective kindershe (childish, childlike, intended for a child), instead of naming the owner of the dress with the possessive noun kinds (child’s). This choice of diction leads the poem to displace the relationship from that between a mother and her child to that between an embroiderer and a halfcompleted dress. If this embroiderer is an artist, she decorates rather than originates and cannot finish her work. Embodying the proverb that a woman’s work is never done, the poem foregrounds a kind of artistic work associated with women in a domestic setting that is a part of either folk or bourgeois culture. Such artistry keeps this woman from acknowledging the emotions that might lead her to make another kind of art, which could disrupt her domesticity and overturn the balance of power be-

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tween the sexes upon which domestic order is built. Embellishing the child’s dress, the embroiderer suppresses her emotional restlessness. The very material of her artistry at once comforts and entraps her, as “the pink thread entwines my soul with silence.” While the sewing instills in the speaker a sense of well-being, the concentration and meticulous care it demands keep her from knowing herself. Defying the restlessness that made her unable to “sit still anywhere in my house,” the speaker, embroidery in hand, can stay in one place, “counting my stitches.” The counting of stitches, like the counting of syllables in a poem’s metrical line, frees the speaker to confront this “terrible restlessness.” But for this speaker, the demands of verse form, like the counting of stitches, do not lead to the articulation of emotion or the untangling of a problem. By picking up her embroidery, this woman has forced her restlessness—the intrusive, illicit, and unnamed emotion—to hide like a mouse. The poem leads us to imagine this restlessness like a mouse still hiding in her house and her heart: When it emerges again, her womanly art will again suppress it. The child will grow up, but the mother will never finish embroidering the dress. Such unfinished art enables a woman to endure the life she is compelled to live.38 The tension and interdependence between art, sex, and motherhood also emerge in Dropkin’s nature poems. In “Zumer-sonata” (Summer Sonata), the poem that opens the book In heysn vint, the speaker depicts herself immersed in the natural world: I bathed in fresh, clear waters, Through a bright, green stream, I saw my white feet. I walked home barefoot through a thick forest, The forest breathed heavily, intoxicating and sweet. I emerged into a wide field, The wind caressingly licked my feet. They kissed the grass, and even the bite Of a huge fly was tender and passionate. I came home full of ecstasy and love, My heart beat quickly, I breathed hotly, And everything was wonderful before my eyes, As if a great happiness would happen to me.

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And when the night came on still and hot, Something sharp gnawed in me and pulled at my heart, As if someone were kissing me in the night, As if snakes were sucking me.39 (1–16)

Alone in a landscape of streams, forests, and fields, the speaker describes how its elements arouse in her a sensual awareness of herself. The stream’s green waters enable her to “see” her own feet, whose naked­ness she maintains as she walks through a forest that intoxicates her. These unclad feet carry the speaker from the forest into “a wide field,” where nature continues to seduce her, as the wind caresses those feet and a “huge fly” bites her, “tender and passionate.” This passion envelops the speaker who returns to the human domain, “full of ecstasy and love.” At “home,” though, such fulfillment cannot last. With the coming of night, an unfulfilled desire takes over: “Something sharp gnawed in me and pulled at my heart.” The pain caused by this desire is expressed through a pair of similes. The first evokes a fantasy of human contact, “As if someone were kissing me in the night”; but the second simile transforms that kiss into an unnatural act, “As if snakes were sucking me.” The poem juxtaposes a human kiss to snake-like physical contact. The kissing and sucking suggest danger and intimacy, sexual pain and the maternal pleasure of nursing a baby. Placing the speaker alone in a benign natural world, the poem displaces the romantic act of reflection and discovery onto the female body. That body becomes the site of sexual engagement, as the encounters with water, wind, and insect transform into an unstable act of human sexual contact that swiftly changes into an unnatural act combining nurture and poison. Dropkin most intensely develops this link between nature and the course of a woman’s sexuality in the book’s title poem, “In heysn vint.” In the morning, “The hot wind rocks / The fresh, fresh leaves, / Like a young mother rocking / Her first, first child.”40 By midday, the “hot wind” has made the branches “Rock in a hot dance,” while “Every leaf dances a circle dance of sin,” which ends when dusk comes and the “hot wind falls asleep,” causing the “languidly tired” trees to stretch upward toward “the pure sky.”41 With the metaphor of the hot wind in the leaves during the course of a day, Dropkin traces what might seem a woman’s reversed progress, from motherhood to profligate sex.

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Dropkin’s sexualization of the landscape continues in the first and sixth poems of the sequence “In Solivan Kaunti” (In Sullivan County), which take place in the country landscape of the Catskill Mountains, where Dropkin went to recover from rheumatic fever brought on by the birth of her youngest son, Henry, in 1921.42 The sixth poem, “Di moskite” (The Mosquito), is one of Dropkin’s most intimate poems: Perhaps I would have died This very night, If not for the small mosquito. She bites me, bites And revives me from fear And still doesn’t want to leave me And buzzes so quietly and thinly And comforts, So I am not again alone in the world, And she will not forsake me in need, When the night is as frightening as death.43 (1–11)

The poem makes no mention of Dropkin’s own illness; rather, it sets the possibility of death into the context of the speaker’s emotions of isolation and fear. Whereas most readers consider mosquitoes a nuisance or carriers of disease, the narrator of this poem finds the insect’s presence a comfort. She depicts the mosquito as a benign, affirming presence, whose repeated biting revives, rather than drains, her life along with the blood it sucks. Although simply following the rule of Yiddish grammar, in which di moskite is grammatically feminine, Dropkin’s use of the pronoun zi at the beginning of line 4 lends an almost human agency to the mosquito. This agency is intensified by the intention of relationship that the speaker gives to the insect in line 6, un vil fun mir alts nit avek (And still doesn’t want to leave me). While this line exemplifies the romantic trope of the pathetic fallacy, in which a person ascribes human intention to something in nature, its effect here is to convey the speaker’s emotional isolation from other people and her sensual reach, beyond lovers and children, to assert her existence in the world. The poem transposes the physical and the emotional domains. In line 1, the speaker’s possible death is an emotional state figured as physical, while the mosquito’s physical encounter with her

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in lines 4–8 resolves her emotional anguish. Biting the woman’s flesh, the mosquito reverses the figure of sexual performance in “Di tsirkus dame,” where the performer risked falling on daggers. The mosquito’s penetration of the woman’s skin provokes in her a fulfillment like that desired from sex. The insect bite, unlike the penetrating eyes of the audience or the daggers in the circus ring, makes the woman speaker feel loved, known, and accompanied.44 Yet the poet’s isolation persists, especially in Dropkin’s poems about the writing of poetry. Dropkin’s “A libe briv” (A Love Letter) combines love, nature, procreation, and the poet’s art of writing in an unwritten love letter to her girlhood love, the Hebrew novelist Uri Nisan Gnessin, who had first encouraged her to write Russian poetry in Kiev and Warsaw between 1904 and 1908.45 Long after his death in 1913 and her own marriage and children, Dropkin dedicated “A libe briv” to Gnessin, depicting love as the stillborn result of unconsummated sex,46 as well as the tension between thwarted language and thwarted sex: I would want to write someone A love letter, a love letter. The roots of the plant, “Love,” Grow deep in my heart. A wild and thorny plant, Sown by the autumn wind. Ach, my love is no plant, It’s a little creature, naked and blind. A plant with blood and with life, How it thrashes, how it cries and how it shouts, Seeking pitifully with its little mouth The empty or distant breast. This hungry little creature, love, Struggles and cries; it turns black. Who sowed it and bore it? Who gnaws and tears out my heart? I would want to write someone A love letter, a love letter.47 (1–18)

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The speaker of this poem begins and ends with a statement of an unconsummated desire to write, an act that displaces sex. Although she first figures the “Love” that grows in her heart as “A wild and thorny plant, / Sown by the autumn wind,” the speaker quickly revises the metaphor from a desolate landscape to the biological innerscape of a woman’s body. The conditional verb, “I would want to write” (ikh volt veln shraybn), renders the performance of art, as well as sex, hypo­ thetical. Poetic metaphors—love as a plant, the heart as its soil, the autumn wind—morph into the grotesque, hybrid fetus-plant whose mouth seeks an unattainable, disembodied breast. In this poem, written in the conditional mood to a recipient who is long-dead, both the love and the writing are miscarried (or ill-born) creatures that the poet cannot nurture in this world. In “Tsu a yunger dikhterin” (To a Young Poetess), Dropkin further develops an ars poetica that connects a woman’s poetry directly to the quality of her sexual experiences. A woman can write poetry only with extreme experiences of sexual love: So what, that you look deep into things: Your heart, your heart sleeps, So what that he came, And that you, with clear eyes, Glanced at him like a sun, So what? You need to burn in hell three times, like me, To burn long, slowly In a fire of love. Three times, like me, you need To be purified in hell, You need to love without sense, without pride, Love unto death! Only when you recognize death In love, Write love poems!48 (1–16)

Designating her listener as the grammatically feminine dikhterin (poetess), Dropkin’s speaker disparages this young woman’s poem with the refrain, voz iz derfun? (So what?). The speaker initiates her younger

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colleague into the secret of writing libe lider (love poems) with a second refrain: darfst dray mol (you must three times) (lines 7 and 10), which is echoed a third time (line 12). She admonishes the young poet­ ess for celebrating a superficial encounter with the dangers of love when she glanced at the figurative sun. Instead, Dropkin commands, the woman poet must immerse herself repeatedly in the consuming “fayer fun libe” (fire of love), as if for purification in the mikve (ritual bath). Only in love’s “Gehinum” (Gehenna) can the younger poet be “vi ikh” (like me), and suffer, burn, relinquish her sense and pride, and love to the point of self-destruction. Such lessons in hyperbole, where love and death are intertwined, will give this young poetess the qualifications to write love poetry. If Dropkin acts as a mentor to a younger woman poet in this poem, such mentorship hardly complies with the image of froyen-lyrik that the male critics had put forth in the Yiddish press. In this poem of poetic example, Dropkin challenges another woman poet’s ability to write by questioning her sexual experience. The poem defines as essential to a woman poet’s ability to write poetry a life far removed from the traditional expectations of tsnies. In Dropkin’s view, a woman’s poetry originates not from the sacred Jewish texts, as in Kadya Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider” (Women-Poems), but from a woman’s ability to give herself over to the emotions and physicality of sex. Dropkin’s poem negates the values expressed in the tkhines, which defined women’s lives as circumscribed by and dedicated to Jewish law, family, and God. The forces of nature at work in a woman’s body are not created and governed by divine power or harnessed by Jewish culture into a sacred calendar and forms of worship. Rather, for Dropkin, a woman who writes poetry in Yiddish will find words in a body purified by its knowledge of “dem toyt / in libe” (death / In love). As a defiant statement of artistic purpose, Dropkin’s “Tsu a yunger dikhterin” echoes the 1909 Yiddish poem by Yehudis (pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn), “Tsum dikhter” (To the [male] Poet), which castigated pretentious, old-fashioned poetry by men:49 Enough! Don’t repeat the old poems—They aren’t yours! . . . But, once, they, Like children, sang praise to God, love . . . stars in the sky . . . Roses in the valley . . .

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

That was then! . . . They will not live again! Your poem now sounds false: your flower is colorless; Your sun—not new; and God?—no one believes in him anymore. Oh, shut up! You are not pious, your God is long since dead! . . . You dream of your past happiness . . . But your dream no longer provokes, it’s sparse-gray, it’s cold; And you! . . . you’re spiritless . . . you are weak! From your terrible illusions— Of whom?—You forget; the world is old! We are all long since grown up, sober. Let the great sadness be—we proudly inspect it, we are not going back. Through flowers! Through the sun . . . through skies.— And our gaze looks farther still.

Where Yehudis castigated the men writing Yiddish poetry in the premodernist generation before 1910 for their inauthentic, hackneyed depiction of nature, Dropkin challenges the representative of the next generation of women poets for her inauthentic sexual experience. In a generation, the terms of the challenge for Yiddish women poets had changed from depicting a direct experience of the physical world that lay beyond the screen of Jewish sacred texts to expressing a direct experience of sex that lay outside of Jewish law.50 Dropkin concludes her 1935 book with “Royte blum” (Red Flower), a poem that dramatizes the way that the writing of poetry joins a poet’s girlhood with womanhood, surviving and helping her to survive.51 The image of the red flower, repeated at the end of each stanza, echoes the red poppy of “Du host tif oyfgeakert mayn frukhtbare erd ” (You plowed my fertile soil deep)discussed above. Where in the earlier poem, the red poppy, the result of a forbidden liaison, emblemized the transgression required for a woman to write poetry, the final poem strips away such illicitness. Instead, “Royte blum” presents the red blooms as the persistent markers of creativity, which spring up from the wreckage and mundanity of life: I have plowed under my girlhood garden, Mixed with the earth the flowers everywhere But upon the field-refuse, here and there, Weepingly sprouts a red flower.

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I have sown my garden with potatoes And weeded out the flowers everywhere, But from the vegetables, like a tiny slipper Boldly sprouts my red flower.52

Through the metaphor of the garden, the speaker attests to growth that requires destruction and pain. Each of the two stanzas begins with an act of cultivation—plowing and sowing. Each action is followed by its consequences: the plowing under of the girlhood garden mixes broken flowers with soil to form “field-refuse”; the sowing of potatoes necessitates the “weeding out” of all flowers. No matter how permanent these actions and consequences seem, from the broken and weededout remnants of the girlhood flowers springs forth “my red flower”— at first weeping, then boldly. The mature speaker attempts to undo her girlhood for the pragmatic demands of a woman’s life: ­flowers must give way to potatoes and vegetables; pleasures of beauty must bow to the obligation to nurture. But the gardener, a metaphor for the poet, cannot eradicate the beauty in her creation. Working crushed flowers into the soil, she fertilizes the earth from which a surviving seed will sprout and flower in the next season. Despite the gardener’s attempt to weed out everything but the food crops, the red flower persists. Rejoicing in this insistent beauty, the gardener claims it as her own. “Royte blum” stands at the end of Dropkin’s 1935 collection as the emblem of a woman who must write poems. At the end of her life, however, Dropkin replaced this natural imagery of the stubbornly regenerative powers of poetry and sex with a trope drawn from Jewish tradition. In “Mayn mame,” the first poem I discussed, the young poet inherited not her mother’s piety and modesty but her suppressed desire and passion. In contrast, in the late poem, “Mit gebrokhene fliglen” (With Broken Wings), the elderly poet returns to the feminine side of the Jewish divinity. Dropkin’s children and the editor Sasha Dillon took this tiny, five-line, free-verse poem from an unpublished manuscript to conclude the posthumous 1959 expanded edition of In heysn vint. In this poem, the poet attributes the source of her poetry to the wellspring of Jewish tradition: How have I written my poems? How have I imagined my poems?

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

They say: The Shekhinah has descended on me, And it seems, surprisingly, that someone stands over me In the dark, with broken wings.53

In these lines, the speaker asks herself how she has been able to write and imagine her poems. Instead of answering directly, she quotes a proverb to explain her inspiration: Di Shkhine iz af mir arop (The Shekhinah has descended on me). The folk saying has great power, for as she quotes these words, the speaker imagines or seems to perceive the presence of the Shekhinah itself, the name for God’s immanent presence that later became known as the feminine emanation of the divinity. In biblical, rabbinic, mystical, and liturgical traditions, the ­Shekhinah is sometimes endowed with wings, like an eagle or a dove, which shelter the faithful.54 In Dropkin’s poem, the figure standing over the speaker, its wings damaged, offers no divine comfort. Dropkin’s lines may allude to a popular Hebrew love poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik (“Hakhnisi tahat kenafeikh” [Take Me Under Your Wing]), which itself draws upon the Hebrew Bible, liturgy, and rabbinic writings: Take me under your wing, be my mother, my sister. Take my head to your breast, my banished prayers to your nest.55

While, as his translator observes, Bialik applies the “sheltering dovewing” of the Holy Spirit to an “entirely carnal love,”56 Dropkin for once forgoes any allusion to the erotic. This Shekhinah’s broken wings cannot protect or embrace like the wings of the traditional emanation of God or of Bialik’s beloved. Instead, the Shekhinah, in Dropkin’s poem of old age, stands as a silent witness, like Molodowsky’s Leah at the end of “Froyen-lider VI,” acknowledging the sorrow of a poet who cannot remember how she wrote her poems. By quoting what the Jewish people (“they”) say to express a moment of inspiration, Dropkin invokes the folk voice of Jewish tradition that she had relinquished, along with her mother’s tsnies (modesty), early on in her life and her poems. In the end, this collective voice returns, when memory and imagination seem to have failed the poet. This uncharacteristic summoning of Jew-

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ish folk wisdom brings Dropkin back to what her poetry had escaped in order to put forth a bold, modernist vision of a woman’s creativity in Yiddish poetry.

Anna Margolin Like Celia Dropkin, Anna Margolin, the best-known of the women poets in New York City in the 1920s, wrote sexually charged poetry that counteracted traditional Jewish concepts of women’s roles and behavior exemplified in the tkhines. Anna Margolin was the literary pseudonym of Roza Lebensboym, who was born in Brest-Litovsk, Grodno, in 1887 and died in New York City in 1952. Educated in a Jewish high school in Odessa, she came to America for the first time in 1906. Subsequently, as secretary for philosopher Dr. Khaim Zhitlovsky at the Yiddish anarchist newspaper, Di fraye arbeter shtime, she published journalism and short stories under the pseudonyms “Khava Barut” and “Khava Gros.”57 From 1910 to 1914 she lived in London, Paris, and Warsaw; she then moved to the British Mandate of Palestine, where she was briefly married to writer Moyshe Stavski and bore a son, Na’aman Stavski.58 She returned to New York in 1914 and wrote and edited for Der tog under the pseudonyms “Sofia Brandt” and “Clara Levin.”59 In 1920, living in New Haven with her second husband, the writer Hirsh Leyb Gordon, and under the influence of the Yiddish poet Reuven Iceland, her lover who later became her life partner, Lebensboym began to publish poems under the pseudonym “Anna Margolin,” which appeared in prominent Yiddish papers and literary journals in New York and Warsaw.60 In 1923, Lebensboym—henceforth I will refer to her as “Margolin”—edited an anthology, Dos yidishe lid in amerike (The Yiddish Poem in America).61 Her only volume of poems, Lider (Poems), appeared in 1929. She published no poems after 1932.62 Lider is composed of six sections in which, I will argue, Margolin successively tests the ways in which a woman can create a poetic voice in Yiddish. For Margolin, the poetic voice is bound to the speaker’s sense of self. Her ability to define her identity determines what kind

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

of voice she can find in poetry. Margolin interrogates this challenge in her volume of poetry through a series of shifting binaries that contrast the female and the male: autobiography and portrait; hardness and fluidity; artifice and nature; sex and death; psychosis and society. Paradoxically, it is precisely a woman’s failure to reconcile these binaries that silences her in the world, yet enables her to write poems. In my analysis of Margolin’s book, I will follow these binaries as a way of understanding her poetic project.63 My analysis builds on the work of scholars whose essays have established Margolin’s importance within the modernist literary movements of the early twentieth century. Avraham Novershtern’s introduction to his 1991 Yiddish edition of Margolin’s poetry argues for the artistic integrity of her poetry within Yiddish modernism, although in his 2008 article, he contends that the category of “women writers” is less than adequate for considering Margolin’s poetry.64 Barbara Mann, in a 2002 article, demonstrates that Margolin’s poems, which she calls examples of “Jewish imagism,” were influenced by the poetics and aesthetic theories of Russian Acmeism, American imagism, and German expressionism.65 My reading of Margolin’s work adds to the interpretations that place Margolin into a modernist context by bringing to the forefront the question of gender. The poetry itself gives rise to a focus on gender, as does the memoir of Reuven Iceland, which served both Novershtern and Mann as a point of departure. In his elegiac essay on the poet, Iceland asserts a direct link between Margolin’s life and the poems she wrote. He states, “In the first few years there was great intensity and struggle between us. Many of the poems in my book Fun mayn zumer, which came out in Vienna in 1922 and a great part of her book of poems, which came out in New York in 1929, describe in different ways that intensity and that struggle.”66 Iceland further exemplifies Margolin’s achievement of an organic “unity” between “true form” and content with a discussion of “Muter erd” (Mother Earth), in which, he says, “Tone, rhythm, and image, everything here is harmonious, as if one grew out of another, and all three together are expressed in ten lines, so beautifully and profoundly, what woman, in all generations, has felt in her blood, for man.”67 Iceland apparently perceives no tension between the woman and the poet. Moved by Iceland’s statement about her life, but skepti-

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cal of his generalization, I will argue that Margolin’s poems demand to be read with attention to gender. The first section of the book, “Vortslen” (Roots), contrasts autobiography and portrait. The two poems that open the “Vortslen” section of Lider present the crisis of voice and identity that, as we have seen, Dropkin also addressed.68 But Margolin, complicating Dropkin’s erotic challenge, posits each of these opening poems as a declarative statement of who the poet is and what she can do through poetry. The initial poem, a dramatic monologue, “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” (I Was Once a Boy), is spoken by a figure whose declaration of gendered and cultural identity stands in explicit contrast to the literal, factual author of the poem. The second poem, “Muter erd, fil getrotene, zun gevashene” (Mother Earth, Much Trampled, Sun-Washed), presents figurative language—simile and metaphor—as the means by which a poem can both cement and transform gendered identity. Whereas Dropkin’s “Di tsirkus dame” declared a dramatic identity for a woman poet who transgressed the Jewish cultural boundaries for women’s expression of sexuality, Margolin’s paired opening poems all but ignore Jewish culture and set up a dialogue between the male and female aspects of the poet. In “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling,” Margolin establishes an ancient Greco-Roman male speaker for the Yiddish poem in opposition to its modern Jewish female author: I was once a boy, a stripling, Listening in Socrates’ portico, My bosom-buddy, my sweet darling, Had Athens’ most stunning torso. Was Caesar. And from marble constructed A glistening world, I the last there, And for my own wife selected My stately sister. Rose-garlanded, nursing wine all night, In high spirits, heard tell the news About the weakling from Nazareth And wild tales about Jews.69 (1–12)

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

Undermining her contemporaries’ assumptions that women could write only autobiographical poetry in Yiddish, Margolin composed “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” in the dramatic persona of a male speaker. At the same time, Margolin appropriated the Introspectivist principle that the poet’s choice to write in the Yiddish language, rather than a poem’s content, made a poem “Jewish”;70 she establishes the poem’s subject and setting as decidedly not Jewish. Margolin is not the first modern Jewish writer to invoke pagan culture, and she may have known of the Hebrew translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the works of Sophocles, Anacreon, and Horace by the great poet, Shaul Tchernikhovsky.71 The persona is a pagan man who evolves from a disciple of Socrates in ancient Athens into a member of Caesar’s court during the decline of the Roman Empire, from a homosexual into an inebriated, hedonistic practitioner of incest. Flouting all expectations, Margolin purposefully summoned an eroticism and culture foreign to the traditional Jewish ethos in order, it seems, to shock the Yiddish reader. The crushing blow to that reader is the fact that the speaker, whose very being transgresses Judaic law and culture, knows of actual Jews only through distant rumors about “the weakling from Nazareth” and “wild tales about Jews.” The poem problematizes the issue of writing modern poetry in the Jewish vernacular, as the Yiddish diction dramatizes a movement within the poem from the foreign to the familiar, from the pagan to the Jewish. The first two stanzas are marked by unfamiliar non-Yiddish words imported from the Greek, such as portikos (porticoes), sokratn (Socrates), atn (Athens), tors (torso), and tsesar (Caesar). With such diction, the poet expands the cultural referents of Yiddish literature and reconstructs its literary tradition outside of Jewish literature. That the only Hebraic word in the poem, mayses (tales), occurs in the last line plays out Margolin’s intention to show how Jewish culture occupies only a marginal position in the Yiddish poem.72 Yet, even as it enriches its Yiddish lines with alien words, the poem argues that whatever seems familiar and Jewish is alien to Margolin’s Yiddish poetry. The loan words from Greek and Latin indicate how much at home in a Yiddish poem Socrates’ acolyte and Caesar’s courtier can be. At the same time, these imported words push away the reader who expects

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a Yiddish poem to tell only mayses vegn yidn (stories about Jews) in a language full of loshn-koydesh (the Holy Tongue). The poem’s tight, rhymed tetrameter quatrains draw attention to the conventions of lyric form. While the four-beat, four-line stanzas of Margolin’s poem may allude to the prevalent stanza form of Yiddish folk songs, here they primarily connote the tradition of European gentile high culture. The closed poetic form and the imported diction draw attention to the non-Jewish origins of this Yiddish poem, connecting Margolin’s endeavor to the works of Socrates, the sculptor of Apollo, and Rilke. Proclaiming an ars poetica for the Yiddish lyric, this poem declares its origins not in Eastern European Jewish tradition but in the Western European classics. In contrast to this deliberate fiction of male identity, the second poem, “Muter erd, fil getrotene, zun gevashene” (Mother Earth, Much Trampled, Sun-Washed), establishes an alternative female identity transformed through figurative language: Mother earth, much trampled, sun-washed, Dark slave and mistress Am I, Beloved. Out of me, lowly and sad, You grow—a mighty trunk. And like the eternal stars and like the flame of the sun I circulate in long and blind silence Through your roots, through your branches, And half waking, and half drowsing I seek the heavens through you.73 (1–10)

As in “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling,” a dramatic persona speaks. Here, however, the speaker is gendered female rather than male. ­Although this poem and “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” both share a deliberately non-Jewish field of reference, “Muter erd” takes on the terms of nature rather than culture. While the language of “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” establishes culture and history as the forces from which a poem emerges, that of “Muter erd, fil getrotene, zun gevashene” asserts that nature is the force behind poetry. This speaker casts her dramatic situation through the metaphor of “Mother Earth,” the name she gives herself, describing herself as fil getrotene,

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

zun ­ gevashene, / ­ Tunkele shklafin un harin (much trampled, sunwashed, / Dark slave and mistress). The phrases characterize Mother Earth by pairing the opposite extremes of low and high, dark and light and the states of being trodden and shone upon, slave and mistress. From these extremes—dirtied and cleansed, powerless and powerful— Mother Earth subordinates herself to her listener. Line 3 juxtaposes the speaker’s declaration of her identity, bin ikh (am I), with the name of her listener, gelibter (beloved). This juxtaposition resolves the ambiguous syntax of the opening two lines, which might initially be read as an address to Mother Earth, rather than as the figure of speech with which the dramatic persona characterizes herself. The speaker and listener are thus placed in opposition to each other. Lines 4 and 5 make the hierarchy of this opposition clear: Fun mir der nid’riker un der batribeter / Vakstu aroys—a mekhtiker shtam (out of me, lowly and sad, / you grow—a mighty trunk). As “Mother Earth,” the speaker subordinates herself to the tree that grows from her, a metaphor for a lover, a son, or a listener. The “I” presents herself as “trampled” and a slave, but also as “sun-washed” and as a mistress. Although calling herself “lowly and sad,” in relation to the “mighty trunk” that emerges from her, the speaker retains the power she purportedly relinquishes. The similes, “like the eternal stars and like the flame of the sun,” imbue the speaker with power: she is hot and remote, eternal and consuming. This figurative language also counteracts the earlier image of the speaker as lowly, enslaved, and passive. In lines 7–8, the similes of the heavenly bodies merge into a metaphor of botany: “I circulate in long and blind silence / Through your roots, through your branches.” Like sap or like blood, the speaker courses through the roots and branches of the tree-like listener. And although it occurs in “long and blind silence,” her act of circulating leads her forward and outward: “And half waking, and half drowsing / I seek the heavens through you.” Even while she remains earthbound, the speaker ascends to the heavens through the branches of the tree, the listener. Thus, the static, horizontal, trampled “Mother Earth” can move up through her own creation—the tree—toward the sky inhabited by the sun and the stars. Because she is “like” the sun and the stars, the speaker seeks their environment. Although she is the earth, she belongs in the sky. The simi-

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les, “like the eternal stars” and “like the flame of the sun,” convert this speaker from the silent, trampled matter that she claims to be at the poem’s opening into the substance that she resembles at the p ­ oem’s end—eternity and flame, stars and sun. Through her creation—the lover/tree/listener—the speaker transforms herself into what she resembles, but what she is not. This pair of opening poems comprises Margolin’s metaphor for a woman poet writing in Yiddish in the 1920s. In the first poem, this poet-persona denies that she is a woman, Jewish, and living in the modern city of New York. In the second poem, she asserts that whatever she essentially is (earth, mother) and whatever roles she plays in society (slave, mistress), nothing can keep her from finding what she aspires to become through the language of poetry. Through the figurative language of “Mother Earth,” the four elements transgress their boundaries: Earth is like fire (sun and stars); Earth is like air (the heavens); Earth is like water (circulating through roots and branches). These metaphors transform what suppresses her. The tree, created and nurtured by the soil, while seeming to define the earth’s horizontal lowliness, actually becomes the instrument through which the earth can attempt to become or to reach the sky. The woman poet’s creation—lover or poem—enables her to become that to which she has likened herself. While a simile likens two different things, it does not transform the tenor into its vehicle. Instead, a simile asserts the difference between the two sides of the comparison and, by its very nature, resists the connection that the semantic meaning of the figure asserts. In contrast, the metaphors that begin and end this poem transform Mother Earth from powerlessness to power by recognizing the consequences of a particularly female kind of creativity that is engendering and nurturing. This creativity is not traditional Judaism’s idea of female procreativity as prescribed in Genesis. Margolin’s “mother” engenders not a child, but a lover. Like Dropkin, Margolin supplants what Jewish culture expects of a woman with what art demands of her. Eros replaces mishpokhe (family). These opening two poems set forces of culture and nature in opposition to each other. Accordingly, Margolin implies that a woman poet finds her voice and legitimacy by appropriating and then overturning

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

conventions and stereotypes: she writes in the personae of a pagan man and of a fecund female force of nature in order to redefine poetic form, sexual boundaries, and the idea of a Yiddish poem. In the book’s third poem, “Portret” (Portrait), Margolin continues her investigation of how a woman can be a poet. Its very dedication, to A. Leyeles, speaks to this point, for Leyeles was one of Margolin’s harshest critics and, in effect, had tried to silence her.74 This poem is a kind of truncated, inverted sonnet;75 its thirteen lines are divided into three rhymed stanzas, composed of lines ranging from four to seven stresses, and with four of the six rhymes being half- or off-rhymes: a tercet (aba1), a quatrain (cdcd), and a sestet (ee1fgf1g1). The fractured sonnet form underlines the subversiveness in the portrait. Inverting the convention of portraiture in the visual arts, in which an artist depicts a person’s character by representing his/her physical presence, Margolin depicts her subject’s inner life as an explanation for the way she appears: Because mockery and unhappiness glowed through her life, She carried her head as proudly As if God, full of secrecy, were to exalt her. In the empty house, in the mirror, saw herself as through a rain. And, as if acquaintances were gazing at her, She drew near herself solemnly, As one nears an Infanta. Reposed, reposed. Sat straight and stiff. And did not confide her mask to the solitude, When good evening hours Lamentingly bowed above her, above everything. And only felt: Desolate, flaming madness Presses gently against her throat.76 (1–13)

In contrast to the first two poems’ dramatic monologues, this poem is a narrative in the third person. The first stanza explains why the poem’s subject, referred to only by the personal pronoun zi (she), appears as she does to the portraitist’s gaze: She carried her head “proudly” “because mockery and unhappiness glowed through her life.” These lines simultaneously present the conflicting points of view of the auto­biographer

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and the portrait-painter. The autobiographer experiences mockery and misery, while the portraitist sees only the external manifestation of that suffering. In line 3, the portraitist interprets the woman’s proud carriage with a simile of her being divinely chosen, a possibility that both mocks the woman as arrogant and embraces her as extraordinary. The combination of the inner experience of mockery and unhappiness and the outer perception of pride and superiority presents a conflicted portrait of a misunderstood subject. Stanza 2 reveals that, instead of an external portrait-painter, it is the woman who depicts herself, though obscured, “as through a rain.” Observing her veiled reflection in the mirror, the woman appropriates the seemingly objective attitude of her “acquaintances” and “draws near herself solemnly, / As one nears an Infanta.” The first stanza’s impression of an observer simultaneously outside and inside gives way to solipsism. Separate from her own being, the woman is trapped within it. In her formal, obsequious approach to herself, the woman is both commoner and royalty. In stanza 3, this person, although resting, sits “straight and stiff ” and although alone, keeps her “mask” on. She cannot reveal her true face even to herself; and she cannot experience her inner life without being constantly aware of how she appears to an outside observer. The tension inherent in an existence in which one constantly observes oneself results in the woman’s feeling “Desolate, flaming madness” as it “Presses gently against her throat,” suggesting that this pressure will silence the voice that might emerge. In contrast to Dropkin’s “Di tsirkus dame,” where the speaker dances before an audience, the woman in “Portret” performs only for herself in the mirror. Where Dropkin’s protagonist speaks for her own desires, Margolin’s mutely strangles on her silence. “Portret” both summons and resists autobiography and portraiture, for these genres exemplify the central problem for a woman poet: She cannot find a voice to tell the stories of her experiences, whether they are of her life in the world or of her life in her imagination, when she must remain the muse, the object of an uncomprehending male gaze. This conundrum may explain the poem’s dedication to Leyeles. In these three poems, Margolin dramatizes the dilemma of a character whom I read as a woman poet: Although she can assume the voices of an alien male or a figural maternal earth, this poet-character,

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

attempting to depict herself, must summon an objective gaze that silences her in madness. Portraying herself literally, as a woman, the poet-character conveys a damaged speaker who lacks the authority to speak in the domain of her own poem. Margolin elevates the suffering of a humiliated woman in the sonnet “In gasn” (In the Streets), as she compares the speaker to Jesus at the moment of his crucifixion:77 Here, a word of fear and here, full of regret. Here, I wept and here, rested in grief. You have yet transformed all the streets into Golgotha. In all streets runs my blood. Here I wept. Muffled, the walls Roared the fateful sentence on the weak and the lost. And many ladies and many gentlemen watched As a woman walks through twilight in tears. Was prayer, and was rage, regret. And now the last fear-filled note Of life shouts out, sinking in dust. And yet, oh, God, oh Tormentor, I believe: I will, with moribund fingers, still touch a star And detect an infinitely deep, infinitely tender word.78 (1–14)

In the first person, the speaker first recounts a life in terms of suffering, although we learn that she is a woman only in line 8 of the poem. In the two opening quatrains, she tells how her words are full of fear and regret; her actions, full of mourning (weeping and resting in grief ). Yet hers is no ordinary grief, for lines 3 and 4 raise it to a higher level by accusing the addressee (du) of converting “all the streets into Golgotha,” where her blood runs. The initial ambiguity of the speaker’s sex renders all the more powerful the likening of her victimization to that of the Christ in the extended metaphor of Golgotha, the place in Jerusalem where the crucifixion of Jesus occurred, and the image of the speaker bleeding in the streets. However, this sufferer, who weeps and witnesses the fateful sentence—the gzar-hadin, a Hebraic legalism, that condemns those who are weak and lost—confesses that she is no saint, savior, or divinity. She

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states that the mocking observers are not the mobs who tormented Jesus on the cross. Rather, she is “a woman [who] walk[s] through twilight in tears,” whose humiliation is observed by “many ­ladies and many gentlemen.” Likening the weeping woman to, and then distinguishing her from, Jesus on the road to his crucifixion, the poem depicts, in extreme terms, a woman’s condemnation by society. In the sonnet’s sestet, the persona recounts her response to this humiliation, and she does so in the same odd, impersonal phrasing of the personae in “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” (I Was Once a Boy), gevezn t­ sezar (was Caesar), and gerut, gerut (reposed, reposed): geven gebet un tson geven, kharote (was prayer, and was rage, remorse). Omitting the subject, these abbreviated sentences make the utterance intimate, and at the same time they erase the enactor of the verb. Such erasure connotes both the economy and the exhaustion of the voice, which lists juxtaposed actions, rather than composing a narrative. From that weariness, in the present moment of the poem, the voice shouts out “the last fear-filled note / Of life.” Only here do we understand that the du addressed in line 3 is God, and that the speaker shouts out a cry of faith to “God,” the “Tormenter.” What will save her is not divine intervention, but rather an act of words: “I will, with moribund fingers, still touch a star / And detect an infinitely deep, infinitely tender word.” Words are what save the woman in the street, who is humiliated and ostracized by the ladies and gentlemen of society. The poem begins with “a word of fear” and ends with the expectation of a “tender word.” Composed of words, the speaking of the poem transforms the speaker’s complaint into a prayer. Words address the divinity and come from the divinity. Thus, the woman who crafts her life in words joins herself to the divine, and her suffering among people leads to an understanding of the divine. The speaker loses her voice when she allows her ancestors to speak in “Mayn shtam redt” (My Tribe Speaks).79 The poem is divided into three sections. Each of the first two sections begins with a line extending into the left margin, repeating the title, “Mayn shtam redt” (My tribe speaks). In the first section, the subsequent stanzas catalogue the men, and in the second section, the women of the speaker’s extended family. Their collective characters are evoked to convey the different religious and social facets of the speaker’s origins, all of which conspire

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

to silence her. These categories include traditionally religious men, “in satin and velvet / Faces long and silken pale, / Faintly glowing lips,” whose “thin hands fondle yellowing folios” and who “speak in the depths of night with God.” There are also the acculturated Jews— “merchants from Leipzig and from Danzig,” who wear “Shining cuffs” and exhale “Refined cigar smoke.” Caught between the old ways and the new, these men exchange both “Gemarah jokes” and “German civilities.” Unlike the traditional Jews, who speak to God, these ancestors regard the world with a “gaze [that] is clever and dull, / Clever and over-satiated.” The speaker characterizes these men as “Don Juans, dealers, and God-seekers.” In the second section of the poem, the worldly women of the tribe appear “like goddesses adorned with jewels, / Dusky red of Turkish shawls, / Heavy folds of satin-de-Lyons,” counterparts to the well-off merchants. Yet their lush garments belie the women’s stymied lives: “But their flesh is a weeping willow, / But like dried flowers, their fingers in their laps, / And in their faded, veiled eyes, / Dead cheer.” Although these cosmopolitan women wear imported cloaks—Turkish shawls and French satin—their bodies are remnants of nature, and their eyes dead. In contrast, the “grande-dames in chintz and in linen” are women who are “Big-boned and strong, and mobile, / With their contemptible, easy laughter, / With soothing words and uncanny silences.” These voluble female ancestors, the counterparts to the Talmud scholars of the first stanza, do good works in the community: “Evening at the window of a destitute house / They materialize like statues. / And through their twilit eyes twitches / Savage cheer.” Unlike the sophisticated women, with their “Dead cheer,” these grandesdames of the Jewish community express a “Savage cheer.” Margolin orders these groups in a chiastic form, aligning the traditional men with worldly ladies, and the modernized merchants with the traditional women, to keep the poem off-balance and in motion. Each of the lists ends with a mention of people who have betrayed the values of the family: The list of men is followed by “A drunk, / A couple of converts in Kiev”; and the list of women, by a por (a couple), whose acts are unmentionable, except that they embarrass the speaker. The poem’s third part asserts that this ancestral tribe speaks not to the poem’s narrator but, rather, through her. Echoing and transforming

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Adam’s words after the creation of Eve from his rib, Margolin’s narrator calls her ancestors, “Blood of my blood / And flame of my flame,” as though she, the descendant, was the originary source of her progenitors. Whereas the biblical Adam names his newly created helpmeet Isha (woman), adapted from ish (man), saying, “This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Gen. 2:22),80 Margolin transforms Adam’s literal flesh and bone in these lines into the poet’s metaphorical blood and flame. While Adam’s “flesh and bone” were drawn out of his body, the speaker is invaded by her ancestors. They “Trample with prayers and curses and lament, / Shake my heart like a copper bell.” While the biblical Eve does not speak until she addresses the serpent (Gen. 3:2–3), the poem’s speaker utters words, as if possessed, with a tongue out of control and in a voice from which she is estranged: My tongue quivers, I don’t recognize my voice— My tribe speaks.

While the sacrificed woman of “In gasn” prayed and shouted in her agony and sought to hear a saving word, the speaker in “Mayn shtam redt” has relinquished control of her voice. The memory of her ancestors endangers the poet. Recalling her family origins, the speaker becomes the vessel through which their communal voice is heard and, as a result, relinquishes the ability to tell her story. If we understand that speaker to be a persona for the figure of the poet, then “Mayn shtam redt” suggests that a poet who endeavors to transmit the voices of her tribe will be silenced. Margolin fills the rest of Lider with this woman poet’s struggle to fashion a voice of her own. The poems of section 2, titled “Ikh dayn ru un ikh dayn shverd,”81 narrate an illicit love affair that results in a power struggle not only between a woman and a man but also between art (or artifice) and nature. In the first, untitled poem, the poet summarizes a love relationship through the extended metaphor of a primordial garden that undermines its allusion to the biblical Eden: We went through days as through storm-shaken gardens. Blossomed and ripened and practiced in playing with life and death. Mist and broadness and dream were in our words.

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

And among stubborn trees in summery-rustling gardens We branched into one single tree. And evenings spread with heavy darkening blueness, With the aching desire of winds and falling stars, With the straying, fawning light over twitching grasses and leaves, And we took shape in the wind, soaked in the blueness And were like the happy animals and like clever and playful gods.82 (1–10)

The first stanza of the poem figures the lovers, mir (we), as walking through a paradisial garden, after a storm has passed. Although the weather has thoroughly unsettled the “storm-shaken gardens,” the l­overs have flourished, even “Blossomed and ripened” through the experience of “playing with life and death.” Finding unity among trees in the garden, they have “branched into one single tree.” In this state of Edenic harmony, the lovers become part of a natural order that alludes to but contrasts with that of Genesis. As evenings “spread with heavy darkening blueness,” “the aching desire of winds and falling stars” make the lovers become “like the happy animals and like clever and playful gods.” With this simile, the speaker subverts the Genesis narrative and, as in “Mayn shtam redt,” places the lovers in a distinctly pagan context: Their likeness to animals and gods distinguishes them from Adam and Eve, defined in Genesis as distinct from both God and the animals. Transforming them like the metamorphoses in Ovid, these similes remove the lovers from Jewish tradition. Such transformation does not, however, lead to eternal happiness, as shown in the next poems in the section. In the “gray parlor” of “Mit halb farmakhte oygn” (With Half-Closed Eyes)83 the woman does not look at the man, nor do the lovers summon each other. Her imagination, characterized by “noise and light” and “sun and wind,” contrasts with the constraint and alienation that she experiences with her lover, whom she has “painfully and deeply and blindly / With half-closed eyes / Sucked . . . in.” The relationship includes passion that causes pain, when, in subsequent poems, the woman weeps because “You are sunken with our black fire / In my blue fire,”84 as well as moments of tenderness, when she asks her lover to “Bow deeply over me, / Hide the world from me / And also my own blood.”85

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The melancholic tone of these domestic love poems gives way, in the prose poem “Du” (You), to a hubristic outburst in which the speaker addresses a lover like an emperor taking a city: I pass through you in barbaric splendor, as through a conquered city. Four little Negroes carry the tails of my gold-embroidered coat, sewn with peacocks and poppies. Behind me walk warriors, flashing with their short swords, naked arms and knees; priests in white linen; a whole crowd of poets in black silk and purple; and wide elephants stomp and carry on their backs the joyous gods of my homeland, the holy monkeys and colorful birds, which shriek out sweet and wild ­under the foreign sky.86

Depicting sexual relations through similes of political power, the narrator describes the “barbaric splendor” of her retinue—“Negro” servants, an elaborately embroidered cloak, the company of warriors, priests, and “a whole crowd of poets,” the elephants that carry “the joyous gods of my homeland,” and the shrieking holy monkeys and exotic birds. Despite such grandiosity, the speaker’s refrain contains a hint of uncertainty: “I pass through you, as through a conquered city.” This reiteration draws attention to the simile and questions the likeness of the speaker to a conqueror and the lover to a vanquished city. To silence doubts, the speaker describes adoration: “Rejoicing voices throw my name like a devoured flame to the sky, and it falls back splintered into dancing sparks. In palms lie gems, emeralds, rubies, which you have dug up from your depths, their sides still caked with your soil and blood and sorrow.” Like fireworks, adulating voices disperse the conqueror’s name, and this glitteringly synesthetic image repeats in the “emeralds, rubies” held in unidentified “palms.” These gems, though, come from the “depths” and bear the “soil and blood and sorrow” of vanquishment. Pulling downward the skybound voices, this image expands upon the doubts raised by the refrain: But oh, those dark and twisted streets, where I am afraid to tread. That vigilant silence within you, in which my name never sang . . . and shadows that do not bow down before me . . . And you are my conquered city. In your sad, desolate temples, I have placed my gods. And this poem, which you try to sing before them with an uncertain voice, is like sun and love.

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

But those silent and solitary corners. In the darkness, I have seen mocking eyes. I have seen the luster of a knife. And when you embraced me with a thousand hands in the night, in all those thousand hands was destruction.87 (16–26)

“Under the foreign sky” of the vanquished city, the conquering emperor is uneasy. Despite “rejoicing voices” that proclaim the conqueror’s name and the hands full of jewels, “which you have dug up from your depths,” the speaker is afraid to enter the “dark and twisted streets” and equally afraid of “that vigilant silence within you, in which my name never sang . . . and shadows that do not bow down before me.” Placing “my gods” inside the lover’s “desolate temples,” the speaker commands the lover to “try to sing” in their worship the very poem she composes. Yet the speaker remains suspicious of what the lover withholds, for by withholding he may rebel and betray: “When you embraced me with a thousand hands in the night, in all the thousand hands was destruction.” Binaries throughout the poem—sky and earth, brilliance and darkness—lead to the question of the speaker’s gender. The opening phrase, Ikh gey durkh dir (I pass through you), connotes a phallus or a knife penetrating a body, and the extended metaphor of conqueror and conquered suggests conventional assumptions of male aggression and female passivity. One might conclude that, as in “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling,” Margolin fashioned the speaker as a male dramatic persona. However, the act of singing connects the speaker’s persona to the poem we are reading. The first of these two acts refers to the speaker’s inability to control or possess the listener: yene vokhndike shtilkayt in dir, in velkhe mayn nomen hot keynmol nit gezungen (That vigilant silence within you, in which my name never sang). The second describes the listener’s inability to sing: un dos lid, vos du pruvst far zey zingen mit an umzikher kol, iz vi zun un libe (And this poem [song], which you try to sing before them with an uncertain voice, is like sun and love). In the first case, the conquered cannot be forced to accept the conqueror’s name or presence. In the second case, the conquered cannot properly worship the gods implanted by the conqueror, for such worship requires the pronouncement of “this poem.”

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As in Dropkin’s “Di tsirkus dame,” the dynamic of domination and submission within an erotic encounter leads Margolin to question the voice and artistry of a powerful woman speaker. Margolin’s extended metaphor of the emperor and the “conquered city” culminates in the penultimate stanza with the problem of poetry and worship: The speaker characterizes the city by both the “gods” she has placed within its “sad, desolate temples” and “this poem, which you try to sing before them with an uncertain voice,” which is “like sun and love.” The emperor is the author of the poem we read, which is also the poem, or song (lid ), that the conquered lover attempts to sing “with an uncertain voice” in worship of the conqueror’s gods. Although the emperor asserts that “this poem” “is like sun and love,” giving light and heat, the brave simile masks an anxiety about both the lover’s loyalty and the emperor’s power. While the power in question is erotic and political, its essence is that of the woman poet, who seeks to write a poem that will move the reader, the beloved du, to sing. The fraught authority of a woman over the beloved addressee continues through the poems in the second section. In “In kuper un in gold” (In Copper and in Gold), the speaker addresses her lover as “my king” and worships his power, which is conveyed in the copper and gold coins bearing his portrait: In copper and in gold of the coins Shines cool and clear the face of a king, And the world lies at our threshold, enchanted By the distant brightness of the king. On all brilliant and on dim things Is engraved the face of my king. And all the things are now gold-weight, And the world in my heart blossoms golden, Enchanted by your distant light, my king.88 (1–9)

The speaker, who played emperor in “Du,” has reversed roles with the submissive lover: Now she is the bewitched subject, and he is the monarch dominating her through his image on a coin. The image of common copper and precious gold coins and the modifiers (“cool,” “clear,” “distant”) in the first stanza convey the power that the remote king

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

holds over the speaker. In the second stanza, the ubiquity of this engraved image of the beloved endows “all the things” with the heft of “gold-weight” and transforms the speaker: “the world in my heart blossoms golden.” This reversal seems to restore a conventional hierarchy of power—male over female, political over individual, art over nature. Yet, even as the coins’ hard, brilliant weight brings the internal “world in my heart” to life, the artifice of the made object engenders the organic act of blossoming. Critics have persuasively invoked Poundian binaries of “hard” and “soft” to argue that Margolin’s “sculptural” poems established her as a high-modernist.89 I would expand those aesthetic readings to include the dynamic of gender in the dialogue of power. Margolin’s lines invoke charged acts of articulation—songs, poems, lullabies, dreams—that oppose the stuttering, uncertainty, and muteness of a woman disempowered and a poet struggling to find her voice. From such interaction comes a poem such as “Es redn haynt ale shtume zakhn” (Today, All Mute Things Speak): Today all mute things speak. The blue whisper of slender clouds Runs like dew. High clever words rush in the crowns of the trees From the old, mighty dreamers, And fall in my heart with every leaf and every star. And can you hear, How the sand trembles Under the solitary, slow steps of the night? And a wide song Of the gray stone, ringed-around by shadows, Seriously and huge Circles around. And you, my lover, my lover, You are silent.90 (1–15)

The speaker creates the poem from the paradoxes of inanimate clouds whispering and of trees speaking. The voices of these mute things “fall in my heart.” With her gift of hearing such voices, the speaker asks her lover if he can “hear / How the sand trembles / Under the solitary, slow steps of the night.” While she perceives the ominous coming of

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darkness and death, and even the “wide song” of the “gray stone,” the listener, “you, my lover, my lover,” remains silent. Margolin requires the hard and the soft, the male and the female to write poetry. The remainder of section 2 deals with the tumultuous ups and downs of the love affair. The speaker resists nostalgia: “Happiness grew . . .  / I don’t remember it.”91 Exposing the hypocrisy of a married lover who “kissed my hand and looked about / To make sure no one saw,” she says, “I’d much prefer that you’d get drunk / And sleep with prostitutes.”92And she prays to “Ancient murderess night, black mother,” for his death.93 After the affair has ended, the speaker connects the experience to her ability to imagine and write it into her poems, in “Ikh hob nit ­gevust, mayn liber” (I Did Not Know, My Lover): I did not know, my lover, That with slow, longing fingers I etch you into my poems. Now they have the heavy gleam Of your eyes, the sharp line Of your mouth, of your Stubborn hand. The wonder, When my own word Touches me with your hand. When near, oh near you evolve From a severe, bright chord. The wonder.94 (1–13)

At the opening, the poem seems to be a love poem, addressed in the first line to “my lover,” and in the second, evoking a sexual encounter with “slow, longing fingers.” But from the third line on, the poem turns to the subject of writing poems, as these fingers “etch you into my poems.” In the second stanza, these poems take on the features of the lover, while in the third stanza, the poems have displaced the l­over’s physical presence: “The wonder, / When my own word / Touches me with your hand.” The lover no longer exists; he

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

has been replaced by the poem the speaker has written, and his sexual gesture is now enacted by her word. The speaker marvels at her own power: he comes to her not of his own volition, but “evolve[s]” from the strict yet luminous music of her poem.95 The final poem of section 2,“Iz di goldene pave gefloygn, gefloygn” (When the Golden Peacock Flew, Flew), is, like a poem earlier in this section, “Driml ayn, gelibter, driml” (Doze off, beloved, doze), a lullaby addressed to the lover:96 When the golden peacock flew, flew, And the night opened its golden eyes. My bright one, fall asleep. The night has opened its golden eyes, So I became a fiddle and you the bow. My restless one, fall asleep. When I became a fiddle and you the bow, And happiness bowed over us in love. My tender one, fall asleep. And happiness bowed over us in love, Left us alone and flew away, flew away. My sorrowful one, fall asleep.97 (1–12)

In this lullaby, Margolin disrupts convention by recasting the maternal voice in an erotic role that addresses a lover, rather than a child. At the same time, she invokes the traditional Yiddish folk tropes of lullabies—the golden peacock (a Jewish version of the mythical phoenix, that eternally regenerating bird) and the fiddler with his bow (an emblem of Jewish creativity)—to convey the transience of sexual love. The poem urges the listener to fall asleep as a story unfolds, telling how the golden peacock, the golden eyes of the night, and the fiddler with his bow come, one by one, to the lovers, bringing a happiness that, in the end, departs. The refrain of the poem in lines 3, 6, 9, and 12 traces the decline. The listener, at first, “My bright one,” becomes “My restless one,” “My tender one,” and, finally, “My sorrowful one.” He remains wakeful, despite the lullaby. In the end, the woman continues singing, her work never done.

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Section 3, titled “Farshlosene lipn” (Locked-up Lips), deals with the aftermath of the affair. The speaker is alone. Her solitude brings on rage, madness, and eventually, a rebirth of the self through the language of poetry. The madness begins in “Sheydim hobn umetik gefayft” (Demons Whistled Sadly), when the speaker’s muteness gives way to an assault of demons’ disembodied mouths. These demons, however, do not completely silence the speaker. She struggles to find her “stammering voice” and “the word” that will express her “happy . . . world-embracing hate” (“Fun mayn finsternish” [From My Darkness]).98 Then she confronts her mortality in “Dos iz di nakht” (This Is the Night): This is the night, the grief, the not-becoming, The treacherous light of dreams. ... Be quiet, be quiet, And with the whole of your freezing blood, you will hear, How the earth opens up And how the worm calls.99 (1–2; 6–9)

With the admonishment, Zay shtil, zay shtil (Be Quiet, Be Quiet), Margolin’s speaker echoes the famous Yunge poem by Mani Leyb, “Shtiler, shtiler” (Quieter, Quieter), a call for Yiddish poets to quell their political noise and make way for a new cultural salvation in the aesthetic lyric poem of the Yunge.100 Margolin’s call for silence enables this particular woman to hear the voiceless worm of death and, in “Shlanke shifn” (Slender Ships), to perceive the approaching storm: “Pale and peaceful, the earth waits for thunder and lightning. / I will be quiet” (ikh vel zayn shtil ).101 In “Shtiler” (Quieter),102 the speaker commands “proud woman’[s]” “hard, masterful voice” to quiet down, and her “sharp and thirsty eyes” to “retreat beneath / The dusky lashes.” This woman must “Braid together in [her] lap” her “white, desiring hands,” and “wait” while time passes and she ages in solitude. Again invoking Mani Leyb’s poem, the speaker admonishers the woman to “Be quieter and quieter,” not because she anticipates the salvation in Mani Leyb’s poem but because “Nothing happened. Everything is finished.” In another poem, this silenced woman goes “as if behind a veil” among “invisible

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

walkers,” whose “voices, grimaces, and smiles” she hears “As a song is born on the lips.”103 A woman confronts fiends of madness that “roll past / In the green beam of the hysterical moon,” in “Tayvolim” (Devils).104 These terrifying specters, with “Their thin legs” and “long, black, snaky, twisted fingers,” point at and gravitate toward the tormented, disembodied self. In “Nakht” (Night), the speaker fights “enemies in the darkness, / Not seeing a single face.”105 Battling unseen enemies in the darkness, tormented by mysterious noises and, later, “the wide, streaming silence, / As from many organ pipes, and undulating light,” the speaker is comforted by a smiling “giant, shadowy face.” Exhausted by this continual struggle, the speaker, in “Mid” (Tired), contemplates suicide: Today I am tired. Wounded by the sharp voices, By everyone’s benevolent gaze. ... I have thought long today About death. ... In water, they say, death is extremely easy. So tired.106 (1–3; 10–11; 16–17)

Instead of suicide, the speaker succumbs to the poem’s refrain, “So tired,” which gives form to the “word, / That glows in me and glows.” Metaphor interrupts the allure of suicide. There is no need to kill yourself if you can write a poem. Language keeps the speaker from dying in “Libe monstern” (Kind Monsters). In daylight, the speaker holds her monsters at bay, but they remain at a distance, like armies heard from within a house. The monsters return when night arrives and she is overcome by her “old guilt.” As the room dissolves, the speaker begins to drown among the monsters, to be trampled by them, and to howl with them “the story of an old, old guilt.” Yet, she does not succumb. As the monsters force her to tell the story of her guilt, the language keeps the speaker from dying.107In “Di nakht iz arayn in mayn hoyz” (Night Has Entered My

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House),108 nature intrudes into the speaker’s domestic space and creates a turbulence, out of which comes an affirmation of her existence. Nature takes over the human space, as trees “Thrust themselves in gigantically with roots and trunks / And ancient-deep gazes of leaves,” and huge storm clouds fill the house. The pagan aspects of the gigantic trees with “ancient-deep gazes” and the clouds “Like dark heads of the gods” create a chaotic turbulence that affirms her existence: “You are, you are, you are.” Such survival requires the speaker, in “Hart harts” (Hard Heart), to open her heart to the “bright surge / Of whores, mothers and children, / Beggars, cripples and dancers,” and to flee from God to these needy people. 109 Her isolation, expressed in “Mid,” gives way to a series of invasions—by the monsters of madness, by the forces of nature, and now by hordes of needy people. Confirming her own, flawed humanity, the speaker confronts her mortality. In “Epitaf” (Epitaph), Margolin manipulates the reader to intervene with a former lover, in order to make him understand what killed her: Tell it to him: She could not Forgive her sorrowful mood, So she went through life With apologetic steps. Tell that she devotedly guarded With bare hands until death The fire that was entrusted to her And in her own fire burned. And how in hours of hubris She struggled mightily with God, How deeply her blood sang, How dwarves destroyed her.110 (1–12)

This poem and a variant epitaph, published in 1932 and later engraved on the poet’s actual tombstone, have been discussed in the context of the biography and of Margolin’s modernism.111 However, in the context of Margolin’s book, “Epitaf ” functions as a dramatic monologue with a particular purpose for the narrative. Placing “Epitaf ” in the

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middle of the book, the poem marks the turning point in the structure of the underlying narrative. With “Epitaf,” the speaker, who, after the failed love of section 2, had almost succumbed to her demons earlier in section 3, begins an attempt to return from madness to creativity. In this context, “Epitaf ” functions as the woman’s imagined posthumous voice, commanding that the listener recriminate her lover with her apparently failed return to poetry. “Epitaf ” instructs the listener, Dertseyl es im (Tell it to him), relating in three stanzas the trifold biography of this woman. In the first stanza, the listener is ordered to “tell” the lover that the dead woman, who spent her whole life apologizing to others, died unable to forgive herself. The second stanza instructs the listener to reveal how the woman, although ill-equipped, guarded the fire bestowed upon her by others until it consumed her. The third stanza charges the listener to tell how the woman’s extraordinary ambitions and efforts were stymied by tsvergn (dwarves): Although she ascended to grapple with the Divinity in shoen fun ibermut (in hours of hubris or high spirits),112 and reached inward to the very blood in her veins to write poetry, she was vanquished not by her ambitions, but by the smallness of men. The characterization of the speaker in stanza 1 and the explanation of her death in stanza 2 allow for two contradictory interpretations, one grounded in gender and the other in art. The importance of gender is apparent from the poem’s grammar: While the speaker’s identity is not stated in an explicit first-person voice, and the listener is invoked only in the familiar imperative form of the verb dertseyl (tell), the dead woman is referred to as zi (she) and ir (her), while her lover is designated once explicitly by the dative form of the masculine pronoun, im (him). By denoting the woman and the man in the third person, in contrast to the many first-person monologues in the previous poems, Margolin objectifies the relationship between them, and distances it from the reader. The woman’s submissive, apologetic comport implies her conventional femininity. Excessively attending to the needs of others, she neglected herself. In the second stanza, however, that characterization shifts from apology to the ferocious devotion required to make art. Entrusted with a “fire” that she “devotedly guarded / With bare hands until death,” this woman transformed a treacherous, burdensome gift

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into “her own fire,” an uncontrolled conflagration that immolated her. While the first stanza presents the woman among people, the second stanza reveals the suprahuman demands of her art. Significantly, the masculine pronoun, with the male character, submerges in the second stanza, as the woman’s devotion and heroism rise. The poem concludes with the third stanza’s claim that the woman’s existence among people left her struggles in art unknown and unknowable to “him,” her lover. In several ways, this poem contradicts the conventional epitaph that would remind a passer-by of the particular person buried in a grave. Unlike an epitaph on a tombstone, Margolin withholds the dead woman’s name. Such anonymity assumes an intimacy that requires no statement of a proper name. Or, contrarily, and against the traditional purpose of an epitaph, it ensures that the dead’s identity will remain unknown. Although conventionally the words of an epitaph are carved into a stone, to be read silently, Margolin’s poem commands that words be uttered: The repeated imperative, “Tell,” posits a listener, rather than a reader. The words from the grave command a dialogue among the living. The reader informs the absent lover how the dead woman lived and died, and what she accomplished, as if to persuade him to visit her grave or to read the poems from her blood. Against the expectations for an epitaph that sums up and concludes a life, Margolin’s poem serves as a message mediated by the reader from a dead woman to her absent lover. Rather than closure, finality, or thwarted sexual love, this message conveys the death and rebirth of the narrator through poetry. Margolin presents an ars poetica of renouncement in “Sheyne verter fun marmor un gold” (Beautiful Words of Marble and Gold).113 The speaker announces the vision of a poetry that will incorporate her female body into her poetic endeavor: Beautiful words of marble and gold, Not you, not you did I want. In truth, I did not want these poems. But others—like fire and like the joyous storm, Which tear impetuously through the transparent form. Too late.

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

And I would want to be other to people. But even now I am not ready To love kith and kin. But if I were able to forgive My afflicted life And to approach this one and that, The bad, the beautiful, those dream-driven, World-losers, world-vagabonds, And say, I want to give myself to you. I want to squander myself, Like holy ones and legends. May my goodness ascend above you Shining and rich . . . Too late. I often hear weird steps. I often think about the last “exit” And I swear By Else Lasker-Schüler, Rilke and Baudelaire, That I will be mute, not lament. I will bear the last insult of flesh with dignity. In those hours, perhaps dreaming, perhaps growing, I will See worlds spin around their axes And my home in morning-red, and fields in dozing, And how in a city that rejoices and blooms, My sad child kneels. I will shrug with my still-beautiful shoulders, Will still force my trembling lips perhaps To smile, and I will succeed. And smiling, and breathless Against the tremendous iron mask of heaven Exhale the weak smoke of my last cigarette.114 (1–38)

Addressing her own poetry, the speaker states her regret for those “Beautiful words of marble and gold”: “In truth, I did not want these poems.” Instead of words made of stone and metal, the speaker declares that she had wanted “others—like fire and like the joyous storm / That

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tear impetuously through the transparent form.” Claiming dissatisfaction with words crafted from solid stone and metal, the speaker would prefer to write poems made of ever-changing elements—fire, air, and water. No matter what she regrets or desires, it is “Too late.” It is also “Too late” for the speaker to change the way she has behaved among people. Even though she “would want to be other to people,” she is “not ready / To love kith and kin.” If she “were able to forgive / My afflicted life,” she would speak to other people on the margins of society—”The bad, the beautiful, those dream-driven, / Worldlosers, world-vagabonds.” Devoting herself to these outcasts, the speaker wants to be a paragon of their particular types of virtues, “Like holy ones and legends.” She extends the comparison of this perverse devotion with the syntax of a blessing—Zol mayn gutskayt oyfgeyn iber aykh / shaynendik un raykh . . . (May my goodness ascend above you / Shining and rich . . . ), replacing the liturgical invocation of God’s goodness and mercy with the speaker’s own qualities. But it is “Too late” for such redemption. Instead, the speaker confesses her hallucinations and suicidal thoughts: “I often hear weird steps. / I often think about the last “exit,” lightening the tone with a bilingual rhyme of the Yiddish trit (steps) with the English word “exit.” The dark wit inherent in this rhyme continues with the oath she swears, neither to God, nor even to pagan deities, but to the three giants of German and French modern poetry, “Else Lasker-Schüler, Rilke and Baudelaire,” that she “will be mute, not lament.” The formal discipline and poetic economy of their poems inspires the speaker to “bear the last insult of flesh with dignity.”115 The example of such poetry, which measures voice and silence along with meter and rhyme, will allow the speaker to accept her mortality. Restraining her lament as she approaches death, the speaker will receive the gift of vision, “perhaps dreaming, perhaps growing,” and she speculates that her visions will include images both of the astronomical universe (“worlds spin around their axes”) and of her past life (“my home in morning-red, and fields in dozing”). Her visions will also bring forth an image of an aspect of her life that she has renounced: “And how in a city that rejoices and blooms, / My sad child kneels.” This image of a child, which recurs, although very infrequently, in Margolin’s poems, may be read as an autobiographi-

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

cal allusion to the son that Margolin left in Tel Aviv with his father in 1914. Despite the regretful tone of these lines, which seem to disobey the earlier injunction not to lament, however, the allusion to “my sad child” summons the particularly female nature of the speaker. She envisions herself as if observed by another person, noting her own sexual beauty: “I will shrug with my still beautiful shoulders, / Will still force my trembling lips perhaps / To smile, and I will succeed.” Juxtaposing her “still beautiful shoulders” with “my sad child,” the speaker calls up two contradictory aspects of a woman’s sexuality—motherhood and beauty. Motherhood is remote from this speaker, who holds on to the image of herself as sexually attractive, even in the moments before she dies. The poem concludes with an equally tentative gesture: “smiling and breathless / Against the tremendous iron mask of heaven,” the speaker will “Exhale the weak smoke of [her] last cigarette.” Cigarette smoke, ephemeral and defiant, makes human breath visible and asserts that the transient, vulnerable state of life persists. In contrast, the “mask of heaven” is “iron,” and the poems the speaker has written and now rejects are “marble and gold.” Such permanence presents a negative force in this poem. What this speaker values are the fluid, the imperfect, and the ephemeral—feeling, forgiving, dreaming, smiling, and smoking. At the end, the speaker figures herself not as one of the immortal poets, but as a living woman. Aware of her still-beautiful shoulders and her trembling lips forced into a smile, she calls forth her human qualities to defy the mortality imposed upon her by the rigid inscrutability of heaven. In the course of the poem, the speaker has asserted that she seeks neither static, eternal immortality in words of marble and gold nor sainthood. Rather, she presents the mutability and imperfection of her life as a woman in words that include the aesthetically forbidden lamenting, for which there is no place in the immortal words of marble and gold. The ideal art she sought to make in the past, in Rilke-like words of fire and storm through transparent form, is replaced by the most transitory and formless sign of a woman’s life—her exhaled breath. By privileging fluidity and ephemerality, the mutable, mortal female dominates the marble immortality of words. In the fourth section of the book, “Sun, Asphalt, Roads,” Margolin continues to weigh the value of being mortal, hence transient, against

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the attempt to write immortal poems. The poems in the first half of section 4 take nature as their subject, and those in the second half describe urban places. In the nature poems, the speaker defines and justifies her poetry, which announces mutability and mortality, even as it tries to create something immutable and immortal. At the same time, metaphor, the language of poetry, breaks down distinctions between nature and artifice. By the end of section 4, the speaker argues that it is better to be human than to create immortal poems. She defines that humanness in terms of gender, saying, that all poems originate in grief, “from the lips of a tired woman.”116 In the first half of section 4, each of the three poems called “Harbst” (Autumn) examines an aspect of writing poetry in a changeable world. The first “Harbst” poem describes how nature creates poetry, without the intervention of a human hand: “A crude, hasty poem ascends from young grasses / And hammers in the blossoming treetops.”117 The second poem titled “Harbst” develops this paradox by addressing the predicament of the lovers whose time has passed: I think, That the earth In her desire for passing Turned us to stone. Two large, dark statues Wander slowly with stony steps Over dead avenues.118 (12–18)

They have been turned to stone statues by the earth and become works of art made by nature, rather than fashioned by a human hand. As such, they are unnatural and, therefore, dead. The speaker in the third poem called “Harbst” in her own “Dark heart” observes the autumnal phenomenon of a single branch and leaf growing from the asphalt. This sapling insists on life’s regeneration, despite its stone environment and the season of dying. With irony, Margolin insists that such an unseasonable blossoming serve as a metaphor for the speaker’s despair and hope. In the second part of section 4, Margolin grouped ten poems that evoke the cities in which she lived: “her hometown Brest-Litovsk; the

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

city of romance, Odessa; and various aspects of her American home, New York Each of these places locates an aspect of the speaker’s struggle to write poetry. These poems are among the most splendid in the book, and I will analyze a poem about her city of origin, Brest-Litovsk, and then a poem about New York City to exemplify Margolin’s strategies throughout the entire section. “Brisk” (Brest-Litovsk) exemplifies the necessity to move beyond memory: 1 The old city, a city both small and big, Is now as dead as Athens and as Troy. But lovingly, tenderly, with soft breath Sometimes I conjure up from myself her shadow: The streets in languorous going without will, The terrifying and always sudden Aprils, The rains full of sun, the fortress menacingly mute, The tired wings of two old mills. The oaks wander out of the Emperor-Orchard, The oar twitches over the river, the oar whispers, “A shame, a shame.” And the empty boulevards yawn, The tea streams mightily from glistening samovars, Over Sabbath candles, tkhines, grandchildren— The ribbons of the grandmothers in an orgy, And thin lips whisper always the names of the Forefathers. At the tables, fingers in the beards and turning Talmud pages And the nigun intertwines with a student’s bass. And garden plots—sunflowers, reseda, poppies, Blond braids, cockades, Pushkin and Nadson. And in red twilight, with talk nevertheless misty, quiet, As if following an invisible violin-player, Couples gravitate to the field. And over everything so much springtime sadness, glimmer, The scent of lilacs. 2 Young women at night in the doorways Speak, engrossed and stately About their husbands in Germany, About evil spirits, About Gypsies.

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For a long time, children stand in the shadows, Fluttering, hoping That soon a Gypsy will grab them. Mere small Cleopatras, Fifteen-year-old misses, With gloves and parasols Float elegantly through the alleys, Raising and lowering their veils, Hearing harsh words that kiss, And “Carry my soul away into the bright distance . . . ”119 Burning daytimes. All the shops doze. All the walkers doze. Once, like a storm, A saint drifts in With chastising brows. The streets bow. The young men Hold their breaths. In the background, soldiers, officers Despoil The Jewish landscape. On the hunchbacked highway Like a subway thunders A solitary coachman. Oh, soft sands of my city. Oaks and tea-roses. Like the scent of fresh bread Is your “Good morning!” In all the streets And houses Every morning.120

(1–61)

This magnificent poem opens with a comparison of Margolin’s birthplace, “The old city,” with the ancient cities of Greek legend, Athens and Troy. With this comparison, the narrator places personal history into the context of classical literature, an analogy that suggests irony as

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

Margolin compares the memories of a late-nineteenth-century Jewish girl with the heroic epic poems of Homer. In lines 3–4, the speaker brings the “shadow” of this dead city back to life and, in lines 5–10, she lists what she remembers in images that are oxymoronic: streets meander; the spring month of April is unexpected and thus terrifying; rains are full of sunlight; a fortress is silent; the mills of industry are tired; oak trees wander away from the royal orchard; and the oars of a boatman on the river whisper a reprimand (a shod, a shame) that happens to rhyme with the word “orchard” (sod). From the “empty boulevards” of the city enervated by the April heat, the speaker moves inside the houses of Brest-Litovsk’s Jews on a Sabbath eve. These lines, echoing the list of family members in “Mayn shtam redt” (My Tribe Speaks), portray traditional and modern Jews, old and younger generations, indirectly, through actions and possessions, as if these were artifacts of memory: The tea streams from samovars; the grandmothers sway “in an orgy” of prayers, whispering the names of the Patriarchs over the Sabbath candles and grandchildren. The religious men are seen through their synechdochal fingers that stroke beards or turn pages in the sacred tomes they study. Chanting the texts, their melody braids together, like the Sabbath loaf, with the deep voice of a “student,” a young man who is studying, not in a ­yeshiva, but in a Russian gymnazye (high school). The mixing of old and new continues in the list of fragmented images that conjure up scene and mood. In contrast to the culture indoors, the outdoors blooms with sexual energy. The gardens are full of flowers, and the young people—the girls with blond braids and the boys with cockades of student or military uniforms—are full of secular and/or gentile culture, quoting two nineteenth-century Russian poets, the great Pushkin and the obscure, half-Jewish Semen Iakovlevich ­Nadson.121 In the twilight, red from the sunset and also, perhaps, from the symbolism of revolutionary politics, couples wander into the fields, as if drawn by imaginary music and as if intoxicated by the smell of lilacs. The scene develops in the second half of the poem, which describes a street scene of women and children as the night progresses. The young women—religious, superstitious, fearful, and xenophobic—stand in the doorways at night to talk about their husbands, who are in Germany on business, or about evil spirits and Gypsies. In contrast to the women

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who are afraid of Gypsies, the children long for adventure at the hands of that wandering people. The lines describing “small Cleopatras” evoke young prostitutes, or perhaps just daring girls, not quite respectable, who dress up and walk the streets “elegantly,” hearing “harsh words that kiss” and the lyrics to a well-known Russian poem by Sh. Frug, who also wrote in Yiddish. The languorous tone of the poem does not explain whether the “harsh words” are sexual propositions or political dicta that seduce the girls away from the propriety of their parents. The poem then switches from night to midday, from the varied nightlife to the somnolence of noontimes, behind which stands the threat of social and political change. In these lines, both the political prophet, “A saint . . .  / With chastising brows,” and the “soldiers, officers” of gentile armies, disrupt the city as it sleeps in the summer heat. This somnolence—recalled by the poet in New York—will be destroyed as the “solitary coachman” brings bad news. The simile comparing the thundering noise of the coach on the “hunchbacked highway” to the “subway,” brings the poem back to New York, where the poet writes the poem. Margolin concludes with an uncharacteristically nostalgic stanza that evokes the “soft sands,” “Oaks and tea roses,” and “fresh bread” of memory in order to hammer home the fact that the city’s daily “Good morning” exists only in the poem. In “Brisk,” Margolin demonstrates that modern Yiddish poetry can recreate a place within a personal history that is as monumental as A ­ thens and Troy in classical Greek poetry. Like the earlier poem, “Mayn shtam redt,” “Brisk” evokes home and origins. However, in the earlier poem, the poet acted as a ventriloquist for her ancestors and, lacking her own voice, could speak only through the voices of others. In contrast, the poet’s clear voice in “Brisk” evokes the vanished place, rather than its inhabitants. References to Athens and Troy link “Brisk” to “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling,” where the poet took the stance of autobiographical speaker in order to give voice to poetry, but filled that autobio­graphy with details foreign to the woman poet writing in Yiddish. In “Mayn shtam redt,” ancestral autobiography silenced Margolin’s speaker. In “Brisk,” the speaker returns to her ancestral setting and replaces the daunting characters of family with generalized, social types. This displacement allows the city itself a voice that speaks through the poet.

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

If “Brisk” shows that modern Yiddish poetry can create a place within a personal history that is as monumental as Athens and Troy, then in the seven poems about New York, Margolin presents a woman’s difficulties writing poetry in the American urban setting. “Nit tsufridn” (Not Satisfied) characterizes the poet’s entrapment by the external world: I am not satisfied with my “furnished room,” I am not satisfied with anything.122 (3–4)

Riding the “El today,” the speaker “swayed on the strap / To the cadence of miserable Jews.” “[N]ot satisfied with the nights,” which are “black, like the mood of a slave,” she finds And the days are holy and yellow, Like verses in the old prayer book. Perhaps it would not be so horrible for me, If I did not dream any poems.123 (9–12)

The speaker only “dreams” rather than writes her poems, which embody a liberation that further oppresses her. Like the other Jews trapped on the El, in the city, she is enslaved to both labor and prayer. The final rhyme of sider (prayerbook) with lider (poems) seals the impossibility of her escape from culture and language. The second New York poem, “In kafe” (In the Café), deepens the speaker’s entrapment by distorting language and speech. Part 1 of this long poem depicts the speaker’s increasing solitude as she sits in a café, where words replace both her outer reality and her inner self, despite her attempt to address her lover. In part 2, the speaker’s emotional solitude increases until, in part 3, language becomes the subject of the poem, beyond which the speaker cannot exist.124 In “Meydlekh in krotona park” (Girls in Crotona Park), Margolin transforms a Bronx public garden into a thesis linking perception, memory, nature, and art: In autumn evenings Girls took shape As in a faded picture. Their eyes are cool, their smile wild and thin.

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Their dresses are lavender, old-rose, and apple-green. In their veins flows dew. They have bright and empty words. In a dream Botticelli loved them.125 (1–8)

In the poet’s eye, the girls materialize in the park as the season turns to autumn and the time of day to evening—but such a natural process occurs only in the simile of the manmade image of the faded picture. The girls in the park embody both nature and artifice at the same time: their dresses (made by man) become metaphorically flowers and fruits through their colors (lavender, old rose, apple green). Dew, rather than blood, flows in their veins. As their smiles are “wild and thin,” so their words are “bright and empty.” The last line—zey hot in troym gelibt Botitsheli (In dreams Botticelli loved them)—may compare with irony the girls’ beauty with a painting by Botticelli. However, a different meaning emerges when we consider the odd emphasis of the syntax, which places the object of the verb (zey) before the predicate (hot gelibt) and subject (Botitsheli) of the sentence, and the predicate’s declarative rather than conditional mood. It is as if the speaker who observes the scene in the northern reaches of New York City has a direct line to the thoughts and feelings of the long-dead Renaissance painter. In this line, the speaker and the Italian artist coexist: The Yiddish poet knows an ideal beauty that surpasses the most exquisite beauty of Botticelli’s classical painting. The subsequent New York poems evoke the rush and elegance of a city caught in the gaze of disaster, where poetry can transcend rented rooms, the El, the café, and the public park to connect the poet to the highest art. In “Dos shtoltse lid,” (The Proud Poem), she defines the woman poet’s work as that of a divine creator in a world ruled by “the queens of life” who sit “On golden chairs / In high palaces,” with eyes like “hard diamonds” and lips like “refined pomegranates,” determining the fate of men with “Goblets of poison and goblets of luck.” In contrast, the speaker, “the queen of words,” sits “On the fifth floor / In a broken chair,” creating “a race of men, / Of women and invented children,” to whom she grants “Goblets of poison and goblets of luck.”126 Her words, a more potent medium than even life, endow the poet with the creative powers of a deity.

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

The theme of the poet’s dilemma—to write poetry that is both eternal and mortal—comes to a head in the last poem in part 4, “Mir veln boyen a vant,” (We Will Build a Wall). The collective first person, the mir (we) denotes the poem’s coauthors, Margolin and her husband, Reuven Iceland, who, according to Novershtern, composed the poem together:127 We will build a wall, So the trumpeting About the new times, So the clamor About the wild metropolis, And the shouting About messianic throes On the birthing stool of lost worlds And the like Shall not reach us here. Smilingly build a wall. For us, the silence will remain—the heart of the storm, A world that is simple and exalted and poor. The glance, and the gesture, and whisper of beloved and dying things, The concealed melodic theme of the manifold rhythm of life. And perhaps, after years of effort, we will Engrave in the moonlight of transparent verses The lightest bend of a branch, Small birds in flight Like black, dancing stars, The voice of grief deeply resounding and gray, The pale, noble lips of a tired woman.128 (1–22)

The first stanza, identified by Novershtern as Iceland’s, asserts, “We will build a wall to keep out the world,” that is, the trumpeting of current political movements, the noise of the city, and messianic ideologies that interfere with poetry and art. While the poet “smilingly” builds this wall against disorder, the first stanza, through its extended metaphor of childbirth, suggests that this wall will also exclude the processes of life. Despite the metaphor of the “throes” of a woman giving birth and the

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“lost worlds” in the metaphor of “the birthing stool,” within which he couches the ideas of political and social messianism, Iceland excludes an actual woman giving birth from his poem. His dead metaphor appropriates the female creative act and erases the woman. In contrast, Margolin’s stanza includes an element of the transient in her depiction of an actual woman. Margolin’s lines announce that “the silence will remain.” She defines that silence as part of “A world that is simple and exalted and poor.” Such a world includes the small and transient gestures of life: “The glance, and the gesture, and whisper of beloved and dying things, / The concealed melodic theme of the manifold rhythm of life.” These phrases repeat the images in “­Toyt-mid fun der last fun a kholem” (Dead Tired from the Burden of a Dream): “A gleam seen by no one, / A word heard by no one.” Creating poems from transient flecks of life takes “years of effort,” and those poems are not rigid stone or hard bronze. Rather, they are themselves ephemeral, “transparent verses” that the poets “engrave in the moonlight.” The image of engraving in light, rather than in stone or metal, embodies the paradox of Margolin’s poetry, the tension between hard and soft, permanence and transience, male and female. While Iceland’s stanza uses figurative imagery of the female act of childbirth to negate what he will allow into poetry, Margolin’s lines use the literal imagery of a woman’s mouth to tell what must enter poetry. The ephemeral contents of poetry—”The lightest bend of a branch, / Small birds in flight / Like black, dancing stars”—accompany “The voice of grief deeply resounding and gray, / The pale, noble lips of a tired woman.” The image of a woman’s lips presents a gendered sense of what writing poetry means to this poet, who is, in the end, a tired woman. Margolin anchors the writing of poetry in the body of the woman who writes it. The fifth section of Margolin’s book reconfigures this “tired woman” as the character Mary, a displaced and dramatized alter-ego for the poet, whose name is also the title of this section.129 This sequence resembles to a degree poems by Margolin’s male contemporary, MoysheLeyb Halpern, whose “Ladushka”(the name of a Polish woman) and “Pan Jablonski” (Lord Jablonski) created studies of gentile figures—a prostitute and a Polish nobleman—in a narrative context in his 1919 collection In nyu york, a book that Margolin and Iceland discussed at length in their letters of the early 1920s.130 In the seven poems in this

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

section, Mary appears as a modern, alienated version of the ancient biblical character, the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. The overall argument of this section is that if a woman, like the New Testament’s Mary, encounters God and is impregnated by Him with divinity, she will be sacrificed to men’s ideals. She will bear a child whom she cannot mother, and she will be isolated among people. The only way Margolin’s Mary can find herself is to escape from the house, where she is obligated to play the roles of hostess, lover, and wife, and to relinquish her name. On the street, as a beggar woman, in a truer solitude, Mary finds company among the wounded and marginal people who follow after Death, personified as the legendary Pied Piper. The sequence of “Mari” (Mary) poems thus portrays the life of a woman figured as a Madonna and a whore, a hostess and a shattered goblet of sacrificial wine. In Margolin’s telling, society and religion offer a woman touched by divinity with no place to go but to death. “Mari” can be profitably compared to Molodowsky’s “Froyen-lider,” which was published two years earlier. Both sequences are built out of distinct but linked lyric poems, which were originally written as individual works, not as parts of a continuum. (For example, Molodowsky retained the dates for the individual poems in “Froyen-lider” and arranged the poems in an asynchronic order; similarly, the concluding poem in Margolin’s “Mari,” “Mari vil zayn a betlerin” (Mary Wants to Be a Beggar Woman), was one of Margolin’s first published poems, printed in variant form with a first-person narrator rather than a thirdperson narrator, in 1921.131) In the poem with which Molodowsky concluded “Froyen-lider,” the speaker, “now . . . a woman” and unable to sleep, remembers her mother’s bitter tears as she used to recite the searing words of the prayer for falling asleep. Although unwilling to say this traditional Hebrew prayer, the modern woman in her décolleté brown silk recites “a quiet, simple / Plea to God,” and, like her mother, weeps tears that “come drop by drop like a stingy drizzle.”132 In contrast, Margolin’s Mary removes herself completely from identification with Jewish society and traditional gender roles. Although both personae are modern women seeking an identity, Molodowsky’s speaker finds herself in the words she recites, but Margolin’s Mary slips wordlessly into oblivion. Like Molodowsky’s persona in “Froyen-lider,” Margolin’s protagonist defines herself as a poet speaking out against

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the roles decreed for a woman by her society, culture, and religion. For Molodowsky’s speaker, traditional Judaism defines these roles, and the rebellion in her poems remains Jewish. In contrast, Margolin’s allusions to Christianity and paganism in the “Mari” poems appear to universalize the speaker’s struggle in an attempt to transcend the Jewish cultural parameters of the Yiddish language.133 Within Lider, which is otherwise a collection of discrete poems, Margolin marked the seven poems of “Mari” as a sequence. Each of Margolin’s “Mari” poems bears the name of its protagonist in its title, with an insistent repetition, which drums up an irony that draws attention to what it may be shielding: “Vos vilstu, mari?” (What Do You Want, Mary?), “Maris tfile” (Mary’s Prayer), “Mari un der prister” (Mary and the Priest), “Eynzame Mari” (Lonely Mary), “Mari un di gest” (Mary and the Guests), “Mari vil zayn a betlerin” (Mary Wants to Be a Beggar Woman), and “Mari un der toyt” (Mary and Death). As Avrom Novershtern has suggested, Margolin’s Mari persona may have “served the same purpose . . . as Moyshe Leyb Halpern’s ‘Moyshe Leyb.’”134 While Halpern’s ironically eponymous poet-character reflects the author and his world in a fun-house mirror, Margolin’s Mari persona deflects the image of the poet out of the poem. That the name “Mari” or “Mary” at least partly represents the Virgin Mary in at least two of the poems (“Mary’s Prayer” and “Mary and the Priest”) only emphasizes Margolin’s dodging of explicit self-representation.135 Yet the issue at stake in these poems is that of a woman’s identity in the world. At the outset, the poet asks repeatedly, “What do you want, Mary?” In the first stanza, Mary answers that she longs for “a child” to “doze brightly in my womb,” while she loves a man “who loves me not,” and wanders and waits, quietly and despairing, alone. When asked a second time what she wants, Mary speaks in the conditional mood, saying that she “would have wanted” (ikh volt gevolt) to “stand alone in the midst of a bright, dewy field,” her “feet rooted in the earth,” as the sun “goes through me.” When the sun penetrates her body, it brings out “The ripening and the fragrance of the drowsy field.” The implicit sexual metaphor becomes explicit: And suddenly, a broad, wild rain overtakes me And beats and kisses me noisily and hard,

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

A storm comes flying like an eagle, Sinks into me, screeching, and bends me back and forth.136 (12–15)

The contrast between the two layers of desire—the immediate longing for pregnancy and marriage, an unsatisfying domesticity, and the more remote longing to be immersed in and ravaged by nature—lead Mary to question her own humanity: Am I a person, a lightning bolt, the restlessness of the roads, Or the black, groaning earth? (16–17)

Returning to the theme initiated in “Muter erd,” Margolin depicts Mary’s dilemma of identity by setting the gender roles that society imposes on a woman against a sensual sexuality identified with the metaphorical powers of nature. Mary’s humanity comes under scrutiny when, in the second poem, “Mari’s tfile” (Mary’s Prayer), she is taken by God spiritually and sexually, in a line that repeats the phrase that described the penetrating sun in “Vos vilstu, Mari,” du geyst durkh mir (you pass through me): God, humble and mute are these ways. Through the fire of sin and of tears All ways lead to you. I have built you a nest out of love And out of silence, a temple. I am your protector, servant, and beloved, And I have never seen your face. And I lie on the rim of the world, And you pass through me, dark as the hour of death, Pass like a broad, flashing sword.137 (1–10)

While the repeated phrase connects the first two poems, the title of the second, “Mari’s tfile,” extends the answer to the question of what Mary wants from the Romantic escape from society into nature to the realm of prayer. Expectedly, then, the poem begins by addressing God. Unexpected, though, are the imagery, the rhetorical stance, and

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the tone of the woman praying. The poem—its ten lines organized into four unrhymed and metrically irregular stanzas—opens and closes with tercets, between which lie two couplets. In the first tercet, after addressing God by name, the speaker describes di vegn, “the roads, paths, or ways,” as hakhnoedik un shtum, “servile, humble, meek, or abject” and “mute or dumb.”138 She then asserts that these roadways or paths all lead to God, “Through the fire of sin and of tears.” ­Although these opening lines serve as a kind of invocation, affirming the dominion of God, they are not followed by supplication, entreaty, or confession, as one might expect in a prayer, particularly in a tkhine. Instead, in the two couplets at the poem’s center, the speaker narrates her history with God. In the first couplet, she tells God that she has built Him a nest out of love and a temple out of silence. In the second couplet, she states that she is His hiterin, dinst, un gelibte, God’s guardian, maid-servant, and beloved. After thus characterizing herself in relation to God, the speaker announces that she has never seen His face. We might hear this last statement as a complaint. If we understand it to be a complaint, then the concluding tercet of the poem resonates in a peculiar way. Here, the speaker describes both her present position, lying afn rand fun der velt, “on the edge” of the world, and God’s problematic action. Margolin’s poem presents a woman’s prayer in which the conventional elements of praise, supplication, entreaty, or complaint are presented through the rhetoric of narration. This subsuming of a prayer’s direct address to the indirection of narration is a feature of modern Yiddish prayer poems, as we have already seen.139 This poem’s figurative language, however, is distinctively not Jewish. The rather direct metaphors in the first half of the poem convey the speaker’s attitude toward God by connoting fire, tears, a nest, and a temple. The complex, extended metaphors in the poem’s second half connote relationships rather than things and call forth the experiences of servitude, the sexual act, and violence. The last stanza of “Mari’s tfile” describes the moment of the Divine Conception—a moment thoroughly foreign to a Jewish sensibility, yet presented in these Yiddish lines in the most intimate of terms. In these lines, Margolin answers a blasphemous question, which perhaps only a skeptical, modern Jew could ask of a sacred Christian belief, as she

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tries to imagine the unimaginable—sex with God. Margolin offers answers that are both conventional and radical: Mary falls off the rim of the world; God enters her body like the hour of death; a sword passes through her.140 The succeeding poems in the sequence explore the sexualized conceit of Mary as God’s beloved in the form of a literal vessel, “a goblet of sacrificial wine;” her alienated place in human society. In “Mari un di gest” (Mary and the Guests), a poem with autobiographical resonances for Margolin, explores Mary’s relationship with her past ­lovers and with her son.141 Key lines refer to what Iceland describes as Margolin’s lifelong anguish over having left her young son in Palestine with her first husband, Moshe Stavski, to whom she was married from 1910 to 1911:142 And the child is here, It came to its mother’s door from very far. It shoved itself into a corner, small and full of sorrow.143 (24–26)

Letters from both Stavski and their son Na’aman to Margolin reveal a vexed relationship that, corroborated with Iceland’s account of it, may elucidate Mary’s memory in the poem of a child who arrives at his mother’s door from a great distance and dejectedly sits in a corner.144 In the last line, Mary expresses a simultaneous denial of guilt and an unwillingness to deny it: “Eyes, do not accuse me, eyes, do not turn away.”145 In the sixth poem of the sequence, “Mari vil zayn a betlerin,” Mary renounces her house, her husband, and her life to become a beggar woman: To be a beggar woman. As if from a sinking ship, To throw all treasures to the wind: The burden of your love and the burden of joys, And—when I no longer know who I am— Also my good or my bad name.146 (1–6)

Discarding love and joy, the trappings of human relationship, the speaker would rid herself of her reputation and her identity—her

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“good or bad name.” Only through this imagined shedding of social attributes and the identity that she wears in society can the speaker imagine her desired freedom. As a beggar on the streets, Mary would find pleasure in poverty. With the pennies tossed at her, she would buy opium. Falling asleep on the street in the middle of the day, she would be like a stalk of grass in the field and like a “ragged flower,” “[f ]aded, foul, / And yet divine,” with “a pair of beautiful, silken petals.” Mary makes explicit the genital image of the flower’s petals, as she imagines how she, “illuminated by the sick light of a lantern,” would “unfold oneself from the mute gray night,” and with a biblical cadence, “Like a mist from mist, like a night from the night. / . . . become a prayer and . . . become a flame. / . . . give oneself away tenderly, burning and ruthless.” Such an encounter, with sexual overtones, would lead Mary to the kind of loneliness experienced by “kings and beggars”—at the peak and the nadir of the social order. This extreme solitude would open Mary to perceive anew her place in the world, so that she would walk “with astonished eyes” through the “secretive days and nights” “To the high court, / To the aching light, / To the self.” Discarding the name, “Mary,” by which society knows her and which connotes her value within that society, the speaker would be alone in the city. Only without a name could she move toward learning who she actually is. This act of becoming nameless—even in a poem where the author’s actual name is hidden by a pseudonym, and that pseudonym is masked by a persona—proves how far the modern woman writer stood from the sixteenth-century Royzl Fishls and seventeenth-century Toybe Pan, who inscribed themselves into their poems as a sign of their place in the community of Jews. Margolin so deliberately excluded her name from her poems that no name appears even in the two bitter, brilliant versions of her epitaph.147 In the final poem in the “Mari” sequence, “Mari un der toyt” (Mary and Death), Margolin’s speaker realizes her desire. Taking “leave of the house filled with light,” the woman wends her way “into the night, like a walk in the forest” filled with both frightening forms and “God’s breath.” She finds comfort, as “Softly, the night laid itself on her pain, / Laid there like nestling, black snow.” Leading a parade of “beggars, drunks, vagabonds,” “cripples,” and “people with eczema,”

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Mary follows “The stripling Death with his dark flute.”148 In “Mari vil zayn a betlerin,” Margolin depicts the protagonist’s destitution as the only way she can find her identity. In the sequence’s concluding poem, that identity leads Mary to an alluring and inescapable death. The sixth and final section of Margolin’s Lider, “Geshtaltn” (Forms, or “Figures”), presents a series of character studies of men and women in dramatic monologues, dialogues, and songs. The initial three of the fourteen poems in this section can be read as portraits of the artist—as an inept philosopher, a hallucinating madwoman, and a murderous gangster.149 “A mentsh” (A Person) records with irony a man’s interior monologue as he smokes an American cigarette. Questioning his purpose in life, this man regards himself as one freak among the “millions of other half-giants and half-gnomes”: . . . an unfinished experiment In great sufferings, truth, pose, A half-baked metamorphosis Of high incandescent thought In poor flesh and blood.150 (2–6)

Blaming “the Almighty” for a weak command of “his trade” in having created him this way, this diminutive man, “tired and too clever,” who strokes “his bald pate, smoking his Pall-Mall,” nonetheless contemplates his place in the universe with an inkling of its glory, “the steps of jade, amethyst,” above which “Slowly the days circle around.” The man admits what he cannot deny in the repeated expletive phrase, “As I am a Jew” (vi ikh bin a yid). Deprecating his life as “not the smallest among heroisms,” he accepts the minor role he plays in the universe, “in an instant / That hangs uncertainly between eternities,” and he forgives God by toasting Him with a cup of coffee. In contrast to the laconic irony of “A mentsh,” “Di meshugene” (The Madwoman) evokes the inner and outer life of a deranged woman. Trailing her skirts through the rain-drenched city streets, laughing and talking to herself, she endures the mockery of a gang of children: Stone lay like grass and like dew Beneath the ragged train of the woman,

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Who walked laughing in the rain And was loudly sincere. Children came running unexpectedly, Strode around her whistling and crowing, And she thought That their shouts Were crazy. And like choruses of birds They dissolved and lost themselves In dreamed up, dozing music. (1–12)

While the man in “A mentsh” utters his despair in solitude, the protagonist of “A meshugene,” wearing a dress with a ragged train (­tsefliktn shlep) like a deposed queen, expresses herself publicly, “laughing in the rain / And was loudly sincere.” Although her behavior looks crazy to the children who harass her, the woman conversely interprets their mockery as a madness that compares to “choruses of birds.” Unlike the man who cynically forgives God for creating him imperfectly, this madwoman reviews her own painful life in order to grant forgiveness: And everything that had been came back, Came with goodness. Begged forgiveness For the anger, that it once gave. After a while her face darkened And, as before, writhed in shame, And she wavered a while And soon with a broad sweep of her hand Forgave everything, everything. (13–21)

Such grace and acceptance seem to be a state of madness as elements of the woman’s life fly past, blurring the distinction between her mind’s activity and her physical environment: Then singing voices flew past, A familiar house half-bowed And loyally courted her with its wooden threshold That she used to, sometimes, as if by command, Set foot on with sinking feet.

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

And she marveled at how near this was, Oh, happiness, how nearby clattered the dear steps; And someone’s eyes suddenly blossomed forth, Dazzling her and bewildering her And touched that body of hers. (22–31)

The woman’s memories are so vivid that they cause her to break into a dance with her past: And calling all the more, the music rushed more widely In the air And like a storm twitched through her shoulders and hips. And tucking up her dress into her hands, Her head turned back, Under the clamor of children And lamenting rain She slowly, solemnly danced opposite to Her dead life.151 (32–40)

The poem concludes with the woman’s experience of madness, seen from without and experienced from within. The children still “clamor” after this strange, waltzing woman. At the same time, though, the reader experiences the “storm” of memory that “[twitches] through her shoulders and hips” and compels her to dance in the rain. Unlike the mentsh, who regrets his inability to live a life as full as his visions of grandeur, the meshugene celebrates the fullness of a life that she no longer has. In “Der gangster” (The Gangster), a third character study, Margolin portrays an underworld figure as a metaphor for the artist.152 At first, she shows the gangster from the outside, describing his “stony face” and “eyes of metal, / Round and luminous, without remembrance,” as if he were not human. This machine-like man, whose head’s “holy glow” is like a saint in a Byzantine icon, devours the image of people and cars in the street “In hungry emptiness.” Made of sculptural stone and metal, the gangster is an alternative to the forgiving philosophical mentsh and the madwoman lost in her memories, the thinker and the dancer. In the final lines, the poem shifts to the inside

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of his pocket, where the gangster fingers a stiletto knife that he is eager to “play” “like a golden harp” as he enters the crowded street. This trio of poems depicts people who make flawed attempts at art: the mentsh is powerless to enact his visions of the ideal; the madwoman can dance only with her vanished past; and the gangster suppresses his humanity in order to “play” the city street like a musical instrument with his weapon. The next poems are self-portraits spoken in the voices of personae called “the girl” and “a woman,” which, like Dropkin’s sexual poems, invoke a woman’s struggle with a man for sexual power while depicting her subjugation through elaborate metaphors. In “Dos meydl zogt” (The Girl Says), the speaker attempts to escape the abuses of sexual love through her imagination. In the first part, a girl portrays herself as a queen and the intimate listener (du) as her subservient page; yet, in the second part, the boy’s words “stone and whip” the girl. Injured, she bleeds, until she can escape in her imagination to a place where, “pure, joyous, / Joyous and bloodied,” she is worshipped and comforted. In the final part, the girl complains that in her dress of “cheap wool,” she can make herself beautiful for her lover in nothing but “the black velvet of sorrow.” In “Dos lid fun a meydl” (The Song of a Girl), Margolin presents a girl’s ominous love song. And in the third dramatic monologue, “A froy zogt” (A Woman Says), Margolin contrasts the girl’s destructive passion with a woman’s perspective on love. In contrast to the extremes of the girl’s power-riven depiction of her lover, the woman describes her man as huge and savage and says he sometimes tramples her like “the sorrowful earth,” leaving tracks that are “sharp” and cause “wounds.” At other times, though, the man is “frightened” and needs the woman’s protection from the storm. Then, she is “the tall tower from children’s stories.” Figured in opposing images of the “black and tired” earth, on which the man walks, and a legendary tower from fairytales, the woman speaker grows larger than human as she embodies both nature and artifice, female and phallic, the earth and the tower. The dissociation of sexual passion, the animation of objects to represent emotions, and the violent reversals of power that characterize the monologues of the girl and the woman continue in “Entre’Acte,”

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

a poem in which Margolin makes metaphors of nature overpower the “refined web of clever conversation”: The refined web of clever conversation, Like spider webs shaken by a gust of wind, Suddenly tore. Marveling, smiling sedately Through the heavily rushing silence She sensed him, As sometimes in sleep one senses a wolf: With golden, bloodshot eyes, Indented ribs, Paws bent stiffly, Turning dizzyingly in circles Ever tighter around her. Marveling, sedately smiling, With disgust and with a sweet shudder She sensed the taste of wolfish blood Between her teeth. And slowly she crouched, Showing him the hot, fainting Whites of her eyes, Thus she crouched slowly And collected The finely carved words of the cool conversation.153 (1–22)

As words fail and the woman senses her lover circling her like a wolf, she transforms herself into a creature that “sens[es] the taste of wolfish blood / Between her teeth.” Pretending to submit to him, “Slowly she crouched, / Showing him the hot, fainting / Whites of her eyes,” as she prepares her counterattack with “the finely carved words of the cool conversation.” While at the beginning of the poem, Margolin depicts the “fine conversation” of the woman and man through a metaphor of nature—a spider web so fragile that a gust of wind can tear it—at the end of the poem, the words of that conversation are figured as “finely carved” fragments of a shattered sculpture. This shift of the metaphor from the spider’s weaving to a person’s carving, from nature to art, is mediated by the transformation of the speaker

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from somnambulism into an animal plotting to retaliate. The poem has been interpreted as an example of civility veiling a woman’s “innermost store of emotions,” and her revenge as “nothing more than the woman’s fantasy.”154 Yet if one regards the metaphors for the conversation, a fragile spider web that becomes a broken carving, the fragmentary words are in the end sharp weapons with which the woman will defend herself.155 “Af a balkon” (On a Balcony) and “Mayn Venus trogt zaydene ­shikhlekh” (My Venus Wears Silk Slippers) portray a male figure as useless, in light of the sexual power of lesbian attraction.156 The speaker in “Af a balkon” recalls a memory of “a distant summer,” in which she saw two small, dainty women leafing through a picture book, as “their hands meet in longing. / Their soft shoulders seek each other out and twitch.” When their “bright bodies arch perplexingly” above a “thirsty red-orange landscape,” a large man “towers . . . / with heavy grace, / Like a superb and superfluous decoration.”157 No man is necessary in “Mayn Venus trogt zaydene shikhlekh,” which describes a woman’s sensual appeal: My Venus wears silk slippers On her brilliant, naked feet. Her lap is a purple iris. Her hips, wide and precise. From bronze hair In murmuring chorus Pearls slink and tremble And kiss the oblong breasts. In the pale, lyrical lips Are melancholy and glowing fire. And lightning in the eyes, Mist, smoke, Softly shadowed By the great, black, plumed hat.158 (1–14)

Evoking the sexuality of this “Venus” through metaphors, the poem compares the female body with things—her lap with an iris, her hair with bronze, her lips with fire, and her eyes with lightning, mist, and smoke—or animating the inanimate, such as when pearls murmur,

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

slink, tremble, and kiss. These metaphors detach the parts from the body and appropriate what seems to be the male gaze to transform the woman into an object of desire. However, the title marks this Venus with the possessive adjective mayn (my), a claim that reorients the appreciative gaze from male to female. A woman describing another woman evokes the sexuality and attraction of both. Framed by silk slippers and a “great, black, plumed hat,” this Venus, a Roman sculpture in modern dress, embodies a woman’s power as object and viewer. In this chapter, I have argued that Margolin develops a woman’s voice for Yiddish poetry outside of Jewish tradition. Yet “Fargesene geter” (Forgotten Gods), which tells of Greek deities who must create their own worshippers, articulates a crisis of identity and power that is deeply Jewish: When Zeus, and Pheobus, and Pan, And Kyprid, silver-footed mistress, World-intoxicatress, world-protectress, Were veiled in silence Down from Olympus, They, in their long and lucid going Through flaming and slow self-extinguishing generations, Ignited torches and built temples In the hearts of the solitary, Who still bring sacrifices and smoking incense. The world is deep and bright, The old winds rustle eternally through the young leaves. With fear I hear in my soul The heavy treading of forgotten gods.159 (1–14)

Deposed from Mount Olympus, the gods Zeus, Phoebus, and Pan, and the goddess Kyprid (another name for the Greek Aphrodite or Roman Venus), light torches and build temples to ensure that they will have the worshippers they need for their continued existence. Banned from the holy mountain, they locate these new temples in the “hearts of the solitary ones / Who still bring sacrifices and smoking incense.” Margolin creates a pagan version of the Exile of the Jews from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount with familiar tropes—the descent from a holy mountain (Olympus or Zion), the secretive, persistent faith, the

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wandering exiles—and displaces the Jews’ traditional longing for their return to Zion onto the pagan gods’ nostalgia for a return to Olympus.160 The last two lines of the poem reveal that the speaker is one of the solitary people in whom the gods have lit a torch. Although she fears the obligation that being thus chosen forces upon her, she cannot deny it. The final three poems in Lider portray the bankrupt relationships between women and men. In “Ir shmeykhl” (Her Smile) a woman,161 bound by husband and child, dreams at night of orgies and wild dancing, which lead to a forbidden lesbian encounter. While the act of sexually touching “her friend’s small pointed breasts” is “the devotion of hot fingers,” this act transforms the dreamer into both “a god turned to stone” and the “womb from which all stories emerge.” When her husband kisses her, he brings the woman back to the world in which she is a wife. Margolin leaves ambiguous whether or not the woman’s dream will make her life better, and whether the husband’s kiss saves her from her chaotic imagination or crushes it. “Tsvishn khinezishe lampterns” (Among Chinese Lanterns)”162 depicts a middle-aged couple in a Chinese restaurant on New York’s East Side. She angrily confronts her lost beauty. He is bored, guilty, and afraid of her. They recall that once they had passion and love, even though each feels that the other has destroyed it. As the poem seems about to move these distasteful characters toward some kind of reconciliation, the waiter “mercifully” interrupts them with a banal question that makes redemption impossible, “Does the lady want coffee or tea?” Lider concludes with “Er brengt troyer” (He Brings Sorrow),163 a 68-line dialogue between a man and a woman. He brings her a message from her distant lover, who claims to have “a sick desire” and to be “mortally tired.” “Half faun / Half Pierrot,” the lover is both a sensualist and a pathetic, mute clown, who declares that the woman is too beautiful, rich, and royal for him. He will reject her for the naïve girls he prefers. The messenger fawns pretentiously: Pretty lady, do you comprehend the grief? You keep silent. Oh, you are proud. You are a dark statue of ebony. No, of bronze.

Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin

Like a hideous nightmare passing through sleep, So soon I will pass you by. I carry away with me a secret of wondrous silence, A secret read aloud From a dark profile, refined and petrified. But, my God! What? You’re crying? Who shall believe That a bronze statue can cry.164 (58–69)

To the messenger, the rejected woman appears as a sculpture. He marvels at her silence, admiring her profile, eydl un farshteynt (refined and petrified), and remains oblivious to her rage, hurt, and sorrow. When she weeps, he is amazed but yet misinterprets her humanity. This final image of a woman objectified as a sculpture serves to counterbalance the book’s opening poem, “Ikh bin geven a mol a y­ ingling” (I Was Once a Boy), where, through a male persona, a woman poet affirmed that she could make art. In “Er brengt troyer,” a woman mistaken for a work of art, rather than an artist, is silenced by the verbiage of a man. Having drawn the reader into the book through the voice of a Greek boy and a Roman man, Margolin now ushers the reader out with the messenger’s false interpretation of the woman as an object of art to be admired. With the image of this wordless woman, Margolin perhaps voices a fear that her work will be misread.

Conclusion The woman weeping in Margolin’s Lider’s concluding poem contrasts with the “red flower” that springs up from the refuse of life in the poem that ends Dropkin’s In heysn vint. Margolin closes her book with despair, as the woman is “petrified” into art in the eyes of a man. Dropkin ends her book with hope, as the red flower of poetry blooms again from an accidental sowing. Both Margolin and Dropkin attempted to redefine Yiddish poetry by resisting the literary models of Jewish tradition and Yiddish prayer that had circumscribed women’s literature. Both Margolin and Dropkin found the subject and figuration of sexuality as the way to rebel against those models.

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Dropkin created a new form of women’s art that, through sexual tropes, overturned the traditional requirements, roles, and powerlessness of women. While Margolin, too, created art out of sex, hers was constrained by the ideas of art in male-defined western culture, ideas that silenced a woman poet’s voice. Both Margolin and Dropkin are exceptional poets in this book, because they seem not to refer to Jewish tradition in their poems. As such, they stand outside the general argument that I’ve adopted to analyze the other poets. On the other hand, it is unmistakable that they wrote about the experience of being women poets in Yiddish. I have argued that the works of both Dropkin and Margolin foregrounded the lives and experiences of women in the context of a New York Yiddish modernist scene dominated by men. But the question remains: Were they writing as Jews? I would say yes: Dropkin’s explicit eroticism flouted the Jewish customs of modesty, or tsnies, and the laws shaping the reproductive role women play in traditional society. Margolin’s repeated setting of sexual themes within the cultural referents of paganism and Christianity distinguished her poems from contemporary expectations of what Yiddish poetry by women should be. In these insurrections against Judaism, both Dropkin and Margolin indirectly invoked the culture they defied, and as a result, reinterpreted sacred parody. Rejecting the cultural tenets of Judaism, their Yiddish poems reaffirmed a literary connection to Jewishness.

S i x   Prayer-Poems against History Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

The two poets who are the subjects of this final chapter—Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman—differ from most of the other poets discussed in this book. Unlike the others, each developed her poetic work over decades; and each published multiple books, rather than a single, signature volume. The lives of Molodowsky (1894–1975) and Tussman (1893–1987) spanned most of the twentieth century. They were born within a year of one another in Eastern Europe—Molodowsky in the Belarus shtetl of Bereze-Kartuska and Tussman in the farm village of Khaytshe (Bolshaya Chaitcha), in the Ukrainian province of Volhynia. Each immigrated to the United States, but under very different circumstances: Molodowsky left Warsaw at age 41, in 1935, to escape political danger; Tussman departed Volhynia for Chicago as a teenager in 1912 to join her older siblings who had emigrated earlier. Molodowsky came of age as a writer in Poland; she published her first three books of poetry in Warsaw during the years 1927–1935. Tussman, in contrast, living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, debuted as a Yiddish writer with two New York newspapers—a short story in Der fraynd (The Friend) in 1918 and a poem, in Fraye arbeter-shtime (Free Workers’ Voice), in 1919. Her first book appeared only in 1949, in Los Angeles, where she then resided. Each poet found her fullest voice during and after the Holocaust. They also shared an approach to writing secular poetry that engaged prayer and devotion, although each cultivated these religious tropes and themes in her distinctive way. Both poets taught and wrote poetry for children during their careers. And both were recognized in old age for their literary achievements with awards of the prestigious Manger Prize in Israel: Molodowsky in 1965, Tussman in 1981.

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The second distinction between Molodowsky and Tussman and the other poets discussed in this book is that each wrote a prolific poetry of response to the destruction of European Jewry during World War II.1 Yet, while Molodowsky and Tussman share much in the trajectories of their literary careers, their work differs significantly. Molodowsky’s early writings were shaped by the Yiddish literary and political ferment of Kiev and especially of Warsaw, the center of Polish Jewish life, while Tussman’s responded to New York’s Yiddish modernism, which reached her in the outlying but vibrant Jewish communities of the American Midwest and West. When Molodowsky began to publish her revolutionary poems in Ukraine,2 Tussman, in Chicago and Milwaukee, wrote poems predicated on the aesthetic theories of Introspectivism and Expressionism, tempered by an association with the Anarchist movement. In this chapter, I will trace the careers of both poets, concentrating on their work published during and after the Holocaust. Molodowsky’s earlier work has already been discussed in chapter 3.

Kadya Molodowsky In the fall of 1944, in New York City, Kadya Molodowsky, upon learning the extent of the destruction in Europe, wrote a poem entitled, “Eyl khanun” (Merciful God), which has justifiably become her most famous poem.3 This poem is an extraordinarily powerful response to the horrors of the Holocaust, and perhaps only the full knowledge of those horrors, which became possible in the last six months of the war, allowed the poet to take her place so authoritatively in the Jewish tradition of response to catastrophe, and to speak in the communal voice: Merciful God, Choose another people, Elect another. We are tired of death and dying, We have no more prayers. Choose another people, Elect another. We have no more blood

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

To be a sacrifice. Our house has become a desert. The earth is insufficient for our graves, No more laments for us, No more dirges In the old, holy books. Merciful God, Sanctify another country, Another mountain. We have strewn all the fields and every stone With ash, with holy ash. With the aged, With the youthful, And with babies we have paid For every letter of your Ten Commandments.4 (1–23)

Molodowsky repeats the opening lines, which ask God to “choose” and “elect” “another people,” as a refrain throughout the poem. The refrain emphasizes the poet’s sense of communal responsibility as she speaks for the people whom God has chosen and then betrayed. In a litany of denial, the speaker negates all the traditional Jewish responses to catastrophe found in “the old holy books,” in the written texts of prayers, laments, and dirges through which the Jewish people have responded to catastrophe for millennia.5 As she negates the traditional texts of mourning, Molodowsky evokes the imagery of written Scripture. Such imagery enters even the way in which the poet addresses God. The Hebrew epithet Eyl khanun (Merciful God) comes from the penitential prayer “Shlosh-esre middot” (The Thirteen Attributes of Mercy), recited on several occasions in the liturgical calendar—including during the selihot (penitential) prayers recited during the High Holiday season and on Yom Kippur. Some rites also prescribe that it be recited every Monday and Thursday as part of the morning service. This prayer is based on two biblical verses, Exodus 34:6–7, which describe how God Himself passes before Moses and recites His attributes to him. As these verses appear in the prayer, God proclaims that He is merciful and will cleanse all sinners.6 Repeated in every stanza in Molodowsky’s poem, the phrase Eyl khanun reverses the

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prayer’s acclamation and demands that the Merciful God repent His sins and “cleanse” the Jews of their commitment to Him. According to Molodowsky, this undoing of the Covenant would be the most compassionate act possible for such a Merciful God. Because God showed so little mercy to the Jews during the khurbm (Destruction), the Yiddish poet refuses to forgive Him. With deliberate blasphemy, Molodowsky blames God for choosing the Jewish people: their chosenness has led to their destruction. At the end of the second stanza, the poem climaxes in an image of fractured script. The poet refers to the covenantal Decalogue not as laws or statements or even words, but as disconnected letters. The murders of the old, young, and newborn break apart the coherent meanings of the Commandments into the elemental symbols in which they are written. Thus fragmented in this khurbm-lid (poem of destruction), these letters, the building blocks of the Covenant written down by God, cease to signify anything but their price in human death. Paradoxically, however, these letters reconstitute another meaning in the alphabet that the poet uses to write her Yiddish poem. As the divine laws of the Ten Commandments shatter into letters in Molodowsky’s poem, so does the “folk” disintegrate into the ashes strewn across the land and into the list of victims—the old, the young, the little children. Yet the poem provides an answer to the undoing of  the Covenant and of the sacred text on which this Covenant is based; that answer is a revision of the idea of the Jewish people. The third stanza commands: Merciful God Raise your fiery brow, And see the peoples of the world— Give them the prophecies and the Days of Awe. Your word is babbled in every language— Teach them the deeds, The ways of temptation. (24–30)

Having allowed the destruction of the Jewish people, God must, the speaker demands, bestow upon all the other peoples of the world the sacred privileges and obligations that He had once given the Jews. This

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

act would reverse the curse of chosenness of the Jewish nation, and instead it would place the curse on all the other nations of the world. The Jewish people themselves will become common, no longer chosen: Merciful God, Give us simple garments Of shepherds with their sheep, Blacksmiths at their hammers, Laundry-washers, skin-flayers, And even the more base. And do us one more favor: Merciful God, Deprive us of the Divine Presence of genius. (31–39)

Although she speaks in the collective voice in this bitter prayer, Molodowsky’s persona undoes the idea of that collectivity—the Jewish nation—and strips the survivors of everything that identifies them as the Jewish people. The enigmatic final line demands the ultimate deprivation, in the phrase, “Nem tsu fun undz di shekhine fun g­ aones ” (Deprive us of the Divine Presence of genius). By characterizing the Shekhinah, the emanation of God that follows the Jews in Exile, as being the spirit of genius, Molodowsky demands that God show his “mercy” by taking away the Jews’ uniqueness. The word gaones, which I have translated as “genius,” evokes a host of connotations in the tradition. In one sense “genius” refers to possessing a unique, special quality of exceptionality; but the term also invokes its usage as a title held by the heads of the great Babylonian yeshivot in Late Antiquity and, by extension, a title for extraordinary rabbis, like Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna (1720–1797), who exemplified the hyper-learnedness of Talmudic scholarship and spiritual leadership. By asking that God take away this gaones, Molodowsky declares that none of its virtues—erudition, scholarship, genious—helped the Jews during the Holocaust. Molodowsky’s depiction of the survivors as simple artisans and laborers, shepherds and blacksmiths, suggests a very different kind of nation—unsanctified, but alive. The speaker in Molodowsky’s poem challenges God in a voice resounding with tones of anger and sarcasm

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that cannot be attributed to either a male or a female voice. Rather, the poet’s voice echoes the biblical prophets, who excoriated the errant Jewish people; the medieval Ashkenazic Hebrew poets, who complained of God’s silence during national crisis; and even Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934), who appropriated the prophetic voice in his great Hebrew poem on the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, “Al hashkhita” (On the Slaughter). The outraged, collective voice that Molodowsky adopts in this poem seems to transcend gender, yet by claiming a place in the mainstream Hebraic textual tradition it assumes qualities of a male voice. The implicit maleness of this voice points directly to the poem’s genre—what David Roskies calls “sacred parody,” namely, a poem that appropriates a traditional liturgical or literary form in order to demand the very opposite of what is asked by the traditional form. In “Eyl khanun,” Molodowsky parodies the traditional prayer proclaiming God’s compassion for the people of Israel to ask that He, in his mercy, remove their chosen status, which has become a curse to their existence.7 Throughout the poems in her 1946 book Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn (Only King David Remained), Molodowsky invoked this model of the sacred parody, calling forth the tradition that her poems seem to reject in grief and rage, whether or not these poems explicitly address the topic of the Destruction.8 In this book, as well as in many of her post-Holocaust poems, Molodowsky subsumes a female voice in order to speak for the entire Jewish people and to address the generalized problems of Jewish cultural and national survival after the Holocaust.9 However, the assumption that a strong, collective voice speaking from the mainstream of Judaism is by definition “male” rings false. In fact, what Molodowsky achieved in “Merciful God” was to reconfigure in Yiddish the traditional voice of Judaism’s Hebraic tradition, speaking as a woman poet whose voice takes possession of a genre and tradition thought of as male. This choice brings out the authority of Molodowsky’s subsequent poems, where she invokes what might be thought of as a more conventional female voice. An example is the tender 1941 poem “Tsu a kinds portret” (To a Child’s Portrait), which depicts a toddler, perhaps drawn from a photograph of her brother’s daughter, in the Warsaw Ghetto. The speaker expresses fear at the vulnerability of this child and

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

her mother—and by extension, of the Jews. If the poet doesn’t explicitly identify herself as female, this poem is very much about the experiences of girls and women: The little ruffle around your dress Is girlish, mild, and sweet. The little socks on your small feet, The soles of your little shoes exposed To our large, foolish, and wild world. I’m frightened by the large ball near your hands, It reminds me of a globe— A world that mourns, a world that burns, I’m frightened by the fire that is so close To your small hands. I’m frightened by the city where you live, The yellow patch on your mother’s dress, The gray dish of groats To which your little hands reach out. Your mother writes that you already walk and laugh— And I believe again that wonders never end, And maybe with your little steps, you will Bring us to a laughing world again.10 (1–18)

The opening description of a child in a photograph emphasizes her femininity (the “girlish” ruffle on her dress) and her vulnerability (the soles of her shoes “exposed / To our large, foolish, and wild world”). The poet’s gaze moves outward from the child to the toy ball near her hands, and the “gray dish of groats / To which your little hands reach out”. Likening it to “a globe”, the speaker projects onto “the large ball” her dreaded knowledge of current events in the world surrounding the child and her mother: the concentration of Polish Jews into the Nazi ghetto in “the city where you live”; the fighting and “the fire that is so close / To your small hands”; the marking of Jews with “the yellow patch on your mother’s dress”; and the systematic starvation of the Jewish population, as the girl reaches for the bowl of cereal. Contrasting the mother’s description of the daughter’s development with her own trepidation, the speaker concludes the poem

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with weak optimism calling for a miracle—that the toddler will “Bring us to a laughing world again” through the unlikelihood of her normal development. As Passover approached in 1942, Molodowsky wrote “A briv tsu ­Eliyohu ha novi” (A Letter to the Prophet Elijah), in which she fleetingly evoked the image of a little girl again; here, it is her childhood self. Alluding to the Passover seder, Molodowsky’s poem begins with a plea: Old message-bearer, Elijah, I have lost all the addresses, So now I write a letter to you. Surely you have not forgotten an old friendship, When, as a child, I would open the door for you. More than once, trembling and praying, I led you To the holiday table, to the cup of wine. It can’t be that now you will not hear out My long, bitter letter, This bitter megile of mine.11 (1–10)

In despair, the speaker addresses the Prophet Elijah, because she has “lost all the addresses” and can no longer communicate, presumably, with her family in Poland. She reminds Elijah that, as a girl, she followed the custom during the seder of opening the front door while her family recited from the Haggadah the curse of the Jews’ enemies, “Shfokh khamotkho eyl hagoyim” (Pour out Your wrath upon the nations).12 She recalls that they then chanted the prayer summoning ­Elijah, “the prophet of mercy and vengeance” (25) to visit “the holiday table” and drink from the special cup of wine set out for him, as a harbinger of messianic salvation. Although she communed with the prophet in childhood, the speaker writes, she later rejected traditional Judaism. Now, though, she returns to that tradition in the hopes that, through stories of salvation and redemption associated with Elijah, she will be able to find redemption and reach her family: Reckless, I tore up all traces of you And also the reach of my sky, And also the warmth of belief.

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

Now my poems stand naked, like whores, But your stories cover them like doves.13 (11–15)

Although she has long since renounced her childhood devotion, the poet sees her own works at this desperate moment as standing “naked, like whores.” Writing to Elijah, the speaker turns back to the tradition she had abandoned. This return summons the prophet’s legends to protect and redeem the speaker’s poetry. Further in the poem, she asks Elijah if he has seen, behind the ghetto walls, that same young girl she depicted in her earlier poem “Tsu a kinds portret” (To a Child’s Portrait): Have you been there? There . . . there . . . behind the evil wall? In the land of pain, in the home of ruin? Is the patch on their holiday despair Larger than in the middle of the week? Did you hear a child laughing there? A child with shorn, blond hair? Did you take a sip from their cups? Did it scald your lips?14 (41–49)

Shifting from the memory of her own childhood faith to the image of the small girl trapped behind the ghetto wall, the speaker asks how she can continue to believe in Jewish tradition, and how even ­Elijah himself can continue this belief, because “in the home of ruin,” such a “patch” of despair must be even greater during the holiday, and the  Passover wine in “their cups” must necessarily “scald” the lips of the legendary prophet. With this question, the speaker seems to contradict her own reassertion of belief and her desperate need for the tradition to return to clothe her poems and to comfort her. In the end, she fears the news that the prophet might bring: So many names stick in my throat . . . I’m afraid to ask you, and don’t tell me If something has happened . . . Bestir your compassionate brow, Put out my lamp,

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And if you have received no news, Put out my lamp And close my eyes. 15 (50–57)

Returning to her sense of tradition, the speaker has summoned the Prophet Elijah to act as a messenger between her and the Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied Poland at a moment when she perceives her own poems to be vulgar and vain as “whores.” As she develops the imagined reconnection with tradition, though, the speaker becomes afraid of both news and a lack of news. The poem peters out when the poet longs only for oblivion through either sleep or her own death. The wartime poem that addresses the loss most explicitly through a gendered voice is Molodowsky’s “Mayne kinder” (My Children). Here the poet confronts another kind of loss, where her own unborn offspring, aborted, miscarried, or imagined, speak to her about their lost future: Today, through a haze of falling snow, I saw My children—two by two. They ringed around me, children dear, Tugging at my skirt with complaints to air: “Come play with us. We’ll dance in a circle And you’ll stand in the middle And tell us why you kept the living world from us.”16 (1–7)

The would-be mother gives her four unborn children “cookies” and watches them play, as she explains her neglect with the lame excuse “that I’d forgotten their address” (8– 9). Although “The youngest girl, a tiny tot” (10) with “ringlets” and “a Purim hat” (11) rejoices, “Suddenly, [the speaker’s] eldest son / Began to talk up a storm” (14–15), rebuking his mother ferociously: “I’m nothing now. I never was, will never be. I don’t know the taste of pleasure or of pain. Sometimes I descend to foreign worlds, I hear their noise and sometimes hear The echo of your voice. Why did you not deliver to me My portion, the one reserved, the one decreed

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

In your world of music and tears? Sometimes I see how my vision that was never born Flutters before me, It quivers among all the heavens. What do your songs matter, their melodies and choruses While, behind them, our souls, all wilted, swarm? You are not the final cause, You’re not the beginning and you’re not the last intent, Why should I be condemned to unrealized worlds? Unlit fires glow in me, Sorrows cry in me without a prayer, The thresholds of unfulfilled journeys call me. Why did you sentence me to limbo here?”17 (16–35)

Questioning why she had never allowed him to be born, this son complains that his mother has deprived him of his “portion, the one reserved, the one decreed / In your world of music and tears.” Her decision not to bring him into the world of the living has left this boy with his own “vision that was never born,” one that tantalizes him with its unrealized expression. He demands, “What do your songs matter, their melodies and choruses / While, behind them, our souls, all wilted, swarm?” Questioning why she chose poetry over children, the son excoriates the mother, “You’re not the beginning and you’re not the last intent, / Why should I be condemned to unrealized worlds? . . . Why did you sentence me to limbo here?” When the mother’s “eyes [fill] with tears” (37), her “youngest daughter took pity on me / And rested her forehead on my knee” (38–39). The girl offers a sweet but despairing comfort: “It doesn’t bother me,” she said, And I recognized my smile on her face. I don’t long for this world, And you may keep all that happiness! I, too, would probably have been a wretch like you, Quarrelling with everyone and holding grudges for years. And what’s so delightful about constantly creaking with that pen? It doesn’t bother me that I was never born.”18 (40–47)

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Recognizing herself in her unborn daughter’s smile and ironic resignation, the woman accepts the small girl’s assessment of a literary career, filled with rivalry, grudges, and the laborious application of pen to paper. At this key moment, the poem takes over the story, as the poet’s “dream” (13) of her unborn children fades, and the words on the page assert themselves: I wanted to give her a kiss, but in my hands I held only cold snow that melted away. I wanted to hug her at my knees, But I could not find her little head.19 (48–51)

Unable to see her children through “the haze of falling snow” (1, 52) from which they had materialized at the beginning of the poem, the speaker must accept that they cannot exist in her world: The haze of falling snow grew thicker. My children vanished in the gray haze. All I could hear were their faint footsteps, Like small bells in a windy whirl, And I hear them now at night, in silent hours.20 (52–56)

Placed into the 1946 collection of khurbm-lider (poems of destruction), “Mayne kinder” assumes a poignancy even more profound than the deeply felt regret of a woman who apparently chose a writer’s career over motherhood. The woman’s choice not to bear children resonates with the historical moment at which the Yiddish poet demands that God “Choose another people,” because the “holy ash” of murdered children have “paid / For every letter of your Ten Commandments.”21 As well as a woman’s lament for her unborn, “Mayne kinder” becomes in this context an elegy for the future of Yiddish, one figured here as shaped in the most essential way by the gender of the Yiddish poet. If in Molodowsky’s poems, Jewish children represent the generational continuation of Yiddish beyond the present, then their absence connotes its end. The persona speaking in “Mayne kinder”—a woman who is both a poet and the mother of children never to be born—thus expresses sorrow for a future, both personal

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

and cultural, that she perceives as lost. Such despair is not the ­final word. Throughout her last decades, as Molodowsky continued to address the question of how a Yiddish poet could write after the Holo­ caust, she revisited the issues of sexuality, gender, and prayer. In these poems, Molodowsky repeatedly depicted the poet as an aging woman who tells stories and blesses the candles to perpetuate and even restore Jewish tradition in a new form. In her final book of poems, Likht fun dornboym: Lider (Lights of the Thorn Bush),22 she achieves a monumental voice in the dramatic monologues of legendary personae, both male and female. Whereas in her earlier poems, Molodowsky’s personal “I” spoke to the issues of the day, her poems of the 1950s and 1960s assumed guises that deflect the personal, yet reveal the anxieties of “stifled words,” a weary body, and an alienated self. These poems are informed by the poet’s cultural exile in America, her despair over the Khurbm poyln (the Destruction of Poland), and her Zionist hopes. Although the poems of this last book may lack the politically feminist voice of Molodowsky’s earlier poems, they are, in fact, subtly but powerfully gendered. The book opens with a poem written in 1954, “Af mayn dorn blit a royz” (On my Thorn Blooms a Rose”), which reconstitutes beauty from pain, a whole from fragments: On my thorn blooms a rose— But how can this be? In the shards on my table Foams a drop of wine— But how can this be?23 (1–5)

As the rose blossoms on a dead thorn and a drop of wine foams on the ruined table, the speaker wonders how life can be renewed and ritual continued after great destruction. Her puzzlement, figured in the frage-tseykhn (question mark) she encounters everywhere she looks, is answered by the prediction of Elijah the prophet, der vos hit mikh ale yorn (the one who has protected me all these years): It’s not a thorn, It’s a green tree. (15–16)

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... These are not shards— But golden goblets. Immortal Is the blessing over wine (21–23)

... Make a blessing over your drop of wine.24 (26)

The prophet denies the finality of destruction by asserting the possibility of growth and restoration—the thorn is actually a living tree and the shards, golden goblets. He instructs the poet to thank God for what has survived. Despite this opening poem’s measured optimism and reaffirmation of the survival of the Jewish people through ritual, other poems in the book present an ambivalent recreation. In “On verter” (Without Words), dated 1955, the poet takes on the persona of a bride to assert the creation of a positive world through the negation of language, material things, and art: Without words, bring forth my saying, Without speech. And without musicians’ playing— My wedding tune, Without thread, weave My wedding dress. Just like this— Like the music flying And escaping from his fiddle. And I, with arms akimbo, Am escaping from my being. Oh, at dusk pour out for me The cup of sunset wine, The flaming drink Of dying day. Load me with the light That the sky sifts out

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

Right before the sun Casts down her brass weight.25

(1–19)

In the opening lines, the poet requests that utterance be brought forth without words. This oxymoron negates the poet’s craft while asserting that she has something to say. The contradiction creates tension between the poem and the poet’s intention. Immediately the stanza shifts, as a bride orders wedding music without musicians and a wedding dress woven without thread. The juxtaposition of the poet and the bride creates a metaphor that connects the writing of poetry to the traditional role for a Jewish woman. Thus joining the double creative acts of a poet and a woman, the metaphor recalls Molodowsky’s query in “Froyen-lider” (Women-Poems, 1927), which asked whether a woman poet could write within the patriarchal Jewish tradition. Conjoining the poet and the bride in 1955, Molodowsky compounds the question of the traditional limitations for women within Judaism with a further contradiction, asking whether a woman can write Yiddish poetry after the destruction of her culture. The second stanza articulates the metaphor of disembodiment. In the same way that wedding music escapes from a musician’s fiddle, so the speaker, with flailing arms, escapes from her very being: The woman’s corporeal existence is a musical instrument and her essence is its music. In the extended oxymoron, the bride becomes the wedding music and flees the ceremony that would establish her traditional role within the community as a wife, while the poet relinquishes her role as poet even as she sets the poem down on paper. The third and final stanza of the poem resolves the contradictions by punning on the preposition on (without) and the verb prefix on-, which in the verbs ongisn (to pour) and onlodn (to load) connote the taking-on of materiality. Where the poem began with the prepositional phrase, On verter (Without words), the final stanza begins with the request, O, gis mir on (Oh, pour out for me). Like the bride who submits to marriage and drinks from the wedding cup, despite her desire to flee the canopy, the poet resumes her place in this world. By taking into her mouth the “sunset wine, / The flaming drink / Of dying day,” she accepts the burden of writing poetry in Yiddish, in the last light of her culture.

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In “Dos gezang fun shabes” (The Sabbath Song), Molodowsky again asserts, through metaphors of gender and ritual, the poet’s determination to continue writing: I fought until Sabbath eve With the six emperors Of the six days of the week. Sunday they confiscated my sleep. Monday they scattered my salt. And on the third day, my God, They flung away my bread And, above my face, they fenced with knights. They caught my flying dove And slaughtered her. And so forth, until Friday dawn. And this, you see, ends my whole week, With the dying of my dove-flying. At dusk, I kindled four candles And the Sabbath Queen came to me. Her countenance shone And the whole world became Sabbath. My scattered salt Glittered in the saltshaker, And my dove, my flying dove, Flapped her wings And groomed her throat. The Sabbath Queen blessed my candles. They shone with a clear flame. The light covered the days of the week And the battle with the six emperors. The greenness of mountains— Is the greenness of Sabbath. The silver of a river— Is the silver of Sabbath. The song of the wind— Is the singing of Sabbath. And the song of my heart Is the eternal Sabbath.26 (1–34)

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

The speaker of this poem is a heroic woman who fights “With the emperors / Of the six days of the week.” The weekday “emperors” would destroy the gifts of the Sabbath: sleep, the blessing’s bread and salt, and the dove of the poet’s imagination. But when, on Friday evening, the speaker kindles four flames in a candelabrum, the Sabbath Queen appears and, with her blessing, enables the Sabbath candles to reconstitute the symbols of the Day of Rest, gathering up the scattered salt crystals and bringing the slaughtered dove back to life. The flames of the Sabbath candles extend further and bring nature’s beauty—the green of the mountains, the silver of the river, the song of the wind—under the dominion of the Sabbath Queen, who empowers the poet’s song. “Dos gezang fun shabes” divides the male and female parts of life: the week is male, inhabited by emperors, soldiers, and the act of fighting; while the Sabbath is female, inhabited by the dove, the queen, and the Jewish woman’s obligation to light the candles. Although she must struggle in the male weekday world, on the Sabbath the poet immerses herself in the female domain. Thus strengthened, the poet extends the commandment to light the Sabbath candles into nature, beyond conventional domesticity, and transforms her poem into a prayer that summons the belief that celebrating the Sabbath in this world will bring on the eternal Sabbath of the messianic World-to-Come. In contrast to the speaker’s concluding certitude in “Dos gezang fun shabes,” a number of poems in Likht fun dorn boym depict the poet as lacking a language or having only a language of silence or echoes, as in “Mayn shprakh” (My Language): For this much grief The spoken word Or silenced word Will not suffice. There lives in me A language, white, A word that I Have never sealed. Speechless, dumb, Not formed from words, My white language,

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My utterance, voice, Assaults my soul. My white language Has no script And has no tongue For its display. With its creation, it purifies, Then in white silence, sinks away.27 ( 1–19)

As in “On verter,” this speaker articulately describes an unarticulated “white language” of grief and loss. This oxymoron—poems that deny the very language in which they are composed—develops the reflexive images of scripting and speaking that characterize Molodowsky’s writing throughout her life. In these late poems, the images become central and explicit subjects of the poems. Losing her language, the poet depicts herself losing her voice as she becomes a beggar woman. Nature and the wind take over the role of storytelling in “Der vint iz alt gevorn” (The Wind Has Grown Old): The wind has grown old. The stories that it roars with a hoarse voice Are melancholy. They cast me down from the mountain, And I become a beggar woman in the valley. The gold of my pearls Becomes the color of ash. Thus the old wind Violates me. The wind has grown old. The melody that it roars with a hollow voice Is frightening. It saws the green from the forest, The singing green of the past. My mountain bird Becomes a bat. Thus the old wind Eats out my heart.

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

The wind has grown old. The secrets that it roars with a whispering voice Are deadly. They deny the clarity of a tear. They deny the promise of a glance. Thus the old wind, Whispering and deaf. Only two do not believe the old wind: The beggar woman in the valley—in ash and dust, And the moon on high—that white, mute dove.28 (1–28)

Taking the form of a legend, this poem displaces the acts of storytelling and singing from the poet onto the wind. It is the wind’s melancholy stories that force the speaker to descend from the mountain into the valley and that transform her, the ikh (I), into a “beggar woman,” robbed and violated. It is the wind’s hollow melodies that ruin the fresh beauty of the forest of previous times and that transform the speaker’s mountain bird into a bat. However, the wind, the force of the outside world, the force of history, cannot finally defeat the poet. As the humiliated beggar woman, she and her heavenly counterpart, “that white, mute dove” of a moon, refuse to concede to the wind’s terrible secrets that deny human grief and hope. When passive resistance takes the place of the poet’s active assertion of voice, the next step is the loss of self. Molodowsky keeps this ultimate despair at bay by writing in a comic and self-parodic tone. In “Fun midkayt kh’varf arop di shikh un zokn” (I Kick off my Shoes and Socks in Exhaustion), the poet argues against the harangue of her sore feet and her tired hands: I want to lift my hands, to shield myself from wrath, But they hang like strangers, as if not mine since birth. They mutter in anger: “What’s the point? Why bother Greeting him and her with ‘Shalom,’ with a handshake? We have no peace. Our fingers ache. And in your old age, nearly a century old— How does it suit you, this wandering in the void?”29 (20–27)

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The irony darkens into a deeper alienation from the self, as the poet, looking into her own mirror, confronts her body’s relentless aging: Seeking protection in my faithful eyes, I looked into my mirror. But there stood a stranger, an unknown face. He gazed at me, as if in deep disgrace: “How does a stranger come to me in the mirror?”30 (28–32)

Rather than comforted by the familiar image of her own face, the speaker confronts herself, transformed by age into a strange man: “He gazed at me.” This disquieting image of sexual transformation puts into gendered terms the speaker’s alienation from her own body and her essential being. In the last two lines, this transformation reverses reality, as the stranger in the mirror appropriates the speaker’s own shocked question of identity. As Molodowsky’s speaker confronts the difficult truth of her identity by looking in the mirror, she confronts her alienation from her younger feminine self.31 Molodowsky uses the comic tone to confront necessary distinctions between literature and life in “Tsum melekh Shloyme kumt di ­herlekhe Shulames” (Glorious Shulames Comes to Solomon the King). The biblical heroine of the Song of Songs confronts King Solomon to complain of her entrapment in the literary work: King Solomon laughs: You glorious thing, don’t get me wrong, You’re the loveliest shepherdess of hill and vale, I’d say, But you must stay forever in the Songs’ exalted Song. This, for beauty, is the price you pay.32 (13–16)

Envious of Shulames’s eternal beauty, the speaker comments on both the transience of actual beauty and on the dangerous ideal of beauty by which a culture entraps women. This skeptical evaluation leads the poet to reconcile herself to her own physical aging. The poet confronts her mortality in “Dos likht fun dayn tish” (The Light of Your Table), which bears the parenthetical epigraph, “At my father’s grave.” Standing at the “hermetic door” ( farkhasemter tir) of her father’s grave, she apologizes for having long neglected to visit. As she observes the green willow sapling and the grass growing nearby,

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

the speaker finds refuge from the turmoil of her daily life. In the last two stanzas, a transformation occurs. The present moment is overtaken by a memory in which the poet becomes her father’s young daughter again: Nighttime, God returns my soul to me. I see the light of your table, And your hand absentmindedly Turning a page In that holy book with its ancient binding. I stand, bowed near your shoulder. Now, I’m someone else, another, And soon you will say: Go, sleep, my child, your bed is waiting. For a moment—I’m in the peace of a home. But here is your name engraved on a stone. The small willow is standing. The light of your table is still shining. It’s a secretive shining.33 (25–39)

As the speaker recalls her father reading a holy book, she enters the memory so fully that she becomes “someone else, another” (Kh’shtey lem dayn aksl geboygn. / Kh’bin an andere itst, kh’bin a tsveyte). When her father urges her to “Go, sleep, my child, your bed is waiting,” his words address her both as a child, told to go to bed, and as an old woman, told that soon she, too, will die. These words resonate with this double meaning, for it is precisely at her father’s grave that she feels the “peace of a home.” In the final lines of the poem, the father’s name on the gravestone coexists with the light of traditional Jewish learning that the daughter remembers. The private, secretive quality of the light from the father’s study lamp (di shayn a geheyme) puns on heym (home), which emphasizes the power of the Yiddish poem that brings into a new life the father’s holy books through his name engraved on the tombstone. Writing as an old woman momentarily transformed by a memory of her dead father into a young girl, Molodowsky affirms the need to write poetry that continues the

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f­ather’s Jewish tradition. This tradition, passed from father to daughter, provides the old woman, who is also a Yiddish poet writing after the Holocaust, with the means to continue writing poetry. “Ikh bin a viderkol” (I Am an Echo) signals this determination to continue writing, in a dialogue between the Yiddish poet and the character of a Jewish fiddler standing where Joshua, who succeeded Moses as the leader of the Israelites, once stood, at the walls of Jericho: I am an echo Of a vanished symphony. My voice is a marvel, Whether it’s prayer or blasphemy. A fiddler appears, Saying, I’ve come from yesterday. He raises his fiddle— His pallid fingers: Soon I will play The prescribed melody That they played long ago By the walls of Jericho. Soon I will play By the walls of Jericho. I want to touch his fiddle To see if it’s real. But he is no more, His echo trembles: Here I am, here I am, You don’t need what is real. My voice will reach you. Here I am, here I am, Take along my echo To the walls of Jericho. Soon I will play By the walls of Jericho.34 (1–26)

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

Questioning whether the voice of her poetry is “prayer or blasphemy” (S’iz a vunder mayn shtim, / Tsi s’iz tfile, tsi lester), the speaker acknowledges the “marvel” of her very existence as the echo of a greater collective, an orchestra that has vanished. The poet’s solitary voice is joined by a fiddler, who materializes from the past and promises to play the music of triumph and conquest, dem zemer gerekhtn, that the biblical Joshua played on his shofar to make the walls of Jericho fall. For a brief moment, she observes, the Jewish fiddler of Eastern Europe takes on the power of the ancient military conqueror. When the poet reaches out to touch his fiddle, though, the player and instrument melt away. Only his trembling voice remains, vowing to accompany the Yiddish poet to the walls of Jericho. Although the poet, an echo herself, has only the echo of the fiddler’s promise, that vibrating string connects the reader through the Yiddish poet to the murdered klezmer violinist and the triumphant Joshua. This echo asserts its presence and ephemeral reality in words that themselves echo both the biblical response of prophets when called by God—Hinneini / Ikh bin do (Here I am) and the refrain Mir zaynen do (We are here!)—in Hirsh Glik’s famous “Hymn of the Partisans.”35 Repeated four times in the last eight lines of the poem, the phrase Ikh bin do insists upon the viability of a poet whose language and culture are no longer present. In “Gots kinder” (God’s Children), Molodowsky highlights the importance of the gender and age of this poet by casting her as an old woman in a folk version of a biblical legend of King Solomon. This device brings the woman Yiddish poet literally into the Hebrew tradition and establishes the role she will play in perpetuating Jewish culture: I came to the great King Solomon, An old woman, no longer lovely, He wouldn’t want me as number one-thousand-and-one, So I sat down at his gate with the lowly. At the king’s gate, they tell stories: How a star shoots out from a spark, And God’s children, the barefoot, the faithful, The luminous, hark and hark.

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How the judge has become such a fool, Dressing up in velvet clothing, And God’s children, the barefoot and faithful, Sit in brightness, laughing, laughing. There they tell of their favorite wonders, How the dead are brought back to life, And God’s children, the barefoot and faithful, Know full well how to come back to life. How sometimes the angels, folding their wings, Show themselves to the good and the pious. And God’s children, the barefoot and faithful, Sit in splendour, and bless and bless. There they tell of the fiery miracles: How wellsprings broke through desert land. And God’s children, the barefoot, the faithful, The drunken sit, and their voices resound. The king comes out after sunset, His wisdom has no measure. The king sits among God’s children And hears of his palaces’ treasure: The mechanical bird at his window, Golden bears that growl by his throne. Never has he seen such a palace, And he weeps heavy tears, alone.36 (1–32)

Approaching King Solomon’s palace, the speaker, “an old woman, no longer lovely,” joins the ranks of the storytellers who sit at the gates, “God’s children, barefoot, the faithful.” She joins them in telling Jewish folk stories about miracles, angels, and fools. When the king emerges from the palace after sunset, he listens to the tall tales about his own palace, which outfit it with a mechanical bird and golden bears. The wise Solomon responds with tears, for he knows that his palace is nothing like the stories told of it. With the image of the mechanical bird echoing Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” Molodowsky depicts the storytelling children of God as dreamers and mythmakers. The speaker observes both the delusional

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

faith of the other storytellers and the despair of the king of whom they tell. Bearing witness to this faith and despair, Molodowsky suggests, is the responsibility of the woman poet, specifically, an old woman who is the only one able to sing the truth to the king.

Malka Heifetz Tussman After immigrating to America in 1912 to join her family in Chicago, Tussman married in 1914 and moved to Milwaukee with her husband and two sons. They settled in Los Angeles in 1941 or 1942.37 In 1945 Tussman wrote a poem that in her oeuvre is comparable to Molodowsky’s “Eyl khanun” (Merciful God). In fact, it may have been a response to Molodowsky’s poem. But in contrast to Molodowsky’s prophetic voice in “Eyl khanun,” Tussman’s 1945 poem of Jewish peoplehood, “Tsu dir Miryam” (To You, Miriam), insists on its specifically female poetic stance. Instead of challenging God and His Covenant, the speaker of Tussman’s poem addresses Miriam who, in Exodus 15:20–21, played the role of prophet and poet with her song of praise after her brother Moses led the Children of Israel out of slavery and through the parted Red Sea: And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam sang unto them: Sing ye to the Lord, for He is highly exalted: The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea. (Exod. 15:20–21; JPS translation, 1955, 1976)

With these verses in mind, Tussman’s speaker opens the poem by invoking Miriam: To you, Miriam the prophet, To your song, To your feet, joyously bloodied, Dancing on desert sand, My heart goes out again In envy and in longing. You sang at a time When God was righteous,

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When it was wonderful to lead Israel’s daughters In a sacred dance.38 (1–10)

The Yiddish poet confesses that she envies the biblical poet Miriam’s moment in Jewish history. In Exodus, Miriam’s brief song comes as a postscript, a reiteration, or, as some argue, an antiphony of M ­ oses’ verses. In contrast to Miriam’s minor role in Exodus, Tussman’s speaker depicts her as prophet and poet at a triumphant moment in the redemption and survival of the Children of Israel. When she sings and leads the women in dancing after the harrowing escape, Miriam’s feet bleed on the desert sand. The miraculous rescue of the Children of Israel proves to the poet that then, in Miriam’s time, “God was righteous.” Now, however, the poet tells us, God is no longer righteous. She asks: How shall I exalt the women of my generation? How shall I bring them joy? No longer does a light-filled eye watch over us, No compassion from above. With his right hand, God the Master Has opened abysses of destruction. Hear and be astonished, oh, Miriam: From the deep precipice, like lightning, Erupts praise of his beloved Name.39 (11–19)

As Miriam led the women of her time in song and dance, so the poet wants to uplift her contemporaries. She asks, “How shall I exalt the women of my generation? / How shall I bring them joy?” In 1945, the poet wonders how she can take on the role of spokeswoman for her generation, when God no longer “watches over us” and there is “No compassion above.” At this crucial moment at the end of the war, when God appears to have abandoned the Jews, the roles of a Jewish poet, a Yiddish poet, and a woman poet are called into question. Instead of parting the waters of the Red Sea “With his right hand,” as in Miriam’s time, God now “has opened the abysses of mass death.” The only praise for God is a shvakh (Hebrew, shevakh), a praise poem that erupts like “lightning” from “the depths of the precipice.”

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

The speaker admits that a single form of traditional praise for God still exists, when women light and bless the candles on the Sabbath eve: And there, in our darkness, a Sabbath table is laid, But the sanctity sputters and goes out. The candle flames duck In shame.40 (20–23)

Although the Sabbath still comes, and women still light the candles, the sanctity of the blessing has been extinguished and the flames themselves are ashamed. The metaphor of blessings sputtering out while the flames themselves burn on emphasizes how empty tradition is without a righteous God. The poet blames this unrighteous God for hurting the Jews even more by sending false moralizers who blame the Jews for their victimization: And he sent men to punish us again. They chastise with whipping tongues. They find offenses within us. God’s braggarts command us to repent.41 (24–27)

The pundits (shtrofer), who blame “us” for sins that God has punished with genocide, speak from a corrupted religious platform, deceitfully echoing the biblical prophets. Unable to respond on behalf of the collective, the speaker defends herself against such hypocritical accusations: But I, oh, poet, my sister, will defend myself. —Forgive my strength . . . I no longer accept God’s wrath As well and good. Who am I, you will ask, Who am I to make demands and stand against him? Do not refute my right, Miriam. I stem from a martyr to the people, and My image of God sits within me.42 (28–36)

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Answering Miriam’s anticipated protestations, the speaker rejects the righteousness of God’s wrath and defends her rebellious stance. She defines herself as one who has the right to “stand against” God, because she is a descendant of “a martyr to the people, and / My image of God sits within me.” These Yiddish lines, in which the speaker explains why she has the authority to challenge God, are culturally dense in their connotations and merit further explanation: mayn yikhes iz a folk martirer un / ikh hob mayn tseylem elokim. Two phrases within these lines are particularly difficult. First, where the speaker explains her lineage, or heritage (yikhes) she describes her ancestors with the phrase, a folk martirer, which can be understood to mean “a nation of martyrs,” “a martyred people,” or “a martyr to the people.” She then states that, as a consequence of this inheritance, she possesses her tseylem elokim. This phrase is a deliberate variant of the Hebrew expression, tseylem ­elohim literally, “the image of God,” which derives from Genesis 1:27, where God is said to create man “in His image.” In Yiddish idiomatic use, though, the phrase also denotes the “godliness” within people, mainly  the qualities of basic human decency or mentshlekhkayt.43 By replacing the letter hey (h) with a kuf (k) and thus writing the phrase as tseylem elokim, Tussman adopts the guise of traditional piety. Changing these consonants, she avoids writing the actual, sacred name of God, Elohim, in a non-liturgical, even blasphemous context, which is something that a Jew who fears God would do. Perhaps the poet, does this to convince the character Miriam of her poetic persona’s righteousness—or perhaps she wishes to protect herself from God’s own wrath, even as she challenges Him. The distinction blurs between the dramatic persona of the poet addressing the biblical character and the author of the poem in which this dialogue takes place. This orthographic gesture also emphasizes the several meanings of the original phrase tseylem elohim, in a way that is both ironic and profound. At the very moment that she challenges God’s authority and justness, the poet asserts that she does so based on the authority of the very traits which make her both God-like and deeply humane. Confronting God’s authority as a human being who also possesses qualities of the divine, she expresses this hubris in a traditional, pious way of speaking.

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

Acknowledging such qualities, the poet finds the temerity to challenge God in a way that cuts even deeper: Still more— I lodge another complaint. I stand up to him and accuse him With his own Ten Commandments.44 (37–40)

Characteristic of Tussman, the phrasing of the verb shteln zikh within the Yiddish lines ikh shtel zikh kegn im un klog im on / tsu zayne tsen gebot emphasizes the contrary stance of the speaker as a poet who challenges the authority of God, who is both creator and destroyer. The phrase, repeated several times in “Tsu dir Miryam” reflects a central theme in Tussman’s poetry. We see it again in “Vos zol ikh zey dertseyln?” (What Shall I Tell Them?), another poem from her first book, Lider, which questions what she can teach her Yiddish pupils after the Holocaust, as well as in her 1977 poem, “Fargesn” (Forgotten). Tussman’s use of the Ten Commandments to accuse God echoes Molodowsky’s “Eyl khanun” (Merciful God): “With the old, / With the young, / And with little children, we have paid / For every letter of your Ten Commandments.”45 But it does so to a different effect. Both Molodowsky and Tussman refer to the Ten Commandments with the Germanic Yiddish phrase tsen gebotn, rather than the Hebraic phrase aseres-hadibres, as if to distance their speakers from the very language of those commandments and the suggestion of religiosity in mentioning them. In lines that descend through the ages of humankind, Molodowsky lists the old, the young, and the infants, whose lives comprised the price the Jews paid for every single letter (os) spelling out the commandments that God wrote on the tablets in order to demand that God reverse the sacred Covenant. In contrast to Molodowsky’s attention to the letters of the Law, Tussman’s lines address the spirit of the Law as her speaker enters a metaphorical courtroom where God is on trial. Acting as a prosecutor—and perhaps recalling I. L. Peretz’s famous short story, “Bontshe shvayg” (Bontshe the Silent), in which the heavenly prosecutor condemns the innocent Bontshe—she stands in opposition to God in order to accuse Him of His acts, which violate the very laws by which He had commanded the Jewish people to live.

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Tussman’s poem ends with a statement that negates all hope for the redemption of the Jewish people and also of God himself: Abandoning us to destruction, he has put us At his mercy. And nowhere, anywhere, is any hint, Nowhere any sign of a redeemer. I vow! No longer shall a Jew’s last breath ignite the torch— “Hear, O Israel.” Mute, with gall, Shall be The final fall.46 (41–50)

In the dense phrasing of lines 41–42, the speaker informs Miriam of the extent to which God’s transgression of his own laws has left the Jews without hope: fun unzer vistn hef ker hot er farmitn / zayn barot. ­Deliberately, Tussman rhymes the word barot with gebot two lines above, to emphasize the layered meanings of barot. Barot by itself, denotes “hazard,” but in the phrase af gots barot it means “at God’s mercy,” signifying the state of being in God’s care or custody.47 Sometimes, barot takes on more treacherous connotations, as in ­iberlozn af gots barot (to forsake; literally, to leave to God’s mercy), which emphasizes the precarious position of such a person, utterly forsaken by human powers and thus af barot fun got (at the mercy of God).48 Rhyming barot (at the mercy of) with gebot (law, commandment), Tussman’s lines depict a people, or a nation, abandoned by humankind and now utterly forsaken by a God who disobeys his own Ten Commandments. This scofflaw God creates a world without order and negates or stands in the way of any possibility of mercy or any inkling of redemption. Under such arbitrary power, the very word barot, “at the mercy of,” becomes a cruelly ironic concept. As a result, the poet swears an oath that she cannot retract and prophesies to Miriam, the ancient ­prophetess, that Jews will no longer utter, upon dying, the words of the Shema, the watchword of Jewish monotheism given by God to the people of Israel (Deut. 6:4). The poem addresses not only the problem of the poet whom history has silenced. Rather, God’s betrayal of his

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

own covenant and commandments will silence the words of faith and render every Jew mute. Like Molodowsky, Tussman here speaks for the Jewish people and contends with God’s treachery and abandonment, but she does so through the dramatic persona of one woman poet, the daughter of a folk martirer, addressing another, the daughter of slaves, across time. If the ancestor of the Jewish poet is a people’s martyr, one who sacrificed himself for the sake of the nation, then it is necessary that the poet speak out as an individual who will extend this inherited act of self-sacrifice. In the final stanza, this act turns out to be the speaker’s vow of silence. This self-imposed muteness, though, was not a poet’s refusal to write but rather it is her refusal (and, by extension, that of all Jews) to utter the affirmation of faith at the moment of death. Tussman demands that each Jewish person, beginning with herself, silence the statement that allows God to know that His people believes in Him. By retracting the Jewish practice of reciting the Shema, the “watchword” of monotheistic faith, before dying, Tussman deprives God of His authority over human life. Moreover, she emphasizes gender as the framework for answering the question discussed by Yiddish writers from 1939 through 1945, which asks (according to Anita Norich) “what it meant to enter into a creative enterprise at this historic moment of war and catastrophe.”49 By addressing Miriam as an intermediary figure, in the tkhine tradition, and invoking the image of the Sabbath candles, Tussman projected the problem for Jews writing poetry after the Holocaust onto the specific responsibility of a woman poet to Jewish tradition. As Tussman developed her poetry into a mature oeuvre in the postwar years, she increasingly wrote from an explicitly female perspective. She incorporated both gender and sex into the central structure of her poetic voice, as she argued through her own example for the continuity of Yiddish poetry. In another poem from 1945, “Vos zol ikh zey dertseyln?” (What Shall I Tell Them?), Tussman confronted the certainty of the European atrocities when she contemplated the problem of how to teach Yiddish to her young students and, indeed, how the Yiddish language would continue after the Holocaust. The poem alludes to Mark M. Warshawsky’s famous song of 1901, “Afn pripetchik” (At the Fireplace), in which a teacher instructs his young pupils by telling them how the

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very letters of the Hebrew/Yiddish alphabet embody the history of the Jews in the Diaspora and can comfort them as they wander the world in exile, waiting for redemption. Warshawsky’s lyrics urged Jews of the early twentieth century, beset upon by pogroms and forced migrations, to seek strength in the texts at the center of Jewish tradition. In contrast, Tussman’s poem of 1945, which she dedicates tsu mayne talmidim (to my students), shows how the Hebrew/Yiddish alphabet, which she has inherited from her idealistic father and must teach to her pupils, embodies the story of the Holocaust destruction of the Jews and their culture. The speaker of Tussman’s poem has inherited not the capable hands of workers and craftsmen, who break stone, knead clay, bend steel, and weave wool, but rather the os (Hebrew/ Yiddish letter) of a troymer-layt (dream-folk)—the alphabet and the moral charge of her enlightened, idealistic, yet deeply Jewish father: Not in hands that break stone, Not in hands that knead clay Is the blessing given me. Not in hands that bend steel, Not in hands that weave wool Is the blessing given me. I’m born of delicate, pale dream-folks So the tremble of each alphabet letter was Parceled out to me. In my whole tree of generations Nowhere is found A baptized kinsman. —God, Jew and Man— My father’s lips exalted. Light and freedom He sermonized in a peculiar language, And I Inherited from him peculiar letters.50 (1–18)

This language and its letters, which are both modne (strange, odd, peculiar), are at home neither in Ukraine, her father’s homeland, nor in the United States, where the poet lives.

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

Like the Jews in Warshawsky’s song, who carry the alphabet letters with them into exile, Tussman’s speaker wanders the world with “these peculiar letters” and teaches them to “little children.” Yet unlike Warshawsky’s melamed (schoolteacher), who, in the song’s refrain, instructs his pupils to chant the alphabet’s first letter, “komets alef, o,” in order to find the strength of tradition inherent in the Hebrew Bible, Tussman’s speaker teaches her pupils to create crude tools and basic food to help them survive in a difficult world. Playing on the shapes and sounds of each letter, the lamed (l) and the kuf (k), the teacher urges her students to “make a spade (lopete),” and to make it “From the lamed ” and “From kuf a poker (kotshere).” From the beys (b), the children will “Knead out bread (broyt) / To maintain life and need.” The letters also teach the students to understand the traditional Jewish qualities of passivity and of hope for God’s redemption: The “Zayen [z] / Is a sigh (zifts) of alas and alack /—Who decreed this fate of ours / This way!” The speaker comments, “—A silent one is a fool!” when, “With a silent alef—[a] / Big and mute and numb,” the Jews “raise your eyes (oygn)” to heaven for an answer. When she comes to the letter khes (kh), the teacher hesitates: But the lips tremble on the khes That aspires to be Slaughtering knife [kheylef ].51 (35–37)

Although kheylef is a Hebraic word that refers to the ritual knife used for the kosher slaughtering of animals, the violence that this word conjures reminds the teacher of the violence assaulting Jews in Europe, even as she teaches her students in America. The present moment is radically different from that in which her father taught her that “All is good, / Man is miracle, / And dream [kholem] is khes [kh] / Not, Heaven forfend, slaughtering knife [kheylef ].” When the teacher was her father’s pupil, her father taught her to associate the eighth letter of the alphabet, khes, with kholem, the dreams of a better world, rather than the rituals of slaughtering decreed by Jewish law. Now, to the speaker, these rituals connote the violence within the Binding of Isaac, which is implied in Tussman’s next, untranslatable lines: “And I shall not bloody / Anokhi’s alef !” “Anokhi,” which begins with the letter

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alef, signifies the first-person pronoun “I” in Hebrew, and it appears in Exodus as one of the names that God calls Himself when He commands Moses from the Burning Bush to free the Jews from slavery in Egypt. The image of the knife in this line also evokes the knife held by Abraham above Isaac bound on the altar in Genesis 22, although the word there is makhelet, not kheylef. Calling forth the foundational stories of Jewish suffering and redemption, the speaker perceives her young students’ trusting eyes, which “ask / For stories about little birds, / About cookies and bagels and / Crystal palaces” (47–52). Instead of such innocent tales, though, she “begin[s] again with trembling in [her] voice” to tell them of the persecutions of Jews, casting them in ironic reversal to emphasize the impossibility of keeping the terrible truth from these children: So I begin again with trembling in my voice: —You should not believe, children, That stones fly through the windowpanes. Don’t believe—we were chased out And driven out. We ourselves chose The road of wandering. Saucy little children Whipped themselves to death. And an angry Jewish man Tore out his own beard with his hand. Beggar’s bread and yellow patch, Fear of the cross in dull eyes, Feet in chains, neck in rope— A made-up theater-play.52 (53–67)

With grotesque sarcasm, the teacher lies to her pupils, “teaching” them not to believe what she and they know is true—that stones break windowpanes and that the Jews were driven into exile. The version of contemporary history that she would have to present to her students if she were to protect them from the horrible truth sounds deliberately preposterous and even monstrous: Jewish children “whipped themselves to death,” a Jewish man “tore out his own beard.” And

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

starvation, the yellow patch, and imprisonment are only “A made-up theater-play” in a euphemistic version of education that this teacher cannot practice. The teacher feels compelled not to lie to her students, yet she worries that she cannot “Shield these Jewish children, / So that all the evil of the world / Should elude them.” Still, she prays that the alphabet she is teaching them not reveal to the children the associations that it inevitably invokes for her as the atrocities of the Holocaust unfold: Let it elude them That fey [ f ] is flame and fire—( flam un fayer) To no one is a Jewish life dear. Let it elude them That hey [h] is ax (hak), Shin [sh] is sword (shverd), And tes [t] is death (toyt). And blood is More than red, Oy, more than red.53 (72–81)

To emphasize the extremity of the current sufferings of the Jews, the speaker ends her poem with a variation on lines 15–18: Light and freedom my father Sermonized in a peculiar language. Soon I won’t know what to do With what I have inherited from him.54 (82–86)

Earlier, the letters of the Yiddish alphabet had taught her humanistic idealism, as when her father “sermonized in a peculiar language” the “light and freedom” of “God, Jew and Humankind.” At the end of the poem, all such optimism has vanished. Her father is now a “ghost” and so are the principles he had lived by. The speaker, once her father’s pupil, now a teacher of what he had taught her, is at a loss for words. When he taught his young daughter Jewish literacy and ethics, her father had put into practice the prescription in Deuteronomy reiterated in the Shema, the central prayer of Judaism: “And these words which I

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command you this day shall be upon your heart. And you shall teach them to your sons” (Deut. 6:5–9). The father had adapted this precept freely, teaching his daughter, as well as the “sons” (beynekhah) named by the prayer. Although standard twentieth-century English translations of the Hebrew Bible translate “beynekhah” as “children” rather than its literal meaning “sons,” Tussman’s poem assumes the Hasidic Judaism of her childhood, in which a father would teach the law primarily to his sons.55 The father in the poem, though, taught the girl the literal commandment of Deuteronomy, to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might”— alongside the maskilic or Enlightenment ideals of Likht un frayhayt (Light and freedom), which contradictorily replaced the love of God with the love of humankind. The grown daughter now reinterprets this Jewish obligation to pass along the tradition in her efforts to teach her young students. (Tussman’s own sons were by then grown.) After the Holocaust, however, the daughter finds it impossible to teach these children either the biblical commandment to love and obey God’s Law or her father’s secularized version of that commandment—to love humankind and to treat them ethically. Rather, she is compelled either not to teach them at all, or to teach them a lie. If she were to teach them the truth, she would have to inform her pupils that the Destruction of the Jews had corrupted the sacred letters of the Hebrew / Yiddish alphabet. Now the letters have come to communicate a command to disobey both God’s commandments to love Him and His teaching and the maskilic interpretation of those commandments, namely, to love humankind. Spoken by a lowly female teacher of young children, this apparently modest poem calls into question the very possibility, after the Holocaust, of transmitting tradition, of one generation educating the next. Yet without education, there will be no cultural memory. Without memory, the Jews will cease to exist as a people. The themes of remembering and forgetting were central to Tuss­ man’s entire body of poetry from 1945 to 1987. In “Vos zol ikh zey dertseyln?” Tussman revises Jewish literary tradition by making the Yiddish alphabet the key to continued Jewish existence. Although doubting that there is anything left to teach, the woman teacher assumes the role of her own father and teaches her pupils the Yiddish letters, which will let them read the laws that God has broken. Tussman elucidates a con-

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

cern shared by all the Yiddish poets of her generation for the future of the Jewish people. Her poem spells out the cultural annihilation that the Jewish people will suffer as a result of the violence inflicted upon them. Tussman’s poem “Mit tseyn in der erd” (With Teeth in the Earth) furthers the problem presented in “Tsu dir Miryam” and “Vos zol ikh zey dertseyln?” by dramatizing the inadequacy of words and language to express the poet’s knowledge of murder and death: My cheek on the earth And I know why mercy. Lips to the earth And I know why love. My nose in the earth I know why theft. Teeth in the earth I know why Murder. What are words Compared to Teeth in the earth? What is shouting Compared to Teeth in the earth? And nothing is enough, And nothing is now And nothing is ever Like this. It’s clear to me I know precisely why The man Who digs the earth with his teeth And he Who tears himself from the earth Forever Oh, ever Must weep for himself.56 (1–28)

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In fact, this poem was first written in 1934, showing Tussman’s preoccupation with its themes long before the Holocaust, but in revising the poem for the book after the Holocaust she found a powerful context for it.57 The poem evokes the sensory experience of a person who comes to know extraordinary loss. Prostrate on the ground, as if at rest, or in the pose of a lover, the speaker discovers that the contact of her face upon the benign, maternal surface of the earth brings her knowledge of mercy and love. In the third and fourth stanzas, however, when she puts her nose and then her teeth “in the earth,” the speaker learns the reasons for theft and murder. The speaker now finds herself forced to lie face down on the earth and is subjected to a violence that pushes her nose into the soil; when she responds by opening her mouth to cry out, she finds her voice stopped as her teeth bite into the dirt. However, in the fifth stanza, the speaker states that she is not literally lying with her face to the ground, but rather that she imagines the experiences she has described so far in her poem. Because her imagination, expressed in the poem, has taken her from a voluntary posture to one imposed by violence, the speaker wants to protest that violence with the words of her poem. She stops short of that protest, though, when she asks if it is possible to compare the poet’s act of speaking and even shouting with the physical experience of having one’s teeth forced into the earth. In the sixth stanza, she answers her own questions, stating that “nothing” can compare with the experience of death and the knowledge of murder. By repeating the word “nothing” ( gornit) in three of the four lines of this stanza, Tussman emphasizes the finality of death, the immediacy of death, and the impossibility of making a comparison between words and experience. With irony, this stanza points to the inefficacy of the poet’s effort to write about experiences that are so extreme that they defy the power of words. In the seventh stanza, Tussman’s speaker explains that the knowledge she has gained from lying on the earth like a murdered person has taught her that both the victim and the murderer are fated to weep eternally for the humanity that has been lost. Tussman’s revision of this poem from its original published form reveals how she developed it into a response to the Holocaust when she compiled Lider. The significant changes from the earlier version of the

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

poem occur in the lines corresponding to stanzas 5 and 7 in the 1949 version. In the early version, these lines read: And what is too much And what is too much For despair With teeth in the earth?! ... And man is provoked And man is greedy, And man is lonely And man will always, Oh, always Need to weep for himself.58 (13–16, 20–25)

When, in 1949, Tussman replaced the abstract fartsveyfl (despair) with the specific verter (words) and geshrey (shouting), she drew attention to the consequences upon speech that having one’s face shoved into the earth would have: What are words Compared to Teeth in the earth? What is shouting Compared to Teeth in the earth? (10–15)

Furthermore, in 1949, Tussman replaced the irritation, greed, and loneliness of the generalized “man”—mentsh—with the speaker’s firstperson interpretation of the crises experienced by both the murdered person, whose teeth remain in the earth, and the one who can rise from the earth and continue to live: It’s clear to me I know precisely why The man Who digs the earth with his teeth And he Who tears himself from the earth

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Forever Oh, ever Must weep for himself.59 (20–28)

The 1949 text revises the earlier version’s generalized, modern human predicament of doubt, torment, and isolation into the specific dilemma of a Yiddish poet who, after the Holocaust, has only similes with which to comprehend what has happened. Tussman’s generalization of the human condition in terms of a “universal” masculine in this poem contrasts with other poems in Lider that focus specifically on women. By voicing such a conventional hegemony in this key poem, Tussman reveals a rare ambivalence about asserting authority as a woman poet. Tussman’s concern with the futility of figurative language echoes poems by Anna Margolin, discussed in chapter 4, which question whether similes can possibly describe the harrowing experiences of mental illness and of sex. In its earlier 1934 version, Tussman’s poem had echoed Margolin’s questions, but in the context of Tussman’s 1949 book Lider, the revised “Mit tseyn in der erd” responds to the teacher’s anguished question about the adequacy of language to express the horrors of the Holocaust. Now, this poem suggests, a teacher can tell her students how it must feel to be murdered. And because it is forbidden to teach such a truth to children, the teacher perceives her own mouth to be filled with earth. The Yiddish poet has been doubly silenced by the historical trauma—literally, as an instructor of the Jewish alphabet and its lessons, and as a poet herself. In “Tsu dir Miryam,” Tussman had established a dialogue between a biblical poet and a postHolocaust woman poet in order to subvert the continuity of Jewish culture. In “Vos zol ikh zey dertseyl?” Tussman reiterated that subversion by transforming the poet into a stymied teacher. In “Mit tseyn in der erd,” the teacher and the poet merge into a witness who can teach only by writing a poem that imagines the unimaginable death of each of the millions. Drawing the collective loss down into the voice and imagination of a single speaker, Tussman establishes the tense, vivid balance of her signature style. From this point in Lider, Tussman articulates what she came to insist on throughout her poetic career: that the poet is an individual,

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

discrete voice who speaks both for herself and for others. This persona appears most clearly in the penultimate section of Lider, “Froyen” (Women). In this section, Tussman turns away from the Holocaust theme in order to depict women’s conflicted relations with men.60 In fact, Tussman wrote most of the nine poems in this section before or at the beginning of the war years, but their depiction of women resonates with the Holocaust poems’ depiction of the Yiddish poet’s reaction to the Jews’ suffering. The issues raised by the female voice, the burden of remembering and forgetting, the obligation to prayer, and the pleasures of sex continue throughout Tussman’s poetry. The nine poems in “Froyen” portray specific women who, caught in risky sexual and social situations, are in danger of losing their identities. Within these poems, sexuality defines the precarious lives of these women protagonists, as if the sexual subjugation of women were a symptom of the knowledge of murdered humanity, brought on by the Holocaust. The first poem of “Froyen,” “A gelibte vayb” (A Beloved Wife), describes a woman luxuriating in her bed late one morning: From her brows drip, Drip again Droplets of belated dreams. On her body still breathes The warmth of bed. With her hand, she strokes the cushion— It’s already late. Her purple robe embraces her politely; Quiet, silken rustling in her ear: After such a night You should be sunny. And the purple curls, Curls around her body. Tired is a beloved wife. The water in the bathtub Clears up before her. The soap in the little dish Waits and tidies itself. Her bones indulge

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In the soft robe. She is a little lazy. Her feet sway down from the bed— Two small hares escaping. In a row by her bed, Three pairs of shoes languish and yearn With open mouths. Everything and everyone is ready to serve a fondled body. Tired is a beloved wife.61 (1–28)

Stanza one describes a vayb (wife/woman) awakening slowly, still half in her dreams and encompassed by the bed’s warmth. The image of her languidly stroking the pillow implies the husband’s recent caressing of his wife’s body. This personification of objects develops in the second stanza, as the woman’s “purple robe embraces her politely” and admonishes her to “be sunny” after “such a night.” Even wearing a bathrobe seems an effort for this woman, because, as “the purple curls, / Curls around her body[,] / Tired is a beloved wife.” The wife’s “beloved” status makes all objects eager to serve her, in the third stanza, as “The water in the bathtub / Clears up before her” and “The soap in the little dish / Waits and tidies itself.” Yet the woman is slow to act, even to bathe: “Her bones indulge themselves / In the soft robe. / She is a little lazy.” When, in the final stanza, the woman begins to get out of bed, the animated objects that surround her, ready to do her bidding, take on a subtly menacing cast. Her bodily movement seems tentative, as “Her feet sway down from the bed,” and that quality increases with the metaphor comparing them to “Two small hares escaping.” With feet likened to fleeing prey, the woman’s sensual lassitude becomes a form of entrapment. Who has trapped the “two small hares” that are her feet is only implied, but we understand that such confinement characterizes the state of being “a beloved wife.” Thus, the image of “Three pairs of shoes,” which “languish and yearn / With open mouths,” reads with a threatening humor. The open mouths of the shoes long to devour the woman’s feet like “fleeing hares.” As “a beloved wife,” this woman is reduced to being “a fondled body,” and as such is enervated by the pleasurable luxury inherent in that status.

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

The words “late,” “tired,” “lazy,” and again “tired,” italicized in each closing line of the four stanzas, emphasize the passivity and satiation of a woman who is subjugated by her own body beloved by a man.62 “A gelibte vayb” is the first of five character studies that depict the lives of women who suffer because they define themselves according to their relationships with men. Interspersed among them are three dramatic monologues about renunciation. The character poems are about the limitations of fulfillment.63 A reading of these poems reveals the tension between renunciation and fulfillment, as the women depicted in them attempt to deal with impossible situations. The second character study, “Reyzls broyt iz shvarts” (Reyzl’s Bread Is Black), tells of the difficult sexual life of Reyzl, a lower-class Jewish woman in the countryside of Eastern Europe, whose “skin is thick” but “heart is thin.”64 The poem depicts the emerging self-knowledge of a Jewish woman condemned by her class to eat the black bread made from unrefined flour and to endure a brutal and unsatisfying sexual life with her husband. Contemplating a countess ( grafinye) whom she glimpses having sex with a groveling lover, through “the crack in a door,” she reflects upon her own situation. Her husband is “ugly with a self-righteous face.” He doesn’t wear “pressed trousers” and never asks for sex, but rather takes her as he likes. Reyzl contrasts the countess’s relationship with her own: “And everything with them is so pretty. / With her—so vulgar.” Reyzl’s awareness of how class difference alters sexual relationships makes her dream of a different way to live. First, she “longs and craves / at least a mild look.” But even in this desire, she realizes that the class differences are insurmountable: “No. / She does not want much, / Only / Quiet.” Rather than longing to have a relationship like that of a grafinye, Reyzl simply wants to be left alone. But she knows that she is denied the luxury of solitude, too. Her husband cannot help himself or change his character or behavior any more than she can become a countess. She understands that because he must “Work with sweat,” and drinks to comfort himself, her husband will never see her as anything but an object to fulfill his needs. Despite her new insight, Reyzl cannot change the life that traps her: “So why, then, / Would he ask her? / Those who don’t wear pressed trousers / Don’t ask, / Don’t fondle, / Don’t stroke / And she is no countess.” With irony, Tussman’s poem exposes the conundrum of

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the simple woman, whose awakening to the limits imposed upon her by class difference necessitates that she resign herself to accept them. In the third character study, “Gitele mitn gebentshtn boykh” (Gitele with Her Blessed Belly), Tussman interrogates the traditional assumptions that determine a woman’s moral status through her reproductive sexuality.65 The opening two stanzas depict how Gitele offsets the physical hardship of her pregnancy—swollen, blue veins in her hands—by whispering the names of her future sons “like a prayer” (un sheptshen vi tfile di nemen / fun zin mit di likhtike kep). Informed by “a song” “from everywhere” that her pregnancy is a blessing, Gitele bends her body in the posture of piety, rocking back and forth “piously to the melody” of the cantillation of the Torah (vigt zikh frum un mit trop). The world approves of Gitele’s pregnancy, which fulfills God’s commandment in Genesis to Adam, and through him, to Eve, to be fruitful and multiply. Despite her acquiescent physical response, Gitele does not fully accept this affirmative message from her environment. She “smiles thinly down to her belly” (shmeykhlt Gitele din tsum boykh arop) and breaks off the third repetition of the adjective, “Blessed,” in the middle—“Gebentshtn,/Gebentshtn,/Geben—.” What interrupts Gitele’s blessing of her pregnant belly is a series of wails (az vie falt tsu vie tsu), whose source Tussman’s telegraphic style leaves ambiguous; they are cries either of Gitele or of her future baby, and they send Gitele into a reverie of her past life. Gitele recalls herself as “a foolish young sapling,” a charming girl (an ­antikele fun shtot) brought from the city to the village to marry “the best of the lessee’s sons.” Tussman conveys Gitele’s initial romanticization of her country marriage through the imagery of “Bells and lilacs,” “Cherry blossoms and barley stalks,” and “jasmine.” Gitele remembers the maturation  of her marriage through the metaphors of the promise and fragrance of flowers that lead to a catalogue of fruit— ”Gooseberries, raspberries, acacia and apples; / Pears, cherries, currants and plums. / ­Service-berries and guilder-roses / water-elders.” Instead of bringing fulfillment and joy, though, this fecundity results in sadness. The progression of imagery from flowers to fruits connotes Gitele’s bountifully pregnant belly, yet all this abundance results only in “Frogs in the rushes / Wind / In / Chimneys. / Willow branches swaying, hugging tight—/ Ooo—sadness.”

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

Conveyed through the metaphor of “empty pitchers” (leydike krugn), a series of miscarriages causes this sadness. In contrast to her inability to conceive or carry a child to term, Gitele avidly observes the calf suckling in the farmyard, punctuating the contrast between the calf’s vitality and her own infertility with the repeated nokh, nokh! (more, more!), a phrase that echoes the repetitions in the preceding stanza of gekumen, gekumen (came, came) and gornisht gebrakht,/gornisht gebrakht (brought nothing). When Gitele remarks upon the calf that s’iz gut! (It’s good!), she reiterates God’s affirmative refrain in the Creation story (Gen. 1: v’yomer Elohim, ki tov [And God said that it was good]). As if she cannot bear to see this goodness denied her, she closes her eyes, and then looks out the window and prays. The prayer of this good woman resounds with traditional Jewish references, beginning with a salutation typical of tkhines, Raboynu shel oylem (Master of the Universe), and comparing herself with the biblical Hannah, who pledges her offspring to the service of God, if she can conceive. But Gitele’s prayer does not conform to that tradition. Instead, she prays for a baby to redeem herself, an urbane woman trapped among windmills and raw earth in a backwater marriage to a dorfishn yid (village Jew). In the end, the poem clarifies the current situation of Gitele, finally carrying a pregnancy to term, as she reminisces while preparing for the Sabbath. Once she “has / Entered the Sabbath’s fine, long stillness,” Gitele admonishes herself to find peace in her expectancy. However, although the final stanza repeats Gitele’s piety, it bodes that motherhood will not bring Gitele peace: The repetition of gebentsht (Blessed) again breaks off mid-syllable. Gitele entraps herself in her own acquiescent goodness, and the traditional role of a good Jewish wife provides her with an incomplete comfort. With irony and empathy, Tussman explores the tension between the religious laws governing women’s sexuality and the experience of that sexuality by women, a tension that Molodowsky had addressed in her 1927 “Froyen-lider VI and VII,” on infertility and childbirth, and in her 1945 “Mayne kinder,” on a woman’s regret at having aborted or miscarried babies. In contrast to Reyzl, brutalized by her husband, and to Gitele, resentful of her pregnancy, the protagonist of the fourth character study, “­Ikhome,” glories in her solitude but suffers as much for her independence as the other characters suffer for their oppressive relations

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with men.66 For this poem, Tussman invented a woman’s name by joining two Hebraic Yiddish nouns, nekhome”(consolation, comfort) and nekome (revenge, vengeance), with both the Hebrew name for the biblical Book of Lamentations, “Aicha,” and the Yiddish first-person singular pronoun, ikh (I). The resulting name, “Ikhome,” denotes “consolation in myself,” and the opening line repeats the name’s first syllable, ikh. Ikhome walks alone in the city, comes home alone, and celebrates herself when alone in the privacy of her house. In this dazzling, pure solitude, the “I” splits from the “self.” Celebrating this divided identity results in an odd kind of self-embrace, engaging Ikhome’s eyes, lips, and hands. Because this solitary love-making is “Not man, not woman,” Ikhome’s “Fingers sobbed on the weeping rib bones.” The term “ribbones” alludes subversively to Genesis 2, where God took Adam’s rib to create Eve in order that Adam should not remain alone. In her sexual self-sufficiency, though, Ikhome reverses God’s work and is left “More alone” than anyone. She imposes her ego on others so relentlessly that she calls her sexuality into question and isolates herself. Piercing the camouflage of her dazzling appearance, Tussman depicts this woman’s pain. Among the protagonists in the four character studies—the beloved wife; Reyzl, the abused wife; Gitele, the unhappy pregnant wife; and Ikhome, the narcissistic beauty—not one is happy. According to Tussman’s “Froyen” poems, all options for women, with or without men, are painful. Tussman culminates the problematic portraiture of women’s sexual relations with men in the fifth character study, “Shpigl ponim” (Mirror-Face).67 Mirror-face!!! He went out And slammed the door fast behind him And she Remained furious, beside herself. On her cheek still hovered the warmth Of a huge hand. A hand that originally raised up a little face: True, destined. In the huge hand the little face paled And struggled.

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

Above the tiny little face, Above the pale little face A huge face suddenly brightened And eclipsed light and world And breath. Resonance in ears Rings mild echo-words. On pallor flickers up A wild rose. Wild rose color plays crescendo, Colors break in desire/lust. Wild rose in forehead ignites Two desires. Whose eyes spew pitch and sulphur!? Oy, whose, whose eyes Are obdurate against Eros’ bow? Small hands Two terrified dove-wings Tremble against the mirror— Face!!!68 (1–32)

The poem opens and closes with the enigmatic phrase shpigl-ponem (mirror-face). Repeated twice in the title and the first line of the poem as an exclamation of the protagonist’s name for herself, the phrase “mirror-face” is reiterated a third time, enjambed across the final lines. Aside from this phrase, the characters in the poem do not have names. The man is referred to by the personal pronouns er, im, and zayn (he, him, and his), recalling the nameless speakers in the dialogues that comprise the third section in Dropkin’s “Odem” and Margolin’s final poem “Er bringt troyer” (He Brings Sorrow). But where Dropkin’s dialogue between the archetypal “He” and “She” evinces a struggle for sexual dominance that the woman achieves through her art, and Margolin condemns a man’s aesthetic objectification of a beautiful woman, Tussman’s poem sets up an unresolved tension between a man’s brutality and a woman’s self-knowledge. The four lines that follow the open-

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ing refrain—“Mirror-face!!!”—depict the man and woman in a violent drama: “He went out / And slammed the door fast behind him / And she / Remained furious, beside herself.” Immediately the poem shifts into the woman’s point of view to depict the internal, sensory, inarticulable experience of someone in profound shock, with the woman’s physical memory of “his hand” on “her cheek:” “On her cheek still hovered the warmth / Of a huge hand.” While this image might connote a man stroking the face of his beloved, it is ominous in the c­ ontext of his departure and her suppressed reaction. Stanza 3 begins with a couplet, consisting of a sentence fragment that characterizes the action of the man’s hand in the past and its apparently benign intention: “A hand that originally raised up a little face: / True, destined.” With this couplet, the poem emits a staccato shorthand of sentence fragments that lack active verbs and nouns, and also lack articles, thereby reducing the characters to their disembodied faces, hands, ears, and eyes. The disruption of syntax and the depiction of the character and action through metonomy and synecdoche convey simultaneously the intimacy of overhearing or eavesdropping on a person talking to herself and the terror and shock of someone who is trying to keep calm or regain control after a traumatic experience. In both cases, language serves not as a medium of communication or of artistic creation, but rather as a means of psychological survival. T ­ ussman fashions this language of trauma and survival into a poem. Tussman’s “Shpigl-ponim” gives voice to what a woman cannot articulate when her very sense of self is challenged by a man’s violence. The rhyming words Bavert, bashert (True, destined) juxtapose the romantically and religiously sanctioned beliefs with which the woman initially understands her overall relationship with the man and his specific gesture of raising up her face in his hand. But then the man’s gesture turns threatening and the woman’s acceptance of his physical power over her becomes one of fear, anger, and resistance: “In the huge hand, the little face paled / And struggled.” Attempting to defend herself against the man, the woman finds her small face eclipsed by his large face: Above the tiny little face, Above the pale little face

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

A huge face suddenly brightened And eclipsed light and world And breath. (12–16)

The diminutive for “face,” peniml, introduced in lines 8 and 10 and repeated in lines 12–13, effects the many meanings of smallness. While in line 8, the small face raised up by the man’s large hand connotes his affection and his words of endearment in a conventional love, in line 10 the face pales and struggles in “the huge hand.” This contrast underlines how affection can turn into manipulation (literally, the control by the hand) if one party is large and the other small. When Tuss­man repeats peniml (tiny face) in lines 12 and 13, the ponem a groys (huge face), echoing the “huge hand,” becomes terrifying: “A huge face suddenly brightened / And eclipsed light and world.” No longer are a large man and a small woman linked sexually by the conventions of romantic love and Jewish marriage—“Bavert, bashert.” Rather, a man’s huge hand, grasping the small face of a small woman, holds it so that when he draws his face so close to hers—whether in affection or to threaten—he grows to the dimensions of a sun or a moon, and blocks her perception of “light and world / And breath.” The man’s overbearingly physical presence threatens to kill the woman, whether physically and literally, or spiritually and metaphorically. Yet, in stanza 5, the two couplets convey quiet enigmatic images of sound and touch: Resonance in ears Rings mild echo-words. On pallor flickers up A wild rose. (17–20)

The sudden shift in tone makes unclear when this stanza takes place and who is hearing the “mild echo-words.” If the woman recalls a better time with her husband and expresses ambivalence that she still loves and desires him, then the “mild echo-words” may be her aural memory of his endearments. Or perhaps these viderverter milde are the woman’s memory of the man’s endearments, which she now realizes were merely echoes of her love for him. Or, perhaps in this stanza

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and the next, the woman realizes, standing alone before the mirror, that she is of two minds about her desire for him. The visual image of the “wild rose” combines with the aural image of the echoes and leads to several possible readings: in the first, the woman remembers how her blushing stimulated the man’s lust or desire ( glustn), which in turn “ignites / Two desires” (lustn), his and hers; while in another reading, as the woman sees her own flushed face in the mirror, she feels the contradictory desires both to be with her husband and to escape from him. In the next stanza, the narrator’s questions become the reader’s: Whose eyes spew pitch and sulphur!? Oy, whose, whose eyes Are obdurate against Eros’s bow? (25–28)

By suppressing the personal and possessive pronouns, Tussman charges the actions with ambiguity: Are the man’s eyes demonic? Do the woman’s eyes resist Eros? Does she resist his sexual advances, or is she ambivalent about wanting to accept them? In the context of the violence depicted and implied in the preceding stanzas, these lines suggest that the woman struggles with her desire for this man who has hit her and either raped or threatened to rape her. She fears and resists him, yet she is also drawn to him. In the violent sexual relationship depicted in this poem, the woman, victimized, is yet, in some ways, complicit. She is trying to figure out who she is within and outside of this relationship, in relation to him and in relation to her own image in the mirror. The final stanza returns the poem to its title and opening line: Small hands Two terrified dove-wings Tremble against the mirror— Face!!!69 (29–32)

As the woman’s “small hands” “tremble against the mirror” like “two terrified dove wings,” it becomes clear that she has been standing in front of the mirror from the beginning of the poem, looking at her

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

face with the red mark of her passion and his blow. She faces herself at the moment she realizes the danger and the lure of her relationship to this man. At the poem’s beginning, she sees only her “mirror-face,” her reflection. By the end of the poem, as her terrified “small hands” touch the reflection of her flushed face on the mirror’s cold surface, she realizes who she is, “Face!” The poem concludes with irony: Although she knows that she must escape from the relationship, the woman cannot escape from the reflection she sees of her contradictory self. Trapped in its mirror image, her face is no longer the hyphenated shpigl-ponem (mirror-face), nor the peniml (a beloved woman’s diminutive face seen by her lover), but rather it is the ponem—the full face with which she must face her truth. Tussman dramatizes the trajectory of this story in the subtle changes she plays with in the phrase shpigl ponem. The title presented the phrase shpigl ponem as two separate nouns, “mirror” and “face,” juxtaposed with no syntactic or semantic relationship to explain them. The first line hyphenated the words into an epithet, shpigl-ponem, “mirrorface.” Following the pattern of peniml and ponem, which traces the woman’s interior narrative in the body of the poem, the final two lines return the words to discrete entities, separated by enjambment, syntax, and punctuation: tsitern antkegn shpigl—/ ponem!!! ” (Tremble against the mirror—/ Face!!!), With the indirect object of the verb and newly exclaimed name, the words “mirror” and “Face,” the woman protagonist learns who she is. In these five character studies, Tussman works through the conflict between the roles decreed for women by class, culture, and religion and what women want. Tussman concludes the sequence “Froyen” with a renewed notion of identity in the ninth poem, “Ikh bin froy,” which combines the historical collective identities of archetypal Jewish women with the modern individual identity of a particular Jewish woman in America, after the Holocaust: I am the exulted Rachel whose love lit the road from Rabbi Akiba’s. I am the small, shy village girl who grew among tall poplars and blushed at the “good morning” of my brother’s teacher. I am the pious girl who paled as her mother’s fingers trembled over her eyes at the candle blessing.

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I am the obedient bride who humbly brought her head to the shears on the eve of her wedding. I am the woman of valor who undertook bearing and nurturing for a little promised Paradise-light. I am the refined daughter of a scholar who saved a Jewish city with her guarded body and then with her own life set herself afire. I am the mother who under inconceivable afflictions, to the point of consumption, raised sons to good deeds. I am the Hasidic daughter who with her father’s ardor carried her shorn head into the people. I am the bridle-breaker who shared “bread and freedom” and freed love from under the khupe poles. I am the coddled girl who, behind the plow, forced gray desert into green life. I am the girl who ordered her white hands to carry bricks and stones to the raising of renewed life. I am she whose fingers stiffen around the spade, lying in wait for the footsteps of the destroyer. I am she who stubbornly carries around a strange alphabet and whispers it into the ears of children. I am all these and yet many, many not mentioned. And everywhere And always I am Woman.70 (1–18)

“Ikh bin froy” is comprised of fifteen free-verse stanzas, each a single sentence. In the opening two stanzas, the speaker proclaims her identity in two distinct voices, which contrast what she has learned from books and what she knows from experience: the exulted Rachel, daughter of the Talmud’s legendary Rabbi Akiba, and a shy Jewish village girl of late-nineteenth-century Ukraine. Speaking in the first person through these characters, the speaker both affirms and transcends

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

her distinct identity. In such simultaneous affirmation and transcendence of the self, the poet becomes a mediator between the texts of Jewish history and the reader of her poem. The next five stanzas of “Ikh bin froy” define the “I” as various types of Jewish women from traditional lore—dos frume meydl (the pious girl), dos kale-meydl (the bride), di eyshes khayel (the woman of valor), di bas-talmid khokhem (the scholar’s daughter), and di mame (the mother). Heroic in their daily adherence to Jewish law, the pious girl, the bride, the woman of valor, and the mother mark the progress of a traditional woman’s life from girlhood to marriage to motherhood. The girl learns to follow the three “women’s commandments” from her own mother’s example: the bride hearkens to the customs of modesty prescribed upon marriage, and the woman of valor, whose praise is sung each Friday evening in the traditional Hebrew song, “Eyshes khayil,” earns her reward in the world to come by assuming the responsibilities of childbearing and child-rearing. Expanding beyond this quotidian valor of pious women, the poet presents two historical examples of extraordinary self-sacrifice: the scholar’s daughter, who martyrs herself to the Crusaders to save the  Jewish city; and the afflicted mother, who sacrifices her health for the pious men her sons will become. In stanzas 8–13, Tussman situates these heroic types in more recent Jewish history, as the six women in these lines transform the religious ardor of their forebears into secular terms. Although the daughter of a Hasid cuts her hair like a traditional bride, she immodestly bares her head and transforms her father’s religious ardor into socialism. Women’s roles expand beyond marriage and chidlbearing: the anarchist “bridle-breaker” frees love from the institution of marriage; one girl plows, and another builds the Judean desert into the Jewish State; a woman waits in a wartime field to take revenge on “the destroyer”; and a teacher stubbornly teaches the Yiddish alphabet to subsequent generations of children. In the concluding stanzas, the speaker claims her identity as froy, “Woman” rather than “a woman.” In the end, “Ikh bin froy” depicts these women characters as revising rather than rejecting tradition. The conflict that Tussman works through so subtly in the other poems in “Froyen”—between the roles decreed for women by class, culture, and religion and what women want—disappears from “Ikh

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bin froy.” The speaker calls forth each of the valorous types of Jewish women without irony; she does not challenge the traditional precepts or assumptions, even when some of these women define themselves by their rebellion. Suppressing the contradictions, Tussman argues for the continuity rather than the rupture of Jewish tradition for postHolocaust Jewish women. The catalogue of characters, the long verse lines, and the proclamatory, universal “I” reflect the strong influence of Walt Whitman. Tussman’s final lines echo Whitman’s celebratory opening in “Song of Myself”: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.71 (1–3)

Tussman’s poem also builds upon one of Whitman’s many devices, the poet’s assumption of other identities, as when Whitman writes: I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, ... I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.72 (422; 425–427)

Later in the poem, he takes on the additional roles of doctor, teacher, and athlete.73 Even while Whitman’s poet transcends the conventional notion of the self and dips into a myriad of other lives and modes of existence, he maintains his identity as the author of the poem by asserting his equality with God, the Author of Creation: “Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? / . . . / (I am large, I contain multitudes.).” He also allies himself with the earth: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” Whitman’s transcendentalism is as American as the dirt under the feet of his American reader. Similarly, the speaker in “Ikh bin froy” assumes the identities of Jewish women throughout the Diaspora to reflect her historical moment in 1949. Tussman transcends the rhetorical limits of the speaker’s voice,

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

becoming a single speaker who represents each individual from a communal perspective. In “Ikh bin froy,” Tussman resolves the problems of a woman’s identity in relation to a man and the laws of men by placing the individual woman speaker into a lineage of Jewish women. The tone of this poem differs from the other poems in the “Froyen” section of Lider. Instead of the tentative, ironic ikh (I) of the first-person poems or the depictions of troubled, modern women in the narrative poems, the speaker of “Ikh bin froy” finds her voice in unity with Jewish women throughout history. Furthermore, “Ikh bin froy” traverses the generational struggle between religious adherence and enlightened Jewish nationalism, asserting that the daughter has inherited from the father the Jewish spiritual zeal with which she will “rais[e] . . . renewed life” and perpetuate the “strange alphabet” of Jewish texts, no matter what they say. This proclamation of Jewish continuity through the “strange alphabet” resolves the doubt expressed by the teacher—that she could transmit Jewish tradition spelled out in Yiddish letters only by falsifying the violence suffered by the Jews—in “What Shall I Tell Them?” Written between 1947 and 1948, during the tense months when the State of Israel was established, “Ikh bin froy” reconfigures the losses of World War II into an assertion of Jewish continuity. Tussman advocates for Jewish peoplehood, as the Labor Poets, eschewed by the modernists, had advocated for socialism in the early twentieth century. It is significant that Tussman figures the message of the Jews’ survival in the voice of a woman poet. Because Jewish culture has not acknowledged the heroism of women in upholding the tradition, initiating change, and defending against enemies throughout the Diaspora, the woman who continues writing poetry in Yiddish must correct that omission.74 By creating a lineage of Jewish women that will fill the silence, Tussman seeks to speak for all women, and she speaks with an indifference to their differences. Behind the woman poet’s defiant voice resounds the silence of the dead who cannot speak. Tussman thus resumes her dialogue with the prophetess Miriam, which she had ended with a refusal to pray. Although now she neither forgives God nor calls for renewed prayer, Tussman retracts her 1945 condemnation of tradition by representing the poet as a Jewish “Everywoman.”

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By attributing Jewish survival to the heroic acts of ordinary Jewish women, she rewrites Jewish history. In her subsequent five books of poetry, Tussman continued to explore the creative process involved in writing poetry through tropes of sexuality and gender, but she also linked poetic creativity to religious devotion and rebellion against God. In her second book, Mild mayn vild (Mild My Wild, 1956), Tussman located female creativity in the natural world, as in the poem “Erd” (Earth): Earth, My lilac has blossomed And your moistness is piercingly sweet Around my bare feet. I gape at your perfection and wonder Astounded as Eve. I rock in the illusion of love In the safety of your depth. I probe my heels and root down, Down. You embrace me and Your darkness becomes tinder. In your panting breath, spaciously, breastily, I rise and Become full of desire. Primeval power pounds, pricking my veins And crosses an ascension— I become gigantic And wing my imagination above heaven, above. The ends of the world resound, Call to each other. I grow! My flaming crown will soon be ready. To reach unbelievable, terrifying altitudes. Suddenly I sense a great movement down in your depths

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

And I Become all the less           All the less               All the less.75 (1–30)

Alluding to the biblical Eve, Tussman expounds upon the sexual energy summoned by the season. The imagery of expansion and growth of a tree recalls Anna Margolin’s 1929 poem, “Muter erd,” in which the speaker, taking the voice of the earth, addressed the male listener in the form of a tree that grows out of her soil. In “Erd,” Tussman reverses Margolin’s metaphor: she speaks not as the maternal earth, but rather addresses it in the voice of a woman who metamorphoses into a tree (lines 9–24). Tussman’s speaker gains power from the sensuous delights the earth offers her, but when she feels too empowered, when her imagination, enriched by the earth, ascends too high above heaven, the speaker feels a movement deep within the earth and is brought back down to size, but shrunken even smaller than she was when she began the poem. In “Erd,” Tussman establishes a prototype for female creativity that she repeats in many of her subsequent poems. The prototype presents a speaker who gains inordinate strength from or challenges a larger force (the earth, the deity), but then realizes that she has exceeded her proper limits and thereby affronted that larger force. In response, she retreats. The same aspect of nature that empowers the speaker and her imagination inevitably diminishes her. So, too, in a 1977 poem “Fargesn” (Forgotten), the speaker, playing an obedient woman’s role of lighting the candles, challenges God’s authority and threatens to demand obedience from him, but then is disempowered by her own forgetfulness. In both poems, Tussman calls up the tools of the poet— imagination, words, ideas, voice—which are granted power and then contained or diminished. Through this pattern of hubris and deflation, Tussman transforms the Greek myth of Daedelus, who flies too close to the sun, into a gendered archetype of human creativity—the ambitious female self whose creative powers drive her to achieve more than is humanly possible.

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In the poem “Vi andershdik” (How Otherly), Tussman anchors this creativity within the female body by likening the writing of poetry to childbirth: Word in embryo, How beautiful and complete you are in the imagination’s warmth And how otherly you are In the play Of syllables on my lip. How terrifying was the first look Into the face of my newborn little boy But then Suddenly, my eye flutters and I recognize him. You, my word, Must beforehand demand, demand, That in your ripeness I recognize you.76

Stanza 1 addresses the personified “Word,” the medium of poetry, by comparing it to an embryo. In this comparison, a word not yet uttered or written is likened to an unborn fetus, and the imagination in which that word is conceived is likened to the womb. The subsequent lines, “And how otherly [andershdik] you are / In the play / Of syllables on my lip), develop the contrast between what is potential and what is enacted. The adjective andershdik, from the adverb ­­andersh, has two possible meanings—“different” or “elsewhere.” If the embryonic word is “other,” then that very divide between the unborn and the born characterizes the yet-to-be-realized being. A word that stays in the imagination, like a fetus lingering in the womb, is “different” from what it will be once it emerges. The second meaning of ­andershdik, “elsewhere,” compounds the otherness of the unborn with its remoteness from the speaker’s world. The rest of the sentence characterizes the “you” as andershdik in the “play / Of syllables on my lip.” Although words are made up of syllables, individual syllables played upon a lip do not necessarily make up a word. However beautiful and complete the imagined word may be, the act of utterance renders it imperfect.

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

In the second stanza, the speaker shifts to a memory of the moment after giving birth: “How terrifying was the first look / Into the face of my newborn little boy.” What caused the mother’s terror was the andershdik quality of her newborn son. But in an instant (nor ot), though, the speaker’s eye suddenly flutters and she recognizes him. When the mother gives birth, and thus transforms the fetus into a child, it takes only a sudden flicker within the eye to change her perception so that she can recognize what was previously andershdik. The mother, creator of the fetus, must revise her vision so that she can accept the baby once it is outside her body and separate from her. In comparison, a word given life by the poet presents a different problem: “You, my word, / Must beforehand demand, demand, / That in your ripeness, / I recognize you.” Unlike a woman’s child, the poet’s word must “demand” that its creator recognize its existence. While the new mother has an instinctual desire to know her newborn infant, the poet must be prodded by her mature or ripe work to recognize and accept it. By comparing the biological process of a mother who creates a fetus, which becomes a separate being, with the creative process of a poet, Tussman reverses the childbirth metaphor to emphasize the essential “difference,” the andershdikayt (otherness) between childbirth and writing. What the poet writes is foreign and other to her until it speaks, demanding that she claim it. Just as “Erd” contrasted with Margolin’s “Muter erd,” so Tussman’s reversal of the childbirth metaphor in “Vi andershdik” contrasts pointedly with Celia Dropkin’s 1935 poem “A libe briv” (A Love Letter). While Dropkin’s poem evoked through the metaphor of a stillborn, plant-like fetus a love poem that was never written, Tussman’s “Vi andershdik” presents through the metaphor of a viable fetus and newborn son a poem written but not spontaneously embraced by its maker. While Dropkin wrote her poem in the conditional mood (Ikh volt veln shraybn / a libe-briv, a libe briv [“I would want to write a love letter, a love letter”]), Tussman writes her poem in the declarative and the subjunctive (az ikh zol in dayn tsaytikayt / dikh derkonen [“That I should in your ripeness / Recognize you”]). Significantly, Tussman’s title begins with the comparative article, vi, which in the syntactical context of the poem means “how,” but standing on its own in the title can also mean “like” or “as” and could also mean “like otherness” or

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“like elsewhere.” By bringing forward the idea of a simile, but making that simile a figure for the essential otherness of a woman poet’s written poem, Tussman enacts the ongoing tension between the vehicle and tenor of figurative language—a tension as old as Homer’s similes—and the ongoing tension between the creative issue of a woman’s body and that of her imagination and language. Tussman’s late poems returned to the themes of possibility and regeneration. Somewhat ironically, as the poet herself aged, her persona seemed to grow younger. Her poetic voice challenged the assumptions of tradition through metaphors of nature and sexuality. In a pair of poems from her 1972 book Bleter faln nit, “Duner mayn bruder” (Thunder My Brother) and “Mayn shvester” (My Sister), Tussman establishes a lineage for herself as a Yiddish poet:77 Thunder my brother My powerful brother, Stones rolling on stones—your voice. Like a forest, forceful, your voice. What pleasure you take in making mountains rattle, How happy you feel When you bewilder creeping creatures in the valley.78

(1–7)

Personifying the thunder as my brother (mayn bruder) in the first stanza, the speaker describes its “voice” (kol ) with metaphors that compare its noise to “stones rolling on stones” (shteyner af shteyner) and describe it as forested and dangerous (valdik un gvaldik). She attributes to the thunder “pleasure” ( freyd) when it shakes the mountains and terrifies the “creeping creatures” (krikhike bruim) in the valley. In the second stanza, the speaker explains her sibling relationship to the thunder through their father: Once Long ago The storm—my father— Rode on a dark cloud, And stared across To other side of the Order-of-the-Universe, Across to the chaos. I, too,

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

Have a voice— A voice of fearsome roaring In the grip of my muteness. (8–18)

Claiming that she shares the thunder’s father, “the storm” (der shturem—mayn tate), the speaker narrates a legendary event when a storm approached the boundary that separated the primordial chaos from God’s orderly creation of the universe in Genesis 1. Because the paternal storm’s gaze transgressed the divine order, the poet has “A voice of fearsome roaring” (a kol fun a moyredik brumen) like that of the thunder. However, unlike the thunder, the poet cannot make her voice heard, for it is trapped “In the grip of my muteness” (In klem fun mayn shtumen). The cause of her silence is explained in the third stanza: And there are strict commandments Forbidding me: “Thou shalt not, Thou shalt not” O thunder, My wild unbridled brother.79 (19–24)

These “strict commandments” (enge farbotn) that forbid the speaker, “Thou shalt not” (Du zolst nit), are the Ten Commandments that the poet had argued were negated by the Holocaust in the 1945 poem “Tsu dir Miryam.” In the 1972 poem, Tussman invokes these commandments as the limitations to a poetic voice that would cross the boundaries of God’s creation to challenge divine might. The parallel poem, “Mayn shvester” (My Sister), invokes God’s strict commandments, as the speaker addresses lightning as her “wanton, unbridled sister” (Farshayte, tselozene shvester), and asks it to pour its “thrashed beauty” (tsebaytshete sheynkayt) over the humble objects of her life, even while the poet closes her eyes before its “terrifying beauty” (shreklekher sheynkayt): Lightning my sister, Wanton, unbridled sister. Golden one, Streaming with thrashed beauty,

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Pour down over me fateful beauty, Gild my homely things, But before your terrifying beauty I Must close my eyes.80 (1–8)

Narrating a second myth of origin, the speaker tells that she and her sister the lightning share a mother, “Silence”: Once, long ago Silence—my mother In her longing— She swung in white clouds, Pumped herself, Rocked herself over To the other side of dreams Gazed over at the gold of “abandon.” Therefore I also have gold— The gold of a shuddering pleasure: Thrashing gold in my laughter, Prickling gold in my gaze.81 (9–21)

In contrast to the thunder’s paternal legacy of the storm, the lightning’s maternal root is silence; and compared to the roar of primordial chaos that the storm imparts to his daughter the poet, the silence conveys to her daughter a taste of “the gold of ‘abandon’” ( gold f­unem “hef ker” ). Like the biblical phrase toye-voye (Hebrew: tohu vevohu, primordial chaos), the use of the Talmudic term hef ker 82—the word I have translated as “abandon”—points to the realms of unsocialized nature and unrestrained sexuality, access to both of which are denied to the speaker by the prohibitions of Jewish tradition. ­Toye-voye recalls the cosmological chaos that existed before the divine ordering of the universe. Hef ker points to chaos on a more human scale. Both property and people can become hef ker —the former by the owner renouncing his or her rights of ownership; the latter, by  having a ­woman’s husband or the woman herself relinquish exclusive possession of her body. Property that becomes hef ker can be taken by anyone. A woman who is hef ker can also be taken by anyone.83

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

When Tussman writes how “Silence—my mother / in her longing” gazed at the gold funem hef ker —the “gold of abandon”—on the other side of her dreams, she is describing how the mother, or woman, has been silenced by tradition, kept from articulating her desires or even knowing that she had them. Even a glimpse of hef ker , “abandon,” and its freedom might lead a woman to lose herself in licentious fulfillment. By claiming as her mother the personified Silence that swung high enough to see the danger and the allure of transgression, the speaker acknowledges how the desire to transgress expresses itself as the gold flash of lightning in every aspect of her physical existence. As in “Duner mayn bruder,” such expressions of this alluring but prohibited freedom must be contained: There are rigid commandments Forbidding me “Thou shalt not, Thou shalt not.” Oh, my wanton, unbridled little sister Lightning.84

(22–27)

Concluding with a stanza almost identical to the end of “Duner mayn bruder,” Tussman reiterates the paradoxical axiom that the restraints of Jewish law are intrinsic to the wantonness of modern poetry. Although the desire to transgress urges the poet to write, that writing requires the curbs offered by commandments that forbid transgression. From this tension comes poetry. Indeed, as she ages, Tussman’s speaker constantly regenerates herself through increasingly explicit sexual metaphors. In the poem “Midbar vint” (Desert Wind), the speaker recalls a shortcut taken through the Negev Desert that makes her reconsider the order of God’s world: Dusk comes on. We take a shortcut from Moshav Hogla To Kibbutz Hama’apil. The rickety pickup truck is Panting, bumping Over stones, sand and Clumps of red earth.

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Desolate desert—servile to The mad ruler—the wind. Desert wind rebels against the Creator. Here he mingles His paradise and hell. God formed mankind from Dust of the earth— Male and female to be fruitful And multiply. Here the desert wind forms His own creation: From hot sands he fashions Dazzling, rosy, smooth Female bodies, Makes them heavy with Passion, Symmetrically fits them into One another And gives them to Lesbian love— To eternal barrenness. Dusk: Colors of unearthly illumination Play a strange rhythm Over those bodies— An inkling of The other rhythm Before chaos was harnessed and tamed Into order. I gaze And before the dreadful beauty I half-close my eyes.85 (1–38)

Tussman wrote this poem in California in 1973, but it describes an experience she had in Israel in 1960. Riding through the desert twilight, the speaker regards the barren landscape as the creation of “The mad ruler—the wind,” which “rebels against the Creator” by mixing together Paradise and Hell and undoing the order of God’s creation of

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

humankind in Genesis, where the male and female were instructed to be fruitful and multiply. In the desert sands, the wind forms only “Dazzling, rosy, smooth / Female bodies,” which the speaker interprets as “heavy with / Passion” and given to “Lesbian love—/ To eternal barrenness.” The splendor of this half-lit landscape and the sexuality it suggests to the speaker both dazzle and terrify her. What she sees in the dusk is “An inkling of / The other rhythm / Before chaos was harnessed and tamed / Into order.” Repeating the language of “Duner mayn bruder” and “Mayn shvester,” the speaker finds the terrible or dreadful beauty (shreklekher sheynkayt, “My Sister”; ­shoyderlekher s­heynkeyt, “Desert Wind”) of the primordial chaos, ­toye-voye, both forbidden and irresistible: “Before the dreadful beauty / I half-close my eyes.” Whether it is the renunciation of the Shema in “Tsu dir Miryam” or women’s illicit sexual encounters in the “Froyen” poems, or the forbidden sexual knowledge of “Midbar vint,” the recurrent imagery of creativity in Tussman’s poems grows from the tension between what Jewish culture decrees and what lies beyond the boundaries of divine order. The poet’s subject matter arises from this liminality. The modern poet living at the edge of society finds her voice only when she transgresses. Even in a poem describing the physical vagaries of aging, Tussman embeds the narrative of illness and pain in a sexual metaphor, as in the title poem of the manuscript she left at her death, “Un ikh shmeykhl” (And I Smile): Yes, I’ve been beloved, Most dearly beloved, One suitor more enamoured than the other— In my house, their shadows Keep company with My silent smiles. Now My suitor is different, Volatile. He comes and takes me in his arms— Flames engulfing a sheaf. This is my latest feat,

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And I smile. You want to know his name? I will reveal it If You need to know: His name is “Pain.”86

(1–21)

The opening lines establish a mode of recollection, as an old woman reminisces about her lovers, bragging to a listener, perhaps a woman friend, that “One suitor [was] more enamoured than the other.” Halfway through the stanza, though, it becomes apparent that the speaker is alone with her memories, whose shadows cause her to smile silently. The second stanza calls that solitude into question, as it introduces what seems to be a new, even more passionate lover who, present at the moment of speaking, engulfs her in the heat of desire. In the third stanza, the speaker again summons the listener, and teases with artful enjambment, repetition, and rhyme, as if answering someone skeptical that an old woman would have a lover: vos iz zayn nomen vilt ir visn?/ zog ikh oys/oyb/visn iz aykh neytik (You want to know his name?/I will reveal it/If/You need to know.” The concluding lines present an unexpected answer: s’iz zayn nomen / ‘veytik’” (“His name is / ‘Pain.’”). By personifying pain as a lover and figuring the experience of physical suffering in a metaphor for passion, “Flames engulfing a sheaf,” Tuss­ man transforms the agony and isolation of an old woman’s physical infirmity into a poem. By choosing the sexual metaphor, Tussman situates the speaker of the poem unequivocally in a woman’s body. However alluring for the poet were the sexualized forces outside the order imposed by the Jewish God, Tussman continued to summon that God, as in her 1977 poem “Tate ziser” (Sweet Father): And I call Him Sweet Father Although I don’t remember my father. But I do remember A thorn,

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

A fire, A thunder, A mountain And something of a voice. When I think I hear His voice I shout at once: Here I am! Here I am, Sweet Father! When a father abandons, He is still a father, And I will not stop longing And calling “Here I am” Until He hears me Until He remembers me And calls my name And talks to me Through fire.87 (1–24)

Like Margolin’s 1929 “Fargesene geter” (Forgotten Gods), Tussman’s poem addresses the phenomenon of an incomplete devotional amnesia, in which the worshipper’s fragmented memories of deity assert themselves. Whereas Margolin, in the 1920s, masked this devotional impulse in the voice of an impersonal narrator who spoke in the name of classical pagan deities, Tussman’s first-person speaker summons the Jewish God. This deity is remembered through images of biblical moments of divine revelation. The “thorn” alludes to the Burning Bush; the “fire, thunder, and mountain” allude to the giving of the law at Sinai (Exod. 3:1–6). As in Molodowsky’s “Ikh bin a viderkol,” the Yiddish phrase Do bin ikh (Hebrew, hinneini) could refer to the story of the Binding of Isaac and Abraham’s response to God’s call (Gen. 22), although Tussman herself once told me that she had in mind the story of the young Samuel awakened for the first time near the Ark by God’s voice when she used that phrase in her poem (I Sam.3:4).88 These biblical episodes evoke the response of Abraham, Moses, and Samuel when God revealed himself. Tussman’s poem, in contrast, tells of God’s absence,

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yet with this phrase, she attempts to restore God’s presence. Reversing the roles, the person standing on the mountain persistently calls out, “I am here, I am here,” until God is compelled to ask the biblical question, “Where are you?” At the beginning of the poem, she claims not to remember the God so remote that his name has been forgotten. She can recall only the places where he once appeared. Nevertheless, the poet repeats the words of Abraham, Moses, and Samuel, “Here I am,” until God makes himself known to her. Significantly, Tussman refers to this forgotten and forgetting God through the metaphor of the “sweet father.” On the one hand, the Yiddish phrase tate ziser is a colloquial version of such traditional phrases of address in Hebrew prayers as avinu malkeynu (Our Father Our King) and av harakhamim (Merciful Father); yet tate ziser connotes a familiar and familial father, rather than the powerful father of kingship who grants mercy. By addressing God intimately, Tussman establishes both God’s emotional immediacy for this worshipper and the enormity of her estrangement from Him. The metaphorical filial sentiment strains against the fragmented abstractness of forgetting. Yet this tension enriches the familial metaphor, for even if God is like a father who willingly abandons his offspring (az a tate farlozt/iz er alts nokh a tate), his fatherhood remains intact. The relationship of parent to child, of God to worshipper transcends either member’s will or consciousness to acknowledge or act upon it. In depicting the reciprocal distancing and forgetting by both deity and worshipper, Tussman calls into question the entire structure of worship. Unlike the young Samuel, who mistakes the divine voice for that of his mentor Eli, this speaker takes as God’s voice whatever voice she hears. These lines dramatize the extent to which the incomplete communication is predicated on the speaker’s desire and expectation. Not remembering God, the speaker does remember the symbols that figure in the essential stories of human communion with God, especially the exact response of others who heard the divine voice. By quoting the biblical phrase repeatedly, the poet joins the individual speaker’s voice with the archetypal voice of communal prayer. Yet rhetorically, this poem is not a prayer, but rather it is a narration of the mutual forgetting that explains why prayer is not possible at the present moment. The poem’s only direct address to God, do

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

bin ikh, is presented initially as a direct quotation within the narrative action as the speaker tries to remember, and then it is repeated as the example of habitual action in the future, as the speaker awaits God’s remembering. This direct address, then, is ensconced in a narrative context. Because the poem is a narration, it maintains praying in balance with forgetting as a device subordinate to the rhetoric of telling. Both prayer and forgetfulness share a tentative reciprocity between the deity and the worshipper. In contrast, the narration is the poet’s surety of exchange, for it allows her to express what may come to pass: “Until he hears me / Until he remembers me / and calls my name.” As a narrative, this poem is true to its assertion of faith at a distance. It is significant that the poet changed the last line of the poem after the book appeared in print. In my copy of the book,Tussman crossed out the last line of the poem, revising it from durkh fayer (Through fire) to durkh likht (Through light).89 I understood this change to be consistent with her denial of God’s delight in fire sacrifice, which she stated in a discussion of another poem, “Mayn har,” for she believed that after the Holocaust, God would not make his presence known through the fire that had destroyed his people. Malka Heifetz Tussman’s own diminishing eyesight (due to glaucoma) intensified the symbolic power of light.90 With the repetition of Do bin ikh (Here I am), Tussman reiterates the fiddler’s assertion, Ikh bin do, in Molodowsky’s “Ikh bin a viderkol.” While Molodowsky’s fiddler insists on the continuing presence of Yidishkayt despite the destruction of the Jewish people and culture, Tuss­man’s poem asks whether the Jewish God still exists. Despite uncertainties of culture and divinity, the refrain reiterated by both Molodowsky and Tussman momentarily assures the precarious survival of Yiddish poetry in the late twentieth century. In a later poem, “Fargesn” (Forgotten), Tussman responded to the question of tradition that she raised in “Tsu dir Miryam.” She does so in the body and voice of a specifically Jewish woman performing the commandment to light the Sabbath candles: Master of the world! Creator, I stand before You with bared head, With eyes uncovered,

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Stubbornly Facing Your light. Not a single hair Trembles on my brow Before Your greatness. I place my Sabbath candles In candlesticks Tall and straight as a ruler So they may flicker toward You Without a drop of humbleness. I rise to You Without the slightest fear. For a long time I’ve honed my daring To stand before You Face to face, Creator, And to let my just complaints Open out before You From my mouth. Woe is me: I’ve forgotten! I can’t remember What I came to demand. I’ve forgotten. Woe is me.91 (1–27)

This poem contains elements of sacred parody. Instead of reciting a blessing or a tkhine when she lights the Sabbath candles, she engages in a rebellious dialogue with God. Although this poem opens with the conventional appellations, “Master of the World, Creator of the Universe,” the speaker’s stance is one not of supplication but of bold confrontation. She immodestly bares her head and refuses to cover her eyes in the traditional gesture that delays the enjoyment of the Sabbath lights until after the blessing.92 Indeed, she stares directly at the candles, “Stubbornly / Facing Your light.” This stance is one of deliberate challenge to God’s authority and, to underline that challenge, the speaker violates all the traditional symbols of female piety that center around the lighting of the candles. The speaker even sets the candles straight in their holders, which, according to the poet, should lean a little, so as

Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman

not to affront God.93 What is her reason? She has a complaint to air and demands to meet the Creator face-to-face, glaykh-af-glaykh, as equals, for as a poet, she regards herself as a creator, too. And what is the difference, she seems to challenge, between the creation of the world and that of a poem? At the moment of uttering her complaint, though, she forgets. All she can say is: Woe is me: I’ve forgotten! I can’t remember What I came to demand.

The play on the Yiddish words dermonen (remember) and monen (­demand) makes a statement about prayer: To remember is to demand and to call forth responsibility. According to all of Jewish tradition, she who remembers the Sabbath and keeps it holy is obeying God’s commandment, and in doing so, will be remembered by God in this world and the next. This speaker, lighting the candles, obeys the letter of the law, but violates its spirit and the entire culture that has perpetuated it. Regarding herself, a poet, as God’s equal creator, she has broken this reciprocal exchange of the covenant—the human demand upon God and God’s demand of humans. As a consequence, she loses the words she needs to write her poem, and is reduced to the empty sighs of Vey mir (Woe is me). Although the speaker in Tussman’s poem knows for certain that God is there to hear her counter-tkhine, she has lost both the traditional ways to approach the deity and her newly invented words. The ironic, self-mocking humor at the end of the poem bespeaks emptiness. How can a woman talk to God after having put aside the religious tradition? Poetry is only a partial answer, yet Molodowsky and Tussman continued to write in Yiddish, perpetuating tradition against history.

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Women poets wrote poems to each other. In 1949, Rokhl Korn dedicated Der onheyb fun a lid (The Beginning of a Poem) to Kadya Molodowsky, and in this poem described the process of writing a poem.1 Angst (anxiety) and anendike shrek (unending fear), she says, overwhelm a poet who stands “on the brink” of creation. These feelings intensify until they approach a point of anguished redemption such as Abraham must have felt when he was about to sacrifice his son Isaac. A poet with these feelings would compose not for herself alone, but for her people, in their voice and their tradition, if she only could. At this point in the poem, the tension breaks: Un plutsem vert es azoy shtil in dir, Az herst s’geveyn fun falendike shtern, Un verst a krug, a lekhtsendike krug, Vos zalmt ayn in zikh dem bloem shayn fun trern. Un s’dakht, di velt iz rayfer itst gevorn Un muterlekh di erd tsu yedn voglers trit, Un Got aleyn vet faln koyrim Far ot der eyntsikster, der heylikster minut— Un s’iz dokh bloyz der onheyb fun a lid. (And suddenly within you it becomes so still That you hear the cry of falling stars, And you become a vessel, a yearning vessel, That absorbs the blue light of tears. And now it seems as if the world has mellowed And the earth grown motherly beneath every wanderer’s step, And God himself will kneel in awe Before this singular, most holy moment— And, yet, it’s only the beginning of a poem.)

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Twenty-eight years later, in 1977, Rokhl Korn received a prestigious literary award in Israel. On that occasion, her friend Malka Heifetz Tussman wrote a poem in Korn’s honor in which she described in great detail, and with a twinge of envy, the commonalities she shared with Korn, both of whom were born and raised in country villages in Ukraine and Poland. Yet Tussman ends the poem by asserting the difference between them: Khotsh mir beyde trogn dem dorf in unzere beyner Zenen dokh unzere lider farshidn. Azoy darf zayn. Azoy muz zayn. S’ken dokh nit zayn keyn tsvey Rokhls Oder tsvey Malkes. (Although we both bear the village in our bones Our poems are necessarily distinct. This is how it needs to be. This is how it has to be. There cannot be two Rokhls Or two Malkas.)2

Both Korn’s poem to Molodowsky and Tussman’s poem to Korn express the shared experience of women writing Yiddish poetry. Korn’s poem to Molodowsky evokes the struggle that a poet experiences in the act of creation, an effort that strikes awe into God himself, the original creator. Tussman’s poem to Korn celebrates the common origins of these two poets, and yet insists on the individuality that enables each to write her own poetry. Both poems acknowledge how the Jewish textual tradition and the memory of traditional life supply the Yiddish poet with language and lore and simultaneously constrain her. Each poet, these poems say, must find her own silence and her own distinct voice. Writing in 2004, Rivka Basman Ben-Haim, a prolific Israeli Yiddish poet and a survivor of the Vilna ghetto and the Kaiserwald concentration camp, wrote a poem dedicated to Miriam Ulinover, who perished sixty years earlier in Auschwitz. The poem begins: Gut ovnt dir, Miryam Ulinover In mayn nakhtiker heym.

Conclusion

(Good evening to you, Miriam Ulinover In my nocturnal home.)3

Summoning Ulinover back to life in her dream, Basman Ben-Haim describes her admiration for the older poet’s legendary generosity “with every person / Who ever met you” and the “teary joy” that characterizes Ulinover’s poems. After alluding briefly to the millions lost in the Holocaust, including access to Ulinover’s “dayn got” (your God), Basman Ben-Haim concludes: Ikh dir nit onton keyn umet Bloyz bagrisn dayn kumen aher Un zitsn mit mir zalbe tsveyt Ariber dem thom fun di tsaytn, Farnemen dem nes vos fareynikt undz vider— Ikh nem dikh arum Un otem in Miryam Ulinovers lider. (I don’t want to make you sad But only to welcome your coming here And sitting with me, the two of us Above the abyss of the ages, Absorbing the miracle that joins us again— I embrace you And breathe in Miriam Ulinover’s poems.)4

Basman Ben-Haim’s tribute to Ulinover bridges the distance between this world and the next, between the survivor and the dead, between the present and the past. Figuring Ulinover’s poetry as a metaphor for the very air that the living poet breathes, Basman Ben-Haim’s poem reenacts the process of passing down the tradition of women poets who wrote in Yiddish. In the preceding six chapters of this book, I have examined only some fifteen of the eighty poets from Korman’s anthology, as well as several others that he did not include. Through my readings, I have argued that twentieth-century women poets established their place in modern Yiddish poetry by working within a tradition defined by and against devotion, sexuality, and artistic creativity. Korman’s anthology was only a beginning, and this book only continues what Korman began. In 1995, Professor Chava Turniansky gave me a

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large blue plastic folder filled with notecards her students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem had made, listing all the women Yiddish writers who have entries in the CYCO Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, prese, un filologye (1956–1981) and in Berl Kagan’s L ­ eksikon fun yidishe shrayber (1986): a total of 264 women writers in the former and 95 in the latter. These lists included many novelists, essayists, memoirists, and journalists, with whom I was not familiar, but even among the poets, there were many whose names I did not know. On my own shelves at home and in my office sit books of poems by still other women poets, including the following twenty-seven, whom I was not able to discuss in A Question of Tradition. I will list them simply in alphabetical order: Rivka Basman Ben-Haim, Chasye Cooperman, Broche Copstein, Gella Schweid Fishman, Rukhl Fishman, Eliza Greenblatt, Roza Gutman, Perl Halter, Rivke Kopé, Malka Lee, Khane Levin, Malka Locker, Ida Maze, Sarah Reyzen, Chava Rosenfarb, Hadassah Rubin, Rivke Rubin, Khane (Anne) Safran, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, Gitl SchaechterViswanath, Esther Shumiatsher, Rashel Veprinski, Shifra Weiss, Yehudis, Yudika, Hinde Zaretsky, and Rajzel Zychlinska. The work is not yet done.

Reference Matter

Appendix Letters from Women Poets to Ezra Korman, 1926–1927

The first of the two boxes of the Ezra Korman Papers in the YIVO Institute’s Archives the contains six letters written in 1926 and 1927 by women poets in Europe and America to Ezra Korman. These poets wrote the letters apparently in response to a solicitation from Korman requesting submissions of poetry for the anthology that would become Yidishe dikhterins. These letters, listed chronologically, are from Rokhl Korn, Malka Lee, Anna Margolin, Miriam Ulinover, Roza Yakubovitsh, and Kadya Molodowsky.1 The correspondence from these women poets provides insight into both the process by which Korman assembled Yidishe dikhterins and the relationships that existed among the women poets themselves. Although we do not have Korman’s side of the exchange, these letters to Korman indicate that he had sent out inquiries to locate a large number of women poets. Once he found them, he apparently invited these poets to submit poetry for his anthology. What comes across strikingly in the letters to Korman is how eager the women poets were to contribute to this project, as well as their self-conscious humor about what they saw as feminine vanity in their reactions to Korman’s request for a photograph. In some of the letters, the poets present their literary biographies or correct mistaken accounts of their lives and works. In others, they ask Korman to help them make contact with Yiddish publishers in America. Most importantly, the six letters make perfectly clear the fact that these women poets were reading each other’s poetry and were often in direct contact with one another. In the earliest of these letters, written from either Warsaw or Prze­ mitshl on January 31, 1926, Rokhl Korn responded to Korman’s request

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for names and addresses of other women poets in Europe with this information about three poets she knew: “It makes me sincerely suffer that I cannot also oblige you by sending you the addresses of the European women poets. Kadya Molodowsky is now in Paris, but the street where she lives I also cannot provide. Roza Yakubovitsh lives in Kalish, to Sara Reyzen you can write at the address of her brother Zalmen.”2 With humor, she advises Korman to contact Melech Ravitch for further details: “For their completely accurate addresses you can find out from Ravitch, I don’t know if there exists in Poland a poet, or poetess, either those who have already stopped writing or those who write, or those who only now are beginning to write poetry, with whose addresses Ravitsh is not acquainted.” Korn also provides a poignant autobiography, in which she explains that she began composing poems as a very young child to combat her isolation in the Galician countryside and that she had inherited her poetic talents from her father, prematurely deceased. This account reveals that Korn wrote her early poetry and fiction in Polish and became acquainted with what she calls the “terra incognita” of Yiddish literature only at age 21, in 1919, through her husband. “From that time on, I have always struggled to master the Jew-language.” Explaining that she will send Korman a photograph of herself “in a couple of weeks,” she jokes, “You must not for one moment forget that you are publishing a women’s anthology [a froyen antologye]—and a woman is more likely to send her bad poems before she will send a bad picture of herself.” Seven months later, on August 9, 1926, Malka Lee, age 22, responded to Korman from New York. In a rambling five-page letter, she commends him for the proposed anthology, yet protests that he has invited the submission of only unpublished poems: “I believe for your purpose, it makes no difference to you.”3 Informing Korman that she has not yet published a book of her poetry, Lee brags that she has enough poems for a book manuscript; that her individual poems have been published in a variety of Yiddish journals (“Feder, Nyu Yidish, F. A. Shtim, Shriftn, Kultur, and still others . . . ”); and that such literary figures as Moyshe Nadir, Sh. Niger, and Kalman Marmor have praised her poetry. She explains that she has been writing in Yiddish for the past four years. Born “in Manasterzisko [Monastrishtsh], Galicia,

Letters from Women Poets to Ezra Korman, 1926–1927

in 1904,” she “completed five Polish schools, learned Hebrew, German,” and “in the middle of the war I went away to Vienna,” where she continued her education and “Wrote in German. Now I’ve been writing in Yiddish for four years.” In a second installment to this letter, Lee announces that she will soon complete a book of poetry written in a new style: “It is in short phrases.” Like Yakubovitsh and Korn, she makes a joke about the photograph she encloses, writing, “I send you my terrible picture right now, I don’t have another one.” And she promises that “In a week I will send you poems.” She demands, “I want you to accept the poems from the last couple of issues of “Feder” [Pen] (however you may read them, like furniture in the attic). . . . My poems must be in the anthology.” And she orders him, “From the ones I sent you, throw out the worst of them.” Assuming a familiar tone, Lee scolds Korman for not calling her when he visited New York: “A shame, you ran off so quickly that it truly hurt me; also, I didn’t have a chance to talk with you. I will catch up with you sometime. If I come to your city, I will likewise disappoint you.” In contrast, Anna Margolin, using her given name, Roze Lebensboym, wrote Korman a collegial note on the letterhead of the newspaper Der Tog, where she worked, dated January 28, 1927. In her characteristically telegraphic style Margolin explains the “simple matter” that delayed her response to the “Honorable Korman”: “Became suddenly seriously ill, went through the nightmare of an operation, for weeks in the hospital and slowly, without distinct diligence, returned to life.”4 Inquiring if he had come to New York “in December, as you had planned,” she recommends that he read and consider for his “collection” “the truly fine book by Rachelle Veprinski, Ruf fun fligl.” Margolin thinks so highly of Veprinski’s book that she says, “Perhaps I will write a review about this, if I don’t burst.” Although in this letter, Margolin does not discuss which of her own poems or what of her biography might be included in the anthology, her suggestion of Veprinski’s poems and her willingness to review the book suggest the regard in which she held both the poems of another woman and Korman’s project. On July 7, 1927, Miriam Ulinover wrote Korman from Lodz, using letterhead belonging to her husband Wolf Ulinover.5 Assuming a professional tone, although with her characteristic archaic Yiddish spelling,

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Ulinover responds “several days” after receiving Korman’s invitation by sending him “for the anthology of women Yiddish poets” “several fragments of the not-yet-published book of poems, Shabbes, about which my cousin Rabinovitsh wrote you.” With formality, Ulinover then thanks Korman for his review “of my little book,” which in 1925 “was one of the first to respond to it,” and graciously says, “I do not want to miss the opportunity to express my thanks to you.” She signs off “mit frayntlekhn khaver-grus un akhtung” (with friendly collegialgreeting and respect) by wishing Korman “the best success for your work on the anthology in particular and for all others in general.” Ulinover’s letter conveys an appreciation for both Korman’s current project and his recognition of her earlier work in his review. This letter, alongside the others, communicates the poet’s respect for Korman’s anthology and her eagerness to contribute to it. In an undated letter from Kalish (Kalisz), Roza Yakubovitsh writes that “Miriam Ulinover wrote to me about you, and about her part in the anthology.”6 This statement indicates that these two poets were friends and that Yakubovitsh wrote her letter to Korman after Ulinover had sent hers. The fact that Korman has already read her poetry emboldens Yakubovitsh to inquire about other possible publishers for her next two books: “I am delighted that you know me from the ‘Gezangen.’ Now I have a collection of novellas (novelen) and do not know to whom to turn, to publish them. Also a poem book, ‘Poems to God’ (Lider tsu Got) is completed.” Commending Korman’s plan to anthologize women Yiddish poets, Yakubovitsh makes explicit her appreciation of the works of her contemporaries: “Little by little indeed the visage of the Yiddish woman poet rises to reveal itself. Kadya Molodowsky, Warsaw, Rokhl Korn, Przemitshl, write strong things in the big-city context. And still there are many more such poets who still have not found their place. I send you several poems, a little piece of a biography, and a photograph, [crossed out: “which I will send you in ten days”] I send now.” Yakubovitsh entreats “my good friend Korman” to “send me the book when it comes out (whether or not C.O.D.). But for God’s sake, send one.” And she promises him another customer: “Also my brother who lives in New York, Rabbi Zelman Graubart would like to buy it when you send him the book or a catalogue of it.”

Letters from Women Poets to Ezra Korman, 1926–1927

In her postscript, Yakubovitsh complains about the previously published and inaccurate account of her life in Bassin’s 1917 anthology, Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye: “In Bassin’s anthology, there is printed a biography of me, may I suck from my fingers if I am as old as I seem there. Comrade Korman, if perhaps you are in written contact with this aforementioned publisher, let him know how not nice it is to talk about someone’s life, not knowing the person and not listening to anyone, but just that way presenting him to the world.” Referring to the misstatement by Bassin that she was born “arum di 70er yorn” (around the 1870s), Yakubovitsh criticizes the presumption of this man who did not bother to invite the poets he anthologized to provide their own biographies. Furthermore, unable or unwilling to contact Bassin herself, Yakubovitsh asks Korman to write him on her behalf. Alongside with this request for a champion, the postscript conveys how remote the literary scene in America seemed to Yakubovitsh in the shtetl of Kalisz. In the last of these six letters, Kadya Molodowsky wrote to Korman from Warsaw on September 6, 1927. We should recall that Molodowsky was acquainted with Korman from 1923, when he published her poems in his first anthology, Brenendike brikn. After the usual salutation (“Respected Friend Korman”), Molodowsky begins her letter with a joke about her photograph: “I confess to you that I send you my photograph not whole-heartedly. First because I’m too ugly for my ‘picture’ to be presented before fine people and even more so among these 50 women poets (I had no idea that we possessed such a treasure). It is certain that in the company of beauties like Esther the Queen, I will remain behind the scenes, although my poems shall stand in for me.”7 The self-deprecating humor about her photograph, the comparison of the younger beauties to the legendary Queen Esther, and the sarcastic aside about the number of women poets Korman had assembled in his anthology do not hide Molodowsky’s main concern: that the anthology must present with full import the poetry by women, rather than personalities or pretty faces. Molodowsky then tells Korman which of her poems she would like him to include in the anthology: “If you have not yet made the selection of my poems, and have not yet set them [in type], I would advise

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you to choose from my little book, the ‘Froyen lider.’ Those that were published in ‘In Shpan’ about the ‘Matriarchs,’ ‘Such spring nights,’ the rest you yourself can probably decide.” Suggesting two specific poems from the “Froyen-lider” sequence, Molodowsky describes their themes, rather than giving their titles, as if she assumes that Korman read these poems when they first appeared in the May 1926 issue of the shortlived Vilna socialist journal In Shpan (In Harness).8 Molodowsky’s framing comments suggest that she is aware how advanced the anthology is in July 1927. In her reference to the poems’ publication in both her 1927 “bikhl” (little book), and in the earlier journal, Molodowsky seems to ask Korman to take the later rather than the earlier versions of the poems. Although Korman’s editorial actions are not further documented, this letter may explain the discrepancy between the versions of “Froyen-lider I”—the revised version she preferred that appeared in Molodowsky’s 1927 book, Kheshvndike nekht—and what seems to be the earlier version from In Shpan, which Korman reprinted in 1928. After instructing Korman which of her poems to include, Molodowsky offers a critique of the assumptions behind his project: “Truly I think that there is no special women’s poetry. There is poetry written by men or women, so that such an anthology is more an external, rather than an essentially received thing.” Three years later, Molodowsky developed this skepticism about gender-distinguished poetry in her 1930 newspaper article “Bagegnens” (Encounters). Although in her letter she voices her doubts about the validity of the category of women’s poetry, she nonetheless contributes her work to Korman’s collection. Of all the six letters we have here, only Molodowsky expresses unease with the gender-specific concept of the anthology. Yet she does not refuse to participate, as did Malka Heifetz Tussman. In the last part of her letter, Molodowsky asks Korman about his life in America and tells him about hers in Warsaw: “What are you doing in America? In Warsaw I am a schoolteacher and write a few poems, and from both things, I can barely afford water for kasha. Perhaps you would send me some work for which I can receive dollars from your America? Although after the story of Sacco and Vanzetti, I cannot even look at a dollar. Now take a look at my head, which is a little prettier than the original.” Molodowsky’s joke about earning so little from

Letters from Women Poets to Ezra Korman, 1926–1927

teaching and writing that she cannot afford even the water needed to make kasha, and the expression of her disgust with the execution of the American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, 1927, convey this poet’s serious financial straits in Warsaw and suggest the ambivalence with which she regarded the United States. Concluding the letter in a friendly tone, Molodowsky wishes Korman well with her “heartfelt greeting.” These six letters document the means by which Ezra Korman found poets and gathered poems for his anthology of women Yiddish poets. The letters also provide evidence of the mostly positive attitudes toward Korman’s project by the women poets themselves. Most importantly, they show that these poets knew each other either personally or by reputation, read each other’s work, and, with or without reservations, considered themselves to be women poets.

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Bibliographic Essays

Celia Dropkin As discussed in chapter 5, although Celia Dropkin was one of a few women whose poetry was regularly included in the modernist Yiddish journals in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, she published only one book of poetry during her lifetime. In heysn vint: Lider (In a Hot Wind: Poems) came out in New York in 1935. In 1959, three years after her death, her eldest son John J. Dropkin and her other four children published a second book with the same title as the first, but they expanded it to include Dropkin’s short stories and paintings to accompany the poems from her 1935 volume and her later uncollected poems (In heysn vint: Poems, Stories, Pictures). Critical apparatus, such as a bibliography and an introduction, provide invaluable resources for scholars and students. Regarding the 1959 volume, it is important to acknowledge that editorial changes were made that significantly alter some of the poems and that such changes were done without the deceased poet’s oversight. For example, “Di moskite” (The Mosquito) concludes a six-poem sequence “In Sullivan County” in the 1935 book In heysn vint; but in the 1935 book, “Di moskite” is presented as a separate poem. In another example, in 1935, the sonnet “Dionysus” was divided into s­ tanzas of two quatrains and two tercets; but in the 1959 book, the poem is printed as a single block of verse. As well as this typesetting change, the later editors made a significant substantive change in this same poem. In the 1935 book, Dropkin wrote, Ver ken dayn t­soyber oysshteyn? (Who can bear / put up with / suffer your charm?). In the 1959 book, this phrase has been changed to Ver ken dayn tsoyber bashteyn? (Who can allow / consent to

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your charm?). There is a striking difference between a woman who endures and one who consents to a lover’s manipulative magic. This inexplicable editorial decision changes the tone of the poem. An interview I conducted with John J. Dropkin and his wife Ruth Dropkin in their home in Brooklyn, on March 9, 2005, provided insight into the process by which the 1959 book was put together. (The transcription of this interview remains unpublished.) Before the interview began, John Dropkin brought to the dining-room table a page or two of an essay he’d started some time ago, which began with the statement that he had not known his mother’s poetry until after her death. I asked him to elaborate. He told me that after Celia died, he and his siblings decided to use the money she had left to compile and publish a book of her poems. They enlisted Celia’s friend Sotshe Dilon to write the biographical note and help prepare the book for publication; the poet H. Leyvik to select the unpublished poems; the artist B. ­Kopman to select and introduce her paintings; Helen Londinski to correct the proofs; the painters G. Kits and L. Bunin to advise in the selection of her paintings; her friend Mendl Elkin, the librarian at YIVO, to help find the already published pictures and stories; her friend Yefim ­Yeshurin to compile the bibliography; and her close friend Mrs. Rosa Margoshes to provide other support. With so many people helping to prepare the manuscript and publish the book, it seems inevitable that changes would be made, even such intrusive alterations as revising a poem. It thus seems crucial that translators and scholars work from the 1935 version of the poems, because the poet oversaw publication of that volume. When working with poetry that appeared only in the 1959 book, it is best to corroborate these texts with any previous publications of these poems in journals or miscellanies that came out while Dropkin was still living. Ideally, one should consult Dropkin’s manuscripts, which are in the Celia Dropkin Papers at the YIVO Archives. One full translation of Dropkin’s 1935 In heysn vint was published in French, with the Yiddish texts en face, in Paris in 1994: Dans le vent chaud (In a Hot Wind: Poems), translated by Gilles Rozier and ­Viviane Siman (Éditions L’Harmattan). Translations into English of small groups of Dropkin’s poems have appeared in anthologies, such as Joseph Leftwich’s The Golden Peacock (London: Robert Anscombe, 1939); Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s A Treasury of Yiddish

Bibliographic Essays

­Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969); Irving Howe, Chone Shmeruk, and Ruth R. Wisse’s The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Aaron Kramer’s A Century of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Cornwall, 1989); Jules ­Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein’s Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); and Benjamin and Barbara Harshav’s Sing, Stranger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). English translations of individual Dropkin poems have been published more recently in print journals, such as in Prairie Schooner 81, no. 1 (Spring 2007), translations by Yetta Sugarman and by Kathryn Hellerstein, (82–83 and 87, respectively). Publications in online journals include The Drunken Boat, www.thedrunkenboat.com (April 2004), translations by Hellerstein; Zeek, A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, http:// zeek.forward.com (Fall 2008), translations by Hellerstein; and Asymptote, http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Poetry&id=52&curr _index=1&curPage=Poetry (July 2011), translations by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon. Individual short stories by Dropkin have been anthologized in ­English translations: “At the Rich Relatives,” translated by Faith Jones, in Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, edited by Sandra Bark, 55–73 (New York: Warner, 2003); “A Dancer,” translated by Shirley Kumove, in Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Frieda Forman, Ethel Raicus, Sarah Silberstein Swartz, and Margie Wolfe (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994); and “Sonya’s Room,” translated by Hellerstein, in Jewish American Literature: A Norton ­Anthology (2001). Dropkin published poems in other Yiddish journals besides In zikh, such as Di naye velt, and Poezye. Her manuscripts and correspondence are housed in the Genazim Biobibliographic Institute, Tel Aviv, and in the Melekh Ravitsh Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, as well as in the YIVO Archives. The scholarship on Dropkin in English includes Sheva Zucker’s “The Red Flower: Rebellion and Guilt in the Poetry of Celia Dropkin,” in Studies in American Jewish Literature 15 (Fall 1996): 99–117; Janet Hadda’s “The Eyes Have It: Celia Dropkin’s Love Poetry,” in Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, edited by Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich (New

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York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992); and two studies by Hellerstein, “The Art of Sex in Yiddish Poems: Celia Dropkin and Her Contemporaries,” in Modern Yiddish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, edited by Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner (2011); and “Against ‘Girl Songs’: Gender and Sex in a Yiddish Modernist Journal,” in Leket. Jiddistik heute/yidishe shtudyes haynt (2012) (Collection. Yiddish Today/Yiddish Studies Today), edited by Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg (Dusseldorf: Dusseldorf University Press, 2012).

Anna Margolin Anna Margolin, like Celia Dropkin, was one of the few women whose poetry appeared frequently in the New York modernist Yiddish journals, beginning in 1920. As discussed in chapter 5, Margolin published a single book of poetry, Lider, in 1929, and ceased publishing poems in 1932. Avraham Novershtern established Margolin’s corpus of works in his definitive work, the meticulously researched and edited Yiddish edition, Anna Margolin: Lider (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991). Novershtern’s volume presents the full text of the 1929 Lider and the uncollected poems that Margolin published between 1929 and 1932. Along with the excellent introduction in Yiddish and English, which Novershtern adapted from his 1990 Prooftexts article, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep: The Poetry of Anna Margolin,” this volume includes the Yiddish poems with annotations that compare variants in the texts of the manuscripts, journal publications, and final versions in the book. Novershtern also provides a glossary that translates Margolin’s sometimes idiosyncratic vocabulary into both Hebrew and English. Shirley Kumove’s 2005 book-length translation of Margolin’s poetry into English verse, Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), includes the Yiddish texts of the poems. Translations of selections of Margolin’s poems into English have been anthologized over eighty years, including in Samuel J. Imber’s Modern Yiddish Poetry: An Anthology (New York: East and West, 1927); Joseph Leftwich’s The Golden Peacock (London: Robert Anscombe,

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1939); Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969): Howe, Chone Shmeruk, and Ruth R. Wisse’s The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Aaron Kramer’s A Century of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Cornwall Books,1989); Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein’s Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); and Benjamin and Barbara Harshav’s Sing, Stranger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). English translations of individual poems by Margolin have appeared in print and online journals. The poems have also appeared in translations by Marcia Falk, American Poetry Review 15, no. 6 (1986): 21; Kathryn Hellerstein, Tikkun 2, no. 5 (November 1987): n.p.; Ruth Whitman, Bridges 4, no. 2 (Winter 1994/1995): 58–59; Hellerstein, in the online journal Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture (Fall 2008), zeek. forward.com; and the print journal, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Studies and Gender Issues 19 (Spring 2010): 136–40; and Lawrence Rosenwald, in the online journal qarrtsiluni, http://qarrtsiluni.com/2011/01/28/ mary-a-yiddish-poem-by-anna-margolin/, accessed June 25, 2013. In his 1991 Yiddish article “Anna Margolin: Materialn tsu ir poetisher geshtalt” (Anna Margolin: Materials on Her Poetic Oeuvre), Novershtern presents a historical assessment of Margolin’s creative process by quoting at length from and examining the poet’s letters and manuscripts. The most complete account of Margolin’s life remains in the memoir by Margolin’s life partner, Reuven Iceland, Fun unzer friling: literarishe zikhroynes un portretn (From Our Springtime: Literary Memoirs and Portraits) (New York, 1954). Iceland’s chapter on Margolin has been translated into English by Gerald Marcus as “The Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life,” in Yiddish—Modern Jewish Studies 17, nos. 1–2) (2011): 52–93. Scholarship on Margolin, published between 1982 and 2012, begins with Norma Fain Pratt’s biohistorical study, “Anna Margolin’s Lider: A Study in Women’s History, Autobiography, and Poetry,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1982): 11–25. Eight years later, in 1990, Novershtern’s English article appeared in Prooftexts; and in 1991, in

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the same issue of YIVO Bleter as his examination of Margolin’s correspondence, Sheva Zucker’s psycholiterary analysis of the poetry appeared in Yiddish, “Ana Margolin un di poezye fun dem geshpoltenem ikh” (Anna Margolin and the Poetry of the Divided Self), YIVO Bleter 47 (February 1991): 173–98. In 2000, Kathryn Hellerstein (in dialogue with Lawrence Rosenwald and Anita Norich) published a consideration of gender and translation that centered on Margolin, “Translating as a Feminist: Reconceiving Anna Margolin,” Prooftexts 20 (Winter 2000): 91–108. Barbara Mann’s consideration of Margolin’s poetry in the context of Russian, German, and American literary modernism, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” appeared in 2002 in Modern Language Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2002): 501–36. Shirley Kumove included a literary introduction to her 2005 translations of Margolin’s poetry, Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005). In 2010, two articles on Margolin appeared: Adrienne Cooper presented a reading of Margolin’s poetry through a discussion of the poet’s life and setting the poems to music, in “Making Music with Anna Margolin: Creating Shake My Heart Like a Copper Bell: A Poet, a Composer, an Interpreter—Three Lives in Yiddish Art,” Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal 4, no. 2 (2010): 39–49. Naomi Brenner compared the poetry of Margolin with that of the Hebrew poet Rahel (Rachel Bluvstein) in “Slippery Selves: Rachel Bluvstein and Anna Margolin in Poetry and in Public,” Nashim 19 (Spring 2010): 100–33. And in 2012, Barbara Mann compared the evocation of the Christian figures of the Madonna and Mary Magdalene in Margolin’s “Mari” poems and early poems in Hebrew by Leah Goldberg, in “Of Madonnas and Magdalenes: Reading Mary in Modernist Hebrew and Yiddish Women’s Poetry,” in Leket: Yidishe Studyes Haynt, Jiddistik heute (Yiddish Studies Today), ed. Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2012), 49–68.

Kadya Molodowsky Kadya Molodowsky published prolifically and in a variety of genres throughout her long literary career in Europe, Israel, and the United

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States. Kheshvendike nekht: Lider (Nights of Heshvan: Poems), issued in Vilna by B. Kletskin in 1927, was the first of the four books of ­poetry that appeared while she was living in Warsaw. She won a prize from the Jewish Community of Warsaw and the Yiddish Pen Club in 1930 for her second book, poems written for the children she taught in the Warsaw TsiSho school, Mayselekh (Tales), published in Warsaw by the Yidishe Shul Organizatsye in Poyln in 1931. Her third book of poems, Dzshike gas: Lider (Dzshike Street: Poems) appeared in Warsaw, published by the press of the great literary weekly Literarishe Bleter, in 1933, reprinted in 1936. Her fourth book of poems, Freydke: Lider (Freydke: Poems), was also published in Warsaw by the Literarishe Bleter Press in 1935, reprinted the following year. Her play, Ale fentster tsu der zun (All Windows Facing the Sun) appeared from the Literarishe Bleter Press in Warsaw in 1938. After immigrating to the United States in 1935, Molodowsky published three full-length books and two chapbooks of poetry, as well as several volumes of children’s poems. In land fun mayn gebeyn: Lider (In the Land of My Bones: Poems) came out with the Chicago press of L. M. Stein in 1937. Her book of poems reflecting on the Holocaust, Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn (Only King David Remains), was published in New York by a small press that she and her husband founded, Farlag papirene brik (Paper Bridge Press), in 1946. This same press published a chapbook of her poems written during the years she lived in Israel, In yerushalyim kumen malokhim: Lider (In Jerusalem, Angels Come: Poems), in 1952. Her final volume of poetry, Likht fun dornboym: Lider un poeme (Light from the Thornbush: Poems and Long Poems), was published in Buenos Aires by the Labor Zionist press Farlag Poaley Tsion Histadrut in 1965. Her collections of poetry for children published in New York were: Afn barg (On the Mountain), published by Yungvarg bibliotek (Youth Library) in 1938; Yidishe kinder: Mayselekh (Jewish Children: Tales), published by Tsentral-Komitet fun di Yidishe Folks-shuln in di Fareynikte Shtatn un Kanade (Central Committee of the Yiddish FolkSchools in the United States and Canada) in 1945; and Martsepanes: Mayselekh un lider far kinder (Marzipans: Tales and Poems for Children), published by the Workmen’s Circle and CYCO in 1970. A Hebrew edition of her children’s poems, translated by prominent poets

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in prestate Israel, including Fanya Bergshteyn, Natan Alterman, Lea Goldberg, Avraham Levinson, and Yankev Fikhman, came out in Tel Aviv from Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House in 1945, with a second edition in 1979. This collection, Pithu et hasha’ar: shirei yeladim (Open the Gate: Poems for Children), was used for decades in the Israeli municipal schools. Molodowsky wrote prolifically in prose as well. Farlag Papirene Brik published both her novel, Fun lublin biz nyu york: Togbukh fun Rivke Zilberg (From Lublin to New York: Diary of Rivke Zilberg), in 1942 and her play, Nokhn got fun midbar: Drame fun yidishn lebn in 16tn yorhundert (After the God of the Desert: Drama of Jewish Life in the 16th Century), in 1949. She wrote a series of columns on famous Jewish women for the Forverts under the pseudonym of Rivke Zilberg, the name she gave her novel’s protagonist. Her collection of short stories, A shtub mit zibn fentster (A House with Seven Windows), was published by Farlag Matones in 1957, the same year that her collection of essays on the new State of Israel, Af di vegn fun tsion (On the Roads from Zion) came out with the New York publisher, Pinchas Gingold Farlag of the National Committee of the Jewish Folk Schools. Her novel, Baym toyer, roman fun dem lebn in yisroel (At the Gate: Novel about Life in Israel), was published in New York by CYCO in 1967. In addition to writing poetry and prose, Molodowsky worked as an editor, journalist, and memoirist. She compiled one of the first anthologies of poetry about the Holocaust in any language, Lider fun khurbn: Antologye (Poems of Destruction: Anthology), which appeared in Tel Aviv from Farlag I. L. Peretz in 1962. During the three years she lived in Israel, Molodowsky founded and published a journal, Heym (Home), distributed to the Pioneer Women Organization. From 1943 to 1944, she was founding editor of the journal, Svive (Surroundings), which she revived after the war and edited until her death. In Svive, from March 1965 through April 1974, she published her serialized autobiography Mayn elterzeydns yerushe (My Great-Grandfather’s Legacy). In 1965, Molodowsky was awarded the Itsik Manger Prize in Israel. Scholars can find individual poems by Molodowsky in: Literarishe bleter (Warsaw), Eygns (Kiev, 1921), Tsukunft (New York), Signal (Moscow, 1930s), Fraye arbeter shtime (New York), and Ezra Korman’s Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (1928), as well as many other journals and antholo-

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gies. Molodowsky’s manuscripts and correspondence are found in the Kadya Molodowsky Archive at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York), the Jewish National Library (Jerusalem), the Genazim Biobibliographic Institute (Tel Aviv), and in private collections. A few of Molodowsky’s contemporaries wrote about her. For example, in 1931, Dvore Fogel reported on Molodowsky’s visit to Lvov, in her Polish newspaper article, “Kadja Molodowska: Z Okazji przyjazdu poetki de Lwowa” (Kadya Molodowsky: The Poet’s Joyous Arrival in Lvov), Chwila, 8, no. 4265, (1931): 9–10. In 1945, Melech Ravitch included a biographical sketch of Molodowsky in his quirky encyclopedia of Yiddish writers in interwar Poland, Mayn leksikon: Yidishe dikhter, dertseyler, dramaturgn in poyln tsvishn di tsvey groyse velt-milkhomes, 122–24 (Montreal: A Committee in Montreal, 1945). Molodowsky’s absence from the postwar Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur (New York) was reportedly due to her refusal to allow her biography to be included there because the publication received support from a German reparations fund. I corrected this omission in my biographical essays on Molodowsky in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2008) (http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/ Molodowsky_Kadia), accessed October 2, 2013; and in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia (http://jwa.org/encyclope dia/article/molodowsky-kadya, accessed October 2, 2013). One major collection of Molodowsky’s poetry appeared in English translation, with the Yiddish texts en face and introduced by a literary biography, in 1999: Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky, edited and translated by Kathryn Hellerstein. Numerous articles and chapters have been published on Molodowsky’s work, including at least six by Kathryn Hellerstein, beginning in 1988, with “A Word for My Blood: A Reading of Kadya Molodowsky’s ‘Froyen-lider’”; “Hebraisms as Metaphor in Kadya Molodowsky’s ‘Froyen-lider I’” (1990); “A Yiddish Poet’s Response to the Khurbm: Kadya Molodowsky in America” (1998); “Finding Her Yiddish Voice: Kadya Molodowsky in America” (2002); “The Gilgul of a Translation: Kadya Molodowsky’s ‘Eyl Khanun’” (2010); and the forthcoming “Gender and Nation in Poems of 1945 by Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman.” Hellerstein’s articles present Molodowsky’s work in both Europe and America.

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Most other scholarship focuses on Molodowsky’s early work in Europe. Anna Fishman Gonshor’s 1997 master’s thesis, “Kadye Molodowsky in Literarishe bleter, 1925–1935: Annotated Bibliography,” presents a thorough account of Molodowsky’s literary and political development in Warsaw through her publications in this one journal. Sheva Zucker writes a critical appreciation of Molodowsky’s “Women-Poems,” in “Kadye Molodowsky’s Froyen lider” (1994). Nathan Cohen examines (in Hebrew) Molodowsky’s literary role in interwar Warsaw, in “Kadya Molodowsky’s Status and Activity in the Jewish Literary Milieu in Warsaw” (Hebrew, 2008). Efrat Gal-Ed discusses (in German) Molodowsky’s adaptation of biblical motifs in two poems spoken in the voice of Shulamith, from the Song of Songs, in Efrat Gal-Ed, “Spur und Differenz: Zu Kadya Molodowskys Shulamith-Gedichten” (Vestige and Difference: On Kadya Molodowsky’s Shulamith Poems), Leket: Yidishe Studyes Haynt, Jiddistik heute (Yiddish Studies Today), ed. Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2012), 31–47.

Malka Heifetz Tussman Living far from New York, the center of Yiddish culture, Malka Heifetz Tussman published many individual Yiddish poems beginning in 1918, but she collected them into book form only after 1949. Six of Tussman’s seven books of poetry appeared in print during her lifetime. Funded by a group of patrons and friends in Los Angeles, where she was living at the time, her first two books—Lider (Poems), published in 1949, and Mild mayn vild (Mild My Wild), published in 1958—bear the imprint of the Malka Heifetz Tussman Bukh Komitet (Malka Heifetz Tussman Book Committee). Tussman’s other four volumes were published by Farlag Yisroel Bukh (Israel Book Press) in Tel Aviv: Shotns fun gedenken (Shadows of Remembering) in 1965, Bleter faln nit (Leaves Do Not Fall) in1972, Unter dayn tseykhn (Under Your Sign) in 1974, and Haynt iz eybik (Now Is Ever) in 1977. Although Tussman completed the manuscript for her seventh book in 1986, Un ikh shmeykhl: lider un proze (And I Smile: Poems and Prose) remains

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unpublished. Tussman was awarded the prestigious Itsik Manger Prize for Literary Work in Yiddish in Israel in 1981. Between 1976, when I was first introduced to Tussman, and her death on March 30, 1987, I met or spoke with her at length at least once a week. I often took notes on these conversations, some of which were de facto interviews. Throughout this book, I have drawn upon my unpublished notes, as well as on my memories. In addition to her poems, Tussman also wrote essays; translated poetry from English, Russian, and even Sanskrit into Yiddish; and composed verse for children, including her own and her students. For example, “Yosl kaposl,” published in Kinder zshurnal (n.d. [ca. 1920]), was written for and about her eldest son, Joseph, when he was a child, as she once told me. Shabbes-oyps (Sabbath Treats), a collection of her children’s poems, remains in manuscript in the Malka Heifetz Tuss­man Archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (RG-622, Boxes 153–160, Folder 157). A representative list (in Yiddish) of some thirty-five poems that Tussman published in journals between 1928 and 1973—in Poland (Literarishe bleter), Israel, and the United States (Inzikh, Tsukunft, Oyfkum, Studio, Vokh, Shikago, and Svive, the latter edited by Molodowsky)—can be found online in the Index to Yiddish Periodicals on the Hebrew University website, http://yiddish -periodicals.huji.ac.il/, under the heading Heifetz-Tussman, Malka. A significant number of her poems also appeared in the Tel Aviv journal Di goldene keyt, edited by Avraham Sutzkever. Many of Tussman’s poems were anthologized in Yiddish. For example, eight poems—“Oktober” (October), “Trioletn” (Triolets), “In a vayter pasme zayd” (In a Wide Strip of Silk), “Mayne verter nit geshporte” (My Unsaved Words), “Frum vi in tfile zikh getsoygn” (Pious as If Drawn to Prayer), “Fus-bal” (Football), “Zumer” (Summer), “Tut mir bang” (I Regret), and “Ven kholile” (If, God Forbid)—first appeared in Antologye: mitvest-mayrev: di yidishe poezye fun mitvest un mayrev biz di letste teg fun Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (Anthology: From Midwest to North Pacific: Yiddish Verse until the Last Days of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern), ed. Mattes Deutch, Ben Sholem, and Shloime Schwartz, illus. M. Tsiporin (Chicago: M. Ceshinsky, 1933), 105–9. This collection defined its contents both in regional terms—Yiddish poetry written in the Midwest and the West—and through the work

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of New York modernist poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, who died prematurely the year before the anthology came out. Another anthology that included Tussman’s poetry was Amerike in yidish vort, ed. Nakhman Mayzel (New York: Ykuf, 1955). Significantly, though, Tussman’s poems are not represented in Korman’s Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (1928). Around 1979, she explained to me that she had declined Korman’s invitation to submit poems for ideological reasons: she wanted to be read not as a “woman poet” per se, but simply as a poet. We can learn how Tussman worked by comparing poems she first published in journals or anthologies with versions that she later included in (or excluded from) her books. For example, as indicated in clippings in Tussman’s own notebooks, which are now in the Malka Heifetz Tussman Archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the poems “Oktober” (October) and “Shtoyb” (Dust) first came out in Vokh (1929). Twenty years later, Tussman revised and included “­Oktober” in Lider, but she omitted “Shtoyb” from the book. Similarly, her notebook of clippings reveals that the poems “Inderfri” (Early Morning) and “Vos ken ikh tun” (What Can I Do) were first published in Literarishe bleter in 1930. Tussman revised both poems, giving “Inderfri” the new title of “A gelibte vayb” (A Beloved Wife) and included them both in Lider. Two collections of Tussman’s poems have appeared in English translation by Marcia Falk: Am I Also You? (1977) and With Teeth in the Earth: Selected Poems (1992). An extensive selection of her poems in translations by Kathryn Hellerstein appeared in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (University of California Press, 1986; reissued by Stanford University Press, 2007). Falk’s translations of her poems were included in the Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, edited by Irving Howe, Khone Shmeruk, and Ruth R. Wisse (Penguin, 1987). Individual ­English translations of Tussman’s poems have been published in a variety of journals, including Kerem, Yiddish, and American Poetry Review. Scholarly articles in English that discuss Tussman’s poetry at length include Marcia Falk, “With Teeth in the Earth: The Life and Art of Malka Heifetz Tussman—A Remembrance and Reading,” Shofar 9, no. 4 (1991): 24–46. There are three studies by Kathryn Hellerstein: “Songs of Herself: A Lineage of Women Yiddish Poets,” Studies in

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American Jewish Literature 9, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 138–50; “The Subordination of Prayer to Narrative in Modern Yiddish Poems,” Parable and Story as Sources of Jewish and Christian Theology, edited by Clemens Thoma and Michael Wyschogrod (Paulist Press, 1989), 205–36; and “Gender and Nation in Poems of 1945 by Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman,” forthcoming in Essays on Women Yiddish Writers, edited by Rosemary Horowitz. Also see Lori Hope ­Lefkovitz, “Inherited Holocaust Memory and the Ethics of Ventriloquism, Ken­ yon Review n.s. 19, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 34–43. In Hebrew, Aviva Tal published “‘Froyen’: Feminism and Expressionism in the Poetry of Malka Heifetz-Tussman,” in Bikoret Ufarshanut: nashim betarbut Yidish (Spring 2008): 147–62.

Miriam Ulinover This bibliographic essay augments the account of Miriam Ulinover’s literary career discussed in detail in chapter 4. Because this poet was killed in Auschwitz in August 1944, her bibliography is thus necessarily curtailed. Bringing together materials from chapter 4, the bibliography, and the Appendix, this brief essay will make suggestions for further reading. As stated in chapter 4, Ulinover published only one book of poetry, Der bobes oytser (My Grandmother’s Treasure), which Farlag Brider Levin-Epshteyn (Levin-Epstein Bros. Publishers) brought out in Warsaw in 1922. However, by 1927, according to her letter to Ezra Korman discussed in the Appendix, Ulinover had completed a second book of poems, Shabes (Sabbath), for which she was seeking a publisher. This book never came out, but as discussed in chapter 4, several poems from this book were published by Ezra Korman in Yidishe ­dikhterins (1928). Others had been published in journals. According to N ­ atalia Krynicka, Ulinover arrived at Auschwitz carrying a backpack that contained the manuscripts of both Shabes and another new book of poems, A grus fun der alter heym (Greetings from the Old Home). These manuscripts were never found. Ulinover’s poems did, though, have an afterlife. In 1975, a Hebrew translation by Yehoshua Tan Pi, accompanying a photo-offset reprint

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of the original Yiddish of Der bobes oytser, appeared from the religious Jerusalem press Mossad HaRav Kook. This edition was invaluable, in that it made available for a new audience in Israel the original Warsaw imprint that had survived the war in only a very few copies. This facsimile of the Yiddish texts, which share each page with excellent Hebrew verse translations, preserves the look and spelling of the original book. Yet the introductory essays by David Frishman, the Hebrew author who had first championed Ulinover’s work in Poland (“Al shirata shel Miryam Ulinover” [On the Poetry of Miriam Ulinover]), and the noted Israeli scholar Dov Sadan (“Shomeret haotser: al Miryam Ulinover” [Guarding the Treasure: On Miriam Ulinover]) present some questionable views on Ulinover and her work. In 2003, Natalia Krynicka published the superb scholarly edition of Ulinover’s complete work, A grus fun der alter heym: lider (Un bonjour du pays natal: poems; Greetings from the Old Home: Poems), with the Parisian Yiddish press, Bibliothèque Medem. Alongside the text of Der bobes oytser, Krynicka searched for, found, and meticulously assembled all the poems Ulinover had published in journals and newspapers, thus restoring at least partially the two books of her poetry lost at Auschwitz. Krynicka also standardized Ulinover’s archaic Yiddish spelling and reset the poems in a modern font, accompanying them with fine verse translations into French by Batia Baum. Krynicka annotated the poems helpfully and wrote an excellent, nuanced scholarly introduction that establishes definitively the arc of Ulinover’s biography and literary career. In addition, the book provides an extensive bibliography of Ulinover’s publications in journals and anthologies. English translations of Ulinover’s poems have been included in several anthologies, such as Samuel J. Imber’s 1927 Modern Yiddish Poetry: An Anthology (New York: East and West); Joseph Leftwich’s 1939 The Golden Peacock (London: Robert Anscombe); and Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf’s 1979 Voices within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets (New York: Avon, 1980), with translations by Seth Wolitz). Translations by Kathryn Hellerstein have appeared in the 1992 and 2010 editions of Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality, edited by Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992; rev. ed., Waltham: MA: Brandeis University Press, 2009); in The Drunken Boat online poetry journal, www.thedrunkenboat.com (April

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2004); in Jewish Lodz: The Missing District, ed. Pawel Spodenkiewicz and John Crust (University of Lodz and City of Lodz, 2004); and in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, ed. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Andrea Weiss (Union of Reform Judaism Press, 2007). Articles that present extended discussions of Ulinover’s poetry include Sarah Moskovitz’s essay introducing her translations of two of Ulinover poems found in the Ringelblum Archives from the Warsaw Ghetto, “Rich with this Tradition: Ghetto Poetry, Miriam ­Ulinover,” Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal 14, no. 2 (Autumn 2009): 78–83; as well as Kathryn Hellerstein: “Song of Herself: The Lineage of Women Yiddish Poets,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (Fall 1990); “The Other Side of the Poem: Translating Miriam Ulinover,” in Multiple Voices of Modern Yiddish Literature, ed. Shlomo Berger (Menasseh ben Israel Institute and University of Amsterdam, 2007); and “Beyond the Purim Shpil: Reinventing the Scroll of Esther in Modern Yiddish Poetry,” in Jews and the Creation of Modern Jewish Culture in Eastern Europe, ed. Gabriella Safran and Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

Roza Yakubovitsh Like her friend and colleague Miriam Ulinover, Roza Yakubovitsh perished during the Holocaust. Adding to the discussion of Yakubovitsh’s work in chapter 4, this bibliographic essay offers a brief discussion of her published work that was not collected in book form. Yakubovitsh published one book of her poems, Mayne gezangen, in Warsaw in 1924. She completed a second book of poems, Lider tsu got (Poems to God), and a collection of short stories or novellas that she described to Ezra Korman in a letter she wrote him in 1927 (discussed in the Appendix). Neither of these books was published, and the manuscripts apparently have been lost. However, a fair number of these uncollected poems appeared in journals and newspapers that were published in Poland between the wars. We can reconstruct a bibliography of Roza Yakubovitsh’s journal publications through the forty-four listings in the Index of Yiddish Periodicals (IYP) on the website of the Jewish National Library (JNL)

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at Hebrew University: http://yiddish-periodicals.huji.ac.il/ (in Yiddish with an English interface for searches). A number of these poems, published between 1907 and 1939, did not appear in her book Mayne gezangen, including the following, titled with biblical women’s names: “Yehudis: balade” (Judith: Ballad), Nayer haynt (Haynt) 292 (Dec. 25, 1921), 3; “Biblishe motivn: Bas-sheva, Khane, Yoevs vayb” (Biblical Motifs: Batsheva, Hannah, Job’s Wife), in Haynt: Yubeley bukh, 1908–1928 (Warsaw, 1928), 36–38; and another that evokes a girl in a traditional Jewish context, “Dem shameses tokhter” (The Shammes’s Daughter), Di yudishe tribune 1 (3) (Mar. 18, 1922), 13. In 1932, she published a play, Di hofenung (The Hope), in the Warsaw newspaper Haynt 25 (89) (Apr. 15, 1932), 5. Thereafter, her poems appeared in the following publications: “Nakht” (Night) and “Der veg” (The Road), Haynt 27 (266) (Nov. 23, 1934), 6; “Iz vos az es kumen shoen ven ikh kon fargesn on dir . . . ” (Will Hours Come When I Can Forget You . . . ), Haynt 27 (272) (Nov. 30, 1934), 6. In 1935, 1936, and 1937, in Haynt (Today), Yakubovitsh published several installments of poems from her book-in-progress, Lider tsu got (Poems to God). Yakubovitsh published other poem sequences, too, on such biblical themes as the Book of Job and the Psalms, between 1937 and 1939: “Yoav motivn” (Job Motifs), Haynt 30 (135) (June 11, 1937), 7; “Tehilim-gezangen” (Psalm Songs), Haynt 31 (18) (Jan. 21, 1938), 7; “Tehilim-gezangen,” Haynt 31 (84) (Apr. 8, 1938), 5; and “Tehilim-­ gezangen,” Haynt 32 (66) (Mar. 17, 1939), 5. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Haynt, which had begun in 1908, ceased publication. Yakubovitsh’s last publications are two poems brought out in the April 7, 1939 issue of Haynt 32 (82), “Der moner” (The Demander) and “Ikh halt in ayn zukhn” (I Keep on Searching), Haynt 32 (82) (Apr. 7, 1939), 5. According to Zalman Reyzen’s Leksikon, Yakubovitsh also published poems in I. L. Peretz’s collection, Yudish, in the weekly paper Dos folk; in a miscellany, Ringen, edited by Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg (Isaac Meir Weissenberg) ; in the Lodz publications Folksblat, Der z­ shurnalist, Yugnt, and Heftn; and in the periodical Yetstike tsayt (published by Solnik). In addition to Haynt, Reyzen lists the Warsaw paper Unzer tribune, as well as the Lublin togblat. Reyzen describes Mayne ­gezangen: “Besides lyric poems—a portion of which are about patriar-

Bibliographic Essays

chal Jewish-Polish life—[Yakubovitsh] also included a cycle of poems about biblical women.” Yakubovitsh was one of the two women listed as authors in the 1908–1928 jubilee book of Haynt, where she published three of her “Biblishe motivn” poems: “Bat-sheva,” “Khana,” and “Yoav’s vayb.” These poems are listed under Yakubovitsh’s name in Haynt: a tsaytung bay yidn: 1908–1939 (Haynt: A Newspaper for Jews) (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz Farlag, 1978), a history of the Warsaw news­ paper, written in Yiddish by its last editor, Chaim Finkelstein. A kind of crowd-sourced English translation of this book is found online. For this list of Yakubovitsh’s poems, see Berta Kipnis’s translation of “Contents of the 1908–1928 Jubilee Book of Haynt,” “p. 429,” on the webpage http://www.haynt.org/Part_3_424-436.htm. The only published English translations of Yakubovitsh’s works are selections by Kathryn Hellerstein, included in The Mirror (Spring 1990); and in Scrolls of Love: Reading Ruth and the Song of Songs, ed. Peter Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing (Fordham University Press, 2006). Three essays by Kathryn Hellerstein treat Yakubovitsh’s poetry in depth: “The Metamorphosis of the Matriarchs in Modern Yiddish Poetry,” in Yiddish Language and Culture Then and Now, ed. Leonard Jay Greenspoon (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1998), 201–31; “Ruth Speaks in Yiddish Poems: Roza Yakubovitsh and Itzik Manger,” in Scrolls of Love: Reading Ruth and the Song of Songs, ed. Peter Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing (Fordham University Press, 2006), 89–121; and “Beyond the Purim Shpil: Reinventing the Scroll of Esther in Modern Yiddish Poetry,” in Jews and the Creation of Modern Jewish Culture in Eastern Europe, ed. Gabriella Safran and Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 241–66.

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Notes

Introduction 1.  Twenty years later, in 1939, Cleanth Brooks restated this idea in reference to the poets of the American South. See Brooks, “The Modern Poet,” 75–76. In 1960 J. V. Cunningham, in contrast to Eliot, argued that tradition produces literary forms. See Cunningham, Tradition and Poetic Structure, 62–63. 2.  Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 38–39, 44. 3.  Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” 1. 4.  “T. S. Eliot’s essay of 1919, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is the classic point of departure for any discussion of the problem of literary traditions in modern literature.” Shmeruk, “Medresh Itzik,” v; vii; ix–xi. 5.  The only other work that in any way resembles Korman’s anthology is Roz­ shanski’s Di froy in der yidisher poezye. However, this anthology, which covers only the modern period, is arranged thematically and impressionistically. It includes as many poems about women as it does poems by women. 6.  Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics.” The essay was revised and reprinted in Baskin, Women of the Word. 7.  Hellerstein, “A Question of Tradition”; “Word for My Blood”; “Subordination of Prayer”; “Songs of Herself”; “Hebraisms as Metaphor”; “Canon and Gender”; and “From Ikh to Zikh.” 8.  Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed” (Prooftexts). 9.  Sokoloff et al., Gender and Text. On women Yiddish writers, see Norich, “Jewish Literatures”; Miron, “Why Was There No Women’s Poetry”; Hadda, “The Eyes Have It”; Hellerstein, “From Ikh to Zikh”; and Baskin, Women of the Word. On Yiddish women writers, see Niger, “Yiddish Literature”; Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics”; and Hellerstein, “Canon and Gender.” 10.  Zucker, “Ana Margolin”; “Kadye Molodowsky’s Froyen lider”; and “Red Flower.” 11.  Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction” and “Di Mames.” 12. Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin”; Brenner, “Slippery Selves”; Chaver, “How Shall I, So Poor, Go Forth?”; Margolis, “Remembering”; Tal, “Froyen”; and Hellerstein, “Art of Sex.”

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Notes to Introduction and Chapter One 13. Turniansky, Glikl: Memoirs; Turniansky, “Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur”; Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs; Kay, Seyder Tkhines; and Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts. 14. Hadda, Passionate Women; and Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven. See also Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs. 15.  Novershtern, “Voices and the Choir,” 78. 16.  See Hellerstein, “Appendix: Letters from Women Poets to Ezra Korman,” at the end of this book.

Chapter One All translations are by the author, unless otherwise indicated. 1.  Niger and Shatzky, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, s.v.“Korman, Ezra,” 8:137–38. 2. Bassin, Antologye, 1: i–ii. Despite Bassin’s insistence that the anthology includes no poems published after 1910, a number of selections actually appeared after that date, such as poems by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, H. Leyvik, and Mani Leyb. Bassin, born in Nivkes, Homlier Krayz, White Russia, in 1889, acquired a traditional Jewish education and was otherwise self-taught. Bassin deserted the Russian Army in 1907 and fled to the United States, where, from 1909 onward, he wrote and published lyric poems, long narrative poems, essays, and children’s verse in newspapers, journals (Arbeter, Fraye arbiter-shtime, and Tsukunft) and miscellanies or anthologies (Literatur, Shriftn, Naye heym, Fun mentsh tsu mentsh, V ­ arhayt, Tog, and Yidisher kemfer). See also Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, s.v. “Bassin, Moyshe,” 1:228; and Algemeyne entsiklopedie, s.v. “Bassin, Moyshe,” 5:166–67. The encyclopedia entry describes the themes in Bassin’s poetry as “the struggle between the primitive and aesthetic elevation, instinct and purification” and his form as “impressionistic.” 3.  Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 1:228. 4. Bassin, Antologye, 1:i. 5. Glatshteyn, Leyeles, and Minkoff, In zikh. The poets are M. Afranel, Al. ­Gurieh, Yankev Glatshteyn, Bernard Lewis, Reuven Ludvig, A. Leyeles, N. Minkoff, and Yankev Stodloski. 6.  Celia Dropkin, “Du erniderigst mikh haynt” (Today You Humble Me) and “Mayne hent” (My Hands), Inzikh (January 1920): 11. 7. I have been deliberately inconsistent in translating the word dikhterins. Niger uses it in the context of the Yiddish word for poets in general, which is conventionally the masculine form of the noun dikhter. In his review “Froyen lyrik,” he uses the feminine noun dikhterins with a tone of matter-of-fact respect. Ravitch, in contrast, in his review of Korman’s anthology, “‘Den mir hobn z­ unshtn keyn andri (mekhaye) in der velt,’” 830–31, gives the word a mocking tone by repeating it insistently and lewdly. I have translated dikhterin as “poetess” in the Ravitch review because I think that the archaism best conveys his attitudes and intentions in using it. I hesitate to use “poetess” in Niger’s review or in the letters of

Notes to Chapter One Molodowsky and Tussman, because they intend neither mockery nor archaic condescension and politesse. See Tussman, “An entfer melekh ravitshn af ‘Meydlekh, froyen, vayber—yidishe dikhterins,’ Literarishe bleter, May 27, 1927” [An Answer to Melech Ravitch concerning “Girls, Women, Wives—Yiddish Poetesses,” in Literary Leaves], manuscript of letter that reportedly appeared in Literarishe bleter (August, 1927): 1–3. Manuscript in the Melekh Ravitch Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Quoted by permission of Malka Heifetz Tussman. See also Molodowsky, “Meydlekh, Froyen, Vayber,” 416. 8.  Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8:137–38. 9.  According to Malka Heifetz Tussman, telephone interview with the author, December 1985. 10.  Korman’s reviews are “Vegn Miriam Ulinovers Der bobes oytser” (Bikher velt, no. 1, 1922); and “Vegn Glazer-Andrus, In halb shotn, Celia Dropkins un Rashel Veprinskis lider” (Bikher velt, no. 6, 1922). Cited in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 373n215. 11.  Korman’s original poetry appeared as Shkye: lider fun elter yb toyt. Poems also appeared in Deutch et al., Antologye, 152–55, 197. The biography on p. 197 states that Korman, born in 1888 in Kiev, began to write in 1910 for Godelik’s Almanakh. He wrote journalism pieces for various European and American newspapers and published poems in the journals Milgroym (Pomegranate), Kultur (Culture), and Yidish (Yiddish). He also compiled bibliographies of Niger and A. Tseytlin for Zalman Reyzen’s Leksikon fun der Yidisher literatur un prese. See also Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, s.v. “Korman, Ezra,” 8:137–38. 12. Korman, In fayerdikn doyer; and Korman, Brenendike brikn (2nd ed. of In fayerdikn doyer). Cited in Korman, “Kvaln un literatur” (Sources and Literature), in his Yidishe dikhterins, 360n16–17. 13.  Erik, “Brantshpigl.” Cited in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxxn3. 14. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxvii, xxxi–xxxii, xxxiii–xxxv. 15.  Ibid., lxvii–lxxxiii, 357. 16.  Froyen zshurnal-vokhenblat (New York, 1922). Cited in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 364n73. 17. Ulinover, Der bobes oytser; Blokh, Poezye fun a litvishe(r) meydel in afrike [Poetry by a Lithuanian Girl in Africa] (South Africa, 1921); Gutman, Far gor dem noen(t)stn [For the Nearest and Dearest] (Berlin, 1925); Glazer-Andrus, In ­halb-shotn [In Half-Shadow] (New York, 1922); Hofman, In kinderland [In the Land of Children] (New York, 1921, 2nd ed.); Hershfeld, Kareln [Carols] (Chicago, 1926); Vurtsel, Hundert lider [A Hundred Poems] (New York, 1927; Veprinksi, Ruf fun fligl [Call of Wings] (New York, 1926); Khaveydanski, KhanaLayeh, Gedikhte un aforizmen [Poetry and Aphorisms] (Ponevezsh, Lithuania, 1922); Yakubovitsh, Mayne gezangen; Yudika, Naye Yugent [New Youth] (Kovne, 1923); Molodowsky, Kheshvendike nekht; S. Reyzen, Lider [Poems] (Vilna, 1924). 18.  Korman’s bibliography, though, is not complete, because among the biographies he mentions at least one book, Paula R.’s Der malakh un der sotn: poeme

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Notes to Chapter One (The Angel and the Devil: Long Poem) (Warsaw, 1908), which does not appear in the bibliography. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 350. 19.  Among the earlier generation of Labor Poets, see editions of the collected works of Morris Rosenfeld and David Edelstat. Edelstat had appeared in 1908 and 1909, signaling a self-conscious making of a canon. Of Di Yunge, MoysheLeyb Halpern published his two collections of poems; Mani Leyb published at least twelve books of poems, children’s poems, and other writings; Reuven Iceland published one volume of poems and several translations; and Zishe Landau published a play, the anthology of 1919, and translations. Of the Introspectivists, Jacob Glatshteyn published three books; and A. Glanz-Leyeles published at least six volumes, including poems, plays, and scholarship. 20.  See Sadan, “Shomeret haotser,” 1–8. This essay includes a bibliography of eleven articles in Yiddish on Ulinover: Mirl Ardberg-Shatan, “Miriam Ulinover” (1956); Yehemial Briks, “Miriam Ulinover” (1953) and “Literatn in ghetto” (Men of Letters in the Ghetto, 1963); Yitskhok Goldkorn, “Miriam Ulinover” (1959); Yitskhok Zilberberg, “Fartretn fun interesante froyen” (Encounters with Interesting Women, 1955); Sh. D. Zinger. “Miriamn ulinover, tsu ir zekstn yortsayt” (For the Sixth Anniversary of Her Death, 1950) and “Vegn shrayber un bikher” (About Writers and Books, 1959); Rikuda Potash, “Der goyrl fun tsvey lider” (The Fate of Two Poems, n.d.); Khaim Leyb Fuks, “Lodz shel maalah” (1972); Leo Finkel­ shteyn, “Di eyshes khayl in poyln” (The Woman of Valor in Poland, 1947) and “Megillat Poyln” (The Scroll of Poland, 1947). 21. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxxii. Standard histories of the Yiddish language use Old Yiddish to refer to the state of the language from 1250 to 1500, Middle Yiddish to designate the language from 1500 to 1700, and Modern Yiddish to designate usage after 1700. I use Korman’s term throughout my discussion. See Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed.), s.v. “Yiddish Language,” 21:332–38. 22. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxix. 23.  See Friedman, “Creativity in the Childbirth Metaphor.” Also see Lauter, Women as Mythmakers, 13–17, 131–223; and Kristeva, “Semiotics of Biblical Abomination.” Kristeva discusses the prohibitions for the menses and childbirth in terms of keeping “a being who speaks to his God separate from the fecund mother . . . that phantasmic power of the mother, that archaic Mother Goddess” (100). This separation of the art of language through prayer from the creativity of the female body contradicts the childbirth metaphor of the Yiddish critics. 24.  See Weissler, “Traditional Piety”; and Voices of the Matriarchs. See also Zinberg, “Historical and Travel Literature: Memoirs and Tehinnot” and “Popular Literature: Tze’ena U’re’enah,” in his History of Jewish Literature, 119–39, 229–59. Also see Freehof, Devotional Literature in the Vernacular. 25. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxx. 26.  Ibid., lxiv–lxv. 27.  Ibid., xlvii. 28.  Ibid., xlviii–xlix.

Notes to Chapter One 29.  David G. Roskies has pointed this out in reference to Jewish literature responding to catastrophe. See Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 17, 77–108, 225–57, 283, 289. 30. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, l. 31.  Ibid., li. Roza Goldshteyn, “Di yidishe muze—elegye,” in ibid., 45. 32.  Ibid., liv–lvi. 33.  Ibid., lvi. 34. Yakubovitsh, Mayne gezangen; Yakubovitsh, Lider tsu got (unpublished book manuscript, as of 1928). 35.  Malka Heifetz Tussman, conversation with the author, September 1978. Fradl Shtok published her sonnets in groups, for example, the eight sonnets in the 1914 miscellany, Di naye heym. However, A. Tabachnik argues that Shtok’s introduction of the sonnet into Yiddish poetry is a popular misconception that originated with Bassin’s Antologye; rather, Morris Vintshevski was the true innovator, writing sonnets between 1892 and 1908. Tabachnik, “Fradl Shtok un der sonet.” 36.  See also Korman, “Vegn Miriam Ulinover’s Der bobes oytser,” cited in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 373n215. 37. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, lxiii–lxiv. 38.  Ibid., lxiv. 39. For a study of the Warsaw group, the S. Ansky Vilna Jewish HistoricEthno­graphic Society, and the Ethnographic Commission, see Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation. On the efforts of S. Ansky (Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport) to collect folk literature and folk art before and during World War I, see also Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 133–62. And see Weiser, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation. 40.  Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin” (all references to this essay are to the 1959 reprinting in Niger’s Geklibene verk fun Sh. Niger). See also Freehof, Devotional Literature in the Vernacular; and Zinberg, “Popular Literature” and “Historical and Travel Literature” in his History of Jewish Literature. In addition, see Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, 3–6, for a reading of Niger’s essay, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” which Seidman dates as 1912. 41.  Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” 37. 42. Ibid., 52–53. 43. Ibid., 55–68. 44. Ibid., 69–73. 45.  For a survey of fifty women Yiddish poets from a cultural historical perspective, see Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 68–90. 46.  A. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” Di fraye arbeter shtime (October 30, 1915): 4–5. Brought to my attention by Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 77n18. 47.  Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” 4. 48. Ibid., 5. 49. Ibid. 50.  Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 78–79. A recent source documents that Shtok published stories in Yiddish as late as 1942, in the Forverts, and that she

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Notes to Chapter One probably died in Hollywood, on December 31, 1952. See Helene Kenvin, “Fradel Shtok: Author and Poet,” under “Skala Luminaries,” on the Skala ShtetLinks page, available from http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/skalapodol/index.html#People, accessed September 10, 2013. See also Glanz, “Ertseylungen fun Fradl Shtok” (Short Stories by Fradl Shtok), Der tog (December 7, 1919), 9. 51.  Ravitch, “‘Den mir hobn zunshtn keyn andri (mekhaye) in der velt:’ E. Korman Yidishe dikhterins: antologye” [Then We Have Hardly Any Other Pleasure in the World: E. Korman—Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology], Literarishe bleter (October 19, 1928): 830–31. 52.  Molodowsky, “Meydlekh, Froyen, Vayber,” 416. 53.  Niger, “Froyen lyrik,” 909–10. 54. Ibid., 909. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 910. 58.  Chava Weissler has translated this conventional Yiddish and Hebrew phrase, which often appeared at the beginning of religious Yiddish books from the seventeenth century on (such as in Erik’s “Brantshpigl”), as “This book was written in Yiddish for women and for men who are like women in not having much knowledge.” Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 38–44. See also Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven. 59.  For a study of the feminization of Jewish men by European anti-Semitism, see Hyman, Gender and Assimilation. 60.  Such as Kadya Molodowsky, whose first poem appeared in 1921. 61. Bassin, Antologye, 47. 62.  The three Knizshnik poems were “Unter shlos” (Under Lock and Key), “Volkns” (Clouds), and “A shpetige royz” (A Late-Blooming Rose), all in Bassin, Antologye, 2:47. 63.  Knizshnik, “Kapores,” in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 51–52. 64.  Yehudis. All three poems can be found in Bassin, Antologye, 2:49–50. 65. Bassin, Antologye, 2: 49–50; and Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 64–65. 66. Bassin, Antologye, 2: 47; and Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 55. 67. Bassin, Antologye, 2:49; and Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 62. 68. Yehudis, “Ikh endik mayn veben” (I Finish My Weaving), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 65. 69. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 84–92, 344. 70. Bassin, Antologye, 2:125–26; and Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 88–89. 71. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 86. For the train metaphor, see Sholem Aleykhem, Tevye the Dairyman. 72.  Yakubovitsh, “Rokhl” (from Biblishe motivn), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 89–90; and Yakubovitsh, “Hagar,” in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 90–91. 73.  Melech Ravitch referred regretfully to the sudden silence of Fradl Shtok, the poetess from Galicia, whom he accused of being more woman than poet in his 1927

Notes to Chapters One and Two review of the anonymous women poets. Pratt, in “Culture and Radical Politics,” asserted that Shtok died in an asylum for the mentally ill, a narrative that Irena Klepfisz dramatized in a 1990 poem, “Fradel Shtok.” A more recent biographical note on Shtok corrects these accounts: see Helene Kenvin, “Fradel Shtok: Author and Poet,” under “Skala Luminaries,” on the Skala ShtetLinks page, available from http://kehil alinks.jewishgen.org/skalapodol/index.html#People, accessed September 10, 2013. 74. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 93–95. 75. Ibid., 93–94. 76. Ibid., 94–95. 77. Ibid., 96–97. 78.  Malka Heifetz Tussman, conversation with the author, September 1978. As noted earlier, Fradl Shtok published her sonnets in groups. Landau’s Antologye of Di Yunge poets presented one Shtok sonnet. A decade later, Itsik Manger included a series of his sonnets on biblical themes in his first book, Shtern afn dakh, 62–67. 79.  Shtok, “Sonnet,” in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 98. 80. Bassin, Amerikaner yidishe poezye, 253–66. 81. Ibid., 7. My translation reflects Bassin’s literalization of the grammatically gendered possessive adjectives, which are used with masculine, neuter, and feminine nouns denoting inanimate entities.

Chapter Two 1.  The three poets were Toybe Pan, Khane Kats, and Gele. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, lxvii, lxix, lxxi, lxxiii, lxxv, lxxvii, lxxix, lxxxi, lxxxiii. 2. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxxii. For information about the term “Old Yiddish,” see note 21 in chapter 1. 3. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxviii. 4. Ibid. 5.  Scholars of Old Yiddish include Korman’s contemporaries Max Erik, ­Israel Zinberg, Shmuel Niger, and Solomon Freehof in the 1910s and 1920s; and later figures, such as Chone Shmeruk, Chava Turniansky, Chava Weissler, Shlomo Berger, Marion Aptroot, Jerold C. Frakes, Jean Baumgarten, and Devra Kay. For a succinct history and survey of scholarship on Old Yiddish literature, see Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, xliv–liii. 6.  For the devotional literature, see Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, xvii. Also see Shmeruk, Perakim fun der yidisher literatur-geshikhte; and Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature in Poland, 11–118. For the tkhines, see Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 6–8, 16–17; and Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 15. For the definitive overview in English of Yiddish literature before 1800, see YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, s.v. “Yiddish Literature,” sec. “Yiddish Literature before 1800,” 2:2059–65. 7. Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 193–94n6; Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, xvii– xxviii; Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, 1–10; and YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, s.v. “Yiddish Literature,” sec. “Yiddish Literature before 1800,” 2:2059–65.

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Notes to Chapter Two 8.  For the Fishls poem, see Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 368–70. 9.  Korman, “Araynfir,” in his Yidishe dikhterins, xxxii–xxxiii; Kay, Seyder ­Tkhines, 19, 101–3, 105–8, 262–64; Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, xii, xiv, xv, xxiii–xxiv, 368, 637, 834. 10. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 107–8. 11.  YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, s.v. “Rivke bas Me’ir of Tikotin,” 2:1565–66. Frauke von Rohden, who wrote the encyclopedia entry, states that Tiktiner’s “headstone in the old Jewish cemetery of [Prague] asserts that she ‘had preached day and night to women in every pious commuity.’ Her epitaph also refers to her father as ‘morenu ha-rav rabi [our teacher and master, rabbi] Me’ir,’ suggesting that she was the daughter of a scholar and had probably acquired her knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinical literature at her parents’ home. Presumably her husband was not a rabbi and therefore it can be assumed that the titles rabanit (teacher) and darshanit ve-rabanit (preacher and teacher) were honorifics bestowed on her out of respect for her activities in Prague and its surrounding communities” (1565). See also Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 648; and Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:241, 285. 12.  For the editions of Meynekes Rivke , see YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, s.v. “Rivke bas Me’ir of Tikotin,” 2:1565–66. See also Tiktiner, Meneket Rivkah. For the Simhat Torah song, see Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 103; and Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 648–51. 13. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 221. 14. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 834–42. Kay dates Toybe Pan’s poem to 1680 (Seyder Tkhines, 99–100) and asserts that “the first bodies were buried there [in the Olsan cemeteries in Prague] during the great plague epidemic in 1680, when small, parochial graveyards inside the city could no longer hold the thirty thousand dead that needed to be buried over a period of several weeks. Toybe refers to this crisis in her lid.” I am skeptical of Kay’s numbers here. Arno Pařík, writing in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (s.v., “Prague,” 2:1448), states that “in 1680, an outbreak of plague . . . took lives of more than 3,500 Jews.” Regarding Jews being blamed for causing the plague, Antony Polonsky, writing in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2:1538, s.v. “Relations between Jews and Non-Jews,” states, “In addition, Jews were attacked in Prague, Eger, and Kolin following the outbreak of the Black Death” in the fourteenth century. I wonder if Toybe Pan knew of this event or later ones and expressed her fear that the Christians in 1680 would blame the Jews for causing the plague, as they had in the past. For example, an anonymous twenty-page manuscript, discovered and edited by Abraham David and published in English translation in 1993 as A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague c. 1615, describes “briefly the calamities that befell Bohemian Jewry in general, and the Jews of Prague in particular during the last centuries of the Middle Ages” (David, Hebrew Chronicle, 3): the “accusation of Host desecration” that resulted in the burning to death of “many Prague Jews,”

Notes to Chapter Two “approximately 3,000,” on the last day of Passover, April 18, 1389 (David, Hebrew Chronicle, 21, fol. 41 and note 1); an account of the legendary meeting in Prague between Rabbi Loew (the Maharal), the great scholar and leader of the Prague Jewish community, and Emperor Rudolf II on February 16, 1592; and the praising of another “great rabbi, R. Mordecai Jaffe,” and a generous philanthropist, “R. Mordecai Meisel,” who built the Hochschul, donated Torah scrolls and their decorations, built the bathhouse and ritual bath as well as the poorhouse, paved the Judenstrasse, and erected “an exceedingly splendid great synagogue,” mentioning the names of two “skilled masons” (David, Hebrew Chronicle, 90–93). When I asked Chava Turniansky how to determine which Prague leap-year plague Toybe Pan’s poem might refer to, she replied that Pan’s poem’s language marks it as predating the 1713 Prague plague she had written about (email exchange, May 15 and 25, 2008). See Turniansky, “Yiddish Song as Historical Source Material,” 189–98. 15. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxvii. 16.  Ibid., xxviii. 17. Ibid. 18.  Ibid., xxvii–xxix. 19.  Ibid., xxviii. 20.  Ibid., xxvii–xxix. 21.  Ibid., xxix. 22. Ibid. 23. Abramovitsh, Shloyme reb Khayims, in Ale verk fun Mendele Moykhr Sforim (Krakow, 1911), 2:35–37; Abramovitsh, “Of Bygone Days,” in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. Ruth R. Wisse, trans. Raymond P. Sheindlin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 300–302. For Abramovitsh’s 1889 account of his choice to write fiction in Yiddish in 1864 and of his 1875 translations into Yiddish of Sabbath songs and the Psalms, “to do something for our sisters, Jewish daughters and just plain folk, to present them with a gift in a pure language,” see Abramovitsh, “Notes for My Biography,” 42–44. 24. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxvii, xxx. Korman cites Shmuel Niger’s 1913 essay “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” Max Erik’s Brantshpigl, Solomon B. Freehof’s Devotional Literature in the Vernacular, and Elias Shulman’s Sfat yehuditashkenazit v’sifruta. 25. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxix. 26.  For the list of published works, see Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxix–xxx. 27.  Korman noted two scholarly works on the tkhines published as of 1927: Sh. Niger’s 1913 essay, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin”; and the Reform rabbi Solomon B. Freehof’s 1923 work, Devotional Literature in the Vernacular. According to Chava Weissler (Voices of the Matriarchs, x–xi), these remained the only publications on this topic in English for the next half-century. 28.  See Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs.

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Notes to Chapter Two 29. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxxvi. 30. Ibid., 353. In the poem, Royzl Fishls spells the translator’s name “Shtendil,” whereas Korman renders the name “Shtendal” (Yidishe dikhterins, xxxvi). Jerold C. Frakes gives the name as “Moses Shtendl of Hanover” (Early Yiddish Texts, 368). I have adapted Korman’s spelling. 31. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxxvi and xxxvi–xxxviin17. 32. Shulman, Sfat yehudit-ashkenazit v’sifruta. Cited in Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, xlii. 33. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxxvi. 34.  Ibid. See Steinschneider, Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum, 189, no. 1280. 35. Bassin, Antologye, 1:1, 29. Bassin wrote, “Moyshe Shtendal—lived in 16th century, was the author of a Yiddish psalm translation, from which the following is the first chapter. In 1586 his wife, Royzl Fishls, published this translation with a rhymed foreword, which she herself wrote. It appeared in Krakow.” Bassin based his incorrect attribution of Royzl Fishls as Moyshe Shtendal’s wife on a Hebrew article by Elias Shulman, which he cited as “‘Sfat yehudit-ashkenazit v’sifruta,’ 24–26.” 36.  Korman’s citation of Shulman’s Hebrew scholarship raises a question of how and where he researched his introduction and gathered the poets for Yidishe dikhterins; this story has yet to be discovered. 37. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 368–70. 38.  See Halpern, “Memento Mori,” in his In Nyu York, 141–42. Also see Mani Leyb, “Ikh bin,” first published in Di tsukunft (October 1932), 568; and later in Mani Leyb’s Lider un balade, 1:160–61. 39.  In the title of the poem, the abbreviation “yas.” stands for the Hebraic Yiddish yisborakh (“blessed be He”). The translation is made from the Yiddish text in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 5–6. I have corrected this translation according to the Yiddish text in Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 368–70. Frakes notes that “while it was not the purpose of the Korman volume to present scholarly editions, his presentation of this text is quite unusual, for the text’s original orthography is radically distorted, but not modernized, while almost half of the poem is arbitrarily and silently omitted” (368). 40.  Literally, “And with the help of God, blessed be He, I hope to get through this [come to an understanding of this].” To maintain the rhymed couplets of the Yiddish poem, some liberty has been taken in the translation. 41.  Royzl Fishls’s assumption of a literal continuum in Jewish history from King David’s psalms to her own poem can be seen in the notion of apocalyptic historical continuity from the fall of Jerusalem in 587 bce through the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, as expressed in Jewish writing from the Book of Lamentations through the secular poems of Yitzhak Katzenelson See Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 15–52. 42. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 368–70.

Notes to Chapter Two 43.  Chava Turniansky (in a conversation with the author, April 2000) confirmed my sense of the need to rhyme and the resulting ambiguity. 44. The authorship of Shmuel-bukh is disputed (either Sanvl the Scribe or Moyshe Esri ve-Arbe). For a standard discussion of the Shmuel-bukh, see Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:107–15. For a refutation of Zinberg, see Shmeruk, “Cambridge Manuscript.” 45. Erik, Di geshikhte fun der yiddisher literatur, 222: “Klor, tehilim kon gornisht hobn gemeynzames mitn kharakter fun dem ‘Shmuel-bukh’; ober oykh der ‘raym un nign’ zenen in a sakh erter zeyer vayt fun der nibelungisher strofe fun dem ‘Shmuel-bukh’” (Clearly, Psalms have essentially nothing in common with the character of the “Shmuel-bukh”; but also the “rhyme and melody” are in many places very distant from the Nibelung stanza of the “Shmuel-bukh”). Erik refers here to “Der Nibelungenlied,” the Middle High German heroic popular poem, characterized by a long, twelve-beat line, a form that Wagner revived in the nineteenth century. 46.  According to Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, 3, “such Yiddish texts would typically open with an apologetic introduction explaining the necessity of writing in Yiddish for those who were ignorant of Hebrew, a social category often referred to in some variation of the phrase, ‘women and simple people.’ Weinreich records a few examples: ‘For women and men who are like women, that is, they are uneducated,’ ‘for men and women, lads and maidens,’ and ‘for women and men.’” Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 276. Also see Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 54–59. 47.  The Hebrew honorific Moreynu HaRov Reb (Our Teacher, the Rabbi Mister) designates the poet’s paternal grandfather, Yehudah Levi. 48.  See Davis, “Arguing with God,” 14. For a full treatment of Jewish women’s lives in seventeenth-century Europe, see Turniansky, Introduction to Glikl: M ­ emoirs, 9–60. 49. Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 10: “Some of the earlier, eighteenth-­century texts were indeed written by women. Leah Horowitz, who lived in Bolechow, Poland, in the early eighteenth century, is mentioned in contemporary sources as the author of ‘The Tkhine of the Matriarchs.’ Other eighteenth-century authors as well, such as Leah Dreyzl, great-granddaughter of Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, and Serl, daughter of the Maggid (preacher) of Dubnow, Jacob ben Wolf Krantz, can be readily documented.” 50.  Turniansky, “Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur,” regarding Ele and Gele, 18–19; Frakes, “Ella b. Moses b. Abraham the Patriarch, Verse Colophon to Tfile l’Moshe (1696),” in his Early Yiddish Texts, 749–50. 51. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxxii–xxxiv. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 19, 101–3, 105–8, 262–64. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, xii, xiv, xv, xxiii–xxiv, 368, 637, 834. 52.  Turniansky, “Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur,” 7–20. Turniansky writes, “Tsharnah bas Reb Menahem Maysils of Krakow included her name as typesetter

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Notes to Chapter Two for a book of Jewish law published in Lublin in the 1630s, and Reykhl bas Yitskhok Yudls Ka”ts included her name in loshn-koydesh (Hebrew-Aramaic) books that she set in the German towns of Wilhermsdorf, Sulzbach, and Fürth” (18). 53.  For information on the Jewish population of Nikolsburg, see ­JewishEncyclo pedia.com, s.v. “Nikolsburg” available from http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com /view.jsp?artid=292&letter=N. Also see Library Atlas of the World, 2:65, 216. 54.  Korman, “Biografyes,” in his Yidishe dikhterins, 341. 55.  Turniansky, “Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur,” 19. Korman gives the title of this book as Tfiles Moshe (Yidishe dikhterins, 341). 56. Ibid. 57.  Ele’s poem (translation mine) is from Turniansky, “Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur,” 19. It also can be found in Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 749–50, item 118. 58. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 749, item 118. 59.  Turniansky, “Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur,” 19. 60. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 749. 61.  Yiddish text of Gele’s poem transliterated from Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 18–19, and corrected against Turniansky’s reprinted text, in “Meydlekh in der alt­ yidisher literatur,” 19. 62. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, lxxxiii (photograph). In accordance with the printed version of Gele’s poem, Turniansky does not give Gele’s text a title either (“Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur,” 19). 63. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 19–20, 247. 64. Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:242n30. 65.  Marvin J. Heller, The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 1: xxxiii. 66.  Turniansky notes here that she is not certain that the last five lines of the poem are Gele’s and states that the other anthologizers of this poem (Korman in 1928, Bassin in 1918, and Zinberg in 1935) are also not in agreement about the authorship of these last lines. Kay translated Gele’s poem, also leaving out the last five lines (Seyder Tkhines, 19–20). 67.  David Stern translated these last five lines from the Hebrew. 68.  Turniansky, “Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur,” 19n30. 69. Ibid. 70. Bassin, Antologye, 1:79. Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:242–43. 71.  Turniansky, “Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur,” 11. 72.  Turniansky’s presentation of the text, with justified margins and no line breaks, follows the photograph of the text in Korman’s anthology (Yidishe dikhterins) and suggests that Gele’s lines are rhymed prose. In contrast, Korman lineated Gele’s text to conform to the image of a modern poem. I perceive a rough and varying metrical form of seven stressed syllables per line in the poem, defining the text as verse rather than rhymed prose. The facsimile photograph of Gele’s poem that Korman includes in Yidishe dikhterins shows that Gele placed a colon

Notes to Chapter Two at the end of each poetic line, although the printed lines are justified on both the left and the right margins of the page, like prose. Although this format explains Turniansky’s proselike presentation of the text, in fact there seems to be a colon after the name of Gele’s maternal grandfather, “Harov Reb Yisroel Kats Zal:.” This punctuation would verify Korman’s breaking of the line there, although the photograph does not indicate a line break after her father’s name, Harov Reb Moyshe Hamadfes, which Korman has apparently inserted in his version of the text. 73. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 21. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 107. In Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 21, the title page to Kats’s “Eyn hipshe droshe” reads, “Al yad ha’almone Khane bas Moreynu harov reb Yehuda Leyb Kats / Almone Moreynu harov reb Yitskhok Ashkenazi zal / Po kehile kedoshe, Amsterdam, n.d. (seventeenth century)” (By the hand of the widow Khane daughter of our teacher the rabbi Mr. Yehuda Leyb Kats [Yiddish]/ Widow of our teacher the rabbi Mr. Yitskhok Ashkenazi, may his memory be for a blessing [Hebrew]). See Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, 266n14. 74. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 107–8. 75. Ibid., 107. 76. Ibid., 106. 77. Ibid., 108. 78. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xli. 79.  Ibid., quoting Khane Kats, xli. 80. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xli. 81.  I have translated this poem from Korman’s version of the text. Devra Kay’s translation is quite different from mine—she converts Kats’s couplets into unrhymed verse paragraphs and paraphrases or summarizes some of the images and statements that stand out in Korman’s version of the Yiddish original. I am grateful for Kay’s rendition of this and the other Old Yiddish poems as checkpoints for my attempts. See Kay, “Sabbath Prayer” (translation of Khane Kats’s “Tfile l’shabes”), in her Seyder Tkhines, 217–18; translation of Gele’s “Tfile,” in Seyder Tkhines, 19–20; “Father, King” (translation of Toybe Pan’s “Eyn sheyn lid”), in Seyder Tkhines, 236–43; and “Simkhes toyre song” (translation of Rivke Tiktiner’s “Simkhes toyre lid”), in Seyder Tkhines, 220–23. 82. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 23. 83.  Mishnah Shabbat, chap. 2. Cited in Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 31n25. 84.  For Yiddish renditions of the normative Hebrew liturgy, see Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 71–85. For tkhines recited at life-cycle events, see Kay, Seyder Tkhines, vii– viii, 125–216; and Klirs, Merits of Our Mothers, 108–39. On tkhines for cemetery visits, see Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs. Also see Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 65. 85.  See Klirs, Merits of Our Mothers. 86.  See, for example, Sabbath tkhines in Klirs, Merits of Our Mothers, 88; and Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 148–57. 87. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 220–21. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 648. Newman,

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Notes to Chapter Two Ashkenaz. Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish bpolin, 66–69. Also see Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:285–86. 88. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 221. Two versions of this poem are extant, as cited in Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 649: “Oxford, Bodleian Opp. 8°, 460 (2c) ] [olim 405], unfoliated [fos. 7r–8v], and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Opp 8°, 650; zdy. 3637; 3696; 5524, 1; 6817, 3; Cowley, 292, 591; IDC J-43-134/1.” I consulted the second version on a photostat on microfilm at the Jewish National and Hebrew University Library (S64A/1483). Editions include Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish bpolin; and Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 648–51. I thank Zelda Kahan Newman for providing me with a photocopy version of a section of this poem reprinted in Shas Tkhine (n.p., n.d.; 145–47). The original book is in the collection of the Jewish National Library in Israel. 89.  Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4–5. Carmi, Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, 14–18. 90. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 648. 91. Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:241. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 648. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 103. Tiktiner, Meneket Rivkah, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, s.v. “Rivke bas Me’ir of Tikotin,” 2:1565–66. 92. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 648. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 221. 93.  In completing my translation, I was fortunate to be able to consult Devra Kay’s authoritative translation of Rivke Tiktiner’s poem in Seyder Tkhines, 220–23. In this translation, as in the others that comprise half of her book, Kay aims to make sense of the poems and prayers for a modern reader. In this effort, Kay has compressed or elided the lines and couplets so that the meaning fits into modern syntax and the poem is comprehensible today. She also has not attempted to recreate the acrostics or the rhymes. Although she may be wiser than I in her decision, I think it is important to convey something of the Yiddish prosody, even imperfectly, so that at least the original’s rhythm of syntax and logic, the stop and start of the voice, comes across. 94.  Rivke Tiktiner, “Simkhes toyre song,” translated by Kay in her Seyder Tkhines, 220–23. 95.  The variant is found in a microfilm negative at the Jewish National Library at the Hebrew University, Givat Ram, OPP 8, 1103 (34), bar code 6011538560115. “Eyn naye lid gimakht b’loshn tkhine iz vardn oys gitrakht, benign akeyde.” The original text is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. 96.  I located one variant of the piyyut, “Adir ayom venorah,” in a collection of songs for the Sabbath and holidays, listed in the National Library of Israel Hebrew Songs Index as “Rotenberg 54.” One variant is a voice recording of the song, found in “Melodies and Songs for the Sabbath and Holidays,” Haifa, 1971 (54, 70), Material Type SONG Donor Code ZZ 160, H. Noy Collection, Jewish National and University Library, record no. 002533032. There are at least two other variants of “Adir ayom venorah:” Mahzor Vitry for Motza’ei Shabbat (Bar Ilan CD); and Isaac ben Aryeh Josef Dov [Bear], Seder Avodat Yisroel, 316. 97. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxxvii, comments on the placement of the re-

Notes to Chapter Two frain in the two surviving versions of the poem: “In the variant, ‘Benign akeyde’ (To the melody of Akeda, the Binding of Isaac), the beginning of the first line is altered. Instead of ‘her got’ (Lord God), it reads ‘Foter kinig almekhtiger’ (Father Almighty King), and the refrain comes at the beginning of every stanza instead of at the end. (This was done both according to the new beginning and the technical structure of a sentence, to which, in past times, apparently not much attention was given.)” 98. Chava Turniansky, conversation with the author, Jerusalem, March 23, 1995. This stanza is one of six that deviate from the norm in this poem of quatrains by adding a fifth line, usually unrhymed. Turniansky suggested that perhaps the fifth line in each of these stanzas had been miscopied, with either a single line mistakenly broken into two or the extra line imported into the poem from another text. Although she suggested omitting the fifth line, I prefer to translate them and add a note. 99.  Note the elliptical verbs in these lines—onton onzen, onnemen. This transliteration reflects the Korman version; the Bodleian “Benign akeyde” variant of the poem has the singular tfile, not tfiles, in the first and last lines of stanza 18, which makes more sense in the context: Foter kenig, / Zikh on di tfile ale tsayt. 100.  Chava Turniansky, conversation with the author, Jerusalem, June 28, 1995. 101.  This tale may have a source in the Midrash. See Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 2:396, 397n122. 102. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, xxxviii. 103.  Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985). Subsequent biblical quotes cited in this text (unless otherwise indicated) are also from this edition of the JPS Tanakh, accompanied by book and verse nos. 104. Jewish communities and families observed the custom of celebrating Purim Katan (minor Purim) to mark the anniversary of their escape from a specific pogrom, famine, or plague by reciting special prayers, reading the story of the personal or communal salvation recorded in a scroll (the Scroll of Esther is read on Purim), eating a festive meal, and giving charity to the poor. Often a fast day (similar to the Fast of Esther) would precede Purim Katan. Encyclopaedia Judaica (CD-ROM ed., 1997), s.v. “Purims, Special.” 105.  Chava Turniansky suggests that there may have been a superstition about the bad luck brought by leap years in Toybe Pan’s time. Conversation with the author, June 28, 1995. Stanzas 34, 35, and 44 are irregular, for each is composed of five rather than four lines. 106.  Adapted from Hellerstein, “Beyond the Purim-shpil,” 242–45. 107.  This phrase is based on a Hebrew saying, “Before the evil, the righteous depart.” Chava Turniansky, conversation with the author, June 28, 1995. 108. Psalms 56:9, “Put my tears into Your flask, are they not in Your book?” 109.  “All the gates are locked, but not the gate of tears” (Kulam ninolu rak shaarei demo’ot lo ninolu) (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 32b), cited in Klirs, Merits of Our Mothers, 50–51, 76n16.

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Notes to Chapters Two and Three 110. Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 177–78. 111. Ibid., 111, 114. 112. Ibid., 115, citing Idel, Kabbalah, 75–88, 197–99. 113. Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 115.

Chapter Three Parts of this chapter have appeared in my articles “A Word for My Blood: A Reading of Kadya Molodowsky’s ‘Froyen-lider,’” AJS Review 13, nos. 1–2 (1988): 47–79; and “Hebraisms as Metaphor in Kadya Molodowsky’s ‘Froyen-lider I,’” in Spolsky, Uses of Adversity, 143–52. 1.  Ansky, “Destruction of Galicia,” 210–26, and Peretz Markish, “The Mound,” 362–67, both in Roskies, Literature of Destruction. 2.  The single illustration by Rybak for Korman’s Brenendike brikn is the publisher’s insignia on the first leaf of the volume: a black shield with the three-word name of the press curving across the top, center, and bottom of the shield, in contrasting black and white letters, and a stylized folk motif of two gazelles or deer. One of the illustrations by A. Mintshin is on the cover of the softcover volume, with images of three broken, weblike arched bridges floating through a whirlwind at upended angles; the title of the book in contrasting black-and-white letters; and the subtitle and author’s name in concentric curves at the bottom of the image. Mintshin also did the illustrations marking each of the three sections of poems in the anthology, which Korman calls “cycles.” The titles of the sections were taken from poems by David Hofshteyn: “In veltn-konen,” “In fayerdikn doyer,” and “Rusland.” Mintshin also designed the titles that mark the heading, “Antologye,” and the two tables of contents, “Inhalt.” I am working from a copy owned by David Stern. 3.  Korman, “Tsu der ershter oyflage” (Introduction to the First Edition), in his Brenendike brikn, 12, footnote regarding Niger’s review of Korman’s In fayerdikn doyer in Der tog (February 18, 1923), 3003. This dialogue between Korman and Niger, which is embedded in Korman’s footnote to the second edition, shows that his argument with Niger began well before he published Yidishe dikhterins in 1928. 4. Korman, Brenendike brikn, 12–13. 5. Ibid., 5–11. 6.  See Moss, “Not the Dybbuk,” 196–240, esp. 205–6, 213. 7. Korman, Brenendike brikn, 5. 8. Ibid., 11. 9. Ibid., 5. 10.  Ibid. Note that this is the line of poetry that flummoxed Cynthia Ozick as Einhorn’s translator for Howe and Greenberg’s Treasury of Yiddish Poetry; she discussed this dilemma in her essay “Prayer Leader.” 11. Ibid. 12. Korman, Brenendike brikn, 7. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid.

Notes to Chapter Three 15. Ibid., 8. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 8–9. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Ibid. 22.  YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), s.v. “Kadya Molodowsky,” 2:192–93. See also Gonshor, “Kadye Molodowsky.” On Friedrich Froebel, see Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. Friedrich Froebel, http://proxy.library.upenn .edu:2377/EBchecked/topic/220593/Friedrich-Froebel, accessed October 2, 2013. 23.  Molodowsky, “Mayn elterzeydns yerushe,” cited in Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 20–21. 24.  Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 21. 25. Ibid. 26. The other poets were Nahum Oyslender, Moyshe Broderzon, David Hofshteyn, Peretz Markish, Ezra Finigberg, Itsik Fefer, A. Fridkin, Leyb Kvitko, Moyshe Kulbak, Lipa Reznik, and Asher Shvartsman. Korman, Brenendike brikn, 155–56. 27. Molodowsky, “Fun fintster,” in Korman, Brenendike brikn, 52–53. This poem is included in Molodowsky, Kheshvendike nekht, as “In bloyen baginen,” poem XI. In the following notes, I will cite it in Molodowsky, Kheshvendike nekht, 60; and in my translation of Molodowsky in Hellerstein, Nights of Heshvan, 56. 28.  Molodowsky, “Fun fintster,” in Korman, Brenendike brikn, 52–53. Revised in Molodowsky, “In bloyen baginen,” poem XI, in her Kheshvendike nekht, 60. Molodowsky, “At Blue Dawn XI,” in her Paper Bridges, 128–29. Hellerstein translation of Molodowsky, Nights of Heshvan, 56. 29.  “Baginen” (Dawn) was a common title and concept in Yiddish poetry in the 1920s. See Moss, “Not the Dybbuk.” 30.  Molodowsky, “In bloyen baginen IX,” in her Paper Bridges, 124–25. 31.  Molodowsky, “Afn beys-oylem” (At the Cemetery), in Korman, Brenendike brikn, 105–6. 32.  Molodowsky, “In bloyen baginen III,” in her Kheshvendike nekht, 51. Also in Paper Bridges, 112–13. 33. Molodowsky, “Groye land,” in Korman, Brenendike brikn, 143–46. In Molodowsky, Kheshvendike nekht, as “A matseyve V” (A Tombstone), 80–81; and in Hellerstein’s translation of Molodowsky, Nights of Heshvan, 76–77. (The two variants are lineated differently and have some changes in vocabulary.) 34.  Niborski and Neuberg, Verterbukh, 233. 35. The 1923 version has Der murmlendiker drot, / Vos tsit zikh / Mit der velt oyf (The murmuring wire / That connects / With the world). The 1927 version has Un unzer himl der fargroyter un fargelter (And our grayed and yellowed sky).

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Notes to Chapter Three 36.  Molodowsky, “Mayn elterzeydns yerushe” (My Great-Grandfather’s Legacy), Svive 33 (January 1971): 59–62. See also Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 21, 54nn23–24. 37.  Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 54nn23–24, citing an interview with Ben Litman and Edith Schwarz, Philadelphia, March 30, 1993; and Ravitch, “Kadya Molodowsky,” in Mayn leksikon, 122–24. Another source, Molodowsky’s younger cousin, claimed that both Molodowsky and Lev earned doctorates at the Sorbonne. Anne Heilman, telephone interview with the author, Chevy Chase, Maryland, May 4, 2009; and personal interview with the author, July 1, 2009. 38. Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 21–22. For a description of Molodowsky’s outspoken role in the highly misogynist Warsaw literary scene, see Cohen, “Kadya Molodowsky’s Status,” 163–74. 39.  Molodowsky, “S’iz haynt a shtiler tog” (Today Is a Quiet Day), II, in her Kheshvendike nekht, 62. 40. Molodowsky, “Oreme vayber I” (Poor Women), in her Kheshvendike nekht, 90. 41.  Molodowsky, “Froyen-lider I,” in her Kheshvendike nekht, 11. Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 68–69. 42.  For example, in the 1783 “Tkhine of the Matriarchs for the New Moon of Elul,” by the Rebbetsin Serel (daughter of Jacob Halevi Segal of Dubno, the famous preacher in Lithuania, and wife of Mordechai Katz Rapaport, a rabbi and author from Silesia, Poland), the supplicant appealed to the Matriarch Sarah to protect the exiled Jews, those “sinful homeless children,” and in particular, the actual offspring of the women reciting the Yiddish prayer. Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:257. 43.  Weissler, “Traditional Piety,” 2:48. 44. Yanov, Tz’enah Ur’enah, 131–32. 45.  Molodowsky, “Women-Poems VI,” in her Paper Bridges, 81. 46. Molodowsky, “Froyen-lider VII,” in her Kheshvendike nekht, 18. Molodowsky, “Women-Poems VII,” in her Paper Bridges, 82–83. 47. Molodowsky, Kheshvendike nekht, 19. Molodowsky, Paper Bridges, 84–85. 48. Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law, 2:60–62. 49.  Molodowsky, “Opgeshite bleter II” (Fallen Leaves), in her Kheshvendike nekht, 21. Molodowsky, Paper Bridges, 88–89. 50.  Regarding Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, see Genesis 22. Regarding Nimrod’s testing of Abraham in the furnace, see Midrash Rabbah 38:13. 51.  Molodowsky, “Opgeshite bleter II,” in her Kheshvendike nekht, 21. 52. Molodowsky, “Opgeshite bleter I,” in her Kheshvendike nekht, 20. Molodowsky, Paper Bridges, 86–87. 53. Molodowsky, “Opgeshite bleter VIII,” in her Kheshvendike nekht, 29. Molodowsky, Paper Bridges, 90–91. 54. Ibid. 55. Kay, Seyder Tkhines, 3–11, 261–64.

Notes to Chapter Three 56. Molodowsky, “Tfiles” (Prayers), in her Kheshvendike nekht, 73–75. Molodowsky, Paper Bridges, 144–49. 57.  Halpern, “Di mayse mit der flig” (The Tale of the Fly). 58. Birnbaum, Daily Prayer Book, 81–82. 59. Molodowsky, “Oreme vayber I,” Kheshvendike nekht, 90 (line 2). Molodowsky, Paper Bridges, 170–71. 60.  Molodowksy, “Dzshike gas” (Dzshike Street) in her Paper Bridges, 224–25. 61. Ibid. 62.  Molodowsky, “Olke”(Olka), in her Paper Bridges, 180–89. Molodowsky, “Freydke: poeme I,” in her Paper Bridges, 280–305. 63.  Molodowsky, “A matseyve” (A Tombstone), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 198; in Molodowsky, Kheshvendike nekht, 76; and in Hellerstein’s translation of Molodowsky, Nights of Heshvan, 72. 64. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, acknowledgments page (unnumbered). 65.  Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 28–29. 66. Ibid., 28, 55n42. Molodowsky, Svive 36 (April 1972): 57–58. 67.  Korn, “Dzshike gas un ir dikhterin” (Dzshike Street and Its Poetess). See Gonshor, “Kadya Molodowsky,” 84. 68.  Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 29, 55n43; Korn, “Dzshike gas un ir dikhterin.” 69.  Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 29n44. 70. Ibid., 29n45. 71. Ibid., 29–30n46. 72. Ibid., 33n54. 73.  From Hellerstein, “Question of Tradition,” 195–237. 74.  Ravitch, “Meydlekh, froyen, vayber.” Ravitch, “Den mir hobn zunshtn keyn andri.” Both of these essays appeared in Literarishe bleter. I found all the materials cited from Literarishe bleter and other Yiddish journals and newspapers at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. I thank the librarians for their assistance and generous cooperation. Molodowsky, “Meydlekh, froyen, vayber, un . . . nevue”; and Malka Heifetz Tussman, “An entfer melekh ravitshn af ‘Meydlekh, froyen, vayber—yidishe dikhterins.’ Literarishe bleter, May 27, 1927” (An Answer to Melech Ravitch concerning ‘Girls, Women, Wives—Yiddish Poetesses’ in Literary Leaves), manuscript of letter that reportedly appeared in Literarishe bleter in August 1927, 3 pages. Manuscript in the Melech Ravitch Archives, Jewish National Library, Jerusalem, 4° 1540, Folder 1. Quoted by permission of Malka Heifetz Tussman. 75.  Kadya Molodowsky, letter to Ezra Korman, September 6, 1927, Ezra Korman Papers, YIVO Archives, RG 457, Box 1, Folder “Molodowsky.” 76.  Ravitch, “Den mir hobn zunshtn keyn andri.” 77.  Molodowsky, “Meydlekh, froyen, vayber . . . un Nevue.” 78.  See Hannah Levin [Khane Levin], “Tsu Shtayer” (To Duty), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 319–20. 79.  Hellerstein, Introduction to Paper Bridges, 34, 56n58.

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Notes to Chapter Three 80.  On Yiddish modernism, see Wolitz, “Between Folk and Freedom.” Also see Malinowski, “Yung-Yiddish Group”; and Kronfeld, Margins of Modernism. 81.  A recent article argues against the premise of this chapter, that women poets of the interwar period can be legitimately compared. See Novershtern, “Voices and the Choir.” 82.  Karolina Szymaniak, email message to the author, September 14, 2008. Szymaniak’s account corrects Yekhiel Hirshhoyt’s biography of Fogel that appeared in Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, s.v. “Fogel, Dvore,” ed. Samuel Niger and Jacob Shatzky, 7:287–89 (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1968). 83.  Szymaniak, email messages to the author, September 14 and 26, 2008. For Dvore Fogel’s correspondence with Bruno Schultz, see “Three letters from Dvora Fogel to Bruno Schultz: One of Those Wondrous Things,” translated from Polish into Hebrew by Ofer Dayenes, Ha’Aretz, February 27, 2008. 84.  Szymaniak, email message to the author, September 14, 2008. 85.  Szymaniak, email message to the author, April 18, 2006. See also Hirshhoyt in Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, s.v. “Fogel, Dvore,” ed. Samuel Niger and Jacob Shatzky, 7:289 (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1968). 86.  Fogel, “Kadja Molodowska.” I thank Karolina Szymaniak for this reference. 87.  Szymaniak, email message to the author, April 18, 2006. 88.  Fogel, “Figurn-lider,” in her Manekinen, 5. 89.  Giorgio de Chirico, Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure), Paris, early 1914, oil on canvas. 90.  Fogel, “Ferd un torsn,” in her Manekinen, 15–16. 91. Ibid. 92.  Such female mannequin head busts, often with realistic makeup and human hair rooted into plaster or wax scalps, were common in millinery shops and beauty salons throughout Europe and the United States in the 1930s, and were the subjects of modernist photography and art, including Bauhaus artists such as Lyonel Feininger and Josef Albers. See Lyonel Feininger, “Mannequin in Shop Window and Reflection of Lyonel and Julia Feininger, Dessau,” 1932, Harvard Art Museuems/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of T. Lux Feininger, BRLF.168.19, http:// www.harvardartmuseums.org/study-research/research-tools/lyonel-feininger -photographs/subjects/shop-windows-1932-1933-1950s, accessed October 7, 2013. See also Josef Albers, “Mannequin,” n.d., The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, http://www.albersfoundation.org, ARTstor: AALBERT_10311268479, http://­ library.artstor.org/library/secure/ViewImages?id=8DFNejIxLD9dLS04ez5%2BSn UqUQ%3D%3D, accessed October 7, 2013. Marcel Duchamp and his Surrealist colleagues exhibited installations featuring standing mannequins in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938. See Marcel Duchamp, Rrose Sélavy Mannequin, 1938, ARTSTOR_103_41822001509981, http://library.artstor.org/library/secure/ViewI mages?id=8CJGczI9NzldLS1WEDhzTnkrX3gveFR8eC8%3D, accessed October 7, 2013. The popular fascination with these lifelike mannequins is evident in a 1937 Life magazine story on “Cynthia, the Mannequin”; see http://life.time.com/cu

Notes to Chapter Three riosities/life-with-cynthia-the-world-famous-mannequin/#1, accessed October 7, 2013. For images of a “Vintage 1930s Lamoureux Mannequin Head Bust,” made of plaster, with actual hair attached, most likely used in beauty shops and millinery shops, see http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-1930s-lamoureux -female-102550171, accessed October 7, 2013; see also http://www.pinterest.com/ flapperdashery/vintage-mannequin-beauties/, accessed October 7, 2013. 93.  Chaver, “How Shall I, So Poor, Go Forth,” 54–55. 94. Ibid., 55. 95. Ibid., 56. 96. Rikuda Potash, “Ikh bin a kinigin” (I Am a Queen), as discussed by Chaver, “How Shall I, So Poor, Go Forth,” 68. 97.  Chaver, “How Shall I, So Poor, Go Forth,” 67. 98. Ibid., 80n36. 99. Ibid., 55. 100.  Potash-Fuks, “Dayn valize” (Your Suitcase), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 255–56. 101.  Potash-Fuks, “Ven tsugn geyen op” (When Trains Depart), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 256–57. 102.  Potash-Fuks, “Dos dinstmeydl” (The Servant Girl), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 257–58. 103.  Potash-Fuks, “Prostike fliterlekh,” (Ordinary Details), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 258–59. 104. Levitan, “Chronology of the Poems Included in This Collection,” in Paper Roses, 111–12. Korn’s books of poetry include Dorf (Village), 1928; Royter mon (Red Poppies), 1937; Heym un heymlozkayt (Home and Homelessness), 1948; Bashertkayt (Fate), 1949; Fun yener zayt lid (On the Other Side of the Poem) (1962); Di gnod fun vort (The Grace of the Word) (1968); Oyf der sharf un a rege (On the Edge of the Moment), 1972; and Farbitene vor (Altered Reality), 1971. 105.  Rokhl Korn to Ezra Korman, letter dated January 31, 1926. In YIVO Archives, Ezra Korman Archive RG 457, Box 1, Folder “Korn.” 106.  Levitan, Introduction to Korn, Paper Roses, iii. 107.  Ibid.; also, Korn, letter (1926). 108.  Rokhl Korn, “Dir” (To You), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 199–200. This is a variant of “Dir” in her Dorf, 11. The lineation differs, and Korn’s version does not have the line “vi nod (sic.) geler honik—.” For Levitan’s translation of yet a third variant text, see Korn, Paper Roses, 20–21. 109. “Konkol” is Korn’s Yiddish version of the Polish “kąkol,” which translates into English as “corncockle.” The Common Corncockle (Agrostemma githago) is a pink or purple wildflower found in European wheat fields. See http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Common_Corncockle, accessed October 7, 2013. I thank Michael Steinlauf for this reference. 110.  Korn, “Zumerdiker regn” (Summer Rain), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 200. Contrast with “Regn,” in Korn, Dorf, 37.

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Notes to Chapters Three and Four 111.  Korn, “Regn,” in her Dorf, 37. Contrast with Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 200. 112.  The word vrones (translated here as “crows”) was not in the Yiddish dictionaries. I consulted the translation by Seymour Levitan, “New Furrows on the Black Earth,” in Korn, Paper Roses, 5. 113.  Korn, “Kheshvn” (Heshvan), in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 202. Contrast with Korn, Dorf, 38. 114.  Korn, “Kheshvn,” in her Dorf, 38. Contrast with Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 202. 115.  Korn, “Shvester” (Sisters), in her Dorf, 21–22. Korn uses the Hebraic zoyne (whore), not the Slavic kurve (whore). 116.  I consulted Levitan’s translation for podelek (translated here as “apron”), which is not in the dictionaries. 117.  Korn, “Di alte Hanke,” in her Dorf, 51–53. For Levitan’s translation, see Korn, Paper Roses, 6–9.

Chapter Four Parts of this chapter have been adapted from my essay “The Other Side of the Poem: Translating Miriam Ulinover,” in Shlomo Berger, ed., Multiple Voices of Modern Yiddish Literature (Amsterdam: Menasseh ben Israel Institute and University of Amsterdam, 2007), 56–76. 1.  Krynicka, “Araynfir” (Introduction), to Ulinover, A grus fun der alter heym: lider (A Greeting from my Old Home: Poems), xxxi (French); 33* (Yiddish). Hereafter, in citations of Krynicka, “Araynfir,” in A grus fun der alter heym: lider, the roman numeral page nos. indicate the French translation of the introduction; arabic page numbers with an asterisk refer to the Yiddish original introduction and represent its pagination in Hebrew letters. 2.  Ibid., xiv/15*. 3. Ibid. 4.  Ibid., xv–xvi/16*–17*. 5. Ulinover, Der bobes oytser. 6.  A letter from Ulinover to Korman in 1927 states that, at his invitation, she was sending him to include in Yidishe dikhterins “several fragments of the not-yet published book of poems, ‘Shabes,’ about which my cousin Rabinovitsh wrote you.” Miriam Ulinover, letter to Ezra Korman, July 25, 1927, Ezra Korman Papers, YIVO Archives, RG 457, Box 1, Folder “Korman.” 7.  Regarding the perception of Ulinover’s naiveté, see the two introductions to the 1975 Yiddish and Hebrew bilingual edition of Ulinover’s poems: Sadan, “Shomeret haotser”; and Frishman, “Al shirata.” See also Krynicka’s discussion of this perceived naivete, Krynicka, “Araynfir,” 66*–69*. 8.  In Ulinover’s book, Der bobes oytser (1922), the eponymous first section, “Der bobes oytser,” is found on 1–70; and the second section, “Kale yorn,” on 73–116. 9.  Krynicka, “Araynfir,” xiv/15*.

Notes to Chapter Four 10. Ibid. 11.  Krynicka, ”Araynfir,” xxxv/37*–38*; and Krynicka, “Makorim fun di shafungen in der doziker oysgabe” (Sources for the Poems Chosen for this Edition), in Ulinover, A grus fun der alter heym, 242. 12.  Ulinover, “Dos mame-kindele” (first published in Di yetstike tsayt: zamlung fun milkhome-literatur (The Present Time: Collection of War Literature) (Lodz, No. 1, 1915), 7. Poem reprinted in Ulinover, A grus fun der alter heym, 3–4, bibliographic citation on 242. 13.  Ulinover, “Dos mame-kindele,” in her A grus fun der alter heym, 3–4. 14.  Ulinover, “Untitled” (Gelofn blime-brokhele [Blime-Brokhele Ran)], in her A grus fun der alter heym, 9. 15. Ibid. 16.  Ginzburg and Marek, Evreiskie narodnye pesni. Cited in Slobin, Old Jewish Folk Music, 9. 17.  Bernshteyn, “Yudishe shprikhverter un rednsartn,” i–xi. 18.  On the Jewish ethnographic expeditions, see Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation; and Weiser, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation. 19.  Peretz, “Appeal to Collect Materials”; and Ansky, “Destruction of Galicia.” 20.  Ulinover, “Antiklekh” (Rarities), in her Der bobes oytser, 26. 21.  Krynicka, “Araynfir,” xvii, lxxv n49/18*, 79* n49,; and “Bibliografye: Miriam Ulinovers Shafungen” (Bibliography: Miriam Ulinover’s Works), in A grus fun der elter heym, 245; Ulinover, “Mazl tov” and “In hoyf,” in Kestin, Naye himlen, 68–69. 22.  Krynicka, “Araynfir,” xxxii/34*. 23.  See Hellerstein, “Beyond the Purim-shpil,” 246–51. 24.  Adapted from my entry in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), s.v. “Miriam Ulinover,” 2:1940–1941. 25.  Ulinover, [untitled] (“Ven ikh hob fun liben shtetele”), in her Der bobes oytser, 3–4. I have divided the verse lines in my translations of Ulinover by combining my understanding of the lineation in the 1922 edition and Ulinover’s own metrical forms. The prosody of this poem consists of alternating four- and threestressed lines, mostly in quatrains. The deliberately archaic font and layout of the poems in the 1922 edition makes the line endings and the stanza breaks hard to distinguish. I have followed the 1922 lineation, as well as Ulinover’s meter and syntax, to determine the line and stanza breaks in my translations. Natalia Krynicka used a different strategy of lineation in her 2003 edition of Ulinover’s work. Also note that Ulinover’s final two lines—“Vu iz dos yikhes-brivele fun / unzer altn hoyz?”—translate literally as, “Where is the pedigree of / Our old house?” 26.  Ulinover, “Puter-Broyt” (Buttered Bread), in her Der bobes oytser, 5. 27.  Krynicka, “Araynfir,” 15*. 28.  Ulinover, “Havdole-Vayn” (Havdolah Wine), in her Der bobes oytser, 6. 29.  Ulinover, “Antiklekh” (Rarities), in her Der bobes oytser, 26. 30.  See Lewinsky, Encyclopedia, 1:138: “Havdalah: Women do not drink Havdalah

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Notes to Chapter Four wine; folk saying with irony: a woman who drinks Havdalah wine will grow a beard.” To date, I have not been able to find a rabbinic source for this folk belief. (I thank Dan Ben-Amos for this reference.) Louis Ginzberg, in Legends of the Jews, does not offer anything on Havdalah wine, although he cites an example of the prohibition of drinking water just before the Sabbath ends (1:577n135). Ginzberg relates that the belief that it is dangerous to drink water right before the end of the Sabbath arose because at that time the souls of the departed take their last sip before returning to Gehenna, when the respite granted to them during the Sabbath is at an end. Ignatz Bernstein’s Yudishe shprikhverter un rednsartn” appears to contain no reference to the danger of drinking Havdalah wine. 31.  Ulinover, “A segule,” in her Der bobes oytser, 7. 32.  Batia Baum, the French translator of Ulinover, picked up on this theme in “Une charme,” where she translates the lines “Grand-mère de son livre de prière / Tirait bien vite un chant de magie.” (From her prayer book, Grandmother / Quickly pulled out a magic song). Ulinover, A grus fun der alter heym, 26–27. 33.  The French translation by Batia Baum translates hindl as poulette (chick). Ulinover, A grus fun der alter heym, 26. 34.  Ulinover, “Di khales” (The Hallahs), in her Der bobes oytser, 13. 35.  Ulinover, “Les pains natte” (The Hallahs), in her A grus fun der alter heym, 34–35. Ulinover, “Hakhalot” (The Hallahs), in her Haotser shel hasavta, 13. Hellerstein, “Other Side of the Poem.” 36.  Ulinover, “In Hoyf” (In The Yard), in her Der bobes oytser, 22–23. 37.  Ulinover, “Der alter sider” (The Old Prayer Book), in her Der bobes oytser, 24–25. 38.  See Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven. See also Parush, Reading Jewish Women. 39.  Ulinover, “Antiklekh” (Rarities), in her Der bobes oytser, 26. 40.  Ulinover, “Di shabes likhtlikh” (The Sabbath Candles), in her Der bobes oytser, 48–49. 41. Ibid. 42.  Ulinover, “In der fremd” (Away from Home), in her Der bobes oytser, 53–54. 43.  Ulinover, “A brivele der boben” (A Letter to My Grandmother) in her Der bobes oytser, 55–57. 44. Ibid. 45.  Ulinover, “Der shlukerts” (The Hiccups), in her Der bobes oytser, 58–59. 46.  Ulinover, “Dayn lebn” (Your Life), in her Der bobes oytser, 60–61. 47.  Ulinover, “Dos yagde-flekel” (The Berry Stain), in her Der bobes oytser, 62–63. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50.  Ulinover, “Di tsavoe” (The Last Will), in her Der bobes oytser, 64–65. 51.  Ulinover momentarily retracts that finality, however, in “Opgehoybn ligt di bobe . . . ” (Taken from Bed, My Grandmother . . . ). Gazing at the grand-

Notes to Chapter Four mother’s corpse laid out on the floor before burial, the speaker recalls the old woman’s singsong proverb that a corpse continues to perceive the surrounding mourners until it is buried. She senses that “My grandmother sees each and every one / From under the black cloth” (Yedn, yedn zet di bobe / untern shvartsn tukh). Ulinover, “Opgehoybn ligt di bobe . . . ,” in her Der bobes oytser, 66–67. 52.  Ulinover, “Dos ringl” (The Little Ring), in her Der bobes oytser, 68–69. Krynicka states that “Dos ringl” was published in Di yugnt: zamelheft far shener literatur un frayen gedank in 1918, in the “Froyen motivn” (Women Motifs) section, alongside poems by Shoshana Tshenstokhovska, Roza Yakubovitsh, Mirl Erdber, and Khane Gerson. Krynicka notes that Ulinover’s poem “Dos ringl” was placed on the page next to Yakubovitsh’s poem “Dos dinstmeydl” (The Servant Girl), a Sabbath love-poem, in a similar style to Ulinover’s. In 1921, “Dos ringl” was translated into Polish for an anthology of Yiddish poetry in translation, published by the Brothers Epstein, who a year later published Ulinover’s Der bobes oytser (Krynicka, “Araynfir,” 17*). 53.  Ulinover, “Dos ringl,” in her Der bobes oytser, 68–69. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56.  Ulinover, “Gut-vokh” (Good Week), in her Der bobes oytser, 70–71. 57.  Ulinover, “Vald-meydl” (Forest Girl), in her Der bobes oytser, 74–75. 58.  Ulinover, “Baym taytsh-khumesh” (Reading the Taytsh-Khumesh), in her Der bobes oytser, 76–77. 59. Ibid. Taytsh-khumesh is the Yiddish translation (taytsh) of the Five Books of Moses (khumesh) intended for women and uneducated men. Many versions of the Taytsh-khumesh were published from 1560 onward. In these works, the khumesh, or Pentateuch, was fartaytsht, or translated into Yidish-taytsh (literally, “Jewish German”) from Hebrew. These translations into the vernacular, intended to bring the unlearned worshipper into direct contact with the sacred text, were either literal or homiletic Yiddish translations (see Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:119–39). The title of Ulinover’s poem plays on a second meaning of the word taytsh, “interpretation,” for the poem offers a poignant interpretation of the story of Rebecca’s betrothal to Isaac through the desires and hopes of the young girls reading Genesis in Yiddish. 60.  Ulinover, “Far der tir” (Before the Door), in her Der bobes oytser, 80–81. 61.  Ulinover, “Ester hamalke” (Queen Esther), in her Der bobes oytser, 79–80. 62. Rozshanski, “Biografishe shtrikhn,” 9–10. Rozshanski, in Oysgeklibene shriftn, calls Broderzon the “Prince of Yung-yidish,” the modernist Yiddish literary group that published an eponymous journal in Lodz. See also Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (3rd ed.), s.v. “Broderzon, Moyshe,” 1:401–4; and Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, s.v. “Broderzon, Moyshe,” 1:429–32. 63.  Rozshanski, “Biografishe shtrikhn,” 8. Broderzon was born in Moscow in 1890, moved to Lodz with his family in 1891, and attended heder in Gevishz, White Russia, at age 9. He returned to Lodz to attend business school and became a

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Notes to Chapter Four bookkeeper. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Broderzon fled Poland for Moscow; he returned to Lodz in 1918, where he lived until 1938. Although Melech Ravitch (Encyclopedia Judaica [1971], s.v. “Broderzon, Moshe,” 1:1391–92) states that Broderzon received his “early education” in Moscow and came to Lodz only in 1918, Rozshanski’s account contradicts this version. See also Wolitz, “Jewish National Art Renaissance,” 29, 33. 64.  Broderzon likely encountered Ulinover’s poetry in the 1919 and 1920 issues of a Lodz provincial publication, Gezangen (“Songs”) to which he contributed after his return from Moscow in 1918 (Krynicka, “Introduction,” 18). Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (3rd ed.), s.v. “Broderzon, Moyshe,” 1:402. 65.  Ulinover, “Far der tir” (Before the Door), in her Der bobes oytser, 80–81. 66.  Ulinover, “Dos royte kleydl,” in her Der bobes oytser, 82–83. 67. Ibid. 68.  Ulinover, “Dos tirl” (The Small Gate) in her Der bobes oytser, 84–85. 69.  Ulinover, “In Beker-shtub” in her Der bobes oytser, 88–89. 70.  Ulinover, “Af shvomen”(For Mushrooms) in her Der bobes oytser, 91–93. 71.  Ulinover, “Brivelekh” (Little Letters) in her Der bobes oytser, 94. 72.  Ulinover, “Dos bagegenish”(The Encounter) in her Der bobes oytser, 95–96. 73.  Ulinover, “Baynakht” (At Night) in her Der bobes oytser, 99–100. 74.  Ulinover, “A brivl” (A Note) in her Der bobes oytser, 103–5. 75.  Ulinover, “Di mame” (My Mother) in her Der bobes oytser, 112–13. 76.  Ulinover, “Erev Peysakh” (Passover Eve) in her Der bobes oytser, 114. 77.  Ulinover, “Maskir neshomes” (Commemoration of the Dead) in her Der bobes oytser, 114–15. 78.  David Frishman, “Al shirata shel Miryam Ulinover” (On the Poetry of Miriam Ulinover), in Miriam Ulinover, Haotser shel hasavta: Der bobes oytser, ed. David Frishmann and Dov Sadan and trans. Yehoshua Tan Pi (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1975), 9–11. 79.  Regarding Ulinover’s “Khumesh lider,” see Krynicka, “Introduction,” 17–19. 80.  Ulinover, “Khumesh grusn: Lots vayb” (Bible Greetings: Lot’s Wife), ­Ilustrirte Vokh, ser. 2, 13, no. 15 (April 3, 1924): 11. (I found this poem in the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, in July 2000.) The poem is also in Ulinover, A grus fun der alter heym, 157. 81.  These details of Ulinover’s life and death are adapted from my entry in Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), s.v. “Miriam Ulinover,” 2:1940–41. 82. Ulinover, Haotser shel hasavta. 83.  Krynicka, “Araynfir,” 17*, 78* n37. 84. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 344–45. 85.  Roza Yakubovitsh, letter to Ezra Korman, n.d., Ezra Korman Papers, YIVO Archive, RG 457, Box 1, Folder “Yakubovitsh.” 86.  Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (3rd ed.), s.v. “Yakubovitsh, Roza,” 1:1237.

Notes to Chapter Four 87. Ibid., 1:1236–37. 88.  Yakubovitsh, quoted in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 344. 89. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 334. Also see Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (3rd ed.), s.v. “Yakubovitsh, Roza,” 1:1236. 90.  I have not been able to establish the name of Yakubovitsh’s husband nor was I able to find the publication he founded, der Bendiner vort. It is not listed in the Jewish National Library, Index to Yiddish Periodicals. 91. Roza Yakubovitsh, in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 84–92; Biographical Note, 344. Also see Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, s.v. “Yakubovitsh, Roza,” 1:1236–37; and Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, s.v. “Yakubovitsh, Roza,” 4:222. 92. Kryincka, “Araynfir,” lxxx n117/ 84* n117, quoting Khayim-Leyb Fuks, Lodz shel mayle (1972), 251. Also see Khayim-Leyb Fuks, “Yakubovitsh, Roza,” in Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 4:222. 93.  Yakubovitsh, Untitled (“Mit pasn goldenem . . .” [With golden rays . . .]), in her Mayne gezangen (1924), 5. 94.  Yakubovitsh, Untitled (“Osfraykayt mayne” [Oh, my freedom]), in her Mayne gezangen, 6. 95. Yakubovitsh, Untitled (“Nokh shmekt fun unzer libes-nakht dos shtile tsertlen dayns” [Still fragrant from our loving-night, your quiet fondling stays]), in her Mayne gezangen, 7. 96.  Yakubovitsh, “Dos dinstmeydl” and “Di shilerin,” in her Mayne gezangen (1924), 8–9. 97.  Yakubovitsh, “Fun kale-sidur,” in her Mayne gezangen, 10. 98. Ibid. 99.  Ophir is a wealthy land mentioned in 1 Kings 9:28, 1 Kings 10:11, and Isaiah 13:12 as the source of gold and precious woods for Solomon’s Temple. It is also mentioned in Psalms 45:10: “Kings’ daughters are among thy favorites; at thy right hand doth stand the queen in gold of Ophir.” 100.  Yakubovitsh, “Di akore” (“The Barren Woman”), in her Mayne gezangen, 11. 101.  The practice of a husband divorcing a wife who does not produce a child was later depicted in Dvorah Baron’s 1943 Hebrew short story, “Kritut”:translated as “Excision,” by Felice Kahn Zisken, in Ribcage: Israeli Women’s Fiction, ed. Carol Diamant and Lily Rattok (New York: Hadassah, 1994), 1–9. 102.  “Kh’volt mekh gern erkindikt.” Folksong source: Itzik Gottesman’s recording of and lecture about Lifshe Schechter Widman. Translation by Itzik Gottesman, with some revision by Kathryn Hellerstein. Conversation between author and Itzik Gottesman, Philadelphia, December 1986. kh’volt mekh gern erkindikt vus ekh hob azoyne groyse zind. Vus ekh hob mekh azoy farzindikt, ekh bin farsholtn fin a kind.

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Notes to Chapter Four Der numen “mame” iz a groys vinder. voy iz der mamen ven zi azoyns hert. Ekh bin farsholtn fin kinder “Mame” tsi hern bin ekh gor nit vert. Vus fara vert hot der boym, on peyres, in on tsvagn? Er ligt ba dr’erd, in vert getsert, im iz nebekh tsim baklugn. 103.  Yakubovitsh, “Tsum zoyg-kind” (To the Nursing Child), in her Mayne gezangen, 12. 104.  Yakubovitsh, “Di shrek” (The Fear), in her Mayne gezangen, 13. 105. Yakubovitsh, Untitled (“Es hot getsankt dayn tate zikh mit maynem” [Your father fought with mine]), in her Mayne gezangen, 14. 106.  Yakubovtish, “Ikh hob gemeynt dir alts avektsugebn” (I meant to give everything away to you), in her Mayne gezangen, 22. 107.  Yakubovitsh, “On a statsye” (Without a Station), in her Mayne gezangen, 23. 108.  Yakubovitsh, “Tsu mayn tatn” (To My Father), in her Mayne gezangen, 36. 109.  Yakubovitsh, “Af keyver oves” (At My Ancestors’ Grave) (first poem), in her Mayne gezangen, 37. 110.  Ibid. (second poem), 38. 111.  Yakubovitsh published four other poems in the voices of biblical women that were never collected: “Yehudit: Balade” (Judith: Ballad), in Nayer haynt (Haynt), no. 292, Warsaw, December 25, 1921, 3. Also, “Bas-sheva” (Bat-Sheva), “Khane” (Hannah), “Yoyavs vayb” (Job’s Wife), in “Biblishe motivn,” Haynt: Yubilay bukh, 1908–1928 (Warsaw, 1928), 36–37. 112.  Peretz, “What Our Literature Needs,” 31. 113. Ibid., 25. 114. Ibid., 26. 115. Ibid., 31. 116.  Yakubovitsh, “Rut” (Ruth), in her Mayne gezangen, 39–40. 117.  Ibid., ll. 1–8. 118.  Ibid., ll. 9–14. 119.  Ibid., ll. 15–21. 120. Ibid., 40, ll. 22–27. 121.  Meyer Waxman, A History of Jewish Literature (1933; 1960), 2:634–35. Also, Jerold C. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts (2004), 540–42. 122.  She refuses to bend over while gleaning, in fear of exposing her bare legs. Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Yanow, Tz’enah Ur’enah: The Classic Anthology of Torah Lore and Midrashic Comment, trans. Miriam Stark Zakon (1984), 3:859. 123. Ibid., 3:866. 124. Ibid., 3:867.

Notes to Chapter Four 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid., 3:872. 127.  Yakubovitsh, “Rokhl” (Rachel), in her Mayne gezangen, 41. 128.  Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Yanow, Tz’enah Ur’enah, trans. Zakon, 1:152. 129. Ibid., 156. 130.  Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, vol. 2, trans. Rabbi Dr. H. Freedman (New York: Soncino Press, 1939), 663. Bareyshis Midrash Rabba (Vayetze LXXII 3). 131.  Yakubovitsh, “Hagar,” in her Mayne gezangen, 42. 132.  Yakubovitsh, “Miriam,” in her Mayne gezangen, 43. 133. Exodus 15:21, The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (1955; 9th printing, 1976, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America). 134. Available from the Hebrew-English Bible/Mechon-Mambre, http:// www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt3003.htm, accessed October 2, 2013. 135.  Yakubovitsh, “Shulames” (Shulamit), in her Mayne gezangen, 44–46. 136.  Yakubovitsh, “Ester” (Esther), in her Mayne gezangen, 47. 137.  Esther, in The Five Megilloth and Jonah: A New Translation, 2nd rev. ed., introduction by H. L. Ginsberg (1969; reprint, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), 97. 138. Ibid., 98. 139.  Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Yanow, Tz’enah Ur’enah, 2:546–47. This translation, by Zakon, keeps the Yiddish transliterations of the biblical names. 140.  Benjamin Hrushovski (Harshav), “On Free Rhythms in Modern Yiddish Poetry,” in Field of Yiddish, 234–35. 141.  Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther, 14. (Esther 1:6 describes “cloths of white, percaline, and violet, bound with cords of linen and purple on silver rods and alabaster pillars . . . on a mosaic pavement of porphyry and alabaster, mother of pearl and dark marble.”) See also Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Yanow, Tze’enah Ur’enah, 2:537–38. (“White hangings and fine cotton [1:6] Linen, white as pearls, hung from one tree to the next, woven with threads of green, blue, and silk. A hanging of purple encircled it, bound all around with golden chains.”) 142.  Definition of dergeyn, in Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary, 141/652. 143.  Tz’enah Ur’enah, 2:546–47. 144. Regarding the traditional views of Esther never bearing children, see Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 4:388 (Esther never had sexual relations with Ahasuerus, because she was really married to Mordecai); 4:419 (Esther, frightened by news that Mordecai appeared in mourning garb, miscarried); 6:469n127 (citing the sources for the miscarriage tale as Abba Gorion 35 and Panim Aherim 51, and states that the latter “contains also another opinion to the effect that Esther took precautions to prevent pregnancy”). In the Talmud, Sanhedrin 74a posits another tradition, which holds that the last Darius was the offspring of Esther and Ahasuerus. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 6:460n80.

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Notes to Chapter Five

Chapter Five 1. Landau, Antologye. The anthology included Dropkin’s poem, “Mayn vayse shney printsesin,” 51–52; and Shtok’s, “Du trogst dos harts,” 172. 2. Margolin, Dos yidishe lid in amerike, 2. 3. Margolin, Dos yidishe lid in amerike: Dropkin, “Di royte blum,” 5; Lee, “Shtoyb,” 14. 4. Imber, Modern Yiddish Poetry, xiii. 5.  Ibid. The five women poets are: Celia Dropkin, “Di tsirkus-dame” (excerpt), 26–27; Rokhl Korn, “Di 31 kemlen,” 126–27; Anna Margolin, “Yorn,” “Mayn shtam redt,” “Mayn heym,” and “Muter-erd,” 202–9; Fradl Shtok, “Sonet” (“Tsi zol ikh mikh farborgn ergits vu”), 310–11; and Miriam Ulinover, “Iber nakht,” 318–19. 6.  Aron Glants, “Kultur un di froy” [Culture and Woman], Di fraye arbiter shtime (October 30, 1915): 4–5. 7. Melech Ravitch, “Meydlekh, froyen, vayber—yidishe dikhterins” (Girls, Women, Wives: Yiddish Women Poets), Literarishe bleter 4, no. 21 (May 27, 1927): 395–96. 8.  Shmuel Niger, “Froyen lirik,” Literarishe bleter, 909–10. 9.  The date of Dropkin’s birth is disputed. John and Ruth Dropkin found a certificate of graduation from gymnasium (now in the YIVO Dropkin archive). It stated the date of her birth (Tsile Levin) as December 5, 1887 (Julian calendar), which is December 18, 1887, on the Gregorian calendar. However, in an uncatalogued autobiographical manuscript note, composed around 1952, and preserved in the Genazim Archive in Tel Aviv, Dropkin writes, “I was born on December 18, 1888.” 10.  Interview with John Dropkin and his wife Ruth Dropkin, March 9, 2005, Brooklyn, NY, conducted by Kathryn Hellerstein, transcription typescript, 4. 11.  Di Naye Velt and Inzikh (1920). Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Dropkin’s poems appeared in these and other publications of the modernist Yiddish literary movements, Onheyb, Poezye, and Shriftn, as well as in the more established journal Tsukunft, edited by Avraham Liessin. Her stories and some installments of a serialized novel came out in Abraham Cahan’s daily Forverts. 12.  Dropkin, in In heysn vint, 1959 ed. The 1959 edition will be cited as IHV (1959 ed.) and the 1935 edition as In heysn vint: lider, as IHVL (1935 ed.). See also my bibliographic essay on Dropkin for a more detailed discussion of her family and the publication history of her poetry. 13.  Dropkin, “Mayn mame,” in IHVL (1935 ed.), 48. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Parts of chapter 5 are adapted from my “Art of Sex in Yiddish Poems.” 14.  That Dropkin and Landau were friends was verified by John Dropkin in my interview with him, 10–11. 15.  Landau, “Mayne zelikaytn” (My Pleasures), in Lider, 70–71. See also Landau, “Pleasures of the Soul,” in Howe and Greenberg, Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, 99–100.

Notes to Chapter Five 16.  Landau, “In el,” in Antologye, 84–85, translation mine. Also translated by Field, “On the El,” in Howe and Greenberg, Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, 100–101. 17.  Landau, “In kinematograf,” in Lider, 134, translation mine. Also translated by Field, “At the Silent Movies,” in Howe and Greenberg, Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, 101. 18.  Reuven Iceland, “Shtil-leben,” in Fun mayn zumer, 11–12. 19. Ibid. 20.  Ibid. Iceland dedicated the book “to Roza Lebensboym, whose influence I owe most of the poems in this collection.” Lebensboym took the pseudonym “Anna Margolin” when she published her poetry. 21.  The letters are preserved in the Anna Margolin Archive at YIVO. He also wrote about this in his 1954 memoir, Fun unzer friling: literarishe zikhrones un portretn. 22.  Novershtern, “Anna Margolin,” 154–58. 23.  Translations of “Di tsirkus dame” appear in Joseph Leftwich, Golden Peacock; Howe, Shmeruk, and Wisse, Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (1987); Whitman, Modern Yiddish Poetry; Kramer, Century of Yiddish Poetry; Chametzky, Felstiner, Flanzbaum, and Hellerstein, Jewish American Literature. Interestingly, “Di tsirkus dame” was not included in Howe and Greenberg, Treasury of Yiddish Poetry. For a very different reading of this poem, see Novershtern, “Voices and the Choir” (Hebrew) (2008), 105–8. 24.  Dropkin, “Di tsirkus dame,” in IHVL (1935 ed.), 49; also in IHV (1959 ed.), 12. 25.  Molodowsky, “Froyen-lider II,” in Paper Bridges, 70–71. 26.  Dropkin was not the only New York Yiddish woman poet to write sexually explicit poetry. See the discussion of Fradl Shtok and Berta Kling in my “Art of Sex in Yiddish Poems,” 189–212. 27.  Dropkin, “Dos lid fun a getsndinerin” (The Song of an Idol Worshipper) and “Ikh shpil zikh mit a langn, royt-shmutsikn vorem” (I Play with a Long, Filthy Red Worm), in IHVL (1935 ed.), 28–29, 79. 28.  “Odem” (1935) has parts 1, 2, 3. The 1959 variant combines parts 1 and 2 into a single poem and omits part 3. Dropkin, “Odem,” IHVL (1935 ed.), 51–52; also in IHV (1959 ed.), 26. 29. Gen. 2:16–17. 30.  “Du host tif oyfgeakert mayn furkhtbare erd,” in IHVL (1935 ed.), 45. 31.  Hadda, “Eyes Have It,” 93–112. Hadda reads Dropkin’s love poems through the lens of psychoanalytic theory and places the sexual conflicts depicted in them within the context of the poet’s own childhood relationship to her father and her mother. The only poem considered by Hadda that I discuss in this chapter is “Mayn mame.” See Hadda, “Eyes Have It,” 97. 32. Dropkin, “Tsu a tokhter (Estern)” (To a Daughter [To Esther]) and “Mayn meydele” (My Little Girl), in IHV (1959 ed.), 83 and 117.

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Notes to Chapter Five 33.  Hadda, “Eyes Have It,” 108. Hadda offers a different translation of these stanzas. 34.  Dropkin, “Ikh tulye tsu mayn heysn shtern” (I Nestle My Hot Forehead), in IHVL (1935 ed.), 97. 35.  Interview with John and Ruth Dropkin, 1. 36.  Dropkin, “Tsu mayn zun, velkher hot mir geshenkt hel bloye kareln,” in IHVL (1935 ed.), 93. 37.  Dropkin, “Rozeve fodem,” in IHVL (1935 ed.), 95. 38.  For other poems with the thread imagery, see “Ot azoy” (Just Like This), in IHVL (1935 ed.)., 100–101, in which the speaker imagines the child sleeping on her lap as “still mute and blind,” with “the little face of one unborn” and still bound to her by “that thread.” As she holds the child, the poet imagines that “the thread that joined / You to me / Stretches out longer, longer / And wraps around you and me together / In the half-darkened room . . . / Weaving around us . . . Like a giant cocoon / Around two silk worms.” While at first the metaphor of the fodem (thread) designates the umbilical cord that joined the child in the womb to its mother, Dropkin expands the image in subsequent lines into a thread of the artistry of nature, the silk thread of a cocoon that will envelop both the child and the mother. In the cocoon, mother and child will be equals, both as pupae (zayd verem, silkworms). However, the speaker says, while the child will metamorphose into a moth, growing wings and flying away, its mother will remain forever a larva, spinning out the silk of a poetry that both gives her purpose and shelters her. The spinning of silk is the perfect figure for Dropkin’s idea of woman’s art, the raw material of which is produced by biological process and manufactured into artistic form. This combination of nature and artifice recapitulates the contradictory forces of sexual desire and the controlled dance in “Di tsirkus dame” and of the subverted sexual power and the empowerment of the imagination in “Odem.” 39.  Dropkin, “A zumer-sonata” (A Summer Sonata), in IHVL (1935 ed.), 5; IHV (1959 ed.), 3. 40.  Dropkin, “In heysn vint,” in IHVL (1935 ed.), 6–7. 41. Ibid. 42.  Interview with John and Ruth Dropkin, transcript, 13. 43.  Dropkin, “The Mosquito,” “In Sullivan County 6,” in IHVL (1935 ed.), 17–20. 44.  For other poems where insects figure, see Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, “Di letste,” in Di goldene pave, 136. Discussed in Wisse, Little Love in Big Manhattan, 135–36, 261n 43. Translated by Nathan Halpern, “The Last,” in Howe and Greenberg, Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, 108. Halpern, “Di mayse mit der flig,” Shriftn: a dray monat bukh (Spring 1921): section 7, 3–4. Also see Kadya Molodowsky, “Tfiles I” (Prayers I), Kheshvndike nekht, 73. Also, Paper Bridges, 144–45. 45.  See Miron, “Why Was There No Women’s Poetry in Hebrew before 1920?” 75–90. For a fictional account of Dropkin’s relation to Gnessin, see Dropkin’s short story, “Bela iz farlibt,” in IHV (1959 ed.), 133–56. Also see Dropkin, “Bella Fell in Love,” in Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, 211–31.

Notes to Chapter Five 46.  Dropkin, “A libe briv,” in IHVL (1935 ed.), 25; IHV (1959 ed.), 59. 47.  Dropkin, “A libe briv,” in IHVL (1935 ed.)), 25. 48.  Dropkin, “Tsu a yunger dikhterin,” in IHVL (1935 ed.), 72; IHV (1959 ed.), 72. 49.  Yehudis, “Tsum dikhter,” in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, 66. 50.  Dropkin’s “To a Young Poetess” also echoes Rainer Marie Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929) in significant ways. I hope to write an article exploring this connection. 51.  Anna Margolin anthologized an earlier version in 1923: Dropkin, “Di royte blum,” in Dos yidishe lid in amerike—1923, 5. The only variant is in line 8: “shtekt rayst aroys di royte blum” (The plucked red flower sticks out) (1923); “Shprotst dreyst aroys mayn royte blum” (Boldly sprouts my red flower) (1935). 52.  Dropkin, “Royte blum,” IHVL (1935 ed.), 117; IHV (1959 ed.), 58. 53.  Dropkin, “Mit gebrokhene fliglen,” IHV (1959 ed.), 102. 54.  “ . . . the Holy Spirit had the form of a dove, and the Shekinah [sic] had wings. Thus he who acknowledged God took refuge under the wings of the Shekinah [sic] (Shab. 31a; Sanh. 96a)” from JewishEncyclopedia.com, “The unedited full-text of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia,” Available from http://www.jewishency clopedia.com/articles/13537-shekinah. 55. Nevo, Selected Poems: C. N. Bialik, 56–57. 56.  Ibid., xiv. Bialik’s poem and Nevo’s translation appear on 56–57. 57. Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” v,n1. 58.  Correspondence between Moshe Stavski and Na’aman Stavski and Roza Lebensboym, in Anna Margolin Archives, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Box 1, Folder 2. Also, Iceland, “Anna Margolin,” in Fun unzer friling, 153–54. Iceland, “The Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life,” in Yiddish—Modern Jewish Studies, 75–76. 59. Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” vi. Also, Pratt, “Anna Margolin’s Lider,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 11–25. 60.  Novershtern gives the date of publication of “Zayn a betlerin” as January 8, 1921 (“Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” vii). This, however, is not Margolin’s first published poem. The first poem she published was “Shvaygn,” A naye velt, May 28, 1920. Cited in Novershtern, “Anna Margolin,” 133 and 168n8. The poem was republished as part 3 of “In kafe” in Lider, 84. 61. Margolin, Dos yidishe lid in amerika—1923. 62. Margolin, Lider (1929). Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” vi. 63.  For a beautiful, persuasive reading of Margolin’s poems through her life, see Cooper, “Making Music with Anna Margolin,” 39–49. For a translation of Lider, see Kumove, Drunk from the Bitter Truth. 64. Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed that a Bronze Statue Can Weep?” ix–xiii, xlix–lv; Novershtern, “Voices and the Choir,” 61–80.

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Notes to Chapter Five 65.  Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” 502–5. 66. Iceland, Fun unzer friling, 159. Iceland, “Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life,” 80. 67. Iceland, Fun unzer friling, 161–62. Iceland, “Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life,” 82–83. 68.  As Novershtern has shown, Margolin ordered the poems in her book deliberately, not in the chronological order of composition or original publication. For example, of the book’s first two poems, the second was written and published before the first. “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” was first published in Di tsukunft 33 (1928): 101; while “Muter erd, fil getrotene, zun gevashene” was first published in Fraye arbeyter shtime 23, no. 1 (November 25, 1921): 1135; and republished in Literarishe bleter 2 (1925): 153. Novershtern, Lider, 140. 69. Margolin, “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling,” in Lider (1929 ed.), 5. In Novershtern, Lider, 3; 140. 70.  Introspectivist Manifesto (1919). 71. Carmi, The Penguin Book Of Hebrew Verse, 133–34. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, 123–24. Iceland states that she learned to read biblical and modern Hebrew as a child. Iceland, Fun unzer friling, 136. Iceland, “Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life,” 58. 72.  See Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” xiii–xvi. 73.  Margolin, “Muter erd, fil getrotene, zun gevashene,” in Lider (1929 ed.), 6; Novershtern, Lider, 4; 140. 74.  Margolin was quite critical of this poem in a letter to Reuven Iceland, in which she complains that “Portret” is “like an infelicitous translation of one of Rilke’s infelicitous poems. This [is] in general. And it won’t allow itself to be corrected. The details (the sacrifices for the sake of bad rhymes) I will perhaps be able to improve.” Anna Margolin, Letter 27, to Reuven Iceland, April 26, 1923, in Novershtern, “Anna Margolin,” 158. 75. Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” xvii. 76.  Margolin, “Portret,” in Lider (1929 ed.), 7; Novershtern, Lider, 5. Novershtern notes that the manuscript of this poem was in a letter to Reuven Iceland, April 16, 1923, without the dedication to Leyeles. The poem was first published in Inzikh 2, no. 8 (June 1923): 237, under the title “Eskiz,” and without the dedication to Leyeles. Novershtern, Lider, 140. 77.  Margolin, “In gasn,” Lider (1929 ed.), 9; Novershtern, Lider, 7. 78. Ibid.; Lider (1929 ed.), 9. Novershtern, Lider, 7. 79.  Margolin, “Mayn shtam redt,” Lider (1929 ed.), 10–12; Novershtern, Lider, 8–9. 80. Genesis 2:22. 81.  Margolin, “Ikh dayn ru un ikh dayn shverd” (I Your Peace, and I Your Sword), Section 2 (poem-sequence), Lider (1929 ed.), 15–44; Novershtern, Lider, 13–42.

Notes to Chapter Five 82.  Margolin, Untitled (“Mir zaynen gegangen durkh teg vi durkh shturemdurkhtsiterte gertner”), Lider (1929 ed.), 17; Novershtern, Lider, 15. 83. Margolin, Untitled (“Mit halb farmakhte oygn”), Lider (1929 ed.),18; Novershtern, Lider, 16. 84.  Margolin, Untitled (“Langzam un likhtik”), Lider (1929 ed.), 19; Novershtern, Lider, 17. 85.  Margolin, Untitled (“Hob ikh azoy fil gevandert, mayn liber”), Lider (1929 ed.), 20; Novershtern, Lider, 18. 86.  Margolin, “Du,” Lider (1929 ed.), 21–22; Novershtern, Lider, 19–20. 87. Ibid. 88.  Margolin, “In kuper un in gold,” Lider (1929 ed.), 25; Novershtern, Lider, 23. 89.  See Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” xxiv–xxv; and Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” 516; 529. 90.  Margolin, “Es redn haynt ale shtume zakhn,” Lider (1929 ed.), 26; Novershtern, Lider, 24. 91.  Margolin, “Fun a briv” (From a Letter), Lider (1929 ed.), 32; Novershtern, Lider, 30. 92.  Margolin, “Gekusht mayn hant” (Kissed My Hand), Lider (1929 ed.), 35; Novershtern, Lider, 33. 93.  Margolin, “Uralte merderin nakht, shvartse muter in noyt, helf mir!” (Ancient Murderess Night, Black Mother in Need, Help Me!), Lider (1929 ed.), 37; Novershtern, Lider, 35. 94.  Margolin., “Ikh hob nit gevust, mayn liber,” Lider (1929 ed.), 42; Novershtern, Lider, 40. 95.  Margolin, “Azoy vi mayn blik der fartrerter” (Thus Like My Tearful Gaze), Lider (1929 ed.), 44; Novershtern, Lider, 41. 96.  Margolin, “Driml ayn, gelibter, driml,” Lider (1929 ed.), 23. Novershtern, Lider, 21. 97.  Margolin, “Iz di goldene pave gefloygn, gefloygn,” Lider (1929 ed.), 44. Novershtern, Lider, 42. 98.  Margolin, “Fun mayn finsternish,” Lider (1929 ed.), 48–50; Novershtern, Lider,46. 99.  Margolin, “Dos iz di nakht,” Lider (1929 ed.), 51; Novershtern, Lider, 47. 100.  Mani Leyb, “Shtiler, shtiler,” Shriftn: drites zamelbukh, 6–8. 101.  Margolin, “Shlanke shifn,” Lider (1929 ed.), 52; Novershtern, Lider, 48. 102.  Margolin, “Shtiler,” Lider (1929 ed.), 53; Novershtern, Lider, 49. 103.  Margolin, “Oft gey ikh vi hinter a shleyer” (Often I Walk as Behind a Veil), Lider (1929 ed.), 54; Novershtern, Lider, 50. 104.  Margolin, “Tayvolim,” Lider (1929 ed.), 55; Novershtern, Lider, 51. 105.  Margolin, “Nakht,” Lider (1929 ed.), 56; Novershtern, Lider, 52. 106.  Margolin, “Mid,” Lider (1929 ed.), 57; Novershtern, Lider, 53. 107.  Margolin, “Libe monstern,” Lider (1929 ed.), 58–59; Novershtern, Lider, 54–55.

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Notes to Chapter Five 108.  Margolin, “Di nakht iz arayn in mayn hoyz,” Lider (1929 ed.), 60; Novershtern, Lider, 56. 109.  Margolin, “Hart harts,” Lider (1929 ed.), 61; Novershtern, Lider, 57. 110.  Margolin, “Epitaf,” Lider (1929 ed.), 62; Novershtern, Lider, 58. 111. Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” xxv; and Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” 505–10. The first discussion of Margolin’s epitaphs I heard was in a lecture by Naomi Seidman at the Ninth Annual Symposium of the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, October 27–28, 1996. 112.  The word ibermut is not in the Yiddish dictionaries, although Harkavy defines mut as “courage, spirit.” Harkavy’s Yiddish-English 6th Edition (1910), from “Harkavy’s Dictionary,” available from http://www.cs.uky.edu/raphael/ yiddish/harkavy/index.utf8.html#h. Novershtern’s glossary gives “high spirits,” Novershtern, Lider, 159, although this idiom, meaning “cheerful,” unintentionally trivializes the line. 113.  Margolin, “Sheyne verter fun marmor un gold,” Lider (1929 ed.), 63–64; Novershtern, Lider, 59–60. 114. Ibid. 115.  For an extended discussion of Margolin’s rhyme and her use of these three poets, see Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” 514–16. Also see the correspondence between Margolin and Reuven Iceland, discussing poems by Rilke and Schiller, in Novershtern, “Anna Margolin,” 129–71. See especially letters of January 18, 1921, regarding Rilke’s rhythm, and April 16, 1923, regarding a bad Rilke poem. 116.  Margolin, “Mir veln boyen a vant,” Lider (1929 ed.), 99–100; Novershtern, Lider, 92. 117.  Margolin, “Harbst”, Lider (1929 ed.), 67; Novershtern, Lider, 63. 118.  Margolin, “Harbst,” Lider (1929 ed.), 71; Novershtern, Lider, 67. 119.  Quoted in Russian in the Yiddish text. These are the first lines of a wellknown poem by Sh. Frug. Novershtern’s note offers the Yiddish translation of this line by L. Faynberg. Novershtern, Lider, 72. 120.  I consulted Wolf’s translation of selections of this poem in his translation of Novershtern’s “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Could Weep,” Lider, xxxix–xlii, as well as Cooper’s translation in The Tribe of Dina, 154–59. 121.  Semen Iakovlevich Nadson (1862–1887), whose Jewish paternal grandfather had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, was considered “the defining Russian poet of the 1880s,” on the basis of his only book of poems, first published in 1885. Robert D. Wessling, “Semen Iakovlevich Nadson,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 277, Russian Literature in the Age of Realism (2003), 240–46. 122. Margolin, “Nit tsufridn” (Not Satisfied), Lider (1929 ed.), 81; Novershtern, Lider, 76. 123. Ibid.

Notes to Chapter Five 124.  For detailed readings of “In kafe,” see Hellerstein, “From ‘Ikh ’ to ‘Zikh,’” 122–26; and Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” 521–25. 125. Margolin, “Meydlekh in krotona park” (Girls in Crotona Park), Lider (1929 ed.), 85; Novershtern, Lider, 79. 126.  Margolin, “Dos shtoltse lid,” Lider (1929 ed.), 91; Novershtern, Lider, 85. 127.  Margolin, “Mir veln boyen a vant,” Lider (1929 ed.), 99–100; Novershtern Lider, 92. Note, p. 92: “Di ershte helft iz fun R. Ayzland.” 128. Ibid. 129.  In “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” Lider, v–lviii, Novershtern discusses the penultimate poem in the “Mary” sequence, “Mari vil zayn a betlerin,” which, published under the title “Zayn a betlerin,” was one of Margolin’s first poems published in 1920 or 1921. Novershtern’s translator, Wolf, renders the name as “Marie,” apparently missing the allusion to “Mary,” and Novershtern argues, “Through this figure, the poet tried to build a bridge between profound empathy and objective description; in this respect, it is certainly noteworthy that she chose a name so foreign-sounding to Jewish readers” (xiii). Note that although as early as 1909 the Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch had written about the Virgin Mary’s journey from Bethlehem to Jerusalem (Charles Madison, Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers [New York: Schocken, 1971], 248), Asch’s controversial trilogy of Christological novels did not appear until the late 1930s and 1940s: The Nazarene, the English translation of Der man fun nazares, was published in English in 1939 (New York: Putnam) and not until 1943 in Yiddish. The Apostle was published in English translation in 1943, also by Putnam, and appears never to have been published in Yiddish. Mary, the English translation of Meri, appeared in English in 1949 and seems not to have been published in Yiddish (Der leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 1 [1956], 189–90). See Goldie Morgentaler, “In the Foreskin of the Heart,” 220. 130.  See Novershtern, on the correspondence between Margolin and Iceland, “Anna Margolin,” 156. 131. Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” x–xiii. 132. Molodowsky, “Froyen-lider VIII,” Kheshvndike nekht (1927), 19. Molodowsky, Paper Bridges, 84–85. 133.  See letters 21, 23, 25, between Margolin and Iceland in Novershtern, “Anna Margolin,” 154–58, about the Mari poems. Letter 21 from Reuven Iceland to Anna Margolin, January 19, 1921, (156); Letter 25, from Margolin to Iceland, July 1, 1921 (157–58). 134. Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” xiii. 135.  Hellerstein, “Translating as a Feminist,” 91–108. 136.  Margolin, “Vos vilstu, Mari?” Lider (1929 ed.), 103–4; Novershtern, Lider, 95. 137.  Margolin, “Maris tfile,” Lider (1929 ed.), 105; Novershtern, Lider, 96.

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Notes to Chapter Five 138.  In this paragraph, I am listing definitions of the Yiddish words, based on Weinreich, Yiddish-English/English-Yiddish Dictionary. 139.  See Hellerstein, “The Subordination of Prayer to Narrative in Modern Yiddish Poems,” 205–36. 140.  The reading of “Mari’s tfile” is adapted from Hellerstein, “Translating as a Feminist.” 141.  See “Mari un di gest,” lines 6–13, which allude to events described in Iceland’s Fun unzer friling, such as her secretarial work when she was 19 for the socialist philosopher Khayim Zhitlovsky, who was her lover. At the same time, she had many admirers and lovers among Zhitlovsky’s young followers. Iceland, Fun unzer friling, 148–52; Iceland, “The Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life,” trans. Gerald Marcus, Yiddish–Modern Jewish Studies 17, nos. 1–2 (2011): 52–93. 142. Iceland, Fun unzer friling (1955), 154–55; “The Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life,” 75–76. 143.  Margolin, “Mari un di gest,” Lider (1929 ed.), 108–10; Novershtern, Lider, 99–100, lines 23–27. 144.  Moshe Stavski, Letter to Rosa Lebensboym (Anna Margolin), in Anna Margolin Archives, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Box 1, Folder 2. Stavski wrote Margolin at least one letter, in Yiddish—an undated document, almost illegible, written in pencil on poor quality paper, about “not seeing the child.” Through at least 1935, this son wrote plaintive letters to his mother, in Hebrew and later in English, which are preserved in Margolin’s archive at YIVO. The content of these letters suggests that Margolin did not respond. 145. Iceland, Fun unzer friling, 152–55; Iceland, “The Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life,” 73–76. 146.  Margolin, “Mari vil zayn a betlerin,” Lider (1929 ed.), 111–12; Novershtern, Lider, 102–3. 147.  One version of Margolin’s epitaph is inscribed on her gravestone in New York. See Margolin, “Epitaf,” Novershtern, Lider, 58; and “Zi mit di kalte marmorne brist,” Novershtern, Lider, 136. 148.  Margolin, “Mari un der toyt,” Lider (1929 ed.), 113; Novershtern, Lider, 104. 149.  More obviously, they are studies of marginal or underclass characters and fall into the genre of the 1919 realist poems by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, such as “Leyb-Ber,” which evokes a Jew beaten into muteness by his shtetl environment, or “Blut-blitsn” (Blood-Bursts), in which a man, rebuffed sexually by his wife, descends in frustration into the New York street, punches a dray-horse in the muzzle, and then, raging inarticulately, disappears into the night after a prostitute and three soldiers. Halpern, “Blut-blitsn,” In nyu york, 43. 150.  Margolin, “A mentsh,” Lider (1929 ed.), 116–17; Novershtern, Lider, 107–8. 151.  Margolin, “Di mishugene,” Lider (1929 ed.), 118–19; Novershtern, Lider, 109–10. 152.  Margolin, “Der gangster,” Lider (1929 ed.), 120; Novershtern, Lider, 111. 153.  Margolin, “Antrakt,” Lider (1929 ed.), 127; Novershtern, Lider, 117.

Notes to Chapters Five and Six 154. Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” xx–xxiii. 155. Letter from Reuven Iceland to Anna Margolin, October 29, 1920, in Novershtern, “Anna Margolin,” 136. Iceland at first praised and later objected to the image of the wolf in a letter to Margolin, on October 29, 1920: “Also, ‘Entre’Acte’ doesn’t suffice, with the thousand-time banal description of an infuriated wolf. Because how should I know what a wolf looks like.” Iceland commented on the verse form, but not on the subject of the poem. 156.  Iceland to Margolin, Oct. 26, 1920, in Novershtern, Lider, 134–35. This theme may explain what bothered Iceland in this cranky letter to Margolin. 157.  Margolin, “Af a balkon,” Lider (1929 ed.), 128. Novershtern, Lider, 118. 158.  Margolin, “Mayn venus trogt zaydene shikhlekh,” in Novershtern, Lider, 119. 159.  Margolin, “Fargesene geter,” Lider (1929 ed.), 130; Novershtern, Lider, 120. 160.  Adapted from Hellerstein, “Fear of Faith,” 211–12. 161.  Margolin, “Ir shmeykhl,” Lider (1929 ed.), 131–33; Novershtern, Lider, 121–22. 162.  Margolin, “Tsvishn khinezishe lamptern,” Lider (1929 ed.), 134–36; Novershtern, Lider, 123–24. 163. Margolin, “Er brengt troyer,” Lider (1929 ed.), 137–40; Novershtern, Lider, 125–27. 164. Ibid.

Chapter Six 1.  For an excellent discussion of Yiddish literary response to the Holocaust, see Norich, Discovering Exile, esp. chaps. 2 and 4. 2. On Molodowsky’s role in the 1933 dispute between the Warsaw Jewish Bundists and Communists, see Gonshor, “Kadye Molodowsky.” 3.  Molodowsky, “Eyl khanun,” Yidisher kemfer, October 13, 1944. See Norich, Discovering Exile, 190. It is likely that she wrote this poem in response to reports such as one that appeared in the American journal Contemporary Jewish Record ’s “News Review” in October 1944: “More than 1,715,000 Jews of many nationalities had been executed in the gas chambers of the ‘death camps’ at Auschwitz and Birkenau between Apr. 1942 and Apr. 1944.” Norich, Discovering Exile, 129. Molodowsky chose this poem to open her book, Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, where she dated the poem “1945” deliberately, it seems, so as to situate it at the end of the war as a statement of protest to God. 4.  Molodowsky, “Eyl khanun,” Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 3–4; Paper Bridges, 352–55. All translations of Molodowsky are by Hellerstein, Paper Bridges. 5.  For a discussion of the implications of variant translations of this poem, see Hellerstein, “Gilgul of a Translation,” 91–101. 6.  By truncating Exod. 34:7, the prayer actually reverses the passage’s meaning in its original biblical context; in that context, the full construction of the

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Notes to Chapter Six verse has God saying that He will not forgive the Children of Israel. See Complete ArtScroll Siddur, 2nd ed., trans. Nosson (Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah, 2003), 434–35; and Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: A Prayer Book for the Days of Awe (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1992), 162–63. 7. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 20. 8.  Hellerstein, “A Yiddish Poet’s Response to the Khurbm,” 243–60. 9.  Klepfisz, “Di mames, dos loshn/The Mothers, the Language,” 34–36. Novershtern, “Voices and the Choir,” 142. 10.  Molodowsky, “Tsu a kinds portret,” Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 14; Paper Bridges, 366–67. 11.  “A briv tsu Eliyohu ha novi,” Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 5–7; Paper Bridges, 356–59. The poem was first published in Zamlbikher 5 (Feb. 1943): 96–98. See Norich, Discovering Exile, 190. 12.  Nathan Goldberg, Passover Haggadah: A New English Translation and Instructions for the Seder (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2007), 33. 13.  Molodowsky, “A briv tsu Eliyohu hanovi,” Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 3; Paper Bridges, 357. 14.  Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 6; Paper Bridges, 359. 15.  Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 7; Paper Bridges, 359. 16.  Molodowsky, “Mayne kinder,” Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 86–87; Paper Bridges, 418–21. 17.  Molodowsky, “My Children,” Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 86–87; Paper Bridges, 418–19. 18.  Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 87; Paper Bridges, 420–21. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21.  Molodowsky, “Eyl khanun,” Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 3; Paper Bridges, 353. 22. Molodowsky, Likht fun dorn boym. 23.  Molodowsky, “Af mayn dorn blit a royz,” Likht fun dorn boym, 5–6 (translation mine). 24. Ibid. 25.  Molodowsky, “On verter,” Likht fun dornboym, 15; Paper Bridges, 438–39. 26.  Molodowsky, “Dos gezang fun shabes,” Likht fun dorn boym, 105–6; Paper Bridges, 452–55. 27.  Molodowsky, “Mayn shprakh,” Likht fun dorn boym, 107; Paper Bridges, 456–59. 28.  Molodowsky, “Der vint iz alt gevorn,” Likht fun dorn boym, 123; Paper Bridges, 460–61. 29.  Molodowsky, “Fun midkayt kh’varf arop di shikh un zokn,” Likht fun dorn boym, 127; Paper Bridges, 462–63. 30. Ibid. 31.  The image of the woman poet regarding an alien, male self in the mirror re-

Notes to Chapter Six calls Molodowsky’s 1945 poem “Khad gadya,” in which the poet rhymes her name “Kadya” with the refrain from the Passover song of divine retribution, “Khad gadya” (One Kid). In the final lines, the speaker sees in the mirror the likeness of a man she once invented and tossed away. Molodowsky, “Khad gadya,” Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 47–48; Paper Bridges, 382–85. See Hellerstein, “A Yiddish Poet’s Response to the Khurbm,” 243–60. 32.  Molodowsky, “Tsum Melekh Shloyme kumt di herlekhe Shulames,” Likht fun dorn boym, 135; Paper Bridges, 472–73. 33.  Molodowsky, “Dos likht fun dayn tish,” Likht fun dorn boym, 147–48; Paper Bridges, 474–77. 34.  Molodosky, “Ikh bin a viderkol,” Likht fun dorn boym, 158; Paper Bridges, 480–81. 35.  Hirsh Glick, “Zog nit keynmol,” (Hymn of the Partisans), Mir Trogn a Gezang, The New Book of Yiddish Songs, ed. Eleanor Gordon Mlotek, 4th ed. (New York: Workmen’s Circle Education Department, 1987), 190–91. Also see Glick, Lider un poemes. 36. Molodowsky, “Gots Kinder,” Likht fun dorn boym, 198; Paper Bridges, 506–7. 37.  Hellerstein, “Malka Heifetz Tussman,” in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia (CD-ROM) (Jerusalem: Shalvi, 2006); also available online at http://jwa.org/encyclopedia. 38.  Tussman, “Tsu dir Miryam” (To You, Miriam), in her Lider, 6. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 7. 42. Ibid. 43. Niborski and Neuberg, Verterbukh fun loshn kodesh-shtamike verter in yidish, 251. 44.  Tussman, “Tsu dir Miryam” (To You, Miriam), in her Lider, 7. 45.  Molodowsky, “Eyl khanun” (Merciful God), Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn, 3; Paper Bridges, 352–53. 46.  Tussman, “Tsu dir Miryam” (To You, Miriam), in her Lider, 7. 47. Alexander Harkavy, Yiddish-Hebrew-English Dictionary: Reprint of 1928 Expanded Second Edition (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Schocken, 1988). 48.  Uriel Weinreich, Modern Yiddish-English, English-Yiddish Dictionary (New York: YIVO and McGraw-Hill, 1968). 49. Norich, Discovering Exile, 23–24. 50.  Tussman, “Vos zolikh zey dertseyln?” (What Shall I Tell Them?), in her Lider, 8. 51. Ibid., 9. 52. Ibid., 10. 53. Ibid., 11.

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Notes to Chapter Six 54. Ibid. 55.  Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text, 437 (Deut. 6:7). 56.  Tussman, “Mit tseyn in erd,” Lider, 12–13. Hellerstein translation in Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, 594–95. 57.  The first version of the poem “Mit tseyn in erd” appeared in an undated clipping with the heading Shikago (Chicago), in the Malka Heifetz Tussman Archive at YIVO, alongside her poem “Tsvishn neger in a keler sheynk” (Among Negroes in a Cellar Bar), RG-622, Boxes 153–160, Folder 157. I have since identified this clipping as coming from the journal Shikago (Chicago) 5, no. 38 (December 1934): 69. 58.  Tussman, “Mit tseyn in erd,” Shikago (Chicago) 5, no. 38 (December 1934): 69; clippings in Tussman Archive in YIVO Archives, RG-622, Boxes 153–60, Folder 157. 59.  Hellerstein translation in Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, 594–95. 60.  For a different reading of Tussman’s “Froyen” poems that argues that “the feminist trend . . . in . . . the dichotomous group of feminine types . . . and relationships between men and women during intimate encounters” culminates in an “androgynous being with an Expressionist scream of assertive existence” in “Ikh bin froy,” see Aviva Tal, “‘Froyen,’” 147–62. 61.  Tussman, “A gelibte vayb,” Lider, 92. 62.  Comparing “A gelibte vayb” with its first published version sheds light on the purpose the poems about women serve in Lider. This poem was first published in 1930 in the Warsaw journal Literarishe bleter, under the title “Inderfri” (Early Morning). The most significant revision that Tussman made for the 1949 book was to change the first-person dramatic persona into a third-person narrator. Tuss­ man thus transformed what was a coyly ironic poem about sensuality that might be attributable to the poet herself into a study of the sinister consequences of sexual indulgence for all women. 63.  Tussman, “Vos ken ikh ton,” Literarishe bleter, 3, no.298, 48 (n.d.[1930]), clippings in Tussman Archive in YIVO Archives, RG-622, Boxes 153–160, Folder 157. Tussman made only minor revisions to this poem for Lider. The three dramatic monologues are: “Vos ken ikh ton” (What Can I Do), “S’tut mir bang” (I Regret), and “Umetik un gut” (Sad and Good). 64.  Tussman, “Reyzls broyt iz shvarts,” Lider, 94–96. 65.  Tussman, “Gitele mitn gebentshtn boykh,” Lider, 99–102. 66.  Tussman, “Ikhome,” Lider, 103. 67.  Tussman, “Shpigl ponem,” Lider, 104–5. 68.  Tussman, “Shpigl ponem,” Lider, 104-105. 69. Ibid. 70.  Tussman, “ Ikh bin froy,” Lider, 106–7. 71.  Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass, 28. 72. Ibid., 48. 73. Ibid., 84

Notes to Chapter Six and Conclusion 74. This section on Tussman’s “Ikh bin froy” is adapted from Hellerstein, “Songs of Herself,” 138–50. 75.  Tussman, “Erd,” Mild mayn vild: Lider, 16–17. 76.  Tussman, “Vi andershdik,” Mild mayn vild: Lider, 107. 77. Tussman, “Duner mayn bruder” and “Mayn shvester,” Bleter faln nit, 34–35. 78.  Tussman, “Duner mayn bruder,” Bleter faln nit, 34. 79. Ibid. 80.  Tussman, “Mayn shvester,” Bleter faln nit, 35. 81. Ibid. 82. Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim,2:1212. 83. Ibid. 84.  Tussman, “Mayn shvester,” Bleter faln nit, 35. 85.  Tussman, “Midbar vint” (Desert Wind), Unter dayn tseykhn, 41–42. 86.  Tussman, “Un ikh shmeykhl,” Un ikh shmeykhl: lider un proze (And I Smile: Poems and Prose), unpublished book manuscript (YIVO archives and Hellerstein personal archives, 1986). 87.  Tussman, “Tate ziser,” Haynt iz eybik, 14. Hellerstein, translation in American Yiddish Poetry, 614–15. 88.  Tussman told me that she intended the poem to allude to the story of Samuel, not of Moses. She claimed to feel it too presumptuous to compare herself to Moses. Conversation with the author, Berkeley, California, October 29, 1979. 89.  Tussman, conversation with the author, Berkeley, California, November 29, 1979. 90.  See Hellerstein, “Subordination of Prayer to Narrative in Modern Yiddish Poems,” 205–36. 91.  Tussman, “Fargesn,” Haynt iz eybik, 30–31. Hellerstein, translation adapted from American Yiddish Poetry, 616–17. 92. Millgram, Sabbath, 15–16. 93.  Tussman, conversation with the author, October 29, 1979.

Conclusion 1.  Rokhl Korn, “Der onheyb fun a lid: Kadye Molodowskien,” Bashertkayt: lider, 5–6. 2.  Malka Heifetz Tussman, “Tsu Rolkh Kornen: Tsu ir bakumen di Mangerpremye,” Haynt iz eybik, 69–70. 3. Rivka Basman-Ben-Haim, “Tsu Miryam Ulinover.” Unpublished manuscript, sent to Kathryn Hellerstein by the poet for inclusion in A Question of Tradition, August 18, 2011. Used with permission of Rivka Basman Ben-Haim. See also Rivka Basman Ben-Haim, On a Chord of Rain: Yiddish Poems, trans. Zelda Kahan Newman (Norfolk, VA: Poetica, 2014). 4.  Basman-Ben-Haim, “Tsu Miryam Ulinover.”

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Notes to Appendix

Appendix 1.  These letters are found in Box 1, the Ezra Korman Papers RG 457, YIVO Archives, 15 West Sixteenth Street, New York, NY 10011-6301 (hereafter “Ezra Korman Papers): Letter from Rokhl Korn to Ezra Korman, January 31, 1926, Folder “Rokhl Korn,” Ezra Korman Papers; Letter from Malka Lee to Ezra Korman, August 9, 1926, Folder “Malka Lee,” Ezra Korman Papers; Letter from Anna Margolin (pseudonym for Roza Lebensboym) to Ezra Korman, January 28, 1927, Folder, “Ezra Korman,” Ezra Korman Papers; Letter from Miriam Ulinover to Ezra Korman, July 7, 1927, Folder “Ezra Korman,” Ezra Korman Papers; Letter from Roza Yakubovitsh to Ezra Korman, n.d., in Folder “Ezra Korman,” Ezra Korman Papers; Letter from Kadya Molodowsky to Ezra Korman, September 6, 1927, in Folder “Kadya Molodowsky,” Ezra Korman Papers. 2.  Letter from Rokhl Korn to Ezra Korman, January 31, 1926, Folder “Rokhl Korn,” Ezra Korman Papers. 3.  Letter from Malka Lee to Ezra Korman, August 9, 1926, Folder “Malka Lee, Ezra Korman Papers. 4.  Letter from Anna Margolin (pseudonym for Roza Lebensboym) to Ezra Korman,, January 28, 1927, Folder, “Ezra Korman,” Ezra Korman Papers. 5.  Letter from Miriam Ulinover to Ezra Korman, July 7, 1927, in Folder “Ezra Korman,” Ezra Korman Papers. 6.  Letter from Roza Yakubovitsh to Ezra Korman, n.d., in Folder “Ezra Korman,” Ezra Korman Papers. 7.  Letter from Kadya Molodowsky to Ezra Korman, September 6, 1927, in Folder “Kadya Molodowsky,” Ezra Korman Papers. 8.  Kadya Molodowsky, “Froyen-lider,” In Shpan 2 (May 1926): 67–69.

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Works Cited Iceland, Reuven. From Our Springtime: Literary Memoirs and Portraits of Yiddish New York. Trans. Gerald Marcus. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013. ———. Fun mayn zumer (From My Summer). New York: Farlag Unzer Shayer, 1922. ———. Fun unzer friling: literarishe zikhroynes un portretn (From Our Springtime: Literary Memoirs and Portraits). New York: Farlag Inzl, 1954; and Miami Beach, FL: R. Iceland Yubl Komitet, 1954. ———. “The Most Important Details of Anna Margolin’s Life.” Trans. Gerald Marcus. Yiddish–Modern Jewish Studies 17, nos. 1–2 (2011): 52–93. Idel, Moshe. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Imber, Samuel J., ed. Modern Yiddish Poetry: An Anthology. New York: East and West, 1927. “Introspektivizm” (Introspectivist Manifesto). In Zikh: Monatlikher zshurnal far introspektiver literatur 1, no. 1 (January 1920): 1–10. Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Yanow. “Tsenerene.” In Miriam Stark Zakon, trans., Tz’enah Ur’enah: The Classic Anthology of Torah Lore and Midrashic Comment, 3:859. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, in conjunction with Jerusalem: Hillel Press, 1984. Jastrow, Marcus. A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli an Yerusahlmi, and the Midrashic Literature. New York: Pardes, 1950. Kaufman, Shirley, Galit Hasan-Rokem, and Tamar S. Hess, eds. The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1999. Kay, Devra, trans., ed., and commentary. Seyder Tkhines: The Forgotten Book of Common Prayer for Jewish Women. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2004. Kestin, Lipe, ed. Naye himlen: literarish zamelbukh (New Skies: Literary Collection). Warsaw: L. Kestin, 1921. Klepfisz, Irena. “Di mames, dos loshn/The Mothers, the Language: Feminism, Yidishkayt, and the Politics of Memory.” Bridges 4, no. 1 (1994): 12–47. ———. “Queens of Contradiction: A Feminist Introduction to Women Yiddish Writers.” In Frieda Forman, Ethel Raicus, Sarah Silberstein Swartz, and Margie Wolfe, eds., Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writer, 21–62. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994. Kling, Berta. Fun mayne teg: lider. New York: published by author, 1952. ———. Lider. New York: published by author, 1935. ———. Vi ikh shtey un gey: lider. New York: published by author, 1939. Klirs, Tracy. Merits of Our Mothers. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1992. Korman, Ezra, ed. Brenendike brikn: Antologye fun revolutsionerer lirik in der nayer yidisher dikhtung fun ukraine (Burning Bridges: Anthology of Revolutionary Lyric in the New Yiddish Poetry from Ukraine). Second edition

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Works Cited Tabatchnik, Abraham Baer. “Fradl shtok un der sonet” (Fradl Shtok and the Sonnet). In Dikhter un dikhtung (Poets and Poetry), 505–8. New York, 1965. Tal, Aviva. “‘Froyen’: Feminism and Expressionism in the Poetry of Malka ­Heifetz-Tussman.” Bikoret Ufarshanut: nashim betarbut Yidish 40 (Spring 2008): 147–62 (Hebrew). Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985. Tiktiner, Rivke [Rivkah bat Meir]. Meneket Rivkah: A Manual of Wisdom and Piety for Jewish Women. Ed. Frauke von Rohden. Yiddish translation by Samuel Spinner; German translation by Maurice Tszorf. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2008. Tregebov, Rhea, ed. Arguing with the Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers. New York: Feminist Press, 2008. Turniansky, Chava. “Introduction.” In Glikl bas Yuda Leib, Glikl: Memoirs 1691– 1719, ed. and trans. Chava Turniansky. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, Ben-Zion Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, Hebrew University, 2006 (Hebrew). ———. “Meydlekh in der altyidisher literatur.” In Walter Röll and Simon Neuberg, eds., Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift für Erika Timm, 7–20. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999. ———. “Yiddish Song as Historical Source Material: Plague in the Judenstadt of Prague in 1713.” In Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, 189–98. London: Peter Halban, 1988. Tussman, Malka Heifetz. Am I Also You? Trans. Marcia Falk. San Francisco: Tree, 1977. ———. “An entfer melekh ravitshn af ‘Meydlekh, froyen, vayber—yidishe dikhterins,’ Literarishe bleter, May 27, 1927” (An Answer to Melekh Ravitsh concerning ‘Girls, Women, Wives—Yiddish Poetesses,’ Literary Leaves). Manuscript, Melech Ravitch Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. ———. Bleter faln nit (Leaves Do Not Fall). Tel Aviv: Farlag Yisroel-Bukh, 1972. ———. Haynt iz eybik (Now Is Ever). Tel Aviv: Farlag Yisroel-Bukh, 1977. ———. Lider (Poems). Los Angeles: Malka Heifetz Tussman Bukh Komitet, 1949. ———. Mild mayn vild (Mild My Wild). Los Angeles: Malka Heifetz Tussman Bukh Komitet, 1958. ———. Shotns fun gedenken (Shadows of Remembering). Tel Aviv: Farlag YisroelBukh, 1965. ———. Un ikh shmeykhl: Lider un proze (And I Smile: Poems and Prose). Unpublished manuscript, 1986. ———. Unter dayn tseykhn (Under Your Sign). Tel Aviv: Farlag Yisroel Bukh, 1974. ———. With Teeth in the Earth: Selected Poems. Trans. Marcia Falk. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992.

Works Cited Ulinover, Miriam. Der bobes oytser (My Grandmother’s Treasure). Warsaw: Farlag Brider Levin-Epshteyn, 1922. ———. A grus fun der alter heym: lider (Un bonjour du pays natal: poèmes). Ed. Natalia Krynicka and trans. Batia Baum. Paris: Medem-bibliotheque, 2003. ———. Haotser shel hasavta: Der bobes oytser. Ed. David Frishman and Dov Sadan, Hebrew trans. Yehoshua Tan Pi. Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1975. ———. “Khumesh grusn: Lots vayb” (Bible Greetings: Lot’s Wife). Ilustrirte Vokh, 13, no. 15 (April 3, 1924): 11. Veprinksi, Rashel [Roshelle Weprinsky]. Ruf fun fligl (Call of Wings). New York: n.p., 1926. Vurtsel, Khana [Hannah Wurtzel]. Hundert lider (A Hundred Poems). New York: n.p., 1927. Waxman, Meyer. A History of Jewish Literature. 1933; New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960. Weinreich, Max. History of the Yiddish Language. Trans. Shlomo Nobel and Joshua A. Fishman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1973]. Weinreich, Uriel. Modern Yiddish-English/English-Yiddish Dictionary. New York: YIVO and McGraw-Hill, 1968. Weiser, Kalman. Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Weissler, Chava. “The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women.” In Arthur Green, ed., Jewish Spirituality from the Sixteenth Century Revival to the Present, 245–75. New York: Crossroad, 1987. ———. Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Weltman, G., and M. S. Zuckerman. Yiddish Sayings Mama Never Taught You. Van Nuys, CA: Perivale Press, 1975. Whitman, Ruth, trans. and ed. An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry. Bilingual ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995. Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” In Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, eds., Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Crticism, 28–89. New York: Norton, 1973. Wilde, Oscar. Salome: A Tragedy in One Act. Trans. Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894. ———. Salomé: Yiddish Salome. Trans. Avraham Frumkin. London: L. Fridman, 1909. Wisse, Ruth. A Little Love in Big Manhattan: Two Yiddish Poets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Wolitz, Seth. “Between Folk and Freedom: The Failure of the Yiddish Modernist Movement in Poland.” Yiddish 8, no. 1 (1991): 26–51. ———. “The Jewish National Art Renaissance in Russia.” In Ruth Apter-Gabriel, ed., Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian AvantGarde Art, 1912–1928, 21–42. Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987.

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Works Cited Yakubovitsh, Roza. Lider tsu got. Unpublished. ———. Mayne gezangen. Warsaw: Tsentrale Yidishe Bibliotek un Prese Arkhiv, 1924. ———. “Various Poems.” In Ezra Korman, ed., Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye, 84– 92. Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1928. Yanov, Yitskhok. Tz’enah Ur’enah. Trans. Miriam Stark Zakon. New York: Hebrew Publishing and Moses Greenfield, 1969. Yezierska, Anzia. Salome of the Tenements. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923. YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Ed. Gershon David Hundert. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Yudika [Yehudis Tsik]. Naye Yugent (New Youth). Kovne, Lithuania: Farlag Likht, 1923. Zilbertsvayg, Zalman, ed. “Frumkin, Avraham.” In Leksikon fun yidishn teater (Lexicon of Yiddish Theater), 4:2632–33. New York: Farlag Elisheva and Yidisher aktyorn yunye in amerike, 1963. Zinberg, Israel. History of Jewish Literature: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period. Trans. Bernard Martin. Vol. 7. New York: Hebrew Union College Press and Ktav, 1975. Zucker, Sheva. “Ana Margolin un di poezie fun dem geshpoltenem ikh” (Anna Margolin and the Poetry of the Divided Self). YIVO Bleter, 1 n.s. (February 1991): 173–98. ———. “Kadye Molodowsky’s Froyen lider.” Yiddish 9, no. 2 (1994): 44–52. ———. “The Red Flower: Rebellion and Guilt in the Poetry of Celia Dropkin.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 15 (1996): 99–117.

Index

Abraham, 89–90, 132, 232–33, 356, 389–90 Abramovitsh, Sholem, 50 Acmeism, 243, 271 Acrostic signatures, 74 Adam, 253–56, 368 Adar, 90–92 Ahasuerus, King, 92, 95 Anacreon, 273 Anarchist movement, 324 Ansky, S., 173 Anti-prayers, 3 Anti-Semitism, 33, 42, 105 Aptroot, Marion, 433n5 Aramaic language, 33, 47, 68 Aramaic literature, 45 Asch, Sholem, 121 Ashkenaz, Yitskhok, 46, 69 Ashkenazi, Jacob ben Isaac, of Yanow, 227 Authorship, 69, 78 Avant-garde, 16, 18, 103, 197, 246 “Avinu Malkeinu” (Our Father, Our King), 79 Bark, Sandra, Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, 6 Baskin, Judith R., Women of the Word, 4 Bassin, Moyshe, 28, 53, 428n2; Amerikaner yidishe poezye (American Yiddish Poetry), 41–42; Antologye, 8–9, 16–17, 19–20, 33–34, 36–37, 39–41, 43, 68, 405 Baum, Batia, 6, 170 Baumgarten, Jean, 433n5 Bendiner Vort (Bendin Word; journal), 213 Ben-Haim, Rivka Basman, 396–98 Bereishit Rabbah (midrashim collection), 231 Bergelson, David, 108 Berger, Shlomo, 433n5 Bernshteyn, Ignatz, 173 Bernshteyn, Rokhl. See Yehudis

Bialik, Hayim Nakhman, 104; “Al hashkhita” (On the Slaughter), 328; “Hakhnisi tahat kenafeikh” (Take Me Under Your Wing), 269; “In the City of Slaughter,” 26; “Take Me Under Your Wing,” 163 Borokhov, Ber, 17–18, 20, 28, 29 Brenner, Naomi, 5 Brest-Litovsk, 299–302 Broderzon, Moyshe, 169, 175, 443n26, 451n63; “Ikh, a purim shpiler” (I, a Purim Player), 197, 198 Brooks, Cleanth, 427n1 Charney, Shmuel. See Niger, Shmuel Chaver, Yael, 5, 148–49 Christological imagery, 148–49 Chwila (newspaper), 144 Collective responsibilities. See Individual vs. collective responsibilities Cooperman, Chasye, 398 Copstein, Broche, 398 Creativity. See Poetry and creativity Cubism, 147 Cunningham, J. V., 427n1 CYCO, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, prese, un filologye, 398 David, 54–57, 60, 95 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 61 De Chirico, Giorgio, 144–46; Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure), 145 Deuteronomy, 357–58 Devotional literature, 45, 50 Devotional poetry: gender concerns and, 10; modern poetry in relation to, 9, 17, 40; purposes of, 51; women poets’ appropriation of, 10–11. See also Premodern poetry

487

488

Index Dillon, Sasha, 268 Dobrushin, Yekhezkl, 104, 108 Dramatic monologues, 213, 219, 221, 224, 239 Dropkin, Celia, 4, 5, 11, 18, 21, 39, 142, 243– 70, 321–22, 409–12, 456n9; “Dimoskite” (The Mosquito), 263–64; “Du host tif oyfgeakert mayn frukhtbare erd” (You plowed my fertile soil deep), 256–58; “Ikh tulye tsu mayn heysn shtern” (I Nestle My Hot Forehead), 258–59; “In heysn vint” (In the Hot Wind), 262; In heysn vint (In the Hot Wind), 246, 268, 321; “In Solivan Kaunti” (In Sullivan County), 263; “Kh’hob zikh gezen in kholem” (I Saw Myself in a Dream), 39; “A libe briv” (A Love Letter), 264–65, 381; “Mayn mame” (My Mother), 246– 47, 268; “Mayn vayse shney printsesin” (My Snow-White Princess), 39; “Mit gebrokhene fliglen” (With Broken Wings), 268; “Odem” (Adam), 253, 369; “Di royte blum” (The Red Flower), 244, 267–68; “Rozeve fodem” (Pink Thread), 259–61; “Di tsirkus dame” (The Circus Lady), 250–53, 272, 278, 286; “Tsu a yunger dikhterin” (To a Young Poetess), 265–66; “Tsu mayn zun, velkher hot mir geshenkt hel bloye kareln” (To My Son, Who Gave Me Bright Blue Beads), 259; “Zumer-sonata” (Summer Sonata), 261–62 Dropkin, Shmaye, 245 Droshes (sermons), 23 Edelstat, David, 24, 180, 430n19 Education, of Jewish women, 185–87 Einhorn, David, 104, 105 Ele, 9, 62–63, 66; “Di taytshe oysyes hob ikh gezetst” (These Yiddish Letters I Have Set), 62–63 Elijah, 330–32 Eliot, T. S., 1–2 Erdberg, Mirl, 174 Erik, Max, 19, 50, 57, 433n5 Erlich, Max, 29 Eroticism. See Sexuality Esther, 92–93, 95–96, 196–97, 224, 237–41 Ethnographic Commission of the YIVO Institute, Vilna, 28 Ethnography, 173 Eve, 253–56, 368, 378–79 Exodus, 136, 142, 325, 347–48, 356, 465n6 Expressionism, 271, 324

Eygns (Our Own; anthology), 108 Falk, Marcia, 5 Farlag B. Kletskin, 122 Fefer, Itsik, 443n26 Feminism, 5, 7, 8, 22, 30 Finigberg, Ezra, 443n26 Fishls, Royzl, 9, 23, 46, 51–61, 79, 100, 101, 312; “Mit hoylf gots yisborakh” (With God’s Help, Blessed Be He), 52–60, 73, 111 Fishman, Gella Schweid, 398 Fishman, Rukhl, 5, 398 Fogel, Dvore, 10, 107, 143–48, 171; Akatsyes blien (Acacias Blossom), 143; “Ferd un torsn” (Horses and Torsos), 145–47; “Figurn-lider I” (Figure-Poems I), 144– 45, 151–52; Manekinen (Mannequins), 143, 144, 147; Tog figurn (Day Figures), 143 Folk life, 173 Folk poetry, 17, 26–27. See also Literary folk poems Folksongs, 219 Forman, Frieda Johles: The Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers, 6; Found Treasures, 6 Forverts (journal), 246 Frakes, Jerold, 5, 54–59, 63, 74, 433n5 Fraye arbeter shtime, Di (The Free Worker’s Voice; newspaper), 30, 270, 323 Fraynd, Der (The Friend; newspaper), 323 Freehof, Solomon, 47, 50, 433n5 Fridkin, A., 443n26 Frischmann, David, 209, 211 Froebel, Friedrich, 108 Froyen zshournal-vokhenblat (Women’s Journal-Weekly), 21 Frug, Shimen Shmuel, 24–25 Gele, 5, 9, 18, 23, 46, 51, 61–69, 101; “Dize sheyne naye tfile” (This Beautiful New Prayer) [“Tfile”], 61, 63–69, 73, 111, 138, 438n72 Geler, Todres, 20 Gender: in Margolin’s poetry, 271–76, 287; in Molodowsky’s poetry, 111, 119–21, 332–35, 338–39; in Potash’s poetry, 152–53; scholarship on, 4–5; in Ulinover’s poetry, 180; in women poets’ works, 6–7, 10. See also Women Genesis, 90, 119, 124–25, 210, 230–31, 233, 254–55, 276, 283, 350, 356, 368, 387 German expressionism, 271

Index Ginzburg, S. M., 173 Glanz, Arn. See Leyeles, A. Glatshteyn, Yankev (Jacob), 28, 430n19; In zikh (In the Self), 15–16, 18 Glatstein, Jacob, 148 Glik, Hirsh, “Hymn of the Partisans,” 345 Gnessin, Uri Nisan, 245, 264 God: challenging of, 80–101, 324–28, 348–53, 358, 391–93; covenant of, 89–90, 326; epithets for, 94; in Fishls’s poetry, 54–55, 59–60; in Kats’s poetry, 71, 73; in Margolin’s poetry, 310–11; as merciful, 98–99; in Molodowsky’s poetry, 324–28; in Pan’s poetry, 80–101; power of, 136; in Tiktiner’s poetry, 73, 77; in Tussman’s poetry, 348–53, 358, 388–93. See also Devotional poetry Goldshteyn, Roza, 18, 24–25, 33–34, 37; “Di yidishe muze: Elegye” (The Jewish Muse: Elegy), 25 Gordon, Hirsh Leyb, 270 Gottesman, Itzik, 219 Graubart, Zelman, 404 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 149 Greenblatt, Eliza, 398 Groybart, Yisakhar-Berish, 212 Gutman, Roza, 398 Hadda, Janet, 4, 5 Hadlikes neyres (commandment), 71 Hagar, 224, 232–34 Halevi, Yosef (Joseph Levi), 46, 52 Halperin, Yekhiel, 108 Halpern, Moyshe-Leyb, 11, 12, 113, 180, 308, 430n19; “Blut-blitsn” (Blood-Bursts), 464n149; “Dertseyl” (Tell), 163; “LeybBer,” 464n149; “Di mayse mit der flig” (The Tale of the Fly), 135; “Memento Mori,” 180; In nyu york, 306 Halter, Perl, 398 Haman, 92, 96 Hamapil, 130–31 Hannover, 57 Haskalah (Enlightenment), 23, 29 Haynt (newspaper), 212 Hebrew language: criticisms of, 48–49; typesetting of, 61–63, 68–69; value placed on, 29, 33, 45, 47; women’s knowledge of, 29, 45, 62, 68 Hebrew literary tradition, 25–26, 45, 48 Heller, Marvin, 66 Hellerstein, Kathryn, 4, 5 Hobsbawm, Eric, 1–2 Hofshteyn, David, 104–7, 443n26

Holocaust, 11–12, 211, 323–28, 335, 344, 351, 353, 357, 360–63, 383, 391 Homer, 273, 382 Horace, 273 Horowitz, Leah, Tkhine of the Matriarchs, 96–97, 100, 126, 230 Hurvits, Beyle, 69 Iceland, Reuven, 11, 27, 247–50, 270, 271, 305–6, 311, 430n19; Fun mayn zumer (From My Summer), 250, 271; “Shtilleben I” (Still-Life I), 248–49; “Shtilleben II” (Still-Life II), 249–50 Idel, Moshe, 96 Illustrirte Vokh (Illustrated Week), 211 Imagism, 271 Imber, Samuel J., Modern Yiddish Poetry, 244 Individual vs. collective focus: in early Yiddish writings, 45, 110; in modern Yiddish literature, 10, 16, 30; in premodern poetry, 44–46; tension between, 10, 16, 18, 28, 30; in women poets, 24–28, 32 In Shpan (In Harness; journal), 406 Interwar poetry, 10 Introspectivism, 11, 15, 18, 21, 28, 30, 40, 51, 148, 243, 246, 273, 324, 430n19 In zikh (journal), 18 Isaac, 89–90, 132, 355–56, 389 Israel, tribes of, 231 Jacob, 89, 125–26, 230–32 Jewish Community of Warsaw, 140 Jewish men, feminized stereotypes of, 33, 42, 105 Joshua, 344–45 Judeo-German literature (Yidish-taytsh), 21, 23, 47 Kagan, Berl, Leksikon fun yidishe shrayber, 398 Kahanowitch, Pinchas. See Nister, Der Kats, Khane (Hannah Katz), 9, 23, 46, 51, 69–73, 101; “Tfile l’shabes” (A Prayer for the Sabbath), 70–73, 110, 138, 439n81 Kats, Tuvye, 209 Kats, Yehude Leyb, 46, 69 Kats, Yisroel, 65 Katsenelson, Yitzkhok, 209 Katz, Hannah. See Kats, Khane Kay, Devra, 5, 69, 74–75, 433n5, 439n81, 440n93 Kazdan, H. S., 141 Khale (commandment), 71

489

490

Index Klepfisz, Irena, 4–5 Kling, Berta, 11 Knizshnik, Zelda, 18, 25–26, 33–36; “Kapores” (Atonement), 35; “Mayn letste likht” (My Last Candle), 35; “Mayn man iz in amerike” (My Husband Is in America), 35; “Volkns” (Clouds), 35 Kook, Abraham Yitshak, 211 Kopé, Rivke, 398 Korman, Ezra, 18–19; Brenendike brikn (Burning Bridges), 103–8, 120, 405, 442n2, 443n26; In fayerdikn doyer (In Fiery Duration), 103; letters to, 7, 12, 401–7; poetry of, 32, 103, 429n11; Yidishe dikhterins (Yiddish Women Poets), 2–3, 8–10, 15–102, 139–40, 149, 156, 169, 170, 401–7 Korn, Rokhl, 4, 5, 7, 10, 107, 121, 141, 142, 155–68, 233, 244, 395–96, 401–2, 404; “Di alte Hanke” (Old Hanke), 165–67; “Dir” (To You), 156–57; Dorf (Village), 155–56, 160–62; “Kheshvn” (Heshvan), 159–61; Der onheyb fun a lid (The Beginning of a Poem), 395; “Regn” (Rain), 157–59; “Shvester” (Sisters), 162–63, 167; Yidishe dikhterins (Yiddish Women Poets), 167; “Zumerdiker regn” (Summer Rain), 157–58 Kri’at shema ‘al hamittah, 130 Kronfeld, Chana, 5 Krynicka, Natalia, 6, 170, 171, 175, 178 Kulbak, Moyshe, 121, 443n26 Kumove, Shirley, 6 Kvitko, Leyb, 105, 107, 443n26 Laban, 125 Labor Poets, 16, 18, 180, 430n19 Landau, Zishe, 11, 27, 28, 247–48, 430n19; Antologye, 15, 18, 39; “In el” (On the El), 248; “In kinematograf” (In the Cinematograph), 248; “Mayne zelikaytn” (My Pleasures), 247–48; Yunge (anthology), 243 Language. See Voice and language Leah, 124–26, 230–32 Leap year, 90–92 Lebensboym, Roza. See Margolin, Anna Lee, Malka, 7, 398, 402–3; “Shtoyb” (Dust), 244 Leib, Glikl bas Judah, 61 Leissen, Avraham, 26 Lerner, Anne Lapidus, Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, 4 Lev, Simche, 108, 121

Levi, Yehudah, 59 Levi, Yoysef, 59 Levin, Khane, 142, 398 Levitan, Seymour, 5, 155 Levites, 59–60 Leyb, Mani, 27, 113, 430n19; “Shtiler, shtiler” (Quieter, Quieter), 290 Leyeles, A. (Arn Glanz), 30–31, 148, 245, 277, 430n19; In zikh (In the Self), 15–16, 18 Leyvik, H., 121 Likhtenshteyn, Y., 17, 19–20 Lissitzky, Eliezer, 175 Literarishe bleter (journal), 31, 32, 121, 140, 141 Literary folk poems, 11, 174 Locker, Malka, 398 Lot, wife of, 210–11 Manger, Itzik, 2, 169; Khumesh lider (Bible Poems), 37; Medresh Itsik (The Midrash of Itsik), 210; Megile lider (Scroll of Esther Poems), 210 Manger Prize, 323 Mann, Barbara, 5, 271 Mannequins, 144–47, 446n92 Marek, P. S., 173 Margolin, Anna (pseudonym of Roza Lebensboym), 4–7, 11, 21, 39, 41, 142, 243–44, 250, 270–322, 362, 403, 412–14; “Af a balkon” (On a Balcony), 318; “Brisk” (Brest-Litovsk), 299–302; “Driml ayn, gelibter, driml” (Doze off, beloved, doze), 289; “Du” (You), 284–86; “Entre’Acte,” 316–18; “Epitaf” (Epitaph), 292–94; “Er brengt troyer” (He Brings Sorrow), 320–21, 369; “Es redn haynt ale shtume zakhn” (Today, All Mute Things Speak), 287–88; “Fargesene geter” (Forgotten Gods), 319–20, 389; “A froy zogt” (A Woman Says), 316; “Der gangster” (The Gangster), 315–16; “Harbst” (Autumn), 298; “Hart harts” (Hard Heart), 292; “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” (I Was Once a Boy), 272–74, 321; “Ikh hob nit gevust, mayn liber” (I Did Not Know, My Lover), 288–89; “In gasn” (In the Streets), 279–80, 282; “In kafe” (In the Café), 303; “In kuper un in gold” (In Copper and in Gold), 286–87; “Ir shmeykhl” (Her Smile), 320; “Iz di goldene pave gefloygn, gefloygn” (When the Golden Peacock Flew,

Index Flew), 289; “Dos iz di nakht” (This Is the Night), 290; “Libe monstern” (Kind Monsters), 291; Lider (Poems), 270–71, 313–21; “Dos lid fun a meydl” (The Song of a Girl), 316; “Mari” (Mary) poems, 307–13; “Mari’s tfile” (Mary’s Prayer), 309–11; “Mari un der toyt” (Mary and Death), 312–13; “Mari un di gest” (Mary and the Guests), 311; “Mari vil zayn a betlerin” (Mary Wants to Be a Beggar Woman), 307, 311–13; “Mayn shtam redt” (My Tribe Speaks), 280–82, 302; “Mayn Venus trogt zaydene sikhlekh” (My Venus Wears Silk Slippers), 318–19; “A mentsh” (A Person), 313; “Di meshugene” (The Madwoman), 313–15; “Meydlekh in krotona park” (Girls in Crotona Park), 303– 4; “Dos meydl zogt” (The Girl Says), 316; “Mid” (Tired), 291; “Mir veln boyen a vant” (We Will Build a Wall), 305–6; “Mit halb farmakhte oygn” (With Half-Closed Eyes), 283; “Muter erd” (Mother Earth), 271, 379; “Muter erd, fil getrotene, zun gevashene” (Mother Earth, Much Trampled, SunWashed), 272, 274–76; “Nakht” (Night), 291; “Di nakht iz arayn in mayn hoyz” (Night Has Entered My House), 291– 92; “Nit tsufridn” (Not Satisfied), 303; “Portret” (Portrait), 277–78; “Sheydim hobn umetik gefayft” (Demons Whistled Sadly), 290; “Sheyne verter fun marmor un gold” (Beautiful Words of Marble and Gold), 294–97; “Shlanke shifn” (Slender Ships), 290; “Shtiler” (Quieter), 290–91; “Dos shtoltse lid” (The Proud Poem), 304–5; “Tayvolim” (Devils), 291; “Toyt-mid fun der last fun a kholem” (Dead Tired from the Burden of a Dream), 306; “Tsvishn khinezishe lampterns” (Among Chinese Lanterns), 320; “Vos vilstu, mari?” (What Do You Want, Mary?), 308–9; Dos yidishe lid in amerike (The Yiddish Poem in America), 244, 270 Margolis, Rebecca, 5 Markish, Peretz, 105–7, 121, 443n26; “Di kupe” (The Heap), 149 Marmor, Kalman, 402 Marriage, 198–206, 217–18 Mary, mother of Jesus, 307–13 “Ma Tovu” (How Goodly), 69 Matriarchs, 124–26, 232

Maud, Zuni, 17 Mayne, Seymour, 5 Mayse bukh (Book of Tales), 23, 50 Mayzel, Nakhman, 121, 141 Maze, Ida (Ida Massey), 5, 398 Megillah, 92, 196–97 Messianic redemption, 66, 96–97, 100 Michaelis, J. H., 66 Midrash, 86 Minkoff, Nokhem-Borekh (also N. Minkoff), In zikh (In the Self), 15–16, 18, 148 Mintshin, A., 103, 442n2 Miriam, 224, 234–35, 347–51 Miron, Dan, 4 Mishnah, 71, 71–72 Modernism: Dropkin and, 39; Margolin and, 271, 287; Molodowsky and, 144; Potash and, 148–49; Shtok and, 39; Tussman and, 324; Yiddish poetry and, 41–42 Modern poetry: and gender concerns, 10– 11; individuality and autonomy as characteristic of, 43; premodern poetry in relation to, 44–45, 47–50, 102; tradition in relation to, 9–10, 17, 21–24, 26–28, 40–42. See also Secular poetry Molodowsky, Kadya, 3, 5–6, 7, 10–13, 31, 107–42, 144, 167–68, 209, 323–47, 395, 402, 404–7, 414–18; “Af mayn dorn blit a royz” (On My Thorn Blooms a Rose”), 335–36; “Afn beys-oylem” (At the Cemetery), 108–13, 113–15, 122; “Bloyen baginen” (At Blue Dawn), 112; “A briv tsu Eliyohu ha novi” (A Letter to the Prophet Elijah), 330–32; “Dzshike gas,” 139; Dzshike gas (Dzshike Street), 139–41; “Eyl khanun” (Merciful God), 324–28, 347, 351; Freydke, 139; “Freydke,” 139; “Froyen-lider” (Women-Poems), 122, 147–48, 160–61, 174, 251, 266, 307–8, 337; “Froyen-lider I,” 123–25, 140, 406; “Froyen-lider II,” 140; “Froyen-lider V,” 123; “Froyen-lider VI,” 124–25, 140, 367; “Froyen-lider VII,” 126–29, 140, 367; “Froyen-lider VIII,” 129–32, 140; “Fun fintster” (From Darkness), 108–13, 122, 134; “Fun midkayt kh’varf arop di shikh un zokn” (I Kick off My Shoes and Socks in Exhaustion), 341–42; “Dos gezang fun shabes” (The Sabbath Song), 338–39; “Gots kinder” (God’s Children), 345–47; “Groye land” (Gray Country), 108, 115–21, 127, 128, 140;

491

492

Index “Ikh bin a viderkol” (I Am an Echo), 344–45, 389, 391; “In bloyen baginen,” 112–13, 114; “Khad gadya,” 466n31; Kheshvndike nekht (Nights of Heshvan), 108–9, 112, 122, 129, 131, 134, 138–39, 168, 406; “Dos likht fun dayn tish” (The Light of Your Table), 342–44; Likht fun dornboym (Lights of the Thorn Bush), 335; “A matseyve” (A Tombstone), 140; “Mayne kinder” (My Children), 332–35, 367; “Mayn shprakh” (My Language), 339–40; Mayselekh (Tales), 139, 140; Der melekh Dovid aleyn iz geblibn (Only King David Remained), 328; “Olke,” 139; “On verter” (Without Words), 336– 37; “Opgeshite bleter” (Fallen Leaves), 132–34; “Opgeshite bleter II,” 140; “Opgeshite bleter IX,” 140; “Oreme vayber” (Poor Women), 138; “Otwock I,” 140; “Tfiles” (Prayers), 134–38, 153, 194; “Tsu a kinds portret” (To a Child’s Portrait), 328–30; “Tsum melekh Shloyme kumt di herlekhe Shulames” (Glorious Shulames Comes to Solomon the King), 342; “Der vint iz alt gevorn” (The Wind Has Grown Old), 340–42 Morgentaler, Goldie, 6 Mosad HaRav Kook (publishing house). See Kook, Abraham Yitshak Moshe ben Avrom Ovinu (Moses ben Abraham Avinu), 62–63, 65–66; Tfile leMoshe (Moses’s Prayer), 62–67 Moses, 104–5, 240, 325, 348, 356, 389–90 Motherhood: in Dropkin’s poetry, 247, 256, 258–62; in Korn’s poetry, 166–67; in Molodowsky’s poetry, 332–34; in Tussman’s poetry, 366–67; in Yakubovitsh’s poetry, 233 Musar-sforim (ethical treatises), 23, 50 Nadir, Moyshe, 402 Nadson, Semen Iakovlevich, 301, 462n121 Nationalism, 18, 25, 120–21 Naye himlen (New Skies; anthology), 174 New York City, 303–4 Nide (commandment), 71 Niger, Shmuel (pseudonym for Shmuel Charney), 4, 19, 29, 32–33, 42, 47, 50, 103, 140, 141, 245, 251, 402, 433n5 Nimrod, 132 Nister, Der (pseudonym for Pinchas Kahanowitch), 108 Norich, Anita, 353; Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, 4

Novershtern, Avraham, 4–7, 271, 305, 308 Old Yiddish literature (di eltere yidishe literatur), 2, 21–23, 44, 47–48, 110, 430n21, 433n5. See also Premodern poetry Opatoshu, Joseph, 121 Oyslender, Nahum, 443n26 Ozick, Cynthia, 442n10 Paganism, 115, 148, 244, 273, 308 Pan, Jacob, 47 Pan, Toybe, 9, 20, 23, 46, 47, 51, 79, 239, 312, 434n14; “Eyn sheyn lid naye gemakht beloshn tkhine iz vardin oysgetrakht” (A Brand-new Beautiful Song, Composed in the Tkhine-Tongue), 47, 78–102, 110, 111 Pan, Yankev, 79 Parush, Iris, 187 Patriarchs, 89–90 Paula R. (pseudonym for Pearl Rozental Pryłucki), 18, 25–26, 33–34, 174 Peretz, I. L., 173, 213, 224, 228; “Bontshe shvayg” (Bontshe the Silent), 351 Pitsker, Leyb, 47, 79 Piyyutim (Hebrew liturgical poems), 74, 79 Plague, 80–102, 434n14 Poetry and creativity: in Dropkin’s work, 256–70; in Korn’s work, 395; in Margolin’s work, 270–79, 303–6; in Molodowsky’s work, 334–47; sexuality linked with, 11; in Tussman’s work, 347– 53, 362, 378–87; women associated with, 30–32, 128; of women writers, 22–23. See also Voice and language Pogroms, 103, 155, 328 Poland, 28, 103–68 Post-Holocaust poetry, 11 Potash, Rikuda, 5, 10, 107, 148–55, 167–68, 233; “Dayn valise” (Your Suitcase), 149–50; “Dos dinstmeydl” (The Servant Girl), 152–54; “Ikh bin a kinigin” (I Am a Queen), 149; “Prostike fliterlekh” (Ordinary Details), 154–55; “Ven tsugn geyen op” (When Trains Depart), 150–52; Vint af klavishn (Wind on Piano Keys), 148 Pound, Ezra, 287 Prague, 79–102, 434n14 Pratt, Norma Fain, 4 Prayer, 79, 132–34. See also Tkhines Premodern poetry, 43–102; authors of, 43; individual vs. collective focus in, 44–46; in Korman’s Yiddishe dikhterins,

Index 43–102; modern poetry in relation to, 9–10, 21–23, 44–45, 47–50, 102. See also Devotional poetry Printers. See Publishers/printers/typesetters Prostitution, 125, 147, 162–65 Pryłucki, Noah, 28, 173 Pryłucki, Pearl Rosental. See Paula R. Psalms, 52–61, 95, 217 Publishers/printers/typesetters, women, 46, 52–57, 60–63, 65, 67 Purim, 90–92, 95, 196–98 Purim Katan, 91, 441n104 Pushkin, Alexander, 301 Rabinovitsh, Sholem. See Sholem Aleichem Rachel, 124–26, 224, 229–32 Raicus, Ethel, Found Treasures, 6 Ranger, Terence, 1 Rappaport, Anna, 18, 25, 33–34, 37 Rashi (rabbi), 86 Ravitch, Melech, 31–32, 121, 141–42, 220, 245, 402 Rebecca, 124, 125 Religious poetry. See Devotional poetry; Premodern poetry Revolutionary poetry, 103–4, 106–9, 120 Reyner dikhtung (pure poetry), 27 Reyzen, Avraham, 26, 106, 171 Reyzen, Sarah (Sore), 18, 27, 33–34, 142, 398, 402 Reyzen, Zalman, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur un prese, 19 Reznik, Lipa, 443n26 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 274 Rolnik, Joseph, 27 Romantic love, 229–32 Rosenfarb, Chava, 6, 398 Rosenfeld, Morris, 17, 24, 26, 180, 430n19 Rosental, Rivke, 39 Roskies, David, 3, 24, 328 Rozier, Gilles, 5 Rozshanski, Shmuel, Di froy in der yidisher poezye, 427n5 Rubin, Hadassah, 398 Rubin, Rivke, 398 Russia, 28. See also Soviet Union Ruth, 224–29 Rybak, Yisakhar-Ber, 103, 442n2 Sabbath, 70–73, 133, 179, 192, 339, 393, 440n96, 450n30; candles, 23, 46, 71–72, 101, 109, 110–11, 134, 167, 189, 247, 339, 353, 391–92; food, 71–72, 110, 133, 182; prayer, 70, 71–72, 110

Sacco, Nicola, 406–7 Sacred parody, 3–4, 24, 322, 328, 392 Sadan, Dov, 211 Safran, Khane (Anne), 398 Salome, 252 Samuel, 389–90 S. Ansky Vilna Jewish HistoricEthnographic Society, 28 Sarah, 124, 125 Schaechter-Gottesman, Beyle, 398 Schaechter-Viswanath, Gitl, 398 Secular poetry: emergence of, 23–24; and gender concerns, 10. See also Modern poetry Sefer mides (Morality Book), 23, 50 Segal, Esther, 5 Segal, Serl bas Yankev, of Dubnow, 94 Seidman, Naomi, 5, 187 Sexuality: in Dropkin’s poetry, 39, 243–70, 321–22; in Margolin’s poetry, 243–44, 270–322; in men’s poetry, 247–50; in Shtok’s poetry, 38, 39; traditions concerning, 123–24; Tsene-rene on, 228; in Tussman’s poetry, 363–77, 387; in Ulinover’s poetry, 202, 204–5; in women poets’ works, 10, 11; women’s, 30–31; in Yakubovitsh’s poetry, 215–16. See also Prostitution Sharkanski, A. M., 17 Shatski, Yankev, 209 Shema, 129–31, 136, 352–53, 357 “Shlosh-esre middot” (The Thirteen Attributes of Mercy; prayer), 325 Shmeruk, Chone, 2, 433n5 Shmuel bukh (epic poem), 57, 58 Sholem Aleichem (born Sholem Rabinovitsh), 170, 185 Shtendal, Moyshe, 52–58 Shtok, Fradl, 11, 18, 27, 31, 33–34, 37–39, 243, 244, 431n50, 432n73; “Du trogst dos harts” (You Carry Your Heart), 39; “Farnakhtn” (Dusks), 38; “Serenade,” 38; sonnet cycle, 38–39, 431n35; “Vi beyz bistu mayn fraynd” (My Friend, How You Are Evil), 39; “A vinter echo” (A Winter Echo), 38 Shulames, 224, 235–37 Shulman, Elias (Eleazar), 50, 52–54 Shumiatsher, Esther, 142, 398 Shvartsman, Asher, 105, 107, 443n26 Siman, Viviane, 5 Simhat Torah, 46, 73, 78, 105 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 121 Singer, Israel Joshua, 121

493

494

Index Socialism, 48 Socrates, 274 Sodom, 84 Sokoloff, Naomi B., Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, 4 Solomon, 217, 346 Song of Songs, 194, 235–37 Song of the Sea, 234–35 Sonnet form, 38–39, 277, 431n35 Sophocles, 273 Soviet Union, 15. See also Russia Stavski, Moshe, 270, 311, 464n144 Stavski, Na’aman, 270, 311, 464n144 Steinschneider, Moritz, 53 Surrealism, 144, 145, 147 Svive (Surroundings; journal), 108, 168 Swartz, Sarah Silberstein, Found Treasures, 6 Szymaniak, Karolina, 143 Tal, Aviva, 5 Tashlikh, 190 Taytsh-khumesh (Yiddish translation of Pentateuch), 23, 50, 210, 451n59 Tchernikhovsky, Shaul, 273 Tears, 96–97 Ten Commandments, 104, 240, 351–52, 383 Tfiles (prayers), 23 Tiktiner, Rivke bas Meir, 9, 46, 51, 73–78, 434n11; Meynekes Rivke (Rebecca’s Wet Nurse), 46, 74; “Eyn simkhes toyre lid” (A Simhat Torah Song), 46, 73–78, 101–2, 110, 111, 440n88, 440n93 Tkhines (supplicatory prayers for women): authorship of, 61; elements of, 72; Korman’s inclusion of, 50; for the Matriarchs, 124–26, 232; modern poetry in relation to, 23, 58, 69, 72; requests for intervention in, 87–88; tradition of, 3, 45, 71–72; types of, 71; Ulinover’s inspiration from, 174 Tog, Der (newspaper), 103, 270, 403 Tradition: meaning of, 1–3; modern poetry in relation to, 9–10, 17, 21–24, 26–28, 40–42, 152, 155, 169, 175, 213, 224; Yiddish poetry in relation to, 104–6, 107, 167, 319, 321, 397. See also Yiddish literary tradition Tregebov, Rhea, Arguing with the Storm, 6 Tsene-rene (Yiddish translation of and elaboration on Pentateuch), 23, 50, 126, 174, 210–11, 227–28, 230–31, 239–41 Tshenstokhovska, Shoshana, 174 Tsnies (code of modesty), 26, 246–47, 252, 256, 266

Tsukunft (journal), 246 Turniansky, Chava, 5, 61–63, 67, 68, 397–98, 433n5 Tussman, Malka Heifetz, 3, 5, 11–13, 38, 323–24, 347–93, 396, 406, 418–21; Bleter faln nit, 382; “Duner mayn bruder” (Thunder My Brother), 382–83; “Erd” (Earth), 378–79; “Fargesn” (Forgotten), 351, 379, 391–93; “Froyen” (Women), 363– 78; “A gelibte vayb” (A Beloved Wife), 363–65, 468n62; “Gitele mitn gebentshtn boykh” (Gitele with Her Blessed Belly), 366–67; “Ikh bin froy,” 373–78; “Ikhome,” 367–68; Lider (Poems), 351, 362–63; “Mayn shvester” (My Sister), 382–85; “Midbar vint” (Desert Wind), 385–87; Mild mayn vild (Mild My Wild), 378; “Mit tseyn in der erd” (With Teeth in the Earth), 359–62; “Reyzls broyt iz shvarts” (Reyzl’s Bread Is Black), 365–66; “Shpigl ponim” (Mirror-Face), 368–73; “Tate ziser” (Sweet Father), 388–91; “Tsu dir Miryam” (To You, Miriam), 347–53, 362, 383; “Un ikh shmeykhl” (And I Smile), 387–88; “Vi andershdik” (How Otherly), 380–82; “Vos zol ikh zey dertseyln?” (What Shall I Tell Them?), 351, 353–59, 362 Typesetters. See Publishers/printers/ typesetters Ukraine, 103, 106 Ulinover, Miriam, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10–11, 21, 27–28, 142, 168, 169–211, 213, 244, 396–97, 403–4, 421–23, 449n25; “Af shvomen” (For Mushrooms), 202–3; “Der alter sider” (The Old Prayer Book), 184–85; “Antiklekh” (Rarities), 187–88; “Dos bagegenish” (The Encounter), 203–4; “Baym taytsh-khumesh” (Reading the Taytsh-khumesh), 194–95; “Baynakht” (At Night), 204–5; Der bobes oytser (My Grandmother’s Treasure), 170–71, 175– 76, 211; “A brivele der boben” (A Letter to My Grandmother), 190; “Brivelekh” (Little Letters), 203; “A brivl” (A Note), 205–6; “Dayn lebu” (Your Life), 190; “Erev peysakh” (Passover Eve), 207; “Ester hamalke” (Esther the Queen), 149, 196–98, 238; “Far der tir” (Before the Door), 198–99; “Gut-vokh” (Good Week), 192–93; “Havdole vayn” (Havdalah Wine), 178–80; “A heymish brivl” (A Letter from Home), 206;

Index “Iber nekht” (Overnight), 202; “In beker-shtub” (In the Baking-House), 201–2; “In der fremd” (Away from Home), 189–90; “In hoyf” (In the Yard), 184; “Kale yorn” (Bridal Years), 193; “Di khales” (The Hallahs), 182–83; “Khelem lider” (Poems of Chelm), 209; “Dos lid fun koymen-kerer” (The Song of the Chimney Sweep), 205; “Lots vayb” (Lot’s Wife), 210–11; “Di mame” (My Mother), 206–7; “Dos mamekindele” (Mother and Child), 171–72; “Mazkir neshomes” (Commemoration of the Dead), 207–8; “Puter-broyt” (Buttered Bread), 177–78; “Dos ringl” (The Little Ring), 191–92; “Dos royte kleydl” (The Red Dress), 199–200; “A segule” (A Remedy), 178, 181–82; Shabes, 170, 404; “Di shabes-likhtlekh” (The Sabbath Candles), 188–89; “Der shlukerts” (The Hiccups), 190; “Dos tirl” (The Small Gate), 200–201; “Di tsavoe” (The Last Will), 191; “Vald meydl” (Forest Girl), 193–94; “Dos yagde-flekel” (The Berry Stain), 190–91 Ulinover, Wolf, 403 United States, 15, 406–7 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 406–7 Veprinski, Rashel, 398; Ruf fun fligl, 403 Vintshevski, Morris, 24, 180, 431n35 Voice and language, poems about: Margolin and, 270–79, 362; Molodowsky and, 336–42; Tussman and, 359–62. See also Poetry and creativity Warshawsky, Mark M., “Afn pripetchik” (At the Fireplace), 353–55 Weeping, 96–97 Weinreich, Max, 28–29 Weiss, Shifra, 398 Weissler, Chava, 5, 61, 96, 433n5 Whitman, Walt, 376 Wisse, Ruth, 5 Wolfe, Margie, Found Treasures, 6 Women: commandments for, 71–72; in conventionally male roles, 93; creativity ascribed to, 30–32, 128; cultural roles of, 2–4, 37, 40–42; empowerment of, 30; knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic, 29, 45, 62, 68; poets on “women’s topics,” 11; prayers and liturgy for, 78–79 (see also Tkhines); as publishers/printers/ typesetters, 46, 52–57, 60–63, 65, 67;

Yiddish language associated with, 29, 33, 42, 78. See also Gender Women poets: characterizations of work by, 22–23, 29, 32, 34–36, 40–41, 141–42, 244–45, 322; in conventionally male roles, 101; critical responses to, 31–33; cultural role of, 30–31; in early Yiddish anthologies, 18; folksongs of, 219; and gender roles, 11; Korman’s anthology of, 15–102, 397; male depictions of, 220, 247; premodern, 9, 43, 242; publication of, 5–6, 21, 30, 33–34; scholarship on, 4–5; and sexuality, 10, 11, 139, 184, 205, 220, 237, 255, 319–20; and tradition in crisis, 11–12, 109, 134, 194–95, 214–17; tradition of, 6–8, 15, 21–23, 32, 42, 44, 397–98; and “women’s topics,” 11, 113–14, 161, 189, 241; and Yiddish literary tradition, 2–3, 8–9, 16, 19, 22, 25, 28–33, 39–42, 143, 174, 176, 244–45, 391 Yakubovitsh, Roza, 3, 5, 7, 10–11, 18, 21, 27, 33–34, 36–37, 169, 174, 212–42, 402, 404–5, 423–25; “Af keyver oves” (At My Ancestors’ Grave), 221–24; “Di akore” (The Barren Woman), 218; “Baym yam” (By the Sea), 27; Biblishe motivn (Biblical Motifs), 37; “Dos dinstmeydl” (The Servant Girl), 216; “Es hot getsankt dayn tate zikh mit maynem” (Your father fought with mine), 221; “Ester” (Esther), 237–41; “Fun kalesider” (From the Bride’s Prayer Book), 217; “Hogar” (Hagar), 232–34; “Ikh hob gemeynt dir alts avektsugebn” (I meant to give everything away to you), 221; Lider tsu got (Poems to God), 212; Mayne gezangen (My Songs), 212, 213; “Miryam” (Miriam), 232, 234–35; “Mit pasn goldenem” (“With golden rays”), 213; “Oh, my freedom,” 213–15; “On a statsye” (Without a Station), 37, 221; “Rokhl” (Rachel), 229–32; “Rut” (Ruth), 225–29; “Di shilerin” (The Girl Student), 216; “Di shrek” (The Fear), 221; “Shulames” (Shulamit), 232, 235–37; “Tsu mayn tatn” (To My Father), 37, 221; “Tsum zoyg-kind” (To the Nursing Child), 220 Yeats, William Butler, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 346 Yehoash, 26 Yehudis (pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn), 18, 25–26, 33–36, 398;

495

496

Index “Breyte himlen, erd a groyse” (Ample Heavens, Earth Enormous), 36; “Di nakht iz tif, di nakht iz shvarts” (The Night Is Deep, the Night Is Black), 36; “In a vinkl fun mayn hartsn” (In a Corner of My Heart), 35; “Tsum dikhter” (To the Poet), 36, 266–67 Yetstike tsayt, Di (The Present Time; journal), 171 Yiddish language: stages of, 430n21; value placed on, 29, 33, 42; women associated with, 29, 33, 42, 78 Yiddish literary tradition: anthologies’ significance for, 40; Hebrew tradition compared with, 25–26, 29, 345; Jewish tradition in relation to, 104–6, 110, 220, 396; scholarly establishment of, 15–19. See also Women poets, and Yiddish literary tradition Yiddish Pen Club, 140 Yiddish Writers’ Union, 121

Yidish-taytsh. See Judeo-German literature YIVO Ethnographic Commission, 173 Yom Kippur, 79 Yudika, 398 Yugnt (Youth; anthology), 212, 451n52 Yunge, Di, 11, 15, 18, 21, 27, 28, 39, 40, 42, 51, 243, 246, 290, 430n19 Zagat, S., 17, 20 Zaretsky, Hinde, 398 Zaydnbaytl, Yosef, 175 Zayonts, Yankev-Ber, 213 Zeitlin, Aaron, 121 Zelmelin, Reb, “Shabes-lid” (Sabbath Song), 17 Zhitlovsky, Khaim, 270 Zinberg, Israel, 433n5; History of Jewish Literature, 68 Zionism, 48 Zucker, Sheva, 4 Zychlinska, Rajzel, 398