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A. F. HERNDON, Founder
Yiddish
Poetry
by SAMUEL KREITER
• (A Seven Arts Feature)
Yiddish is Dead! Long Live Yiddish! is a paraphrase of a cry
heard over the years in monarchist capitals denoting the passing
of a king, ascension of another, and the continuity of the respect
ive royal dynasty. This in a sense would apply to our vexed and
plagued mame-loshen which its eager-beaver detractors have in
the course of decades repeatedly laid to rest, but was kept alive
by its ardent devotees.
In this country, the major center of Yiddish creativity, Yid
dish and Hebrew arrived in the Eighties on the crest of Jewish
mass immigration Yiddish expression, particularly poetry, de
veloped in nourishing, meaningful diversity. Much of the subject
matter was shtetl-oriented; some writers attempted to bridge the
old world and the new. A good deal of the writing today is still
removed from the American scene. Obviously, this creative de
tachment has nothing to do with the writer’s love of his adopted
country, and his lingering remoteness from its socio-cultural
frontiers.
There have been notable exceptions. Over half a century ago
Yiddish novelists captured the complexities of the immigrants’
foundering between agony and achievement in America’s eco
nomic jungle. Some, like Boruch Glazman and Aaron Raboy,
unreeled more idyllic phases of Jewish settlement in rural Geor
gia and the Western Plains.
In poetry J. J. Schwartz exhilarated readers with a book-
length significant epic called "Kentucky," and Reuben Ludwig
produced a remarkable cycle of “Indian Motifs." A. Glantz-
Leyeless hymned our country, and also introduced in translation
(and cogent evaluation) topflight American and British verse
classics. It was the time of movements, manifestoes, schools, and
blossoming magazines which reflected contrasting diversions
from established art norms.
The "Jungle" departed from the sweatshop-blues chanted by
the "Alte versifiers, swayed by the then dominant theory of art
as a social weapon. In rejecting the drum-beating doctrine of
class-struggle they linked up with the more tranquil Impression
ist school. At the same time Glanz-Leyeless. the impeccable poet
and critic Jacob Glatstein, and the late poet and scholar Nochum
B. Minkoff, heralded Introspectivism. and cultivated the soil for
the Imagists. Second Avenue and Greenwich Village, once
citadels of Yiddish and American avant-garde esthetics, locked
arms in parallel re-assessment of art as an extension of human
experience.
A plethora of accomplished poets do honor the Yiddish lyric.
They include Ephraim Auerbach, Chaim Grade, Aleph Katz
Jeremiah Hesheles, Melech Ravitch, Abraham Tabatchnik. who
is also an incisive analyst of literary trends, and Rajzl Zychlinska.
In conclusion I submit selected poems in my translation to
give non-Yiddish readers a taste of the themes and range touched
by our contemporary verse writers.
AN EVENING AT HOME
You sit at the window and stare
out into the stars.
Behind you by the light your wife
knits, or sews,
or only toys with needle and thread,
and ponders the incidents that passed.
You wonder why you cannot break
the tedium encircling you,
the spell of dreams unmaterialized.
Your wife looks up, smiles.
You catch her eyes—
and all becomes clear in a flash.
You rise, walk over,
place a gentle hand on her shoulder,
and with the other you stroke her hair.
Zisha Landau
14
The Southern Israelite