PART THREE—
PARAGONS FROM THE PERIPHERY

Chapter 6—
Yehuda Amichai:
On the Boundaries of Affiliation

In a complex early poem of the 1950s, “Through Two Points Only One Straight Line Can Pass” (“Derekh shtey nekudot over rak kav yashar echad”),^[1] Yehuda Amichai combines geometrical theorems with astrological tales and images of love in a metaphysical style reminiscent of John Donne.^[2] Yet the poem was set to music by a popular singer and became quite a hit in Israel in the 1970s, under-scoring the popular success of Amichai's poetry. This poem, like quite a few others by Amichai, participates in a unique tradition—blending Middle Eastern and Eastern European custom—of blurring the distinction between poetry and song, of treating shira (poetry/song) as part of everyday experience.^[3] Amichai's popular success (and the critical displeasure that it often elicits) also lies in the background of his ambivalent relation to literary modernism.

This ambivalence marks a contradictory set of orientations in Amichai's poetics. One orientation places antielitism at the center of his poetics; Amichai reduces both God and the sacred muse to life-size, sometimes bite-size, dimensions, and succeeds in generating a truly popular poetic voice able to reach people in the work-a-day world. Yet an opposite orientation within his poetry embraces much of the poetics of Anglo-American modernism, including the difficulty of classical allusion, highly figurative language, and syntactic fragmentation. These imported modernist prototypes in Amichai's poetry seem to deny or at least clash with the possibilities for a truly accessible populist poetics. Amichai does not simply oscillate between these two orientations; rather, he harnesses together both the popular

and the difficult within a systematic, unified poetics that problematizes trend affiliation in general and the boundaries of modernism in particular. Thus, while Amichai is the most central poet Israeli modernism has produced, he remains on the margins of his poetic trend affiliation. How do these two contradictory orientations, simplistically construed as modernist and antimodernist, coexist, and how do they combine in the actual poetic practice?

In the poem “Ve-hi tehilatekha” (“And That Is Your Glory”) the picture of God as a garagenik, a mechanic lying on his back underneath a world that keeps breaking down as if it were a lemon of a car, creates a quotidian image that is at once populist and iconoclastic:

From: And That Is Your Glory

Underneath the world, God lies stretched on his back
always repairing, always things get out of whack.
I wanted to see him all, but I see no more
than the soles of his shoes and I'm sadder than I was before.
And that is his glory.
                                        —Amichai (1962, 1977 ed.:71–72;
                            translated by Bloch and Mitchell in Amichai, 1986:11–12)

Framed by its title and refrain, the poem also alludes to an obscure piece of liturgy for the Days of Awe that the average reader cannot identify since it is not found in the abbreviated versions of the machzor, the holiday prayer book many synagogue goers use. Amichai alerts the reader to the allusive context by including a parenthetical remark next to the title—“(from a liturgy for the Days of Awe)”—but does not tell us where to find it, nor who the liturgical poet is. Furthermore, the title and refrain require not only the identification of this allusion but also a scholarly “excavation” of the rare paradoxical meaning of tohola (“fault,” “imperfection,” as in Job 4:18) alongside

the normative sense of tehila (“praise,” “glory”). The combination of the domestication of God and an intertextual, etymological critique constitutes Amichai's typical stance (see Arpali 1986:114–119). This bivalent position has led critics and readers alike to observe that Amichai's poetry is at once easy and difficult, accessible and elusive, familiar and strange. (See Tzvik, 1988:12–14, 29–30.)

Ironically, this simultaneous use of contradictory poetic beliefs is commonly associated with the conceptual structure of the category modernism in general. But Amichai's particular form of ambivalence leads him in part away from the modernism of his—and his generation's—Anglo-American prototypes. This further complication adds two interesting questions to an investigation of Amichai's poetics. First, how can the very ambivalence toward the modernist prototypes embedded in his poetry point to Amichai's own modernist affiliation? And, second, what use is it to talk about his modernism if the very turning away from one of its trends can itself be seen as a modernist practice? A closer examination of what it means for Amichai to be or not to be affiliated with Hebrew and international modernism might help shed some light on the particular ways in which he has come to serve as a paragon of his generation while remaining—in many important ways—on its margins.

The poetry of the entire third modernist wave of the Statehood Poets demonstrates an ambivalent position toward these complex trends. The explicit poetics (manifestoes, public proclamations) of Amichai's generation proclaimed it to be a late modernist, neoimagist grouping. However, the implicit poetics, reconstructed from the poets' actual works, contains many principles which subvert or go beyond the modernist stance, whether they are a reaction against the moderna of the pre-Statehood Generation or a partial withdrawal from—and modification of—the newly imported Anglo-American prototypes. These contradictory trends, though, are manifested much more fully in Amichai's own poetry than in the poetry of his fellow central poets of the Statehood Generation, in particular Nathan Zach, who along with Amichai and, somewhat later, Dahlia Ravikovitch is often identified as the core poet of this generation. Precisely for this reason Amichai's poetry and poetics offer an intriguing challenge to any attempt to view modernism on the model of marginal prototypes.

Modernism was always a self-referential literary movement, although this fact does not make self-reference itself into a sufficient condition for modernism.^[4] The choice of affiliation among modernists

was usually quite deliberate and often entailed the compulsion either to join or to form groups of like-minded artists, in what Douwe Fokkema (1984:11–12) has termed the “sociocode of modernism.” Each group would then usually provide public declarations of its explicit poetics to distinguish itself from other groups. Not only do the icon-oclastic manifestoes of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Italian futurists before the First World War set the stage for this type of writing, but the futurists remain perhaps the most salient example of the self-conscious, manifesto-publishing literary group; after the war that role falls to the dadaists, who made the manifesto into a full-fledged literary genre that embodies—again self-referentially—its own necessary and imminent destruction. These modernist groups were intent on supplying the readers as well as the critics with programmatic credos stating their aesthetic and ideological goals, goals they often deviated from—in significant, even systematic, ways—in the implicit poetics of their literary practice.

Amichai's generation of Hebrew modernist poets, led by the activist paragon Zach, follow this familiar pattern, and perhaps because of the trend's belatedness, their explicit poetics often read like self-referential allusions to the famous “high-modernist” manifestoes. Given all this, Amichai's participation in the formation of Statehood Generation groupings remains highly ambivalent. He was a founding member of Likrat, the modernist group whose magazine published the neoimagists' works and manifestoes in Israel during the early 1950s. But Amichai himself never actually signed any public credos and never wrote any manifestoes; to this day he regards himself as only a marginal member of the Likrat group. His only credo, as he once told an interviewer, is his noncredo: ha-ani ha-lo ma'amin she-li (“my nonbelieving I” or “my ‘I don't believe’”).^[5]

Amichai's ambivalent relation to Likrat is acknowledged even by Zach, a cofounder of the group and its self-appointed spokesperson throughout its various transformations. Even though Amichai never publicly articulated a binding set of aesthetic principles for his own poetry, Zach, always quite keen on the manifesto as a metapoetic genre, points to Amichai as a salient prototype of Statehood Generation poetics. In Zach's major manifesto of 1966, titled “On the Stylistic Climate of the Fifties and Sixties in Our Poetry” and better known as tet-vav ha-nekudot (the fifteen points), Zach (1966a) provides a checklist of necessary and sufficient conditions for the poetry of his generation. Zach's list is revealing precisely because this type of def-

inition cannot work for modernism or for that matter for any literary trend. With perhaps a touch of self-irony, Zach finds himself at once citing Amichai as the internal paragon, the most salient example of the third trend of Hebrew poetic modernism, and also acknowledging Amichai's deviation from the various strictures of the fifteen points.

In point (a), Zach prescribes: “Opposition to the quatrain,^[6] because of its excessive symmetry and static nature.” Zach then continues by citing an example from Amichai that, he claims, successfully breaks the “squareness” of the line. But Amichai clearly and consistently prefers the quatrain, especially in his early poetry, to which Zach refers in the 1966 manifesto. Zach is then forced to qualify his very first principle by saying that Amichai finds ways to break the static symmetry of the quatrain, especially through the use of enjambment, even while continuing to write stanzas in quatrains. Zach encounters similar trouble when he states in point (d) that free verse should be embraced as a rule for the generation's poetic goals. But he immediately qualifies the prescription by saying that Amichai's rhythms continue to be free even though, in this early period, they are often based on more or less regular tonic-syllabic metrical schemes. Zach cannot minimize the importance of Amichai within the neomodernism of the 1950s and 1960s, but he is forced to acknowledge that Amichai's implicit poetics provides a limit case for the explicit poetics that he, Zach, is trying to establish as the mainstream of the trend. While Amichai's poetry has since undergone many changes, his work continues to present complex challenges to any orthodox notions of literary affiliation.

Solutions to these challenges become especially elusive because Amichai rarely thematizes the aesthetics of poetry in his poems, or at least he never presents his poems as overt statements of metapoetic pronouncement. This fact in itself points to Amichai's ambivalent modernism since poems about poetry have often been considered by poets and readers alike as a quintessential modernist gesture; modernist poets have made poetry, modernity, metaphor, or poetic language in general the subject of their poems. From Paul Verlaine's “Ars Poétique” to Wallace Stevens's “Of Modern Poetry,” modernists have used their poems to explore the aesthetic, philosophical, and even the most technical metapoetic questions about their work. In the entire corpus of Amichai's work, by contrast, only a handful of poems actually thematize the poetic process; and even these few present themselves as if they don't.

However, while Amichai shuns the metapoetic use of poetry, he does compensate for it with a meditative concern for language, ordinary language, especially the kind that is traditionally considered quite unpoetic. Grammatical constructions, everyday trite phrases, and word etymologies are commonly thematized by the speaker in Amichai's poetry. But despite this concentration on the possibilities of language, Amichai's speaker never presents himself as a poet contemplating the possibilities of poetic language; for Amichai, language never goes beyond the quotidian, the realness of the everyday and colloquial. Rather than make metapoetic assertions, Amichai's speaker consistently takes on the character of an ordinary human being thinking about ordinary language. His demystification of the written word and the concomitant privileging of ordinary discourse explain why for Amichai the poem about language replaces the poem on poetry, just as journalistic interview—with its emphasis on colloquial speech, dialogue, and direct communication between people—replaces the manifesto as metapoetic genre. The poet, Amichai said during a visit to the University of California at Berkeley in 1986, is the lowest of the low; but that, he added, is the greatest achievement a poet could possibly strive for. In typical Amichai fashion, which refuses to take on any elevated role for the poet, Amichai has always claimed that he writes poetry because he is too lazy to do anything harder. For the poet, as for the reader, poetry should be easy because it is ordinary language—not any privileged poetic diction—which is magical, inexhaustible, and, if one only pays attention, infinitely complex.^[7]

The privileged and complex status accorded to ordinary language is brilliantly exhibited in the early poem “Sonet ha-binyanim” (“The Verb-Pattern Sonnet”) (Amichai, 1962, 1977 ed.: 64–65). In this poem, Amichai offers a spectacular, utterly untranslatable account of life as changing grammatical constructions. The universal second-person addressee in the poem is caught within the structure of language, within the morphology of Hebrew verb forms, making the rocky journey from active to passive action, with a final, self-fulfilling stop in the reflexive. But the point is not the modernist and postmodernist cliché about the trap of the sign. Neither is this poem merely a series of puns on the traditional names of the patterns created by Hebrew verbs. Rather, through sustained verbal play with the correlation between the name of a pattern and its thematic, human significance Amichai seems to suggest, with perfect seriousness, a maximalist view of the power of dry, ordinary language. The triconsonantal roots and the verb patterns “built” around them^[8] are the very core of the

grammar of the Hebrew language. In this grammar—its precision, nuances, and modulations (Amichai often uses the adjective “precise,” meduyak, derived from the same root as “grammar,” dikduk, as a poetic—even romantic—compliment)—Amichai finds true poetry, material for the late modernist revival of the Hebrew sonnet. Taking a few basic roots through the dizzying transformations that make up Hebrew verb patterns, he also tells the story of a human life. The following verbs and paradigms diagram the transformations that constitute the journey of a life within the poem (X representing a consonant variable that can be filled by any lexical root in Hebrew):

The importance of the poetic function of conjugation does not rest on the accuracy of the grammatical insight. After all, it is a gross oversimplification to assert such an automatic, predictable correlation between verb pattern and syntactic-semantic function in Hebrew. The main point of the poem is how “mere” grammar can be made to tell such a fascinating meditative story about life's processes. Drawing attention to the linguistic medium and orienting the reader toward the signifier rather than the signified are inherently modernist gestures; through a particularly modernist defamiliarization of semantic features within Hebrew, the poem forces the native reader to perceive grammar in a new, philosophically charged way. But the way Amichai expresses his point—the abandonment of standard thematic presentation in favor of an expressive thematization of grammar that follows a mimetic paradigm—both upholds and subverts basic modernist tenets at the same time. The valorization of language, its ability to express meaning and convey ontological truth, goes against the modernist concern with language's inability to signify (a position which Zach represents consistently).

Amichai's view that poetic language is no more creative and insightful than grammatical forms and the discourse of ordinary people becomes a central feature in another early poem, “El male' rachamim” (“God Full of Mercy”) (Amichai, 1962, 1977 ed.:69–70). In this famous poem, however, Amichai speaks self-consciously about the relations of poet to language, especially concerning the problems of difficulty within a modernist poetic discourse. At one important and yet subdued moment in the poem, the speaker says of himself: ani she-mishtamesh rak be-chelek katan min ha-milim she-ba-milon (“I who use only a small part of the words in the dictionary”). This simple declaration reveals Amichai's ambivalent attachment to modernism. The speaker here objects to the poetics of difficulty so common to many modernist trends, from German expressionism to Anglo-American imagism and vorticism. He is just another member of the speech community, whose experiences with humans and with God have taught him the superiority of simple literal language to lofty poetic diction. Those experiences have taught him, as the title and first three lines suggest, to take the trite metaphor el male rachamim (God full of mercy) literally, thereby unmasking its inverse meaning: “God full of mercy, / If God weren't so full of mercy / There would be some mercy in the world and not just in him” ([1962] 1977 ed.:69; translation mine).

In his later work Amichai goes even further, radically challenging the very distinction between various forms of language—ordinary, poetic, scientific—and between linguistic action and real-life action. In the poem “Ba-yom she-bo nolda biti lo met af ish” (“On the Day My Daughter Was Born No One Died”) Amichai obscures the typographic distinction between poetry and prose.

On the Day My Daughter Was Born No One Died

On the day my daughter was born not a single person
died in the hospital, and at the entrance gate
the sign said: “Today kohanim  are permitted to enter.”
And it was the longest day of the year.
In my great joy
I drove with my friend to the hills of Sha'ar Ha-Gai.

We saw a bare, sick pine tree, nothing on it but a lot of pine cones.
Zvi said trees that are about to die produce more pine cones than
healthy trees. And I said to him: That was a poem and you didn't
realize it. Even though you're a man of the exact sciences, you've
made a poem. And he answered: And you, though you're a man of
dreams, have made an exact little girl with all the exact instruments
for her life.
          — Amichai (1980:44; translated by Bloch and Mitchell in Amichai, 1986:131–132)

The poem takes the form of a reported conversation between the speaker, an aging poet whose wife has just given birth to their daughter, and his scientist friend, Zvi. Within this dialogue, the poem builds an important analogy between the aging poet, who is still producing both poems and babies, and, on the hills at the outskirts of Jerusalem,^[9] some dying pine trees that, as a matter of botanical fact, produce more pine cones than young, healthy trees; interestingly, the analogy is built as a traditional poetic simile. But in the dramatic situation of this poem, the poetic qualities of the simile are attributed to the spontaneous speech of Zvi, the scientist, who knows the right botanical facts about trees, and not to the conventions of the literary institution within which the reader ultimately finds this simile—namely, the poetic text. This reversal—on the level of theme—of the traditional roles of poetic and nonpoetic discourse is echoed closely in the generic structure of the text.^[10] The poetic first stanza gives way to prose as the spontaneous speech of the scientist subverts the lyrical ruminations of the old poet. There is no sense here of a professionalization of language or poetry, or any sense of a necessity for difficulty in poetic discourse; the point of this poem is expressed clearly, meaningfully, and prosaically by a scientist, who within traditional terms is the opposite of the poet. Thus, an egalitarian view of the poetic language is effected, a view which is much more characteristic—within the Anglo-American models of Statehood Generation poetry—of the work of the antimodernist critics of elitist modernism: W. H. Auden, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, and others (see Lodge 1981: 3–16).

Amichai's redefinition of the poet's status may be motivated by specific reactions to traditional poetic models within the Hebrew literary system as well as to international modernist movements generally. In Chaim Nachman Bialik's premodernist verse, the poet is seen not only as a prophet but also as a mother, giving birth to the tear/poem/prophecy; clearly, Amichai's poetic persona, especially in a poem like “El male' rachamim” works against precisely this type of poetic model. But Amichai's poet equally distrusts the poet qua linguistic magician, a view that continues to predominate in the work of the moderna poets of the first wave of Hebrew modernism. Ironically, the motivations for Amichai to reject the elitism of a Pound, with all its subsequent links to fascism and antisemitism, also cause him to deny the special powers that had been attached to the Hebrew poet within a Jewish nationalist or socialist framework.

Shimon Sandbank (1976:173–214) and other critics, by showing the influence of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auden on Amichai, have pointed out the poetic complications that arise from these combinations of disparate influences and reactions. The specific qualities that can be associated with Rilke and Auden in Amichai's work demonstrate the ways in which selective modeling of modernist and antimodernist prototypes helps form Amichai's particular style of ambivalent modernism: Rilke as the paragon who represents Amichai's orientation toward protomodernist poetics; and Auden representing his tendency toward an antimodernist critique. Instead of creating a homogenized unity from the combined models of his predecessors, Amichai maintains the individual strands of each and uses the differences between them as a source of tension that informs his own discourse strategies. Thus, Amichai's need to maintain a rhetorical impression of accessibility remains consistent with the Auden prototype, while his emphasis on innovation, surprise, and reversal of conventional meaning stays true to the Rilke one. Amichai's use of Auden and his use of Rilke are closely interwoven and not in the least because, as Sandbank (1976) has shown, Auden himself, though critical of Rilke, was also greatly influenced by him.

Amichai's combination of readability and elusiveness, familiarity and surprise, is perhaps best illustrated by his unique use of metaphor. The long autobiographical poema “Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela” is an important but often neglected poem that reflects on many of the issues that Amichai faces as both a modernist and an antimodernist poet. It offers many excellent examples of Amichai's ambivalence through his use of metaphor. Metaphor, in effect, is the overarching principle of the poem's organization: a fragmented, simultaneous journey of the adult protagonist into “everything that I had,” a nonlinear spiritual autobiography which is also “an autobiography of the world.”^[11] This journey to the past of the speaker and of his culture is modeled, metaphorically, on the travels of Benjamin of Tudela,^[12] Amichai self-consciously placing himself at the end of this generic tradition. This parodic point of departure is significant, for in its intertextual cycles the very possibility of presenting a life—or a literal journey—in linear fashion is denied, at the same time that it is attempted again and again.

In the middle of the second strophe, as the speaker attempts for the first time to describe his childhood and capture what it was like to see

the world through the eyes of a toddler, there appears a complex catalogue of similes which forces the adult perspective onto the child's:

From: Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela

But even then I was marked for annihilation like an
                                                                      orange scored
for peeling, like chocolate, like a hand grenade for
                                                  explosion and death
                                                    —Amichai ([1968] 1975:97;
                            translated by Bloch and Mitchell in Amichai, 1986:60)

The fragmented catalogue of similes is prototypical within modernist trends like expressionism and imagism in its focus on the simultaneous, paradigmatic aspects of language rather than on linear, syntagmatic, and logically coherent sequence. Furthermore, a striking semantic and stylistic distance between the frames of reference of the tenor and the first two versions of the vehicle within the catalogue enhances the initial incongruity of the two lines. The selection of the colloquial shokolada and tapuz, rather than their more formal equivalents, shokolad and tapu'ach zahav, for “chocolate” and “orange,” respectively, contrasts with the grand and tragic mesuman li-khlaya (“marked for annihilation”). The switch mid-metaphor to metonymy with the third vehicle (a hand grenade) further complicates the figurative structure of the catalogue; the hand grenade—the instrument of death—is like the victim, implying perhaps that the child is destined not just to be killed but also to kill.

What first appears fragmented and distant—and ultimately modernist in its apparent incongruity and lack of cohesion—actually becomes closely integrated by intricate image schemas that mitigate or bridge the semantic distance between the terms of the metaphor. Various thematic and linguistic clues absorb the vehicles into a quasiliteral frame and thus, subverting modernist tendencies, make the metaphor simple and visually accessible despite its radical novelty.

For example, the visual and associative cohesion within the vari-

Fig. 4.
Amichai's composite image schema (T = Tenor; V = Vehicle).

ous versions of the vehicle—orange, chocolate, and hand grenade—reveals a composite visual collage that links the entire metaphoric process (see Figure 4). The mapping of one image (the chocolate bar divided into little squares) onto another image from the same domestic realm (the orange scored for peeling) produces a visually realistic motivation for the unexpected, deadly member of the catalogue (the hand grenade). The hand grenade is “simply” a “mapping” of the chocolate bar onto the orange scored for peeling, an inviting looking chocolate orange. From a child's point of view, the adult's powerlessness before the inevitability of death is given shocking sensual immediacy. In typical fashion, Amichai enhances the accessibility of this metaphor through the use of junction words, polysemies which apply—in a different sense—to the domain both of the tenor and the vehicle: the verb k-l-h (“finish off”) is used with reference to both chocolate and life. The poetic message seems to be that ordinary language, not the poet's privileged sensibility, brings together the mundane and the philosophical. Even more poignant is the use of rimon yad as a junction term, returning it to the literal meaning (“hand grenade” in Hebrew literally means “pomegranate of the hand”); thus, for one ironic moment the hand grenade becomes yet another food item on the list.

The larger context of these charged lines enhances the realistic motivation for the use of such radical figures of speech. The items in the catalogue are, for the most part, selected from the immediate experiential field of a child but seen from the war- and death-fearing

perspective of the adult. Hence the semantic distance between vehicles in this catalogue of similes is simply a realistic expression of the simultaneity of these two points of view, the child's and the adult's, so common to the genre of autobiography. In the end, the combination of surprise and simplicity, or of the attempt to present the novel and surprising as simple and readable, produces a uniquely cohesive metaphor. Amichai's metaphors follow this same bifurcated pattern of ease and difficulty throughout his poetry: at first, a wild, often playfully violent conflation of heterogeneous semantic material but—after a second look—a combination so natural that we begin to wonder why no one has made it before.

We have seen in Chapters 4 and 5 similar effects created by Amichai's uses of intertextuality to critique both the internal tradition of decorous pastiche and the elitist classicism of Anglo-American modernist allusion. In “Two Hopes Away” Amichai again plays with the combination of simplicity and complexity in one of his most favorite intertextual domains: the biblical allusion. “Two Hopes Away” is part of a quatrain cycle entitled “The Right Angle.” All the quatrains in the cycle are conceived with geometric precision as belonging in the right angle “between a dead man and his mourner” (Amichai, 1962, 1977 ed.: 153; 1986:29). Death, war, and fire imagery become recurring motifs. The quatrain “Two Hopes Away,” the title poem for Amichai's second book of poetry (1958), centers on the survivors and victims of the War of Independence. But in several of the other quatrains in the cycle Amichai extends this frame of reference to include those who survived or perished in the German death camps of the Second World War. Within this thematic setting Amichai introduces an allusion to the epiphany of the burning bush in Exodus 3:

From: Two Hopes Away

Two hopes away from the battle, I had a vision of peace.
My weary head must keep walking, my legs dreaming apace.

The scorched man said, I am the bush that burned and that  was
          consumed:
come hither, leave your shoes on your feet. This is the place.
                                        —Amichai (1962, 1977 ed.: 153; 
                            translated by Bloch and Mitchell in Amichai, 1986:28)

The most striking feature about this traditional allusion is, of course, its antitraditional nature. The antitraditionalism of the allusion is generated by a series of role reversals between the sacred and the secular. The speaker of “Two Hopes Away” is a weary foot soldier, hallucinating about peace a reified “two hopes away” from the battle.^[13] His is a thoroughly antiheroic epiphany, for he is no Moses, and there is no God speaking from the burning bush. Rather, the symbolic bush is replaced by the literally burnt/burning comrade. But while there is no miracle, the very trial by fire makes the burnt man—like Tiresias in Eliot's Fire Sermon in “The Waste Land”—into the true oracle. There is no transcendent, sacred authority present before whom the surviving soldier must remove his shoes, as he feels compelled to do. Instead—and this is the point of the deflation of the miraculous and of the sacred—it is he and his fellow soldiers that are sacred; the power of the epiphany resides in them. In a play on words that highlights precisely this reversed function of the sacred and the profane, the speaker says, “This is the place,” meaning also “this is God,” since makom is one of the common euphemistic names for the deity. The divine promise of rescue from the enemy in the verses of the evoked biblical text that follow the burning bush narrative is deflated by its contrast with the emphasis on human suffering. Moreover, the human and divine roles are completely reversed, with the poetic epiphany deeming the ordinary human victim the only truly sacred authority.

Amichai's celebration of the ordinary and deflation of the sacred becomes the larger ideological framework within which he articulates a critique of modernism. But the anticlassicism of this particular allusion is also an example of Amichai's rejection of the elitist, intentionally difficult, use of allusion in Anglo-American modernism. However, this rejection does not allow Amichai to remove completely the label of modernist. In a move that is also typically modernist, Amichai's almost obsessive use of biblical and liturgical allusion demonstrates that a poet can effect the simultaneous activation of two texts and their implied contexts, thereby overcoming the linear confines of language. Moreover, the poet can produce intricate, innovative, and iconoclastic

deviations from the norms and conventions set by those evoked texts, and yet appear perfectly lucid and completely accessible to the general reader or professional critic. Hovering on the borders of poetic affiliation, embracing modernism yet escaping it, Amichai seeks for the poet a state of syncategorematic existence, a state between ontological and aesthetic categories, a state he calls beyna'yim or “interims”:^[14]

From: Interims

Where will we be when these flowers turn into fruit
in the narrow interims, when flower is no longer flower
and fruit not yet fruit. And what a wonderful interim we made
for each other between body and body. Interim eyes between
waking and sleep.
Interim dusk, neither day, nor night.
                                        —Amichai (1989:35; translation mine)

Chapter 7—
David Fogel and Moyshe Leyb Halpern:
Liminal Moments in Hebrew and Yiddish Literary History

David Fogel and Moyshe Leyb Halpern—what could these two radically different poets possibly have in common?^[1] Even a cursory familiarity with their poetry is sufficient to establish the divergence of their poetic styles: the minimalist, introverted, and deceptively plain Hebrew free verse of Ayefim anachnu, / nelkha-na li-shon (“Weary are we, / let us go to sleep”) (Fogel, [1966] 1975:253) versus the raucous, flagrantly rebellious, rhythmically and figuratively rich Yiddish poetry of Mayn umru fun a volf un fun a ber mayn ru / Di vildkayt shrayt in mir, di langvayl hert zikh tzu (“My restlessness is of a wolf, and of a bear my rest, / Riot shouts in me, and boredom listens”) (Halpern, [1919] 1954:152; translation in Harshav and Harshav, 1986:401). However Fogel and Halpern are perhaps more alike than they initially appear; their respective rhetorical impressions may prove subversively misleading. (While the once symbiotic literary systems of Hebrew and Yiddish did, indeed, continue to maintain complex contacts during the modernist era,^[2] my inquiry focuses on the roles of these two poets within the dynamics of modernism in their respective literary systems. The point of comparison, therefore, is intra- rather than intersystemic.)

Within the model of marginal prototypes outlined in Part 1, Fogel is portrayed both as a retrospective paragon for the third trend of Hebrew modernism, the Statehood Generation neoimagist poets, and also as one of the few acknowledged representatives of a repressed prototype of marginal modernism, the antiformulaic first wave of Hebrew modernism comprised primarily of non-Zionist male and

Zionist female Hebrew poets. Halpern was construed as a proleptic paragon for the introspectivists in New York, the generation of modernist Yiddish poets that followed his own; and, from a synchronic perspective, within his own group, the aestheticist/impressionist poets who made up di yunge (“the young ones”), Halpern was seen as a deviant paragon. He was the “odd man out,” “the mischievous rebel within this movement of self-declared rebels” (Wisse, 1980:36). Both poets offer dramatic illustrations of the importance of limit cases and transitional prototypes for the formation and crystallization of literary trends in general and modernism in particular.

There is, however, a more concrete point to be made about the relationship between the poets' marginal prototypicality and the periodization of modernism in Hebrew and Yiddish poetry. Both Fogel and Halpern published their first books of poetry at the time of the beginnings of modernism within their “indigenous” poetic systems.^[3] Yet this time period is already considered the height of modernism within the mainstream of the central and eastern European literary systems to which each poet maintains strong links.^[4] The “international time lag,” so characteristic of the intercultural dimensions of modernism in general, places Fogel and Halpern, particularly in their early poetry, at a crucial literary-historical conjuncture: on the fuzzy boundaries between pre- or protomodernism and modernism proper, or, more specifically, in a self-conscious oscillation between impressionist and expressionist literary prototypes. Their poetry and poetics elaborate and thematize this oscillation in incompatible, even contradictory, ways. Yet the salience of glissements between premodernism and modernism in their work is itself a decidedly modernist tendency within their specific literary and cultural contexts.

In order to understand the social and cultural background for Fogel's and Halpern's modernist hesitation on the threshold of modernism, some light needs to be shed on the manner in which each poet either resisted the allure of or was excluded from the dominant trends of contemporary literary systems. For Fogel, a famished, uprooted perpetual wanderer through Europe's modernist centers, the very decision to become a Hebrew poet was an act of self-marginalization and self-modernization.^[5] Unlike his near contemporaries, the moderna Hebrew poets, who participated in shifting the center of Hebrew literature from Europe to prestatehood Palestine and were actively involved in the politics and praxis of labor Zionism, Fogel was never truly committed to or actively involved in any branch of Zionism.

Throughout his life he remained ideologically, though not aesthetically, alienated from the linguistic-national Hebrew revival. Robert Alter has argued persuasively in The Invention of Hebrew Prose (1988:72) that Hebrew was to become for Fogel, as for other antiformulaic writers, a road into international modernism, “a calling card that gave them entry to the great polyglot salon of European culture, as if to say: We belong here as equals, and we are proud to display our original address.”^[6] Yet Hebrew, as well as Yiddish, poets would always remain in a remote corner of this great polyglot salon; they would hardly have been able to engage in very much modernist mingling, given that while they could understand the language of the other guests, no one could comprehend theirs. The examples of Fogel and Halpern, the great neglected paupers of Jewish literature, call into question the possibility of transgressing socially and economically determined marginality and achieving equality even within those prototypes of international modernism which purport to privilege exile, periphery, and multilingualism.

Fogel's Hebrew diary,^[7] which spans roughly ten years in the young poet's life (1912–22) and breaks off significantly just before the publication of his first book of poetry, expresses his total alienation from any of the collective settings that cultivated Hebrew letters during that period, be they traditional/religious or modern/Zionist. On the day after Yom Kippur in 1912, feeling like an exile in his hometown of Satanov (having been deported back there from Vilna, where he had been studying Hebrew), Fogel writes: “Yesterday I was in the synagogue but nothing at all from the prayers left an impression on me” (1990:272). A couple of weeks later, having stolen across the border to Lemberg [Lvov], the Galician capital of Hasidic Jewry, he describes his anguish in the form of hatred for the community to whose children he must teach Hebrew in order to survive: “I hate Lemberg and its Jews with their sidecurls down to their shoulders” (1990:275). In Vienna in 1913, on the eve of the Zionist Congress, he expresses an acerbic optimism, couched in language that blatantly precludes identification with Zionism as the possible source of that optimism: the Zionist Congress is a source of joy simply because it provides temporary employment to the starving young poet. Able to work for a living (as a porter or doing odd jobs for the Jewish National Fund), Fogel receives a short-lived break from his usual hunger: “[The Congress] has removed to some extent the philosophy of hunger from me. And I'm hoping to be rid of it [the philosophy of hunger]

at least for this month: Days of the Zionist Congress, days of profit…. Yes, the last period has been so terrible in its famine, I've been so hungry that my hair started falling out…. Just as in the novel by Knut Hamsun. Yes, those were the days” (1990:299). The sarcastic reference that elevates hunger to a philosophy and its “aestheticization” in Hamsun's influential novel Hunger^[8] are very much in the spirit of traditional Yiddish humor. They also suggest a self-conscious critique of the romantic stereotype of the tormented poet-philosopher who needs to suffer and starve in order to attain a higher level of spiritual creativity.

Interestingly, around this time Fogel contemplated emigration to Eretz Israel but in a context that could not be less enthusiastic: “[S]ometimes when my patience dwindles, I would like to run away from here even to the bottom of hell (she'ol tachtiya ) or to the end of the world (le-afsey tevel ): to America, to Argentina, to Brazil, to Eretz Israel, it makes no difference where, just to run away, not to be here” (1990:291). It is not accidental that Fogel lists Eretz Israel here as the last item in a catalogue of escape routes metaphorically located in hell or at the end (literally: zeros, nullity) of the world. Indeed, sixteen years later his attempt to escape poverty and isolation by emigrating to Palestine would fail miserably. Feeling like a refugee in Tel Aviv even more than in any of the European capitals he had wandered through, Fogel would leave Palestine merely one year after his emigration, more isolated and despondent than when he came, never to return.

Yet the same diary also evinces the extraordinary single-mindedness and zeal with which Fogel carried out his plan to mold himself into an unaffiliated modernist Hebrew poet: he starts from his systematic study of Hebrew in Vilna (what he nostalgically refers to as his “Vilnaese metamorphosis,” ha-gilgul ha-vilna'i^[9] ) through his selfstyled apprenticeship in German and western European literature, all the while struggling with hunger, unemployment, homelessness, and the early stages of tuberculosis. As Alter (1988:75) points out, even the geography of his wanderings almost seems part of this literary self-education: “He sojourns briefly in Vilna, then Odessa, Lemburg, and beginning in 1912, in Vienna, as if on an inadvertent pilgrimage of the major way stations of Hebrew literature in Europe.” Yet it would be critically naive to portray Fogel's social and ideological isolation, and his lifelong indigence, as poetic choices, calculated steps in a plan for self-modernization. Ultimately, Fogel's death at the hands of the

Nazis in 1944 underscores how involuntary his “victimhood” was throughout his life.

Similar dangers need to be avoided in characterizing Halpern's inability to find a well-paying job or to cooperate with the Yiddish literary and political establishment of New York—and the horrible destitution this entailed for him and his family—as a willful modernist retreat to the margins.^[10] The sustained ambivalence and sarcastic tone of Halpern's poetry, as well as his journalistic and personal writing, have perpetuated the critics' tendency to equate his poetics of rebellion with a biographical refusal “to settle down.” Furthermore, the blurring of the borders between self-directed criticism and social protest, a central thematic tension in Halpern's work, tends to be interpreted reductively within a critical tradition that is highly biographical: the poet, unable to care for his wife and child, tries to blame his inadequacies on the general social and political condition only to realize in the end that he himself is to blame. This is a gross oversimplification of the social and poetic critique so inexorably intertwined in Halpern's work and expressed with vivid rhetorical ambivalence even in his early personal correspondence.

In a letter dated July 23, 1917, to Royzele Baron, who was later to become his wife, Halpern describes his social and economic hardships through a series of metapoetic images that oscillate typically between ruthless self-irony and biting social protest:

Perhaps it is only the lyrical poet who coquettishly shows off his suffering like a clown toying with the bells on his cap, or like a pauper who jingles the few coins in his pocket so others would believe he has golden riches?

For, after all, there still exists the light of day, not only night. And I'm not yet old enough to say that everything is nothing. But the truth is that the lighter the day, the darker my hope becomes. And not because everything is nothing, but rather because everything is a lot! And if there is something which is nothing—then I am it, I alone who have been wandering around for ten years already, together with ten million other people, like one huge hunk of raw meat, in the lumbering garbage can: New York. (Quoted in Greenberg, 1942:67; translation mine; italics in the original).^[11]

The first simile of poet and clown pitilessly questions the poet's transformation of his suffering into aesthetic material by exposing the poem as manipulative exhibitionism. The deflating image of the bells on his clown's (jester) cap (vi a payats mit di gleklekh fun zayn mitsl )

renounces any pretense to lasting aesthetic value. This theme recurs throughout Halpern's poetry: a fierce self-critique of the poet's social helplessness and inevitable complicity in an oppressive structure by aestheticizing his own suffering and that of the oppressed working classes.^[12] Yet the second simile in the letter, which is presented in typically disjunctive-interrogative syntax as a hypothetical alternative to the first, is already much more ambiguous with respect to the poet's responsibility: oder vi a kabtzn vos klingt mit di etlekhe groshn in keshene kedey mentchen zoln gloybn az er iz raykh in gold? (“or like a pauper [beggar] who jingles the few coins in his pocket so others would believe he has golden riches?”—literally, “that he is rich in gold?”). The first part of the image appears to reiterate the first simile and still depict the poet as a beggar who uses his destitution to increase his appeal. Once we get to the end of the sentence, however, the meaning seems, almost imperceptibly, to have been reversed: the poet now describes himself as a proud pauper who hides his poverty by jingling the few coins in his pocket as if they were a golden treasure. Characteristic also of Halpern's later poetry, these two contradictory readings are made possible by the lexical ambiguity of kabtzn, meaning both “beggar” and “pauper,” and by the “associative concatenation” of syntax, which shifts the situation mid-sentence.^[13] The result is a simultaneous condemnation and exoneration of the poet's marginality.

The second paragraph evokes a similar tension between two opposing views of the poet at the social and economic periphery of his community. The first view is expressed through a sardonic allusion to old Solomon's proclamation: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). The young poet cannot hide behind the nihilism of “everything is nothing”^[14] precisely because, within the social context of the immigrants' struggle to survive in an urban consumer society, “everything is a lot.” At this point Halpern appears to conclude, as expected, that “if there is something which is nothing—then I am it,” internalizing the blame as well as the value system which treats people as commodities and a lack of assets as evidence of personal worthlessness. But within the apposite sentence which expands on this personal nothingness, the relative clause completely reverses the direction of the argument: the poet who starts out saying “I alone [am nothing]” ends up describing his lonely (aleyn, oscillating here between an adjectival and an adverbial use) wandering—and that of millions of others—in the lumbering garbage can (the Yiddish is bru-

tally expressive and quite untranslatable here: umgelumpertn mistkastn ) called New York. The final simile also sustains two different readings, and again this duality is made possible through a combination of syntactic ambiguity and lexical polysemy. In one sense the poet is saying: I have been wandering all alone, like a big lump of live flesh or raw meat (lebedike fleysh ) in this dirty (garbage-can-like) metropolis, and there are millions of others just like me. In another sense he is also saying: together with (as one with) (in eynem ) millions of others who share my destitution and isolation from mainstream society, we form one huge hunk (eyn groys shtik ) of raw meat, discarded by the affluent culture and thrown into the lumbering urban garbage can, New York City. Not only does this final twist place the responsibility for poverty and marginality away from its victims, it also suggests, in the image of the unified human mass of raw/live meat/ flesh, the potential for insurgent power which is latent within it.

Halpern: Deviant Paragon, Proleptic Paragon

In his mature poetry, especially in the genre that Benjamin Harshav (1990:107) has aptly named “political talk-verse,” Halpern achieves a systematic blurring of the borderline between the poetic speaker's critical introspection into his personal marginality and “an existentialist-anarchist slashing at life in general and at American capitalism in particular” (1990:107). This self-styled genre, and the peculiar thematic ambivalence associated with it, is already dominant in his first volume of poetry, In New York. This book established Halpern as the deviant paragon among his contemporaries, di yunge, and as a proleptic paragon for the introspectivists, who reacted against them. As Kathryn Hellerstein points out in the introduction to her volume of translations from Halpern, In New York: A Selection (Halpern, 1982:xiii), “[T]he struggle between the poet's responsibility to self and to community culminates in the final and most ambitious poem of the book, ‘A Night,’ where the protagonist dreams himself into a collective, historical voice, with which he tells simultaneously the stories of the poet and of his people.” An early version of “A Nakht” appeared in 1916, in the yunge anthology Halpern coedited with Menachem Boreysho, East Broadway (1916:20–60). Four years

later a new group of introspectivist poets published their own poetic credo in the journal In Zikh, blasting Halpern—as one of the leaders of di yunge —but at the same time formulating artistic principles for which “A Nakht”—as well as many of Halpern's earlier and later poems—serves as a latent but rather obvious example.

Halpern's poem provides a particularly intriguing reworking of the materials and techniques first introduced in his letter to Baron. The poem takes significant steps to subvert the aestheticist harmonies of di yunge and to offer an overtly expressionist, apocalyptic alternative to their poetry of “quietude.”^[15] “A Nakht” is often taken to be an antiwar epic, in which the pacifist Halpern declares the impending ruin of Europe. Ruth Wisse writes that the poem was “[s]et equally against both sides of the war [World War I],… [and] concentrated on the destruction itself. The result was a fevered work of apocalyptic doom in which all of European civilization disintegrates with the Jews in its midst” (Wisse, 1988:95). Wisse's remark most likely captures the circumstances of the poem's composition; however, as a reading of the poem, it presupposes the very distinctiveness of the personal and the collective that Halpern's work disrupts. Wisse's reading therefore remains an essentially premodernist interpretation of the articulation of the relationship between personal fate and historical condition: the death of the speaker is seen as a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic destruction of an entire civilization. David Roskies offers a different, and more appropriate, description of the poem as “the conflation of two nightmares, one personal the other historical” (1984:95, emphasis added). If the poem's figurative language, syntax, and manipulation of point of view are taken seriously and if the location of “A Nakht” at the end of an architectonically structured book whose title is In New York is systematically explored, then the poem emerges as an “experimental verse narrative” (Hellerstein in Halpern, 1982: xiv) which—much like Eliot's “The Waste Land”—forms a new modernist poetic prototype. As in “The Waste Land” and other radically modernist long poems, the poetic world view of Halpern's “A Nakht” emanates from the structure of the text.

In an important but often neglected article, Seth Wolitz (1977) has argued that in its conception and organization, Halpern's first book, In New York, projects this type of modernist world view. The book's organization brings together three distinct levels of meaning within each poem. Thus, as the book moves from beginning to end, each poem acts within all three separate continua, creating a rather com-

plex systematic structure that multiplies levels of meaning within any particular poem along several different paths throughout the book as a whole. These three levels, while related in that they can be seen within each poem, are actually quite distinct:

1. natural time—one day in the life of a foreigner, from morning to night,

2. the life of the Poète Maudit from childhood to death,

3. the generational epic repetition of the ejection from the Garden of Eden into the exile of Israel. (Wolitz, 1977:62)

These three architectonic levels are articulated through the arrangements of poems in the book. The book is divided into five sections, starting with morning/childhood/the Garden of Eden (in the first section called “In Our Garden”) and ending with night/ death/exilic apocalypse (the last section of the book, comprising the twenty-five part poem, “A Nakht”).^[16]

Contrary to Wolitz's claim, however, this three-tiered organization hardly effects a harmony of symbolist “correspondences,” of the kind di yunge would have appreciated. Instead, the mixed-up simultaneity of all three levels, the mélange of voices and masks, and the fragmented iterability of all points of view create the cumulative, “jagged, episodic narrative” (Hellerstein, in Halpern 1982:xiv). While individual early poems incorporated by Halpern into this new book in 1919 may preserve some of the aestheticist, impressionist, and symbolist norms of the yunge model, the later poems, such as “A Nakht,” and the overarching structure of the book as a sustained composite narrative introduce into Yiddish poetry new expressionist and postsymbolist prototypes.

When “A Nakht” is read as the culmination of the book-length portrait that Wolitz aptly calls a neshome-landshaft (soulscape) of In New York, it can no longer be construed according to premodernist, realist norms as a vision of the destruction of Europe and its Jews (although this theme is certainly an important part of the work). Rather, the poem is both a projection and an interiorization of that vision, an expressionist montage of the war theme on top of other fragments of personal and collective existence. The vision is split spatially between eastern Europe, the speaker's bedroom in New York, and a mythopoetic Middle East; it takes place simultaneously in the present, in an undetermined series of historical-mythical pasts, and in a mock-apocalyptic future. Nonlinear space and time are all

refracted within the speaker, who is both asleep and wide awake, and whose identity is divided between the detached third-person narrator, the elegiac first-person participant in individual and historical destruction, and the discordant mentshele, the humunculus as “brilliant master of ceremonies,” whose nihilistic hokum is “more chilling than the barbarism he describes” (Wisse, 1988:96–97). Halpern transforms typical Yiddish discourse strategies into a highly intricate art form: the dialogic monologue, the question as indirect speech act, the ironic quotation, and the digressive, associative concatenation of syntax (Harshav, 1990:98–116). All of this takes place within a decadently rich prosodic framework, which for di yunge was part of a serious attempt to turn literary Yiddish into a refined instrument of high-brow culture, but which in the context of “A Nakht” has a chilling, morbid effect.^[17] Section XX offers an untranslatable thematization of this contrast between prosodic and semantic structure in the danses macabres of fragmented victims and the disembodied acts and tools of victimizers.^[18]

The early letter to Baron expressed the inseparability of a personal sense of responsibility for the poet/pauper's nothingness and a collective protest against the system that discards its human resources as so much raw meat in the garbage can called New York. Now, in “A Nakht” the kaleidoscopic objectification of the personal and social perspectives is refracted in a series of harrowing narrative elaborations that systematically erase distinctions among all the realms involved in the narrative.

From: A Night, XX

So they stop on a snowy field,
and leave me behind alone.
Along comes on a crutch, head bandaged,
that Little Man again.

It calls me king, it bows low,
asks my every wish and desire.
I tell him:—you see I'm alone,
and can't move anymore.

He winks—and along comes, chased by soldiers,
a naked skeleton from afar.
Lifts its legs, like a woman at night
in a bar among drunken men.

Lifts its legs and dances around me,
dances and sings in a growl:
—Death should go around you like this
with its eternal wheel.—

Trees come closing in from every side,
cradling corpses in their limbs.
The wind turns against the trees,
charges at the corpses with snow.

The corpses line up in a circle
as if standing before a throne:
—may the same evil be done to you,
that has been done to us.

Forever barren may the earth remain,
upon which you have spun your dream.
May there hang every night, without a reason why,
another man from your tree.

And if you should stretch out a longing hand over there—
may your hand be struck numb.
May you choke to death in the middle of your word,
when you mention the name of this land.

And dying you'll go on wandering,
and never be dead and done,
for you drag us along with your royal dream
without end, land in, land out.—

As I hear the dead cursing me so,
I cry and curse myself.
The corpses' last Amen drops on me,
like stone after stone.

Hitched to an empty wagon
a horse comes along, white as snow.
From its mouth the blood hangs frozen,
on its mane gleams the ice.

I stretch my hand out to the little man,
it stares back at me so cold.
I see the wagon sinking in snow,
I see the horse as it falls.

A voice carries through the wind, through the night,
it calls—Ahoy!—and—O ho!—
I look around me, far and wide,
and there is no one there anymore.
                                        —Halpern (1919, 1954 ed.:215-17; translation mine)

As the metapoetic dimension of this section suggests, “[T]he dead cannot forgive the survivor the rhetorical web of deceit that has been spun around them, and they curse their would-be elegist” (Wisse, 1988:96). But it is the gallows humor, the wink of the naked skeleton, the sarcasm of the mentshele that ties the critique of the poet's aestheticization of horror to its brutally unadorned depiction:

From: A Night, XV

Your own brother, poor thing
lost both his hands at war.
Now he doesn't sleep at night
since he can't scratch himself anymore
                                        —Halpern (1919, 1954 ed.:
                            200; translated by Wisse, 1988:96)

The Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, herself an important liminal figure whose career spans several modernist trends, in referring to Halpern's ironic multiple voices and the unique role humor fulfilled for him, described this rhetorical strategy as “laughing on the wrong side of the mouth” (literally: “laughing with lizards,” in the wonderful Yiddish idiom, lakhn mit yashtsherkes ), “a tortured, automatic laughter” in which Halpern “[a]t once ridicules both the world and himself, for he is the world” (quoted by Hellerstein in Halpern, 1982:xiii).

This connection between self-ridicule and “world-ridicule” and the thoroughly expressionist motivation given to it (“for he is the world”) may help explain the significance Halpern's poetic and rhetorical innovations had for his supposed rivals, the younger poets of the introspectivist group, of which Heifetz Tussman was an important member. One of the introspectivists' major principles, formulated in their first manifesto of 1919 (In Zikh, [1919] 1920; translated in Harshav and Harshav, 1986:774) reads: “The world exists and we are part of it.^[19] But for us, the world exists only as it is mirrored in us, as it touches us. The world is a non-existent category, a lie, if it is not related to us. It becomes an actuality only in and through us. This general philosophical principle is the foundation of our trend. We will try to develop it in the language of poetry.” As Yankev Glatshteyn ([1919] 1920), the leading introspectivist poet, was later to acknowledge, this general philosophical principle had already reached significant development in the poetry of their predecessor, the odd man out among di yunge:

Halpern. In other words, from Halpern's implicit poetics, from the poetic principles embedded in and inferred from his actual literary practice, the introspectivists derive an important tenet of their explicit poetics, even before they had published any poetry as a group.^[20]

Halpern's closeness to the introspectivists can also be seen in the social, political, and anti-aestheticist elaboration of this principle in the introspectivists' theoretical and critical writings. Later on in the same introspectivist manifesto the poets declare the inseparability of the personal and the collective, the emotional and the social:

For us, then, the senseless and unproductive question of whether a poet should write on national or social topics or merely on personal ones does not arise. For us, everything is “personal.” Wars and revolutions, Jewish pogroms and the workers' movement, Protestantism and Buddha, the Yiddish school and the Cross, the mayoral elections and a ban on our language;… we write about ourselves because all these exist only insofar as they are in us, insofar as they are perceived introspectively. (Translated in Harshav and Harshav, 1986:779)

As Harshav correctly observes, “This is not an escapist, ivory tower poetry” (1990:178). The introspectivists' ideas echo precisely the kaleidoscopic refraction of levels of history and personal experience in the neshome-landshaft (soulscape) of Halpern's speaker. Yet when the composers of the first introspectivist manifesto single out paragons from among their precursors, Halpern is not one of them. Instead, they mention Halpern as a run-of-the-mill member of di yunge, whose poetry has lost its relevance and vitality.

In rejecting the aestheticist ossification of their immediate predecessors,^[21] the introspectivists turn, in keeping with the formalist model, to the avuncular path, to a contemporary of di yunge who was associated with a faction one critic has called the “sober” poets: “As with the older writers, here too there is an exception—namely, H. Leyvik. Leyvik is only in part one of the Young Generation. From the first, he introduced so much that is individual—and even profound—that there can be no talk of his stopping, of his having already completed his poetic mission [like the rest of di yunge ]. We regard him, too, as being close to us” (in Harshav and Harshav, 1986:783). Only in Glatshteyn's series of essays in the first two numbers of the introspectivist journal In Zikh ([1919] 1920) is Halpern mentioned explicitly alongside Leyvik as an exception to the destructive and deadening influence of di yunge, epitomized by Mani Leyb's aestheticist

poetics of “quietude” (see Wisse, 1988:21–44ff): “Among his [Mani Leyb's] small, helpless imitators, linguistic “Mani Leybism” has spawned a dead language without the slightest breath of the spoken word. Except for two—[Leyvik] with his simplicity and Halpern with his vulgarity, vitality, and mobility—the language of all other Yunge is colorless and lifeless, despite the plaudits so many have heaped on them for having given us a finer linguistic tool.”^[22]

These attempts to find an appropriate paragon within the rejected paradigm point to a perception of heterogeneity within the poetic voices and styles of this earlier paradigm. In part this situation results from the unusually sophisticated theoretical (and not only programmatic) orientation of two of the main introspectivists: Avrom Glantz-Leyeles and Glatshteyn; it is also a function of the anomalous proximity of one “generation” of Yiddish modernist writers to the other and their intimate knowledge of each others' internal struggles and rifts.

Wisse (1988:ch. 3) offers a fascinating description of the tensions within di yunge and the ways Mani Leyb, Halpern, and Leyvik represented different aestheticist/symbolist prototypes. She reveals a three way split within di yunge: the core of the group centered on Mani Leyb and his poetics of quietude; the “sober faction,” eventually led by Leyvik, who criticized Mani Leyb's and David Ignatoff's “slippered smugness, their dustiness, their spitting into the alien cold” (Leyvik, 1919:33); and the “ironic faction” of Halpern and Moyshe Nadir, whose work for the humor magazines and whose German (rather than Russian) influences made them “[s]keptical of both the efficacy of art and the possibilities of a refined literature in an immigrant vernacular” (Wisse, 1988:52–55). In terms of the prototype model, it seems that this struggle was inevitable among the various strands. From the start this heterogeneous group maintained only a tenuous family resemblance among its members: the competing contemporaneous prototypes of (Germanic) poetic impressionism, aestheticism (or art for art's sake), symbolism (of a Russian model), and decadence. By 1918 Halpern, the poet most closely associated with the German rather than the Russian models, was already shifting into a dominantly expressionist prototype which made him a proleptic paragon for the introspectivists. Halpern's newly found salience as an artistically unaffiliated and politically committed poète maudit at the very time—indeed during the same years—that the introspectivists were trying to establish themselves may explain why his status as a paragon was never fully recognized until after his death.

Because of the poetic closeness between Halpern and the introspectivists, it may be possible to conclude that the proximity of the publication of Halpern's first book to the appearance of the innovative in zikh manifestoes was not a mere coincidence. This is not to say that the individual introspectivist poets owe all their inventiveness to Halpern nor that the publication of In New York is directly responsible for the introspectivist credo. Clearly, as the in zikh group itself always declared, these new modernist poets saw themselves as part of the broad range of movements that made up international Euro-American modernism. They themselves constituted a heterogeneous cluster—like their predecessors who acted as “high-modernist” prototypes—each poet working to reverse major strands within di yunge poetics. The generational tension was construed primarily as a struggle between expressionism and the earlier poets' impressionism; as Anglo-American modernisms (imagism, vorticism, and objectivism) reacting against di yunge' s aestheticism; and, to a lesser extent, as futurists rejecting their predecessors' symbolism and decadence. It is, therefore, understandable why Glatshteyn, the introspectivist who was much closer to the expressionist/futurist prototypes than the Eliotesque Glantz-Leyeles, would be among the first to acknowledge Halpern's role.

Halpern's poetry and poetics do not fit well into the framework of di yunge, not simply because of the growing pessimism and complexity of his work, as Wisse suggests (1980:40), nor because he was always the outsider and rebel, as standard critical anthologies describe his marginalization from the group. Rather, Halpern's poetry stands between impressionism (one of the yunge prototypes) and expressionism (one of the introspectivists' prototypes), using expressionism to criticize impressionism. Like Fogel, Halpern straddled the jagged spaces between premodernism and modernism “proper,” a straddling which in its transitional, intercategorical status becomes itself prototypically modernist.^[23]

While this transitional status applies primarily to what philosophers of science have termed “the context of justification,” namely what can be descriptively surmised from the poetic works and programmatic discourse, I think it pertains to “the context of discovery” as well, the circumstances under which these works were produced and received. Halpern's early published work in Shriftn, East Broadway, and especially In New York may indeed have helped the young introspectivists form their poetic principles as well as supplied them

with “ammunition” for their later struggle against the dominance of di yunge. The tremendous impact of In New York is widely acknowledged. As Wolitz points out (1977:56), the book was considered “a major landmark in [Yiddish] literature.” Wolitz goes on to cite A. Tabachnik's statement that In New York “is one of the few epochmaking books in Yiddish literature” and Itzik Manger's exclamation that this is “one of the greatest poetry books of modern poetry in general.” Glatshteyn's own homage to In New York is characteristically expressed in silence, in the way he chose “to structure his inaugural volume of poems” (Novershtern, 1986:138).

When the general labels “impressionism” and “expressionism” are applied to modernist groupings in marginal literatures such as di yunge and the introspectivists, the problematical nature of determining trend affiliation is underscored. As I have suggested, di yunge also aligned themselves with symbolism (especially through the imported Russian paragon of Alexander Blok) (Boaz, 1971:160-74), while the introspectivists explicitly pledge allegiance also to Anglo-American imagism (In Zikh, [1919] 1920:25).^[24] This blurring of affiliations at the international margins of a trend is symptomatic of the center of the category as well. Numerous general critical discussions of impressionism in mainstream literatures associate it with symbolism (Mains, 1978; Paulk, 1979) as well as with decadence and naturalism (Scott, 1976). Similarly, the term expressionism has been used imperialistically, referring at times to all the modernist trends in the first quarter of this century (Furness, 1973). It is possible nevertheless to use these labels, however tentatively, within the particular conjuncture of modernist and premodernist tendencies in Yiddish poetry in North America from the 1910s to the 1930s. Specifically, we need to explore the extent to which the vacillation of the literary system on the threshold of modernism can be illuminated through the perspective of the contrasting prototypes of impressionism and expressionism. Only within this specific conjuncture can Halpern's special role as deviant and proleptic paragon be understood.

Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg ([1969] 1976:39–40) have argued for a clear distinction between the first modern Yiddish group in North America, di yunge, and the first modernist one, the introspectivists:

While Die Yunge validated the idea of the poem as autonomous creation and brought into the narrow precincts of Yiddish poetry some awareness of modern European literature, they cannot be said to have been “modernists” in any strict sense of the term. For self-conscious

experimentation with form and theme, we must turn to a new group of Yiddish poets who began to make their presence felt shortly after the First World War, … the In Zich or introspectivist group.

The question of whether literary impressionism (or any of the other trends associated with di yunge, such as symbolism, aestheticism, and decadence) can be excluded categorically from modernism depends on how precisely the category is delimited. The single criterion offered by Howe and Greenberg, that modernism involves “self-conscious experimentation with form and theme,” remains too vague and latently evaluative to be useful. Undoubtedly, Mani Leyb, Ignatoff, not to mention Leyvik, and most certainly Halpern conceived of their poetic coterie as experimenting with styles and materials that had never before been used in Yiddish poetry. That their poetry was perceived as such in the initial stages of its critical reception can be seen from reviews that refer to di yunge' s poems as formless, sloppy, and ridiculously “beautiful”;^[25] perhaps, most amusingly, this self-evaluation can be surmised from di yunge' s own metapoetic self-parody published in their satirical review, Der Kibitser (April 15, 1908, p. 4; translation by Wisse, 1988:18).

Call us Yunge
Call us Goyim
As you will.
Write reviews, write criticism
To your fill.
No! We'll not perform
Tradition's dance.
Our two-step is the modern
Decadence!
From the void
From airy nothing
From the abyss
Lacking form, without much grace
Or artifice,
Our verse, too proud perhaps,
And happenstance
Will tunefully accompany our
Decadence!

Clearly, when contrasted with the high-modernist, free-verse models of the introspectivists, di yunge poetry seems quite traditional. But, typical of the dynamics of literary movements in general, when

compared with the rhetoric and thematics of their predecessors, the sweatshop poets of the turn of the century, they emerge as modernist experimenters. Furthermore, neither impressionism nor aestheticism, symbolism nor decadence, was wholly and unambivalently embraced by any of these poets, not even by Mani Leyb. Hence, in a way Halpern's stormy and ambivalent affiliation with di yunge makes him a marginal prototype of the group as a whole.

As this kind of marginal prototype, Halpern has a role within the Yiddish literary system similar in significant ways to Fogel's within Hebrew poetry. From their (different) marginal vantage points, Halpern and Fogel launched poetic/critical explorations of the limits of impressionism. In the process, they pushed the impressionist prototype to its outer boundaries, to the place where, turning back on itself, impressionism becomes expressionism. Although interartistic analogies are quite politically and methodologically problematic, especially where examples of “great artists” are concerned, such a “larger-than-life” example leaps out at us from the center of the mainstream artistic canon: the postimpressionist painting style of Paul Cézanne, who took impressionism so seriously he made it reach beyond itself, and in the process became the great deviant paragon whose work is now taken to be one giant prolepsis of all the high-modernist trends that were to follow. That the margins of peripheral literatures may be filled with small Cézannes is one of the most ironic—and ultimately encouraging—quirks of literary dynamics.

Focusing as it does on the competing models of impressionism and expressionism, Maria Kronegger's (1973:14) common characterization of impressionism in its poetic manifestations becomes particularly useful for our purposes:

Impressionism is born from the fundamental insight that our consciousness is sensitive and passive; … consciousness faces this world as pure passivity, a mirror in which the world inscribes or reflects itself. As detached spectator, the individual considers the world without having a standpoint in it. Reality is a synthesis of sense-impressions…. What we actually see is a vibration of light on matter in dissolution.

Literary impressionism, especially in its German models, which are most relevant for both Halpern and Fogel, is often associated with the creation of a mood (the notorious Shtimung of di yunge ). This description refers to a mental state which forms the organizing principle of the text rather than the dynamic act of an interpretative narrator/

speaker. Yoseph Ha-Ephrati (1976:144-75) developed a theory of literary impressionism which shows how these three principles cohere: the passive nature of consciousness, reality as a synthesis of sense impressions, and the mood as organizing principle of the text.^[26] According to Ha-Ephrati, literary impressionism consists of the attempt to create the illusion that the world is rendered as it is perceived by an observer who is part of that world at a certain moment, without any conceptualizing or editorializing mediation between the reader and the fictional observer (who may or may not be the lyrical “I” of the poem). In other words, the impressionist text, in order to create the illusion of immediate sense perception, cannot afford to be perceived as self-conscious, to draw attention to its fictionality, or to create an ironic distance between the observer/perceiver and the implied author or reader. It is on this technical, perceptual basis that di yunge's much criticized flight from political engagement is to be understood, as well as the gallery of passive observers who populate the poetry of Fogel and his antiformulaic generation.

The prototype of an expressionism which also informs the work of these Yiddish and Hebrew poets can be traced back to the programmatic assertion first made in the German expressionist manifesto of Kazimir Edschmidt during a lecture in Berlin in 1917 and adopted two years later by the Yiddish introspectivists in North America.^[27] Edschmidt's statement reads: “The world is there. There is no sense in repeating it.” Instead, reality needs to be created anew within the soulscape of the artist; the artist then becomes the new human who is no longer a character but a real human being, a human being “entangled in the cosmos.”^[28] The in zikh credo contains an analogous passage: “The world exists (iz do ) and we are part of it. But for us the world exists only insofar as it is reflected in us (es shpiglt zikh op in undz ), as it touches (moves) us” (In Zikh, [1919] 1920:5).

We can see from these descriptions that expressionism differs from impressionism precisely in its ambition to give purely “internal” or “subjective” events the effect or status of “objective” or “factual” reality. Of greatest importance for the political and ideological dimensions of the two credos—those dimensions which define the ambivalence of these poets' marginality—is the proliferation of mimetic, even ethical, motivations for the introspective, expressionist practices. Thus, for example, in their manifestoes, the introspectivists, like expressionists elsewhere, continuously insist that their kind of poetry, their kind of rhythms, and their kind of subject matter are more

“realistic,” more “true” and “authentic,” than any premodernist, nonexperimental rendering of external reality. Di yunge' s impressionism has to be replaced because it is “unreal” and “untrue.” The first introspectivist manifesto argues for the truth of the “introspective manner” (in Harshav and Harshav, 1986:774), while declaiming the mendacity of the yunge method:

[T]he poet must really listen to his inner voice, observe his internal panorama—kaleidoscopic, contradictory, unclear or confused as it may be. From these sources, he must create poetry which is the result of both the fusion of the poet's soul with the phenomenon he expresses and the individual image, or cluster of images, that he sees within himself at that moment.

What does take place in the poet's psyche under the impression or impact of any phenomenon?

In the language of our local poets, the “Young Generation” (Di Yunge ), this creates a mood. According to them, it is the poet's task to express or convey this mood. How? In a concentrated and well-rounded form. Concentration and well-roundedness are seen as the necessary conditions, or presuppositions, that allow the poet's mood to attain universal or, in more traditional terms, eternal, value.

But this method, though sufficient to create poetic vignettes or artful arabesques, is essentially neither sufficient nor true. From our point of view, this method is a lie.

Why?

Because the mood and the poem that emerge from this conception and this method must inevitably result in something cut-off, isolated, something which does not really correspond to life and truth. (In Harshav and Harshav, 1986:775)

This attempt to reject a competing poetic paradigm by scientifically refuting its truth claims points to a curiously antimodernist element within this prototypically modernist literary program: both Yiddish introspectivism and German expressionism evince a return to mimetic, representational criteria as a justification for a radically nonrepresentational poetic technique.

Halpern's expressionist critique of impressionism, while evident already in his first book, reaches its fullest development in his later poetry, no doubt because of the influence of the new introspectivist model which he inadvertently may have helped launch. In his later poetry, with its radical disruptions of the traditional strophic and

prosodic structures that were irresistible for him as a younger poet, Halpern's intergenerational role becomes most complex.

The first section of Halpern's “Zunfargang oyf Beymer” (“Sunset on Trees”) offers an interesting ars-poetic thematization of the introspectivist critique of impressionism and its particularly aestheticist di yunge interpretation. Published posthumously in 1934, the poem is divided into two sections, with the same repeating refrain. The second section of the poem (stanza 2 and the refrain) calls into question the whole poetic project—be it impressionist, realist, or modernist—by describing the poet's work as an impossible mystification of “the real thing,” a harmful, aestheticizing mimesis of human emotions. In what seems half oath, half curse, the speaker forbids the poet in him to “stretch out his hands/ to that which people call happiness,” implying that he can only wreck its wholeness. By severing the pain of real people from its concrete social setting and framing it aesthetically within the formal relations of the poetic image, the poet puts their already precarious existence in jeopardy: “sorrow that dances on a golden tightrope—over a river that copies the sky.” The point of departure for this total reassessment of “the crying [that] people call song” is a more localized, almost technical critique—in the first section of the poem—of one of the most conventional scenes of poetic and artistic impressionism: “sunset on trees.”

From: Sunset on Trees

Sky. Sunset on trees,
and wind and dread decked out with grief,
and the little boy in me to the man the gray one
listens to see the hand that leads
the sun, to lie down and die.
And the artist in me looks at his paints
which are golden and blue and red—
and his life weeps like the eternal death
that is beautiful and bright in the evening shine
like a child when his mother rocks it to sleep.

Let my gray head bend down—
let my gray head bend down.
                    —Halpern (1934, vol. 2:130-31; translation mine)

The poem's title and first two lines, with their strictly nominal elliptical syntax and omission of articles, invoke a stock subject for impressionist poems and paintings: a static visual “freezing” of a sunset. The process of sunset in nature is rendered as a “synthesized sense impression” of a moment of “retinal contact” between sky, sunset, and trees, seemingly without the mediation of an interpretive consciousness. The injection of dread and grief into the scene in line 2 could still be considered impressionist, in its impersonal objectification of a Stimmung. But the equivalence of emotional and meteorological entities in the zeugma “and wind and dread … with grief,” especially the near-oxymoronic personification of batsirt (“decked out,” “adorned”) when combined with “grief” or “sadness” (troyer ), begins to call into question the possibility of being a detached spectator of a natural scene. In the third line, the poem turns inward to a self-conscious contemplation of the lyrical “I” and with it to a total rejection of impressionism. Abandoning an impressionist rendition of a sunset, Halpern makes the possibility of such an artistic rendering the topic of his introspection. Through this thematization of poetic technique and artistic affiliation, the mind of the dramatized observer, rather than being a passive, reflective medium, becomes the only measure of reality.

Significantly, at this point the syntax turns radically expressionistic, and the interplay of visual perspective and poetic point of view becomes more and more intricate. Translated literally, the second sentence (lines 3–5 in the Yiddish) reads:

And the little boy in me the man the gray one
listens to see the hand that leads
the sun, (should) lie down to die.

While the deferral of the predicate horkht (“listen to,” “hear”) is slightly more grammatical in Yiddish than it would be in English, the effect of the enjambed lines with no punctuation marks is still remarkably jarring. Read according to lineation, the text creates a series of equivalences between subject and object, the little boy and the gray old man, listening and seeing, cause and effect, sunset and death. Halpern, a talented painter in real life, is not content to editorialize about the contrast between the static, impressionist premodernism of the first two lines and the dynamic, figurative expressionism of the painter's/poet's hand leading the sun. Instead, the perspective is internalized and multiplied, quite literally, by focusing on the little boy inside the speaker (in mir ) listening to the aging adult. The little boy fails to recognize the old man as himself because the older persona is an outer, objectified self. That outer self is perhaps the impressionist-di yunge artist/poet who comes to the sunset with the ready-made symbolic “reading” of death and old age, and imposes it on the natural sunset scene under the illusion of capturing the moment “as it is.” It is not the sense impression synthesized by the passive, nonreflective artist but his very hand “that is leading (leads) / the sun, to lie down to die” because—as in the most traditional versions of the pathetic fallacy—his own head is old and gray and about to “set.” This ironic critique of impressionism as veiled romanticism concerns poetry as much as painting, as the synaesthesia created by the irregular Yiddish word order shows: horkht tsu zen (“listening to see”).

Halpern rejects the premodernist symbolic senses of sunset and the impressionist mood which pretend to be passively recorded by the artist as “retinal” imprints of the natural sunset on his unreflective consciousness. Yet he does so only to arrive at those same senses and mood again through the circuitous route of introspection. An intriguing parallel to the first section of this poem is found in the same introspectivist manifesto quoted above, in the very section that criticizes impressionist renditions of sunsets:

[The premodernist poet] uses too many ready-made images and materials pre-prepared for him ahead of time. When the poet, or even the ordinary person [azoy a mentch ] looks at a sunset, he can see the

strangest things, which appear on the surface perhaps to be completely removed from the sunset. The image which is reflected in his soul is removed by a whole chain of fast-flying associations from that which his eye sees. (In Zikh, [1919] 1920:9; translation in Harshav & Harshav, 1986:776)

Halpern engages precisely this type of fast-flying chain of associations, depicted in rapid centrifugal motion, during the second half of this section of the poem. Here the expressionist mode is laid bare quite explicitly: the “cognitive reference point” (Lakoff, 1987:41, 45, 89) for the scene is no longer the realist sky or the aestheticist painting of the sky, but the expressionist gauge of reality, “the artist in me”; the objects for self-conscious introspective examination cease to be the ready-made clichés (imposing death on the sunset) but are instead the beautiful raw materials of expression: not structured color strokes capturing the golden, red, and blue hues of the natural scene, but blotches of paint on the artist's palette. Halpern no longer uses a literal sunset “standing in” for a metaphorical death but an inextricable combination of traditional poetic oppositions: life and death, childhood and old age, metaphor and literal meaning, external and internal reality. Only once the poem completes this kaleidoscopic view of the artistic subject (as both persona and theme) from all its contradictory inner and outer angles can the (little boy within the) speaker come to terms with his external, adult self and accept with stark simplicity the analogy between his graying head and the setting sun: “Let my gray head bend down—let my gray head bend down.”

Fogel: Retrospective Paragon, Repressed Paragon

In the case of Fogel, even more than Halpern, the critique of impressionism and the ambivalent affiliation with expressionism are crucial to the poet's special role as marginal prototype within the literary system. Yet since only one of Fogel's roles—as retroactive paragon for the Statehood Generation poets—has received any degree of recognition, and only in the context of late modernist

affiliations, the issue of Fogel's struggle between impressionist and expressionist models retreats into the background; there is little discussion or even awareness of the issue in the critical literature. Fogel's poetry was retroactively construed according to the needs of Hebrew poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, at a conjuncture of the new acceptance of imported Anglo-American, neoimagistic poetics and the rejection of the old dominance of futurist-inspired, maximalist poetics of pre-Statehood moderna.

Moreover, the two Statehood Poets who have had the greatest stake in turning Fogel into a retrospective paragon, Dan Pagis and Nathan Zach, were also engaged in a struggle to extricate themselves from the dominant modernist prototypes of their native German and shift to the Anglo-American models, which offered them, politically and aesthetically, greater freedom and more room for innovation. It is therefore not surprising that Pagis, in his erudite critical edition of Fogel's poetry, argues with uncharacteristic zealousness against those critics who “have found in the open-ended structure of Fogel's poetry and in their radical images traces of German expressionism” (Fogel, [1966] 1975:42). Interestingly, Zach, in his influential book-length manifesto-cum-literary-criticism, Zman ve-ritmus etsel Bergson u-va-shira ha-modernit (Time and Rhythm in Bergson and in Modern Poetry ) (1966b), argues with Pagis on this point and clearly outlines Fogel's connections to German expressionism:

Dan Pagis' argument … that Fogel never heard of German Expressionism, and therefore was not influenced by it in his early poetry, an argument based mainly on the fact that “in the poet's diary there is no trace of any impression made upon him by the new trends in poetry, or that he was at all familiar with them,” is not very convincing…. The influence of German poetry on Fogel's poetry is, in my opinion, crucial. This is a general stylistic influence and therefore there is no sense in listing specific lines or images which are common to him and to the German poets, even though this could have been done as well. (1966b:56)

Zach's own tendentiousness is revealed, however, when in the same book, as in other of his essays of the 1960s, he self-consciously dehistoricizes Fogel even though, as the quotation above attests, he is keenly aware of the historicity of Fogel's modernism.

In this discussion, Zach uses a mélange of Fogel's poetry and T. S. Eliot's criticism in order to lend legitimacy to the cause of free verse

in the poetry of Zach's own generation and to reject the rich meters of Nathan Alterman and Avraham Shlonsky's moderna: “A poem by Fogel which is written in such [free] rhythm, proves how right is T. S. Eliot when he asserts that ‘there is no freedom in art,’ and that the artist who expresses himself through the rhythms of free verse must be no less, even at times more sensitive than those who employ the ‘mechanism of repetition,’ or at least of the more mechanical ones among them” (1966b:50).

But when Zach reads a Fogel poem, the poem functions only as an exemplary text for the poetics of Zach's own generation rather than as an ambivalently expressionist poem maintaining a dialogical relation with other German and Hebrew modernist models of its time, such as impressionism, decadence, and symbolism. The poem Zach reads, “Le'at olim susay” (“Slowly My Horses Climb”), is the first poem in Fogel's first book (and the only collection of poems published during his lifetime, Lifney ha-sha'ar ha-afel [Before the Dark Gate ], 1923):

[Slowly My Horses Climb]

Slowly my horses climb
up the mountain slope,
night already dwells black
in us and in all.

Heavy my wagon will squeak at times
as if laden with thousands of dead.
A silent song I'll send
upon the waves of night
that will pass into the distance.
My horses listen and climb slowly.
          —Fogel ([1923] 1966, 1975 ed.:73;
                                          translation mine)

Zach, who treats the reader to a stunning analysis of the prosodic, syntactic, and musical aspects of rhythm in this poem, prefaces his analysis with a six-point “summary” of the general characteristics of Fogel's style evident in this poem. Predictably, these six points echo several included in his own fifteen points (1966a), the manifesto of his own Statehood Generations's poetry published in the same year as his book:

1. laconic, selective diction,

2. open-ended structure, composed of image-stanzas whose narrative links are fairly loose,

3. the poet's avoidance of innovative or overstylized figurative language (his metaphors are more natural and evocative than those of Shlonsky and Alterman thanks to their more concretized sensual import, the natural appearance of his landscapes, the astute distribution of the figures over the entire poem and the avoidance of cerebral or excessively wordy-artificial constructions),

4. traditional diction which stays away from neologisms, linguistic acrobatics, and purely phonetic decorativeness,

5. renunciation of originality as a value unto itself,…

6. despite what appears here as simplicity and naturalness of language (and indeed such “naturalness” does exist here too!), the careful eye detects in Fogel's poetry a remarkable inventiveness and maneuverability. (Zach 1966:52b)

These points—all astute observations and evaluations of Fogel's poetics—exclude most of the stylistic and thematic features that are salient within the particular historical prototypes of the first trend of Hebrew modernism. But these are precisely the characteristics that make Fogel a representative of a repressed trend of Hebrew poetic modernism, a trend whose recovery has only just begun. Ironically, then, the Statehood Poets who “have kept discovering” Fogel since the late 1960s, in a selective modeling of his poetics aimed to serve their own historical needs, have also helped suppress some of the

most radical aspects of Fogel's type of modernism. Furthermore, by turning him into an individual paragon, the Statehood Generation poets ignore the fact that a rather large number of individuals, many of them women, developed similar antiformulaic versions of modernism at roughly the same time as Fogel, even though they never formed a self-conscious coterie.

What Halpern's “A Nakht” achieves within the expanded structures of an experimental narrative poem—of an entire book of poetry, in fact—Fogel accomplishes in the confines of what Greenberg has aptly called a kamer-lid, a chamber-music poem.^[29] “Slowly My Horses Climb” establishes, with lexical and rhythmic economy, the concrete situation: horses slowly climbing up the mountain slope as night descends, as if the mimetic rhythm of the horses' slow trot also punctuates the imperceptible stages of the process of nightfall. This is the sparse functionalism that Zach finds so remarkable. However, what happens next is typical of almost all of Fogel's poems that start out with the impressionist impetus of capturing the nuances of an external scene or act at the instant of its becoming, without any projection of the observer's consciousness. The poem subverts the concreteness of the situation—indeed, the very ability to discern concrete and abstract, literal and figurative—at the moment that the situation is established; this subversion occurs in Halpern's sunset and night poems as well. The color black, an apparently redundant, unadorned epithet of night, actually becomes a radical, ungrammatical, but functional adverb, a move Zach describes as the “salvation of the color black by turning it from adjective to adverb” (1966b:52). Zach argues that this shift creates a syntactic analogy among the first three stanzas (1966b:52). But this shift is not just syntactic; the grammatical transformation of black into an adverb is the first step in the movement of the night inward, into the undefined, systematically blurred plural consciousness of speaker, horses, and “all,” : layla kvar shokhen shachor/banu u-vakol (“night already dwells black / in us and in all”). This one simple step, defining the locus of the night's “black dwelling” inside the poetic “us” as well as the surrounding “all,” transforms the passive and flat impressionist Stimmung into an expressionist “entanglement in the cosmos,”^[30] where it is no longer possible to tell where subject ends and object begins. Michael Gluzman (1993a:138) has astutely observed:

As a “substance” that dwells within the speaker, the night is not only an external temporal marker but also an inner quality. Moreover, the

opposition between foreground and background is also destabilized as a result of the complex relationship between subject and object, since it is unclear whether the night foregrounds the speaker or whether the speaker foregrounds the night.

Just as the structure of Halpern's long poem revealed night as an internal property, a mental state of being “in New York,” Fogel's poem transforms within its texture—through the enjambed last line of the first stanza—the descriptive element into an expressive one.

Typically, the framing stanzas (one and four) employ a present tense, beynoni (which in Hebrew can mark a present progressive or habitual action or state as well as an adjectival form): olim, shokhen, ma'azinim, ve-olim (“climb/ing,” “dwell/ing,” “listen/ing,” “and climbing”). The adverbial use of kvar (“already”), therefore, enhances the sense of a change, a perfected, albeit stative action. Moreover, the chiastic structure of the beginning and end of the poem—le'at olim and olim le'at (“slowly climbing” and “climbing slowly”)—emphasizes the difference within the sameness in the poem's concrete situation. After the expropriation of the night from the domain of external reality, the act of listening (ma'azinim ) to the imperceptible objectified song (poem?) is added to the scene. The reader is reduced to the aural perspective of the horses, who, pulling the wagon along uphill, are deprived of seeing their load. Thus, the simile “as if laden with thousands of dead”—its hyperbole seemingly so out of line with Fogel's poetics of understatement—can be construed as a literal hypothesis (though surreal) rather than a figurative comparison. Neither the horses nor the reader may ever know what is really in the wagon since the poem seriously questions the very possibility of knowing what is actually there in any described moment of reality.

This “epistemological ambivalence” (Gluzman, 1993a) is maintained through one of Fogel's major linguistic achievements (described in detail in Chapter 4): the development of late biblical fluctuations between grammatical tense and aspect into a refined stylistic merging of impressionism and expressionism. Fogel's verbs produce a consistent hesitation between the factual and the hypothetical, “realis” and “irrealis,” action and stasis. Remarkably, these innovations, important within both the intrinsic and the international literary/ linguistic systems, are hardly ever mentioned in discussions of Fogel by poets and critics of the Statehood Generation. The reason is quite clear: both the internal function of perfecting the defective polysystem of literary Hebrew and the general poetic function of providing a

glissement between two crucial periodological and typological models are important only when the system is conceived in its historicity. By the time Zach, Pagis, and their colleagues arrive on the scene, the problems addressed by Fogel's poetics have been solved or displaced by others. Yet only by acknowledging this linguistic achievement can we understand the specific ways in which Fogel and the other antiformulaic poets allowed Hebrew poetry a way out of the nusach and into modernism.

In the second and third stanzas of “Slowly My Horses Climb” the verbs appear in the ambiguous future/imperfect form which allows them to be construed either as an uncompleted action (captured impressionistically in the process of its becoming) or, quite the reverse, as an “irrealis,” fantastic, or surreal situation. The image of thousands of dead becomes an expressionist projection of the speaker(s)'—or listener(s)'—state of mind. Ironically, the one “realis” grammatical tense in this stanza appears only in the surrealist image of the thousands of dead on one wagon, as if the emotional reality of the wagon's macabre load—and its analogue, the introverted version of the night—were the only sure thing left in the scene. It is precisely this kind of a reversal of mimetic norms of representation and romantic norms of poetic self-expression that Halpern's critique of impressionism also achieves.

The third stanza thematizes the very impossibility of separating the (ir)reality of the scene from the poet's expression. It is typical, as Eric Zakim has argued convincingly (1996),^[31] that a metapoetic musical resolution supplants the visual concreteness of the discrete images: “A silent song I'll send / upon the waves of night / that will pass into the distance.” Since we already know that the night is “in us and in all,” the song that the speaker sends out into the distance is simultaneously also introjected, sent inside himself and his listeners. That this song is silent both disrupts its reality claims and matters not at all since the entire process of perception has been turned inward. Thus, it says little about Fogel to assert, as the few critics who have bothered to read his poems closely are prone to do, that most of Fogel's early poetry “is a poetry of night and darkness, or a poetry of evening and sunset: the night ‘dwelling dark’ is analogous to the wagon of dead bodies, … to the very stance ‘Before the Dark Gate.’—This is the central motif of this poetry, and its various images are meant only to create one multi-faceted poetic situation: standing face to face with death.” (Luz, 1964:189-90, 214). The expressionist critique of impressionism is meant, among other things, to make just such a static motif

hunt completely meaningless because no night, evening, or sunset in Fogel—as in Halpern—can have any stable, general meaning outside of the particular disruptions which constitute it uniquely in each text.

This point is made even more emphatically in Fogel's seminal poem “Be-leylot ha-stav” (“On Autumn Nights”), a salient example of the transition from impressionism to expressionism in the first modernist Hebrew trend of antiformulaic poetry.^[32]

[On Autumn Nights]

On autumn nights
there falls in the forests an unseen leaf
and lies still to the ground.

In the streams
the fish will jump from the water
and an echo of a moist thump
will answer in the darkness.

In the black distance
gallops are sown of unseen horses
that are melting away.

All these
the tired wanderer will hear
and a quiver will pass through his flesh.
—Fogel ([1923] 1966, 1975 ed.:113; translated by
                            Chana Kronfeld and Eric Zakim)

On first reading, the poem seems to be a paradigmatic example of impressionistic static observation. Three discrete images each occupy a stanza (leaf, fish, horses) and present the verbal equivalent of a series of “retinal imprints,” each of which freezes one fleeting and nuanced moment in nature. The final stanza observes, in detached and precise fashion, the physical effect made by these “synthesized sense data” on the human observer.

However, when readers pay careful attention to the linguistic texture of each stanza, as the impressionist technique demands, and when they take seriously the implicit invitation—which this poetic prototype carries with it—to focus on the most fleeting and delicate of movements, they realize that the text, in typical expressionistic fashion, presents the most subjective, imperceptible internal qualities as if they were objective sense data. In fact, none of the finely detailed scenes can be concretized by any of the perceptual means privileged by an impressionist mode of writing or painting.

In the first stanza, the leaf is not only unseen but also invisible (lo nir'eh ) and cannot in principle be visually perceived; this single, invisible leaf falls on many fall nights (simultaneity of time) and in many forests (simultaneity of place). The omnipresent, invisible leaf then lies down to the ground dumam —not only without sound but also without motion. The possibility that any observer might actually have sense impressions of an objective, external scene is negated at the same time that it seems to be asserted and with respect to every one of the senses and reality principles involved: sight, sound, motion, time, and place.

The possibility of impressionist concretization is further problematized in the second and third stanzas. As Zakim has shrewdly suggested (1995), each image forms only a sense trace around which the scene “fills out.” Thus, the first half of the second stanza is impossible to perceive since it depicts a single, specific fish jumping out of the water in many different streams. The second half of the stanza, which can be perceived in terms of singular identity, is only a synaesthetic echo (hed … ba-ofel, “an echo … in the darkness”) of another synaesthetic trace of an action (nekisha lacha, “a moist thump”). As the

images recede into the horizon (from the illusion of a close-up view of a leaf to the explicit remoteness of “In the black distance”), their “impossibility,” by any premodernist standards, becomes pronounced on all levels of the text: the predicate nizra'ot (“are sown”) stands in ironic, almost grotesque, contrast to the haunting insubstantiality of its subject (daharot, “gallops”), and its self-erasing, syntactically and semantically misleading modifiers. The metaphorical “seeds” are the auditory traces of horses which, like the leaf of the first stanza, are both unseen and invisible (lo nirim ); and these invisible horses, not the sound of their hoofs, are melting away, or—as Zakim has cogently observed—surrealistically, literally, melting and walking (ha-nemasim ve-holkhim ).^[33]

The sustained negation of all realist and impressionist concretizations of the three scenes places their referents in the soulscape of the weary traveler of the last stanza: his weariness, his experiences on the road—of which we can see and hear nothing—and, ultimately, his very mode of existence as a helekh (literally, “a walker”) mark him as the poem's shifting, transitional center of consciousness. These are the conditions that not only affect our perception of the scenes but actually give them their identity.

When the Israeli poets of the fifties and sixties rediscovered Fogel in their own poetic image, they were only doing what poets—and critics—always do when they struggle for hegemony over a dominant literary regime: they made him their own. In a similar if less selfconscious way the introspectivists tacitly adopted Halpern's implied poetics as a model in their own battle with di yunge. Both Halpern and Fogel pointed to a future even as they wrestled with the burdens of the poetic past within their respective literary traditions. From their displaced or decentered vantage they could begin to create a modernist poetic expression that in its richness—both as individual voice and as paragon for later generations—played cruelly on the irony of each poet's personal and physical destitution.

Remapping modernism in Yiddish poetry to include marginal prototypes and deviant paragons like Halpern is important for a critical examination of the paths taken in the literary history—fast becoming the archaeology—of Yiddish culture. But within Hebrew poetry, a more rigorous understanding of the role played by marginal prototypes like David Fogel is vital for the future of the literary system, not just for excavating its past.

Chapter 8—
The Yiddish Poem Itself:
Readings in Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutzkever

In earlier chapters I have looked at ways in which the production and reception of modernist Hebrew poetic trends, or of the total oeuvre of individual Hebrew poets, exemplify and challenge the model of marginal prototypes I have developed here. Chapter 7 goes on to open Yiddish poetry to this examination by developing a comparative perspective. It unfolds the partially parallel narratives of marginalization and liminal modernism in the work of the Yiddish poet Moyshe Leyb Halpern and the Hebrew poet David Fogel. In this chapter my focus will be on the individual poem rather than the total oeuvre of a poet as a locus of decentered exemplariness. The question to be addressed, in the process of subjecting these texts to close reading, is one of thematization and implicit poetics. To what extent do these poems, construed in the historical context of their multiple/partial trend affiliations, reveal a concern with their own marginality and modernism? And if they do, how do the different articulations and contextualizations within each text affect the theoretical model presented here?

The poems I have chosen, including another by Halpern, demonstrate some of the tense polyphony characteristic of all formations of modernism in Yiddish poetry. Modernist Yiddish poetry, perhaps even more than the Hebrew poetry of this movement, provides salient examples of marginal prototypicality for a number of reasons. First and foremost, perhaps, is the status of Yiddish as a literary system poised on the edge of complete annihilation. This perspective from

the precipice, while it makes the process of reading these wonderfully rich poems exceedingly painful, might also allow access to cultural, linguistic, and aesthetic processes that would normally be imperceptible. But the challenge is to read “the Yiddish poem itself” closely and rigorously even when the poets themselves died of hunger and neglect (Halpern), were murdered by Stalin (Markish and Hofshteyn), or survived the Nazi genocide (Sutzkever). We must repair not only the ravages of historical erasure but also the damages of a sentimentalizing, nostalgic Yiddishkayt. And let the poetry be heard. Second is the condition of being a language without a land. The development of modern Yiddish literature involves the construction of a collective identity that cannot be reduced to the Eurocentric model of the nation-state. In this, Yiddish modernism discloses a heightened, literalized articulation of marginal modernism as deterritorialized literature at the same time that it calls into question standard literary models of nationalism, colonialism, and cultural identity. Third, while the historiography of its many sociocodes (groups, journals, shifting centers) remains to be written, Yiddish modernist poetry exhibits in intensified fashion the modernist obsession with forging an aesthetic through constructing a literary group identity. To what extent then do these individual poems, written in some cases by the same poets who participated in the collective composition of the group's manifestoes, reveal an implicit poetics, and if they do, how is the dialogic tension between the explicit and implicit poetics to be accounted for within a family-resemblace or prototype model of literary trend? But it is best perhaps to allow the poems to speak.

Some notes on the texts. The readings in this chapter include five poems by four major Yiddish modernists: Halpern, Perets Markish, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Avrom Sutzkever, who represent three of the shifting centers of modern Yiddish literature: New York, the Soviet Union, and Israel. The English translations provided try to remain as close to the original as possible to give a literal sense of lexical and syntactic composition. The translations should enable the reader of English to follow the stylistic analyses of the Yiddish texts. In addition, a transliteration of the Yiddish is provided for each poem to help non-Yiddish speakers follow the discussions of sound patterns and to illustrate the special emphasis modernist Yiddish poetry attaches to prosodic virtuosity.

Moyshe Leyb Halpern (1886–1932)

Mayn Shrayedikayt

Mayn shrayedikayt iz ayngeshlofn iber mayne hent
vi a kranker in mitn gas in a vinternakht oyf a shteyn,
dos likht fun der levone oyf azoynem iz gel vi oyf a toytn,
un bloyz der vint vos flit in der fintster fun shild tsu shild—
iber di alte kleyder-gesheftn—zet im—

un di velt iz dokh azoy ummeglekh-raykh in fentster,
vos loykhtn aroys in der nakht—antkegn relsn
ba di bregn fun yam
fun breg arunter,
fun palatsn mit gortn un tsoym arum zikh—
un dort iz varem layb unter zayd—
un geler un broyner kukhn tsvishn finger un tseyn vi perl kleyne,
beys di oyern hern libe-reyd fun man oder froy,
un faran vayn-flesher mit azoyne lange shmole heldzer sheyne
un mit zilber fun oybn un mit gold
un blumen far azoy-fil iberik gelt
oyf hertser—vos zenen efsher zeyer gut—vayl zey hobn lib.
Nor vi fremd un vi opgesheydt zey zenen fun dem in mitn gas.
Loyt zeyer freylekhkayt iz er in gantsn nishto,
oysgetrakht bloyz. Oysgetroymt fun a shrekndikn in der fintster
in a nayer dire ergets
eyner aleyn
di ershte nakht
shloft er nit—hert er dem vint—meynt er, ver veyst vos
es tut zikh dort ergets in droysn.

My Screamingness

My screamingness fell asleep in my arms
like a sick man in the middle of the street on a winter night on a
          stone,
the light of the moon on someone like that is yellow as on a dead
          man,
and only the wind which is flying in the dark from signboard to
          signboard—
over the old garment stores—sees him—
and the world is after all so impossibly rich in windows,
that shine out in the night—facing rails
by the shores of the sea
from the shore down,
from palaces with garden and fence all around them—
and there flesh is warm under silk—
and yellow and brown cake between fingers and teeth like little
          pearls,
while the ears hear love-talk from man or woman,
and there are wine bottles with such long slender beautiful necks
and with silver on top and with gold
and flowers for so much superfluous money
upon hearts—which are perhaps very good—for they love.
Yet how alien and how cut off they are from that someone in the
          middle of the street

judging by their cheerfulness he is not there at all,
just imagined. Dreamt up by a fearful (man) in the dark
in a new apartment somewhere
all alone
the first night
he does not sleep—so he hears the wind—so he thinks, who knows
          what
is going on somewhere out there.
                                                  —Halpern (1934, vol. 2:166-67; translation mine)

“My Screamingness” was published posthumously in 1934 in the second of a two-volume edition of poems from Halpern's later period (1924–32). Although this volume includes mostly unpublished manuscripts, “My Screamingness” survives as one of Halpern's major poems and one which apparently occupied the poet for some time. A significantly different, longer, and altogether more transparent version of this poem appears in the first volume of the same edition and is dated 1927.^[1] The present version, with its carefully structured free verse, its systematic avoidance of traditional rhyme (the type of rhyme which always was a great temptation for Halpern), and especially with its virtuoso manipulation of tensions between rhythm and syntax, bespeaks a new, perhaps never fully developed phase in the tightly wrought modernist poetics Moyshe Leyb concealed under his rogue's mask.

The “screamingness” of the title and first line is an untranslatable neologism in Yiddish (shrayedikayt), a noun formed from the gerund. It expresses a unique combination of the angry pain of “outcry” (geshray or the verb shrayen) and the ruthless, garish vulgarity of “loudness” (shrayedik is a dead metaphor similar in sense to “garish” or “loud” as in “a loud tie”). This combination of pained outcry and flaunted loudness summarizes better than many longer descriptions the “Moyshe Leybism” of the multifaceted persona that we meet in so many of Halpern's poems. The screamingness of the poetic “I” is given two contrasting personifications. First, it is implicitly described as a baby crying itself to sleep in a parent's arms (line 1). Then it is seen as a sick derelict asleep on a stone during a cold winter night (line 2), harshly reversing the soothing, warm implications of the first line. Interestingly, this reversal is effected through an extended simile, a figure of speech which according to traditional views serves to point out similarities rather than create contrast. By implication, the cold stone in this simile becomes the ironic equivalent of the parental/

poetic cradling arms. Furthermore, sleep itself is no longer the calming, peaceful rest of one whose needs have been satisfied; it is a state of deathlike petrification. In line 3 the metaphor of sleep as death is developed further by utilizing the flexibility of gender in Yiddish:likht usually means “light” when feminine, and “candle” when it is—as here—in the neuter, although the two may be used interchangeably. Thus, invoking the traditional Jewish custom of lighting a candle by the deathbed, the line can also read: “even the (beautiful, romantic) moonlight looks like deathbed candlelight when it touches someone like that sick man.”

The sick derelict becomes, as the poem unfolds, an expressionist juncture of orientations: for the speaker he serves as an objectified version of his screaming artistic self, while at the same time presenting society's attitudes toward the artist and toward the poor and the homeless. A link between the personal and the social themes of the poem, the “screamingness”-cum-sick-man, provides both a metaphor for the inner turmoil of the lyrical “I” and a metonymy for the distress of poverty during the depression. This link is made explicit in the 1927 version of the poem mentioned above, in which Halpern's own shocking economic hardship is directly identified with the sick derelict's state: the screaming self is openly described as a hungry artist (a kinstler a hugeriker ) (Halpern, 1934, vol. 1:215). The scene of the sick man, introduced initially only as a simile (line 2), takes over completely as if it were part of the literal frame and has an elaborate, concrete, and seemingly nonfigurative situation spun around it. With this development, the first-person point of view as well as the objectified screaming “I” totally disappear: the scream falls silent when it falls asleep.

Two dynamic elements, the wind and the light, develop the situation by moving the scene from the static image of the sick man asleep in the street to other more affluent parts of the city. There is an interesting division of labor between the two elements: the wind appears in the context of the poorer parts of the city (lines 4–5) and is associated with the absence of light (it is “flying in the … /Over the old garment stores”), and the light is associated with the richer sections (line 6, lines 10–17) and is the one to show the way out, to shine on the escape route. Thus, loykhtn aroys in line 7 means both literally “shine out” and idiomatically “show (shed light on) the way out”; fentster, “window(s)” (line 6), is contrasted with fintster, “darkness” (line 4), and is a traditional metaphor in Jewish literature for light, liberation, and hope.^[2] Here, however, windows are explicitly

and ironically associated with being rich (line 6). Irony is maintained through ambiguity: “the world is… impossibly rich in windows” can mean either that there are an infinite number of windows (ways out, sources of hope) for the screaming, impoverished artistic self; or it can have the contrary meaning, that it is only in(side) windows (of palaces such as are described in lines 10–17) that the world's impossible, unattainable riches lie—for the rich to own and enjoy.

The transition, with the wind, from the inner city (lines 4–5) to the glittering suburbs along the coast (lines 8–10) appears to inject an optimistic chance for change, literally to outline an escape route from homelessness and illness; yet the ambiguous diction and syntax undercut the very possibility of such a solution. All the terms used to depict the escape route—the windows shining on the way out, the railway tracks, the coastline—also describe a series of barriers which cut off the destitute artistic self from the better world. The windows have impossible (ummeglekh ) riches locked up inside them; the word for “railway tracks,” relsn (line 7), also means “railings,” and even “the shoreline,” breg, means, in addition, “edge” or “border.” Furthermore, this shoreline is high up, above the observer's reach since the light is shining out from the hilly shore down (line 9). The 1927 version of the poem may explain this enigmatic passage. Between 1927 and 1929 a very sick and hungry Halpern stayed in Los Angeles. And, indeed, the physical and social landscape of a hilly coastline dotted with the rich estates of partying “beautiful people” seems to fit the Los Angeles that Halpern observed but was never part of, in the late twenties, just before the Great Depression.^[3]

While the list of ways out is only implicitly revealed to be a catalogue of barriers, the final item (and the subject of the next ten lines) quite explicitly shuts the outsider out. Line 10 uses the word tsoym, which in addition to the meaning “fence” is the generic term for any type of barrier. It provides a summary of the preceding catalogue and indicates, in its blatant juxtaposition with gortn (“garden”), a switch in tone from implied irony to unveiled sarcasm. The sarcastic depiction of the “beautiful people” in their fenced-off high palaces (lines 10–20) is especially rich in expressive uses of syntax, rhythm, and rhyme.

The sense of constant movement and the ironic undercutting of the illusion of progress which accompanies it are served by the syntax of the first section of the poem. The descriptive section which covers the bulk of the text (lines 3–17) is all one long sentence, interrupted by sets of dashes which follow intonational rather than grammatical patterns.

Numerous enjambments and fluctuations in line length contribute further to the dynamic innovative structure. Rhyme is almost completely absent in its traditional location at the end of lines, while line beginnings, instead of having the conventional “content” words (nouns, verbs) are almost exclusively occupied by grammatical formatives—conjunctions and prepositions. As a result, a flowing speech rhythm is achieved, of the kind that was rare in the poetry of di yunge aestheticists of Halpern's generation. This flowing rhythm is also flexible enough to accommodate the many syntactic ambiguities and to allow the speaker to weave his ironic or sarcastic commentary into the description.

This flexibility is especially evident in lines 11–19, where the text alternates between a detailed description of the scene's aesthetic and sensual beauty, and a sarcastic editorial deflation of whatever romantic connotations that a rich and beautiful type of existence might evoke. On the one hand,“teeth like little pearls” (line 12) and “wine bottles with such long slender beautiful necks” (line 14) are metonymic descriptions of the beautiful people in terms of their beautiful objects (pearls), and of the beautiful objects in terms of the people (the women's long and slender necks). On the other hand, the very use of metonymy as the central device for depicting this precious beauty has a deflating effect. It creates an interchangeability between the people and the objects. The fragmentary, modernist impetus of the metonymic description is enhanced by the use of synecdoche—a metonymy based on part-whole relationships—in lines 12–13; people are represented only by lists of their body parts: fingers, teeth, ears. The ears are being talked to about love while the fingers and mouth are busy consuming “yellow and brown cake.” The critical tone becomes increasingly evident in the closing description (lines 16–19). The interplay of the two meanings of hertser in Yiddish (“hearts” and “chests”), together with the enjambment of lines 16–17, create a sarcastic double entendre: an image of people wearing rich flowers on their chests, as tokens of their devotion to beauty and love, but who really have money on their mind. Similarly, when their ability to love is asserted (line 17), the transitive verb lib hobn, “to love,” receives no object. Instead we have—for the first time in the entire poem!—a period, typographically indicating just how narcissistic their love is and how “cut off they are from that someone in the middle of the street” (line 18). Expressionist syntax is in this manner rendered strictly, rigorously functional; experimental modernism is made to provide an urgent and most precise form of social critique.

Now that the image of the sick man in the street has returned, we expect the poem to complete the circle by going back to the first person point of view of the beginning. The young Halpern may have chosen to do just that. The Halpern of “My Screamingness” prefers simplicity to symmetry, using the closure of the poem to provide a realistic motivation for the title and initial image. The word “imagined,” oysgetrakht, in its bivalent location at the end of a sentence and the beginning of a line, offers the semantic transition to the final section of the poem. For the palace people, the sick derelict is not a metonymy for poverty, nor is he a metaphor for a screaming artistic self; he simply does not exist (line 19). In their cheerful disregard, any type of existence which is uncomfortably different from their own is characterized as imaginary. But oysgetrakht (literally, “thought up”) self-consciously refers also to the poet's imagination, which is responsible for this fiction, this metaphor of artistic outcry as a sick derelict.

Although the final section is presented in the third person, it is clearly a metapoetic objectified version of the lyrical “I” of the beginning. However, unlike the earlier objectification, this one is blatantly literal and personal. The colloquial diction and speech rhythm of the last five lines supply a balancing counterpart to the highly figurative, structurally intricate first section. Thus, the conclusion of the poem simply tells us how the image of the sick man and, by implication, of the poet's screamingness came into being. The loneliness of the poet in an apartment that is not yet home (line 21), the night, his sleeplessness, the sound of the wind—all combine in the waking dream where the screaming self is created in the poet's image.

Perets Markish (1895–1952).

[Veys Ikh Nit Tsi Kh'bin in D'reym]

Veys ikh nit tsi kh'bin in d'reym,^[4]  
tsi in der fremd—
ikh loyf!…
Tseshpiliyet iz mayn hemd,
nito z'af mir keyn tsoym,
kh'bin keynems nit, kh'bin hefker,
on an onheyb, on a sof…

Mayn guf iz shoym,
un s'shmekt fun im mit vint;
mayn nomen iz: “atsind”…
Tsevarf ikh mayne hent,
derlangen zey di velt fun eyn ek bizn tsveytn,
di oygn kh'loz gevendt,
fartrinken zey di velt fun untn biz aroyf!

Mit oygn ofene, mit a tseshpiliyet hemd,
mit hent tseshpreyte—
veys ikh nit, tsi kh'hob a heym,
tsi kh'hob a fremd,
tsi kh'bin an onheyb, tsi a sof.

[Don't Know if I'm at Home]

Don't know if I'm at home,
Or if I'm afar—
I'm running!…
My shirt's unbuttoned,
There are no reins on me,
I'm nobody's, I'm unclaimed,
Without a beginning, without an end…

My body is foam,
And it reeks of wind;
My name is: “Now”…
If I throw out my hands,
They'd give the world a smack from one end to the other,
My eyes if I let roam about,
They'd guzzle down the world from the bottom up!

With eyes open, with an unbuttoned shirt,
With hands stretched out,
I don't know if I have a home,
Or have a-far,
If I'm a beginning, or an end.
—Markish (1918–19; reprinted in Harshav [Hrushovski], Sutzkever, and Shmeruk, 
                            1964:375-76; translation mine in collaboration with Bluma Goldstein)

In his essay “In the Ways of Jewish Poetry” (1921), Markish writes: “The spirit of human creativity and the spirit of the revolution are so intermingled that it is hard to tell which… generates which” (quoted from the Hebrew translation in Harshav [Hrushovski], 1973:117). This combined spirit finds an expression in “Don't Know If I'm at Home” with the forcefulness and the conviction of a poetic credo. Written during the tumultuous times of the Russian revolution, the poem belongs to a group of early programmatic statements in which Markish asserts a new stance for the poet. The joyful aggressiveness with which the speaker in this poem interacts with the world around him is reminiscent of Russian futurist and other modernist manifestoes of the period, with which the young Markish was strongly—though not exclusively—affiliated. Underlying these early poems is Vladimir Mayakovsky's dictum: “The revolution of content—Socialism-Anarchism—would be impossible without the revolution of form—Futurism” (Mayakovsky, 1918, in Harshav [Hrushovski], 1973:56). This belief not only gave poetry in general a sense of indispensability but also allowed Markish and the other Yiddish poets in revolutionary Russia

to integrate their Jewish modernist experience with the cultural and political collective one. Radicalism became for them the unifying factor that rendered the different dimensions of their expression—political, poetic, and ethnic—consistent rather than contradictory.

In the spirit of Mayakovsky's futurism, but in terms which foreshadow Markish's own involvement with expressionism, the poem presents the general theme of poet versus world through an extended modernist metonymy: it focuses on the speaker's body (hands, eyes) as representing the poet's new dynamic grip on reality. This portrait of the poet as “new man” is not without its self-irony. The speaker is seen running around with no definite goal, hands waving wildly, eyes turning in his head—a disheveled and violent image, echoing the prototypical descriptions of the geyer or meshulekh, the Jewish holy tramp, the privileged, valorized marginal character of Jewish cultural discourse. The revolutionary modernist poet is thus seen not only as free and unencumbered (lines 5–6) but also as abandoned and poor. Hefker (line 6) is a complex notion implying lawlessness and recklessness on the one hand, and neglect and abandonment on the other. In the background one hears the expression hefker-mentch, “derelict,” as well as the humorous saying hefker petrishke (literally, “ownerless parsley”), which stands for “anything goes.” But unlike the devastating social and self-criticism of Halpern's beggar/clown or sick derelict (Chapter 7), in fact unlike the macabre depiction of the poet's destitution in Markish's later work, the liberating, celebratory tone is unmistakable.

The combination of the new image of the liberated modernist poet with the traditional image of the wandering Jew uprooted from his or her cultural tradition runs throughout the poem as a personification of a modernist marginal prototype of poetic and social existence. The new “native of the world” who does not need a home is also the poor homeless tramp who has severed ties with the past; the revolutionary poet who unbuttons his shirt and reeks of the wind in celebration of his new “organic” and “naked” aesthetics is also the disheveled derelict whose smell is probably not pleasant (the Yiddish in line 9 uses the impersonal colloquial expression es shmekt fun im, “it smells from him,” which usually implies a rather foul odor). Perhaps the clearest examples of ambivalently modernist images are those that involve the speaker's hands and eyes (lines 11–16). They depict the new poet's sense of power and aggressive creativity: rather than record reality passively, he has the ability to reach into it, even beat it up (in line 12).

In the description of the hands, the same verb, derlangen, means both “to reach” and “to deal a blow.” Similarly, in the description of the eyes, the verb fartrinken (line 14) can mean both “to booze up” and “to drown or flood.” Thus, the poet simultaneously takes reality in and ex-presses it, flooding it with his own inner visions. However, to these complex images Markish still manages to add that other dimension of the wandering pauper and thereby to “Judaize” and ironize his own radical modernism. In sharp contrast to the poet's aggressive blow to the world, the stretched-out hands (line 16) echo a beggar's pose. Similarly, the eyes, which are a simultaneous source of artistic impression and expression, are also seen as roaming about (line 13)—a synecdoche for their wandering owner. Furthermore, the verb fartrinken has in colloquial Yiddish an additional sense which fits very well the prototype of the penniless, homeless poet: it denotes idiomatically spending all one has on drink, as well as drowning one's troubles in alcohol.

Despite its undercutting effect, the image of the poor wanderer does not destroy the poem's rejoicing in the new. This celebration is especially evident in the playful reversal of conventions, both linguistic and poetic, as well as in the poem's tone and diction. Even though it is a poetic self-portrait, the poem deliberately deviates from the lyrical strategies that are traditionally associated with this mode. Instead of a static, descriptive profile of the lyrical “I” reflecting after the fact on his experiences and emotions, we get the impression of a breathless, spontaneous, and hurriedly edited “instant replay” of the poet in motion and action.

The focus on the dynamic perception of a present moment is, of course, not just a mark of the modernist mode of presentation. It is also one of the poem's major themes, foregrounded in exclamatory futurist fashion at its center (line 10)—“My name is: ‘Now.’”Markish's flaunted statement of an abstract concept (Atsind can also be translated as “the Now”) in the center of a poem whose genre is traditionally descriptive and concrete is no accident. Even though the line is weakly metaphorical, the diction reveals a clear preference for the more abstract and declamatory atsind (rather than the colloquial and concrete terms for “now,” itst or yetst ). This selection is especially salient on the background of the blunt slang and colloquial idioms used everywhere else in the poem. A few years after the publication of this poem, when Markish was organizing the Yiddish expressionist movement, he generalized this practice as an explicit poetic principle:

“Jewish poetry has left behind its back the descriptive stage and is approaching the threshold of the liberated idea-word, the sublime philosophical thought” (in Harshav [Hrushovski], 1973:120).

While the center of the poem foregrounds the speaker's concern with time, the beginning and end of the poem reveal a preoccupation with space. But whereas the speaker joyfully contracts time to a dynamic, ever shifting present, without past or future, his rejection of linear space proves more complex. The spatial statements in the first and last stanzas differ significantly. Whereas in the first stanza the speaker asserts that he does not have a beginning or an end (line 7), by the end of the poem he is asking whether he himself is a beginning or an end. Conversely, while in the first line the speaker questions his being at home, in the last stanza (line 17) he questions the very fact of his having a home. This chiastic representation of the speaker's orientation in space, the fusion of having a property and being an entity, are typical of the expressionist poetics which opposed the very dichotomy of inner and outer reality. In the first stanza the speaker already sees himself as boundless, “Without a beginning, without an end” (line 7), but his view of the world around him is still scientifically and aesthetically the premodern one; he accepts the distinction between here and there, near and far, familiar and foreign. In the Yiddish all these conventional oppositions are captured in the two fixed expressions: in der heym (“at home,” line 1), as against in der fremd (roughly, “away from home,” “in foreign parts,” line 2).

However, in the process of the poem the speaker himself changes; his epistemology grows into his (already modernist) aesthetics and (revolutionary) politics. He grows to view not only himself but also the world around him as having no beginning and no end. Once he realizes that his hands can reach from one end of the world to the other (line 12) and that—homeless little tramp though he is—he can still give that huge world a good smack, the distinction between far and near, being at home and being away from home, no longer holds. Moreover, since he is free to act in this world and to change it, even those foreign parts can belong to him. The revolutionary socialist and the radical modernist views converge to produce the new, oxymoronlike notions: of possessing that which is (according to the old view) alien and unpossessible; and of giving up ownership of that which is considered inalienable and possessible.

The reversal of the “normal” way of looking at the world and at a human being's place in it is reflected also in the violation of linguistic

norms. Markish uses the term fremd as if it were a concrete, possessible noun (something like “afarness,” the place where one feels far from home). Normally, fremd is an adjective, and nominal uses occur only in expressions such as in der fremd (line 2, “away from home”). Thus, the locution kh'hob a fremd (loosely translated as “I have a-far”) is both grammatically and conceptually jarring; it reconciles the wandering tramp with his modern surrogate—the revolutionary poet—by reinterpreting for both the notions of home and of ownership, of beginning and of end. Ultimately, however, not just the norms of language and perception are called into question but even the promise of modernism and modernity. The poem's end, after all, asserts only the speaker's “I don't knows,” not any positive credo, in his mock-heroic echo of Jesus' “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last” (Revelation 22:13).^[5]

Dovid Hofshteyn (1889–1952)

[Di Kri'ye Geyt]

Di kri'ye geyt—
un bregn nemen breyt
dem vaser-yokh
oyf akslen veykh bavoksene,
un lozes bukn zikh
far zunen-freyd …

Un lozes eyne veln di farheylte drapn
in frishn taykh banayen,
un eyne vet es untershvenken
mit vortslen zey farkhapn
un forn in di vaser-lengen …

Nor hel iz zunen-freyd!
oyf taykh oyf frayen kri'ye geyt!
un shtenglakh bukn zikh:
mir zaynen greyt, mir zaynen greyt…

[The Ice Floe Is Moving]

The ice floe is moving—
And banks, magnanimous, are putting
The water-yoke
On soft hairy shoulders,
And twigs are bowing low
To sun-joy…

And some twigs will renew their healed-over scratches
In the fresh river,
And some will be washed away,
Roots seized
And led into the water-reaches…

Yet bright is the sun-joy!
On the river onto freedom the floe is moving!
And young stems are bowing low:
We are ready, we are ready …
                              —Hofshteyn ([1912] 1919:27; translation mine)

Dovid Hofshteyn was one of the central figures of modernist Yiddish poetry in the Soviet Union. Together with Leyb Kvitko and Markish he formed “the lyrical triumvirate of the Kiev Group” (Liptzin, 1972:203), which for a while was the leading force in Yiddish modernism in Russia. Although he was raised in a rural area of the Ukraine, Hofshteyn received a sophisticated formal education in

Kiev, where he became prominent in literary Jewish life after the revolution. Even though Hofshteyn often tried to follow the party line, he never quite managed to rid his poetry of the forbidden cultural and biblical associations. In 1948 he was seized, and after years of torture he was executed on August 12, 1952, the same day that saw the collective murder of many of the greatest Yiddish writers in Stalinist Russia, including Markish and Kvitko.

Hofshteyn's is a low-key, lyrical, and introverted modernism. Innovations are never flaunted in his poetry, and those aspects which are most daring and unconventional are often also latent or implied. This tone is especially true of the early poetry, from which my selections are taken. The romantic images of a pantheistic, glorified nature are in the foreground, while the modernist tone is lurking underneath, undercutting the traditional view and adding contemporary “antipoetic” dimensions to it. In this sense, Hofshteyn's poetry participates in the same “minor key” liminal modernism that Fogel and the other antiformulaic Hebrew writers engaged in.^[6]

In “The Ice Floe Is Moving,” the impression of traditional symmetry turns out on examination to be quite misleading. Although the beginning and end of the poem are made to create the illusion of a regular rhyme scheme (aa, da), no regular scheme in fact appears. Instead, functional rhyme is used throughout, namely rhyme that appears only to convey meaning relations between the rhyming elements. Similarly, while the meter consists of seemingly regular iambs, the number of feet per line varies constantly, according to the requirements of meaning and speech rhythm, rather than in accordance with any symmetrical form. (Note, for example, how the meter emphasizes the center of the poem in line 7).

This poem, written in 1912, describes a natural phenomenon which must have been quite a familiar sight for a boy growing up in the northwestern Ukraine: The floe, the ice field covering the river during the winter, has begun to melt and is floating downstream, carrying with it the promise of spring and rejuvenation. However, a half-implicit metaphor, which encompasses the first stanza, introduces quite different feelings into the scene. The riverbanks putting the water-yoke on their shoulders bring to mind the Russian burlaki —the barge haulers, who would often be prisoners, wild and despondent forced laborers on a chain gang. Thus, the poem's quietly subversive tone is already established here by combining two images of opposing semantic and aesthetic import. The explicit, literal image of the float-

ing ice floe invokes the conventional associations of spring with joy and renewal (lines 5–6). The implicit, figurative situation of the prisoners (the riverbanks) hauling a barge (the ice floe) stresses those aspects of the natural scene which the conventional depiction usually fails to mention: the hard labor involved in pulling the water-yoke with its cargo of an ice field and the efforts needed to keep these waters under control (within the banks). The melting of the ice signals here the dangers of flooding, the violence inherent in nature, no less than the renewed joys of sunshine.

The two opposing images are combined into one complex scene. The banks are indeed wild-looking like the burlaki (bavoksene in line 4 means “overgrown,” not just “hairy”); but they are softly so (veykh ). Unlike the prisoners, the riverbanks put the water yoke on their shoulders of their own free will, with a broad, magnanimous gesture. Finally, this combined image does not overshadow the literal scene but rather adds concreteness to it: breyt (line 2) can refer metaphorically to the banks' open and generous gesture, but it also literally describes the width of the river. Similarly, bavoksene (line 4) may refer to the wild and hairy look of the metaphorical burlaki, but it also describes the vegetation along the banks.

The second stanza is the only one to use the future tense, placing the speaker in a position of knowing things to come. This ironic distance of the speaker from the scene undercuts the romantic tone of the “rites of spring” in lines 5–6. Two different fates are described for the twigs, and by extension for all those awaiting rejuvenation: some will be “renewed” in the fresh water, in a scene that echoes purification rites; others, less fortunate, will be swept away and uprooted. A closer look reveals, however, more than a touch of irony in the first case, and more than a glimpse of hope in the second. Again, in Hofshteyn's subtle modernist poetics, opposites are presented only in order to be merged. Renewing (banayen ) old scratches can indeed here mean having them cleansed and refreshed by water, but it must mean also a reopening of old wounds. This ironic twist is most effectively felt in the Yiddish syntax because the word banayen (line 8, “renew”) comes as a rhythmic surprise at the very end of a sentence with inverted word order, and with it comes the reversal of all romantic expectations.

The second prediction is indeed ominous. The Yiddish uses an impersonal sentence, with an unspecified and nonreferential “it” as the subject which is doing all the capturing, uprooting, and carrying.

Moreover, even though the scene has clear references in nature, its human connotations for the relations between oppressor and oppressed are undeniably present: the common metaphor of uprootedness and the reference—through the verb farkhapn (line 10, “capture,” “seize,” “kidnap”)—to the practice in czarist Russia of kidnapping Jewish youths for military service. However, the violent fate predicted for the twigs, or the human parallel they may represent, is carefully mitigated. The twigs will, after all, be led to the water-reaches (vaser-lengen in line 11), an expression coined by Hofshteyn which connotes adventure, openness, and freedom.

Just as pain and submission were the price for maintaining the romantic dreams of cyclical renewal, so are freedom and the opening of new horizons a compensation for the violent upheaval of change. The second stanza, with its image of the raging river on the verge of spring, makes the problem of freedom and submission more explicit in the thematic structure of the poem. Two competing models for development in nature and in humanity seem to emerge as the poem's correlated aesthetics and politics: the old model, coupling pantheism with self-imposed servitude and seeking to maintain the present order (stanza 1); and the new model, combining freedom and change with the dangers of violence and destruction (stanza 2).

In the third stanza the speaker directly expresses his feelings about the natural scene and more implicitly about the issues of social renewal and change. Again, the emerging view is a combination of the old model and the new, of romanticism and radical modernism. Each line is a short exclamation, reaffirming in a modified but enthusiastic way the joys of spring. A detailed contrast is established between the first stanza, with its one long sentence, and the third, with its brief, excited one-liners. The first three lines of the third stanza repeat asymmetrical lines in the first stanza (in lines 12 and 6, 13 and 1, 14 and 5) with several significant changes. For example, now the ice floe—not just the riverbank—is portrayed as a prisoner, albeit one that is sailing to freedom (line 13). Frayen, rather than frayhayt, is chosen for “freedom” to emphasize its complementary relationship with freyen zikh (“to rejoice”). Consequently, although the sun-joy is reaffirmed (line 12), the stems are no longer bowing low to it. Their readiness for liberation is indicated in the fact that their bow is not directed at any particular authority but rather is expressed in their speech act (line 15). Clearly, the romantic reading of the twigs awaiting the renewal of

spring is still possible. But the emphasis on freedom (in line 13) gets a strong, though subtle, reinforcement in the last line. The only words actually spoken in the poem, “We are ready, we are ready,” echo the prayer uttered before drinking each of the four glasses of wine during the Seder celebration on Passover eve, the feast commemorating liberation. Since Passover is also the spring festival, the allusion offers a combination of the natural theme of spring with the social and national theme of freedom.

Finally, the Yiddish word for ice floe offers a juncture of the double perspective the poem maintains. Kri'ye is homophonous with the Hebraic term used in Yiddish to describe the custom of tearing clothes as a sign of mourning. Death and rejuvenation, mourning and joy, imprisonment and liberation, are seen as complementary dimensions of the same experience. Thus, an ostensibly premodernist poem about the traditional theme of the coming of spring is revealed to be an excited—though not an anxiety-free—annunciation of the imminent social and aesthetic revolutions: communism and modernism.

[Kh'hob Derzen Zi Baym Taykh]

Kh'hob derzen zi baym taykh
unter tsvaygn
unter grinem, mit himl farlatetn dakh.
In a por tsendling trit,

oyf dem erdishn shvaygn
hot geshtumt dort a shteyn
a far'akshnter glid
fun mayn urlands tsezeytn, tseshtoybtn gebeyn …

Kh'hob derzen zi in naketer freyd fun ir layb,
in tseflosener kroyn fun di duftike hor,
kh'hob derhert fun di tifn fun uryunge yor:
—Ot-o di ruft men vayb!

[I Saw Her by the River]

I saw her by the river
Under branches,
Under the green, sky-patched roof.
Several dozen steps away,
Upon the earthly silence
There a stone was mute
A stubborn limb
From my old country's bones, scattered and turned to dust …

I saw her in the naked joy of her flesh,
In the disheveled crown of her fragrant hair,
I heard from the depths of age-young years:
—This is what one calls a wife!
                                        —Hofshteyn ([1912] 1919:55–56; translation mine)

As in “The Ice Floe Is Moving,” the central artistic concern of this poem is the relation of contrasting elements. The poem consists of two images which together form one scene: a naked woman by the river, and—“several dozen steps away” (line 4)—a dusty old stone. Despite the spatial contiguity of the two images within the “world” of the poem, there are striking contrasts between them in structure, theme, point of view, style, and genre. The image of the naked woman is clearly in the foreground, but it is given in two discontinuous strokes in the first part of each stanza (lines 1–3, 9–10). The depiction of the stone which “interrupts” the woman image is also given in five lines, but it is presented in one continuous segment (lines 4–8). This digression from what appears to be the main human focus of the poem creates a tension between the two images. However, when the alternating images are examined in detail, it turns out that despite their opposing tendencies each image also contains elements of its counterpart. Contrast and similarity are finally brought together in the last

two lines of the poem, where the historical (associated with the stone) merges with the personal (associated with the woman).

At the beginning of the poem, the image of the woman is presented as a vivid, concrete experience of the lyrical “I” (“I saw her”). The verb derzen (“to see all at once,” “to discern”) as well as the other occurrences of verbs indicating sense perception in the poem (lines 9, 11) use the prefix der, which emphasizes the perfective and sudden aspect of the action of seeing (zen ) or hearing (hert ). While these verbs have the force of immediacy, they also draw our attention to the fact that the speaker is reconstructing a personal past experience, rather than “objectively” or impressionistically observing a present one.

The tension between syntax and diction in the first three lines adds another dimension to the hesitation between immediacy and perfectiveness. Syntactically, the woman is the object of description, and the river, green branches, and blue sky are just the natural backdrop expressed in a series of prepositional phrases. However, these prepositional phrases constitute the bulk of the sentence and are semantically the most informative part. In fact, in this first part of the image, reference to the woman is limited to a single pronoun (zi, “she”), giving her no concrete character or shape. As in the postimpressionist paintings that this scene echoes, the distinction between foreground and background is either deliberately blurred or altogether reversed. Furthermore, like other more famous modernist images of women by the water,^[7] Hofshteyn's poem deflates the familiarly romantic or decorative conventions associated with bathing scenes in the artistic tradition such as Tintoretto's Susanna and the Elders and Renoir's Bathers. It is interesting to note that this image-oriented poem, like other early modernist poems in Yiddish and Hebrew, draws much more directly on the history of art than of literature, embracing a postimpressionist modernist prototype and conveying meticulously the possibilities of applying this artistic model to poetry. At the same time, however, the contrastive structure of the image, the emphasis on physical juxtaposition rather than symbolic interpretation, and the lexical and syntactic economy reveal an orientation toward a contemporary poetic modernist trend to which Hofshteyn owes a great deal: Russian acmeism.

The third line, with its surprising metaphor of “the sky-patched roof,” foreshadows the contrastive structure that is to become the poem's central device. The realm of social reality is introduced ironically through a description of a natural scene. The branches and the treetops form a roof over the woman's head; but rather than stress the

beauty of the sky patches that show through the treetops, the speaker invokes an image of a poor, dilapidated house, in which “sky-patched” is a sarcastic euphemism for “full of holes.” (farlatete, “patched up,” evokes a semantic field of poverty and refers primarily to the mending of tattered clothes.) Conventional expectations would be that this figurative depiction of nature in human terms enhance or parallel the theme of free, erotic beauty which the woman later comes to represent (lines 9–10) or that it supply the appropriate backdrop for the anticipated love scene: a lovers' nest, a natural haven, or a canopy of trees and sky. Instead, the text suggests a moldy (green), leaky (sky-patched) roof. Interestingly, the contrasts between the vehicle (leaky roof) and the tenor (treetops and sky), and between the metaphor as a whole and the initial image of the woman, result in the ultimate inseparability of these contrasting domains. This inseparability, in turn, is essential to Hofshteyn's modernist artistic credo: there can be no clear distinction between the natural and the social, the human and the inanimate, the past and the present. Thus, the woman is first seen “under branches” (line 2), merging into a natural backdrop; but the same natural backdrop is also a human and a social one, as the syntactic parallelism indicates: “Under branches/Under the green…roof” (lines 2–3).

The speaker makes the transition to the second image by “measuring” its distance from the first image—“several dozen steps away”—or, more literally, “in a couple of tens of steps,” where “in a” is used in a spatial context in the same way that it may be used temporally in expressions such as “in a couple of minutes.” As in the beginning of the poem, the reader is introduced to the image (line 4) through the point of view of the speaker. But unlike the abrupt “I saw (all at once)” of the first line, here the speaker approaches the stone more gradually, as though step by step (and note that in the Yiddish word order is manipulated so that the stone is “arrived at” only at the end of line 6).

Whereas the metaphor in the first image was concealed as part of the concrete natural scene (the sky-patched roof of trees), the image of the stone flaunts its nonliteral nature in two sets of metaphors of two lines each. The first centers around silence, or more precisely the active and willfull refraining from speech. Thus, the Yiddish for “earthly silence” (line 5) reads literally “the earth's refraining from speech” (erdishn shvaygn ), and the stone's being mute (line 6) is expressed in the Yiddish by an intransitive verb derived from the

adjective shtum (mute), resulting in something like “there a stone muted.” Silence thus becomes an active means for expressing protest, anger, and pain. On this background the stone itself can insert—in the second metaphor—the veiled theme of Jewish dispersal and survival. Ironically, this metaphor (lines 7–8) first turns the stone into a part of a living body, “a stubborn limb,” only to describe later on the dismemberment and death (“turned into dust”) of the rest of the organism. Around the same time Bialik coined his famous Hebrew metaphor peger avanim (“a corpse of a stone”), which also personifies an inanimate object only to indicate its death.^[8]

The speaker's personal experience of the woman's erotic and life-producing beauty is perceived as dependent on his ability to come to terms with the collective heritage of pain and destruction. But even as the stone is becoming a collective symbol, the speaker refers to it as a limb from “my old country's bones.” The national experience of age-old collective suffering is personified and personalized in this half-dead body toward which the speaker feels the same attachment that he has to the vibrant, beautiful body of the naked woman.

The ability to recognize the living limb in the stone, the links to history within the present experience, and the message inscribed in the silent objects provide the central experience of the poem. Only once these links are established do the present moment and the beautiful woman it depicts come to life. It is almost as if the anatomical metaphor of the stone provides the bones (gebeyn, line 8) and the woman's naked joy forms the flesh or skin (layb, line 9) of one and the same living organism. Note that in the Yiddish the woman's flesh and the country's bones are juxtaposed in parallel position at the end of successive lines (lines 8 and 9). The majestic, Venus-like image of the woman is, in this context, reinterpreted in quite untraditional terms: she is indeed “natural woman,” Venus and Eve, royal because unruly (line 10); but she is as much one with human history (line 11) as with nature.

Thus, only in the second stanza is the actual union of the historical and the personal, the painful and the beautiful, achieved. The structure reflects this resolution of opposites, for only here do we find a fully symmetrical scheme couched in the traditionally harmonious quatrain. When the first image of the woman by the river is continued so vividly in lines 9–10, it is perceived not only as a contrast but also as a complement to the image of the stone.

The last two lines of the poem make explicit this complementarity of nature, humanity, and history when the silence of the stone is

replaced by speech; the age-old ancestral country (urland ) by the oxymoronic neologism “age-young years” (uryunge yor ); and the distant “her” (zi ) of the first line by the familiar exclamation: “This is what one calls a wife!” While this ending, like others by the young Hofshteyn, may sound a little heavy-handed, it provides an interesting and intricate metaphorical reading which in retrospect may organize the whole poem: a modernist variation on the traditional Jewish motif of the wedding in the graveyard.^[9] When the speaker is symbolically calling the woman a wife (line 12), he is invoking the bridegroom's speech act at a wedding ceremony. In times of communal strife, such as are described in lines 7–8, the destruction of the people (the bones of the ancestral country) symbolically warrants a graveyard ceremony. Thus, the woman is being called a wife in a cemetery of sorts, “a few dozen steps away” from memorial stones (shteyn can also refer to tombstone) and the skeletons or remains (alternative meaning of gebeyn, line 8) which have turned to dust (tseshtoybtn, line 8). But this figurative graveyard wedding ceremony is not enacted to ward off the dangers of death or disaster, as in the folkloristic tradition. Rather, it functions aesthetically and socially as a corollary to the “marriage” of the living and the dead, the young and the old, change and tradition. Politically, it bespeaks the Yiddish modernists' attempt to join the national Jewish heritage with the unbridled revolutionary present.

Thus, the veiled traditional motif of the wedding among the graves allows Hofshteyn's emergent political radicalism to cohere and—a more difficult task—to grow naturally out of his traditional cultural roots. This need to reconcile change and tradition, the cosmopolitan “I” with the national “we,” eventually became the identifying mark of Hofshteyn's poetry. Tragically, the Stalinist oppressor could not, in the end, tolerate this mark of dialectical pluralism.

Avrom Sutzkever (b. 1913)

Hirshn Baym Yam-Suf

Der zunfargang hot zikh far'akshnt mit hoze
tsu blaybn in yam-suf bay nakht, ven es kumen
tsum palats fun vaser—di umshuldik rose,
di eydele hirshn tsu shtiln dem gumen.

Zey lozn di zaydene shotns baym bortn
un lekn in yam-suf di ringen fun kilkayt
mit fidlene penimer lange. Un dortn
geshet di farknasung bay zey mit der shtilkayt.

Ge'endikt—antloyfn zey. Royzike flekn
balebn dem zamd. Nor es blaybn ful yomer
di zunfargang-hirshn in vaser un lekn
di shtilkayt fun yene, vos zenen nito mer.

Deer by the Red Sea

The sunset insisted impudently
On staying in the Red Sea at night, when there come
To the palace of water—the innocent rosy,
The graceful deer to quench their thirst.

They leave their silken shadows on the shore
And lick in the Red Sea the rings of coolness
With fiddle-long faces. And there
Takes place their betrothal to the silence.

Finished—they run away. Rosy stains
Animate the sand. Yet there remain woeful
The sunset-deer in the water and lick
The silence of those, that are no more.
          —Sutzkever (1963:71; published in 1949; translation mine)

“Deer by the Red Sea” is an Israeli Yiddish poem. Like so many of the other poems Sutzkever has written since coming to Israel in 1947, it offers a surprisingly harmonious hybridity of the most Israeli in milieu and experience with the most uniquely Yiddish in idiom and expression. “Deer by the Red Sea” is a hybrid text also in its trend affiliation, a typical example of what Harshav has cogently described as Sutzkever's “Neo-Classical Modernism” (in his introduction to Sutzkever 1991:4). The poem's prosody, which first appears anachronistically traditional, in fact offers a modernist functionalism applied to a tightly symmetrical metric scheme. Each stanza contains four lines of four amphibrachs each. However, the amphibrach is also the least conspicuous of meters in Yiddish because it coincides with the penultimate stress pattern of normal speech. Frequent changes in syntactic rhythm (sentence length, enjambment) and the unpredictable location of caesuras in the metrical line^[10] combine to establish a speech rhythm alongside the symmetrical traditional meter. Similarly, the rhyme scheme is completely regular, but within its limits we find several modernist innovations such as rhyming across word boundaries (yoMER /nitoMER , lines 10 and 12) and the equivalence of voiced and voiceless consonants for the purposes of rhyme enrichment (Es KUMEN /dEm GUMEN , lines 2 and 4).

On the literal and concrete level, the poem presents a closely observed natural scene: deer drinking water by the Red Sea at sunset (or, to be more precise, when the sun has already set and its reflection lingers on in the water). Silence, shadows, reflections, and rosy-red colors dominate the delicate scene. One gets the impression that with some luck a quiet and careful nature observer might witness just such a scene near the Red Sea, in the southern tip of the Israeli desert.

However, several puzzling elements prevent the literal interpretation from being fully realized and suggest instead a figurative, if not a surreal, situation. How can deer drink seawater? How come the sun sets in the Red Sea when (for an Israeli observer) the sea is in the south, not the west? Once such hesitations are created, the surreal elements in the beginning and end of the poem are put in the foreground: the unnaturally prolonged sunset (staying in the water at night, lines 1–2) and the reflection of the deer in the water without any real deer nearby to produce it (lines 11–12).

How, then, is the initial literal impression maintained despite the violations of verisimilitude? Among other devices, the diction is especially functional for this effect, presenting a carefully noncommittal

and periphrastic vocabulary. Note, for example, that the deer are never explicitly said to be drinking Red Sea water. Instead, they quench their thirst in “the palace of water” (line 3), or they “lick in the Red Sea the rings of coolness” (line 6). Thus, the description seems simultaneously to be true to nature and to blur the borderline between the probabilities of external reality and the possibilities of poetic imagination.

This fusion of the levels of reality is perhaps most evident in the subtle linguistic treatment of color terms in the poem. The central color images consist of different kinds of red: the colors of the sunset and of the water in the sunset, the innocent rosy deer (line 3) and later their rosy images as they disappear into the distance (lines 9–10). Thus, the scene is not represented by the expected contrast of white sand and blue sea but rather—like an impressionist painting—by the fleeting shades and nuances of the moment captured. This foregrounding of reds clearly surpasses, however, the requirements of simple concreteness. As the English translation indicates, the very name of the sea invokes this color. In the Yiddish text the sea is called by its normal Hebrew name yam suf (the Sea of Reeds), but the other, more poetic name, ha-yam ha-adom (the Red Sea) is definitely in the background. Thus, the sunset and its reflection in the water allow the Red Sea, in reality the bluest of seas, to be seen as literally red. This reification of a label that otherwise has no literal reality reveals two qualities common to all of Sutzkever's poetry: its emphasis on the power of words to create realities and its special sensitivity to the role of the Hebraic component in Yiddish.^[11] David Roskies has passionately and carefully articulated the correlation between Sutzkever's valorization of art and language and the survivor-poet's “desire to impose meaning on chaos” (Roskies, 1984:254). Through the implied echo of a Hebrew name, the materiality of red—and its mythopoetic qualities—become both equally palpable, equally (sur)real.

Another reality created through words and anchored in a particularly Hebraic mythopoesis concerns the multiple meanings associated with deer in this poem. The first appearance of the deer relates their rosiness to innocence (line 3). They are thus seen as fawns, baby pink and virginal—qualities which become especially significant in the second stanza with its erotic figurative situation. The deer's second—and most striking—characteristic is expressed in the adjective eydl (line 4), one of the richest in meaning and connotation in the Yiddish language. Among these meanings are: graceful, of noble

birth, kind, spiritual, vulnerable, delicate, and abstract. To these meanings one should add the traditional Hebraic contexts in which deer (and fawns or gazelles) appear repeatedly as metaphors for the lover (Song of Songs, medieval Hebrew poetry in Spain) and the soul (Psalms). Most significantly, deer are emblems both of the nation (see below) and of natural and artistic beauty. Sutzkever's poem seems to utilize all these metaphorical potentials, concentrating on the deer's associations with love, natural beauty, and art, but injecting them with the (shadowy, reflected) national image of “those, that are no more” (line 12). The special use of the multiply ambiguous adjective eydl in conjunction with hirshn (deer) makes many of these associations possible. In addition to the senses listed above, eydele hirshn is also the plural of a name of a specific kind of deer, eydlhirsh, the European and Asian red deer. Like the Red Sea, then, this conventional name is given literal veracity while at the same time enhancing the all-pervasive presence of the color red. The red deer literally become one with the sunset and the water, in anticipation of their symbolic union within the poem's figurative situation.

This quite elaborate figurative situation or event accompanies the literal scene from the very beginning of the poem. In it, a bold and impudent sunset ventures to stay in the palace of water at night, just when a delicate and discreet affair is to take place: noble and innocent visitors (the graceful deer) take off their silken clothes (shadows), and in a scene of delicate erotic initiation, they are betrothed to their mate or mates. There is some unclarity about the mate's identity in this metaphorical ritual. The second stanza, in which the climactic moment is described, explicitly names the silence as the bride (shtilkayt, “silence,” is feminine singular in Yiddish, whereas hirshn, “deer,” is masculine plural). However, within the figurative situation, the silence seems to be a metonymy for the water (the deer drink the silence) or for an as yet unnamed entity found in the water in the quiet of night. Thus, in lines 6–7 the drinking itself has nuptial connotations, with the “rings of coolness” echoing wedding bands and the deer's “fiddle-long faces” invoking the klezmer music of a Jewish wedding. Finally, in lines 11–12, the secret spouses are revealed. Both the silence and the water turn out to be metonymies linking the flesh-and-blood deer with their ethereal mates, the “sunset-deer” who “remain woeful” in the water. These mysterious sunset-deer are quite easily explained realistically within the concrete situation as the real deer's reflection in the sunset-red water. And yet the world which this

poem creates defies the simplicity of such an explanation because within it the sunset-deer are really present while the flesh-and-blood ones “are no more.” We witness, then, at the end of this poem the final fusion of real and imaginary, of the object described and its reflection or shadow, of nature and its representation in art.

The literal and the figurative situations which were developed in the first and second stanzas combine in the third to form one intricate pattern. At first, the two realms can still be kept apart to some extent; literally, the deer, no longer thirsty, have finished drinking and are seen running away. In the air at dusk their figures look like rosy stains on the sand (lines 9–10). At this point the reader is reminded, of course, of the initial violation of verisimilitude (the deer drinking seawater) and must turn to the figurative situation. Here, the language clearly refers to a postorgasmic state (“to finish” in Yiddish and Hebrew slang means to have an orgasm). Through their sexual initiation, the deer have introduced into the barren and stagnant desert new elements of vitality, fertility, and dynamism (balebn, line 10, means “to animate” both in the sense of “fill with life” and “impart motion, activity”). The image of a revitalized desert is again created through the use of the color image, and it invokes the national rather than sexual connotations of the deer (as in the biblical ha-tsvi Israel, “the deer Israel”). Significantly, however, the desert and the flesh-and-blood deer that bring it to life remain in the background. It is not, in the final analysis, just a national turn that the poem has taken, even as references to the destruction of European Jewry become undeniable. But the last two lines add to the poem's emphasis yet another metaphorical potential of the deer image—that of the artistic object: the sunset-deer. For Sutzkever, art is neither holding up an objective mirror to reality (after all, these are sunset-deer) nor a purely abstract expression of an inner reality (they are reflections of “real” deer). Instead, “Deer by the Red Sea” offers a complex blend of representation and expression typical of Sutzkever's attempt to unite what he calls “the world of truth and the world of lies.”^[12]

The “real” flesh-and-blood deer “are no more,” but in their disappearance, they have produced something of meaning—ethereal and intangible as it may be—which has a lasting reality all its own. The poem ends with the imagined literary deer mourning the loss of the real ones. This ultimate reversal can also be taken as a statement about the need to cling to the reality of the aesthetic process, of the sunset-deer, in a world that destroys its flesh-and-blood ones.