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.”