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.