1. Dan Pagis insists in the opening section of his introduction to the critical edition of Fogel's poetry that the poet's name should be spelled "Vogel" following the German. I have nevertheless chosen "Fogel," in line with the common romanization of the Hebrew spelling. See "Kavim le-biyografia,"

in Fogel ([1966] 1975:13). Similarly with Halpern's name, I have chosen to follow the transliteration of the Yiddish, "Moyshe Leyb," rather than the more Germanic "Moishe Leib."

2. For a brilliant analysis of this relationship, see Seidman (1993a). See also Even-Zohar, (1990:121-30).

Research into the bilingual aspects of Hebrew-Yiddish modernism seems particularly necessary in the case of Fogel. It now appears that Fogel was quite familiar with modernist Yiddish poetry (perhaps mainly in its Central and Eastern European manifestations, such as the expressionists of the khalyastre and the albatros groups). See Pagis's introduction in Fogel ([1966] 1975: 21-22, 42-43) and Feldman (1985:30). With Menakhem Perry's publication of his heavily edited Hebrew translation of Fogel's unfinished Yiddish novel, under the title Kulam yats'u la-krav (All Have Gone Out to Battle) in Fogel (1990:65-198), it has become public knowledge that Fogel was also a Yiddish writer himself. The gallows humor characteristic of this novel, which Perry associates with the grotesque in the tradition of Mendele and Gogol (Fogel, 1990:30), in fact bears the mark of the macabre wit salient in modernist Yiddish poetry and most clearly exemplified by Halpern's work. Several translations of Fogel's poetry into Yiddish (some apparently his own) appeared in literary magazines in Vienna, Warsaw, and New York. See Fogel ([1966] 1975:275, 1983:65).

The situation is less certain with respect to Halpern's association with Hebrew literature. Although his lifelong involvement with the Yiddish press would have exposed him to modernist Hebrew writers in Yiddish translation, he also explicitly declared his separateness from the Zionist revival of Hebrew: compare his mocking criticism of the Zionist Marxists who expressed their ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity by practicing birth control and promising that when they went together to Eretz-Yisroel to smell tobacco they would sneeze in Hebrew." (Translation of Halpern's "Introduction" to Zishe Weinper's Geklibene verk, 1932; cited in Wisse, 1988:199).

3. Although Hebrew modernism is prototypically exemplified by poetry, prose fiction is perceived to have predated Fogel's early poetic modernism by almost twenty years with the groundbreaking works of Uri Nissan Gnessin and Yosef Chaim Brenner. See, for example, Steinhardt (1989), Alter (1988:49-63), Shaked (1973:57-120, 155-92), Brinker (1990), and Miron (1964:40). Although Fogel explicitly acknowledges Gnessin as an influential "precursor," stylistically they are construed as members of one and the same literary "generation" of antiformulaic writers. This relationship lends further empirical support to the repudiation of linear conceptions of literary periodization. Fogel's relationships to the older poets who are sometimes associated with the antiformulaic generation—Ya'akov Shteynberg, Avraham BenYitzhak—as well as to women poets who are more rarely associated with it, needs to be studied further.

In Yiddish prose fiction, Dovid Bergelson is usually credited with a position similar to Gnessin's in Hebrew, an interesting fact given Bergelson's familiarity with Gnessin since 1904-5 (see Harshav [Hrushovski], Sutzkever, and Shmeruk, 1964:734). Like Gnessin, Bergelson is considered the creator of

an early modernist prose style for his literature and is associated both with impressionism and with explorations of consciousness. The prototypical text of this early modernist style is his "Arum Vokzal" ("At the Depot") ([1909] 1961), fragments of which were originally written in Hebrew.

A critical account of the bilateral bilingualism of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in the context of the first anti- nusach wave of Hebrew literature and the impressionist phase of Yiddish literature still waits to be written, but Seidman (1993:188-263) makes an important contribution in her discussion of Dvora Baron as a bilingual writer. And see also, Feldman (1985) and Bakon (1986). Feldman's discussion in particular is illuminating on the New York Yiddish-impressionists/aestheticists' links to modernist Hebrew poetry on the one hand and American imagism on the other.

4. Halpern's In New York was published in 1919 and Fogel's Lifney hasha'ar ha-afel appeared in 1923.

5. On the concept of self-modernization in a decentered literature (here, early twentieth-century American, as distinct from European literature), see Robert Alter's perceptive critique of Eliot's relationship to modernism in "What Was T. S. Eliot?" (1989:32ff). In his discussion of Eliot's self-modernization, Alter emphasizes the precociousness of the author of "Prufrock" and quotes Ezra Pound's observation "in a letter after meeting Eliot for the first time in London in 1914 that his young compatriot had 'actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own'" (italics in the original)

Halpern's choice of Yiddish was also far from automatic but ultimately entailed less isolation from a community of writers and, most dramatically, from a community of contemporary readers than did Fogel's choice of Hebrew. Interestingly, his first poems, written in German, were composed, like Fogel's early Hebrew work, in Vienna, where Halpern was apprenticed to a commercial artist even though he spent a good deal of his time sitting in on German literature classes at the university. See Wisse (1988:76) and the biographical appraisal of Halpern's European period by his landsman, the poet Dovid Kenigsberg (1938; reprinted in Eliezer Greenberg's excellent monograph, Moyshe Leyb Halpern in Ram fun zayn Dor (Moyshe Leyb Halpern in the Framework of His Generation), 1942:116-21). Upon returning to his hometown of Zlochev, which had already become a small center of Yiddish letters, he began to write poetry in Yiddish. But only with the addition of two intermediary stops during his travels does the choice of Yiddish become identified with a cultural commitment to the language and with an increasingly modernist sensibility: the Czernowitz Conference he attended as a delegate in 1908 (in which Yiddish was declared for the first time(!) a Jewish language) and his emigration to the United States, which followed almost immediately afterward.

6. A detailed discussion of Fogel's innovative prose style immediately follows this quotation (Alter, 1988:75-94).

7. The diary was given the apocalyptic title Ktzot ha-yamim (The End of Days) by its editor, Menakhem Perry (see Fogel, 1990:268-326). However, the poem from which this title is borrowed, "Ayefim anachnu,/ nelkha-na lishon" (referred to at the beginning of this chapter) deflates the apocalyptic

pathos of the "end of days" through a metaphorical concretization of "ends" as physical "edges" or "tails." Rather than conjure up a universal judgment day, the poem—like the diary that predates it by two decades—deals with a mundane ennui: days' ends inexorably lead into nights, which redundantly stand for death. Life is ungracefully stuck or tucked into ( tchuvim ) death, perhaps like the tail ends of a blanket or a pajama top invoked within the poem's dramatic situation: " Ayefim anachnu,/ nelkha-na li-shon./ / Ktsot hayamim tchuvim ba-layla,/ tchuvim ba-mavet " ("Weary are we,/ let us go to sleep.//The edges of days are tucked into the night,/tucked into death"). Translations are my own, unless specified otherwise. For a nuanced reading of Fogel's diary as a laboratory for the forging of a modernist Hebrew self, see Alter (1993).

8. Which Fogel most likely read in the German translation (Hamsun, 1891).

9. Fogel (1990:285). For other renditions of Vilna as the only locus of happiness and its simultaneous association with Hebrew and with love, see Fogel (1990: 276, 279, 283, 291, 303).

10. Wisse comes close to doing just that in her otherwise sensitive and erudite literary biography of Halpern and Mani Leyb, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988:81). She argues that what was "special about Halpern, that set him apart from even the other individualists and eccentrics of the nascent literary community" in New York was that "for one thing, he resisted employment. ... Halpern took ... pleasure in his inability to succeed at a regular job."

11. I am grateful to Nanette Stahl for help with translating Halpern's richly figurative colloquial Yiddish into idiomatic English.

12. The terms in which this theme is expressed in the poetry—as in this early letter—are decidedly Marxist, although Halpern remained ferociously critical of state-controlled Bolshevism even before his break with the Sovietleaning paper Frayhayt in 1929. Just as during his early literary affiliation with di yunge, he was one of only a few who consistently maintained a critical distance from the aestheticist dictates of the group, so in his political conviction "it was Halpern alone who remained the local 'Trotsky,'  irritant to those who upheld collective discipline" (Wisse, 1988:184). An interesting example of Halpern's resistance to institutional corruptions of the Marxism he was committed to is found in the circumstances under which he left Frayhayt. The final break with the paper—for which he paid dearly with the unemployment and total destitution that may have led to his premature death three years later—came, despite his outspoken anti-Zionism, when Frayhayt obeyed the Soviet dictate and refrained from condemning the massacre of Jews in Palestine by Arabs during the uprising of 1929.

Halpern was among the first to leave the paper and, with a few temporary exceptions, remained unemployed, literally hungry, and critically ill until his death on August 31, 1932. "The word went out that he had died of neglect. ... One critic was certain that 'Yiddish literary history would consider his death a murder'" (Wisse, 1988:204; the critic cited is Borukh Rivkin, 1934:110). Rivkin also quotes the poet H. Leyvik's (1932) graveside eulogy of Halpern:

"One of our greatest poets has been murdered." This eulogy is typical of the sense of communal responsibility for the poet's death, in particular for his fellow writers' and readers' failure to assess the severity of his malnutrition and illness, expressed in many contemporary appraisals. This sense of responsibility was enhanced, I believe, by the fiercely ironic dramatization which Halpern's work offered of the ambivalence of self- and social criticism concerning the personal and social dislocations of the poet-as-pauper.

13. A brilliant discussion of this technique, its roots in premodernist Yiddish discourse and fiction, and its political uses in Halpern's poetry is offered in Harshav (1990:100-111); see in particular the section "Halpern's Political Talk-Verse."

14. Compare the unadorned prosaic crudeness of Halpern's 1917 altz is gornit with Yehoash's poetic-philosophical translation: nishtikayt fun nishtikaytn, altz iz nishtikayt (Yehoash, [1936] 1939). Halpern may also be alluding to the famous Jewish joke about being a nothing as an achievement not everybody is entitled to (see my analysis of this story as a parable on marginality in the Conclusion).

15. On the aesthetics of quietude as practiced and preached by those members of di yunge who clustered around Mani Leyb, see Wisse (1988:38ff).

16. Abraham Novershtern discovered, in an innovative study (1986:138), that Glatshteyn's first book of poetry was modeled—in its thematic structure—on Halpern's In New York. Thus, Glatshteyn adopted Halpern's radically modernist poetic architecture in the same book that launched his group's "rebellion" against di yunge.

17. This effect, so essential to the shock value of the poem, is unfortunately lost in translation.

18. The poem's rhythmic complexity notwithstanding, I offer below a literal translation that follows the poem's semantic and syntactic structure as accurately as I could. But for poetic renditions, see Hellerstein's translation in Halpern (1982) and Roskies (1989).

19. This declaration, as Harshav shrewdly points out, is almost a direct parallel to Kazimir Edschmidt's expressionist manifesto, published not much before the introspectivists', in his Über den Expressionismus in der Literatur und die neue Dichtung (1919:56). Edschmidt's influential declaration was first made in a speech in Berlin in 1917. The introspectivists' relation to expressionism—like Halpern's—is, however, rather ambivalent. See Harshav (1990:178) and my discussion below.

20. The distinction between explicit and implicit poetics, by now quite accepted in literary theory, was first introduced by Benjamin Harshav [Hrushovski] in lectures during the 1960s.

21. In discussing their relation to the first group of Yiddish poets in the United States, the so-called proletarian or sweatshop poets, the introspectivists select a "grandfather" who should have been their literary father: "Only one representative of the older Yiddish poets has crossed the boundary of his time and is, for us, not merely a precursor but a fellow poet. This is Yehoash. — Perhaps he should have been the initiator of a new trend in Yiddish poetry and perhaps also, at least in part, of our trend. He did not do

this for understandable reasons, and we would like to note that we regard him as one who is close to us" (in Harshav and Harshav, 1986:782).

22. An English translation first appeared in the journal Yiddish, 1(1)(1973):34. Sections of this essay are reproduced in a different translation in Harshav and Harshav (1986:785-88).

23. Recognizing Halpern's liminality may help us become more aware of the importance of women poets to the dynamics of both modernist trends. Novershtern has shrewdly observed Anna Margolin's transitional role between di yunge and the introspectivists (1990:460-63). But her recovery project has only just begun.

24. See also numerous retrospective appraisals of their "Americanism" and "imagism" in the December 1939 issue of In Zikh devoted to A. Leyeles.

25. For early reviews, see Wisse (1988:248, note 34) and Boaz (1971:169-72).

26. My summary relies on the last two chapters of his posthumously edited book (1976), as well as on my own studies with Professor Ha-Ephrati up to his death in the 1973 war.

27. See note 19 above.

28. Cited from the Hebrew translation, in Harshav [Hrushovski] (1973:81).

29. In his monograph on Halpern (Greenberg, 1942:23); within Yiddish poetry it is the quietude faction of di yunge, not Halpern, that developed this genre.

30. Edschmidt (1919), Hebrew translation in Harshav [Hrushovski] (1973:81).

31. In a study on the relationship between fragmentation and totality in modernist poetry and music (Ph.D. Diss., Berkeley; 1996).

32. My reading of this poem has benefited from the teaching of Boaz Arpali.

33. Idiomatically, the verb to walk ( h.l.kh. ) is used to indicate process (the horses are in the process of melting away). Yet, the surrealism of the imagery allows for a literalization of this idiom. Note that it is not the sound that is "fading away"—as a realist or impressionist would have it. The Hebrew for "melting (and walking) away," ha-nemasim ve-holkhim, is masculine, in agreement with "horses," susim, but not with "gallops," daharot.