Highlighted Issues
Seymour Mayne
On this page, we share the preface to Vol XXXIV/II & Vol XXXV/I (2016-2017) Dream the Living into Speech: A Selection of Poems and a Homage to Yiddish by Seymour Mayne, along with three poems from that issue.
Preface (by Marc Steven Dworkin)
We asked Seymour Mayne to do something extraordinary for this issue of SHIRIM. Could he intertwine holistically his own poetry with his Yiddish translations of poetry and commentary on Yiddish/Jewish life and culture in Montreal? Could he draw a picture of how life in Eastern Europe transported itself and adapted to life in a Canadian city? Could he reconcile the tragic memories of the past with the new hopes of life in a modern society?
The result is a creative and compelling mix of autobiographical commentary and the poetic insight into the continuity of Yiddish/Jewish life. Seymour has blended his memories of childhood in Montreal with the emotional searching of Yiddish poets and his own poetry that reflects one foot in the present and one deeply rooted in the past.
Language plays an important part in the story. Life in Montreal was a mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew, of English and French. Even when speaking English, Yiddish remained just below the surface. As Seymour writes, Yiddish “often welled up in speech, a sorrow and lament that could not be staunched. It was as if the dead were finding utterance on the tongues of those alive.” It is these utterances that inform and drive Seymour’s poetry, translations and deep commitment to Yiddish language.
Above all, Seymour captures the Jewish drive to survive and move forward that transcends all language. As he writes:
No language can contain
our need to speak — and how
we talk, debating silence
and eternity with words
that trace God’s handiwork
no matter how flawed
Marc Steven Dworkin
Editor
Poems
Yiddish
Echo
of
whisper
as
distant
ghosts
in
their
millions
dream
the
living
into
speech.
The Children of Abel
The children of Abel —
where are they?
His children’s children?
Great-great grandchildren?
All under a simple stone.
Forgotten for millennia.
And crying out
on nights like this —
the clamour of their
innumerable voices
amplifying and growing
unbearably louder and louder.
The children of Abel —
where are they?
Fiddler
When
I
was
young
no
fiddler
dared
to
play
on
an
icy
Montreal
roof.
The table of contents of the entire issue is available here.