SHIRIM: A JEWISH POETRY JOURNAL

Essay: "Sounding it Out: A Note on Yiddish and My Poetry" by Richard Fein

I find Yiddish inviting itself into my poems. I mean not only my including the Yiddish presence alongside the English but my prompting the Yiddish to intensify the English.

This task, in different ways, was assumed by novelists like Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud — to invigorate their English through the Yiddish.

In my case, I don’t mean Yiddish as an element of personality, or a Yiddish atmosphere, if you will. I don’t mean Yiddish joke-making (clever foundry I admit I love stealing into) and I don’t mean having a Yiddish “take” on experience (a bent I admit I possess), and I don’t mean oral characterization of Yiddish “soul-making” (like the nuances of sufferings and sarcasms voiced by Yiddish characters). But I mean sewing the fabric of Yiddish alongside my English so that presence of Yiddish — words, phrases, sentences — dwells with and adjoins my English. I mean where the English and the Yiddish work to co-translate each other and where the Yiddish seems to intensify the English. Translation, yes, but something else as well:

“Go ahead,” my mother intoned:
“Suck the bones. Eat the eggs. Grow.”
Zoyg di beyner. Es di eyerlekh. Vaks.

(“Lab Work”)

What merely looks like a translation here is really a heightening of the English, which, if you will, is returning to its Yiddish source. It’s as if the English has a trochaic Yiddish propulsion behind it. The Yiddish is pointing back to the English, which in turn vivifies the Yiddish that gave birth to it in the first place. There is a kind of placenta shape-shifting going on here.

Something akin to what I am talking about occurs in Delmore Schwartz’s story “America! America!” where the immigrant possession of Yiddish infiltrates some of the characters’ use of English, as when food seems exceptionally appetizing or when someone refers to another woman who came over from Europe on the same boat as ship sister, or when a woman says that without her doing knitting she would go crazy. Or so and so came from people who were really common. Or when a son says to his mother she should remember it was his father who drove him to insanity. (They’re all Schwartz’s italicizations.) In such instances Schwartz is emphasizing phrases that are English yet englished through a Yiddish spin. I don’t have that skill in my poems, that ability of Schwartz to reveal character through such language intercourse, but I think in my poems Yiddish and English are playing catch with one another.

Perhaps something even closer to my poetry can occur in Robert Frost’s poetry, like in “Home Burial”:

“But I went near to see with my own eyes.”
“I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.”

This is no mere adding of local color by way of New England speech but a localized English inviting us to move more deeply into the experiences of the two characters. A localized English expands what the language can do and what the characters carry within themselves.

I don’t want to exaggerate by my search for parallels. What is more important is the way Yiddish intensifies itself into a line of English, or the way the translation of English into Yiddish or Yiddish into English seems to invite the English into a deeper sense of itself. Again, translation is involved, but also a trans-relation:

          Sound me out. Kling mir on.
Kling mir on. Sound me out.

(“Dear Yiddish”)

Is English the bud out of which the Yiddish comes, or Yiddish the bud out of which the English comes? It seems that both can sound me out.

It seems the English gives birth to the Yiddish that in turn impregnates the English. An alembic of cross-fertilization is occurring here. Or to change my metaphor, a kind of superfetation is going on here — where the formation of an embryo occurs while another embryo is already in the uterus.

I am just trying to understand what this “calling upon” Yiddish means to me, what my absorbing of Yiddish has led me to. The past of Yiddish or the future of Yiddish has never meant to me as much as what the play of Yiddish in my imagination has meant to me. What drew me to Yiddish in my middle age was not a cultural act of reconstruction or an act of homage or respect or scholarship (rewarding and helpful as such endeavors can be). But my entering Yiddish is, if anything, an act of personal archeology — a re-birth or expansion of childhood into my adulthood as a poet:

I can see again Uncle Max’s tooth — how gross and garish it was,
how repulsive and conjuring, how primitive and configured —
that brazen gold that threatened me, that seized me,
that glary yellow grinder that flashed way back in his mouth,
where accents hive, gauche habits thrive, and the old world lurks —
that source and cruncher of sounds, that grasp, that onkhap.
(“The Mouth of Uncle Max”)

Nothing of what I have said (or explained) here has meant very much in terms of the history of Yiddish. But the justification of my remarks only lies in their ability to convey me to the sense of Yiddish in my poetry. My ruminations have no scholarly or critical value in themselves but are a kind of cruise into waters I have not been able to fathom otherwise.

Maybe it can be said that Yiddish has meant for me what Greek and Christian myths have meant for Milton—a way of invention. I no doubt overstate the influence of Yiddish on me by invoking such a grandiose comparison. And yet I'd like to claim a little part of that internalized heritage-mode that poets like Milton and Yeats have activated for themselves in the making of their poetry. Nothing more and nothing less is at stake for me in this little note of mine— to show how Yiddish has entered some of my poems. Or to put the matter differently, Yiddish has been my "leg up" into the making of poetry. I add to Yeats's famous contention that sex and death are the two great themes of poetry — add that childhood makes for the third great theme, in my case a childhood connection to the presence of Yiddish, not the knowledge but the perplexing claim of it; that was its dubious hold on me, that rich uncertainty I could later draw on as fertile grounds for poetry.

So Yiddish has brought me back to early sounds in my ear, that uncertain claim it was making on me. For it was the way my English brushed up against Yiddish without my will or intention or pleasure or understanding that made the necessary mark of Yiddish on me. It was a language coming out of my depths to contend with me, beyond my desires. It's as if early on in my life Yiddish was insisting, "I am inside of you— against your will— and you have to translate me into yourself."

The need for me to translate Yiddish poetry is really an intense gambit of mine to be a Yiddish poet. It is the closest I can get to becoming a Yiddish poet, a "Yiddish poet" who has found himself in a culture in which Yiddish has transferred to English— and thus that "Yiddish poet" has no choice but to write his poems in English. (And thus, by the way, I keep on meeting Yiddish poets in my poetry.) The final poem in my book of translations of the poetry of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Zlotchev, My Home, is a poem in English that is a translation of a poem that purports to be an original poem by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, written to me in Yiddish (as if). That's bad enough as far as deception goes, but as I was preparing my book for the publisher I found myself checking my English translation against that Yiddish I deluded myself was Moyshe-Leyb's original. I had become a true believer in my own contrivance. Or as Baudelaire famously put it—

hypokrit leyener, mayn deknomen, mayn tsviling-bruder.

The Yiddish poets who have meant the most to me — Halpern, Leivick, Margolin, Glatshteyn — are city brothers and sister to me. (And, I add, Sutzkever, for his great inward poem about childhood, Siberia.) Through them I have taken on the foxy mantle of being a Yiddish poet. Indeed, I am such a poet by inventing myself as one — Yankev Rivlin, so I dub him — and so proceed to translate the poetry of my handle. If you can't actually join them, invent them. How intimately "other" these poets are to me.

Once I visited the Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tuzman in her apartment in Berkeley. We talked about her poetry, and the poetry of Yankev Glatshteyn, whom she intimated she was close to. She also appreciated my memoir of Yiddish, The Dance of Leah. She acknowledged me as a kind of second cousin removed. In seeing her I had briefly entered the colony of Yiddish poets, as I myself have imagined in some of my poems. She had invited me in in this limited way. My wife and kids were off somewhere in San Francisco enjoying themselves while I had gone off alone to the apartment of Malka Heifetz Tuzman. After a while, she indicated that it was time for me to leave because she had to take a shower. "Unless," she flirted as she led me to the door, "you want to take a shower with me." Then this woman in her eighties gave me a peck on the cheek, showed me out, and locked the door behind me.

It turned out that Yiddish — that inescapable attendant, that puzzling attachment, that early rejection of mine — became the source of much of the truest work in my poetry, coming to me again in my middle age and old age. When I am asked, "Why Yiddish? Why did you turn to it?" the only answer I can give that is honest is "The return of the repressed." But the compulsion that Yiddish brings to my poems — that's what really matters to me. Yiddish often takes me into my poems — the loss that shapes.

Poems

Apologia
by Richard Fein

Have I left line-making for mere narrative,
ending up with stories masquerading as poems?
Troubled last night I could only remind myself,
"You only stumble around when messing with meter,
yours a fat chance at old prosidies, sometimes,
however, finding you've fallen into a near rhyme."
Then it came to me later on during the day
that sometimes I could make a rhythm out of
seemingly accidental repetitions of sounds,
as if therebyI had answered that question of mine,
finding myself guided back to my homespun skills.
As I say, though always clumsy managing meter,
making rhyme, employing old forms , carving rhetoric —
except for lucky accidents — I also find some shapes
come from 1istening for a lifetime and listening
to speech within, a kind of ear-to-mouth respiration.

I hear my memory listening once again to aunts and uncles, like
when they came over the house or when I visited them,
I, lashed to their Yiddish gabble in Brooklyn, or
further north, in their Bronx hil1s and Yankee fervors.
No matter what their boroughs, their jabber, their yammer —
their plop1erye-klogarye, ploplerye-klogarye — reminded me
of the clatter of utensils overstacked in the kitchen drawers,
or of the sparks of trolley car poles switching their wires.
Then that clamor of the Family Circle duly harvested in me.
And then Whitman came back to me, that bearded loafer.
who looked and listened and walked along Fulton St.,
near Orange, just as I myself did, during my lunch break.

Nursing Home
by Richard Fein

Yiddish words emerge in me from childhood,
not the language, which I never knew, just

separate words, disconnected, that come back.
If only I could put them into a sentence,

they might add up to something, some-
thing other than their separate existence,

other than those laden isolate words
my parents uttered — disparate, sighful,

issuing from some deep source.
Oh words my parents singly emitted to me.

Oh words, why bother, even coming back
if you can't breathe into sentences?

I don't mean for conversation with other residents,
I don't mean for chatting with my parents.

I just mean you should add up to something.
Oh, please, stitch at least one sentence,

something you bring together — full, clear.
But you remain disjointed sounds, accidental,

detached from contexts, from moments,
mere sheer echoes of ancestral voices.

It's as if you are cries from some animal,
stricken, that interfere with my thoughts.

My Doras
by Richard Fein

Dora Dymant — and then Dora Diamond from Freshman English
at Brooklyn College — Dora Dymant, last girlfriend
of Kafka's, whom he was sure to have married
if only he had lived, for she was able to talk
to him in Yiddish and she was able to read
him psalms and the stories of David, Ruth, Jonah
in Hebrew -- Dora Dymant, last girlfriend of Kafka's.
You, Dora Diamond, girl and date in my Freshman English class,
Dora, come back to me in old age, be my last girlfriend —
and show me how we live in this loneliness — old age.
Now, listen as I read my poems to you in old age,
even as I read from my first book, Kafka's Ear,
and also poems I write alone in the house with you.
And you accompany me to my medical appointments,
just as I accompany you to your medical appointments;
just as you…Dora…accompanied Kafka to medical appointments.
just as you accompanied Kafka to the clinics in Vienna,
as he was driven in the only car available, an open limo,
and you stood up to protect him from the wind and rain.
And you and I now talk in Yiddish and you will tell me
all that you remember about your childhood in Poland,
when we met one Baltic summer at the Jewish People's
Home where you cleaned fish and served meals… Oh, Dora
Diamond — that college summer when we were counsellors
at camp in the Poconos, where we slipped off
to the forest, or the nearby town, to make love —
not to love, but to make love — acts, deeds, taking turns.
And back in New York now you will tell me again
about your childhood in Poland and I will tell you
about the plaque I saw on the house in Steglitz
where you lived together with Kafka, and I pointed
it out to Helen once during our walks Saturday afternoons
when the stores were all closed down as if while in Berlin
we had been walking in Jerusalem during the sabbath.
And that was briefly where you and Kafka lived together.
And then I visited the cemetery in Prague with Helen,
where you had thrown yourself on the grave when Kafka was buried,
and now you tell me what it was like to be with him
even as we are married now, we two old people
who read together and fondle each other's body at night —
the flabs, and creases, and moles, and little growths.

The Sorrow of the World
by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (Translated by Richard Fein)

Not far from my house the city begins,
an old God is crying there
while sitting on a stone in the night,
because all doors are closed to him.

Near my house, between night and smoke,
the guards laugh, wild and raucous,
as if with iron on gold
they would deafen their own dread.

Not far from my house three old men
with gray beards sit on the ground in a barn
with crowns of light on their heads and on their hands —
three holy men from morning-land.

But the wife, naked and old
and gray as they are, sits on hard straw,
groaning like a thin tree in the wind,
rocking herself alone, the way one rocks a child.

And over all of us the sorrow of the world.
It cries through all the windows and curses
that star deceiving again with its light,
that star people have been waiting for.

My Will
by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (Translated by Richard Fein)

So, I played a little joke on myself
As soon as the sun rose
I went outside and gathered
goat droppings for my poem
which I wrote just only yesterday
about the glow of the moon,
to which I have added on
several poems — written on the nearby table
about the holyness of the Bible,
which, when I think about it, nauseates me,
as if I threw it all into a bag
stuffed in my old tux,
and then hammered a nail
outside by the window, and hung the whole pack
on a poker,
and the people and the children walking by
asked me, “What is this?”
I bowed low to their feet
and answered that these are my years
that over time have become moldy
amid the stench of old wisdom
on the shelves of my wonderful bookcase.
When my only son, four years old,
and with my ocean of sadness and my thimble of joy,
went around contemptuously, with his nose in the air,
I took him on my lap
and said to him as follows: “Listen to me,
my heir apparent, I swear to you,
that just as one doesn’t disturb the dead in their rest
I will, when you grow up,
not interfere with anything in your life.
Do you want to steal bagels, go ahead, snatch bagels,
good luck to you, my son.
Do you want to be a murderer, an arsonist, a swindler,
go ahead, my son.
Do you want to change girls
as often as they themselves change skirts,
go ahead, change them, my son.
Just one thing, I have to say, my son:
if you want to go among people,
putting on airs, and may it never happen,
because you have written a poem about the glow of the moon
or even, of all things, about the Bible, that poison of the world,
then my dear son,
no matter how little money I have,
I will write in my will that I leave it
to my fellow countryman,
the one about to become the king of Poland.
I shred everything that binds me to you,
the way a miser cuts up cake for the poor at a wedding.
By all that binds me to you — father-shmather, son-shmon —
so help me God.
I —
swear —
I —
will.”

The Last Poem
by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (Translated by Richard Fein)

When people stopped believing in God
love also disappeared —
people threw themselves into the river,
people hanged themselves in the forest.

The sky turned away from the river,
the bird grew quiet in the forest,
the shepherd’s flute and plough
lay abandoned in the field.

The earth has become a desert,
all roads have lost their ways —
the prophet sat upon a stone
until he himself turned to stone.

Biographies

Richard Fein’s latest book of poems, his thirteenth, Dear Yiddish, appeared in 2003. Fein also published three books of translations of Yiddish poets, as well as three books of prose: Robert Lowell, a critical study; The Dance of Leah, a memoir of Yiddish; and Yiddish Genesis, a book of personal essays. His latest book of poems, The Polish Dance Machine, is forthcoming from Box Turtle Press, and his translations of the poetry of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Zlochov, My Home, is forthcoming from SUNY Press.

Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886-1932) arrived in America in 1908 from his hometown of Zlotchev. His first book of poems, In New York (1919), was followed by an even greater work, The Golden Peacock (1924). After his sudden death, a two-volume posthumous edition of his remaining poems, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, was published in 1934.