Please note, this is purely play on my part, or a glimpse into the way that my rather freely-associative mind works, so let me clarify that I don’t suggest any actual influence. That’s not what this is about. There ‘s only a certain similarity of images and approaches, and perhaps even of biography. If I really wanted to belabour the point — and carry on a very strained argument — I could play with Leivick’s ‘The Wolf’ and Heaney’s ‘Sweeney Astray,’ as two tales of men once at the heads of their communities, transformed into beasts or wild-men, both facing the possible extinction of their way of life at the hands of a Christian or Christianising culture and also the metaphorical (hi)story of a nation….but again, that’s maybe a bridge too silly, even for me.

On one hand, we have Leivick, once destined to be a rabbi like his illustrious forebear, the Shaagas Aryeh, and who had what were clearly enormous powers of recall for both secular literature and scripture, and on the other we have Heaney, with a repertoire of Catholicism and classics, sender of the occasional Latin text message; a child of Jewish tradition who was introduced to the social revolution and a child of the tension between Ireland’s rural past and industrialised present and future.

Both were also the eldest of nine children and both lost a sibling tragically young. And that’s where I’m heading today.

Regarding Leivick, I’ve certainly been here before with an in-depth look at the influence of the loss of his sister, Tania (or Tanya, I am not particularly beholden to YIVO transliteteration) following a household accident, where her clothing caught fire on the stove and she was seriously burned, dying a year later. It’s one of those moments where time moves both quickly and slowly at once.

While I’ve discussed the influence of her death on Leivick and his conviction of her ‘presence on all the crossroads of his life,’ I’ve not really looked closely at the poem dedicated to her in 1955’s A blat oyf an eplboym (A Leaf on an Apple Tree) here before.1

I’ll start by rectifying that particular omission.

My Little Sister


My little sister lies on the clay floor,
Outside — a storm, and inside — still.
We take the stillness from the clay house
And carry it to the dug grave.

We wrap it in a little trough.
Scarcely passing through the waves of wind,
Through howling storm, through demons tearing, 
We carry the silence wrapped in white.

We lower the stillness into the grave,
And immediately the storm’s force ebbs,
It uncovers — twisted-together and frightened —
My sister’s bright golden locks.

The storm falls to my sister’s body, 
It remains lying there and doesn’t rise again,
It takes off its noisy wings
And sleeps, lulled in cradle-tomb.

Then all go, like wanderers, home,
To the small mourning house of clay,
Carrying the dirt — the touch of graves —
And the empty trough under an arm.

Then my parents take off their shoes,
And sit shiva in their socks. I do too.
I sit in imagined bright blond socks
Woven from the gold of my sister’s locks.

To me, a natural companion to this poem is Heaney’s autobiographical ‘Mid-Term Break.’

The ‘holiday’ from school of the title is swiftly and brutally undercut by the death of Heaney’s little brother, Christopher. It isn’t the year of suffering between Tania’s accident and her death, but a fast, less physically scarring incident. Nor does it have the supernatural elements of the demons, the wind, the storm that uncovers her and eventually lies with her. There are flesh-and-blood relations and community members who come to console him.

It’s a popular poem to teach here, and one that I’ve taught in the past.

Mid-Term Break


I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

There are only really slight parallels beyond the loss of a younger sibling of roughly the same age — the cradle/grave and box/cot imagery, for one.2 Other parallels can, perhaps, be teased out with more background information.3

But if I restrain myself to the text alone, it’s ultimately the silence, the feeling of solitude and isolation that comes from both of these poems is part of what draws me to make this connection. They’re both members of traditional religious communities, children surrounded by family, ritual, belief and routine, and so alone in their private grief.

The ad from 1915 promising the poema ‘My Little Sister’s Death’ from Leivick Halper. The pseudonym really comes in 1917.

And I lied about the footnotes. Sorry.4

But I don’t consider the two great loves in my life to be in fundamental opposition to one another. They coexist very smoothly, one informing and helping the other along. One, in fact, sparking the other. The ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’ (Lament for Art O’Leary)2 seemed to lead me naturally, organically into ‘Der Volf’ (The Wolf). Specifically through Doireanne Ní Ghríofa's Ghost in the Throat, about her translation of the poem. I don’t read Irish, and I didn’t read Yiddish at the time, so I had these two slightly-strange-to-me documents in translation in front of me at the same time. Both dealing with the idea of a grief so deep as to entirely alter a person’s being and physical form, pushing them to the extra-ordinary, the supernatural feats of strength, the spilling — and even drinking — of blood.

One thing that did become clear to me during my abortive academic career was the accessibility of poetry. And sometimes that of the poet. Should a poet and poetry be instantly accessible on some basic level? I think so. Understandable in all their mysteries? That’s a different question. Any poem forces you to sit down and learn the language of the poet; what they’re saying and how they’re saying it to you. Are they straightforward? Or are they playful or even malicious, full of tricks that don’t only rely on the word, the language, but on the form, on the rhyme, on the meter? Do they require a key beyond that of the poem itself?3

Heaney is the poet from my time in academia I think of as particularly accessible, both as national institution by the time I came around to study him, with plenty of resources and criticism to be had, and because of the fact that, in the course of my Masters, I wrote to him and he wrote back. And he was nice.4 I haven’t forgotten that generosity.

Heaney is also where I get my love for (or fixation on) looking at different versions of the same poem: a conference paper I gave about two decades ago on versions of one canto of ‘Station Island’ — in which Heaney meets Joyce, á la Virgil and Dante, in crisis of religious and artistic faith — is the springboard, in a sense, for things like my fascination with the two versions of H. Leivick’s ‘Bullfight’ and it’s sparring with religious, political and humanistic faith.

I also, I fear, read Leivick’s meeting with Spinoza at the sanatorium under the slightly woozy influence of Heaney’s meeting with Joyce. If an imagined Joyce gives Heaney artistic permission, what does the TB fever-dream of Spinoza give Leivick? I’m still not sure I know completely, though it’s maybe a bit less mysterious to me now, and other people have certainly written about it — though I don’t always agree with them.

But if we agreed about everything, what would there be to write about?

I’m going to go all the way back to Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), and that poem which has become so (in)famous: ‘Digging.’ Here, as we do with Leivick’s ‘Ergetz vayt,’ we make a concession that this is Heaney’s ‘first’ poem, that he sticks the landing on his first try.5 But it’s really only the first one that he was confident enough to call a beginning.

Both Leivick and Heaney are perhaps more exciting poets to me before they are ‘very important’ poets, before they hit the status of national treasure that confers the lifetime achievement awards and honorary doctorates. Not that they are lesser poets later by any stretch of the imagination — merely that their younger selves are a different sort of electrifying (to me, anyway) than their ‘poetic institution’ selves, when they have to try to live up to their own earlier example.

We have to imagine ‘Digging,’ as we do with ‘Ergetz vayt,’ as a new poem, the first time it was printed, the first time it was read aloud, announcing a new arrival, a new voice. Something that was breaking new, untouched ground, something going after those ‘riches kneaded into the earth’ (to approximate Leivick’s words).6

Digging
 
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
 
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
 
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
 
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
 
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
 
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
 
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
 
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

We have all that stuff — stuff, as in material, physical matter — from which so much of Heaney’s best known poetry will come; all that easily-satirised squelching mud. If it weren’t so distinctive, you couldn’t parody it half as well.

It also prefigures all those bog body poems of his that hint at a violence buried in the past, steeped in the soil itself from time immemorial. One cut of a shovel into the peat and up it comes, fresh as the day it was buried. And they’ve got that whiff of sadism, too, participation in the form of a tacit agreement with the violence being done to the body. Or at least a slightly chilly observer’s eye as it all takes place: ‘the artful voyeur.’

It’s semi-fashionable at the moment to dump on Heaney, his popularity, and those too-imitable sounds of his; the famous Seamus, as his close contemporary, the critic Seamus Deane, termed him. But if we’re honest, that’s what we like about him, too — the appearance of simplicity.

We also have those great jabs from Manger and others about Leivick as at least part cult of personality. But we also have him lauded for the clarity and simplicity of his writing. Leivick himself addressed complaints about his themes (see below) and his frequent, rather rigid rhyme (four line stanzas, abab) — but noted he found it freeing and inspiring rather than straightjacketing.7 And some of those ‘faults’ are exactly what I like so much about Leivick.

And on my part, I’ll counter this with a poem I’ve long found strikingly similar in spirit to ‘Digging,’ if not necessarily in form or language: Leivick’s ‘Lid veygn zikh’ (Song of Myself or Poem About Myself, but I prefer to lean into the seeming allusion) in 1937’s Lider fun Gan Eyden. Under this Whitman-esque title,8 we find another poet at work using his pen as digging implement.

There’s a slight difference, though, in that this poet had wielded the shovel and the pick himself — unlike those who came before him — digging at least one grave and breaking the ice on the river in Siberia. Also unlike Heaney — there can be no pretence of this being a ‘first’ poem. It comes a few books in, in the middle of a book.

Song of Myself


I saw whipped bodies
And the blood that ran from them;
Afterward, when I became a writer,
I wrote poems about the snow.

People loved those poems
Because they were white as snow,
But they often disgusted me,
Because I had covered the blood.

Years passed this way,
And it deeply troubled me.
I became a writer forever,
And the blood waited beneath the snow.

Once I took up the pen
And scraped away the layer of snow.
And all took fright,
As the earth spattered their faces with blood.

The blood was still warm,
As though only just shed;
It raised an angry din:
—Why does he torture us with blood?

Hard voices cursed
My songs, struck at their step,
My heart fell in two
At the battered feet of my songs.

People waved barbed switches
waving them back and forth,
Striking my poems’ bare bodies 
With their hatred.

My poems — they wept,
As woe was already in their nature,
And remained lying on the earth,
But, finally, no longer covered by snow.

I have always been a writer —
My truth is still this:
In the blood of whipped bodies
Lies my whipped name.

My songs as well,
And so they should lie;
Perhaps I will cover them again,
When I have new snow.

I haven’t made this rhyme — it follows Leivick’s frequent, possibly most frequent, form of quatrains with rhyming alternate lines — but I think you can get the picture.

Here too the pick and the pen reveal human history, including a history of violence, instead of more mundane ‘riches.’ It isn’t mummified bodies that are uncovered, but the blood — still hot, only just iced-over. Digging down also reveals a personal history, as it does with Heaney, that Leivick was always a writer, and that this ’treasure,’ and this blood, waited for him to find it and himself.

Of course the blood, the wounded body it implies, is also a treasure. He’s putting his name and his words out there to be whipped. Perhaps all writers are, in that respect, slightly masochistic.

Will there ever be enough snow to cover all that blood again? It’s a slightly tricky issue. Snow does fall again in 1945’s I Was Not in Treblinka, in ‘My Longed-for Snow Has Come,’ covering what seems to be a child’s grave, marked only with a number. It’s not really the same, sanitising and obscuring snow — only one that lets you rest a moment before you realise exactly what the shape beneath it is.9 But we still find him longing for the snow that will cover it all in the sonnet ring that closes the book (again, a literal translation here):

How should I again bring the song of white snow?

And I must bring it, through life or through death —
And again cover the blood, the white and chain, 
So that in purity there may tread

The feet of one who has heard my voice,
In whose heart, nursed on the pain of love,
Still trembles the dream of true poets.

There’s another major difference between the two poets. Heaney finds his own tool to metaphorically continue the work of his forebearers — or, as he says in his own speech about ‘Digging,’ the seemingly lighter tool to wield, while Leivick is at least half looking back at his grandfather’s refusal to ‘make an adze out of the Torah’ — to turn his learning into a tool, a financial means. And there’s something significant in Leivick’s own manual labour, at least in his earlier career, his taking up of those more traditional tools alongside his pen.10 I can’t read his pieces that mention things like running a sewing machine over your fingers without the visceral feeling that he’s either done that himself or been sitting next to someone who has. It might not have been working the fields, but it’s physical enough. And, of course, there is his actual ice-hacking and grave-digging in Siberia.

As for Heaney’s pen being ‘snug as a gun,’ with the insinuation of doing more violence as well as being the shove, that uncovers it — Leivick’s pen sometimes has the point of a spear, the blade of a knife or sword. I don’t know that we ever get the sense of Heaney’s pen really firing, even metaphorically, only its documentation (or his spectating) of violence, but Leivick’s pen certainly, he tells us, leaves broken and wounded lines in its wake almost as often as it strings words and letters like pearls.11

This isn’t the only poem by Leivick where you find traces of the people (if not always the bodies themselves, as in Heaney) that have passed through in the ice — you can go back to the beginning and find those Siberian poems with the remnants of people in the ice; bootlaces, book pages…but I’m interested in the digging and the self-revelation here, as well as the idea of Leivick’s ‘name.’ Both Leivick’s ’Song of Myself’ and Heaney’s ‘Digging’ are declaration of intent and ‘branding,’ so to speak, and a realisation — just look at that certainty building in Leivick: when I became a writer, I became a writer forever, I have always been a writer.

Am I a just a fan of a rather striking head of white hair? Could be.

But this final article gives us, in essence, Leivick’s eulogy for the whole of the Russian Revolution, even if he doesn’t know it yet. It’s remarkable to contrast this article and the poem that references it (‘Bullfight’) with Leivick’s depiction of his visit to Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square back in 1925 and his imagined conversation in Lenin’s Tomb between the embalmed bodies of Lenin and Stalin in 1956 — a contrast only made possible by the extraordinary variety and length of his writing career.

This is the last travelogue I have in its full run, so it’s the last I’ll be sharing here. Both the trip to Russia in 1925 for Frayhayt and Israel in 1950 for Tog remain tantalising in their incomplete nature and poor quality of their scans. I believe there to be articles about his trip to South America in 1936, but those are also currently unavailable to me, barring the one that appears in Esayen un Redes.

Back to Part Eight.

Back to the beginning of the series.

Monument and Tombstone

Just at the entrance to the city park in Mexico City stands the monument to the assassinated Mexican president, Álvaro Obregón — a stout general with one arm. His right arm was amputated. He lost it in a revolutionary uprising which he led. Became president of Mexico in 1924. In 1928, he was shot by an opponent. On the spot where he was murdered stands this monument to him: A statue of the general together with a tower of red and black marble. Beneath the tower, on the ground, in a closed-off area, is where he was shot. You see it through glass. Before he breathed his last, he said ‘I die for the Revolution.’

The monument is large, imposing. Steeped in sun, brightness. It towers proud and celebratory.

This is freshly-minted history immortalised in marble. It seems that if you were to lay a hand on it, you would feel the heat of a living body beneath its cold gleam, you would feel as blood flowed through veins. And as you look at the president’s missing arm, you want to reach out to touch that arm with your own fingers, to touch the place where the hand should be; touching the emptiness which should be fullness.

Whether or not you are acquainted with all the details of the frequent Mexican government coups — and in this case, with all the details of the Obregón Revolt, you immediately, instinctively, feel one thing: This monument is the new historic Mexican tragedy. A great act of the people’s dramatic awakening. And it makes you happy the monument is handsomely built, expresses respect for and recognition of the murdered president, and it also makes you happy that the monument stands so expansively, so proudly, so clear and bright, surrounded on all sides by the sun.

***

On the same day, I also visited a little street on the edge of Mexico City and the last house on that little street, where Leon Trotsky lived and where he was murdered. Also freshly-trembling, bloody history. But without pride, without honour, without monumental expanse.

I went there without any political intent, nor with any expectation of finding anything more there than what I already knew about Trotsky’s tragic end. I was also clearly aware that I wouldn’t discover anything new about the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin’s regime in visiting the scene of the tragedy. Nor did I seek to find anything new. And I didn’t.

Nevertheless, when I walked down that obscure little alley and visited the yard and the house where Trotsky stayed and spoke to Trotsky’s widow1 for a few minutes, I left shocked, broken.

Politically, I was never a Trotskyist, just as I have never been a Stalinist, and my visit to the house of the murder didn’t alter my attitude toward the political side of Trotsky’s being.

Trotsky, as a leader, was not my ideal. But the human drama of Trotsky was a powerful one, and you first felt that power when you saw with your own eyes the far-flung, poor, dusty corner to which fate dragged or, correctly said, drove, hurled, this man who was certain that he was Mother History’s anointed one, the most fortunate, the most successful, and therefore the her destined, world-leading son. In the end though, it turned out that history was no mother to Trotsky, nor even a stepmother, but a sort of condemning, pursuing, eternally-threatening hand, which grasped and killed.

This isn’t the time to go into the essential quarrel that took place in the ranks of the Soviet leadership and which brought about the Trotsky tragedy; the one-sided explanations which the strictly party, personally-interested current writers of history volunteer about it are certainly not to be accepted, and it’s also clear that this isn’t the time to be able to objectively artistically portray the tragedy at all. Objective artistry means having a deep understanding of both sides and being just to both sides.…At the present moment, it isn’t possible to do this from beneath the mountain of political and social quarrels, grievances, intrigues, lusts for power and mastery, uncovering the sorrowful humanity of these quarrels. But in the future — it surely must not be in the distant future — I think it will be done. A few artistic attempts have even already been made regarding the Trotsky tragedy. One such interesting attempt is from A. Leyeles.2 This will certainly assist in the seeking of the wished-for objectivity on all sides.

Yes, there are attempts. But full illumination isn’t possible. The time has not yet come. I certainly don’t undertake to do it in notes. I only present the shock I experienced when I saw the pierced heart of human destiny itself.

A leap from the fantastic, legendary Moscow Kremlin, where Trotsky shone in his time, to the dirty, dusty, shabby alley, and to the poor, stone, fenced-off, closed-off house at the end of this alley in the outskirts of Mexico City. What a leap!…A house that resembles a village jail. The windows bricked up. An entrance — a blank black gate, which is indeed suited to a little prison. Gloomy. Locked. Bolted. No way in or out. And on all four corners — little towers with roofs. Armed guards used to stand in the towers. They would watch and keep look out that no one came to attack the man who sat inside the improvised fortress, writing and writing with a pen he was certain was a sword, and that every word from that pen flew across the globe like a flame! And then suddenly — no more pen. No more flame. No more guards, either. Protection was no longer needed. The writing desk stands as it stood, but no head bends over it any longer. No hand trembles. On the desk pages lie, as they lay, papers — as they lay, but covered with a sheet because dust falls on them.

And in another room, in the nearby bedroom, the walls are pierced with bullets which a band of attackers shot into the bedroom through the window in the middle of the night, about half a year before the murder. The bullet holes haven’t been plastered over. They are left in memory. They are livid as open wounds.

And the Widow Trotsky wanders through all the rooms. Her face twitches. Her eyes barely restrain their tears. Barely. Barely. But they hold them in. They weep inside themselves. She bears her sorrow proudly. Silently. Silently. Lonely. In solitude.

And in the courtyard — a little garden planted with cactuses, and in the middle of the little garden there stands a tombstone. Trotsky’s name and the year he was murdered are carved into the tombstone. Black letters. Over his name — the hammer and sickle, and the red flag hangs over the whole stone. It hangs wearily, fallen, powerless, miserable as a broken wing….The hammer and sickle carved on the stone also look miserable….You stand and look and think: How have the hammer and sickle wandered here? See how it’s been driven here, the red flag? And if that’s the case, whose is it in truth — the red flag? To whom does it belong?…You stand and look and it starts to seem to you that it will soon shudder, the red flag, it will flutter and start to shiver. Toss about, storming. A moment passes, and another moment, and another moment, and — nothing happens. The sorrow overwhelms more and more and the flag sinks down, down, even more hopelessly.

This, it seems, is world-history? This, it seems, is world-drama? This? This miserable stone is world-tragedy? Or is it perhaps a game for children? Children have built the little turrets, sown the cactuses, carved a little tombstone and hung a torn red shirt over the little tombstone. They did it and — ran off in all directions. And hush. Silence. Why did they do it? No one knows. Go and ask the gloomy black gate. But the gate doesn’t know either. It doesn’t know. It remains silent.

The gate opens. It lets me out. I leave. I go away. The further I go, all the more keenly I begin to feel the lonliness of the grieving widow and the downward-hanging flag, the silence of the tombstone. I would like to turn and say a word of consolation to them. But I don’t find that word.

March, 1943, Mexico

— H. Leivick, Tog, 9 June, 1943

Trotsky’s grave at his former home turned museum in Mexico City. Photo credit here.

I’ll take this opportunity to mention B. Rivkin, writing in 1921 for Di Tsayt, names Trotsky as his golem — the ersatz messiah who overturns the order of the world. A golem who falls victim, in more than one sense, to his own axe.

So I thought I’d share Leivick’s (admittedly brief) words. Any infelicities definitely mine, as done on the fly!

9 May, 1954

Dear colleagues Y. Harkavy, A. Zak, M. Turkov and A Yanasowicz.

I have received your letter in which you ask me to take park in an anthology you are publishing in the honour of our dear Shmerke Kaczerginski, Z”L.

You probably understand yourselves that I am not able to send you any great work on Kaczerginski. The time is short, after all. I am sending you only a few word. And it truth, I wouldn’t be able to better convey the upset with which I was filled the moment I learned of the terrible misfortune, and with which I am still filled as I write these lines, in a longer article.

The news of how Kaczerginski had perished stunned everyone here. Never mind talk about the unexpectedness of his having been burned in an airplane. The injustice of it is more horrifying. He, who had fought courageously as a partisan against the Nazis, against the Hitlers, against being burned in German crematoria hadn’t escaped being burned — fire, fire!

He was so wonderfully brave! He was so wonderfully sincere! He was so wonderfully proud, both fighting as a partisan against the Nazis and when he came out, when he felt that he had to speak his truth, against Stalinism.

He was beloved by all of us here in New York when he was a participant in the very first sessions of the Cultural Congress. He roused all of us then with his speech about his experiences in the forests as a partisan and about his bitter disappointment in the people who lie about totalitarian redemption.

I recall, as I was in communication with him before he came to America for the first time for the Cultural Congress, when he sent us the large, precious collection Songs of the Ghettos and Camps1 in order for CYCO to publish it. He asked me to help him in the compilation, in the sorting of the material. He also asked me to write an introduction to the book. I very much wanted to accept and did. And I thanked him for giving me the opportunity to at least be a small partner in the great and sacred work he did. He applied himself with such care to every song in the collection, every verse. His own beautiful spirit fluttered over the songs. It was my own thought that such sacred material couldn’t be approached by conventional literary measures. Nevertheless, he asked in the letter that we must be absolutely strict, in order for the poems and songs not to be artistically embarrassed. They ought to start at the height of artistry, as well, in honour of the songs themselves. In this frame of mind, he accomplished a wonderful work. Today — his own works, full of heroism, full of Jewish fidelity, full of a particular grace. Moreover, his social energy, the exuberance of his spirit.

A great loss. I send my condolences to all of you and, above all, to his family, to his wife and child. Do all that you can for them. Do all that you can to cherish the memory of Shmerke Kaczerginski.

Yours,

H. Leivick

Kaczerginski, from the Ghetto Fighters’ House archive.

Back to Part Five of the poems.

Our last instalment of Mexican poems.

The first appears in In Treblinka bin ikh nit geveyn as ‘Shabbos in a Desert Land.’

Evening In A Desert Land

The cactus menorahs stand lit
It’s eternal Sabbath in desert-land — 
Stretch out your fingers and palm,
Touch the sun with your open hand.

The sands separate into seven colours
Once again the thorn-bush burns
A divine voice permits this fire touched
And God Himself says: See my face.

And when He says it, the sands and stones
Rise up from their earthly place,
Set off across the pure breadths
Back into God’s first word of creation.

And all the flames descend
And lie down like a flock of sheep,
The eternal Sabbath gathers them together,
And spreads its holiday sleep over them.

Sealing forever the covenant of covenants,
The night falls upon the evening flame,
The millions of menorahs stand lit,
And guard the covenant between the world and rest.

Cactus menorahs — to some extent Leivick sees God in every landscape; He’s the connecting thread between all the disparate places Leivick visits and writes about. He is, of course, for a poet who says that every poem is a prayer, the connecting thread of all poems. Even the poet who blasphemes, he says, is praying.

Many of the images from his Mexican voyage collect here — reaching to touch the sun, the endless desert, but it could easily be one of his poems about the desert in Palestine/Israel. His own frequent images of fire/flame is here one of continued creation, covenant and protection — the burning bush, not the destructive flame we saw in his vision at the Hotel Maria Cristina.

Under The Sun

Poverty horrifies from early to late
Mexican poverty— masses of people
Eyes that wail, flesh that rots,
Under the sun that soothes and caresses.
Under the sun, that suddenly becomes
Scorchingly tropical — a furnace,
Bodies rising like dough with yeast,
Over a bare, parched earth.

Bells swing, psalms carry
Overhead with a crucifying mockery,
Underfoot, a leprous street. —
Two steps away, sleeping palms,
Monuments. Marble. Dance and parade.
Homesickness and Jewish song off to the side.

This, of course, is his summary of the other side of Mexico — grinding poverty, need and want. His intense disgust at Christian hypocrisy. But this, too, is an image that could be set almost anywhere.

Leivick noted way back at the beginning that the poverty he was witness to in Mexico was the same he had seen elsewhere, everywhere. The weak get nothing, the strong get everything. The palaces and the hovels stand almost beside each other, in stark contrast. The sun shines down on everything pitilessly.

And in contrast to the Jewish desert of first poem, here the Jewish people are off to one side, incidental, an afterthought in all this grandeur and misery.

Not Mexico, but…From NYPL digital collections.

Gods, Pyramids, Monasteries

A few hours journey from Mexico City are found countless historical places with remainders of the former, idolatrous, pre-Christian Mexico: Stone gods of all sizes and appearances; altars on which sacrifices were offered; palaces, stairs and extraordinary mountainous pyramids. When you travel to see them, don’t fail to visit the monuments and monasteries built by those who destroyed the old Mexico, the children of Jesus who needed to introduce love and kindness and — introduced persecutions, hypocritical edicts, pyres and bloody murder.

Hundreds of years ago, conquering the land, they build monasteries, holy palaces and cathedrals. Now, although the church still rules quite strongly over the people, a great number of these sacred buildings are in a state of ruin; no one lives in these monasteries any more. Emptiness itself dwells in them, staleness, the invisible blind owls, which you indeed do not see, but whose scent you smell over all the cells and dungeons, and whose wings begin to flap above your heads as soon as you enter the buildings. You distinctly feel the idol-paralysis, idol-horror.

***

The external descriptions of the idolatrous Aztec pyramids and the old Spanish Catholic cathedrals and monasteries have already been presented by more than one traveller. They are sufficient and I have no desire to concern myself with this. Another thing captivated me, and that was the astonishing inner similarity between all cultures, between all gods and idols, between all the intents, so to speak, which lie in the giant, body-of-Christ-filled monasteries and the stepped, built in the open desert, snake- and beast-head-filled pyramids and altars. And never before had I so felt the gulf which lies between all the idol and god-cultures, including the Jesus cult, and the Jewish bodiless, shapeless, formless, purely ideological, greatly spiritual, universal idea of God. And I can’t restrain myself from saying that I have never felt so deeply the truth and the joy of the Jewish abstract concept of God, and I have never felt so proud of it as then, when I saw with my own eyes, in one and the same time, both the idolatrous clay golems of the Aztecs and the vulgar depictions of God and God’s corporeality of the old Spanish monasteries and cathedrals. And I thanked God that he had kept us, Jews, from having art like this! And I also began to understand how the auto-da-fé, the murderous dungeons, and the sadistic, holy murder-instruments of the Inquisition came to be, and I heard still more keenly as the terrible wings of the sacred owls flapped over all the dungeons and cells. Their flapping resounded across the whole of the land.

***

The sun burned fiery over the Aztec altars and giant pyramids. The pyramids have a certain similarity to the pyramids of Egypt, and a shudder goes through you at this thought of similarity.

They even say that the pyramids in Mexico were built at the same time as the pyramids in Egypt. Whether or not this is correct, I do not undertake to say, but it’s enough that the idea should arise amongst people that the pyramids of two tremendously distant from one another parts of the world should built their pyramids in one and the same era.

Everywhere, it seems, there is one and the same desire for enormity, for towers reaching the heavens, and — for massacre. Small gods and godlings and — high, mountainous footstools for them. And the builders themselves, their creators, come to nothing, sheep and moth-eaten unfortunates, and they crawl on the steps and stone spikes to the mountain-tops where they erected or hung their gods made of wood or stone with their own hands. They climb up to the mountain peaks, they clamber, they lie themselves out and crawl further. Then they creep down, to the deepest caves, to the lowest step, and they howl and they tear the flesh from themselves and they offer human sacrifices, and they dance, and they dance their hearts out, and fall, exhausted, sated and gorged on god-eating, god-drinking. They, and all those after them, the distant generations who, like them, have eaten god. They have drunk god. They have tasted his flesh. They have tasted his blood.

They have, intentionally, many, many generations later, in order to continue this god-eating, seized upon an imagined god-murder and god-blood, in order to always be able to eat his body, to be able, even in mere wine, to add the sweet taste of blood…For now I enter the monasteries, which were built for him, for the simple murdered Galilean Jew of whom a world of people have, in their bloodlust, made a crucified god so that they may always have their goblets of blood full and holy.

***

The walls of the old Spanish monasteries, now empty, are still hung with his crosses and crowns of thorns, with his images in all sorts of crucified poses and tortured contortions. Filthily smeared in fat rivulets of blood. The thickness of the blood — truly palpable with the hand. And together with him and the angels and Madonnas — dozens and dozens of portraits of monks, holy fathers, popes — faces from elsewhere; large necks; abyss-like eyes demanding, dominating; dry lips.

The portraits hang on all the walls, in all the corridors. A foreboding surrounds, stifling, sepulchral. Oh, how people have twisted and bent the idea of God, butchered, incarcerated, ossified and sullied it with barbed, pointed crowns of thorns.

***

When you see all this now — and if you see it, you see the true face of hissing Christendom — even the least desire to revise something of this blood-and-filth game, to want to peel away a pure figure of a redeemer, and return this figure back to the source, as is attempted of late by some of our own Jewish neo-Nazarenes, subsides. I walk around through the monastery cloisters and corridors, under the vaulted stone ceilings, accompanied on all sides by the faces of holy crosses, which look at you with eyes of physical, corporeal, lustful god-staring, and I feel with all my senses that there is nothing to revise, that those who think there is anything to revise are mistaken.

He cannot be separated from all that which has grown up in a scant two thousand years around the man from Nazareth. He cannot be cleansed, this man from Nazareth. He cannot be liberated from the blood and thorn rags, from clouds of incense, in order to return him to former Galilean simplicity. For if he is removed from beneath this two-thousand-year-old blood and god cult which has grown up over him, absolutely nothing at all remains of him. He cannot be removed, peeled away from all this. Hopeless. By no artful means, however great they should be, can this be achieved. Too much lust, too much crude might, too much death, too much sublimated sin, too much fleshly symbolism surrounds him like a permanent atmosphere. Hopeless. He is either a god or he is nothing.

It’s good, I think, that Jews haven’t accepted or made peace with the idea that one of their own, an ordinary man, should be able to become their god. Welcoming him back and adding him to the line of prophets is entirely out of the question, because those who weren’t placed amongst the prophets in the past can’t be added now. Modern Jews cannot increase the list of prophets. And he who dared to want to be more than a prophet — a god — gambled away both things — both god and prophet.

So I think, walking around through the corridors, caves and cloister-cells of the old Mexican monasteries, which the Spanish conquerors of the land built hundreds of years ago. They give me a key to the hidden places which make my Jewishness clear and conscious for me. They allow me to smell the scent of old inquisitions and the pyres, on which the bodies of my forefathers burned.

Now I go through a pitch-black monastery cave, lined with cells where once, the overseer describes, the victims of the Inquisition were tortured to death. I carry a lit candle in hand to light my step. Here is a cell where the victim would stand upright, and drop of water would fall on their shaved head from the ceiling above them, through a wheel, rhythmically. Drop after drop, over the course of several days, the water would fall on their bare skull until the victim went out of their mind and died in agonies. This used to be done below. And above, at the same time, the monks would prattle on about love and kindness, and about the merciful nature of the human god, who is as a lamb! And the human god would hang as always — as he hangs even now — on the cross — and could not do anything to save the victims, because he himself was a victim in the hands of the Inquisition. And the Inquisition, it seems, tortured its victims below, in the dungeon, and the victim on the cross, only because of its heart. The Inquisition was, poor thing, full of mercy and good will and love. Yes, only because of that!!

When you finally leave the dungeon and the monastery cells, where people held their god captive like a prisoner in jail, on an eternal scaffold over hundreds and hundreds of years — when you finally go out into the street, into the bright, sunny, Mexican street, your lungs almost shout with joy when they start to breathe fresh air again and everything in you truly sings:

— Ah, how good it is to be in the bright sun!

— H. Leivick, Tog, 30 May, 1943

The ad for the official welcome evening in Mexico City in Der Veg. Glantz and Aks are listed as participants, amongst others. Lectures, music and recitations. All that for two pesos!

When I awoke, I saw it was a dream — but before I awakened, I was certain it was reality.

I flew in an airplane to the Moon.

Flying in an airplane was nothing new to me. I’d already flown several times in the States. I‘d already flown to Europe, there and back. But the thought that I flew to the Moon for the first time naturally filled me with excitement.

Excitement — not so much for the moon itself as for the thought of how the world would appear to me when I looked at it from the Moon.

True, I was almost certain that I wouldn’t see a change, that it wouldn’t look any different than the way the world appears when looking at it standing on the Earth. My almost-certainty drew itself from the experience which I’d already had flying over the Atlantic to Europe. That experience was the same as flying from, for instance, New York to Detroit. The difference in time created no difference in the space, in the distance. The wonder that is in you when you look at the world standing on a small hill is no smaller than it is when standing on the highest mountain. The wonder of of a single mile is no smaller than the wonder of the distance that exists between our Earth and the very furthest planet.

But what then? It’s merely of interest to fly to visit the Moon, or Mars, or Jupiter.

That the Earth is on the verge of flying to the most distant planets is a fact. To the Moon is already a long established flight path. Airplanes fly there every day. The speed is unmatched. And furthermore — I haven’t tried the trip yet. And now I’m trying it. I am flying to the Moon. I look through the window of the airplane and I see — nothing. Pure emptiness. It seems that the airplane, it its fantastic speed, stands in one place. Yet again — it resembles the emptiness you see when you look out while flying from New York to another city when there aren’t any clouds in the sky.

I’m not overly impressed by the speed or the transparent emptiness. My excitement that I am flying to the Moon ebbs. I’m filled with an indifference. I feel tired and begin to doze off.

In dozing, I feel that someone has sat beside me. I shake off my sleepiness. Yes — a passenger from another seat has sat beside me. A man of thirty, elegantly dressed.

‘You’re flying to the moon for the first time I see,’ says the man.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘for the first time. How did you know?’

‘From your drowsiness. If you aren’t used to it, then you get very drowsy. Though it ought to be the opposite, the excitement shouldn’t let you sleep.’

‘And you’re used to it now?’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘certainly, I’m flying for the twentieth time already. I doze off when I want and wake when I want. The route from the Earth to Mars and Jupiter is opening soon, and I’ve already reserved a place on the airplane to Mars.’

‘Why do you fly so often?’ I ask.

‘I fly to the Moon almost every month. I deal in Moon rocks. You’ve caught me red handed. Don’t you know my store on Fifth Avenue?’

‘I don’t know your store at all. I don’t often go to Fifth Avenue. What does the Moon look like when you see it?’ I ask, curious.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘there’s a customary joke answer to that sort of question: A moon like all moons. Mountains, stones, granite.’

‘And what do you see when you’re standing on the Moon and looking from it?’

‘I don’t understand the question at all,’ says my conversation partner. ‘What do you mean, what do you see? What should you see? What do you see when you look from the Earth? You see nothing. You see stars. You see a moon. That’s the way it is when you look from the Moon, too.’

‘You see nothing. You see stars. You see a moon. What do you think you’ll see standing on Mars?’

‘Probably the same thing.’

‘Why, then, do you prepare to fly to Mars?’ I ask.

‘What do you mean, why? On Mars, it’s certain now, there’re people like me. I’ve already founded a service to import Moon rocks to them.

‘Perhaps they take flights to the Moon themselves?’ I ask.

‘Best of all, they don’t make trips like that yet,’ says my companion, with a sort of certainty. ‘In any case, we’ll see. It’s worth it to fly there anyhow. May I ask you why you’re flying to the Moon?’

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know why I’m flying there,’ I reply. ‘My heart told me that I’d probably be disappointed.’

‘May I ask what business you’re in?’

‘Certainly you may ask,’ I say, ‘I write poems, I write plays, if that’s a business.’

‘Of course it’s a business, of course,’ my fellow flier says almost feverishly. ‘Is that a business? No question at all. I believe strongly in poetry and the theatre, as well. No doubt you’ll see the Moon for yourself and will, on the very spot, indeed begin to celebrate it in song, write about it.

‘Why do I need write about it on the spot? What for? You said yourself it’s a moon like all moons.’

‘What do you mean, what for?’ My fellow flier is startled. ‘I’m busy with rocks, with pieces of granite, but you — a poet. How can you say, how can you ask such a thing? You have to be something different. You won’t be impressed by touching the Moon with your hands and feet?’

‘Touching the Moon with your hands must indeed be a great thing,’ I say, ‘and of course I’ll be impressed when we leave the airplane and my feet walk on its soil. That’s why I’m flying there now, just for that, to touch it with my own hands.’

‘Just for that?’ My fellow flier looks at me.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘for that, and also to feel if touching the Moon is as wonderful as touching our own Earth.’

‘What wonder is there in touching our own Earth?’ asks my fellow passenger. ‘How can you even make such a comparison? Of course, we find eager sorts who snatch up simple stones from our Earth like they snatch up the stones I bring from the Moon, and pay just as high prices for them as they pay for Moon rocks. I’ll tell you the truth: I can see that you want to lessen the Moon even more in my eyes, the real Moon, and you want to give our Earth exaggerated praise; its dust, its sand, its mud, its swamps, not to speak of its forests and fields. To tell you the truth, I’m amazed at you.’

I don’t know how it happened that our conversation was suddenly interrupted. It seemed that we were both suddenly beset by a drowsiness or a sleep. I also slept, it appeared, through our arrival on the Moon. I opened my eyes when it seemed I’d already been on the Moon for several hours. I lay face up on a hard, stoney mountain. My fellow passenger was nowhere near me. I’d forgotten him. I looked all around myself. Still and dark. The stillness and the darkness — the same that I have always known, since I have been alive. The darkness gradually began to relent. A paleness began to filter through it, then — a silvery-ness. The same paleness and silvery-ness I saw on the steppes and mountains of Siberia, in the heights of Colorado, on the granite of the Negev near Eilat; the same paleness and silvery-ness I saw in the heavens over my hometown of Ihumen in Belarus. Exactly the same. And see — the same sky set with stars as Abraham’s starry sky in the Chumash. Exactly the same.

I strain my memory to recall — where am I? I remember that I am on the Moon. It seems a bit strange to me. Or, perhaps, not strange. I’d found my same place beneath the same stars. And my eyes — the same eyes. They look with the same astonishment at the same divine mystery.

The same — not lessened by a hair. Not a hair further from it, from the divine, nor any closer. And good that is it no further or closer. Eternal balance, all around.

And then I recall my fellow flier, and it makes me happy that he walks around somewhere, here on the Moon, collecting stones. And it doesn’t even bother me that he collects them to sell them after returning to the Earth, just as it doesn’t bother me, for instance, that people collect diamonds or pearls or gold on the Earth.

And when I think like this, I am enveloped with a longing to be back on the Earth. I lie down with my face to the hard stone and begin to dream a sweet dream that I lie on the stone of the Earth. I start to feel that looking from the Earth, I saw more stars and closer than I do now, looking from the Moon. And as I start to feel so, I get up and — begin to fall. And I feel such an ecstatic happiness in this falling…

H. Leivick, Tog, 3 December, 1955

Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Internet Archive / Library of Congress

In ‘What Do You Do In Palaces At Night’ there are two images which interest me greatly — the pen as weapon (or tool) and the prison garb. Both are intensely personal to Leivick and fairly frequently deployed. It’s also writing about writing, which frequently produces some of his most interesting poems (in my opinion).

His writing about writing is, naturally, about an important part of his own conception of self. The order he imposes on his letters, his words — here, on the broken and wounded fragments of lines — is perhaps a reflection of his various attempts at reconstructing the disarrayed, fragmented self (which we can follow back at least as far as Di Yunge and other introspectivists/modernists in terms of movement). But it’s maybe also his own version of a Dada-ist cut-up, where he himself has done the fragmentation and is reassembling the pieces into a different order which reveals something new or more truthful. We already know from elsewhere he’s got a dislike of relating things in perfect chronological order!1

The prison coat/smock coming out of the box here is reminiscent of the poem ‘Smith,’ (Naye Lider, 1932) with its forging of katorga chains and the retention of his prison coat in a drawer for future wanderings (sometimes this is replaced with a prepared shroud that turns red with the blood of others when tried on for more than a moment).2 Koytman, one of the protagonists of Leivick’s drama Do, vu di frayhayt (written c1912, published 1952), also refuses to sell his katorga coat, preferring it to any other and symbolically remaining a prisoner.

The prison-palace, too, is an image we see repeated in Leivick’s work when he sees the setting sun reflected gold in the prison windows in Oyf Tsarisher Katorge following a visit by his parents.3

At the gates, on the way back to my cell, a guard gave me the sack with the biscuits, sugar and cigarettes. I took it in one hand and, with the other, I pulled on the chains so they didn’t batter my knees so much. It was already dusk. The evening sun struck the barred panes of the prison windows. The glass shone with pure gold. It was strange to see such wonderfully pure gold in the windows of a prison.

How long since I’d seen such golden sun. How long, how long.

It seemed to me that I went not into a prison, but into some enchanted evening-palace.

What Do You Do In Palaces At Night

What do you do in palaces at night,
While I lie in eternal planning
Gathering up bits of broken lines
From beneath the point of my pen?

I want to set down your features,
And cannot clearly depict them — 
Your dream-form begins to creep
Into some abyss-like reality.

In your palaces, of course, 
The night is full of golden suns;
For the wandering step, though,
The palaces remain closed.

And prison taught you
To love this life of the grave;
Now my eyes wander around
Around your fantastical home.

What do you do in your palaces? —
I think that sometimes you jump up
And see the walls all bursting,
Like a net on a humped body.

You open, I think, a chest,
And take from this chest,
A striped prison smock
And chains, link after link.

You dress your body in all these links,
And button up the smock as well;
You start to walk — steel chains ringing
To the dance of the cap on your head.

A march across the golden halls;
The lustre — gleam on top of gleam.
You walk until the walls begin falling
To dust on your cap and chains.

Then your body heaves itself
To the ruined marble floor;
And what happens after that —
Happens exactly as I wish.

I take you away from the palaces,
To me, to my eternal planning, 
Where I put together wounded lines
From beneath the blade of my pen.

Mexico, March, 1943

I know I’ve spoken about Leivick and the substance that time takes on in his work quite a bit here. You mark time, pass time, serve time, and can even pick up and hold time’s physical essence in Leivick’s work. Time is circular, traveling around and around and seemingly becoming thin where it touches, allowing travel, visions, the joining of beginning to end and, eventually — the existence of all times at once.

It’s this permeability and unity of time that allows all of Leivick’s Ihumen to stand at the foot of Sinai, that lets a prisoner from Dachau travel to the Maharam of Rothenburg, and sees Isaac and Job meet and converse.

But light is also something that takes on substance as it’s refracted, reflected, as it enters (or doesn’t) into dark places. Here there is artificial light, nothing like the sun. Not that he doesn’t sometimes take the sun itself to task, but the indoor, lesser suns are lesser gods here, idols, the gleam of this hallway doomed to collapse in dust, rather than open out into life of one kind or another.

And you’ll get a second poem in this installment, ‘Until It Is Tomorrow,’ because Leivick takes a break in his Mexican articles to write about both B. Rivkin’s 60th birthday and about his attendance at a memorial evening for the town of Pukhovitz.

I’m currently (at least, at this writing) reading Rivkin’s essays on Leivick, and it’s clear he had a unique and interesting take on the material, sometimes in stark contrast to that of Sh. Charney. On Leivick’s part, he credits Rivkin for helping him to feel better while hospitalised by encouraging him to read Tehilim.

For Rivkin’s 60th, he shares this anecdote:

When I think about B. Rivkin, I will never forget one particular moment that isn’t easy to recount, but which I will:

I once encountered Rivkin — and this was years and years ago, in days of deep tragedy for him, days laden with death and sorrow — I encountered Rivkin on Second Avenue and, if I recall, Twelfth Street. He stood in the middle of the street, without a hat, and wept. It was the middle of the day. People passed by him. He didn’t see them. He saw no one around him in the middle of the day, and no one stopped at his crying. By chance, I came along and spotted him. I approached him and said: ‘Don’t cry, Rivkin…’ He was obviously quite happy with my appealing to him with the words ‘don’t cry.’ He spoke with great hope:

— Death will not conquer. No! I have decreed it!

While this poem doesn’t have a note attesting to its place of composition, I feel like the ‘sun’ of it, plus being sandwiched between poems that are marked as such, certainly puts it in the right area. This one does appear in 1945’s In Treblinke bin ikh nit geven, using the first line as title,

Until It Is Tomorrow

I go about steeped in sun
And flames wave above me,
My heart, though, doesn’t want to know,
It laments, as if at a graveyard:

Oh struggle, struggle into the sun
And ignite like a thorn —
Until it is tomorrow
Oh, alas, what today has become!

My own fate descends —
A fiery chariot,
It flutters, it races over my head
And takes me and starts to carry me.

World-in, world-out, world-out, world-in,
Where will I stray?
Until it is tomorrow —
Oh, alas, what today has become!

I stop in the midst of flight
And fall down alone,
I fall on swords with head bare
And surrender to all.

I see everyone drinking blood like wine,
In a dance on pointed spears,
Until it is tomorrow —
Oh, alas, what today has become!

I close my eyes tight,
I keep them entirely sealed,
A wind murmurs: The blood is spilled
In the name of God.

I wrap myself in the last glow,
In old sorrow and rage,
Until it is tomorrow —
Oh, alas, what today has become!

This idea of being drunk on blood is in Leivick’s article exploring the ancient temples and monasteries of Mexico, as well, and I think we’re seeing the confluence of the blood sacrifices of the ancient inhabitants of Mexico and the victims of the Inquisition, Christianity itself, and the blood sacrifices that he views as taking place, as he writes, in Europe.

But there’s also a return to the sacrifice of Isaac, the Akeydah, as a theme, which haunts so much of his writing — poetry, drama and prose.

Drinking and/or being drunk on blood is imagery which Leivick frequently uses in reference to the Nazis — for instance, when describing the Nazi attacks on the Soviet Union (for which he still has some lingering sentiment) in 1942: ‘What can the Wotan-ruler of a German people drunk with misfortune, sunken in blood and slaughter, pit against the Soviet people but tanks, airplanes and millions upon millions of young men raised in great madness?’

Diego Rivera’s Quetzalcoatl mural in the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, from 1929. If you follow the link, there’s a nice breakdown of the images in more detail. Rivera believed he had Jewish ancestry himself, and he illustrated a Yiddish book about Mexico City — Berliner’s Shtot fun palatsn (City of Palaces, 1936) about which you can find brief discussion by David Mazower here.

A freylakhn Pesach!

When a holiday like Pesach comes, memories from your childhood and younger years surface. Memories from the distant past, on the other side of the ocean, of how the holiday engrained itself into your soul and affected your life.

The older you become, all the younger grow the memories.

Last year, I told you what Pesach looked like fifty years ago in my old childhood home in Ihumen, Minsk Gubernia, in Belarus — and into what a wonderful figure my mother, who slaved away for years, was transformed on the night of the first seder.

This time I want to tell you how, in the year 1913, in flight from Siberia, I unexpectedly arrived in a small, isolated village in Siberia, into Pesach enchantment.

It wasn’t my home, nor my parents’ table. It was a house still enveloped in winter snows, although it was already Pesach according to the calendar.

Distant — the end of the world, remote, but full of wonder.

It was during the very first portion of my escape from exile — fleeing across the frozen Lena River, then across the steppes and through the woods in stages, through small villages where I would — if it was necessary to spend a night or two — instinctively seek out Jewish houses. Sought, but very seldom found, although I knew that Jewish families of old exiles were scattered across all of Siberia. I couldn’t, for the sake of safety, do too much wandering around in the streets — or, better said, the single small road — of the villages.

I’d already undergone a four-week journey by horse and sleigh over the length of the River Lena and had come to a place where I could no longer drive over a smooth path of ice. It was the end of winter. The ice over the river had begun a little to slacken in places, and was covered with water. What was more, I was now close to the large city of Irkutsk. Only a few verst [.66mi] still remained to Irkutsk train station, from which I could take a train to European Russia.

Ought I risk leaving from Irkutsk immediately? I could be easily arrested there, at the station. Should I make a detour through a long, large forest? Driving through the wood would take until around Sivan. But if I made it through the difficult drive, I would come to a small, out of the way railway station. There I could board a train with much less danger.

I settled on driving through the wood. A good opportunity presented itself: A caravan of farmers driving wagons who brought loads to spots near the River Lena, where I was, and then drove back through the forest empty. The caravan would bring me to a little village, not far from my desired train station. I truly saw a sign of luck in them, and the farmers gladly welcomed me for a small payment. They took me for one of their own people, as a Siberian; I was dressed like them, Siberian-style and for the winter.

They warned me that I had to expect a difficult journey. The frozen earth melted a bit by day, but at night it was still frozen through. The way through the wood was rough, jagged. The wheels jumped, they slid and shook out your soul. I prepared my sack of bones for the coming shaking.

The farmers mentioned that it would soon be their Pascha. Their talk reminded me that it was already Spring. I was back into this reckoning of time, the reckoning of which I had entirely lost track during my riding. I had arranged it in such a manner that I would come to the desired hamlet on the first day of Pesach. I felt a Pesach-time nostalgia. A nostalgia that I hadn’t felt, not for years, so keenly as I felt it travelling with the farmers’ caravan in the depths of the great forest. It was a terrible journey that only the strength of youth could survive.

We arrived at the desired village around midday. I rested a little one of the farmers’ small shacks, then got up and looked around the village to discover how to get to the train station a few verst from the village.

The day became colder, gloomy, Northern. The streets of the village became hard and thickly covered in ice. I was alone, full of unease. Who knew if my boarding the train, which would pass not far from here in the middle of the night, would be allowed? After so many weeks of wandering, having arrived at the train — I didn’t want to fail at this point! I didn’t want that at all!

And where could I change into the hidden European suit that I carried with me, wrapped in my pack? Who could I trust? I came to the edge of the village. I saw no way over. I walked around a second time; ice and emptiness. A mournful, frozen expanse— and not a living soul.

I turned to go back, crossing the village again. I suddenly caught sight of a Russian sign over the door of a building: a little shop.

I was delighted. Perhaps I could buy something for myself there.

I went up to the door, tried to open it. The door did not open. It was locked. I tried knocking. No answer. I knocked a second time, and out came a women in her forties, asking in Russian what I want. I answered that I wanted to buy something. The woman went on to say:

‘We aren’t selling anything today. Today is our Jewish Pesach.’

She wanted to close the door again. She hadn’t seen how my heart leapt within me. I answered in Yiddish: If that’s so, then you must certainly let me in. I‘m a Jew, too, a traveler. Don’t let me into the shop, but into your home.

The woman lit up and called out in Yiddish: ‘Dovid, Dovid, we have a guest on Pesach, a Jew!’

Her husband ran to the door quickly — tall, strong, with a black beard.

‘Come in, come in,’ he cried with a greater brightness. ‘Come in! You’re a precious guest. When do we lay eyes on a Jew? Come in. It’s Pesach.’

The speech rang with joy. The happiness of celebration, of unexpected joy.

And I was embraced with such warmth by the word ‘Jew’ in such an outpost, in such world-forsakenness, in such frozen loneliness.

To me, they were two persons for whom I didn’t need to know who and what they were. And they didn’t need to know who and what I was. It was enough that we were Jews, that the man and woman and myself felt like kin, connected by one destiny. My coming to their house dawned on me like a true miracle. I’d been so overwhelmed by the unexpected joy that I didn’t feel as though I’d crossed a threshold, but suddenly saw myself at a table between two hearty people, who looked at me with delight, as if I were s newly-found son or brother who had arrived.

The table was straight-away set with refreshments, food and wine. We celebrated a festive Pesach-feast together. From what the couple said, I learned that they’d been living as exiles in the village for around ten years. They had no children. They didnt tell me why they’d been exiled and, of course, I didn’t ask.

I understood they weren’t political exiles. Nevertheless, I felt free and comfortable there, and I explained that I needed to go to the train station at night and had to change my clothes. I’d begun to feel certain they’d do me no harm, that they’d faithfully help me to get to the station.

They happily expressed their desire to accompany me to the station. They greeted me with even more joy when I’d changed into my European suit. They rejoiced, as my appearance had changed. They asked not a single question of me. They were full of anxiety about my further fate.

I whiled-away the time in the house with them until late in the night and truly rested well. None of the farmers came in. All of them knew that is was Pesach for the only Jews in the village, that the Jew celebrated this holiday.

For me, the secludedness was exactly as I desired. I couldn’t get my fill of the strangeness of this meeting. Once again, I was filled with the sense that no matter what corner of the world you might come to— you would find a Jew, and in that fellow Jew’s eyes, you would see your luck shine.

At night they accompanied me to the station. The train only stopped there when the single watchman, who also sold the tickets, gave a signal. They told me that it would be better if they accompanied me to the little station, and then let me go into the station alone.

I parted with them, bade them farewell, I receiving their blessings and they— my thanks.

As I walked to the station, the heavens were starry, the wind not so cold. I walked and thought about luck, about the coincidence of Pesach and a meeting a Jew unexpectedly on the last day of that secluded Siberian world. And a bright thought occurred to me: What corner of the world could you arrive at — and not find a Jew! It confirmed for me the certainty that I would evade the train-spies and that my journey would finish with success— with freedom.

H. Leivick, Tog, 1 April, 1953

Leivick on his arrival in Vitim in 1912.

With the Elohim-niks in Mexico City

…Returning from the Mexican village where we visited the poor Elohim-Jews, one of the three women who performed with the choir during the prayers there rides with us. She is the leader of the choir, and she had allowed herself subsumed by the most pathos of all during the song ‘Ma tovu ohalecha, Yaakov.’ She is a young woman, quite well-dressed. She lives in Mexico City herself, but from time to time she travels to the village on a Shabbos, to the Elohimniks there, to lead the choir. She has, it appears, great happiness in singing the prayers and — from her role as a song-leader in the little shul.

I sat beside her in the car and, with the help of my colleagues, carried on a conversation with her.

I was very interested to know something more about their way of life. I posed questions and she wanted to answer them. What’s more — she willingly added to every answer an explanation of things that had an indirect connection to the question asked. She spoke quietly, somewhat shyly and timidly. It probably seemed a bit strange to her that I was so interested in her information and showed a natural friendship toward her. I anticipated that she, like most of her circle, felt lacking in the presence of our Jews; lacking because — not recognised by us. I followed the movements of her face, the unhappy gaze of her eyes, listened to her extraordinarily calm, but not entirely sure voice, and the sorrow that had overwhelmed me in the little shul didn’t leave me here, riding in the car, either. A sorrow mixed with a keen guilt. Although what could I, for instance, truly be guilty of against her? I’d never foreseen the existence of such Jews in Mexico and I saw her for the first time in my life. Unless it was in the fact that, to her, I was one of the Jews in whom she saw Jewish establishment, permanence and certainty, and she might have thought that her becoming a true and natural daughter of Israel or not also depended upon me. Perhaps she indeed thought so, and held me partly to blame for the segregation in which she lived.

And I would like to agree that this separation should be wiped away. Yes, I’d like to agree. But does it lie in my hands? Is it only a technical division? Is there not also something fatal, something inevitable in the division that lies between us and them? Do they not carry within themselves a grief that doesn’t reach us? Are they capable of adopting the Jewish weeping that nests in my own heart?

In her answers to my questions, she described how her family lived in a strong Marrano manner and that stories and traditions about persecution, burnings at the stake, Inquisition tortures, etcetera, had been passed to her through the generations, and that she knows there are Jewish people all over the world, and there is a land that calls itself Eretz Yisroel, for which Jews long and to which Jews travel of late, and her heart strongly yearns for this land. So indeed she said: ‘Oh, how I yearn for Eretz Yisroel, for Jerusalem. Oh, how I’d like to be there. I’ve dreamed of going there my whole life.’ And to my question about her encounters with Jews, she said, amongst other things, confidingly: ‘When I find myself in the company of Jews and spend time with them, I feel such happiness, such a sweet happiness…’

This word, ‘sweet,’ went straight to the quick. I was astonished by the statement, which at first had the ring of exaggeration, almost flattery, to me. But looking at her face, which expressed true enthusiasm, I drove all suspicion from myself. Even more: I felt envious of her, envious of that feeling of sweetness the longing for Judaism can give…It seems, I thought, longing for Jewishness can create happiness for a person, and a sweet happiness, at that — and we, who have this Jewishness, have become dulled to it and no longer feel this happiness anymore…

***

The next Shabbos, we went to visit the Elohimniks in their little shul in Mexico City itself, far in the poor outskirts of the city. Here the building is a bit larger, even having a couple windows and more benches. And most importantly— it has a holy ark with a Torah scroll. One Torah, which the Jews of Nidjei Israel gave them as a gift. The whole arrangement though, apart from the holy ark, is almost the same as the little village shul. That is to say, the same poverty. However — the poverty doesn’t make such a heavy impression here. It’s softened and made milder beneath the gleam of the embroidered paroches and the innocent, childlike smiles of the two lions who stand rampant on either side of the Ten Commandments.

We arrived a few minutes before the reading of the Torah. Mr Ramirez also led the prayers here.

The choir here was a bit larger; several children also took part in it. At the head, beside Ramirez, sat three people — invited guests from the Orthodox Jews of Mexico City. They come to the little shul from time to time at the invitation of Advocate Ramirez, with instructions regarding the order of prayers and other Jewish laws. The woman who leads the choir in the village and who travelled with us last week is also a chief tone-setter here.

On the benches, there sat about thirty people. Once against— all, almost, women. I say ‘almost,’ because there were also a couple of men. No more than a couple. The men were almost unnoticeable and made no impression at all. The women, though, as well as the children, made the same impression on me as there in the village. Here, incidentally, the women were much better dressed. Some of them even looked dressed up. The air of Shabbos was felt in all of them.

The festive tichels on everyone’s heads gave their faces a pious and quiet grace. Over this grace, though, there was felt that general, characteristic sorrow of theirs — their grief and reticence. A couple of them — quite old — sobbed in distress, flowing with tears.

Ramirez opened the holy ark to take out the Torah, and the profound solitude that hovered around the single Torah scroll in the ark gleamed before the eyes.

‘All alone in such solitude’ — That was the thought which shuddered.

Before he called anyone for an aliyah, Ramirez unwrapped the Torah and lifted it on high, as is done in our shuls after reading, for hagbah; lifted and revealed its inside before everyone’s eyes.

Everyone rose from their places and stretched out their fingers toward the unrolled Torah, then put their fingers to their mouths and kissed them. Ramirez then spread out the Torah on the little table and everyone sat back down. No more than three aliyot were given out, and the reader read no more than a few verses from the Torah for each aliyah. It wasn’t leyning, but a sort of uphill climb over scalding stones. Climbing three times was more than enough for the poor, strained powers of the baal koreh.

After the reading, Ramirez re-rolled the Torah scroll, dressed it in its mantle, took it in his arms and carried it round and round the congregation. Everyone, particularly the women and children, fell to the Torah with their lips and kissed it with great bliss. At that moment, I entirely forgot that I was in a little shul of extraordinary Mexican people. It seemed to me that I was in a shul in my former hometown; so near and so similar this scene appeared to me. And I, myself, was enveloped with that warm tenderness toward the Torah which used to stir me in my own childhood. The ‘purity’ — the holiness. How brightly it flashed before my eyes! — The Purity. What a wonderful name these people have given the Sefer Torah. What beauty, what moral impeccability lay in calling the Sefer Torah by the name ‘The Purity’!

Ramirez placed the Torah back in the ark, covered it with the paroches, and the shul again took on its former poor appearance. All the faces suddenly became unhappy, and the unhappiness wept with silent, hidden tears…

February, 1943 (Mexico)

— H. Leivick, Tog, 9 May, 1943

From the Haggadah illustrated by Saul Raskin.

In some ways, there’s very little to say about this one — it’s a poem of pure disgust.

Bad subject, worse painter. Amen.

Leivick certainly had a profound appreciation of visual art — there are brief reviews of artists such as Chagall1 and Glicenstein2 to be found in his writing for Tog and other writers refer to the art on his own walls, not to mention his own painting/potentially going to art school at one point mentioned by at least two contemporary critical biographers and painting as an occupation being given to his hero Levine in Dort Vu Di Frayhayt. That’s not even getting into the fabulous art that sometimes accompanied his work, like Max Weber’s woodcuts in an early edition of Golem3 or Benn’s illustrations for Lider tsum eybikn.

I think you can run this one up alongside ‘Ruined Gods,’ and compare them a bit, at least in Leivick’s relief that this isn’t his God; Neither plumed serpent nor ‘hanged’ man. And maybe we also need to think back to those painted Madonnas in the Hotel Maria Cristina, too.

This is also a good poem to keep in mind for some of the final articles and what they tell us about his conception of Christianity at this particular juncture.4

You Hang, You Hang

You hang, you hang, you hang,
On the cross. 
A long, long time since you’ve been seen
Amongst the masses.

You hang, you hang, filthy with blood,
Hanged.  
Ach, what do they want, what do they still
Demand from you?

Human detritus, writhing, writhing,
Squalor and rags
Stroking, licking — kissing, it seems
The soles of your feet.

Ach, your painter, the dauber, 
The profaner,
Better bloodying himself
With nail-holes.

Ach, your desecrator, desecrator, desecrator —
Brush disdainer —
What did he have against your knees,
Against your fingers?

Why did he nail 
And hang you
And leave you
On the dusty posts?

You hang, you hang on the wall
And on the gates. 
A good thing you aren’t my God
Oh, very, very.

We can also discuss this poem in relation to the fact that Leivick has sometimes been the only man in a room full of supposed Christians who notices a crucifix/icon, which he describes in Oyf Tsarisher Katorge.5 The imagery deeply unsettles him, as he sees violence towards Jews in every aspect of its sheer existence, while it’s completely ignored by others as an everyday, negligible thing. Just background noise.

Another interesting feature here is the repetition — hanging, writhing, desecrating — though it’s not as extensive as in some of his works. Charney calls it his internal refrain, as I’ve mentioned before, and I’ve also had feedback from some quarters that this repetition of words and phrases isn’t as ‘marked’ in Yiddish, but I’m of the opinion that it’s still fairly marked, especially when contemporary native speakers and critics make particular note of it in Leivick’s writing. It’s one of his tools and one of the features I do try to maintain when putting things into English, as I feel it’s a big part of what makes his voice so distinct, even in prose.

On to Part Five of the poems.

Painting by Boris Borvine Frenkel. Frenkel did a few illustrations based on Leivick’s work which can be found in the volume of French translations. I honestly couldn’t resist this one — from it’s vaguely Chagallesque Jesus in an almost tallis, to the fact that he’s crucified on the village water-carrier’s yoke, another burden for him to carry — Leivick wrote more than once about his own town water-carrier, wrote about being sent to carry water himself and even attended yeshiva at the Water-carrier’s shul…

A Visit to the Elohim-niks

In Mexico City, and in a few villages deep in the countryside, there are found a large number of Mexican families who say that they are Jews and trace their ancestry to former Marranos. In their appearance, you note no feature that recalls Jews.

Thoroughly Mexican faces. Their deportment is also Mexican. When you spend a certain amount time with them, though — particularly when you come to them with a Jewish interest, and you look at their movements, their reservedness, and their near- humiliation — you begin to see a true Jewish sorrow, a true Jewish yearning, in their eyes.

It could be this is merely an illusion, that we ourselves ascribe this sorrow and yearning to them.

But even if so, they deserve our closeness and attention. Because if they were complete strangers, it would be impossible for them to willingly adopt this way of life and conduct which gives them no more than misery and isolation. I don’t know how to explain it, but they unsettle my spirit; my visit to them left a keen disquiet in me. I have never so profoundly felt the power of Judaism as then, when I sat amongst those poor people in whose faces it was difficult to see my relationship to them, and heard as their lips trembled out — with almost the same trembling as my father’s lips — the sounds of Shema Israel.

A small community of these strange Jews is found in Mexico City itself. They also have a little shul. Another group of theirs of found in a small village a couple of hours car-journey from Mexico City. Before I visited them in Mexico City, I travelled to the group in the village. The trip was organised by their leader — someone by the name of B. Laureano Ramirez, a lawyer.1 He is one of them and claims to be of Marrano descent himself. He turns his energies to organising this group, tying them to one another, and seeking means of removing the boundaries which lie between them and our Jews of today — with whom they, these groups, would very much like to fraternise. They would like to — but it isn’t so easily accomplished. What’s more — the boundary isn’t even especially weakened. The boundary is there, with all its division and distancing.

The lawyer Ramirez is their enthusiastic representative. He comes to them on Shabbos and celebrates Shabbos prayers for them in a very primitive manner. He is sermon-giver, prayer-leader and Torah-reader. In a word — in their custom. He is, naturally, far from being a great scholar. He knows a bit of Hebrew and that’s enough. He reads from Tehilim for them, and from other Jewish prayers, as well as parts of the Sidra. He interpolates the Spanish translation from verse to verse, because most of his listeners can scarcely read a whole loshn koydesh2 word, let alone understand the Pirush Hamilos.3

This group is called by the name ‘Elohim-Jews.’ I don’t know who gave them that name, whether they, themselves, or some outsider who designated them this — and perhaps it was once ironic. I found nothing ironic in this name of theirs, however. On the contrary, the Elohim-symbol strongly moved me. The name, it seems to me, is striking, vivid, dramatic.

Colleagues Glantz and Glikovski4 travelled with us. They know Spanish and they greatly assisted me by taking on the role of translators. It was also important and of interest to them to more closely acquaint themselves with these Mexican relations and see them in an intimate light, the likes of which my colleagues have unfortunately never seen them in until now, nor, it seems, wanted to see them.

We arrived in the village at eleven o’clock in the morning. It was Saturday. The village, like most Mexican villages, looked dusty, grey, dirty, and boundlessly poor. The houses — little houses of put together from simple clay. Without windows. Blind walls. And all around, such beauty, such spaciousness, such mountainous wonder. Mountains packed with silver. And a bright, pure sun dazzled the eyes with its radiance.

Ramirez took us to the little shul. There it was. Let it not be spoken aloud — a hut like all the huts.

Without windows. Only a door. The door was open in order for the light of day and fresh air to penetrate inside. Fifteen, twenty people could sit on the couple of poor benches. Bare clay walls.

At the eastern wall, right, stand two little tables. Left — something which one must call an organ, though it resembles an old, disintegrating chest, a child’s toy, that cannot be touched with too firm a hand. There is no holy ark, because this little shul has no Torah scroll (the shul in Mexico City now has one Torah scroll and, of course, a holy ark) What sort of sign is there, then, between these four bare walls, which remind of their connection to Judaism and the Jewish God?

There is such a sign and it is two white tablecloths that are spread over the tables. Long hems hang down from the tablecloths, and on the hems is written — on one tablecloth, in Hebrew letters: ‘Remember the Sabbath and Keep it Holy’ and on the other tablecloth, in Latin letters : ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One.’ And on either side of the phrases — Stars of David.

On the benches were sat ten or twelve women, a few holding children in their arms. There were no men. Where were the men? The men were busy at work somewhere in the silver mines. The women were arrayed in all their Shabbos poverty. Heads wrapped in tichels. The children — barefoot and ragged.

The women held siddurs in their hands. Hebrew texts with Spanish translations. They peered into the texts and their lips whispered piously and tremblingly. I had the impression that they couldn’t read, but they murmured with their lips, repeating blindly after the prayer-leader Ramirez. The word ‘Amen,’ though, they uttered clearly and sharply, with palpable passion. They did not lift their eyes from their siddurs, keeping them lowered modestly; and if a brow did lift, it revealed an eye full of suffering, of quiet sorrow, sadness and — tears.

I did not take my eyes from those thoroughly Mexican women’s faces. I sought my connection to them, sought my people’s sorrow in them with a keen longing. It began to seem to me that in the face of an older woman, wrapped in a black tichel, I clearly saw my mother’s features. My mother’s upper lip also, it seems to me, hung over her lower lip so tremblingly, and my mother also used to, it appears to me, wrap her head like that with a tichel.5 Yes, yes, so it seems. But —— only an illusion. An illusion.

The order of prayer was entirely confused. That is to say, there was no order. Ramirez mixed in a bit of Tehilim here, a bit of prayer there, and then he read something from Vayikra and then Ramirez gave a sign and the three youngest women united and made up a bit of a choir.

They stood at the side of the young man who played the organ and began to sing along to his accompaniment. He, this young man, also helped to sing. He was also the reader of a couple prayers. He said the prayers in Hebrew, but it was hard to catch a single clear word from his mouth. It seemed that he poured with sweat when he said a word. The three singers understood him though, it appeared. They sang delightfully, with feeling and pathos. There was little Jewish melody according to our fashion, but there was much religious rapture in their song.

I cannot say that I felt enraptured by Ramirez himself. In him, in his manner of reading and speaking, particularly in the sermon which he gave, there was mostly the sense of a director, so to speak, a lecturer, an ambitious leader and a scold. The scolding was on the account of the Jewish community in Mexico City, which refrained from befriending the Elohim-Jews. When he spoke about this, there was palpable anger, disconsolation and offence in his voice, and it bothered me greatly how he addressed his anger to me, as well, and deep within myself, I felt as I was enveloped by a sharp sorrow. Perhaps he was indeed correct, I thought. Perhaps we were all guilty in this lack of friendship. Perhaps we were all guilty of such empty pride. We too, wronged, defeated, and offended, display strangeness and look down upon those more wronged, the even more defeated, who beg to come into our family, who long, as they themselves say, to nestle together with us under the wings of one God.

Ramirez spoke about this, and in the end it was no more than a sermon. And it could be that he was out to make a particular impression upon me, the guest from the States, with it. But what did the poor women, his listeners, think at the time? Did their faces also express annoyance and scolding? No, by no means. Their faces did not cease to be steeped in mute sorrow, in mournful silence, to give more mercy and more blessing, and I fell all the more and more under the power of that wondrous mystery, of that divine mystery — the mystery which calls itself by an extraordinary name: Jew. And I was stunned and astonished and I asked myself and the four poor walls of the extraordinary little shul and the silent, sorrowful faces: What precisely drives these poor people to want to be Jews? Why do they need it? What do they want from Judaism?

What do they seek in Judaism? What do they see in me and those around me that makes them so envious of us? I know how many Jews — for whom the Elohim-niks yearn so — now wish to stop being Jews, have grown tired of their Judaism and their fated burden, wish to flee, struggle free from their own skin, from their being, want to steal away from themselves, from their destiny and their essence, and here come people, different, poor, downtrodden, brown and red-skinned — many of whom, as they themselves told us, were Catholic for years and went to the giant, beautiful cathedrals, knelt before the hanging, blood-stained, gold-trimmed, real-bodied god — renouncing the giant cathedrals, extraordinary paintings, gilded carvings and crowns, the abundance of candles and chandeliers, angels with singing bells and breath-taking incense for a dark and poor little shul — a hut — with bare walls, a clay floor, broken benches and ordinary tablecloth with the lonely inscription Shema Israel…

Yes, what drives them to it? And who drives them to it? Do they not sometimes hear that hungry, primal voice, the true Elohim-voice, which we, professional Jews, well-practiced in Judaism, full of prayer, over-satisfied with all 316 commandments, no longer perceive?

The choir of three women, accompanied by the child’s organ, start to sing with great rapture:

‘How beautiful are your tents, Jacob.’

The song interrupts my thoughts, but the meaning of the words ignites my thought again, and my eyes are held, as if they have only just seen the small, miserable four walls of the little shul — the tent of the Jacob-caller, the Jacob-dreamer. What a beautiful little tent!

My irony, though, drains away of its own accord in a moment. Through a strange force, I am drawn into the flow of the choir’s song. A chill goes through me. Where am I? What is around me? Who sings it? Who moves to a higher pitch in ecstatic fear of God? Am I not in the cave hiding-place of Spanish anusim?6 Am I not in an Inquisition dungeon? See, look well, do they not come — the Torquemadas — are the pyres not lit and does the song not come from throats surrounded with hellish flames?

How beautiful your tents, Jacob! How beautiful, oh how beautiful!

Mexico, February 1943

— H. Leivick, Tog, 1 May, 1943

Forward to Part Seven.

The emblem of the ‘Kahal Kadosh Benei Elohim’ of Mexico.

Today I’ll lead in with the well-known story of the two pockets, attributed to Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa. In one pocket, to be read when needing consolation, a note reminding ‘For my sake, the world was created.’ In the other pocket, to be read at times of too much self-certainty, a note reminding ‘I am nothing but dust and ashes.’

The dust and ashes is all too real in 1943.

We’ve already seen the red-bearded man wearing a yellow star and carrying the baskets full of the ashes of Jewish children in the Hotel Maria Cristina in Part Two. But the relative complacency of those who find themselves going to bed full and warm, Leivick reminds us, must still be punctured.

Later on he’ll talk about the pitiful attempts made at protesting the war, calling for action, how they declared fast days and signed petitions and sent their sons to fight, but was that really all they could have done? But he isn’t there yet.

Remember where you came from, remember where you’re going.1 This could be you tomorrow. This could be you ten minutes from now.

And To You, Jewish Brothers

…And to you, Jewish brothers, 
I would say:
Keep memory of hunger
Inside yourselves.

Because every foundation is dust,
Because every wall falls down,
Hunger blooms eternally 
In the bodies of young and old.

And I would also say,
Asking of myself as well:
Where will you spend tomorrow?
Where will go you from here?

But I see a fire in you,
And I see how your hands 
With love, with loyalty,
Fall to threshold and wall.

I welcome and note
The caressing hands,
But I drive myself
Deep, deep into an unsettled land.

I also think, perhaps, we might see more definite traces of an admiration for the ‘Elohimnik — someone who fervently, passionately, takes a fate and belief upon themself despite the difficulty. Maybe even because of it. However cautious he may be, Leivick certainly knows the story of Ruth and others who joined their own destinies to that of the Jewish people.

We might also talk about Leivick’s various ‘lands’ again, in respect to this poem. Famously, we start with the uninhabited, untrodden ‘forbidden land’ which is somewhere far, far away, for which the prisoner yearns. By the end of that first full book, 1919’s Lieder, he has passed through a dream of a ‘summer land’ and is in his ‘own land,’ guided there by a rainbow which has disappeared by the time he reaches shore — but the faceless abstract personages have become the first person.2

Keynem’s Land (1923) brings us exactly there, to a post-war, post-revolution, and, perhaps significantly, post onset of chronic illness, no man’s land. But the speaker is no longer alone, they travel as part of a pair; it’s still far away for one, but close for two. Naye Lider (1932) takes us back, for the first time, to the ‘Soviet Homeland’ in 1925. But first we must pass through ‘someone’s land’ — that ‘someone’ perhaps being Jesus, denoted by the roadside crucifixes in Poland.3 And in In Treblinka bin ikh nit geven (1945), no man’s land will become ‘Everyone’s Land’ in a poem of the same title.4

Here, though, we are in the land of unrest, anxiety, both public and private. And as there is so often in his work, there is fire — both generative and destructive, as always.

Parícutin, the volcano which suddenly appeared and erupted in Mexico in February of 1943.

I seem to have picked up some new people, so hello!

Everything here is my own translation from Yiddish, flaws and all, except where noted. I’m self-taught, so maybe more ‘flaws’ than ‘all’s’? The Leivick is mostly above-board, for the rest — I ask forgiveness and indulgence.

The Bright Side of Jewish Life in Mexico

The brightest aspect of the Jewish community in Mexico City is, without doubt, the Jewish school movement. I have already made mention of it in my previous notes. The scope and size of the Jewish children’s schools certainly deserves to be reported in more articles. And I would certainly do so, were the character of my notes precise reportage. But I set myself no such aim. I think this will certainly be done by people in the field of Jewish education in time, because a detailed report on the Mexican Jewish children’s schools will certainly be of much use both to itself and to the entire Jewish school movement of America.

For my remarks, it is sufficient merely to say the words with which I began these notes: The Jewish children’s schools of Mexico City are the brightest aspect of all of Jewish life in Mexico, and it may truly boast and take pride that such a small community as the Jewish community in Mexico City has such a large bright side. And we, for our part, may forgive this community certain faults for a while, even if we aren’t prepared to overlook them.

***

In relation to the number of residents — between twelve and fifteen thousand — the number of children who attend the three types of Jewish schools in Mexico City — around twelve hundred children — is a very large one. No Jewish school in the States, or even in Canada, can brag about such a percentage. It’s true that one of the factors which has given rise to this is the poor educational state of the whole Mexican population, and particularly the fact that the general school system in all of Mexico is very disorganised. It lacks schools and buildings, and the whole of the Mexican people, particularly in the countryside, is rootless and dejected. Therefore, regarding the Jewish school movement, there is no strong pressure to assimilate from the outside.

While this is true, it certainly doesn’t diminish the meaning and the deservingness of the Jewish school, nor must it diminish the credit which is due the builders — credit for energy, will, and love of Yiddish and Judaism. An entirely different picture could have been painted on the backdrop of the surrounding negligence and general poverty of schools. We also see another tendency in some Jewish communities which aren’t very disturbed by outside interference: A tendency to imitate the surrounding slovenliness, to copy the surrounding negligence and crudeness and not rise above them. I think, therefore, that at the very depths of the young Jewish community of Mexico City, in its very being, there is something which awakens it to vivacity, to Jewish cultural activity and cultural consciousness, the best expression of which is the children’s schools. And the Jews in Mexico City understood — and understood correctly — that in order to start the fire of Jewish schools for children, they needed to be built on the principle of wholeness, and the approach must be: Spaciousness, comfort, beauty and large scope.

It’s a delight to come into the buildings, courtyards and playgrounds of the Folk-school, where around eight hundred children study. The size — four large blocks in all — catches the eye.

You are filled with joy when you see the open fields surrounding the school building, the blinding whiteness of the walls and columns, the ample sun, which pours its rays down through the windows with a generous hand.

***

I was a guest at the dedication celebration of the Folk-school. The newly-built buildings were finished — a library, a study hall, an auditorium, a swimming pool, a kindergarten, etcetera. It was a Sunday. Well past midday. The sun poured down molten gold with beginning of twilight. The large auditorium and all the courtyards were filled with a crowd of two thousand: Parents and school children. It was a true people’s holiday. In the auditorium and the courtyards, a joyous ceremony was carried out.

As is customary, speeches were given. Children declaimed, sang, welcomed. It seems the same as is done at all school assemblies. But there was something in this celebration which gave it a particular grace. Perhaps it was due to the blinding whiteness of the hall; the blazing of the sun, which flickered over all the windows; perhaps the closely packed crowd — children and adults; perhaps the faces of the directors and builders who sat on the stage, their faces those of ordinary Jews, devoted, tested, builders of the school— a few of them already of advanced age— who have given many years of their lives and very great portions of what they own for this folk-school; and perhaps the warm evening, which struggled to push in through the windows and through the sun; the shadowy evening, which struggled through the golden sun, continually reminding all of us — me, the guest, as well — that although Mexico is far from Europe and its ruined Jewish communities, we nevertheless should not forget that there, in those destroyed communities, it is now dark, horrifically dark, and if the sun does sometimes shine there, it doesn’t shine with the same festive gold as here. Yes, we shouldn’t forget. We ought not forget.

Because a great portion of the people who are here, in the hall, haven’t been in this country long at all. They have only just come from over there. For what are a couple years in the face of world destruction and, above all, in the face of Jewish destruction there?!

Yes, yes — the there cut its way into the here, into the spacious, sun-enveloped auditorium of the folk-school, and trembled over everyone’s heads, and the whole celebration began to tremble.

And it became absolutely clear for everyone, both the parents and the children, and certainly, but certainly for the school builders and teachers, that there, Hitler makes a ruin of our communities, our schools, our books, our people’s life, he drenches them in blood and death and here, in distant Mexico, in the small, only just gathered Jewish community, a new Jewish life arises, with new cultural buildings. The connection is clear. It is full of historical meaning. Not only end of day sun shines upon it, but also the eternal Jewish sun.

This large Sunday assembly of parents, teachers, school activists and children in the hall of the Folk-school in Mexico City, the evening sun-gold that poured through the windows along with the coming shadows, does not depart from my sight to this very day.

***

I visited the other two children’s schools in Mexico: the Hebrew Tarbus school and the Talmud-Torah, Yavneh. They are schools of smaller scale — around two hundred children in each school — but the energy, the devotion, the love which surrounds them — no smaller. Good buildings and cleanliness, brightness — to be marvelled at. The kindergarten at the Tarbut school makes a wonderful impression.

Yavneh is led by Orthodox Jews from Mexico City who group themselves around the large, imposing, synagogue ‘Nidjei Israel.’1 The name alone, ‘The Scattered of Israel’ says much. Jews call themselves, and want to call themselves, the expelled, the wandering, the driven out. They like this name, this name warms them, the name binds them to the eternal nature of Judaism. The connection between Nidjei Israel and Netzakh Israel2 is, of course, clear.

The synagogue: A broad dais with high ceilings, with beautiful electric lights and lamps.

Traditional Jewish painted decoration. It makes you ache with the familiarity of childhood. You feel the full essence of a true home, of a whole, undestroyed home. It tastes of Torah, Gemara, of ‘Anokhi,’ of ‘V’hu rakhum,’ of ‘Ratz K’Tsvi,’ of ‘Gibor K’Ari.’ Here they are — the good-humoured lions. They look at you with their playful, smiling eyes. Approach, take them by the paws and shake hands.

And here are people — also your own. And here is someone, short, broad-shouldered, grey-haired, with wide, piercing eyes and — only one arm. He is missing his other arm. An empty sleeve. He immediately becomes familiar with you, leading you around the synagogue, across all the sections. He brings out an album and shows you the first page — the first articles in connection to the building of the house of prayer. And he himself — one of the first builders, one of the dedicated. He is full of trembling — this man with an empty sleeve. Full of an inner fever. He is pleased with himself, proud that he was one of the builders. Who is he? — He tells you this straight away that he was a victim of the Petliura pogroms in Ukraine at the time of the First World War. His wife and entire household died in the pogroms. He alone survived. But — without an arm. And now he is in Mexico. Here a long time now. One of the first. And he is everything: He is belief, he is obstinacy, he is faith, he is triumph. And everything he tells me leads to one thing: They slaughtered his relations and also wanted to kill him and he survived. They destroyed his shul there — and he built a shul here. The holy ark is here again. The lectern is here again. They hacked off his arm — he built with the other arm, the remaining one. Of the hacked-off arm, there remains only a sleeve, but he isn’t ashamed of that sleeve. You see — that sleeve is proud, very, very proud.

Mexico, February, 1943.

— H. Leivick, Tog, 24 April, 1943

On to Part Six.

Picture of the now ‘Historic Synagogue Justo Sierra 71’ in Mexico City borrowed from Atlas Obscura, credit to user linkogecko.

Back to the first Mexican Poems

First, a bit of news I am late in picking up, but vaguely on theme — Oyf Tsarisher Katorge is now out in Spanish: En las kátorgas del zar. Onwards!

The third poem from Mexico to run in Tog was, in fact, ‘Bullfight,’ which I’ve previously discussed here in both its incarnations:

the original, set amongst the reports about Leivick’s trip to Mexico, and the second — and easiest to find, also extant in English translation by the Harshavs — collected more than a decade later in revised form in 1955’s A blat oyf an eplboym in a group of poems about the murdered Soviet poets of 1952.

Skipping over that, we find ourselves at the fourth poem, ‘In the Hotel Maria Christina.’ Which does appear in In Treblinka bin ikh nit geven (1945), exactly as you would expect it to do — and exactly the way it appears in the paper. I think you can see why it appears in that 1945 book. But why Leivick held on to ‘Bullfight’ — whether because of dissatisfaction or some inkling of events to come — remains unclear.

In The Hotel Maria Cristina

On the walls of the Hotel Maria Cristina
In beautiful Mexico, the sunny state,
Hang full-breasted, smug Madonnas
With rosy cheeks, blossoming matrons,
Clasping to their bosoms
Stiff, white little Jesuses,
In little glittering shoes
And little purple trousers —
Such exquisite little saviours,
Such pampered little gods,
Nothing like our little Moyshes,
Nothing like our little Motls,
Who lie scattered somewhere
In pits in forbidden fields.

I look at the broad Madonnas,
Who ought to be cloistered nuns,
And I ask them: Why do you deserve little Jesuses
In little purple trousers?
Why do you deserve little saviours, little gods,
When our little Motls, Moyshes 
Lie broken, scattered,
In pits in trampled fields.

That is what I argue in Mexico,
Pacing through the halls of the Maria Cristina,
Back and forth, back and forth, until
I go around in a circle amidst my pacing,
My step starts to halt entirely.
And suddenly, see: I fall with my forehead 
To the stone walls of an old building,
Without pictures, crosses, images of gods.
And as soon as my forehead touches their stones,
There comes a voice: I am eternally alone.
A familiar voice, and now completely different,
It resounds in me like a new wonder.
The voice spreads over walls and ceilings,
A hellish flame, and in the very midst 
Appears a Jew, an ordinary father — 
With a red beard and a yellow patch.
He carries in his hands baskets filled
With the thin ash of little Moyshes.
He walks through the sated stones,
Carrying and carrying arms full,
He carries them — he knows where he carries them,
And I rush after them and cannot catch them.
I rush after them with eyes blinded
By the flames of times ended forever.

February, 1943, Mexico City

An advertisement for one of Leivick’s lectures in Mexico from Der Veg. The subject? ‘The World in Flames and the Jew in the Midst of the Flames.’ You could get tickets for all four lectures for 8 pesos, or 2.50 individually.

If you’ve been here before, I’m sure you’ve spotted Saul the Cohen, Leivick’s father,1 at the end of the poem, with his red beard and yellow patch.2 Or, perhaps, since we know that Leivick’s conception of the Wandering/Eternal Jew also has his father’s red beard, it’s Ahasver again, condemned to live and survive in solitude, taking those baskets full of ash to a place where Leivick cannot yet follow — off into eternity.

That yellow patch takes up, as you might expect, a large part of Leivick’s imagination the war years and afterwards. He will, in 1946, also view the World Jewish Congress patch he sews onto the sleeve of his UNRRA uniform as a sequel to the yellow patch which means something more than helplessness.

Looking backward, Leivick had expressed his views on the figure of the Virgin Mary before in ‘He’ (1918)— where he sees an element of distasteful eroticism3 in the relationship between Mary and Jesus and in the worship of Jesus in general. Christianity is all sex and violence to him, and he can only really interact meaningfully with the figures that effectively he strips of Christian identity (and, well, sexuality, as he does with Peter Abelard, writing poems in his voice).

But it’s also worth looking forward into his take on Easter Sunday in Germany in 1946:

[T]he Germans of Munich are walking somewhere. Going to church, we assume.

They go to kneel before Jesus — their redeemer.

The six million Jews they’ve burned won’t come to complain in the presence of their redeemer.

They won’t come arguing: Where’s the love you preached? Where’s the kindness you spoke about so much?

Let them, the Germans, the Nazis, be with their redeemer.

Let them place the trampled paroches of a Warsaw shul on his shoulders.

Let them, instead of diamonds, set the plucked eyes of Jewish children in his crown.

Let them light, right in his face, candles made from the tallow of Jewish bodies and let them wash his feet with soap made from the marrow of Jewish mothers.

Go on, go to church.

Here’s the Hotel Maria Cristina in Mexico City — it would only have been about five years old at the time of Leivick’s visit.

Forward to Part Three of the poems

A brief update from me, apropos of absolutely nothing — I’ve known generally when H. Leivick’s pseudonym came into use, but was delighted to find a letter to the editor of the Fraye Arbeter Shtime in June of 1917 (just under a year after getting married as ‘Leon Halper’) saying that he’ll now be using his first name as his last, since everyone calls him that anyhow.1

Okay, back to Mexico in 1943!

Light and Shadow in the Jewish Community of Mexico: Trip Impressions from Mexico

After a four-day journey on a train in cramped and sleepless conditions, reaching the goal — in this case, Mexico City — is truly a relief. Particularly when, a couple stops before Mexico City, you are found by a delegation sent to greet you: the renowned poet Yankev Glanz2 and the secretary of the Jewish Cultural Center in Mexico, N. Aks.3

They wandered through all the carriages until they finally caught sight of me. It was unexpected and truly very appreciated. For the couple hours we travelled together to Mexico City, I became as acquainted as possible with the general features of the Jewish community in Mexico through them and the nature of the speeches and readings that I would need to give also became quite clear to me.

From the conversation with them, I got a good sense of the unique public character of the still young and small, but quickly blossoming (especially materially), Jewish community in Mexico. I also felt the qualities and the salient faults of that community. I was already a bit acquainted, incidentally, with the stories and reports of colleagues who visited Mexico before me — colleagues S. Charney, Dr Y. Shotsky, Dr Koralnik, A”H,4 and I imagined a bit more along the lines of the impressions I had taken away from my visits to South American countries, like Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. I guessed — and my guess proved to be more or less correct — that the Jewish community in Mexico had certain tendencies in it that the communities in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires also have, leaving aside the fact that these communities are much larger, older, and have undergone difficult, unique manifestations. My hypothesis, though, was perhaps be not entirely correct regarding Argentina, because that Jewish community, one must not forget, underwent the unusual chapter of a real colonisation, of working the earth, village life, and a Jewish Colonisation Association; my hypothesis was entirely correct, though, in my application of my impressions of the Jewish community in Brazil to the Jewish community in Mexico in advance — my later observations indeed agreed.

***

The first impression of Mexico City, as a city, is a very good one, a happy, festive one. You gape at the expansiveness, at the wonderful palaces, rich suburbs, at the unique historicity, which carries you off into the mysterious past of the present culture; at the cathedrals and old monasteries, which carry you into the not-so-deep, not so-long-ago past, into the very, very well-known to you, perhaps even too well-known, melodramatic Catholicism, with the remains of the Inquisition, the subterranean odours, the mildew of bones and skulls, with the suffocating stenches of still uncleansed incense of desire, and of going into raptures with the sickly eroticism of a feverish, nightmarishly dreamed-up, joyfully lustful God-murder.

After a while, the joy of the initial impression darkens precisely because of these things. Images of poverty and humility, of barefooted beggary, with which Mexico City is stuffed full, are also cast upon your first, festive, impressions. You are, though, unprepared and don’t want to surrender to the power of these oppressive impressions in the first moments.

You think you’ll have time for all that a bit later. The monasteries, with their dead, suffocating darkness and chill, the poor with their nakedness and bare feet won’t run away. You’ll visit them or they’ll visit you. They’ll come to you on their own. Take your eyes from them for now and feast your gaze, for at least one short day, upon the brightness of the hot sun, the palms and the old alleys of the long streets, the whiteness of the houses, which remind you of the houses of Los Angeles and Tel Aviv.

For a moment, it may appear to you (and perhaps it is more than an imagining) that the eternal sunniness, the powerful radiance of the all-summer, forgets all and forgives all. The poverty is made sunny, the barefootedness is made celebratory. Perhaps you only see the screaming contrast between rich and poor because you come from a land of winter.

For a moment it may also appear to you that the eternal sunniness also excuses all the skewed and unnatural features of Jewish life. The sun, after all, covers everything in its brightness, and brightness must cleanse and purify people and things. But what plays out in tropical lands, the most brutal and bloody scenes, between both individuals and collectives, the sun, it appears, neither cleanses nor purifies at all, but makes people dull and indifferent, in a certain sense, and blurs the visible lines between one person and another, one life and another, and often transforms everything into lawlessness — I don’t wish to think about this now, either. Let us welcome, at least for a while, the sun with the creation-like wonder of ‘And there was light’ and ‘it was good.’ We imbue the word ‘light’ with so much imagination and ‘dawn,’ ‘morning,’ ‘eastern fire’ with so many meanings. Let us accept the reality of perpetual sun, at least for a while, with the purity of a dream.

***

The first impression is that the Jews of Mexico City (their number, I am told, is between twelve and fifteen thousand) are serene, satisfied. This impression later proves itself to be correct. Most of them make, as they say, a nice living. A portion of them posses a great deal and a few of them are very rich. Economically, they have undergone a great development in a brief amount of time.

They have displayed efficiency and energy, and for their energies, they have found an open field.

When you bear in mind that the community is still a very young one, all of twenty-five years old, what you see here in Jewish life was accomplished by the first, pioneering generation, and that generation is still the most active, the dominant one, because the next generation is still only emerging, forming themselves, and you must marvel at the zeal for life of the Jewish people in general, who master and conquer the harshest difficulties, who make a bit of space for themselves in the most foreign of climes, and gradually, gradually begin to become one and intimate with that atmosphere.

A Jewish person who comes to visit from another country can be very happy with this zeal for life.

They can and must be satisfied. I don’t know if the saying that a visitor comes for a short while and surveys a mile is really true. I think anything that’s truly there to be seen is seen by everyone — both the resident and the visitor. That said, the resident is too involved in the surroundings, becomes a part of it, and thereby passes certain things by. He sees them, but doesn’t stop specifically to look at them. The visitor, however, does do so. The Jewish pioneering energy indeed makes a pleasing impression on the visitor. Particularly when the guest — like, for instance, the writer of these lines — loves Jewish life not only in its zeal, in its first emergence, but also in its fatefulness, in its profound historicity. The pioneering becomes tinged with an entirely different colour in his imagination, and he approaches it with a national metric and a concept of national responsibility. According to this concept, a Jewish community, wherever it should arise and however small it should be, must feel that it is part of a larger historic Jewish destiny, and that it must feel itself responsible for Jewish fate in everything that it does and builds. Its deeds shouldn’t be to the shame of the Jewish name, to Jewish honour, in the deepest sense of the word. The day to day must be measured by both the scale of yesterday and tomorrow. And the tomorrow of Jewish life is, in the present era, deeply and tightly bound to the tomorrows of all the people of the world, and certainly with the tomorrows of the people amongst whom the given Jewish community finds itself. The art of living of such a community consists of how, on one hand, to maintain one’s own natural national personality, and on the other hand — to be an earnest, productive, progressive force in the general life of the country.

And however much the Mexican Jewish community, as a whole, carries out or doesn’t the only-just marked line, I do not undertake to say. You certainly cannot apply the maxim: Come for a short while, survey a mile. In order to form a correct opinion, you must live here a long time and be well-acquainted with all the forms of the economy here, the politics and social life here, and particularly with all the Jewish employment here, which is thoroughly based in business and industry, not on Jewish proletarianism.

However, I do undertake to say that one aspect of Jewish life here is unsuitable — and hope that the Jews of Mexico will not take offence at me for it. This is the feature of a too-great placidity of the spirit which almost reaches carelessness. I’m not saying I see this feature in all the Jews of Mexico. But I do see it in a large portion. And another difficult aspect is thrown into your face, which is an unnatural and absolutely incomprehensible inclinations of a portion of Mexican Jews to great, to very rich, luxury. If this aspect meant that we have anything to do with a true bourgeoisie, an overstuffed people who can no longer satisfy their exaggerated tastes by ordinary means, there would be nothing about which to speak. For who do the spoiled and privileged interest? But in this case, it’s an entirely different thing. It doesn’t have to do with the privileged, but with simple, ordinary people, generally good and faithful Jews, who still profoundly recall their days of drudgery, their impoverished homes, with a single word: ‘Amkho’5 — Jews, who still don’t want to stop being ‘ordinary’ Jews, even now, and indeed do not leave. How, then, do they come to such hideously bourgeois desires? That is absolutely inconceivable to me.

Unless I should see a sort of childishness in this, that when material fortune favoured them, they, like children, reached out for the sun itself and thought they could grab it, that they could hold the sun and not burn their fingers…Yes, yes, no one has yet succeeded holding the sun, not even in Mexico. But burning their fingers — and burning wounds — this people have done more than once, even when their fingers only reached towards the burning sun from a distance.

You want to strongly caution the Jews of Mexico: Protect yourself, brothers, so you don’t burn your fingers! And you want to warn them, because they concern you, because their simplicity and their hospitality are to you liking, because they are your flesh and blood, and even more so because they display at their heart a yearning for the culture of the Jewish people, for the Jewish word, for their own Jewish way of life. And they don’t only show it with words, but with actual deeds. They build religious shuls, secular cultural buildings, children’s schools — whole, full schools, not hourly, like we do in the States. They build with scope and enthusiasm. As small as the community in Mexico City is, it already has three large children’s schools with kindergartens, outfitted in the loveliest manner. The ‘Yavneh’ school and the ‘Tarbus’ school and — the crown of the local Jewish school movement — the ‘Folk-school,’ which already has about eight hundred children, and which celebrated the dedication of its beautiful buildings, playgrounds, yards, study halls, which capture the eye with their spaciousness, the brightness and their comfort, last week. Who built the Folk-school for the Jewish children of Mexico? Indeed, the same ordinary person who rushed with bare hands to seize the sun, which they cannot. And who is it that stands, even now, faithfully around the local Jewish school movement? And who is it that stands around the cultural club now? The same ordinary person with their instinctive yearning for a Jewish life.

Indeed, I don’t understand how the same ordinary person, who still has a deep longing for a healthy, honest people’s culture, occupies themself with a way of life entirely in disagreement with their upbringing, their modest character and their ideals, and which carries the germ of social dangers to come!

Mexico, Feb. 1943

— H. Leivick, Tog, 17 April, 1943

The title page for Glantz’s book on Leivick, published in 1943 and advertised along with Leivick’s lectures in Mexico’s Der Veg.

When You Encounter Border Officials: Travel Impressions from Mexico

Laredo, the Mexican border. The train arrived at midnight and stopped until sometime after four in the morning. It took that long for the lackadaisical Methuselahs of Mexican border officials to inspect the couple cars, look over the passengers and the baggage of no more than a couple dozen passengers. Most of the passengers travelled as tourists, and were not at all subject to special ordinances. Only four or five — myself among them — were in the category, not of tourists, but of visitors who needed to have another piece of paper with their visas and passports.

Well, I had prepared this piece of paper, along with a couple other bits of paper with scribblings on physiognomy and fingerprints in New York, and paid the Mexican consulate in New York a rather large sum for them — so that no fault, it seemed, might be found in my papers, even if there should be the greatest diligence regarding border regulations.

But this was my opinion and not that of the Mexican border officials. They have an entirely different approach (now or always?) to the laws and to the customs of border-crossing. They are the lawmakers, they are the border. Passing through or crossing over the border, you must go through them. What do they want? They want you to learn the Torah of bribery. Nothing more. And they’ve already found cause to argue in your papers. They inform you of some sudden new decree and you have no choice. You want to be firm and not give in, you want to assert your right, as a thoroughly-legal, passport and visa-furnished passenger, but the officials make it so that you can’t travel today, in the train with which you have arrived at the border and in which you must travel further into Mexico. They will hold you in the border-station office, under the pretence that they must study your documents in detail and that they must get in contact with a ‘higher official,’ and this higher official, they will tell you, is at home, he’s asleep, and can’t be woken in the middle of the night, (indeed, to be so bold as to wake a higher official in the middle of the night!) and therefore you must regrettably wait until tomorrow. But the train won’t stay and wait for you all night and all morning, it will leave for Mexico City without you, and you’ll have to remain in Laredo for a whole day. You’ll have to go to a hotel, dragging your things with you, and everyone who begins to circle around you, in the middle of the night at a strange station, starts to lead you into the town to look for a hotel, etcetera, wanting take you for a real ride.

A sly young man, one of the group of border officials, but without an official uniform or even a badge, approaches me and immediately tells me that if I want my papers not to be held too long, I should see him in the control office, there my papers will be immediately looked over and everything needed cancelled. I need, he says, to pay sixteen pesos for this, that is to say, twelve dollars, and I will need to pay additional tens of pesos for some more stamps that must be stuck to my passport. I will need to give to him the sixteen pesos, he says, with rather bold simplicity, and he’ll give it to the office. So, he says, it goes; he is, he says, one of the office staff. I wasn’t happy about the matter, and I said with annoyance that I wanted to wait in the carriage for the official officer.

There is, generally speaking, no awkward helplessness like that which a person experiences at countries’ borders, even when everything is in order and correctly lawful. A border fills you with anxiety and an unsettling fear. I don’t know about others, but I experience a painful feverishness at a border. It seems to me that now a officer comes and shouts: Seize him, take him, put him in chains, send him back…

Well, I conquer this by pretending it’s nothing. I won’t be taken. I won’t be shackled, I won’t be sent. But the nervousness doesn’t leave me. The other officers appear, the official ones, uniformed and badged. They look at my documents and say: Your papers need to be studied closely. It’s going to take a long time to do that. You’ll come into the control office. So now I understood that the cunning young man knew what he was talking about. And he is indeed immediately at hand now. His eyes blazing. He takes me to the control office. We descend from the car. We wind through narrow platforms, through old buildings. The night is dark, cold. We go into an office. A conversation which I do not understand begins, the telephone receiver is lifted, and they speak as though they are dealing with an army passing though, or a flotilla through the Dardanelles. And finally, it ends with ‘I see you mean well’ and I pay however much is required for ‘quick stamping of my documents.’ I would pay even more, if only to be rid of this obscurity, this scrawling, and the prospect of spending the night here and missing my train.

Only at around five in the morning did the train began to stir from Laredo. Over the border, that is, and into Mexico at dawn. All the passengers breathed freely. A trifle — fulfilling all the border commandments. Relieved of several tens of dollars. Why shouldn’t you be pleased?

Everyone throws themselves on their beds which, incidentally, were not made, only just now feeling how nervous and anxious they are from spending a night nowhere. I crawled up into my bed in the heights, but could not fall asleep. As day was beginning to dawn, I got out of bed, stood by the window in the corridor and let myself drink in the daybreak landscape which revealed itself before my eyes. The train sped through desert earth and mountain rings. An aridness came from everything. Cactuses and gnarled thorn bushes. The sun comes out, red, flaming, and all the mountains and plains are covered with a pure brightness. God’s beauty over the thorns, over parched earth. God’s beauty, it seems, doesn’t care over what and whom it spreads itself. All is one to it. For this beauty, all parts of the world are equal. It does not have to undergo any borders. It passes through them easily, without visas, without bother.

Here and there, a little village. Small houses of clay and stone. Entirely without windows. Holes in caves. Truly shabby dwellings. A few hundred miles from any city and such a difference. Here, it seems, live the Mexican peasantry, the Mexican poor, across the great, broad, beautiful and rich Mexican earth. The further the village, the poorer and more shabby. Children, tattered, barefoot, run along the dusty platforms, stretching out little hands unwashed in years. They beg, the murmur something with their languid lips. Some of children, only tiny, carry on them those even smaller than themselves — little brothers and sisters — they carry them on their backs, bundled in cloth. The little head of a child can just barely be seen. They carry their little brother or sister on their backs, and in their hands they carry bunches of blackened bananas and even blacker breads. In this way, they run up to the stances to do business with the passengers. They position themselves opposite all the windows of the carriages and shout in or, better said, hawk their wares.

Scenes of indescribable poverty, which reminds me of the poverty of Brazil, of Alexandria, of Arab villages. Almost the same image. As though they had all agreed amongst themselves to have the same dark aspect, the same manner of begging, the same shabbiness, the same eye-disease, and so on.

How uncreative poverty is, I think. How mindless in its simplicity and similarity it is, this hand that begs for a coin. It’s dusty, trembling, poised in the air. Everywhere one and the same hand. Everywhere! And you, no more than a passenger, a chance passer-by, suddenly become almost a king. Imploring eyes, squinting eyes, diseased eyes, follow you, and you must be made of iron to be able to withstand them. There is no more shocking thing than sick, begging, children’s eyes. You take out a several coins and offer them to a few of them — there is immediately a running of dozens of children, a pushing and shoving, a fight. The strongest — here, too — get their share, and the weakest — here, too — are left with nothing. A few of the children, I would swear, are no more than three or four years old. They are entirely mute and unmoving, and their little hands don’t even know how to reach out for charity yet.

The train moves from the spot, begins to leave the station. The children remain behind, the very smallest standing in their rags, frozen, as though they want to sleep, and the sun, the hot, eternally summery sun, hurls flame after flame at them.

And now we near Mexico City, to the beautiful, large, spacious city, rich in history. The landscape changes. It becomes lively, planted with the national Mexican cactus, the ‘Magui,’ from which is derived the people’s drink of ‘pulque.’ The appearance of the peasants’ houses is unchanged.

They are the same holes, huts, burrows made of dusty clay, and the dirt and masses of ragged children around them are also the same. In light of the approaching rich palaces, cathedrals and old monasteries, overflowing with sun, the pigsties in which the poor live look truly fantastical. Yes, it isn’t the palaces which look fantastic, but the pigsties, the clay burrows in which the people lie. Fantastic because they’re shocking, unbelievable.

— H. Leivick, Tog, 10 April, 1943

Onward to Part Four.

Laredo Station c1920, borrowed from the University of North Texas

It’s also really cold here.

I have no rights to this work, and ask for a bit of indulgence and forgiveness.

This is the last story that Opatoshu delivered to the editors several days before his death.

The Jews of Vurka could not recall such a cold Shabbos as that of 1859. Such a frost set in that water froze in the houses. And when the Vurker Jews went to pray in the morning on Tu B’Shvat, so great was the cold that the birds were frozen to the fences.

On an evening like this, a minyan of Chassidim found themselves with the Vurker Rebbe, with R’ Mendele, in the beis midrash. Some sat and studied, some stood and told tales of the old Vurker, about R’ Yitzchok, z”l. The younger shammes prepared the Rebbe’s table, which was already covered with a white tablecloth. He set out dates, carob, and figs. He put out a large carafe of wine.

By the broad, open, tiled stove stood the hoary old Abbo, who had been shammes for the old Vurker. Although Abbo was barely able to davven, he knew every ‘Torah’ of the Rebbe R’ Yitzchok thoroughly. And when R’ Mendele Kotzker once asked his friend, R’ Yitzchok Vurker, how it happened he had taken on a shammes who knew nothing, the Vurker answered him: ‘If I’d taken on a clever shammes, he would’ve become ignorant. It’s much better to take an ignorant one, in the end he’ll learn rabbinical words on matters.’

Old Abbo fed wood into the oven, so that it would be warm for the Tu B’Shvat feast, and sang in a hearty voice:

‘…No davenning, no studying, so long as it doesn’t upset above...’

Here and there a Chassid who paused in the middle of study, or a Chassid who moved about the beis midrash in great ecstasy, took up this nigun and murmured along quietly:

‘So long as it doesn’t upset above.’

Just then, a carriage drove into the Rebbe’s courtyard. R’ Berish Bialer alighted from the carriage. R’ Berish, the greatly learned and most important Vurker Chassid, who had become something of a Rebbe himself, and had his own followers, drove to the Kotzker, to the Vurker, and was a follower of both.

R’ Berish entered the beis midrash neither dead nor alive from the cold. Old Abbo went to meet him with a flask of liquor.

‘Bitter outside, isn’t it, R’ Berish Bialer?’

‘Brutal.’ R’ Berish removed the flecks of ice from his beard and peyos and started to recover after the second glass of schnapps. ‘Listen, Abbo, tell the Rebbe I must see him straight away.’

‘I’m going now, R’ Dov Berish.’

Chassidim, who held R’ Berish Bialer as something of a Rebbe, surrounded him with great deference, gave welcome and, timidly, asked:

‘What’s wrong, Bialer Rebbe?’

‘R’ Mendele Kotzker is in need of mercy.’

‘Alas, alas…’

The shammes entered with short, quick little steps: — Bialer Rebbe, the Rebbe is waiting for you.

R’ Berish went to the washstand. He washed his hands a long time, dried them a long while on the towel which old Abbo brought him, and a bit of life began to resolve itself before his eyes:

Vurka was homely, redolent of mother and father, of poured cherry brandy. Kotzk — calls, pulls, eternally restless, ninety-proof akvavit.

R’ Dov Berish travels from Kotzk to Vurka, from Vurka to Kotzk. How to bring a bit of Kotzk to Vurka? R’ Yitzchok Vurker had two sons. The elder, R’ Yitzchok Dovid, the Amshinover Rov and Rebbe, was a great scholar and a greatly dedicated student. The Younger, R’ Menachem Mendel, had not sat and studied. He liked horses, befriended coachmen, and the Vurker Chassidim looked askance at his ways. Only the Rebbe, R’ Yitzchok, had delighted in Mendele. After his wedding, R’ Mendele surrounded himself with better youths, with sharper minds, as if with a ‘bodyguard,’ where R’ Mendel was the leader.

With the ‘bodyguard,’ R’ Mendel walked through the fields, through the forests where they celebrated feasts, went about mysteriously. The congregation had murmured ‘What do they do there? Why such secrecy?’ He too, Berish Bialer, whom the Rebbe, R’ Yitzchok Vurker, had already closely befriended, he too had murmured unceasingly: ‘Why doesn’t he study, this Mendel? For what end does he waste days and nights?’

It was Shavuos. When the Chassidim started off, after the holiday feast, to go to the beis midrash to celebrate Tikkun and begin to study, day had already begun to dawn. R’ Berish Bialer saw that R’ Mendel and his ‘gang’ started for the market. He had secretly followed them. They went into a basement tavern. He — after them. They wrapped themselves in tallises in great haste to davven Shacharis and sit to drink wine. R’ Berish, who observed all, fumed. Afterwards, when each of the gang had drunk two glasses of wine, Mendel said to his bodyguard:

‘Do you know what a Jew must do? A Jew must do three things: scream in silence, dance while standing still, and when bowing, falling to his knees, do so with head held high.’

As Mendel uttered these few words, all lowered their heads, leant upon the table and began to weep, weep bitterly. And R’ Berish Bialer was certain that the youths, these sharp minds, filled the glasses to overflowing with their bitter tears.

Thus the young R’ Mendel had brought a small piece of Kotzk to Vurka.

R’ Berish Bialer, himself a Rebbe, became a follower of R’ Mendel on that Shavuos morning and remained so until R’ Mendel passed away.

As R’ Berish entered the Rebbe’s chamber, the door opened and the Rebbe came out to meet him. The Rebbe — forty years old. R’ Berish Bialer — thirty-seven. The same height. The Rebbe — dark eyed. Beard and peyos — pitch-black. His complexion — dull. And, in general, like his father, like R’ Yitzchok Vurker, z”l, or, as they called him, ‘Black Yitzchok.’ R’ Berish Bialer — blue-eyes. Beard and peyos — pale blond. His complexion — clear. And, with his arrival, became brighter.

They greeted each other and looked into each other’s eyes with shock and such a sorrow as though both were suddenly aware that the Kotzker’s days were numbered. The Rebbe’s eyes asked without words:

‘Is R’ Itche Meir in Kotzk?’

‘The second week already.’

The Rebbe closed his eyes:

‘When was it? Yesterday? The day before?’

Oh, he hadn’t wanted to become Rebbe after his father’s death. He had travelled to Kotzk. He had stood before the Tsadik, trembling all over and remained silent. The Tsadik had raised his heavy brows and said:

‘You’ve come to me to say that the Chassidim make a Rebbe of you? Is that it? You ought to know that we need to relinquish accounting for every follower who comes to us. And you should also know that when the holy man does God’s will, he draws Jewish hearts towards him. And of what is the holy man guilty if people come to him?’

The Rebbe held R’ Berish Bialer’s hand in his and remained silent. And R’ Berish Bialer?

He was in Kotzk. It was the week after the first Shavuos that R’ Mendel Vurker led the rabbinate. The Rebbe asked him:

‘Have you travelled from Vurka? Was there a crowd?’

‘Three thousand Chassidim.’

‘And R’ Mendel Vurker greeted each of them?’

‘Each of them, Kotzker Rebbe.

‘If so, then the ‘silent one’ is without a doubt a ‘Rebbe.’ If he gives three thousand people his hands and doesn’t himself become a leper, this is the best sign that one is a Rebbe…’

The Vurker Rebbe released R’ Berish’s hand and raised both of his own hands:

‘Listen, Berish, let us cry out silently.’

Both sat, sat and remained silent, knowing that they served God with thought. They knew that a Chassid must do everything by the rule of law, and that law is: Do not deceive your friend. And what is the rule of law? Do not deceive yourself.

Both friends sat and remained silent, davvened Mincha, davvened Ma’ariv, and remained silent, pained that the Kotzker Tsadik had passed, and remained silent. And when, in the midst of remaining silent, R’ Mendel Vurker said: ‘What is one?’ and R’ Berish had not immediately answered, the Rebbe closed his eyes and said: ‘Happy the Jew who knows that one means one, the One and Only’ and fell into such a silence that one could hear and feel it. Hours like this, hours. And both holy men suddenly broke the silence, speaking as though in agitation:

‘A shiur must be given on Tu B’Shvat, a shiur must be given, as R’ Mendele Kotzker says: ‘He who applies his mind to the Torah, this I guarantee, he will have this world and the next world from it.’’

R’ Berish went to the door. He met with the minyan of Chassidim who stood and listened in, wanting to catch a word from the holy men, a groan.

The Chassidim beset R’ Berish with open arms and wide eyes:

‘R’ Berish, we’ve stood here for hours and we haven’t heard a thing?’

‘What are you saying?’ R’ Berish Bialer lifted a hand and a shoulder. ‘It was a tish. He taught me and tried me. And I did not give in. I answered him everything. What, didn’t you hear anything? Perhaps you really didn’t hear anything, because our entire conversation was in thought and implied.’

The Chassidim sat around the laid table and R’ Berish Bialer began to give the shiur for Tu B’Shvat.

On The Train on a Trip to Mexico

The crowded conditions, the standing in line, the young soldiers, the sleepless nights, the atmosphere

…Cramped in the train. From New York to St Louis, it was still negligible. From St Louis, the crowding started to be felt very intensely. There were still two days until Laredo — the Mexican border. Not a single empty place. All the upper berths in the Pullman cars were taken as well.

And those who had gotten them were very pleased. A passenger today, even the experienced, habitual Pullman-traveller, the correctly-attired businessman for whom the Pullman-car and Pullman-club is half-home, has no privilege now. Even amongst the porters and the waiters in the dining-car there is no privilege. What can be said and argued today? I travel on the odd occasion, and I have my philosophy when I encounter unexpected discomforts: This too shall pass. So I say to myself at the worst, true difficulties in life, particularly in the face of such ‘tragedies’ as getting up in the morning and finding the Black Pullman attendant hasn’t shined your shoes!!!

How indeed can one live without an attendant, without a cheerful good morning from a porter and without shined shoes?

Hopeless. You must carry on. Even the businessman must, so to speak, make peace with his fate. A Hitler has come upon the world; because of him, the cars are full of soldiers; because of the soldiers, even the Pullmans are cramped; because of this, the privilege of the civilian passenger is curtailed, the companies don’t depend so heavily on him, don’t pursue him and his ticket money; because of this, the waiters in the dining-car aren’t so attentive to him, either, when he comes in to eat; because of this, the porter even neglects to shine his shoes.

Poor, poor shoes, victims of Hitler. If only I were able to find enough words to depict your fate, unpolished shoes — but my head and heart are occupied with those other victims who are brought to the bloody altar of the world, and when I think about these victims, no words come to my mouth at all and my lips cannot even utter the consoling verse: ‘This too shall pass.’ Hitler himself will certainly, in the end, fall into the category of ‘will pass,’ but the millions he slaughters, and our people, which he annihilates — how can we go on living with that and in that?! The more they enter the category of ‘will pass,’ all the worse for us.

With or without shined shoes — the train rushes onwards, rushes, rushes. And the crush becomes greater. Soldiers stream though all the doors, in and out. Our soldiers. Our young men. The train carries them. The train races.

***

I go into the dining-car to eat dinner. The thickest crowd is here. There’s no place to sit. You must wait in line. Naturally, I wait. I am patient in such cases. I’ve already come to stand in line many times in life. You could say that the modern man is a man who stands in line. I stand for a long while waiting for a place at a table. I sit and wait for the waiter to take my order. Just then, I feel even more strongly the great change which has come of late in the whole understanding of passenger service. The decline of the passenger is fact. All their glory is gone. The waiter has become affected, pays you little attention. He immediately wants to be rid of you, not because there are others who are waiting for a place, but because he knows you have no choice and must take what you’re given and pay whatever they say.

***

Our soldiers, our young men, sit at many of the tables. They sit in groups, most of them wearing Air Force insignia. They’re all young, tall. Their faces earnest. They behave modestly and politely. A fine sorrow surrounds each, even those who laugh and joke. I look at them, I follow their movements with my gaze. They please me. I feel that they are close to me. Still more — I feel anxious. I’m drawn to them by this closeness. It becomes thoroughly clear to me why I feel it: It might even be that somewhere in the cars, amongst the soldiers, my son Daniel is also to be found.1 And perhaps he will soon come into the dining-car. You see your own son in every uniformed youth.

Where are they going? You can’t ask them that. They won’t say. Perhaps they don’t know themselves. They are in the sway of a higher power which controls their fates. I feel deflated opposite them. I am going — I know where I’m going. I’m going to Mexico to give lectures about poetry, literature. That’s all. They are going — where? They are going to the war, into the great world-misfortune, and they bear their lives, their young lives, into this world misfortune, in their hands. What will the world-misfortune do with their lives, with their youth, with their quiet, noble faces?

I’m travelling to give lectures on Jewish life and Jewish literature! Unless I think that Yiddish literature is also a world-misfortune, a world-tragedy. Yes, sometimes I feel that it is. Yes, yes. But nevertheless, I lower my head and hunch over.

***

Night falls. The train slices through the darkness. The climate begins to change. I set off on a winter day, in a frost. The day before I left New York, I was still in Montreal, which was submerged in deep snow. And now I travel, in the span of the same week, through regions where snow is a dream. Every hour further, the closer we come to a land of sun. It is night. The sun is no longer there, but its warmth is still felt.

And the crowdedness grows and grows. There is no room for the newly-boarded soldiers.

Nowhere for them to lie down to sleep. They all hold papers with proof of sleeping berths in their hands.

They sit in groups with their packs and wait with reserved, but strained, patience for the conductors to settle them for the night. The conductors run from carriage to carriage, highly concerned. More people have boarded than there are beds in all the carriages. But room must be found for the young soldiers. They won’t be left sitting all night like that.

Four young soldiers sit directly opposite me. Very young indeed. Their faces are child-like. They are tired and unhappy. Their unhappiness comes from their fatigue. One of them is very upset, nervous. He speaks angrily. He’s offended that he sits waiting for a place to sleep when he has a ticket in hand with an assigned number of a Pullman bed. The other three quieten him, calm him, ask him to have patience. I watch the scene and I begin to get angry myself that the young men have nowhere to sleep. I start to scold myself even more that I had the nerve to be dissatisfied with an upper berth. Here I feel the difference between those who indeed go to the war and those who only talk about the war in a concrete way. And even those who have sons in the war themselves, and feel deeply about the matter — they must also feel guilty in sight of such a moment. And I feel it with all my senses. The sons wander around in the carriages, are tired and nervous. Amongst them, I think again, could certainly also be my own son, and he is certainly also tired and nervous and has no place to sleep. And I — the father, lie on a bed up above and — nothing.

Of course, the conductors settled all the young men in the end. Made room for everyone. It took a a couple of hours, but they accomplished it, and accomplished it in a fatherly manner.

At night, when I had already laid down on my bed up above, I was eager to climb out of bed and to go through all the carriages and see whether the young men indeed slept. Sleep didn’t come for me.

The unease in me grew. I indeed climbed out of bed and went from carriage to carriage. Thank God, they were all in beds. They slept as though sunken. Everywhere there was an empty space, even in part of the dining-car, it was turned into a sleeping place for the young men, for the Daniels.

Thank God. They’re all sleeping. I returned to my upper berth with a soothed spirit.

***

But I still couldn’t sleep. I had felt the sleep in all the carriages, and the more I felt it, the more my eyes could by no means close. The curved ceiling above me, over my high bed, surrounded me like a casket, and the noise of the wheels seemed to me not to come from below, but from above, from over my head…an accounting suddenly started to emerge in that noise.

Thoughts, imaginings. Past actions, words, plans. I was removed from the entire world, but I could not free myself from even the least thing. There suddenly began to clamour over me events that I didn’t want to admit had any connection to me at all. Just then, they made the greatest storm over me and truly struck me in the temples the way one beats drums. They demanded a confession from me, and if I didn’t want to, they would tear apart both my temples as one tears pieces of paper.

Just barely, with trouble, I still the pounding. My temples are calmed. I start to carry on a conversation with writing colleagues from in New York about the the necessity of a writer’s conference — in particular that we, New York writers, should hold a conference on Yiddish literature in a few months’ time. Before my departure, we had spoken a great deal about it. Everyone felt, everyone agreed, that it was very necessary for such a conference to be held.

Yiddish literature experiences profound and difficult days. The war has terribly wounded not only mankind, but also its word, its art, its poetry, its most intimate prayers. Jewish literature has been struck still more. It is simply shattered by inner stresses, unable to encapsulate the present Jewish catastrophe. And it must be able to take in and even overcome this catastrophe, for if not — but the ‘if not’ cannot come into it at all. It is a must for our literature to attain its highest powers, its highest role, just as it is necessary to win the war…

Let us now pass over the small obstacles. Let us lay aside personal thoughts and quarrels. Let us find a boundary to respect and honours. Let us spring free of our self-oppression. Let us try to reach a new beginning — but how does one do it? Shh, shh, don’t break down into shouting! Don’t shout, forbidding embitterment, which will entirely drown out my voice and even the noise of the wheels. Don’t be frightened by downfalls and hell and the iron rods of loneliness, and don’t pull any rumpled promissory notes from tight pockets and wave them in the air. Breathe, speak peacefully, keep both eyes open and bright. Let it seem that silent stalks sway over large, spacious fields, and the evening comes and it becomes more still, even more still.

And in the evening, a large audience enters, a Jewish audience — an audience from a land where I have never been. And one must stand before the audience and speak to them. This audience doesn’t know about our little writerly feuds, nor does it know how woundedly we bear our great writerly loneliness. What sort of word should I bring to them? How can I open my mouth? They want pretty words, they want winged consolation. They have a sunny sky overhead — they want sunny words, too, eternally summery words. But how can you open your mouth before an audience when everything around lies ruined and bloodied, and our people, in its very essence, is annihilated, slaughtered, poisoned? What do you say to an audience today? What?

What does the silly curved ceiling of the Pullman-car that arches over my head want from me? Why doesn’t it go to sleep? Gevalt, why doesn’t it go to sleep?

H. Leivick, Tog, 3 April, 1943

From I Ride the Harlem Line — where you can see a large collection of the Pullman Company’s wartime advertising.

I’ll be sharing the poems that were interspersed between the instalments of prose travelogue this time, as they’re closely related to the trip, starting with the poem that actually kicked off the series and the poem that followed the first article.

The first two poems are joined by what appears to be a printer’s error (as I think will become very clear — you’ll note some square brackets that are my addition) and so it seems right to me to present them together.

This is also our first introduction to the ‘Elohim-Jews’ or the ‘Elohimniks’ that Leivick meets in Mexico. We’ll be hearing more about them from Leivick in his travels, but his introduction to them here conveys a lot of the ambiguity towards them.

Here’s the first poem, as it appeared in Tog.

What Do They Want of Elohim?

(In Mexico are found a number of families who pretend they are descended from Marranos. They look like true Mexicans, but their way of life, they say, is a Jewish one. They gather on Shabbos and festivals in poor, hapless little shuls and pray in a rather strange, helpless, broken way. They have given themselves the name of ‘Elohim-Jews.’)


What do they want of Elohim?
What does Elohim want of them?
Oh, my heart, do not sneer
Hearing their miserable cries,

In grey clay pits,
In humility, in poverty, in mockery,
They make a home
For the old Jewish God.

Faces full of mystery,
Every step with trembling,
They cling to the One
With the silence of the marrano.

They bury their eyes
Intent and pious —
The book of Jewish pain
Locked and mute for them.

Why do they need Elohim?
Why do they seek His burden?
They reach out to Him
Longing for Jewish fate.

Longing for Jewish fate —
When Israel’s heart 
Is weary of its own burden,
Wants to die, wants to perish.

But they don’t know that, 
They come from here and there,
From outside, full of sun,
For fear of God’s word.

Knotted in cloths
Their breasts, throats, heads — 
God’s fear comes and terrifies
And does not depart.

Their song ignites
With Inquisition-flame
And burns like sunset
In the middle of the sea.

[To the steps and ledges
Of your giant altars
And pyramids of the gods.
I am not come to you, but to Jews
To the escaped from Germany and Poland,
About whose fates, gestures,
In their caverns,
Even in their sleep, 
The Aztecs and Mayas did not dream.

Nor will I call you as witness
To my trials and my deserts.
In my deserts, all is desolate and empty,
And their whiteness never ceases,
And my God is — who?

He has no tail, nor feet nor head,
He still burns in a lonely bush —
That is what I can tell you about Him,
As I cannot carve Him, cannot paint Him —
Sleep peaceful, sleep peaceful in your caves,
On your hard, dusty onces
Which will be no softer later,
You mute, serpentine, Aztec gods.

All ruins are equal
And all ruined gods, too
Made of the same stone,
Carved by the same hand,
Smashed by same hand.]

Mexico, February, 1943

Leivick doesn’t have much experience with non-Ashkenazi Jews, and I’ve previously mentioned his encounter with Yemeni Jewish immigrants in Israel where he’s struck by both their familiarity and their otherness. We’ll see more of that to come.

The Torah is silent for ‘Elohimniks,’ in Leivick’s poetic assessment — not speaking as it does to him. They can’t speak directly to him, either. They ‘pretend.’ But at the same time, undercutting the harness of this assessment, is his fascination with what they’re doing, how they suffer for their Judaism, how they make a place for it in a life that doesn’t allow them much to begin with, shunning the trappings of the Church for this supposedly silent Torah. And there is also, of course, his long-running interest in the Inquisition, seemingly gained mostly through Graetz’s history.1

This is a slightly confusing poem in another sense for me; as far as I know, it doesn’t make it into any collection, so I can’t correctly judge what’s going on at the end where, following the stanza about Inquisition-flame, it seems to change direction. I’ve set the doubtful lines apart with those square brackets for better visibility.

What appears (to me) to have happened is that the end of the following poem somehow got appended to this poem,2 though other times, in the case of such an error, a correction was printed on the following week. There is no such correction. That said, the following week doesn’t feature any poems by Leivick in his usual slot, insofar as he has one, so perhaps it just escaped notice (or I have, in fact, missed it). Are there missing lines which should have finished this poem or is the verse about the Inquisition flames the end? I don’t have enough information to draw that conclusion.

But moving on…

The second poem, ‘Ruined Gods,’ in which those seemingly mistaken lines are properly found, is collected — under the title ‘Ruined Mexican Gods’ — in 1945’s In Treblinka bin ikh nit geven (I Was Not in Treblinka).3

Ruined Gods

(At the pyramids of the Aztec gods in Mexico)

All ruins are equal
And all ruined gods, too
Made of the same stone,
Carved by the same hand,
Smashed by the same hand.

Greedy altars
Desert pillars —
For whom do you hunger?
For whom do you thirst?
Upon who do you gaze
From all directions? —
Ruined temples of stone gods,
To whom the Aztecs knelt,
My eye sees you now —
Another’s eye will see you later 
Tomorrow,
The day after,
Next year,
In a hundred years —
And you will all stand
Lauded, marvelled at
Amidst a sun-drenched world
And towers,
And stones,
And teeth.

All ruins are equal
And all ruined gods, too
Made of the same stone,
Carved by the same hand,
Smashed by the same hand.

At whom do you bare your teeth
Serpentine gods?
If you are angry —
Do not let out your wrath upon me;
If you lament —
Do not cry your lament to me
After so many ruined years;
If you also await as I do
The day of reckoning, 
Of trial and judgement —
Do not call me as witness
To the steps and ledges
Of your giant altars
And pyramids of the gods.
I am not come to you, but to Jews
To the escaped from Germany and Poland,
About whose fates, gestures,
In their caverns,
Even in their sleep, 
The Aztecs and Mayas did not dream.

Nor will I call you as witness
To my trials and my deserts.
In my deserts, all is desolate and empty,
And their whiteness never ceases,
And my God is — who?

He has no tail, nor feet nor head,
He still burns in a lonely bush —
That is what I can tell you about Him,
As I cannot carve Him, cannot paint Him —
Sleep peaceful, sleep peaceful in your caves,
On your hard, dusty onces
Which will be no softer later,
You mute, serpentine, Aztec gods.

All ruins are equal
And all ruined gods, too
Made of the same stone,
Carved by the same hand,
Smashed by same hand.

Mexico, February, 1943

I’m rather taken with Leivick’s reflection on who and what his God is compared to the Aztec gods — it’s presumably Quetzalcoatl mentioned in particular here — and the lines he draws between the diverse things he considers blood-thirsty idolatry (spoilers: He doesn’t think Christianity is any better).

I must suspect some of his hesitancy in relation to the ‘Elohim-Jews’ is that he sees both these Aztec gods and the Christian conception of God/Christian side of the Inquisition as their heritage rather than being the same as his own.

And really, this opens up very complicated ideas about conversion, both in and out of Judaism,4 how analogous the Jewish experience is to that of other oppressed peoples (given that the people he meets are pretty clearly of some indigenous ancestry, they too have a history of coerced and forced conversion) as well as the role that slavery, conquest and colonisation has played in Jewish history, as enacted against Jews and by Jews.5

Forward to Part Two of the travelogue.

To Part Two of the Poems.