Charney and Leivick in Conversation.
Almost.
Today, the point of departure is H. Leivick’s eulogy for the literary critic (and all-around cultural macher) Shmuel Charney, whose funeral took place 68 years ago today.
I do not personally employ Charney’s pen-name and I have not left it in-situ in the excerpts of Leivick’s writing about his long-time friend and colleague (barring a book title). For an larger exploration regarding the use of his pen-name, I would recommend Eli Bromberg’s essay here.
From H. Leivick, ‘Words of Sorrow,’ Tsukunft, February 1956:
I have been assigned the sad duty and the sadder honour of saying the parting words — of bidding farewell to our Shmuel [Charney], A”H, in the name of all the institutions where [Charney] was, to his very last moment, one of the most important leading members: In the name of the Cultural Congress and the bodies attached to it; the Arbeiter Ring, the National Worker’s Alliance, the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, Women’s Reading Circle; in the name of the Institute for Jewish Research, where [Charney] spent the last hours of his life at a meeting about the institute; in the name of the I.L. Peretz Writer’s Union and the PEN Club; in the name of the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary; in the name of Tog (now Tog-Morgn Zshurnal), where [Charney] was a contributor for a full thirty-five years (before this he was, for a certain time, a contributor to Forverts and years later — co-editor of Dos Naye Leben, co-editor of Tsukunft, editor of Kinder-Zshurnal); in the name of TSYKO and Histadruth Ivrith, which have, over fifteen years, under the leadership of S. [Charney], carried out the Lamed Prize meetings, which [Charney] saw as an attempt to realise his dream: Two languages — one literature; and lastly, lastly — in the name of Yiddish literature, which sorrows across the entire world today over the departure of a writer who, in the span of more than fifty years, was one of its most expert builders, one of its creators and co-creators, its guardian and protector — like a gardener protects a garden. Above all — the faithful believer in the literature, in ours, the most trusted custodian of it — a believer both in its national, greatly historic entirety and in every creative writer as an individual; also in individuals who are, because of some reason or another, not within the frame of its consideration. The frame, however, which he created and erected with so much devotion and loving perseverance, was large enough and bright enough for the creativity of everyone who brought something to the picture of our literature, to the picture of our culture and of Jewish education, to the picture of Jewish thought, to have had a place in it.
We all stand with bowed heads over the coffin of the deceased, and great is our sorrow and greater, certainly, is the sorrow of the deceased’s family, of his wife and children and brothers and brothers’ children and, particularly, Daniel Charney, who lies ill in hospital in Boston and was unable to come to his beloved brother’s funeral. And if I should want to pay particular attention my own personal sadness that I have lost a close, dear friend and colleague, an old comrade — how can I single my sadness out from the depths of everyone’s sadness?
And when I think of what to say, I am struck by the words: What is there to say and what is there to speak of? — However much each of us should expect the day of our own departure from the world of the living, the departure of another, of one deeply rooted in our heart, comes unexpected, unanticipated — truly such a sudden departure is that of our Shmuel [Charney]— a departure which can be likened to a lightning-strike.
Whatever we should say, everything in us will cling to the thought of remaining silent; but the silence itself is not silent. It speaks aloud. It cries out.
When this departure from life occurs — we remain stunned, the order of our existence is shaken; until we restore it, the order, there passes through our hearts the entire grief of our shock and upset. […]
From Leivick’s posthumous introduction, you certainly get a sense of just how large a figure Charney was by the time of his death, and how many different threads he connected within non-English Jewish literature in America; the Lamed Fund, mentioned above, awarded four prizes total yearly: two in Yiddish and two in Hebrew. Charney was also involved in the Achisefer — a bilingual anthology.
As for Charney himself, and his connections to Leivick…well, he wrote a whole book! Charney’s 1951 critical biography, H. Leivick: 1888-1948, is massive and the most comprehensive text that exists on Leivick in any language. Other books either focus on a few works (such as Levi Shalit’s monograph on the Moshiach in Leivick’s drama), are limited by time/lifespan of the author, or cover most works superficially in the context of larger works about more than one author (For example, Charles Madison’s Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers). Charney, of course, had the great advantages of being able to ask Leivick to clarify and access to things like unpublished manuscripts.
In his book, H.Leivick: 1888-1948, Charney gives a bit more information about his own, personal, relationship to Leivick and the circumstances that eventually brought them together for the first time. The two of them had, in fact, attended the same yeshiva in Berezin, though Charney has already left by the time Leivick arrived. They were destined to meet for the first time somewhere else entirely…
From Shmuel Charney, H. Leivick: 1888-1948 (1951):
At five years old [Leivick] was taken to cheder. At ten — he left his home, his birthplace, and traveled to Berezin, a nearby village, to study in the local yeshiva…The Berezin yeshiva is well known to the author of these lines: He studied there himself. Leivick arrived there when he had already left it. We were destined to meet not in Berezin, in the ‘stone-walled shul,’ in Reb Itche Frades’ yeshiva, but later in…Minsk Prison.
[…]
Reb Itche Frades, the head of the yeshiva, was not a Jew in the old model. Almost still a young man, wearing a pitch-black Shabbos overcoat (I recall him still today, standing before a large Gemara on the table, with a foot on the bench and with a hand twisting his short peyos) — he was a bit of a Maskil, and still more — on the quiet— a Zionist, one of the first Zionists amongst the frum Jews…He dared to introduce innovation into the yeshiva. He installed a teacher who every evening might teach grammar, mainly Hebrew, to the yeshiva bochurs…Leivick thirstily cleaved to the new study — and quickly began to write verses in Hebrew.
[…]
He had nowhere to live, he went hungry. But he didn’t give in. On the contrary, he felt proud he did revolutionary work. Even more, he had time to read (he then read mostly Russian books and journals). At the end of 1906, he made a false move: he returned home, although he knew the Ihumen police knew him. It did not take long — and they arrested him — for the second time. They found him with Bundist and other such illegal literature. He was held three months in Ihumen prison, alone in a cell. Then he was taken to incarceration in Minsk, where he waited close to two years, two long and difficult years — for his trial. Around that time the author of this book also, on a train, en route between Riga and Vilna, was arrested in a Tsarist ‘punishment expedition,’ which raged in Latvia, and when he was taken a bit later ‘with a transport’ through Minsk, he spent a night or two in the same Minsk Prison where Leivick was locked up, and this was our first meeting. I had already published then — my name was known to him through the press. I wasn’t aware (I only became aware later), that I, in Minsk Prison, had met the later to become so-renowned poet and dramatist, H. Leivick.
[…]
Their relationship, however, was one which contained two reservations — their personal natures and that which, as Leivick expounds in his essay ‘The Critic and the Writer,’ necessarily exists between the critic and his subject.
In this essay, Leivick recounts the two of them heading forth from Tog to a restaurant to talk over what’s troubling Charney — no prizes for guessing it’s a nasty letter from an author who has taken exception to Charney’s review of their book. While Leivick seems to have appreciated his rather candid reviews, not everyone did. Part of Charney’s legacy is the attack, or at least non-support, of many writers who deserved to be better known — including several female poets.
From H. Leivick, ‘The Critic and the Writer,’ Shmuel Niger Book, 1959:
In [Charney’s] letters to me (I have a couple hundred letters from him, written over the span of thirty years) he often underscored his character trait of reservation and was pleased that he could sometimes, in a letter, be a bit more open and direct regarding himself. More that once, he writes that he envies the poet, who has the opportunity, through poetry, to reveal himself before the world, to be as open before it as he wishes. It annoys him that he was not given the same opportunity, and even if he were to have it, he doesn’t know whether he would take advantage of it.
If he was not overly open about himself even in a letter, he was more open in letters about colleagues and about the grief which some created for him through arguments and oftentimes through impatiently angry demanding letters which he received. The summation of a great portion of his outpouring of the soul is that he felt lonely, that between him and the writers there became a great partition, and that he turned all his strength to making himself immune. He succeeded in instilling this immunity in himself. This helped him to maintain his equanimity and not to lose his optimism, his belief in the beauty and the sublimity of the creative word.
[…]
It also seems to me that we understood each other well, when it was a moment for closeness and when it was a moment for separation — for a bit of specific division, which is sometimes especially necessary between the critic and the writer. We understood how to cherish one another’s friendship, how to maintain it at the height of correctness, sometime even — too much correctness. Especially on my part. I guarded myself from making him feel that I desired from him, as from a critic, something in particular. The whole time, since we met and often corresponded, I had, when I used to send him a new book of mine, never burdened him with any questions, if he would write about my book and when he would write. Even when it happened that a very long time has passed and he hadn’t written about my book, then, too, ignoring the fact I certainly craved for him to react, I prevented myself from giving him any hints about it. Then, too, if it sometimes happened that I was not pleased with his approach to me (there certainly were such instances), I prevented myself from letting him feel my dissatisfaction. If this is a sense of pride or a sense of willing acceptance of everything which the destiny of a writer brings to me — whether this cheers or saddens — I do not enter into this now. I only firmly state a fact which has to do with my view of writerly relationships — of writerly, I would say, autonomy. [Charney] valued that approach of mine. He certainly had an approach like that to himself. He therefore felt mostly free in a conversation with me, even at a time when he worked on his book about me. I say: mostly, because there were also occasions when he had, meeting with me, felt greatly restricted, wound up in himself, enclosed, as if behind seven locks.
[…]
But whatever the personal and professional limits which applied to their relationship, it was clearly a close and cherished one between two people born into a world that no longer existed and living in one they felt threatened by extinction. To return to Leivick’s eulogy, which was given at a time when he had already lost many close friends and colleagues, and full of very palpable grief, their connection had always been there, waiting to be found.
From H. Leivick, ‘Words of Sorrow,’ Tsukunft, February 1956:
But I may, though, mention at the moment — however personal it may be — one detail, that my first introduction to [Charney] occurred fifty years ago, in 1906, behind Tsarist Russian bars, in Minsk prison. We were political prisoners in the days of the first revolution. [Charney] had already then published his impression-making essay about Sholem Asch’s Time of the Messiah. This was [Charney’s] revelation of himself as a critic and as an influencer of our literary path. Our meeting then was fateful, everyone’s meeting was fateful.
[…]
It was a happy experience for me to later learn that [Charney] came from Dukor, a little settlement all of twenty verst from my town of birth, Ihumen, Minsk region.
Geographic relatedness which became creative family; besides the fact that our literature is, in general, family to all of us.
Twenty verst — a shtetl beside a shtetl. Within arm’s reach.
A stride to the wondrous horizon where the heavens descend to the earth.
And there — when one comes to the horizon — the horizon becomes a great forest.
We go through the forest — we come to one another; we arrive there, where we were born.
Born and — here lies Shmuel [Charney] from Dukor in a New York coffin and rests. And I — from Ihumen — give the eulogy over him. And we all surround him and we are stunned by this rest.
In the heart, there gnaws a hidden weeping. We wish to instantly understand what happens here. Why has such a thing happened suddenly?
A small moment happened. A sudden moment.
What is this sudden moment? — An unseen light which illuminates an eternal journey of wonder — the journey from eternal rest to eternal rest ———
Faithful guardian of our creative garden: We look upon your coffin and we see in it the radiance of our fiery Jewish chariot — our eternal fiery Jewish Merkabah.
A critic is, after all, as Leivick quotes Charney as saying, ‘no more but no less than a living person.’
All excerpts of Leivick are from essays collected in H. Leivick: Essays, published by the Congress for Jewish Culture in 1963. The excerpt of Charney from his own critical biography of Leivick, H. Leivick: 1888-1948.
Leivick and Charney were both founders of the Congress for Jewish Culture, and if this interested or amused you in the slightest, please consider helping them continue their work by donating here.
