‘He’
H. Leivick and the Confluence of Christianity, Violence and the Erotic.
Leivick often bestows a sort of honorary Judaism —
or, at the least, removes the full Christianity — of figures he admires. Amelia Glaser notes in Songs in Dark Times, for example, Leivick’s bestowing of this honorary Jewish status upon Sacco and Vanzetti.
Everything Jewish is, or has the potential to be, good and therefore everything good and admirable is Jewish. And, as this is Leivick, this is balanced with and predicated upon its opposite: everything not-Jewish is more than suspect.
In 1935’s Abelard and Heloise, part of the symbolic cancellation of Abelard’s Christianity — perhaps the most salient of these ‘conversions’ — which allows Leivick to interact whole-heartedly with the figure of Abelard is accomplished rather neatly, through one of the other monks stating in the first few pages that he isn’t a Christian at all. He’s there, not only in the monastery, but in the entire faith, under duress. Almost like one of the conversos about which Leivick has read so much in his interest in the Spanish Inquisition:
From H. Leivick, Abelard and Heloise, 1935.
But the other thing which helps, in my view, to strip Abelard of his Christianity in Leivick’s work is his revulsion at and inability to participate in the sexual act, which Leivick heavily conflates with Christianity. He flees home for good at what seems to be witnessing his parents engaging in the act, and rather than desiring a wife of his own to visit this upon himself, desires his ‘person’ (in the case, Heloise) to be whole. And it is this desire for a completion that is not necessarily a sexual one which is lauded as a purer love than the base act in which he can no longer partake.1
Sex and violence are also deeply entwined in Leivick, and this is also particularly easy to see in Abelard and Heloise — the now-monk who had led the attack on Abelard had been a romantic rival who wanted Heloise for himself, Abelard’s mother reacts in what he seems to describe as pain or unhappiness to his father. In 1921’s Different, Marcus does not wish to see his wife undressed because of the violence he has seen toward the human body during the war.2
But long before we arrive at Leivick’s take on the doomed love affair at the heart of Abelard and Heloise, and a few years before we encounter the traumatised Marcus, there is the long poem ‘He,’ which appears at the end of In No Man’s Land (1923).3
Dating from 1918, ‘He’ is one of the four ‘Pogrom Poems’ at the close of the book, alongside ‘The Wolf,’ ‘The Sickroom’ and ‘The Stable’ which seem to be in response, in some form or another, to the Russian Revolution and the Petliura Pogroms.
Leivick’s own personal experiences with Christianity until 1918 seem to have mainly been being assaulted as a child, by an adult, for being Jewish, witnessing pogroms as a teenaged Hebrew teacher in a small village and his time in prison. Prison, perhaps, having been the most formative of them.
In In Tsarist Katorga, which for these purposes I will treat as purely factual autobiography, we are introduced to his explicitly-practicing Christian cellmates: ‘Granddad,’ Rudin and Bassanov.
The eldest, ‘Granddad,’ is portrayed quite neutrally — generally inoffensive, praying frequently, and Leivick attempts to summon a priest for him when he dies. Rudin, the Tolstoyan Christian Democrat, is an entirely positive character. It is him to whom Leivick entrusts his papers when he is taken to infirmary, and he seems to admire Rudin’s dedication to his pacifist beliefs and willingness to be punished, though unsettled by his desire not to stand against evil, but be entirely pacifist. Rudin, in turn, seems to vaguely appreciate or, at least understand Leivick’s own affiliation with the Bund and his approach to the religious icon which hangs in their cell.
From H. Leivick, In Tsarist Katorga, 1959.
It’s the third of the practicing (well, more than nominally so) Christians, Bassanov, which Leivick has profound and understandable reason to dislike: He has killed a family of four Jews with an axe partly in disappointment that there wasn’t a more formal pogrom.4
From H. Leivick, In Tsarist Katorga, 1959.
The ‘ninth’ prisoner in the cell, to whom Leivick appeals here is, once again, the icon of Jesus.
Already, we can see how violence and Christianity occupy the same space for Leivick — they are made one in the figure of Bassanov, the pogromist. In the icon, in Leivick’s feverish hallucinations of a conversation with Jesus, who has stepped down from the cross, the element of the erotic is added.
From H. Leivick, In Tsarist Katorga, 1959.
Here all three themes are in play: the violence of murder, pleasure — including sexual — and Christianity. If we do treat Tsarist Katorga as purely factually biographical, all this is the background which feeds into Leivick’s ‘He’ of 1918.
And all three of these themes can be discerned in ‘He.’
The speaker, who opens the poem, receives an unexpected guest late at night and provides a friendly ear. Or is it friendly? In the speaker’s initial repetition of what the visitor has to say, is there not a desire to soothe and a growing tone of alarm? He’s almost a hostage talking this very strange visitor/captor down.
From H. Leivick, In Keynems Land, 1923.
The speaker then, after this preamble, admits that he think there is something not quite right with his new guest. What, he asks himself as well as the reader, does the clearly unwell guest want?
But the guest is undeterred and continues. Leivick had refused the company of the hallucinated Jesus in prison as dangerous to his well-being for multiple reasons, not least of which is fear of what the Christians would do to him if he was found lying on the bunk beside Jesus. The speaker of ‘He,’ it seems, has a similar interaction with and reason to fear his guest — Jesus.5
From H. Leivick, In Keynems Land, 1923.
And there is the eroticism again, with a threat of violence, as in the excerpt from In Tsarist Katorga. Here, with the added twist that it’s an incestuous, sexual love, rather the purer love of a mother for a son.6 Deification and worship rather than maternal feelings and responsibility .
From here, Leivick moves into what are possible the most erotic images I’ve encountered from him yet. And, tellingly, they are murky, smokey, bloody and disturbing ones.
From H. Leivick, In Keynems Land, 1923.
And from this, Leivick’s ‘guest’ swerves from the erotic to the orgiastic violence of the pogrom:
From H. Leivick, In Keynems Land, 1923.
Christian theology not necessarily being Leivick’s strong suit, I read this as a bit of a swing at the violence inherent in the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The latter is born of the former — but is ready to come after its own mother with a hammer and a knife.
In the closing section, the visitor proves himself to be a pogromist after all, taking out his bloody knife and brain-spattered hammer. The horrified speaker, at last, seems to have realised exactly what he has allowed into his house.
From H. Leivick, In Keynems Land, 1923.
The threatened matricide, in fact, may already have been committed, in an ultimate act of supercession.
Is the speaker no longer in danger as the violence is only an intimate, familial one? Is he only someone to confess to? Must the crime be confessed before another Jew? Does not the fact of them both being Jews make them family, as the hallucination of Jesus in had appealed to their mutual Judaism? That is, perhaps, ruled out, as the speaker is called a ‘stranger.’ Is the speaker spared solely to be victim on another night, in another pogrom, his reprieve only temporary? It’s a poem with as many questions as answers.
By the time of Leivick’s arrival in Germany post-war, there’s no mere eroticism left in the trifecta. The Christianity and its attendant violence remain. And Leivick, who had once seen Jesus as a Jewish prisoner incarcerated with him, fully expels Jesus from Judaism.7 He is a redeemers of murderers, adorned in the physical remains of slaughtered Jews and of their culture and communities.
From H. Leivick, With the Surviving Remnant, 1947.
Taking this imagery as a launching place, Leivick’s imagination, source of those very dangerous visions of Jesus the pogromist, imagines fresh horror, a tragedy which will compound, in his estimation, that of the Khurbn itself: Germans converting to marry Jewish women. Jewish men marrying German women. It plays out with the blackest of humour.8
The delegation hears tell of such marriages (and similar attitudes towards them) from the DPs themselves in the symposiums they hold to engage with the opinions of the survivors:
From H. Leivick, With the Surviving Remnant, 1947.
The primary objection — that this move toward intermarriage and conversion is coming in place of genuine penance and reconciliation is an understandable one to a reader in 2023.9 The second, the attitude toward ‘dilution’ or marring the people of Israel with non-Jews and this talking of racial purity by Jews in the immediate wake of the war, even laden with irony and sarcasm, is a disturbing one — disgusting, even.
But the reader must also take into account what Leivick, his co-delegate Efros (a rabbi as well as professor and poet), and many of the survivors they are interacting with will have in the back of their minds: Ezra 9:13-15, which is where the Yiddish/Hebrew term for the survivors, the She'arit Hapleta (the ‘Surviving Remnant’) is drawn:
From Sefaria.
Leivick often has a textual/scriptural reason for what he writes, and this is no exception — the Tanakh is informing this attitude and his writing. But one can see how different sort of fear has seemingly taken the place of the merely distastefully, but abstractly, erotic in the trifecta of Christianity, violence and sex for Leivick — that of willing marriage and procreation with the enemy.
Sex and Christianity will lead to the ultimate act of annihilating violence — the final erasure of the survivors and the entire Jewish people.10
Leivick’s a bit prudish about saying what was done to Abelard, both in his introduction and the text itself — Abelard was, of course, castrated. Interestingly, one of the things Leivick’s Hanina, the Moshiach Ben Dovid, can do is father a child without physical contact.
More on this next week!
Romantic/sexual desire and violence are woven together through the shorter poems of the volume, as well. Jesus — or seeming allusions to him — appear in two other poems in In No Man’s Land: ‘Stands My Saviour’ and ‘Crosses’. In the first, the saviour arrives in the speaker’s home with an axe and a sack, the image of a pogromist. In the second, the speaker may be Jesus — crucified, disconnected from humanity. 1919’s Lider also contains a poem called ‘Jesus,’ which is mainly a poetic description of the crucifix which hung in his prison cell. Leivick portrays the sexual violence of the pogrom in both ‘The Stable’ and Who’s Who.
More on Bassanov, too, in two weeks’ time!
Incidentally, I disagree with Shmuel Charney on this poem, who says Leivick specifically doesn’t call it — or his visitor — ‘Jesus’ to distance him from Judaism and Christianity. The visitor certainly implies himself ‘Jesus’ in the 1940 version, telling the speaker that he, the speaker, ‘ha[s] never been a Jesus,’ has never been hung in a cross and can’t understand.
The love between mother and son is a very important theme to Leivick, and a love he clearly considers sacrosanct.
Artists like Di Khalyastre and Chagall had portrayed European Jewry as a Jesus-like figure, persecuted and crucified — Judaizing the imagery. A similar thing occurred in the presentation of the KZs to American soldiers who had not been there for liberation; they were sometimes presented with albums and postcards contextualising the situation for them in overtly Christian imagery. But Leivick’s Jew, at least at this juncture, is on the pyre, the stake. Never the cross.
It remains slightly unclear to me whether this continued imagining and conversation is entirely, solely, Leivick elaborating on the conversation begun with Efros or if Efros participates throughout in the imagining. Leivick does carry out rhetorical conversations with himself, and I suspect it is almost entirely internal.
See the recent controversy about conversions to Judaism in Germany.
He makes no attempt, at least on the page, to imagine the children of these unions. Perhaps a horror too far, even for him, after having touched the barbed wire at Dachau. Another monster which might turn and kill its own mother.