Hirsh Lekert: One Jew Is Enough

History, Myth, Religion and the Personal

Today I’m going to start with a plea for donations. The Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center in the Bronx was defaced and is currently trying to raise funds to restore its building. You can donate here.

Leib Kadison’s set design for scene three, for the Vilna Troupe, borrowed from YIVO

Hirsh Lekert (1927) is a play about personal history as much as anything.¹

Right away, we’re introduced to one of the factors weakening the Bund — the General Jewish Labour Federation — in the form of Sergei Zubatov. Zubatov, head of the Okhrana (the Russian Empire’s secret police), helps create the Independent Jewish Workers Party to counter the Bund. Eventually, he falls out of favour, gets himself semi-exiled, the state trade unions are disbanded…and some of their former members join Father Gapon’s march to the Winter Palace, which turns into the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905, when the Tsar orders the marchers fired upon. Leivick takes part in the protests for the one year anniversary of Gapon’s march in Ihumen, where he’s arrested for the first time and beaten all night before being released for being underage.²

And with the play’s revolutionary council, we get a bit more of Leivick’s own biography — there’s certainly something of him in Usishkin, the coughing former Yeshiva student who doesn’t like to talk about himself and sells ‘nonsense for servant girls.’ It’s almost impossible not to read this and think of Leivick organising a strike in Minsk for these same servant girls (and, indeed, his father teaching them Yiddish with brivenstellers). Even Isaac, the Bundist leader to frightened to act, has something of Leivick in him in his war with himself: how can he lead when he doubts himself? How, Leivick asked, can he bless a congregation if he doubts? The public, the believers shouldn’t be led astray.

We’ll see more of this juxtoposition of the revolutionary and the religious later…

Lekert remains a touchstone for Leivick (and, well, all Bundists) throughout his career, a key figure in his personal martyrology, appearing at several junctures — notably in the long poem ‘First of May — New York, 1935,’ which appears in Songs of Paradise. His first encounter with Lekert and his story, though, goes all the way back to Leivick’s yeshiva years, where word of Lekert’s attempted assassination of Von Wahl even filtered in to the bochurs.

From Y. Pat, Conversations with Yiddish Writers, 1954.

Of course, Mendel, the mentally-disabled water-carrier, is also something of a totemic figure for Leivick. He also appears in a poem from Songs of Paradise, ‘I Am Thankful for All,’ where he is established as something of an alter-ego for Leivick himself. The name of the real Mendel, a denizen of Leivick’s hometown, was used as an insult against Leivick by his father.

From H. Leivick, Songs of Paradise, 1937.

In interview with Yankev Pat, Leivick talks about the significance of Mendel to himself and his work, saying that he had to be something more than mere water-carrier in his estimation.

From Y. Pat, Conversations with Yiddish Writers, 1954.

Hinting of course, in his typical manner, that Mendel may well have been a Lamed-vovnik.³

Leivick also pushes a bit further into his frequent theme of of fathers and sons. Lekert, in Leivick’s play, is noted as soon to be a father. His own father absent. Mendel the water-carrier is given a father — a severe father (a ‘bayzer tate’ — the same term also referring to a version of Leivick’s own father in an early poem of the same name) by the name of Reb Zelia Michas.

Michas bears the inverted name of real person, Micha Zelias, who is also mentioned in a poem from 1956’s Leaf on an Apple Tree, ‘On High Shoulders’ — again, a poem connected to a childhood experience with his own father. Leivick’s made two real, presumably unrelated people, father and son here and given them rather familiar antagonistic relationship: the son who admires the revolution and the devoutly religious father. A third Ihumener, the rich man Shepe, who appears in an autobiographical essay of Leivick’s about his hometown is mentioned as the customer who under-pays Mendel.

And Leivick’s done something else here, hinted at by the figures of Mendel, Zelia and Shepe appearing. This isn’t Vilna at all. It’s Ihumen. Or, as in ‘Ballad of the Desert,’ where he brings Ihumen to Sinai, it’s Ihumen brought to Vilna. But I’ll stay with the idea that it’s almost a sort of Bundist Mystery Play about Lekert’s martyrdom, where Lekert and Von Wahl, the Vilna Shul and the major action have all been transported into Leivick’s hometown.⁴

And ‘mystery’ play it is — prison has carried out a magical transformation, translating a simple thug into a secular saint. There are hiccups. Leivick isn’t so simplistic as to give Lekert no struggle at all: he isn’t a particularly good or admirable man, there is a love triangle (quadrangle? Five, if you count Isaac and Rokhl, who are now a couple), his childlike impulsiveness hasn’t disappeared —shades of the enormous, toddler-like Golem⁵ who’s all Id —  he’s called a big child, described as boyish, a child with a toy. He shoves his pregnant wife. He gets drunk. Not, he is admonished by Usishkin, what a good Bundist would do.

But Lekert also now rejects physical strength with no greater purpose. His old buddies still want to smash windows, ‘flick’ policemen in the back of the head. Perhaps Lekert still can’t read and write, but he wants more than being a street brawler. He is ready to eschew the body and all it’s pleasures for the cause. Rise above himself. An almost religious abnegation of the physical.

From H. Leivick, Hirsh Lekert, B. Kletskin, 1931.

Lekert has returned from exile knowing he must give all of himself — which might even remind the reader or audience a bit of Rabbi Akiba, that other late-bloomer who was ready to surrender himself body and soul. And while this might be stretching it a bit — it’s only a bit! Leivick draws a very straightforward equivalency between the secular revolutionaries and the religious Jews of Vilna himself: Reb Zelia, the scholar, proclaims that there is no such thing as too few Jews for Mincha — one Jew is enough. A few pages later, Lekert declares that there is no such thing as too few fighters for the revolution — one is enough.

Shmuel Charney also identifies this particular parallel, of the religious individual and revolutionary individual, and continues on the tack that Leivick’s play, unlike the folk ballad and the other play about Lekert by Kushnirov, focuses on Lekert’s individual nature. The individual and his struggle remains, of course, a critical theme for a Leivick throughout his career.

Hirsh Lekert is the ideal combination: a willingness to shed blood — and spill his own. He’s aflame — and in Leivick, flame is always double-edged, with both destruction and creation; It gives birth and ruins in equal measure. Lekert doesn’t crawl into the flame, as he is accused of doing twice, but it’s already everywhere he steps and he willingly walks into it, upright. He takes the charcoal, the aftermath of fire in hand and — creates. He can’t write, but draws the gallows which will complete his apotheosis.⁶

From H. Leivick, Hirsh Lekert, B. Kletskin, 1931.

As in the previous year’s Shop, also originally published in the communist monthly Der Hammer, we get a few kinds of actors — the purely theoretical, those who want to act in the name of the cause and those who solely want to act out violently. Lekert’s inability to read, but capability to carry out his own accounting (there’s Leivick’s constant personal accounting again, the kheshboyn hanefesh), is actually a shield for him. He has a reverence for the ideas contained in the written work, but his own illiteracy protects him from getting lost forever in theory, in sophistry and verbiage like Isaac, the Bundist council leader.

Lekert proves himself to be the only one not hopelessly tangled in symbols here, even as he becomes one. He interrupts the mourning for the lost flag by pointing out that while the flag is lost, the council has saved themselves. A new flag can be sewn, made as it is needed. Heroes, too, can be made as needed. Lekert is, as Gottlieb says, an ‘intuitive revolutionary,’ and synthesis of what Leivick values: A man who can lead others, inspire them, and be the first to put his own head on the block.⁷

And Lekert’s own bleeding head is the red flag which he shows Mendel (who is desperate to see the flag)— and Lekert’s really been the flag all along. The family’s mourning Lekert before he’s dead segues into the revolutionaries mourning the red flag as though the flag ‘already lies dead.’ And Leivick isn’t about to let the audience/reader forget for a minute the flag has always been dyed red with blood in this intensely socialist/communist phase following a visit to the Soviet Union in 1925.⁸

(Leivick won’t let you forget the flag is red with blood later in his career, either, but there it becomes a very different proposition.)

Hirsh Lekert is also a play about the process of myth-making. Mendel, the play’s ‘fool,’ speaks what might be its wisest words in truest Leivickian fashion. Isaac, the revolutionary who becomes too consumed in theory and fearful of death to act, warns that Hirsh, too, will die. But Mendel has already assured us that Hirsh can’t be killed. And, indeed, he can’t, not by hanging, because he’s not only a person, but also an idea and more than that — a myth. And has been one for Mendel the whole time.

Conversely, Von Wahl may well live on but, as Hirsh says, the Governor is dead. The idea of a Governor isn’t bulletproof. He isn’t a mythical, untouchable boogeyman, only a human tyrant who can bleed.

And if we accept Mendel, as, in part, Leivick’s own avatar on the stage — especially with Mendel’s conflation of the workers’ paradise with a post-messianic age in which the dead live again — we are confronted with Leivick’s highly personal myth-making; an image of the author himself drawing inspiration from Lekert, as well as writing himself into the myth with his support of Lekert before his execution.⁹ He makes himself part of the reason and the legacy for which Lekert faces his end. Is there not even a shade of Leivick’s own refusal to plead for mercy because of his age in Lekert’s in-play refusal to beg for clemency after his youth is underscored?

From H. Leivick, Hirsh Lekert, B. Kletskin, 1931.

Mendel’s explanation, and Leivick’s, of Hirsh Lekert’s role in the myth is a simple one — he has been to the well itself, bringing the water, the inspiration, to others as he marches to his death unassisted. Like the water carrier, Lekert performs a task which assists others in living, performing of mitzvot. Is he, perhaps, a sort of secular Lamed-vovnik in Leivick’s conception? Certainly his relationship with Mendel, whom Leivick points to in a more definitive manner, seems to suggest this.

The play closes with Rokhl and Reizel, the two revolutionary women who have loved Lekert. Lekert’s wife, who is only ever ‘Wife,’ can’t fully love the revolutionary part of him — her ‘house arrest’ of him after the demonstration is paralleled with Von Wahl’s imprisonment of the protestors; the protestors should (and don’t), we’re told, break the prison windows and Lekert breaks the window to escape from his own house. She’s the symbol of more mundane responsibility and reality, a woman who needs a husband and a father for her child. Incapable of the cold calculation that her own sacrifice may result in the happiness of more families, of husbands and fathers of children.

Rokhl and Reizel, though, are more of Leivick’s rather flinty revolutionary women, like Mina in Shop, who accept the sacrifice of the individual for the ultimate goal.¹⁰ They put love aside for this different sort of accounting — not, incidentally unlike Von Wahl, who has done his own arithmetic. This, too echoes Shop — there both Mina, the worker’s leader, and Gold, the crueler of the two sweatshop bosses, deal in numbers, not tears and hearts.

In Hirsh Lekert, Rokhl and Reizel sit at their ‘Singer’ machines and sew. Perhaps they are already in a shop in America, having brought the tale of Hirsh Lekert with them, just as Leivick did himself.¹¹ And it’s the two of them who sing a few stanzas of a folk ballad about Lekert. And in this act, they anticipate Wedding in Foehrenwald’s Chronicler who will write/sing the events of the Khurbn and its survivors into folk record. It likewise recalls the end of Maharam of Rothenburg and it’s closing look at where we draw the line between the  ‘sober’ details of history and the immortal legend, the myth, which ensures the survival of the spirit.

It’s also an act similar to Lekert’s drawing of his own gallows — gallows which he has never seen but has gotten correct anyway — in the translation of Lekert’s act, the performance of it, they begin to own it. Lekert owns his own death and masters it in the drawing of the gallows.¹² The people will own Lekert in the singing of his song. And in the performing of his play, too.

From H. Leivick: Poète Yiddish, Gopa, 1967. From a 1934 production in Kovno. I believe those are possibly Rokhl and Reizel on either side, presenting the scene, with the drawn gallows just visible on the white wall behind the two guards in dark uniforms.

---

A further note on music in the play: An-ski’s Bundist anthem, ‘Di Shvue,’ and Edelstadt’s ‘In Kampf’ are sung in act four, the former almost in full. ‘In the Salty Sea’ and Liessin’s ‘The Lena’ turns up in Shop, of the same compositional period (as does ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’). Leivick writes elsewhere about how impactful Edelstadt’s songs (amongst others) were in prison.¹³ For a man who claims himself no musician and a ‘limited singer,’ Leivick has a keen ear for music and how it functions in these settings.

In Hirsh Lekert, Hirsh’s secular, though fervent, revolutionary song of the tea houses and streets has a counterpoint in Reb Zelia’s constant nigun of religious study in his room. Gottlieb, in fact, argues that the whole drama plays out on this backdrop of ‘old Judaism’ to show the backwardness of tradition, the blind Jew on the shul steps a symbol of the old guard who are still unenlightened, afraid of liberation.

The religious and secular are in conflict with each other here and it is, as Gottlieb says, a ‘collision of two worlds.’ Quite blatantly so. We never know if Zelia is, as Mendel tells Lekert, celebrating because of Lekert’s impending execution or because of his stand against Von Wahl. Lekert, in his part, refuses the rabbi provided for him in favour of Mendel. The air in Lekert’s house, filled with Zelia’s nigun, is stifling — there is no room for his revolutionary song there.

But Leivick has a foot firmly in each of these worlds and acknowledges the sanctity of the personal and group experiences linked to both.¹⁴ More than just the integration of music into the drama, Leivick understands the liberating and transformational nature of song and it’s place in spiritual resistance — when the singer becomes a conduit for something more, possibly the divine. And how song may elevate its subject to the sacred.

1. It would be remiss not to point out that this play is indeed available in English translation, with an in-depth preface giving historical context, in the David S. Lifson’s Epic and Folk Plays of the Yiddish Theatre, 1975. I could talk about this play forever.

2. Leivick really knows his stuff here — for instance, he knows that you don’t want to clump up in a demonstration to make rounding you up or ‘kettling’ easier. He credits his cousin, the cabinet-maker Meir Halpern, for introducing him to the Bund proper in interview with Y. Pat, and talks about the secret meetings he attended — the ones that Mendel begs Lekert to take him to.

3. Jacob Gottlieb also pinpoints Mendel as source for the Golem, which is a bit born out in the Golem’s stint as water-carrier, though Leivick himself, in interview with Yankev Pat, leans more towards another denizen of his hometown, a mentally-ill man kept prisoner in a house by his father, a ‘prince.’ Charney identifies Mendel as the original for Tankhum, the madman in Golem. But the affinity between Mendel and Leivick is clear, particularly in his giving Hirsh Lekert’s Mendel a red beard, like both himself and his father. The real Mendel, according to his interview with Pat, had black hair. Another poem from c1939, appearing in a series of poetic recollections, sees Leivick sent to the well for water with two buckets— and again called an idiot — by his father.

4. I don’t feel I need abstain from using a term so historically connected with Christian drama, because Yiddish-language critics such as Charney, Gottlieb and Bal-Makhshoves employ it themselves when speaking about such works as Golem.

5. The dramas Hirsh Lekert and Golem certainly aren’t a million miles apart in concept: a avenger born from Jewish rage, destined to trade blow for blow, draw blood for blood.

6. There’s yet another roughly contemporaneous poem, in 1932’s Naye Lider, later reorganised into Songs from Paradise in the 1940 Ale Verk, about painting a hanging, the hanged figure being only a minor, incidental detail, the heavens painted as if with the artist’s blood— ‘And it Was Good.’

7. Leivick’s description of a prison riot from In Tsarist Katorga is also apt to reference here — his dismay at noticing how the leaders and instigators positioned themselves behind the bodies of others, out of reach of rifled and bayonets. He notes his shame at having slipped back, away from the danger, with his own hesitation

8. Amelia Glaser notes, in Songs in Dark Times, that Leivick had written to his wife expressing a desire to relocate back to the Soviet Union, to which she responded positively. This, of course, never came to pass. By 1929, Leivick had joined the ‘runaway’ poets in leaving Morgn Frayhayt, the Communist paper, over party justification of the pogrom in Hebron of that year.

9. Leivick writes movingly elsewhere about his own experience of the anticipation surrounding executions in prison. The visit of Hirsh’s Wife, Mother and Uncle (they have no other names) where the women have been forbidden to cry also brings to my mind the description of Leivick’s own parents’ visit to him in Minsk Prison as recounted in In Tsarist Katorga, where there seemed to be an unspoken agreement between between his mother and father that she wasn’t to cry.

10. If Leivick’s men frequently struggle with societal norms of masculinity, his women often seem to fall to two extremes: the sister/wife/mother (all in one) or the hard-bitten revolutionary.

11. It’s actually for this reason I’m dealing with Hirsh Lekert before Shop. Though Shop was finished first, the life experience it keys to is slightly later.

12. It’s also a very good bit of stage business, putting the gallows on stage, where the audience can see them — thus into the mind — the while also keeping the action constrained to the one location.

13. This is a wonderful essay, available in the original in an Edelstadt memorial volume, though unpublished in English, like most of Leivick’s articles and essays.

14. Again, I’ll point you to ‘On High Shoulders’ from Leaf on an Apple Tree as a clear depiction of the ecstatic, traditionally religious experience in Leivick’s work and life. Gottlieb is quick to acknowledge the old, ‘unenlightened’ world that Zelia’s crowd is part of, but misses out the information we are given about how deeply he cares for his child. The authorial empathy is, I feel, fairly clear.