Poor Kingdom, Part Three

The Kingdom And The Palace.

An ad from 1944 for the Folksbiene production of Poor Kingdom (rather than as Beggars).

One of the rare things I agree with Shmuel Charney on is the titling of the play.

Poor Kingdom is a far better choice than Beggars.

From Sh. Charney, H. Leivick: 1888-1948.

Aside from Charney’s own argument, I’ll add that Beggars is almost a voyeuristic title, and Leivick isn’t inviting you to look at the poor like an anthropological exhibit. It’s an invitation to look at humanity and what we control versus what we think we might control. Our kingdom and its relative greatness or poverty. One doesn’t have to search much further than many of his early poems dealing with his own father’s violence and his family’s extreme poverty and treatment by wealthier family members — such as ‘Mother Went to the Rich Uncle’¹ — to see he’s not making a display of the poor and not just treating them with sympathy, but with deep empathy.

If the wagon on which Melekh rides is his ‘kingdom,’ his ‘palace’ is the vault under a city bridge. And there, at the beginning of Act Three, Yetta and her sister, Mirl, are faced with a choice. You can have silk and new shoes under the bridge, or you can wander the roads and forests (always a magical place in Leivick) barefoot, free and holy. Micah, at the close of the act, in a sort of Union speech (a leaf out of Schwartz’s addition to Rags?) presents a related choice to the assembled beggars: be honest and poor or be rich from deception.

From H. Leivick, Poor Kingdom, 1923.

Shmuel Charney argues Mirl is unnecessary to the play, but she hammers home however bluntly, the theme that whoever you are, you can make a choice to lead an honest, kind and poor life or you can be rich and morally deficient. We see it reflected in the decisions made by the father and son, and we see it between the sisters, Mirl and Yetta, who, it is hinted, might previously have worked as prostitutes. All four characters work together to underscore this theme.

Charney also says that it’s a psychological lacking of the play that we never see Melekh mete out to Yetta any of the brutality that he visits upon others, that none of his violent nature shows through in that relationship. But that isn’t necessarily a lacking — rather it’s that we are still in an early phase of what might be an abusive cycle. Act Three is only a week after the first act. Melekh once loved and cared for his wife, was once a pious man. There is absolutely nothing to say that as time wears on with Yetta the seams won’t begin to show.

We shouldn’t discount Rifke’s curse, and here we are presented with a way in which it very much might be fulfilled. Yonah had made his play for power and, amongst his threats of violence, is the threat that he will cut Melekh’s legs off for him, so that he’ll never get out of the wagon again. The realist and mystical occupy the same space in Leivick, neither necessarily more logical than the other — perhaps the largest artefact of his Orthodox childhood that he carries with him. The curse itself might be supernatural, but has the potential be carried out in a very mundane, earthly way. Or the mundane elevated into the divine by prophecy.

A few lines later, Zerekh, who has carried the news about Yonah’s threat, also tells us that his constant companion — the deaf man — is a tsadik.

From H. Leivick, Poor Kingdom, 1923.

Language is interesting in the play, and the characters seem less Americanised and assimilated than many of those in Leivick’s realist works. There is very little phonetic English, compared to other works of the same period.

We must also treat the more religiously-loaded word choices as deliberate and guiding us toward interpretation. Leivick makes certain we don’t miss them, having others repeat the words: The wagon is tumah, not just bad luck, the deaf man a tsadik — Zerekh doesn’t stop at calling him a wonderful person, but calls him a saint. And if we think back to the first act, we might remember Zerekh’s dream of being sighted again and seeing a bright figure who nodded approvingly toward him. Is Zerekh also, then, someone who has been marked as able to see things which are ‘truer’ than reality? Does he, perhaps know more than even he knows?

Chaim explains what he’s been told about the Lamed-vovniks amongst the poor (though he doesn’t initially use the word himself, not until accusing the deaf man) and while Zerekh laughs — he’s always laughing — he very explicitly does not refute the idea. It is perhaps significant that this conversation occurs right after some of the very limited scripted action of the ‘Deaf-Mute.’ And it’s worth considering why it is that Zerekh and the deaf man have been paired off. Surely it isn’t just Melekh’s matchmaking of opposing disabilities, but the authorial hand, as well.

Chaim clearly is beginning to have his suspicions; the more the lamed-vovniks are tormented, he says, the more they laugh. Zerekh, constantly in floods of laughter, reveals the loss of his eyesight as a child and the deaths of his own wife and child almost immediately after Chaim’s description.

From H. Leivick, Poor Kingdom, 1923.

Again, not very subtle stuff here.

But at the same time, the water become increasingly muddy when Zerekh suggests that even Chaim’s own father could be a disguised Tsadik and Chaim rounds on both the deaf man and on Zerekh, accusing the first of faking, then accusing both of them of being concealed tsadikim. Also clouding things is Leivick’s threatening to write a play about the lamed-vovniks as his last play in the mid fifties (at least a few pages of a thematically similar attempt are held by YIVO), as he mentions in interview with Yankev Pat. So he clearly didn’t consider Poor Kingdom as fit that particular bill. At least not in full.

The deaf man is given the most to do textually in the third act that he has been given up until this point. The wagon, again, is the focus of his signing. While Zerekh believes him wonderful, neither Chaim not Melekh are at ease around him. And Melekh’s terror of him is justified in the closing actions, where the deaf man throws the money he has collected at Melekh, drags him to the wagon and signs for him to get back in it.

This response is spurred by what might be the worst sign of all — the fortune-telling canary dies, murdered by Yonah. In his impotence, the only show of strength he can muster, despite all of his threats, is to murder a caged bird.

To be continued…

1. In this poem, his mother arrives back from a visit to her brother with a bag of secondhand clothing ridiculously unsuited and humiliating for a poor, working, frum family in the provinces: the suit cut for ‘an Odessa dandy’ for his father and a dress with a train for his mother who baked and stood in the market all day.