Marc Chagall, The Prophet Elijah, ink and gouache on paper, 1917, Centre Pompidou
I’ve previously talked about the fact that Leivick is perfectly capable of telling the same story in a multitude of ways. And that some of might well be a function of the way he admittedly worked; Leivick says himself that he reverses the order of events to defamiliarise them, to achieve a truer, less subjective result. One major example is that of his trial and sentencing for being a member of the Jewish Labour Bund which I looked at in parallel accounts from several years apart. There, the order of events is inverted, supporting players seemingly intentionally stripped away, and a speech before a courtroom becomes a conversation of sorts between father and son, the only players who matter. Even the time of year seems to change, the snowy streets of the earlier version — written twenty years prior — become leaf-covered streets in the version which is serialised in 1957 (and published as part of Oyf Tsarisher Katorga)
Not every story Leivick revisits gets this treatment. For instance, the story about a former cellmate, a socialist leader, who couldn’t adhere to his socialist ideas when faced with the idea of sharing a food packet received in prison. That story — told at least three times that I’ve encountered — is told roughly the same way each time, the only variable being the length of the story or the inclusion of all the players. The core, however, remains the same and the essential feeling of the piece is unaltered: the parcel is concealed, the contents devoured without sharing, though certainly not in total secrecy.
This food-parcel incident appears in a fictionalised form in the drama Chains (there it’s a box of chocolates, rather than a roast duck/goose). Many of Leivick’s own experiences seem, naturally, in some way or another, to filter into his drama. It’s impossible for me to consider Shop’s cutter, Leibl, who takes a moral stand again being called ‘Louie’ without seeing a sort of ghost-image of the dramatist himself, who got married as ‘Leon.’ Or to think of Leivick’s (girl)friend from his hometown, ‘D,’ who went abroad to study (she’s in Tsarist Katorga as herself) without thinking of There, Where Free’s Levine, whose wife never visited him in prison (and wasn’t arrested herself) because she was a student abroad.1
But the plays are never presented as factual record in the same way that the prose pieces are. Leaving aside that Leivick tells us he holds something back for the sake of art, many of his more autobiographical articles and essays generally confirm each other and many of the details and stories. It’s as close to a full autobiography as we get. Though, again, as he says, it’s really no such thing and he had no real intent of writing his own autobiography — though toyed with the idea of writing the ‘biographies’ of some of his poems.
A major divergence from this is an incident he describes in Oyf Tsarisher Katorge (In Tsarist Katorga, 1959) which takes place during the final stretch of his transit to exile.2
Before we get to that, I think it’s worth stating again just how important a figure Elijah is to Leivick. There probably aren’t many who are quite so central to his concept of the world and, within that, the Moshiach. Elijah is, of course, the herald of the Moshiach and the redemption. The story of Passover and the exodus from Egypt is also a key image for Leivick — one entwined with his own escape from Siberian captivity — and there, once again, we have Elijah. In fact, Leivick almost plays Elijah himself in that one — turning up at the door of other exiles, just in time for a Seder.
Four of Leivick’s works written in play format, Chains of the Moshiach, Golem 1+2 and Wedding in Foehrenwald, feature Elijah as a character. In Leivick’s war-time poetry and articles, Elijah visits houses where Jews used to live. When Leivick visits the DP camps, he imagines Elijah searching the DP camps, the mass graves of Dachau, for the Moshiach.3
And, of course, Leivick met Elijah.
Of course he did.
Leivick recounts quite a few odd, perhaps even supernatural, experiences. The sensation of running, flying even, while hardly moving while leading the family cow. The brief moment where he seems to leave his body and pass through the prison wall in In Tsarist Katorga. An incident in response to a traumatic story where he feels himself almost split in two in With the Surviving Remnant.4 But the most normal — and the most unusual— is his meeting with Elijah.
With the importance of Elijah to Leivick this is no small claim for him to make. And he’s well aware. Perhaps this is what causes the story to shift over the years, but it seems to shift over a relatively small period of time, from roughly 1950 to the appearance of pieces of In Tsarist Katorga in Tog in 56-57. It certainly eventually causes him to be rather circumspect about discussing this meeting with his fellow exiles. As he says in regard to the religious basis of some of his poetry written in prison:
I hadn’t read it to any of my Jewish friends in the cells. I wasn’t certain what they’d have felt about a poem on a traditionally Jewish Messiah-motif. Neither the Bundists, nor the anarchists nor even the Poale-Zion were inclined (fifty years ago, at the time of the first revolution in Russia) to give up the party anti-traditionalist approach to Jewish history and to earlier Jewish literature, so they might receive a poem on the theme of the Moshiach without prejudice […]
With this in mind from near the start of the book, his encounter with a mysterious old man who gives him a dry shirt sparks two, entirely predictable (for Leivick), contradictory feelings in him: that he has encountered a miracle and that as excited as he is by the prospect, his comrades are not very likely to be receptive to the event being cast as miracle.
So I’ll start with the least ‘magical’ version of the event:
This version of the story, from Leivick’s interview with Y. Pat, printed in Conversations with Yiddish Writers (Shmuesn mit Yidishe shrayber, 1954) is the most mundane telling of it. The bare facts, the sequence of events. But it’s also the most amazing version — possibly the least believable.
There’s no Elijah here, but this version of the story trades on something just as miraculous — (extra)ordinary human kindness amongst the prisoners bound for exile. At the start of the march, as Leivick tells it, we see one inmate warn another that he won’t take any responsibility for him if he runs out of water. Leivick tells the reader that prison let him see amazing things in the human soul, and there it is in action.
It also functions as something of a set-piece, a bookend to the beginning of the book, where his dungeon-mate offers him his own coat (which they wind up sharing) — while suggesting that he’s only able to be kind in the dark. In the light, it would probably come to violence.
This act of kindness, too, occurs in the dark. What, then, happens in the light?
In this version of the telling, we don’t know.
To Be Continued…
I’ve discovered there’s even more to this than I knew while looking at the play and I am dying for a chance to really share it.
I am so excited by Tsarisher Katorge generally, that I can and will talk about it all day, every day. It’s the book that really made me sit up and take note of the fact that it wasn’t going to be enough for me to read it, put it down and move on. It’s the book that forced me to realise I was really going to have to learn Yiddish. How many other writers could start their autobiographies in their underwear, in the dark, sharing a coat with a triple murderer who wants to talk about God and Dostoyevsky?
And that, in brief, is the secondary plot of Wedding in Foehrenwald.
The whole book is a semi-hallucinatory experience — as is Oyf Tsarisher Katorge. There are nightmares about counting heaps of skulls, Hitler under his bed, the Shabbos Queen confronting him in the streets of the Landsberg DP camp, the vision of Elijah sifting through the mass graves of Dachau looking for the Moshiach, the one of a body being torn in two which ends with his own seeming bifurcation, the dead joining the living at performances (both of Ansky’s Dybbuk and the delegation themselves)…