Sentence, Part 2
Crossing the Jordan
Yemiel, the youngest of the last three holdovers mentioned last time, who must die before the Israelites enter Canaan, is also the angriest. Like the others, he has wonderful memories of the exodus from Egypt itself, and the writing rises, in my opinion to the sheer wonder of the moment.
This and following excerpts from H. Leivick, Sentence, 1953.
Yemiel, oddly enough — or perhaps not oddly at all, given the weight the disease takes on in Leivick’s work and in his own life — seems to have tuberculosis. And his hearing of the camp gossip about those who must die, his own illness and his impossible love for Noa (who it is hinted was the small girl he carried on his shoulders) sends him swinging wildly between sorrow, fear and rage. Once a great warrior, he either wants to run Moses through or be killed by him.
Why, he wants to know, are there no exceptions? How is his age his fault? He cannot reconcile him and is struck dead in punishment.
Even if he weren’t doomed to die, his love for Noa could never be fulfilled. Noa, one of Zelophehad’s daughters, must marry within her own tribe as a condition of her inheritance. She’s all but promised to Yitzhar, son of Korach and a fellow tribe-member.
Yitzhar, though, and his brother, Kehath, are both killed. They won’t go to Canaan either. But Noa will, her future and those of her sisters still to come. Their story doesn’t end there.
The old woman, Iscah, is the opposite of Yemiel in the fullness of her resignation to her own fate.
As a character, she’s somewhat reminiscent of Redemption Comedy’s Dvorel; she’s grandmother to all the children of the camp. And Leivick is a big fan of maternal devotion, liking mothers best of all. But unlike the unfailingly pure Dvoreleh, who it is hinted will bear the Moshiach Ben David’s child, Iscah has sinned gravely and admits as much. She tells her charges the story of Sinai.
And how she helped to make the golden calf.
But she also tells them how she helped to create the mishkan itself, weaving the tapestries. And I really think it’s some of the most beautiful writing I’ve encountered in Leivick’s drama and intriguing in its immersion in religious tradition. There’s no subversion, no inversion. Just Tanakh. And Leivick’s own embroidery on the theme of the Tanakh is a glorious thing to me.
The miracle, as far as Iscah is concerned, is that she has come this far at all. Even if it means never entering and being buried in the desert. She crawls off and dies, quietly, in a corner of the tent while Yemiel, Hefer and the last battle all rage around her. And doesn’t complain about her sentence.
The play has all the hallmarks of a late-in-life work with its resignation to one’s ultimate fate. Resignation to perhaps not live to set a single foot in the promised land. Not to draw a single breath there, but only to see it from a distance, from a great height, in the consciousness that others, younger, perhaps better, will go there and build a life for themselves. It’s hard not to think of Leivick himself, who at this point had made a trip to Palestine in 1937 and one to the newly-founded State of Israel in 1950, and about Chaim Greenberg, the ardent Zionist who was unable to return there in the end.
The elderly Hefer, last of the three holdouts, who has demanded an audience with Moses, finally sees him. Why did Moses save him in Egypt only for him to die in the desert? He demands a single day in Canaan.
There, Yemiel and Hefer learn that Moses will not enter the promised land either. That he shares their fate. Their sentence. And with this, Hefer, too, becomes resigned.
Hefer ascends Nebo with Moses at the close of the play, just as the young Levi did in ‘Ballad of the Desert’ — is Hefer perhaps at least one aspect of the older Leivick, the one who admits in an interview of roughly the same period with Yankev Pat that he couldn’t make aliyah to Israel now, even if he wanted to do so?
To indulge myself in the diary side of things, the further life of this play is one which sent me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It was never performed, never published in book form. As I have little access to archives and larger libraries, all I had was Leivick’s summary of the play for Chaim Greenberg which was reprinted in Esayen and Redes. But a rather mysterious entry for a single bound copy — in Hebrew — showed in WorldCat. So I chased it, and less than 48 hours later, I had a copy. In Hebrew.
I must note, at this juncture, that despite more than a decade of a Hebrew school, my Hebrew is appallingly bad.
In a couple weeks, with a dictionary, I had a copy in English. (I do have a copy in Yiddish now, from Yiddisher Kemfer, a groysen dank to a very sweet soul.)
But why was there a single typescript copy in the National Library of Israel? The first page explained everything: it was translated by Aharon Ashman for Habima — the same troupe which had premiered Golem, in Hebrew, all those years earlier and which has performed several of Leivick’s plays over the years. And which, of course, still exists today.
The play was reported in newspapers as being slated for production as part of a Mediterranean festival in 1954,1 to be performed by Habima and directed by Zvi Friedland.
Friedland at left, Kafka’s old friend Max Brod at right.
It was never performed. Why? That remains a mystery to me for now. Perhaps the answer still lies somewhere in either Ashman’s archive or Leivick’s own.
Leivick talks elsewhere about Habima taking plays to a French theatre festival, and I do wonder if this was an intended entry.