Sodom
Looking Forward and (Not) Looking Back
The Burning of Sodom (formerly "The Destruction of Sodom")Camille Corot, 1843 and 1857
Leivick often revisits certain symbols, concepts, settings, and characters.
Sometimes more straightforwardly than others. His Maharam of Rothenburg and Maharal of Prague might have different responses, but the defiance in their eyes connects them through time and space. His sweatshops in Rags and Shop differ in their details, but are equally monstrous in their inhumanity and bosses. Bankrupt is a reworking of Different. His Golem has a second outing in The Redemption Comedy. The biblical Isaac and Abraham work on their relationship and how you get past attempted human sacrifice in two plays (Akeydah and In the Days of Job). Elijah and the Moshiach appear in a total of four plays (or, ‘dramatic poems’ — written in play-script format), Chains of the Moshiach, Golem, The Redemption Comedy and Wedding at Foehrenwald, comprising a rough quadrilogy.1
And it’s to the first of these, Chains of the Moshiach, I’d like to turn to begin.
Written in Minsk Prison in 1908, Leivick smuggled Chains of the Moshiach out to his parents, along with ‘Soul from Hell’ and eventually had it sent to him in New York. Where he seems to have promptly misplaced it, finding it in time to include it, in slightly revised form, in 1940’s Ale Verk. The plot is top to bottom Leivick and his deep messianism: Upon the destruction of Jerusalem, the Moshiach is born and must be chained in the desert until the time of his arrival. The angels are smithing the chains which will secure him until the right time.
All but one angel, Azrael, who refuses to make chains because he cannot stand the world’s suffering. Why must it suffer a minute more when the Moshiach actually exists? The wrath of God frazzles his wings and Azrael is banished to the earth, where he proceeds to look for the Moshiach, presumably still searching to this day.2
What does all that have to do with Sodom?
Azrael doesn’t turn up again in Leivick’s work, unlike Elijah and the Moshiach (and Satan) but we see a striking echo of him in Sodom’s ‘Third Visitor.’ Shmuel Charney notes this similarity:3
From Shmuel Charney, H. Leivick: 1888-1948
Their love for the earth, the ‘wronged earth,’ and all of its people is the same.4
From H. Leivick, ‘Chains of the Moshiach’ c. 1908.
Similarly, the Third Visitor’s wings are reduced to ash the second his foot touches the earth. He ceases to be an angel. He doesn’t know, at the end of the play, if he will even be capable of seeing his brother angels any longer when they appear. Along with his wings, he also abandons his divine mission as it is set out. He will no longer help in the destruction.
This and following excerpts from H. Leivick, Sodom, Tsukunft, 1937.
In this sense, Sodom is a sequel to almost everything that Leivick has written until this point. A casting off of notional holiness while remaining isolated, removed from the world and its suffering. There can be no holiness at all if it doesn’t concern itself with the betterment of all mankind.
Sodom is also something of a sequel to Akeydah, written immediately afterward, even if the events predate those of Akeydah (we might remember Ishmael notes that the babies of Sodom were killed for no crime of their own). And it’s also a play which touches upon illness and being outcast because of age and illness. The sort of thing you might write in your own personal ‘exile’ from the world you know.
There’s also present some of the social elements and themes that we see in the roughly contemporary poems of Naye Lider (New Poems) of 1932 — the poems relating to Leivick’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1925, poems concerned with race and with class, such as ‘Soviet Home’ and ‘Letter from America to a Distant Friend’. Leivick, though he later expresses more doubts later, is taken at the time with the social experiment he sees in the Soviet Union.
Leivick’s already had his first big break with the Soviets over the Hebron massacre in 1929 which saw him become one of the ‘runaways’ from Frayhayt, the Communist party paper. But we aren’t quite yet at the purges and murder of 1937 which will claim friends and colleagues (like M. Kulbak and I. Kharik), nor the Hindenburg-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 which will really tear things. Perhaps, the Third Visitor asks, such a world-changing, class-eliminating revolution could even happen in Sodom, where the rich look down on the house slaves, the house slaves look down on the field slaves, the field slaves look down on the wall slaves and everyone ostracises the sick, the poor and the foreign (this does, perhaps, begin to sound like a familiar situation for an immigrant poet in a charity sanatorium…) And so he tries to incite one.
The sarcasm with which the Third Visitor’s fellow angels greet the first, failed, revolt is something special — you don’t want them killed in the destruction of Sodom, so you just hurried that up and had them kill themselves, essentially, in a futile revolt? But the Third Visitor speaks in the voice of every martyr (and the voice of that great admirer of martyrs, Leivick himself) and confirms it is better to die free, in the act of rebellion, if only for a moment.
In an interesting twist, it is Hemda, Lot’s daughter, who offers herself to the crowd for the angels5 — Lot himself is a bit of a coward. The idea isn’t to survive unscathed or even to survive but to claw back human dignity.6 A concern in so much of Leivick’s work.
Nor is rebellion, at play’s end, entirely futile. While yes, there’s a volcano hurling down fire and sulphur, there’s also a group of slaves who have escaped the city who appear in the company of the other two angels, wielding torches. They, too, have been doing the divine work of destroying Sodom.
There’s another undercurrent in Leivick’s Sodom which is unsettling, especially in light of the period of its composition. Sodom has racial laws. You have to be a fourth-generation Sodomite to be a real one.
Lot and his family (he’s Abraham’s nephew) are only immigrants. Assimilated — never a good thing in Leivick. They’ve worked their way up, own land, hold public office, have married into the elite. But they are not, we are reminded again and again, truly from Sodom and cannot be.
A Sodom with racial laws in 1935 — the year of the Nuremberg laws. Lot, nephew of the world’s first Jew, protesting how much he loves the city. How he belongs there.
But let’s not get too cocky.
Shmuel Charney may agree that Sodom is Nazi-esque from 1951, and it surely is, but Sodom has a far closer-to-home equivalent. One we see bits of in Leivick’s poetry, too, in the same period. One that both of them are bit more shtum about during and after that war. If Sodom is sequel to Leivick’s previous work, it’s worth considering how New York is also called Sodom by his beggars in Poor Kingdom. How Marcus, from Different, sets fire to his shop not unlike the escaped slaves who torch Sodom along with the angels, how Uri Don, Marcus’s twin from Bankrupt, sees everything that is rotten manifested in the form of his own shop, all the shops with their lights always on a temples of commerce. We might even think of the pitiless sweatshop of Shop, whose operators can be replaced as easily as any slave in Sodom.
We might think of Leivick’s own now rather cringe-inducing, if then well-meaning treatments of race in his poetry.
Of course, as usual, someone else — here the Third Visitor rather than Isaac or even Abraham (or even Job) — has quite literally been put on the altar to be sacrificed in the name of something. This is the only bed in Leivick’s Sodom. The rack. From which the Thirst Visitor prophesies.
It’s Akeydahs all the way down. And angels — to quote the Third Visitor himself: ‘Here and everywhere. They’re under your chariot, they’re over your head, they’re above all of us [….]Don’t you see? If not, then you’ll never see.’
Levi Shalit considers the first three a trilogy, and Shmuel Charney groups the latter three. But I see no reason not to put them all together as the evolution of an idea.
Satan makes a brief appearance here, fully serving the divine intent, making certain Azrael the rebel will not find the Moshiach.
The reference to Lermontov here is to the poet Mikhail Lermontov’s ‘Demon,’ the titular Demon’s kiss fatal to the mortal woman with whom he falls in love. Charney sees a connection between this poem, Byron, and Leivick’s Chains of the Moshiach, pinpointing it as part Leivick’s reading in early years which had an effect of his early work. It’s certainly worthwhile to look at Leivick in terms of Russian literature, as well, and not just Jewish or Yiddish-language literature. Leivick himself cites his Russian influences often enough!
The Third Visitor, in fact, does love one of the beautiful daughters, though Azrael does not. And we get a — fairly typical for Leivick’s drama — love triangle of sorts. Both the Visitor and Nimrod love Hemda, Lot’s eldest daughter. But they’re both good people, gentlemen, so there’s no real conflict there.
I’ll never try to make a feminist, at least not a modern one, of Leivick. But his female characters are often given some agency — or are fighting for it.
Perhaps shade of the sanatorium here again. If there’s one thing that frequently goes out the window when one is chronically unwell, it’s dignity.