From an exhibit called ‘Dressed for Eternity: Jewish Shrouds Through The Ages’ at the Israel Museum in 2023.
There were many, many things I didn’t get to say at Farbindungen24, though I remain intensely grateful for what I did get the chance to share and for the infusion of new ideas and enthusiasm!
One subject I did get to talk about briefly was Tania, Leivick’s little sister. I’ve mentioned her before, but I really feel like breaking my usual schedule to say a bit more about her today.
I’ve previously written a bit about the duality of fire in Leivick’s work, it’s generative and destructive power. It is, he shows in various places, the making of him: as a person, as a Jew (in ‘In Fire,’ from Leaf on an Apple Tree), as a poet and, perhaps, prophet. (I look specifically here to ‘Ballad of the Desert’ from I Was Not in Treblinka, where he touches a flaming Sinai and is ‘marked’ and to Malka Lee’s ‘To Leivick in Hospital’ where she calls him Jeremiah). He is the Isaac who walks away from the sacrificial fire.
But fire is the unmaking of his sister. She becomes the lamb, the sacrifice. The korbn — victim and/or burnt offering.
Intriguingly, Leivick also imagines an early end for himself in the early poem ‘The Severe Father’ (Poems, 1919) where it is him who is killed as a child, beaten to death, and lies on the floor with candles at his head — possibly a sort of ‘what if?’ where she lives and he does not, rather the reality that it is him who comes home and sits shiva in his socks in ‘My Little Sister.’ (Leaf on an Apple Tree, 1955)1
Here’s what S. Charney has to say about Leivick and his sister.
From S. Charney, H. Leivick: 1888-1948, 1951
And then what Leivick has to say about her in interview with Y. Pat:
From Y. Pat, Conversations with Yiddish Writers, 1954.
I disagree with the identification of her death as the fourth event in his landmark day when he was seven (involving an antisemitic assault, a breakdown over the story of Isaac’s attempted sacrifice and a bleeding tongue) that he identifies as marking all his work in his 1957 speech, ‘The Jew — The Individual,’ in spite of Sandor Goodhart and Sarah R. Horowitz’s inclusion/identification of it as such.
Repressed? Perhaps initially. But the fourth event he references? Personally, I lean toward the fever and scolding he says his father gives him when he retells this event in In Tsarist Katorga.
For one, if you read the longer description of his terrible day in Oyf Tsarisher Katorge, he does not include that event and the day finishes quite differently — the event is recounted as part of a series of fevers he describes relating to his experience of having typhus in prison and which functions as a sort of time travel through his life and what has brought him to that juncture. The scene ends as he briefly comes to, back in prison.
From H. Leivick, In Tsarist Katorga, 1959.
The description of the day that Tania was fatally injured from the interview with Pat is entirely different: Leivick never makes it into the house, he is taken to a neighbour. (Charney also places the event at six rather than seven, since I’m splitting hairs about 1895-ish)
So while Leivick may or may not have combined the events to make up his very bad day, as Goodhart and Charles Madison theorise, and we know he could tell a single story in several configurations, I find it unlikely that is a fourth, repressed, incident in 1957. He is clearly sharing the detail publicly by at least 1951 when it appeared in Charney’s Leivick-book. A poem, ‘My Little Sister’ describing her golden hair alongside the details of her burial, appears in 1955’s Leaf on an Apple Tree.
But I can believe that he’s still suppressing it, consciously or not, in 1946, when revisiting the DP camps. There are a few junctures where he shuts down or turns away, unable to continue; the emotional stress of the situation overwhelming for anyone.
And here are is the first excerpt from With the Surviving Remnant which, I think, underscore that vision of Tania on ‘all the paths of his life’.
From H. Leivick, With the Surviving Remnant, 1946.
Here, the passage ends abruptly, switching over to his search for the grave of Aaron Zeitlin’s nephew.
There comes a second:
From H. Leivick, With the Surviving Remnant, 1946.
Here, he again quickly breaks off and walks away from the crowd, suddenly at a loss. And while there was, of course, the woman he met earlier, I’m not convinced there isn’t a time even before that which he has in mind — as a child, with his sister.
Mit Der Shayres Hapleyte largely predates any real discussion of Tania in Leivick’s work that I’ve read so far and I wonder if he quite realises why he’s so affected. He can clearly put his finger on his sanatorium experiences for a reason why the survivors with TB touch him so deeply. Nathan Newman and Denver are public knowledge at this point.
He can also identify why going into the dark of a ‘bunker’ at Kaufering II is vaguely familiar; it reminds him of the total darkness of his punishment of solitary confinement in prison, both similar and entirely unlike it.
From H. Leivick, With the Surviving Remnant, 1946.
But Tania?
Apart from Nathan Newman and Katorga, Leivick often does play personal detail close to the chest in this book. And he clearly does hold back, saying that he practices conscious restraint for the sake of art. For whatever reason, art or repression, he’s clearly keeping some things to himself and keeping shtum. Leivick is especially moved by the children he meets, and particularly affected by a young boy named Dovid — but doesn’t mention in his text that he has only just become a grandfather himself. Likewise, he writes, seemingly generally if you’ve read nothing else by him, about blessing sons and sending them off to war. His colleague and fellow delegate, Israel Efros, certainly writes this sort of statement rather theoretically — he has a daughter and it’s a very general platitude. It wasn’t general or abstract for Leivick, he’d actually done it.
But it goes some way to explaining, at least to my mind, why he so intimately empathises with the survivors he meets, not just as a humanist or as a Jew.. He says, at the end of ‘The Jew — The Individual,’ the same speech where Tania’s death may or may not be a fourth, repressed, event, that while he cannot understand six million Isaacs, he can understand one.
As we’ll see moving forwards from here, he can understand one innocent lamb, as well.
Not the only time he imagines wearing his own shroud!