The Ballad of My Father’s Portrait, Part 1
Der Bayzer Tate
H. Leivick, Tog, 14 April, 1952
The bolder expression to which the more complicated relationship with his father came, however, is plain to be seen throughout Leivick’s career.
In Leivick’s drama, the father and son relationship is expressed in several ways,1 beginning with the literal: In Rags, we meet ragpicker by day and scholar by night Mordecai Maze and his baseball obsessed, thoroughly Americanised son and imagined nemesis, Harry; Reb Zelia the frum scholar and Mendel the mentally handicapped water-carrier who is enamoured with the revolution in Hirsh Lekert, Professor Shelling the traumatised pogrom-survivor and his son, Ludwig, who has been raised to believe he’s a gentile in Who’s Who, Yechiel the joiner and his two sons, one ready to stay and fight in the ghetto, the elder hidden with his gentile wife in Miracle in the Ghetto, Abraham and Isaac in Wedding in Foehrenwald, and a different, Biblical Abraham and Isaac in In Days of Job. Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael appear in Akeydah. Sometimes, Leivick expands to take in three generations — father, son and grandfather appear in Poor Kingdom and (almost) in The Poet Went Blind.
There are also a few missing fathers in the mix, with the absent/dead fathers of Marcus in Different,2 Hirsh Lekert — he will also become an absent father, himself, as will Hanina in Redemption Comedy — and Uri Don’s father in Bankrupt. Don, too, will likely becomes one of these absent fathers. Armilus in Redemption Comedy is also of uncertain, possibly mass, paternity.3
There’s also a missing son or two. Notably, Isaac becomes a missing, murdered, son in Wedding in Foehrenwald. There is Job and his slaughtered children and Tankhum’s martyred son in Golem. Marcus spurns the advances of his wife, rejecting potential fatherhood. Maharam of Rothenburg’s Knup (another character of unknown parentage), is the son-in-law who never was and, being rejected, becomes an actual nemesis instead (not just Maze’s imagining of Harry).
Lastly, we have the metaphorical fathers and sons. The most famous of those, of course, are the Maharal and his creature, the Golem, which he brings into the world and takes back out of it. I would also class the relationship between Levine and Daniel, the teacher and student revolutionaries of Chains, as father and son adjacent, as well. In addition to his actual son, Bob, Morris Rosenfeld Maxim Thornfeld has a spiritual heir in Leivick Lev, the former revolutionary turned poet. Even Leivick’s constant pairing of Elijah and the Moshiach contains something of the father-like figure shepherding a son through a world he is not prepared for — which is not, in turn, ready for him.
And, while the Golem and the Maharal are best the known, the most intriguing of these metaphorical father and son relationships to me is Abelard (who ran from what he perceived as violence against his mother by his actual father in the form of the sexual act) and his Father-Confessor. Gregory, who asks to be referred to as Abelard’s ‘Father,’ has quite literally emasculated his now ‘son’ — he was the leader of the gang who castrated him.4
Almost all of these are highly contentious, emotionally charged relationships. And the father-figures and relationships with them which appear in Leivick’s poetry are no less so. In his poetry, however, the figure of the father is far more blatantly modelled on his own — often stammering, red-bearded, frequently furiously angry at life and violent toward his eldest child.
To list them all in this format would approach the impossible — Saul the Cohen is everywhere. He’s the ghost in the house, the eternal nagging voice of self-doubt, sometimes Leivick’s own alter-ego, with whom he can trade places, as much as his father, and his influence stretches from Leivick’s first book all the way to his last, from 1919 to 1959.
One of the earliest versions of this father figure can be been in ‘The Severe Father,’ five poems into 1919’s Poems.5 I think it’s presence near the beginning of the volume owes as much to the time of its composition as it’s perceived importance in this image-building collection. Image-building, because Leivick is in no way ignorant of the public persona he’s creating, deliberately choosing the poem which will be his ‘first,‘ though there were published poems which pre-dated it. It’s the moment where things first slid into place, though, as Leivick says to A. Tabachnick in interview. A first of a different kind. And though he says he typically arranges poems by order of composition, that also has exceptions. I think of much of Poems (Lieder) as an announcement of arrival, a statement of purpose and being.
I’ve mentioned a few times now that Leivick doesn’t put himself on the page unedited, without holding something back — the ‘blessing of restraint,’ as he says — and it would be wrong to think of the poem (or any) as entirely autobiographical. Nevertheless, there are a enough similarities to his own situation (as written about elsewhere) to make a few parallels clear and make it worth consideration.
And, as Chava Rosenfarb says, you can’t separate Leivick entirely from his work either.
The children make a racket, And the severe father beats them, The children cry, The children get tired and sleep, And the severe father — he does not sleep. Bent The severe father. Through the window The wind slinks in and snuffs out the lamp. And the lamp is extinguished. I, too, do not sleep, I — the quietest of the children, On my face I still feel father’s fingers, As I cry silently into my pillow. […] In the dark Stumbling blind, I do not find the door, Go astray, Strike myself and fall down With head facing Father. Bent The severe father sits still, Not hearing a thing. I say: Father, I’ll die You won’t beat me anymore; Candles burn On the earth, at my head. The children cry. The children get tired and sleep. He mourns alone, the severe father.
From ‘The Severe Father’ from H. Leivick, Poems, Inzel, 1919.
‘The Severe Father’ follows Leivick’s pattern of taking an existing situation, story or idea and taking it to an extreme — turning all the dials up to eleven, so to speak. There are clearly identifiable realistic, and potentially autobiographical, details: a number of children, all of them sharing a single sleeping space, the fact that the child-speaker is the quietest of them, Leivick’s ‘sullen’ silence a source of strain in his relationship with his father as noted by Solomon Simon, the beatings which are also recorded elsewhere.
Then there is the brutal resolution — Leivick’s imagining of this alter ego’s death, candles burning at his head, whether caused directly by the father or by the failed attempt to flee. An empathetic treatment of a truth for someone, somewhere in the world, but not his own. A could-have-been, intensified, perhaps, by the loss of his sister in childhood.
Many of the poetic versions of Leivick’s father fall into the category of not merely the heightened, as in ‘The Severe Father,’ but the dreamed, supernatural or visionary. In ‘Dozing Boy,’ from In No Man’s Land, a decidedly ghostly version of what may be Saul the Cohen stands over his son’s bed and speaks to him, awaiting his joining him in death, which you can hear Leivick himself reading here.
1932’s New Poems has a whole spate of father poems, and that’s where we’re off to next!
Father and Son, Mordecai Maze (Maurice Schwartz) and Harry (Zvi Scooler), at right.
To be continued…
I don’t often indulge myself in ‘diary’ — it’s boring — and prefer to keep to the ‘Bad Yiddishist’ side of things, which is far more interesting, but yesterday would have been my father’s birthday. It’s hard not to think of him at this time of year. It wasn’t an easy relationship and it never will be. And I occasionally find some consolation in knowing other people spend as much time replaying everything
There are fathers and daughters, too — notably Mordecai Maze’s two daughters and those of the Maharam of Rothenburg, but we’ll stick with sons for my purposes.
Marcus explicitly rejects intimate relations and precludes his becoming a father himself.
This is wonderfully strange: Armilus’ mother is a woman-shaped stone which all the local men took turns with. His father is also possibly Satan. In Leivick’s play, he’s the ‘Prophet of the Eternal Present,’ a sort of shape-shifting spin-doctor/influencer who’s always on to the next hot thing, but it’s nearly impossible to tell if he’s only predicting the trend or shaping it himself. A thoroughly modern figure — from 1932!
As opposed to the emasculating, Americanised, sons in Rags and The Poet Went Blind, who have no respect for their fathers as people with their own desires and lives, let alone as fathers. Abelard’s own status as a father is happily ignored and though he refers to Heloise as ‘Mother,’ it’s more in the sense of her being all to him — his wife, sister and mother. Making poor Astrolabe another missing/fatherless son.
There’s some latitude in ‘bayzer’ — harsh, wicked, angry, fierce, unkind, etcetera. I’ve gone with ‘severe’ though I think ‘enraged’ would also work quite handily, as there were clearly calm periods in the real relationship which Leivick also writes about. But I do think, taking a wholistic view, ‘severe’ is as equally viable a candidate, when you consider how the stick remained there as a warning in a later poem — but more on that later. Mendel’s father, in Hirsh Lekert is also described as ‘bayzer’ and certainly is, while it is also made clear he’s been both mother and father to his son and does love him.