The Ballad Of My Father’s Portrait, Part 2
Who Doesn’t Know Your Face?
Having last time had a glimpse of a severe, angry father in 1919’s Poems (Lieder), who is roughly based on Leivick’s own father,1 we get a look at what is a rather more definite image of Saul the Cohen in Canto XII of ‘Songs of Annihilation’ in 1932’s New Poems (Naye Lider). There, amidst all the stylised, ritualised death and macabre imagery, a rather familiar-looking ghost stalks through a darkened house.
Who doesn’t know them, given how much time Leivick spends telling us about them?
What is also established in this poem is Saul the Cohen as an alter-ego for Leivick himself. While Leivick frequently employs other selves, doubles and masks,2 the one he most often returns to is his own father — the father he was both meant to be like and also not to be like.
And, of course, he is both like him and not like him. But in in the ways imagined.
Leivick speaks at several junctures about his resemblance to his father, his ‘inheritance’ which is not merely physical and intimately familial, but one of ‘race.’ And also the expectation that was placed upon him to become a rabbi, though his father had not become one himself.3 The poem ends with these doubles who are not simply doubles, but mirror images or even sequels — or perhaps shards of some greater, broken whole; the ‘Old Home’ father and the ‘New Home’ son, one dead and one alive. Both struggling to speak. An Old Home slur is coupled to a brand new one: ‘Oh, zhid, oh, sheeny.’ They both are compelled to smash their own faces in response — the inherited gestures and fate. And not just of one father and son.
There isn’t long to wait before the reader again encounters Saul (or someone very, very like him) in a symbol-building cycle of four poems entitled ‘My Father.’ The first of which is the encounter between living speaker and dead father.
Y. Gottlieb says of this particular entry in the cycle that ‘The cadaverous, tormented fingers of his father’s body are, for the poet, transformed into the eternal beams of a warm, bright sun which had, like a living well of light, drew toward itself the poet’s visions and wishes.’ I don’t necessarily disagree. But, rather, return to my idea that for Leivick life is predicated entirely on the fact that we die. I don’t know that the fingers are truly ‘transformed’ in any way, but rather that it’s the encounter with death, the acknowledgment of it, that allows for better, more meaningful living. We see it in Leivick’s post-war work, too, where he declares that living must be easier now that he has touched the barbed wire of a KZ with his own hand.
According to Midrash, ‘all sevens are beloved’ — and there’s no exception here. The speaker guides his father’s hand over his face seven times. And Gottlieb seizes upon another poem, from the same book, where the seven becomes prominent, quoting: ‘If one dies seven deaths,/The arising is easier…’ Are these, then, seven (self-controlled, self-administered) brushes with death which allow for an easier return to life?
In these early books, Leivick is constructing (or, at least, presenting to the reader) his symbology and — at least to my way of thinking, eventually his own ‘shorthand.’
I’ve already jumped to other poems in the book, and I think you must, because they do provide more context. For Poem II of ‘My Father,’ I’ll skip back to ‘Songs of Annihilation’ yet again. In the second poem of that sequence/cycle, the speaker carries his ‘holy song’ in his teeth ‘like a wolf with miserable bone’ and has a cave to which to retire. A very different image than the one in Leivick’s ‘Yiddish Poets’ of poets as house-cats carrying kittens in their teeth. There’s nothing caring, protective or nurturing in that image of a wolf and the bone he gnaws.
Here, again, that wolf-like creature returns. And it’s not just the speaker’s own animal nature, but his ancestry. We see a pattern being played out. The father is the furred beast in a cave, now unrecognisable apart from the fact the speaker knows it to be some, perhaps primeval, ancestor. Perhaps recognising him (and recognising his father in him) by his attack and by his howling that he isn’t the same. Who doesn’t know his father’s face? He’s certainly struggling now himself.
And he cannot see his own similarity now. It will take the eyes of another to see him, too, as a vaguely-familiar, vaguely-savage, stranger someday.
The task of finding the speaker’s family resemblance will fall, in turn, to the speaker’s own son — the boy who plays in the snow, who will take his own father’s head, grown into beastly form, in his hands and search it for familiar features.
And if the second poem touches upon ancestry in almost a Darwinian way, exploring the possibility of a non-human ancestry, the third brings things back to a less ‘scientific’ and more intimate exploration of inheritance. There’s no doubt left that the father of the quartet’s title is Leivick’s own father — if there ever was any to begin with. The speaker locates his parents graves precisely where Leivick says his own parents were buried, in the cemetery beside the mill. And, of course, also in New York, with him.
Because of the ‘heritance’ in him, his father, follows him wherever he goes. And the poems build, one upon the other. His father is in the dead house, just as Leivick is, suffering the same slurs. He’s in the park, like his son and grandson, the blanket of snow covering and joining all three of them. They are all part of a great, primordial chain of fathers and sons.
The third poems also joins beginnings and ends. The grave is just down the street, in Hester Park, as much as it is thousands of miles away in Belarus.4 This closing of the circle, meeting of beginning and end in an individual (or through shadow, snow, some physical feature) though thousands of miles separate them, will be a frequent theme in Leivick’s last book, Songs to the Eternal (Lider Tsum Eybikn).
In poem IV of ‘My Father,’ there is a decided shift. The identity of the double is altered; Leivick’s identical twin no longer his father, in any guise or form, but Death. Beginning is joined to end, in a circle — just as it will be in Leivick’s late poems, where he talks about the end of life bringing him ‘back to the place of [his] cradle.’ Death, quite literally, shares the cradle here. It’s always been with him, because he’s alive.
Death, of course, has been woven through the whole quartet (as well as through poem XII of ‘Songs of Annihilation,’ and all of New Poems): The father who restores his son to new life through his death, the father who lies buried in snow and the son who becomes the father himself (and both of them decidedly…beastly? Wolfish?), the father’s death/grave which has accompanied the speaker to New York, to Hester Park. What importance there is in out ancestors, our pasts and histories, we carry with us.
Finally, there is living, earthly — rather than ‘other-worldly’ — father who becomes father to a contradiction, to a Leivickian duality, to almost a sort of symbiosis: To both Life and Death itself.
To be Continued…
There is also a poem in the first few pages of Lieder, a poem about a bad mother — who is very definitely not his own. Where that particular image comes from is unclear, but I feel it certainly muddies the interpretive waters enough to remain reserved about ‘The Severe Father.’
Again, caution in reading the ‘I’ of any one poem as purely the voice of the poet, but ‘I Am of Two Aspects’ from Leivick’s Poems (1919) touches upon his dual nature. Shmuel Charney also talks about Leivick’s doubles and masks at length. Leivick himself says that something must be withheld. His ‘masks’ are one way he does this withholding.
You have to skip back to Saul’s father, Dov-Ber, who did have his semicha, but who purposely did not take up a post as a rabbi and died young of tuberculosis (which Leivick counts as a family inheritance). Saul was a Yiddish teacher who taught girls how to read and write. While, as he writes in In Tsarist Katorga, his father was ashamed of this, ‘Grandfather would have entirely respected it; he would be pleased that you teach Jewish daughters Jewish letters. — Grandfather would, I think, feel pleased with my desire to be a Yiddish writer.’
Later, on his trip to Mandatory Palestine in 1937, Leivick writes about the proximity between Mount Carmel and this cemetery by the old mill in Ihumen: ‘It’s not very far. It’s just there, behind the mill. A few strides from here, from beautiful Carmel to the mill which is in the shtetl of Chervyen, Minsk region; on from there, beyond the great wood…’