There, Where Free, Part One
A Play from Siberia
The last four plays I was missing were very kindly found for me in New York
— for which I am eternally grateful! — and as I write this, I am reading the very last of Leivick’s twenty-one completed plays/dramatic poems. Twenty-one, spanning from 1908’s Chains of the Moshiach (really a long poem in a play format, written in Minsk Prison) to 1953’s In the Days of Job and Sentence.1 It feels rather momentous in a way.
Little work, Shmuel Charney tells us, survived from the brief period Leivick spent in Siberia. A lone surviving poem from Siberia appears in Charney’s H. Leivick: 1888-1948, a segment of Leivick’s own diary from the time appears at the end of In Tsarist Katorga (1959) after being published in part in Tog in the forties.
And there’s There, Where Free, from 1912 — slightly revised and published forty years later, in 1952.
It was rather a treat to read something so early at this stage of my acquaintance with Leivick. And, unlike in the case of the later volume of unpublished dramas, to have Leivick’s own introduction to it; rather unsentimental, revealing that, as with Chains of the Moshiach, he has ‘bettered’ the language.2 I’m interested by his edits and when/ where he feels them necessary and of what, precisely, bettering the language might have consisted. Things, perhaps, to discover in the future.
Leivick says in his introduction to There, Where Free, published in Yidisher Kamfer, that it’s precisely Charney’s book, and his treatment of the play — then still only in manuscript — that had spurred its publication. And that’s how I knew the play for a long time; only through criticism, in the bare details of the plot; Two men, Koytman and Levine, who had grown close in katorga, meet again in freedom and exile in Siberia. Levine is joined by his wife, Rokhl, there and Koytman, the subject of the affections of Lena, a girl born in Siberia, named for the river who has carried them to their exile.
Things go to hell very quickly.
But knowing the play through Charney isn’t such a terrible thing, as it opens up more of the autobiographical angle. Dovid Levine,3 arguably the play’s main character — its really a quartet, but I get ahead of myself — is a painter of portraits. Portraits through which the conflict of the play is embodied and through which the relationships of the characters unravel rather spectacularly.4
We learn through Charney (and also through Solomon Simon’s book on Leivick’s childhood) that Leivick had almost attended art school in Odessa and in addition to breaking ice on the river, teaching and at least one round of grave-digging, he supported himself in Siberia by painting portraits.
From S. Charney, H. Leivick: 1888-1948, 1951.
Leivick, the would-have-been painter writing Levine, the painter by profession.
And there’s another autobiographical detail about Levine that we learn in the play’s prologue: his roubles are concealed in his sugar. Leivick describes himself how he concealed his own ten roubles in the bag of sugar he carries with him on his convoy from prison to the Lena.
From H. Leivick, In Tsarist Katorga, 1959.
Levine’s far richer — he has a hundred roubles. And an address sewn into the sleeve of his coat.5 He’s also done a bit more time, and expects his wife to be waiting in Siberia for him, having returned from her studies abroad.
From H. Leivick, There, Where Free, 1912/1952
The other male protagonist is Koytman. Let’s be perfectly clear, he’s also Leivick. Just somewhat differently than Levine. For one, he doesn’t have Leivick’s/Levine’s will to escape. Or, at least, not in the same manner.
Koytman won’t remove his prisoner’s coat, refusing even an offer to buy it off him, though at the start of the play he has been liberated from prison for a year. He sleeps wrapped in it. And in Leivick’s 1932 Naye Lider (it’s reorganised into Lider fun Gan Eyden in 1940’s Ale Verk) we find the poem ‘Smith’ :
From H. Leivick, Naye Lider, 1932.
While Leivick might not wear his coat or sleep in it any longer or even want it, he can’t get rid of it either. Whether in actuality or purely metaphorically is debatable (I certainly think he wouldn’t have wanted to be caught leaving with it, especially with the length he goes to to change from Siberian clothes to a ‘European’ suit during his escape) but certainly it’s effect remains — he speaks about his own ‘prison-like’ nature in poetry.
Koytman is just a heightening of this, a way of staging it — at one striking juncture, he ceases to be Koytman, the man who cannot find his freedom even with a wild, native-born daughter of Siberia who loves him obsessively (until Levine appears, literally, on her shore) and becomes the coat:
From H. Leivick, There, Where Free, 1912/1952
The retention of the coat isn’t the only autobiographical detail given to Koytman, however. When he receives a letter from his mother in Siberia, a couple more pieces of Leivick’s own life can be found in it. His mother has had to enlist someone else to write to him for her, in an echo of Leivick’s mother’s own near-illiteracy. And Koytman’s mother’s concern about what she’s heard about Siberia echoes the concern Leivick tells us his own mother expressed about his conditions in prison — what she’d heard about the treatment of prisoners.
Now the letter writer is ‘the bagel-baker’s grandson’ — Leivick’s own mother the bagel-baker, as mentioned in several poems. Previously, though, Koytman’s mother had another letter-writer:
From H. Leivick, There, Where Free, 1912/1952
It’s Shimon Leyb again! Shimon Leyb was, in fact, Leivick’s own childhood melamed in Ihumen who appears in essays and poems such as ‘Ballad of the Desert’ and ‘Clouds Behind the Forest.’
Levine, too, carries more of Leivick’s own autobiography in him. In a rather hallucinatory scene, Levine imagines the figure of his wife from several years earlier, before he was arrested, and they recall their life in the shtetl together.
From H. Leivick, There, Where Free, 1912/1952
And it seems clear from In Tsarist Katorga that this is Leivick’s own shyness, his own infatuation with a girl in his village who he was too reserved to approach (Levine’s a bit luckier or bolder).
And
From H. Leivick, In Tsarist Katorga, 1959.
Just as Levine once imagined Rokhl, his wife, standing beside his bed in prison, Leivick briefly entertains the idea that this girl who, like Rokhl, has gone abroad to study, might appear in prison beside him as his doctor.
Koytman and Levine are, in typical Leivickian style, two fragmented aspects of the same person: himself.
To Be Continued…
I don’t have the rights to the material here and present it out of my personal interest. I hope it piques yours. If you do own the rights and want things removed, let me know. All translations and mistakes my own unless noted.
If you’re interested in what I have to say about Leivick (I’ll suppose you are if you got this far) I’ll be presenting a short paper at Farbindungen 2024, a virtual Yiddish conference this Sunday, the 18th of February
The latter of these being a bit of a tale on my part, having been located and read in Hebrew first. And also a bit of a tale in what didn’t happen with it.
Leivick does make changes and leaves things out. There are a couple poems that don’t make their way into the Ale Verk in 1940 (and almost all of the plays!) and even a couple variant version of poems where they are published in Tog one way and in a book another. For instance, there are lines which are left out of the 1940 version of 1920’s ‘Der Volf.’ And a recontextualising of ‘The Stable.’ And those missing lines/action from Who’s Who, which appear in the play’s program and in Charney but not in the published version of the play in 1973.
The name ‘Levine,’ incidentally, is recycled for one of the protagonists of Chains, Leivick’s other drama touching upon prison.
I find in interesting to note that as of 1936, Leivick had certainly read Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Grey. Whether or not he had read it prior to writing There, Where Free, I don’t know.
This isn’t clarified in the text, but perhaps to do with the escape he later plans.