Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?
There are two wolves inside you, and one used to be the Rov.
An illustration for ‘Der Volf’ by Marek Halter, from H. Leivick: Poète Yiddish, Gopa, 1967.
I like to think Leivick might have appreciated my constant moving in circles…
if not, necessarily, my general approach to reading and sharing his work in a haphazard way. Or, as he once put it with regards to the Poale Zion of Warsaw: ‘[they] took it upon their own responsibility and pulled extracts of my speeches from newspapers, and printed them unedited, without order and without taste.’
He certainly wouldn’t have liked the fact I could only read about two words of Yiddish before the age of forty. Although he did predict that would most likely be the case.
Being that ‘The Wolf’ kicked everything off, I come back to it fairly frequently. And I like to play a bit with it. One-hundred-year-old spoilers, personal experiences and academically-unsound conclusions ahead!
Outside of the first Golem play, ‘The Wolf’ is probably Leivick’s best known work in English.1 Certainly one that’s received a lot of attention for it’s ‘prescience’ after the Second World War and the Khurbn. A Rov who’s the only survivor of his town sifting through piles of ashes, looking for something, anything — anyone — to give a proper burial? Looking back at that from 2023, it seems to have a particular clairvoyance about what the 20th century would hold.
But he gives it the subtitle ‘A Chronicle’. Leivick wasn’t so much trying to predict the future as to record an experience. Again, like in Wedding at Foehrenwald, an experience not entirely his own to chronicle. But Leivick did have a certain knowledge of pogroms, as well as their perpetrators, himself. Yisroel Shtern apparently commended him on the veracity of its depiction, saying ‘That’s just how it is; just the way it is.’2
And what was it Leivick was recording? The aftermath of the Petliura pogroms. ‘The Wolf’ is part of a quartet of long poems found at the end of the 1923 collection In No Man’s Land, sometimes dubbed the ‘Pogrom Poems.’ I’ll get to the other poems (‘The Stall,’ ‘The Sick Room’ and ‘He’) at another time. In fact, I’m not going to stay with ‘The Wolf’ — at least not on it’s own — for very long.
The Harshavs included an abridged version of the poem in their vast, bilingual American Yiddish Poetry, drawn from the version printed in Leivick’s Complete Works in 1940. Joachim Neugroschel’s complete translation, in his anthology, Radiant Days, Haunted Nights, is also drawn from that 1940 version.3 Dara Horn wrote about it for Tablet,4 Jewcy wrote about it, there’s a feature on Sefaria…you get the picture!
While ‘The Wolf’ is very much it’s own thing, and very definitely Leivick (the ‘body horror’ and grotesquerie is very, very typical for him), you can see something more universal in it, too. How like Curt Siodmak’s later Wolf-Man it is in places — and any number of other works of horror fiction and film: The Wolf-Rov attacks the people he ought to love, is hunted by a couple of brave young men, the women and children stay at home, afraid to go out at night, they’ve essentially (re)built their new town on a mass grave, the Wolf is eventually killed and, to distress of the townspeople and the joy of the Wolf himself, it wasn’t a wolf at all, but the Rov all this time.
And while I can’t say how much ‘The Wolf’ may or may not owe to most other popular media, it’s important to remember that almost all of Leivick’s fantasy, horror and grotesque imaginings have a foot in very traditional, very observant Judaism.
Siodmak’s Wolf-Man is Jewish, yes, he says as much himself in interview, but more symbolically so. His treatment of lycanthropy runs parallel to his own experience of Judaism — something he has been made by someone else. Sometimes, even a curse. To be fled.
Leivick’s Wolf, on the other hand, comes more from the long history of Jewish werewolves, possibly reaching as far back as Benjamin, Jacob’s youngest son. He’s a wolf with yichus — though, in fact, the Rov’s transformation begins when he finds himself unable to continue being Jewish, when he cannot even remember the words to pray, despite wanting to. In that wonderful blurring between Judaism and personhood that you get in Yiddish, he can no longer be human when he cannot be a Jew.
But that tradition isn’t necessarily Leivick’s only source.
Heinrich Heine’s ‘Princess Sabbath’ is frequently mentioned in almost the same breath, particularly in Jay Geller’s Bestiarium Judaicum, as Leivick’s ‘Der Volf.’ Leivick, as we can tell from elsewhere,5 was a reader (I think, perhaps, fan, though I’ll remain conservative) of Heine. He most certainly would have been aware of ‘Princess Sabbath’ and the poem’s Jew who is transformed from a man, into a dog, by weekday life and the antisemitism of the surrounding world.
I believe Leivick’s Wolf, though built on that firm traditional, religious foundation, is possibly also a response— at least in part — to Heine. The Rov is transformed by antisemitism (as well as his own grief) into not a dog, but a wolf. He is restored to humanity by Judaism, not on Shabbos, but at the very close of Yom Kippur, not by celebration, but by death.
To me, that’s a very Leivickian response and development of a theme: the heightening of a text, turning all the dials to eleven, further pressurising a pre-extant situation to the point of explosion. And adding a bucket of blood for good measure. Everything is exaggerated, taken to a ‘logical,’ if sensationally gruesome, extreme.
The introduction of the fantastic into what otherwise would have been, and surely could have been, a purely historical poem, is part of Leivick’s method of drawing the ‘chronicle’ of ‘The Wolf’ out to the extreme. It isn’t enough for the survivors (of, presumably, another act of similar violence) who have come to the town to rebuild their lives be haunted metaphorically or to be full of self-destructive rage themselves; It has to take on a physical form. And it must be brutally put down.
‘Dreams of Yiddish Writers: The poet H. Leivick walks around in his garden of lament and he dreams that every tree grows an axe and knife — and he feels himself the happiest poet amongst Jews…’ Morgen Zhurnal, 1945.
To be continued…
Other languages, too! It ran on Swedish radio in 2005 as Vargen, in translation by Salomon Schulman.
As per Leivick’s introduction to the 1955 volume of Shtern’s poems and essays, available in translation by Jon Levitow here.
I say ‘version’ here because there are at least two versions of ‘The Wolf’ in Yiddish. The 1923 version, printed in In No Man’s Land, sees the Wolf ripping out the throats of the new villagers’ livestock as his way of introducing other presence to the town — initially, they meet him as a rather feral Rov. The lines are deleted in the Complete Works of 1940.
While I very much respect Horn’s work, I prefer not to link to Tablet due to their platforming of transphobic writers. The article, ‘Message from a Yiddish Werewolf,’ is easily found. Horn’s take on the poem itself is pretty darn sound, but she’s slightly off, in my opinion, in the total assessment of Leivick.
Heine gets particular mention for admiration in ‘Ballad of Denver Sanatorium,’ and his ‘Rabbi of Bacharach’ is invoked in With the Surviving Remnant, off the top of my head.