A couple of years ago, my then father-in-law was living at my house when he read a notice in the Yiddish paper about money for holocaust survivors from Swiss banks. There was an eight-hundred number to call. I dialed it. Press one to continue in English, the recorded message said. Press two to continue in Yiddish. Press three to continue in Hebrew. I was so astonished by these options – was there another recording on the entire face of the earth that offered people a button to press to hear a message in Yiddish? – that I barely took in the information that was coming at me as a result of my pressing one. When I finished listening, my father-in-law was eager to find out what I'd learned. "Vad dey say?" he asked me. "You want to know," I said. "Come here." I handed him the receiver and instructed him to press two. He listened for about thirty seconds and slammed down the phone. "What's the matter?" I asked him. He looked at me in disgust. "She speaks Yiddish like you."

An Israeli cousin once gave me a similar compliment. "Redst Yidddish vi a gar," he told me, after I tried to start a conversation in Yiddish. "You speak Yiddish like a convert."

I thought I had better come clean, lest you think I'm qualified to be writing this essay. I'm not. I own some volumes of Yiddish poetry, which I purchased at a place in the East Twenties in Manhattan, where you could only go on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 to 2, and where, when I told the man I wanted all the works of Peretz Markish that were written in poetry, not prose, he told me, "If I knew that, which was poetry and which was prose, would I be working here?" I used to try to read the poetry with my friend, Isaac Rose, of blessed memory – an accountant, a native of Krakow – in study sessions that invariably went something like this:

"This is a terrible Yiddish," Isaac would say, disgusted. "It doesn't make any sense. What's that supposed to mean? The disappearing red."

"Well, Isaac, maybe it has to do with the sunset in the line before."

He'd look at me for a minute and say, "Could be."

He understood Yiddish but not poetry; I, poetry but not Yiddish. We were like a blind man leading a deaf man through an art gallery to a concert – or perhaps vice versa. In any case, we didn't get very far.

So what am I doing here, writing on poetry composed in a language that I don't speak and read even more poorly? Weirdly, I found the answer in an obscure essay by Abraham Koralnik, an American Yiddish poet, whose poems have not, to my knowledge, been translated into English. Written in 1928, when the world was still teeming with speakers of Yiddish, it's called "On Mazl," which most would translate "without luck." Even before Hitler murdered most of the world's Yiddish speakers, before Stalin murdered Yiddish literature's greatest Soviet practitioners, Koralnik maintains that the days of Yiddish are numbered. The reason? Yiddish has no mazl.

But mazl – though it's one of those stubborn Yiddish words that refuses to die – also refuses translation. Koralnik insists that it should not be confused with "luck." "If a man grows rich because gold has been discovered on his land, that still isn't mazl," he writes, "it's just an accident. It has nothing to do with him, it doesn't reflect his essential being. Mazl is something different and deeper. It is rooted in personality. It is the crux of our being, determining that we live in one way rather than another. It is character and talent" (326).

Excuse me? Needless to say, Koralnik does not mean that Yiddish – a language teeming with such sayings as "There are better-looking people underground," and my favorite, "Ich ken nisht tanzen bai tzvei chasanas mit ein tuchas" (I can't dance at two weddings with one behind), and that calls a boring person a "shtik holtz" (a piece of wood) – is lacking in character. What Koralnik means is that "character" and "talent" are lacking in the Jews who have abandoned Yiddish. He complains that we Jews are too in love with antiquity: "The new doesn't please them. They can't accept the new with ease – and not the new language either" (328). He is, of course, referring to the return to Hebrew among the pioneers in the land of Israel. But he is also, of course, being ironic, as an American Jew, about the American Jews' race to acquire the newfangled American English. He closes his essay by saying:

Still – it is to be regretted. A shame. I can imagine a time when Jews will regret that they behaved so frivolously and condescendingly to the Yiddish word. It will be a time when Yiddish will have "disappeared." Once "disappeared," it will have become old, dead – and interesting. The Jews of that time will grow nostalgic – the English-speaking ones, the Hebrew-speaking ones – for the tones of a language generations and generations of Jews had spoken. They will grow nostalgic for the sounds born in the Middle Ages and strengthened on the Slavic steppes, sounds of Jewish intimacy and loneliness, sorrows and jokes, sounds saturated with the heart's blood of a people.

They will regret it, those who come after us. They will yearn for songs that were not sung, the sigh that failed to become a symphony, treasures that were never used.

Perhaps a Maecenas will then appear in behalf of the dead and sacred Yiddish tongue. But it will be too late.

A language without mazl. (328)

You can see why I had to include this quotation. Here we are, in an obscure little article I discovered only by sheer mazl, written nearly eighty years ago. My wanting to write this essay and your wanting to read it are proof of the clairvoyance of this never-translated American Yiddish poet; there we are, in his luckless, haimish crystal ball, with our too-late nostalgia and regrets, and Maecenas isn't anywhere in sight. There's only Koralnik, shaking his head, sighing his Yiddish I told you so.

But Koralnik meant something else, too, when he called Yiddish a language without mazl. He meant that Yiddish is a language that refuses to take luck into consideration, that refuses to believe that accident has any sway over us, but rather, that talent and character – that we – will make our own luck. It's this world-view, this insistence on believing not in destiny, but in character and talent – that character and talent are destiny – that makes Yiddish so profoundly compatible with America.

I want to argue that the great American Yiddish poets were great American poets, that theirs was very much an American literary enterprise. And while this language without mazl may seem incompatible with such a country, which has always had (at least until the last two presidential elections) such excellent luck, its very essence as a language makes its literature, in relation to the traditional literature of its culture, very like American literature in its relation to the extraordinary literary tradition of Great Britain. The great Yiddish novelist Joseph Opatoshu points out that Poe and Whitman also refused to write in the accepted literary tradition of their English forebears. "By seeking to express themselves in their own way... they laid the cornerstone of contemporary American literature. Their youthful successors in the twentieth century deliberately discarded English tradition and began to write about themselves, about their America. In the process they gave birth to a new language: unpolished words, lively, full-blooded, that drove out the genteel and rigid diction of the English" (307). Look at the adjectives Opatoshu chooses to describe the American idiom: "unpolished..., lively, full-blooded" – could there be a better description of Yiddish?

The great Yiddish poets take Hebrew literary tradition head on. Itzik Manger has our matriarch Leah reading French novels, and describes Abishag, the young maiden who kept King David warm in his old age, as "the king's hot-water bottle," dreaming about the "handsome miller," and "the shepherd... whose piping is still dear to her." He goes on, "they even promised her a line in the Bible," but makes clear that she paid too high a price:

A line for her young flesh
the years of her youth
A line of ink on parchment
for the whole long truth.
          (Whitman 127; translated by Ruth Whitman)

Manger's implication is that he – in his full-blooded Yiddish – is getting at more of the "whole truth" (in Yiddish it's "gantze var") than the ancient "ink on parchment" – quite an extraordinary claim. And then there's Hagar, cast out with her son Ishmael in the desert, saying: "Ven nisht, Ishmaelikl tata." With this one endearment, Manger manages to turn the progenitor of the Arab people into the darling little boy of a Yiddishe Mama. Just seeing these larger-than-life Biblical characters as ordinary Yiddish-speaking folk is revolutionary and irreverent. And Manger includes himself among them. When Abraham scolds Lot for his drunkenness, he says

Manger, the tailor, can do such things,
But it simply won't do for you.
You've a couple of daughters to raise, knock wood,
and besides, you're a wealthy Jew.
          (Treasury, 275; translated by Leonard Wolf)

Manger very deliberately identifies himself as tailor, not as poet. The poet, like the prophets and patriarchs, is an ordinary working man.

This is entirely akin to the world-view expressed by America's first self-appointed national poet, Walt Whitman, when he announces:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.
Those of mechanics – each one singing his as it should be
     blithe and strong;
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plane or
     beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or
     leaves off work;
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat –
     the deckhand singing on his steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench.... (12)

Whitman hears the laborers singing, but our Yiddish poets go one better: they are the laborers singing. Manger's a tailor; Mani Leib is the "shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench."

The first words in the brief biography of Mani Leib in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Poetry are "A skilled bootmaker." His poem "I am" begins:

I am Mani Leib, whose name is sung —
In Brownsville, Yeheputz and, farther, they know it:
Among cobblers, a splendid cobbler; among
Poetical circles a splendid poet.
          (Penguin, 128; translated by John Hollander)

The long poem goes on to tell of the poet's attempt to give up his day job as a bootmaker, the disastrous financial consequences, and his return to making shoes. He ends:

In Brownsville, Yeheputz, beyond them, even,
My name shall ever be known, O Muse.
And I'm not a cobbler who writes, thank heaven,
But a poet, who makes shoes. (130)

The poem is, of course, very funny: Brownsville and Yeheputz are hardly Paris and London and that "beyond them, even" is both wistful – for the inaccessible old country – and ironic. But even as he mocks himself, Mani Leib declares himself a poet. And, unlike their English predecessors, who were frequently either clergymen or aristocrats, many American poets also had highly incompatible day jobs. T.S. Eliot worked in a bank, Stevens in an insurance company, William Carlos Williams as a pediatrician, Whitman himself as a printer. I think Whitman would have loved Mani Leib' s poem, and would gladly have shared the Brooklyn of his "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" with the Brownsville where Mani Leib made shoes.

Like the down-to-earth Manger, Whitman, too, had no time for scholarship. In "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" he describes "[h]ow soon unaccountable I became tired and sick" of "the proofs, the figures... the charts and diagrams.... / Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself / ...and from time to time / Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars" (227). As we've already seen with Manger – who pits life's long truths against the pithy text of the Bible – Yiddish literature is by definition anti-scholarly. It must defy a scholarly tradition just to get written, since it comes of a culture that prizes study of Hebrew Bible and Aramaic Talmud over using one's own voice in the vernacular. Yiddish gets its revenge in its very expression for a great Hebrew and Aramaic scholar: "er oyskenen zich in de schvartze pintilach" (he really understands those little black dots). Yiddish, unlike Hebrew, does not use the "black dots" as vowels, but rather imports silent Hebrew letters for its own Yiddish purposes. To understand the little black dots is, literally, to be able to use that alphabet to read not Yiddish but Hebrew and the even more scholarly Aramaic. But at the same time, this phrase cannot refrain from suggesting that the scholar is involved in trivial minutiae – how important, after all, in the scheme of things, can a little black dot really be?

Not that Mani Leib was anti-intellectual. Indeed, from his perch at Goodman and Levine's, the Lower East Side dairy restaurant which was the hang-out of Di Yunge – the new generation of Yiddish poets just after the turn of the century in Lower Manhattan – he could be found "a finger rocking in front of his noise like a pointer – his green, visionary eyes squinting at the homely, freckled, yet vital and insolent face of Moishe Leib Halpern" (304). The poet Reuben Iceland, who wrote this description, goes on to say:

I no longer remember what subject they were so passionate about at the time I came in. All I know is that in a moment I was in the midst of it myself. And it continued to boil – an hour, two, three. From one topic we would leap into a second, from a second to a third. Soon we were back at the first, each trying to prove a point with a quotation from an essay or a poem. This sort of thing went on until Goodman, at the buffet, exclaimed, "Even in Hell there is a time when they rest. Go in good health!" But it sounded like "Go to the devil."

          (translated by Shlomo Noble)

This is not the description of an anti-intellectual. Clearly Mani Leib knew plenty. But he, like Poe and Whitman before him, very self-consciously wrote out of a non-canonical tradition. At times, he expressed real envy of those with a literary inheritance, a literary culture in which the writing of poetry is more welcomed than in his own. Addressing the "goyisher poet" who has a "yirish fun Shakespeare" (the gentile poet with an inheritance from Shakespeare), who has only to twitter to receive a response from far-off places, he says, "und da bin ich" (and here am I),"a nit-gedarfter" (an unneeded thing; maybe even a good-for-nothing), "a poet bai yiddin" (a poet among Jews). He says all this in perfectly wrought sonnet (I've sliced a bit):

and here I am, unneeded, a poet among Jews,
growing from wild grass on a soil not ours . . .
in an alien world I sing of the tears
of men in the desert beneath alien stars . . .
          (Penguin, 139; my translation)

For all its alienation, Leib's sonnet demonstrates as much bravado as Whitman's "Song of Myself." He still makes a space for himself, nit-gedarfter though he is, in a world that produced Shakespeare. "Und da bin ich," he insists. And here I am. Of course, I understand the Yiddish sarcasm – one can hear something like, so he's living at the Ritz Carlton and here I am in my fifth-floor tenement walk-up. But it is, at the same time, a self-declaration, and he makes it in Shakespeare's own preferred lyric form. It may not be my earth; these may not be my stars, but I'll be damned if you can shut me up, says Mani Leib. You may have a yarish fun Shakespeare, but here I am.

Of course, Shakespeare really isn't Leib's problem. Leib is "unneeded" because his subject "vagler in di midbar" (men in the desert, or better, wanderers in the desert) is a subject that's already been amply considered in Exodus, where the very same word, "midbar" (wilderness), appears again and again.

I'm struck by the remarkable similarity – both in construction and conceit – of this poem to a sonnet by the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, a contemporary of Leib's, though Leib was born earlier and died later. Here is Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel":

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing! (1305)

Like Leib, Cullen demonstrates his membership in the community he claims to be alienated from by writing his poem in perfect sonnet form; like Leib, Cullen rails against a fundamental injustice. And, as Leib brings up Shakespeare, Cullen brings up Greek mythology. Each demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the literary tradition from which he declares himself excluded. As Leib's ethnic identity makes him a "nit-gedarfter" as poet, so Cullen's makes him, as poet, a sort of freak plaything of God. With the word "bid," the third-to-last of the poem, Cullen turns God into a sort of slave-owning master, forcing His black poet to do His bidding. Cullen is utterly divided: both rebelling against being made to sing AND singing. That "bid him sing" is reminiscent of the Babylonian captors' demand for a song of Zion, from the captives in Psalm 137: "They that carried us away captive required of us a song... how shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" (KJV).

And like those captives, who in the very act of denying their ability to sing in a foreign land actually produce a great poem, make great singing out of their not singing, so too Cullen's description of the impossibility of a singing "black poet" is an exquisite sonnet. Moishe Leib Halpern – Mani Leib's freckled interlocutor at Goodman's and Levine's – takes on the same psalm even more directly in a similarly bitter and self-divided poem.

The Last

Evening sun
And, in evening cold, all the flies
In the corners of the panes are numb,
If not already dead.
On the rim of a water glass, the last
Is alone in the whole house.
I speak:
"Dear fly,
Sing something of your far-off land."
I hear her weep — she answers:
May her right leg wither
If she plucks a harp
By strange waters,
Or forgets the dear dung heap
That had once been her homeland.
          (Treasury, 108; translated by Nathan Halper)

The echoes of Psalm 137 are everywhere here: the weeping, the waters, the harps, the "sing us a song of Zion," the allusion to "if I forget thee, let my right hand forget its cunning...." The poem is quintessentially Yiddish and quintessentially American. It's bitter and almost sacrilegious, but also wistful. What's most impressive to me is its capacity to be both brutal and subtle at the same time. Of course the poem intends to shock: the promised land is recast as a dung heap, the Jew as the last fly on the windowpane. But what redeems the poem from mere shock value, what makes me read it again and again is the way its speaker splits himself. He is both the despicable Babylonian captor, asking Jewish prisoners for a song, and, as the writer of this poem, the fly on the windowpane trying to sing of his homeland. One can't help wondering whether the "dung heap" is the Jerusalem of the psalm or the shtetl of Halpern's birth. Of course, it's both: the American Yiddish poet is doubly exiled – both from scholarly Hebraic/Aramaic tradition and, as a vernacular poet, from the more elegant diction of the secular literary tradition.

Yitzhak-Yankev Segal – who emigrated to Canada, which, for the purposes of this essay, is also America – makes a different kind of radical move in his poem "Tihilim" or "Psalms." Instead of being bitter, or envious, he simply puts the "Goyish" writer in the Jewish tradition. Segal has "das vonderliche yingel Rilke" (that wonderful kid, Rilke), undisputed master of German lyric poetry in the twentieth century, walking by the synagogue one morning "In a Germany of the past" and hearing a psalm. ("Hot er oyfgekauft zeyn leid yenem morgen" – he got hold of his song that morning.) Segal attributes all Rilke' s poetic genius to his eavesdropping on Hebrew psalms. Not only does Segal refuse to allow Rilke's lyric a part in the German tradition, he makes him bear a torch for the Jews. Segal deliberately gets Rilke wrong, from his nationality – Rilke grew up in Prague, not in Germany – to his predilections. He describes him chasing an angel who has come down to earth in the form of a beggar:

and followed them in the rain.
He listened to the sound of wandering
and wrote his poems: new settings
of the old psalms.
          (Penguin, 418; translated by Grace Schulman)

Anyone who knows anything about Rilke knows that his angels were not remotely earthbound, but out of earshot, in heaven (his great Duino Elegies begin, "Who will hear me, if I cry out, among the angels' hierarchies?"). One can't imagine Rilke, who, after all, wrote his Elegies about angels in a castle belonging to the Countess Turn und Taxis von Hohenlohe and makes sure we know this in his dedication of the book, paying attention to any beggar, much less a Jewish one, much less following one in the rain. Segal, finally, is rewriting Rilke, making him his own.

He's also reiterating a point made by Koralnik in the essay "On Mazl." As much as Yiddish lacks mazl, Koralnik tells us, Hebrew has it in abundance: "The language of a small people in a cranny of Asia, Hebrew became the holy language of the world, for thousands of years a reservoir of spiritual potentialities" (327). Much of Western lyric poetry does, after all, have its roots in the psalms. And this, perhaps, is even more reason why the Yiddish poets have to establish themselves in opposition to them. Yiddish poets are most certainly not psalmists singing in a holy temple, but flies singing of a dung heap. They're so far removed that even their stars are "alien."

Weirdly, for a literary person in America, this is a mainstream position. In American literature, from the very beginning, marginality is mainstream. Two of our first poets were women, one a slave. In this country, literature has always been the recourse of the marginalized. Even Henry Adams – son of Charles Francis Adams, United States Ambassador to England during the Civil War, and scion of the family that produced not one but two presidents of the United States – had to place himself on the margins to begin his masterful autobiography in 1905. And just look how he does it. Here are the first two paragraphs of his Education:

Under the shadow of the Boston State House, turning its back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.

Had he been born in Jerusalem, under the shadow of the Temple, and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer. (9)

What could be more astonishing? In order to write his own American autobiography, this inheritor of elite American tradition, this Henry Brooks Adams, had to liken himself to Israel Cohen! A half-century later, Robert Lowell – again, the scion of one of the first families of Boston – a man related to two important American poetic predecessors, James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell, also gives himself a bogus Jewish ancestor: the revolutionary war hero, Mordecai Myer, of Life Studies. In America, writers see themselves as Jews.

It is their way of describing the fundamental placelessness of any literary person – but particularly a poet – in our utterly practical country. Countee Cullen is alienated. Mani Leib is alienated. But so is the son of an ambassador, not to mention America's greatest poet, the daughter of a congressman, member of one of the most important families of her town, Emily Dickinson, who published almost nothing in her lifetime. Like Mani Leib, she declares herself ironically, but she does declare herself. "I'm nobody," she says, "who are you?" Like Moishe Leib Halpern, Emily Dickinson, questions her own importance by putting herself on the level of insects; I'd lay a wager that they're the only two poets in the world whose work contains the phrase "dear fly."

The American Yiddish poets, constantly lamenting their uselessness and obscurity, are squarely in the American tradition. Like Dickinson, they persist in producing "a letter to the world that never wrote to me." Aaron Zeitlin, a Yiddish poet who became an American Yiddish poet only because he happened to be producing a play in New York when the Nazis invaded Poland, sounds a good deal like Mani Leib:

I know that in this world no one needs me,
me, a word-beggar in a Yiddish graveyard.
Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?
          (Penguin, 538; translated by Robert Friend)

Like Leib, Zeitlin makes clear that his uselessness is a valuable act of defiance.

Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty
and only the ephemeral is godly
and humility is the only true rebellion.

But Zeitlin goes even beyond Leib: his uselessness is not merely defiance, but godliness; it's of singular value on a worthless earth. Of course, what has happened between Leib and Zeitlin, what has created this breeding ground for such an outrageous claim, is the disaster of the mid-twentieth century. The complete destruction of the world out of which they'd come had an effect on Yiddish poets that cannot be compared with any other literary phenomenon, just as that genocide cannot be compared with any other historical phenomenon. Yiddish poetry, after World War II, was at once pointless and essential. Why write it when there were no readers? But one had to write it, because, after all, how could you sing these people's song in a foreign tongue? The fate of the Yiddish world simply had to be rendered in Yiddish. American Yiddish poets – who had, after all, gone to America to find a new world – became, involuntarily, the sole repositories, if indeed there were any repositories, of the lost one.

No one conveys this tragic and difficult and yet urgent condition more movingly than Yakov Glatstein, in his "Night Song":

Strangers' eyes don't see
how in my small room I open a door
and begin my nightly stroll among the graves.
(How much earth — if you can call it earth — does it take
     to bury smoke?)
There are valleys and hills
and hidden twisted paths,
enough to last a whole night's journey.
In the dark I see shining towards me
faces of epitaphs
wailing their song.
Graves of the whole
vanished Jewish world
blossom in my one-man tent.
And I pray:
Be a father, a mother to me,
a sister, a brother,
my own children, body-kin,
real as pain,
from my own blood and skin,
be my own dead,
let me grasp and take in
these destroyed millions.

At dawn I shut the door
to my people's house of death.
I sit at the table and doze off,
humming a tune.

The enemy had no dominion over them.
Fathers, mothers, children from their cradles
ringed around earth and overcame him.
All the children, astonished,
ran to meet the fear of death
without tears, like little Jewish bedtime stories.
And soon they flickered into flames
like small namesakes of God.

Who else, like me, has
his own nighttime
dead garden?
Who is destined for this, as I am?
Who has so much dead earth waiting for him, as for me?
And when I die
who will inherit my small house of death
and that shining gift, an eternal deathday light
forever flickering? (121)

It ceases to matter whether or not anyone is listening. The important thing is that the song is sung. And Glatstein doesn't write an ordinary lamentation here. He does not declare his extraordinary pain. Instead, he begs for more pain, to feel still more, to mourn for each murdered person as an intimate. He's lost his listeners, but gained his destiny: it's when he "doze[s] off / humming a tune," when he is dreaming or writing his poem, that "the enemy had no dominion over" the dead, that they can continue to exist. It's as if his own life is of greater value because it holds the last vestige of theirs.

Rokhl Korn, a Canadian, who escaped her Polish town just before it was invaded, is a bit less sure of the value of writing poems in the face of this catastrophe, even as she continues writing them. This is her "On the Other Side of the Poem":

On the other side of the poem there is an orchard,
and in the orchard, a house with a roof of straw,
and three pine trees,
three watchmen who never speak, standing guard.

On the other side of the poem there is a bird,
yellow brown with a red breast,
and every winter he returns
and hangs like a bud in the naked bush.

On the other side of the poem there is a path
as thin as a hairline cut,
and someone lost in time
is treading the path barefoot, without a sound.

On the other side of the poem amazing things may happen,
even on this overcast day,
this wounded hour
that breathes its fevered longing in the windowpane.

On the other side of the poem my mother may appear
and stand in the doorway for a while lost in thought
and then call me home as she used to once, as once:
enough playing, already, Rokhl. Don't you see? It's night.
          (Penguin, 524; translated by Seymor Levitan, but
          I have supplied my own translation of the final two
          lines.)

The humble gesture of putting her vanished world not "in the poem" but "on the other side of it" – as if it must stay, always, just beyond any poem's reach – has a powerful effect. What was once an ordinary, probably an annoying occurrence, becomes "on the other side of the poem" an amazing thing: her mother's appearance, in the doorway, lost in thought, calling her in with the subtle and profound, "enough playing, already.... Don't you see? It's night." Sitting and writing this poem, Rokhl Korn compares herself to an oblivious child – her poetry is child's play – but she continues to sit and write it. For the world of the Jews and for the Yiddish language in particular, it is most certainly night, but she nonetheless refuses to come in.

And Glatstein, too, for all the power of his night-song, looks this same night directly in the face and refuses to acknowledge it. He seems to realize that his responsibility to the lost world of his youth involves not just the yahrzeit lamp, not just memorializing but actively keeping its essence alive through its language, through new, fresh, up-to-the minute poems. Let me offer you one of his last, published in 1966, a poem so American that it contains words in Mexican Spanish; the American Glatstein's desert is no longer the wandering place of the Jews, but a miserable stretch of cholla and saguaro in Arizona:

Arizona Desert

Something goes on here
every dawn, when they sing their hymn of praise
although why He deserves a gift of praise
for doling out this parsimonious
distortion and prickliness
only God knows,
who accepts everything without thanks.

Something goes on here,
but no matter how early I try to get up
to hear that morning hymn of praise in the desert,
I'm always too late.

I come when it's all over.
The crippled cholla-cactus wives
have just finished dancing.
The proud candelabra-men,
the saguaras, have just finished singing
praise to the creator
for their meager rations.

Something goes on here,
especially at night when the saguaras
pay with bloody scratches for every drop
of prickly pleasure
after lying with
those twisted freaks, their cholla wives.
Nothing comes easy around here.

Late at night the snakes crawl out of their holes.
The wolf barks, the coyote curses.
It's a late-night bacchanal,
proof that here too is a slice of the world.

But at such an hour it's dangerous
for human feet to intrude.
They say that the proud saguaras
cry every night with human voices, praying
God, have pity on your insane world.
          (Whitman, 167-68; translated by Ruth Whitman)

It's a charming, funny poem, but also a profound one. Those desert cactus couples – the cholla wives and their saguaro husbands – may only experience "a drop of pleasure" but it's still pleasure. It may be a pitiable, insane world, but it's what there is to sing about. And American as it is, set in the backdrop that did so much for John Wayne and Gary Cooper, with its snakes and coyotes, it also bears the stamp of the same literary ancestry Yitzhak-Yankel Segal claimed for Rilke. Glatstein's "Arizona Desert" is pure psalm. Of course, it's Yiddish, blatantly stinting on praise even as it offers it, but it does seem to suggest, like the psalmist, that we must be happy and rejoice on this, the day the Lord has made – even if it can't resist wondering why God couldn't have done a slightly better job. And when I read this poem, finally, I have to disagree with Koralnik. Yiddish may have no readers, but it does have mazl. Its mazl is poets like Itzik Manger, Mani Leib, Moishe Leib Halpern, Yitzhak-Yankev Segal, Rokhl Korn and Yakov Glatstein. Its mazl is even essayists like Koralnik. And its mazl is also American literature's mazl. Because these great American poets unite both strands of the American poetic tradition. The Yiddish-American poet is always willing, on this hostile earth, to sing himself, albeit in a letter to a world that isn't likely to reply.

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Cullen, Countee. "Yet Do I Marvel." Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Glatstein, Jacob. The Selected Poems of Jacob Glatstein. Trans. Ruth Whitman. New York: October House, 1972.

Koralnik, Abraham. "Without Mazl." Howe and Greenberg 326-328.

Howe, Irving, and Eliezer Greenberg, eds. A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry. 1969. Reptd. New York: Schocken, 1987. Cited in the text as Treasury.

Howe, Irving, and Eliezer Greenberg, eds. Voices from the Yiddish: essays, memoirs, diaries. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1972.

Howe, Irving, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk eds. The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse. New York: Viking, 1987. Cited in the text as Penguin.

Iceland, Reuben. "At Goodman and Levine's." Howe and Greenberg 300-305.

Opatoshu, Joseph. "Yiddish Literature in the United States." Howe and Greenberg 306-315.

Whitman, Ruth, ed. An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry. 3rd ed. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1995. Cited in the text as Whitman.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Eds. Michael Moon, Scully Bradley, Harold Blodgett. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.

Western Humanities Review
Fall 2005

University of Utah English Department
Salt Lake City, Utah

Editor: Barry Weller
Poetry Editor: Richard Howard
Fiction Editors: Karen Brennan, Robin Hemley
Non-Fiction Editors: Stuart Culver, Robert L. Caserio
Managing Editor: David McGlynn


Copyright © Western Humanities Review 2005,
University of Utah
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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