Thread by @AshRobertson20

More ‘Nature’ — as I said, it’s one I’ve worked on a bit more and here’s the first stanza, pushed into slightly better English shape #Yiddish

And here I move laterally to the poem ‘Tired’ by a contemporary of Leivick’s, Langston Hughes.

Hughes, too, wants to cut nature, in two. Not how it works, not its design, not if there’s some pre-determined order — but why it is rotting from the inside. It’s infected, not divine

@aglaser‘s excellent book, Songs in Dark Times, shows how Leivick teeters on the edge of recognising where he stands as visually, if conditionally, white in America. And he does teeter, even talking in interview about the danger of the whipped becomes the ones who wield the whip.

But he never quite makes the leap that some of his Jewish contemporaries do into a recognition of tacit complicity by silence, by the grotesquely racist images in his own work — in terms of his own self-identity, it seems impossible;

he feels terrible, Leivick says, but he himself was put in chains, he tells us over and over — shows us in photos and on stage — and could never have done it to another. It is, to his mind, impossible for him to be the oppressor even as he concedes he can operate as a white man.

Leivick’s ‘Letter from America to a Distant Friend,’ in which he protests that it wasn’t him, his father or his grandfather responsible for Black oppression in America, was composed in 1927 — the same year that Hughes’s collection ‘Fine Clothes to the Jew’ was published.

They may not be in direct conversation with each other, but they breathe the same air.

They are, in fact, practically neighbours: Leivick living in Washington Heights, Hughes in Harlem. A regard for Whitman, too, connects the two poets. As well as, perhaps, Hughes’ stated belief that he descended in part from a Jewish slaveholder.

Both poets acknowledge the precarity their own and of the other’s existence, the virulent racism of the America they are part of — and yet they almost couldn’t be further apart.

Hughes, I should note, spreads his umbrella of otherness wider than Leivick does his symbolic Judaism (as Glaser suggests he does for, say, Sacco and Vanzetti):

I think you could explore connections between the two further — The first half of ‘Tired’ expresses a not dissimilar dissatisfaction with a wait for redemption as in Leivick’s golem: Aren’t we so tired and so angry? Could we not bring the time sooner by some artificial means?

There is also, for example, Hughes’ short, abrupt ‘Mammy,’ where Mammy is Death, in contrast to Leivick’s Death in the last section of the cycle ‘My Father’ — an imaginary twin brother nursed at the same breast.

A further note on Leivick and race: I make no allowances or apologies like ‘it was the thirties, the fifties, they were from Russia, etc, etc’ to wave away what is clearly not only the usual grotesque imagery that Leivick employs…(Con’t)

but racist imagery appearing in a several poems in Naye Lider (at least five poems, and an instance in describing the features of an Asian man in Tsarist Katorge).

Contemporaries from the same background do a better job, and the inadequacy of such arguments become very clear reading pieces such as Eli Bromberg’s piece for @ingeveb ingeveb.org/articles/we-ne…

All that said, the poem ends with a bit of a gut punch From Leivick: The young man who will die instead of him and where God is in that.

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