Gilman reads ‘See How Little’ as tinged with homoeroticism, and says that the Yiddish speaking reader would have instantly thought of ‘male limb’ with the ‘אבר’ used for limb here. And while yes, it can be a euphemism, I think there is something working on a few levels. #Yiddish There is likely a bit of a physical union, shades of the existence of the shechinah, or dwelling of God between a man and wife — but also perhaps a fraternal spiritual/intellectual union of minds.

I’ve previously touched upon Leivick as ‘prophet.’

He doesn’t seem to outright reject this identification and it’s treated very seriously by Malka Lee — and derisively by Zishe Landau. Yankev Pat sees him as a ‘Cohen Gadol’ in 1954. #Yiddish Emma Schaver (here in excerpt) views Leivick and Levi Shalit as Rabbi and Hasid:

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

‘Nature’ is one of the poems I asked for permission to try publishing a translation of formally. With no response, I prefer not to post too much of a ‘final’ version, with rhyme restored, rather than a partial literal working one for analysis. #Yiddish Another wrestling with the natural and the divine, where do we come from, where do we go, why and how. Can we only be what we are destined to be? If God is in everything, then where is God in the sanatorium, in death? We foreshadow the pantheism of ‘Spinoza’

I think there’s a real sense in Leivick of time/history/fate — if not quite being a flat circle — being helical. One reaches the same juncture, only further down the road. Every sacrifice the first, every murder the first, everything repeating….just displaced in time. If we jump ahead again to ‘Leaf on an Apple Tree’, Leivick writes from Munich in 1946 (a rarity in that the poem is explicitly dated, from a time when he said he was largely unable to write poetry) having visited Dachau, about the ‘Cain-brotherhood’ of Germany.

If we look ahead to ‘A Leaf on an Apple Tree’ again — almost twenty years later — we find Leivick compelled to join in singing about a different kind of belief, with different prisoners — Ani Ma’amin, with the survivors of the Shoah in DP camps. #Yiddish (Con’t) In fact, the three members of the delegation to the DP camps in 1946 each come away with their own version of ‘Ani Ma’amin.’

We’re setting up for a couple May Day poems.

Leivick doesn’t break fully with the Soviets— and was quite popular in Russia, visiting in 1925— until 1939 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the initial break was in 1929, and the Freyheyt walkout over Hebron) #Yiddish The May Day poems also continue beyond that point, through ‘In Treblinka bin ikh nit geven’ and there is even in that volume a temporary mending of fences, it seems, with the Soviets when they are anti-Nazi.

It’s true Leivick wasn’t particularly humble about his writing and seemed to believe he was always destined for something special — though I am getting the impression he was introverted by nature and didn’t necessarily enjoy public speaking. #Yiddish He seemed to like to take the opportunity to leave — in his prose pieces, he’s quite often slipping out the door and going for a wander. Perhaps it’s more about the fact that he *can* leave and exercises the option in order not to lose it.

Charney connects this poem to his earlier ‘Redemption Comedy’, saying it could be a coda. And it could (2nd excerpt.) Here is the real redeemer in contrast to the false redeemer of the previous poem — roughly the plot of Leivick’s Golem plays, reduced to two poems. #yiddish I would argue, in light of Horn, that if you work with the idea that in the two Golem plays Leivick acknowledges a belief in the concept of two Moshiachs, Ben Yosef and Ben David — then as a revolutionary…

Eventually, Leivick is forced to deliver Daniel to be sent to war, recounted in a later poem appearing in ‘In Treblinka bin ikh nit geven’ (1945) which I have shared pieces of previously… #Yiddish In his post-Khurbn writing he often portrays himself (and also American Jewry) as the father and the son, the knife and the throat — the (potential) victim and the culpable-through-insufficient action.

In response to John Boyne’s latest stab at making money off murdered Jews getting reviews, let me tell you some of the story of Dr. Boris Pliskin. I have written it longer form elsewhere, as part of a look at the disservice these ‘fables,’ which include real murdered Jews as set dressing for the imagined tragedy of ‘normal people’, do and how they undermine what is perhaps the most Jewish mode of memorialisation — the book.