by Lev Ozerov
and with the road that runs between them,
and with the children of these villages,
with their fathers and grandfathers,
mothers and grandmothers.
He understands them and they him.
He listens to the heart, his own and that of a stranger,
and the stranger’s heart is not strange at all.
That was in the beginning.
And then. . .
He wasn’t listening for footsteps,
those harsh footsteps up the stone staircase,
while a Black Maria waited at the gates.
They’re coming. Really?
Must be a mistake. Alas, belief in one’s innocence
is no protection against arrest.
Purity of thought and action
is no defense in a lawless age.
Not even artlessness and wisdom together
carry any weight with the investigator
or executioner.
We were at his birthday banquet
at the Oak Hall.
The chandeliers were shining,
the speakers were promising miracles.
Fine words were spoken but so were diktats
over which hovered birds of death,
birds of death we could not see.
A trite image, but that’s how it was.
We heard that his one-volume edition
had already been axed.
Or remanded in custody—
as the authorities might have said.
His Yiddish-writing colleagues
were already in jail.
Maybe just before death,
which, simply by virtue of being alive,
no man truly believes in,
not even if he knows for sure
that death is very near—
maybe just before death
he saw himself once again
as a young man floating in a cradle
between earth and sky.
A most wonderful craft—
fresh air, freedom, light . . .
Berta Samoilovna, I am silent.
No matter how much we have talked about
your husband, we have not said enough;
a human being is an inexhaustible subject,
especially if his life
has been cut short.
Now you too are gone,
you, the angry widow,
who never forgave anyone
the death of a pure man—
a man who became a sage
yet remained a child.
Alone, I think of Kvitko
and I write about him,
so that those who did not know
will know.
Translated by Maria Bloshteyn
DOVID HOFSHTEYN (1889–1952) was a poet, playwright, and prose writer who initially wrote in four languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian) but switched to Yiddish after the Revolution of 1917, which he welcomed enthusiastically. Along with Peretz Markish and Leyb Kvitko, he published in Kyiv’s Yiddish journals and became known as one of the stars of Yiddish poetry during its “Kievan period,” which the American Jewish poet Richard J. Fein has described in With Everything We’ve Got: A Personal Anthology of Yiddish Poetry as “probably the happiest and most hopeful moment in Yiddish poetry in Europe.” Hofshteyn’s Troyer (Grief, 1922)—a response to the pogroms in the Ukraine during the Civil War—is a modernist poem brilliantly integrating innovative typography with drawings by Marc Chagall. He left Russia in the early 1920s to live in what is now Israel and participated in the inauguration of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1926 he returned to the Soviet Union and joined the Communist Party. In the 1930s, like many others, he turned to writing for children as a means of avoiding political pressure. During the Second World War he became a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He was executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets.
DOVID HOFSHTEYN
In that house there were so many different clocks—
white, blue, yellow, red,
all makes and types—
that not a single moment passed
without the sounds
of grasshoppers, crickets, cuckoos,
thrushes, buntings, finches,
all delighting the ear
while reminding us of time’s passing.
The house was filled with sound.
Here, time flowed forth willingly
into eternity,
and unwillingly back:
from eternity
into the land of time.
The poet listens to both time and eternity,
which keeps him in a state of white heat.
Glazov, my friend from the Arsenal factory,*
introduces me to his townsman,
the poet Dovid Hofshteyn,
whose apartment I have just described.
Hofshteyn reads us a new poem,
woven from snowflakes,
pity for other people,
and the cruel insomnia of our century,
a century fit for neither
ape nor man.
“Your grandfather and your father will understand me,
at the very least, they’ll hear me out.
But your generation has no use for me
and my poems, written in Yiddish.
Don’t ask why—
but when I leave town
and enter the resinous forest in the half-light,
I feel that I am happy,
and I am a poet and have been given the means
to express the forest’s rapture—
but only in Yiddish.
I know other languages,
but I can express my joy and pain
only in Yiddish.”
Oddballs is what we call those
who are wisest and most honest.
He went to buy a hammer
but bought a hat.
Went to buy a hat
but bought pears.
Went to buy some pears
but bought a pump organ.
It took three hefty young men
to drag it into his apartment,
then stand it against the wall like a pipe organ.
He was waiting for a streetcar and, when the streetcar came,
he took off his galoshes and climbed inside,
leaving the gleaming products of the Red Warrior Factory
behind him on the pavement.
It is madness to be a poet,
and still more, to be a poet
belonging to what is hardly the happiest nation on earth.
The manuscript on the table awaits him.
But who is he to write for
if there are no Yiddish schools?
But how can he stop writing?
Pain must be expressed—
if only in words.
Speech and her daughter, poetry,
spring up here,
there, and everywhere.
“So, my young friend, what can I say to you?
I am not certain that you will get
so much as a thank-you
for your poems.
Go ahead, claim the inheritance
of Pushkin and Tyutchev,
Baratynsky and Blok.†
There is no finer profession,
but it might not turn out
so very well for you personally.
I may well be wrong—
but I say
not a single good deed
goes unpunished.”
He had a poet’s heart—
a passionate, sensitive heart.
When my daughter Yelena was born,
he brought a golden challah
to our house—a gift
for a young mother
who had too little to eat.
Oh, if you knew what a challah means
in times of hunger.
Oh, if you knew what a challah means
when it
is cold.
Challah—is much.
Challah—is little.
Challah—put in your hands
by the hands of a friend
is a splash of rapture,
a crust of gold.
A decade later
he wrote my wife, Margarita,
a tender farewell.
Premonitions made him gentle,
diffuse, like twilight.
The mildest man I ever knew—
not out of cowardice but
because he did not know fear.
He was old
when I first met him—
not from age but from weariness.
Much later I wanted to see his beginnings
and so I went to Korostyshev—
his Korostyshev. I sailed
on the Teterev River, surrounded
by pines, rock,
the sky overhead,
and the sky reflected in water.
He was right when he said,
“How sweetly sad it is
to be a human being!”
He did not specify
the degree of sweetness
and the degree of sadness.
It is hard to bring joy to your own heart,
and still harder
to bring joy to the heart of another.
But he was a bringer of joy
when he called
the earth a round house.
That house has been destroyed
along with the pump organ
and the clocks, and the volumes of Goethe,
and the ancient Pentateuch.
“Oh, time! Oh, space! Oh, terrible year!”
he said, holding a handful of dust on his palm,
and then he himself became a handful of dust on our century’s palm.
His own dust is mixed with the dust of others
who perished in August of 1952.
The location of his grave is unknown.
When they name those who perished,
they call out the name of the poet
Dovid Naumovich Hofshteyn—
and readers of Yiddish
stand up, heads bowed.
Translated by Maria Bloshteyn
*The Arsenal factory specialized in optical mechanics and electronics. Ozerov worked there as a young man.
†Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky, a contemporary of Alexander Pushkin, wrote elegiac, philosophical verse that was an important influence on Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, and other twentieth-century poets. Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, also a contemporary of Pushkin, is one of the most important Russian poets of the nineteenth century. His relatively small body of work includes verse on political and philosophical topics, as well as tender love lyrics.
PERETZ MARKISH (1895–1952), born in Polonne, Ukraine, was a poet, playwright, and prose writer. He began writing his poems in Russian and switched to Yiddish only after being wounded as a soldier in the First World War. He moved to Moscow in 1919 and to Warsaw in 1921, before returning to the Soviet Union in 1926. He was favored by the Soviet regime and was the only Yiddish writer to receive the coveted Order of Lenin. Markish is best known as the writer of epic poems, and his Milkhome (The War, 1941–1948) was one of the first poems about the Shoah. He also wrote a book about the Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, who was killed on Stalin’s orders in 1948; during Mikhoels’s funeral, Markish read a poem in which he called Mikhoels’s death a murder. Markish was executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets.
PERETZ MARKISH
Once you’d seen him,
you could say
you’d seen Byron:
honor, dignity, stature,
a melancholy beauty.
He’d raise his head
and, with half-closed eyes,
recite his poems
as if he were singing.
He wrote his own Childe Harold,
his own Don Juan, his own
Beppo. His sin, his one
and only sin:
that he wrote in Yiddish.
He could express
himself only in Yiddish.
For this, he was jailed.
For this alone, executed.
Everyone knew, but
it wasn’t done
to say it
out loud, to spell
it out in black and white.
It was said and written: He died.
Just went and died.
Just went and died, you see.
Why get people upset?
In the province we call Volhynia
lies a village we call Polonne.
That’s his childhood,
that’s his grandfather Shimshon-Ber,
that’s his cheder. And after that,
he was chorister, tutor, day laborer,
worker at the vineyards,
army private, and office clerk.
But he didn’t like calculating,
he liked the immeasurable;
on the flip side of banking documents
poems began to appear.
This dreamer’s distant gaze
was focused not on the faces
of clients but on the Galaxy. Later,
he said in passing,
“While you clutch a grass-blade,
I hold up the Earth,
the planet vast and blue.
Immensity is what attracts me,
but your grass-blade is a part of it too.”
We didn’t see each other for a long time.
Then I saw him
on a canvas by Alexander Labas.*
There, there he is—
Markish, who was built
for a long life, imagining
his last hour. There is a touch
of sunset in the dawn blaze.
The light melts into a dark
that allows no return.
His widow is making inquiries about her husband,
about his notebooks and manuscripts,
confiscated when he was arrested.
His widow walks down the long corridors
of the seventh floor—
corridors her soul
had walked long before.
She had endured much:
a waiting room, a small window
where relatives could hand in parcels
of food and clothes for a prisoner.
But now she is here by invitation.
Courteous and charming,
General Borisoglebsky† addresses her:
“You can probably guess
why I’ve called you here.”
“No. Tell me.” “I am now able
to inform you that your husband
has been rehabilitated.”
“Where is he?” The general’s reply
is ready and waiting, planed
and polished: “He was executed
by enemies of the people.”
And he offers Markish’s
widow a glass of water,
also ready and waiting.
“I want to read his case file.”
“But you are not a lawyer.”
“Where is my husband’s grave?”
“He has none . . .”
More time passed.
Another telephone call:
“This is the KGB,
finance department. It seems
we owe you a little money.”
“What do you mean?
You’ve already returned me the money
I tried to send to my husband
but which he never received.”
Pause. An in-breath. An out-breath.
“We owe you for the teeth.”
“What teeth?” “The gold crowns.”
In a voice not her own,
the widow
let out a wild scream.
Neighbors ran out into the hallway
and caught her,
as she collapsed in a faint.
She was pale now
and silent.
While the telephone receiver
on its twisted cord
groped the wall,
swinging like a pendulum,
counting off
our godforsaken time.‡
1990
Translated by Maria Bloshteyn
*Alexander Labas painted this portrait of Markish in 1937 at the height of the Great Terror, when Markish had good reason to think he might be awaiting his last hour. The portrait is now in the State Art Gallery of the Kirghiz Republic.
†During the late 1950s—the first years of Khrushchev’s thaw—General Borisoglebsky was the head of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Illegally Repressed. Hundreds of thousands of people were informed that relatives had been unjustly executed or had died in the camps.
‡During much of the Soviet era, most people lived in communal apartments. Each family had one room to themselves and the shared use of a kitchen and bathroom. In most such apartments there would also be only a single telephone in the hallway.
SHMUEL HALKIN (1897–1960), born in Rahachow, Belarus, published his first poems in 1917 in an anthology edited by Peretz Markish, and his debut collection, Lider (Songs), in 1922. During the 1930s he also wrote historical dramas and translated both Alexander Pushkin and Shakespeare into Yiddish. His translation of King Lear was used for an acclaimed Moscow Yiddish Theater production, with Solomon Mikhoels playing the title role. During the Second World War, Halkin was a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and of the editorial board of its journal, Eynikayt; he wrote powerful poems about the Shoah. After being arrested in 1949, he suffered a heart attack. This probably saved his life; unlike the other members of the committee, who were executed in 1952, he was sent to a relatively mild prison camp. Some of the poems he composed there were included in a Soviet edition of Mayn Oytser (My Treasure) in 1966, but the collection was first published in full only in 1988, in Israel.
SHMUEL HALKIN
He was in Maleyevka
when they came for him.
They led the sick man to the car.
He managed to hand his stick to Prishvin
who was standing in the snow with his dog,
looking bewildered:
“Where are you going, Samuil Zalmanovich?”
“Goodbye!” said Halkin.
He thought this was the end for him,
but it wasn’t; he was sent to the camps.
Laboring at the bottom of a mine,
he once said to the poet Sergey Spassky,*
“Would you like me to stay alive?
Then read me every day
