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The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse

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The last time my friend from Vilna visited, in 1993, I shared this book with her, purchased a few years earlier at a New York remainder sale. It contains both the Yiddish and English translations, on either side of a page, of 39 Jewish poets. Her lips began to tremble and move as she read the verses, in Yiddish, of poets she had known in Vilna, Abraham Sutzkever and very likely Moyshe Kulbak.

It's no wonder. Listen to the fifth stanza of Sutzkever's "In the Hamlet," about Siberia, where his father died in the 1930s.

"Into the quenched corners of the room,/
The moon breathes its solitary brilliance./
My father's face is white as the moon,/
The snow's silence weighs upon his hands."

(Translation by Chana Bloch)

The poems are all that good, and better. It is eerie reading these great works. The rich literary heritage of Yiddish was all but wiped out in the Shoah. Yiddish remains vibrant in certain Jewish communities today, but only as a liturgical language. Few poets now work in Yiddish.

The great Yitskhok Leybush Perets, born in Zamosc, Poland in 1852 died in Warsaw in 1915. Leyb Naydus died in Grodno in 1918 and Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, from Zloczow, died in 1932 in New York. But several of these poets themselves perished in the Holocaust --- including Kulbak (1940), Yisroel Shtern (Warsaw, 1942), Yisroel Rabon (Ponary, 1941). Others were swept into the maw of the Soviet war on culture, dying who knows where.

Some survived and later emigrated. Rokhl Korn, for example, fled to --- and then from --- the Soviet Union. In a sense, Aaron Teitlin, who emigrated from Uuarovo, Russia to New York in 1939 writes for them all. Certainly, he writes for me.

Six Lines

"I know that in this world no one needs me,/

me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard.

Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?

Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty/

and only the ephemeral is godly

and humility is the only true rebellion."

(Translated by Robert Friend)

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We all need these poems and their humility. You can see why my friend's lips trembled.

--- Alyssa A. Lappen