Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

reb lycanthrope

I have been interested in the Yiddish language and its literature since the day I heard John Simon declare on the Dick Cavett Show that Yiddish was not even a language because it lacked a literature. Even then I knew tha Simon was full of it, and his later pronouncements on the state of the English language and his wishy-washy movie reviews did nothing to change my mind. So for quite some time I have been collecting Yiddish books and have been slowly teaching myself the mame-loshn. This weekend, Gabriel, a friend from Southern California, visited and took a look at some of my yidishkayt haul. Our mutual friend, Cliff, dropped by and since Cliff is finishing his masters in English, and Gabe is an ABD in comparative literature (with an emphasis in modern Hebrew literature and a minor in Yiddish), the talk naturally turned to literature. I have been toying for some time now with translating a longish poem, der volf, by one of the great American Yiddish poets, H. Leivick. I knew that Gabriel is a fan of Leivick’s poetry, so I got him to read the first couple of stanzas out loud and we all did a quick translation. I had picked up a copy of Leivick’s two-volume ale verk from the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst. They have been saving Yiddish books from neglect and destruction for quite a while now, and via a generous grant from Steven Spielberg and friends they have been digitizing every Yiddish book they laid their hands on and offering them through a print on demand system. My edition of Leivick was not one of the modern reprints but a duplicate original which they have been selling off.

I first learned of Leivick while reading Sol Liptzin’s A History of Yiddish Literature which I picked up remaindered a decade or so ago. Here’s what he had to say:

In another long poem, The Wolf (Der Volf, 1920), Leivick has a rabbi arise from a mound of ashes as the sole survivor of a masacred Jewish community. Looking about him the rabbi sees neither victims nor victors. The victims have perished and the victors have moved on. Only ashes, smoldering chimneys, and uncanny silence surround him. He burrows in the mound to find the limbs of the perished Jews so that he could bury them in the Jewish cemetery. In vain! Nought is left of them but coal and ashes. When night descends upon the ravished, deserted town, the Rabbi creeps away to the forest and is gradually transformed into a werewolf. Later on, when Jews expelled from other communities, find their way to this town and seek to rebuild the devastated houses and the synagogue of which only bare walls remain standing, they ask the rabbi, when he reappears, to resume religious services. But he insists that the ruins be retained as a memorial for his dead generation and that the synagogue be not rebuilt. He himself does not want to live on. He howls as a wolf through the nights and terrorizes the new inhabitants. On Yom Kippur he invades the synagogue as a werewolf and finds release from his suffering when he is beaten to death. Then the newcomers need no longer fear this last survivor whose existence was bound up with murdered generation. They can resume the reconstruction of a new communal life. This poem was regarded, after the Hitler catastrophe, not as Leivick’s reaction to Petlura’s pogroms but as a prophetic vision of the later and greater extermination of Jews by their Christian neighbors.

[pp.301f.]

I have decided over the next month or so to transliterate the poem and post it here along with my first attempt at a translation.