Jan 10, 2025
The work of Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin (1887–1956) answers a need that is hard to name and speaks to questions that were previously unarticulated. Dropkin narrates an experience of interiority, anguished self-probing and explorations of power in the context of erotic relationships—and she does so from a woman’s perspective and in the Yiddish language. The layering of Jewish, female, and artist’s experiences that Dropkin channels into her work continues to astound readers. She holds a mirror to the experience of female desire and romance that is uncanny and magnetic, perpetually new and boundary pushing despite the fact that her key achievements were a product of the 1920s and 30s. As a longtime reader of Dropkin, I was very excited to hear that her life was being made the subject of a documentary. After almost a decade of work on the project by director Eli Gorn, working in collaboration with producer Bracha (Bee) Feldman, “Burning off the Page” was recently screened by YIVO at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
In the film, details of Dropkin’s biography are intertwined with readings of her poetry accompanied by short animated sequences. The documentary features a wealth of photos and home video footage of the poet and her family. These archival images are a delight and revelation, affording a new intimacy with the artist. The narrative put forward in the documentary provocatively centers the story of Dropkin’s teenage affair with Hebrew poet Uri Gnessin. A dramatized reading of a letter Dropkin wrote describing the affair plays a central role in the film and is referred to over and over. This early episode of overpowering desire is used to “explain” Dropkin and her fixation on sexuality, tying together Dropkin’s life and work into one neat narrative. This somewhat conventional vision of Dropkin’s story was given counterbalance through insightful commentary by some of the key scholars of her work, including Agnieszka Legutko and poet Edward Hirsch, both of whom were on hand for the Q&A session at the end of the YIVO screening.
The film’s strength lay in its attention to the role Dropkin’s poetry has played in the contemporary Yiddish music scene. An entire of oeuvre of new Jewish song has been composed based on Dropkin’s poetry. This musical engagement with her work is well documented in “Burning off the Page.” The film presents the pioneering work of the Klezmatics, who promoted Dropkin as a sentinel of non-compliance with norms of aesthetics and social proprieties, themes that characterize the Jewish Radical Culture scene in New York City of the 1980s and 90s. Through musical presentations, the salience of Dropkin for projects of Jewish Queer identity were first identified. Dropkin has since taken on a signal significance, being read as a patron saint of Jewish sexual non-conformity. 1 1 See Zohar Weiman-Kelman, “Touching Time: Poetry, History, and the Erotics of Yiddish.” Criticism 59, no. 1 (2017), 99–121. The role Dropkin has played in the aesthetic and social scenes of Queer Yiddishkayt, however, are mostly absent from “Burning off the Page,” an indicator of the conceptual issues that trouble the production.
In 2018, composer and singer Jewlia Eisenberg and I, working as a duo we called Book of J, were artists in residence at YIVO, where we were doing research and developing a music composition project based in the Dropkin archive (Jewlia and I are also featured in the film). Over the course of a few weeks, we created a song cycle titled “Bent Like a Question Mark,” 2 2 See YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, “Celia Dropkin: Bent Like a Question Mark,” YouTube video (August 7, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKeGlHELe1I. setting texts drawn from some of Dropkin’s unpublished and published poetry, an excerpt from her serialized novel, and a few English language selections from The Acrobat, the translation that helped make Dropkin a household name (among Yiddishists). 3 3 See Celia Dropkin, The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin, Translated from Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon (Huntington Beach, CA: Tebot Bach, 2014). Like other Jewish musicians before and since, Jewlia and I were drawn to Dropkin’s radical eroticism, the terse economy and electrifying imagery of her free verse, and her explorations of the romance of abjection.
In presentations of our Dropkin song cycle, Jewlia wanted to play the songs alongside our renditions of Yiddish women’s ballads that we had learned from the Ruth Rubin collections, Itzik Gottesman’s Yiddish Song of the Week, and other sources for folklore. At first, I was resistant to this juxtaposition of Dropkin’s modernism with folk poetry because I feared that it ran the risk of misplacing Dropkin in an overdetermined conception of women’s art relegated to the sphere of domesticity, in contrast to the cosmopolitan aspirations of Yiddish modernism. The first wave of critics in the 1990s who worked to restore Dropkin to the attention of readers had taken pains to position Dropkin in the rarified realm of literature, defending her posthumous reputation from denigration by male critics of her day who framed Dropkin as overly sensual or unbecomingly focused on the body.
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See Janet Hadda, “The Eyes Have It: Celia Dropkin’s Love Poetry,” in Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anna Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 93-112; Sheva Zucker, “The Red Flower—Rebellion and Guilt in the Poetry of Celia Dropkin,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 15 (1996), 99–117; Kathryn Hellerstein, “Chapter 9. The Art of Sex in Yiddish Poems: Celia Dropkin and Her Contemporaries,” in Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries, Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer and L. Scott Lerner eds., (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 189-212.
Jewlia dismissed my concern as granting too much power to a masculine-coded conception of “high art.” She argued that putting Dropkin in dialogue with Yiddish women’s ballads would highlight the modernity of Jewish women’s creativity across genres of music and literature, while acknowledging Dropkin’s lineage in Jewish women’s culture. Jewlia noted the shared set of themes in the murder ballads and songs of thwarted love in women’s folk songs as in Dropkin’s unapologetically violent explorations of eros. These themes constituted a “Yiddish Gothic” that appeared in seemingly disparate elements of Yiddish women’s cultural productivity.
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See Jeremiah Lockwood, “Once Upon a Time the Fire Burned Brighter: Ballads from the Yiddish Gothic,” multimedia folio (Ayin Press, 2023), https://ayinpress.org/folio/once-upon-a-time-the-fire-burned-brighter/.
As in many of our discussions, I came around to seeing things Jewlia’s way.
But perhaps I was not completely wrong to be cautious. Dropkin’s work continues to be vulnerable to misrepresentation and oversimplification, both because of her gender and the highly charged subject matter she traffics in. The power of her embrace of the female first person perspective is a source of her greatness, and also the score on which her work is most likely to be essentialized, evacuated of its thorny and challenging modernism and reduced to biography. Because she is a woman artist writing about sexuality, Dropkin’s work is prone to be misunderstood as purely descriptive of her actual experiences, and thus deprived of artistic agency, layers of signification and intertextuality.
“Burning off the Page” made me remember my conversations with Jewlia and my fears of a step backwards to the critical reception of Dropkin in the 1930s, when her work was cast as too female and too embodied to be read as literary art. The collapse of art into biography is a convenient device for storytellers, but is always a shaky proposition, and in the case of Dropkin is especially unjustifiable because it reopens old wounds of sexist miscomprehension. Treating Dropkin’s affair with Gnessin as a Rosetta stone that “solves” the mystery of her work undermines the reality of the multifaceted nature of her work and obscure the facets of her story (as maven of the Yiddish modernist scene in New York, as devoted mother, as stubbornly anti-political life partner to a Bundist revolutionary, as worker hustling in the New York publishing world) that are harder to fold into the overt themes and broad associations of erotic poetry.
Despite these issues, there is much to be appreciated about having this document of the cultural products that have evolved out of Dropkin’s poetry, both in the academic study of Yiddish literature and in the social worlds of contemporary Jewish music. “Burning Off the Page” is rich in musical detail, with beautiful performances by Marilyn Lerner, Rachel Weston, Anthony Russell and others. A fine score for the film was composed by Frank London, who also offers thoughtful words about Dropkin’s poetry and its dramatic powers of reversal and surprise that have inspired so much song writing. I was touched to see that the final image of the film was a memorial to Jewlia, who passed away in 2021. The image was a fitting moment of connection between two great Jewish women artists and an invitation to the viewer to more deeply explore the artistic lineages that Dropkin’s artistry initiated.
