Herring Barrels

I grew up not know­ing my father. When I met him for the first time I was six­teen. He gave me a copy of A Por­tion of the Peo­ple: Three Hun­dred Years of South­ern Jew­ish Life, edit­ed by my aunt, Dale Rosen­garten, and my uncle, Theodore Rosen­garten, and opened it to a page with the fam­i­ly (our fam­i­ly) pic­ture tak­en July 1927 in Kryvitsh, a shtetl not far from Vil­na, then in Poland. It was tak­en to com­mem­o­rate my great-grand­moth­er Ida Katzoff’s vis­it, after twen­ty years in Amer­i­ca, with her two youngest daugh­ters. In it, three gen­er­a­tions stare intent­ly for­ward. My grand­moth­er Trudy sits cross-legged at her mother’s knee. Her old­er sis­ter stands behind. The sis­ters look caught in motion, unlike the rest of the fam­i­ly. They lean away from the cam­era as though still on a boat cross­ing the Atlantic, their mouths slight­ly open, sug­gest­ing curios­i­ty as well as sus­pi­cion — or maybe dis­ori­en­ta­tion — in this large Jew­ish fam­i­ly they had nev­er met but were part of.

I asked my father whether Trudy spoke Yid­dish. He said no. But Trudy Kat­zoff Rosen, at nine­ty-years-old, recalled the sum­mer of 1927 clear­ly. She told me she had dis­em­barked back in New York speak­ing Yid­dish. Mere months before she died, years after I met my father, a Yid­dish song she learned in Kryvitsh burst from my grand­moth­er’s lips, the words flu­ent­ly sum­moned from mem­o­ry, per­fect­ly enun­ci­at­ed, and record­ed. What does it mean, to have this fam­i­ly his­to­ry in me? Though I only had a vague idea of what Yid­dish sounds like, I won­dered if it might erupt out of my hand while writ­ing poet­ry, or come to me in my sleep.

On a trip to South Car­oli­na to vis­it the Rosen­gartens, who live in McClel­lanville, down a sandy track skirt­ing the salt marsh on the edge of Cape Romain, my uncle gave me Jerzy Ficowski’s biog­ra­phy of Bruno Schulz. In its pages, I read about Deb­o­ra Vogel. Schulz penned chap­ters of his acclaimed nov­el Cin­na­mon Shops (renamed Street of the Croc­o­diles for the Eng­lish lan­guage edi­tion in 1963, long after his death) in the mar­gins of let­ters to her. I imme­di­ate­ly loved the title of her own book of prose poet­ry, Akat­syes blien (Aca­cias Bloom). Vogel com­posed poet­ry in Yid­dish as she learned it in her twen­ties. This puz­zled and intrigued me. The Vogel fam­i­ly spoke Pol­ish at home. Vogel was very close to her father. He was a Hebraist and, as Vogel’s friend and edi­tor Rokhl Auer­bach not­ed, expressed con­tempt towards Yid­dish as the folk lan­guage. Her mother’s fam­i­ly were promi­nent Zion­ists who also reject­ed Yid­dish. Why did Vogel write in this lan­guage that iden­ti­fied her as state­less, pos­si­bly anti-nation­al­ist, of doubt­ful alle­giance? Why write in a lan­guage she didn’t grow up speak­ing? Why write in Yid­dish if she felt close to her Hebraist father? 

That lan­guage could be a mea­sure of dis­tance between Vogel and her father, and between me and my fam­i­ly, piqued my curios­i­ty. I wrote to any­one who might know Vogel and her work. Unable to read her writ­ing in the orig­i­nal Pol­ish and Yid­dish, I com­mis­sioned trans­la­tions, and soon held a few rough Eng­lish ver­sions in my hands. Lat­er, I read and reread Vogel — as though for the first time — in Anas­tasiya Lyubas’ and Anna Ele­na Tor­res’ beau­ti­ful trans­la­tions. I dis­cov­ered her poet­ry was very dif­fer­ent from mine. To vis­it Lviv as it was then — Lwów, in Poland, between world wars — through the frame of her poems is like enter­ing a Cubist paint­ing. You see angles of bound­ed space, bor­ders between the inside and out­side of hous­es, domes­tic and urban events col­lapsed into melan­choly land­scapes, lan­guid inte­ri­ors, and a topog­ra­phy of sen­su­al expe­ri­ence with­out nar­ra­tive. She large­ly rejects a per­son­al voice. The very force of her still­ness chal­lenges the dynamism and self-rev­e­la­tion often asso­ci­at­ed with mod­ernism as an artis­tic movement. ^{1 1} Anna Tor­res, ​“Cir­cu­lar Land­scapes: Mon­tage and Myth in Dvoyre Fogel’s Yid­dish Poet­ry,” Nashim 35 (2019): 68. In con­trast, I tell sto­ries in verse, coax­ing my fam­i­ly his­to­ry to appear through lan­guage. I began to ask myself: what would it mean to merge my own voice with Vogel’s? How might there be an inti­ma­cy despite this distance?

Land­scapes were deeply impor­tant to Vogel. In a let­ter to Melech Rav­itch, 1936, trans­lat­ed and sent to me by Anas­tasiya Lyubas, Vogel wrote ​“I know there are worlds that at first appear as for­eign to us on the sur­face. We reject books that rep­re­sent such worlds to us to only dis­cov­er the beau­ty of these worlds lat­er … And I think that this can only be the fate of my poet­ry and prose. And per­haps the still­ness and soli­tari­ness of Aus­tralia (per­haps it is an imag­ined pic­ture?) is quite appro­pri­ate to read me. Nor­wid said once that every­thing should be read in a set­ting that is sim­i­lar to the one where it was writ­ten.” The low­coun­try salt marsh in South Car­oli­na where I read Vogel and spent long after­noons walk­ing and think­ing about her could not be more dif­fer­ent from Lwów; fecund, not a per­son or build­ing in sight, late after­noon rains chang­ing the land­scape dai­ly. Yet as I grew close to my Jew­ish fam­i­ly of Pol­ish descent, the cityscape that pos­sessed Vogel nonethe­less min­gled with the land­scapes where we spent time togeth­er. Seek­ing close­ness with my fam­i­ly, and lament­ing the time lost with my half-sis­ters, I grew inti­mate with an imag­i­nary Deb­o­ra Vogel. I dis­cov­ered her poet­ry could describe my world. Dur­ing the dog days of sum­mer, lines of Vogel’s poet­ry hummed in my head, and I felt com­pelled to write back. When I start­ed writ­ing the poems below, Vogel became real to me as a char­ac­ter. I asked her, why did you write in Yid­dish? Is lan­guage passed down through gen­er­a­tions? Will your Yid­dish emerge from my hand? The poems are writ­ten to her. They address her and beg a response.

The ital­i­cized lines spo­ken by Deb­o­ra Vogel in the fol­low­ing poems are excerpt­ed from her book of mon­tages, Aca­cias Bloom, trans­lat­ed by Anas­tasiya Lyubas. ^{2 2} Deb­o­ra Vogel, Bloom­ing Spaces: The Col­lect­ed Poet­ry, Prose, Crit­i­cal Writ­ing, and Let­ters of Deb­o­ra Vogel, trans. Anas­tasiya Lyubas (Boston: Aca­d­e­m­ic Stud­ies Press, 2020). They are lines which float­ed to the sur­face dur­ing six years of read­ing Vogel and stuck in my head. Vogel’s direct address is imag­i­nary. In Vogel’s poet­ry, every­day sights — white­washed kitchens, bowls of oranges, wag­ons car­ry­ing milk jars, orange aza­leas — con­tain the secrets of the world. What there is to expe­ri­ence can be expe­ri­enced in every­day mate­r­i­al, in dai­ly encoun­ters, in the five hooped her­ring-bar­rels at Yazhe Shimel’s. Just so, peer­ing into Vogel’s world through the pluff mud of mine opens a win­dow not only into lost Gali­cia, but into my rela­tion­ship to my father, to my her­itage, and to real and imag­i­nary closeness.