Selections from Neger-Dikhtung in Amerike (Negro-Poetry in America)

Robert Magidoff’s 1936 anthol­o­gy Neger-Dikhtung in Amer­i­ca (Negro-Poet­ry in Amer­i­ca), pub­lished in Moscow under the gen­er­al edi­tor­ship of the Yid­dish mod­ernist poet Shmuel Halkin, pre­sent­ed Yid­dish trans­la­tions of the work of twen­ty-nine African Amer­i­can poets. From among them, I have select­ed to present here for the In geveb audi­ence three poems by African Amer­i­can women poets in Yid­dish trans­la­tion — Ani­ta Scott Cole­man, Angeli­na Weld Grimke, and Claris­sa Scott Delaney — all trans­lat­ed by the jour­nal­ist and schol­ar Robert Magid­off, who edit­ed the anthol­o­gy, with the assis­tance of the Yid­dish writ­ers Sheyn­dl Fen­ster, Henekh Hoykhgel­ern­ter, and Itshe Goldberg. ^{1 1} Eli Rosen­blatt, ​“A Sphinx Upon the Dnieper: Black Mod­ernism and the Yid­dish Trans­la­tion of Race, 1926 – 1936, ” Slav­ic Review no. 81 (2021).

If any­thing unites these three poets and their poems, it is their respec­tive focus on the hap­tic, the sense of touch – both phys­i­cal and imag­ined. Ani­ta Scott Cole­man, born in 1890 in Sono­ra, Mex­i­co and raised in New Mex­i­co, was a pro­lif­ic writer whose work, accord­ing to the schol­ar Emi­ly Luten­s­ki, was a West­ern response to the aes­thet­ic con­ven­tions and urban con­cerns of the Harlem Renais­sance, and who was an ear­ly Afro-Lat­inx writer sen­si­tive to the dis­tinct expe­ri­ence of Black peo­ple set­tled in the Mex­i­co-Unit­ed States bor­der­lands. Angeli­na Weld Grimke, a play­wright and poet, was born in Boston to a fam­i­ly of mixed racial back­ground. An ear­ly activist against lynch­ing and mob vio­lence, she exem­pli­fied in her writ­ing the ris­ing polit­i­cal con­scious­ness of Black activists of wealth and edu­ca­tion. Claris­sa Scott Delaney was a Harlem Renais­sance poet and social work­er known for her schol­ar­ly stud­ies of juve­nile delin­quen­cy and social mar­gin­al­iza­tion. She also trav­eled to and lived in France and Ger­many, and died in Wash­ing­ton, DC of kid­ney dis­ease at the age of 27.

Their poems, among the oth­ers select­ed for the anthol­o­gy, demon­strate the extent to which African-Amer­i­can mod­ernism, and the folk­lore from which it drew, was mean­ing­ful to Sovi­et Yid­dishists, not out of a sense of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with Black oth­er­ness or essen­tial expe­ri­ence, but based on the firm belief that Black cul­ture pos­sessed uni­ver­sal appeal and aes­thet­ic dis­tinc­tive­ness for minor­i­ty nations in the Sovi­et sphere. The pri­ma­ry audi­ence for the anthol­o­gy was Sovi­et Yid­dish folk­lorists, writ­ers and intel­lec­tu­als who con­struct­ed uni­ver­sal cat­e­gories of oral cul­ture and per­for­mance through which mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture devel­oped read­ers’ class con­scious­ness. Their inter­est in the poems like­ly stemmed from their work in the cat­e­go­riza­tion of folk mate­r­i­al: as the Sovi­et Yid­dish folk­lorist Ayzik Rozentsvayg remarked, one way that all forms of folk­lore delin­eate the bound­aries between social groups –mer­chants, arti­sans, and women – is by using dis­tinc­tive forms of song and poem in social protest. ^{2 2} Ayzik Rozentsvayg, Sot­syale difer­entsy­atse inem yidishn folk­lor-lid (Social dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion in Yid­dish folk­lore poet­ry), (Kiev: Alukrain­ish­er vishn­shaftlekher akade­mye, 1934); Mikhail Kru­tikov, ​“Yid­dish Folk­lore and Sovi­et Ide­ol­o­gy dur­ing the 1930s, ” in Going to the Peo­ple: Jews and the Ethno­graph­ic Impulse, ed. Jef­frey Vei­dlinge (Indi­anapo­lis: Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2016), 100 – 18. Accessed June 15, 2021. http://​www​.jstor​.org/​s​t​a​b​l​e​/​j​.​c​t​t​1​9​q​g​hd3.9. Sovi­et Yid­dish writ­ers like­ly read this poet­ry by African Amer­i­can women as evi­dence for social cat­e­go­riza­tion with­in folk­loric material.

The pub­li­ca­tion of mod­ernist prose and poet­ry writ­ten by African-Amer­i­can and Afro-Caribbean writ­ers in Yid­dish trans­la­tion com­menced ten years before the appear­ance of the Sovi­et anthol­o­gy, in 1926, when a small insert appeared in the pages of Der Ham­mer, the month­ly mag­a­zine of the New York Com­mu­nist dai­ly Morgn Fray­hayt. Der Hammer’s small insert, titled Neger-Lit­er­atur (Negro-Lit­er­a­ture), reflect­ed New York society’s broad fas­ci­na­tion with local Black aes­thet­ics and the inte­gral role that lit­er­ary cul­ture played in specif­i­cal­ly Yid­dish forms of White patronage. ^{3 3} Amelia Glaser, Songs in Dark Times (Har­vard UP 2020). 

In the after­math of World War One, White Amer­i­can mod­ernist poets and intel­lec­tu­als, such as William Ellery Leonard, known for his pas­sion­ate anti-lynch­ing poet­ry infused with grotesque racial imagery, and Vachel Lind­say, pop­u­lar­ized a prim­i­tivist Black poet­ics fur­ther devel­oped by dandy-intel­lec­tu­als such as Carl Van Vecht­en and Clement Wood. Joined by a group of phil­an­thropists and oth­er cul­tur­al activists, some of them Jew­ish, in finan­cial­ly sup­port­ing Black writ­ers, artists, schol­ars, and politi­cians, the Harlem Renais­sance poets, as George Hutchin­son writes, were deci­sive­ly shaped by the prob­lem­at­ics of a sus­tained and vital inter­ra­cial dimen­sion in their cul­tur­al movement. ^{4 4} George Hutchin­son, The Harlem Renais­sance in Black and White, (Har­vard UP, 1996). As WEB Du Bois wrote of Vachel Lindsay’s 1914 poem Con­go, “[He] knows two things, and two things only, about Negroes: The beau­ti­ful rhythm of their music and the ugly side of their drunk­ards and out­casts. From this pover­ty of mate­r­i­al he tries now and then to make a con­tri­bu­tion to Negro literature.” ^{5 5} W. E. B. DuBois, The Cri­sis, August 1916.

With this in mind, the appear­ance of the Harlem Renais­sance in the Yid­dish lan­guage is notable because it pre­sent­ed its read­ers with a view of Black cul­ture in direct trans­la­tion, a phe­nom­e­non that was rare in its own time. Where­as Yid­dish writ­ers like Joseph Opatoshu, Berish Wein­stein, and Mal­ka Lee all addressed Black peo­ple or invent­ed them as speak­ers and char­ac­ters, the Yid­dish trans­la­tors of the Harlem Renais­sance, liv­ing in both the Unit­ed States and the Sovi­et Union, pre­sent­ed Black mod­ernist poet­ry as expres­sive of folklore’s uni­ver­sal forms, as the­o­rized amongst Sovi­et Yid­dish folk­lorists, rather than expres­sions of a racial spir­it – a con­cept well known to Yid­dish writ­ers from the Ger­man Volks­geist . Resist­ing racial­ist inter­pre­ta­tions thus allowed the Yid­dish trans­la­tors to present Black cul­ture in its rad­i­cal het­ero­gene­ity, rel­a­tive­ly unmoored from dom­i­nant stereo­types that shaped much of the Yid­dish recep­tion of Black Amer­i­can cul­ture and social life.

— Eli Rosenblatt

Note from the edi­tors: We have repro­duced the Yid­dish text accord­ing to the orthog­ra­phy of the orig­i­nal volume.