Selections from Yidishe dikhterins

As I write, Russ­ian forces have reached the north­ern edge of Kyiv, which once was home to both of these poets and the edi­tor in whose anthol­o­gy I first encoun­tered them — Ezra Kor­man. After leav­ing Ukraine, Kor­man came to the Unit­ed States and, buck­ing con­ven­tion in his choice of res­i­dence as in so many oth­er things, set­tled in the Mid­west. Though he spent the reminder of his life in Detroit and I find myself in Min­neapo­lis, as a fel­low immi­grant to the region I can’t help but feel a kin­ship with Kor­man, who ded­i­cat­ed much of his career to try­ing to under­stand what this dis­tant place — so far from Kyiv or even New York — could do for the cause of Yid­dish cul­ture and the free­dom of cre­ative expression.

Pub­lished in 1928, Korman’s anthol­o­gy of poet­ry by women writ­ers, Yidishe dikhterins, was one of many efforts to reach out to oth­er kinds of periph­eries of the Yid­dish lit­er­ary world and to raise up oth­er voic­es from the mar­gins. As a poet, I was struck by the hon­esty, per­cep­tion, and skill of its con­trib­u­tors. As a lin­guist and trans­la­tor, though, what stood out to me most was the abun­dance of ellipses. An astound­ing pro­por­tion of the poems con­tain at least one, as though to high­light how small a por­tion of any life a poem cap­tures, or to sug­gest how every poem remains unfin­ished until every gen­er­a­tion has had its chance to read, or to remind us of all that, for so many rea­sons, must remain unsaid — or even unlived.

Dine Libkes’s ​“On the Oth­er Side of the Wall” is not her the­mat­i­cal­ly deep­est or her most tech­ni­cal­ly daz­zling poem, but it is among her most heart­felt. Orig­i­nal­ly from Slovet­shno, Ukraine, Libkes moved to Kyiv as a young woman, work­ing first as a teacher and then as an assis­tant librar­i­an. Her fic­tion, poet­ry, and trans­la­tions appeared reg­u­lar­ly in left-wing pub­li­ca­tions and, dur­ing that brief, promis­ing time when it seemed the Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917 might yet bring free­dom to the peo­ples of the Russ­ian Empire, she became a sig­na­to­ry to the found­ing of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Jew­ish Writ­ers. There­after, her life becomes a series of ellipses. She sur­vived the khurbn by going to Cen­tral Asia and was last known to be liv­ing in the vicin­i­ty of Kyiv again after the War, leav­ing us to won­der what her life was like in that ter­ri­ble cru­cible and its after­math, and whether the long­ing and intense affec­tion for oth­er women that glows at the heart of so many of her poems was ever requit­ed. As an LGBT librar­i­an and teacher myself, fac­ing a slew of attempts here in the Mid­west to ban mate­ri­als like Libkes’s poems and lis­ten­ing to promi­nent fig­ures on the right exhort my fel­low cit­i­zens to sup­port Russia’s inva­sion of Libkes’s home­land because ​“there are no Pride flags in Rus­sia,” I have so few weapons with which to fight back oth­er than her ellipses.

Hinde Royt­blat was born in Cher­nobyl, which, as of this writ­ing, has been cap­tured by Russ­ian forces. As a teenag­er, she was deeply affect­ed by the 1905 Rev­o­lu­tion, join­ing the Russ­ian Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty and tak­ing fac­to­ry jobs in Kyiv. Although she start­ed pub­lish­ing in 1912, she dis­owned her ear­ly work after the 1917 Rev­o­lu­tion, declar­ing that it had ​“no mean­ing … now” and reded­i­cat­ing her­self as a ​“work­er on the cul­tur­al front.” Lis­ten­ing to Pres­i­dent Zelensky’s speech­es, I think often of Roytblat’s ​“We March” and its sense of qui­et resolve and patient ded­i­ca­tion, even as Royt­blat finds a kind of action in the ​“busy[ness]” of mourn­ing as much as in the prover­bial ​‘sol­dier­ing on.’ Still, what haunts me is the ellip­sis at the end of ​“Snitkov,” with its descrip­tion of the ruined shtetl and the bare fig­ure of Lenin, whose stat­ues have been com­ing down so quick­ly since the annex­a­tion of Crimea that the Ukraini­ans have dubbed the process ​“Lenin­fall.” A few days ago, Israel began prepa­ra­tions to receive refugees from Ukraine. It is to be hoped that this war will include no ded­i­cat­ed pogrom, but it is still cer­tain that what remains of Ukraine’s ven­er­a­ble Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties will be fur­ther emp­tied, both into Israel and into the dias­po­ra. It is unavoid­able that price­less trea­sures of Jew­ish cul­tur­al her­itage still resid­ing in Ukraine’s syn­a­gogues and cul­tur­al cen­ters, muse­ums and libraries, will be lost or destroyed. There will, once again, be ruins of shtetlekh and, indeed, deep­er ruins made of what are already the ruins of shtetlekh. What, then, is Roytblat’s ellip­sis? Is it a reminder that life — and specif­i­cal­ly Jew­ish life — car­ries on? Or is it a reminder that there is so much of what is lost that will nev­er be described tru­ly, or maybe even men­tioned again? Per­haps both.

I know these few words of mine will be quite dat­ed by the time they are read. I cast them onto the chop­py sea of the future, uncer­tain where they will land or how they will be read. In this, I am again like Kor­man, who put out his anthol­o­gy to dis­mis­sive reviews and lost his pub­lish­er — L. M. Shteyn — a tidy sum. Kor­man died in 1959, hav­ing lived long enough to see the Sovi­et régime dash the hopes of Dine Libkes and Hinde Royt­blat and so many oth­ers for a grow­ing free­dom — long enough to see the offi­cial­iza­tion of Yid­dish in Ukraine reversed, the last Yid­dish the­atre in Ukraine closed (in Cher­nivt­si in 1950), sev­en of Ukraine’s bright­est lumi­nar­ies extin­guished in the Lubyan­ka on the Night of the Mur­dered Poets (only a few of so many vic­tims of Stal­in­ist ter­ror). Yet the anthol­o­gy he assem­bled in 1928 car­ries the voice of each of its poets still as some­thing liv­ing: an expres­sion of long­ing for inti­ma­cy and com­mu­ni­ty, a dec­la­ra­tion of defi­ance toward con­ven­tion and ter­ror, an open­ing of the heart into a break­ing world that could end in noth­ing oth­er than an ellipsis …

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

Click here to down­load a PDF of the text and trans­la­tion. The full work is avail­able at this link from the Steven Spiel­berg Dig­i­tal Yid­dish Library.