Avrom Walt, who wrote under the pen name of A. Liessin, was born in Min­sk in 1872 to a fam­i­ly with an emi­nent rab­binic lin­eage. Like his ances­tors, he demon­strat­ed remark­able intel­lec­tu­al apti­tude from a young age, which he put toward the study of Tal­mud. Like his con­tem­po­raries, though, he was also attract­ed to non-reli­gious works, espe­cial­ly his­to­ry books, and at the age of twelve already had ​“fright­en­ing doubts in his faith” (line 37). A year lat­er, Liessin aban­doned tra­di­tion­al obser­vance of Jew­ish law when he was caught break­ing the Sab­bath at the Volozhin yeshi­va, and was placed under a ban by the head of the yeshi­va. Because of this, he became an out­cast in the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, leav­ing him home­less. After wan­der­ing for some time in this state, he depart­ed for Vil­na, where he joined a group of mask­il­im and even­tu­al­ly became rec­og­nized as a leader in Jew­ish social­ist cir­cles. In 1896, at the age of twen­ty four, Liessin immi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States and began pub­lish­ing his poet­ry in the Forverts. In 1913, he became edi­tor of Di tsukun­ft and pub­lished his writ­ings there, almost exclu­sive­ly. Under his lead­er­ship, Di tsukun­ft became the most sig­nif­i­cant jour­nal of Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture in the coun­try. Despite Liessin’s pro­lif­ic activ­i­ty and pub­lic promi­nence in his life­time, few of his poems have been pub­lished in Eng­lish translation.

“Yom Kip­pur in Syn­a­gogue” was writ­ten by Liessin when he was twen­ty-five years old and is one of his first poems writ­ten in the New World. I can­not help but feel that it rep­re­sents a con­fes­sion, a sym­bol­ic nar­ra­tive of his own loss of faith. I first dis­cov­ered the poem in Di yon­tefdike teg, a vol­ume of Rollansky’s Muster­verk fun der yidish­er lit­er­atur series, where it had been select­ed for the chap­ter on Yom Kip­pur. I was drawn by the pow­er of the poem, espe­cial­ly the cen­tral line: ​“But who … but who can prove it?” Can any­one read that line with­out a deep empa­thy for the boy who los­es his faith on the Day of Judge­ment — alone among the mass­es? Indeed, this theme haunts much of Liessin’s work; as Shmuel Char­ney wrote: ​“What is the cen­tral motif, what drove A. Liess­in’s poet­ry? […] To me, it seems: the weighty long­ing for faith, the lost and long-sought Eden of emu­ne [belief].”

Liessin’s craft express­es itself through a metic­u­lous lyri­cism and rhythm, which he main­tains almost obses­sive­ly. It would have been unjust not to strive to pre­serve these aspects of his poet­ry in trans­la­tion, though at times oth­er styl­is­tic con­cerns take prece­dence. But that trade­off is nec­es­sary, as ​“Yom Kip­pur in Syn­a­gogue” is also char­ac­ter­ized by a dense, oppres­sive, and time-slow­ing atmos­phere gen­er­at­ed by a rep­e­ti­tion of words and phras­es that trap the read­er in this envi­ron­ment. Between and with­in stan­zas, for exam­ple, words like ​“hey” (hay), ​“gezikhter” (faces) and ​“kohol” (con­gre­ga­tion) focus the read­er on some of the most evoca­tive imagery:

And feet pound the hay beneath.

The hay-smell wafts up, reek­ing like liquor,
[…]
And bleach­es and yel­lows each face.

The old faces look out in ter­ror,
[…]
A con­gre­ga­tion of corpses.

The con­gre­ga­tion shiv­ers and sways

In oth­er places, Liessin links con­cepts across the poem using sin­gle words like ​“flatern” (quiver): the boy ​“stands and he quiv­ers, con­demned to death,” join­ing the ​“quiv­er­ing” flames, which burn ​“slow­ly and sad­ly.” Pre­serv­ing Liessin’s care­ful dic­tion, there­fore, took prece­dence in my trans­la­tion. I hope that I have struck a bal­ance that faith­ful­ly allows the read­er to expe­ri­ence the full range of emo­tion I had the first time I read the poem.

Click here to down­load a PDF of the text and trans­la­tion. The orig­i­nal text can be found on pp.100 – 103 in Vol. 1 of Liess­in’s Lid­er un Poe­men, avail­able at this link from the Steven Spiel­berg Dig­i­tal Yid­dish Library.