An Inch or Two of Time: Time and Space in Jewish Modernisms 9780271071978

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An Inch or Two of Time

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VOLUME 3

DIMYONOT

‫דמיונות‬

Jews and the Cultural Imagination

samantha baskind, general editor editorial board Judith Baskin, University of Oregon David Biale, University of California, Davis Katrin Kogman-Appel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Laura Levitt, Temple University David Stern, University of Pennsylvania Ilan Stavans, Amherst College

Volumes Volumesininthe theDimyonot Dimyonotseries seriesexplore explore the theintersections, intersections,and andinterstices, interstices,ofofJewish Jewish experience experienceand andculture. culture.These Theseprojects projectsemerge from many disciplines—including art, emerge from many disciplines—including history, language, literature, music,music, religion, art, history, language, literature, philosophy, and cultural diverse religion, philosophy, andstudies—and cultural chronological geographical locations. studies—andand diverse chronological and Each volume, however, interrogates the multiple geographical locations. Each volume, and evolving representations of Judaism however, interrogates the multiple and and Jewishness, by both Jews and non-Jews, over evolving representations of Judaism and time and place. Jewishness, by both Jews and non-Jews, over time and place.

other titles in the series: v o l u m e 1 David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, eds., The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee, with a prologue by Friar Erhard von Pappenheim v o l u m e 2 Ranan Omer-Sherman, Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film

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An Inch or Two of Time Time and Space in Jewish Modernisms

Jordan D. Finkin

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Finkin, Jordan D., 1976– , author. An inch or two of time : time and space in Jewish modernisms / Jordan D. Finkin. pages cm — (Dimyonot: Jews and the cultural imagination) Summary: “Explores the metaphorical power of time and space in Jewish modernist poetry in Hebrew and Yiddish as a response to the experience of exile and landlessness, and as a means of furthering modernism’s exploration of the self and its relation to community, nation, and the world”— Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-271-06641-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Hebrew poetry, Modern—20th century— History and criticism. 2. Yiddish poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Jewish poetry—20th century— History and criticism. 4. Space and time in literature. 5. Modernism (Literature). I. Title. pj5024.f56 2015 892.41'609—dc23 2014049795 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48-1992. This book is printed on paper that contains 30 post-consumer waste.

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To Dashiell and Emmett, with my love everywhere and forever.

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Contents

Acknowledgments / ix

Introduction: The Aesthetics of Spatiotemporality / 1

1 A Brief Essay on Time, Space, Nation, and Metaphor / 11

2 “Heymen un Reymen”: Homelandscapes, Shtetlekh, and Other Creative Spaces / 44

3 Temporaesthesia / 93

4 The Revolutionary Principles of Time and Space / 131

5 Enclosed in Distances: The Poetic Experiments of Yocheved Bat-Miriam / 156 Afterword / 181 Appendix: Y. L. Perets, “The Little City” or “The Shtetl” / 185

Notes / 195 Bibliography / 231 Index / 241

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Acknowledgments

My debts, intellectual and personal, in the preparation and improvement of this book and its ideas are many, too many and deep for me to offer thanks in the length and detail they deserve. I will briefly acknowledge some here, knowing full well that I inevitably though unwittingly omit others to whom my apologies will hopefully make amends. Lucky is too meager a word for my great good fortune in enjoying and profiting from an abiding Berkeley khevruse, in whose company the earliest seeds of this project germinated. Chana Kronfeld, Allison Schachter, and Naomi Brenner all offered valuable suggestions at various stages of its development. Much of this work was undertaken while at Oxford, and I am indebted to Elli Stern and Francesca Bregoli for their support and pithy commentary. To David Rechter I offer eternal gratitude for his professional guidance, personal encouragement, friendship, humor, and humanity. We should all have such a mentsh in our lives. The University of Illinois’s Program in Jewish Culture and Society, especially its director Matti Bunzl, welcomed me with open arms and gave me a temporary academic home, a shelter from the storm as it were, for which I am sincerely grateful. I also gratefully acknowledge the other conferences, journals, and publications where some of these ideas and materials first took shape. Chapter 3 is based on “Markish, Trakl, and the Temporaesthetic,” Modernism/modernity 15, no. 4 (2008): 783–801, copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press, reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press; and chapter 4 is based on “Time and Space as Revolutionary Principles in Interwar Soviet Yiddish Poetry,” in Yiddish Poets and the Soviet Union, 1917–1948, ed. Daniela Mantovan (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012), 39–57. To Patrick Alexander and the staff of Penn State University Press, including Hannah Hebert, John Morris, Jennifer Norton, Laura Reed-Morrisson, and Robert Turchick, I cannot begin to express my appreciation for their ix

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acknowledgments

consummate professionalism, helpfulness, support, and efficiency. Moreover, at a time when support for monographs on modern Jewish literature by many academic presses is regrettably on the wane, Penn State Press to its immense credit (no matter the merits or demerits of my own project) forethoughtfully sees and values the importance of such studies. To my family—my parents, Matthew and Eleanor, my brother, Ezra, and his wife, Jessica—for their sustenance, and to my friends for their goodwill, I am exquisitely and lovingly obliged. My wife, Sarah, is simply my sine qua non, that without which nothing I am or do is possible. If time and space are the axes of human perception, then our two boys, Dashiell and Emmett, are the axes of my life, giving me a way of making sense of it all.

x

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introduction The Aesthetics of Spatiotemporality

Happy the man, whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air, In his own ground. If these famous lines of Pope’s are the appropriate barometer of contentment, then the Jews have been distinctly discontented. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s mordant phrase, the Jews are “a people who can’t sleep themselves and let nobody else sleep either.” Even when on their native Eastern European ground, their insomnia was chronic. The more Jews felt the pressure for nation, the greater the anxiety about their few paternal acres, wherever those might be. Not only longing for, but also actual connections to physical space transcend political or cultural autonomy. Natural, reflexive, and organic connections to places are part of being human. Jewish self-reflection, however, tends to trace tensions over that terrain. Jews are a diasporic people, and diasporic thinking, for better or worse, has an affinity for the portative. But unlike the small piece of land owned by Boris’s father in Woody Allen’s Love and Death, which he carries with him under his coat, land is not portable. Time, however, and with it a perception of history, a connection to an historically oriented sense of mission and of meaning, are all transmissible. In his artful meditation on the connections between history and collective memory, the historian Amos Funkenstein makes the intriguing assertion that “reflection on the contents of collective memory gives rise to increasing freedom in their individual instantiation. In other words, the more a culture permits conscious changes and variations of the narrator in the contents, symbols, and structures of collective memory, the more complex and less predictable the narrative of history becomes.” The structures of memory are plotted in inter1

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an inch or two of time

esting ways along spatial and temporal axes. Moreover, the “narrator” of Jewish time and of Jewish space is not only the rabbi or the historian, the political leader or public intellectual, but also indeed the writer and the poet. That an estimated one hundred thousand people accompanied the funeral procession of the Hebrew and Yiddish writer Y. L. Perets in Warsaw in 1915 requires some pause to consider. That a poet and short-story writer occupied that kind of cultural position says something fundamental about how literature is more than an aesthetic conceit. This is the landscape in which the stakes of this project are set: understanding the trope of being homeless in the world, at home in a given place, but, in George Steiner’s memorable phrase, frappante (housed in time). This book is not a synthetic approach to the subject, nor an historical overview. Neither are the poems analyzed historical documents, but rather fictive conceits. Nevertheless, they are conceits that reveal core cultural concepts relevant to Jewish spatial, temporal, and indeed historical thinking. The present volume represents a modest project, offering small apertures— produced by a few preliminary stabs at understanding the ways in which metaphors of time and space are made to interact—from which to look at the uses of time and space in modern Jewish literatures. My focus on poetry, and on the Hebrew and Yiddish poetry of the high modernist interwar period, is unapologetic insofar as in these works there is concentrated so much energy devoted to figuring out the structures by which literary language works. Moreover, modernist literature offers one of the best vantage points from which to view the active engagement with these ideas because it was modernism’s own valuation of critical self-reflection that placed issues of perception front and center. The writing of such verse was driven by the poets’ shared belief that poetry had the power to shape the world through language: such poems are themselves some of the most contested of literary spaces. Poetry, as Paul Valéry put it, is language in the state of being born; the cultural space which poetry occupies is the creative core of a language, and its metaphors of space and time are the engines of that creativity. To worry about time and space, history and place, in their literary forms is to worry about precisely these texts. Furthermore, this work proceeds on a broad assumption about East European Jewish culture: that it placed a premium on overt, as opposed to covert, semiotic systems. A great cultural premium was placed on texts and therefore on language—a point encapsulated not only in the concept of Jewish discourse and the cultural practices certainly of Ashkenazi Jewry over close to the past 2

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introduction

thousand years but on the fact that Yiddish and Hebrew were perceived not only as Jewish cultural products but in many ways as constitutive of Jewish culture. But an equally consequential emphasis was placed on the development and deployment of sophisticated interpretive strategies. It is as if an inversely proportional relationship existed between a circumscribed Jewish political autonomy over physical places on the one hand and control over everexpanding semantic spaces on the other. Modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature are born of that world. Notions of space and time, I argue, are integral to those developments. Time and space have long been studied as the axes of perception, as some of the primary categories by which we as human beings organize our experiences. The study of time and space as cultural categories in Jewish studies, however, has a less lengthy history but has expanded in earnest in the past generation. Certainly a reevaluation of the relationship of Jews to history has been one of the most important factors in the making of modern Jewry, as the works of historians like Yosef Haim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein have painstakingly pointed out. On the spatial side, a cohort of scholars of modern Jewish culture have participated in the “spatial turn” in the humanities, as can be seen most recently in the works of Barbara Mann, Shachar Pinsker, and Allison Schachter. Taken together, Jewish studies is clearly working through the complexities and ramifications of the concepts of time and space and their deployment by Jewish intellectuals, writers, and artists. Again, the present volume—on the metaphorical interconnection of time and space in Hebrew and Yiddish modernist verse—is one brick in that growing edifice. In Yehuda Amichai’s poem “An Old Bus Stop,” a poem in which the titular location stimulates a reverie on the emotional pulls of the poet’s life, the temporality of his memory meets the physicality of the place. At the conclusion of the poem Amichai writes, “The stop is still there. God is still / Called ‘Place,’ and I, sometimes, / Call him ‘Time.’” In Barbara Mann’s illuminating reading of this poem she notes of the bus stop that it “represents . . . a caesura in theological experience wherein the God of History is encountered in intimate terms, through a simple address in a particular location.” And moreover, insofar as the poem also meditates on the complexities of space in modern Israel, by speaking of emotional reflections in theological terms, she reads the poem as dealing with “a foundational question in Jewish theology: Is God revealed in time, in history, or in space, in ‘the Land’?” Here the categories of time and 3

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an inch or two of time

space remain distinct, a separation which is very common. What interests me, however, are not those instances where it is a matter of a choice between time or space, of an either/or situation, as in Amichai’s “sometimes.” Nor those in which we encounter an intersection, time and space. Rather, my interest is in those cases of mixing, of time as space or vice versa. Stepping back, if we take the Bible briefly as a starting point, in Psalm 39:5–6 the supplicant pleads, “Make known to me, oh Lord, my end and what is the measure of my days, I will know how ephemeral I am. You have made my days but a few hand-breadths, and my duration is as nothing to you; all men stand but as a breath.” These verses make momentary use of a felicitous spatial metaphor for time. That is, a period of time is marked out in terms of spatial distance. On its face this is not so startling, as many languages employ similar metaphorical figures. The goal of this book is to unpack the deeper significance of this metaphorical vocabulary when used by Jewish writers, often in startling ways, to understand their condition in the modern world. I do not mean to give the impression that this specific literary activity is unique to the Jews. The renowned English hymnodist Isaac Watts (1674–1748), for example, creatively reformulates precisely this biblical passage by focusing on that metaphorical structure: Teach me the measure of my days, Thou Maker of my frame! I would survey life’s narrow space, An learn how frail I am. A span is all that we can boast, An inch or two of time; Man is but vanity and dust, In all his flower and prime. Watts skilfully plays up the carpentry imagery of the psalm, going so far as to add workshop dust in order to highlight a tangible dust-and-ashes understanding of mortality. But while the carpenter measures the wood in order to cut and to construct, God measures time just as precisely in order to cut off and bring to an end. Watts foregrounds the psalm’s psychological insight into human insecurities about mortality by bringing out the metaphorical dimension of the verses: while the future may be unfathomable, the carpenter’s saw 4

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introduction

is all too real. The metaphorical language of the poem offers a profound understanding of how we as human beings can experience reality through literature. More specifically, this “inch or two of time” is a pithy example of the kinds of spatiotemporal conflations with which I am concerned in this book. Put another way, while time and space are the axes according to which we understand the world, they can also be transformed from abstract organizational categories into aesthetic objects. This transformation unlocks dramatic metaphorical and creative potential, especially when space and time are made to interact, as in the striking “inch or two of time.” Indeed, engaging the metaphorical power of the interrelations of time and space is one of modern literature’s innovative attributes. This book presents, in a series of case studies, an argument for viewing the metaphorical interaction of time and space as one of the innovative techniques of modern and modernist literature, certainly in its Jewish inflections in Hebrew and Yiddish. While in this introduction and opening chapter I will look at some of the important issues relevant to investigating time, space, and their connections to one another, these observations are in service of an argument that is ultimately a literary one. If we take as a starting point the metaphorical intuition contained within the “inch or two of time,” modern writers used that linguistic intuition in order to come to terms with the radical changes of the modern world with which they were confronted, including rampant accelerations in urbanization, industrialization, democratization, communication, transportation, privatization, secularization; revolutions in politics, science, technology, warfare; new conceptualizations of the individual, the community, the nation; etc., etc. The ability to create time out of space and space out of time is a complicated expression of a creative power to impose a kind of order on a world spinning dizzyingly out of control. There are those who maintain that a language, its grammar, structure, and categories, determines how we understand and make sense of the world (the so-called SapirWhorf hypothesis). A modernist would say, however, that not only does language itself form the world, but we deform the world through language. This is language’s power. Mindful of that power, this book will focus its attention through three literary lenses. The first is modernism, specifically its literary high-water mark in the early interwar period. This was a moment when the order of the world was not only in disarray and chaos, but also in a cataclysmic, apocalyptic, revolutionary way. The second lens is poetry. In no other genre was the formative and 5

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deformative power of language both present and the subject of its own contemplation so immediately. While in prose we find a number of experimental, radical, and innovative hallmarks of modernist literature, I focus on that poetry in which the metaphorical potential of spatiotemporality was most concentrated. Looking at all of modernist poetry in this way would be an enormous task, and one impossible to undertake in a single volume. What I propose for this book as a whole therefore is to look at these issues through a third lens, namely Jewish literature, specifically modernist Jewish poetry in Yiddish and Hebrew. Jewish writers, certainly since the late nineteenth century, were dedicated to producing a literature that could come to terms with a modernity that they as Jews experienced in specific and important ways. Their perspectives, cultural history, sociopolitical vantage point, and so forth gave them a unique perch from which to experience, examine, and understand what was going on in the processes of modernity. Moreover, as members of a national-ethnic-religious community long denied the rights and privileges of autonomy or self-determination by political authorities—and one with a dramatically internalized sense of exile and landlessness—the Jewish writers at the core of this investigation reimagined and reinterpreted their spatial and temporal orientation and embeddedness. They set as the fulcrum of their imagery the metaphorical power of time and space both as calibrations of perception and as aesthetic objects in and of themselves. Where, for instance, non-Jewish writers might tend to view space as a given, as their foreground— an element of their own sense of belonging to a nation at home in a given territory—many of the Jewish writers discussed in this project are just as likely to spatialize time. That is, they create an ersatz space out of time, out of history, which—given the cultural emphasis placed on traditional canonical texts articulating a national historical pageant experienced in annual ritual cycles—is the “space” they most comfortably inhabited. While such a scheme represents not a one-to-one correspondence but a set of interesting tendencies, the heightened sensitivity towards the literary potentials of spatial and temporal metaphors among these Jewish writers is one of the impetuses for this project. Indeed, the revolution in modernist Jewish-language poetry involved the reorganization of language itself as an organ of perception. That is why space and time—as well as the equation of space and a spatial sensorium with temporal concepts—are so important for literary studies of this period. 6

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introduction

To take but one example (expanded on later in greater detail in the third chapter), in the aftermath of a series of brutal Ukrainian pogroms in 1919–21 the Yiddish modernist poet Perets Markish wrote a nightmarish sonnet which envisions an ominously deserted marketplace. Through a window we see on a wall how “clocks hang, hairy like hacked-off heads of calves, / And lick emptiness with the pendulum’s back-and-forth.” We find brutality and death merging into the domestic space. And within that space the objects of the senses, that is, the concrete, the tangible, the tastable—in other words, the spatial—are objectified as clocks. Their pendulums, like tongues, are the organs that experience that sensory, spatial world. The aesthetic domination of the senses has given way to (has been displaced by) time. This is typical of the disorientation and reorientation undertaken by many Jewish modernist poets, one of a number of strategies which make their poetry so challenging and so rewarding. The convergences and divergences in the two literatures at the heart of this analysis, Yiddish and Hebrew, which were produced by groups of writers and intellectuals living and writing in largely the same communities in the early part of the last century, offer a dramatic test case for the issues of space and time at the heart of this project. For example, is there any way of formulating a sense of time and space that is uniquely “Jewish”? And if so, what are the necessary and/or sufficient conditions of such a formulation? How do socialist cosmopolitanism and Zionist nationalism plot on these axes? Does language choice affect the emphasis on time or on space, or does an understanding of these categories determine language choice? So, for example, starting from stereotypical assumptions, would a Zionist writing in Hebrew, with his or her emphasis on land and political autonomy, focus more heavily on spatial topics, while a revolutionary Yiddishist, with his or her universalist principles and deterritorial outlook, stressed temporal themes? And as is alluded to by this latter pronominal indeterminacy, does gender play a role in questioning normative understandings of space and time? These are some of the questions guiding this project. In the first chapter I present not a tour d’horizon but a somewhat idiosyncratic exposition of some of the key spatial and temporal concepts involved in the close literary readings of Jewish modernist writings I offer subsequently. Ideas of dynamism and stasis, linearity and cyclicality, parochialism and universalism all vie with one another as time and space enter a poetic free-for-all in the modern period. As I argue, however, the stakes of this wrangling are not merely aesthetic. How you conceive of the relationship between time and 7

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space, history and territory, has a profound impact on a range of other concepts, including the idea of the nation, a most fraught idea in Jewish modernity. Indeed, beyond the ideological ones, these metaphorical concepts have deep moral implications as well. Though I have tried to impose a general kind of order to the progression of topics, from philosophy to linguistics to national space and history to literature, this seeming order belies the maniacal associative leaps in its composition reminiscent of Strindberg’s A Dream Play. But as in the remarkable psychological perceptions of that work, time and space nowhere in literature function according to orderly systematic constructions. In their messiness lies some of their aesthetic appeal. The second chapter is an exploration of the “Jewish space” par excellence in Jewish Eastern Europe, the shtetl. These places, anything from oversized village to small city, were the demographic center of gravity in Jewish Eastern Europe for a good deal of the modern period. These were also the native places of the vast majority of the writers dealt with here and formed the backdrop to many of their works. That said, these literary shtetls are not ethnographic locales; they are profoundly intimate and contentious literary spaces. And in this space writers experimented with a number of political, ideological, and philosophical ideas. Intersecting with all of this is the notion of home and homeland. Divided into two parts, this chapter deals with the idea of home as embodied first in the shtetl, and then in its natural environment and landscape, which I refer to as a “homelandscape.” Literary thinking about the shtetl is nearly coterminous with that habitation, but critical models for its description have not been updated for some time. This chapter is a preliminary step in reconfiguring some of the spatial and temporal tropes associated with the diasporic homeland. The temporal ramifications of space are pursued in the third chapter. The metaphorical intersection of time and space, spatiotemporality, is most graphically portrayed in the aesthetic perception of time as an object of sensory perception. Briefly put, if time can be slowed down to a static moment, then it can be “sensed” like taste or touch; time can, in effect, be spatialized. This spatialization of time I call “temporaesthesia.” I pursue the analysis of this metaphorical relationship in a comparison of two mainstays of European and Jewish modernist verse—the German Expressionist Georg Trakl and the Yiddish Expressionist Perets Markish—who both use this technique from divergent perspectives, depending on whether space is in the foreground or the background of their cultural experience. This pairing also underscores both 8

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introduction

the participation of Jewish artists in other European trends as well as their own unique contributions. In the coda to this chapter, I explore the distinctive temporaesthetic technique of one of the most striking of Hebrew modernist poets, David Fogel, as a test to the presumptions of Jewish territoriality implicated in the readings of Markish and Trakl. A different configuration of time and space lies at the heart of the fourth chapter. The first decades of the twentieth century saw Europe and the world convulsed by world war, revolutions scientific, social, and political, civil wars, pogroms; in short, all manner of chaotic transformation. One of the great explosions of Jewish creative energy not only coincided with these realities, but was catalyzed by the revolutionary atmosphere after the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The universalizing rhetoric of that heady period, which electrified many a Jewish writer, included the creation of a new model of personhood and a new time for that New Man to achieve his unfettered potential. That new revolutionary time overturned the past and, while looking to the future, focused on the concrete present, the fervent “now” in which the new man could transform his gaze from the dark past of tradition to the bright dawn of the future. The “moment,” concrete and elemental, became a basic unit of revolutionary poetry. Writing as members of a “deterritorialized” nation long invested in exploring temporal alternatives to that control over space which it lacked, Jewish poets were able to capitalize on an inherited vocabulary of temporality to write poetry that could easily match the new revolutionary spirit. This chapter deals with some of the signal achievements of this new temporal thinking, including two Soviet Yiddish poets of differing poetic temperaments: the more aestheticist Ezra Fininberg and, again, the brash and vociferous Perets Markish. (I think it will not go unnoticed that many of the case studies presented here in some way deal with or intersect with Markish. On one level this is because I cannot seem to escape the magnetism of his persona and his poetry. Yet more importantly, much of his early poetry especially is intimately involved in trying to understand and experiment with precisely these ideas of space and time.) In the final chapter I turn to one of the more complicated and enigmatic voices in Jewish modernism, the poet Yocheved Bat-Miriam. Likely due to her poetry’s hermetic nature, she is a poet who is mentioned far more often than her work is seriously attended to, the subject of only a handful of scholarly articles and one short monograph. Relevant here is her poetic experimentation with the vocabulary of time and space. One of the poets associated with the Moderna, the 9

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movement of Hebrew modernism in Palestine, whose heyday coincided with the interwar period, Bat-Miriam is read very often both alongside and apart from its other major canonically associated figures. She is also often written into the framework of women writers of the period (and the themes and styles with which they are linked). Yet Bat-Miriam stands out from these simplified categorizations as something of an enigma in modern Hebrew letters. This chapter focuses on the poetry of Bat-Miriam’s early period in order to outline some of the primary features of her experiment with developing that spatial and temporal vocabulary, including how memory functions as the connecting link between time and space. Her early poetry presents a kind of intimate spatiotemporality, weaving together memory of her native Byelorussian landscape with her experience of her adopted Palestine, through biblical, religious, and romantic/erotic imagery. The landscapes and timescapes of her verse defy easy interpretation and call for a continued investment in understanding space and time themselves, making her project an essential link in Jewish literary thinking about these topics. Bat-Miriam’s intuitions about the associative structures of temporality in particular are reflected in her use of memory, of poetic techniques such as synaesthesia, and of the poetic potentials of the Hebrew verbal system. Though submerged by the poetry’s complexity, the boldness of Bat-Miriam’s investment in and investigation of time and space makes hers a distinct, if distinctly underappreciated, voice in Hebrew and Jewish letters. The poetics of spatiotemporality offered a fertile vocabulary for modernism’s exploration of the self, its relationship to community and nation, and its connection to the world. I provide for how poetry works as a kind of organ of perception on its own, and why Jewish literature presents a particularly dynamic system for working out the implications of that understanding. And while there is an important case to be made, implicit in this project, for why Jewish modernist literature is an indispensable part of the modern library, these creative and aesthetic experiments, for all their philosophical sophistication, ideological stridency, or aesthetic nuance, are nevertheless intensely personal attempts by artists to navigate the stormy seas of modernity. That the stakes of those experiments were oftentimes high—in a way which we tend to lose sight of these days, when appreciation of poetry lists somewhat to leeward and its moral dimension, once taken so seriously, now seems quaint—must inform our reading of these works and their context.

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1

a brief essay on time, space, nation, and metaphor

The following discussion cannot present a tour d’horizon of time, space, and their metaphorical intersection (spatiotemporality), however desirable such a presentation may be. Rather it will introduce those spatial and temporal concepts most germane to a study of Jewish modernist poetry. Because of their complexities as well as their hardwiring into our perceptual apparatus, I will begin with a brief consideration of time and space as philosophical and linguistics concepts. This will be followed by an exploration of some of the variety of metaphorical modes most commonly associated with time and space, concluding with a specifically Jewish approach to constructing spatiotemporality.

Time and Space as Axes of Human Perception The past existed! Herman spoke to himself. Granted that time is nothing more than a mode of thinking, as maintained by Spinoza, or a form of perception, as Kant thought, still the fact cannot be denied that in Tzivkev in wintertime the stove was heated with firewood; his father, blessed be his memory, studied the Gemara and its commentaries, while his mother cooked a barley stew of pearl kasha, beans, potatoes, and dried mushrooms. —isaac bashevis singer, Enemies: A Love Story

Within the many dense pages of philosophical thinking on space and time, among numerous influential lines of thought, one of the most significant developments for the present purpose is the conceptualization of time and space as axes of perception, rather than as objective facts of reality. Kant’s understanding of time and space as a priori categories of apprehending the world, for example, is perhaps the best-known formulation. In this view, time 11

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and space are preprogrammed into our perception of the world; we are hardwired to use these axes. When speaking, however, of the metaphorical potential of space and time—the power which drives a great deal of modernist literature, especially poetry—it is a different model which ends up gelling more consistently with literary constructions of time and space. In David Hume’s account, predating Kant’s by a generation or so, time and space are not taken as a priori categories, but rather as their own special category acting in similar ways on our ideas and impressions. In effect, Hume’s claim is that space and time are respectively the categorical organizers of both spatiality, which he calls extension, and of temporality, which he calls duration. The primary distinction in this sense from the Kantian model is that time and space are inconceivable without the objects to which they pertain. Because of a consonance in their effects the Humean structure is of increasing relevance in a number of fields today, not the least of which, as we will see, is history. Despite this similarity in kind, space and time nevertheless enjoy certain properties distinct from one another. Though like space “an abstract idea,” time for Hume “comprehends a still greater variety than that of space.” Indeed, Hume pursues the difference by describing how “[a] man in a sound sleep, or strongly occupy’d with one thought, is insensible of time; and according as his perceptions succeed each other with greater or less rapidity, the same duration appears longer or shorter to his imagination.” This relative rapidity of the succession of impressions, an “appearance,” will encode for the poet (among others) a flexibility in the notion of time itself. Indeed, it is Henri Bergson who in formulating his theory of duration (la durée) points to a confusion among various notions of time. On the one hand there is a scientific, spatialized notion, with time plotted as a linear, strict chronometry. On the other there is time as it is perceived, present to one’s consciousness. In the latter notion this essential linkage of temporality with changeability accounts (at least in part) for its metaphorical potential. What becomes increasingly clear, from the eighteenth century onward, is that the problems of space and time are in some sense ones of perspective. So, while a philosopher like Kant or Hume might raise “the question of apriority and aposteriority of our perception of space, i.e. whether our concept of space is innate or developed from our experiences,” a geometer, an artist, or a psychologist, say, would not ask the same questions, or perhaps even related questions. As Géza Révész goes on to assert, by means of a geometrical example, the Euclidean regime was toppled by a proliferation in differing ways of conceiving 12

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of space; in effect, while an elegant model, it becomes less useful if one presumes a multiplicity of spaces. That multiplicity generates its own problems. Among them one encounters “the problem of choosing that type of theory of space which agrees the closest with the theories and discoveries in physics. That they decided against an Euclidean structure of space is generally known (Planck, Einstein).” What is sauce for the spatial goose is sauce for the temporal gander. As Reinhart Koselleck makes clear, modernity itself is marked by the advent of subjective temporality. Koselleck marks that advent with Johann Gottfried von Herder’s powerful critique of Kant: “At one time,” says Herder, “there exist (one can say it truly and boldly) countlessly many times in the universe.” As we will see throughout the studies in this book, perspective becomes extremely important to the workings of space and time within literature as well. The breakthroughs of early twentieth-century physics accomplished a feat even more metaphorically dazzling than the paradigm shifts of perspective. A tridimensional space was suddenly replaced by a quadridimensional one; to height, width, and depth a fourth axis—time—was added. Put another way, time had been spatialized. When Einstein published his landmark article in 1905, what followed was nothing less than a revolution in human thought. The natural world had not changed, but our understanding of it would never be the same. And while the science involved is quite complicated—how many people actually read the article?—its impact certainly on the popular imagination, including in literature, was meteoric. This is why the metaphorical energy unleashed by spatiotemporality in the interwar period—a period inaugurated by staggering scientific as well as political revolutions—makes not only for powerful but important reading. These new, modern reconceptualizations of time and of space, which bring the one into focus by means of the other, are equally consequential for modern literature. And this is the idea at the root of this book. The modern perceptual revolution turns the central metaphor of Isaac Watts’s psalm from a bit of startling and effective imagery into a means of looking at and understanding the world; from a poetic conceit to a mode of perception.

Space and Time as Axes of Language As a lapidary précis of the preceding discussion, Kevin Lynch notes that “[t]he psychological dimensions of time and space are not identical—their feel and 13

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the data they use are different—but they are linked together. The fit is natural and necessary.” That the “naturalness” of this fit is also perceptual is clear from what we have just seen. More than that, though, Lynch’s comment refers as much to language as to psychology. As much as axes of perception, then, space and time are also axes of language, an equally significant reality for literary analysis. Space and time are the very warp and woof of language. The most salient aspect of this fabric within linguistics is the notion of deixis, which refers to how the things we say are made meaningful by their context of utterance. The primary structural, grammatical categories of this meaningfulness are person, time, and place. So, for instance, when one utters the pronoun “he,” what that pronoun actually refers to (and in some sense means) has to do with the referential context in which it is uttered. In another storied example, a note on one’s office door reading “Back in 5 minutes” loses its oomph if we don’t know when the note was left. The presuppositions of our own linguistic hardwiring show how interconnected these deictic concepts are (and how artificial, if useful, their discrete analysis can sometimes be). So, even in a technical and precise account, where time deixis can be unhesitatingly defined as “the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the time at which an utterance was spoken,” the words “points” and “spans” are still spatial terms. One of the problems implicit in this unselfconscious blending is made explicit by considering that it is often linguistically possible to use temporal terms in order to refer to deictic locations, as in: . . . I first heard that ominous rattle ten miles ago . . . There’s a good fast food joint just ten minutes from here. Lynch again sums up the conceptual underpinning of this assessment when he allows that “[s]pace and time are associated constructs, although the spatial concept arises earlier and more easily than the temporal one. In early life, space and time are confounded. Later, space and time are still used interchangeably to measure and symbolize each other.” This is why a distance can be “ten minutes” or one’s life but “an inch or two of time.” Though interchangeability may not be the most tightly constructed model for what actually goes on in temporal spatializations or spatial temporalizations such as these, the fluid relationship between a desire to measure and a desire to symbolize cap14

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tures some of the psychological drive behind the question of how literature deals with time and space, especially in relation to specific cultural constructions of their connection. Indeed, while the creative potential of these deictic categories is unmistakable, what is just as important for Jewish modernist literature is to pay attention to how individual cultures understand and ultimately mediate precisely those potentialities. Linguists have long studied the variety of spatial and temporal deictics and their interconnected relationships, as in Charles Fillmore’s elegant description of the Salteaux Indians, who measure walls, canoes, or tools, with fathoms, cubits, or fingerstretches, but it is not even conceivable to them that the distance between two towns can be indicated in comparable terms. Longer distances, that is, are always measured in terms of the amount of time it takes to get from one of them to the other. If the two towns are at a distance that cannot be traveled in one day, they are, say, “three sleeps apart.” Shorter distances are indicated by pointing to the extent of the sky that the sun travels in the time it takes to get from one town to the other. The point is that this temporalization of space is not only a figurative representation, but comes close to describing how these Salteaux people, this one culture, actually conceives of and understands that space. When a Yiddish modernist poet, caught in the thrall of revolution but contemplating the simple life and faith of his forefathers threatened by that maelstrom, envisions how “High above my grandfather’s Wednesday / the Milky Way leads to my marble home,” we see a similar expression of the cultural weight of time conceived spatially. And in the later discussion of the poetics of revolutionary spatiotemporality, it is the perceived concord between revolutionary and traditional Jewish understandings of time which opened a space for these poets’ innovative experimentation. Time and space play cognitive roles similar only to one another while at the same time they bear important differences. Despite his recognition of “the mysteries and paradoxes of time”—a recognition which likely owes very much to Henri Bergson—Fillmore notes that “time is conceptually simpler than space, since it only has one dimension and is unidirectional.” (Of course, “conceptually simpler” is a relative assessment for linguistics; philosophers no doubt might well differ on this point.) These twin aspects of unidimensionality 15

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and unidirectionality can be understood as movement. The trope of movement gains in importance for understanding the figurative ramifications of space and time. Where place is largely understood as static, time is correspondingly dynamic. Given their anchoring in the linguistic code, these larger issues of spatiality and temporality are played out with remarkable diversity in literature. From a metaphorical and literary perspective, a relationship between the two may well involve, for example, making space dynamic or time static. Understanding such a metaphorical potential yields yet another conceptual building block for literary constructions of spatiotemporality.

Space and Nation There is a common and to some extent unavoidable slippage between the terms “space” and “place,” each one having both concrete and figurative realizations. While they are synonyms in colloquial language, in much of the critical literature generally (but by no means uniformly or consistently) place is the specific cultural, social, political, ideological, and so on instantiation of a philosophical, linguistic, or metaphorical understanding of space. This is, however, only a convenient partition of semantic space. Building on the work of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Yi-Fu Tuan, a recent collection on Jewish topographies, for example, offers a slightly different terminological and conceptual scheme in which place is defined by geographical location and space by some kind of social performance. Such dogmatic rubrics tend to crumble quickly; in fine, though, while space tends to encompass a greater number of figurative uses, the groundwork of place is in empirical, especially sensory experience. As Yi-Fu Tuan, an influential spatial theorist, observes, “What sensory organs and experiences enable human beings to have their strong feeling for space and for spatial qualities? Answer: kinesthesia, sight, and touch.” While these are important—the visual having been remarked upon as particularly so for spatial orientation—space and place cannot be understood except by both the full nexus of sensory apprehension as well as a host of social constructions. Indeed, Henri Lefebvre, the dean of spatial theorists, attempts to unify in a single theory all of the sundry conceptions of space: The fields we are concerned with are, first, the physical—nature, the Cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; 16

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and, thirdly, the social. In other words, we are concerned with logicoepistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imaginations such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias.  .  . . Even if the links between these concepts and the physical realities to which they correspond are not always clearly established, we do know that such links exist, and that the concepts or theories they imply—energy, space, time—can be neither conflated nor separated from one another. From a literary point of view, the implied connection between the latter formula, “energy, space, time,” and the Aristotelian unities of action, place, and time makes both Lefebvre’s and Tuan’s accounts of space more stable because it links the social space of literature to these other social spaces. Turning to one particular literary-cultural space, as a recent introduction to specifically Jewish notions of space has put it, “ ‘space’ has come to the foreground as a category of cultural analysis, at least as far as contemporary cultures are concerned. Accordingly, no political, social, or cultural space exists in isolation from others or can be considered in isolation from others.” Indeed, though there are times when one feels perhaps rather too much hay has been made of the linkage, part of the centrality of conceptions of space within modern Jewish literatures has to do with “the process of nation-building.” In the earlier example of the Salteaux Indians we could speak straightforwardly about cultures and cultural conceptions of space. That discussion elided the fact that what we were describing was actual speech, not literature. And literature in the modern period is more than cultural; it is also a national phenomenon. Since the European Enlightenment, various Jewish emancipations, and the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the Jewish national awakening has been intimately and essentially linked not only to its languages (for the most part Yiddish and Hebrew, on which I will focus, though the Jewish national appropriation of coterritorial languages calls for more study) but also to the development of literatures in those languages. The Jewish case is additionally important because European national political discourse came to be dominated by particular understandings of the nation-state, something which Jews preoccupied themselves with less in their literatures. In these Jewish literatures, the concepts of space and of time are inextricably bound up with the fraught discourses of nationhood. As we will see, many writers devoted a great deal of effort to working out how to reject that association. But that effort 17

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itself is a confirmation of the strength of the cultural connection. The literary structure of spatiotemporality in the works of Jewish writers, the subject of this book, is most comprehensible within that context. That many prevailing constructions of nationhood place an emphasis on the physical space of the nation, whether territorially or geographically or otherwise understood, is clear. There are, however, different ways of understanding that space. One of the significant distinctions presents space as it is encountered (present) on the one hand, and space as it is imagined or remembered (future and past) on the other. The latter, for example, is of immense importance for exilic or diasporic communities, of which Jews are a paradigmatic case. It is safe to say that the traditional Jewish territorial connection is to Palestine, and that whether attenuated or tightened that connection is enduring. In diaspora, however, there is an immediate cleavage between the space of the nation and national space. Palestine is not encountered physically by the Jews of Europe, but it is communally remembered (commemorated) and very well imagined. The “nation,” though, is itself, in Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase, an imagined community. And in the workings of that communal imagination, memory (the past, history) may itself be imagined. In an interview with the historian and novelist Shelby Foote, Tony Horwitz describes the following: “ ‘For me, something emanates from that ground,’ [Foote] said, ‘the way memory sometimes leaps up at you unexpectedly.’ His great-grandfather fought at Shiloh. And it was a landscape Foote had traveled over many times in his literary imagination. ‘If you’ve drawn a picture or written about a particular historical incident in a particular place, the place belongs to you in a sense. I feel that way about Shiloh, a sense of proprietorship.’ ” What is intriguing here is not just that connection to place which comes from either the native or the national relationship with it (or indeed both), but also the fact that such a connection can be created by literature. “Proprietorship” can be a literary, textual thing, which fosters an imaginary connection, itself potentially as palpable and poetic a relationship as any other. As a preliminary thesis, therefore, when national space is the space of memory (or indeed imagination), its underlying frame of reference is temporal as much as physical, if not more so. The “natural” analogy of spatial apprehension with a temporal model of present-past-future makes the association of a geographic nation with its history similarly—if deceptively—“natural.” As David Lowenthal notes, “History in the landscape often stands for durable 18

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national ideals.” Nationhood is often conceived of (ideally) as sovereignty over place and suzerainty over history; in other words, nations map space onto time. The spatiality of history is what Lowenthal terms the “tangible past”: “The tangible past also meets our need for the diachronic quality of history, ‘not only of the pastness of the past,’ T. S. Eliot suggests, ‘but of its presence; . . . a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and . . . temporal together.’ ” The spatiality of history is easily conceived for a nation inhabiting its “historical space” (in whatever way that may be imagined). However, as was said, such is not the case for Jews—though the creation of an Israeli national identity is a special case—or for other diasporic nations and communities. The terms of their spatiotemporality are differently configured. For Jews at least, their performative space is textual. That is why the issues of language and literature are so culturally emphasized and hotly contested in the modern period. Indeed, the stakes of the arguments over literature were so high because they were arguments over literary space as national space, not just a space of the nation. However, the insight of Lowenthal’s “tangible past”—namely history as both a narrative sequence and a simultaneously experienceable physical object (in space)—leads to more than mere fetishization or nostalgification of place. The image of a tangible past is inter alia aesthetic. Again, in Révész’s words, “Art does not reflect upon space, rather it creates and demonstrates it.” That literature creates space is the terse but economical presupposition to the influential notion of a textual homeland—the theme of George Steiner’s important essay “Our Homeland, the Text” (to which I will return later). As much of the field of Jewish spatial theory attempts to show, “Text . . . becomes a space in which collective identity can be formed without territory, and consequently it can be a metaphor for exile and homelessness.” While the latter assertion needs to be unpacked in the light of a theoretical discourse on exile and diaspora, the idea of a textualized space of home is a powerful one, particularly in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. (That textualized place is but one of the ramifications of creative space is a focus of the discussion of the shtetl and other creative spaces in the second chapter.) Since sensory perception—and therefore space—is the backbone of aesthetics, of art, and of literature, might time be structurally analogous, both in terms of sensory perception and of the artistic conditions that flow from them? Abraham Joshua Heschel tantalizingly states that “[w]hen closing our eyes in moments of intellectual concentration, we are able to have time without space, 19

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but we can never have space without time.” This embodies a powerful intuition about just how similar the two can be, or just how far they can be made to resemble one another. Let us therefore take a moment to look at but one resonant example of the relationship between national space and history.

Excursus: Yiddishland; Hebrewland? The development of the concept of Yiddishland is one of the notable examples of modern Jewish spatial thinking and its connection to national discourse. To explain: cultural Yiddishism, an outgrowth of both the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and Romantically inflected European nationalism—as well as its political and ideological branches, the seeds of which were planted in the late nineteenth century—grew apace in the early years of the twentieth century. Especially after the upheavals in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, Yiddishism became a potent force in Jewish Eastern European intellectual thought. One ramification of this collection of ideas was the development of the notion of Yiddishland. The older idea of Ashkenaz referred to the Jewish terrain of Europe, an essentially ethnographic conception with its own particular geography and cartography. Understood as having been made obsolete by the pressures and shifts of the modern world, Ashkenaz came be replaced by a new quasi-spatial concept. Today this is referred to as “Yiddishland” (even though this is used anachronistically; the word “Yiddishland” seems not to have been used with any regularity or frequency till perhaps the 1930s.) One may use it, however, as a shorthand to refer to a relatively new shift in cultural understanding which had its roots much earlier in the nineteenth century. One of the “new and peculiar[ly]” European aspects in the development of its nationalisms was a suspicion of linguistic diversity and the related emphasis placed on “language loyalty.” In Michael North’s analysis, when “language becomes the cornerstone of national identity and an index of cultural health,” the result is that “linguistic unity is not just crucial to national unity but actually synonymous with it.” His diagnosis for Europe was that these ideas became not only problematic but ultimately corruptive and destructive. This diagnosis, however, applies less accurately to the relationship between Jewish national self-conceptions and Jewish languages. (Indeed, North’s argument revolves almost entirely around so-called “major” languages and their modernisms.) While the ideas which would come to be expressed summarily as Yid20

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dishland germinated in the same soil as this European conception of “language loyalty,” and were indeed related to it, the definitionally polyglot nature of Ashkenazi culture made establishing the primacy of linguistic unity very difficult. Indeed, the geographical breadth of Ashkenaz over a large number of political, national, and ethnic borders made such diff use notions of “unity” trickier to define. Moreover, a relatively open linguistic system, in both Yiddish and Hebrew, as well as a textual tradition (encompassing the Bible, Talmud, midrash, and liturgy, among other texts) noted not only for its own multilingual nature but also for its anthological diversity of literary and textual genres and forms, meant that “language” occupied a different position for Jews as a category of identity formation. Yiddishland, then, stands at the end point of a dynamic period in which ideas about the nature of home and homeland, territory and diaspora, were topics of creative debate, which in one sense began in and with the shtetl. The creative endeavors of Jewish poets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explore their homelands in space and time were cut short by the vicissitudes of history. As these ideas were successively undermined, Yiddishland attempted to create space out of one of the few things that were left, namely language, or perhaps even better, out of memory of a language. Yiddishland can be understood in effect as a social and cultural concept in which utterance of Yiddish created Jewish space. While originally this was a physical geography largely coterminous with Europe—though with a decidedly different cultural geography—Yiddishland became in effect an ideological position, one which might be called “covenantal.” Jesus makes an analogous claim in the book of Matthew, where he says that “when two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). The locative orientation is an important analogue between the two cases. In both, it is a matter of the creation of space by enunciation: for Christianity, this is the foundation of the idea of a church; in the case of Yiddishland, two or three gathered together speaking Yiddish situates them in Yiddishland. Despite the oft-mentioned semantic ambiguity in the word yidish between the meanings “Jewish” and “Yiddish,” the central content of Yiddishland is language. It should be stressed that the notion of a Jewish language coded in Yiddishland is different from that found in George Steiner’s model of diasporic textuality, in which “[t]he tensions, the dialectical relations between an unhoused at-homeness in the text, between the dwelling-place of the script on 21

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the one hand (wherever in the world a Jew reads and meditates Torah is the true Israel), and the territorial mystery of the native ground, of the promised strip of land on the other, divide Jewish consciousness” (my emphasis). The Jewish exile may be unmoored from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, but that does not mean that an individual Jew (or indeed his or her community) is unmoored from land. “At-homeness,” both linguistic and geographic, is a stubbornly idiosyncratic feeling, resistant to the doctrinaire. Jeff rey Shandler’s account of Yiddishland updates this (Steinerian) notion of textuality by adding an oral component. “At-homeness” in this understanding of Yiddishland entails a community of speakers, rather than a single meditative reader. This notion of territory defined by something as immaterial and evanescent as spoken language—especially a language that has almost never had any official recognition by any government or been employed to define a discrete territory—challenges conventional notions of turf defined in relation to a language (and, by implication, the language’s speakers) that has long been fundamental to concepts of nationhood. Benedict Anderson . . . has noted that, following Herder’s assertion that “ jedes Volk . . . hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache,” the “conception of nation-ness” as linked to “private-property language”—language, implicitly, as something owned, like turf—“had wide influence . . . on subsequent theorizing about the nature of nationalism.” Conversely, the idea of Yiddishland flouts notions of statelessness long associated with diasporic Jews, especially in the rhetoric of political Zionism (wherein Jews were regularly self-described as “a people without a land”). In denying a statist understanding of nation, Shandler’s use of Yiddishland does not wholly reject territoriality either. In a way it is closer, for example, to the Scottish Gaelic concept of the Gàidhealtachd, which indicates (among other things) all those places where Gaelic is spoken. In one account, while “the territorial meaning of the term seems predominant in poetry from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, Gàidhealtachd is sometimes used to mean a specific Gaelic-speaking district, or perhaps the Gaelic community of that district.” In an important sense people and place merge in the language; they are mutually defined by it. Stressing the orality of the relationship between people, language, and place emphasizes the importance of a moment of communica22

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tion. Steiner’s textual model has much more in common with traditional static temporalities; Yiddishland presents a dynamic view of reality. What then of Hebrew? Is there no correlate concept of Hebrewland in the Jewish imagination? Significantly, there is not; at least not in the contours of Yiddishland. This is not surprising considering the historical connection of biblical, postbiblical, and Rabbinic Hebrew with the landscape of Palestine. Nor is it surprising considering the relative paucity in numbers of fluent native or quotidian speakers of the language in the pre-statehood period outside of Palestine or the Yishuv. It is somewhat surprising, however, from the perspective of nonterritorialist Hebrew culture. The very idea of a European Jewish geography of “Ashkenaz” (see Genesis 10:3 and Jeremiah 51:27) bases itself, however conjecturally, on Hebrew sources and Hebrew terminology. How these elements fit together is not an easy question. My one brief intuition is that, starting with the metaphorical orientation of this discussion, from a static perspective Hebrewland would be the land of Israel. From a dynamic (and diasporist) point of view, Hebrewland and Yiddishland merge together.

Dynamic Temporalities By temporality I mean any system for understanding time and how it works. Beyond the chronometric abstraction of scientific time, temporality can also be as figurative and metaphorical as space (especially as used by Lefebvre, Tuan, and other spatial theorists). In this sense, analogous to “social space” there is a concept of “social time,” first developed by Durkheim, in which time is understood not only in the perceptual and linguistic way that we have seen but also as social constructs according to which we organize, arrange, and understand social activities. As a result, for example, understanding various social conceptions, such as art, literature, religion, history, depends on identifying the temporalities used to construct them. In the following section I sketch out some of the important ways temporality is understood and how certain aspects of that understanding—including movement, simultaneity, and temporal shape—came to influence our reading of literature. There are many models used to describe temporality, but for the present purpose we can distinguish between two broad schemes, one dynamic and the other static. As we saw with the linguistic treatment of deixis, the dominant figurative association of time is movement. So the first model is a more dynamic 23

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one in which time is conceived alternately as linear, as episodic or repetitively patterned, or as cyclical. The latter is generally perceived as either natural (with regard to days or months, to lunar or solar reckonings, to seasons, etc.) or everyday (involving cyclical elements of the human life cycle). (While understanding time in these ways seems uncontroversial, even inevitable, difficulties do arise when the linear and cyclical systems “collide.”) Following a debate in sociology, it is difficult if not impossible to say whether the linear or the cyclical conception is primary or original. However, one can set the question aside by looking at temporality from a slightly different perspective. Indeed as Siegfried Kracauer notes (employing an art-historical idea developed by George Kubler), within a given area or field (note yet another spatial metaphor), such as politics, art, geography, and so forth, time is understood as proceeding at its own particular pace, and therefore has its own “shape.” As a result, related events between different areas occur at divergent points within, and relative to, those individual areas. The structures of such times are thus referred to as “shaped times”: “[I]t may be assumed that events in each single area follow each other according to a sort of immanent logic. They form an intelligible sequence. Experience shows that each such sequence unfolds in a time peculiar to it. . . . The shaped times of the diverse areas overshadow the uniform flow of time.” The point of bringing in shaped time here is twofold. As was said, within their dynamic structure linearity and cyclicality derive their significance as part of the shape of time within a given context. The placement of, say, the 1917 Revolution diverges significantly between Marxist political philosophy, Russian literature, and Jewish culturism. Where one sees a climactic end point or culmination, another sees a Christ-like apocalyptic watershed (e.g., Aleksandr Blok’s famous long poem The Twelve), and the other an iteration of the cyclical liberations inaugurated at the Red Sea. Each encodes a different temporality. In effect, “shaped time” becomes another word for temporality. The other point of introducing this notion of shaped time is to foreshadow the complexity of spatiotemporality: the “meeting” of differently shaped times is analogous to the meeting of time and space, and care must be taken to understand each on its own terms. Embedded in Kracauer’s assessment is a further pair of preliminary concepts: the popular metaphorical notion of a flow of time (movement), and the notion of simultaneity (that is, at a given point in time, an event or moment). In terms of cognitive development, for instance, there inevitably comes a time 24

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in childhood when “the idea of succession is coordinated with that of duration, and different sequences can be put into a common ‘time.’ ” In this way time becomes “a mental device to give order to events, by identifying them as coexisting or successive,” that is, simultaneous or sequential. And what applies cognitively also applies historiographically. Lynch’s description mirrors precisely what an intellectual historian like Koselleck would say, namely that “history” (as temporally understood) is the narrative structure—shape— which gives cultural semantic order to events. Lynch’s description has its own analogue in (again) Humean empiricism, in which time is produced by a succession of perceptions. Time is therefore not a single unified concept but a complicated system of understandings and perceptions. Nevertheless, following Kracauer, it is linear temporality—namely a succession of perceptions which gets conceived as a flow of past into present into future—which came to dominate certain branches of cognitive study and philosophy. Lynch himself cautions that such a temporality is still an “imaginative creation,” a “mental construction.” Indeed, historically speaking, though the linear model may have purchase cognitively, it appeared relatively late as an element in specifically Western cultural thinking about history and historical time. When it did, though, it was part of the Enlightenment scientific Newtonian abstraction marked culturally by the rise in importance of the clock. “Clock time,” so to speak, or “mechanical time” divorced time itself from our organic relationship to it. That is to say, even though time is a construct—our construct—it had been one pegged to the natural rhythms and patterns of the cosmos, the world, the environment, and our bodies. Clocks, however, “objectified” time, “denaturalized” it, by making it seem a universal absolute, an Enlightenment regimentation of the universe by mathematical means. This would come to affect how we even conceive of time, most dramatically, chronographically. The critique of Herder, the analyses of Bergson and Durkheim, and, as we will see, the ruminations of Walter Benjamin are all in some sense reactions to this objectification. In Markish’s image of the clock as a hairy decapitated calf ’s head with its tongue-lolling pendulum we find a particularly graphic reaction indeed. Though this discussion has presented them as rather abstract, none of these complex issues is very far from cultural inquiry or relevance. One need only think of the various calendars a society keeps, reckoning its sundry civic, religious, cultural, and other events and rituals to get a sense of this relevance. Indeed, one can doubtless come up with any number of sites in which cultures 25

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manipulate and deploy these temporal conceptions. To take an important artistic example, in the West one of the most immediate of these sites is painting, where developments in the graphic coding of temporality can be quite dramatic. In an important discussion of Albrecht Altdorfer’s masterly painting Alexanderschlacht (1529)—depicting the famous battle of Issus, in which Alexander defeated Darius’s Persians and “Hellenism” began its storied spread—Koselleck describes a painting of exceptional and anachronistic detail, one which collapses the entire course of the battle into a single scene. But the fact that the physical work of art was itself painted during the Turks’ unsuccessful siege of Vienna folds history onto itself and produces a concomitant timeless[ness]. On seeing the painting some three hundred years after its creation, Schlegel commented that it is in effect a premier painting of its time, thus rehistoricizing what was originally an anachronistic work. In a related vein, Tuan is struck by the rise of landscape painting in Europe in the fifteenth century: “Since then landscape pictures that transform ‘the simultaneity of space into a happening in time—that is, an irreversible sequence of events’[—]have become increasingly popular. Seeing landscape in perspective presupposes a major reordering of time as well as of space. From the Renaissance onward, time in Europe was steadily losing its repetitious and cyclical character and becoming more and more directional.” Because of this development, the complexity of premodern artistic temporality is often seen as more strange than staggering. It is, however, the ability of a single (albeit potentially very complicated) artistic unit, observable in a moment, itself to encode a multiplicity of moments, which is a monument to cultural ingenuity wherever it should arise. To put it in slightly different terms, simultaneity became a curious problem in a way it had not been before. A medieval painting depicting an historical trajectory (for example, the life of Jesus) in the single space of the painting itself would look strange indeed to eyes conditioned to watch for the synchronic frozen moment, not a diachronic narrative sweep. This perceived strangeness, then, provided the jumping-off point for the innovations of many modern writers and artists. Take, for example, the Cubists, who sought to present the simultaneity of multiple perspectives in a single “view” of an object; they were depicting not an arc of time but a static moment. What is important to stress is that such graphic, spatial innovations in their own way reflect temporal assumptions. In literature we see a different though related set of problems, a kind of inverse relationship. Where the plastic arts are spatial, and individual works 26

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can be taken in for the most part simultaneously, literature is bound by temporal reality, namely the time it takes to read. The literary analogue to the Cubist painter, the modernist poet, therefore sought to overcome the inherent temporal sequence of reading by “forcing [the reader] to perceive the elements of the poem juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time.” (This is the core of Joseph Frank’s concept of “spatial form.”) These writers constructed their works such that they could only be understood when all of their elements were taken simultaneously, not sequentially. The dynamic was put on pause. However, one of the curious things about artistic simultaneity, whether a canvas by Picasso or a Canto by Pound, is that despite the impression of stasis that it gives—somehow freezing a moment in space—we nevertheless feel the need to embed that moment in a narrative. Ulysses may be a day in a number of simultaneously perceived lives, but we still understand Joyce’s experiment in terms of those lives themselves being larger complex narratives (made up of momentary units such as the one given in the novel). This narrative imperative is central to understanding the conceptual structure of time in its essence as a construct, “shaped” by the demands of a particular context into a dynamic linear or cyclical sequence, a static space, or some other configuration. It is the narrative which gives that shape meaning and significance. History is one of the narrative sequences in which the forces shaping time are most evident and in which we feel the social, cultural, and political stakes of how that shape is understood. Earlier we took nationhood as an appropriate lens through which to analyze various ideas about space. It is an equally appropriate lens to look at some of the crucial issues of time and history. In her book on the ways in which Israeli national identity is constructed by means of restructuring historical narratives, Yael Zerubavel speaks of a “commemorative density” particular to such narratives: “The mapping of the past through the construction of a master commemorative narrative also designates its commemorative density, which is the function of what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘the pressure of history.’ Commemorative density thus indicates the importance that the society attributes to different periods in its past: while some periods enjoy multiple commemorations, others attract little attention, or fall into oblivion.” It is worth pointing out how this description moves its focus from “history” to “periods” to “events.” This is not careless, but rather emphasizes the fluidity with which we are given to move between conceptions of time and temporal units. Ultimately and most 27

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significantly, the additive nature of these discretely chosen units (events) produces its own temporality: Through the restructuring of the past, the commemorative narrative creates its own version of historical time as it elaborates, condenses, omits, or conflates historical events. By using these and other discursive techniques, the narrative transforms historical time into commemorative time. . . . Although historical changes usually occur over a period of time and as a result of a process rather than a single event, collective memory tends to select particular events and portrays them as symbolic markers of change. We all of us as individuals and collectively as families, tribes, sodalities, corporations, and nations have our own organizing narratives. Commemorative densities for each of them will be different, even when the histories themselves largely coincide; put another way, they are all shaped differently. Though this is not an argument about collective memory—or collective amnesia—it does relate to the larger implications of nation formation discussed earlier, especially given the importance of both space and time to nationhood. Meanwhile, in the interplay (even competition) between dynamic and static models we see here a singling out of symbolic or symbolically freighted events over formative processes. While Zerubavel ultimately concludes that the competition is one between two dynamic systems (linear and cyclical), her phrase “mapping the past” uncovers an important conceptual slippage. “Mapping the past” may be a felicitous cartographic metaphor, but it is one which plots temporal points geographically—and therefore spatially. This glissement provides an apt segue to move from a dynamic “process” or narrative to a static event or moment.

Static Temporalities and the Spatialization of Time Alongside these dynamic temporalities described in terms of movement, speed, even “acceleration,” there is also a set of static temporalities which in a similar metaphorical vein are decelerated considerably, if not to a stop. And even more so than for the dynamic models, the figurative vocabulary of static temporality is spatial. We see, for example, this static temporality composed of (to borrow an apt phrase from Stéphane Mosès) three familiarly spatialized 28

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“zones of temporality”: past, present, and future. This spatial conception is an element of one of the more influential static models, which, echoing Durkheim, I refer to as traditional temporality. In what follows I will briefly explore this traditional understanding as a backdrop against which to consider how modernist literary temporalities developed their own spatial vocabulary of time, constructed around the moment as a fundamental building block. In its basic form, traditional temporality refers to a concept of time centered on a stable present, a dominant “now,” whose ritual patterns and social practices are understood as having been this way since the distant past and, barring some rupture, will remain so into the distant future. In such a traditional system, the past is seen as the most “relevant” model for “most forms of human behaviour.” Change is not understood as change per se, but is coopted and interpreted by traditional authority as having been a part of the tradition. This temporality is part of the worldview of certain societies—this is indeed the temporality of “traditional” East European Jewry—whose predominant warrants for power and authority derive from an appeal to “tradition,” to knowledge, power, authority having been transmitted from a distant, mythical, divine, or otherwise authoritative past. At its core such a society presumes that as it ever was, so it is, and so will it ever be. As a result, the present “now” is a static concept, understood as unchanging, even despite change. When, for example, St. Augustine describes “a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future,” we hear an apothegmatic distillation of this traditional position, denying linearity in favor of a kind of radical simultaneity (think again of medieval Christian painting, or mutatis mutandis the Alexanderschlacht). Commenting on Erich Auerbach’s analysis of traditional Christian reading practices—which as a matter of course saw events as prefigurations—Benedict Anderson notes how Auerbach rightly stresses that such an idea of simultaneity is wholly alien to our own. It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present. . . . Our own conception of simultaneity has been a long time in the making, and its emergence is certainly connected, in ways that have yet to be well studied, with the development of the secular sciences.  .  . . What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneityalong-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of “homogeneous, 29

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empty time,” in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar. Walter Benjamin’s notion of “empty time [leere Zeit]” cited above, appearing in an essay he finished in 1940 (though not published till 1950), is roughly coincident with Mikhail Bakhtin’s use (in an essay from 1937 or 1938) of precisely this phrase, “empty time [pustoe vremya],” to refer to a temporality devoid of cyclicality. For Bakhtin this was but one of many models of temporality he explored in developing the notion of the “chronotope,” or the specific narrative matrix of time and space generally characteristic of different genres of literature. For Benjamin the category was part of a larger analysis of historical materialist thinking. Much as utterances have a “deictic anchorage” (as we observed in the discussion of deixis in linguistics), one is struck when lining up these two discourses by what we might call their “textual anchorage.” The analogy is more than fortuitous. Time does not exist outside the texts it anchors (narrative, historical, and so forth). In point of fact, what we are seeing is a radical reappropriation of traditional temporality. This sets the stage for a reconfiguration of how time is understood and will become a very important component of how modernist authors conceived of the “moment,” the most spatial of the units of static temporality, and indeed of the relation between time and space (spatiotemporality). For Europe, the watershed for this radical perceptual reconfiguration was arguably the French Revolution, which unleashed a “modern” temporality. Folding the past over onto the future, where diagnosis of one serves as a basis for prognosis of the other (one of the axioms of traditional temporality), lost traction. In Benjamin’s memorable description alluded to by Anderson: “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past.” The modern historical temporality is certainly understood as dynamic. Koselleck, for example, as was noted earlier, describes this movement (or speed, or dynamism) as “acceleration,” or the idea that the perception of events outpace themselves. From a literary point of view at least, this opening up of the modern also involved a narrative imperative for history. The elements out 30

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of which the historical narrative is constructed are events. In the vocabulary of history, event is the most deictically anchored term. Indeed, in at least one important sociological model it is an event theory which is understood as allowing us to structure time as such at all, because “without the interruption of the flow of time by events, no temporal experience would be possible.” A temporal element that “interrupts the flow of time” in effect presents a conflict of temporalities, static and dynamic. For our purposes, in an event-centered temporality the relationship of an event to history is as the subsumption of a static model under a dynamic one. As we saw with the idea of commemorative density, it is not about history per se, but about the discrete events excerpted from it and applied in different ways. In other words, the real gravitational force of commemorative density acts on the event. Given that the metaphor of density is based in extension, in mass, that is, in space, the communal— national—process of which it is a part is one of spatialization, of regrounding the dynamic temporality of an historical narrative in an idea of sensory, spatial, ultimately static, experience of the event. Schematically put, the analogy looks something like this—history : event :: time : moment. And it is that last term—moment—which will become a central component of modernist spatiotemporality. We saw a moment ago how part of the groundwork of the event theory of history was laid in a conflict of temporalities, and how analogously the groundwork for a spatialized moment is laid in a similar collision of systems. However, before returning to that moment, it is worth taking a look at one important example from Jewish history to get a sense of how traditional temporalities gave way to modernist ones. As part of a larger project to “resacralize” time in Jewish life, A. J. Heschel observes that “[t]o Israel the unique events of historic time were spiritually more significant than the repetitive processes in the cycle of nature, even though physical sustenance depended on the latter.” As a result of this collision of temporalities, “[o]ne of the most important facts in the history of religion was the transformation of agricultural festivals into commemorations of historical events.” Thus Passover went from spring festival to a celebration of liberation from slavery; Sukkot, from agricultural festival to a commemoration of life in the wilderness; Shavuot, from harvest festival to the giving of the Torah. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi notes, with regard to the annual cycle of Torah reading, “The historical events of the biblical period remain unique and irreversible. Psychologically, however, those events are experienced cyclically, repetitively, and to that extent at least, atemporally.” 31

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It is less a matter of “atemporality” than, as we have seen, a matter of overlapping, or colliding, temporalities. There is much at stake in this competition of worldviews, certainly for Jewish conceptions of history. We see this, for example, in the debates about Jewish historicism at the center of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. The ruptures of modernity were calling into question not only traditional temporality but many of the guiding principles of the traditional worldview. For Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), one of the foremost historical thinkers in that movement, it is the very idea of history itself which in the nineteenth century comes to stand in for the legal tradition and philosophy as filling communal needs with regard both to how to live as a Jew and how to interpret and understand that Jewishness, respectively. To counter a fetish of historicism, which Graetz saw as the danger in taking such an analysis too far, he posited a superhistorical idea or essence of Judaism. In Graetz’s analysis, the striking temporal element of this idea of Judaism was its futurity: “Judaism is not a religion of the present but of the future. As its patriarchs once lived in a world of promises and viewed their contemporary circumstances merely as a preparation for the future of their progeny, so Judaism struggles toward a present which it currently lacks.” Despite its nineteenth-century diction, this comment is at once a cogent insight on the temporality of certain kinds of traditional worldview, and a striking recasting of Jewish history as at variance with them. Graetz’s approach still employs a static model of temporality. It is one, however, which replaces pastness as the authoritative zone with futurity. In one sense a radical turn, this approach can be thought of as a neotraditional one. Their common term, though, is the centrality of a spatial moment.

Moments—The Aesthetic Units of Time No matter which version of traditional temporality one considers, their shared structure is marked by the stability of a present “now” and accompanied by a past and a future (no matter how emphasized) which are deictically parallel, that is, both can be referred to as “then”—and indeed, “there.” However, while the traditional worldview sees an eternal, universal present as a bulwark against change, the modern present is a moment severed from exactly that concept of eternity. For literature in particular, the metaphorical vitality of that perception, especially its most radical modernist formulation, is realized 32

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in the “deceleration” and ultimate spatialization of the moment. Put another way, according to Tuan, “if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.” This “pause” is itself a temporal concept. In this way space is definitionally dependent on time (and likely vice versa). Again, the “moment” is the (spatial) pause in a (dynamic) temporality. Lynch condenses some of these insights by concluding that “[i]n the logic of science, space and time are now joined. In the realm of art, ‘space-time’ is a fashionable though rather illegible banner. It is clear enough that space and time, however conceived, are the great framework within which we order our experience. We live in time-places.” The present discussion began by setting aside the expressly scientific notions of space and time in favor of their metaphorical (and ultimately literary) conceptions, which for their part resemble Lynch’s shedding space-time for time-place. Implicit in these two terms is another version of the collision of temporalities, the former dynamic, the latter static. Part of the metaphorical power here comes from an inherent vagueness in the English word “time” (seen in Lynch’s use). Piggybacking on the earlier analogy (namely, history : event :: time : moment), there is an empty slot in the analogy space : place :: time : X. In poetry, and certainly for much of the Jewish poetry at the heart of this book, that empty slot is filled by the moment. The significance of this literary intuition lies in the fact that the moment can sit astride both space and time, making it a powerful term in the vocabulary of spatiotemporality. The stakes of focusing on this vocabulary are visible when seen through the lens of displacement. Take, for example, S. N. Eisenstadt’s conclusion with regard to the spatial and temporal dislocation observed within a community of new immigrants to the Mazkeret Moshe neighborhood in Jerusalem: “We see here a situation parallel to the one in regard to spatial perception. Every ‘moment’ of time acquired a characteristic of its own, becoming disconnected from other moments. There was no continuity of moments—neither continuity of social relations nor of temporal perception. Each moment (or time unit) tended to become a self-contained unit, ruled according to its own needs and pressures. . . . One of the most important indications of this lack of clear temporal orientation was the undefined structure of the future.” This account of individual and communal dislocation—both spatially and temporally—is presented in terms of the perceptual fragmentation of time into discrete, independent units. For those Jewish communities which place a strong emphasis 33

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on their exile-consciousness—or indeed on redefining the exilic concept— such a vocabulary of dislocation has a dramatic resonance (or a distinct usefulness). Because of the complicated features of its spatiotemporality, modernism offered a literary language with which to understand and express these perceptions of reality. This foregrounding of the moment as a conceptual building block of modernity is, again, a central innovation of literary modernism. This is certainly the case for one of the towering figures of the modernist novel, Marcel Proust. Siegfried Kracauer’s analysis of Proust, for example, presents literature as a test case for an historian’s concept of time and history: “Proust radically deemphasizes chronology. With him, it appears, history is no process at all but a hodge-podge of kaleidoscopic changes. . . . With great ingenuity Proust demonstrates that each situation is an entity in its own right which cannot be derived from preceding ones and that indeed a jump would be needed to negotiate the gulf between adjacent worlds.” Indeed, as he goes on Kracauer questions, “Why not then simply ignore it [i.e., the dynamic force of time as history]? This is precisely what Proust does. He invariably turns the spotlight on time atoms—memory images of incidents or impressions so short-lived that time has not time to mold them.” This notion of “time atoms” encapsulates precisely this contrast between a kinetic event and a static moment. As we have seen, an event has a temporal anchor, whereas a moment can be detemporalized, decelerated to a stop, and thus susceptible to spatialization. Or as Kevin Lynch puts it, “Moments do not exist in themselves; they are classes of events in which there is no need to distinguish one event as occurring before the other.” It is not only the absence of sequence, of linearity, which marks the moment. In Proustian modernism, there is a denial of it, a kind of simultaneity which marks the moment. For his part, Kracauer’s intuitions as an historian are confirmed by Frank’s analysis of Proust in terms of spatial form. In a cogent summarization he notes that “[t]o experience the passage of time, Proust learned, it was necessary to rise above it, and to grasp both past and present simultaneously in a moment of what he called ‘pure time.’ But ‘pure time,’ obviously, is not time at all—it is perception in a moment of time, that is to say, space.” The “pure time” of the moment, however, is defined by more than this simultaneity alone. Its spatialization opens it up in literary space to specifically sensory experience. That is why, again in Frank’s reading of Proust, “This celestial nourishment [which Proust says feeds the experience of transcending time] 34

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consists of some sound, or odor, or other sensory stimulus, ‘sensed anew, simultaneously in the present and the past.’” The simultaneity of the past into the present is the space of history, especially as a lived experience. And that is one reason why it is such fraught space.

The Space of Past and Future—Metaphorical Formulations Though it is most often through history that the space of the past exercises our interest, the space of the future is no less valuable for a discussion of spatiotemporality. Foucault’s rumination on the variety of “spaces” in society offers one useful model which allows for such spatiotemporality. Foucault focuses on two particular kinds of spaces: “utopias” and “heterotopias.” Both of them are conceived of as a nexus of sites which function synthetically; that is, in the case of heterotopias, they are spaces that allow us to view our own situation objectively—rather than ideally, which is how a utopia functions—while still occupying them. Important examples include the cemetery, the museum, the library, the fairground. (It is not by coincidence that the cemetery, about which I will have more to say in the discussion of the shtetl in the second chapter, and the market are two of the most conspicuous literary topoi of Jewish Eastern Europe.) Furthermore, such heterotopias have a distinct connection to time: “Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.” In articulating his position in this way Foucault helpfully confirms the earlier discussion about modernity’s break with the temporality of the traditional worldview. Foucault’s heterochronies, though, can be associated with either “the accumulation of time” or “time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect.” The former echoes Benjamin’s notion of empty time, while the latter much more closely resembles the units of frangible time, namely moments. Though Foucault spends his energies on heterotopias (and their few associated heterochronies), utopias do also offer a valuable insight on the fundamental connections between space and time. Modern utopian literature from its beginning in the sixteenth century through the period of the French Revolution (marked by Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s wildly popular novel L’an 2440 [The Year 2440; 1770]) was a largely “spatial” genre. That is to say, following 35

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Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)—a word of More’s coinage meaning literally “no place”—works of this ilk envisioned unreal or imagined places, buoyed no doubt by the effects of a prolonged era of geographical discovery. However, as the unknown areas on the map began to dwindle, thoughts moved instead to the future; it represented a shift, therefore, from space to time. “If utopia was no longer to be discovered or established on our present-day earth nor in the divine world beyond, it had to be shifted into the future.” In this way “utopia . . . turns into a ‘uchronia.’ ” However, for all of the considerable power of this insight, the “future” envisioned in the uchronic literature is understood as a place (a spatialized zone of temporality). Phrased as a more general thesis, “Time, as it is known, can only be expressed in spatial metaphors.” Not only is this a felicitous account of the spatial resonance of conceptions of temporality, but it also adds vim to why a uchronia could only really be understood as part of the future not the past. More important, though, is the underlying assumption to both heterotopic and utopic models, namely that how we understand time is conditioned by how we understand space, and by implication that with the proliferation of “spaces” comes a multiplicity of “times.” The stakes of such conceptual models are more than purely academic. The spatial metaphor can also be used as a guide to the moral issues that arise from such a discussion. Carlo Ginzburg, for example, traces one mode of thought from Aristotle to the French Revolution, focusing on the moral implications of the trope of distance in time and space. He suggests that Diderot’s determinedly irresolute aperçu—“distance in place and time perhaps to some extent weakens feeling and awareness of all kinds”—ultimately masks a deeper anxiety. It is a “contradiction,” first investigated by Aristotle, in which (in Ginzburg’s reformulation) “too great a distance gives rise to indifference; too great proximity may awaken compassion, or produce murderous rivalry.” And here we return to Hume: Ginzburg structures his argument around a sensitive reading of Hume’s empiricism. He sees Hume in effect tackling headon the cognitive differences and similarities between space and time in which, as we have seen, he is keenly interested. As Ginzburg quotes Hume: “Though distance, both in space and time, has a considerable effect on the imagination, and by that means on the will and passions, yet the consequences of a removal in space are much inferior to those of a removal in time. Twenty years are certainly but a small distance of time in comparison of what history and even the 36

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memory of some may inform them of, and yet I doubt if a thousand leagues, or even the greatest distance of place this globe can admit of, will so remarkably weaken our ideas and diminish our passions.” Ginzburg concludes that the underlying contradictions pointed out by Aristotle are left unresolved by Hume, because Hume’s concern was individual cognition and did not touch upon the collective, moral implications of history. Modernity has altered our perceptions of the immediacy of these moral implications. “Hume could still write confidently that ‘none of our actions can alter the past.’ Today, we might well add that human actions can, however, exert a profound influence on the way the past is remembered: they can distort its traces, consign them to oblivion, and condemn them to destruction.” Put another way, individual memory works differently from collective commemory. It is the latter whose communal, cultural, even national storehouse is history and whose interpretive guide is literature. Indeed, while Ginzburg’s discussion ends with a rumination on futurity— a rumination which is informed once again by Benjamin—it is nevertheless the past which exercises and vexes. As we saw in her notion of commemorative density, Yael Zerubavel adds to our understanding of how the vexations of the past operate in social practice by investigating what she terms a community’s (or a society’s, or a nation’s) “commemorative loci.” These loci are either focal times or dates, or focal places of signal importance to that group. In her model, (1) a temporal locus gets commemorated by a “performance of literature”; (2) a spatial locus gets commemorated by a “performance of space,” which is to say an event at a particular site; and (3) a spatiotemporal locus gets commemorated in any number of ways. The latter is a more, if not the most, open-ended creative structure of commemoration. While this model of sociocultural commemoration comes out of the specific Israeli context, we should by now not be at all surprised that it points to certain larger tendencies or associations located within literature. Literature and text therefore mark out a particular kind of temporal space. Not only that, but within literature there is a large degree of cultural latitude granted to spatiotemporality, that is, to times and spaces as coordinated concepts, and the creative potential of recognizing that coordination. By emphasizing commemoration, Zerubavel focuses on the past, or history, in a way which mirrors how utopian literature would come to focus on the future. Indeed, the importance of the commemorative emphasis for the literary text is confirmed by the idea that there is no “intuition of past time” except only 37

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metaphorically or figuratively. Not only the future, therefore, but the past too is ultimately understood spatially. The endurance of the past is marked in its physical artifacts; the past is present all around is in our everyday lives, from the clothes we wear, to the tools we use, to the structures and buildings in which we live and work. This is one reason why architecture in particular (especially in urban contexts) recurs often as part of the metaphorical vocabulary in discussions of the “presence of the past” (Lynch and Koselleck being but two paradigmatic cases). Indeed, there is a tradition of such spatial thinking about time in a specifically Jewish context. If “Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time,” as Heschel poetically contends, then “the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals.” This elegant wording analogized the Western, Christian religious construction of architectural, spatial edifices with a Jewish “temporal edifice,” as it were, namely the Sabbath day. “Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.” This impressive metaphor, the “architecture of time,” has a conceptual precursor in the poet Chayim Nachman Bialik’s essay “Halachah and Aggadah” (1916), where he notes, “The glory of the Cologne cathedral, the Milan cathedral, Notre Dame in Paris was perfected, and they were made what they were by the skills of enduring artists through so many centuries.” And whereas the idea for such edifices may have been inspired by the Temple in Jerusalem, nevertheless “the children of Israel have a glorious creation of their own—a holy and sublime day, the ‘Sabbath Queen.’ ” Of course Bialik’s metaphor is mixed. Christian architecture is like the Jewish Sabbath day; but that day is itself intraculturally viewed as a person (the Sabbath Queen). The metaphoricity confirms both the difficulty and the seductiveness of temporality within the Jewish cultural system. Reacting to the creative potential of this architectural metaphorical vocabulary, Lowenthal articulates yet another way to connect time (in this instance again in the form of memory) and space: “But the past is not only recalled; it is incarnate in the things we build and the landscapes we create.” History can therefore also be a spatial thing. By this presence of the past (Lowenthal’s “past inevitably present”) what we mean is that (1) the past is inscribed on all things present, they all show marks or signs or indications of their histories; and that as a result (2) we actively search for, recreate, fabricate, and so forth such a history—or narrative—in order to take part in that past. This image of a past “incarnate” is an especially pithy realization of spatial time. 38

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Refractions Through the Jewish Lens There has been a considerable amount of interest recently in exploring the idea of “Jewish space.” Part of this is a reaction to the perception that temporality has received pride of place in Jewish studies. Citing Mary Minty, Fonrobert and Shemtov note “the conviction that the field of Jewish Studies generally remains in the grip of the notion that time exerts more control over Jewish life than space, a notion exemplified by Heschel’s famous assertion that Jews lived and created almost exclusively in the dimension of time.” This contrasts with the influential idea that space was the great anxiety of modernity. This dichotomy, though, is not so clear-cut. It need not be a matter of either/or, one or the other, precisely because of spatiotemporality, the intersections of time and space, some of whose intellectual and literary substructure this introduction has attempted to describe, and whose literary ramifications this book pursues. An important guide in the trajectory of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature beginning in the mid- to late nineteenth century is encapsulated in the following generalization about nostalgia: “The nineteenth century transformed nostalgia from a geographical disease into a sociological complaint. Its early victims had been countryfolk lost in the anonymity of army or metropolis. . . . For mobile modern man, nostalgia is not so much being uprooted as having to live in an alien present.” Nostalgia—a late seventeenth-century Greek calque on the German Heimweh, literally “homesickness”—is converted by this analysis from a spatial to a temporal concept. (This conversion parallels the roughly contemporaneous shift in the concept of utopia discussed above from spatial to temporal as well.) One of the central Jewish communal self-conceptions in Ashkenaz well into the modern period was the centrality of exile to Jewish life. Jewish “homelessness,” images of the Wandering Jew, exile-consciousness in its many guises, and so forth are all part and parcel of this worldview. One of the important literary innovations of modern Yiddish, and to some extent Hebrew, literature in Europe was not only the transformation of Jewish “homesickness” into as much a temporal as a spatial concept, but the radical reinterpretation of the meaning of “home” itself. Part of the process has to do with the openness of the Ashkenazi cultural system. The traditional model of the ghetto mentality of a people separate and separated is now unconvincing. Indeed, as Uriel Weinreich notes on the great project of the Language 39

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and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, “ ‘The geographic fragmentation of a culture and a language thus yields an opportunity to reconstruct the influences of neighboring localities upon one another.’ The Ashkenazim of Europe provide ‘a rare instance of [such] temporal and spatial overlapping on a sweeping scale.’” The influence of Jewish cosmopolitanism is clear in such a statement. More important, however, is the model of openness and incorporation. If in literature you could feel at home in Crimea, like the Hebrew poet Shaul Tshernikhovski, or in Vilne or the countryside along the Nieman River, like the Yiddish poet Moyshe Kulbak, what then is this homesickness, this exile, this wandering? That is supremely difficult to say. That the answer involves what Weinreich sees as a kind of temporal mapping, or more generally spatiotemporality, though, I hope by now is clear. That being said, within the Jewish cultural system exile and homelessness are still the default settings, elements of the communal, indeed national, selfconception. Modern writers would formulate numerous reactions to these concepts, some of which will be explored in this book. However, the void which was opened up by the idea, if not the emotion, of (national) homelessness was filled culturally in a variety of ways, most notably here by a complicated reconceptualization of the text. The text—at first meaning the Jewish sacred canon but coming to incorporate a much wider understanding—would become a dominant site of spatiotemporality: an intersection of one of the more powerful metaphorical examples of a cultural “space” with its own self-contained understanding of how time is structured, a text-temporality. As was mentioned earlier, George Steiner’s essay “Our Homeland, the Text” provides a searching and influential investigation of the nature of this Jewish text-temporality: The community can be defined as a concentric tradition of reading. The Gemara, the commentary on the Mishna, the collection of oral laws and prescriptions which make up the Talmud, the Midrash, which is that part of the commentary pertaining to the interpretation of the scriptural canon, express and activate the continuum of Jewish being. The incessant readings of the primary texts, the exegetic, disputatious, elaborative readings of these readings (the process is formally and pragmatically endless), define temporality. They manifest the presence of the determinant past; they seek to elicit present application; they aim at the futurities always latent in the original act of revelation. (my emphasis)

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What Steiner is in effect describing as exile-consciousness has far-reaching implications for how Jewish writers come to terms with time and space. In one sense Steiner indicates a mode of traditional temporality specific to a text-centered Jewish culture, one with a more complicated spatiotemporal understanding. Though the spatial implications are foregrounded in Steiner’s text—the metaphorical structure of a textual “homeland” being first among them—he does stake a claim to an almost Graetz-inspired (and Heschelinflected) image of Jews as a people in time: Both the occasion and the logic of the conflict [in this case between individual justice and patriotism in the Dreyfus trial] came out of Judaism. They came from the ambiguous entry into the territorial, fundamentally Roman politics of the modern nation of a people at home in exile, of a pilgrim tribe housed not in place but in time, not rooted but millennially equipped with legs. Whether he knew it or not, whether he wished it or not—indeed, he desperately hoped otherwise and did much to deceive himself—the Jew, when given nationality by his adopted gentile hosts, remained in transit. Judaism defines itself as a visa to the messianic “other land.” (my emphasis) This “Messianic other land” is a spatialized version of Benjamin’s messianic time—two mintings of the same coin—especially because, as we have now seen, just as space has essential national implications, so has time. Steiner’s image of temporality—that is, the precise mechanism of “housing in time”—is not entirely clear. It seems to include both dynamic and static models, because it tries to incorporate two understandings of history. Given that the dynamic model of history is marked by acceleration (using Koselleck’s term, noted earlier) or speed, the metaphorical foundation for this understanding is the notion of a rate or ratio. So just as speed is expressible as distance (geographically reckoned) over time (reckoned chronologically), so time and space in literature can be made to interact. In looking at the structure of the speed metaphor—especially in light of the model of figure and ground discussed in the second chapter—one notes how in standard speech the distance-over-time ratio is understood as somehow “normal,” whereas a ratio time-over-distance is far less familiar. However, precisely because of the attention it draws to how we unselfconsciously apprehend the

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world, such a foregrounding of time immediately catches our attention as strange and striking. This is one reason why such defamiliarized metaphors often form part of a modernist Jewish literary worldview. This is a worldview in which, while still thinking in historical terms, these writers’ literary understanding of temporality is decelerative, moving closer and closer to a static model. Even despite the “housing in time,” the trope of homelessness is nevertheless a durable one in the Jewish imagination, one which by focusing on a void encodes a call to fill it. As Ismar Schorsch notes of medieval Jewry, “Surrounded by a hostile society, medieval Jews increasingly withdrew behind the protective institutions of the Talmud, a kind of surrogate homeland and the functional equivalent of the Jewish state in pagan antiquity.” That this “surrogate landscape” is textual should by now come as no surprise. Steiner’s image of the textual homeland is certainly based on an old foundation. Famously, the Yiddish literary critic Bal Makhshoves (1873–1924; pseudonym of Yisroel Izidor Elyashev) makes the assertion in an essay from 1918 in which he comments that “for oppressed peoples their literature was always a kind of territory of their own where they felt as if at home. At least, that was a kind of exterritoriality, just like the palace of a French or English ambassador somewhere in a foreign land. . . . We Jews also were able to live through the historical times thanks to our exterritoriality. Heine once compared the Bible among the Jews to a fatherland which is carried in their luggage (the Bible is ‘the portative fatherland’ [dos portative foterland]).” Steiner makes a claim about the moral implications of such a curious habitation, a claim in which not only is the text representative of exile but that it is exile of a kind—which he calls “exile from action”; the reading is the doing, and philosophizing takes the place of putting into practice the lessons learned from a text. But this avoids a thesis of the present work, namely that reading, “textualizing,” is an active way of engaging, perceiving, and understanding the world. It is not that the text is a place (or a time, for that matter), but that texts, indeed language, provide the terms of our apprehension; the metaphors work actively and not passively to construct, not just to portray. Steiner’s understanding of the moral inadequacy of focusing on textual practice reveals an underlying assumption about how texts are meant to function, as indices to understanding deeds. This is a point which Koselleck, for example, sharpens and critiques. Whereas the scope of Koselleck’s project is to investigate “texts in which historical expe-

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rience of time is articulated either explicitly or implicitly” (especially the relationship between past and future), the goal of the present work is to investigate texts in which aesthetic experience of time is articulated either explicitly (or implicitly) as space, and indeed vice versa. And modernist Hebrew and Yiddish poetry flexes in just such a double-jointed fashion.

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2

“heymen un reymen” Homelandscapes, Shtetlekh, and Other Creative Spaces

The idea of homeland is a vexed one, certainly today. Political, ideological, and emotional accounts of enchanted attachments or enforced detachments continue to exercise heated opinion and to focus the world’s attention. That is why we care. However, the experience of, and relationship with, homeland in literature—even by the most ideologically driven of writers—is often far more searching and circumspect than these other public positions. Thinking about homeland in Jewish literature, especially that of Eastern Europe, still uses models that have not been updated for some time, and often leaves out texts which could well serve to expand and complicate the literary idea of home. Using a spatiotemporal outlook and focusing on both the Yiddish and the Hebrew shtetl and the homelandscape as represented in poetry will give us not only some important absent texts in need of reintroduction into the discussion of Jewish literature but also a new framework in which to examine them.

Part I: The Shtetl Few places have drawn quite as much attention in the modern (Ashkenazi) Jewish literary imagination as the shtetl. Born of the old market towns of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, their name, “shtetl” (literally, a diminutive of the word for “city”; plural, “shtetlekh”), came to be applied to many communities whose scale ranged from a little larger than a village to just shy of a city. Taken together these formed the Jewish demographic center of gravity in Eastern Europe into the modern period. Though no two shtetlekh were alike, they nevertheless offered a common reference point for writers both to explore their individual themes and to connect with their wider readership. To the extent that a given Jewish writer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 44

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centuries contemplated national or communal issues, it was very often against the backdrop of the shtetl, be it a site of shared (if imagined) autonomy; a contested space of ambiguous emotion; or negated space, a reality to be denied on the road to an ostensibly worthier homeland. While beginning with an examination of the shtetl image, this chapter will focus not on the shtetl alone but also on those spaces which writers found not just as contestable sites but as creative ones; as literarily inspiring homelandscapes of their own, however beloved or beleaguered. For these demographic and sociocultural reasons, the literary default setting, “home base” in a sense, is very often the shtetl. As a result it is worthwhile looking at how such shtetl models of homeland have been constructed. However, the apogee of the “classic” literary shtetlekh in the late nineteenth century coincided with sophisticated literary explorations of other Jewish spaces—villages, encampments, and nature itself—which were also understood as “home.” In his study of the “classic” image of the shtetl Dan Miron offers a detailed structural account of shtetlekh as they appear in the works of Mordkhe Spektor (a now subcanonical writer whom Miron recovers for this purpose), Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, and Sholem Aleykhem. These he contrasts with the works of Y. L. Perets, Y. M. Vaysnberg, and D. Bergelson. Where the former, mid- to late nineteenth-century depictions follow an integrative model, presenting a selfcontained and self-sufficient world (no matter how critiqued, satirized, or otherwise evaluated), the latter early twentieth-century works follow a disintegrative model, offering not only various critiques or descriptions of the shtetl’s decline, but an analysis which shatters the supposed unity of the classic image. Focusing on writers such as Y. L. Perets, Sh. Tshernikhovski, M. Kulbak, P. Markish, D. Hofshteyn, and U. Ts. Grinberg, what I offer in the following chapter is in effect a reintegrative model. That is, beginning with the shtetl in the first part of this chapter and moving on to other homelandscapes (as I call them), I present these places’ poetic representations not as self-contained microcosms nor as shards of a shattered world, but rather as creative spaces of their own, able to offer a both critical and constructive understanding of “home.” Yerushalayim shel mata—The Earthly Jerusalem In the introduction I suggested a critical link between space and nation. If one accepts the basic premise of that connection, then the sense of communal 45

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identity makes the shtetl concept into a kind of polity. Even where specific politics are not depicted in the literature, one of the dominant modes of literary analyses of the shtetl is the political. As was mentioned above, in several important studies Miron has formulated one of the more influential shtetl models. For the “classical” prose writers who form the basis of many of his conclusions, the shtetl was something these writers by and large fled in their own lives; in their works, however, “the shtetl image lyrically expressed its essence as the hub of true Jewish intimacy and spiritual self-sufficiency, the homeland of the Jewish soul.” For a homeland, though, the shtetl is often portrayed in decidedly unflattering ways. The dissonance of attraction and repulsion is played out more fully in the following key assessment: The classical literary image of the shtetl is structured around a metaphorical-conceptual core that is none other than the following: the shtetl represents a tiny exiled Jerusalem, a Yerushalayim shel mata, in the enriched sense of the term that indicates not only an earthly, mundane Jerusalem as opposed to the “celestial” Jerusalem but also the low, downtrodden Jerusalem in exile as opposed to the lofty, royal, independent ancient capital graced by the presence of God in His Temple. The shtetl was Jerusalem in her fallen state, and yet it was still Jerusalem—the Jewish polity par excellence. The attractiveness and utility of this model need little elaboration. It does appear to resonate with many of the canonical or “classical” Yiddish writers, including Yisroel Aksenfeld, Mikhah Yosef Berditshevsky, Abramovitsh [Mendele Moykher Sforim], Rabinovitsh [Sholem Aleichem], and even a shtetl anxietist like the early Dovid Bergelson, to name a few. As with any elegant scheme, however, it is the exceptions which prove the rule, offering different points of access and directions of analysis. One notes, for example, the issue of genre; a good deal of scholarly attention focuses on prose, while that poetry which devotes its primary thematic attention to the shtetl gets far shorter shrift. Part of this has to do with the generic and formal ebbs and flows in Jewish literature. Composition of, attention to, and focus on novels, short stories, long or epic poems, essays, feuilletons, lyric poems, to name but a few, have their own trajectories and patterns of development. Lack, for example, of as robust a genre of shtetl poems at a time when shtetl prose was flourishing in the late nineteenth century is not in and of itself a sufficient condition to rule 46

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out its significance in a Jewish literary worldview. It is, however, a goad to uncover the perspective of poetic works as a way of broadening and complicating the literary image of the shtetl. (While this book focuses predominantly on modernist poetry, much could and should be said about contemporaneous modernist prose taken comparatively; however, that is simply beyond the goals of this project.) A shift, however, in the generic centers of gravity is evidence of an expanding interest in exploring different vocabularies of “home,” intensified by the accelerated pace of change at that time. Moreover, the spatiotemporal implications of Miron’s use of Jerusalem as the “conceptual core” of shtetl imagery deserve unpacking. Despite the explicit political context of the idea of Jerusalem as a “Jewish polity,” there is an additional complicated array of polarities in Miron’s evaluation. This shtetl-cumJerusalem construct is a congeries of thematic and conceptual elements. The “earthly”–”celestial” axis, which provides for a mundane reality alongside an almost Platonic form in the sky, presents a spatial orientation, if one that is spiritualized. For its part, the “downtrodden”–”lofty” axis is political and social. It operates on the image of an “independent capital,” which is certainly political, while also pivoting on the adjective “ancient.” At the same time, “the presence of God in his Temple” similarly spiritualizes the scene. However, when taken in conjunction with “ancient,” this assessment is better read as Jerusalem “at the time when God was in his Temple.” The orientation of this polarity is consequently temporal. (Indeed, understanding the space of the shtetl as the eternal Jerusalem seems to imply a traditional temporality.) In both constructions, spatial and temporal, “exile” is the connective concept, Miron’s common descriptor. Exile is spatialized as well as temporalized; Jews are living at a remove from Jerusalem over there and Jerusalem back then. Whether or not all shtetl scenes are prototypical exile scenes is a matter for debate. What the passage shows, however, is a kind of fuzziness that can creep in when using these spatial and temporal categories to orient an exilic shtetl on the Jerusalemite axis. Yerushalmi confirms the cultural pull of this kind of conflation by speaking in terms of collective memory, as indeed do others. Much of this collective recollection circles around moments of catastrophe and lamentation. So in his analysis of a dirge for Tishe b’Av (the fasting holiday commemorating a number of catastrophes in Jewish history, including the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem), he notes how “[t]he ‘memory’ of being exiled from Jerusalem is established and heightened by a repeatedly inverted comparison with the 47

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exodus from Egypt, the archetypal locus of Jewish historical reference. . . . It is rather the realization of a structural contrast in Jewish historical experience, built around the dramatic polarity of two great historical ‘departures’ (Egypt/ Jerusalem—Exodus/Exile), each with its obvious though unstated clusters of meanings and implications.” Indeed, the symbolism of the Passover seder telescopes these ideas; time is conspicuously shaped. In raising the matzah and announcing one’s communal and familial connection to its history, “Both the language and the gesture are geared to spur, not so much a leap of memory as a fusion of past and present. Memory here is no longer recollection, which still preserves a sense of distance, but reactualization.” There is no little significance to the fact that so often in literary descriptions of the shtetl, then, portentous events are made to take place on or around Passover. And while the dominance of exile in accounts such as Miron’s exerts a powerful force within Jewish letters, Yerushalmi’s analysis recaptures a positive valence, the image of national—and indeed individual—liberation. And in point of fact, as we will see, Egypt itself will take on a notably positive association as well. It is not fortuitous that many of the shtetl accounts that note Passover also note the springtime season in which it occurs, with descriptions of verdure and regrowth, part of a cyclical pattern within a linear historical trajectory. If memory is indeed reactualization, that is, not a passive recognition but an active and productive process, then the secondary level or implication of Yerushalmi’s “fusion,” highlighted exactly by the use of the Passover Haggadah, is the relationship of the individual to the communal. We glimpse a certain tension between the two, for example, in Pierre Nora’s meditation on the cultural forms of memory. Where on the one hand he emphasizes the importance of a community’s “commemorative vigilance” and how “[w]e buttress our identities upon such bastions, but if what they defended were not threatened, there would be no need to build them. Conversely, if the memories that they enclosed were to be set free they would be useless; if history did not besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it, there would be no lieux de mémoire. Indeed, it is this very push and pull that produces lieux de mémoire—moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned.” Yet he goes on to opine that “[i]n the last analysis, it is upon the individual and upon the individual alone that the constraint of memory weighs insistently as well as imperceptibly.” Implicit here is the importance to cultures of those individuals whose insight can move 48

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beyond this imperceptibility, which is why we rely on literary writers. Insofar as literary presentations of the shtetl are largely “reconstructed”—that is, written by writers who, though often reared in the shtetl, composed in the cities—the “threats” by both social and historical change as well as by the vagaries of human recollection were felt as very real. The fixing of the shtetl– Jerusalem axis is an emplacement of the shtetl as a lieu de mémoire. What the model presents, though, is only the static configuration of traditional time and traditional space. Even in Nora’s account there is a dynamic component as well. The implication for Miron’s model is that the writing (and reading) of shtetl literature is an enactment of sovereignty, an enactment warranted by the underlying political nature of the shtetl-qua-Jerusalem worldview. From a spatial perspective, the image of the shtetl as a “tiny exiled Jerusalem” puts each shtetl at the center of a peculiar T-O map. This is in one sense predictable. After all, “Human groups nearly everywhere tend to regard their own homeland as the center of the world.” (That this shtetl–Jerusalem Jewish geography envisions two homelands carries with it a network of implications which cannot here be pursued.) However, there are broadly speaking two primary models of mythic space: one which posits a cartographic representation of the cosmos with man at the center, and one which presents space as resembling a human body. The Yerushalayim shel mata image most closely resembles the former mythic construction of space, replacing man at the center with the Jewish people in its homeland. There is, however, an image of Jewish homeland which focuses less on a political or theological understanding of the world and more on the physical landscape, and the individual’s connection to it, in line with the latter model of land figured as a human body. This image transforms the shtetl and its surroundings not into an ersatz Jerusalem, which will always remain a pale imitation of that actual Zion—or a “home-away-from-Zion”—but rather a homelandscape all its own, with a set of creative potentials and a distinct relationship to time and history. In what follows I will explore some of the ways in which these models are worked out in poetry. Locus Communis The formative and classic periods of the shtetl narrative, beginning with Yisroel Aksenfeld’s Dos shterntikhl (The Kerchief; 1861) as well as the prose of Ayzik Mayer Dik, and continuing with the works of Abramovitsh, Rabinovitsh 49

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(Sholem Aleykhem), and Perets, coincided with the heyday of the (belletristic) literature of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. In these works, shtetlekh were very often singled out for a particular kind of critique. The first goal of such an engagement was to understand the shtetl. Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, though, had a particular method for pursuing understanding, an epistemological outlook. One of the original products of the, for lack of a better term, Ashkenazi civilization was the development of a Jewish discourse, one of whose hallmarks is the need to question, to burrow into an issue while interrogating it from all angles, overturning every assumption, and spinning it in an intellectual lathe. The primacy which that culture placed on the Talmud and the centrality it gave to textual traditions became a foundational building block in the development of Jewish literature in this period. The very act of understanding something meant subjecting it to intense scrutiny. While critique and satire—both of which are readily adaptable to Jewish discourse— functioned as part of the social rhetoric of the Haskalah, their literary function was more complicated. And while in some sense both social and literary critique had as their goal the transformation of Jewish society (this was still at a time when literature was seen as serving an important and active social function), the literary transformation involved making the shtetl—a shared point of reference, a locus communis—into something usable and creative. Here was a place which, though not politically autonomous or immune, could function analogously to the creative spaces encountered in the European literatures which served as models for Jewish writers. In recognizing this deep potential, these writers effectively created out of the shtetl what Foucault has called a “heterotopia.” As mentioned in the Introduction, unlike utopias, which are quite etymologically no-where, heterotopias are intersections of various social and cultural spaces and act as “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” For Foucault, one of the paradigmatic heterotopias is the cemetery. Not coincidentally, the cemetery is extremely important in a good deal of shtetl literature. That several commentators mention Sholem Aleykhem’s story “The Town of the Good People” (“Di shtot fun di kleyne menshelekh”; 1901) as one of the loci classici of shtetl literature is again not coincidental. In Sholem Aleykhem’s fictional shtetl par excellence, Kasrilevke, that reservoir of Jewish fortes and foibles, the residents take particular pride in their cemetery.

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Indeed, using their euphemism of “field” for the cemetery, Sholem Aleykhem’s narrator concludes the story: “Have you already visited us ‘at the field’?” a Kasrilevker will ask you with pride, just as he would ask you, for example, if you had visited his father in the vineyard. If you haven’t been, then do him a favor and go to “the field,” read over the well-worn inscriptions on the half-crumbled headstones, and you will find in them some of the history of an entire people.  .  . . And if you are a man of energy and inspiration you will, when considering that poor town with its rich cemeteries, not be able to restrain yourself and will repeat the old verse: “Mah tovu.  .  . .” How goodly are your tents, O Jacob! your dwelling places, O Israel! The inversions are powerful and heart-rending: that the beloved and true Jewish “polis” is a necropolis, that the only health- and pleasure-giving parkland is a cemetery. This passage marshals its literary forces in several ways. In an ironic move typical of Sholem Aleykhem, you have a “poor town” and a “rich cemetery”—an heterotopic inversion. The punch line is also equally telling: in quoting the line from Balaam’s prophecy—“How goodly are your tents, O Jacob! your dwelling places, O Israel!” (Numbers 24:5)—the curse of such poverty is turned into a blessing, of sorts. Indeed, by abbreviating the biblical quotation to its first two words—mah tovu (How goodly; Yiddish vi gut)—Sholem Aleykhem orchestrates a literary transformation of the ironic potential of the traditional euphemism for a cemetery: gut ort or guter ort, literally “a good place.” I say “punch line,” though, because not only does it echo the classical case of a curse gone awry into a blessing, but it also channels the humor of the famous joke in which, upon being shown Rothschild’s ostentatious grave in Paris, the East European Jew comments, “That’s what I call living!” For a native of the shtetl to look out over a cemetery and call it his people’s “dwelling places,” especially given the word’s prominent biblical inflection, is startlingly tragicomic. However, to take the biblical intertext more seriously—which Sholem Aleykhem clearly does—the verse is explicit about the dwelling places (mishkenot [Hebrew]; getseltn [Yiddish]) being plural. Sholem Aleykhem’s narrator notes that Kasrilevke in fact has two cemeteries in which it takes pride. Sholem Aleykhem maps the shtetl onto the Israelite encampment while inverting the relationship to history. Where the inhabitants of the biblical tents look forward

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to a newly blessed future, the Kasrilevkers dwell in a crowded history. What Sholem Aleykhem makes explicit is the legibility of the intersection between time and space (again: “read over the well-worn inscriptions on the halfcrumbled headstones, and you will find in them some of the history of an entire people . . .”). Such carefully worked-out readings are precisely the “representations” and “inversions” that are part of the heterotopia. This heterotopic density accounts for some of the power and dramatic potential of the shtetl within Jewish literature. This power has been eroded as the shtetl has more recently developed a nostalgic or romanticized patina—one need only think of Anatevka in the musical (1964) or film (1971) Fiddler on the Roof to get a glimpse of what that looks like—which is often difficult to scratch away. Since the accelerated shifts in demography in the early twentieth century, and certainly since the ruptures of midcentury, the shtetl has come to be readopted or reappropriated as a kind of idyllic place, “an emblem of unencumbered identity and family peacefulness, a place where Jewish life was (or, so it was claimed) experienced as vividly as anywhere else in modernity.” This afterlife casts the shtetl as a Jewish locus amoenus, an idealized edenic place in nature set between “the basic psychic polarity of city and wilderness.” While from the earlier literature it is clear that the shtetl was not always such a “pleasant place”—Sholem Aleykhem’s peaceful cemetery notwithstanding—it was nevertheless understood as home. Starting from this home base, Jewish literature could more comfortably expand its understanding of the homelandscape towards both of these poles, city and wilderness. Returning to the notion of “Yiddishland” explored earlier, an idea which came about as a result of dislocation from the shtetl, not originating in it, Jeffrey Shandler notes how “[t]he provincial market town in which the preponderance of East European Jews lived for centuries before the Holocaust is a locus left behind by Yiddishland—just as it is by Zionism, though their respective retrospections on the shtetl are quite different. The shtetl is Zionism’s anti-home; in conjurings of Yiddishland, it is the Ur-home.” Here Shandler has converted Yiddishland from a spatial into a temporal concept. To be “left behind” is to be anchored in the past, while to be “conjured” is a present or prospective act. The Zionist imagination saw the shtetl as the historical way station on the journey away from and back to Jerusalem. The shtetl, however, can only be an “Ur-home” if both one is no longer there and Jerusalem was

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rejected as “home.” If Miron’s model is to offer a solution it is by presenting the shtetl as a little earthly Jerusalem on the (spiritual) journey to the heavenly version, a journey in which no physical return was necessary. Since the divinely directed departure (at least in some sense an exile) of Abraham from his homeland, and since the Babylonian and Roman expulsions, Jewish literature has maintained an abiding interest in understanding Jews’ relationships to land and to territory. That the political, and to some extent religious, core of these ruminations should magnetize Jerusalem is understandable. That city came to represent a relatively brief moment of a particular kind of political self-determination. In one of the more emotionally resonant and therefore storied cases in Jewish literary cultural history, both the power of this attraction and the tensions it creates are felt in the poetry of Yehudah Halevi, the medieval Spanish poet and philosopher who left home and family on a perilous sea journey bound for Jerusalem. The tension has several levels. In one sense it is thematic. While his longing is for Zion, and his goal Jerusalem, Halevi is profoundly connected to his native Spain; indeed, as Sidra Ezrahi notes, he “creates one of the most powerful expressions of ‘nonoriginal’ space as the negotiable domestic realm of the diasporic imagination.” It is important that “nonoriginal” appear within quotation marks because that opposed origin is imaginary; culturally and communally powerful to be sure, but nevertheless constructed. The thematic tension of home (the “domestic realm”), between personal biography and national narrative, becomes particularly strong for literary authors, for whom individual experience is of paramount importance. The second level of tension between “homes” is intertextual, namely the figurative tensions inherited from the traditional biblical motif of Jerusalem as a woman. On the one hand, the city is itself personified, echoing Tuan’s mythic model of corporeal embodiment mentioned above; on the other, she is referred to synecdochically as one of her female denizens. Again, in Ezrahi’s words, “the city becomes at the same time both absolutely fixed and static in its suspended state of ruin and strikingly mobile and dynamic in its gesture of dispersal and eventual return.” The tension between the static and the dynamic (as we have seen in other areas) does not get resolved by Halevi. In fact, that competition continues into the modern period. However, while in the latter tension the personal homeland is left behind, modern anxieties over territory reintroduce the former tension, that is, autochthonous versus imagined origins.

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Indeed, one of the pivotal ideological debates among Jewish intellectuals in the late nineteenth century involved how to formulate the connection between Jewish communities and the lands they inhabited. While the political debate roiled over autonomy (in the many ways in which that was conceived), the cultural discourse employed a somewhat different vocabulary. Jewish culture in diaspora, and particularly in Ashkenaz, over a long period of time developed a series of adaptive strategies which permitted creative engagement with coterritorial cultures while maintaining a distinctive identity. Indeed, one can argue that it is diaspora itself which allows and enables the very possibility of Jewish culture. The Ashkenazi permutation of Jewish diaspora culture, with its focus on text and interpretation, semiotics and sophistication, was a culture rooted as much in language as in anything else. In addition to the adept manipulations and hermeneutic somersaults through the Talmud which that culture came to prize (the root of Jewish discourse, as mentioned previously), it was the creation and development of Yiddish into one of Europe’s great culture languages which would come to represent for many Jews one of their proudest accomplishments. Many of the concrete achievements of wider European culture, such as architecture, agriculture, and urban science—given their impetus by the importance that culture placed on both having a connection to physical space and nurturing a proprietary stake in it—were not given pride of place in Ashkenazi culture. Through the nineteenth century, however, one sees the growth of interest in fostering a concern for these plastic realities. From such things as the promotion of scientific education to the landkentenish movement, understanding of and connection to space were seen as part of the price of admission to European society. The spatial discourse of the resulting Jewish literature bears the marks of that decision. Again, the particular places picked out by that definition in Jewish Eastern Europe were often shtetlekh. Indeed, the shtetl is a central site of modern Jewish spatial thinking, the object of longing and loathing, revelry and revilement, revelation and renunciation. However, in the transition to a postclassical literature shtetlekh begin to be relocated in literary geography. Moreover, other terrains, though already represented, start to take on increasing significance. And homelandscapes are revalued as much in opposition to, as complementary to, Jerusalem. Ezrahi makes a similar claim about the trajectories of Jewish literatures in this period: “In the modern Yiddish and Hebrew fiction that began to appear in the late nineteenth century, the changing status of 54

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lowercase and uppercase homelands helped to launch a new constellation of imaginary and actual worlds.” The development of mature Zionist thinking meant that Hebrew would have a “naturally” correlate homeland and landscape. And while one line of Yiddishist thinking, a line consonant with the ideology of Yiddishland, would conjure the shtetl, Samuel-like, as its spiritual core, or present it as a photographic negative of Zionism’s image of the world, neither of these worldviews encompasses all of the truly creative literary thinking on the subject. These were languages and literatures well positioned to set up alternative models of homelands. There is much truth in Tuan’s comment that “a strong attachment to the homeland can emerge quite apart from any explicit concept of sacredness”; one does not need Jerusalem to make the shtetl home. In point of fact, the attachment Tuan speaks of “can form without the memory of heroic battles won and lost, and without the bond of fear or of superiority vis-à-vis other people. Attachment of a deep though subconscious sort may come simply with familiarity and ease, with the assurance of nurture and security, with the memory of sounds and smells, of communal activities and homely pleasures accumulated over time.” This evaluation is consonant with the cosmopolitan humanism of a number of writers in Hebrew and Yiddish. Most significantly it seems almost tailor-made for the Hebrew poet Shaul Tshernikhovski (1875–1943). His image of the southern Ukrainian village/shtetl Bilivirka from the poem “Circumcision” (“Brit milah”; 1910)—a crucially important poem for understanding alternate models of homeland as constructed spatiotemporally—is one of intimate attachment to that particular place and the steppe of which it was an integral part. Pace Tuan’s account, Tshernikhovski’s poem does reckon the history of battles waged on just this land. These were all fought, however, by nomadic tribes, many of which are long gone. The Jews of Tshernikhovski’s poem, like their non-Jewish neighbors, are nonnative natives who have made the steppe their home, legitimating their heterochthony as a source of love and attachment. Indeed, the whole poem, an account of the community’s preparation for and celebration of a circumcision—the welcoming into the community of its newest member—is meant to make us feel the “homely pleasure” of this ritual, a ritual which by its nature and the cultural context Tshernikhovski paints as analogous to a Pecheneg or Scythian rite. At one point early in the poem, the Cossack coachman, Mikhayla, is bringing the mohel Elyokim to Bilivirka to perform the circumcision. As the two friends—they are indeed friends, a cooperative model of the interaction between Jews and non-Jews 55

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(especially Cossacks) of a degree not commonly encountered in shtetl literature—are riding along, Mikhayla sings a Cossack song, which evokes visions in Elyokim’s reverie: And his eyes wandered forward——— Forward through the passage of generations which sprang up and passed away like smoke Here, upon this steppe . . . And he remembered the days of the Khazars: Here was a Jewish kingdom, men strong and stern, Horses of the steppe, spear and bow, shield and lances. Firstly, the political and historical dimensions of this daydream present temporality as a visual phenomenon. Given the importance of vision to spatial perception, using the visual as a primary metaphorical link in spatiotemporalization is unsurprising. Tshernikhovski uses “forward” (hal’ah) as a mixed spatial and temporal adverb to describe that vision. As Cossack songs are sung next to him, Elyokim looks forward, ahead, while riding in the cart. This forward gaze over the landscape (space) becomes a forward gaze through time, through a history once again reckoned generationally. Importantly, prospection is transformed into retrospection; while Elyokim is sitting physically in the cart in the present, the point of view of his “temporal vision” is in the past (“ forward though the passage of generations”). That is to say, “forward” means into the past! This contiguity within the spatiotemporal metaphor allows for the continuity in space and seeming discontinuity in time. This is how Elyokim can “remember” the days of the Khazars (a temporal lieu de mémoire). Insofar as Tshernikhovski has linked an image of futurity to past history, it is not incidental that the first Jewish polity that springs to Elyokim’s mind is the kingdom of the Khazars, a convert nation that ultimately passed away. (The word Tshernikhovski chooses for the “passage of generations”—chalifot— also incorporates the sense of passing away.) Transience is as important as power in the history of nations. Indeed, even the “battle” scene among the guests at the feast following the circumcision is a contest between two “tribes,” the Polish Jews and the Lithuanian Jews; their arguing structurally parallels and recapitulates the battles between the tribes in the historical section at the beginning of the poem. This is why, again, the “Jewish” event par excellence— the circumcision—which is the subject of the poem’s central section is therefore 56

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understood as being far more a cultural ritual or custom than a religious one. Indeed, the poem as a whole is a paean to pluralism, in which the shtetl— place—is open and shared, and the time is epic. Such a presentation runs counter to the classic shtetl spatiotemporality as a self-contained Jewish locus organized around a core mythic time. Tshernikhovski’s image of home as an open, historical (or epic) system resonates more with important strains of Jewish modernist poetry. Though with less of the cultural syncretism which marks Tshernikhovski’s poem, Moyshe Kulbak’s poema (or long poem) Raysn (White Russia) and Perets Markish’s Volin (Volhynia) (all of which will be dealt with later), for example, describe an organic connection to the place of one’s birth as the central tether to the notion of place as home, and its physical nature as homelandscape. It is an at-homeness which is distinctly apolitical—indeed these poems’ temporality is neither historical nor epic, but natural, organic—all the more notable for these two poets so committed to the Revolution and its promise. A Little City Returning to the shtetl models mentioned earlier, Miron singles out Yitskhok Leybush Perets (1852–1915) as the one among the three “classic” Yiddish writers who straddled the shift from integrative to disintegrative images. That one of the early and intriguing works on the subject of the shtetl should be (1) a poem—at a time when Jewish literary energies were being channeled more into prose, and (2) in Hebrew, makes that poem a foundational text in modern Jewish reconceptualizations of home. In his disintegrative approach, Perets actually presents us with some of the building blocks for later constructions of the shtetl as homeland. Perets began his literary career, as did many other writers who would similarly turn later to Yiddish, writing either in a non-Jewish language or in Hebrew. As Perets noted retrospectively in a letter from 1911, “I began writing Polish (but didn’t publish—burned)—it was an international moment—I left it, [it was] foreign, [and] began writing Hebrew, I felt—[it was] not living, [so I went] over to Yiddish.” Perets was very careful about crafting his public image and cultivating perceptions of it, so his words, even in personal letters such as this, were doubtless attentively considered. It is interesting then to note how this decision about language choice—one of the vital issues for Jewish writers in the modern period—was presented as based on personal and even 57

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aesthetic criteria, not national content. An attachment to the cosmopolitanism of writing in Polish, no doubt an effect of the impression left by the failed 1863 Polish uprising, was attenuated by a sense of “foreignness.” In its place came a different kind of cosmopolitanism in the form of a connection to an international Hebrew network of late Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals and their media. There is a tendency in the scholarship to gesture at Perets’s earlier career in Hebrew, but to mark his true authorial debut with the publication of his famous Yiddish poem “Monish” in 1888. Indeed, Perets’s own reminiscence presents his choice of Hebrew as a kind of way station on the road to Yiddish. That he would continue writing and translating in Hebrew after the “shift” shows how such decisions are rarely as clean-cut and schematic as they are described. (The case of the poet Uri-Tsvi Grinberg, for example, offers a similar critical profile.) Moreover, the scholarly or critical work (relatively little though there is) on his early Hebrew writing shows a young but inventive author, influenced by prevailing trends within Hebrew, but neither in thrall to them nor trepid in setting aside maskilic molds and models. Perets’s early Hebrew works (early, that is, with regard to those Hebrew works he wrote after having shifted his primary output to Yiddish) appear in two phases. The first, roughly 1875 to 1877, is notable for its experimentation with forms and imagery expanding on maskilic traditions, evidently under the long shadow of Yehuda Leyb Gordon (1831–1892). (In fact, it was reported that sometime in this period the noted writer and editor Perets Smolenskin opined that “[Y. L.] Perets is becoming a second Gordon.” High praise indeed, not to mention an indication of the Hebrew chops of a writer now almost exclusively associated with Yiddish.) Part of the tendentious tradition of the Haskalah can also be seen in this period, especially in some of the poems from the poetry collection which Perets coauthored with his father-in-law, Gavriel-Yehude Likhtenfeld, in some of whose polemics Perets took part. For almost a decade after the flurry of this first phase Perets entered a quiescent period, publishing very little though continuing to write. During this time he was busy with his legal career in Zamość. He entered the second phase of his early writing career with a number of poems published in various venues in 1886. More mature and less polemical than his earlier work, these poems display a more decidedly modern voice and sensibility. One such poem is “Hoir ha-ktano” (“The Little City,” or better yet, “The Shtetl”; published in the annual Ha-Asif in 1887). While not unique, this poem was somewhat unusual for the Hebrew poetry of this period in its explicit thematization of the shtetl 58

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as such, putting it front and center as a primary concern of a poem (as opposed to a work of prose). If one of the effects of modernization on Jewish literature was decommunalization, or put a different way, front-and-centralizing the creation of a modern Jewish individual self-consciousness, then, part of that individualization involved a shift in the presentation of perception. As we saw in the introduction, time and space are not just intimately bound up with perception, but in some sense are perception. How the shtetl, the literary locus of precisely this fashioning of the modern Jewish individual, gets plotted on those axes reveals much about the development of modern Jewish letters. Perets’s literary output was concerned with the creation of the modern Jewish individual and that individual’s relationship to a traditional culture and community. The related conflicts in spatiality and temporality that often appear in his works are a particular focus of his poem “The Shtetl.” (Please see the appendix for a complete translation of the poem.) A good amount of attention has been focused on Perets’s interest in that traditional community—the “folk”—which was often seen as a repository of “authentic” Jewish values, a storehouse not only of narrative and thematic materials but also of cultural and spiritual treasures. Much has been made, for example, of Perets’s participation in what amounted to a kind of ethnographic survey of the Jews and Jewish communities of Poland in 1890, funded by the wealthy Jewish patron Jan Bloch. Perets, who collected data in the area around his native Zamość, published a series of sketches as Bilder fun a provints-rayze (Scenes from a Provincial Journey) the following year. This was useful raw material for a writer. There is a tendency to think that rural life has more purchase on the notoriously nebulous concept of authenticity than that of the metropolitan intellectual; that the provincial’s habits are more genuine; that his words are more pure; that his values are less diluted. It is a cult of the purity of the “out there” (and, to a certain extent, the “back then”). From the point of view of the cultural critic, writing from his critical distance, out there was the shtetl or the backwoods (understood as something premodern). As Marc Caplan notes of this book’s narrative strategy, The “path of escape” provided by the mirror figure, and indeed by the language of storytelling, thus signifies for Peretz a flight from the intractable dilemmas of modernizing a space lacking the material or social implements of modernity. The description of language and people as 59

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“maps” therefore serves as an apt spatial metaphor to describe a community without a space of is own. Notwithstanding Deleuze and Guattari’s temporally static formulation, taking flight “in place,” what fuels the intensification of this narrative is the dislocation, and thus the motion, of temporality between the modernity of the city and the tradition of the shtetl. Caplan is correct in replacing a notion of authenticity with that of tradition. As we will see later on, though, the notion of “a community without a space of its own” was contested already at that time among Jewish writers as being more a political assessment than anything else. (Kasrilevke’s cemetery, after all, was surely a space of that community’s own.) However, it is in the metaphorical slippage in the phrase “dislocation of temporality” that we glimpse the literary potential these writers saw in the heightened awareness of, and attention to, spatiotemporality. The version of the ethnographic impulse in Jewish Eastern Europe—an impulse which spawned, for example, the Polish expeditions in which Perets took part as well as the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition famously undertaken by An-Ski—has the benefit of having come closer on the heels of the Haskalah than the larger European wave of ethnographic collecting, which was buffered by a far more fully developed Romantic movement. This is certainly the case for Perets, whose maskilic grounding in critique and skepticism found expression in many of his works well into the future. Whatever elements of valorization of Hasidic life can be read in his Hasidic tales, for instance, are found in parity with at least an equal dose of critique and often biting satire. The famous story “Kabbalists” (Hebrew, “Ha-mekubolim” [1891]; Yiddish, “Mekubolim” [1894]), with its macabre mysticism and startlingly cruel conclusion, is a case in point. There is as much at risk in reading “folk” themes backward as there is in reading criticism forward. What is clear, however, when reading Perets’s poem “The Shtetl” (written as it was prior to his provincial travels) is the fact that it is the product of viewing the shtetl as a creative space far more than an ethnographically informed or “authentic” one. In this instance the creative power is the one released by the disintegrative process. According to Dan Miron, [In his Rayze-bilder Perets] knows that what is disintegrating here is not only the actual fabric of observed human existence; but here also there is 60

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in decline a metaphysical conception which is rooted in myth. The shtetlekh were once the exilic equivalents of Jerusalem. Built on Polish soil in the ancient days of legend and romanticized history, they embodied a spiritual order that is now transformed into chaos. Unlike Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleykhem, Perets does not try anew to bring together the elements of the shtetl concept, even if in a parodic manner. On the contrary, he endeavors to set up the elements in contradiction, in their inability to come together. Once the “classic” image is dismantled, a realistic approach disallowed, Jerusalem disavowed, the shtetl as a Jewish space can be used in the construction of a more modern Jewish literature. As if confirming this intuition about literarily creative space, the very title of the poem echoes the opening to a parable in Qohelet (9:13–18): “[There once was] a small city, and in it the people were few” (‘ir ketanah va-’anashim bah me‘at). So begins a compact narrative about a besieged city that is lost because it ignored the wisdom of a lone wise man who subsequently goes unremembered. Despite the degree to which Perets pared down his reliance on the maskilic inheritance of fulsome biblical allusiveness, the utility of a biblical retro-calque (“little city”—“shtetl”) tailor-made for critique or moralizing seems too choice to pass up. Indeed, echoing the theme of the biblical passage, Perets’s poem concludes with the call of a “modern” man gone unheeded. The imposed contact between the poem’s setting and the allusion’s biblical context highlights the locative device Perets deploys in this poem. Instead of mapping Jerusalem onto the shtetl, the poem maps the shtetl onto Jerusalem, or rather the anonymous biblical “small city.” Perets’s poem is structured, however loosely, on a particular perceptual grid, which makes prominent use of binary distinctions. Spatially the poem plots along a “here–there” axis, and temporally the world is divided into natural and human time, polarities which come into particular focus at key moments. In point of fact, the deictic configuration of the poem, particularly the here–there axis, gives us a strong indication of the anxiety felt by the poet. In a useful account of how distance from the shtetl is often a tool for calibrating cultural discourse, Sidra Ezrahi observes that “where the shtetl is regarded as portable and therefore interiorized, the mobility and plasticity of diasporic culture are affirmed; where the shtetl is regarded as fixed point of origin and matrix of identity, distance and loss are the prevailing articulation of the past.” 61

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Perets’s poem deploys both the first model and an inversion of the second, that is, the shtetl not as origin but as destination. The use of both models simultaneously accounts for some of the unease we feel as readers. Put very schematically, in eighteen sections of varying length the poem describes the escape of a modernized Jew from his modern existence to the hoped-for peace of a traditional shtetl, and ultimately the dispiriting facts of life he encounters there. The poem opens in its one-stanza preamble by situating the “I” and the city on the first of these axes: The city here [po] is little, Here I am quiet, at rest. (my emphasis) In quick succession the second section sees a move outward on a sea voyage, full not only of storm and chaos but of a multiple repetition of the adverbial “there” (shom), and the third section returns both to “here” (po) and to tranquility. Miron sees the stormy sea-voyage section as a metaphor for the modern poet’s tumultuous, chaotic, insalubrious life in the city, from which he flees to the shtetl. The concreteness of the imagery, however, simultaneously points us to a different set of associations: the chaotic sea voyage may very well be an allusion to, or deployment of, Yehuda Halevi’s shirei yam, the sea poems written on his ill-fated journey to Palestine. In this vein it is possible to read “The Little City” as a pilgrimage poem, where the Jerusalem—Perets at one point in the poem actually refers to this shtetl as “Jerusalem Rebuilt” (yerusholayim ha-benuyoh)—encountered by the poet is a replication of a shtetl, with the same problems and worthy of similar kinds of criticism. If it is a pilgrimage, then it is one which stresses the physical space encountered by the traveler. The “hereness” inhabited by that traveler is associated with tranquility, and that tranquility in turn with a state of nature. Having arrived at the land of his destination in the third section, the poet notes, “And here the river is tranquil” (u-fo ha-yeoyr sholev). The poem is structured into fairly regular four-line stanzas of amphibrachic dimeter. These short quick pulses of sound allow for language which is compact and which therefore freights words more heavily. The choice of yeoyr (Hebrew, ye’or) for “river” carries such baggage. A biblical word, it can mean “river,” but is also used as the name for the Nile. That the shtetl, figured in this tranquil state of nature, is associated with Egypt disconnects this poem from a much larger pattern of shtetl discourse, one focused on exile-consciousness, 62

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and an exile centered on Jerusalem. In shifting to Egypt, Perets reframes the issue of the people of Israel’s being separated from the land of Israel. As we saw earlier, however, in Yerushalmi’s account of the Egypt/Jerusalem–Exodus/ Exile polarity, these two dominant events for Jewish “archetypal” thinking—a moment of punishment and one of liberation—are both nonetheless moments of “departure.” Put another way, departures are inherently multivalent activities. By way of example, implicit in the subtitle to Sidra Ezrahi’s book Exile and Homecoming is the notion of space dominated by, and even in some sense defi ned by, forces, one pushing and one pulling (as she describes them centrifugal and centripedal). Spatially speaking, these forces are motion. That is to say that space is defi ned in terms of motion, an inescapable shared element in their “cluster of meanings.” Perets moves a link back in the chain of associations and makes this shtetl environment, this ersatz Egypt, tranquil. Th is tranquility, by contrast, slows or stops motion, converting motion into stasis. A similar associative nexus of shtetl-Egypt-tranquility is to be found in Tshernikhovski’s poem “Circumcision” (1910) mentioned earlier. Ostensibly narrating the events around a circumcision, it is Tshernikhovski’s loving portrait of small-shtetl (or village) life in his native northern Crimea (or far southern Ukraine). From the very beginning, the gentle description of Rabbi Elyokim, both shochet (ritual slaughterer) and mohel (performer of circumcisions) as well as a reader of the worldly Ha-Tsefirah (an important and widely read Hebrew newspaper covering a broad range of subjects including current events, science, and literature, and published for much of its life in Warsaw), lets the reader know that this is no tendentious maskilic work. Indeed, when the community’s politics are brought up, in the rowdy scene of the postcircumcision feast, even the critiques are carried out largely with kid gloves. Tshernikhovski’s choice of setting—the very name of the central small shtetl, Bilivirka—is another tranquilizing technique. In the classic Hebrew and Yiddish shtetl narratives, so much a part of a maskilic way of thinking about the social functions of literature, the names of the town were often satiric: Glupsk (Dummyton), Kabtsiel or Kabtsansk (Beggarsville), Kisalon (Foolsburgh), Zlidnivke (Irksome Junction), or Loyhoyopol’ (Neverwasford), to name just a few storied examples. But as for Tshernikhovski’s Bilivirka: That’s its name and how it will be known for all time, But among themselves the Jews dubbed it “Little Egypt.” 63

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A little joke among themselves no doubt, but its playfulness undermines the traditionally bitter associations with exile-consciousness. Their little town is not Jerusalem in exile, but rather is, much like Perets’s little city along the Nile, a tranquil Egypt. In fact, there is nothing Jerusalemite about Bilivirka. It is a shtetl that has thrown in its current lot not with Jews alone but also with gentiles, and its historical lot in with Pechenegs, Tatars, and the other steppe nomads that peopled and fought over this piece of land. Tshernikhovski makes of Jews a heterochthonous group, exactly like other such groups, that is, not first from there but now of there; or put another way, again in Ezrahi’s term, they are “nonoriginal” inhabitants. The shtetl almost becomes a kind of Jewish sech (a principal camp of the Cossacks), which Tshernikhovski mentions early on in an historical excursus. Tshernikhovski’s image of time as epic is counterbalanced in Perets’s poem by a system of competing temporalities. In both cases the stress is on cyclicality, not linearity. The bulk of Perets’s poem consists of a series of descriptions of the shtetl and its sundry goings-on, each with its own temporality. So, for example, while the natural time of the fourth section is marked by a kind of calm (“And yesterday and tomorrow / Are twinned from birth”), the fifth section shifts to human habitation and its festival reckoning of time. These religious rhythms focus on the “appointed time” (mo’ed) of Sabbath and weekday, with their attendant activities, as time’s organizational structure. Perets uses this as his starting point for a broader critique of traditional life. As that critique unfolds, time recurs as a coefficient. Dramatically in the eleventh section, for example, two separate concepts of temporal reckoning in the shtetl vie with one another. The first bases its calculation “from conflagration to conflagration.” From conflagration to conflagration They reckoned from earlier, An age by generations And an era by years. That fires were a fact of shtetl life needs little elaboration; and that they are common in literary depictions of the shtetl has certainly been noted before. Miron claims that it was the fire’s metaphorical power more than its reality in shtetl life that governed its regular deployment. However strongly that argument may be made, what is clear is the fact of reckoning time according to 64

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this shtetl-historical event. Think, for example, of the beginning of Abramovitsh’s story “The Burned-Out” (“Ha-nisrofim”; 1896), relating the encounter of Abramovitsh’s itinerant bookseller Mendele with the wandering former inhabitants of the recently burnt-down shtetl Kabtsiel (“Beggarsville”): “That fire was recorded in the community records, and the Kabtsielites began to reckon all the events of their lives according to it.” Alongside the natural, quotidian, and ritual temporalities, Perets notes another model, namely the supernatural: Yet many were the fires Which had no measure, And from dybbuk to dybbuk The shtetl has many who count. Demonic activity and other supernatural events including possessions (the “dybbuk” being a disembodied soul inhabiting a living person) were terrifying prospects in credulous folk culture, and they are recognizable features of shtetl literature. This offered a fertile field of critique for maskilim and others who waited to shine the bright light of reason on what they viewed as the dark corners of Jewish life. Perets’s poem offers the shtetl’s seemingly regular supernatural possessions as another competing instrument of temporal reckoning. Putting it all together, the shtetl’s temporal makeup is dominated by the regular and unvarying repetition of ritual patterns on the one hand, and measures of rupture on the other. This rupture is in its way parallel to the kinetic (or even kinaesthetic) force inherent in the Exile/Exodus model of literary imaginings of the shtetl. This is then echoed in the tension between tranquility and chaos which marked the beginning of the poem. These two dynamic systems of time and space are not structurally rigorous throughout the poem, but they are suggestive and, analogically, powerful. By the end of the poem, Perets hones these tensions’ critical edge. The community is oppressed by a crushing hunger and poverty. Its hopes are pinned to commerce. And in a scene towards the end of the poem, all eyes are trained on the snaking path out of the hills, waiting for some, any, farmer to come sell his grain and maybe buy a drink at an inn: Thus the eye of the whole community Watches the farmer, 65

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And like the duration of the Exile So is the length of that journey! In this messianic-sounding call for the peasant to come, Perets seems to be playing with the convention of the “unexpected visitor.” Again, as Miron observes of this trope: “Literary shtetlekh often predicate their Jewish identity upon a legend about such a supernatural visit that brings biblical transcendental greetings to a distant Jewish community situated on Slavic ground, thus uniting this ground with Jewish heaven, the present with the past, and the everyday with the holy.” In Miron’s view (in the integrative model), “all of the shtetl’s unexpected visitors, no matter what their special guise, are depicted in redemptive terms, as harbingers of geulah of one kind or another.” Perhaps because of its integrative approach, Perets’s poem, however, presents a curious redemption, if one at all. The peasant who does come is slowed by a limping horse. They will look into an empty market There are still no farmers; Onto the smooth-paved path Between the mountain chains . . . There a farmer will be seen Traveling to the city; He will come with difficulty Because his horse is limping. In the model of movement in space, this wanderer of sorts, or “visitor,” is the kinetic element while the shtetl is the static one. A stasis of this kind, which, laden as it is with Perets’s criticism, is more a stagnation, corroding the initially positive assessment of the “tranquility,” “rest,” or “repose” characteristic of the shtetl at the poem’s outset. Moreover, not only is the peasant’s progress impeded by a limping horse (another pregnant metaphor), but also ultimately his cart will unload not grain for sale but a coffin for burial. The horses stopped, And from the wagon 66

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A coffin was lowered The farmer wailing! Death may be a transcendence of time, but not redemptively so. What’s more— especially in light of the heterotopic importance of the cemetery in the literary discourse of the shtetl—burial is one of the most dramatic spatializations in the Jewish literary imagination. In this case, it is used as a frustration of the redemptive potential of the “visitor.” Motion is converted into the ultimate stasis. The other possible reading of Perets’s subversion of the redemptive “visitor” trope sees the poet himself as the visitor. Here are the final stanzas of the poem, in which the poet speaks to the men of the shtetl: “Oh, my brothers, be calm, Oh listen; I am not a foreigner Neither lord nor nobleman; These short-cut clothes Have misrepresented me; There is but one faith, And one God for us.” But when they heard they scattered To every corner and wind; “Heretic or apostate, Or seductive inciter!” They were scattered, and from afar I still hear the curse. Is this the repose For a miserable soul? Having mistaken him in his modern European dress for a wealthy or noble personage, the shtetl tradesmen swarm over him like bees. But when he reveals that he is a Jew, the traditional world seals him out again, along with 67

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the threatening modern world he represents. The proffered redemption— brotherhood and faith—is as ill-tailored to traditional life as his short-cut clothes. However, returning to the first subverted redemption (the mourning farmer), that the image of death should figure so prominently not only as a spiritual evaluation but within the framework of a collision of dynamic and static systems lays out a series of powerful connections capitalized on in Jewish modernist verse. Compare this image, for example, with Zalman Shneyur’s poem “At the Crossroads” (“Al ‘em ha-derekh”), from the beginning of the First World War, when Shneyur was living in Berlin. Subtitled as a folk song, the poem tells of a wandering Jew—“with his staff and sack” (be-makel vetarmil)—on his way to the land of Israel. At the crossroads he encounters a passerby who asks him why he looks so sad and why he is going to the land of Israel. The answers to these two separate questions reveal an underlying embryonic spatial and temporal thematics. He is leaving because his wife and family were killed, one imagines most likely in a pogrom; and he is headed to the land of Israel to weep “over the graves of the patriarchs and our Mother Rachel.” For Shneyur here, the past is a recreation of the present, not the other way around, and so an inversion of the New Jerusalem paradigm of the shtetl. The only way to mourn for one’s family is to grieve over others long-ago dead and in graves in a distant land. This dual pleat, folding both space and time back over themselves, says as much (if not more) about certain ideas of spatial and temporal relations as it does about Shneyur’s Zionism, for example, which is the surface reading of this simple “folk song.” Shneyur’s own recent dislocations and internment as a foreign alien in Germany at the outset of World War I doubtless reinforced an interest in working out the implications of movement in space and time. Deconstructive Criticism A quarter of a century earlier, when Perets wrote his poem, these radical shifts had not yet occurred. Despite the dramatic reversals of progress (or certainly what many had perceived as progress) in Jewish participation in Eastern European social and political life in the aftermath of the pogroms of the early 1880s, let alone the widespread shock and disillusionment on the Jewish street, Perets’s poem still reflects at least some of the earlier internal critical assessments of the maskilim. The creative models of home to which I will shortly turn my 68

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attention were developed in response to a wide range of phenomena, including these several literary developments: (1) they stepped into the breach opened up by the disintegrative analysis of works such as Perets’s “The Shtetl”; (2) they capitalized on the radical kinds of spatiotemporal reconfigurations one of whose products we have glimpsed embryonically in Shneyur; and (3) they reacted against the pessimistic, even satiric, critiques of the maskilic evaluations and their successors, echoes of which can be heard in Perets’s poem. Examining some of these transitional, often destructive critical approaches will help to understand the creative, often constructive project of evaluating “home” we find in Jewish modernism. When Perets’s narrator steps out into the marketplace, for example, already here the marketplace, a central and definitive place in the classical shtetl, has been made a site for critique. (The contest we see in Perets will later be transformed in modernist poetry into a key locus for the carnivalesque, in works by Perets Markish, Uri Tsvi Grinberg, Avraham Shlonsky, to name just a few.) As soon as Perets’s narrator enters this fraught scene he is beset by tradesmen of all sorts. Dressed as he is in nontraditional secular clothes, he is taken for a wealthy foreigner or nobleman, but when he reveals himself as no foreigner, as one of them, and tries to unify them against deceit and dissension, he is reviled as a heretic and disturber of the peace. His two-couplet judgment expresses his near disbelief: They were scattered, and from afar I still hear the curse. Is this the repose For a miserable soul? This is no cozy or romanticized shtetl, to be sure. The word Perets chooses for “repose” (marge’ah) is hapax legomenon in the Bible (Isaiah 28:12), where it refers to the rest given to the tired as a recompense for heeding what is taught. Of course, in Perets’s shtetl no one heeds and so there is no rest for the weary; least of all (so Perets seems to say) for this narrator turned would-be modern prophet. Critical poems marked by loneliness or despair such as Perets’s stand alongside poems of a noticeably more bitter edge, often seeming less critique than ridicule. Chayim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934), though no foe of a sharp critique 69

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of shtetl life, tends to keep his shtetlekh as a backdrop and setting rather than in the foreground, as Perets does in “The Shtetl.” One important exception is a by turns hilarious and scathing departure in the poem “Who Knows the Town of Lishtin?” from 1901. The majority of the poem focuses its attention on the residents of the shtetl, as if to know the people is to know the place (a common literary presentation). That the portraits are not in the main flattering adds a sarcastic edge to the description of Lishtin as a city (ir), as if to ask rhetorically (and sarcastically): these are the great men of a city? In other words the poem presents a self-aggrandized shtetl. These men constitute a wellknown cast of characters in a time-tested lampoon. The poem is sometimes categorized (though I would argue that it is miscategorized, or better yet undercategorized) as a “folk poem.” In fact it is a liturgical parody: the stanzas are explicitly intoned by a hazzan, and the refrains—largely echoes of the last two lines of each of the hazzan’s stanzas—are uttered by the kahal, the community. This call-and-response format in a ritual context effects a liturgization of the shtetl, its folk and foibles. Yet at the same time it is clearly a sarcastic sanctification. As the poem moves through its antiphonal stanzas, the character types it systematically describes are slowly dehumanized (including the introduction of, and implied association with, the drayman’s horse, as both of these— horse and drayman [balegole]—can also be used as derogatory designations) until the most trenchant juxtaposition of the final stanza: Hazzan: There there is communal wealth—garbage! A heap assembled over generations upon generations, Generations upon generations cast there Rags, broken things, potsherds. A great rubbish heap, ancestral garbage, How many chamber pots have been sunk in you!— Come let us praise Lishtin And tell of her fame! By this point the people have all disappeared from the description, leaving only one place, one location, in the shtetl; it is not one of the traditional literary foci, such as its marketplace, study house, or cemetery, but rather its garbage dump! This is an acerbic take on the idea of creative space. As if this sting were not enough, both the call and refrain to this concluding stanza echo Deuteronomy 32:3 (“Come let us praise God”) as well as the service 70

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for removing the Torah scroll from the ark, in which that biblical verse is used liturgically, and which is therefore associated with the public reading of the Torah, the national history. Liturgy, perhaps even more so than folk songs, implies cyclicality, and therefore to some extent stands above historical temporality. As Yerushalmi notes about the annual cycle of Torah reading: “The historical events of the biblical period remain unique and irreversible. Psychologically, however, those events are experienced cyclically, repetitively, and to that extent at least, atemporally.” The historical “moment” of the poem is coded in the figures of the one-armed cobbler and the sand-blind tailor, the “remnant of the armies of Nikolai.” These characters meantime live in Lishtin, which in the poem’s title is Aramaicized to Lishtina. This archaism uttered in a quasiliturgical mode subsumes the historical moment to the more important—according to the poem’s argument—atemporal structure. This temporal rejiggering is another part of Bialik’s critique of the shtetl way of thinking. Indeed, in the second and third lines of that stanza the shift in meaning of “generations upon generations” (doyre-doyres) from an adverb to a noun underscores a kind of concretization, or heaping up, of time—as if the population of a shtetl is the static accretion of the generations. Bialik presents then a parody of that traditional temporality as a garbage dump! The caustic ante of such a shtetl lampoon is only upped in one of the most painfully bitter appraisals of the shtetl-as-home model, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s poem “Zlotshov mayn heym” (“Zlotshov My Home”; 1923). This sixstanza cringing caricature harps on the twang of its refrain: “Zlotshov my home”; with each repetition come increasingly discordant appeals to “longing” for home and a veritable contempt for it. The opening is all spatial coordinates: church spire, synagogue, bathhouse, market; and again stock characters: women, familiar Jews (yidlekh), dogs, peasants. These unremarkable figures, in unremarkable places, awaken only “my poor wee bit of longing for you, / Zlotshov my home.” Longing being the product of absence, one is meant initially to see the poet pining in some distant place. The imagery quickly subverts those expectations with the meanness it describes. As Ruth Wisse notes, this poem was designed in part as a condemnation of the shtetl nostalgia industry in America in the wake of the First World War. Halpern’s shtetl, a literary myth standing in for his birthplace, portrayed as a place of both banality and cruelty, may claim his origin but it cannot claim his loyalty. The poem ends with his escape to New York, which is summed up tellingly as follows: 71

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And so this really is the only consolation for me, That they won’t bury me in you,— My home, my Zlotshov. The static reality of the shtetl existence, mirrored in what Halpern views as the ultimate curse, namely death’s stasis buried in Zlotshov’s cemetery, is overcome by the dynamic transition (by horse cart, train, and ship) to the antishtetl, the urban hub of the world: “New York downtown.” In a forceful reading of the poem, Halpern can be seen questioning and upbraiding the very idea of “home” that could make it the basis of any system of belief or ideology. From Hometown to Homelandscape This move to the megalopolis as alternative space, as a chosen as opposed to a native home, is characteristic of a number of poets, particularly in the American environment. Equally attractive, though, was a turn to natural landscapes in order to work out and understand a connection to home. While the shtetl, with its common landmarks and stereotypical character types, remained a dominant model for Jewish space in literature, a less pervasive but equally intimate set of home spaces was carved out of the landscape. One of the more pronounced links between them is the image of the wanderer, an image we have already encountered briefly in Shneyur’s poem. As with Halpern’s active “move” to New York, the wanderer is a kinetic figure. This antipilgrim was born in part of a reappropriation of the old negative trope of the Wandering Jew, cursed and doomed to a vagabond existence. As discussed earlier, Miron counts the symbolic (and even symbolist) “wanderer” as one of the archetypical “visitors” to the shtetl, a bearer of some kind of redemption. The wanderer I am referring to, however, is not a stranger come to the shtetl, but one of its denizens who sets out on the road. We see seeds of this attitude in Perets’s poem, and a minor-key echo again in Shneyur’s. It was, however, the Yiddish poets who explored this idea most extensively. Given Jews’ presumptive exterritoriality, derived from the cultural exileconsciousness which runs through so much of this literature—a consciousness which, inter alia, could be rejected (as by Zionism), appropriated (by diasporism), or neutralized (by acculturism)—wanderingness is a notoriously open image. That both shtetl-groundedness and wandering can coexist as well-understood default positions in the literature (and sometimes, as for 72

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example in Abramovitsh’s “The Burned-Out,” both at the same time) has yet to be fully explored. For its part wanderingness as a bridge to homelandscape is often given a positive valence. One of the most important exponents of this positive attitude is the poet Leyb Naydus (1890–1918). An important poet who has been left largely underappreciated due in part to the infelicity of having published at a time and a place of particular upheaval, Naydus was one of the first great Yiddish landscape “pastoralists” (though his work ranged more widely than that common though reductive description would indicate). His novel championing of a kind of highbrow aestheticism while extolling the beauty of his native Lithuanian landscape (in sequences like “Mame-erd” [“Mother Earth”] and “Litepayzazhn” [“Landscapes of Lithuania”]) makes him of particular interest here. Moreover, Naydus’s work is that of one of the most elegant poetic practitioners of the diasporist worldview. While committed to the importance of Jewish peoplehood, “connecting Jewishness to non-Jewishness was for Naydus absolutely not coquetry, nor in the best case a dry programmaticness, but a deep conviction, a strong desire for and striving towards a synthesis.” These are the comments of the Yiddish critic Naftoli Vaynig (1897–1943), who, in one of the most perceptive studies of Naydus, connects his work to Impressionism, NeoRomanticism, and Symbolism (especially the influence of Verlaine), and excavates the very deep seams not only of Bible and Jewish religious imagery, but of Naydus’s own exoticism, Hellenism, and “rococo” style. In Vaynig’s words, “with his wanderer’s staff in hand he set out on his pilgrimage and on the way collected precious stones, colors, and hues, in order to strew them beneath the feet of the Yiddish language and with them to pave a mosaic tapestry for its next step towards royal splendor.” This diasporic wandering is presented as positive and creative (unlike its negative exilic counterpart). We note the disparity in the “walking stick” imagery between this poem and the Shneyur poem earlier. In this case it is a mark of a pilgrim; but the pilgrimage is not directional (and not Jerusalem bound), but wandering itself is a kind of religious act. And where this wanderingness is for poets like Markish or Kulbak, as will be discussed later, a mark of liberation and pure freedom, for Naydus it is one of beauty. And as we will see in a moment, the vocabulary of wandering can itself be, paradoxically, the vocabulary of home. (It is worth noting that Vaynig’s study is itself striking because, writing it in the midst of the Vilne ghetto and finishing it in June of 1943, shortly before the liquidation of the ghetto and his own death, Vaynig makes with it a beautiful 73

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and erudite plea for diasporism based on the stunning work of a disregarded Yiddish master.) One of the pithiest distillations of Naydus’s diasporist attitude is found in the following brief lyric: I am always a wanderer [na-venad] A wanderer, Like a Greek nomad; And I have homes more than spaces, more than the dreams in my soul; Every day a new threshold, I am cast hastily from wave to wave, Mountain to mountain— And my life is not scant. Naydus carefully chooses the Hebrew word na-venad for a “(homeless) wanderer.” Though this word was not in quotidian use in Yiddish, it was nevertheless recognizable, and consequently familiarly foreign. The biblical resonance is key, as this is the expression used of Cain as part of his peripatetic punishment: “What have you done? Listen! your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil. And so, cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it will no longer give you its strength. A restless wanderer shall you be on the earth.” And Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is too great to bear. Now that You have driven me this day from the soil and I must hide from Your presence, I shall be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me.” (my emphasis) This intertext is less about breaking filial bonds and estrangement than about a relationship with the land in explicit chthonic terms; in these five brief verses the words for earth (erets) or soil/land (‘adamah) are used six times! Naydus picks up on Cain’s curious repetition of the terms of his own punishment—as if his fate to become a “restless wanderer” was a conclusion he reached on his own—and converts that eternal curse into a blessing, something to revel in, not recoil from. Part of the importance of this wanderer type—as we have seen here with Naydus and as will become clearer later on with Kulbak and Markish—is the 74

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explicit connection between wandering and a particular kind of home seeking. In effect these writers reconceptualize “here” as home. Schematically, there is the valorization of the positive wanderer (the geyer figure we will encounter), which is a temporal trope; and there is the encomium to the “native” landscapes. This connection becomes an increasingly powerful image in modernist Jewish poetry. Naydus was known for his inventive and virtuosic rhymes (though often dismissed as a rhymester by critics). In this case they bear an important semantic load. By a striking rhyme Naydus links the state of being a wanderer to that of being a “Greek nomad,” ostensibly connecting him to Odysseus. And while Odysseus’s goal was a circuitous return to Ithaca (a return Cavafy would ultimately deem impossible, pluralizing “Ithacas” and therefore the potential homelands they were meant to represent, again frustrating straightforward conception of homeland altogether), Naydus emphasizes the home-like nature of each of the stations of his wandering: “I have homes more than spaces” (hob ikh heymen mer vi reymen). This curious plural turns space into something scarcer than these many homes and therefore into a more precious commodity. Indeed, by the last element of this powerful dialectal rhyme, heymen—reymen—treymen (homes—spaces—dreams), Naydus effectively spiritualizes the very notion of home and space. That spiritualization then allows the power of the crux of the poem, namely the spatialization of time: “Every day a new threshold.” It is not that every day there is a new threshold; rather, every day is a new threshold. The linear and cyclical models of temporality are done away with. Each day is its own new creative reality, indeed a new home. And that is why the rest of the poem returns to the spatial metaphor focusing on a progression of waves and mountains—each respectively an emblem of motion and stasis. The concrete temporal moment (in this case the day) is effectively spatialized by its metaphorical context. Its spiritual content is made part of the discourse not only of space, but also of Jewish wandering and homeseeking. Wandering turns out to be one of the common descriptors of many visions of the homelandscape in Jewish modernism. The idea of home acts as the common thread connecting all of these literary and poetic shtetlekh from that of the “little people” and the “little city” to Zlotshev and Lishtin. These places do not exist in a vacuum but share in a network of cultural connotations whose complexities are masked by the seeming simplicity of the word “home.” And as Naydus’s poem demonstrates, expanding the conceptual parameters of home also expands its terrain. 75

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Extending the scope of Jewish home space, as the next section pursues, broadens our understanding of the intimate connections between space and time found in Jewish modernism.

Part II: The Homelandscape of Jewish Eastern Europe Alongside the idiosyncratic paths of such peripatetic poets, Jewish Eastern European geography was laid out as a network around the various shtetlekh and their surrounding villages and settlements. In a practical, quotidian sense movement along these hub-and-spoke pathways was most often undertaken by the so-called dorfsgeyers, the petty tradesfolk who would go from the shtetlekh to the satellite villages to buy and sell. This, in conjunction with the great influx and thrum of the market, incorporated into the concept of the shtetl its associated region and environment. This is the point of understanding the shtetl as an “economic-cultural zone . . . rather than [an] individual geographical location.” Literarily, these links are very strong indeed. These communicative networks enabled the construction of a particular kind of imagined “Jewish space.” While the realities of shtetlekh were dynamic contact zones, literary portrayals often veered wide of mimetic fidelity. Indeed, “the tendency to reduce the size of the Jewish town, a tendency that gains momentum as it turns from a real historical venue into a mythical site, is found both in literature and in the nostalgic collective memory. The miniaturization of the Jewish urban entity makes it possible to present a world that is simpler, more homogeneous, and more Jewish.” This “miniaturization”—as well as Bartal’s connection of it to the notion of nostalgia—of the Jewish collective self-understanding will become part of how some writers deal with a connection to land, especially the problematic link (or rupture) between native land and homeland. While Bartal focuses on Jewishness, on “homogeneity,” as the crux of this miniaturization (both of which have their own political implications), the importance of space itself ought not be downplayed. In the epigraph to his cycle of self-styled aquarelles, “Pan’s Flute” (“Di fleyt fun pan”; 1917), Naydus makes explicit that he took the license for his pastoralism from Mendele. Mendele is in many respects the font for so many of the “traditional” literary tropes of the shtetl and its environs. In his quasiautobiography Shloyme reb khaims: A bild fun yidishn lebn in der lite (Shlomo Reb Chayim’s Son: A Picture of Jewish Life in Lithuania [1899–1912]; and its 76

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Hebrew version, Ba-yomim ho-hem [In Those Days; 1894–1903]), the memoirist’s native village, Mlinitse, is introduced as follows: Ten short miles from shtetl K . . . somewhere in Lithuania, there is a kind of tiny village, surrounded by vast forests, among which flows a great, lovely river, and nearby there is a small mill, and so the village is called Mlinitse. . . . All of Mlinitse looks like a nest, lying hidden in some corner, separated from the world, far from people and from the main road; but small, narrow paths snake their way through the forest, though valleys and hills, leading to villages that lie scattered all around. Shloyme, the memoirist, reinforces the model of the communicative hub-andspoke network. Though the book’s plot will ultimately involve a move to the shtetl, this origin fable pushes the shtetl to the periphery—both in space and in memory (it is only remembered as “K . . .”)—and moves the miniature hamlet to the center. In a masterful exposé of the novel’s innovative stylistics, Allison Schachter has linked the “nostalgic romanticism” of Shloyme’s depiction of his remembered childhood to “the creation of a modern Jewish literature” by means of a complicated set of reworkings of the literary conventions of frame narrative, authorial persona, and memoir. Ultimately this focuses on the anxiety surrounding the shift of cultural centers of gravity from the traditional to the modern, whose near standard literary emblems were the shtetl and the city. Harnessing the power of nostalgia as a literary engine of innovation is a notable accomplishment. The energy it releases, moreover, pushes Jewish literatures in a number of different directions. For protomodernist and modernist poetry, the relationship to nostalgia becomes even more complicated. To return for a moment to Naydus’s Mendele-inspired naturalism, here is his morceau choisi: “The little hills around the village greet you in a very friendly way, the green valleys encourage you—come, uncle, lie down on the grass. . . . You can feel something of the holiness, a still, sweet rest, a longing, a tugging to life—in your heart a warm prayer to the one who lives forever.” If there is nostalgic intimacy in Jewish Eastern European literature, this is it. Again, it is organized around the miniaturized “village” (dorf), an idealization of Jewish connection to place which employs a natural as opposed to a civilizational vocabulary. This is part of the point Vaynig makes in analyzing Naydus’s debt to Mendele. Vaynig speaks of Naydus’s “Judeomorphization” (yudeomorfizirn) 77

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of nature, that is, “perceiving it in a Jewish way, with Jewish spiritual categories,” which he also dubs “Mendelizing” (mendelizirn). Modernist Yiddish poetry, however, almost as if channeling Tshernikhovski, would take this one step further, unlocking the creative potential of a homelandscape that embraced chthonic connection as opposed to the spatiotemporal dislocation we encountered with regard to the shtetl proper. One of the important conceptual underpinnings for this turn was, again, a deployment of nostalgia. For its part, “nostalgia” has a revealing historical semantics. A learned coinage, it is a calque of the Swiss German Heimweh (homesickness), indicating a longing (if not pathologically so) for one’s home or homeland. Unlike the delightful parallel—if less successful—term “pathopatridalgia,” with its solely locative component (patra, “fatherland, native land, or homeland”), the core etymon of nostalgia is the Greek nostos, that is, not the native place itself, but rather the voyage of return there. It is derived from the Homeric term for Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War; as such, the metaphorical power of this now common word is ultimately literary. Nostalgia as a modern—indeed also a modernist—concept shuttles between the literary poles whose comparative connection was pioneered by Erich Auerbach: the Bible and the Odyssey; Abraham and Odysseus; the creative potential of being made to go forth from home into the unknown and striving to return to a home one no longer knows. Jean Starobinski explicitly links nostalgia (given the pathological origins of the concept) to “the workings of memory.” In the soldier absent from home who hears a folk song from his youth there is awakened a yearning, “an attack of emotional hypermnesia: the illusion of a sort of presence of the past.” We see in the semantic and conceptual peregrination of nostalgia from its origins in a particular kind of literary movement (Odysseus’s homeward journey), to a focus on place (the “home” of “homesickness”), and ultimately to this focus on time (the “presence of the past”), a spatiotemporal fusion. If nostalgia, then, is the appropriate model to use—and Schachter’s work tells us that at least in the premodernist literature it was a formative component—then it is in this reshuffled spatiotemporal configuration. An exemplary case of the modernist incarnation of nostalgia is the Yiddish poet Moyshe Kulbak’s long poem Raysn (White Russia; 1922). On the heels of the shift from communal shtetl to village, which we have just been looking at, Kulbak takes miniaturization to the next extreme, into the familial hut (khate). The poema is composed of a sequence of twelve poems of varied style and genre 78

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that deal with an extended family of Jewish peasants and raftsmen on the Nieman River. The first and last poems, constituting the frame imagery, begin immediately with the image of the simple, hardworking grandfather, and then his assembled family—in the first poem they are gathered for work, and in the last assembled for the grandfather’s death. Communal cohesion is not national (though the family members are repeatedly referred to as Jews) but rather familial, even tribal. The central thematic inventory, moreover, includes work, nature, and the family members’ at-oneness with that nature, presented most often in the act of working upon it. The grandfather’s biblically resonant deathbed benediction blesses the uncles as much for their physical abilities as for how those abilities relate to the physical environment, through plow, scythe, and river raft. And presenting the benediction as avitic, not paternal, further emphasizes the chthonic connection by pointing up the transition not from one generation to the next but of multiple generations. The connection of the longevity of this familial temporality to a specific locative anchoring unifies the spatiotemporal imagery of the poem. This is what Marc Caplan characterizes as a “suspended temporality, a permanent present tense signifying an organic, cyclical notion of time uninterrupted by history, change, or modernity but closed off definitively by death.” Even though this benediction has one of the highest concentrations of non-presenttense verbs in the poem, the temporal description is apt; it is a unity which can mark a moment or an era. Here we see another example of modernism’s reappropriation of traditional temporality. The grandfather’s death, however, does not “close” anything off. It is but another organic punctuation. The uncles themselves are stoic, while it is the birds who offer the only lament, further embedding the tribe in their habitat. When Caplan describes this as nostalgia, however, it is a curious application. Caplan argues that the works produced while Kulbak sojourned in Berlin experiment with nostalgia and apocalypse as poetic means of dealing with spatial dislocation from his native and beloved White Russia in temporal ways: nostalgia as a discourse with the past (in Raysn), and apocalypse as a discourse with the future (in Meshiekh ben-Efrayim). The problem is that Raysn is not an ideal work for such a streamlined figuration of nostalgia. There is no effectuated return because within the world of the poem there was never a departure; the traditional temporality is static; and while there is an emotional core, it does not consist of longing. Part of Caplan’s goal is to look at how Kulbak’s modernism while in Berlin— a state of dislocation which Kulbak keenly felt—used poetic form as an 79

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engine for converting “place” (physical location) into a different kind of performative “space.” For Caplan, “Raysn, precisely through its embrace of a pseudooral, conspicuously Romantic form, performs the same function as ‘place,’ signified in Raysn ultimately in negative terms of absence, silence, and death.” I would argue contrariwise that “place” in Raysn was signified in positive terms of work, earth, and family. The nostalgic engine is less “reflective” or “restorative” (to use Svetlana Boym’s terminology) than recreative (even reintegrative); it is part of a discourse of diaspora more than of Romantic longing. Take, for example, the fourth poem, “Driving Rafts .  .  .” (“Men traybt plitn . . .”), in which rafts are being driven on the river by Shmulye under the grandfather’s supervision. The landscape along the Nieman River is shrouded in dense fog, and among the scattered and partial images resolved through the haze reality is perceived mostly through sound. However, at the close of the second stanza we read, But something gets wrapped . . . Here pass by all kinds of fields and valleys, There the houses stand enwrapped, covered like the furniture in rich-men’s homes . . . And here bursts forth a green clarity. . . . And it grows clearer in one’s soul . . . This breaking of the fog is made explosive by the vibrancy of the color which it finally allows through—“green” is the very first color term used in this particular poem. And even more than green as the emblematic color for the state of nature in Kulbak’s palette, the deictic vocabulary is telling. “Here” indicates nature (“valleys,” “fields”) while “there” indicates culture (“houses,” “furniture,” “rich men’s homes”). The verbal inventory, too, adds yet another dimension. While the fields and valleys “pass by,” the houses “stand.” In the perception of the Nieman riverman the contrast is between (1) Here—dynamic—nature on the one hand, and (2) There—static—culture on the other. Ranging far from the familial hut, plying the river, it makes sense that the native element would be nature, not settlement, that one’s soul’s clarity should be clad in green and not upholstered in greed. Following the dissipating fog comes a rainbow of fields and plants arrayed before the raft that is floating by them. In beholding the magnificent view, the grandfather cannot contain himself, exclaiming, 80

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Damn [trashtsya] your father! . . . Damn [trashtsya] your mother! When my sons set off on the rafts, One sees how the hot colors flow down from the hills like streams, Spring gushes in upon the world and one is right there in the middle of it. The intense physicality of the scene, with the vividness of the color imagery (blue, green, yellow, white, red, and ruddy) emphasizes the implication of the human subjects into their natural surroundings. That they are Jews is incidental, not essential. The only marker of Jewishness is their language. And it is that language which adds another brush stroke in the diasporist panorama. Part of that linguistic panorama includes “local color.” The grandfather’s Slavic oath is mirrored in the folk song which is the poem’s eleventh section, “Antoshe Plays the Bandura . . .” (“Antoshe shpilt af der bandure . . .”). (Note the similarity to the non-Jew Mikhayla, as noted earlier in Tshernikhovski’s “Circumcision,” and his singing of a Cossack song, which sets Elyokim on his historical reverie.) The refrain to this folk song is actually the family’s repeated call for the non-Jew Antoshe to sing and accompany himself on the bandura, a lute-like folk instrument of Ukraine and Byelorussia. The song tells of a nobleman whose daughters are made pregnant by his stable hand, named Dmidruk Byadulya, known as a shalapay, a good-for-nothing, rake, or idler. The name which Kulbak gives the “hero” of the folk song is more than reminiscent of that of Zmitrok Byadulya (pen name of Shmuel-Nokhum Plavnik, 1886–1941), a Jewish Byelorussian writer and poet known among other things for his use of Byelorussian folklore and imagery, as well as for helping shape the course of modern Byelorussian literature. Kulbak’s use of an intercultural, hybrid literary figure is not for nothing; and that the beloved character should be a roué or good-for-nothing recapitulates the inverted heroic type, the leydikgeyer (idler), from the lyrical section of New Poems. The symbolism is clearly important to Kulbak: a Slavic folk song should be an organic part of Jewish culture, one which everyone calls for, indeed demands. The song itself is notably spatial, referencing numerous Byelorussian locales, in Yiddish (Kreve, Mazhir, Zhetl, Damir, Krivits); but as a performance of a folk song, which the call-and-response nature of the refrain emphasizes (Antoshe’s name is included in the text itself), it represents a specific temporal instance. Followed immediately by the death of the grandfather, that performance infuses the deathbed 81

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scene with some of the associations of a folk song, and the family history with a timeless local embeddedness. Kulbak was not the only poet to paint such a loving portrait of his native landscape. Perets Markish’s Volin (Volhynia) offers a similar paean. While Kulbak’s Raysn is a family chronicle, Markish’s Volin is more of a perceptual chronicle, following the poet’s “I” as he takes in and experiences that landscape. Remarkably similar to Kulbak’s are (1) the descriptions of the natural landscape—dominated in Kulbak’s poem by the Nieman River, and in Markish’s by the Horyn, the entire sixth section of the poem being given over to an apostrophe to that river; (2) the marked use of regionalisms in the vocabulary; and (3) the positive presence of gentiles. Indeed, one of the striking similarities between Raysn and Volin is the timelessness of many of the landscape descriptions. There is, to be sure, a kind of temporal punctuation, but these by and large are natural phenomena: night, day, evening, the seasons, and so forth. These landscapes thus exist as part of an eternal moment, an often timestopped (or time-recycled) aesthetic and sensory reality outside of the temporal structures of historical consciousness. This is, for example, the vein in which the second stanza of the final section begins: No one there [i.e., in the Volhynian shtetlekh] knows of the times, One’s heart catches after washing, One goes to stretch out after reading the Shema And stands up among the cows. The attitude towards news reminds one of Perets’s “The Shtetl,” but it is the proximity of the most sacred (and most intimate) of liturgies—the Shema— with standing among the cows which naturalizes the patterns and rhythms of traditional folkways. This ahistorical sensory reality is envisioned in part through the interplay of stasis and motion. Take, for example, the fourth section, which describes the paths that link Volhynia and its shtetlekh together, echoing the hub-and-spoke communication networks mentioned earlier: The paths themselves sing One interlaced with the other, Cast over the shtetlekh Like a net of coarse rope; 82

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Days and nights and days again pass There on the gray paths, Then little wagons approach from the village And go back. The “communication” of the network of roads is presented here literally as “song.” In fact, the previous stanza begins, On the paths there is sung A song of wanting nothing Of needing nothing, of having nothing, Only that the little wagons should go. Kulbak and Markish both are poets of restlessness, of the joys—indeed, imperatives—of movement. Markish paradoxically converts the stasis of the physical roads themselves into dynamic actors, not merely by the verbal metaphor but by associating them through the passage of time with the passage of wagons. This image of transportation also connects the Jewish and gentile worlds. It is not coincidental that the tavern scene—a staple of the literary shtetl— described in the fifth section finds the gentile coachman, Vassily, taking a rest. Readying to go, he finishes his smoke: “One more pull, no joke [literally, ‘As I am a Jew’ (vi ikh bin a yid)], And then it’s good day to you, tavern!” One yell at the “roan” [deresh] And two miles are gone! While the gentile’s averral “as a Jew” is quite humorous, it is also designed to show the parameters of cultural embeddedness and, more importantly, true cross-pollination. Part of Yiddish linguistic consciousness is the awareness of the multiple source strata of the language. Slavic regionalisms are an important part of many modernist Yiddish literary projects, as we have already noted of Kulbak and Markish. Yet to have a non-Jew not only ostensibly speaking Yiddish, but also with a distinctly Jewish-inflected idiom, shows diasporism as a productive two-way street. Indeed, in this particular exchange it is the slavicism (deresh, “roan horse”) which is made strange in the mouth of a Slav by setting it off in quotes. 83

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The non-Jewish world also functions as a point of cultural contrast. Markish in some sense realigns the traditional border zones of the intercommunal contact and differentiation. Instead of demarcating spaces on a horizontal axis, he describes a vertical axis. In the third section Markish presents the architectural features of Volhynian shtetlekh, first with regard to the Christian elements, including the church, rampart, and wall. When passing by the latter one “knows of a ‘fortress’ and the wars which that country waged”; and so the wall becomes a temporal marker of history. While on the one hand the gentile builds his wall up, on the other hand, A Jew digs himself a well, And Jews come to bless the water And wander around that place Quite aimlessly. To dig a well is to strike deeply into a place, an image of groundedness in a very concrete sense. What is more, not only does the sanctification (“to bless the water”) present a cultural connection, but also Markish’s linguistic turn in the fourth line emphasizes what is so striking about the description. The idiomatics of the phrase in der velt arayn denote “aimlessly,” “unintentionally,” or “at random.” But the collocation literally means “into the world.” It is precisely the kind of self-implication, entangling, or intrication into a landscape—symbolized by the digging of a well, digging quite concretely into the world—which makes out of a place a home. These are neither national nor political acts, but rather domestic universals. And from domesticity to eros is no far leap. While neither Raysn nor Volin is significantly erotically charged, there is nevertheless a common element which ought not be overlooked. In Kulbak’s Raysn the figure of Nastasye—daughter of the bandura-playing Antoshe—recurs as an image of healthy youth, simplicity, and the natural stirrings of love. In the sixth and eighth poems she is presented as the love interest of uncle Avrom. In the eighth poem (“Nastasye”), for example, Avrom comes upon her in the field as she gathers greens for her father’s meal. We see their hide-and-seek-like game of fear and attraction: “You my little calf, where are you, my dear and my darling!” Nastasye from behind the branches delighted in [my] uncle . . . “He is so fresh, as if just having laid down in the forest!” 84

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Their game ends in a tender embrace. This naturalness of their relationship and the organic quality of its observation are elements shared by Markish. His poem, less a description of a specific family than a generalized depiction of an entire region, does mention Volhynia’s gentiles, especially its peasants, on several occasions, all as favorable and as naturally connected to the landscape as the Jews. Grasses—greener than the trees, Sands—softer than your water, Bushes—denser than the forest, Shadows—as cool as you yourself, Barefoot Volhynian peasant girls [shikses], Washerwomen launder in the rivers With singing and with laughter, Do you, Horyn, hear them going to you?! Elsewhere in the volume—in the sequence “Erd” (“Earth”)—Markish’s boundlessly energetic youth describes his participation in the local pastimes: I run after the peasants [shkotsim] watering their horses, Half-naked riding the river I am worked up; I sit right down among all the peasant girls [shikses] on the ground And sing songs together with them. What these poems put together as beloved evocations of homelandscapes and the creative lyricism they inspire, Dovid Hofshteyn complicated in his poem “Ukrayne” (“Ukraine”). Far more modernist than the poems Raysn or Volin, this poem forms an apostrophe to the poet’s native Ukraine as told through the point of view of one who is traveling through that landscape on a train in the aftermath of the devastating pogroms of 1919–21. It forms the second section of the book Troyer (Mourning; 1922), composed by Hofshteyn in collaboration with the artist Marc Chagall in response to those calamities. And while there are many modernist pogromologies (most notably Perets Markish’s poema Di Kupe [The Heap]), Hofshteyn’s work is an explicit evocation of, and apostrophe to, the landscape itself. As Seth Wolitz makes clear, the deployment of multiple perspectives, genres, and intertexts makes the work as a whole one of a number of highly 85

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accomplished and complicated modernist responses to these catastrophes. One of the intriguing intertexts which Wolitz excavates is based on the title itself. Troyer is the unmarked Yiddish word for “mourning.” Its German cognate (Trauer) is also the source for its counterpart in Russian and Ukrainian, traur. Wolitz notes the coincidence of the Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelshtam’s publication in 1922 of his second book of poems, entitled Tristia (Sorrows). This is itself the title of the elegiac poems written by Ovid during— and evocatively about—his exile to Tomis on the Black Sea. The exile motif is an important element of Hofshteyn’s construction of his native homelandscape, especially in the wake of the horrors his poem is designed to respond to. Through the sadness and the anger, this place yet maintains the resonance of home; not of a home shtetl or a homeplace, but of a full homelandscape, imbued with more than just fondness, but rather with love: I still feel with love: No windowpane here has been broken In your mountain towers That look, still pure, Over the floods of the Dniepr, Over your steppes. This presentation of the mountains, the Dniepr—like Kulbak’s Nieman or Markish’s Horyn, yet another loving evocation of a riverscape (in this case one whose very name was used as a kind of accusation in Markish’s own pogromological long poem Di Kupe [The Heap])—and the steppe participates in the homelandscape discourse described so far, and blends it into the modernist catastrophe genre. Hofshteyn concludes by inverting precisely the paradigm of exile which the blending of such discourses was meant to confuse: I know this too: You were for generations A place of refuge [miklet-plats] For the exiles [oysvurfn] From the great gray land . . . Over all-all of its distance Your shame hides itself, Ukraine! 86

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As Wolitz observes, When Hofshteyn’s poetic voice protests against the pogroms and demands justice in verse, he functions from his own sense of poetic/moral responsibility and not from a received political ideology. When, for example, the persona complains to Ukraine in Poem 2—bist doyres lang / geven a mikletplats / far oysvurfn / fun groysn groyen land (Poem 2, p.VIII), “for generations long / you were a place of refuge / for outcasts from a great gray land”—the moral and social protest defends his own and his folk’s right to inhabit the Ukraine no less than the Gentile peasant. The ideological dimension is certainly present, and Wolitz makes a very good case for an overtly political reading of the poem as a “fellow-traveler dirge.” The complexity of Hofshteyn’s modernist polyphony may, however, be unpacked still further. The use of “generations” as the temporal measurement, for example, introduces the familial or tribal element, over against the national and historical vocabularies invoked earlier in the poem. This sets up the biblical intertext which follows it. The term miklet-plats (place of refuge) is a calque of the Hebrew mekom miklat, itself a later Hebrew synonym for the biblical ‘ir miklat (city of refuge). Of the seven Hebraic words used in “Ukraine,” this is the most marked and least usual, and given both the carefulness and relative straightforwardness of Hofshteyn’s diction in general, this word choice is freighted. The term ‘ir miklat is used in Numbers, as well as elsewhere in the Bible, to refer to a specifically urban (‘ir) settlement singled out as a place where someone who has unintentionally killed a person may flee to for safety from retribution. Having to seek out such a place entails at least the stigma of some kind of guilt. However, Hofshteyn’s refuge seekers are not the manslaughterers associated with the term but rather “exiles” or “outcasts” (oysvurfn). Who these are is unspecified, but Hofshteyn implicates both Jews and non-Jews into the mix, as the “generational” timescale, biblical intertext, and association of travelers (fusgeyer) and wanderers (vanderer) with the steppe (like the nomads in Tshernikhovski’s or Naydus’s homelandscapes) cuts across the ethnic mix. As in those works, Hofshteyn makes no claim to sacredness of place. But like Kulbak or Markish, Hofshteyn verges on his own version of sentimentality when it comes to his native environs. Nevertheless, in deploying the Ovid inflection of Troyer-Tristia he inverts that exilic trope—Jews are no more in 87

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exile in Ukraine than are its non-Jewish denizens—just as “place of refuge” (miklet-plats) is an inversion of “city of refuge” (‘ir miklat). The train-traveling voyeur is an exile in his own home. The poet Uri-Tsvi Grinberg (1896–1981) treats the issue quite differently. Reacting to the same history and trajectory of anti-Jewish violence as Hofshteyn, Grinberg’s self-admittedly personal idiosyncratic attitude and “reactionary” ideology lead him to a different understanding of connection to place. After a controversy with the Polish censors regarding his avant-garde Yiddish journal Albatros, Grinberg left Warsaw for the expatriate Yiddish and Hebrew literary center in Berlin in 1923. There Grinberg published the third and final issue of Albatros and in it included a vitriolic essay entitled “Veytikn-heym af slavisher erd” (“A Home of Pains on Slavic Soil”), a painful meditation on the very idea of home. The essay presents a series of indictments which ultimately convince the author to uproot himself from Europe and go to Palestine (which he did in December of that year). In a series of fluid “arguments” (put in quotes because of the vitriol which makes it more argumentative than argumentation), Grinberg castigates in turn America for its rampant capitalism and melting-pot ethnic ideology; Poland for the perilousness of its seeming accommodation of Jews; Christian Europe in general for its hypocritical lack of acceptance of its Jews; and European Jews themselves either for so selling out to the idea of Europe that they have ironically lost the very concept of nationhood by which Europeans self-identify, or for the cosmopolitanism of the leftward ideologies, which also downplay or outright reject national affiliation. The impression one gets from the essay is that of a man in fear. Having seen the horrors of the First World War as a soldier in Serbia, and the postwar turmoil as a Jew, by 1923 Grinberg was convinced of a European Jewish doom. He even self-diagnosed his condition as a “persecution complex” (farfolgungsvan). And the image of what he elsewhere calls “healthy one-home-having culture-folks [i.e., autochthonous cultures]” he focuses in this essay into a kind of anti-Christian polemic. In fact, given Grinberg’s noted fascination with and investment in the image of Jesus, it would be more accurate to call it an attack on those European nations (ethnicities), which are Christian. And here I come to a crossroads: (two paths). I don’t believe in our folk’s further existence on Slavic soil, I don’t believe in the possibility of continuing our individuality in Europe in general. History teaches me that, 88

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and the great wakefulness: Europe has till today not accepted the Jews and it cannot allow Jews, a living people with their own way which is not Christian, upon their soil. . . . I have forgotten my heredity. But Europe denies my birth here. For many generations it keeps my genealogical certificate: Orient, so be it! In my veins flows Hebrew blood, Arab blood, Egyptian blood. So be it! I give back Europe its dress coat, its tie, its polished shoes. Indeed, my cemeteries I also give back. For free. The question is, if he is an “Oriental,” then how is Europe his home except by accident of birth? (That would call into question the very notion of “home” at issue in the essay’s title.) But by his own admission Oriental identity is an artificial construction, a congeries of “bloods” whose binding criterion is that they are neither Christian nor European. When Grinberg asserts, “I wanted to live in Europe where I was born—I wasn’t allowed,” this is not the image of a homelandscape as conceived by the literary traditions of contemporary Yiddish or Hebrew, nor is it a participation in the discourses of heterochthony, critique, or praise. Indeed, Grinberg so continuously yokes the very notion of soil (erd) to the word “Slavic” that he never allows any room—apart from desire—for the kinds of associations of “home” we have so far seen with the shtetl, the village, and the natural landscapes of Jewish Eastern Europe. Grinberg’s antipathy to Slavicness forces him into the position of believing that a “home of pains” can really be no home at all. And so for Grinberg the cemetery—that most evocative and powerful of literary tropes of emplacement (and heterotopia par excellence)—is simply a geographic (or lithographic) emblem of an outmoded Europeanness. More permanent, ironically, for his own sense of identity is that cultural birth certificate (which he calls a “genealogical certificate”) which the dominant nations of Europe keep on file, like some grim cultural bureaucracy, to prove and maintain the Jews’ otherness. It is in Grinberg’s first volume of Hebrew poetry, published two years after his arrival in Palestine, that the issues come both full circle and reconfigured. The last section of that book, Eymah gedolah ve-yare’ach (Great Terror and a Moon; 1925), is entitled “Yerushalayim shel matah” (“Earthly Jerusalem”). That section consists of two poemas: the eponymous first poema, followed by “Kfitsat ha-derekh” (“The Miraculous Shortcut”). In content it is a poeticized version of the essay “Home of Pains,” moving from the woes of European Jewry, to their barbarous treatment at the hands of the Slavs, to the flight of Jews to America, and ultimately the poet’s own decision to go to Palestine 89

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refracted through a messianic vision of Shabbetai Tsvi. Where Grinberg had spoken of being at a crossroads (poroshas drokhim) now he describes the “miraculous shortcut” (kfitsat ha-derekh) as the figurative transport to both a synoptic view of European Jewish history and his own physical move to Palestine. While the phrase is used as part of the world of wonderworking rabbis and holy men, there are also literary echoes. Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s deceptively simple tale “Ma’aseh ha-ez” (“The Fable of the Goat”) was first published during that writer’s own sojourn in Berlin after the First World War. A complicated Zionist parable, it tells of a young man’s miraculous journey from East European shtetl through a cave directly to Safed, while pursuing a goat whose Holy Land–fed milk had been a balm to the man’s ailing father. In a Maupassantlike tragedy of errors the son remains in Safed and the message to his family, cleverly concealed in the goat’s ear, goes unnoticed and is rendered moot by a precipitous and grief-stricken decision to slaughter the message-bearing goat. While the story has been read as a cautionary tale about cultural preparedness for immigration to Palestine, Grinberg’s gesture to the image underlines his belief in his own self-perception as social prophet and pioneer. However, it is out of two literary tropes of “home” in Jewish Eastern European literature that Grinberg fashions his own forward path in Hebrew poetry. The first is the image of the shtetl itself. Grinberg does not make a fetish out of space, as his caustic opinions about “Slavic soil” (slavishe erd in Yiddish, and admat ha-slavim in Hebrew) make abundantly clear. Personal connections to the shtetl, then, are predictably absent. The shtetlekh do reappear in the poem, but most often as sites of pogroms. In one important exception Grinberg imagines the life of the Jewish immigrants to America (whom he views with disdain as opposed to the numerically far fewer immigrants to Palestine): And in New York—mourning and his bread is like vinegar and his face is gloomy in the shop: swelling on Sabbath eves like the sick crying bird: —Dear shtetlekh across the sea! Wonderful food and tablecloths like snow! What kind of smell is the straw in the bed! This is Tisha b’Av for him on Sabbath eves——This is the jackal’s complaint in wondrous New York! The dismal life working in the stereotypical “shop” is punctuated by Sabbaths whose joy has been converted into mourning by those realities. And even the 90

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bird, a typical folk song motif, underlines this inversion. In Bialik’s famous poem “El ha-tsipor” (“To the Bird”; 1891) a miserable young East European Jew pines for a better life than his dreary traditional existence and asks the cheerfully singing bird outside his window to tell of the hale and hearty conditions in the Holy Land, which he believes the bird must recently have visited. Here in Grinberg’s poem, however, the bird is not joyful and robust but “sick and crying”; it does not bring news of the Holy Land to Eastern Europe but nostalgia for Eastern Europe to America. (Halpern’s depiction of Zlotshov is of course a corrective to these stereotypes of American nostalgia for the shtetl.) Even the lament is phrased as the transformation of the Sabbath into Tisha b’Av, the holiday commemorating numerous tragedies which befell the Jewish people, most apposite here being the destruction of both of the Temples in Jerusalem. This fast day is accompanied by the threnodious recitation of the Book of Lamentations. This lyrical association with the destruction in Jerusalem is an important connection to the second literary trope, namely the figuration of Jerusalem itself. In a brief but telling section of the poem’s rambling narrative—which connects the historical antiepic of the preceding pages to the final messianic “rehabilitation” of Shabbetai Tsvi—the poet apostrophizes the city of Vilne (Vilnius), which he calls “Vilne of Lithuania” (vilna de-lita). This refers to Vilne’s well-known epithet, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” (yerushalayim de-lita). Grinberg’s substitution takes the epithet literally and explores what happens when that cognomen is invested with precisely the Jerusalemite interpretation of the shtetl with which our discussion began: And I am leading it [i.e., Vilna] with a trembling hand from the land of Mickiewicz, transporting it to Canaan, setting it up securely on the bank of Kineret near Teverya; And I give the Vilija to the Jordan to be a sister, if once it mourned, And the two of them are faithful to Kineret in holiness—— And if it is so—why can I not lead all the shtetlekh of Israel from the land of the Slavs when they are Jerusalemites thus on Sabbaths?! Instead of Jerusalem being recreated in exile and instantiated in every shtetl, it is Europe’s Jerusalem which will be transported to Palestine! And its river—as we have seen, an important locus of Jewish spatial thinking—will be paired with the Jordan. 91

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Far more has been left out of this sketch—and a sketch it is—than has or could be included. (The city as home, for example, is an immensely important topic.) While this chapter has ranged over a number of different yet interrelated topics, its circular trajectory has brought us back to Jerusalem, as both spatial and temporal locus. David Frishman’s famous assertion that one could “reconstruct” the shtetl based on Abramovitsh’s major works alone has by now been set aside on historical as well as cultural grounds. The importance (and indeed the problem) of the Jerusalemite trope of the shtetl and Jewish home space more generally is that it is a modernized and more sophisticated version of literary ethnography. Grinberg’s portative Vilne is the kind of inversion which tests that image. “Grounded” as it is in futurity—not the stereotypical Yiddishist “hereness” (doikayt) or “nowness” (atsindikayt), nor the Hebraist plaiting of history onto that prospective reality—Grinberg’s is a troubling meditation on the “at-homeness” which the poems attended to in this chapter have tried to define and work out. This literary diasporism—the attenuation of mythic bonds to the idea of a never-experienced place as home in favor of other models of intimate connection to place—is a richer seam in Jewish letters than has generally been credited, and one which can only serve to enhance our picture of the complicated relationships between Jewish literature and the image of home so fraught in its pages.

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3 temporaesthesia

Introduction One of the most interesting and theoretically challenging intersections of time and space in the poetry at the heart of this book is the aesthetic mixture of the metaphors used to describe them. In the concept of temporaesthesia isolated in the following pages the creative potential of the technique of synaesthesia, notably used to great effect by Romantic poets, is taken to the next theoretical level; in it modernism sees a tool to challenge and reformulate the categories of language itself. And by this challenge are uncovered penetrating insights into how Jews come to understand and mediate their relationship to time and to space. What the present chapter offers is a way of reading these metaphorical relationships through the voices of but a few of its most adept expositors. Synaesthesia is that species of metaphor which uses the vocabulary of the data of one sense to describe the data of another sense—for example, “a green smell” or “a soft flavor.” And as a novel poetic technique synaesthesia has a respectable pedigree in the Western literary tradition, featuring prominently in modernist poetry. The development of European Expressionisms, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe in the years surrounding the First World War, involved a complex array of innovations of form, treatments of the self, and philosophies of language. Because of its conceptual sophistication, synaesthesia also began to be employed to startling effect by modernist poets intrigued by blurring the boundaries between the senses (boundaries commonly understood to be clear-cut and definitive). In general terms, “[t]he adjective,” writes Richard Sheppard about that fundamental building block of Expressionist metaphor, “the principal agent of description, was to change function: instead of describing the impression made by the external world, it was to bring forth the hidden metaphorical dimensions of the poet’s subjective 93

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vision.” Synaesthetic metaphors bear a considerable load in such subjective visions. Building on this characterization of modernism’s figurative language, the purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, after a preliminary discussion of the literary and linguistic foundation of synaesthesia, I will develop the idea of temporaesthesia, that is, the perception of time as an element in the concrete sensory world of modernist metaphor. I will argue, second, that this synaesthetic category is a potentially potent tool for assessing not only a particular poetic vision, but also a poet’s view of history informed by it. One outcome of this discussion is to highlight once again the distinct importance of these spatiotemporal issues to Jewish poetics. Though synaesthesia is a recognizable feature of many modernist literary trends and movements, it is in Expressionism that the spatial and temporal ramifications of synaesthetic metaphors are on clearest display. Expressionist and Expressionist-inflected poetry presents the emotional deformation of a perceived reality imposed back onto that reality. It is a poetry, in other words, which seeks to turn what is subjective to the perceiver into objective reality. Frames of reference in the poetic world were thus liberated from the representational conventions of Impressionist or Symbolist language. Moreover, Expressionism was a markedly “decentered” movement. Speaking of German Expressionism, for example, Neil H. Donahue notes that “[t]he atmosphere of subversive excitement was not centered in any one city, as was the French avant-garde in Paris (where Expressionists were also active), but rather it spread through regional cities”; it was an electric and eclectic atmosphere with “collective but disparate dimensions.” This was as much the case for the Yiddish Expressionist incarnations as the German ones. However, whereas this decentering was symptomatic of the literary cultural attitude of the Germanlanguage poets, for the Yiddish poets, as we will see, it was also a thematic nexus. The following portrait of the spatiotemporal potential of this poetic technique is structured in two parts. In the first and primary section I will examine the works of two important poets: Perets Markish, one of the premier Yiddish Expressionists, and Georg Trakl, one of the early German Expressionists. The choice is not fortuitous. Trakl, who lived from 1887 to 1914 and spent most of his life in his native Austria, was a key figure in early German Expressionism; his poetry is marked by a minimalism of subtly altering permutations of imagery and language. Markish (1895–1952), on the other hand, lived a remarkably peripatetic life, sojourning in many of the centers of Eastern European Jewish 94

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cultural life. In his early career—the focus of this chapter, from roughly 1917 to 1922—he produced some of the most recognizable works of Yiddish Expressionist poetry (alongside Moyshe Kulbak, Meylekh Ravitsh, and the maximalist Uri Tsvi Grinberg), often marked by a similarly compact set of themes, imagery, and language. Not only are these two poets’ literary lives bookended by the First World War in Eastern Europe—Trakl was an army medic who died by his own hand in 1914 after witnessing the war’s unspeakable brutality on the battlefield, and Markish, who fought and was wounded at the front, published his first Yiddish poem in 1917—but their poetries share an additional affinity in their synaesthetic imagery. In the second section, a brief coda to this discussion, I will examine a few of the early poems of the Hebrew poet and novelist David Fogel (1891–1944), a writer with a noted affinity for the minimalist Austrian Expressionism of Trakl. In Fogel we find both a Hebrew inflection of this spatiotemporal aesthetics and a distinctive (if to some a controversial) voice able to test the extent to which some of the assertions about temporaesthesia as part of a Jewish thematics may or may not be taken. In a number of the poems of all three of these poets the sensory perception of time itself is featured as a central element in many of their metaphors. This temporaesthesia, or using temporal perception as part of the sensory apparatus and therefore making it available for synaesthetic metaphors, is important because, in addition to being an element in an artistic repertoire, it opens a window on how time and space are used actively to construct a poetic vision of the world. Moreover, returning to the primary comparison of this chapter, what gets cast in strong relief by setting Markish and Trakl next to one another is the representative place each one occupies as the pole of a spectrum. In their use of temporaesthesia, Trakl by and large temporalizes space while Markish starkly spatializes time: of Trakl, the completely “grounded” poet, it has been noted that “landscapes not only provide the dominant source of vocabulary for [his] work, but that they also form the most meaningful living space for his speakers.” In point of fact, in her important work on Trakl’s use of landscape imagery, Hildegard Steinkamp finds that Trakl “chooses landscape words according to the principle of the experiential proximity of phenomena (contiguity), and then, using this selection (of landscape words), structures two coherent and dominant thematic sequences, i.e., space and time.” She is ultimately led to conclude that “[c]haracteristic for Trakl, however, is the structuring of time by 95

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idiolectal means, that is, by means of landscape words.” The metaphors which she chooses to analyze, though, are not synaesthetic; rather, they set up correlative or parallel frames of reference. Such a construction sets up a conceptual move to synaesthesia, and more specifically temporaesthesia. For Markish, on the other hand, at least geographically speaking, groundedness in the landscape featured far less prominently. Instead, one of the central elements of his “lyrolect” (that is, those elements of a poet’s idiolect which transcend mere repetition and constitute individual vortices of shifting thematic and semantic value) was the word hefker. Originally meaning “ownerless or abandoned property,” it came to mean both what was licentious and lawless (negative) and what was completely free and unfettered (positive); in this early period, Markish’s preference was for the latter valorization. This devil-may care freedom was emblematic of a peripatetic poet inspired by the promise of the Revolution and reared on traditional Jewish “exterritoriality” (in Bal Makhshoves’s use of the term). Taking these two poets as such poles provides a benchmark against which the use of this technique may be evaluated in the poetry of other Expressionists, or modernists more generally. Although what emerge are two distinctly different and complicated techniques for coping with spatial and temporal relationships, it is ultimately through this affinity that we find at least one way of accessing these poetries’ understanding of history. Trakl, for his part, could “stand poised above” history; he was able to develop a finely calibrated vocabulary for his hallucinatory sensescapes precisely because there was a particular kind of cultural connection to place, a conventional grounding which anchored the poetry. This is why even such a powerful war poem as “Grodek,” written after experiencing the horrors at the eponymous battle, “appears to be perhaps the most impersonal front-line poem ever written” (my emphasis). Furthermore, when Steinkamp writes, “It is in the ‘blue hour’—in the characteristic leisure of his mental and physical passage through the landscape—that Trakl’s speakers gain insight into the peril threatening their existence,” she is pointing out a fundamental temporalization of space. Take, for example, the first half of Trakl’s “Der Abend” (“The Evening”): With the shapes of dead heroes You fill, moon, The forests growing quiet, 96

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Crescent moon— With the soft embraces Of the lovers, The shades of celebrated times The decaying boulders all around. The forest is not still and silent; rather it is at that hazy crepuscular moment when everything is in the process of growing quiet. For all that sensory data, the forest is reckoned by time. Not only that, but the moon—described visually—fi lls this time-space with the “shades of celebrated times.” Such “celebrated times” (berühmter Zeiten) foreground an historical or even epic temporality punctuated by the celebrated acts of the heroes mentioned earlier in the poem. These “times” (in the plural), however, exist by virtue of the shadow cast by the moon’s light. History is thus regulated by the lunar shadows of the nocturnal forest. For Markish, however, there was no option to stand poised above, certainly in no meaningfully cultural way as for Trakl. Groundlessness and exile as literary principles are as culturally organizing as conventional landscape was for Trakl and many other German Expressionists. See, for example, how this is expressed in the “Proclamation” which opened the first issue of the Yiddish Expressionist literary journal Albatros (Warsaw, 1922), edited by the poet Uri Tsvi Grinberg: “A bridge, four walls, and a ceiling for the homeless, poetindividuals, in their foreign-land wandering around in the various centers of the Jewish-people’s exterritoriality, literary dissolution.” Placing the “poet individual” alongside “Jewish people” sets the individual, however autonomously conceived, within a folk or national discourse. Moreover, the use of “wandering,” “exterritoriality,” and “literary dissolution” in such quick succession forces a connection between literariness and actual wandering; which is to say, in an almost Steinerian way, that wandering is almost a precondition to Jewish literary creativity. In this context, how different from Trakl’s outlook, then, is Markish’s poem “Mit hoyker afn hartsn” (“With a Hump upon the Heart”) from 1922: With a hump upon the heart, with a hump upon the back —You look, watchmaker, like you should have four shoulders! And time upon them grows like wild moss on boulders With the thin dust of dark rafters and pavements. 97

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In a complicated poem about the abject difficulty of maintaining a sense of self under the “grotesque” tyranny of the modern world, time is explicitly described twice. First, it is figured as a doubly hunchbacked watchmaker (modernity’s weird Geppetto). Then time is presented as a mossy boulder, which is about as natural and concrete a spatialized image as one might imagine. Notice, too, the very different treatment in each of these poems of the key cognate for “boulders”: German Felsen, Yiddish feldzn. But where temporality in Trakl’s worldview is imposed (or reflected) onto the physical natural world, Markish’s image is at once a simile removed from that relationship while being more organically connected. The complexity of these two spatiotemporal vocabularies is the core of this chapter.

Modernist Notions of Time and Disunity It seems clear that the loss of perceived order, whose ultimate symbol was the First World War, offered a foundational element for the larger vocabulary of “disunity” so prevalent in early modernist thinking. (Consider, for example, the “prophetic” martial poems of Trakl or Georg Heym published prior to the First World War to see how atmospheric this was.) It is a concept which touched all areas of life, from the artistic and philosophical to the social, political, and ideological. Focusing, however, on only one of the fundamental perceptual constructs, time, we see that, again in Sheppard’s words, “[b]ecause a principle of unity is felt to have been lost, the present seems to lose its organic connection with the past and the future. Time becomes a series of fragmented instants, and a sense of continuity gives way to discontinuity.” Such literary conceits as the vignette, the slice of life perceived as the coupd’oeil (or in German Expressionist parlance, the Augenblick), a glance at a passing reality, give way to the “fragmented instant,” “discontinuous” from its contextual reality, broken away, fractured (to use another good modernist Leitwort). As we saw in the introduction, these are ultimately not only literary conceits. They form the conceptual underpinning for the “momentary” theory of temporal constructions. Refocusing the lens once again, this time on Expressionism, we constantly see language exploring the notion of the discontinuous instant, and not only on the individual perceptual level, but as part of a strikingly cleft view of history. As Sheppard remarks, again in his essay “German Expressionism,” “the 98

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Expressionists frequently stood poised above the twentieth century, unsure of their commitment to it, simultaneously looking back to an ideal past and forward to a Utopian future.” This account presents us with a discord between the notions of instantial fracture, itself part of the loss of a perceived “organic” unity, and the self-dissociation of the poet from that fractured moment and extending his sight forward and backward to the “utopian” and the “ideal,” the distant endpoints in an organic, cultural (and even mythically constructed) conception of history. In that sense, though, these poet-individuals truly are “no-where,” praising the folly of modern man’s attempt to regain the unity, or better yet order, that was somehow lost, and where the grim and umbral conventionalities of language render one incapable of even expressing that feeling. One way of approaching this issue of discord is by positing a different way of expressing the perception of time among the Expressionists, one which presents a kind of synchronic ordering of a vision of both the past and of the future. To use an archaeological metaphor, we are dealing with tel time. In his Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot—not an Expressionist to be sure, but reflective of a modernist propensity—weighs in thus: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. The fundamental disconnectedness of time rests precisely in the poet’s ability to “stand poised above,” where the standpoint occupies a moment infected by refractions from the prism “time past” and “time future.” It is all an instant in itself, both perceived and contextualized in itself. It is the perfect fragment, dissociated, but still bearing the outline of its former host. As if to confirm this Janus-faced concept, consider the title of an important collection of German Expressionist poetry, Menschheitsdämmerung. The word Dämmerung is in German an enantioseme (that is, a word bearing semantically within itself its own opposite), and so the title can be translated both as “twilight of humanity” and as “dawn of humanity.” Yet the poetry contained within the anthology is poetry of the Expressionist moment, looking simultaneously to both creation and destruction. The title’s cultural echo is the Götterdämmerung, the “twilight of the Gods.” Indeed, even Wagner’s Ring, whose 99

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final opera is called Götterdämmerung, ends in the same place and situation as it began, coming full circle. It is time as a mythic, cyclical process.

Theoretical Framework Moving away from time briefly and back to synaesthesia, in his article “Romanticism and Synaesthesia,” Stephen de Ullmann proposes a descriptive model for synaesthetic metaphors in English Romantic poetry. First, de Ullmann designates a “hierarchy” within the sensorium in which he ranks, from lower to higher, the realms of touch, heat, taste, scent, sound, and sight. Despite the traditional division into five senses, de Ullmann gives “heat” its own separate designation within the sensorium. While heat seems to operate as a subset of the tactile realm, adding it separately to the sensory inventory permits a degree of liberty with regard to how one construes (or feels permitted to construe) the sensory world. De Ullmann would not have included a discrete calorific category if it were not felt to have been of particular importance in English Romantic poetry. The traditional sensory division therefore can and should be refined in light of the particular poetic idiolect (and indeed lyrolect) of a poet as well as the larger literary context in which he or she writes. On this ground one can well interpret the sensory world of modernist poetry as characterized by a set of sense perceptions of specific importance to it, extending to a greater or lesser degree the traditional sensory schematization, depending on the poet. The second element of de Ullmann’s model is the assertion that one can make generalizations about trends in the directionality of synaesthetic transfers. Directionality is part of the tenor-and-vehicle vocabulary applied to metaphors, of which de Ullmann notes that “the destination will always be provided by the element about which the poet is saying something.” This is to say that the origin or “source” of the synaesthetic transfer is the complement, or the modifier (the vehicle), and the destination or “terminus” (the tenor) is the actual object of description. His contention, then, is that there are discernible trends in which senses more often act as sources and which senses more often act as termini. Summarizing de Ullmann’s findings, in the case of the Romantics it seems that most transfers are from lower to higher senses; that they originate in the tactile field; and that their terminus is the auditory one. Whether this is borne out in modernist poetry remains to be seen, but it does provide us with a prior methodology to bear in mind when analyzing cases of 100

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synaesthesia. Based on a representative assortment of synaesthetic examples, a number of general instructive trends become apparent for our two poets. By and large, in both Markish and Trakl, their sense transfers conform to de Ullmann’s observation that most transfers move from lower to higher levels in the sensorium. After that, however, the ability to generalize begins to break down. For Markish, taste → sight transfers appear to be slightly more numerous, whereas for Trakl, sight → sound transfers, contrary to the “lower to higher” generalization, are rather more abundant than any other single category. These tendencies are confirmed in an interesting way by linguistic theory in the notion of figure and ground as presented by Len Talmy in his Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Terminologically speaking, the figure is the variable element, the focus of attention, and the ground is the relatively static element, the orientation point of the figure. Taking Talmy’s illustrative sentence “The bike is near the house,” the bike is the figure and the house is the ground. Yet were we to take the sentence “The house is near the bike,” this sentence strikes us as somehow odd, due to the fact that there are “ ‘associated characteristics’ of Figure and Ground that tend to correlate it with [their] definitional properties.” Yet these “associated characteristics” are set in terms of definitional ones, and if context reorganizes the conditions of the definitional characteristics, the relations of the associated characteristics may also change; that is why “The house is near the bike” sounds strange but is still permissible. Later on Talmy asserts that “[a]s part of the system of spatiotemporal homology that is found in language . . . the reference of Figure and Ground to the relative location of objects in space can be generalized to the relative location of events in time.” With regard to our poets, then, they seem to have taken this perception about language one step further. In what we might call a “synaesthetic” move, both space and time become contemporaries, the one figure and the other ground in the same image. We have already seen how modernist poets, especially Expressionist ones, fractured continuous or unified time into “fragmented instants” and discontinuous moments. In accordance with Talmy’s “spatiotemporal homology” these moments become spatial, sensory, aesthetic units. And insofar as the senses, inhering in objects, are spatially organized, I have termed this transposition of time into a spatial continuum “temporaesthesia.” We can move on to make a qualified generalization, à la de Ullmann, about the tendency of the transfers which we find in Markish and Trakl. That is to say, once time can be understood as participating in sensory metaphors, 101

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temporaesthesia too can be analyzed in terms of any such trends in directionality. For Markish, as for many of the Yiddish modernists, Yiddish is conceived of as “a language without a land.” Put another way, the ground is the lack of groundedness, at least according to the conventions of Yiddish language and culture. Given the “spatiotemporal homology,” time comes to occupy the open ground. Therefore, one effect of this “deterritorialization” (or what both Bal Makhshoves and Grinberg call “exterritorialization”) for Markish is that the “conventional” ground for his temporaesthesiae is time, thus inverting a more “standard” locative, or even territorial, ground as we more often find in Trakl.

Synaesthesia Before beginning to look specifically at examples of temporaesthesia, it will be instructive to examine a few instances of sensory metaphors as well as synaesthesia proper in Markish and Trakl for two reasons: first, to get a feel for their styles and to gauge, where possible, how that technique is oriented in their poetry; and second, to show how the idea of temporaesthesia I am developing can be arrived at as a legitimate modernist technique on theoretical grounds. To begin let us look at a short passage from Markish’s phantasmagoric and fantastic long poem Di Kupe (The Heap). Written in response to the Ukrainian pogroms unleashed by the Civil War in 1919, and set in the town of Horodishtsh, Di Kupe presents a ghastly Expressionist vision of a heap of decaying corpses, victims of the brutal slaughter. In the poem’s fifth section, in one of myriad nightmare visions of the actions of the personified heap, we read: Slowly! The pile is climbing to lick up the heavens like a plate of cloudy jelly, And to suck out the world’s scraped, hollow bone,— Red craziness from her gushes out over distances and over seas. “Craziness” is not itself a concrete object of perception. Nevertheless here it is described as red, associated with the “red snows” that cover the top of the heap of bodies, bloody with the massacre. Indeed, this is the same blood with which the speaker of the poem orders the “wind-pilgrims”—those passing breezes personified as if on some holy mission—to anoint their wings. The poem pres102

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ents an image of the blood as transferred to the winds themselves in their peregrinations over the heap, seemingly as an element of some gruesome rite. In Trakl’s somber, and less bloody, poem “Trompeten” (“Trumpets”)—in which the sounding of trumpets rolls over the sad landscape, causing even the shivering of a graveyard—we find a similar conjunction of “craziness” with sense data. The end of the poem reads: Dancers arise from a black wall; Banners of scarlet, laughing, craziness, trumpets. By means of a modernist catalog, the scene on the wall associatively pulls together four “objects,” three of which are “sensory” in the traditional sense: “banners of scarlet” (visual); “laughing” and “trumpets” (both auditory). The fourth element—“craziness”—shares in the redness of the banners, whose context bears hints of religion but is predominantly martial. We are thus presented with two dominant associations: (1) death (and possibly bloodshed, depending on how far the repeated image of scarlet banners may be taken), especially in light of the earlier sepulchral imagery of the poem; and (2) triumph. This image, however, is not necessarily a rarity, bearing in mind an example such as Markish’s poem “Du, oysgehonikte af turemshpits fun sdom” (“You, Enhonied on the Tower Top of Sodom”), where we read, “in red, crazy nights,” which extends the associative field of “redness-craziness” to that of desire and sexuality. Insofar as it is difficult to construe “craziness,” or insanity, as a member of the sensorium per se, these are not examples of synaesthesia except in a nebulous way. Instead they are illustrative as a preliminary glimpse of the complexities of individual sense data, as in the “red-crazy” pair. What is most instructive in these examples is the effect of the ostensibly awkward application of a sensory description. This discussion could refer to any area of the sensorium, but I have begun with color insofar as it is the most marked (and most remarked upon) sense in this regard. Françoise Meltzer, in her article “Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse,” speaks of a shift in weight, in symbolist poetry, of a color term from its “secondary” rôle of attribution to one of much greater importance when the noun of which it is predicated is “abstract”: “Since color itself is void of any ideational content, when it refers to an abstraction, a sort of semantic boomerang effect is produced: instead of intensifying the object it should modify, the color returns to itself, and 103

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suddenly stands out in isolation. In this way a dissonance is produced.” This may also be applied to our examples above, but there, instead of isolating the color, the “boomerang effect” heightens the associative force of the sense term. Meltzer addresses this “dissonance” technique further: “Dissonance is also achieved by the symbolists when they force the color to modify an inappropriate concrete noun—a general technique of which synaesthesia would form a subcategory.” At issue is not just the bold or striking metaphor; the salient feature is the dissonance itself which is designed to pull one up short. Shimon Sandbank discusses this technique in his article “David Fogel, Georg Trakl— and Colors.” Again, color is accepted as the most readily approachable of the senses with regard to literary analysis. According to Sandbank, we learn of Expressionist poetry that “the effort to make color more expressive begins first of all with an attempt to neutralize its accepted symbolic value.” The metaphoricization of color—and this can be well extended to all of the senses— happens in one of three ways: (1) a color is predicated of a visual object incorrectly, for instance (using Sandbank’s examples) a “black seagull,” insofar as seagulls are not naturally black; (2) a color is predicated of a nonvisual, but nevertheless sensorily perceivable, object, for example a “black tune”; or (3) a color is predicated of a “non-object,” which is to say something which is not properly perceivable by the senses, for example “black despair.” In the first and second options, the sources of the transfers are still sense data, whereas in the third option this is not the case. Yet there is an important affinity between these two subcategories, namely that certain objects or concepts have conventionalized associations. For instance, in Sandbank’s article there is a distinction between a conventionally yoked pair, such as “black despair,” and a pair which is not conventionally yoked, such as a “black promise.” The forms of Expressionism with which we are dealing here seem to take a great interest, on the one hand, in establishing these nonconventional connections, and, on the other, in shattering the conventional ones, or at least playing with them in novel ways. In other words, for the Expressionists dissonance realigns perception. Let us look at some further examples of this transitional form of synaesthesia in order to fill in the picture we have begun to draw, before moving on from there to the depiction of time. Here is Markish’s poem “Fun torbes . . .” (“From Sacks . . .”): Sails sew themselves from sacks, They tie themselves to little oaks like blisters, 104

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And drink a storm with their nails, And have nothing to lose! . . . They shuffle you, twisting inside out, And with you they gauge A storm, As with oars, —Who thinks: is it near or far? Who asks the time On a dial, sealed with paper? Oh, when from brown hunger the peril Will flutter on the sails, as on the flags,— Let me at least spit at a New York or Warsaw street On her adorned, secondhand dealing, palm. Both of the synaesthesiae here have taste in some way as their termini, the first (“drink a storm with their nails”) originating in the tactile realm, the second (“brown hunger”) originating in the visual realm. The overlapping metaphorical vocabulary constitutes a kind of synaesthetic vortex. As for the first—“to drink with the nails”—this synaesthesia engages the vocabulary of consumption, of fulfilling a basic biological craving or need, but is associatively extended to the domain of artisanry. As was mentioned in the note above, “with the nails” is an idiomatic usage indicating a struggle or great effort. What Markish does, though, is to peel back the conventionalized semantic value of the idiom, revealing once again the literal meaning of “with the nails.” In this way the sense of ardor is brought to bear, but alongside it the language of the poem likewise maintains the explicitly tactile imagery associated with sewing craft—“sails sew themselves,” “they tie themselves.” As the sails “drink a storm” this becomes an ingestion fraught with peril. They are drinking “tooth and nail,” as it were, with their claws even, a struggle for survival. As for the image of drinking as a source for gustational synaesthesiae—such as we see in lines from Markish like “But the thirst burns” and in lines from Trakl such as “Your lips drink the coolth of the blue rock-fountain”—we find that it is susceptible to “collocability,” what de Ullmann calls “stale epithets,” or even, as discussed earlier with regard to Sandbank, the “conventionalisms” 105

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whose habitual usage fossilizes the image and “kills” the metaphor. That is to say that there is something in the nature of the particular senses (or intersensory associations) that tends to freeze a synaesthetic transfer into set linguistic collocations, thereby hamstringing the metaphor’s potential, or at least its longterm potential. What is nice about the earlier Markish example (“drink a storm with their nails”) is that in it the dormant metaphorical force of the Yiddish idiom has been awakened and reinvigorated. Its very potency lies in its conflation of inanimacy with both craft and desire. Now, returning to the poem, danger (“peril”) is a hungry beast, never seemingly to be sated. It uses the sails to ride the storm, made emblematic (“flags”), hungry for something, brownly hungry. The use of a short synaesthetic phrase such as “brown hunger” is a very good example of the kind of modernist linguistic experimentation which reinterprets the nature of the noun-adjective relationship, as we have seen before. Looking, though, at the next to last stanza, the question “who asks the time . . . ?” is an even bolder experiment. The instant of the poem not only has no general context, but it seems pointedly to assert that at least the temporal context is in some way outside of the experiential purview of the poem’s “actors.” That moment is everything and everything relevant is in that moment. Time’s passing—that is, dynamic temporality understood as the primary structural framework for ordering and understanding our experiences—is somehow being reckoned differently, though in this case not in an explicit but rather an atmospheric way. The modernist “moment” approaches traditional temporality. At the end of the poem “Vi zangen . . .” (“Like Ears of Corn . . .”) in Di Kupe, there is a short Expressionist rhetorical question about the conspicuous lack of a response from heaven, a sign, a drop of rain or a quick flutter of wind: And sunsets ruminate trampled grass, Like the small bones of children’s wee hands, —Will no miracle yet happen? In this seemingly eternal present of signlessness, this waste of ubiquitous infertility, where at the end of each stanza the supplicant asks whether some sign of water or fresh wind will come, the request for a miracle is the only one phrased as a negative. It is a consciously unreal favor, miracles being the stuff of the mythic (and unrecoverable) past, not the urgent, decaying present. And 106

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the synaesthetic property of the verse, whereby the visual sunset engages in the gustatory activity of cud-chewing, serves to heighten the effect: the only nourishment that can go on is in stepping over the sensory borders, in wresting sustenance from impossible sources, like water from stone. It is as if in the sunsets—the pluralization marking a repeated end time—one might imagine the tiny bone of a newly skeletal child’s hand crunching as the crisp stalks of grass in a sheep’s mouth. The complicated sensory world is not only visual and gustatory, but also calorific (in the sun’s heat and desiccating force), auditory (crunching of bones and of cud), and temporal (the plural sunsets). The macabre effect of this multilevel synaesthetic nexus is heightened by the traditionally tranquil, even edenic, associations with cud-chewing livestock. In Trakl’s poem “De Profundis,” published in a 1913 collection, almost exactly this breed of synaesthesia is employed. It is a dark poem, which begins by describing a sad evening when Over by the hamlet The gentle orphan girl collects scanty ears of corn. Her eyes graze round and gold in the twilight And her womb waits for the heavenly bridegroom. While returning home The shepherds found the sweet body Decomposing in the thorn bush. Even without the palpable gestures to Christianity, how jarring is the imagery juxtaposed in these stanzas. There is no infertility, at least not in the first stanza. The orphan maiden collects the earth’s fruits and waits for the moment of her conceiving, of the beginning of her fecundity. And the source of that fertility is the miraculous, celestial act, seemingly a Marian reference. Of particular interest is the image which Trakl here employs, namely of her very eyes grazing, ruminating, in the twilight—where in Markish’s poem the grazing is done by the twilight itself. In point of fact, in Markish’s poem it is not one crepuscular moment but rather “sunsets” which chew the bony cud. The image therefore not only includes the visual element but at the same time incorporates and emphasizes the temporal aspect of the activity, continued over an unknown, perhaps innumerable, number of evenings. Trakl’s image, though, does not involve that yoked concept of vision and time. The sunset is not an 107

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actor at all, but a reflection in the consuming eye of the orphan, a background of sorts. Though she is waiting, it is only through that single crepuscular event—twilight (Dämmerung), again using this modernist-marked term as the liminal moment par excellence. As the poem pivots on that twilit event—the waiting of the fertile womb— we find in the next stanza her ultimate infertility, her death. No causal connections are drawn, merely the contiguity of sweetness and decay, and we are to assume no offspring born. Again, through a visual-gustatory synaesthetic incongruity we see a powerful play on fertility, twilight, and desire. The very next stanza, even, when we are introduced to the narrator, the shadow, we see a similar abutting of the divine refusal of revelation with a gustatory image: A shadow am I far from dark villages. God’s silence I drank from the fountain of the forest glade. To drink (gustatory) the silence (auditory) of God is to engage poetically God’s own dissociation from his creation and to ask the question of how even to inquire, the disjuncture being incomprehensible. This dissociation is intensified in that “silence” is the absence of sound, the absence of auditory data. Drinking silence in this way means drinking nothing. (Just as “being” a shadow means being nothing, certainly as reflected by the explicit disconnection from whatever is casting that shadow.) Perhaps this “empty” consumption is the only kind of gustation of which a shadow, a being without body or corporeal existence, is capable.

Temporaesthesia In these examples of sensory interplay we have seen how both Markish’s and Trakl’s curiosity about time percolates through their imagery. We may now turn to cases where the transfers are more robust, and where full-fledged temporaesthesia constitutes some of the central imagery. Let us begin with one of Markish’s more stalwart examples, the poem “Af shtume vent fun leydike gevelber” (“On the Silent Walls of Vacant Stores”) from 1922. This formally structured sonnet, part of the distinctly more frenetic long poem Radyo 108

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(Radio), is with regard to content an instance of what Chana Kronfeld has called Markish’s “chaos-art.” On the silent walls of vacant stores, With bored yawning windows over markets; Clocks hang, hairy like hacked-off heads of calves, And lick emptiness with the pendulum’s back-and forth . . . An instant there—on the gulping side, Here an instant—and transacted already . . . And hands silently raise themselves and turn on time And quietly count the small change of floating foam . . . And houses suck earthy shoulders, just like medicinal cuppings . . . Oh, don’t fix upon me your twelve eyes, boredom-carcass, Quickly shaking here and there time itself with violence! I do not want to know when it is Past! I do not want to know what the time is! I do not want to know how old I am . . . This is a poem about time, about the violence it inflicts on the reality of a modern world obsessed with its regimentation, about the cavernous emptiness left in its wake. The final stanza—immediately after the perceiver’s “I” is first heard and when it finally gives itself full voice—is designed to unsettle our perception of our relation to time. The boredom-carcass, that grotesque creature conjured up when time is wasted in the throes of ennui, when efficiency and mercantile profitability (“vacant stores,” “transacted already”) are lost, violently shakes time and alters its perception. This is what Sheppard speaks of when he refers to “a recurrent suspicion of the modern mind,” namely “that, variously, the industrial order, or mass democracy, or concepts of efficiency, have destroyed the still point within the spirit and that order has been sacrificed to formless and entropic anarchy.” As a result of this anarchic disorder, the “I” rants that he no longer wants to perceive, neither to be the prey to the clock, the all-seeing “twelve eyes,” like some providential Medusa with an eye for every hour, nor to be set along the inorganic, mechanized time line of life. Nevertheless, he still stops short of 109

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calling for the fracture of time, the dissociation of the moment from its environment. The instants themselves are in cahoots with the run of time. It is rather for the imperception of temporality that he calls. The danger, as he sees it, is depicted precisely in the synaesthetic moment where “clocks . . . lick emptiness with the pendulum’s back-and forth.” The transfer is motivated by the resemblance of a pendulum to a tongue, but the context—the terminus is temporaesthetic and the source is gustatory, since licking is an element of the gustatory semantic field—is again a desire for satiety, a theme coursing through the whole poem. The first “instant” (oygnblik), in line 4, is concerned with swallowing. The houses—the places clocks inhabit, or the temples containing time’s idols—are also pictured as sucking like bankes (the glass globes for medicinal cupping). Th is is to say that their “sucking” is a fruitless ingestion. As in the poem “From Sacks . . . ,” Markish deploys a Yiddish idiom to highlight thematically weighty material. In this case the importance of the theme of futility is emphasized by the proverb brought to mind by the use of the uncommon word bankes: “es vet helfn vi a toytn bankes” (that will help like cupping a dead man; in idiomatic English, like a bandage for a cough). However, in denying his desire to know when a moment goes by—in effect denying the perception of time’s passage, that is, temporaesthesia—in denying his desire to know the time at all, or even his age, he is saying that his perceptions need a new organizing principle. The “lives” of moments are not to be regulated by the impersonal, nullifying force of the clocks, which is as repugnant as the matted hair on a calf ’s hacked-off head. In this way, time is the terminus, the figure, and taste is the source, the ground. The clock is described as licking emptiness with the motion of its pendulum. Each swing is an instant, a discrete concretized moment. But just as quickly, the dominance or stability relationship is inverted: time is the immutable element. However, it is nothingness/emptiness which is being desired, described “in terms of ” the monolithic temporality. In effect, the frame of discourse just outlined (taste [ground] → time [figure]) itself becomes inverted, such that time (as ground) is that in terms of which the empty set of “gustatory” data is being described (as figure). Jewish modernists were often fascinated by both the thematic and technical potential of such grounding of time. Moving to a poem with a much different feel, we read in Markish’s “Ikh zegn zikh mit dir” (“I Take My Leave of You”) from 1917:

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I take my leave of you Passing time, I don’t know you, Past, You don’t belong to me,— I dreamt you! . . . And you who are, my Future, Grown old in gray hair? I don’t belong to you, But you dream of me! I am your, insignificant “Now,” Blind! And blindly I am rich! We both of us die alike And alike are born! It is a much more aestheticizing poem (in a more literal than technical sense), personifying time past, future, and present as a lover. The sense of belonging apportions itself out inversely. The past no longer belongs insofar as it has no further perceptibility. The future is not belonged to, either because it has not yet happened or because it is too old to care (“grown old in gray hair”). The leave-taking which the poem describes is parting from time as motion (“passing time,” a dynamic temporality). The wonder of the scene is therefore the interdreamability of the two distant times, sandwiching time periods, past and future, into a dream space—the present—where “blindly I am rich,” rich with the layers of time. There is no synaesthesia here, strictly speaking; rather there is syntempora, taking the varied periods of time together, simultaneously, as in the lines of Eliot quoted earlier: Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. A slightly different treatment can be found in Markish’s poem “Veys ikh nit tsi kh’bin in dr’heym” (“Don’t Know if I’m at Home”), from 1917, as elucidated by

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Chana Kronfeld in On the Margins of Modernism. In that poem “the dynamic perception of a present moment” is physically the center of the poem’s thematic structure, roughly corresponding to the three stanzas: “space—time— space.” But the “dynamism” of this “modernist mode of presentation” cannot but cause an interfusion of these thematic elements. This is powerfully demonstrated where “[i]n the first stanza the speaker already sees himself as boundless, ‘without a beginning, without an end’ (line 7).” These terms, “beginning” (onheyb) and “end” (sof), can refer to either space or time—or both—and are therefore part of the primary shared vocabulary of the spatiotemporal homology. This apperceptual yoking constitutes a key element of temporaesthesia. We can tell that these instants are taken aesthetically, sensorily, precisely because they are being used as constituents of synaesthetic descriptions. That in mind, let us quickly look at a couple of shorter examples to fatten up this conception. From the seventh section of Markish’s long poem “Feldzn” (“Stones”) we find “Who are you, white abysses, hey, fire-flaming infinity.” These abysses, though spatial, take on a temporal cast, particularly in that umendlekhkayt—as I have translated it, “infinity”—literally means “endlessness,” a word which, as we have seen, enfolds in itself both spatial and temporal referentiality. To use the figure-ground vocabulary, we have a spatial figure and a temporal ground, inverting the more “common” poetic practice. Not only is the infinite personified (as “you”), but it is personified as a being in the present, both tense and place; it is the passage of time perceived in a present instant. Indeed, not only is it “presently” personified, but its infiniteness is described visually and calorifically as “fire-flaming,” indicating once again its ripeness for the synaesthetic harvest. In our final example, it is not an infinity, but rather a day which is the measure of a moment. In the poem “Yo-yo, mayn kop geven a mol iz . . .” (“Yes-Yes, My Head Once Was . . .”), we find the sentence “But let your day feed from my hands in the valley of desire.” The transfer from temporaesthetic to gustatory is fairly clear. What makes this case interesting is the fact that the desire and satiety valence of the taste sense, which we have documented above, is now being transferred to time as well. Markish’s temporaesthetic sensitivity shifts focus from the spatial orientation of the traditional sensorium to sensate (human) agents. This is one reason why Markish invests this energy in the personification of time.

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Turning now to Trakl, we see in his temporaesthetic movements, which are relatively no greater numerically than Markish’s, a much more static trend as compared to Markish’s pronouncedly vigorous layerings. The first example comes from the second part of his poem “Helian” (published in the same 1913 collection as “De Profundis”). Typical of Trakl, there is very little suggestion of larger time frames. In this poem, for instance, our only cues are das Schweigen (the silence) and der Abendwind (the evening wind). So we read, The hands touch the old age of bluish waters Or on a cold night the white cheeks of the sisters. The word Alter does not just indicate age or old age, but has another valence, namely antiquity. Within the timeless crepuscular moment being depicted, the purely tactile act of touching water becomes no longer a physical act insofar as what is being touched is the water’s antiquity and not its aqueousness. But the synaesthetic property still remains, in which some tenebrous tertia comparationis is yoking time to touch. Another example I cull from the curious poem “Kindheit” (“Childhood”), the first poem of Trakl’s posthumously published collection Sebastian in Traum (1915). In this poem childhood itself, a marked expanse of past-time, “silently lived / in a blue cave.” Childhood is not a memory but a living existence, only one secreted away in a cave, a blue cave no less. Later: A blue instant is but more soul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More devout, you know the sense of the dark years, Coolth and autumn in lonesome rooms; And in holy blueness luminous footsteps ring forth. Not only does meaning get imputed to the run of the “dark years” of the past, but the present—the moment born of those dark years, which is blue, the color of the twilit sky before the dark black of night—is redolent with the signs of its own origin, its childhood. The word fromm, rendered here as “devout,” also has the sense of “gentleness” and “innocence.” As a result, in that “blue” (or innocent) moment—a synaesthesia between the visual and the temporaesthetic— the “you” of the poem, whose identity is left inexplicit, by understanding the

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meaning of the past is even more innocent (“devout”). All of the many senses therefore get bound up in the phrase “holy blueness.” This, in turn, is followed by its own synaesthetic image, namely that of the luminous (visual source) footsteps ringing forth (auditory terminus). Our final example comes from the poem “Hohenburg”: There is no one in the house. Autumn in the rooms; Moonbright sonata And the waking up at the brink of the twilit forest. Always you think the white countenance of Man Far away from the tumult of the time; Over one dreaming a green bough gladly bows. The notable synaesthesia of “moonbright sonata” certainly heightens the perinocturnal context, and in a way that diminishes the confusion of senses and rather makes their interplay harmonic. Moreover, the naturalness of the harmony of disparate features is heightened on the initial activity “waking up” (Erwachen), a border state between sleep and wakefulness (not to mention an action expressed as a noun), and even more in the setting “at the brink of the twilit forest” (am Saum des dämmernden Walds). The twilit moment is itself liminal and takes place at the edge or brink (Saum) of the forest. All of this notwithstanding, it is rather the autumnal context which interests us here. For Trakl, the seasons when taken together tend to betoken more a perception of time’s passing than a particular associated attitude. Looking, for example, to the first section of the poem “Helian,” we see the play between the seasons autumn and summer pointing out just this kind of distinction of the passage of the time of those seasons. In this way it is a natural clock of sorts. Placing a single season, then, as the sole inhabitant of a vacant house, at the edge of a forest at twilight filled with moon music, is the height of a static temporaesthetic that we have seen as more typical of Trakl’s poems. The difference is not merely stylistic, setting Markish’s more kinetic, “chaotic,” even vortical depiction of time and its sensory perception against Trakl’s more staid, sober, and dream-like vision. Rather, more importantly, the difference is linguistic. As was said, where Trakl’s temporaesthetic tends more conventionally to temporalize space, Markish tends to spatialize time. Put another way, for Trakl “The bike is near the house,” but for Markish “The house 114

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is near the bike.” Each poet through his linguistic and to some extent literary traditions inherits preexistent modes of perception: Trakl, the grounded, autochthonous connection to place; Markish, the deterritorialized, exilic consciousness. Each one then molds (or even deforms) that with a fresh perspective on the place of the perceiving subject in the world of the poem, a world which (in the Expressionism of both poets) was formed by that perceiver. Ultimately, Trakl “stands poised in place above” history, and Markish is anchored in history, but still nowhere, like pages in the wind.

Coda: The Color of David Fogel’s Metaphors There is a large and complicated body of writing on the poet and novelist David Fogel’s work and legacy. His peripatetic and ultimately tragic biography, his heterodox political commitments (or lack thereof), his tortured and neurotic personality, and his enigmatic oeuvre all continue to exercise opinion, often in the quasi-generational undulations of Hebrew literary historiography. Indeed, his relatively few poetic and novelistic works have sparked a number of heated debates. Those never dull and often important debates—the stated aims of many of which cut to the quick of the question of what modern Hebrew literature is—have produced some vibrant textual readings; but they are neither the subject nor the background, except perhaps obliquely, of the current investigation. Rather, the object of this coda is to situate Fogel’s early poetics—that of his first collection, Lifnei ha-sha’ar ha-afel (Before the Dark Gate; published in 1923), whose poems are subtle, suggestive, and paradoxically simple yet opaque—as an important participant in the kind of spatiotemporal thinking, indeed worldview, at the heart of this chapter. David Fogel was born in 1891 in Satanov, Podolia, which is part of present-day Ukraine. A child of a traditional family, he followed the trajectory typical of so many Jewish writers from Eastern Europe and the pale of settlement of this period, shedding their traditional confines—literal and figurative—and seeking their secular literary fortunes in the centers of European culture. Fogel throughout his life would live in Vilne—where he sought to perfect his Hebrew— Odessa, Lemberg (Lvov), Vienna, Paris, Tel Aviv, Warsaw, and Berlin. He would ultimately pen a relatively small number of poems (only one collection would be published in his lifetime), a handful of novels or novellas, and a revealing diary, before ultimately being murdered in a concentration camp in 1944. 115

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The collection I am focusing on here, Before the Dark Gate, represents a first flower of his literary career, crystallizing his contribution to that extraordinary efflorescence of early interwar modernist literary production, not only in wider European letters but also in Hebrew and Yiddish literature in particular. It was an age of both poetry and ideology, and the Jewish tributaries to the European river were torrential. As reflected in the poetry of this collection, Fogel’s aesthetics clearly resonated most closely with the minimalist German Expressionism as practiced in Austria, most notably (and I will return to this later) by the poet Georg Trakl. In 1912, at the age of twenty-one, Fogel came to Vienna to make his name as a Hebrew poet. Strangely for this decision, Vienna was not a Jewish literary center, at least for a Jewishness defined by a self-conscious decision to write in a Jewish language. And that is where the curiosity begins. As Robert Alter has noted, “Fogel’s attachment to Hebrew was neither sentimental nor nationalist, and it is something of a puzzle as to why this profoundly isolated, neurasthenic, desperately unhappy young man trying to find a place for himself in Vienna should have chosen to record his most intimate thoughts in a language he had almost no occasion to speak, whose revival as a vernacular was being undertaken elsewhere.” One approach to this problem is to gesture at the affinity to German Expressionism. However, in Michael Gluzman’s analysis, German writers didn’t read Hebrew, and Hebrew writers were more influenced by Russian modernisms and Zionist ideology; German styles were therefore largely (though not completely) alien. When Gluzman goes on to opine that “Fogel’s literary choices were similarly determined by his self-imposed isolation, and his perpetual exilic condition found expression in his style” (my emphasis), I find in this not uncommon observation an important kernel of Fogel’s metaphorical world. Given his biography and the nature of the works themselves, the interpretation of Fogel’s literary choices has long been fraught space, giving rise to a critical literature one might well call Fogelistics (ha-fogelistikah). Fogel’s poetry, at least this first collection, was relatively favorably received when it was noticed at all. However, by the late twenties and early thirties the center of Hebrew literary gravity had shifted to Palestine. Some important proponents of the modernist vanguard there, the movement referred to as the Moderna, avoided, rejected, or even denounced Fogel’s poetics. The Moderna, under the dominant (some might say domineering) presence of the poet Avraham Shlonsky, had little use for the introspective, delicate, moody, and minimalist aesthetics of Fogel. Theirs was by and large an expansive, maximalist, world-slapping, 116

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and engagé poetry, much more in contact and conversation with Russian Futurist, Symbolist, perhaps even Acmeist models than Fogel’s particular brand of German Expressionism. This is the background and substance of the now famous so-called simplicity debate enjoined on either side by Fogel and Shlonsky’s polemic salvos against each other in the press. To give just a flavor, here is part of Shlonsky’s complaint, published in 1923: Its [Before the Dark Gate’s] exterior: a black binding. And its interior: “black closets,” “black birds,” “the black ship,” “the black organ of the night,” “dark wine,” “dark stain,” “dark forest.” And night—night— night. Also father has a “black coat” and “his beard is black.” Oh, father! Father! “Like a lonely star so does my father now wander sadly there between his mountains.” And all of us, yes, all of us are lost, eyes closed and stooped on autumn’s paths strewn with leaf-fall. Each one to his part, each one to his part. But we will indeed meet one day, all of us will meet—“And all the paths lead to the evening.” And the evening is very close. And here too is the night. Very soon! Really very soon!——— But he who will not feel the “fluttering of black flags flapping in the wind”—let him not open this book. With eyes wide open there’s more than enough cleverness. Only those feeling around, whose fingers are long and exceedingly thin, will be attracted to and feel—the “dark gate.” This debate had other ramifications, more political than aesthetic. As Gluzman distills the matter, “this conflict between minimalism and maximalism has an underlying political meaning: it signifies opposing ideological stands concerning the role of poetry in the nation-consolidating process.” And given the power of Shlonsky within the literary and publishing world of Palestine—and therefore Hebrew letters generally—one can understand this reading of the then-contemporary political/ideological marginalization of Fogel within Hebrew canon-making structures. The advent of a new generation of poets, the so-called statehood generation (dor ha-medinah), brought with it a shift in poetic outlook, part of which consisted in the search for Hebrew literary forebears which could serve as new models. Given the statehood 117

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generation’s turn inward to a pared-down and introspective style, and their affinity for Anglo-American, as opposed to Russian, modernism, those “simple” poets previously sloughed-off and marginalized were reappropriated by these poets, notably by their theorist-polemicists Dan Pagis and Natan Zach. This process, not unique surely to Hebrew literature, Chana Kronfeld has termed the search for “proleptic paragons.” Subsequent scholarly attention to Fogel has sought to plot Fogel’s poetics on a grand chart of Hebrew literary history, and in a sense where one “places” Fogel is an indicator of how one “places” oneself vis-à-vis cultural politics. In one view Fogel remains an outlier, an apolitical anomaly, sui generis, not participating in the grand national narrative of return. In another prominent reading, a detailed literary investigation of the poetry and poetics itself, its own critiques, ambivalences, and resonance, is thought to be able to show Fogel’s “special role as marginal prototype within the literary system.” Dynamic States: A Fogelistic Poetics That said, Fogel’s poetry and poetics do deserve a great deal of attention. While I cannot here undertake an exhaustive survey, the present discussion will expand upon the spatiotemporal impressions his poetry leaves. The first thing to note when dealing with Fogel’s metaphorical world is the intuitive interplay Fogel orchestrates between Expressionism and Impressionism. If we simplify Impressionism to a way of getting down the minute details of an external reality as they are impressed on the perceiver’s perceiving apparatus, then Expressionism can be seen as the perceiver’s deformation of that reality by the activity of his or her individual perception. Many of the early problems within Fogelistics are caused by a procrustean need to decide between them (and the ideological positions they may encode). Sensitive analyses reveal their simultaneous presence in the poetry. The constant tensions, ambivalences, and indeterminacies of the simultaneous external and internal movement form a key aspect of Fogel’s poetic observation. The engine of this movement has two parts: the verb and the adjective. Much attention has been focused on Fogel’s use of the verb. What Gluzman describes as “epistemological ambivalence” is part of what Kronfeld cites as “one of Fogel’s major linguistic achievements,” namely “the development of late biblical fluctuations between grammatical tense and aspect into a refined stylistic merging of impressionism and expressionism.” In this sense, tense is 118

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a function of the relationship between the action and the deictic world of “time”; aspect is an attribute wholly of the action itself. Therefore, “Fogel’s verbs produce a consistent hesitation between the factual and the hypothetical, ‘realis’ and ‘irrealis,’ action and stasis.” The English translator notices this immediately when grappling with a Fogel poem: the tension between “imperfect” and “future” is dissipated by their mutual exclusion. In Hebrew they are simultaneous. In one case an uncompleted action, and in the other case “an ‘irrealis,’ fantastic, or surreal situation.” It is, however, the adjectival relationship which I will focus on. Uzi Shavit has noted of Fogel’s poetry that, among the differences posited between metrical tonal-syllabic verse and Fogel’s free verse, “The poetic ‘atom’ of the accentualsyllabic line is the foot; that of Fogel’s line is the word.” This “atomic” observation is also a focal element of his larger poetics and thematology. But this very noticeable “atomic” character has caused some confusion. There is, for example, a criticism to be leveled at those readers of Fogel who look for an objective symbology of the poetry. Shlonsky takes this perception to a ridiculous extreme. But even in a straightforward analysis such as Tsvi Luz’s isolation of “a poetry of night and darkness, or a poetry of evening and sunset,” as being “the central motif of his poetry . . . standing face to face with death,” one sees how easy a snare such a reading may be. Rather, in Kronfeld’s words, “[t]he expressionist critique of impressionism is meant, among other things, to make just such a static motif hunt completely meaningless because no night, evening, or sunset in Fogel . . . can have any stable, general meaning outside of the particular disruptions which constitute it uniquely in each text.” And as we will see with regard to Fogel’s color palette, this assessment is certainly quite valid. Certain varieties of particularly interwar Jewish poetry—in both Hebrew and Yiddish—involve a highly refined sensitivity by poets to their own philosophies of the word. The lyrolect is, as I have described it elsewhere, “those repeated elements of a poet’s idiolect that stand at the center of his or her thematic and semantic laboratory.” So for example the critic Yekhezkel Dobrushin writes of the Soviet Yiddish poet Izi Kharik, “He has a few words or concepts that he repeats over and over again—‘restlessness,’ ‘wind,’ ‘hands,’ and ‘head.’ He uses the word ‘despondence’ at least 50 times; wind—40 times; hands and head—30 times. This combination of words resembles that of Markish in his first book, Thresholds [Shveln] (1919), in which he used the same words as Kharik. Perhaps this is a sign, if not of poetic relationship, then of the same elemental forces, if unrest, of a hot-tempered grasping with the hands 119

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and the head.” How similar in critical edge is Dobrushin’s comment to Shlonsky’s review of Fogel. Fogel’s lyrolexical dynamism (with its atomic core) dispels that critical edge as an odd and static sort of word counting. This is not to say that repeated use of particular words cannot effectively be analyzed to discern some “elemental forces” in Fogel. “Trembling,” “heavy,” “bright,” “dark,” “sky-blue,” and “black,” for example, are all-important features of this lyrolect. It is the deception of simplicity to think them monotonic or monochromatic. I will begin by looking briefly at color words and then move on to time and space, in each of which is foregrounded Fogel’s essential adjectival revolution. To begin with the most storied example, take the adjective “black,” as in the following line: Night already dwells black In us and in all. [Layla kvar shokhen shachor banu u-va-kol.] In Kronfeld’s analysis “the color black, an apparently redundant, unadorned epithet of night, actually becomes a radical, ungrammatical, but functional adverb, a move Zach describes as the ‘salvation of the color black by turning it from adjective to adverb.’” And not only here but throughout the collection “black” is the single most important lyrolexical lodestone. It is not for nothing that Shlonsky bases his denunciation of Fogel precisely on the use of such a relatively restricted lyrolect (“black,” “dark”). Their philosophies of poetic language entailed radically different understandings of what counted as a linguistic palette. For Fogel’s modernism, the chiming “black” is an important token of the “inward” motion spoken of before; in other words, the adverbialization of “black” begins a process of “quasi”-Expressionist internalization of reality. Though in this case we are singling out the word “black,” these perceptions about Fogel’s poetics can be extended to any number of colors which Fogel deploys. So, for example, The morning sun trembles goldenly Before my pale, silent beauty. [shemesh boker yir’ad zahuv mul yofyi hachiver, ha-shotek.] 120

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Or: From the end of the night here I go astray And my disheveled hair Floods blackly the sky-blue of my shirt. [miktseh ha-laylah hineni to’ah u-se’ari ha-paru’a shotef shachor tchelet ketonti] Or: And the tiles of the roof Laughed redly In tears. [ve-ra’afei gag sachku adumim tokh dema’ot.] (In this latter case, there is a sonic merger between the laughter’s redness [adumim] and tears [dema’ot], synaesthetically merging the staccato character of both laughter and sobs; indeed, the reduction of the long vowel effectively to nothing forces “d” and “m” into a consonant cluster, which itself sounds like the echo of rain on a tile roof.) This overall technique of grammaticalizing color goes hand in hand with Expressionist deformations of reality, because it deforms the basic language of sensory perception. One of the most radical elements of Fogel’s poetics lies in such innovations to the metaphoricity of sensory perception in Hebrew. To return to Sandbank’s analysis earlier in the chapter, Sandbank’s ultimate goal was to soften or deradicalize Fogel as not ultimately being an Expressionist as we understand that word. What is important to the present discussion is the particular means Sandbank used to make his claim, namely the structure of Fogel’s use of color. To reiterate Sandbank’s three-tiered analysis of color metaphors: 1. Color incorrectly applied to a visual object (e.g., “black gull” when gulls are white) 121

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2. Color applied to a nonvisual object (i.e., synaesthesia) 3. Color applied to a nonobject, or a nonsensory object (i.e., what is referred to elsewhere in the theoretical literature as “pseudosynaesthesia”) Sandbank concerns himself primarily with the first two groups, that is, cases in which sensory data are used to talk about other sensory data. Here, context is the calibrator of metaphor. As Sandbank puts it, “It is not that these colors themselves are necessarily exempt from any metaphorical baggage, but rather that their connection with these well-known objects is not the bearer of metaphorical charge.” This is to say that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar—an object can simply be a certain color descriptively, and therefore metaphoricity is not for that reason necessarily attached to colors. To make his point he cites the following lines from Trakl’s poem “Die Sonne”: The fish rises ruddy in the green pool. Below the round sky The fisherman silently sails in the small blue boat. [Rötlich steigt im grünen Weiher der Fisch. Unter dem runden Himmel Fährt der Fischer leise im blauen Kahn.] Sandbank goes on: The very group of objects that are here—pool, fish, little boat—is made decidedly in order to belong to a scene that is in reality. Except that nearly every characterization of the objects here is by their color: we know nothing about the fish except that its color is ruddy; about the pool that its color is green; about the little boat that its color is blue. Had the subject been in a reproduction of reality, then other characteristics of the objects also would probably have been included. Whereas, when each object’s color was established and nothing else, we would see before our eyes not reality but rather splashes of color. In a nutshell this is one of the core techniques of minimalist expressionism. We might have divorced the “description” automatically from the colors were it not for the fact that colors are the only things “going on” in the poem. In this 122

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way “misapplied” colors are easily taken metaphorically; but the metaphoricity of “correctly” applied colors inheres in the contextual syntagm of the poem. Therefore the metaphorical valence or “meaning” of a color is not necessarily stable, but can change between poems in which it appears: that is what happens in Trakl and a number of German Expressionists, and that is what happens in Fogel as well. This instability has been the spur to theoretical interrogation. With regard to another poem in the collection, Sandbank cites Yael Shwartz’s analysis “that ‘the automatic connections between color and meaning are destroyed’ in it.” He goes on to ask, however, “Why so? Since death (as well as life) is represented in it by contrary colors, both dark and bright (‘overflowing gold’). And this very fact ‘is compared with the ambiguous connection of the speaker with death.’ Here is exactly the point: it is not the connection between color and meaning which is ‘ambiguous,’ rather the relation of the speaker to death!” To modify this analysis from a technical point of view, in the Expressionist’s deformation of reality through his or her own internalization of it, the color is the relationship, made absolute by the grammaticalization of that relationship. That recasting of the means of description into the world itself is a radical move. And more radical still is the deployment of Sandbank’s third category, so-called pseudosynaesthesia. Sandbank essentially rejects the metaphorical validity of Fogel’s pseudosynaesthesiae (such as they are in his reading). I argue the opposite, that they are actually important in many of his poems. Moreover, other than by the Hebrew language itself (and one school of thought might well ask, “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” But I leave that delicately aside for the nonce), there are minimally few markers of Jewishness in his poetry, or at least the traditional, religious, or national token of it. Though this is a conjecture at this point, in looking at Fogel’s metaphorical techniques, however, we have open to us some of the few apertures to a Jewish thematics in these works. Earlier I argued that in comparing Perets Markish and Georg Trakl synaesthesiae involving time (temporaesthesia) are some of the most important indices of what makes Jewish modernism so Jewish. The perception of time for these brands of modernism was an aesthetic perception, a kind of sensory experience. And Fogel’s color scheme fits into the complicated synaesthetic world created by this innovation. My conclusion that “Trakl stands poised in place above history” but “Markish is anchored in history, but still nowhere” leads me to the question I posed myself when looking at Fogel’s metaphorical 123

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world, namely which end of the spectrum he was closer to, and whether the writing of Hebrew implies a difference in precisely this outlook. As it happens, Fogel’s temporality, and the intersection of time and space in particular, have been gestured to before, in a slightly different way. It is not only, as Gluzman has suggested, that a Fogel poem “seems to disorient the reader’s sense of temporality: are these events taking place simultaneously at one time and in the same place, or are they simultaneous only in the wanderer’s perception (as a moving, displaced subject)?” But also, as Judith Bar-El notes, “emotional relationships are transferred to topographical spatial relations. Thus, for example, processes in time such as the feeling of growing old, getting away from childhood or advancing towards death and reminiscing about the past, are described in terms of a journey in space.” Aharon Komem makes it even more explicit: “in Fogel’s poetry, the interchangeability of concepts of time and images of space is a kind of constant presence. Fogel repeats and realizes the basic synaesthesia ‘time + space.’ The repeated qualifying of images of time with images of space creates a feeling of perpetual affinity/connection or of perpetual potential change/mutability. . . . The fact is that Fogel repeats and realizes the concepts of time by fixing them in space.” All of these analyses reflect a definitive realization of the important, indeed crucial, metaphorical interplay of temporal and spatial perceptions. They all treat such interplay as a nebulous characteristic of the verse, while overlooking some of the technical workings of time and space. Notably absent, for example, is the overall directionality of the metaphorical transfers (especially given its relevance in the early theoretical literature on synaesthesia, the conceptual core for such spatiotemporal metaphoricity). This temporaesthetic approach is connected to a reëvaluation of Jewish poetics of homelessness, glimpses of which one can discern in Fogel’s poetry. The ambivalent movement between village and city, the constant anxieties over being the “weary traveler” (haheilekh ha-ayef)—as opposed to the valorized wanderer type (the geyer) in some of Markish and in Kulbak, for example—and of course the directionality of the synaesthetic metaphors, among other things, is all part of this larger discourse of homelessness. Gluzman notes from the literary-historical realm that “Fogel’s biography, his constant exile(s), is a living metaphor for deterritorialization. In a period when the reterritorialization of language was the ultimate goal of Hebrew literature, Fogel’s continuous attempt to destabilize meaning—to deterritorialize his language—could not be understood or valued.” This assessment is echoed on the internal literary-critical end by 124

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Naomi Seidman. In discussing the arresting image of a man’s incorporation of a girl within himself, as a kind of male pregnancy, she notes, “This image, not coincidentally, is linked with the experience of exile, as if homelessness corresponded with or slipped into the exile of the subject in its gender identity as well.” As in much of Fogel’s early poetry, these are the tantalizing glimpses which call for rereading and reinterpretation. Purple Poetry The Tantalean color for me in Fogel’s early poetry was argaman, which is a purple or reddish-purple color. The word is of biblical provenance, where it is used most often to indicate either the fine adornments for the tabernacle or temple, or the luxury commodity materials dyed with such a color. In both cases the image of refinement is dominant. Indeed, the traditional Western association of the color is that of royalty and so of wealth. As a result, it comes to take one a distinctly aesthetic cast. The rest of this discussion will look at the four poems from Before the Dark Gate in which the word argaman occurs. Purple is in Georg Trakl’s poetry “associated . . . with the passion and suffering of human life.” The most common Traklish collocation is “purple sleep” or “purple dreams.” Casey dismisses the comment of another critic who notes of these collocations that “on the one side the eternal, timeless, clear, fogless; on the other the earthily foggy, the world of sorrows, surrender (‘sleep’) to the world of experience.” This purple sleep and these purple dreams expose, however, the suffering not of what is static but of liminal and therefore unstable realities. These borderland, transitional states have precisely those associations which Fogel links to “purple”; its emotional shades are variable. Poem 70 is an almost elegiac account of a sunset as a kind of death. The vocabulary of the first stanza—“A lone and last wagon is already ready for the road, / Let us board and travel, / For it will not wait”—with its simple diction and open symbols interprets readily as such a metaphor. This introductory image is followed by I have seen tender girls on their way And their sad faces Turned flushed and mourned Like purple sunsets. 125

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The nexus of associations of purple, sunset, and mournfulness is more than fleetingly reminiscent of Trakl’s color scheme. In Fogel’s poem, the connections between motion and stasis and their objects are intentionally confused. In the first half of the stanza the girls are described by stative adjectives (“tender,” “sad”); even their motion—and they are the ones who are moving—is presented in a grammatically nominalized infinitive (be-lekhtan; “when they went” or “in their going”). However, by the second half of the stanza their faces change: “they turned flushed and mourned.” This transformation is a visible change of state, which is likened in a simile to “sunsets of purple,” given as two nouns in construct. In the physical scene before us, then, all we actually see are the faces of girls walking by as they turn flushed and mournful. This movement in emotion we are meant to associate with the movement in time, the color tide of the sunset; the blush of their faces is like a reflection of the crepuscular light. Moreover, as in Markish’s “Vi zangen,” the plural “sunsets” highlights an iterative association; the only way to understand mourning is as a kind of sunset. To put it another way, from a spatiotemporal point of view, the girls’ movement in space is marked in the language as a kind of stasis; Fogel sees their “going” in a nominalized form. That movement, by contrast, is also presented as a visual reflection of an actual movement in time. The blushing of their sad faces—described by conjugated verbs—is the twilightening evening. By the final stanza, however, the objects associated with motion and stasis have shifted. Recapitulating and expanding the first stanza, we find the following: We are the last, The day is passing, A lone and last wagon is already ready for the road, Let us board silently And we too will travel, For it will not wait. The verbal echoes of the first stanza—“Let us board and travel for it will not wait”—present a desire and an expectation but describe no actual physical activity. The only motion in the stanza is the imperfective “the day is passing.” The interplay of human desire and fear in the face of the inexorable change of state Fogel presents as a subtle competition of motion and stasis, all in a tableau painted purple.

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Compare this mournful purpleness with the opposed image in poem 41. The winter twilight through the window causes a reverie in its witnesses: Quiet they come and enwreathe us All the many beautiful moments Which our dark life has passed Like beaded pearls. When we sit amazed In the prime of our youth Before the trembling purple twilight And great mercy Suddenly brightens our soul To everything vile And loathsome, Which was beautiful in the redness of the sunset. Time here is memory; but it is memory curiously configured. In one version it is time as movement (“passed”). Yet that image is not emphasized; or it serves to highlight less movement than the passage between two, or a series of, states. In that other version, time is structured as a string of pearls, each discrete moment frozen or concretized—in a word, spatialized—as a bead, a strikingly aestheticized image. The time of memory of youth is the imperfective “we sit” (neshevah), during which the purple twilight is able to convert the loathsome aspects of life into beauty. The sonic play here is as important as the visual was in the previous poem. “Purple twilight” (dimdumei argaman) echoes the sound of the “prime of our youth” (dmi alumeinu). The word captured here by “prime” points etymologically to a high or midpoint in life (as in youth), a calm perch between the buildup that preceded and the decline which is inevitably to follow. As the twilight, so this too is a liminal state. In this state of reverie the memories of youthful moments can seem an enchanted diadem, to be enjoyed in silence. And silence (especially the Hebrew words dom and dumam) recurs in Fogel’s work to suggest another aesthetic quality to the liminal state. Indeed here it may well be an echo of the “purple silence” (dmi argaman) of the thirty-eighth poem.

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In poem 38, we find the image of an ancient tree, so anthropomorphic in its stooped and burdened stance, as the static gauge of the movements of life. In the central stanza, Many summers Have passed away sadly in purple silence, Thousands of wanderers have camped silently In the darkness of its shadows. The purple is not an automatic stand-in here for sunset, neither with positive (joyful, beautiful) nor with negative (mournful) associations. Rather, it is the static coefficient of the passage of summers—time—and the passage of wanderers who camped in the tree’s shade—space. The “purple silence,” however, is a curious synaesthesia here. Its form in Hebrew—bi-dmi argaman—recalls other set collocations, most apposite being bi-dmi ha-layil (in the still of the night). In this poetic phrase a temporal meaning (that part of the night when it is most still and quiet) is connected to a sonic vocabulary. In bi-dmi argaman, the sonic component is turned into color, reviving the metaphorical origin and power of the phrase. In turn, that metaphorical power is connected to the image of encampment, another depiction of a wandering, homeless existence. But the wandering campers are transient. The “stooped” entity is the ancient tree. The Wandering Jew has been converted to the eternally emplaced tree watching the passing of time and the spatial vagabonds. In Fogel’s spatiotemporal vision here there is no burden to homelessness; rather, the burden is watching time and history unfold. It is not a poetic throwaway that the very first word of this poem is the imperative “Look” (re’eh). The final example is poem 31: Suddenly I awaken from my dream, Hastily I cast my two hands Into the darkness To you, my beloved. The smell of your warm back Still enwraps part of my flesh Like a gauze of silken mists [or: Like thinness of silken mists].

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Where do you now set Your weary foot?— Morning The purple ball of the sun Peeks out from behind the hills. On the silent threshold of my house I still sit alone And gild silence: “A dream have I seen.” The poem is striking both for its compactness and for how much it packs into those few words. A lover awakens at night from a dream. We know nothing of her (the speaker’s sex is notably left unmarked, but given the absence of homoeroticism here one may venture to presume a woman speaker) but the desire to hold the male beloved (the object’s sex, by contrast, is clearly and repeatedly given). The memory of the amorous encounter accompanies the speaker-lover through the dawn and into her solitary musing on the ephemeral nature of that night. (There is a parallel to be drawn from a comparison with analogous— indeed strikingly resonant—images in the early poetry of the Hebrew poet Yocheved Bat-Miriam, which will be the focus of the final chapter of this book.) We note the complicated synaesthesiae of the second stanza. The smell (odor) of something warm (heat/calorific) wraps (tactile) like a gauze (tactile or, in its diaphaneity, visual); the word for gauze in the third line of that stanza can also be read as thinness (abstraction, i.e., pseudosynaesthesia). This sensory froth imitates the confusion of a sleeper hastily roused. It leads, however, to the very concrete reality of the third stanza. The “weariness” of the lover’s foot is a curious description on which to focus. Certainly we are made aware of the foot’s association with movement and therefore the speaker’s consciousness of the lover’s very real absence. Footsoreness is the ailment of the wanderer, and so the seemingly congenital condition of this male lover. This wistful conjecture or philosophizing compartmentalizes the homelessness traditionally associated with that idea of footaching weariness. Instead, we find the lover quite physically at home. Indeed, it is the female lover, the true sensory experiencer, who inhabits space.

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The whole poem reads as a flood of liminal states and spaces: the lover moves from her dream to wakefulness; the marks of her beloved’s presence are given only in the memory of their tryst, and his absence—and her loneliness— are keenly felt; the time of the poem moves from the nocturnal awakening to morning, which is to say dawn—and it is the move from darkness to light, not the twilight of light to darkness, which is here designated as “purple,” unlike elsewhere in Fogel’s poems; and the scene of the final stanza finds the lover seated on her house’s “threshold” (a most concrete limen). Despite the very concreteness of the imagery, these transformations unsettle many of our commonplaces about reality, which is what a Fogel poem seems supremely capable of doing. The irreality of the poem is punctuated in the final stanza by a sound, or better yet, by the precious nature of the absence of sound (“silence”). The last line is therefore an ironic move (and I find it also a surprisingly humorous one) in which that precious silence is “gilded” by the poetspeaker’s own disruption of it, her speech! By focusing on the dreaminess of her memory, she calls into question—as do we readers—whether any assignation has taken place at all except in that dream. Her sole utterance, far from a calm appraisal, may well echo Nebuchadnezzar’s statement: “A dream have I seen and it has frightened me” (cheilem chazeit vi-ydachalinani; Daniel 4:2). These preliminary comments on Fogel—by no means exhaustive but hopefully suggestive—seek to complicate an already difficult poet (as a spur to further work, not as an inhibitor from it). But more than that, in setting them alongside Yiddish and other modernisms I suggest a deeper continuum in Jewish modernist thinking which defies standard historiographical narratives in any of those languages and traditions. Each of the poets presented here has an intimate connection to the specific technique of temporaesthesia, which in turn gives us a window on their spatiotemporal worldviews. From the Jewish perspective, while Markish’s was not a renunciation of homelessness but rather a conscious if complicated reappropriation of it, a kind of valorization, Fogel’s was a complete reconfiguration of the very vocabulary of that experience.

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4 the revolutionary principles of time and space

In 1919 the Soviet Yiddish critic Yekhezkel Dobrushin wrote an essay entitled “Three Poets” in which he analyzed and compared the first books of poetry of the triumvirate of the so-called Kiev grupe (Kiev Group, a constellation of young Yiddish literary and intellectual talent centered in Kiev in the early post-Revolutionary years): Perets Markish, Leyb Kvitko, and Dovid Hofshteyn. To Dobrushin’s mind these books, all of which first appeared in 1919, are not the highest achievement of modern poetry, but they do give Yiddish literature something dramatically new: a youthfully exuberant energy and new individual expression which raises Yiddish poetry to a level commensurate with some of the accomplishments previously achieved by Yiddish prose. In the heady years after the Revolution, when Yiddish literature developed rapidly, these contemporary assessments lead us to examine the nature of the bold modernist and avant-garde steps taken by Yiddish poets in particular. What I propose to do is to take Dobrushin’s observation about the boldness of these first collections as dramatic statements of personal poetics and connect that to a larger project of understanding how Yiddish poets employed the perceptual axes of time and space to structure these poetics. In this chapter I will focus on the temporal axis, and to do this I will look specifically at Perets Markish’s Shveln and the first collection of his younger contemporary Ezra Fininberg. There are several reasons for this choice. First of all, these two poets represent two distinct (though not diametrical) points in the spectrum of early interwar Yiddish poetry: Markish the graphomaniacal and impulsive energy of the Revolution, and Fininberg a highbrow, intellectual restraint. Second, more so than for Kvitko or Hofshteyn, time itself was a persistent concern of these two poets, and by comparing their youthful poetry we can glimpse a perception of time which is at once Jewish and revolutionary. And third, while the poetics of the Kiev grupe generally deployed varying configu131

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rations of common metaphors for the revolutionary “new beginning,” it was Markish’s radical individual liberalism—as opposed, in Mikhail Krutikov’s analysis, to Kvitko’s folkloric stance or Hofshteyn’s “nonnational” focus— which directly deal with time and space categorically, not obliquely, within that metaphorical system. Fininberg’s socialist aestheticism, as one might describe it, also appealed to a similar kind of individual freedom.

Ezra Fininberg’s Marmoreal Thematics Ezra Fininberg (1899–1946) opens a slightly differently positioned window on the nascent Soviet Yiddish literary poetics. A onetime advocate of Zionist socialism, Fininberg was one of a number of younger writers magnetized by the Kiev grupe. He was not a full-throated yawper of the avant-garde; his lyrics tend to a more compact and diff use sensitivity, entertaining a full array of sensory descriptions. This diff useness in the mood of the poems, however, conceals a kind of tightness in the thematic construction. This is certainly the case for his first volume of poems, Otem (Breath; 1922). Fininberg was a product of the Ukrainian Yiddish literary scene. After the Kiev grupe dissipated and Kiev’s Kultur lige (Culture League)—the influential non-Party organ of Yiddish cultural promotion—went largely defunct (and its press had been coopted by the Party), a group of its erstwhile adherents set up a publishing house there in 1921. The next year it established an imprint for young writers called vidervuks (aftergrowth), which became the eponym of its writers. Though these writers were communists who praised the catchword of proletarian literature, and “[d]espite their rhetoric about devoted service to the masses, they essentially created an ivory tower and fought against popular culture. Their publications targeted a sophisticated Yiddish reader, a rarity in post-1917 Russia.” Fininberg’s Otem clearly resonated with his association with vidervuks, especially its central concerns: “Yiddish, modernism, and the revolution.” This cultural context makes the juxtaposition of Markish and Fininberg that much more salient. Evgeny Dobrenko has analyzed the shifts in the culture of writing in Russian in the early Soviet period as compared to an earlier generation, some sixty years before, when there was a similarly vibrant publishing culture. One of the primary differences which marked the 1920s was the strong ligature between state and ideology, and the force which that con132

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struct had on various aspects of composition, publication, and dissemination. The fluidity and hybridity of the earlier “avant-garde” intellectual writers, with their mix of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” materials and forms, was replaced by at least lip service (and often far more) to the “utilitarian” aims of revolutionary literature. The writer Dovid Bergelson, another member of the Kiev grupe, had discerned already in 1919 the pitfalls of the intimate bonds between one notable revolutionary literary “movement” (namely, Futurism) and the desiderata of the Party’s artistic ideology with its stress on the masses. In Seth Wolitz’s account, “Futurism, Bergelson recognized, was an elite movement. ‘Futurizm is ober tsufil “inteligentisher lubok’ ” [Futurism, however, is too much ‘intellectual lubok’]. . . . Surely the masses could not absorb its formlessness, its intellectual élan, its sophisticated playfulness. Conversely, ‘gevis vet tsu uns . . . kumen nit der emeser nor der volveler futurizm’ [We will surely get not the true but the cheap Futurism].” Dobrenko notes that “the dependency of the new cultural strata in the revolutionary era was artificially oriented toward the ‘high’ (‘classical’) models.” The vidervuks group espoused just such a highbrow aspiration. Markish’s poetics, on the other hand, were a hybrid of Futurism, among other things, of a variety Bergelson would likely have singled out under his volveler futurizm (cheap futurism) rubric. (There was to be sure no love lost between Bergelson and Markish.) An aspirant to intellectual legitimacy, Markish married many literary trends and strata in hybrid texts, which were expressly not mass literature (lubok), but neither were they highbrow of the sort represented by Fininberg. Nevertheless, within the gyre of these “competing” attitudes Fininberg and Markish both demonstrate a deep concern with spatiotemporality, a modernist preoccupation that for many would transcend these issues of genre and audience. In Otem Fininberg’s sensory world presents a complete infiltration of sensory data, very often presented in alternating dynamic sequences. The book itself contains twenty-four poems unevenly distributed among three sections. The critic Sol Liptzin isolates what he considers to be the core of Fininberg’s thematics in the very first poem of Otem: In his early poems, although they were written under the Communist regime, he cannot tear himself away from the Jewish past. In a poem on his grandfather’s “Wednesday,” he sees this past, with its worm rot and cancerous petrifaction, continuing into the new era and attaching its prongs into his soul. High above his grandfather’s “Wednesday,” the 133

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Milky Way leads to a marble home, where trees of purest gold spread their giant foliage. He, however, still feels the crippling effect of the decaying townlets and the hoary traditions which link him to the Jewish ancestors. Despite the ideological slant of this reading, and the ambivalence of its understanding of Jewishness, Liptzin’s intuition about Fininberg’s poem involves a temporal conception of that Jewishness. The notion of tradition, of ancestry, of the space of time between a grandfather and his grandson are dramatically realized through a concrete temporal metaphor. It is a weighty freight that is thus loaded onto “Wednesday”: High above my grandfather’s Wednesday The Milky Way leads to my marble home. High above my grandfather’s Wednesday Fine-golden trees have grown enormous. My grandfather’s Wednesday reigns upon the mange of stone. My grandfather’s Wednesday still lasts and lasts [or: endures and endures]. The complexity of the effect is a product of the fact that Wednesday is the only stable grounded element in this reality; all of the objects we are meant normally to associate with that groundedness and stability (in a word, with space)— trees, stone, home—are transferred to the sky, a locus of transitoriness and mutability. It is only the temporal Wednesday which has tangible durability here. Wednesday does highlight a religious tension touched on by Liptzin. Not only is the chain of ancestral Jewish tradition introduced with the lightningrod leitmotif “grandfather” (zeyde), but Fininberg also seems to be gesturing to a poem by his friend and Kiev grupe mentor Leyb Kvitko (1890–1952). In his moving lyric “On Wednesday” (“Um mitvokh”) the poem’s speaker describes a scene in which he ever so gently wakes up his sleeping daughter. Still halfasleep, she asks, “Is it shabes today?” He tenderly replies, Do you want a little holiday, my child? . . . Today is Wednesday . . . simple Wednesday Right now. 134

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The poem’s stress on the popular, even proletarian, virtues of common simplicity (prostkayt) and the valuation of “right now” (atsindikayt) as being of as great a value as the Sabbath holiday makes out of Wednesday an icon of this attitude. Appearing as it does in Kvitko’s first volume of poetry, in 1919, the resonance cannot but be felt in Fininberg’s poem. There, however, it is divested of its ordinariness and elevated to an almost Symbolist empyrean with its golden trees, Milky Way, and “marble home.” Indeed, this ethereal “marble home” (mirml-heym) for its part involves a tightly constructed set of associations. The neologism begins with the Yiddish word mirmlshteyn (marble), which is then analyzed into its component elements: mirml (marble) and shteyn (stone). The latter is replaced by the rhyme word heym (home). By this rhyme we associate “home” with solidity, with stone. On the one hand this is marble, which is to say, something which is at once refined, elegant, and expensive—that is, very far from an actual home of Yiddish-speaking revolutionaries—and a link to antiquity, the distant past. On the other hand, the element mirml- on its own, detached from the word mirmlshteyn, gets associated with speech. This is the case in the tenth poem, where we find the following lines: I have been nourished on the steppes with the ash of generation upon generation, I have winked on the steppes—a star from the sky,— The trickling murmur, like a dream, was heard. This “murmur” (murml, which would be pronounced mirml in Fininberg’s dialect) plays on a problematization of talking about home, about its idealization and its reality. (This tension is heightened by the graphic dislocation of the internal rhyme: genert zikh—gehert zikh (nourished—heard), presented as two passive forms of internalization.) In this way Fininberg’s work participates directly in the discourse of home space described in chapter 2, in this case from the perspective of “highbrow” Soviet Yiddish art. Home for Fininberg is far less a stable space than a series of shifting problems and images. Take, for example, Fininberg’s repeated unflattering descriptions of the steppe, one of his various models of homelandscape. The steppe is for him a sparsely populated and essentially acultural reality which contrasts often sharply with urban or semiurban spaces, ambivalent as Fininberg’s attitude may be to them. Mirml-heym, which is also the title of the book’s sec135

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ond section, can be seen as emblematically representing a process of development and maturation away from the steppe and towards a new reality. The third poem of the “Mirml-heym” section opens, My home takes its leave of me—my city With the slender morning on the young sidewalks. The nature of “home” keeps changing. The inability to locate it, to define it, to talk about it is a central anxiety of the book. A conclusion of sorts is offered in the third section, but that first requires some exploration of Fininberg’s temporal vocabulary. Fininberg’s temporal trajectory is propelled in part by the central ambiguity of the idea of “Day.” The two primary frames of reference are (1) temporal, that is, the day as a unit of time, and (2) aesthetic, that is, the associations of day with lightness, brightness, the sun’s shining, and so forth. More often than not “Day” is presented in the Otem poems with these connotations overlapping. Hand in hand with this ambiguity is Fininberg’s predilection not to take “Day” in opposition to “Night” but rather as complementary. So, for example, the lines There’s still a whiff here of days in a prison. There’s still a draft here of nights in an asylum and Days spin there and are tangled into nights. This complementarity—day with night, not day versus night—gets its full head of steam with the following passage: The sanctified day Goes With the sanctified night Upon the washed bricks of our yard. The sanctified day with the sanctified night Kisses

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Everything that grows and that ripens In our gardens. Day and night are coactors interacting with “our” place, “our” land, either by kissing it or by walking on it. Beyond the other opposition here between the brick as token of human cultural habitation and the steppe with all of its Fininbergian associations of the stanza which follows, what is important is the connection between the temporal concepts embodied (spatially) as aesthetic participants in the events of the poem. Cyclical time is a blessing—in the words of the poem, night and day are “sanctified”—to place. The crucial element in Fininberg’s temporaesthetic move, in his spatialization of time, is the distinct dynamism of the metaphor. At least in this poem, there is far less of the subdued lyricism we are wont to find elsewhere in this volume. In the complicated assessment of time’s role in what is ultimately a work which has revolution as its end point, there is yet another important opposition to be mentioned. More than once Fininberg returns to a tension between “historical” time and “natural” time, what is reckoned by human endeavor and what is perceived by the natural transitions between day and night; it is an opposition whose analogue can be found in the distinction again between city and steppe. This opposition is central, for example, to the verse which begins Alone and by myself By what was torn from the generations I sit, far off, My hands on my knees. It flooded loudly With ash—melancholy. The distances burn, burn With sunsets. This “what was torn from the generations” (opris fun doyres) is a discrete “unit” of historical time, excised from the traditional Jewish reckoning of “generations.” The speaker’s loneliness inheres in a dislocation from that system of reckoning. The melancholy—a Leitwort for Fininberg—lonely man watches as the distant skies go fiery red “with sunsets” (mit shkies). The plural lets us know that this is not a single crepuscular moment but a series of them. This is the

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movement of time calibrated according to nature. The speaker is caught seated statically between the two temporalities. However, just as the day-night syntagm always promises another day, so too in the (especially Soviet) Yiddish poetry of this period does the ubiquitous “sunset” (shkie) portend a revolutionary dawn (baginen), a new age and a new time. As was mentioned earlier, there is a thematic progression through the three sections of the book, culminating in the two poems of the final, untitled section. It is telling that the first of these is taken from a cycle called “1919,” a year of turbulent civil war and pogroms. With such a portentous reference, the book has reached a revolutionary crescendo. In the middle stanza of the second poem’s three stanzas we read: Winds play in the forests—cry on sincere lyres. On the snow-covered spaciousness quiver dead days. Mad little blond children in the flaring frigid cold, Mad little blond children make faces: “E—a—t!” The expansive anthemic tones of this poem as a whole are unmistakable. More important to the present discussion, however, is the move from temporal and spatial generality to specificity. The first and third stanzas describe not some vague steppe and its watercourses but the Volga by name and the plains that it waters. Sandwiched between these two spatially oriented strata is the quoted stanza at whose core sit “dead days.” The word for “day” here is meslés—a word taken from Hebrew but with a distinctly Slavic sound—which indicates a period of twenty-four hours. In the preceding line we hear the wind’s call on “sincere lyres.” This is in part a reference to an aeolian harp, which picks up and expands on the classical cast of the “marble home.” It is at the same time an allusion to the opening of Psalm 137, the exilic motif par excellence, with lyres hung on willow boughs. As such, this almost liturgical turn reinserts this poetry into the discourse of home space; in effect, the whole volume has come to its conclusion by turning to time, not space, as the defining vocabulary of home. In both cases, classicizing or liturgizing, even though the imagery itself is by definition aesthetic, the use of meslés picks out the distinctly temporal strand of the concept “day.” In thwarting our expectation, and by referring to these days as “dead,” the poem subverts traditional temporality in favor of a new conception.

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These anaesthetized days somehow “exist” on snowy expanses. This spatialized presentation of time, coming as it does layered between the two other locative stanzas, is strikingly reminiscent of Perets Markish’s own configuration of these elements. Within this shared poetics revolutionary timeconsciousness plugged into many of these poets’ own Jewish temporality and spatiality in important ways. What makes Fininberg’s Otem an interesting test case is how Jewishness is often worn more prominently on the sleeve, from the opening “Wednesday” to the concluding psalm. Ultimately, one fundamental characteristic of a good deal of this early interwar Yiddish use of temporality, especially as highlighted by the example of Fininberg, is that the store of images and metaphors used to conceive of Jewish time and those of revolutionary time in effect converge. These poets’ use of their own Jewish temporality was in itself a revolutionary act, one ideological configuration of the specific “perceptual grid” of modernist Jewish poetry.

The Thresholds of Perets Markish Spatiotemporality is an interest of Fininberg’s in individual poems; it is also a concern of the whole collection. We may then ask more generally to what extent these issues are implicated in the development of poetic systems. Time and space do recur as calibrations of such systems in a good deal of this poetry, often covertly, sometimes overtly. Perets Markish’s verse gives us a case in point of an overtly spatiotemporal poetic worldview. Perets Markish’s first major volume, Shveln (Thresholds; 1919), falls clearly into this category. It is a collection of ten linked poetic cycles. Taken as a whole the book deals explicitly and at length with the perceptual grid of space and time. Markish’s poetics was never uniform; his themes were heterogeneous, and his exuberant flow of words sometimes defies absolute categorization. However, the trends of his treatment of time and space do become readily apparent. Markish’s spatial descriptions generally fall into three rubrics: (1) general, (2) specific, and (3) mythological. Though there are sometimes overlaps, each one tends to be dealt with in different ways. In Shveln the third category is almost completely absent. As for the remaining two, his specific references are for the most part to his native Ukraine, specifically to the Volhynian rivers,

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farmland, fields, and steppe which occupied an important and intimate place in his works (as we saw in the second chapter). However, when it comes to Markish’s exploration of temporality, it tellingly takes place more often than not in the context of a generic spatialization. The “places” which he creates out of time are by and large unnamed and even abstract generalities, and not the Dniepr-watered fields of grain near his native home. Markish’s take on the new revolutionary poetics in Shveln was also no mere manipulation of symbols and images. His was a realignment of the perceptual axes in order to describe the creation of what can be called a “new man” for a new age. This is not the ideological construct of “liberated mass man” (bafrayter masnyokhid) as envisioned by Litvakov among others, the creation of which was the practical goal of a literature which was itself seen as being in the service of ideology. Markish’s new man is a poetic construct, part of a revolutionary exuberance which was itself not colligated to political ends. In fact, the image of a “new man” was environmental at the time. It seemed that almost every artist—writer and plastic artist alike—had his or her own (sometimes rather idiosyncratic) notion of such a creature and what that meant, whether it be social, political, ideological, artistic, aesthetic, or some combination thereof. Markish early on recognized the importance of the spatial dimension within this heady ferment. The sensitivity of his portrayal of his native land in the cycle Volin (Volhynia) is ample testament to that. However, the promethean principles of this new man, which he articulates in the first part of the book, elevate temporality, and instead of place they promote time as the core of the new revolutionary reality, while simultaneously casting spatiality in a hazier light, something more ambiguously conceived. These principles, encapsulated in the titles of the first four cycles of the book—“Erd” (“Earth”), “Shveln” (“Thresholds”), “Hayntn” (“Todays”), “Mentsh” (“Man”)—themselves summarize a progression to this humanistic realization at the very heart of the poetic project in Markish’s early career. Starting with “Erd,” one quickly observes the almost Whitmanesque effervescent “I” standing in the middle of all of this cycle’s poems. This remarkable consciousness is precisely the one captured by the word hefker. Coming from Jewish religious discourse as the term for legally ownerless property, this word came also to mean “licentious or libertine.” As has elsewhere been noted, this becomes Markish’s shorthand for the absolute liberty of the modern poet, or even the modern man, let loose upon the world, happy to be carried about

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by the winds of the times. As “Erd” demonstrates, Markish celebrates the joys of a youth abandoning himself to the nature of his native place. I am myself the earth, I am myself the field, I am myself the ear of corn And I am not sorry at all! In several places he enjoys the pleasure of the company of the gentile farmhands and lasses on the steppe, singing songs or watering horses. When, however, They run after me, they look for me throughout the world,— Why do they need me? I am gone, I am at the river, I am in the field. He had earlier proclaimed himself to be “the earth”; so what here has changed? He now expresses his absence—“I am gone”—by the phrase ikh bin nito. Yiddish, like many languages, constructs its existential statements by asserting that to exist is to be in a place. In French, for example, one finds il y a; in English, there is; in Arabic, hunāk (literally “there [is]”); and in Yiddish, s’iz do (“here”). To exist is to be “here.” The poem’s “I” is both “gone” and “at the river, in the field” simultaneously, that is, in the places understood as the “here” of the poem. In placing the phrases in such close proximity, it is as if Markish has turned the word nito itself into a kind of place-name: “I am Nothere.” Being “not here” for this consciousness is to be in all places, to be an expansive and expanding presence, and one expression, therefore, of the universalization which revolutionary aesthetics embraced. Markish will dramatically enlarge the all-encompassing quality of this poetic being in some of the mythically inflected passages of his manifestoes and critical writings. In an enlightening discussion of the corporeal metaphor in Markish’s early manifestoes, for example, Karolina Szymaniak notes how “[f]rom beneath the chains of images, the figure of a human giant emerges, a zombie and a robot at the same time, Prometheus and Atlas, or the expressionist neuer Mentsch (new man), who encompasses the whole world.” In the nonmythical home space of Markish’s steppe, however, the new man is less world-striding colossus than carefree nature spirit.

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In the cycle’s fifth poem, which forms a kind of hinge to the cycle as a whole (one of its cardinal points), this boundless “I” announces, “So I come with the day” (kum ikh mitn tog). Here he uses the (temporally vs. aesthetically) ambiguous term for “day” (tog). However, just as in Fininberg, where such a use was subsequently disambiguated in the same poem, so Markish follows in his poem with the lines So I come with today! [(kum ikh mitn haynt!]) A grain from the time storm’s sieve . . . To the earth, to the black earth I stick And fall below a new plow! “Day” (tog) has become “today” (haynt). This new consciousness is now associated closely with the concept of nowness. The metaphorical vocabulary used to understand what this means is a temporaesthetic spatialization. This “I” is a seed of time which has been literally grounded, planted in the earth. The ominous tones of the “time storm” and being cut down by the plow are interpretable as revolutionary references, a kind of poetic martyrology. For not only are there overtones of productive labor, but in this metaphorical construction living in the present moment, for today, is in effect being a today; it means that by day’s end this “I” is gone, to be replaced by the next today. That is one reason why Markish is so taken in this collection by the image of dying and being reborn anew. The image of “today” will return as one of the monolithic principles mentioned above in the cycle “Hayntn” (“Todays”). For the moment, though, the cycle immediately following “Erd” is “Shveln” (“Thresholds”), which inter alia is an exploration of precisely what is entailed by that metaphorical end of a “today”; it is about the evening time, twilight, and the process of day turning into night. The notion of a process is very important here because what Markish is describing is a kinetic temporality, not a static one. To give the meaning “evening” Markish less often uses the word ovnt than the synonym farnakht (literally “prenight”), thereby encoding this movement of day into night. In fact, the third poem of the cycle presents the “I” as the embodiment of temporal movement. The poem presents the violent image of this “I” being assaulted by some vague “they” who “mutely tear the day off of me” (raysn shtumerheyt arop fun mir dem tog). In the two subsequent stanzas:

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I become an evening! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And I clothe myself with the night from my head to my feet. [kh’ver a farnakht! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . un tu ikh on af zikh di nakht fun kop un biz tsufisn.] The metaphor of being clothed in the night or in the day is not a new one. What is new is the presentation of self as time itself, moving from day to evening to night, first by violence and then under his own volition. In this construction “day,” “evening,” and “night” are clearly aesthetic and not temporal concepts, since the self is time being sensorily clothed in tactile and visual raiment. This complex disposition of elements runs throughout Markish’s various cycles, which may account for some of the volume of his poetic effluence. Part of the effectiveness of Markish’s kinetic strategy comes from the context in which this poem appears. The cycle’s title, and that of the book as a whole—Thresholds—is one of the key images certainly of Yiddish modernism, of Jewish modernism more broadly, and likely of modernism in general. The domestic frame of the threshold softens or conceals the potential power of the metaphor of liminality. The threshold is a point of transition between two places, two states, one internal and one external. The revolutionary resonance of this image can be found in many of Markish’s cohort of poets. In Kvitko’s staccato “In roytn shturem” (“In the Red Storm”), for example, he presents the emergence of children from a traditional familial household into the dawn, the “morning,” of a new time. Addressing the freedom and joy of this new era, they declare, Upon your threshold We lay down our heads before you, We bear our lives. Where for Kvitko the threshold marked the transition to a political awakening in the “red storm,” for Markish again it was less overtly a site of political realization than of personal transformation. The distinction is immediately underscored by the fact that in this period political awakening is usually linked to the dawn. The threshold moment in Markish’s cycle, however, is evening.

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Both are “twilight,” that is, a liminal moment between light and dark. But Markish’s investigation of the opposite directionality further indicates his searching obsession with understanding perception itself, developing a vocabulary for describing it, and ultimately testing it in both aesthetic and ideological arenas. Further on in that same cycle the more specifically aesthetic dimensions of his project become apparent. To begin with, the seventh poem of the cycle is a sonnet. Very often, and particularly in longer works composed of different poetic forms, Markish will use the sonnet to signal his attention to (and sometimes consequent subversion of) aesthetic or artistic themes and images. So, for example, the tenth poem of Markish’s book cycle Nakht-royb (Night Robbery) is a sonnet addressed to an unnamed wanderer in “the singing forest of poets.” The concerns in that poem, though, differ from those of the sonnet from shveln, which seeks to aestheticize temporal perception and movement. The concluding tercets read, Over my head—a light stabs the darkness, All around is blanketed in darkness, Someone approaches rather closer to me . . . Little moments run out and in . . . Someone touches the dead by the nails— Somewhere stones are struck with a horse-like hoof. Here the synaesthesia of visual (the light and the darkness), tactile (stabbing, the touch of the nails), and auditory (the sound of hooves on stone) elements blend together with the temporaesthesia—“Little moments run out and in”—to produce the image of a subjectivity being bombarded by sensory perceptions out of which he is desperately trying to make sense in the darkness. The personification of moments as actors in the scene is an early attempt on Markish’s part to figure time and to come to terms with its centrality in his poetic worldview. The ominous elements of this scene are also unmistakeable, and Markish piles them up to support the image of this beleaguered subjectivity. For one, we move seamlessly from darkness (finster) to Darkness (khoyshekh), a word which echoes with the biblical plague. Then the stabbing or pricking of the light is linked to the digging in of fingernails later on, a clawing which would 144

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seem painful were it not a corpse being so handled. The nature and identity of that corpse, with its attendant “little moments,” will be explained in the next cycle. The first poem of the cycle Hayntn is also a sonnet, full of aesthetic concerns. In the latter section of that poem we read, Evening, at every sunset, I come there by foot To bury a corpse—a day . . . A lived-out today I carry There, one of today, one of yesterday, one of the day before yesterday on its own. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Today I have the yortsayt for my today’s long ago, Of yesterdays I have for a long time lost count, And I am there a complete today; And on old graves I dig new pits And I strew with time over that which is dearer and more beloved to me Than to you, oh eternity, my greatest enemy! The corpse of the preceding cycle, we now learn, is that recurrent “today,” the center of the speaker’s sense of identity. Though conscious of an imminent rebirth, this “I” still must observe the proprieties of burial, for which this sonnet acts as a kind of philosophical elegy. Though all of this is in a sense prefatory to the coming dawn, to the construction of a new identity, Markish is still clearly trying to understand what is given up, surrendered, lost in glorifying “nowness.” Markish seems to be teasing out the implications of an eternal string of todays. The description of a yortsayt—the traditional Jewish recognition and observance of the anniversary of a death, often in one’s immediate family—is not at all sentimental, but rather presents a striking insight into the human need for the rhythms of ceremony and tradition. The line which marks that insight—“Today I have the yortsayt for my today’s long ago”—nominalizes the much more commonly adverbial words “today” (haynt) and “long ago” (amol). Indeed, Markish in effect personifies these temporal concepts. Moreover, by placing them alongside the “I” of the poem, who is represented as a “today,” Markish links them all together familially (domesticating these identities as 145

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appropriate for the practice of a yortsayt). Two lines later, though, Markish takes this grammatical shell game a step further: “And I am there a complete today.” The ongoing nominalization of adverbial concepts gives this line an additional possible interpretation: “And I am there for a whole today.” The “I” is at once temporal and spatial, a “today” and a “there.” These deictic categories work by “pointing out” what content is to fill the verbal bottle. “There” can be anywhere until specified; “today” is similarly any day until it is made precise. The fact that the deictic anchorage of the poem is multiple creates a kind of hazy spatiotemporal indeterminacy mirroring how unsure the subject is of his changing reality. This grand metaphor continues to get played out in different permutations in the cycle. The next poem shows a willingness to dispense with a need to disperse this deictic vagueness and rather embraces it with some of the most explicit and concrete spatializations of time we have encountered: I devote myself to the silent steppes, No beginning and no end of which I can see, Just as I see no beginning and no end of myself. Indeed, a few stanzas later we read, I am already at that place from which I go, Came back . . . And only a field of “todays,” died young And dead. The point of bringing in all of these examples has to do with the shifting significance of that spatialization. Space in the Jewish literature of Eastern Europe was almost reflexively associated with the traditional Jewish vocabulary of exile and homelessness. As we have seen, the beginning of Jewish literary modernity in the late nineteenth century inaugurated a period marked both by understanding the idea of home using the vocabulary of homeless (as in classic shtetl prose) and at the same time redefining “home” itself, problematizing the reflexivity of exile-consciousness. The internalized sense of homelessness in traditional Jewish culture left its impression on Markish, as it did on most of the writers of his shtetl-reared generation. For Markish it was not a desiccated legacy to slough off but a potent source of symbols and themes 146

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to reinterpret. For example, the variety of Yiddish Expressionism which Markish would develop during his time in Warsaw, beginning in 1922, would actually emphasize homelessness as a central tenet of his poetics, a homelessness informed by that Jewishness—which was brought home to him during the dislocations and brutality of the anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine during and after the Civil War—but reconfigured within the expansive worldview of the Left at that time. Markish’s valorization of the wanderer figure (an identification he shared with many in his cohort, including Kulbak, for example)—a figure whose homelessness is perhaps his most positive attribute as it is the mark of his unfettered freedom—is the most immediately apparent emblem of the reappropriation of homelessness as part of that worldview. However, in his earlier poetry, of which Shveln is typical, space and place are important as parts of the universalizing tendencies of revolutionary ideology; the stress is not on homelessness, on having no place, but rather on understanding what it means to have all places. And as we have seen, Markish’s connections to place are unmistakeable here. These spatial investigations notwithstanding, as we shall see in the next cycle, it was time which the new man would be measured against, time which would demarcate his reality as new and revolutionary. The very title of that cycle—“Mentsh” (“Man” or “Human”)—indicates its central holistic or synthesizing concern as an exploration of what constitutes the new man in this revolutionary reality. And just as all of the preceding cycles with their monolithic principles—“Earth,” “Threshold,” “Today”—lead up to and combine in “Man,” so this cycle puts together or synthesizes the temporal and spatial realities explored in those earlier poems. First and foremost, the new man is a boundless being. Markish repeatedly echoes the idea of having neither beginning nor end. This is precisely the metaphorical vocabulary in which time and space bleed together, since both are describable in terms of boundaries, beginnings and ends. For the selfconsciousness of Markish’s poem, this boundlessness is not reflexively positive. The first few poems of the cycle describe the inherent problems, not least of which is the confusion entailed both by being an individual and by being boundless: In the empty space of the Infinite I have strayed between worlds I have gotten lost between times I have gotten tangled. 147

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Markish shares the sense of entanglement with Fininberg, who used the intermediaries of night and day to pose this problem. Markish’s tangle, however, involves much more explicitly the axes of perception themselves; the perceiving “I” is quite literally implicated in them (“I am in the middle!” [kh’bin in der mit!]). This implication allows Markish to indulge in some of his more freewheeling poetics. Symptomatic of this liberty are lines such as these, a stanza in the middle of the fourth poem of the cycle: I was already yesterday there And will be there tomorrow, And am there now, And don’t know where that is. The first three lines revolve around the verb “to be,” each one in a different tense: “was,” “will be,” “am.” Each line also contains two adverbs, one temporal and one spatial: “yesterday here,” “there tomorrow,” and “there now.” The individual poetic subject’s existence is therefore fundamentally, existentially linked to these concepts. The difference between them is subtle but striking. The temporal adverb shifts with the verbal tense (“yesterday,” “tomorrow,” “now”); the spatial adverb, however, is constant (“there”). The riddle-like quality of these lines—highlighted by the stanza’s conclusion that “I don’t know where that is”—is based on Markish’s play with the meanings of the verb “to be”: existential, copular, and predicative (a philosophical game extending back to Parmenides). More than positioning the subject in a given place at a given time, these lines also make a statement about that subject’s identity. Recalling Markish’s almost manifesto-like announcement from the last poem of the cycle “Earth”—“My name is ‘Now’ ”—we know that he does not shy away from this kind of semantic play. At this point in the poem Markish maintains the semantic ambiguity, and the reader cannot help but work through the possibilities to figure out the puzzle. The core element in this formulation is that space is static, and time is dynamic. The next poem opens with the resounding: “I am a person!” (ikh bin a mentsh!) This shout announces that Markish will begin to resolve that haze into the image of the new man.

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I am created from the blue distances, From times, And times running—I avoid— I am myself—a time! The “I,” the poetic consciousness, is explicitly composed of two elements: (1) distances, and (2) times, both notably in the plural. In one of Markish’s favored techniques, he yokes these two together by rhyming vaytn (distances), which is one of the more common words Markish deploys to stand in for notions of space, and tsaytn (times). However, it becomes clear that the more crucial of the two for this worldview is time. Self is identified as a discrete temporal entity, and not only that but one which shuns the “natural” behavior of time, that is, being fleeting. The perception of such a discrete time as unique, and as something aesthetic, is Markish’s great metaphorical revelation about the new revolutionary individual. The “I” is identified with the temporal axis because in this new poetics space, while not necessarily pejorative, represents a false universality. Time, on the other hand, is the only principle upon which the true new man can be realized. This temporal revelation is made clear in the shift of tone between the fifth and sixth poems. Opening with the pronouncement “I am here!” (kh’bin do!), it starts out as a poem about spatiality, about “hereness.” However, unlike the exuberance of the preceding poem, this one deals with “congealment,” “rot,” “black crows,” “death,” and “terror.” Presenting time positively and space negatively continues both into the following poem and on to the end of the cycle as well. This realignment of axes along evaluative lines takes these poems out of the realm of exuberant modernist lyricism and superimposes them onto the ideological grid of the revolutionary events through which Markish and his colleagues and contemporaries lived and in some of which they actively took part. In the final two poems of the cycle what begins as a love lyric to the wind— that quintessence of both the absolute freedom, lonely and capacious, as well as of the boundlessness of this new man—ends as a prayer: From me—endlessness! From me—generations, From me—the man

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With joy I listen To eternity’s praise of me . . . Scream! I believe, I pray! “Endlessness” is yet another ambiguous, biaxial concept; it applies temporally as well as spatially. Markish links this concept to the self over successive lines in a litany of self-definition, the second concept of which is “generations.” This connection to traditional Jewish cultural identity is something Markish does not shy away from. It is a cultural concept, however, which is linked directly to time and temporal reckoning. Again, unlike Fininberg, who as we saw excised a single segment of generational time, Markish speaks of the run of generations in the plural. It is an idea picked up in the title of his 1929 novel Dor oys, dor ayn (A Generation Comes, a Generation Goes). Part of cultural change is progress, both social and individual, and that is why the third element of Markish’s litany is “the man.” Markish is trying to define full humanity, especially as more than a concatenation of elements, rather a progression of them. It is not enough, however, for the individual to have made this realization, to have made himself into the new man. He is and must be part of some larger community of identification, and so external recognition is essential. (A poet, for example, belongs to a larger social community since he does not only write, he publishes; and Markish did graphomaniacally publish.) Praise on its own is also insufficient; it must be bellowed out. This praise comes from “eternity,” the utmost extension of the temporal axis, and another aspect of the boundlessness of the modern poet. In the echo of that scream the poet states simply and definitively, “I believe, I pray!” Liturgically inflected endings are not uncommon in works of this period. Fininberg, for example, ended on a psalmechoing note. In some sense such endings participated in the reappropriation, reinterpretation, or reconfiguration of traditional tropes and concepts. Here in Markish’s case, the liturgical conclusion to this cycle sanctifies the cause, turning it from lyrical perception into credo. Insofar as Markish’s liturgical-revolutionary conclusion parallels Fininberg’s psalmic-revolutionary one, in this context one may ask how are time and space “revolutionary” principles? First of all, the notion of “revolutionariness” 150

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as used throughout this account calls for a moment of attention. In an essay from 1923 entitled “Revolutsyonere poezye” (“Revolutionary Poetry”), the critic Shmuel Niger makes what he considers a crucial distinction between “revolutionary poetry” and “poetic revolution,” the latter being a function of the political and social realia of a revolution (he calls it a “social phenomenon”) and the former something “deeply individual.” His conclusion is telling: “The Russian Revolution certainly had an effect on Yiddish poetry, but if something ‘revolutionary’ appeared in it then it is in the individual-psychological and artistic, not the political and social sense of the word. The political and social revolutionariness of Yiddish poetry that comes from Russia is artificial.” Despite the ideological predispositions of the latter comment, and despite the arguable inaccurateness of the claim that Yiddish writers (and so Yiddish literature) were not also imbricated in the process of “poetic revolution” from the very beginning, as many of them clearly were, the perception of different “revolutionarinesses” is nevertheless important, not to mention relevant to the poets described above. That their “revolutionary poetics” (especially in the case of Markish) can be characterized as personal or attitudinal as opposed to pegged to a specific political agenda seems to be the case for many of these poets’ earlier works.

Markish, Aesthetics, and Revolution In this early period, it was not only in poetry that Markish sought to explore his ideas about space and time. His critical writings and manifestoes also deal with spatiotemporality, and nowhere more robustly than in the brilliant if typically rambling essay “Di estetik fun kamf in der moderner dikhtung” (“The Aesthetics of Struggle in Modern Belles-lettres”; 1922). This essay was originally declaimed as part of a bold avant-garde Yiddish literary event held in Warsaw on January 28, 1922. As Markish’s friend, fellow poet, and participant in the event, Meylekh Ravitsh, recalled, “The morning lasted three hours. . . . It was dreadfully hard to understand anything. Hard—because at that time, even the speaker himself [Markish] hardly knew logically and thoroughly what he wanted [to say].” Indeed, the essay as later published still provides less an integrated thesis than a revolving set of themes exploring, in Szymaniak’s words, “the role of tradition in modern art and the place of art in modern society.” 151

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One of the themes Markish focuses on is the idea of a standard of artistic judgment, which Markish asserts is to be found in the “epoch” in which the work was produced. There is a different trend which sees affiliation to literary movements as the appropriate critical standard. To Markish’s mind, however, literary movements per se are often fetishized labels rather than adequate descriptors of elements of an individual artist’s individual style. (This we saw earlier with reference to Futurism.) Such movements are but traditional authority by another name, and therefore work against the individual artistic freedom Markish advocated. As for the “epoch” in which Markish felt his own work fell, it might be called a modernist revolutionary one. Within any epoch, and a fortiori the one in which Markish saw himself taking part, the main problem of art is how to transfer to static form the contents of an experience which is fundamentally dynamic. (This anticipates Joseph Frank’s analysis of modernist literature and his concept of “spatial form.”) In Markish’s words, And here art has posed a problem: How to attend to the quick, whirling tempo of life? How to give this speed concrete forms? How to give the dynamic heart of life to the static form of art? And here all of the newest literary “isms” with their particular paths come together in one point. Markish’s axiom is that more than any other epoch this modernist revolutionary one is an age of motion and of near-constant change. Since one of art’s functions is to capture, to set down, to make static, how can art accomplish this for the exceptional dynamism of the time? Markish emphasizes this problem and the importance of devising solutions because not only does this new epoch most value motion but it also castigates immobility. And nowhere is this immobility—both spatial and temporal— more apparent than in the classic image of the shtetl: One sat in the little shtetlekh and watched how the goats tore the thatch from sukkot, and when the clock called one went off to wash, pray, lie down. With the same yawning drowsiness the beadle’s voice called to God’s service as well as to the bath.

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And that lazy, dragging sleepiness was so heartily idyllically reflected in the forms of literature for that period. The spatial stasis (sitting in the shtetl; laziness) is accompanied by the shtetl’s traditional temporality. That static shtetl epoch is overturned by the antistasis, the dynamism of the modernist one, and especially its revolutionary poetics: So the bloody command for liberation—the revolution—knocked out the windows with stones, with cannon, set fire to the houses, drove [people] out of their nests and thundered: “Run! And don’t ask whereto!” The destination is irrelevant; motion is the whole point. The metaphor Markish uses to bind together his principle of humanist individualism—the point of “Mentsh” as the culminating cycle of the book Thresholds—is spatiotemporal, a metaphor expressed in the vocabulary of Jewish exterritorialism. There is no home where one must come, except death. There are small inns, islands, tucked away and scattered, like signs of rest over the whole area of human homelessness. And great is man’s joy when one draws near an inn’s small fire, and greater still is his sadness when one leaves at night the little point of a fire’s flicker somewhere in the distance. But both joy and sadness are sanctified with the spirit of wandering. And where is the border between eternity and temporariness? Man is eternal, as is his thousand-time stormy moment [oygnblik], and he is a thousand times mortal in his endlessness. So [it is] from little fire to little fire over the whole area of human homelessness. And drowned and choked in the springs of passion and storm. And the reward is—going. Markish embroiders further on the powerful trope of homelessness. Here he goes so far as to equate homecoming with death (both “home” and “death” being powerful static images). At the same time, however, he does recognize

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the “ joy” of some intermittent pauses in the incessant motion and commotion of modern life. In the complicated network of images and terminology he develops for describing such a life, Markish makes a fundamental connection between “wanderingness”—that spatial concept which embodies the positive aspects of motion and homelessness, the dynamic component of freedom in space—and “eternity,” the universalized temporal concept. The “place” where the two come together is “temporariness,” a kind of a pause in the wandering and a pause in eternity. This “temporariness” is the moment (oygnblik), both a spatialized time and a temporalized space. For Markish, this is the building block of modernist literary perception, where artistic works are themselves such moments in the flux of reality. Dobrushin, with whom this chapter began, comes at these issues from a different perspective. He asserts early in his essay that “[a]ll three of them [that is, Markish, Kvitko, and Hofshteyn] play with emotional image-colors and word-colors, and they dip their painterly brushes in the juicy depth of Jewish organic folk soul and folk language. . . . The new grown-up concepts of man and world receive from them Jewish clothing and are embodied in such a way in new artistic expressions that deepen modern thought, feeling, and experience.” This “Jewish organic folk soul” and “Jewish clothing” for these new modern (or revolutionary) concepts is key. One must step gingerly when linking Jewishness with revolutionariness in this way. Poets are individuals, after all, and their poetry is a product of that individuality as much as anything else. These poets were both partisans of a cause—no matter the degree of their commitment—as well as artists who shared similar kinds of cultural experience as Jews writing in Yiddish. The fact that the latter sometimes found expression (whether it was critical, positive, or neutral) in their works opened the door later on to a particular kind of criticism. In a 1934 critique of Markish’s long poem Brider (Brothers; 1930), the Soviet Yiddish critic A. Holdes singles out three typical throwbacks to Markish’s earlier works: (1) “national and shtetloriented limitation, and even nationalistic moments”; (2) “a certain idealization of the Bund”; and (3) “a certain chaoticness.” This “chaoticness” likely refers to Markish’s full-throated Futurist-Expressionist (etc.) verse. More important is precisely this charge of a “national” orientation. The Jewishness perceived in Holdes’s criticism is analogous to the revolutionariness outlined by Niger, that is, not only complicated, and not only personal, but part of individual poetics that must be read as artistic as much as anything else. It is within this framework that I claim that these poets’ particular deployment of 154

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spatiotemporal metaphors is from the point of view of non-Jewish poetry an innovation, but from an internal “Jewish” literary perspective a more or less natural development. This was a poetics which coopted traditional temporality as static and combined that with the equation of homelessness and positive universalism. That their spatiotemporal metaphorical language can appear both so natural and so radical in the context of the new social, political, and especially ideological environment means that these Yiddish poets were uniquely positioned to produce revolutionary works that were still recognizably Jewish.

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5 enclosed in distances The Poetic Experiments of Yocheved Bat-Miriam

Introduction This critical revolutionary juncture offers the opportunity to raise the salient issue of gender, because the same forces at work in the redefinition and realignment of artistic and conceptual categories were at work on social categories as well. The egalitarian promise of the revolutionary moment brought women artists into a more public and prominent position. Indeed, within roughly half a decade of the 1919 watershed for Yiddish poetry heralded by Dobrushin’s essay, the Soviet Hebrew literary miscellanies were blazoning bold new names, including those of women. That the revolutionary project writ large countenanced writings in Hebrew (no matter how marginal or ultimately ill-fated) has been too readily overlooked. That these women poets made significant and novel contributions to modernist letters deserves greater recognition. And that one of the foremost among the Hebrew poets electrified at that moment, who would continue writing important poetry in Palestine—Yocheved Bat-Miriam (1901–1980)—is also one whose spatiotemporal poetics is some of the more sensitive and sophisticated is I think no coincidence. The gendered perspective on traditional Jewish categories of space and time (so important a preconditioned understanding, as we observed, for poets like Markish and Fininberg) destabilizes and defamiliarizes them, as we shall see, allowing access to them that is far more critically attuned, and as such a fitting culmination of this book. In a critical review essay on Bat-Miriam’s work, the critic Azriel Ukhmani makes the intriguing off hand comment that while other poets use the past to interpret the present, Bat-Miriam uses the future to illuminate the past. While opaque, this intuition gets at the heart of Bat-Miriam’s poetic experimentation with spatiotemporal vocabulary. One of the poets associated with the Moderna, the heady froth of Hebrew modernist verse whose heyday coin156

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cided with the interwar period, on which this book has largely been focused, Yocheved Bat-Miriam (née Zhelezniak) is read very often both alongside and apart from its other major canonically associated figures, including the poets Avraham Shlonsky, Natan Alterman, and Leah Goldberg. She is also often written into the framework of women writers of the period (and the themes and styles with which they are linked), including Rachel (Bluvshteyn), Ester Raab, and Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir. Yet Bat-Miriam stands out from these simplified categorizations as something of an enigma in modern Hebrew letters. The few who study her work in depth acknowledge it openly as fascinating, important, and in many ways unique. More often, however, her name is mentioned in various topical lists of other writers and poets, most of them women, and her work is usually singled out as singularly opaque or difficult. And there it is left. As one might imagine, there is much to say about such a notably complex body of work from such an underappreciated poet. Born in White Russia at the turn of the last century, she began her literary career in the early and mid1920s associating with a group of writers who published in the Hebrew anthology Bereishit (Genesis). This was one of the small number of ultimately short-lived Hebrew Octobrist circles whose goal was the fashioning of a Soviet Hebrew poetry. In 1928 she moved to Palestine, and participated in the productive modernist literary circles there. Her collections of poetry published between 1932 and 1946 (she would stop publishing after her son’s death in the 1948 war) trace a complicated trajectory of constantly reconfiguring networks of themes and vocabulary, of spiritual or religious extrospection, personal and erotic longing, and the confrontation of place and memory, all set within a notoriously opaque “Symbolist” language. The present discussion will focus, however, on but one small portion of Bat-Miriam’s literary output. I single out her early work, especially the cycle “Me-rachok” (“From Afar”), because it represents her most concentrated effort at understanding the connections between time and space. Almost all of Bat-Miriam’s poetry is concerned with space in some form or another; her later poetry, most notably the poema “Erets Yisra’el” (“The Land of Israel”), for example, presents a remarkable, sustained examination of emplacement. (I will return to that work at the end of this chapter.) It is, however, the early work in which these explorations also most thoroughly trace out temporal consequences. If Bat-Miriam’s major contribution in “From Afar” is an investigation of “the question of the relation between experience and poetic formulation . . . the 157

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condition of poetic language in general and the relation between reality and poetic invention,” then the instrument of that investigation is a spatiotemporal vocabulary. Ruth Kartun-Blum, one of Bat-Miriam’s most thorough commentators, sets us on the path to understanding the development of such a vocabulary when she rightly notes how Bat-Miriam’s poetry is “not structured narratively but associatively.” The temporality of her early poetry therefore is not chronological but is rather marked by “the subjective internal structure of time.” This analysis presents time as more than just a subjective perception of reality. Very much like Markish’s and Fogel’s use of temporaesthesia, BatMiriam’s temporality is a poetic expression of internal psychological and emotional processes. In an invaluable summary analysis Kartun-Blum maintains, and I think rightly, that “the connections between the events of poems in a certain cycle, or even in one poem, are more spatial than chronological.” That is to say, we encounter a spatialization of time. In my analysis of certain poems from Bat-Miriam’s early poetry I will outline some of the primary features of her experiment with developing a vocabulary of spatiotemporality, including how memory functions as the connecting link between time and space. Bat-Miriam’s intuitions about the associative structures of temporality in particular are reflected in her use not only of memory, but also of synaesthesia as well as a subtle analysis of the poetic potentials of the Hebrew verbal system. Though submerged by the poetry’s complexity, the boldness of BatMiriam’s investment in and investigation of time and space makes hers a distinct, if distinctly underappreciated, voice in Hebrew and Jewish letters.

Symbolism Alongside the epithets “complicated,” “opaque,” and “difficult,” Bat-Miriam’s poetry is most often characterized as “Symbolist,” a characterization which as much as anything means complicated, opaque, and difficult. In the Russian context, Symbolism was not so much the poetry flowing from Baudelaire’s theory, with its “forests of symbols,” but rather came to mean an enigmatic poetics which defies univocal interpretations. Loosely put, this brand of Symbolism deals with the ambivalences and ambiguities surrounding the uneasy blending of the concrete, plastic, physical real with the ethereal irreal. As becomes clear from Oleg Maslenikov’s account of Russian Symbolist circles, the movement as such was really a shifting network of passionate (or in Masle158

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nikov’s apt phrasing, “frenzied”) relationships. Bat-Miriam came of age poetically at a slightly later, revolutionary moment. And while both the more “classical” balance of Acmeism and the wilder whirlwind of Futurism had to some extent superseded or displaced the Symbolists in Russian verse, Symbolist writing was well and thoroughly read by Jewish writers of the early twentieth century. The poetry of Aleksandr Blok, for example, was still widely popular among Russian-reading Hebrew poets; echoes of his polyphonies can be heard again and again. This is certainly the case in many of the Hebrew Octobrist poems of the Bereishit group, just exchanging many of the Christological motifs for those of Jewish life and tradition. Among the most salient elements of the Symbolist poetic worldview, what was attractive to Bat-Miriam—or at least the aspect most resonant in much of her work, and particularly so of the early poetry—was the meeting and muddling of binary categories. It is not fortuitous that Azriel Ukhmani singles out negation and binary opposition as some of her favored linguistic techniques, highlighting their particular “open[ness] to multiple meanings.” For their part the Hebrew Octobrists’ poetics focused on rebellion. These Octobrists loosely crystallized around two journals, Tsiltselei shama (1923), with its more politically engaged verse, and the already mentioned Bereishit (1926), which included such writers as Avraham Yitschak Kariv (né Krivorotshka; 1900– 1976), who would become a literary critic after emigrating to Palestine; and Bat Chamah (pen name of Malkah Shekhtman, 1898–1979), whose contribution to the journal, “Bat hefker,” participates in this more generalized rebellious spirit. As Gilboa notes, their poetic time was that “of a rebellion against the symbols of yesteryear rather than of the construction of the new order.” Bat-Miriam’s poetics stands therefore slightly outside this rebelliousness for its own sake. I argue instead that what Bat-Miriam was producing was indeed a new conception of temporality, one which at the same time understood ambiguity and could be “ordered” spatially. Equally important for Bat-Miriam’s early verse is to look at her Symbolism as a way of teasing out and exploring the correspondences between the objects of the world and whatever symbolic content links them to a deeper, truer understanding of the reality which they compose. This is why even while participating in a political project of creating Soviet Hebrew verse—that is, Hebrew poetry consonant with, indeed even promoting, the political ideology of the Revolution while celebrating the artistic liberty of the individual— she was simultaneously writing deeply ruminative, spiritual, and individualist 159

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poetry. As a result, whether its use was conditioned by reading Symbolist (or Romantic) poetry, in which the technique appears frequently, synaesthesia is deployed by Bat-Miriam in a number of poems. In her particular version, she “attributes spiritual properties to a thing and material properties to sensations.” Given the dualistic or binary tension in Bat-Miriam’s poetry— between the concrete and the spiritual, the human and the divine, the present and the absent, longing and fulfillment—abstractions are conceived sensorily; for example, in the poem “Ha-Karmel” (“Carmel”), two of Bat-Miriam’s primary essences, “dream and hope,” are actually turned into geographic spaces. An even more graphic example is the following stanza from the 1940 poem “Chava” (“Eve”): She touches the edges of the greenery, the fruit trees and the animals of the field, mornings and evenings of revelation, cloud and vision. Not only do we here find synaesthesia, but a kind of temporaesthesia as well; recall Trakl’s “the hands touch the old age of bluish waters.” In Zierler’s commentary on this poem she notes that “[i]n fact, no eating takes place at all. Eve’s interactions with her surroundings are so intense that all her senses blend into one mystical whole; her hands speak, sing, hear, and experience time and there is something exquisitely, religiously sinful about this. Note, of course, that in this poem, as in ‘Ofel hatohu,’ Bat-Miriam uses the verb mithateh (preening, luxuriating . . . ). Eve’s interaction with the tree thus entails not sin but sensual/poetic indulgence.” It has been noted of Bat-Miriam’s verse that it contains expressions of erotic joy alongside a sense of its sinfulness, which often mingle in a kind of synthesis, however tense. This is part of what Zierler is pointing out when she focuses on the verb mitchateh, which means to preen or luxuriate but derives from the root for sin. What is interesting in the trajectory from the two poems she cites which contain that verb—one from 1926 and the other from 1940—is the fact that in the first the adjective applies to the sensualized (even eroticized) and nearly personified tree (“My tree in the field, my preening tree—/ her body rising with a whisper”), while in the second it is each gathered and caressed moment which is “weaned, preening, and fleeting.” By this relatively late poem Bat-Miriam now has at her disposal a vocabulary for the freestanding 160

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(“weaned”), dynamic (“fleeting”), aestheticized and eroticized (“preening” or luxuriating) moment as part of her temporal system. In this individualist vein Bat-Miriam’s verse over her lifetime can therefore be plotted both spatially and temporally. One of the dominant spatial themes is the discourse of homeland, in which there is a tension between the Russian steppes of her childhood (as in the famous sequences “Chamah yeshanah” [“Old Sun”] and “Agurim me-ha-saf ” [“Cranes from the Threshold”]) on the one hand and the Palestinian landscape of her adopted home on the other. Each of these, in turn, is mapped onto a mythic (or mythicized) past, in the former that of her childhood and in the latter that of the Bible. In fact, her choice of pen name reformulates her identity in both of these mythic modes. Born Zhelezniak, she chose the matronymic surname Bat-Miriam (literally “daughter of Miriam”) as both a gesture to her own mother, whose name was Miriam, and an homage to the biblical prophetess Miriam, who figures prominently in her work. Her own inversion of the biblical geneology is another of her modernist exfiliations—in the Bible Yocheved is the mother of Miriam. This description of the mythic past, however, is only one of the temporal modes Bat-Miriam explores. The other is an imperfective present which recurs at key moments in much of her early poetry as a marker of indeterminacy, but also as a way of highlighting longing, separation, or incompleteness, the anxieties that run as a rich seam throughout her work. Bat-Miriam was not the first modern Hebrew poet to reinvest the Hebrew verbal system—long a tense-based system—with elements of its original biblical aspectual structure. Most notably, as we saw in the third chapter, the poet David Fogel had experimented with these possibilities earlier in the century. Bat-Miriam, however, remodels this verbal option with an emotional and symbolic superstructure, the sometimes deeply personal nature of which accounts for some of the notorious opacity of her poetry. Furthermore, for its part the cycle “From Afar”— the first cycle in the eponymous volume, Bat-Miriam’s first collection (1932), a cycle which ruminates on the idea of distance in a series of loosely connected “love” poems from erotic, spiritual, and other perspectives—can be seen as an extended exploration of this imperfective present and its relationship to spatiotemporality (an idea I will return to later in this chapter). The very title of the cycle brings together many of these ideas. The first appearance of Miriam in the Bible (at this point unnamed) is as Moses’ older sister, who stations herself “from afar” in order to watch the infant in his reedy cradle by the Nile and to watch out for what might befall him (“And his sister 161

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stood from afar to know what would happen to him”). Wendy Zierler sees this self-conscious positioning as part of Bat-Miriam’s thematic orchestration of her own voice through, or with, the Bible: “Throughout the title cycle, the poet speaker stands, yearns, calls out, and reaches out merachok, suggesting a melding of the speaker’s aspirations with those of the biblical Miriam.” In addition to this thematics of identity—a sense of biblical identification shared by many Hebrew women poets (which is part of Zierler’s larger argument)—in this freighted word one finds an apt distillation of the spatial and temporal thematics at work in the cycle. Distance is a powerful thematic concept in this early poetry. For the moment I will note its deictic ambiguity. The biblical adverb me-rachok is most commonly an adverb of space, as in the example cited above, but it is also an adverb of time (“long ago”; see Isaiah 22:11). That is to say, deictically it indicates a distance either in space or in time. Moreover, it is also used as a more concrete nominalization. In one of God’s more sly rhetorical questions he asks, “Am I a nearby God . . . and not a distant God?,” using a construct formation (elohei me-rachok) which in effect converts the form grammatically from adverb to noun. One feels the power of this verbal plasticity and its poetic possibilities in the hands of Bat-Miriam. The fact of this nominalization is seen in the biblical compound prepositional phrase le-me-rachok (literally, “to from afar”), a phrase Bat-Miriam in fact uses in her exploration of the poetics of me-rachok. Most often the deictic positioning of “distance” is worked out in the context of an erotic relationship—Zierler characterizes “From Afar” as a “love cycle”—though the identities of the participants in that relationship are vague. In some poems it is the poet, or lyric subject, who assumes the Miriamic stance “from afar.” For example, in the fourth poem: “Alone from afar in silence I am standing / Longing and anticipating” (yechidah me-rachok bi-demamah e’emod / oreget ve-tsofah). This solitude (yechidah), silence (demamah), stasis (e’emod), and longing (‘oreget) are all elements of this cycle’s recognizable lyrolect, the store of constantly recurring words and core concepts throughout this poem, whose quotidian simplicity is destabilized by the unsettling or disconcerting atmosphere they create in their reconfiguring repetition. In other poems from the cycle, however, the love object is the one figured in the distance: “To me from afar you appeared / today.” The fluidity of the deictic anchorage of these interchanging points of view is highlighted by the seeming neutrality of the very first line of the cycle: 162

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The distance, which rests Between you and me— I will cross over all of it And before you will I come. Distance is first set up as a span of space—or of time—which separates. It is then explored as a variable vantage point; what is in the distance is always in some sense the periphery with regard to the situation of the speaking subject, the lyrical “I.” Bat-Miriam begins with the conventional distant-lover trope, with the lover in the foreground and the beloved afar off. From that familiar starting point Bat-Miriam sets out to confuse the sense of perspective and upend the deictic anchorage. She shifts perspective from the central periphery—the distance from which that subject speaks—to a peripheral center—the distance in which the object is figured. The shifting deixis unsettles our sense of time and place. Those shifts make the use of “distant” material—childhood memories, for example, or just as importantly for Bat-Miriam, biblical imagery—less a matter of literary reference than an aspect of how her perception actually functions.

The Place of the Bible In some of Bat-Miriam’s poetry after Merachok, alongside the theme of distance encapsulated in the biblical Miriam’s position “from afar,” the Egyptian orbit of the events of the prophetess’s life figures prominently as one of the most powerful elements of Bat-Miriam’s concerted identification with her biblical namesake. Both Ilana Pardes and Wendy Zierler see in this identification—foregrounded in their respective readings of Bat-Miriam’s 1939 poem “Miriam”—a “radical rereading” of biblical materials in order to reformulate the very idea of literary genealogies which relegate the woman poet to prescribed precincts. For instance, in reclaiming the moment of Miriam’s being stricken with leprosy for gossiping about her brother’s choice of spouse (Numbers 12), Pardes highlights not only that disease’s “capacity to characterize the noncanonical status of the matrilineal tradition she attempts to reconstruct, but also leprosy’s metaphorical use in the writings of other members of her generation. Shlonsky, in particular, often uses leprosy as a metaphor for creativity.” Bat-Miriam argues that true creativity was in effect originally the punishment-turned-blessing of the prophetess. 163

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More radical, though, was the implicit national commentary embedded in that text. Again in Pardes’s words, “By using and misusing the far too few verses allotted to Miriam in the Bible, Bat-Miriam thus manages to conjure up a strong foremother, an exemplary female symbolist, magician, rebel, outcast; a model national prophetess with dual nationality; and, above all, a precursor who can, in turn, empower her descendant” (my emphasis). Miriam’s only home was Egypt; her prophetic “call” and her creative impulses were all nurtured by its environment. And even though she would ultimately end her life in the fugitive wilderness with her brother and her people, her own voice—so BatMiriam suggests—is found not in homecoming but in the dynamic journey between homes. In effect she converts nostalgia—the pain of the homeward journey—into (for lack of a better word) nostohedonia. That is to say, the pleasure of the homeward journey itself. This is one reason why distance is such an important recurring trope in her work. It is a pleasure, a combination of joy and longing, which seeks to prolong that journey. A longing for the Palestinian wilderness in time and place, consonant with Bat-Miriam’s Zionist commitments, cohabits a poetic space with a longing for the Lithuanian landscape of her childhood. The temporal and spatial journey between them in her verse maps out a tension explored in this nostohedonic biblical imagination. This goes some way to account for one curious feature of the poem “Miriam,” namely the fact that “[i]n the initial three stanzas there are very few verbs; where verbs do appear, they reinforce stasis rather than movement or development” (my emphasis). It is a static moment in which her Egyptian self can experience enjoyment. When the poet states, From afar, in the ashes of memory, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . trodden Goshen adopted a dim tribal imagination, she pairs a specifically spatial adverb (mi-neged, “from afar,” unlike the deictically ambiguous me-rachok) with the temporal concept of memory. To do this she speaks of “the ashes of memory” (deshen ha-zekher), where these ashes are more precisely those of an altar sacrifice. Time is thus most dramatically spatialized. Moreover, historical memory is materializable, the poet opines, but it is always a matter of sacrificing something. The poet’s voice presents a

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different kind of cultural recollection, one far better suited to the creative individual than the grim politics of tribe and place. As we have seen so far in Perets, in Tshernikhovski, and now in Bat-Miriam, Egypt becomes a counterpoint to Jewish locative thinking, and a means of recalibrating the idea of emplacement. This is one reason why Pardes notes of Bat-Miriam’s Zionism that it was “idiosyncratic.” And it is not only Miriam whom Bat-Miriam strategically deploys in this way in her biblical rereadings. Hagar, too, is situated as an important foremother. The lapidary drama of Hagar’s rejection and fugition in the Bible becomes emblematic for Bat-Miriam. Hagar is, of course, also an Egyptian, which makes her in an important sense Miriam’s countrywoman. And as David Jacobson notes of Bat-Miriam’s 1940 poem about Hagar: It is likely that Bat-Miriam identifies with the portrait of Hagar in the poem as a woman who has responded to the depressing circumstances of her rejection by turning to the imaginative world of artistic creation. Bat-Miriam may also identify with Hagar the Egyptian in her decision not to return to her native land, despite the tragic circumstances of her life in Canaan. As an immigrant from Europe, Bat-Miriam similarly decided that despite the difficulties she encountered as a woman and a Jew in the Land of Israel, she would remain there and dedicate herself to create a poetic world in Hebrew in which these difficulties could be transcended. Without that political overlay Hagar also figures in the earlier “From Afar” cycle. In this case she appears as a way of connecting the creative office of prophecy with erotic longing, both of which encode a temporal projection from the present into the future, one predictive and the other precative. As with other poems in the cycle, while not graphically divided into structural units, this poem can easily be separated into several sections, each oriented around a natural time: daytime (lines 1–13); nighttime and twilight (lines 14–39); and dawn (lines 40–46). I will focus on just the first, diurnal section: To me from afar [me-rachok] you appeared today And your name I whispered, For my heart trembled against me.

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Like a wind that passed over the surface of a hidden stretch of water And spread out circles, Circles expanding from points, Trembling and quivering, And dying far far away [harchek harchek] At the base of the soft reeds. With great longings my heart stretched out to you Today, And your name between me and myself I whispered And I did not raise my voice. Two separate biblical references animate this section of the poem. The first, in line 4, is to “the spirit [ruach, which also means ‘wind’] of God hovering over the waters” (Genesis 1:2). This is the primordial moment prior to creation. BatMiriam likens God’s birdlike hovering, with the wafting breeze given in the polysemy of ruach, to the whispering of the lover’s name. This has an incantational force, with its still potential creative/erotic power. The second reference is to the story of Hagar, in which she is cast out of Abraham’s home into the desert wilderness. Having run out of water, she puts her child away from her, under a bush, at a distance (harchek) of a bowshot so as not to be able to see him die (Genesis 21:16). Again, the biblical account is used metaphorically to describe the pain of the lover’s absence, in this case, as in the earlier reference, expressed in terms of a potential; here, the potential death of the child Ishmael. This is further highlighted by the sound similarity for the word for the “dying” of the concentric rippling circles of water created by the breeze on the reeds (gov‘im) to the word for “longing” in the next line (ga‘gu‘im). Like Miriam, Hagar was a central character in Bat-Miriam’s poetic imagination, and the stance “from a distance” in both of these women’s stories provides Bat-Miriam a key element of her poetics in this cycle and indeed the collection as a whole. Bat-Miriam’s ventriloquy of Hagar elevates her to a kind of prophetic status (Zierler refers to the “visionary powers” which Bat-Miriam reads in Hagar’s biblical portrayal) on a par with Miriam and the poet herself. This Bat-Miriam emphasizes in the twenty-fourth and final poem in the cycle, a poem which evokes the story of Miriam and in which the poet states how her “heart will tremble with perplexed prophecy.” The sentence fragment in which this biblical polyphony is orchestrated flows from past tense verbs to a catalogue of verbal participles, culminating in 166

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“dying.” This participial flow never allows the death ultimately to happen; it is an imperfective death. This state of verbal abeyance plays more than a fleeting role in Bat-Miriam’s works. The reinvestment of the imperfect constitutes a subtle but important element in her exploration of the poetic language of modernism.

Imperfectivity The cycle “From Afar” works by picking up and leaving off strands of itself throughout. For example, the nocturnal setting of the second poem is continued explicitly only in the fifth section; the speech of the fourth section (a poem which begins “ . . . I then said”), joined seemingly in medias res, seems to flow from the first section, drawing on the theme of silent waiting and anticipation for the lover. Returning to the fifth section, it can be seen as an explicit analysis of how the imperfective might work in a modernist Hebrew poetics. The poem begins with the concrete temporal marker “tonight”: “Tonight my dream wandered to me with its staff.” In this opening Bat-Miriam personifies her dream as the wandering Jew. This man who comes to her in fact “wanders” (nad) to her, using half of the verbal curse of Cain to be a restless wanderer (na-venad). (Bat-Miriam will recapitulate this phrase in the tenth poem of the cycle, in the image of the low, swaying trees on the tranquil riverbank in the shadow of the bonfire of the poet’s rebellious soul, one which “forgets its sin.”) The gesture to Cain, as himself the personification of the dream state, that is, the only “time”—dreams are so often noted as distinctly atemporal phenomena—when intimacy can be achieved and distance overcome, hints at this duality of sinfulness and rebellion. Dreams figure prominently in Bat-Miriam’s poetry, as do dreamlike states; indeed, her poems are often characterized as dreamlike themselves. As KartunBlum notes, such a state denies the wakeful separations between spirit and substance, object and subject, past and present, present and future: “Memory becomes now, and the present acts as if it is now ‘now’ because the past lives on in it.” In other words, one of the reasons dreams are such an important element in her poetry is the indeterminate or fluid temporality which characterize dreams. In Marc Augé’s analysis, “The presence of the past is a present that supersedes it but still lays claim to it: it is in this reconciliation that Jean Starobinski sees the essence of modernity.” If this “reconciliation” is at the 167

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heart of the modernism of Baudelaire, Proust, Joyce—the authors Augé highlights as typical—Bat-Miriam’s technique would be the presentation of a reconciliation which is at one and the same time an opposition, precisely the impossibility permitted in and by the dream. However, in this case the wandering Jew reengages the traditional function of dreams—beginning with the story of Joseph’s ascent in Egypt (note again the Egyptian context)—as interpretable ciphers of meaning: the dream “hinted / at the sign [‘ot].” This conspicuous deployment of ‘ot (“sign” or “symbol”) suggests that the poem become a thematization of symbolism itself, a coming to terms with what that affiliation actually means in her poetry. The brief twenty-line poem that follows can be divided into two sections, the first twelve lines and the final eight, a breakdown given in the overlay of theme and grammar. Tonight my dream wandered to me with its staff. Wandered to me and hinted At the sign. But its solution disappeared from my heart And kept distant from me. Then I arose from my bed Thus astonished,— And again stretched myself out upon it, I cried And I buried my face in the pillow. But its solution disappeared from my heart, Disappeared. And this dream of mine I will not write down, I will not reveal my dream to anyone. It will sink into my heart, It will remain Like a lightning bolt in a dark cloud, That is hidden waiting for the hint of the thunder, Waiting and illuminating the distances—— Thus my dream will sink into my heart. The first section’s thematization of symbolism as a dream revelation presents all of the action as taking place in the past; all of the verbs are in the past tense. 168

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As a recollection, “tonight” indicates that the moment of the poem is after the night, but the second section will tell us that it is apparently not yet dawn. Here we find ourselves in the liminal crepuscular moment in the aftermath of a vivid dream. Just as in the second poem, of which this poem is a continuation, the speaker rises from her bed, only here she sinks back down into it in despair of recapturing the dream’s “solution,” which is to say its truthful interpretation, its real meaning; the sign approached, but the meaning “kept distant.” The poem then shifts abruptly in the second section from the past tense to the imperfective aspect. By refusing ever to write down the dream, the speaker in effect denies any moment in which a complete account will have been committed to paper. Similarly, the speaker denies a moment in which it will be revealed. And as if to recapitulate the dreamer’s falling prostrate upon her bed, so will the dream “sink” into her heart. In this case, the verb is the same as that which indicates the sunset and also connotes decay. These images of sunset and of distant lightning as natural, either iterative or cyclical, events provides a metaphorical vocabulary attuned to the thematic and poetic content of the poem. By shifting to a more aspectual system in the verbs, Bat-Miriam makes a comment on the nature of the symbolist lyric: a Miltonic “darkness visible”; flashes of insight defying interpretation but nevertheless demanding it; hints at images whose wholeness the poet keeps covert. The irony of this poem is its existence at all given the poet’s refusal to write it down. It is, however, precisely the shift from tense to aspect, which indicates that while the poem may exist, the act of writing it down will never be complete. Our access to it is from afar. And in this is precisely the poetics of hints, recurring images, phrases, and gestures which is the structural core of the cycle. It is the working out of a Hebrew Symbolism which calls for a continual process of interpretation and defies the fixed or univocal meaning.

A Poetics of Memory As described earlier, the poetic space that Bat-Miriam charts in her biblical thematics is one in which that mythic past is mapped onto the present. The poet thereby engages in a synchronous conversation with the foremotherly objects of her identification. This in part accounts for the static temporality at the heart of the poem “Miriam.” How different this is from the more fluid temporality of her earlier poetry, even in biblically resonant poems such as the 169

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Eve poem “Ofel ha-tohu” (“The Darkness of the Void”; 1926), about which Zierler notes: “The fluidity and flexibility of time in this poem, which moves from the present, to the past, to the future tense, suggests an encounter between the biblical past and the contemporary moment.” It is more than an encounter; it is another startling instance of syntempora (discussed earlier in the comparison between Markish and Trakl), which presents the simultaneity of times in a given moment. This is why Kartun-Blum maintains that BatMiriam’s poetry more often centers on dynamic modes of comprehension: “Objects are not understood for the most part in static moments, but rather in movement, fluidly: the flickering mist, the mountaintop ‘sailing in light,’ and the leaf floating above.” It is rather when memory is invoked that “distance in time [becomes] distance in space.” Recalling the earlier discussions of Proust’s use of time—in which he constructs “time atoms” (in Kracauer’s phrase) as paradigmatically spatialized, aesthetic moments—Bat-Miriam too intuits a kind of Proustian technique: “Just as the borders between the real and the imaginary, or the spiritual and the tangible, are annulled, so too are the separations between memory and the present event, without the reader’s easily being given the key to understanding what happened then and what is happening now (in this light, Bat-Miriam it seems is the most Proustian of the poets of her generation).” When Frank notes that “[t]his celestial nourishment [which Proust says feeds the experience of transcending time] consists of some sound, or odor, or other sensory stimulus, ‘sensed anew, simultaneously in the present and the past,’ ” he might as well be speaking of Bat-Miriam. Bat-Miriam develops this idea most fully in her later poetry, in which memory figures so much more prominently, especially the memory of her childhood and the memory of the landscapes of her youth. While it is equally true of her European poetry and the poetry written in Palestine that “time and Space are linked together,” that ligature in the latter period has a particular shape. Movement of time stems from movement in space. The expression of links between times is expressed by means of spatial links: from low to high, from internal to external. The distance is turned into time, and time becomes distance. In the landscape of the Land of Israel: “A distance in the sky is tangled / and belongs to time.” Her feeling of time, as for space, is qualitative and real, not quantitative and abstract. The night in Carmel is ancient and high “like a memory storming / raging from 170

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yearning and longing.” The night is high because it is loaded with memories, and in the course of the poem the movement in the landscape is likened to movement in memory. Dynamism in space and time are now intimately and inextricably bound up with the movement in memory such that this later poetry is dominated by what I will call a mnemosynic temporality. The mnemosynic temporality will ultimately take on a more national form in Bat-Miriam’s final collection, 1943—Shirim la-geto (1943—Poems to the Ghetto; 1946). Hanan Hever notes that the temporal mode of Palestinian Hebrew Symbolism was a “representation of national-collective time.” Hever goes on to sketch the stratified temporalities in that collection, which dramatize the tensions between the constructive “national-collective” project in Palestine on the one hand and the destruction and trauma in Europe on the other. Progressive time is set over against “static, frozen time”; “symbolic time” of hope against “allegorical time” of the hopeless; “the time of national advancement” versus “the time of the static observations of the destruction.” As Hever assesses this structure: Yocheved Bat-Miriam the Symbolist chose a special kind of representational apparatus. To cope with this contradiction, she elected to fashion Symbolist representation of the collective death, the ghettos, and the extermination camps precisely by means of a shift, a drastic displacement of the representational apparatus, from the contradictory representation of time—to spatial representation. This apparatus, which already had been common in Bat-Miriam’s poetry, now became, during the Holocaust, an important instrument for containing this contradictory time. The way to represent the terrible and the horrifying is by means of categories of space. (my emphasis) As Hever notes, Bat-Miriam had already developed this spatiotemporal vocabulary in her early verse, so it is not an innovation per se, but rather a culmination of her experiment with poetic language, one she was ready to deploy in that context to such dramatic effect in that later verse. In the earlier verse, however, and particularly in “From Afar,” the spatialization of time is still part of an explicitly aesthetic experiment with poetic language. Earlier I noted the importance of synaesthesia to Bat-Miriam’s project. 171

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What we see therefore in the eighteenth poem of the “From Afar” cycle, “Argeman peragim ra’iti” (“I Saw the Purple of Poppies”), is in effect a hymn to synaesthesia. But it is not just the poetic technique of synaesthesia which is put front and center in this poem. Rather, Bat-Miriam develops her own version of temporaesthesia, one in which the temporality that is thematized is that of memory (mnemosynic). Structurally, the first of the poem’s three parts (lines 1–9) is marked off by a verbal inclusio, the verbs ra’iti (I saw) and giliti (I discovered or I revealed), which represents a kind of passage from the semantically (though not grammatically) passive act of seeing to the active revelation. Within this section the synaesthetic vocabulary is laid out. The purple of poppies I saw In the green of the valley, The ruby poison of mushrooms In the grove of trees— And among the mass of distant clouds A swaying bonfire, Reflecting In the depths of the Nile . . . I revealed. I desired these three. The three desired objects—poppies, poison, and the bonfire—each correspond to a sense, namely sight, taste, and heat, respectively. Bat-Miriam fluidly folds the foreground realities of her White Russian landscape onto a biblical background. So the “mass of distant clouds” (chashrat tselalim rechokim) echoes the “mass of water, clouds of heaven” (chashrat mayim ‘avei shechakim) of 2 Samuel 22:12, an image of the power of the mighty martial God who delivers his servant David from dire straits. But against the intimacy of this divine protection, Bat-Miriam adds her leitmotif, “distant.” As we have just seen in the later poem “Eve,” for Bat-Miriam the image of the “cloud” is linked to revelatory vision. In this case, by placing it at a distance Bat-Miriam makes that vision less clear (and the divine more remote). Sensory data, and by extension their associated attributes, become more mysterious or suggestive, like hints or echoes, in need of clarification. As if to answer that need for illuminations, in that distance from the present place a bonfire sways which is reflected “in the depths of the Nile” (bimt172

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sulat ha-ye’or). In the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15), the word metsolah is used for the depth of the sea into which Pharaoh and his charioteers are cast (Exodus 15:5). The last line of the Song is the prophetess Miriam’s single poetic line in the Bible; she leads all of the women in the Israelite encampment with drums and song, singing a refrain of the first line in the Song: “Sing to the Lord for He is exalted in triumph; horse and rider has he hurled into the sea.” The biblical Miriam’s voice is an echo of her brother’s at the Red Sea, but the Nile was the scene of her protecting her brother. By transposing elements of the two crucial scenes in Miriam’s biography—by folding biographical time on itself—Bat-Miriam gives the prophetess a lyric voice of her own at the moment of her act of protection and salvation. Moses could sing at the Red Sea because of Miriam at the Nile so many years before. Now Miriam has been given a revelatory voice at the Nile. What Bat-Miriam “revealed” in that Egyptian water begins with a full sensory world. In the second section (lines 10–17) the emotional contours of that sensory world are given voice. My breath spread out In the joy of a distant meeting, In the trembling of a dim echo . . . And I sang red songs in their memory, With my blood I watered my songs, I poisoned them with the poison of my sorrow And a bonfire of a scarlet tone I kindled upon my lips. Bat-Miriam’s prophetic role—“I revealed”—she transforms into that of the poet. Bat-Miriam takes her cue for a poet’s audacity from the Bible. The line Miriam refrains refers to God’s being “exalted in triumph” (ga’oh ga’ah), using an infinitive absolute alongside the finite verb. While this verb means “to exalt in triumph,” it has also the derivative sense of being proud or haughty. There is a note of this pride in the revelatory voice which the poet here reclaims in this section. The attenuated links to the biblical font (“distant meeting,” “dim echo”) are reconnected in the explicitly dangerous power of the poet’s song. Each of the primary sensory elements of the first section is linked to elements of danger in the second. So (a) red poppies connect to red songs (which may have 173

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undertones of the Revolution, to which Bat-Miriam was sympathetic) and to blood (especially as something to slake a thirst); (b) the poison of mushrooms connects to the “poison of sorrow”; and (c) the bonfire is linked with the “crimson note” (of her “red songs”). This change of “red” to “crimson” (shani) is not fortuitous. The phrase “crimson tone” (tselil shani) evokes the “crimson thread” (chut shani) or cord of the Bible. The first mention of the cord is in Genesis 28, in which this distinguishing mark is tied around the wrist of Tamar’s emerging firstborn twin in order to recognize his status as firstborn. The second is in Joshua 2, in which the cord is hung from Rahab’s window in order save her from destruction in thanks for her service to the Israelite spies. In both instances the crimson represents the culmination of the courageous acts of cunning women. In one Tamar acts the cult prostitute in order to do her duty and bear a child for her family; in the other Rahab the harlot harbors, hides, and thereby saves the Israelite spies. Crimson in these instances not only bears an erotic charge but betokens the power of these women’s covert cleverness. In the third section (lines 18–24) we encounter the sensorily startling volta of the poem. For I knew The secret of the union of the colors, Interweaving changes in their strange hues— I knew that beautiful are the drops of blood In the brightness of the day . . . And the purple of the tones— For the night of my wild hair. The “secret union of the colors” is a reversal of Rimbaud’s system in “Les Voyelles.” Instead of colors operating in the service of their vocalic, and therefore poetic, effect, Bat-Miriam puts the color palette front and center and makes the sound associations more subtle and changeable. First we find the startling inclusio, in which the tselalim (clouds) of the beginning of the poem are transformed into tselilim (notes, tones), both ephemeral phenomena. The poet, however, is able to enact these kaleidoscopic transformations because of the esoteric knowledge she gained, “the secret of the union of the colors.” This union is itself ultimately transformed into the union of the senses. “Color” has been subtilized to “hue,” which in turn is connected, through the shared 174

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notion of sensory nuance, to “tones,” to sound. This use of color separates BatMiriam’s Symbolism from, for example, Trakl’s Expressionism. Even more important, though, is the temporal complexity of the poem. The first section presents the sensorily resonant memory itself, while the second section, with its emphasis on echoes and of gesturing specifically to memory, marks out the emotional associative space of that memory. The final section, however, picks out the temporal associations of the memory. “The day” and “the night” would seem to be single events, especially given the nearly uniform past tense of the poem’s verbs. However, it is not the fact of these events which the poet emphasizes, but rather their memory. And the point of memory is that it is fluid, changeable, and associative. Here the “purple of poppies” (argeman peragim) of the first line gets recapitulated in the penultimate line as the “purple of tones” (argeman tselilim). The visuality of memory becomes the more ephemeral music accompanying the erotically resonant night. The time of memory is not concrete but synaesthetically fluid. This intuition about memory (along with the mnemosynic temporality she attributes to it) runs throughout Bat-Miriam’s particular vision of temporaesthesia.

The Land I want finally to turn from time and return to the notion of place. By way of conclusion I will set side by side two exceptional long poems in Bat-Miriam’s oeuvre, linked by the common theme of place but separated by a little more than a decade, one which saw a dramatic shift in Bat-Miriam’s worldview: “Erets” (“Land”), published in the single issue of Bereishit in 1926; and “Erets Yisra’el” (“The Land of Israel”), from 1937. Both of them are distinctly Jewish evocations of land, expressed in Bat-Miriam’s often oblique diction and imagery, but unlike some of her other poetry dealing with emplacement that we have looked at, these poems do not adopt the modulated tones of ambiguity we saw elsewhere. Rather, each in its own way speaks forcefully for its own conception of the importance of land: “Land” with the universalizing exuberance of the Revolution (making “Land” an important text for understanding that aspect of Soviet-Hebrew literature), and “The Land of Israel” with the heterodox nationalism of Bat-Miriam’s middle period. I cannot here undertake the kind of very thorough comparison which these two poemas richly deserve, and which would make a fine study in its own 175

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right. I will instead pick out two key morceaux choisis in which figure some of the central tropes of land in each poema. From “Erets”:

From “Erets Yisra’el”:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Land. Enclosed in distances. Captured in the yokes of the wings of your hems, And for a wondrous majesty is your name—an adornment Of a harlot’s pay of holiness, the fire Of a hidden heart singing— It weaves Weaves And departs . . . And you— Full as in the Beginning, Thirsty as in the Beginning For the reddening moons’ heralding [mevaser] The abundance of blood Of Messiah, Awaiting A remaining sacrifice Anew. You Land Altar!———

My land, my land illumined By the kindled and lofty prophetic vision of my people, Casting a yearning for redemption unresolved Out to a hidden, tumultuous world. With it you are borne atremble Like tidings [besorah] into the space of the world. With it you are borne unredeemed [lo’-nig’elet] A chariot of fire among the mountains of the world.

Both of these passages present vocative expressions, addressing the land directly. However, the first, most obvious difference is the personalization in the later poem, “my land,” which is quickly followed up by the axiomatic correlate in Zionist verse, “my people.” In the earlier poem, however, “land” refers more to a concept of land than to a specific place. One does find the conceptualization of place as opposed to a specific locale is in the later poem, too. In the 176

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first stanza Bat-Miriam makes a distinction between “land” (erets) and the “world” (‘olam), the latter being a secret chaotic realm unacquainted with the intimacies of a personal attachment to place. This seemingly turns on its head the assumptions about territoriality and deterritorialization of the Jews. However, in the second stanza the personified “land” is itself contrasted with the “world” (tevel), indeed the “space of the world” (chalalah shel tevel). BatMiriam’s “land” is a spiritualized entity, in contrast to the static, spatial world. In this way, the deictic anchorage of her land, the Land of Israel, is temporal, able to move “like tidings” into space. To digress momentarily, one intriguing comparative text for this poem, and indeed the poema as a whole, is Shaul Tshernikhovski’s poem “An Eagle! An Eagle over Your Mountains,” which appeared around the same time as BatMiriam’s poem. Bat-Miriam was a great admirer of Tshernikhovski’s work, so it is not surprising to find gestures to it. In this case, both poems present stark descriptions of the landscape in the form of either an apostrophe or conversation with the land. Tshernikhovski’s famous poem presents the Judean wilderness under the visual compass of an enormous prey-seeking raptor circling the primordial landscape. Compare, for example, Tshernikhovski’s depiction of the eagle’s circling: “Flying tensely (an arrow from a bow), the eagle inscribes circles within its circlings” with Bat-Miriam’s description of the whirling, dynamic landscape: “Circuit within closed circuit, / circle spinning within circle.” The works intersect in any number of ways, including the harshness of the landscape and the near-complete absence of people, save for the poet addressing the land. Perhaps the most startling similarity is the poems’ endings. Tshernikhovski’s poem sees the great avian wing grazing the “mountains of God” (harerei ‘el). This introduction of the divine element, which Tshernikhovski uses as an emblem of the primordial power, cruelty, and majesty of the landscape itself, Bat-Miriam seems to reconfigure in her fortuitously echoing rhyme. The land as fiery chariot moves, unredeemed, “among the mountains of the world” (bein harerei tevel). While Bat-Miriam spent a good deal of energy exploring the divinity of her particular landscape (that “afflicted strip of sand”), this move transfers that divinity back into the concept of space itself. Moving back a little over a decade, the revolutionary poem “Land” presents the poet’s proud, often defiant, relationship with land. But it is not a specific place, but rather the whole of the earth, which the poet seeks to conquer. From the very beginning she desires not to give the whole world a slap—as Markish 177

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famously declared—but rather to give it an embracing hug, to adorn it with jewelry, which she likens to the ring of the equator. This echoes the rhetoric of Ezekiel’s prophecy about Jerusalem (Ezekiel 16:8–14), but in this instance it is not the Jerusalemite space of the nation but the whole world. This supernational, universalizing discourse accounts for the exultation of the early lines Oh, Land! To your parts—your lands I am foreign! At the end of the poema, Ezekiel’s language is reprised, but instead of the “crown of glory” (ateret tif ’eret) being placed upon Jerusalem’s head (Ezekiel 16:12), we are brought to the next, more negative section of the prophecy, in which the beautiful city-as-woman plays the harlot. Bat-Miriam, however, appropriates this image not as the wantonness of libertinism but as the glory of liberty: “And for a wondrous majesty is your name—an adornment / Of a harlot’s pay of holiness [ateret etnan kodesh], the fire / Of a hidden heart singing.” “The Land of Israel,” by contrast, is a less raucously unbridled exchange. Rather, in Zierler’s words, it describes “Bat-Miriam’s drama of a female poet’s search for the (female) divine presence within the land,” presented as a conversation between the poet and the land and deploying an intertextual toolkit of traditional Jewish sources, most notably the Song of Songs. As Zierler discusses, we find the structural resonance with the Song of Songs in the interplay between desire and unfulfillment, or “pursuit and evasion.” That is to say, just as in the Song of Songs, in which the lovers’ relationship traces a playful pas de deux of meeting and missing, so in “The Land of Israel” does the intercourse of the female poet and the feminine land get played out in a variety of encounters, both real and illusory; though in the latter work the relationship is not so erotically charged as the former. So, for example, when Zierler notes of one particular description in which the poet “strains to behold and find the land, catches sight of her and offers a description, only to conclude that she cannot be seen at all,” we are shown a later version of the BatMiriamic paradox of aesthetic perception accompanied by an inability to perceive. As we saw in the earlier poetry, such a paradox is often presented as the result of a distance in space and/or time.

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Perhaps the most salient and intriguing connections between these two passages involve the unusual version of their prophetic mode of expression. Both of them speak in the vocabulary of futurity—“tidings” (besorah) on the one hand, and “heralding” (mevaser) on the other. Their prophetic ambit, though, is different. What we see are two primary ways of looking at futurity. In one, the subject is static, waiting for the future to come into the present. In that case, the subject stands in an eternal present. In the other, the subject moves forward into the future, continually deferring the achievement of an end. In “Land,” Bat-Miriam speaks of the redemptive capacity of the Revolution (albeit with shadings of the Christological imagery of the Russian Symbolists) as messianic. That bloody cleansing recapitulates creation (“as in the Beginning”) as a new beginning in which the land will act as a sacrificial altar. Here the land is essentially static, and the future is something which one “awaits.” In “The Land of Israel,” the prophetic mode is dynamic. Bat-Miriam speaks of a “redemption,” but here as elsewhere it is one which is “unresolved” or “unfulfilled.” Indeed, the very same adjective, “unredeemed” (lo’-nig’elet), is used of the land in both the first and final sections of the poema, marking a kind of thematic inclusio. But while the first instance is expressed as a command (“Be magnified, be sanctified, unredeemed”), the final use is a description of that condition as a state of being (“you are borne unredeemed”), using a verbal participle. This is a perpetual deferment of whatever rescue or salvation is to be hoped for. (In Bat-Miriam’s elliptical fashion, what that redemption consists of is never described.) Moreover, the “chariot of fire” refers directly to the moment of Elijah’s ascent to heaven (2 Kings 2:11). It is Elijah whose deathless departure has been seen as a kind of promissory note for the coming redemption. Bat-Miriam, however, replaces Elijah with the land itself. In this way Bat-Miriam figures the land (space) as dynamic, not static. The focus, therefore, on redemption, or rather its lack, is a crucial temporal displacement. In fine, the two poemas match our expectations for the trajectory of BatMiriam’s thought. “Land” is a spatialization of time. It participates in both the “traditional” and revolutionary creation of a space (the culturally background concept, the figure) out of time (the culturally intimate one, the ground). With her move to Palestine, her investment in the cultural project there, however fraught, complicated, or heterodox it may have been, Bat-Miriam inverts her

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poetic terms. “The Land of Israel” is therefore a temporalization of place, an inversion of the Jewish scheme of figure and ground. The move from temporal displacement to spatial emplacement—in both poetry and politics—can be traced in this move from “Land” to “Land of Israel.” And that trajectory is not possible without Bat-Miriam’s having experimented extensively with a spatiotemporal vocabulary for her poetic experiences. While these bookend poems are confident about their spatial outlook as the central element, the poems of Me-rachok (certainly those of its eponymous cycle) are ambiguous meditations on the unstable infiltrations of memory and time on one’s sense of groundedness and (especially emotional) stability. The poetics of Me-rachok are those of a process of coming to terms with the tensions of a contrapuntal spatiotemporality, one keenly attuned to the uncertainty of leaving one’s beloved homeland on the way to a distant home known only through a memory which is not one’s own.

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Afterword

This has been a book about time and space and their mutual metaphorical interactions in modern and modernist Yiddish and Hebrew poetry. While the former constitute a vast topic, the narrowness of the latter points of access might at first seem too constricting. The depth, sensitivity, and complexity of the poetic materials offered in the case studies in the preceding chapters I hope have gone far in belying that apprehension. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Jewish culture continued in earnest down the rocky paths of modernization, in the process renovating no fewer than two literary languages, Yiddish and Hebrew, which made up for in sophistication what they lacked in age. Proceeding, to borrow a phrase, forthrightly into the bright sunshine of modernity, these speedily innovated literatures seized intuitively upon the core conceptual and metaphorical frameworks of the European literatures they emulated and brought to them distinctive interpretive frameworks, tropes, and topoi of their own. As we saw, for example, in chapter 4, this multiperspectival interaction between concepts of time and space led to something simultaneously traditional and radically new. Moreover, the ability to create time out of space and space out of time, a creative potential which we have seen Jewish modernists exploit to great and often virtuosic effect, marks out terrain more widely fraught and fought over than just within the Jewish cultural sphere. We have seen the ways in which the shtetl as well as other home spaces were transformed into dynamic actors themselves in the Jewish literary worldview; we have seen time slowed to a standstill in order to provide an alternate vocabulary of territoriality (or, echoing Bal Makhshoves’s words from the first chapter, “exterritoriality”); we have seen traditional concepts of time and space reconstructed into revolutionary principles; and we have seen the process of memory warily developed into a tool of national contemplation. What all of these spatiotemporal subjects— the topics of the several case studies in this book—have in common are stakes beyond the literary and aesthetic. 181

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In his 1952 essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (“The Philology of World Literature”), Erich Auerbach makes a nuanced argument about the detriments done to literature by the process of cultural homogenization he sees going on around him. By way of corrective he calls on the necessity of synthetic approaches to “world literature”—under the heading of philology—that preserve both their “variety and difference” and their contribution to understanding a shared humanity. Recognizing that scholarly works are themselves literary genres, Auerbach brings his essay around toward a conclusion by speaking of the “starting points,” the stylistic hooks that draw one in to the intellectual work. The abstract categories (such as “the Romantic,” “Drama,” “Myth,” to cite but a few of his examples) are poor, even “dangerous,” in this regard because “they are much too ambiguous to be used as starting points to designate something specific that can be grasped and kept firmly in hand. Also, the starting point should not be some generalization that is then imposed on the object of study from outside. Rather it should grow out of it organically, like a part of the whole.” Despite the importance of these starting points, Auerbach goes on to define the ultimate goal as “to be caught up in the dynamic movement of the whole. This movement can be witnessed in pure form, however, only when the individual elements are grasped in all of their substantive reality.” In this book my own use of “time” and “space” has sometimes strayed into the domain of the vague abstract category. But it is precisely the organic context of Jewish modernism which provides them their “substantive reality” and makes this book, though not a synthetic project on its own, a contribution in favor of one. Despite the risk of a vertiginous reaction to this constant shifting of focus from general to particular and back again, Auerbach’s point is that if both are not kept in view the stakes will remain elusive. And the stakes of Auerbach’s essay, echoing Ginzburg’s rumination on Hume with which this book began, are the ethical. Auerbach concludes that our philological home is the earth. It can no longer be the nation. The most precious and necessary thing that philologists inherit may be their national language and culture. But it is only in losing—or overcoming— this inheritance that it can have this effect. We must now return—albeit under different conditions—to what the pre-nation-state culture of the Middle Ages already possessed, to the knowledge that the human spirit itself is not national.  .  . . It is, therefore, a great source of virtue, writes 182

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Hugh of Saint Victor in his Didascalicon (3.20), for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. If the philologist’s most precious inheritance is his or her “national language and culture,” how much more so the poet’s! What it would mean not to lose but to “overcome” that inheritance for the poet is in some sense part of the project of modernism, certainly at least for Yiddish and Hebrew modernisms. Fracturing language, reanalyzing its parts, defamiliarizing its metaphors, reassembling it into something new—those are the artistic goals no adherence to tradition can sustain. More important, though, is Auerbach’s cosmopolitan ventriloquy of a remarkable statement of medieval Christian belief. Hugh of Saint Victor’s point is to understand the transience of this life, to defamiliarize the here and now in favor of the kingdom of heaven. Auerbach, by contrast, converts that reliance on futurity into a present duty of respect on the part of the intellectual towards the international, intercultural character of the republic of letters. Again, my goal in putting time and space front and center is not to create an Auerbachian synthesis of world literature but rather to offer some of the “organic” conditions that will allow that synthesis to grow more fully and responsibly. If I have done my job, this book has shown that Yiddish and Hebrew cannot be left out as an essential part of the full story of modern Western literary culture and history. If Auerbach is right that home “can no longer be the nation,” then it is these Jewish literatures that offer the first best test cases for any theory, for any thoughtful engagement with an idea of literature in which time and space are meaningful literary categories. I find it, moreover, instructive that in Hugh of Saint Victor’s formulation translated above as “he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land” the original reads “perfectus . . . cui mundus totus exilium est”; that is, “he is perfect to whom the entire world is an exile.” For this poetry, in turn, exile— diaspora—is the creative font of culture, not the disease in search of a cure. To return to the image of Jerusalem from the beginning of this book, the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai, in the brief ninth section of his longer poem “Jerusalem Jerusalem Why Jerusalem?,” offers a fitting meditation on which to 183

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conclude. In the first lines the poet wonders why Jerusalem is always double, “above and below” (or alternately “Heavenly and Earthly,” as we saw in the discussion of the idea of Yerushalayim shel mata earlier), “when I want to live in the Jerusalem in between.” And then, playing on the fortuitous similarity between the ending of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, Yerushalayim, and the dual-marking suffix in Hebrew, -ayim, he asks, And why is Yerushalayim in the dual, like a pair of hands or a pair of feet, I want to live only in one Yerushal, Because I am only one I not a pair of I’s. Though this translation does little justice to the puckish wordplay in the original, Amichai’s playful defamiliarization of the intimate verbal space of Jerusalem forces us to reconsider Jerusalem not only as a fractured reality but as a schizoid concept. As I bring to mind the earlier discussion of the shtetl as a little earthly Jerusalem, Amichai exposes the dangers of these essential and essentializing polarities in the thinking about home and homeland. I have been at pains throughout this book to show why this was something Yiddish and Hebrew poets worried and cared about deeply. I think it no stretch of the imagination to see why we still need to do so. Where it will end, time will tell.

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Appendix: Y. L. Perets, “The Little City” or “The Shtetl” (“Ho-ir ha-ketanoh”; 1887)

1. The city here is little, Here I am quiet, at rest; For in me my heart is sick For my spirit is gravely ill. 2. My soul loathed the sea, There is neither end nor bounds— Breakers will rise aloft Like mountains. A miracle—a fleet—a tower, Splitting the midst of the clouds; There the wailing of crocodiles, sea beasts, Leviathan, and frog! There the thieving hand will be strong, There the clefts in the rocks; There a storm will whirl There life is accursed! 3. And here the river [Nile] is tranquil And will be measured by the handful, And green, greenish Are the reeds o’ercovering.

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And as for the splendor of the sun It is astounds the eyes Like a robe of purple Like a fabric of Egypt. 4. And instead, hidden, Here they are fruitful and multiply, Here they love, toil Here they run forth and return. The little fish Are worms of the water Without fear of the Shadow of Death Without life’s questions. For theirs is but one desire; Crumbs of bread! And yesterday and tomorrow— Are twinned from birth! 5. Here the air is pure Of pestilential smells, Of smoke and vapor And the fragrance of fire. Silence in the houses And tranquility in dwellings; At the appointed time the candles Will shine from the windows. Silence was cast all about Till the festival would arrive Then the earth would quake To the sound of the cheers we would shout!

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A holiday, the appointed time would pass— The candles would be extinguished, The voices would pass away, The weekdays returned! Mouths would be shut Windows would be closed Lives would be hidden Concealed in their lairs! 6. Sometimes in the little bottle The storm would be stirred up; Rabbis would argue, A war at the gate! The butcher would sin Or the porger would transgress, Or the tsadik would hurry To censure his flock; Then the waves of life Would swell with pride, Then a river [Nile] would raise Aloft its billows with a great noise. 7. But the two sons Would never fight, And the two of them fled;— And in the midst of those days The butcher would return Or be expelled for his sin, And quickly the tsadik Would shear the sheep.

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And tranquility would return For a year or two, And a storm revert to silence In the little bottle of water. 8. I see but don’t believe, I cannot understand; Here another nation, Another country. Here is Erets Yisrael, Jerusalem Rebuilt, And eyes of government Watching from afar. Here, ruling his roost, The tsadik r’ Barukh; Here the book of laws— Shulchan Arukh! 9. A critic’s eye does not see The library, No one questions the qualification Of the melameds in the schools They’re born, get married, Divorce, die And the watchman’s eyes Neither looked now saw. It was not written in the ledger, They did not come for a quorum, It is not for the clerk To answer for the matter.

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10. There are no newspapers, But like the grass of the meadow News will blossom, From the dust it will flower; All that happens, all that’s heard Upon the earth’s expanse; The world’s processions, The tactics of war. The dissident Will equip with arms, Turk against Persian, Ludites against Cushites. Or Germany and France At war, Or peoples which were not Nor will ever be. Of [Israel’s] oppression by kingdoms There is no one here who knows; Eruvin—the borders, The perutah—a coin. And the rabbi of the city rules With an outstretched arm. Beadles—the police, And with staff and lash: And rebukes and reprimands Are here firm and abiding Vengeful and vindictive Are the scholars!

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11. From conflagration to conflagration They reckoned from earlier, An age by generations And an era by years. Yet many were the fires Which had no measure, And from dybbuk to dybbuk The shtetl has many who count. For quite suddenly A sinful soul Will cleave to a man Like a plague of leprosy. 12. Here is a new land, A new sky . . . But alas! All the people Are poor beggars! There is no oppression by the kingdom There is no burdensome yoke; But there is a lack of bread, And a worry over livelihood. A worry over livelihood, A little powerless gnat With brass claws, Oppressing every mind. And it will suck every draught And eat all that’s within. There is no moldy bread, There are no tattered rags!

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Every day he starves Till he eats—in his dream! Thus Israel lives From day to day! 13. But the dawn comes The windows will be opened The gates of the houses The doors of the dwellings . . . Life was awoken Arose and went forth And men like shadows Will be seen in the streets . . . They will look into an empty market There are still no farmers; Onto the smooth-paved path Between the mountain chains . . . There a farmer will be seen Traveling to the city; He will come with difficulty Because his horse is limping. 14. And every soul watches Every eye asking: Whither will the farmer turn And ask for a glass of wine? Is he coming to sell grain, Wheat or barley— Who will have success today Earning a penny?

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Thus the eye of the whole community Watches the farmer, And like the duration of the Exile So is the length of that journey! 15. Like a twisted serpent Is the path among the mountains, It is seen, it gets hidden, It dips and rises. And at the crossroads There on the slope of the mountain, The crosses are strewn On a small plot of land . . . There is a graveyard The dominion of oblivion . . . The farmer’s calf Has reached it. The horses stopped, And from the wagon A coffin was lowered The farmer wailing! 16. I went outside— Like bees they surrounded me, For my garment deceived them And they took me for a lord. They surrounded me like bees, Pressing, pushing; They besieged me all around, They pleaded and yelled.

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Alas, how their voice Rent my heart utterly! —What will Sir sell, What will the nobleman buy? They are buying everything: Goats and oxen, Cows and calves, Horses and donkeys. The fodder of the meadow And the grain of the ground, From the threshing floor and granary, Sheaf and standing corn. And everything which was Or will be one day, They buy it all Squeezing the blood. 17. And they are selling everything: Ropes and sackcloth, Every spice and incense, And all kinds of sweet things. Salves and soap, Every wine and oil, Women’s jewels, And children’s toys. Gifts for girls, Children’s confections, Buttons, hats, Dresses, and clothes.

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18. “Oh, my brothers, be calm, Oh listen; I am not a foreigner Neither lord nor nobleman; These short-cut clothes Have misrepresented me; There is but one faith, And one God for us.” But when they heard they scattered To every corner and wind; “Heretic or apostate, Or seductive inciter!” They scattered, and from afar I still hear the curse. Is this the rest For an unhappy soul?

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Notes

Introduction 1. Alexander Pope, “Ode on Solitude.” 2. Singer, Family Moskat, 527. 3. Funkenstein, Perceptions, 9. 4. Mann, Space and Place, 4–5. The translation of Amichai is Barbara Mann’s. 5. Based on biblical texts, Thorleif Boman worked out ancient Israelite concepts of space and time as compared with those of the ancient Greeks (Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, 123–83). 6. Watts, An Arrangement of the Psalms, no. 613. 7. There are arguments against the temporalization of space and the spatialization of time as logical fallacies (see, for example, Collingwood, “Some Perplexities About Time,” 144: “To spatialize time is to fall into the illusion of thinking that past and future exist but are not ‘present’ to us at the moment. And this fallacy seems to underlie all the ordinary statements about time”). However, these arguments present conceptual and philosophical understandings, not literary ones, which are the focus of this book.

Chapter 1 1. Again, the present essay is not an outline of the formative ideas in the philosophy of time, but rather an exploration of those ideas most resonant with the body of literature which forms the subject of this book. 2. Hume, Treatise, 39. 3. Ibid. 4. “‘[T]tis impossible to conceive of either a vacuum and extension without matter, or a time, when there was no succession or change in any real existence” (ibid., 40). 5. When, for example, an historical theorist opines on the subject of “experience” and “expectation,” which he describes as “modalities” of past and future, and notes that “the conceptual couple ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’ is clearly of a different nature. The couple is redoubled upon itself; it presupposes no alternatives; the one is not to be had without the other. No expectation without experience, no experience without expectation” (Koselleck, Futures Past, 257), there is more than just an echo of Hume. Though this assessment directly addresses only time (in the garb of history), the core presumption is that the noetic process of temporal as well as spatial perception is habituation, a famously Humean focus. In what follows, the reader will note a marked reliance on the historical observations of Reinhart Koselleck. While there are very many important and influential expositions of the philosophy of history, I have found Koselleck’s conceptual historical approach one of the most consistently helpful with regard to the formulations of time and space in the focal texts of this project.

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notes to pages 12–15 6. Hume, Treatise, 35. 7. This is to say that to Hume’s empiricist model Bergson makes an innovation, saying in effect that the “problem” is one of confusing one notion of time, a spatial one, with another, namely duration. See Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), translated as “The Multiplicity of Conscious States: The Idea of Duration,” chap. 2 of Time and Free Will, 75–139. In Bergson’s felicitous phrase, when considered in its chronometric incarnation “time . . . is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness” (99) (my emphasis). 8. Révész, “Problem of Space,” 429. 9. Ibid., 431. 10. Cited in Koselleck, Practice, 111. As Koselleck notes, “The uncovering or discovery of such subjective historical times is itself a product of modernity. In Germany, Herder was the first to define this, in his metacritique of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of seeing time only as a formal, a priori condition of all phenomena, a condition of inner intuition, Herder pointed toward the plurality of concrete carriers of action.” And as he cites Herder more fully: “Properly speaking, any changeable object contains the measure of its time within itself; it exists even if there were no other one; no two things in the world share the same measure of time. . . . At one time, there exist (one can say it truly and boldly) countlessly many times in the universe” (ibid., 110–11). 11. Lynch, What Time, 242. 12. There are also other important deictic categories—“discourse deixis” and “social deixis,” for example (Fillmore, Lectures, 61; Levinson, Pragmatics, 62–63). For an important detailed study of the spatial structures of language see also Talmy, “How Language,” 225–82. Of course, not all utterances are deictic or have deictic components. As a result, these deictic and nondeictic elements can be made to interact (often literarily) in ways designed to startle us. Take Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur,” where, as the poet shifts from praising God to questioning his heavy-handed dominion, we find the lines “Why do men then now not reck his rod? / Generations have trod, have trod, have trod” (Hopkins, Selected Poetry, 114). The move from the logical connective “then” (itself a polysemous word, also being a deictic adverb of time) to the deictic “now” is highlighted in the next line by the march-like progress of the generations, a concrete representation of the movement of time. The immediate contiguity of “then now” is startling and brings the deictic axes into sharper focus. 13. Levinson, Pragmatics, 62. 14. Ibid., 84–85. Such problems, especially with the concept of time, have been debated vigorously, certainly since the appearance of J. Ellis McTaggart’s provocative essay “The Unreality of Time” (for the spatial metaphor see 470n1). 15. Cf. “Th is raises the issue about whether time deixis or place deixis is more basic” (ibid., 85). 16. Lynch, What Time, 122. 17. Regarding measuring: as in the words of Lord Byron, “The mind then hath capacity of time, / And measures it by that which it beholds” (Byron, Major Works, 923). 18. Fillmore, Lectures, 38. 19. As Henri Lefebvre, one of the innovators of contemporary spatial theory, notes of the linguistic ligature to space: “Perhaps what have to be uncovered are as-yet concealed relations between space and language: perhaps the ‘logicalness’ intrinsic to articulated language operated from the start as a spatiality capable of bringing order to the qualitative chaos (the practicosensory realm) presented by the perception of things” (Lefebvre, Production, 17; Lefebvre makes a distinction between “logico-mathematical” space and “practico-sensory” space, the latter of which is the focus of his analysis [15]). Lefebvre’s conjecture about perceptual reorganization as a means of bringing “order to chaos” offers an attractive plank of support for the overall surmise of this project, in poetic language’s power as a formative force in the world.

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notes to pages 15–21 20. “I will unfortunately have nothing to say about the mysteries and paradoxes of time, the perception of time, illusions about the passing of time which people in different psychological states are said to experience, or indeed any of the really interesting and important insights about time which physicists, astronauts, theologians, and acidheads are said to possess” (Fillmore, Lectures, 45). 21. Ibid., 43–44. 22. Lipphardt, Brauch, and Nocke, “Exploring Jewish Space,” 4. For an important critical introduction to these ideas in Jewish Studies, see Mann, Space and Place. 23. Tuan, Space and Place, 12. To kinesthesia one might also add proprioception. 24. As well as for poetic “perception.” See the important theoretical discussion in Meltzer, “Color as Cognition.” 25. Lefebvre, Production, 11–12. Lefebvre’s ultimate goal is the delineation of a “science of space” (which is reminiscent of how the Russian literary Formalists desired to produce a science of literature). The underlying assumption is that spaces are social productions. It seems safe to imagine a similar project envisioned for time. Indeed, David Harvey brings those assumptions together in a self-avowedly Marxist historiography; see Harvey, “Between Space and Time.” 26. Fonrobert and Shemtov, “Introduction,” 2. 27. Ibid. 28. Casanova, World Republic, 34–40. To be sure, Casanova’s argument is that over time the process of literary development is one of struggle to free literature of national and political constraints (46). Nevertheless, it is within the national discourse that “literature” came to be what we understand that term to mean. 29. I will discuss the important technical distinction between exile and diaspora later on. Here I am engaging a traditional concept, so the colloquial understandings are more appropriate. 30. Horwitz, Confederates, 154. 31. Lowenthal, “Past Time,” 13. There are two distinct options, according to Lowenthal, in the explicitly “national” nostalgification of place: “Nations continually reinterpret traces of their own history. Those emerging from colonial subjugation may feel that self-respect requires a long and glorious past with new light on old artifacts. In this spirit, eighteenth-century antiquarians made Stonehenge Egyptian, Americans found Viking remains in New England, and African arts are claimed to antedate the Assyrians. Others find that the weight of the past stifles present creativity; thus nineteenth-century Americans condemned European ruins and made a virtue of their own tabula rasa. Historical self-consciousness also tends to nationalize the past, condemning its pillage by archaeologists and collectors from other lands” (ibid.). 32. Or, if not history per se, then, following a line from at least the mid-nineteenth century to the present, historiography. 33. Lowenthal, “Past Time,” 11. Lowenthal is here citing T. S. Eliot’s 1917 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The importance of “tradition” will be noted later in the discussion of traditional temporality. 34. Révész, “Problem of Space,” 432. 35. Fonrobert and Shemtov, “Introduction,” 3. 36. Heschel, Sabbath, 96–97. 37. For a current account see Trachtenberg, Revolutionary Roots. See also Hoff mann and Mendelsohn, Revolution of 1905; Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, especially chap. 3, “The Politics of Jewish Liberation,” 134–70. 38. Personal communication with Gennady Estraikh. 39. North, Dialect, 14. 40. Ibid. 41. Chana Kronfeld has offered a powerful challenge to this trajectory:

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notes to pages 21–23 Ironically, Yiddish ought to have been exactly the type of language major modernisms should have turned to as a model. Yiddish was the quintessential deterritorialized, minor language even before its speech community was decimated by what can only be described as a cultural equivalent of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and marginalized further by the ideological forces of anti-Yiddish Hebraism on the one hand, and conformist Americanization on the other. The Yiddish that was stopped dead in its tracks wasn’t a cute and funny thing to feel nostalgic about. It was an exceptionally precise, vibrant, supple, and exquisitely layered semiotic and artistic instrument. At the very moment in the history of literature when modernism was aligning itself in various parts of the Western world with an escape from territorialization into language, Yiddish offered some of the most fertile opportunities for innovation and avant-garde exploration, a veritable modernist Yiddishland. (Kronfeld, “Murdered Modernisms,” 197) 42. The YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute), one of whose functions was as a kind of Yiddish-language academy (an Académie yidichaise, as it were), was itself a relatively late creation, not founded until 1925. 43. See Herzog et al., Language and Culture Atlas. To take an example of such cultural geography, there is an expression in Yiddish that when one hits someone hard enough, er ken zen kroke mit lemberik, that is, he sees stars, or literally, “he sees Krakow and Lemberg (Lvov) at the same time.” That Krakow and Lemberg were the big-city termini of the Galician railroad and that in this period Galicia had an especially dense Jewish population give us some feel for the rich cultural associativity of the concept. 44. As distinctly apt confirmation of this assessment, Jeff rey Shandler remarks, “I once heard a student . . . define Yiddishland as a place that comes into existence whenever two or more people speak Yiddish” (Shandler, “Mapping Yiddishland,” 292). 45. George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” in Steiner, No Passion Spent, 305. Tensions between spatiality and the temporality (“history”) of the Steinerian textual homeland model of Jewish cultural thinking reappear in literary analyses in interesting ways. In the literary critic Dan Miron’s somewhat opinionated reevaluation of Jewish literary history he notes at one point, for example, that “[u]pon the recent death of S. Yizhar, the Israeli literary culture hero, Applefeld had the honesty but also the shortsightedness to severely criticize Yizhar’s prose fiction for being obsessively preoccupied with landscape, flora, fauna, geography, even geology, rather than with people, books, ideas, history, spirituality” (Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity, 415). Miron goes on to outline his notion of a “ ‘spatial’ Jewishness” (ibid., 416) over against the temporal. For Miron, Applefeld’s critique therefore “was even more fundamentally wrongheaded because of the writer’s failure to recognize the essential ‘Jewish’ significance of Yizhar’s preoccupation with space and spatial modalities of perception. For Yizhar’s ‘world,’ the quintessential literary product of the Zionist pioneers, gave full and magnificently orchestrated expression to that great yearning of Jewish modernity: its quest for locus, for place, for re-territoriality, for having earth under one’s feet in the measure of the sky over one’s head (to use Bialik’s dictum: a people had skies over its head in the measure of the earth under its feet)” (ibid., 415). As a blanket assertion about “that great yearning of Jewish modernity,” such an assessment is, as we shall see later in the chapters that follow, somewhat immoderate. 46. Shandler, “Mapping Yiddishland,” 292. 47. McLeod, “Galldachd,” 7. 48. “Moreover, linking a sense of location to the temporal medium of spoken language inevitably links place to time. Yiddishland is, in its essence, what the critic Mikhail Bakhtin called a chronotope—that is, a matrix linking time and space in an interdependent relationship” (Shandler, “Mapping Yiddishland,” 292). Shandler is absolutely right in stressing tempo-

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notes to pages 23–26 rality here, but Bakhtin’s chronotope was formulated as an expressly literary relationship, and in this sense the topos of Yiddishland is far from a clean correspondence. The issue of orality played a significant role in the development of modern literary languages in Hebrew and Yiddish. Where Hebrew struggled to find ways of capturing orality in a language largely lacking mother-tongue native speakers, Yiddish sought to adapt literary registers beyond the colloquial habits of multitudes of such speakers. 49. The word “temporality” is notoriously flexible; it is used in a variety of contexts as a technical term with different meanings. I am using it here in as straightforward a way as possible. 50. For a thoroughgoing account of the history and concept of social time see Nowotny, “Time and Social Theory,” 421–54, especially 421–38. Durkheim himself says that space is also organized in a similarly social way (Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 10–11). 51. I take the terms “natural time” and “everyday time” in these meanings from Bakhtin (Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and The Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics” [1937–38], in Dialogic Imagination, 103). Fillmore would add a calendrical vs. noncalendrical distinction to the latter (Fillmore, Lectures, 48–49). For an absorbing study of the intellectual history of temporal linearity and cyclicality in the natural sciences see Gould, Time’s Arrow. 52. As Koselleck himself has noted, “Because history itself remains embedded in time periods that are pregiven by nature, historiography is likewise unable to dispense with them” (Koselleck, Practice, 106). Ultimately, “We thus arrive at a result that appears to be banal but is really fundamental: natural time, with its recurrence and its time limits, is a permanent premise both of history and of its interpretation as an academic discipline” (ibid., 109). 53. Nowotny also credits Kubler with an influence on the sociological understanding of time (Nowotny, “Time and Social Theory,” 424). 54. Kracauer, “Time and History,” 67. 55. Ibid., 68. 56. For a deep reading of this complexity, juxtaposing a scientific with a phenomenological (focusing on that of Merleau-Ponty) reading of a dynamic temporal shape, see Eliot Wolfson’s concept of “timeswerve” (Wolfson, “Prologue: Timeswerve / Hermeneutic Reversibility,” in Language, Eros, Being, xv–xxxi). 57. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 221. 58. Lynch, What Time, 120. Durkheim would argue then that the “arrangement” of sequences themselves can only be undertaken by and in a social structure (Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 10). 59. I repeatedly return to history as an area of particular relevance in the discussion of temporality because temporality can be easily exemplified through history and vice versa. Not only that, but history is an essential term in the vocabulary of nationhood, which is the running subtext to this discussion. The national discourse within literature therefore uses temporality in marked ways, making it worthwhile to keep a weather eye out for such uses. 60. Lynch, What Time Is This Place?, 121. 61. Koselleck, Practice, 104. 62. Ibid., 104. 63. Lynch, What Time Is This Place?, 127. 64. See, e.g, Miller, “Durkheimian Time.” 65. For an important cultural history of Jewish calendrical thinking in Europe see Carlebach, Palaces of Time, and more generally, see Stern, Calendar and Community. 66. I mean “immediate” in a spatial sense, that is, without intermediary. Our visual apprehension of paintings comes largely unfiltered (the context of museum, gallery, civic hall, or private salon notwithstanding). The English word “immediate” itself is spatiotemporally interesting

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notes to pages 26–28 insofar as its spatial meaning, though earlier etymologically, has been superseded by a temporal sense, namely, without any event intervening in the temporal sequence. 67. Koselleck, Futures Past, 10. 68. Ibid., 9–10. Later Koselleck writes, “Temporal difference was not more or less arbitrarily eliminated; it was not, as such, at all apparent. The proof of this is there to see in the painting of the Alexanderschlacht. Altdorfer, who wished to corroborate represented history (Historie) statistically by specifying the combatants in ten numbered columns, has done without one figure: the year. His battle thus is not only contemporary; it simultaneously appears to be timeless” (10). 69. Tuan, Space and Place, 123, quoting Rudolph Arnheim. Simon Schama’s volume Landscape and Memory explores the cultural dimensions of the landscape metaphor in art generally. He takes it as axiomatic that “it is clear that inherited landscape myths and memories share two common characteristics: their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions that we will live with. National identity, to take just the most obvious example, would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland” (15). For the exilic vein of Jewish national thinking, the one interesting corollary is the fact of that enchanted connection being to a landscape of which there was no lived-experiential memory. 70. Frank, “Spatial Form,” pt. 1, 221–25. 71. Such ideas are more predominant in poetry than in prose, especially the novel, which poses considerable problems of scale; though some prose writers did set themselves the task of overcoming these difficulties, and many of the landmarks of modernism testify to their success. 72. Frank, “Spatial Form,” pt. 1, 227. 73. Ibid., 229–30. 74. While he would likely not have described it as an imperative, Paul Ricoeur does emphasize the importance of narrative structure to understanding temporality (in an article which presents a critique of Heidegger’s concept of time as measured against a theory of narrative and narrative temporality). In some ways it investigates from a philosophical perspective the contest of linearity and cyclicality (what he calls “repetition”), which he notes from the sociological perspective. Ricoeur’s primary focus is contesting the simplicity of the received wisdom that “both the theory of history and the theory of fictional narratives seem to take it for granted that whenever there is time, it is always a time laid out chronologically, a linear time, defined by a succession of instants” (Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” 171). The connection and similarities between history and literature I will point to later, so I only note the essential relation Ricoeur states several times. It is, however, the complexity of what is meant by “instants,” which takes up a good deal of Ricoeur’s interest. He will very quickly convert these into “events” in order to make a distinction between “plot” and “story”: “a story is made out of events” while a “plot makes events into a story” (171, 178). This distinction is then used to construct a two-dimensional narrative structure: (1) an “episodic dimension,” which is a “chronological” presentation of events as a story; and (2) a “configurational dimension,” which is a “nonchronological” structuring of events by a plot (178). The conscious articulation of one as passive and the other as active is mirrored by a concern for the processes of “story-following” and “story-telling.” It is clear to see how such a “configuration” is in effect narrative temporality’s counterpart to Kubler’s “shaped times.” 75. See Ricoeur’s use of Heidegger’s concept of “historicality” (Geschichtlichkeit) (Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” 180–90). 76. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 8. 77. That is, using Ricoeur’s vocabulary, it moves from the episodic dimension to the configurational one. 78. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 9.

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notes to pages 28–30 79. “This general thrust [i.e., ‘portraying [the nation] as a unified group moving through history’] often implies a linear conception of time. Yet the master commemorative narrative occasionally suspends this linearity by the omission, regression, repetition, and the conflation of historical events. The holiday cycle, the annual calendar, and the liturgical cycle typically disrupt the flow of time by highlighting recurrent patterns in the group’s collective experiences. Indeed, the tension between the linear and cyclical perceptions of history often underlies the construction of collective memory” (ibid., 7). 80. Mosès, Angel of History, 86. 81. Hobsbawn, “Introduction,” 11. See also the essays in Carlebach, Efron, and Myers, Jewish History. 82. In Eliot’s notion of a literary tradition, the cooptation of change is part of an evolving system in which what is novel is interpreted critically as participating in it (Eliot, Sacred Wood, 44). 83. Note the comment of the Jewish historian Shimen Dubnow (1860–1941), from an 1892 article: Only in our midst, among the Jews of Poland and Russia, has there been kindled no desire to uncover the secrets of our past, to know what we were, how we came to our present circumstances and how our forefathers lived during the eight hundred years beginning with the start of Jewish life in Poland. There are times when I suspect in my heard that we altogether lack historical feeling. As if we were . . . like gypsies whose lives are entirely in the present and who have neither a future nor a past. And the few, select ones so inclined to know the shape of the past actually recognize merely fragments of things and scattered incidents. (cited in Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry, 89–90; also quoted, from Zipperstein, in Bartal, Jews of Eastern Europe, 7–8) See Bartal’s introduction (1–13) for a consideration of the coincidence of Jewish modernity with the awakening of an “historical consciousness.” 84. Augustine, Confessions, cited in Lynch, What Time, 122. Cf. Amos Funkenstein’s fascinating juxtaposition: “Augustine’s emphasis on the uniqueness of history may also be linked to his notion of time. The Aristotelian notion of time was that of a physicist—time measures external, repeated processes, such as the motion of the spheres of the fi xed stars; Aristotle defines it as “the measure of motion according to the prior and posterior.” To Augustine, by contrast, time measures both motion and rest—it is not the index of motion, but of experience and memory, much like Bergson’s durée. Augustine’s time is the internal time: as experience, it refers not to repetitive events or processes, but rather that which is distinct by its novelty and uniqueness. Kant may have been the first to unite both traditions of the perceptions of time” (Funkenstein, Perceptions, 14). 85. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24. 86. Benjamin, Illuminations, 261. 87. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 91. It very well may be that the concept of “empty time” (leere Zeit) was adopted from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. 88. “We understand the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature” (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 84). Chronotopes (“We will give the name Chronotope [literally, ‘time space’] to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” [Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 84]) are the literary configurations of time and space, not their metaphorical conceptualization as a means of coming to know or understand oneself or one’s reality. Bakhtin’s masterful theory is endlessly useful. In his analysis, for example, of a specific genre of ancient Greek novel, he notes, “The adventure chronotope is thus characterized by a technical, abstract connection between space and time, by the reversibility

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notes to pages 30–32 of moments in a temporal sequence, and by their interchangeability in space” (ibid., 100). The chronotope as a configuration is an analytic tool for understanding how works and genres construct a literary reality from a conception of space (for example, as interchangeable) intersecting with a conception of time (for example, as sequentially reversible). The chronotope, however, is not a theory of metaphor on its own. (For an analysis of the structural integration of time and space within the narrative framework see also Tsoren, “Likrat te’oriyah.”) 89. “Deictic anchorage” is Ragnar Rommerveit’s phrase, quoted in Fillmore, Lectures, 8. 90. Koselleck, Futures Past, 36. “The naturalistic basis [i.e., a mirror of the natural and astronomical cycles, and the chronologies based on them] vanished, and progress became the prime category in which a transnatural, historically immanent definition of time first found expression” (ibid., 37). Anthony Grafton takes the famous Ciceronian notion of historia magistra vitae (history as a guide to life), the loss of which principle Koselleck among others dates to the French Revolutionary watershed, and usefully rehistoricizes the problematic of its utility—intellectuals simultaneously deploying and questioning the principle—further back into the early modern period (Anthony Grafton, “Isaac Casaubon and the Study of Ancient History,” February 13, 2012, Classical Traditions Seminar, Harvard University). 91. Again, to borrow some of Koselleck’s terminology (Koselleck, Futures Past, 19). 92. Benjamin, Illuminations, 261. Later in the same essay Benjamin notes, “A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past” (ibid., 262). Compare this to Heidegger’s notion of the sequence of “nows” which mark modern perception: “The ‘nows’ are what get counted. And these show themselves ‘in every “now’” as ‘nows’ which will ‘forthwith be no-longer-now’ and ‘nows’ which have ‘ just been not-yet-now.’ The world-time which is ‘sighted’ in this manner in the use of clocks, we call the ‘now-time’ [Jetzt-Zeit] [sic]” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 474). Clearly we need a concept-history of the Jetztzeit. 93. Koselleck, Futures Past, 50. As Koselleck notes elsewhere, “historical process is marked by a distinctive kind of temporality different from that found in nature. This temporality is multileveled, is subject to differential rates of acceleration and deceleration, and functions not only as a matrix within which historical events happen but also as a causal force in the determination of social reality in its own right” (Koselleck, Practice, xii). Marc Augé, too, notes “the acceleration of history” by which he means a shift in perception; where history had been understood as “back then,” now any lived experience, once experienced, becomes a part of “history” (in other words, current events are transformed into instantaneous history) (Augé, Non-Places, 22). 94. Nowotny, “Time and Social Theory,” 428. 95. Heschel, Sabbath, 7. 96. Ibid. 97. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 42. 98. In an interesting meditation on time in the writings of Margery Kempe, an English mystic of the fifteenth century, Carolyn Dimshaw paints a vivid scene of an institutional incompatibility of the church’s use of time and Margery’s mystical experience of it. In her words there is a “clash of temporalities”: “the priest’s programmatic observation of a progressive everyday chronology, Margery’s absorption in the everlasting now of the mystic” (Dimshaw, “Temporalities,” 109). (My thanks to Zohar Weiman Kelman for bringing this essay to my attention, and for opening up its relevance to Jewish modernism.) 99. Schorsch, “Ideology and History,” 10. 100. Note the parenthetical at the end of Foucault’s comment: “Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to

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notes to pages 32–36 delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached from the sacred in the nineteenth century)” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23). 101. “What saved Jewish history from the fate of pure historicism was the concept of essence. Behind the panorama of events existed and operated the essence of Judaism. It was this unchanging though ever unfolding idea which provided the continuity as well as the motive power of Jewish history” (Schorsch, “Ideology and History,” 12). 102. Graetz, Structure, 72. 103. My sincere thanks to Eliyahu Stern for his keen insights on traditionalism, which have influenced my thinking. 104. Note Tuan’s enjoyable play on the deictic strengths of this view: “Language itself reveals the intimate connectivity among people, space, and time. I am (or we are) here; here is now. You (or they) are there; there is then, and then refers to a time which may be either the past or the future. ‘What happens then?’ The ‘then’ is the future. ‘It was cheaper then.’ The ‘then’ here is the past” (Tuan, Space and Place, 126). 105. Ibid., 6. Barbara Mann sees a similar critical significance in Tuan’s assessment: “This metaphorical use of space—akin to Tuan’s metaphorical description of place in temporal terms (as a ‘pause’)—is, I would suggest, a key vehicle for importing critical thinking about space in the social sciences into the humanities” (Mann, Space and Place, 23). 106. Lynch, What Time, 241. 107. Eisenstadt, “Perception of Time,” 66. 108. Kracauer, “Time and History,” 75–76. 109. Ibid., 76. 110. Lynch, What Time, 120. 111. Frank, “Spatial Form,” pt. 1, 239. For Frank’s full analysis see 235–40. 112. Ibid., 236. 113. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. 114. See also, for example, Crang, “Spacing Times.” 115. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 26. 116. Ibid. 117. See Koselleck, Practice, 86. 118. An important refinement of this image of the literary utopia is given in Yigal Schwartz’s discussion of what he refers to as early Hebrew “utopian” literature, such as Avraham Mapu’s biblical romance Ahavat tsiyon. Such works “are all anchored in a rereading of master narratives of Hebrew culture that deal with the phase of ‘birth’ (the mythical formation of the nation) and/or in a rereading of one of the master narratives about the mythical future of the nation and the world. . . . These formative master narratives were adopted because the founding fathers considered the constitution of a new society in the Land of Israel to be a rejuvenated creation rather than a new one and because of the revolutionary, or at least reforming, intention of the writers” (Schwartz, “Human Engineering,” 95–96). 119. Koselleck, Practice, 86. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid., 87. It is left to us to note that the formative modern dystopic novels have also been largely set in the future (Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example). 122. Koselleck himself provides for why this is the case. In his understanding of the engine of temporal metaphoricity there are three primary “models of temporal experience”: “irreversibility of events”; “repeatability of events”; and “the contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous” (Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigen), in which “[a] differential classification of historical sequences is contained in the same naturalistic chronology” (Koselleck, Futures Past, 95). How

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notes to pages 36–39 these models combine and intersect allows comparative conceptualization of temporality. (Cf. the felicitous phrase “noncontemporaneous contemporaneity,” cited in Dimshaw, “Temporalities,” 115.) 123. Koselleck, Futures Past, 260; as Koselleck makes clear in the full evaluation, so redolent of Hume: Past and future never coincide, or just as little as an expectation in its entirety can be deduced from experience. Experience once made is as complete as its occasions are past; that which is to be done in the future, which is anticipated in terms of an expectation, is scattered among an infinity of temporal extensions. This condition . . . corresponds to our metaphorical description. Time, as it is known, can only be expressed in spatial metaphors. . . . What is at stake here is the demonstration that the presence of the past is distinct from the presence of the future. (my emphasis). 124. Note again the revolutionary watershed. 125. Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, 160–61. 126. Quoting Hume, ibid., 169. 127. And Ginzburg notes Hume’s awareness of this problem: there are “three phenomena, which seem pretty remarkable. Why distance weakens the conception and passion: why distance in time has a greater effect than that in space: and why distance in past time has still a greater effect than that in future. We must now consider three phenomena, which seem to be in a manner the reverse of these: why a very great distance increases our esteem and admiration for an object: why such a distance in time increases it more than that in space: and a distance in past time more than that in future” (Hume, cited in ibid., 170). 128. Ibid., 171. See also Pierre Nora’s analysis of the shift in modernity from authority given to collective memory to that given to “objective” history (Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 14–16). 129. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 139, 140, 142, 143. 130. Koselleck, Practice, 102: When one seeks to form an intuition of time as such, one is referred to spatial indications, to the hand of the clock or the leaves of a calendar that one pulls off every day. And when one tries to guide one’s intuition in a historical direction, one perhaps pays attention to the wrinkles of an aged human being or the scars in which a life’s past fate is present. Or one calls to mind the juxtaposition of ruins and new buildings or, today, looks at obvious changes in style that lend temporal depth to a spatial row of houses. 131. Many of Foucault’s heterotopias (such as museums and libraries) are marked by physical structures. And the very idea of a lieu de mémoire—“place of memory” (Nora)—has a similar physical resonance. 132. Heschel, Sabbath, 8. 133. Ibid. 134. Bialik, Kol kitvei, 224. 135. Lowenthal, “Past Time,” 6. 136. This, for example, is a point made repeatedly by Lynch. 137. Lowenthal, “Past Time,” 6. 138. Mary Minty, cited in Fonrobert and Shemtov, “Introduction,” 3–4. 139. “In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space” (Fou-

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notes to pages 39–46 cault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23). It should also be noted, though, that unlike more traditional accounts which pose the visual and therefore the spatial as primary, Deleuze sees Bergson, for example, as making “duration” “pure, the other (space) is the impurity that denatures it. Duration will be attained as ‘immediate datum’ because it is associated with the right side, the good side of the composite” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 37–38). 140. Lowenthal, “Past Time,” 2. 141. Ibid., 1. 142. I owe this profound insight, and therefore thanks, to Allison Schachter, whose excellent book Diasporic Modernisms in part details that process. 143. Andrea Schatz notes what she considers Salo Baron’s understanding of the Ghetto as a distinctly “Jewish space” (Schatz, “Introduction,” 1.) The reference is to Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation.” 144. Uriel Weinreich, cited in Shandler, “Mapping Yiddishland,” 297. 145. If it hasn’t become clear by now, I must say that by “Jewish” I mean the modern Ashkenazi cultural experience. I by no means intend to downplay, undermine, or in any way impugn the importance of other Jewish cultures (Sephardi, Mizrakhi, etc.). 146. Steiner, No Passion Spent, 307–8. 147. Ibid., 320. 148. Schorsch, “Ideology and History,” 18. Interestingly, we find a kind of parallel confirmation in Lowenthal’s essay: “When we cannot [perfectly inhabit both our past and present fully], we settle for souvenirs. Keepsakes and mementos substitute for vanished landscapes. Loading their jalopies for the trek to California the uprooted migrant Okies in Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ are told there is no room for such souvenirs as letters, old hats, and china dogs. But they ‘knew the past would cry to them in coming days. . . . “How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?’”” (Lowenthal, “Past Time,” 9). 149. Bal Makhshoves, “Tsvey shprakhn—eyneyntsike literatur,” in Geklibene verk, 120–21. It is noteworthy that Steiner uses a very similar Heine prooftext as well—“das aufgeschriebene Vaterland” (Steiner, No Passion Spent, 305). 150. Steiner, No Passion Spent, 305. 151. Again, from Ismar Schorsch’s account of Graetz’s thinking: “The destruction of the Second Temple did not climax the demise of Jewish nationhood nor inaugurate Judaism’s mission to the world. In an omission pregnant with meaning, Graetz completely ignored the mission concept so central to Reform thinking. Instead, appropriating a Hegelian category, he argued that the period of dispersion was marked by a distinct speculative dimension unknown in the earlier periods. Exposure to confl icting life-styles and ideologies compelled Judaism to reflect upon itself ” (Schorsch, “Ideology and History,” 42–43; cf. Graetz, Structure, 93–124). 152. Koselleck, Futures Past, 75. 153. Ibid., 3.

Chapter 2 1. For the most recent and approachable introduction to the shtetl as both place and literary-cultural concept, see Shandler, Shtetl. 2. Miron, Der imazh, 21–138. 3. See his full monograph mentioned above, Der imazh fun shtetl, as well as Miron, Image. 4. Miron, Image, xii. 5. Miron elsewhere refers to the likeness of the shtetl and Jerusalem as an “equivalency.” Cf. Miron’s description of Abramovitsh’s shtetl par excellence, Kabtsansk: “Like a Jerusalem on the

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notes to pages 46–52 path to reconstruction is Kabtsansk on the verge of Messianic redemption” (Miron, Der imazh, 65; see also 39–41). 6. Miron, Image, 33. See also Roskies, Jewish Search, 41–66, especially 44 for Roskies’ deployment of the Jerusalem trope. 7. Indeed, whether the model of “exile” is always the best to use in shtetl literature is itself an important question, but one which will have to be left for another discussion. 8. See Roskies, “The Shtetl in Jewish Collective Memory,” in Jewish Search, 41–66. 9. Note again the gravitational pull using such an event theory of history. 10. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 43–44. 11. Ibid., 44. 12. This is the overlapping of traditional and text-temporality. 13. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12. 14. Ibid., 16. 15. Harshav, Language, 4. 16. Tuan, Space and Place, 149. 17. Ibid., 89 (see also 85–100). 18. See Roskies’s discussion of the shtetl as “covenantal community” (Roskies, Jewish Search, 44). 19. Caplan, “Fragmentation,” 83. 20. Harshav, Meaning, 89–116; Finkin, Rhetorical Conversation, 31–47. 21. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. 22. Miron, Image, 36–38; Roskies, Jewish Search, 48–49. See, for example, the centrality of the cemetery to An-Ski’s “The Dybbuk.” 23. Roskies, Jewish Search, 48–49; Harshav, Language, 4. See also Miron’s discussion in Der imazh, 94–97. 24. “This ‘holy place’—this is their only little place of their own in the whole world where they are their own masters; their only little piece of earth, their only little bit of field where some grass may grow or a little tree, and the air is fresh and one breathes free” (Sholem Aleykhem, Ale verk, 16). 25. Ibid. 26. Miron, Image, 40. 27. Olsvanger, Röyte Pomerantsen, 49. 28. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry, 4. See also Zipperstein’s chapter “Shtetls Here and There: Imagining Russia in America,” in Imagining Russian Jewry, 15–40; Norich, Discovering Exile, 1–15. There is of course the opposite extreme represented by the Zionist focus on shlilat ha-golah (“negating the Exile”), which saw nothing redeeming in the shtetl except in its rejection or repudiation. That too, however, is part of a different story. 29. Curtius, Europäische Literatur, 202–4. 30. Piehler, Visionary Landscape, 72–73. 31. Shandler, “Mapping Yiddishland,” 300. 32. This idea also occurs in nonideological accounts as well. Shtetl existence is often referred to as marked by some kind of “temporariness.” In one problematic conjecture, the building practices and the oft-mentioned fires in the shtetlekh are given this significance: “Poor workmanship and frequent devastating fires, which left visible traces, often created a dilapidated landscape, investing the town [with] a makeshift feeling, a sense of being a temporary place, which has been captured so graphically by many artists. It was a combination of the prevailing poverty as well as the attitude of shtetl residents to their life in this environment. It also reflected, perhaps, the lingering hope of return to the ancient homeland when the time was ripe” (Pinchuk, “East European Shtetl,” 206). (For another of Pinchuk’s general accounts, see Pinchuk, “Jewish Discourse.”)

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notes to pages 53–58 33. There is, as one might well imagine, a large literature either on the subject or tangentially related to it. For the most modern treatments see Eisen, Galut; and Ezrahi, Booking Passage. 34. Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 38–39. 35. Ibid., 46. 36. “If in the biblical world, ancient and modern, the mandate in its most radical form is to rid the Holy Land of all its impurities, and of all impure others, in the talmudic world the exigencies of coexistence and of relinquished sovereignty produce an ingenious form of dialectical logic that allows for both the contraction of the iconic, cultic, and the expansion of religiously neutral or profane, space. Th is provides an arena for the emergence of the aesthetic and of cultural negotiation between theologically embattled cultures” (Ezrahi, “When Exiles Return,” 42). 37. “Text” also in the Steinerian sense. 38. I must note here that I have left Hebrew out for the moment intentionally. I would in fact argue that Hebrew, too, was consciously developed and transformed into another of Europe’s great culture languages. One need only read Yehude Leyb Gordon, Shaul Tshernikhovski, Dvora Baron, or Uri Nisan Gnesin, for example, to understand the truth of that assertion. The difference is one of rhetorical perspective. The processes of literary language development for Yiddish and Hebrew were largely seen as matters of innovation and renovation respectively, a diasporic creation and an exilic inheritance. This discussion focuses, though not exclusively, on the former discourse. 39. On scientific education, see, for example, Abramovitsh’s Hebrew translation of the work of the naturalist Harald Othmar Lenz, Sefer toldot ha-teva. On the landkentenish movement, see, for example, Kassow, “Travel and Local History.” 40. See the very important study by Allison Schachter, “Bergelson and the Landscape of Yiddish Modernism.” 41. Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 15. 42. Ibid., 15–16. 43. Tuan, Space and Place, 159. 44. Finkin, “With Footsteps,” 125–26. 45. Tshernikhovski, Shirim, 151–52. 46. See again, Hume, Treatise, 33–34; Révész, “Problem of Space,” 434; Tuan, Space and Place, 16. 47. Here Persians fought with Scythians, after them followed Pecheneg clans and Polovtsians in their tribes, Then the blood of Cossacks and Tatars was spilled here (Tshernikhovski, Shirim, 149) 48. Perets, Briv un redes, 201; cited in Mayzel, Perets, 43. 49. See, for example, Lachover, Toldot ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-chadashah, 42–70; Niger, “Y. L. Peretz u-khtavav,” 439–502; Niger, Y. L. Perets, 74–112, 126–31; Malochi, “Y. L. Peretz,” 264–68. 50. Quoted in Mayzel, Perets, 62. 51. Interestingly, very few of the commentators on Perets’s Hebrew works of this period discuss this particular poem, or even mention it. Shmuel Niger’s important 1946 study of Perets’s Hebrew output, for example, makes no reference to it. More recently, the lengthiest analysis of the poem has been a detailed paragraph in Dan Miron’s Der imazh fun shtetl (103–4), in which he takes the poem as one of the first serious works on the “collapse of the shtetl” (disintegrative) as opposed to the “classic” mimetic or, better still, quasi-mimetic portrayals (integrative). By contrast, a more typical treatment—and one whose assessment diverges significantly

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notes to pages 59–62 from Miron’s—is that of Dovid Katz, who writes (in a history of Yiddish), “By the mid-1880s [Perets’s] Hebrew poetry was changing tone from satire to a loving, longing romanticism, at the heart of which stood the East European shtetl, the small town with its heavily Jewish population and its many inimitable features. Almost uniquely in Hebrew literature of the time, his Ho-ír haktáno (The Small City, Ha-ír ha-ketaná in Israeli) is a prototype of poetry that sees the pleasing, romantic side of shtetl life” (Katz, Words on Fire, 217). This particular evaluation, however, does not seem to be borne out by a close reading of the poem itself. 52. For a sketch of the development of these ideas in Perets see Wisse, I. L. Peretz. 53. Perets, Ale verk, 119–209; for an English translation see “Impressions of a Journey Through the Tomaszow Region,” in Perets, I. L. Peretz Reader, 17–84. See also Niger, Y. L. Perets, 200–203; Miron, Der imazh, 104–11; Blank and Hein, “I. L. Peretz’ Blick”; and again Caplan, “Fragmentation.” 54. Caplan, “Fragmentation,” 80. 55. Caplan mentions “the use of temporality as a political mode of representing dislocation” without being clear as to the specifically political stakes of that technique (ibid., 77). 56. For the most wide-ranging and thoroughgoing recent appraisals see Safran and Zipperstein, The Worlds of S. An-Sky. 57. Miron, Der imazh, 106. 58. The passage (Qohelet 9:14–18) runs in full: There was a little city, with few men in it; and to it came a great king, who invested it and built mighty siege works against it. Present in the city was a poor wise man who might have saved it with his wisdom, but nobody thought of that poor man. So I observed: Wisdom is the better part of valor; but A poor man’s wisdom is scorned, And his words are not heeded. Words spoken softly by wise men are heeded sooner than those shouted by a lord in folly. Wisdom is more valuable than weapons of war, but a single error destroys much of value. (JPS Translation; Tanakh) 59. Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 29. 60. In Miron’s pithy summary, these facts of life include An image of the chasing of little fish under the quiet surface of stream—they have none of “life’s problems,” but they must have “crumbs of bread”; an image of a storm in a glass of water—two rabbis arguing, a Hasidic rabbi arrives, etc.; an image of the shtetl like an independent kingdom, a Land of Israel with its own king (the rabbi), with its laws, politics, and its own measurements of time “from one fire to the next”; a frightful Darwinian image of a shtetl, an economic jungle, where everyone is so caught up in the battle for survival that that actually becomes the substance of its existence. (Miron, Der imazh, 103) 61. “Ho-ir po ketano, / po eshkoyt onuakh” (Perets, Kol kitvei, 46). 62. “From an idyllic image of a life which is like a quietly flowing stream under the sun (life in the big city was likened to a stormy sea) the poet must cross over to other images” (Miron, Der imazh, 103). 63. Perets, Kol kitvei, 50. 64. Ibid., 47. It is worth noting at this point that Perets’s Hebrew would have been declaimed using the Ashkenazi stress patterns and pronunciation, according to which the poem’s rhyme

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notes to pages 63–68 and meter were constructed. I have therefore chosen not to disfigure the poetry by rendering it according to the now-conventional use of “standard” Israeli Hebrew. 65. Tshernikhovski, Shirim, 145. 66. Finkin, “With Footsteps,” 126. 67. Perets, Kol kitvei, 48. 68. Ibid., 53. 69. Miron, Image, 17. 70. Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sipurim ketanim, 218. 71. Perets, Kol kitvei, 53. 72. The path from the mountains which the farmer will follow is described as being “like a twisted serpent” (ke-nokhosh akalosoyn). Taken from Isaiah 27:1, this refers to the great beast Leviathan, which God will vanquish in the end-time. Often, though, it could be used as a critical or satiric designation. For example, in Yehudah Leyb Gordon’s famous long poem “Th e Tip of the Yud” (“Kotso shel yud”)—a classic of the Haskalah, unmasking the absurdities of obscurantist religious thinking in the shtetl and the dire straits into which that thinking cast women in particular—the ship on which the abandoning husband sails, and which when it sinks sets in motion the tragic events which render the poem’s heroine a perpetual agunah, is named the Twisted Serpent (Gordon, Kitvei, 137). Perets for his part uses this critical resonance to undermine the messianic associations of the name. 73. Perets, Kol kitvei, 56. 74. Compare this particular description to Uri-Tsvi Grinberg’s evaluation of Jewish Eastern European existence later on in this chapter. 75. Miron, Image, 25. 76. Ibid., 31. 77. Perets, Kol kitvei, 55. 78. Ibid., 57. 79. Ibid., 59–60. 80. For Miron, this is the prototype for the “collapse of the shtetl” trope: the heartrendingly comic image of the poet himself in his short German clothes as he stands in the middle of the market surrounded by merchants who argue over who will get to buy something from him or sell something to him. But when he tries to tell them that he is neither nobleman nor German and that they have the same God in heaven, they run away from him, the heretic, with disgust and curses; ultimately the poet must ask himself: “Is this the rest / for an unhappy soul?” The initial illusion about the shtetl as a place of rest for the weary wanderer has been completely smashed to pieces. In its place came no other complete image, only a series of ironic collisions. Contradictory observations. Now begins the collapse of the complete image [of the shtetl]. (Miron, Der imazh, 103–4) 81. Shneour, Kitvei, 44. 82. The staff and especially the sack are the primary accoutrements of the Wandering Jew, and the literary signposts of exile-consciousness. Again, in Abramovitsh’s story “The BurnedOut” (“Ha-nisrofim”), the inhabitants of Kabtsiel, which has burned down, are wandering the countryside en masse. As they stop to rest, “upon the willows they hang their sacks [tarmileihem] and rags and lie down on the ground” (Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sipurim ketanim, 220). The unsubtle allusion to Psalm 137, one of the canonical lodestones of exile, equates the biblical lyres with Eastern European beggars’ sacks, effectively lyricizing the tarmil in one of its more recognizeable canonical peaks. Shortly thereafter, in 1898, Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote his poem “Remote Star” (“Kokhav nidach”), in which he rejects the emotional baggage of exile:

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notes to pages 69–73 “My father—a bitter exile, my mother—dark poverty; / No! I do not fear my staff, nor is my sack [tarmil] terrifying!” (Bialik, Kol shirei, 91). In Yiddish, too, the sack (or beggar’s sack), torbe, has an extensive pedigree. Note Markish’s use of this image as described in the first chapter. (For a sense of the burden which this symbol sometimes became, see Abramovitsh’s 1888 introduction to a new version of his Yiddish novel Fishke der krumer [written almost a decade before the Hebrew version of “The Burned-Out”], as quoted in Dauber, “Looking at the Yiddish Landscape,” 169). 83. “The marketplace was the only feature of the historical map of the feudal town that survived in these two authors’ [Mendele Moykher-Sforim and Sholem Aleykhem] imaginary geography. This marketplace, which had frequently remained in the same location since the days when the town was under the direct control of the Polish landlord, becomes the main place where Jews and peasant farmers rub against one another in the literary town” (Bartal, “Imagined Geography,” 188). To take but one example, Sholem Aleykhem’s story “Di shtot fun kleyne menshelekh” (“The Town of Good People”; 1901) presents the marketplace as the social nexus of the community, a mixing ground for Jews and non-Jews alike: And there is also in the middle of the town a wide half-circle, or maybe it’s a square, where you find the stores, shops, butcher-shops, tables, and stalls; and that’s where the market is every morning, where so many goyim get together with other goyim with all kinds of merchandise and foodstuffs, fish and onions, horseradish, parsley, and all sorts of other things. These things they sell, and they buy from the Jews other necessities, and from this the Jews make a living, maybe not a great living but still a living. It’s better than nothing. . . . And there, right in the same place, all the goats in the town stretch out during the day and warm themselves in the sun, and right there are, lehavdl, the study houses, schools, synagogues, and kheyders of the town where Jewish children study Torah, pray, read, and write; the rabbis and their students sing and yell with such force it could make you deaf. . . . And also the bathhouse where women bathe, and the hospital where Jews die, and all the other good places which can be perceived from afar. (Sholem Aleykhem, Ale verk, 15) 84. Perets, Kol kitvei, 60. 85. “Mi yode’a ‘ir lishtina?” (Bialik, Kol shirei, 271–73). 86. See Aberbach, Bialik, 59; the volume of collected poetry here consulted, for example, lists this poem under the heading of poems “resembling folksongs [me‘ein shirei-am]” (Bialik, Kol shirei, 265). 87. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 42. 88. Halpern, Di goldene pave, 16–18. 89. Ruth Wisse, for example, notes the intended echo of the well-known song “Mayn shtetele belz” (“My Dear Shtetl Belz”) (Wisse, A Little, 119). 90. For a fuller analysis of the poem see ibid., 117–19. 91. Miron, Image, 25–31. 92. To take an example form further afield, in the folk music, and the music inspired by it, of the Anglo-American tradition, wanderingness (and homelessness) can have both positive and negative reflections. Songs of tinkers, tramps, and hawkers in the British Isles valorize the various landscapes encountered on their itinerant travels, whereas Dust Bowl ballads and other displacement songs in America, while using much similar imagery and vocabulary, speak to a different set of emotions. 93. See the valuable discussion in the introduction to Garrett, Journeys Beyond the Pale, especially 6–16. 94. Vaynig, “Naydus-etyudn,” 79.

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notes to pages 73–79 95. Ibid., 109. As Vaynig will offer a summation in Naydus’s own words: And I should build in grey goles [Exile] The rich castle of ivory; Like the figure of Apollo So shall life be beautiful! (quoted in ibid., 125.) 96. Naydus, Lirik, 416; also in Naydus, Oysgeklibene shriftn, 49. 97. Genesis 4:10–14. The translation is Robert Alter’s (Alter, Five Books of Moses, 31); the emphases are mine. 98. Vaynig, “Naydus-etyudn,” 61. 99. Cavafy, Complete Poems, 36–37. 100. Klier, “What Exactly Was a Shtetl?,” 24. 101. Bartal, “Imagined Geography,” 188–89. 102. Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction, 87; Schachter, “Shtetl,” 92n13. 103. Mendele Moykher Sforim, Ale verk, 3. 104. Schachter, “Shtetl,” 90, 76. 105. In Shachter’s words: “Abramovitsh employs nostalgia as an intentional literary strategy to transform himself into a modern, national writer and a voice for a new generation of Jewish readers” (ibid., 71). 106. Naydus, Litvishe arabeskn, 130. See also Vaynig, “Naydus-etyudn,” 78–79. It is worth noting that in his epigram Naydus pairs Mendele’s romanticization of nature with that of Edmond Rostand! 107. Vaynig, “Naydus-etyudn,” 93. 108. For an important essay on the conceptual history of “nostalgia” see Starobinski, “Idea of Nostalgia.” 109. Oxford English Dictionary (online), s.v. “Nostalgia.” 110. What is sometimes forgotten is that “nostalgia”—as a term—originally indicated a sickness, a pathology. Therefore, it is a curious ideology which bases its raison d’être on an illness which must therefore be thought of as a national epidemic in order to offer a suitable and appropriate cure. Starobinski links the workings of nostalgia to formative trends in Romanticism. He quotes the poet Samuel Rogers, whose lapidary phrase on the nostalgic stands out: “a martyr to repentant sighs” (quoted in Starobinski, “Idea of Nostalgia,” 93n21). 111. Ibid., 89–90. 112. Ibid., 90. 113. See the introductory discussion and conceptual history in Boym, Future, 3–18. 114. See Simon Schama’s description of his own familial memory of a similar experience (Schama, Landscape and Memory, 27–29). 115. Caplan, “Belarus in Berlin,” 91. You, Ortshe, my firstborn, were the foundation of the family! The first in the field and the last to sit at the table . . . The earth did warmly open beneath your plow, Just as the earth will be fruitful and fresh for your seed! Rakhmiel, who can measure up to you on the field! Your scythe in the grass was as a flood of fire, The snakes in the bog and the birds in their nests all know you. May the blessing be yours in stall and in barn! You, Shmulye, the riverman, there’s no one in the world like you! The whip always on your shoulders, always wet,

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notes to pages 79–87 Smelling of scales, with the smell of river muck, Blessed may you be on the land, and blessed on the water! (Kulbak, Naye lider, 46) 116. Caplan, “Belarus in Berlin,” 90. 117. For the effect on his lyrical works see Finkin, “ ‘Like Fires,” 73–88. 118. Caplan, “Belarus in Berlin,” 101. 119. Boym, Future, 41–55. 120. Kulbak, Naye lider, 31. 121. See, for example, Kulbak’s use of moss, especially indicating the “temporal stasis of nature” (Finkin, “Like Fires,” 84). 122. Kulbak, Naye lider, 32–33. 123. See Niger and Shatski, Leksikon, 276–77; see also Friedberg, “Byadulya-Yasakar, Zmitrok,” 323. 124. Finkin, “Like Fires,” 77–80. 125. Markish, Shveln, 101–20. 126. While the larger sequence “Volin” is made up of six sections, it is the eponymous first section, composed of eight parts, which is the self-contained cycle devoted to an encomium to Volhynia. 127. Markish, Shveln, 114. 128. In that case, it is gossip which functions as news of the world: There are no newspapers, But like the grass of the meadow News will blossom, From the dust it will flower. (Perets, Kol kitvei, 51–52) 129. Markish, Shveln, 107. 130. Ibid., 106. 131. For the image in Kulbak, see Finkin, “Like Fires,” 79–80. 132. Markish, Shveln, 109. 133. Ibid., 104. 134. This meaning may come from, or at least be similatively buttressed by, the Rabbinic Aramaic phase be-alma or stam be-alma, literally “in the world,” but meaning “merely” or “unintentionally.” 135. This last phrase is literally “my crown and my life.” 136. Kulbak, Naye lider, 38. 137. Markish, Shveln, 111. 138. Ibid., 16. 139. The literature here is robust. See for example the relevant portions of Novershtern, Kesem ha-dimdumim; Roskies, Against the Apocalypse; Mintz, Hurban; as well as Wolitz, “A Yiddish Modernist Dirge”; Koller, “‘Air Outside Is Bloody.’ ” 140. Wolitz, “Troyer (Grief).” 141. Ibid., 114. For a fuller treatment of this poem, including its Ovidian intertext, see also Finkin, “Consolation.” 142. Hofshteyn, Troyer, 8. 143. Ibid. 144. Wolitz, “Troyer (Grief),” 122. 145. Wolitz makes an analogous and similarly persuasive case for Perets Markish’s long poem Radyo (Radio; 1922) being a brilliant exponent of Yiddish agitprop (Wolitz, “Markish’s Radyo”).

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notes to pages 87–94 146. Numbers 35, Joshua 20 and 21, 1 Chronicles 6; in the Bible the word miklat only occurs in the phrase ‘ir miklat. 147. Grinberg, “Veytikn-heym,” 25–27. 148. “ [T]oday one already speaks of Jewish population, not folk, because one’s lips can’t really call that kind of a collection of people folk any more. Correct is Jewish population—not folk. The Jewish population, not nation” (ibid., 26). 149. Ibid., 27. 150. Grinberg, “Manifest,” 2; cited in Finkin, “Constellating,” 5. 151. See, for example, Hoff man, From Rebel to Rabbi, 141–59. See also, more generally, Efraim Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature, 40–70. 152. The whole European earth is populated by special home-peoples of the cross, and that only we are today the only ones who are according to today’s accepted law and concept of hundreds of millions of earth-inhabitants: foreign, train-station people, and at that of the second class. So it is. That we have in our heads a different opinion is not at all important here, important is what awakens: the hammer on the stone: you are not of this place. We are today the only group of people (folk, in the foreign language) who were born and raised with all the others in Europe and who speak a Germanic language which one can but easily understand and we are not understood because there is no desire to do so. We do not exist as a sound or a color in the rich composition of the European midst. We must all along keep conforming to the regulations and changes, because we are not the cause of the changes. (Grinberg, “Veytikn-heym,” 26) This is the heart of Grinberg’s Zionism at this stage: not being a “cause of changes” means not having power. Lack of power is the diagnosis; the pursuit of it is the prescription. 153. There is an interesting similarity between this exuberant bitterness and the famous speech of “Crazy” Nachman advocating an eastbound perspective at the end of Mordekhai Zev Fayerberg’s novella Le’an (Whither; 1900) (Fayerberg, Kitvei, 122–25). 154. Grinberg, “Veytikn-heym,” 27. 155. Greenberg, Eymah gedolah. 156. Agnon’s source material is part of “Jewish-Polish mythology” (Miron, Der imazh, 106–7); Miron notes a version of this “miraculous shortcut” tale in Perets’s Bilder fun a provintsrayze. 157. Grinberg, Eymah gedolah, 62. 158. See also Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity, 198. 159. Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), a Polish Romantic poet, often thought of as the Polish national poet. 160. The Vilija is the river that runs through Vilne. 161. Grinberg, Eymah gedolah, 63.

Chapter 3 1. Finkin, “Synaesthesia,” 1398–99. 2. Sheppard, “German Expressionism,” 278. 3. Donahue, Companion, 5. 4. Given Markish’s importance to modern Yiddish literature, it is surprising how neglected his work has been in contemporary scholarship. Recently, however, this has begun to change. The publication of an important collection of essays, A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Work

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notes to pages 95–99 of Peretz Markish (1895–1952), in whose production I am proud to have taken part, will hopefully signal a shift in favor of further exploration of Markish’s large and complicated body of work. 5. Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever, Shpigl, 751–52. 6. Steinkamp, “Trakl’s Landscape Code,” 139n15. 7. Ibid., 139–40. 8. Ibid., 143–44. 9. This is not to say that landscape imagery was altogether absent in his poetry; the important long poem “Volhynia” is a notable example. 10. See Kronfeld, Margins, 205; Shneer, “Perets Markish,” 175. 11. Sheppard, “German Expressionism,” 287. 12. Bridgwater, “Georg Trakl,” 108. 13. Note the overt temporaesthesia. 14. Steinkamp, “Trakl’s Landscape Code,” 146. 15. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. All citations from Trakl come from Trakl, Georg Trakl. Mit toten Heldengestalten Erfüllst du Mond Die schweigenden Wälder, Sichelmond— Mit der sanften Umarmung Der Liebenden, Den Schatten berühmter Zeiten Die modernden Felsen rings. (Trakl, Georg Trakl, 159) 16. This was a journal with which Markish was in conversation and which appeared at the same time in Warsaw as Markish’s own Khalyastre. 17. “Proklamirung,” Albatros 1 (1922): 3 (“A brik, fir vent un a balkn far di heymloze, dikhteryekhidim, in zeyer fremdlenderisher umvoglung in di farshidene tsentern fun yidish-folkisher eksteritoryalishkayt, literarishe tseshvumenkayt”). 18. For ease of reference, where possible citations from Markish, except for those from Di Kupe, are provided from both original collections and from the anthology A shpigl af a shteyn (edited by Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever). Mit hoyker afn hartsn, mit hoyker afn rukn —zestu, zeygermakher, oys, vi fir zolstu farmogn akslen! un tsayt af zey, vi vilder mokh af feldzn vakst mit darn shtoyb fun balkns fintstere un brukn. (Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever, Shpigl, 430) 19. “What sets Trakl apart is not just the absence of chauvinism and rhetoric, but the fact that war is a central, pre-existent part of his whole vision, the embodiment of the decline which has been his subject for some years” (Bridgwater, “Georg Trakl,” 97). 20. Sheppard, “Crisis of Language,” 327. 21. Sheppard, “German Expressionism,” 287. 22. A tel is an archeological mound made up of the layers of human settlement, one built on top of the remains of the last. Th is notion of accumulated layering, like an architectural palimpsest, along with the pun on “to tell time,” highlight how these ideas of time are dealt with poetically. 23. Eliot, Four Quartets, 13.

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notes to pages 99–103 24. The word “twilight” itself etymologically encodes the binary nature of the concept: the prefi x “twi-” is historically related to “two.” 25. Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung. The emotional content of the poems in this collection has been described as “rang[ing] from a sense of impending doom reflecting the collapsing metaphysical, social, and political orders to a secularized religiosity that trumpeted a radical transformation in humankind, a transformation that would bring about a new age of community and solidarity. The almost bipolar range of mood is captured by the title itself and the ambiguous notion of ‘twilight,’ which can suggest both dawn and dusk, and by extension, both apocalypse as cataclysmic ending and chance of renewal, as death or rebirth” (Sharp, “Menschheitsdämmerung,” 138). 26. De Ullmann, “Romanticism,” 811–27. 27. See also Tsur, “Literary Synaesthesia,” lxxv–lxxxvi. The recognition of synaesthesia’s place in Hebrew literature was also well in place by the end of the nineteenth century. As Hamutal Bar-Yosef notes, for example, “In 1900, the literary critic David Yishayahu Zilberbush was openly contemptuous of the decadence of both Berdytchevsky’s characters and style, which rests heavily on synaesthesia: ‘Then I said to myself, let me do as the Decadents do. So I trained my ears to see the voices produced by colors . . . , I widened my nostrils to smell the colors of voices and their taste . . . and the taste of castor oil and rat flesh fi lled my mouth’ ” (Bar-Yosef, “Romanticism and Decadence,” 148). 28. De Ullmann, “Romanticism,” 814. 29. Ibid., 813. 30. Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, 312. 31. Ibid., 314. 32. Ibid., 315. The general conceptualization of Figure and Ground in language The Figure is a moving or conceptually movable entity whose path, site, or orientation is conceived as a variable, the particular value of which is the relevant issue. The Ground is a reference entity, one that has a stationary setting relative to a reference frame, with respect to which the Figure’s path, site, or orientation is characterized. (ibid., 312) 33. Ibid., 316. 34. Ibid., 320. 35. Kronfeld, Margins, 195. “The development of modern Yiddish literature involves the construction of a collective identity that cannot be reduced to the Eurocentric model of the nation-state” (ibid.). 36. Citations from Markish’s Di kupe come from Markish, Di kupe. For the now standard accounts of this important poem see Wolitz, “A Yiddish Modernist Dirge,” 56–72 (reprinted in Sherman et al., Captive of the Dawn, 228–41); Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 98–101; see also Novershtern, Kesem hadimdumim, 142–44. 37. Pamelekh! Kupe kletert oyslekn dem himl, vi a teler khmaredike dralyes, un oyssmoken fun velt dem opgeshkrabetn dem hoyln beyn,— ot yushet fun ir royter meshugas af vaytn un af yamen. 38. “Tanzende heben sich von einer schwarzen Mauer; / Fahnen von Scharlach, Lachen, Wahnsinn, Trompeten” (Trakl, Georg Trakl, 47). 39. Of particular note are the juxtapositions found in the opening three lines of the poem:

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notes to pages 103–105 Under pruned willows where tawny children play and leaves drift, trumpets sound. A cemetery shudder. Banners of scarlet rush through the maple’s mourning. [Unter verschnittenen Weiden, wo braune Kinder spielen Und Blätter treiben, tönen Trompeten. Ein Kirchhofsschauer. Fahnen von Scharlach stürzen durch des Ahorns Trauer.] (Trakl, Georg Trakl, 47) The trumpet blast is intimately associated with the cemetery’s shudder, just as the scarlet of the banner is associated with the arboreal grief, a natural decay. 40. “[I]n royte vanzinike nekht” (Markish, Stam, 75; also in Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever, Shpigl, 395). 41. Meltzer, “Color as Cognition,” 253–73. 42. Ibid., 256. 43. It is not just Symbolist verse to which these assessments can effectively be applied. Relevant to this discussion, Expressionist poetry sees similar adjectival experimentation. Take, for example, the following analysis of the work of the German-Jewish Expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schüler: It will have been noticed that Else Lasker-Schüler, in accordance with a stylistic feature of the lyric of Expressionism, frequently diverts the adjective from its regular use, or disregards sensory perception completely. As a result objects are endowed with uses and qualities which normally are not theirs. . . . When colour is endowed with purely subjective meaning, or when it is applied to abstractions, its application to the respective noun can easily become arbitrary. That is to say, the expressive figuration of an image can be accomplished by the mere technique of adding a colour-adjective to an object with which it is incompatible, and thus the image would represent the poet’s skill but not his experience. (Guder, “Meaning of Colour,” 185) 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Meltzer, “Color as Cognition,” 257. Sandbank, Shtey brekhot, 70–82. Ibid., 72. Ibid. Ibid., 72–73. Literally, “with (their) nails,” an idiomatic expression for a struggle or great effort.

Fun torbes oyfneyen zikh zeglen, zey tsubinden tsu demblekh vi pukhirn, un trinken shturem mit di neglen, un gornit hobn vos farlirn! . . . aykh tashn, oysdreyen af droysndiker zayt un mit aykh mestn shturem, vi mit vesles,— —ver trakht: tsi noent, tsi s’iz vayt? ver fregt di tsayt af tsiferblat, farkleptn mit papir?

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notes to pages 105–109 o, ven fun broynem hunger der gefar shoyn vet flatern af zeglen, vi af fonen,— zol ikh khotsh onshpayen eyn gas fun nyu-york oder varshe af ir farputster tendlerisher dlonye! (Markish, Radyo, n.p. [15?]; also in Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever, Shpigl, 423–24) For a fuller modern treatment of this long poem see Wolitz, “Markish’s Radyo,” 103–13. 51. This is highlighted, too, by the simmering “tension” between Yiddish zikh as a marker of both the reflexive and very often the passive as well: “sew themselves” vs. “get sewn,” “tie themselves” vs. “get tied.” 52. Markish, “Nor s’brent der dorsht,” from the poem “Yo-yo, mayn kop geven a mol iz” (“Yes-Yes, My Head Once Was”) (Markish, Stam, 77; also in Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever, Shpigl, 396). Trakl, “Deine Lippen trinken die Kühle des blauen Felsenquells,” from the poem “An den Knaben Elis” (“To the Boy Elis” [Trakl, Georg Trakl, 26]). My thanks to Chana Kronfeld for the term “collocability” and the idea. De Ullmann, “Romanticism,” 814. “[S] tale epithets like ‘sweet sound, soft colour,’ etc.” (ibid.). 53. Un shkies malegeyren groz tsetrotns, vi beyndelekh fun hentlekh kindershe, —vet nit geshen keyn vunder shoyn? (Markish, Di kupe, 27) 54. Cf. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” section V, “What the Thunder Said.” 55. Am Weiler vorbei Sammelt die sanfte Waise noch spärliche Ähren ein. Ihre Augen weiden rund und goldig in der Dämmerung Und ihr Schoss hart des himmlishen Bräutigams. Bei der Heimkehr Fanden die Hirten den süssen Leib Verwest in Dornenbusch. (Trakl, Georg Trakl, 46) 56. Ein Schatten bin ich ferne finsteren Dörfern. Gottes Schweigen Trank ich aus dem Brunnen des Hains. (ibid.) 57. Markish was a master sonneteer. It is difficult to convey the deftness with which he manipulated the form and the effects of his often startling rhymes. 58. Chana Kronfeld, “‘With an Unbuttoned Shirt’: Peretz Markish’s Chaos-Art,” Clara Sumpf Lectures, Stanford University, October 2002. 59. Af shtume vent fun leydike gevelber, mit fentster, genetsdike langvaylik af merk; hengen zeygers horike vi opgehakte kep fun kelber un lekn pustkeyt mit di umrus hin-un-herik. . . .

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notes to pages 109–112 an oygnblik ahin—af shlingendiker zayt, aher an oygnblik—un opgehandlt, shoyn . . . un s’heybn shtil zikh hent un shteln on af zikh di tsayt un s’tseylt zikh shtil dos mints fun shvebndikn shoym. . . . un hayzer smoken pleytses erdishe, glaykh vi refuedike bankes . . . o, shtel nit on af mir di tsvelf oygn, langvayl-peyger, a treysl ton ahin un her di tsayt aleyn mit gvald! ikh vil nit visn ven fargang iz! ikh vil nit visn vifl iz der zeyger! ikh vil nit visn vifl ikh bin alt! (Markish, Radyo, n.p. [24?]; also in Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever, Shpigl, 425) 60. The critique of capitalism is a common and not unexpected feature of both Yiddish and Hebrew modernist poetry in Europe in the interwar period. 61. Sheppard, “Crisis,” 326. 62. Compare this to the above discussion of synaesthesia with an “empty” set of sense data in the fourth stanza of Trakl’s “De Profundis.” 63. Ikh zegn zikh mit dir / fargeyendike tsayt, ikh ken dikh nit, fargangenheyt, ir kert nit mir,— ikh zikh aykh gekholemt! . . . Un du ver bist, mayn tsukunft, farvaksene in groye hor? kh’geher nit dir, du kholemst zikh mir nor! kh’bin dayner, “nishtiker atsind,” blind! un blinderheyt kh’bin raykh! mir shtarben beyde glaykh un vern glaykh geboyrn! (Markish, Shveln, n.p. [5]; also in Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever, Shpigl, 375) And I thank Professor Kronfeld for her pointing out a wonderful parallel to these final two lines in Donne’s “The Canonization”: “Wee dye and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love” (Gardner, Metaphysical Poets, 62). See also Amelia Glaser’s discussion of this poem in Glaser, “A Shout from Somewhere,” 51–54. 64. Kronfeld, Margins, 202–18; and I direct the reader’s attention to that source for the complete discussion of this particular poem. 65. Ibid., 206–7. 66. Ibid., 206. 67. Ibid., 207. 68. “Ver zayt ir, vayse opgruntn, hey, fayer-flamike umendlekhkeyt” (Markish, Shveln, 73; also in Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever, Shpigl, 379).

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notes to pages 112–116 69. Recognizing that this is an awkward way of expressing that the word can be both spatial and temporal, I want by that convolution to demonstrate two things, namely (1) that the deictic overlap of space and time on the level of language meshes with the thematic or philosophical deployment of spatiality and temporality, and (2) that as a result modernist poetics require a kind of decoding or reading practice often at odds with the transparency which ought to mark scholarly attempts to unpack them. 70. “Nor fitern dayn tog fun mayne hent in tayve-tol loz” (Hrushovski, Shmeruk, and Sutskever, Shpigl, 396). The original version reads, “Nor fitern dayn tog fun mayne hent in tayvedikn tol loz” (Markish, Stam, 77). 71. “Die Hände rühren das Alter bläulicher Wasser / Oder in kalter Nacht die weissen Wangen der Schwestern” (Trakl, Georg Trakl, 70). 72. “[R]uhig wohnte die Kindheit / In blauer Höhle” (Trakl, Georg Trakl, 79). 73. T. J. Casey connects this particular image with Trakl’s “frequent” yoking of blue to the eyes, and thus to “vision,” seemingly taking Höhle to be “eye socket” rather than “cave,” thereby associating it with the poem’s upcoming “blauer Augenblick” (blue instant; literally “eyeglance,” cognate with Yiddish oygnblik) (Casey, Manshape, 76). 74. Ein blauer Augenblick ist nur mehr Seele. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frömmer kennst du den Sinn der dunklen Jahre, Kühle und Herbst in einsamen Zimmern; Und in heiliger Bläue läuten leuchtende Schritte fort. (Trakl, Georg Trakl, 79) 75. Es ist niemand im haus. Herbst in Zimmern; Mondeshelle Sonate Und das Erwachen am Saum des dämmernden Walds. Immer denkst du das weisse Antlitz des Menschen Ferne dem Getümmel der Zeit; Über ein Träumendes neigt sich gerne grünes Gezweig. (ibid., 87) 76. A lost novel was recently unearthed and has been published (Vogel, Roman Vinai). 77. In Dan Miron’s analysis, Fogel is very valuable as a lyricist, but “we will not go to Fogel’s poetry in order to struggle with a richly complex and dynamic emotional and philosophical worldview” (cited in, and in many ways disputed with by, Gluzman, Politics, 86). I of course disagree with this assessment; unless, that is, the complicated, dynamic, and at least somewhat philosophical intuitions of the Jewish spatiotemporality I am at pains to introduce in this book are insufficient to qualify as at least an important contribution to a “worldview.” 78. I fully recognize my personal proclivities are on display in using this poet’s work so often as a proving ground for my ideas about Jewish poetry. 79. Alter, “Fogel,” 4. See also the appraisal in Abramson, “Poet of the Dark Gate,” 128–42. 80. Gluzman, Politics, 69. 81. Ibid. 82. See also Shavit, “Bein shlonski le-fogel,” 251–56.

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notes to pages 117–122 83. Cited in Miron, “Ahavah ha-teluyah,” 38–39; also quoted in Gluzman, Politics, 82–83. For Fogel’s vituperative salvo at Shlonsky (especially as a “literary clown”) see Fogel’s 1931 essay “Language and Style in Our Young Literature.” 84. Gluzman, Politics, 76. 85. Ibid., 70. Dan Miron, in his long literary-historical survey of the reception history of Fogel’s work (“Ahavah ha-teluyah”), quarrels with this assertion, contending Fogel was never extracanonical. Reading the critical reception, however, one cannot escape the feeling that the work itself was treated as such. 86. Kronfeld, Margins, 238n21. 87. Ibid., 184. Miron, for example, rejected this view, dubbing it the “Berkeley School,” after the location of some of its most significant proponents, and bitterly criticising what he views as a Fogelian proxy for political positions (Miron, “Ahavah ha-teluyah,” 90–94, especially 91). This critique is hardly tenable in light of the scholarship. 88. Kronfeld, Margins, 189. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., 190. 91. Shavit, “David Fogel,” 69. 92. Cited in Kronfeld, Margins, 190. 93. Ibid., 191–92. 94. Finkin, “Constellating,” 18n20. 95. Cited in Shneer, Yiddish, 185. 96. Fogel, Lifnei ha-sha’ar, 3. 97. Kronfeld, Margins, 188. 98. Fogel, Lifnei ha-sha’ar, 27. 99. Ibid., 28. 100. Ibid., 41. 101. Though titled “David Fogel, Georg Trakl—and Colors,” the essay would more properly have been called “David Fogel, Expressionism—and Colors” since even though Georg Trakl is clearly the most resonant German Expressionist for Fogel, Sandbank hardly mentions him. 102. Sandbank, Shtey bereikhot, 72; Ullmann, Principles of Semantics, 233. 103. Sandbank, Shtey bereikhot, 74. 104. Ibid., 73. 105. Trakl, Georg Trakl, 134. I find a veiled reference to Heine’s “Die Loreley” here. 106. Sandbank, Shtey bereikhot, 74. Sandbank quotes only the second stanza of the poem. Reading it together with the first, though, offers a valuable insight into this issue of grammaticalization. The first stanza reads, Daily the yellow sun rises over the hill Beautiful is the forest, the dark animal, The Man; Hunter or Herdsman. [Täglich kommt die gelbe Sonne über den Hügel. Schön ist der Wald, das dunkle Tier, Der Mensch; Jäger oder Hirt.] Trakl is trafficking in juxtaposed pairs here, including a structural juxtaposition between the first two stanzas. The opening parity of each stanza—täglich (daily), rötlich (ruddy; ruddily)— presents an adverbial parallel between temporal iteration and the redness not of the fish but of its ascent.

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notes to pages 123–133 107. See, for example, the careful unpacking of the metaphorical valence of Trakl’s vocabulary in Casey, Manshape; or the analysis of color terminology in Else Lasker-Schüler’s poetry, which was mentioned earlier in this chapter (see Guder, “Meaning of Colour”). 108. Sandbank, Shtey bereikhot, 78–79. See also Shvarts, “Kol birkei tsiv’onim,” 76–108. 109. Gluzman, Politics, 92. 110. Bar-El, “And I Am Missing,” 11. 111. Komem, Ha-ofel ve-ha-pele, 70–71. 112. Gluzman, Politics, 99. 113. Seidman, “‘It is You I Speak from Within Me,’ ” 93. 114. Casey, Manshape, 68. 115. Ibid. 116. Fogel, Lifnei ha-sha’ar, 76–77. 117. Ibid., 45. 118. Ibid., 42. 119. Passed away = died. 120. Ibid., 35. Chapter 4 1. Not coincidentally, this was the same trio of poets nominated by the self-styled literarycritical superintendent Moyshe Litvakov in early 1919 (shortly before Dobrushin’s essay appeared) and echoed by others (Wolitz, “Kiev-Grupe,” 98–99). 2. Dobrushin, Gedankengang, 75–76. (This essay, “Dray dikhter,” was first published in the journal Oyfgang in 1919.) 3. I am using “graphomaniacal” less as an evaluative than as a descriptive term, though it was used by some contemporaries as a critique (as mentioned by Shneer, “Peretz Markish,” 176). What it represents is the application to the writing of poetry of Markish’s own self-described “boundless” energy. 4. One of the most notable being the image of the primordial time or Urzeit (Krutikov, “Di royte shkhine”). 5. Estraikh, In Harness, 124. 6. Ibid., 111; vidervuks is glossed by Estraikh as “new growth.” See Shneer, Yiddish, 150–51. 7. Estraikh, In Harness, 112–13. 8. Dobrenko, Making of the State Writer, 17–18. 9. Lubok literature is that literature designed for the “mass consumer” (ibid., 17), in effect literature for the masses. 10. Wolitz, “Kiev-Grupe,” 104. 11. Dobrenko, Making of the State Writer, 18. 12. Markish for his part criticizes not the fascination with Futurist poetry per se but the fetish of everything done under its name. Here, for example, taken from Markish’s important essay “Di estetik fun kamf in der moderner dikhtung” (“The Aesthetics of Struggle in Modern Belles-Lettres”; 1922), is his amusing description of the tempest-in-a-teapot religious fervor of those blindly following a (literary) “movement”: When every new-born moment is a round gramophone record with labeled diagrams. And one must only take the trouble to tread with the needle. They take a lease on several “isms” and exploit them by wholesale and retail. They have learned somewhere a few literary terms and shoot them into the air as with popguns.

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notes to pages 134–136 They carry out the piously absorbed three-feasts [fardveyketn sholosh-sudes] of a world decline till late in the night, and one is lazy about lighting candles, even though in heaven little fires ignite, one star after another. They serve god. The god of Abraham, the god of beauty [they serve] with a private feast of Sabbathholy fish. And from a difficult oversatiety they take a fi lthy nap behind the stoked ovens till their tallises and shoulders begin to get singed. And when the bells start to ring with the sound: “Fire!,” people are still sleeping and snore out: —It’s nothing, It’s futurism. Markish, “Di estetik fun kamf,” 39. For the connections of Markish’s early poetry to Futurism see Glaser, “Shout from Somewhere,” 50–65. 13. Liptzin, A History, 231. 14. [H]oykh iber zeydns mitvokh firt der milkh-veg tsu mayn mirml-heym. hoykh iber zeydns mitvokh zaynen gingold-boymer zikh tsevaksn umgehoyer. mayn zeydns mitvokh kinigt nokh af krets fun shteyn, mayn zeydns mitvokh doyert nokh un doyert. (Fininberg, Otem, 4) 15. This is a topos later used to devastating effect by the poet Izi Kharik; see his poem “Fargeyt, fargeyt, ir umetike zeydes” (“Pass Away, Pass Away, You Sad Grandfathers”; Kharik, Af der erd, 37–38). 16. [V]ilst a yontevl, mayn kind? . . . haynt iz mitvokh . . . proster mitvokh grod atsind. (Kvitko, Trit, 87; also appears in Kvitko, Grin groz, 100) 17. One may also hear an echo of the Queen of Sheba’s “marble castles” (mirml-shleser) in the sky from the poet Moyshe Kulbak’s atmospheric poem “A levone-nakht” (Kulbak, Naye lider, 8). 18. [K]h’hob genert zikh af stepn, mit dor doyreshn ash, kh’hob gevinken af stepn—a shtern fun hoykh,— hot rizldik murml, vi kholem, gehert zikh. (Fininberg, Otem, 13) 19. Fininberg, Otem, 12, 13, 15, 17, 27, 31. 20. “[G]ezegnt zikh mit mir mayn heym—mayn shtot / mit shlankn fri af trotuarn yinge” (Fininberg, Otem, 22). 21. “[S]’tut nokh a hoykh do mit teg fun a tfise. / s’tut nokh a bloz do mit nekht fun a dulhoyz” (Fininberg, Otem, 10). 22. “[D]ortn dreyen zikh teg un farplonten in nekht zikh” (Fininberg, Otem, 13). Note the centrifugal syntax, which casts zikh—the reflexive / passive marker, as well as a word meaning “self ”—out to the edge of the verse.

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notes to pages 137–141 23. [G]eyt geheylikter tog mit geheylikter nakht af gevashene tsigl fun undzere heyf. kusht geheylikter tog mit geheylikter nakht alts vos vakst un vos rayft in undzere gertner (Fininberg, Otem, 27) 24. [A]leyn un far zikh bay opris fun doyres zits ikh, farvorfn di hent af di knies. s’hot hoykh zikh tsemablt mit ash—more-shkhoyre. se brenen, se brenen di vaytn mit shkies. (Fininberg, Otem, 14) 25. Cf. the image of the plural “sunsets” from Markish’s poem “Vi zangen . . .” (“Like Ears of Corn . . .”) as discussed in the second chapter. 26. [S]hpiln vintn af velder—veynen hartsike lires. af farshneyter rakhves tsaplen toyte meslesn. dule kinderlekh blonde in tseflakerte krires, dule kinderlekh blonde kortshen zikh: “e—s—n”!! (Fininberg, Otem, 31) 27. See Chana Kronfeld’s analysis of Markish’s poem “I Don’t Know Whether I’m at Home” (Kronfeld, Margins, 202–8). 28. Finkin, “Constellating,” 6. 29. From an article published in early 1919, as quoted in Wolitz, “The Kiev-Grupe,” 101. 30. Kronfeld, Margins, 205. The word appears four times in Markish’s book (Markish, Shveln, 13, 23, 87, 125). 31. See Oyslender, Veg ayn, 112–13; Kronfeld, Margins, 202–8; Shneer, “Peretz Markish,” 174–79; Finkin, “Constellating,” 4, 12–13. 32. [I]kh bin aleyn di erd, ikh bin aleyn dos feld, ikh bin aleyn di zang un s’tut mir gor nit bang! (Markish, Shveln, 15) 33. [M]en loyft mir nokh, men zukht mikh oys di gantse velt,— vos darf men mikh? ikh bin nito, ikh bin baym taykh, ikh bin in feld. (Markish, Shveln, 16)

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notes to pages 141–145 34. One can also say in Yiddish s’iz faran, the latter element cognate with German vorhanden ([to be] to or at hand), i.e., nearby spatially. (In German, the verbal phrase sein vorhanden can mean “to exist.”) 35. Szymaniak, “Language of Dispersion,” 80. 36. Markish, Shveln, 14. 37. [K]um ikh mitn haynt! a kerndl fun tsaytn-shturems-zip . . . tsu erd, tsu shvartser erd ikh klip un fal unter a nayem aker! (Markish, Shveln, 14) 38. See Markish, Shveln, 5, 58, 67, 93. An echo of that theme can be heard a few years later in Markish’s essay “The Aesthetics of Struggle in Modern Belles-Lettres” when he notes, “The great world-pain—that is the divine stream from whose contact with every newly arriving moment we are born anew” (Markish, “Di estetik fun kamf,” 41). 39. Markish, Shveln, 30. 40. Af dayn shvel legn mir di kep avek far dir, trogn mir di lebns op. (Kvitko, “In roytn shturem,” 10) 41. The fi rst poem of the next cycle—Hayntn—is a sonnet, too (Markish, Shveln, 39). For some of the negative connotations of the sonnet in Markish see Wolitz, “Markish’s Radyo,” 108. 42. Markish, Nakht-royb, 10. 43. [I]ber mayn kop—shtekht di finster a shayn, arum un arum iz mit khoyshekh farveyt, epes geyt tsu mir emitser noenter tsu . . . regelekh loyfn aroys un arayn . . . emitser rirt far di negl dem toyt— ergets shlogn zikh shteyner mit ferdishe tlu. (Markish, Shveln, 34) 44. [F]arnakht, bay yeder zun fargang, kum ikh ahin tsugeyn mekaber zayn a mes—a tog . . . an oysgelebtn haynt ikh trog ahin, a hayntikn, a nekhtikn, a eynekhtikn zikh aleyn . . . haynt hob ikh yortsayt nokh mayn hayntikn amol, fun nekhtns hob ikh lang farloyrn shoyn di tsol, un bin ikh dort a gantsn haynt; n’af alte kvorim grob ikh naye griber un shit mit tsayt af dem, vos iz mir tayerer un liber far dir, o eybikayt, mayn grester faynt! (Markish, Shveln, 39)

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notes to pages 146–149 45. gib ikh zikh op di shvaygndike steps, keyn onheyb un keyn sof fun velkhe ikh ze nit, azoy vi kh’ze keyn onheyb un keyn sof fun zikh aleyn nit. (Markish, Shveln, 40) 46. ikh bin shoyn af dem ort, fun vanen kh’ge, tsurik gekumen . . . un nor a feld fun “hayntn,” yung geshtorbene un toyte. (Markish, Shveln, 41) 47. As Markish notes in the untitled manifesto at the beginning of the first issue of his Warsaw-based journal Khalyastre: “At the window of our homelessness new-moonless nights lament with torn-down bells like barren gypsy women with stolen children” (bay di fenster fun unzer heymlozikayt klogn onmoyleddike nekht mit aropgerisene gleker vi tsegaynerishe akores mit geganvete kinder) (Khalyastre 1 [1922], 3). 48. in vistn kholel fun eyn-sof, hob ikh farblondzhet tsvishn veltn, kh’hob zikh forlorn tsvishn tsaytn, kh’hob zikh fardreyt. (Markish, Shveln, 55) 49. Ibid. 50. ikh bin shoyn nekhtn dort geven un vel dort morgn zayn, un bin dort itst, un veys nit, vu dos iz. (Markish, Shveln, 56) 51. “[M]ayn nomen iz: ‘atsind’” (ibid., 23). 52. Ibid., 57. 53. bashafn bin ikh fun di bloye vaytn, fun tsaytn, un tsaytn loyfndik—ikh mayd— ikh bin aleyn—a tsayt! (ibid.) 54. As we will see in the later chapter about Yocheved Bat-Miriam, making “distances” plural is usually more then just a poetic conceit. 55. Markish, Shveln, 59. 56. Markish develops the ominous connotations of crows to remarkable effect in the section “Gefloygene farbay iz der kupe a kroekhe” from his pogrom poema Di Kupe (The Heap) (Markish, Di Kupe, 11).

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notes to pages 150–157 57. fun mir—umendlekhkayt! fun mir—doyres, fun mir—der mentsh mit freyd di loyb tsu mir fun eybikayt ikh her oys . . . shrayt! ikh gloyb, ikh bensh! (Markish, Shveln, 64) 58. Niger, Yidishe shrayber, 126. 59. Ibid., 131. 60. Markish, “Di estetik fun kamf,” 35–41. 61. Meylekh Ravitsh, cited in Szymaniak, “Language of Dispersion,” 67. 62. Szymaniak, “Language of Dispersion,” 67. See this article as a whole for a careful examination of this and other of Markish’s early critical works. 63. Markish, “Di estetik fun kamf,” 37–38. 64. Ibid., 37. 65. See, for example, Markish’s comment that “[w]hen that stubborn rocky restfulness bears within itself the same elemental power as the strongest stormy mobility—then that laziness is a condition of swampy, yawning, and powerless immobility” (Ibid., 40). 66. Ibid., 36. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 35–36. The latter section of this passage turns on the phrase skhar-halikhe— one’s reward for traveling somewhere in order to perform a charitable act—from earlier in the fi rst section of the essay; Markish decomposes it into its constituents skhar and halikhe, and equates them. 69. Dobrushin, Gedankengang, 76. 70. Cited in Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, 137. Mayzel notes that “nationalistic moments” include Markish’s pogromologies, a genre he shared with many if not most of his contemporaries.

Chapter 5 1. Ukhmani, Kolot adam, 55. 2. “Among female poets of early Hebrew modernism, Bat-Miriam is distinguished for being the most complex” (Dykman, “Bat-Miriam, Yokheved,” 132). In a similar vein—but this time in one of the relatively few sensitive analyses of Bat-Miriam’s work—Ilana Pardes notes that Bat-Miriam’s “lack of popularity may be, in part, attributed to the cryptic and dense character of her symbolist poems” (Pardes, “Yocheved Bat-Miriam,” 42). 3. For a full account, see Gilboa, Oktobera’im ‘ivrim. 4. Kartun-Blum notes that the cycle was often Bat-Miriam’s preferred poetic form (Kartun-Blum, Ba-merchak ha-ne’elam, 8). 5. See Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 169–86, for an extended discussion of this poem as well as a fine English translation (277–88). Dan Miron takes the 1937 publication of “Erets Yisrael” as the beginning of the period (1937–48) in which Bat-Miriam “achieved spiritual-creative sophistication,” the early verse suffering from being “weak and cliché” (Miron, Imahot meyasdot, 31). It is not for nothing, though, that in Miron’s assessment Bat-Miriam’s achievement of poetic

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notes to pages 158–160 sophistication coincides with the publication of a remarkable if idiosyncratic evocation of Zionist emplacement. By contrast, Bat-Miriam’s early poetry is indeed poetically sophisticated, when gauged by a different barometer. It will be noted that I make extensive use of both Kartun-Blum’s and Zierler’s work because they are some of the most thoroughgoing attempts to come to terms with Bat-Miriam’s work and set some of the basic frameworks for looking at it. Zierler particularly focuses on the important discussion about the gendered thematics of Hebrew women’s writing. The goal of this chapter, though acknowledging those important debates and frameworks, is to investigate the spatiotemporal poetics of Bat-Miriam’s work, a subject which is not attended to in detail in those works. 6. Kartun-Blum, Ba-merchak ha-ne’elam, 28. 7. Ibid., 45; Kartun-Blum marshals Joseph Frank’s essay discussed in the introduction to the present volume in support of her analysis. 8. The symbolist movement, as a loose literary school, had originated from a yearning for a greater individualism in literature, and issued from the writers themselves. It had achieved unity because established critical opinion rejected its principles, which were contrary to the traditional dictates of social utilitarianism. In order to obtain a hearing for its cause, symbolism was obliged to pool the artistic resources of its individual adherents. . . . The struggle for the recognition of symbolism had in reality been a struggle for the recognition of individualism. When the victory was won, each writer reverted to type and plunged into the pursuit of his own ends. (Maslenikov, Frenzied Poets, 120–21) 9. See Kartun-Blum, Ba-merchak ha-ne’elam, 62; and following Kartun-Blum see Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 172. See also Miron, Imahot meyasdot, 31 (see 31–38 for a longer evaluative discussion of Bat-Miriam, with which I do not entirely agree). Indeed, Kartun-Blum admits that her own lack of knowledge of Russian prevents her from attending to the “obvious” influences of Russian (9). Tracing such contacts and literary affinities would be a major contribution to the field. Azriel Ukhmani notes that Bat-Miriam’s work is most greatly influenced by Blok’s “realist symbolism” as opposed to the “mystical symbolism of Solovyov or Sologub” (Ukhmani, Kolot adam, 47). For his part, Arnold Band links Bat-Miriam’s work most closely to that of Boris Pasternak (Band, “Yocheved Bat-Miriam,” 84). More generally, see Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Simbolizm, 100–119. 10. Ukhmani, Kolot adam, 54–55. 11. Gilboa, “Hebrew Literature in the U.S.S.R.,” 221. 12. These were not necessarily adjectives consonant with the collectivist universalism of the Revolution. According to Maslenikov, again, one of Symbolism’s early adherents, Valerii Bryusov, saw his commitment to Symbolism manifest in three ways: “In this narrow worship of self rather than humanity, in his adoration of art rather than society, and in his striving to escape the present by turning to the future, Bryusov was a typical representative of the modernist mentality” (Maslenikov, Frenzied Poets, 21). Revolutionary modernism, by contrast, would have countenanced the third of these tenets. But where Bryusov saw the relationships as relationships of superiority, Bat-Miriam would have understood them as essential and irresolvable tensions. 13. Kartun-Blum, Ba-merchak ha-ne’elam, 47. 14. Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 65 (translation by Zierler). 15. Ibid., 67. 16. Ibid., 60 (translation by Zierler).

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notes to pages 160–165 17. Ibid., 65 (translation by Zierler). 18. For a fuller account of the ramifications of this choice of name, see Pardes, “Yocheved Bat-Miriam,” 39–63.The matronymic nom de plume is noteworthy in modern Jewish letters: An-ski, Leyeles, and Bashevis are all important examples. The inverted biblical geneology, too, is not unheard of, as in the case of the poet Abraham Sonne’s pen-name, Avraham ben-Yitshak (literally “Abraham son of Isaac”), where biblically the relationship is the other way round. 19. Kronfeld, Margins, 96–98. 20. Exodus 2:4 (“va-tetatsav achoto me-rachok le-de’ah mah-ye’aseh lo”). 21. Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 100. 22. For this Zierler adopts the term “identificational hermeneutics”; see, e.g., 49. 23. There is an especial thematic affinity in this spatiality with the poet Rachel Bluvshteyn (known as “Rachel”; 1890–1931). That a larger undertaking on Bat-Miriam would need to read her in conversation with Rachel is doubtless true, though regrettably it is not possible in the present chapter. In fact, Bat-Miriam dedicated one of the cycles in Merachok to Rachel. The cycle is entitled “Pelekh demamah”; the title literally means “a distaff of silence,” but is doubtless a reference to the phrase, taken from Esther Rabbah (6), “rachel . . . tafsah pelekh shetikah” (Rachel took hold of the distaff of silence). The image is of Rachel keeping mum as her betrothed Jacob wed her sister Leah. As such, Bat-Miriam’s orchestration of this scene—possibly with an echo of the prophetic “still, small voice” (kol demamah dakah), or even a kind of matrilineal gesture with Yiddish mame—with an explicit dedication to Rachel (Bluvshteyn) presents of reappropriation of the traditional view of the “appropriate” use of women’s voices. 24. Jeremiah 23:23 (“ha-elohei mi-karov ‘ani . . . ve-lo elohei me-rachok”). 25. From a spatial perspective see Job 36:3, 39:29; 2 Chronicles 26:15; Ezekiel 3:13; and from a temporal perspective see 2 Kings 19:25; Isaiah 37:26. 26. Bat-Miriam, Me-rachok, 36. 27. Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 176. 28. Bat-Miriam, Me-rachok, 12. 29. From the eleventh poem (ibid., 26). 30. Ibid., 5. 31. I did not immediately see the convention until it was pointed out to me by Naomi Brenner, who so insightfully noted “the conventions of the ‘love letter / poem sent to a distant lover’—I’m thinking here of the ways in which Bialik plays with this in ‘El ha-tsipor,’ and [the Yiddish poet Itsik] Manger also plays with these conventions . . . but I wonder if Bat-Miriam is crafting a far more sophisticated version of this familiar “long distance relationship” bridged by poetry” (personal correspondence). 32. Pardes, “Yocheved Bat-Miriam,” 54. 33. Ibid., 59. 34. See chapter 2 for a fuller explanation of this theme. 35. Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 106. 36. Ibid., 104 (translation by Zierler). 37. See, for example, Rachel’s poem “Mi-neged” (1930), from shortly before she died, in which she envisions the psychological despondence of the poem’s speaker identifying with Moses on Mount Nevo (Nebo) seeing the promised land but being forbidden to enter. (The middle stanza reads, “One opposite the other—the two shores / of one river. / The flintiness of the decree: / distant forever.”) My thanks again to Naomi Brenner for this reference. 38. The word deshen can also mean “abundance” or “luxuriance,” and Bat-Miriam uses the interplay between the notions of abundance and ashes in this word elsewhere in her poetry. 39. Pardes, “Yocheved Bat-Miriam,” 56. (“Just as Bat-Miriam’s yearnings for the Land of Israel and for Russia are not mutually exclusive, so Egypt and Zion do not represent oppositional entities. If in reading the first stanzas of the poem such national blending seems to con-

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notes to pages 165–177 tradict the possibility of ‘Zionism,’ at the poem’s end one realizes that a different kind of nationalism is at stake, a nationalism that fits no conventional categories” [57].) 40. Genesis 16:1–16, 21:9–21. 41. Jacobson, Modern Midrash, 124. 42. Bat-Miriam, Me-rachok, 26. 43. Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 120. 44. Bat-Miriam, Me-rachok, 55. 45. Ibid., 14. 46. This is reminiscent of the connection between the dream-work and opposition in Freud (see for example Freud, “Über den Gegensinn,” 179–84); this is why Kartun-Blum notes that the “quality of a dream” replicates “the logic of opposition” (Kartun-Blum, Ba-merchak ha-ne’elam, 33). 47. Kartun-Blum, Ba-merchak ha-ne’elam, 33. 48. Augé, Non-Places, 61. 49. In fact, the only biblical occurrences of the word pitron—the “solution” or interpretation of a dream—are in chapters 40 and 41 of Exodus, within the Joseph story. 50. Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 61. 51. Kartun-Blum, Ba-merchak ha-ne’elam, 66. 52. Ibid., 68. 53. Ibid., 54. 54. Frank, “Spatial Form,” pt. 1, 236. 55. Kartun-Blum, Ba-merchak ha-ne’elam, 58. 56. Ibid. 57. “Memories of childhood are borne by the sunsets, the moons, and the horizons sinking into her room. And since she sees her childhood somewhere in space (distance in time is distance in space), the horizon becomes a central image in her poetry” (ibid., 68). 58. Hever, “Poems to the Ghetto,” 271. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Bat-Miriam, Me-rachok, 42–43. 62. See chapter 1 for the use of the calorific sense. 63. In this poet-as-prophet image, Bat-Miriam is gesturing at the familiar identification used so famously by Bialik and then also by Avraham Shlonski to challenge Bialik’s authority. Bat-Miriam’s move can be seen as a gendered defiance and reappropriation of that trope. (See generally Shmeruk, “Ha-keri’ah la-navi,” 241–44; Shoham, Poetry and Prophecy; Miron, “Prophetic Mode,” 127–90.) 64. There may be a nod here to the somewhat stereotypical love among Eastern Europeans of mushrooming in the forest. Such a reading would reinforce the force of memory in this evocative poem. 65. See Song of Songs 4:3 (“Your lips are like a crimson thread”). 66. Or “ashes of blood”; NB: “deshen dam,” using deshen as in Bat-Miriam’s signature poem “Miriam.” 67. Bat-Miriam, “Erets,” 71–72. 68. Zierler translates this word “unfulfi lled” (Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 288). 69. Bat-Miriam, Shirim, 53. 70. Kartun-Blum, Ba-merchak ha-ne’elam, 18. 71. Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 283. “[T]as matuach (chets mi-keshet), ‘ayit ‘ag ‘ugiyot chugav” (Tshernikhovski, Shirim, 557); “[M]a‘gal tokh ma‘gal mesugeret / ‘ugah mit‘akefah tokh ‘ugah” (Bat-Miriam, Shirim, 47). 72. Bat-Miriam, Shirim, 40.

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notes to pages 178–192 73. Bat-Miriam, “Erets,” 62. 74. Hoy, arets! La-chalakayikh—artsotayikh Ani zarah! (ibid., 62) 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Zierler, And Rachel Stole, 172. Ibid., 180. Ibid. Ibid., 277 (translation by Zierler). Ibid., 182–83, 186.

Afterword 1. Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” 39–50. 2. Auerbach, Time, 257. 3. Ibid., 263. 4. Ibid., 264. 5. Hugh of Saint Victor (late 11th century–1141), a canon and theologian. 6. Auerbach, Time, 264–65. Auerbach provides only the Latin; the English version here in italics is quoted by Jane Newman, in her translation of Auerbach’s essay, from the translation by Jerome Taylor in Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon, 101. 7. Amichai, Patuach sagur patuach, 144.

Appendix 1. “My soul loathed”: see Zechariah 11:8. 2. See Isaiah 2:21. 3. Cf. Tshernikhovski’s use of Egypt vis-à-vis the Bilivirkans. 4. Proverbs 7:16—part of the raiment of the seductress away from wisdom. 5. See, for example, Deuteronomy 26:8, as well as the Passover Haggadah. 6. Isaiah 27:1, an image of the Leviathan, which God will vanquish or punish in the end-time.

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Index

Abraham, 53, 78, 166 Abramovitsh, Sholem Yankev, 45–46, 49, 61, 76–77, 92 Ba-yomim ho-hem (In Those Days), 77 “Ha-nisrofim” (“The Burned-Out”), 65, 73 Shloyme reb khayims (Shlomo Reb Chayim’s Son), 76–77 Acmeism, 117, 159 adjective and adjectival relationship, 106, 118–20, 126, 160, 179 aestheticism, 73, 132 “The Aesthetics of Struggle in Modern BellesLettres” (Markish). See Markish “Af di shtume vent fun leydike gevelber” (Markish). See Markish Agnon, Shmuel Yosef, 90 “Ma’aseh ha-ez” (The Fable of the Goat”), 90 Aksenfeld, Yisroel, 46, 49 Albatros, 88, 97 “Proclamation,” 97 “Al ‘em ha-derekh” (Shneyur). See Shneyur Altdorfer, Albrecht, 26 Alexanderschlacht, 26, 29 Alter, Robert, 116 America, 71, 88–91, 118 Amichai, Yehuda, 3, 183 “Jerusalem Jerusalem Why Jerusalem?,” 183–84 “An Old Bus Stop,” 3 Anderson, Benedict, 18, 22, 29–30 “An Eagle! An Eagle over Your Mountains” (Tshernikhovski). See Tshernikhovski “Argeman peragim ra’iti” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam Aristotle, 17, 36, 37 art simultaneity in, 27 stasis in, 27 Ashkenaz, 20–21, 23, 39, 54

“At the Crossroads” (Shneyur). See Shneyur Auerbach, Erich, 29, 182–83 Augé, Marc, 167 Augustine, 29 autochthony, 53, 88, 115 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 30 Bal Makhshoves, 42, 96, 102, 181 Bar-El, Judith, 124 Bartal, Israel, 76 Bat-Miriam, Yocheved, 9–10, 129, 156–80 “Argeman peragim ra’iti” (“I Saw the Purple of Poppies”), 172–75 biblical imagery in, 10, 160–61, 163–66, 168–70, 172–74, 178–79 “Chava” (“Eve”), 160, 172 “Erets” (“Land”), 175–80 “Erets Yisra’el” (“The Land of Israel”), 157, 175–80 erotic imagery in, 10, 160–61, 165–66, 175, 178 memory in, 10, 164, 167, 170–71, 175, 180 “Me-rachok” (“From Afar”), 157, 161–63, 165–69, 171–72, 180 “Miriam,” 163–64, 169 mnemosynic temporality in, 171–72, 175 “Ofel ha-tohu” (“The Darkness of the Void”), 160, 170 religious imagery in, 10, 160–61 synaesthesia in, 10, 158, 160, 171–75 1943—Shirim la-geto (1943—Poems to the Ghetto), 171 Ba-yomim ho-hem (Abramovitsh). See Abramovitsh Before the Dark Gate (Fogel). See Fogel Benjamin, Walter, 25, 29–30, 35, 37, 41 Bereishit (Hebrew Octobrist anthology). See Hebrew Octobrism Bergelson, Dovid, 45–46, 133 Bergson, Henri, 12, 15, 25 Berlin, 68, 79, 88, 90, 115

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index Bialik, Chayim Nachman, 38, 69, 91 “El ha-tsipor” (“To the Bird”), 91 “Halachah and Aggadah,” 38 “Who Knows the Town of Lishtin?,” 70, 71 Bible, 21, 42, 73, 78, 87, 125, 144, 161, 162 Daniel, 130 Deuteronomy, 70 Exodus, 162, 168, 173 Ezekiel, 178 Genesis, 23, 166–67, 174 Isaiah, 69, 162 Jeremiah, 23, 162 Joshua, 174 2 Kings, 179 Lamentations, 91 Matthew, 21 Numbers, 51, 87, 163 Psalms, 4, 138 Qohelet, 61 2 Samuel, 172 Song of Songs, 178 Bilder fun a provints-rayze (Perets). See Perets Bilivirka. See Tshernikhovski black, 103–4, 113, 117, 120–21, 142, 149. See also sensorium Blok, Aleksandr, 24, 159 blood, 74, 89, 102–3, 153, 173–74, 176, 179 blue, 81, 96, 105, 113–14, 120–22, 149. See also sensorium “Brit Milah” (Tshernikhovski). See Tshernikhovski “The Burned-Out” (Abramovitsh). See Abramovitsh Byadulya, Zmitrok, 81 Byelorussia, 10, 79, 81, 157, 172 Cain, 74, 167 Caplan, Marc, 59–60, 79–80 cathedral, 38 cemetery, 35, 50, 60, 67, 70, 72, 89, 103. See also Rabinovitsh chaos, 5, 61–62, 65, 109, 154, 177 “Chava” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam “Childhood” (Trakl). See Trakl Christianity, 21, 24, 29, 38, 88–89, 107, 159, 179, 183 chronotope, 30 circumcision, 55–57 “Circumcision” (Tshernikhovski). See Tshernikhovski clock, 7, 25, 30, 109–10, 114, 152 color. See sensorium “commemorative density” (Zerubavel), 27–28, 31

cosmopolitanism, 7, 40, 55, 58, 88, 183 Cossack, 55–56, 64, 81 Crimea, 40, 63 Cubism, 26–27 darkness, 113, 117, 119–20, 123, 127–28, 130, 144, 168–70 “The Darkness of the Void” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam dawn, 9, 99, 129–30, 138, 143, 145, 165, 169, 179 death, 7, 67–68, 72, 79–81, 103, 108, 119, 123–25, 145, 149, 153, 166–67 deixis, 14–15, 23, 30, 32, 61, 80, 146, 162–64 “deictic anchorage,” 30, 31, 146, 162–63, 177 space deixis, 15 time deixis, 15, 119 “De Profundis” (Trakl). See Trakl “Der Abend” (Trakl). See Trakl deterritorialism, 7, 9, 102, 115, 124, 177 diaspora, 1, 8, 18–19, 21–23, 53–54, 61, 72–73, 92, 183 Diderot, Denis, 36 “Di estetik fun kamf in der moderner dikhtung” (Markish). See Markish Di kupe (Markish). See Markish “Die Sonne” (Trakl). See Trakl discourse. See Jewish discourse “Di shtot fun di kleyne menshelekh.” See Rabinovitsh dislocation, 33, 34 distance (spatial and temporal), 4, 14–15, 29, 36–37, 41, 48, 61, 68, 71, 86, 99, 102, 111, 135, 137, 149, 153, 161–64, 166–70, 172–73, 176, 178, 180 Dniepr River, 86, 140 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 132–33 Dobrushin, Yekhezkel, 119–20, 131, 154, 156 Donahue, Neil H., 94 “Don’t Know if I’m at Home” (Markish). See Markish dorf. See village dream, 74–75, 111, 114, 125, 128–30, 135, 160, 167–69 “Du, oysgehonikte af turemshpits fun sdom” (Markish). See Markish duration, 12, 25 durée, 12 Durkheim, Émile, 23, 25, 29 dusk. See sunset “Earth” (Markish). See Markish “Earthly Jerusalem” (Greinberg). See Grinberg

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index Egypt, 48, 62–64, 89, 163–65, 168, 173 exodus from, 48, 63, 65, 173 Einstein, Albert, 13 Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah, 33 “El ha-tsipor” (Bialik). See Bialik Elijah, 179 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 19, 99 Four Quartets, 99, 111 Enlightenment, 17, 20, 25, 58 “Erd” (Markish). See Markish “Erets” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam “Erets Yisra’el” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam eroticism, 10, 84, 129, 157, 160–62, 165–66, 174–75, 178 ethnography, 8, 20, 59–60, 92 “Eve” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam evening, 82, 96, 107, 113, 117, 119, 126, 142–43, 145, 160 “The Evening” (Trakl). See Trakl exile, 6, 18, 22, 34, 39–42, 46–49, 53, 62–63, 65–66, 72, 86–88, 116, 124–25, 146, 183 exodus (from Egypt). See Egypt Expressionism, 8, 93–99, 101–2, 104, 106, 115–23, 147, 154, 175 extension, 12 “exterritoriality,” 42, 72, 96–97, 102, 153, 181 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 53–55, 61, 63–64

“Fun torbes . . .” (Markish). See Markish future, 9, 18, 25, 29–30, 32–33, 36–38, 40, 52, 92, 98–99, 111, 165, 167, 170, 183 Futurism, 117, 133, 152–54, 159 Gaelic, 22 Gàidhealtachd, 22 Gemara. See Talmud gender, 7, 10, 125, 156–57, 162–64, 169, 174, 178 generation, 56, 64, 70–71, 79, 86–87, 89, 115, 135, 137, 149–50 Genesis (Hebrew Octobrist anthology). See Hebrew Octobrism gentile. See non-Jew Ginzburg, Carlo, 36–37, 182 Gluzman, Michael, 116–18, 124 Gordon, Yehuda Leyb, 58 Graetz, Heinrich, 32, 41 grandfather, 15, 79–81, 133, 135 green, 80–81, 93, 114, 122, 160, 172. See also sensorium Greenberg, Uri Tsvi. See Grinberg, Uri Tsvi Grinberg, Uri Tsvi, 45, 58, 69, 88, 90, 92, 95, 97 “Veytikn-heym af slavisher erd” (“A Home of Pains on Slavic Soil”), 88–89 “Yerushalayim shel matah” (“Earthly Jerusalem”), 89–90, 92

“The Fable of the Goat” (Agnon). See Agnon “Feldzn” (Markish). See Markish Figure and Ground, 101–2, 110, 112, 144, 163, 179 Fillmore, Charles, 15 Fininberg, Ezra, 9, 131–39, 142, 148, 150, 156 “marble home” in, 15, 134–36, 138 Otem, 132–34, 136–39 fire, 64, 65 First World War, 9, 68, 88, 93, 95, 98 folk song, 68, 78, 81–82, 91 Fogel, David, 9, 95, 115–30, 158, 161 Fogelistics, 116, 118 Lifnei ha-sha’ar ha-afel (Before the Dark Gate), 115–16, 125–30 Fonrobert, Charlotte, 39 Foote, Shelby, 18 Foucault, Michel, 16, 35, 50 Four Quartets (Eliot). See Eliot Frank, Joseph, 27, 34, 152, 170 spatial form in, 27, 34, 152 Frishman, David, 92 “From Afar” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam “From Sacks . . .” (Markish). See Markish Funkenstein, Amos, 1, 3

Hagar, 165–66 Halevi, Yehudah, 53, 62 Halpern, Moyshe-Leyb, 71–72 “Zlotshov mayn heym” (“Zlotshov My Home”), 71–72, 91 “Ha-nisrofim” (Abramivitsh). See Abramovitsh Hasidism, 60 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), 17, 20, 50, 58, 60, 63, 65, 68–69 “Hayntn” (Markish). See Markish The Heap (Markish). See Markish Hebrew. See also literature; modernism; poetry; Yiddish language, 3, 21, 23, 55, 87, 123–24, 138, 181 modern literature, 10, 19, 39, 54, 57–58, 88, 90, 92, 115–18, 124, 156, 158, 162, 165, 169, 171 verbal system, 10, 118–19, 126–28, 158, 161, 168–70, 172–73, 175. See also Bat-Miriam; Fogel Hebrewland, 20, 23 Hebrew Octobrism, 157, 159 Bereishit (Genesis), 157, 159, 175 Hefker, 96, 140 Heine, Heinrich, 42

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index “Helian” (Trakl). See Trakl von Herder, Johann Gottfried, 13, 22, 25 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 19, 31, 38–39, 41 “architecture of time,” 38 heterochthony, 55, 64 heterotopia, 35, 36, 50–52, 89 Hever, Hanan, 171 history, 1–3, 6, 12, 18–19, 21, 25, 27–28, 30–31, 33–34, 37–38, 41, 48–49, 51–52, 56, 64, 71, 79, 82, 84, 87, 92, 94, 96–97, 99, 115, 123–24, 128, 137, 164 events, 27–28, 31, 33–34 space and, 19, 20 Hofshteyn, Dovid, 45, 85–88, 131–32, 154 Troyer (Mourning), 85, 87 “Ukrayne” (“Ukraine”), 85–88; miklet-plats in, 86–88 “Hohenburg” (Trakl). See Trakl Holdes, A., 154 Holocaust, 52, 171 home, 2, 8, 21, 39, 45, 47, 52–53, 57, 68–73, 75–76, 78, 84, 86, 88–90, 92, 134–36, 138, 140–41, 146, 153, 164, 181, 184 “at-homeness” (Steiner), 21–22, 57, 92 homeland, 8, 19, 21, 44–46, 49, 53, 55, 76, 160, 180, 184 as text, 19, 21–22, 40–42 homelandscape, 8, 44–45, 49, 52, 54, 57, 72–73, 75–76, 78, 85–87, 89, 135, 171, 177 homelessness, 2, 39–40, 42, 74, 124–25, 128, 130, 146–47, 153–55 “A Home of Pains on Slavic Soil” (Grinberg). See Grinberg homesickness. See nostalgia Horwitz, Tony, 18 Horyn River, 82, 85–86 Hume, David, 12, 25, 36–37, 182 “I Am Always A Wanderer” (Naydus). See Naydus “Ikh zegn zikh mit dir” (Markish). See Markish Impressionism, 73, 94, 118–19 “In roytn shturem” (Kvitko). See Kvitko “In the Red Storm” (Kvitko). See Kvitko In Those Days (Abramovitsh). See Abramovitsh “I Saw the Purple of Poppies” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam Israel Holy Land, 91 Land of Israel, 3, 23, 68, 170, 177–80 modern Israel, 3, 19, 37

“I Take My Leave of You” (Markish). See Markish Jacobson, David, 165 Jerusalem, 33, 38, 47–49, 52–55, 61–64, 68, 73, 91–92, 178, 183–84 Yerushalayim shel mata, 45–46, 49, 184 “Jerusalem Jerusalem Why Jerusalem?” (Amichai). See Amichai Jesus, 21, 88 Jewish discourse, 2, 50, 54 Jewishness, 7, 32, 73, 76, 81, 116, 123, 134, 139, 147, 154–55 Joyce, James, 27 Kant, Immanuel, 11–13 Kartun-Blum, Ruth, 158, 167, 170–71 Kasrilevke, 51–52, 60 Kharik, Izi, 119 Khazars, 56 Kiev grupe (Kiev Group), 131–34 “Kindheit” (Trakl). See Trakl Komem, Aharon, 124 Koselleck, Reinhart, 13, 25–26, 30, 38, 41–43 Kracauer, Siegfried, 24–25, 34, 170 Kronfeld, Chana, 109, 111–12, 118–20 Krutikov, Mikhail, 132 Kubler, George, 24 Kulbak, Moyshe, 40, 45, 73–74, 79, 81, 83, 87, 95, 124, 147 Raysn (White Russia), 57, 78–82, 84–85 Kvitko, Leyb, 131–34, 154 “In roytn shturem” (“In the Red Storm”), 143 “Um mitvokh” (“On Wednesday”), 134–35 “Land” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam “The Land of Israel” (Bat-Miriam). See BatMiriam landkentenish, 54 landscape, 2, 8, 10, 18, 23, 26, 38, 42, 49, 56, 72–73, 75, 80, 82, 84–85, 89, 95–97, 103, 161, 170–72, 177 language culture and, 20–21 nation and, 20, 22 as organ of perception, 6 Lefebvre, Henri, 16–17 social practice of space in, 17 lieu de mémoire, 48–49, 56 Lifnei ha-sha’ar ha-afel (Fogel). See Fogel “Like Ears of Corn . . .” (Markish). See Markish liminality, 108, 114, 125, 127, 130, 143–44, 169

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index Liptzin, Sol, 133–34 literature, modern Jewish, 17, 50, 52, 59, 61, 77, 92, 119, 146 nationhood in, 17 Lithuania, 44, 56, 73, 76–77, 91, 164 “The Little City” (Perets). See Perets liturgy, 21, 70–71, 82, 138, 150 Lowenthal, David, 19, 38 Lynch, Kevin, 13–14, 25, 33–34, 38 lyrolect, 96, 100, 119–20, 162 “Ma’aseh ha-ez” (Agnon). See Agnon “Man” (Markish). See Markish Mandelshtam, Osip, 86 manifesto, 141, 148, 151 Mann, Barbara, 3 Markish, Perets, 7–9, 45, 69, 73–74, 83, 86–87, 94–98, 101–2, 105–6, 108, 113–15, 123–24, 130–33, 139–55, 156, 158, 170, 177 “Af di shtume vent fun leydike gevelber” (“On the Silent Walls of Vacant Stores”), 108–9 clocks in, 7, 25, 109–10, 152 “Di estetik fun kamf in der moderner dikhtung” (“The Aesthetics of Struggle in Modern Belles-Lettres”), 151–53 Di kupe (The Heap), 7, 85–86, 102–3, 106 “Du, oysgehonikte af turemshpits fun sdom” (“You, Enhonied on the Tower Top of Sodom”), 103 “Erd” (“Earth”), 85, 140–42, 147–48 “Feldzn” (“Stones”), 112 “Fun torbes . . .” (“From Sacks . . .”), 104–6, 110 “Hayntn” (“Todays”), 140, 142, 145–47 “Ikh zegn zikh mit dir” (“I Take My Leave of You”), 110–11 “Mentsh” (“Man”), 140, 147–50, 153 “Mit hoyker afn hartsn” (“With a Hump upon the Heart”), 97–98 Nakht-royb (Night Robbery), 144 Shveln (Thresholds), 119–20, 131, 139–40, 143, 147 “Shveln” (“Thresholds”), 140, 142–44, 147, 153 “Veys ikh nit tsi kh’bin in dr’heym” (“Don’t Know if I’m at Home”), 111–12 “Vi zangen . . .” (“Like Ears of Corn . . .”), 106–7, 126 Volin (Volhynia), 57, 82–85, 140 “Yo-yo, mayn kop geven a mol iz . . .” (“YesYes, My Head Once Was . . .”), 112 Marxism, 24

Meltzer, Françoise, 103–4 memory, 1, 10, 18, 21, 28, 34, 37, 47–48, 55, 77–78, 113, 127, 129–30, 158 Mendele Moykher Sforim. See Abramovitsh, Sholem Yankev “Mentsh” (Markish). See Markish “Me-rachok” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam me-rachok, 162, 164, 165. See also Bat-Miriam midrash, 21, 40 miklet-plats. See Hofshteyn Miriam, 161–62, 164, 166, 173. See also BatMiriam “Miriam” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam Miron, Dan, 45–49, 53, 57, 60–62, 64, 66, 72 Mishnah, 40 “Mit hoyker afn hartsn” (Markish). See Markish mnemosynic temporality. See Bat-Miriam Moderna, 9–10, 116–7, 156–57 modernism (literature and poetry), 2, 5–7, 10, 12, 20, 27, 77–78, 87, 93–94, 98–100, 108, 116–17, 120, 130, 133, 149, 152, 156, 167–68 Hebrew literature, 2, 5–6, 10, 43, 116, 156–57, 181, 183 Jewish, 7, 9–11, 15, 17, 42, 57, 69, 75–76, 86, 110, 123, 139, 143, 181–82 perception in, 2, 100 spatiotemporality in, 31, 34, 96 temporality in, 29, 34, 79 Yiddish literature, 2, 5–6, 15, 43, 78, 86, 102, 130–32, 143, 181, 183 modernity, 6, 8, 10, 13, 19, 34–35, 37, 39, 52, 59, 61–62, 79, 98, 109, 146, 151, 153, 167, 181 moment, 9, 26–28, 30–35, 71, 75, 98, 101, 106, 108, 110, 112–14, 127, 137, 142, 144–45, 153, 160 “time atom,” 34, 170 More, Thomas, 36 Moses, 161, 173 Mosès, Stéphane, 28 Mourning (Hofshteyn). See Hofshteyn Nakht-royb (Markish). See Markish nation, 17–18, 20, 22, 40–41, 71, 87–88, 97, 118, 154, 164, 181–82 language and, 20 space and place in, 18, 19, 20, 28, 45, 53, 84 territory of, 18, 22 time in, 28, 171 nationalism, 7, 20, 154 nature, 8, 13, 16, 24–25, 31, 45, 52, 57, 61–62, 64–65, 72, 78–82, 89, 98, 114 137–38, 141, 165, 169 na-venad, 74, 167

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index Naydus, Leyb, 73–77, 87 “I Am Always A Wanderer,” 74–76 New Man, 9, 140–41, 147–50 New York, 71–72, 90, 105 Nieman River, 40, 79–80, 82, 86 Niger, Shmuel, 151, 154 night, 82–83, 103, 113, 117, 119–21, 128–29, 136–38, 142–44, 148, 153, 165, 169, 170–71, 174–75 Night Robbery (Markish). See Markish Nile River, 62, 64, 161, 172–73 1943—Poems to the Ghetto (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam 1943—Shirim la-geto (Bat-Miriam). See BatMiriam nomad, 55, 64, 74–75, 87 non-Jew, 6, 41, 55–57, 73, 81–85, 87–88, 141, 155 Nora, Pierre, 48–49 North, Michael, 20 nostalgia, 19, 39–40, 71, 76–79, 91, 164 “now.” See present

poetry, 46, 49, 57–58, 151 experimentation, 9–10, 15, 119, 171 Jewish poetry, 9, 33, 46, 131 as mode of perception, 10, 13 modernism and, 7–8 power of language in, 6 pogrom, 9, 68, 86, 90 in Ukraine, 7, 85, 87, 102, 138, 147 Pope, Alexander, 1 present, 9, 18, 25, 29, 32, 35, 38–39, 66, 98–99, 106, 113, 145, 165, 167, 169–70 “now,” 29–30, 32, 92, 111, 135, 142, 145, 148, 167 Proust, Marcel, 34, 168, 170 purple, 125–30, 172, 174–75. See also sensorium

Octobrism. See Hebrew Octobrism Odysseus, 75, 78 Odyssey. See Odysseus “Ofel ha-tohu” (Bat-Miriam). See Bat-Miriam “On the Silent Walls of Vacant Stores” (Markish). See Markish “On Wednesday” (Kvitko). See Kvitko Orient, 89 Otem (Fininberg). See Fininberg Ovid, 86–87 Palestine, 10, 18, 23, 62, 88–91, 116–17, 156–57, 159, 161, 164, 170–71, 179 Pardes, Ilana, 163–65 Paris, 38, 51, 94, 115 Passover, 31, 48 past, 9, 18, 25, 29–30, 32, 35, 37–38, 40, 52, 61, 66, 98–99, 106, 109, 111, 113–14, 124, 145, 161, 167–70 “mapping the past” (Zerubavel), 28 “tangible past,” 19 Perets, Yitskhok Leybush, 2, 45, 50, 57–68, 72, 165 Bilder fun a provints-rayze (Scenes from a Provincial Journey), 59–61 “Ho-ir ha-ktano” (“The Little City” or “The Shtetl”), 58–70, 82; translation of (in Appendix), 185–94 Peretz, Yitskhok Leybush. See Perets, Yitskhok Leybush place. See space

Rabinovitsh, Sholem, 45–46, 49, 50–52, 61 “Di shtot fun di kleyne menshelekh” (“The Town of the Good People”), 50–52; cemetery in, 50–52, 60 Rahab, 174 Ravitsh, Meylekh, 95, 151 Raysn (Kulbak). See Kulbak red, 81, 102–3, 121, 127, 137, 143, 173–74. See also sensorium Red Sea, 24 redemption, 66, 68, 72, 176, 179 Révész, Géza, 12–13, 19 revolution, 7, 9, 13, 15, 137–38, 140–41, 147, 149–56, 179, 181 French Revolution, 30, 35–36 Russian Revolution, 9, 24, 57, 96, 131–33, 151, 159, 174–75 1905 Revolution, 20 river, 40, 62, 77, 79–80, 82, 85–86, 91, 116, 139, 141, 167, 185 Romanticism, 20, 60, 73, 80, 93, 100, 160, 182 Rome, 30 Russia, 86, 116–18, 132, 158–59, 161 Sabbath, 38, 90–91, 134 Salteaux Indians, 15, 17 space and time in language of, 15 Sandbank, Shimon, 104–5, 121–23 scarlet. See red Scenes from a Provincial Journey (Perets). See Perets Schachter, Allison, 77–78 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 26 Schorsch, Ismar, 42 seagull, 104, 121 Seidman, Naomi, 125 semiotic systems, 2

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index senses. See sensorium sensorium and sensory perception, 6, 16, 19, 35, 82, 94, 97, 100–101, 103, 104, 106, 121–22, 132–33 color, 80–81, 103–4, 106, 113, 115, 119–23, 125–26, 128, 154, 174–75 heat, 100, 106–7, 129, 172 kinesthesia, 16 taste, 7, 100–101, 105–6, 108, 110, 172 touch, 7, 16, 100, 105, 113, 129, 143–44 sight, 16, 56, 100–101, 103, 105–8, 114, 121, 126, 128–29, 143–44, 172 smell, 100, 129 sound, 100–101, 103, 106–8, 114, 128, 130, 144 spatiality of, 7, 19 temporality of, 106–7, 110, 112–13 Shabbetai Tsvi, 90–91 Shandler, Jeff rey, 22, 52 Shavuot, 31 Shema, 82 Shemtov, Vered, 39 Sheppard, Richard, 93–94, 98–99, 109 Shlomo Reb Chayim’s Son (Abramovitsh). See Abramovitsh Shlonsky, Avraham, 69, 116–17, 119, 120, 157, 163 Shloyme reb khayims (Abramovitsh). See Abramovitsh Shneyur, Zalman, 68–69, 72–73 “Al ‘em ha-derekh” (“At the Crossroads”), 68 Sholem Aleichem. See Rabinovitsh, Sholem Sholem Aleykhem. See Rabinovitsh, Sholem shtetl, 8, 21, 44–46, 49–52, 54–55, 58, 61–65, 72, 76, 78, 82, 86, 89, 91, 146, 153–54, 181, 184 “classic” image of, 45–46, 69, 152–53 critical stance toward, 68–72 decline of, 45 disintegrative model of, 45, 57, 60–61 integrative model of, 45, 57 as literary space, 8, 44, 47, 59, 65–68, 75–77, 83, 92, 146 as locus amoenus, 52 as locus communis, 50 miniaturization of, 76–78 as polity, 46 reintegrative model of, 45 “The Shtetl” (Perets). See Perets Shveln (Markish). See Markish “Shveln” (Markish). See Markish Shwartz, Yael, 123 silence, 80, 97, 108–9, 113, 120, 122, 126–30, 146, 162, 167 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 1, 11

Slav and Slavic, 66, 81, 83, 88–91, 138 sleep, 11, 15, 114, 125, 129, 134, 153 socialism, 7 sonnet, 7, 108, 144–45 Soviet poetry and Hebrew, 156–57, 159, 175. See also Hebrew Octobrism and Yiddish, 9, 119, 131–32, 135, 137 space. See also spatiotemporality as aesthetic object, 5–6 as axis, 2–3, 5, 11–13, 61, 84, 131, 149 “commemorative locus,” 37 concept of, 3, 6, 11–12, 14, 18–19 control of, 9 creative space, 19, 60–61, 70 as cultural category, 3, 50 dynamism of, 16, 63, 65–66, 80, 83, 153, 170, 179 Hume and, 12 Jewish concepts of, 17, 19–21, 39, 53, 54, 61, 72, 76–77, 91, 139, 156, 165, 175 Kant and, 12 metaphorical power of, 6, 12, 33, 80 metaphors of, 2, 5, 14, 16, 18, 49, 67, 75; land as human body, 49, 53, 178 mythic space, 49 perception of, 6, 33, 56, 59 place, 3, 16, 18, 33, 36, 89, 137, 140–41, 147, 154, 176–77 social space, 17, 23, 35, 50 spatiality, 3, 12, 16, 59, 124, 140, 149; of art, 26 stasis of, 16, 53, 66, 80, 83, 152–53, 179 temporalization of, 14–15, 95–96, 112, 114, 124, 154, 180 text as, 40, 42 vocabulary of, 10, 74, 139 space-time, 33 spatiality. See space spatiotemporality, 1, 5–6, 8, 10–11, 13, 15–16, 18–19, 24, 30–31, 33–35, 37, 39–41, 44, 47, 55–57, 60, 68–69, 78–79, 94–95, 98, 101–2, 112, 115, 124, 126, 128, 130, 133, 139, 146, 151, 153, 155–56, 158, 161, 171, 180–81 Starobinski, Jean, 78, 167 Steiner, George, 2, 19, 21–23, 40–42, 97 Steinkamp, Hildegard, 95–96 steppe, 55–56, 64, 86–87, 135–38, 140–41, 146, 161 “Stones” (Markish). See Markish Strindberg, August, 8 Sukkot, 31, 152 sunset, 106–7, 119, 125–28, 137–38, 145, 169

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index Symbolism, 73, 94, 103–4, 117, 135, 157–64, 168– 69, 171, 175, 179 synaesthesia, 10, 93–96, 100–108, 110–14, 121– 24, 128–29, 144, 158, 160, 172, 175. See also Bat-Miriam directionality in, 100–101, 124 pseudosynaesthesia, 122–23, 129 syntempora, 111 Szymaniak, Karolina, 141, 151 Talmud, 21, 40, 42, 50, 54 Talmy, Len, 101 Tamar, 174 temporaesthesia, 8, 9, 93–102, 108–15, 123–24, 130, 137, 142, 144, 158, 160, 172, 175 temporality. See time temporariness, 153–54 threshold, 74–75, 119, 129–30, 139, 140, 142–43, 147, 153, 161 Thresholds (Markish). See Markish “Thresholds” (Markish). See Markish time. See also temporaesthesia; spatiotemporality acceleration, 28, 30, 41 as aesthetic object, 5–6, 136–37, 144 as axis, 2–3, 5, 11–13, 61, 131, 149 Bergson and, 12 chronometry and clock time, 12, 23, 25 “commemorative time,” 28 concept of, 3, 6, 11–12, 14, 15, 19, 25–26 as cultural category, 3, 26 cyclicality of, 24, 27–28, 30–31, 48, 64, 75, 79, 100, 137 deceleration, 33–34, 42 dimensionality of, 15–16 directionality of, 15–16 dynamism of, 16, 23–24, 27–28, 30–31, 33–34, 41, 65, 106, 111–12, 127, 142, 170 “empty time,” 30, 35 Hume and, 12 Jewish concepts of, 15, 38, 76, 95, 137, 139, 145, 156 Kant and, 12 linearity of, 12, 24, 25, 27–29, 48, 64, 75 “Messianic time” (Benjamin), 29, 41 metaphorical power of, 6, 12, 26, 32–33, 38 metaphors of, 2, 4–5, 36, 38, 64–65, 71 as movement, 16, 23–24 perception of, 1, 6, 12, 33, 41, 59, 94, 99, 144 “pure time,” 34 revolutionary time, 9, 139 as sensory object, 8, 31, 95, 106, 110–14

“shaped time” (and temporal shape), 23–24, 27 simultaneity in, 23–26, 29–30, 35 social time, 23 spatialization, 6–8, 12–14, 19, 28, 31, 33–34, 36, 38, 75, 95, 98, 112, 114, 124, 127, 134, 137, 146, 154, 158–59, 164, 179 stasis of, 16, 23, 26, 28–34, 41, 79, 113, 152, 171 temporality, 3, 9, 12, 16, 23–24, 26, 30–32, 59–60, 64–65, 79, 82, 97, 124, 137, 139, 149, 158; associative structures in, 10 of literature, 27; subjectiveness of, 13 traditional temporality, 29–32, 35, 41, 47, 49, 71, 79, 106, 137–38, 153; “zones of temporality” (Mosès), 29, 32 text as (text-temporality), 40 timescape, 10 vocabulary of, 10, 38 “time atom.” See moment timelessness, 19, 26, 82, 113, 125 “time-place,” 33 Tishe b’Av, 47, 90–91 today, 140, 142, 145–47, 162, 165–66 “Todays” (Markish). See Markish tomorrow, 64, 148 tonight, 167–69 Torah, 22, 31, 71 “To the Bird” (Bialik). See Bialik “The Town of the Good People” (Rabinovitsh). See Rabinovitsh Trakl, Georg, 8, 9, 94–98, 101–2, 105, 108, 113, 115–16, 123, 125–26, 170, 175 “De Profundis,” 107–8 “Der Abend” (“The Evening”), 96–97 “Die Sonne,” 122 “Helian,” 113–14 “Hohenburg,” 114 “Kindheit” (“Childhood”), 113–14 “Tompeten” (“Trumpets”), 103 “Trompeten” (Trakl). See Trakl Troyer (Hofshteyn). See Hofshteyn “Trumpets” (Trakl). See Trakl Tshernikhovski, Shaul, 40, 45, 55–56, 78, 87, 165, 177 “Brit Milah” (“Circumcision”), 55–57, 63–64, 81; Bilivirka, 55, 63–64 “An Eagle! An Eagle over Your Mountains,” 177 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 16–17, 26, 33, 55 twilight, 97, 99, 107–8, 113–14, 126–27, 130, 137, 142, 144, 165, 169

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index “uchronia,” 36 Ukhmani, Azriel, 156, 159 Ukraine, 7, 55, 63, 81, 85, 87–88, 115, 132, 139, 147 “Ukraine” (Hofshteyn). See Hofshteyn “Ukrayne” (Hofshteyn). See Hofshteyn Ullmann, Stephen, 100–101, 105 “Um mitvokh” (Kvitko). See Kvitko universalism, 7, 9, 141, 147, 149, 154–55, 175, 178 utopia, 35–37, 39, 50, 99 Vaynig, Naftoli, 73–74, 77–78 “Veys ikh nit tsi kh’bin in dr’heym” (Markish). See Markish “Veytikn-heym af slavisher erd” (Grinberg). See Grinberg vidervuks, 132–33 Vienna, 26, 115–16 Vilija River, 91 village, 8, 44–45, 63, 76–78, 89, 124 Vilne, 40, 73, 91–92, 115 “Vi zangen . . .” (Markish). See Markish Volhynia, 84–85, 139 Volhynia (Markish). See Markish Volin (Markish). See Markish wanderer. See wandering wandering, 40, 66, 72–75, 87, 97, 124, 128–29, 144, 147, 153–54, 167–68 Wandering Jew, 39, 68, 72, 128, 167–68 Warsaw, 2, 63, 88, 105, 115, 147, 151 Watts, Isaac, 4, 13 Wednesday, 15, 133–35, 139. See also Fininberg Weinreich, Uriel, 39–40 White Russia. See Byelorussia White Russia (Kulbak). See Kulbak “Who Knows the Town of Lishtin?” (Bialik). See Bialik

Wisse, Ruth, 71 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 32 “With a Hump upon the Heart” (Markish). See Markish Wolitz, Seth, 85–87, 133 World War I. See First World War Yerushalayim shel mata. See Jerusalem “Yerushalayim shel matah” (Grinberg). See Grinberg Yerushalmi, Yosef Haim, 3, 31, 47–48, 63, 71 yesterday, 64, 145, 148 “Yes-Yes, My Head Once Was . . .” (Markish). See Markish Yiddish. See also Hebrew; literature; modernism; poetry language, 3, 21, 50–51, 54, 73, 81, 83–84, 86, 106, 110, 135, 154, 181 modern literature, 19, 39, 54, 57–58, 88, 116, 131–32, 151, 155 Yiddishism, 20, 55, 92 Yiddishland, 20–23, 52, 55 Yishuv, 23 “You, Enhonied on the Tower Top of Sodom” (Markish). See Markish “Yo-yo, mayn kop geven a mol iz . . .” (Markish). See Markish Zach, Natan, 118, 120 Zamość, 58–59 Zerubavel, Yael, 27–28, 37 Zierler, Wendy I., 160, 162–63, 166, 170, 178 Zion, 49, 53 Zionism, 7, 22, 52, 55, 72, 90, 116, 132, 164–65, 176 “Zlotshov mayn heym” (Halpern). See Halpern “Zlotshov My Home” (Halpern). See Halpern

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