Saul Tschernichowsky: Poet of Revolt 0852222769, 9780852222768

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STUDIES IN

MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE

GENERAL EDITOR

DAVID PATTERSON

SAUL TSCHERNICHOWSKY

Photograph o£ Tschemichowsky presented to the author by Isaiah Chernichovsky

SAUL TSCHERNICHOWSKY Poet of Revolt BY EISIG SILBERSCHLAG

With Translations by SHOLOM J. KAHN AND OTHERS

EAST AND WEST LIBRARY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA • NEW YORK

© 1968 BY

EISIG SILBERSCHLAG

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book or parts thereof must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the pubUsher. For information address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 1968

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-24225

Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE

vii LX

PART ONE I. ANCESTRAL MYTHOLOGY AND BIOGRAPHICAL REALITY

3

2. NEW POETIC VISTAS

A. Proto-Judaism B. Fusion ofJudaism and Hellenism

36 41

3■

NARCISSISM

52

4•

THROUGH FORM TO SIGNIFICANCE

A. Sonnet B. Idyll C. Ballad 5•

58 61 64

IN A MINOR KEY

A. Children’s Poems and Tales B. Drama C. Stories D. Science

70 72 75 79

6.

translation: exercise in self-discovery

83

7•

ASSESSMENT

PART TWO POEMS IN TRANSLATION

93

I Believe

95

Plant Strange to Your People

96

Before a Statue of Apollo

97

Circumcision

98

Baruch of Mayence

114

The Broken Spoon (translated by L. Bernard)

134

She-Pilgrim (translated by L. V. Snowman) Death of Tammuz

139 140

To the Sun

142

There Was a King in Israel

151

This be Our Revenge

152

The Grave (translated by L. V. Snowman)

155 156

Saul’s Love Song On the Blood (translated by L. Bernard)

163

On Watch

170

Vulture! Vulture on Your Mountains

172

I’ve Nothing of My Own

173

Behold, O Earth

Grandfather Sails to Odessa (translated by Jacob Sloan)

177 178 180

Ballad of the Wolf

185

Capo Verde

NOTES TO THE POEMS

188

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

196

INDEX OF POEMS

202

GENERAL INDEX

205

Acknowledgments The author is grateful to the American Academy for Jewish Research for permission to reprint portions of his paper ‘Tschernichowsky and Homer’; to Commentary for permission to quote sections of his article ‘Tschemichowsky: Poet of Myths’; to Bitzaron for permission to use parts of his essay ‘Saul Tschernichowsky’; to Hadoar for permission to quote from his article ‘Tschemichowsky and Greek Literature’. The author is also anxious to acknowledge the courtesy of the National and University Library ofjerusalem for the photostats of a part of the poem Ani Li Mi-she-li En Kelum and the letter to Professor Judah L. Magnes, the late President of the Hebrew University ofjerusalem; to the Library of the Hebrew Teachers College of Boston, Massachusetts, for the photostat of the title-page of Tschemichowsky’s first book of poems and for the photostat of the beginning of the story about ‘David Kahana’. The photograph of Tschemichowsky reproduced as frontispiece was given to the author by Isaiah Chemichovsky, a distant relative of the poet. It was taken in 1925. E.S.

The publishers are grateful to Saul Tschemichowsky’s heirs for permission to include translations of some of his poems, and to Mrs J. Slesenger and Miss J. Smith for their help and advice. The translator wishes to express his thanks to the various pubheations in whose pages a number of these translations have previously appeared, and with whose permission they are here reprinted. Details of first publication are given in the notes to the poems. Most of the translations by Sholom J. Kahn have been revised; L. V. Snowman has generously allowed some minor

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

revisions of his versions, and L. Bernard has revised his translation of‘On The Blood’. Gabriel Preil’s virtual collaboration, extending over approximately half the poems included, clarified many obscure points and added many felicitous phrases. Simon Halkin, T. Carmi, Nahum N. Glatzer, Morrison D. Bial, Zevi Scharfstein, Israel Efros, and Reuben Wallenrod have also made helpful suggestions. However, the responsibility for the final versions naturally rests with the translator alone. The translator dedicates his share of this volume to the memories of two former teachers and friends: Yom Tov Hellman and Hillel Bavli. S.J.K.

Preface The twin theme of exile and. redemption has inspired countless generations of Hebrew poets from Eliezer Kalir, the early medieval Hebrew poet, to Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the last descendant of a wailing and nostalgic line. It is a bittersweet theme, charged with monotony by virtue of endless repetition. Tschernichowsky broke away from the magic circle of aspersion and aspiration. Even linguistically he strayed from early models: the Bible was not the exclusive source of his poetic vocabulary. On a thematic, technical and lingual level Tschernichowsky made a breakthrough. He is the first modern Hebrew poet. His native endowments were massive: they included an epic talent in poetry—a rarity in world hterature in general and in Hebrew poetry in particular; a sensitivity to language and a passion for neologism; a literary and scientific curiosity. He used them and was used by them with abandon. His epic gift was responsible for the idylls which were an innovation in Hebrew hterature and which can still be considered a major achievement. His literary curiosity was responsible for translations on a grand scale, including the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, the Symposium of Plato, Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, poems of Anacreon, poems of Horace, two plays of Shakespeare, one play of Moliere, poems from English and American, German and French, Finnish and Slav literatures. Scientific curiosity which led him to medicine coloured many of his youthful and mature poems. His faults were excessive. Since he lacked self-criticism, he did not censure his own banalities of theme and expression; he was less than careful in many important translations; he wrote stories many of which should never have been published and a play which was almost stillborn. Yet the fact remains that he is one of the few great figures in modern Hebrew hterature.

X

PREFACE

Much that is vital in Hebrew poetry today stems from him: thematic innovation, abundance ofgenres, lingual regeneration, variety of form and metric wealth. He stands at the beginning of an era and he is its inaugurator.

PART ONE

Chapter 1 ANCESTRAL MYTHOLOGY AND BIOGRAPHICAL REALITY The urban character of modern Jewry has often been noted by students ofJewish history. The Shtetl, the little town, has been one of the main themes of Hebrew literature since 1850. As late as 1930 a contemporary Hebrew novehst Hayyim Hazaz (1898-) could write: I love the Shtetls of the past—these poor lodging-places of Jews, maligned generation after generation by writers and poets, undermined by versifiers and poetasters, mocked by the stupid and the wise, subjected to governments and governors, invaded by bands of pogrom-makers and robbers till, at last, they ceased to exist and disappeared from the world.1 The Shtetl was cherished and despised, analyzed with microscopic precision and described with skill. The great reputations of Mendele Moher Sefarim and Shalom Aleihem rest on their portraiture of the Shtetl. Tschemichowsky, a rural Jew, is the first singer of rural hfe in modern Hebrew literature. He spent his formative years of childhood and adolescence in the village of Mikhailovka—on the borderlands of the Ukraine and the Crimea. And he maintained an abiding love for his birthplace. Indeed, the landscapes in many of his poems are transformations-in-verse of his birthplace. In his idyll Berit Milah (Circumcision) the village of Bilobirka is really Belozorka near Mikhailovka. In one of his later idylls, Hatunatah Shel Elkah (Elka’s Wedding) he mentions his native village by name—a large and populated village, ‘heavy with good wheat’. And it is, perhaps, not without interest that the name of his1 1. See the opening paragraph o£ the story Dorot Ri’shonim by

Hayyim Hazaz in Sippurim Nibharim, Tel-Aviv, 1952, p. 7.

4

ANCESTRAL MYTHOLOGY, BIOGRAPHICAL REALITY

grandmother was Elka. The entire idyll—the longest and best of his efforts in that genre—may be regarded as a paean in praise of Mikhailovka, its fields, its fruit and its people. Born on the twentieth of August in 1875,2 Tschernichowsky spent the first fifteen years of his hfe in his native village. The vistas of southern Russia became part and parcel of his poetic personality. It may be said without exaggeration that the landscape of southern Russia permeated the mind of Tschernichowsky. Throughout his life he was rightly regarded as a handsome man. He was tall, robust and massive. EEs thick unruly hair and his generous moustache added a shght touch of quaintness to his appearance. Men—and especially women—often turned around to look at his striking figure. This poet with classical tastes and predilections was in looks, at least, the personification of the Byronic type, the romantic man par excellence. The ancestors of the poet originated in Tschernichow in the Ukraine: hence the name. In an autobiographical sketch Tschernichowsky made much of his family mythology3 and vaunted the health, the strength, the longevity of his forefathers. His grandfather’s brother lived to be more than 113 years old and celebrated his second Bar Mizvah. Another ancestor saved his life by sheer sang-froid during the massacres by the Cossacks in 1768. He hid in a haystack and uttered no cry of pain when the spear of a Ukrainian ruffian pierced his foot. A third ancestor was in the army of Nicholas I when it endeavoured to quell the Hungarian revolution of 1848. At the end of a long life the latter became a true disciple of Tolstoy, a pacifist and a vegetarian. Tschernichowsky used his immediate forefathers as characters in numerous poems. In ‘Elka’s Wed2. The date is authenticated by the poet himself in response to a questionnaire sent out by the literary archives—Genazim. It was published on the twentieth anniversary of his death. See Genazim 13-14,1963, p. 5.

3. ‘The mythology of our family’ —this is the phrase used by Tschernichowsky in his ‘Autobiography’, Ha-Shiloah XXXV, 1918, p. 97.

ANCESTRAL MYTHOLOGY, BIOGRAPHICAL REALITY

5

ding’ he mentioned the maternal, ‘half-heretic’ grandfather, Saul Karp who had wandered as far as Turkey and who knew several languages—Italian, French, Ukrainian. Only two years before his death, he glorified him in two poems: Saba Maflig le-Odessa (Grandfather Sails to Odessa) and ‘Al Tel ha-Arabah (On a Hill in the Plain). In ‘Grandfather Sails to Odessa’ he described—not without humour and verve—an adventurous trip undertaken by his ancestor with a Ukrainian friend in a sailing boat. For his grandfather had lived in Golaya Pristan (Hollow Harbour) and felt an affinity with water. His signet ring, with the engraved two carps, symbolized his name Karp and the month of his birth under the zodiacal sign of Pisces (Fish). But Tschernichowsky was not merely describing an odd journey by an odd grandfather. Always on the alert for genealogical mythology, he somehow connected the ancestral urge with the Hebrew sailors of biblical times who lived by the shores of Ezion-geber4 (modem Eilat) and who sailed with Phoenicians to Ophir and other far-away places. The fusion of private and pubhc myth was as characteristic of Tschernichowsky as the fusion of the private and pubhc self in the bibhcal psalms. ‘On a Hill in the Plain’ is an idyllic description of a village where the poet’s grandfather spent most of the last years of his life. It is a perfect counterbalance to the dynamic poem ‘Grandfather Sails to Odessa’, a static representation of the earth and the fulness thereof. As one reads it, one can almost smell the waving wheat and almost hear the hooting owl. hi this poem, too, Tschernichowsky coupled his private mythology with ancient backgrounds in the description of the mound where bones of warriors were found or where a golden diadem, made by a Greek artist, was unearthed. And with that surprising 4. Ezion-geber is mentioned seven times in the Bible: as a station in the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt (Numbers 33:35, 36; Deuteronomy 2:8); as a shipbuilding locality of

King Solomon and King Jehoshaphat as well as a place visited by King Solomon (1 Kings 9:26; 22:49; 2 Chronicles 8:17; 20:36).

6

ANCESTRAL MYTHOLOGY, BIOGRAPHICAL REALITY

suddenness which is the glory of poetry and the despair of its critics, the poet turns to his mother: Mother, dear mother, what crown of all possible crowns have you fashioned for me? Oh, it was not a crown of pure gold and it was not a chaplet of flowers. It was the laurel framed in nettle and nettlewort. This is not senile self-pity, but rather the reflection of a mature mind toward the end of his life. The poet is, after all, a crowned individual. The durable plant of Apollo’s servants, the laurel, is his distinguishing mark; and so is the garland of thorns. Tschemichowsky also dedicated a poem to his great-grandmother and described her work as a midwife. She had no diploma and no official license. But she served for the love of service and she assisted the poor with preferential care. The poet’s father was also depicted with almost objective respect in one of the last poems. In his youth he went from fair to fair to peddle his wares. By sheer accident he acquired the healing art of the veterinarian which he practised without charge, to the great delight of his neighbours. Tschemichowsky who was a physician by profession learned his first lessons in medical lore from his father and from familial reminiscences. Both outstanding Hebrew poets of the twentieth century— Bialik and Tschemichowsky—reminisced in poetry about their respective family backgrounds toward the end of their hves: Bialik in his excellent four-part poem entitled Yatmut (Orphanhood), Tschemichowsky in a series of poems about his parents, his grandparents and his great-grandmother. Both were in search of the lost Eden of childhood, both had devised their own mixture of Dichtung und Wahrheit. Bialik was able to orchestrate his own and his people’s childhood in such verbal symphonies as Megillat ha-Esh (The Scroll of Fire), Ha-Matmid (The Ever-diligent), and Mete Midbar (The Dead of the Desert). In ‘The Dead of the Desert’ Bialik rediscovered the childhood of his people, in ‘The Ever-diligent’ he retraced his youth, and in

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