Guest Post: Spotlight on H. Leivick

H. Leivick and I narrowly missed each other for years. Once, decades ago, I even set his Golem back on the shelf at summer camp in favour of a play whose plot I can no longer fully recall. It was never quite, it seemed, the right time for us to meet.

Not until late in the summer of 2020, when the poem was precisely a century old, did I accidentally encounter Leivick’s ‘The Wolf’ in translation. The rage and grief I felt in myself in those early days of the Covid lockdown, that I saw in people around me, looked back up at me from the page.

To my horror, I found the translation was abridged. The original was acquired — I couldn’t read Yiddish. I bought a dictionary. There wasn’t really any other way to proceed once I had exhausted the supply of Leivick in languages I did speak. A curiosity had become an urgent need to know.

A deeply religious childhood, an escape from Siberia, a pseudonym and one large man made of clay; the broad strokes of H. Leivick’s life and work are well-known. Rather than boundaries, though, they are keys to his unique view of the universe. It does a vast disservice to the man and his work to reduce a nearly forty — or fifty, if you start with works composed in Minsk prison— year career to only prison chains and the Golem. In those fifty years, Leivick chronicles the first half of the twentieth century.

As a reader in 2020, I had the luxury of beginning almost anywhere in Leivick’s body of work to make his proper acquaintance. I selected his lone purely autobiographical volume, Oyf Tsarisher Katorga (1959). And so my relationship with Leivick really began, not with the Cohen HaGadol, as Yankev Pat terms him — the high priest — but with a young man in prison, having refused to defend himself at his trial in the name of taking responsibility; A young writer at the threshold of freedom and self-creation on a long walk to Siberia, squabbling about sausages (it’s the principle of the thing) falling in short-term love and meeting animist shamans in the steppes.

The next logical step, given the circumstances of our introduction in lockdown, was his 1937 collection, Lider fun Gan Eyden, centred around the experience of being treated for Tuberculosis. Leivick had, by this point, become an intimate friend, also unable to go outside, isolated, intellectually consumed by mortality, despair, compassion, social conscience and a yearning for tikkun — repair. Poems from nearly a century earlier sang to me with such an immediacy in that slightly surreal time, it was as if they had only just been written.

Leivick’s keen journalistic eye, which reflects and refracts everything, is always coupled with a profound faith in humanity and coming redemption; The Moshiach, a theme to which he returns frequently, will, must, come and we hasten the hour with our own striving. And while his poetic images oftentimes become unsettling, dreamlike and other worldly, they also remain rooted in a logic equally likely to be drawn from Pirkei Avos as Darwin’s Origin of Species or Spinoza’s Ethics.

Every poem is a prayer, and Leivick’s theory of poetry is a permissive one: everyone has the capability, should they act upon it. It’s part of what, in my view, makes Leivick such a deeply humanistic writer and optimist — even if a complex one.

While glimpses are there to be noticed all along, it’s in Leivick’s final collections and speeches where the image of Leivick as the high priest of Yiddish truly comes into focus. As Leivick says of himself in the late poem ‘My Ships’ : ‘The blood of a warrior doesn’t burn within me,/Only that of one who is aflame with conviction.’ A true believer, sailing fearlessly in his boat of tinder with paper sails for the sake of his language.

Continuity is a vital theme in Leivick — culminating in a speech in Jerusalem in 1957, where he eloquently and ferociously invokes literature, history and Jewish identity to advance the case for continuity with the Yiddish past for the future. I have had the honour of entering into this continuity as a student through his work — accompanied by not a few jokes about being a devoted chassid of the ‘Ihumener Rov.’ But if you can choose to host a small part of another’s belief in the Yiddish word within yourself, you can’t do much better than his.

 

Bluma Lange is a writer, translator and artist living outside of Glasgow, Scotland.