Songs in Dark Times

Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine

Amelia M. Glaser

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780674248458
• eBook ISBN: 9780674250437
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Literature

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples.

Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.

The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee's "God's Black Lamb," Moyshe Nadir's "Closer," and Esther Shumiatsher's "At the Border of China."

These poets dreamed of a moment when "we" could mean "we workers" rather than "we Jews." Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

1

FROM THE YANGTZE TO THE BLACK SEA

Esther Shumiatcher’s Travels

IN JULY 1928, the Kharkov-based Soviet Yiddish literary journal Royte Velt published five poems by the young Canadian Yiddish poet Esther Shumiatcher (1899–1985).¹ “May lid” (May song) characterizes the workers’ celebration in Moscow:

Ver yomtevt do, ver yomtevt do, ba aykh		Who is celebrating, who is celebrating with you
mit fonen nonte in yeder fester hant?		With familiar flags in that sturdy hand?
O, es geyen do di reyen. Vi der friling af ayer taykh!		Oh, the columns advance. Like spring on your river!
—S’iz May, s’iz ershter May, o do in land!^2		Oh it’s May, it’s May First, here in this land!

Moscow’s 1928 May Day celebration was by all accounts a sight to behold. More than a holiday, it was a demonstration of Moscow as the center of world communism, the governing body of, and example for, the Communist International. Shumiatcher, who had recently arrived in the Soviet Union after two years in Asia and the Middle East, marveled at the spectacle. “And here it is, and here it is, Red Square!” the poem continues. “It breathes with victory and the joy of millions” (Un do iz shoyn, un do iz shoyn, der royter plats; / Er otemt mit nitsokhn un milyonendiker freyd).

Esther Shumiatcher and her husband, the well-known Yiddish playwright Peretz Hirschbein (1880–1948), were, in the 1920s, fellow travelers in both senses of the term. Though never members of the Communist Party, they supported the Soviet Union and shared a particular interest in the Soviet territorialist plans for a Jewish Soviet home.³ They were also travelers: having met and married in Canada in 1918, the couple visited six continents together between 1920 and 1929, ending their decade-long sojourn with ten months in the nascent Soviet Union before departing, first to spend time with their close literary colleagues in Warsaw and finally for the United States. Hirschbein, nineteen years older than his spouse and already a celebrated playwright, theater director, and writer for Yiddish newspapers in several countries, had the means to fund the couple’s world tour—an unprecedented experience for a poet of Shumiatcher’s age and social class. Born in Homel (now Belarus), Shumiatcher had emigrated with her family at the age of ten to Calgary, where she attended secondary school and, before meeting Hirschbein, worked at a music store and in a meat-packing factory.⁴ The family was highly educated and well integrated into Montreal’s Yiddish-speaking community (some of the Shumiatchers were quickly becoming important entrepreneurs in their adopted Calgary), but in her poems about the Soviet Union, she emphasizes her family’s proletarian credentials, first as victims of pre-Revolutionary antisemitism and later in the Canadian workforce as new immigrants.

Shumiatcher’s travels with Hirschbein were as significant to her enthusiasm for the Soviet project as her immigrant childhood was: isolated from any one community of writers but suddenly exposed to literary communities (Jewish and non-Jewish) in multiple countries, Shumiatcher found a poetic voice that was internationalist in spirit—her poems from the 1920s reflect a desire for world revolution, with new rights for historically oppressed nations. While in the Soviet Union, the couple lived in Crimea, where Hirschbein wrote the novel Royte felder (Red fields) and Shumiatcher edited her travel poems. During this time, Shumiatcher published poetic cycles in the Soviet journal Royte Velt (Red world), a journal that, David Shneer has observed, published the works of sympathetic foreigners who made pilgrimages to the Soviet Union.⁵ She also sent the Party-aligned New York journal Hamer several poems that highlight a connection between her travels in East Asia and her support of the Soviet Union. She published her travel poems in her 1930 book In shoen fun libshaft (In the hours of love) shortly after returning to North America.

In the 1920s, Shumiatcher was breathlessly excited about her own mobility. In Tahiti in 1921, she had written “Albatros” (Albatross), a poem about wandering:

Un ven likht		And when light
vert in tunkl dertrunken—		Drowns in darkness
zenen khvalyes		The waves are
dayn heym,		your home,
zenen khvalyes		The waves are
dayn bet.^6		Your bed.

Shumiatcher was in Warsaw in 1922, when this poem appeared in the first issue of Albatros, and as Faith Jones surmises, the poem probably gave the journal its name. This poem of wandering and artistic homelessness, Jon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The Optimists
• Introduction: Yiddish Passwords in the Age of Internationalism
• 1. From the Yangtze to the Black Sea: Esther Shumiatcher’s Travels
• 2. Angry Winds: Jewish Leftists and the Challenge of Palestine
• 3. Scottsboro Cross: Translating Pogroms to Lynchings
• 4. No Pasarán: Jewish Collective Memory in the Spanish Civil War
• 5. My Songs, My Dumas: Rewriting Ukraine
• 6. Teshuvah: Moishe Nadir’s Relocated Passwords
• Afterword: Kaddish
• Appendix: Poems from the Age of Internationalism
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index