Queer Expectations

A Genealogy of Jewish Women's Poetry

Zohar Weiman-Kelman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438472249
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jewish women have had a fraught relationship with history, struggling for inclusion while resisting their limited role as (re)producers of the future. In Queer Expectations, Zohar Weiman-Kelman shows how Jewish women writers turned to poetry to write new histories, developing "queer expectancy" as a conceptual tool for understanding how literary texts can both invoke and resist what came before. Bringing together Jewish women's poetry from the late nineteenth century, the interwar period, and the 1970s and 1980s, Weiman-Kelman takes readers on a boundary-crossing journey through works in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew, setting up encounters between writers of different generations, locations, and languages. Queer Expectations highlights genealogical lines of continuity drawn by authors as diverse as Emma Lazarus, Kadya Molodowsky, Leah Goldberg, Anna Margolin, Irena Klepfisz, and Adrienne Rich. These poets push back against heteronormative imperatives of biological reproduction and inheritance, opting instead for connections that twist traditional models of gender and history. Looking backward in queer ways enables new histories to emerge, intervenes in a troubled present, and gives hope for unexpected futures.

ONE QUEER LINES

Adrienne Rich and Kadya Molodowsky

And what was I invoking

but the matrices we weave

web upon web, delicate rafters

flung in audacity to the prairie skies

nets of telepathy contrived

to outlast the iron road

laid out in blood across the land they called virgin

nets, strands, a braid of hair

a grandmother’s strong hands plaited

straight down a grand-daughter’s back.

—Adrienne Rich, “For Julia in Nebraska”

I take these words from Adrienne Rich, and use them to formulate my own search for a model of queer Jewish literary lineage. What are “the matrices we weave”? Rich offers a series of images: webs, rafters, nets, connections of the body (hair, blood), and of the mind (telepathy). These images are active—they are woven, flung (in audacity!), contrived. They are vast, and will “outlast the iron road,” and they are intimate: “a braid of hair / a grandmother’s strong hands plaited / straight down a grand-daughter’s back.” Omitting the possessive pronouns of both the grandmother and (her) granddaughter, Rich casts these women in their respective roles, positioned on a matrilineal matrix of their own making. Coming to this poem, and to the larger history of Jewish women’s writing, I too join in the making of this matrix, and offer a queer model of intergenerationality and intertextuality. Drawing out queer connections and conversations within individual texts, among texts past, and between these texts and myself, I thread together different moments and moments of difference, in multiple queer lines.

The women’s poems I read (and my reading of them) speak to women past as they speak for them, and often, also, against them. Staging one such encounter in “Froyen-lider” (Women’s Poems/Songs), Yiddish poet Kadya Molodowsky negotiates her own model of continuity; as a poetic speaker, she stands up to the women who came before her, while in fact bringing them into being and giving voice to their complaints against her, which she places alongside her defiance of their expectations.

פֿרויען-לידער

I

עס וועלן די פֿרויען פֿון אונדזער משפּחה בײַ נאַכט אין חלומות

:מיר קומען און זאָגן

,מיר האָבן אין צניעות אַ לויטערע בלוט איבער דורות געטראָגן

צו דיר עס געבראַכט ווי אַ ווײַן אַ געהיטן אין כּשרע קעלערס

.פֿון אונדזערע הערצער

:און איינע וועט זאָגן

איך בין אַן עגונה געבליבן ווען ס’זײַנען די באַקן

,צוויי רויטלעכע עפּל אויף בוים נאָך געשטאַנען

און כ’האָב מײַנע ציינער די ווײַסע צעקריצט אין די איינזאַמע נעכט פֿון

.דערוואַרטונג

:און איך וועל די באָבעס אַנטקעגנגיין זאָגן

ווי האַרבסטיקע ווינטן יאָגן נאָך מיר זיך

.ניגונים פֿאַרוועלקטע פֿון אײַערע לעבנס

,און איר קומט מיר אַנטקעגן

,וווּ די גאַס איז נאָר טונקל

:און וווּ ס’ליגט נאָר אַ שאָטן

און צו וואָס אָט דאָס בלוט אָן אַ טומאה

ס’זאָל זײַן מײַן געוויסן, ווי אַ זײַדענער פֿאָדעם

,אויף מײַן מוח פֿאַרבונדן

,און מײַן לעבן אַן אויסגעפֿליקט בלאַט פֿון אַ ספֿר

?און די שורה די ערשטע פֿאַרריסן

The women of our family will come to me in dreams at night and say:

Modestly we carried a pure blood across generations,

Bringing it to you like well-guarded wine from the kosher

Cellars of our hearts.

And one woman will say:

I am an abandoned wife, left when my cheeks

Were two ruddy apples still fixed on the tree,

And I clenched my white teeth throughout lonely nights of waiting.

And I will go meet these grandmothers, saying:

Like winds of the autumn, your lives’

Withered melodies chase after me.

And you come to meet me

Only where streets are in darkness,

And where only shadows lie:

And why should this blood without blemish

be my conscience, like a silken thread

Bound upon my brain,

And my life, a page plucked from a holy book,

The first line torn?¹

In these lines of the 1927 poem “Froyen-lider,” Molodowsky defiantly turns to the women of her family asking why “this blood without blemish” should be her conscience, why her life should be “a page plucked from a holy book, the first line torn.” Invoking lines of blood and of text, Molodowsky opens questions of continuity and disruption, offering in fact a queer model which holds both continuity and disruption as inextricably linked, for her connection to the past, and for our connection to her, and through her to the past she conjures; without the struggle with the tradition of the past, without the poem, there would be no seyfer, no “holy book” that included the women of her family, whose lives remained unnarrated by the same Jewish tradition. Resist this bloodline though she might, the speaker/poet brings this line into being in her writing.

Of all the Yiddish women poets, Molodowsky is perhaps the most well-known outside of Yiddish-speaking circles, but not as a modernist Yiddish writer. Instead, it is her children’s poetry in Hebrew translation that continues to be reprinted and circulates as a staple in many Israeli homes.² This is certainly an unexpected legacy for a writer who distinctly chose Yiddish over Hebrew. Born in the shtetl Bereza Kartuska, Belarus, in 1894 to a Yiddish-speaking family, Molodowsky was educated in Russian and Hebrew.³ She was part of both Yiddish and Hebrew educational endeavors in interwar Warsaw and Odessa, where she also began publishing Yiddish poetry. She immigrated to the United States with her husband in 1935. The two attempted to settle in the newly established State of Israel in 1949, but after only three years they returned to the United States,⁴ where Molodowsky continued publishing poetry and prose, and edited the Yiddish literary journal Svive, until her death in 1975. As much as Molodowsky’s modernist poetry, children’s writing, and Yiddish publishing projects separate her from the kosher lives of her foremothers, for today’s reader these endeavors now serve as a link, allowing us to connect both to Molodowsky and to her predecessors.

Transgressing borders of language and time, Molodowsky’s poem stages a queer cross-temporal encounter and enacts its own form of queer dialogue. Molodowsky stages an imagined encounter between the speaker and her foremothers, where the women implicitly demand that the speaker continue their pure bloodline. The poet/speaker resists this demand in the lines quoted above, asking “tsu vos?,” “why?,” or even, “to what end?” their demands should dictate how she leads her own, apparently divergent, life. The tentative nature of the encounter is emphasized by the future tense veln [will], and even there it is relegated to the space of the speaker’s dream. This dream realm, the place of meeting, is also cast in the poem as the “dark street,” “vu di gas iz nor tunkl”—not where a nice Jewish girl should be, but rather the dark streets where immodest female sexuality is performed (and indeed in a later poem in the same cycle she invokes these “gasn-meydlekh,” “streetwalkers”). This marginal space is where the speaker can come antkegn (toward but also against), meeting the grandmothers halfway and asserting herself against them. As they berate her for all the hard work they put into keeping their bloodline kosher for her, she retorts that their very piety and the price they paid for it was what drove her out onto the streets, away from their legacy.

In answering the women, the speaker disidentifies herself from them, but in the same move also binds herself to them. For she is not only haunted by their nign, the sacred song of their life/story, she is also the one writing it. If patriarchal history denied much of women’s cultural transmission, she re-creates it, at the same time as she attempts to reject it. For Molodowsky and the Jewish women of her time, becoming a woman writer meant breaking with tradition, but it is also what transmits to us the history of women, transforming the unwritten farvelkte nigunim, the “withered melodies” of their lives, into poetry. The nign is a perfect image for this move, for it is a wordless melody. For the nigunim were not meant to be, nor could they be, written. Furthermore, women could sing these melodies despite not knowing the Hebrew words of other prayers. Putting the nigunim in the mouths of women takes them out of the realm of male-dominated religious tradition, while exposing how aspects of this tradition are already aligned in many ways with female experience.

The poet looks back to question Jewish tradition’s hold on her, as well as her stake in it. At the same time, she refuses to be detached from it, as she rejects the notion of her life being “a page plucked from a holy book, the first line torn,” by posing a defiant question to her foremothers. Of course, a page plucked from a holy book is still holy, and in Jewish tradition such a page would receive sacred burial in the gnize, marking Molodowsky as still inextricably linked to the tradition she cannot be torn away from. Similarly, the bloodline she questions is also one that promises continuity regardless of whether its pure state is upheld, insuring a specifically matrilineal form of bequeathal and belonging.⁵ By invoking the bloodline and the line of text in this one verse, Molodowsky establishes the thread as a connection, challenges its necessity and continuity, and questions the inevitability of severing its binding ties, ties with the past, with tradition, with the history of women. Queerly combining modalities of lineage, lineage of blood and lineage of text, she complicates the concept of the pure, continuous, and compulsory line of blood, which would demand a certain type of biological continuity that she refuses. At the same time, she challenges the idea of the complete break embodied in the ripped line of the seyfer’s text.

My reading here is itself a page ripped out of the eight-poem sequence within which it was originally published. Beautifully reading the entire sequence, Kathryn Hellerstein draws out the speaker’s complicated position toward reproduction. If in the poem read above, the resistance to reproduction is implicit in the speaker’s refusal to continue the kosher bloodline, Hellerstein shows that taken together, the poems of the sequence “exclude the dramatic speaker of ‘Froyen-lider’ for whom conventional female fertility seems impossible.”⁶ Offering one of the earliest feminist interventions in Yiddish scholarship,⁷ and indeed preempting the queerest aspects of my own reading, Hellerstein suggests that “the speaker is engaged in a creative act that requires no man.”⁸ In this sequence, writes Hellerstein, “the poem itself becomes a metaphor for childbearing, and that childbearing a metaphor for creating in general.”⁹ Hellerstein positions this metaphor as an expression of, and resolution for, the conflict between women’s productivity and their creativity. Hellerstein traces the inheritance of this conflict in the feminist movement and literary scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s,¹⁰ writing that “the conflict that Molodowsky faced was, in fact, only reformulated in 1972 by the American poet Adrienne Rich: ‘To be a female human being, trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way, is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination.’ ”¹¹

Rich not only “reformulated” Molodowsky’s conflict, she also translated it from Yiddish into English for the Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, thereby linking herself back to Molodowsky.¹² When I first encountered Rich’s translation, I was struck by how different it was from the translation I was familiar with, that of Kathryn Hellerstein. On first encountering Rich’s translation, I ascribed the difference between Rich and Hellerstein’s texts to their sensibilities as translators. My assumption was bolstered by how well the differences in translations seemed to correlate to the difference in the poetic politics of each of the translat...