REACCESS: The Poetry of Jacob Glatstein
Whitman, Ruth
REACCESS: The Poetry of Jacob Glatstein Introduction by Ruth Whitman Among all the poetry written about the Holocaust, the following two poems by Jacob Glatstein shine with a passion, a rage...
...Learn this, my little one, from beginning to beginning to beginning...
...And above the gas chambers and the holy dead souls, a forsaken abandoned Mount Sinai veiled itself in smoke...
...Uncertain whether he would write in English, Polish or Yiddish, at New York University Law School where he matriculated he met a sympathetic group of young poets who had chosen Yiddish, and he, too, discovered that it was " t h e language of his h e a r t . " The group was eclectic, Bohemian, rebellious, bringing all the influences from American imagism, French surrealism and Russian symbolism to their avant-garde poetry...
...wallow in your dust even though it's forsaken, sad Jewish life...
...All those who stood at Mount Sinai and received the Torah took these holy deaths upon themselves...
...In a sense, the poem marks Glatstein's public commitment and passionate concern for the Jewish fate, although, as he liked to point out, this had been implicit in his work from the beginning...
...Take back your Jesus-Marxes, choke on their courage...
...Your nostrils caught the raisin-almond fragrance of each word of the Torah...
...Dead men don't praise God...
...And his brother, Aaron, and King David and the Rambam, the Vilna Gaon, and Mahram and Marshal the Seer and Abraham Eiger...
...We want to perish with our whole people, we want to be dead again," the ancient souls cried out...
...Good Night, World Good night, wide world, big stinking world...
...Our whole imagined people stood at Mount Sinai and received the Torah...
...Dead men don't praise God, the Torah was given to the living...
...Weak-kneed democracy, with your cold sympathy-compresses...
...Little one, your life is carved in the constellations of our sky, you were never absent, you could never be missing...
...You sang with them like a songbird: 1 will hear and obey, obey and hear from beginning to beginning to beginning...
...The dead, the living, the unborn, every soul among us answered: we will obey and hear...
...It was Shavuoth, the green holiday...
...roll around in your garbage— praise, praise, praise— hunchbacked Jewish life...
...And this was your cry: we received the Torah on Sinai and in Lublin we gave it back...
...From all sides the souls came flocking...
...G o o d Night, World" is a pre-Holocaust poem—it was written in 1938, before Hitler's invasion of Poland, but at a time when the Nazi genocide had already begun...
...And just as we all stood together at the giving of the Torah, so did we all die together at Lublin...
...When we were, you were...
...And with every holy soul that perished in torture hundreds of souls of Jews long dead died with them...
...Green leaves will yet rustle on our sapless tree...
...And when we vanished, you vanished with us...
...And you, beloved boy, you too were there...
...Good night...
...He died in 1971, a few months before the publication of his selected works in translation...
...he probes the universal problems of identity, the solaces of love, the ironies of our fragmented age...
...I'm going back to my very beginnings, from Wagner's pagan music to melody, to humming...
...From beginning to beginning to beginning...
...His subject matter is both contemporary and nostalgic...
...With a long gabardine, with a fiery yellow patch, with a proud stride, because I want to, I'm going back to the ghetto...
...German pig, cutthroat Pole, Rumania, thief, land of drunkards and gluttons...
...Not you but I slam shut the gate...
...Little boy with the tousled head, pure eyes, tremulous mouth, that was you, then,—the quiet, tiny, forlorn given-back Torah...
...The second poem, "Dead Men Don't Praise God," written much later, is a long threnody, a funeral dirge for the slaughter of the East European Jewish world...
...Back to my kerosene, candle shadows, eternal October, tiny stars, to my crooked streets, humped lanterns, my sacred pages, my Bible, my Gemorra, to my backbreaking studies, to the bright Yiddish prayerbook, to law, profundity, duty, j u s t i c e ,— world, I walk gladly towards quiet ghetto light...
...Good Night, World" and "Dead Men Don't Praise God" from THE SELECTED POEMS OF JACOB GLATSTEIN Translated from the Yiddish by Ruth Whitman Copyright @ 1972 by Ruth Whitman Reprinted by permission of October House Inc...
...The world was indifferent, unbelieving, and Glatstein, who foresaw how thorough and murderous this indifference would be, repudiated the "electrified arrogant world," choosing the ghetto instead...
...You stood on top of Mount Sinai and cried, you cried your cry to a dead world...
...Damn your dirty culture, world...
...I'll fill the sky with stars and I'll tell him: our people is a fiery sun from beginning to beginning to beginning...
...From beginning to beginning to beginning...
...REACCESS is our column for presenting classics and other documents out of the Jewish past...
...Wipe away, stamp out every vestige of conversion...
...And just as we all stood together at the giving of the Torah, so did we all die together in Lublin...
...I'll make you, world, a gift of all my liberators...
...The souls of those who had lived out their lives, of those who had died young, of those who were tortured, tested in every fire, of those who were not yet born, and of all the dead Jews from great grandfather Abraham down, they all came to Lublin for the great slaughter...
...Dead Men Don't Praise God We received the Torah on Sinai and in Lublin we gave it back...
...The Torah was given to the living...
...Good night, electrified arrogant world...
...You, the saddest boy of all generations, you also stood on Mount Sinai...
...Mama Sara, Mother Rachel, Miriam and Deborah the prophetess went down singing prayers and songs, and even Moses, who so much didn't want to die when his time came, now died again...
...Good Night, World" and "Dead Men Don't Praise God" from THE SELECTED POEMS OF JACOB GLATSTEIN Translated from the Yiddish by Ruth Whitman Copyright @ 1 972 by Ruth Whitman Reprinted by permission of October House Inc...
...Glatstein's poems, spanning over fifty years, are as bold as Whitman, imagistic as Eliot, personal and lyrical as Lowell...
...I don't need any consolation...
...Jacob Glatstein came to New York from Lublin as a young poet of 17 in 1914...
...For I have hope, even if He is delaying, day by day my expectation rises...
...The title is taken from Psalms 115:17 and the dead—who include us—also include the famous masters, teachers, and rabbis through the centuries, to the young Torah "himself," given at Sinai but taken back at Lublin, place of Glatstein's birth, and of his family's end...
...You, carved against the constellated sky, you were there, and you died there...
...I'll translate the tousled head, the pure eyes, the tremulous mouth of a Jewish child into this frightful fairy tale...
...I kiss you, disheveled Jewish life, I cry with the joy of coming back...
...REACCESS: The Poetry of Jacob Glatstein Introduction by Ruth Whitman Among all the poetry written about the Holocaust, the following two poems by Jacob Glatstein shine with a passion, a rage and an eloquence that have seldom been matched...
...Shut your eyes, Jewish child, and remember how the Baal Shem rocked you in his arms when your whole imagined people vanished in the gas chambers of Lublin...
...This month's contributor, Ruth Whitman, is the author of three books of poems, as well as THE SELECTED POEMS OF JACOB GLATSTEIN, which she edited and translated...
...Sweet as a dove you stretched out your neck and sang together with the fathers and mothers...
...Croak over a drop of our christianized blood...
Vol. 1 • June 1975 • No. 2
