Below, you'll find an excerpt from the
introduction to American Yiddish Poetry by Benjamin
Harshav and brief biographies of some of the poets whose
work appears in Diamonds 
Jacob
Glatstein
Moyshe-Leyb
Halpern
Malka
Heifitz-Tussman
Irena
Klepfisz
Rokhl Korn
Zishe
Landau
H.
Leivick
A.
Leyeles
Peretz
Markish
Kadya
Molodovsky
Abraham
Sutskever
Leyzer Volf
Aaron Zeitlin
Rajzel
Zychlinsky
and essays by
Albert
Greenberg and Naomi Newman
by Corey Fischer
The fact that this question arises at all is part of the answer. Yiddish has suffered greatly from decades of association with the trivial, the vulgar or, at best, the merely nostalgic. American poet Irena Klepfisz addressed this issue in recent conversations with ATJT. Klepfisz said, "Deciding to use Yiddish in my poems was a very deliberate and conscious act. I've always objected to the smattering of Yiddish that I call 'Hollywood' Yiddish, you know, schmuck and shyster and spiel." Klepfisz, a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto was inspired by Latina poets to begin writing bilingually. ATJT's Diamonds in the Dark, continues the work of rescuing Yiddish from "Hollywood" and revealing the enormous range of experience contained in Yiddish poetry - from the early labor poets of the lower east side to contemporary poets like Klepfisz.
In another conversation, poet Allen Ginsberg told us that "Yiddish can speak for all species that are being wiped out and for all cultures that are being wiped out. Here's a very active, alert, international culture that may not survive another couple hundred years except as a literary language. Yiddish poetry might speak for the entire human race."
Aside from the position of Yiddish as a representative of all that faces extinction, its poetry has much to teach us about the interaction between cultures. Lacking any singular geographical center, Yiddish poetry was part of a portable culture that Jews carried through lifetimes of exile. Yiddish poets have written poems that reflect the landscapes of Cuba, New England, Kentucky, Buenos Aries as well as Vilna, Warsaw and Jerusalem. Yiddish culture always existed in relation to a host culture and reflected the tensions, conflicts and attractions between the cultures. The early "sweat-shop" poets of turn-of-the-century New York, for example, were faced with inventing a poetry that could speak to masses of newly uprooted, working class Jews struggling to make sense of a radically new world.
In the current climate of polarization, ethnic hatred and "cultural warfare", the tolerant and inclusive vision of Yiddish Poetry needs to be given voice and form. It exists as a rare example of a culture that found ways to celebrate its particularity without isolating from or rejecting the "other."
From the introduction to American Yiddish Poetry by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (UC Press 1986)
There was once a rich buoyant American literature in Yiddish, perhaps the most coherent and full-fledged literary institution in the United States outside of English. Except for its exclusive language, it was not a parochial phenomenon. It spanned a wide gamut of themes and ideologies, from utopian socialism to American engagement, from cosmopolitan universalism to Jewish nationalism, and encompassed a variegated range of styles and genres, from naturalist fiction to avant-garde experiments, from popular melodrama and stirring novels in newspaper installments to virtuoso sonnet garlands and hermetic free verse.
…Yiddish poetry was no mere vehicle for the expression of "Jewish" experience. This was a time of mass movement of people of Jewish origin into general Western culture…Yiddish poets were part of it. They responded to the modern world as human beings and as Americans…Much of the Yiddish poetry written in the United States was consciously and effectively a cosmopolitan, even primarily American literature, expressing the emotions and thought of the individual in the modern metropolis. It was attuned to all facets of modern life and history, though written in the Yiddish idiom and using "Jewish" experience (among others) as a language to express the human condition.
From an American perspective, Yiddish poetry must be seen as an unjustly neglected branch of American literature, a kaleidoscope of American experience…
From a "Jewish" perspective, Yiddish poetry was not the world of "our fathers" but of their sons.
To order American Yiddish Poetry, go to our Bookstore
Came to America in 1914. His first book of poetry, written in 1921, was the first book of Yiddish poetry written entirely in free verse. He went on to become one of the founders of the "Introspectivist" movement—the primary modernist movement within American Yiddish poetry. He wrote more than a dozen volumes of poetry, very American in their sensibility, (for example, Shini Mayk, a poem about Jewish gangsters in New York included in Diamonds) only to announce himself in 1966, in the very title of his book, as "A Jew from Lublin" Glatshteyn’s response to the Holocaust was to bring Jewish themes into the center of his work (as in Brother Refugee) and to evoke, as perhaps no other poet did, the spirit of the Yiddish language itself (The Joy of the Yiddish Word; I Still Remember).
Her first literary efforts were in Polish. In 1919 she began to write and publish in Yiddish. When the Nazis invaded Poland, she fled to Sweden and then to Russia. At the end of World War Two, she emigrated to Montreal.
Descendant of a Hasidic dynasty, he arrived in the U.S. in 1906. Was an early member of "The young ones" a Yiddish literary movement that, in reaction to the earlier "sweatshop" poets called for a "pure" poetry, free of rhetoric and collective themes. He undercut early romantic idealism by self-mockery and irony ("Of course I know")and celebrated the joy of the commonplace ("Tonight"). He also translated English ballads, Russian and German poetry into Yiddish.
Lived in Vilna, Lithuania. Was a member of the "Young Vilna" group of poets. Fought in the Vilna Ghetto and managed to save the archives of the Jewish Museum there. He escaped to the woods and fought with the partisans and later joined the Russian army. He settled in Israel after the Liberation.
Drafted into the czarist army in 1916 and wounded on the German front, Markish welcomed the Russian Revolution as a break with the past that would also usher in an explosive new movement in Yiddish poetry. In 1921 he went to Warsaw where he became a symbol of the new cultural freedom. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1926 and was soon one of the most celebrated and prolific of the Soviet Yiddish writers. He was awarded the Lenin medal in 1939. In 1948 he was arrested by Stalin’s police and executed with other Soviet Yiddish writers on August 12, 1952
Wrote poems, novels, short stories and plays about Jewish life in Poland. Persecuted by Fascist police for her socialist activities. Came to New York in 1935.
Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886-1932)
Emigrated to America in 1908. Worked in a cleaning store in the Bronx that was a gathering place for Yiddish poets. A famous anecdote has Halpern burning many pairs of pants with a hot iron while lost in thought, reciting verses of a poem he was working on. His first book, "In New York" (1919) established him as a major Yiddish poet, giving voice to the alienation of the new immigrant in "The Golden Land." He became a permanent contributor to the daily Yiddish Communist newspaper, Frayhayt (Freedom), writing and traveling on lecture and reading tours all over the U.S. In 1924, he quarreled with the editors and left Frayhayt. He then lived in Detroit, Cleveland and Los Angeles before returning to New York in 1929. He died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-six.
Born in Russia. Exiled to Siberia in 1912 for anti-Czarist political activity. Escaped on foot and eventually made his way to America. He became one of the most respected of the Yiddish poets, wrote many plays as well, the most famous being The Golem.
The daughter of a martyred Warsaw Ghetto fighter. Poet, essayist and Yiddish translator and an activist in the lesbian/feminist and Jewish communities. She is the only contemporary American poet who incorporates Yiddish into her poetry, creating a powerful bilingual voice (Similar approaches have been taken by several poets in the Latino community, using Spanish and English).
Klepfisz is the author of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue (poetry) and Dreams of an Insomniac (Jewish Feminist essays), she co-edited The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology. Her extensive research on women and Yiddish includes: Feminism, Yidishkayt, and the Politics of Memory in Bridge; Queens of Contradiction: A Feminist Introduction; and Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers. In 1995 she served as coordinator of the ground-breaking conference Di Froyen: Women and Yiddish and was co-editor of its proceedings. Over the past few years, she has been Visiting Professor of Jewish Women’s Studies at the University of California, Wake Forest University, and Michigan State University. Currently, Ms. Klepfisz teaches courses on Jewish women at Barnard College and creative writing at Centre College in Kentucky.
Aaron Glants-Leyeles (1889-1966)
He was born in Poland, emigrated to London in 1905 and to America in 1909 where he studied literature at Columbia Universtiy. He co-edited the Introspectivist Journal, In Zikh with Jacob Glatstein and, like Glatstein, was a champion of free verse. He was also a life long activist for socialist and Yiddish cultural causes and helped found Yiddish schools in New York, Chicago and Western Canada.
Born in Russia, he was drawn to the vibrant Yiddish cultural life of Warsaw. Between the wars, he wrote prolifically, poems, narratives, dramas, essays, in both Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1939, an invitation to New York by the Yiddish Theatre director Maurice Schwartz (who was producing one of Zeitlin’s plays), saved the poet from the fate that overtook most of the Jews of Warsaw, including his wife and family. His poetry drew from the Jewish mystical tradition as well as from secular, cosmopolitan sources.
She lived in Warsaw until the German Invasion of 1939 when she and her husband escaped to Russia. After the war, she lived in Poland and France until her arrival in America in 1951. In the United States, shecontinued writing Yiddish poetry while working in a factory, obtaining a high school diploma, studying at City College and raising her son. She currently lives in the Bay Area. Zychlinsky, one of the few surviving Yiddish poets, writes with stunning simplicity and painful clarity.
Malka Heifitz-Tussman (1896-1987)
Born in Russia, she immigrated to America in 1912. Her first poems were written in Russian. She also wrote in English for the Anarchist journal, Alarm. Beginning in 1919, she published poems in the best Yiddish literary journals of the time in New York, Warsaw and Toronto. It was not until 1949, however, that her first book, Poems, appeared.
One of the most prolific members of the Young Vilna circle, Volf escaped to Russia after the German invasion and died there of starvation.
A Creation Story: Diamonds in the Dark Takes Shape
by Albert Greenberg
Ever since we conceived of this project, we have been trying to find a way to give audiences a sense of the work. Perhaps the best thing to do is describe how Diamonds in the Dark came to be.
While our interest in Yiddish poetry goes back to the beginnings of our theatre, Diamonds came out of a radio project that we developed several years ago. After recording the poetry, it became clear that, because of the overriding mindset of Yiddish as a "kitchen" language, the best way for us to bring out its modernist sensibilities, was to set the poems to contemporary musical settings. It was that initial work that led to the development of Diamonds in the Dark.
The first stage in developing Diamonds, was in picking a body of poems that both interested us and worked well on the stage. We then developed bilingual translations; sometimes using an entire poem in Yiddish, sometimes fragments; sometimes using one actor, sometimes two or three. Then we staged the work and developed a performance language for each poem. The actors recorded their performances in a music studio, and those performances were subsequently given musical settings. The actors then had to recreate their performances within the context of the music. The poems were choreographed and deepened directorially, and finally, an architecture for the work was created, using connections between poems, that were sometimes thematic, sometimes musical, sometimes gestural. What has emerged is a work that is part theatre piece, part concert work, part poetry reading. But, whatever lens you choose to use to view the work, we hope that Diamonds in the Dark opens a door into a rich and vital part of our culture legacy.
Itzik Manger is Coming to Dinner
by Naomi Newman
Several times a week my father would announce that a Yiddish poet or writer would be coming to dinner. The literary and artistic elite always passed through "Newman’s" house. My father had been a budding actor on the Yiddish stage in Poland. But after a few years of struggle in New York he moved to Detroit, and, as he loved to say, “gave up acting for eating.” Though he went into business, he kept his passion for performing and for the Yiddish word alive by becoming a reciter of Yiddish poems and short stories. My mother made "a nice table." And the talk around it was lively. Talk about poets and poems, actors and plays, politics and gossip. Also a good free meal was appreciated by writers and artists who got a lot more koved, honor, from the community, than money. And to top off the evening — the Newman sisters. Shirley at the piano, and me beside it, singing Yiddish songs. Unlike many immigrant parents who only spoke Yiddish so that di kinder zolen nisht farshteyn, the children shouldn’t understand, my parents wanted desperately for us to understand, speak and value their beloved Mame Loshen, Mother Tongue. In fact, having separated themselves from religious observance, Yiddish became for them the holy language through which Yiddishkayt, Jewishness, would be preserved.
It was a big feather in my father’s cap that his daughters were talented and knew Yiddish. For me and my sister these evenings were nervous ordeals and we often begged, “Why can’t people come to our house and just eat, like in other houses?” But at the same time we were proud. Though one part of me thought my father was just “showing off”, another part of me sensed that the special atmosphere in our house, so different from my friends’ homes, had a particular beauty and richness to it.
So the poets came. There were so many. I can’t quite remember which ones actually sat at the table, which ones were talked about, and which one’s poems were read. But along with our brisket and kugel we swallowed the names and the poems of Reisen, Rosenfeld, Leyb, Halpern, Margolin, Tussman, Molodovsky, Glatstein, Markish, Korn and Sutzkever. As little girls and adolescents, these people appeared glamorous and bohemian. They were our movie stars. I remember turbans and sparkling scarves, tweedy jackets over dark shirts, intense eyes and smoke-thickened voices. I remember one poet in particular, perhaps because he was so handsome, Itzik Manger, his wavy hair falling in his face, too drunk for my father’s taste, but deliciously romantic for mine.
Diamonds in the Dark, what a surprise! Who would have thought that decades later I would be delighting in creating a theatre piece based on Yiddish poetry. Certainly this is way beyond my father’s dreams. When he died at the age of 66, I was as far from Yiddish culture as I could be. Now I see that the poems I barely understood as a child — their rhythms, tonalities, sensibilities — became part of my aesthetic/spiritual landscape.
It’s taken so many journeys to come home; so many years to realize that my parents passed on to me, sometimes clumsily, sometimes against my will, the jewels of their treasured culture. These jewels now sparkle and shine for me. In Diamonds in the Dark I hope to keep them polished and safe, so that many, many people will see their radiance and understand their value.