Yale University Press
New Haven & London
This book is dedicated to the memory of Uriel Weinreich, scholar, Yiddishist, and friend, who introduced me to the work of Itzik Manger
—L. W.
Let Us Sing Simply
Introduction
POETRY
Itzik’s Midrash
Introduction
The Sacrifice of Itzik
I Praise Thee Lord
Eve and the Apple Tree
Eve Brings Adam the Apple
Abraham Scolds Lot
Lot’s Daughters
Abraham and Sarah
Hagar’s Last Night in Abraham’s House
Hagar Leaves Abraham’s House
Hagar on Her Journey
Abraham Takes Itzik to the Sacrifice
The Patriarch Abraham Gets a Letter
Rachel Goes to the Well for Water
The Patriarch Jacob Meets Rachel
Leah Brings Mandrakes from the Field
Jacob Teaches the Story of Joseph to His Sons
Bathsheba
King David and Abishag
Abishag Writes a Letter Home
Cain and Abel
King David
Songs of the Megillah
Prologue
Invocation
The Song of the Runner
How the Blessed Mordecai Found Favor in the Eyes of the King
Queen Vashti
The King’s Banquet
Vashti’s Song of Grief
Queen Vashti Being Led to Execution
Esther Getting Ready for the King
Mordecai Leaving Esther’s Wedding
Fastrigosso’s Elegy
Queen Esther Can’t Sleep
Fastrigosso Dreaming
The Blessed Mordecai, the Mediator
The Queen Comes to the King
Fastrigosso Has the Birds Carry a Greeting to Esther
Haman Telephones Vayzosse, the Editor, at His Office
Fonfosso, the Master Tailor, Delivers a Eulogy on Fastrigosso
The King Ahasuerus After the Assassination Attempt
Mordecai Comes to Queen Esther
Wicked Haman Can’t Sleep
Wicked Haman in the King’s Courtyard
Fonfosso and His Apprentices Sew a Uniform for Haman
Pious Mordecai Waits for Satan
The Master Tailor, Fonfosso, Prepares to Fast
Queen Esther, Fasting
Haman Gets Ready for the Masked Ball
The King Is Angry
Haman Being Taken to the Gallows
The Master Tailor, Fonfosso, Presides over a Banquet
Fastrigosso’s Mother Lights a Memorial Candle
Ballads
The Ballad of the White Glow
The Ballad of the Crucified and the Verminous Man
Old-Fashioned Ballad
Hospital Ballad
The Ballad of the Man Riding to the Fair
Ballad
The Ballad of the Blue Pitchers
The Ballad of the Necklace of Stars
Erotic Ballad
The Ballad of the Man Who Went from Gray to Blue
Occasional Poems
In the Train
Baal Shem
Satan’s Prayer
Evening
Saint Besht
Like a Murderer
With Silent Steps
November
At the Kolomey Station
Twilight
The Words of the Journeyman Tailor Notte Manger to the Poet
There Is a Tree That Stands
Rabenu Tam
Reb Levi Yitskhok
Since Yesterday
For Years I Wallowed
Epilogue
PROSE
Autobiographical Episodes
Childhood Years in Kolomey
At Grandmother Taube’s in Stopchet
A Portrait of a Tailor’s Workshop
Fiction
Excerpts from The Book of Paradise
The Tales of Hershel Summerwind
The Story of the Nobleman’s Mustaches
The Rabbi of Chelm: May His Memory Be Blessed
Essays
First Letter to X. Y.
The Ballad: The Vision of Blood
Sholem Aleichem, the One and Only
Folklore and Literature
Notes
Let us sing simply, directly, and plain
Of all that’s familiar and dear.
Of agéd beggars who curse at the frost
And of mothers blessing the fire.
Of indigent brides with their candles who stand
At sightless mirrors, forlorn,
Each of them seeking the intimate face
They loved and that laughed them to scorn.
Of those who cast lots and who steal the last coin
Of their victims with speech that’s obscure;
And of wives who, deserted, curse at the world,
Slinking away through back doors.
Of housemaids whose fingers are worked to the bone
And who hide from their mistress’s sight
The morsels they save for the soldiers who come
On their visits to them every night.
Let us sing simply, directly, and plain
Of all that’s familiar and dear.
Of indigent mothers who curse at the frost
And of beggars blessing the fire.
Of young women in summer forced to abandon
Their bastards on doorsteps, and quail
At the sight of a man in a uniform
Who is able to send them to jail.
Of hurdy-gurdies that grind and grind
In poor courtyards on Fridays all day,
And of thieves surprised at their work who must
Flee over the rooftops away.
Of ragpickers picking their way through debris,
Who dream of the treasure they’ll find,
Of poets who foolishly trusted the stars
Then promptly went out of their minds.
Let us sing simply, directly, and plain
Of all that’s familiar and dear.
Of agéd folk who curse at the frost
And of children blessing the fire.
In modern Yiddish literature, what often seems naive proves to be extremely sophisticated. Poets of folklike verse are revealed to be consummate craftsmen and the comic writers are invariably the most deadly serious. Proofs of this paradox are the fables-in-verse of Eliezer Steinbarg (1880–1932) and the whole comic oeuvre of Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916). Among a somewhat younger generation of writers, however, only one created a corpus of ballads and Bible poems so seamless that they might have been written by the anonymous “folk”; a body of autobiographical fiction so innocent and playful as to make the Jewish child into a harbinger of hope; and satires that carried such a punch, they could stave off the fear of destruction. His name was Itzik Manger (né Isidore Helfer). The present selection of poetry, prose, and literary essays is the first attempt in English to give Manger his due as a modernist folk bard, divinely inspired prankster, and consummate poet of exile and homecoming.
Czernowitz, the multiethnic city of his birth in 1901, was also the birthplace of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, and Aharon Appelfeld. Like other aspiring young Jews of his time, Manger looked to German literature as the pinnacle of European civilization. At the Kaiser-Königlicher Dritter Staats-Gymnasium, Manger’s fellow pupils crowned him “Poet” for having given Goethe’s ballad “The Loyal Eckardt” a theatrical form. Then Manger was expelled for bad behavior.1 Other pranks soon followed, one of his favorites being the invention of a mock biography. Here is what, decades later, he submitted to the noted lexicographer Zalmen Reisen, who dutifully published it in the augmented edition of his Lexicon of Yiddish Literature, Press, and Philology (1927).
MANGER, ITZIK (1900–) Born in Berlin as the son of a tailor, an immigrant from Romania. Came to Jassy at age fourteen where he learned Yiddish and until very recently, worked at his [tailor’s] trade.
The son of a German-speaking tailor in Berlin via Romania? Who else could boast of such a mixed-up pedigree? And to have mastered Yiddish in so short a time! Manger even made himself a year older so as to usher in the twentieth century. In a more lyrical moment, at the age of twenty-eight, Manger described himself to an interviewer as “born in a train between two stations. It may be that’s how I acquired the wander- demon in me. When I was myself a child, my youngest little brother died in my arms. My first encounter with the mystery of death. That was the first time that I looked directly into the dark, dead eyes of the ballad. A year later that moment was transformed into my ballads.”2 That would have made Manger a child-balladeer, unless we accept the commonly held notion that he never really grew up. To add the finishing touch, soon after granting this interview, he changed his name from the formal-sounding Yitskhok (Isaac) to the folksy, childlike Itzik.
Still later, Manger described himself as salt of the Yiddish earth, the earth that lay at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, where the saintly Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, was reputed to have roamed. There every horse-and-buggy ride with one’s grandfather carried mythic overtones. Every vivacious aunt doubled as a surrogate mother. At home, “the master, the master’s wife, the journeyman tailors, and one or two apprentices were as one family.” The workplace, he would recall, “was filled with song and laughter. Everyone sang.” The best of the singers was a journeyman named Leybele Becker, who taught young Itsikl to recite Friedrich von Schiller’s “Die Glocke,” Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” and Heinrich Heine’s “Zwei Grenadieren,” and would lend out his secular books. The tailors sang haunting Yiddish love songs to still their grieving hearts. And on the festival of Purim, the chief rhymester and improviser was the master tailor, Hillel Manger, himself (“Childhood Years in Kolomey”). Is it any wonder that his eldest child would grow up to become the last Yiddish troubadour? That Itzik would one day take Warsaw by storm, becoming the boy wonder of the Yiddish Writer’s Club?
This much seems to be true. A love of literature permeated the Manger home. His younger brother, Notte (1903–1942), was also a tailor, but one of those rare people who, though self-taught, had a sophisticated understanding of classical and contemporary European as well as Yiddish poetry. Notte’s influence on Manger’s life and writing cannot be overestimated. Manger admired his brother’s knowledge and taste in literature and made a persona of him in a series of lyric poems, “The Journeyman Notte Manger Sings.” In The Book of Paradise, Manger’s fictional autobiography, the artist Mendl Reyf captured the likenesses of “the two infatuated angels” Siomke and Berl, who worked for the patch-tailor Shlomo-Zalman. They are the spitting image of the two earthly brothers Itzik and Notte Manger. Manger’s mother, the daughter of a mattress maker, was a pious woman who imbued him with a love of the folksongs she sang. And Manger’s father, whose “bohemianism” and bouts of depression kept the family on the move, coined the Yiddish expression literatoyre, a felicitous and extremely naughty pairing of “literature” and “Torah.”3 In this home, apparently, religion and art, piety and profanity were easily reconciled. No Kulturkampf, no adolescent rebellion, no Sturm und Drang. “Itzik” Manger appears to be the only young Jew to have become a writer, poet, painter, or composer without ever leaving home.
Romania was the birthplace of the Yiddish theater, founded there by Abraham Goldfaden in 1877. “My childhood years,” writes Manger, “were filled with theater. I frequented Avrom Axelrod’s Yiddish-German Theater. For the privilege of being allowed to stand behind the curtain during the performance I lugged chairs and set them out and ran errands for the actors.”4 In those years, he tells us, he stood behind the flats and followed the action on stage as he held a copy of the play in his hands, breathing in the theatrical atmosphere, learning to evaluate texts for their theatricality. The Yiddish theater became his Gymnasium. “A fine Gymnasium for someone who was head-over-heels in love with the Yiddish theater.”5
Luckily for young Itzik-Yitskhok, the outbreak of world war forced him and his family to move to Jassy. (At last, one biographical fiction with a basis in fact!) Otherwise he might never have known his ancestral eastern Galician (later Romanian) landscape and, what’s worse, might never have found himself as a Yiddish troubadour. Jassy was a godsend for a young romantic poet in search of inspiration. Here, in “the old city with secluded crooked streets,” one could hear a young maiden singing Yiddish love songs from her window, and one could still commune with the spirit of those “nocturnal vagabonds,” “hungry, pale, and joyous,” who raised their cups and voices in song. Most famous among the latter was Velvl Zbarzher (1826–1883), easily recognized “By his lively large eyes, / By his dusty, dark green cape, / His head rakishly bent to one side.” This inspiring figure was “Drunk from the stars, wine, night, and wind.” Where the “song and sorrow” of troubadours once blossomed, where their living memory still glimmered from every window, lulling the passer-by with longing, here was a place that a budding Yiddish poet could call his own.6
Poet, playwright, and parodist—all this supposedly nurtured on native ground. The most detailed account that Manger gave of his poetic beginnings was on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. To an aging but adoring audience at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, Manger described an epiphany that had occurred, aptly enough, in a tavern late one night, his Muse appearing as a drunken old man, the last of a generation of beer hall singers.
I was sitting one night in a tavern in Bucharest. A guest from Berlin was with me—Dr. Israel Rubin. Long past midnight an old man of some seventy years dropped in. He was well and truly drunk. This man was old Ludvig, the last of the Brody Singers.
We invited him to our table. He poured himself a large glass of wine, made a sort of Yiddishized kiddush, then later he began to sing [songs] from his Brody repertoire.
When he had finished singing Velvl Zbarzher’s song “The Tombstone Engraver,” he improvised a stanza of his own:
Here lie Velvl Zbarzher and Abraham Goldfaden
Our brothers whose sweet songs could unsadden
So many; and now there they lie
With their heads, which they held once so high
As they thought noble thoughts, but see how
Empty those fine heads are now.
My ending will be just the same,
Lying in the dust with no name.
My eyes lighted up: This! This was it! The shapes of the Brody Singers glowed in my mind. All the wedding jesters, rhymesters, and Purim players that had amused generations of Jews came alive. I will become one of them; one of “Our brothers.” Perhaps what they created and sang was primitive, and not lofty poetry; but they themselves were poetry.
I remembered the lovely folksongs I had heard in my father’s workshop. What an orgy of color and sound. What a heritage lay there abandoned. Gold being trodden underfoot. And I paid attention and gazed.7
The image of that drunken wandering minstrel with the wineglass in his hand over which he recited a Yiddishized blessing never entirely left Manger. In the course of his life he would create other aspects of himself, but the one he clung to until his dying day was that he was of the race of shabby-cloaked wandering minstrels thirsty for wine, tips, and applause. Just recently, a former landsman of Manger’s recorded a heretofore unknown song called “Manger’s Testament,” which ends as follows:
Don’t carve out upon my tombstone
All those dates, the wheres and whos,
Just carve out in great big letters
That Manger used to love his booze.8
In short, a folk poet, an admirer and re-creator of oral literature, of the ballad, the folktale, the Purim play. In short, a romantic poet for whom the Gypsy with his homelessness, his rootlessness, and his music was an attractive figure.
A closer look, however, at Manger’s epiphany in the Bucharest tavern belies this myth of humble origins. The late-night setting relived by Manger those many years later bespeaks death, as does the grotesque figure of the ancient rhymester. Would any self-respecting poet mimic this doggerel? Would anyone who had once been drawn to Goethe’s “Erlkönig” and “The Loyal Eckardt” and to Heine’s “Zwei Grenadieren,” later, to Rainer Maria Rilke and Edgar Allan Poe, find anything in the Yiddish “folk legacy” worth salvaging? What was it, then, that tore open the poet’s eyes and ears to the orgy of color and sound? That now drew him to the popular Yiddish performers who “unsadden so many” with their “sweet songs”?
To begin with, they were a native—and therefore, welcome—source of revelry and sentiment. The primitive verse of Velvl Zbarzher and Abraham Goldfaden, in turn, reminded the modern poet of his own discarded past, the very folksongs he had once heard in his father’s workshop. Precisely because that past lay buried and abandoned it could now be unearthed anew. Anyone could try to mimic Goethe and Heine; any artist of a certain age could rhapsodize on the theme of death. What the Yiddish literary and theatrical tradition offered Manger was something else. It challenged him to search (long and hard, if necessary) for indigenous sources of poetic inspiration, to relearn the art of simplicity, to recloak his modern—and modernist—sensibilities within a folksy, Jewish garb. In a way, Manger’s poetic pedigree did derive from Berlin via Romania. And in a way, the tattered present recloaked as the seamless past was just the kind of thing that tailors did to eke out a living. Like father, like son, like brother.
It was easier, Manger discovered, to pass oneself off as a born minstrel and wastrel than to make a real living at it. Recently demobilized from the Eighth Fusilier Regiment of the newly established Romanian army and situated back in his native Czernowitz, Manger refused a job clerking in a store. He would live from Yiddish or not at all. Aside from two notebooks of unpublished poems, including a great many ballads, housed today in the Manger Archive at the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, the formative postwar decade in Manger’s life (1918–1927) has left a scant paper trail. According to Reisen’s Lexicon, Manger moved to Bucharest, where he was one of the leaders of the “radical Yiddishist movement in Greater Romania,” wrote for the local Yiddish press, and did the lecture circuit, speaking on the ballad, on Spanish, Romanian, and Gypsy folklore. “The most important improviser of Romanian folksong is the shepherd,” he informed his audience. “He has, in his flute, captured the subtle, silken tremor of the evening wind, the hot anguished trill of the nightingale, and the silver rhythm of the clouds that hang over his hut, over his hills and over his steppe.”9 Having exhausted what Romania had to offer, Manger headed next for Warsaw, the capital of Yiddish culture.
He was twenty-seven when he arrived in Warsaw as a Romanian poet with thick, disheveled flowing hair, blazing eyes, and a lighted cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips. To the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw, Manger was an exotic newcomer. He would call this period “my most beautiful decade.” It was by far the most productive.10
Warsaw between the two world wars was the largest and most polarized Jewish community in Europe. Each of the major political parties—the socialist Bund, the Zionists, and the orthodox Agudas Yisroel—sustained its own network of schools, libraries, newspapers, publishing houses, social services, youth movements, and soccer teams. Linguistically, too, the community was divided. The poor Hasidim, the working class, and the underworld spoke Yiddish. The merchant and professional classes spoke Polish, and a smattering of intellectuals spoke Hebrew. Everyone hated the Litvaks, those know-it-alls from the northeast with their funny accents.
Few were the neutral venues within this fiercely divided landscape. Depending on the bill, merchants and workers and their spouses could meet in the Yiddish theater, though the cabarets, with their antireligious and off-color fare, catered only to the fashionable. Then there was the Yiddish Writers’ Club on Tlomackie 13, right next door to the Great Synagogue. The buffet was kosher, and on consecutive nights you could hear writers from across the political and aesthetic spectrum—and from across the Yiddish-speaking world. Melekh Ravitch, the club’s secretary, remained steadfastly apolitical and tried to maintain calm when the public programs got out of hand. Finally, for the chosen few, there was the rarefied ambience of the Yiddish PEN Club. The four youngest initiates, elected in January 1930, were Israel Rabon, I. Papiernikov, Yitskhok Bashevis, and Itzik Manger.11
Bashevis, in time to become known to the whole world as I. B. Singer, represented the last—and broken—link in the chain of rabbinic culture. Like his father, Pinchas Menachem Singer, of 10 and later 12 Krochmalna Street, Bashevis was fit only for intellectual pursuits. Both father and son were self-absorbed, impractical, and vastly overqualified for their lowly and low-paying jobs. The father was a run-of-the- mill rabbinical judge, the son a proofreader at a Yiddish literary weekly. The father spent his days dreaming about God and his messiah.
The son spent his nights dreaming of women and omniscient narrators. Because for Bashevis there could be no reconciling religion and art, piety and profanity, that split became the sum and substance of his career. In a breakaway journal immodestly titled Globus (The Globe), Bashevis railed against modernism, politics, and stylistic mediocrity. To make ends meet, he translated European classics and ghostwrote sensational potboilers. In the Yiddish Writer’s Club, he sat alone.
Itzik Manger, by contrast, burst onto the literary scene in person and in print. He granted interviews and published articles in the Literarishe bleter, the same weekly where the young Bashevis first worked as proofreader, gave readings at the Writer’s Club, where he recited all his poetry by heart; published Stars on the Roof (Bucharest, 1929), a meticulously edited volume of his verse; put out twelve issues of his own four-page literary journal called Chosen Words (Czernowitz-Kraków-Riga, 1929–1930), filled mostly with his own manifestos, poems, and literary musings; invented a new genre, which he called Bible Poems (Warsaw, 1935); rewrote the Purim Megillah (Warsaw, 1936); penned a personalized history of Yiddish literature from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century (Intimate Portraits; Warsaw, 1938); published three more volumes of verse, Lantern in the Wind (Warsaw, 1933), Velvl Zbarzher Writes Letters to Malkele the Beautiful (Warsaw, 1937), and Twilight in the Mirror (Warsaw, 1937), an anthology of European folksongs (Warsaw, 1936), and a fictional autobiography in prose (Warsaw, 1939); witnessed the production of his Hotsmakh Play (1936–1937), loosely based on Goldfaden; composed lyrics for the Yiddish cabaret and the fledgling Yiddish movie industry; crisscrossed Poland without knowing more than five words of Polish; and got involved with women. Manger in love—a sordid chapter, to say the least. What Manger needed was a mother more than a wife, someone who would iron his shirts, pack his bags, clean up after him, and forgive him his transgressions.
Such a woman was Rokhl Auerbach (1903–1976), a noted Yiddish and Polish journalist, who suffered physical abuse from Manger, inspired some of his finest poems, remained in Warsaw in September 1939, among other reasons, to save Manger’s archive, and was reunited with him in London after the war. Manger, who had since taken up with another woman, and who never fully regained his psychic balance, greeted Auerbach with such a barrage of invective that she fainted dead away. They were not to see each other ever again.12
But we get ahead of our story. As a Romanian national and otherwise superfluous Jew, Manger left Warsaw in 1938 and headed for Paris, the Mecca of expatriates, where he eked out a living by lecturing on French literature to Yiddish-speaking audiences. Being on French soil reawakened his interest in the nineteenth-century poet Paul Verlaine. On a visit to Metz, Verlaine’s birthplace, Manger had himself photographed beside a statue of the poet.13 Northern France then fell to the Germans and Paris was no longer a safe haven, so in 1940, Manger moved south to Marseilles, where for a while he lived in a shelter for emigrants. There he slept on a bare mattress with only his coat for a blanket. His sleep was troubled by dreams in which he saw “Goethe with a rubber truncheon in his hand, Immanuel Kant wearing an S.S. uniform, Faust wearing a swastika on his right arm, and blood, blood—Jewish blood … dreadful dreams.”14 Manger’s hope, in Marseilles, was that by working his way on a ship he might get to Palestine, but he lacked the necessary documents.
One version of the story has Manger sitting one day in a tavern in Marseilles nursing a glass of wine when a ship’s captain happened to walk in. What follows next is typical of Manger, who all his life, by looking helpless, poverty-stricken, or abandoned, could rouse in other people the impulse to look after him. Manger in the tavern was, just then, looking as dejected as the man in Picasso’s Frugal Repast. The ship’s captain, a gunrunner, noticed the gaunt and vacant-eyed look on Manger’s face and asked him, “Why are you looking so bewildered?”
The upshot of the encounter was that the captain took Manger aboard his ship, which after some North African wandering deposited him in Gibraltar. There Manger was found by another ship’s captain, this time a Scot, who took a very sick Manger to Liverpool, where Manger was hospitalized. It was then Christmastime. The Yiddish-speaking Manger woke in the Liverpool hospital on Christmas Day to find his bed filled with presents. The nurses, who had clubbed together to buy him the presents, lied delicately to him saying that a rabbi had brought the gifts.15
According to another, more prosaic, version, Manger was hospitalized in July, not December, 1940, and the ship’s captain who brought Manger to Liverpool was French.16
Manger eventually became a British citizen and later traveled with a British passport, but he would characterize his ten years in England as the worst period of his life. “He felt as if he was imprisoned,” recalls the Anglo-Jewish writer Joseph Leftwich, “far from the effervescent Yiddish folk-life in whose midst he had been in Eastern Europe. [His] environment was too restricted. He wrote marvelous poems, published them in books. But, as he told me, the poems in the book The Journeyman Tailor Notte Manger Sings were written in London in spite of the bad Jewish atmosphere.”17
Manger was not only writing in those years, he also acquired a reading and speaking knowledge of English. He immersed himself in English classical poetry, reading Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, and William Blake. He dreamed of editing a book of Yiddish translations of English poetry. One way or another, he acquired Jewish and non-Jewish friends, among them Arthur Waley, the expert in Chinese poetry. And he was writing essays, stories and poems. A collection of poems, Clouds over the Roof, appeared in 1942.
Then began his friendship with Margaret Waterhouse.
Margaret Waterhouse, said to be a descendant of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, owned a bookstore in London. The romantic story goes that, one rainy day, Itzik Manger was standing looking hungrily into the window of her bookshop in Swiss Cottage. Waterhouse invited him to come in out of the rain. With that gentle beginning a relationship was formed that lasted some years. As the New Zealand poet Dan Davin writes, “by all accounts only the term ‘ministering angel’—angels were not just clichés in Itzik’s world—suffices for the part she played in his life during his London years. At their first meeting she had discerned his special quality and thereafter did her best to look after him and dissuade him from ruining his health through drinking and smoking too much and allowing his irascibility to spoil his prospects with people who wished him well.”18
That Manger was productive does nothing to contradict his assertion that he was unhappy in his years in England. From the time he got there his hope, and his focus, was on finding the means to get to New York, where there was still an active Yiddish literary community and where he felt he belonged. He and various of his friends made effort after effort to get him the necessary documents and the money he would need to make the move, but for a long time their endeavors were unsuccessful.
In June 1941, Manger, harassed by poverty and the disaster that had overwhelmed the Jews in Poland, sent a strange letter to H. Leivick, at that time the most famous Yiddish poet living in New York. The letter, part prose and part verse, is a document written in despair. In the verse part of the letter Manger announces,
I am weary—ah, good night,
For my eyelids have grown heavy;
Life and thought and love
Have flown, have vanished like a dream.
I am weary—ah, good night,
For my eyelids have grown heavy.
Half awake and halfway dozing,
I prattle now my final poem;
See a great bird flying off
From the earth to heaven.
Half awake and halfway dozing,
I prattle now my final poem.
A dream it was that once I brought you,
It was the dream you thrust away
And when darkness fell, you turned me
Out and sent me on my way.
It was a dream that once I brought you,
It was the dream you thrust away.19
The letter continues in prose that is a mixture of self-pity and accusation. “Where am I? Tattered, abandoned, wandering among strangers. Harried, depressed, unhelped by anyone in any of my needs, I curse the unfortunate trance that led me into Yiddish literature. I have grown sober now, but it is too late. I’ve lost everything that was precious and dear to me. I am a cadger of cigarettes, and nothing more.”20
Leivick, faced with so much agony, reacted with unforgivable tactlessness. First, he had Manger’s letter published in the Yiddish daily Der tog of July 10, 1941. Then, on subsequent days, he published his rejoinder. His intent, he says, is to help Manger find his way out of his present anguish and despair. “Because,” he writes, “what essentially is your verse-letter to me if not a desperate game with yourself.” Leivick does not shrink from accusing Manger of egocentricity, and this at a time when “our entire people is in deadly peril and when the whole world lies under a hail of fire and disaster.”21
The two letters are accurate reflections of their authors: Manger desperate, self-pitying, Leivick condescending, Olympian, self-satisfied, and pompous. The exchange of letters produced between the two men a breach that lasted eight years, in the course of which time Manger grew convinced that there existed in New York a cabal of writers that included Joseph Opatoshu, H. Leivick, and Aaron Glantz-Leyeles, who wished him ill.
At this great distance from the anguish that prompted Manger’s letter and the defensiveness that provoked Leivick’s reply, the entire exchange feels very much too bad: an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Manger was intemperate, Leivick insensitive. History was harassing them both.
In March 1951, after having first been feted in Paris on his fiftieth birthday, Manger was on his way to Montreal. The God who looks after brilliant but hapless poets finally took a hand in Manger’s life. Later that year, with the help of the poet Mani Leyb and the critic Abraham Tabachnik, Manger finally made it to New York. “Manger came like a ghost from the land of the dead,” writes Ruth Wisse.
Haggard, always with a cigarette at the corner of his mouth and a performer’s talent sharpened by years in the Yiddish theater, he looked and played the part of the ruined troubadour. Through his brokenness he evoked the Jewish tailor shops of Romania where he had worked as a boy and the Jewish cabarets of Poland for which he had traded them in as an adult, granting audiences a posthumous glimpse of their liveliness. No one could remain indifferent to Manger or his poetry.22
Or, for that matter, to his heavy drinking. The surviving Yiddishists either condemned Manger or assiduously turned a blind eye. At least one patron of the arts refused Manger entry to her literary salon.23 Dan Davin took a more compassionate view.
During the time I knew him, one would not have described Itzik as temperate. Not that he was an alcoholic either. But he was at all times excitable, and alcohol made him more so; he had rather a weak head and so got drunk on what would have affected others comparatively little; and he enjoyed the company of drinkers and the social pleasures that go with drinking. I suspect also that, like other imaginative writers who have passed their first lyric spontaneity, he valued the stimulus alcohol can give to the imagination, the access to paradox, unexpected simile, dislocated association. And he may also have needed it for escape from his often acute consciousness of a past and a people utterly destroyed.24
Davin first met Manger in August 1950 at a PEN International conference in Edinburgh. The two men cut out from the conference and made their way, amid talk of Shakespeare and Marlowe, to a pub called the Bell Inn. Davin, with his poet’s sensibility, intuited at once that his new friend was “a natural lord of language whose metaphors and figures were strange, simultaneously evoking the Bible, the farmyards of my childhood, and the idiom of surrealism so remote from either of these.” He was drawn to Manger by a presence “that suggested a power, a force, not a power of the world but a power within the self.” In the days that followed, Manger and Davin became habitués of the Bell Inn, where the Yiddish poet ingratiated himself to the Scots in the pub by quoting Robert Burns in his Yiddish accent. Eventually his fellow drinkers made him an “honorary Scot and christened him Mac Manger.”25
Let us stop for a moment and try to imagine Itzik Manger reciting Burns’s famous poem “A Red, Red Rose” to his newfound landslayt (countrymen) in the Bell Inn:
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like a melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.
As fair as thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will love thee still, my Dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
The studied simplicity of this poem would certainly have appealed to Manger, as would the word “melodie,” the non-Yiddish word that he injected into his own verse on more than one occasion, and used it in precisely the way that Burns (1759–1796) was here playing the local Scottish dialect off against the official, neoclassical diction of British high society. Behind the regular beat and monosyllabic rhyme, behind the naive folk-facade stood a champion of natural verse, natural speech, natural love.
Like Burns, Manger used his vernacular to counteract what in academic circles nowadays are called the “hegemonic claims” of the majority culture. British English was to Burns as German was to Manger. Growing up in Czernowitz, Manger was surrounded by upwardly mobile Jews who tried to “pass” by speaking German, just as Burns must have known any number of Scots who used the King’s English to get ahead in life.26 In a wonderful spoof, Manger called the child-protagonist of his Book of Paradise Shmuel-Aba Abervo, borrowing his surname from the German expression commonly used by the Jews of Czernowitz: “Aber-vo, Come off it! What nonsense!” Like Burns, Manger tried to fashion the uncouth “jargon” into a vehicle of high culture and, therefore, of national self-determination. Unlike Burns, however, and the whole romantic school of which he was a part, Manger rose to the status of folk poet only after arriving in Warsaw and becoming part of its urban mosaic.
True to the Yiddish folk imagination, Manger returned to “nature” through the ancient biblical landscape learned by rote and the reimagined byways of the shtetl, the Jewish market town. Paradise, in Manger’s book, was an eastern Galician shtetl at the turn of the century, surrounded, to be sure, by forests and fields, but laid out in boulevards and back alleys, an urban grid divided along social, ethnic, and religious lines. Folklore, Manger proclaimed in 1939, even urban folklore, was the last repository of myth, as the Bible was the eternal and untapped source of drama (“Folklore and Literature”). Through the Yiddish language, once considered the handmaiden of Hebrew and treated in more recent years like the Cinderella of European tongues, Manger set out to reunite folklore and the Bible on native soil—in the shtetl of God.
Having come to English poetry late in life, Manger surely did not learn the subversive art of simplicity from Robert Burns. He learned it, rather, from Sholem Aleichem, from the Yiddish ballad revival in New York, and from Eliezer Steinbarg.
A lifelong admirer of Sholem Aleichem and especially of his stories for children (see, in this book, “Sholem Aleichem, the One and Only”), Manger credited the great master with launching the “grotesque-realistic school” of Yiddish literature. Almost alone among the next generation of Yiddish writers, Manger captured the radical innocence of childhood, whether as paradise lost or as a rustic life protected by birds and inebriated geese.
The ballad, surprisingly, was being revived in the urban maelstrom of faraway New York by the Yiddish poets who were known collectively as Di yunge, the Youngsters. One of them, Mani Leyb, dedicated one volume of his 1918 poetic trilogy to the lyrical ballad. In response, the raucous and rambunctious Moyshe-Leyb Halpern used the ballad structure to play form against content, revealing in The Golden Peacock (1924) the absurdity of the human condition, while Zishe Landau, the chief theoretician of the group, rendered the English, Scottish, and American ballad repertoire into Yiddish.27 Mani Leyb would live long enough not only to welcome his Old World disciple to New York but also to chair the Itzik Manger Jubilee Committee that would produce the beautiful edition of Manger’s Song and Ballad (1952).
Manger’s first published poem, “Meydl portret” (Portrait of a Maiden), appeared in 1921 in Kultur edited by Steinbarg, whose verse fables were widely known and admired. They circulated for decades by word of mouth before they ever appeared in print. From Steinbarg, Manger learned how to enliven dialogue through the use of dialect; how to manipulate ancient forms to produce both a lyric and satiric effect; how to make rivers, birds, and inanimate objects speak idiomatic Yiddish; how to use anachronism to shift temporal boundaries.28 This and more Manger put to brilliant use in Medresh Itsik (Itzik’s Midrash), his bold and zany retelling of the Bible.
What makes Manger’s versions of the beloved Bible stories so audacious is that he has plucked the biblical personages out of their mythic past and set them down in a time and place much closer to home. “The experienced reader,” Manger counsels us, “will catch on to the fact that the landscape in which the biblical characters move is Slavic rather than Canaanitish. I was thinking of eastern Galicia.” Manger’s Bible folk, moreover, are weighed down not only with the heavy burden of their present lives but also with the knowledge of the roles that they play in the biblical versions of their life stories. Manger has done more than redirect our view of the biblical world from above to below. He compels us to recognize that below is where, even in the Bible, those God-struck folk had always been.
Revealed in Manger’s Midrash are those poignant moments when the humanity of the biblical characters is openly displayed. Right from the start in Eden there is the lost struggle against temptation; there is Cain and Abel’s disastrous quarrel; Lot’s drunkenness; his seduction by his daughters; the story of Jacob cheating his brother Esau out of his blessing; Jacob’s meeting Rachel at the well; Joseph’s petty sadism as he torments his brothers in Egypt by charging them with the “theft” of his silver cup; old Jesse’s exultation that his son David will eventually inherit the throne.
What Manger has done is to zoom in on his biblical cast of characters; then, by making use of his acute theatrical instincts, his lyricism, and his comic genius, he has invested his characters with the sort of ordinariness that links them to our own lives. It is a trick Charles Dickens would have admired. Manger’s biblical folk, by having their ordinariness intensified, manage to become extraordinary. Not heroic and, above all, not holy, but down-to-earth real persons capable, in the work of literature they inhabit, of being at once themselves and the allegorical figures that their lives imply.
In “Cain and Abel,” for instance, Manger is not interested in how Cain, after committing the world’s first murder, feels about Abel. Instead, we find his Cain, who has never seen violence or death, meditating over the curiously lovely body of his dead brother:
“Does the beauty lie in my ax
Or is it perhaps in thee?
Before the day has passed,
Speak, answer me.”
When we come to Manger’s “Abraham Scolds Lot” we find the patriarch suffering the social anxiety of a respectable man whose kinsman is bringing shame to the family by his drunken behavior:
“Lot—it’s disgusting—it’s got to be said—
You and your nightly carouse—
Yesterday in the Golden Hart …
What a terrible scandal that was.
Manger the tailor can do such things,
But it simply won’t do for you.
You’ve a couple of daughters to raise, you’re rich—
Praise God!—and besides, you’re a Jew.”
In “Abraham Takes Itzik to the Sacrifice,” Jewish pride and stubborn obedience are fully played out. Bitterly serene, the poem follows its three persons from the time they leave Abraham’s house until they reach a point near the place of sacrifice. Here, Abraham is the rich shtetl Jew, this time obeying an insane command from his God; his servant, Eliezer, in turn knows that something bad is about to happen, but he will make no choice except to be dutiful; and finally, there is the child, Isaac, whose thin, sleepy questions early on a grim morning hauntingly suggest that he knows the purpose of the trip. To the boy’s question, “Daddy, where are we going now?” the father offers the pathetic lie: “To Lashkev—to the fair … [to buy] A soldier made of porcelain, / A trumpet and a drum.” His soul scalded by the lie, the father mumurs bitterly to himself, “To Lashkev … the fair … some fair.”
Then there is Manger’s story of Hagar, the handmaiden who is about to be driven from Abraham’s house because of Sarah’s jealousy. In “Hagar’s Last Night in Abraham’s House” we find Hagar sweeping the kitchen floor, scouring the copper pan, remembering the presents Abraham gave her when he was courting her, and wondering where in the world she will go with her bastard child in her arms.
She takes the kitchen broom up,
She sweeps the kitchen floor.
Under her blouse, her heart says,
“I love him.” She sweeps some more.
Like sea-worn glass, bright gleams of humor are strewn throughout the poems in Medresh Itsik, but this humor is often edged with satire or lightly moistened with tears. “The Patriarch Abraham Gets a Letter” has a little of both. The first three stanzas of the poem, which is sharply divided into two parts, focus on young Isaac, who is moved to tears when he sees a butterfly perching on a cornflower. In the last four stanzas we overhear Isaac’s father, Abraham, chatting with the postman, then reading the letter Abraham’s servant, Eliezer, has sent reporting on his search for a bride for young Isaac. Naturally, we wonder why the butterfly-cornflower event brings tears to Isaac’s eyes and what that has to do with the bride-to-be’s ability to cook fish. The answer to the riddle is that Manger has given us a single snapshot of two men experiencing different kinds of love. Isaac, sexually innocent and repressed, weeps because he reads the butterfly’s perching on the cornflower as an erotic event and, thinking no doubt of his own dream life, concludes that the world is filled with sin. The homely detail about cooking in the second part of the snapshot is Manger’s shorthand for the bittersweet love that Abraham over the years has cherished for his lost Sarah.
When we come to “Jacob Teaches the Story of Joseph to His Sons,” anachronism is the chief source of pleasure the poem can give. The implied frame is The Selling of Joseph, the most popular Purim play in the Yiddish folk repertoire. Mimicking these amateur theatrics, we can expect broad humor, bathos, or doggerel rhyme—or all three, which is what we get, in the small space of the poem. But we also get the comic pathos of the bewildered sons who must suffer simultaneously in the present and in the past as they ready themselves to perform the Purim play about themselves. Manger’s grieving wit sets time-present swirling into time-past and future as Jacob pontificates, telling his favorite son, Joseph, how in the play he should behave:
“And when they throw you in the pit,
Weep, but not for long.
It’s not for the first time that you act
This play out, my dear son.”
As he prattles, Jacob resembles the old Polonius, talking past the perceptions of his children. He bumbles on, sliding from fatuousness to tenderness as he advises Joseph:
“But when you pass your mother’s grave
That stands beside the way,
Be sure you shed a real tear
And softly, gently, say
That gladly would old Jacob serve
Another seventh year
If once, before his death, he might
Again caress her hair.”
In the traditional Selling of Joseph, the two set-pieces were, in fact, Joseph’s lament from inside the snake pit and the scene of him passing by Rachel’s tomb on his way to Egyptian captivity. Not only, then, did Manger succeed in rescuing the nobility and vulnerability of his Bible folk. He also reanimated the hackneyed repertoire associated with their lives, replacing the accumulated weight of the generations with his modern Midrash for all seasons. And to ensure that his Midrash traveled more lightly, Manger eliminated the Bible’s major player: Moses the Lawgiver. Gone from his secular humanistic rereading are all three pillars of biblical theology: Creation, Revelation, and Redemption. There is no primordial chaos, no Flood, no Exodus, no theophany at Sinai, no Golden Calf, not even Balaam’s comical run-in with the talking ass. Manger effectively replaced the Torah with literatoyre.