As we celebrate Passover, after a year marked by protests for racial equality and social justice, Amelia M. Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, reminds us of the Yiddish poets during the interwar years who drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples and embraced a global community of the oppressed.
Last Spring, George Floyd gasped, “I can’t breathe,” seconds before his murder under the knee of a police officer. His plea became a metaphor for the violence of racism in America, and the months of reckoning that have followed have revealed a painful rift in America over the country’s commitment to equality. This year, many Americans have asked how it’s possible to express solidarity with, and fight for, the human rights of all groups, including those that may not be our own. In a year marked both by a deepening divide over social justice and the fear and loss due to the global pandemic, the celebration of Passover, a holiday commemorating exodus from slavery, offers an opportunity to think about how one group’s experience of injustice can help to understand another group’s pain.
I expect that this year, perhaps more than usual, many will be asking at their seder tables how Jews can translate the collective experience of trauma to speak out against racist violence in the United States. This was a burning question for the Yiddish poets who are the subject of my book, Songs in Dark Times, who found themselves between a privileged majority and threatened minority. In 1931, for example, Malka Lee, an immigrant from Galicia to New York, wrote about a Black man on a subway who described a lynching in the American south.
Now I hear his young cry on the wind
“My brother’s body’s swinging from a pine.”
He raises his fist and waves it, wild,
He sees the murderer’s portrait in every white...
The Yiddish poets I write about were not religious Jews. Nevertheless, the poetry they wrote in the interwar period is a wellspring of thought on the struggle among Jews to fight for other groups’ freedom. My book is the story of Yiddish leftist internationalist poets who, in the 1920s and ’30s, described the struggles of non-Jewish groups, including Chinese workers, Black Americans, Spanish republicans, Palestinian Arabs, and Ukrainian peasants. These writers attempted to translate the pain of others by using passwords from Jewish religious texts and collective memory. They were, in essence, changing what “we” meant—altering it from “we Jews” to “we workers of the world.” These poets were rejecting the very idea of a religious or ethnic community of Jews. But they were also drawing from a rich tradition of Jewish text and practice to make sense of a polarized world.
The Yiddish internationalist poets were drawing from a history of Jewish struggle to convince their readers to empathize with others’ struggles. For example, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of the yahrzeit (commemoration of the anniversary of a death), H. Leivick marked the occasion of a year after the execution of the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in his poem “A Sacco-Vanzetti Year.” Leivick identifies the perpetrator of the crime against the two anarchists as “The same evil from accuser to accuser.” In the Yiddish original, Leivik’s “accuser” is a “kateyger,” the talmudic term for prosecutor which had come to mean, in Yiddish, “prosecuting angel.” Leivick, with this Jewish password, links the injustice against the Italian anarchists to the many historical injustices against Jews.
Esther Shumiatsher, who wrote poignantly in the late 1920s about the human suffering she observed on her world travels with her spouse, the playwright Peretz Hirschbein, wrote:
The whole world has become my comrade,—
From the Yangtze’s valleys
And the thirst of India’s hot plains.
The Soviet poet Khane Levin, who is best known for her verse about motherhood and the Revolution, weaves Biblical motifs into her poems about building a new Soviet society. In her 1928 “Crimean motifs,” Levin describes a young Jewish man named “Anaki,” a name conjuring the Biblical giants known as Anakim. Anaki, a strapping youth, must overcome the influence of his two fathers—one a Jewish peddler who “sang on the wagon” and the other the tsar who “didn’t learn to work.”
Even among these Yiddish-speaking secularists, Jewish prayer did not entirely disappear. The poet Aaron Kurtz left his Hassidic family as a teenager to join the circus and later made his way to the US where he joined the Communist Party. And yet Kurtz, writing about the Spanish Civil War in 1938, describes a Jewish volunteer for the International Brigades reciting the Kol Nidre prayer on the eve of Yom Kippur together with his comrades in arms, Pedro of Madrid and Johannes of Hamburg.
With World War II, Jewish internationalism changed. Yiddish poets in the Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere turned inward, mourning the genocide that had taken place in Europe. The internationalist excitement of the interwar period had faded. Those Yiddish poets who had fought the rise in fascism by binding themselves to the Soviet cause were now forced to confront Stalin’s atrocities. The radical internationalism that had become de rigueur in the 1920s and ’30s gave way to new forms of Yiddish poetry as the Jewish world mourned the horrific murder of the majority of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust. Many of the poets who had once focused on the struggles of others now turned, in their writing, to face this indescribable loss.
And yet some writers still found ways of simultaneously mourning Jewish loss and the losses of other minorities. Two decades after World War II, following the murder of four young Black girls in a church in the Civil Rights era, Aaron Kurtz turned to the traditional Mourner’s Kaddish as a way of honoring the victims of American race violence:
I am not a Kaddish-sayer. But today mamas
The world over bitterly
Wept and mourned the four little black girls—
I responded to the rabbi’s Kaddish:
Omeyn!
Today, a year into a global pandemic, we celebrate Passover, at a time of personal and communal struggles for freedom and justice. Some may find hope in the utopian Yiddish writers who believed that a fairer world was at hand.