Ask those who survived before us. During the year I produced “Community through Covid,” I spent a lot of time exploring outdoor schooling and architectural encouragement for air-circulation current 100 years ago. Seeking new perspective on current, hyper-local grief, I settled into study of a mid-20th Century work by a Chicago Hebrew poet.
…I’ve written before about how much I was moved by reading about Lake Michigan in Hebrew. And I have enjoyed getting to know the — very different — work of the two poets featured in Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). I’ve also been quite fortunate to have brief, very helpful correspondence with both translators — Adriana X. Jacobs and Yosefa Raz. Dr. Raz also put me in touch with Anne Kleiman’s daughter, Adina….
Last week, as I struggled with a number of deeply sad local issues, I realized that the looming J6 anniversary — which means something quite different for neighbors of the site — was bringing up more deep feelings, some of which I’d half forgotten I still carried and had no idea how to resolve. In the process, I found myself drawn into this stanza from Anne Kleiman:
Now, just as last year, same season, same melody, same pain… and the day still shrouded in fog and the hand still groping…
— untitled stanza, translated by Yosefa Raz
I looked more closely at the eight untitled stanzas that follow a poem called “To the Musician,” and found myself more and more engaged with the journey the poet describes of loss and grief, through change and compassion, toward acceptance, maybe hope.
“Still Groping”
To explore the Hebrew, I used a Biblical Concordance instead of a dictionary. I was led to verses I know well and verses that were new to me. Along the way, I developed more of an appreciation for how and why Anne Kleiman expressed herself in Hebrew. And I returned again and again to the words that spoke so powerfully to me on the anniversary of J6 — “Now, just as last year, same season…” — each time with the words resonating with more and more biblical background.
While I don’t know when the poem was actually written, I also poked around in a variety of sources to refresh my memory of events and circumstances that would have been current for a Chicago resident around 1947. A few minutes with history can be a reminder that we’re not the first generation to face crises with no easy fix and pressures from many directions. And reading the words of those who struggled under burdens of the past, and still managed to share a few thoughts, can be lightening.
Eventually, I created a page to share sections of Kleiman’s poetry, with Raz’s translations and notes, along with my own annotations. Check out “Hebrew Humpty Dumpty Vision.”
I love the work of Anne Kleiman and the quite different work of Annabelle Farmelant and regularly find myself grateful to them and to their translators. I’m also grateful to Wayne State University Press for making available this and many other important titles. The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, e.g.
Few More Days to Save on Books, BTW
As it happens, there are, as of this writing, a few days left in the annual WSU Press 45% off promotion; academic books are still pricey, but it’s a substantial discount….until Jan 14.
Excited to share news of a new publication, Psalms for Contemplation: Invitation to an Intimate Reading of Selections from 36 Psalms, by Max D. Ticktin (z”l, 1922-2016), edited and introduced by Deborah McCants and Ruth Ticktin. Preface: Rabbi Edward Feld. Poetica Publishing, Dec. 2020.
Video overview of Psalms for Contemplation by Max Ticktin
Three very different approaches, poetically and musically. Three very different explorations of Black and Jewish history and culture. And three very different perspectives on being Black and Jewish to entertain and illuminate as Black History Month comes to a close.
As we head into the season for contemplating “the sacred power of the day” and reciting and singing U-netaneh Tokef, Admiel Kosman’s “Piyyut for Musaf of Rosh Hashanah” and the musical rendition, “Mashiv Haruach,” offer additional perspectives.
An English translation, by Aubrey Glazer, appeared in a 2007 alternative prayer book, Siddur Alternativi l’Shivim v’Edhad shirim v’Shirai Ahava (Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz Hameuchad). Not sure if the Hebrew was published simultaneously or earlier.
Atalya Lavi, cantor and soloist with Beit Tefilah Israeli, composed and recorded “Mashiv Haruach” in 2016. It is part of the congregation’s “Shevarim [broken]” collection of pieces for the high holiday season.
Beit Tefilah Israeli’s “Mashiv Haruach” link includes, along with audio of the musical setting, full Hebrew of Kosman’s poem (credited) and full English (uncredited). Kosman’s Hebrew and Glazer’s English also appear in Machzor Lev Shalem (Rabbinical Assembly, 2010) as a reading/meditation on U-netaneh Tokef.
Many English speakers will also be reminded of Leonard Cohen’s 1974 musical response to U-netaneh Tokef, “Who by Fire.” See, e.g., recent commentary, “Who Shall I Say is Calling,” from cantorial student Gabriel Snyder.
Approaching You in English
As English-speaking Jews prepare to spend so many hours with words, both Hebrew and English, in this holiday season, perhaps Kosman’s “Approaching You in English” will also resonate. In a January 2012 Tablet article, Lisa Katz shares the concluding lines:
Officially You may refuse. I know. I’m
approaching You in English this once.
But, please, be kind,
be attentive to the heart.
Even if it’s pointless,
tasteless. Please accept an offering
from me this time.
I’m pleading with You,
please understand,
don’t be offended,
even if
when I approach
I seem to You
to cross myself
— from “Approaching You in English” by Admiel Kosman Approaching You in English, trans. by Lisa Katz and Shlomit Naim-Naor
Boston: Zephyr Press, 2011.
In her Tablet article, Katz speaks about translation generally and about Kosman’s poetry in particular:
Because I am a translator, I know that for poetry to cross language borders, it must have strong content and brilliant or at least surprising thoughts, not the province of all writers, even the very good ones. To stay at home with honor, poetry must touch a local nerve—be sensitive to both language and current affairs—which is a different thing.
A Talmud and religious-studies scholar now teaching in Berlin, who used to be considered a “religious poet,” Admiel Kosman (10 books, plus one in translation, Approaching You in English, translated in 2011 by me with Shlomit Naim-Naor) crosses most of the heavily guarded borders here, as in the title poem [quoted above].
— Katz, “Beyond Amichai”
In 2008, Katz spoke about Kosman to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs:
Even in Israel, in terms of dominant poetics, Kosman is well-known but marginal, because he uses Jewish sources to confound received thought about Israel & the Jewish religion. Even in Israel, Kosman’s broad, humanist concept of Judaism defeats the assumptions of readers who expect piety from what they believe to be religious poetry.
— Power & Translation: Lisa Katz at AWP
Can You Hear Me This Time?
Katz’s above quoted speech, with many interesting things to say about what poetry gets published in its original language and in translation and why, included this plea: “If there is a publisher out there interested in a witty and political poet who uses Jewish religious texts to make his effects, please contact me.” Three years later, Zephyr put out the bilingual edition quoted above.
Here, for further background, are bits from two reviews of the anthology.
Adriana X. Jacobs in Translation Review:
Approaching You in English offers a selection of poems spanning more than thirty years of Kosman’s oeuvre, which includes nine volumes, from the 1980 publication of And Then the Act of Poetry (Ve-acharei mora’ot ma’ase ha-shir) to the 2012 collection You’re Awesome (Keta’im itkha). But Katz and her co-translator Shlomit Naim-Naor eschew chronology, rearranging the selected poems to create an entirely different order and, in the process, a collection that exists only in English. Readers looking for a timeline of Kosman’s work will be disappointed that the translators neither note the specific collection from which the poems are taken nor date uncollected poems. The lack of a chronological order questions the very efficacy of a selected poems collection. Charting the development of themes, ideas, or style in a poet’s corpus is almost impossible to map without offering readers the possibility of consulting every single poem a poet has written, something that is rarely available in translated volumes. There are a number of reasons for this, but foremost is that translators are often tasked with curating an author’s work for its most “representative” pieces, taking the translatability of a given work into consideration (which is highly contingent on the translator/editor and his or her abilities, interests, and needs).
— Adriana X. Jacobs (2013): Approaching You in English by Admiel Kosman. Translation Review, 85:1, 72-77
E.C. Belli in Words Without Borders:
What this means in practical terms for the poems in this collection is not a reluctance but a downright refusal to be boxed in. The first poem, “What I Can,” an anaphora-based ars poetica, makes it clear from the start: “I can write poems from sand, water and mud./ On the table I’ve written poems/ made of small pieces and crumbs of words”; and later, “I am writing poems now made of potatoes,/ sickly poems,/ ones that wound and tear and do harm, about my childhood about shame/ about rare/ sensitivities and I can write poems for you and brush them off as if nothing/ had ever happened then,/ a series of ornamental poems.”
Kosman’s materials are many. His topics range from writing poems to relationships to sex to women (handled magnificently with what one might call a very gender-light touch, a touching respect) to God to Jewish texts to life in Israel to Israeli-Palestinian politics. He even touches upon language, specifically English, which he takes a few friendly jabs at: “Please, I’m encroaching on Your generosity in English this time”; and later, “Please, won’t You be so kind and understand me this once/ in a broken foreign tongue […] Can You hear me this time? In the language of non-Jews?” (“Approaching You In English”).
— Feb 2012 issue of Words Without Borders
More on Admiel Kosman
Another Kosman poem was translated for this podcast; skip to 5:30 for the poem
Who by Fire?
Leonard Cohen (1934-2016). Lyrics, from the 1974 album “New Skin for the Old Ceremony,” with some interesting commentary at Genius. Dublin 2012 performance on YouTube.
We are about to leave the month of Av — with its mournful cry of “eichah/how?!” — and enter the month of Elul, the final one of the old year. As we make this transition, a few more words about a poem, a poet, and a translator I first encountered during this past year.
The Hebrew poem, “Ka-shir ha-‘olam [The world is like a poem], by the U.S.-based writer, “Annabelle Farmelant, z”l, first appeared in the journal Gilyanot, in 1949, and later in the 1960 Iyyum bodedim (Desert Islands). Here is a 2016 translation by Adriana X. Jacobs:
“The World is Like a Poem”
The world is like a poem
in all its glory,
even in the thick of its aches
terrors and cries
its grandeur is reflected.
Man [ha-adam] enters the world like a wanderer
Like a wanderer man enters the world
and declares that he will roam
always, always.
But how — he asks — just how*
does beauty rule a poem
when a line is erased?
How does splendor** shine
when its form is wiped out?
Man is not in these things
for a poem’s beauty is not in a line
an unnamed [lo-karu] wanderer
in the world’s splendor**
— Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores, p.149
*Eichacha — yisheil — eichacha. “Eichacha” is an unusual form of “how.” The Evan Shoshan Concordance lists 78 occurrences of eich/eichah, plus four instances of “אֵיכָכָה eichachah: two in the Book of Esther and two in Song of Songs.
**”Tifereth” is a feminine word for an attribute of the divine, one right at the center of the Kabbalist tree of life. tiferet ba-olam. splendor in the world. tiferet ha-olam. splendor of the world.
The translation is Jacobs’ (see below), but these footnotes are mine.
Unnamed?
Jacobs often writes about the translator’s role in rendering poetry, generally, and more specifically about the poet-translator’s role in modern Hebrew literature. (See Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018; preview on Google Books; related articles via Academia.edu.)
Farmelant was something of an outlier in Hebrew poetry due to time, gender, and geography. And Jacobs shares some of her process around translating her work in “Hebrew on a Desert Island: The Case of Annabelle Farmelant” (Studies in American Jewish Literature, Volume 34, Number 1, 2015, pp. 154-174 — also available via Academia.edu).
In her introductory remarks in Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores, Jacobs speaks about the poem, “The World is Like a Poem”:
I understood wandering to mean the ways in which a poem circulates through time and place, how it is exchanged between readers, and also how it travels in and through translation….
But in what way is the poem “unnamed”? I thought of how translating a poem simultaneously assumes and undermines the poet’s authority by replacing her textual voice with my own but at the same time acknowledges that whatever origins the original text could claim — the influences and materials that brought it into being — can no longer be claimed….
— Jacobs, p.103
I read the line she is discussing differently, however. Perhaps because I have quite a few years on Jacobs, or maybe because I spent an evening this past week at an event highlighted by GoGo performers known as “Uncalled 4 Band.”
Unnamed? Uninvited? “Uncalled 4”?
As with my reading of Farmelant’s “Skyscraper,” I suspect that our different takes are probably colored by our age (I have decades on Jacobs, although I am quite a bit younger than Farmelant was). For someone who grew up female in the middle of the 20th Century reading “lo-karu” as “not invited” makes a great deal of sense.
The penultimate line of the poem in Hebrew —
והוא הלך לא-קרוא
is translated by Jacobs as “an unnamed wanderer.”
But קרוא can also has the meaning of “called, summoned, invited.” We were so often not unwanted in, even prohibited from, physical and intellectual spaces back then. So, I thought that, like the wandering earthling [ha-adam], the poem is trying to manage in a world which really hasn’t room for it, whose beauty is so easily erased:
??”And he walks uninvited — or uncalled for — in the world’s splendor.”??
Elul and the World Like a Poem
As we enter the month of Elul, our language shifts from “how!?” to more specific seeking as we prepare for the new year and begin reciting Psalm 27 through the season of repentance and return:
One thing I ask YHVH, only that do I seek:
to live in the house of YHVH all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of YHVH to frequent God’s temple.
…In Your behalf my heart says: “Seek My face!”
O LORD, I seek Your face.
— Psalm 27:4, 8
Farmelant’s poem includes that “how?!” — how, he asks, will this work? — but also offers some thoughts about one’s place in the world, a world of splendor, even “in the thick of its aches, terrors and cries.”
With gratitude to Jacobs for making Farmelant accessible…like many readers of Hebrew in translation, I can puzzle out words here and there, recognize biblical and rabbinic allusions, but I would find a whole volume of Hebrew poetry formidable…and for so many ideas about Hebrew literature more generally.
And in memory of Annabelle (Chana) Farmelant, who died shortly after I last wrote about her poetry for Shavuot and whom I find myself missing, though I never had the opportunity to meet her.
NOTES
Translations by Adriana X. Jacobs, Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). See also: information on Farmelant, including an article on her work by Jacobs.
In 1960, Annabelle Farmelant, z”l, a U.S.-based writer, who was living at the time in Israel, published a book of Hebrew verse called Iyyum bodedim (Desert Islands). A second volume, Pirchei zehut (Flowers of Identity), was released in 1961. Shortly afterward Farmelant returned to the U.S. and abandoned the writing of poetry in any language; she lived in New York City until her passing, on June 14, 2019, at age 93. In 2016, Adriana X. Jacobs published translations of her poems in Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). BACK
“What does it mean to be authentic?” asked a younger Israeli poet of Iraqi heritage, Almog Behar:
To write poems about Erez Bitton
And hope that one day I’ll run down Dizengoff, shouting Ana min Baghdad, ana min Baghdad
[I am from Baghdad, I am from Baghdad]
— “Homer of Lod: The Indespensibility of Erez Bitton,”
Matti Friedman, Jewish Review of Books Spring 2017
What do you mean to be authentic?
To run along Dizengoff Street, shouing:
“Ana min al-Maghrib. Ana min al-Maghrib.”
[“I am from the Atlas Mountains”]
— Erez Biton. “Summary of a Conversation” (2009)
IN You Who Crossed My Path (2015 Hebrew-English collection)
Poet Erez Biton (also spelled: Bitton), won The Israel Prize in Literature in 2015. He was the first Mizrachi winner in the history of the prize, which was first awarded in 1953.
In 2016, Biton headed a committee that produced a number of recommendations for increasing content about Mizrachi Jews in Israeli school curricula (NIF story; Ynet story). Recommendations include teaching the poetry of Keissar, Roy Hasan, and others.
“Hebrew Poetry: Idiosyncratic Resources,” posted in January 2019, included some notes on Medieval Hebrew and Africana poetry as well as a link to a set of resource pages. Since then, that Poetry Resources page has been expanded and now includes Mizrachi poets Shimon Adaf, Maya Bejerano, and Ronny Someck, as well as those mentioned/linked above. Some of the resources cited are in print, but many are also available on-line and free-of-charge.
…Also related to “authentic” topic in Jewish poetry, although neither Israeli nor written in Hebrew: Sephardic Jew Vanessa Hidary’s The Last Kaiser Roll in the Bodega.
Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores brings us the work of two quite different poets: Anne Kleiman (1909-2011) and Annabelle Farmelant (b. circa 1926). A few weeks ago, I shared a little about Kleiman and her poetry (see Lake Michigan as Hebrew Landscape). Here are some thoughts about Farmelant (brief bio below).
Rambling with Rachel
In a 1926 piece called “Niv” — translated by Shirley Kaufman as “A Way of Speaking” — Rachel (Bluwstein, 1890-1931) compares “fancy ways to speak, endless and elegant…mincing down the street,” with speech that is “as innocent as a baby, as modest as dust.” The former she knows, but it’s the latter she prefers. See The Defiant Muse (full citation below; preview, including this poem, Hebrew/English, at Google Books.)
In Farmelant’s, “Flowers of Identity,” from the 1961 collection of the same name, the speaker forgets “niv ha-tefilah [the prayer’s idiom]” on a morning ramble. A footnote in on American Shores explains how translator Adriana X. Jacobs rendered the phrase so as to preserve the link with Rachel’s poem; more about the connection:
Rachel’s poem rejects the maximalist poetics of her (male) contemporaries and celebrates the modesty and simplicity of her niv, or poetic idiom, over the ornamental and densely allusive that early twentieth-century Hebrew poetry had inherited from the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. –Jacobs, Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores, p. 222
Additional notes explain specific prayer references as well as the dual meaning of the ramble’s location: “siach” is both “bush” and “conversation.”
The translation of “Flowers of Identity” can be read, on its own, as reflections on formal and informal prayer: “My neighbor left his tefillin behind/ And wrapped a garland around his head/ Intoxicated by their ripe scent/ Even my senses roamed…A foreign prayer/ From dawn to dusk.” But the notes add layers for the non-Hebrew reader and/or one unfamiliar with Rachel’s “Niv“: Farmelant’s “ramble” and the “mincing” steps of Rachel’s poem, for example, and the simpler speech preferred in “Niv” and the [ramble] לַשׂוּחַ and [plant; conversation] לְשִׂיחַ of “Flowers of Identity.”
Depths of Reflection
Farmelant’s poem “Skyscraper [Gored Shechakim],” from the 1960 collection Desert Islands,” appears in Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores and in Jacobs’ 2015 article, “Hebrew on a Desert Island,” which offers an overview of Farmelant’s work and Jacobs’ experience in translating:
Child, the plaza is flat./ Take care, the slope sets/
before you, the sky, immense….Descend up./ Spaceman
(Full poem and a link to the article below.)
unattributed, public domain photo, labeled: “buildings, city, man, reflection”
In her article, Jacobs discusses the challenges of navigating between “American Hebrew” and “Israeli Hebrew,” using as an example differing conceptions of “skyscraper” in the U.S. and Israel in 1960. (Remember: long before Israel started to build “up,” Boston’s Custom House Tower had been around for decades, and skyscrapers had long been a defining part of the U.S. landscape.) She concludes:
In this poem, the speaker experiences the reflection of the sky on the plaza as both a doubling effect and a fata morgana. The reflection of the sky is both literal but also transformative, and it is in this context that the ungrammatical command “descend up” takes effect and makes any sense. In moving between American and Israeli Hebrew, moments of (mis)perception have proven to be comparably generative.
Jacobs’ article discusses, in some detail, Farmelant’s exposure to Hebrew language, and the relationship of her career to wider issues between U.S.- and Israel-based Hebrew writers. The article, as well as end notes in Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores, also highlight issues in gender and gender politics relevant to Farmelant’s work and its reception. Despite the paucity of previous material and Jacobs finding Farmelant “entirely estranged from her poetry” (on American Shores, p. 104), a picture of the poet and her literary milieu emerges. The poet’s relationship to Judaism and Jewish text, however, remains more of a cipher….
Do we know enough about her background to say, for example : When Farmelant warns, “You will be like Adam [Adam ha-Rishon], scraping the whole sky,” is she referencing Talmudic legend? And is that odd locution of “descending up [תַּעֲמִיק מֵעָל]” meant to carry overtones of the sin that diminishes Adam in these legends, while also making him truly human?
R. Eleazar said: The first man reached from earth to heaven…But when he sinned, the Holy One, blessed be He, laid His hand upon him and diminished him…”
B. Sanhedrin 38b; other legends speak of his size, East to West
Also wondering in this context if the “הוּא” (which can be “he” or masculine “it”) in “תְּכַסֵּהוּ, הוּא עֵירֹם [It’s naked. Cover it.]” — might, then, refer to Adam? So, more like “Cover him, he’s naked.”??
Knowing a little more about her Jewish background, beyond linguistics, might help place some of her images. Meanwhile…
The First, Giant, Adam’s Fall?
When I first met this poem, it reminded me of the many hours I have spent — as a child and later, too — gazing into puddles, speculating on life in “the upside down world.” And, as with some of the Kleiman poems that reminded me of Chicago, I loved the connection, in Hebrew, to my U.S. city life. (I know rural places have puddles, but they don’t have upside down apartment buildings and skyscrapers.)
After reading Jacobs’ article, about struggling with the mirages in Farmelant’s writing, I developed another kind of appreciation for those reflections. And now, after more time with this poem, and with the rest of Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores, I am wondering if “Skyscraper” is talking about all the space that man took up in 1961.
So much of her writing itself — and her attempt to carve out a literary career — surrounds the difficulties women experience(d) just trying to take up space: on the sidewalk, in the home, in the workplace, and, most particularly, in any world of “ideas.” Farmelant and I are not the same age, but this, too, is an experience we shared.
As noted in a previous post, I recommend the TLV1 podcast from Marcela Sulak, discussing and reading some of Farmelant’s work. And I repeat my recommendation for getting hold of this volume of poetry. Once you meet these American Hebrew poets, you might discover that your horizon has been a mirage.
NOTES
Annabelle (Chana Biala) Farmelant was born in Boston and has, with the exception of a few years in Israel in the early 1950s, spent most of her life on the east coast of the U.S. Prior to studying at Hebrew College in Boston, she attended local public schools as well as the high school program of Hebrew College. She wrote Hebrew poetry in college and for some years afterward but then focused on writing plays. [UPDATE 8/30/19: Farmelant died in New York City on June 14, 2019 and was buried in Boston.]
See introductory material in Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shore and “Hebrew on a Desert Island: The Case of Annabelle Farmelant,” by Adriana X. Jacobs, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Volume 34, Number 1, 2015. Download full text here: Hebrew on a Desert Island,
Bibliography: Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016.
Shachar Pinsker, professor of Hebrew literature and culture at the University of Michigan, editor. Introduction: “Meager Gifts” from “Desert Islands” American-Born Women and Hebrew Poetry.
Translators: Yosefa Raz, for Anne Kleiman. Adriana X. Jacobs, for Annabelle Farmelant. Each offers notes and a preface.
The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present, a Bilingual Anthology. Edited and introduced by Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Bokem, and Tamar S. Hess. Foreword by Alicia Suskin Ostriker. NY: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1999.
Poems borrowed from Adriana X. Jacobs, “Hebrew on a Desert Island: The Case of Annabelle Farmelant.” Originally in Studies in American Jewish Literature, Volume 34, Number 1, 2015. Download link: Hebrew on a Desert Island
SKYSCRAPER Child, the plaza is flat. Take care, the slope sets before you, the sky, immense. It’s naked. Cover it. You will be a man, like Adam you will scrape the whole sky. Slowly, child, the sea is deep. Descend up. Spaceman. — (c) Adriana X. Jacobs, 2015
Instructions for crafting a place for God to dwell include a pair of hammered-work creatures, with upward spreading wings, facing one another above the cover of the Ark. Between the two sculptured figures is where God promises to meet Moses to deliver further Revelation (Exodus 25:10-22, in parashat Terumah: Ex 25:1-27:19). The imagery is intriguing, if disconcerting: too close to forbidden graven images, too similar to idols of neighboring ancient cultures, and, ultimately, too erotic for prime time. But I’ve I recently learned some new perspectives on the hammered-work creatures and, more generally, the way religious imagery can work for us or not.
Al gedot hamishigan tz’i lach…
Go forth to the banks of Lake Michigan
and skip among the rocks…
the waves will lash
and scatter at your feet.
…drenched in the smell of lakes,
lean your dew-fresh hand on my forehead…
and my soul will rest.
— “My Longings,” by Anne Kleiman, translated by Yosefa Raz
On this snowy day, far from Chicago, I open a new book — found in search for something else, ordered largely because it was on sale, without particular expectations or knowing thing-one about these poets — and through it, a strange woman is telling me in Hebrew that the same light touches us both, as we look out our separate windows, and that the prospect of peace awaits on Lake Michigan’s rocky shore.
How is this poet speaking straight to me? Here are just a few of the ways:
Set in Chicago. (My first hometown).
Composed in Hebrew. (A language I am still learning but already love).
By a woman addressing a female friend. (Thus, speaking to me in a way that so much fails to do).
In dialogue with ancient text and classic Hebrew poetry. (Some of my favorite topics.) In fact, reworking a poem our study group read not too long ago.
Referencing the Song of the Sea — from this week’s Torah portion, itself a favorite and also our daughter’s bat mitzvah portion, a decade-plus ago.
Enhanced by nerdy endnotes…
Leandro Neumann Ciuffo [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
The material in Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores, is itself unlikely in some ways. The introduction, by Shachar Pinsker, touches on many forces working against the material’s creation and publication. Its authors were women educated in a system designed by and for men. They’re U.S.-born in a field focused on Israel and a culture centered in Europe and the Land. And, most fundamentally, they write in a gendered language and a tradition that made it difficult for women to “express themselves poetically as the subjects rather than the objects of masculine desire, a metonymy for the nation, or a projection of masculine self-images” (Pinsker, p.7).
The very structures which gave “American women Hebrew education and access to its riches were also precluding them from writing and especially from publishing Hebrew poetry” (pp.5-6). And “when a work was finally published,” there was no guarantee that “it was received and understood properly” in its day or accessible to later readers and scholars.
Kleiman’s Longings
Anne (Chana) Kleiman (1909-2011 — yes, she lived to 101) was born to Russian immigrants in St. Joseph, Missouri. According to Pinsker’s introduction, Kleiman received an extensive Jewish education before moving to Chicago at the age of 19. There, she studied at the College of Jewish Studies (instruction in Hebrew), and at the University of Chicago (in English). She later worked as a Jewish educator and remained active in adult Jewish education after retirement. Her Hebrew poetry appeared in the 1940s.
In her translator’s preface, Yosefa Raz speculates that existing Hebrew literature formed for Kleiman a “made-up Hebrew landscape (which could include Lake Michigan!), beyond which the words [of her poems] could not travel” (p.18). Raz also describes the challenge of what the poet’s daughter calls “Sabbath Hebrew,” a fancy, heavily inter-textual language.
“My Longings” was originally published in the 1947 collection Netafim[Droplets]. It appears in Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016).
In “My Longings,” Kleiman alludes to Exodus, Kabbalat Shabbat, and some images from H.N. Bialik. She also turns Leah Goldberg’s “The Love of Theresa de Meun” on its head: where Goldberg’s 16th Century French noblewoman experiences unrequited longing for her children’s male tutor, Kleiman’s female Chicagoan treats a meeting with “my sister” — part Sabbath bride, part woman of damp skirts — as possible, perhaps imminent.
Raz calls “My Longings” her favorite poem:
…[it] mixes language from Isaiah, Bialik, and Goldberg is able to strike a balance between the prophetic and the lyrical, imagining sharing a blessing of “light beams” with her female interlocutor, who can also “slake [her] thirst with their radiance.” Thus the poet rewrites the traditional language of the shekhinah, filtered though Bialik’s erotic address to a female lover, into a poem of female friendship.
— Yosefa Raz, “Translator’s Preface,” p.20
Tichnor Brothers, Publisher [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Less Traveled Territory
There is so much to explore in this less traveled corner of U.S.-born Hebrew poetry. Beyond these particular poets and their work are wider topics, including the way non-Israeli Hebrew poets view their relationship — or lack thereof — to the Land.
I have not spent much time with the work of Annabelle (Chana) Farmelant (1926-2019) yet, but it appears to be quite different from Kleiman’s. Marcela Sulak, who translated Orit Gidali’s Twenty Girls to Envy Me, discusses and reads some of Farmelant’s work in this TLV1 podcast.
Kleiman herself employs a variety of styles and covers a wide range of topics. Only two of her poems in this volume explicitly touch on Lake Michigan. These have a special resonance for readers who’ve lived somewhere around the lake. But it’s also interesting to consider what “To Lake Michigan,” the second poem referencing Chicago’s lake, might say about Rachel and her poems to the Galilee or what it means to have this Midwestern body of water as “l’megaleh razi ‘ad [my revealer of eternal mysteries].”
After all, I myself, spent just a few days on the shores
of Lake Kinneret, AKA the Sea of Galilee,
while it was Lake Michigan —
sometimes as apparently motionless as glass,
sometimes roiling with white caps,
either way, with opposite shores as invisible as any sea’s
— which witnessed years of my longings,
like the woman’s in this poem,
twin desires
to break free and
be at rest.
There’s a special kind of poetry in hearing the facts of one’s hometown expressed in the language of one’s prayers. Al gedot hamishigan.
NOTE: Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016.
Shachar Pinsker, professor of Hebrew literature and culture at the University of Michigan, editor.
Introduction: “Meager Gifts” from “Desert Islands” American-Born Women and Hebrew Poetry.
Translators:
Yosefa Raz, for Anne Kleiman. Adriana X. Jacobs, for Annabelle Farmelant.
Each offers notes and a preface. BACK
In postscript to “Thirty on Psalm 30,” here are some related words from R. Aviva Richman, faculty of Hadar. Meant as a teaching for Chanukah, this strikes me as just as applicable to beginning a new calendar year or, indeed, to starting any new day:
The work of hanukat habayit [dedication of the house], then, takes place in multiple spheres—in our homes, in our communal structures, and in our own bodies independent of any particular larger structure. Any narrow focus on one of these aspects of hanukat habayit to the exclusion of others will necessarily leave gaps—some people will not be able to fully participate in the critical transformation that is Hanukkah if we neglect any of these modes.
— “Communal and Private (Re)dedication“
Richman goes on to urge that we work “within all of these sites of rededication, to create homes, communal structures, and selves where brokenness is allowed to be visible and can be transformed into rejuventation and healing.”
The idea of allowing brokenness to show and become rejuvenated also reminds me of the Marge Piercy poem, “The task never completed”:
No task is ever completed,
only abandoned or pressed into use.
Tinkering can be a form of prayer.
…
Each night sleep unravels me into wool,
then into sheep and wolf. Walls and fire
pass through me. I birth stones.
Every dawn I stumble from the roaring
vat of dreams and make myself up
remembering and forgetting by halves.
Every dawn I choose to take a knife
to the world’s flank or a sewing kit,
rough improvisation, but a start.
— from The Art of Blessing the Day (NY: Knopf, 1999)
This poem, like Psalm 30 in its position in the morning liturgy, knows that making a truly fresh, joyful start involves acknowledging that weeping spent the night. (Re)dedicating the house — in multiple spheres — requires knowing where a knife or a sewing kit is needed.
"A Song Every Day" 