'Forgetting How They Died'

In With Everything We’ve Got: A Personal Anthology of Yiddish Poetry (Host Publications, 2009), Richard J. Fein translates into English work by sixteen poets, some of whom are well-known – Mani Leyb, Jacob Glatstein and Abraham Sutzever. The Yiddish versions are on the facing pages. Sprinkled among them are a selection of Fein’s own poems in English, much in the mode of Walt Whitman, who supplies the collection’s epigraph. They are prosy and only marginally poetic but one of them, “For Three Killed by Stalin,” is a touching remembrance that reflects on how we read:

“I think of Bergelson groveling, pleading at the trial, then shot by a firing squad on his sixty-eighth birthday;

“of Mandelstam freezing, psychotic, with ‘paralysis of the heart’ in the gulag;

“of Babel spilling his guts about spying, terrorism, parasitism in the interrogation chambers of Lubyanka.

“I think of them far from their novels, poems and stories, far from their faces on the covers of their books;

“holding onto another prisoner, who feeds them, helps them walk, listens. But maybe none of this happened and they were alone.

“I don’t want to read about Mirele walking to the outskirts of a shtetl; about foreign embassies and gulls shining along the Neva; I don’t want to read about a boy and the docks of Odessa.

“I think of Bergelson, Mandelstam and Babel reduced to madness, fear and hunger, curled up and mumbling to themselves in their bunks.

“Then I read them again, forgetting how they died.”

Those familiar with the life and work of the three Soviet writers will understand Fein’s allusions. David Bergelson, who wrote in Yiddish, is probably the least familiar to English readers. Mirele Hurvits is the protagonist of his novel The End of Everything (Yiddish, 1913; trans. Joseph Sherman, Yale University Press, 2009). Bergelson was among the thirteen Jews murdered in the Lubyanka on Aug. 12, 1952, the “Night of the Murdered Poets.” The phrase about the Neva refers to Osip Mandelstam (d. 1938) and the one about Odessa alludes to Isaac Babel (d. 1940).

The final three stanzas are the interesting part and pose the dilemma many of us experience when reading the work of martyred writers. The temptation is to compromise critical standards and indulge in sentimentality by inflating claims for inferior work. The last line articulates as good an answer as we’re likely to get. Good writing trumps human interest. When absorbed in the words of Bergelson, Mandelstam and Babel, I forget their fates, until I stop reading.