Moyshe-Leyb Halpern was born in Zlochov, Galicia, in 1886. After studying in cheder, aged 12 he was sent by his father to study sign-painting in Vienna. He became, to quote another of his translators, Kathryn Hellerstein, “a brilliant visual artist”. The vividness of Halpern’s poetic imagery supports Hellerstein’s assertion. After attending the famous Czernowitz Yiddish language conference in 1908, Halpern headed for New York. Ruth Wisse, the great Yiddish scholar, has claimed he was dodging the draft.
Halpern’s first collection, In New York, was published in 1919. The Golden Peacock and a posthumous 1934 collection (Halpern died in 1932) were to follow. These were sufficient to establish him as one of the most important and original voices in Yiddish poetry. Indeed, the doyen of American literary criticism, Harold Bloom, remarked that he was a more impressive poet than any American-Jewish poet who has written in English.
Richard Fein’s excellent selection, in parallel Yiddish-English texts, bears that out. Halpern was a maverick, “one of the most cantankerous Yiddish poets”, according to Lawrence Rosenwald in his introduction to Fein’s translations. Much of Halpern’s poetry is acerbic: “let my speech be disgusting, like a dead cat in the garbage”, he shouts defiantly.
But, to quote Wisse, “Halpern was the first to adopt the spoken (Yiddish) idiom, challenging readers to recognise it as poetry”. The eminent critic Shmuel Nigger found Halpern’s crudeness offensive. “The very decorative surface of a poem is like an overly ornate ark of the synagogue. You become so impressed with the decorations that you overlook the scrolls of the law inside. So I opened the doors a bit,” Halpern responded. Indeed, beneath the vulgarity lay a poet of deep sensitivity and integrity. His aim was to strip away the varnish of falsehood to uncover a truth often more ugly than beautiful.
In the Light of a Lamp, for instance, bleakly subverts the tradition of Jewish lament poetry that celebrates the greatness of Jews in suffering by overturning the comfort of religious ritual invocations. It concludes: “It reminds us of nothing – eternal nothing/that waits on us everywhere in the dark.”
But Halpern was also capable of Keatsian lyrical beauty: “Even the darkness is a song/it grows like a forest that rises/with the trees toward the heavens/and its sadness runs like molten gold/over everything that ought to be eternal,” he writes in Zarkhi, Zarkhi!
Fein’s translations are faithful to the Yiddish originals though other translators can come closer to Halpern’s spirit.
“Tsu vet men dos glaybn, Moyshe-Leybn” from Memento Mori works better in Benjamin Harshav’s translation,
“Will they believe what you describe, Moyshe-Leybn” (in A Century of American Yiddish Poetry) than in Fein’s prosaic “Will anybody believe Moyshe Leybn”.
Nonetheless, this is a book anyone with an interest in Yiddish culture, or simply first-class poetry, should buy.
Zlochov, My Home: Poems by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern
Translated by Richard Fein
Suny Press
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