לקט יי דישע שטודיעס ה נט. Jiddistik heute Yiddish Studies Today

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1 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס ה נט Jiddistik heute Yiddish Studies Today

2 Jiddistik Edition & Forschung Yiddish Editions & Research יי דיש אויסגא בעס און א רשונג ISBN לקט Der vorliegende Sammelband eröffnet eine neue Reihe wissenschaftlicher Studien zur Jiddistik sowie philologischer Editionen und Studienausgaben jiddischer Literatur. Jiddisch, Englisch und Deutsch stehen als Publikationssprachen gleichberechtigt nebeneinander. Leket erscheint anlässlich des xv. Sym posiums für Jiddische Studien in Deutschland, ein im Jahre 1998 von Erika Timm und Marion Aptroot als für das in Deutschland noch junge Fach Jiddistik und dessen interdisziplinären Umfeld ins Leben gerufenes Forum. Die im Band versammelten 32 Essays zur jiddischen Literatur-, Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft von Autoren aus Europa, den usa, Kanada und Israel vermitteln ein Bild von der Lebendigkeit und Vielfalt jiddistischer Forschung heute

3 יי דיש אויסגא בעס און א רשונג Jiddistik Edition & Forschung Yiddish Editions & Research Herausgegeben von Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka und Simon Neuberg Band 1

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5 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט Jiddistik heute Yiddish Studies Today Herausgegeben von Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka und Simon Neuberg

6 Yidish : oysgabes un forshung Jiddistik : Edition & Forschung Yiddish : Editions & Research Herausgegeben von Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka und Simon Neuberg Band 1 Leket : yidishe shtudyes haynt Leket : Jiddistik heute Leket : Yiddish Studies Today Bibliografijische Information Der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografijie ; detaillierte bibliografijische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. düsseldorf university press, Düsseldorf 2012 Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlags unzulässig. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfijilmungen und die Einspeicherung in elektronische Systeme. Typografijie, Satz, Umschlag : Efrat Gal-Ed Druck und Bindung : Druckerei C. H. Beck, Nördlingen Hauptschriften : Brill, Hadassah EF Papier : 100 g / m 2 Geese-Spezial-Offfset ISBN ISSN URN urn:nbn:de:hbz: Printed in Germany

7 Jefffrey A. Grossman The Invention of Love? Or How Moyshe Leyb Halpern Read Heinrich Heine Introduction : Star-Crossed Lovers Heinrich Heine and Moyshe Leyb Halpern In 1918, the publisher Farlag Yidish produced an eight-volume edition of, די ווערק ון הײ נריך הײ נע אין א כט בענד 1 translated by a list of Yiddish writers that included Y. L. Perets, H. N. Bialik, D. Frishman, D. Edelshtat, Avrom Reyzen, Reuven Ayzland, Y. Y. Shvarts, Y. Rolnik, Mani Leyb, Moyshe Leyb Halpern, and other lesser-known writers that is, a list numbering some of the most important Yiddish writers of the time. Although two worked primarily in Hebrew ( Bialik, Frishman ), the list also includes the most avant-garde of the three classical writers ( Peretz ), a Sweatshop Poet ( Edelshtat ), and especially a range of writers associated with the American-based movement די יונגע ( The Young Ones or Young Generation ). Indeed, the scope of this project, together with the involvement of such writers, makes the Heine edition into a veritable event in Yiddish literature, one that clearly attests to his importance especially, though not solely, in the American context. Yet it also prompts the question of how one is to account, more generally, for Heine s presence in Yiddish literature a question that invites various responses in terms, for instance, of how Heine was translated, of book publishing, production, and distribution, of audience and reception, of literary influence. Within the space of this essay, I seek to delimit the question by focusing on one poet for whom Heine played a central role and who translated various of his works : Moyshe Leyb Halpern ( ). Specifijically, this essay argues that Halpern s own reading and translation of Heine led to a creative appropriation that constitutes a key moment in his own development as a writer. In particular, this analysis argues that that relationship, somewhat unexpectedly, plays a key role in a poetic shift that, as Chana Kronfeld has shown, Halpern initiated. 2 Halpern moved from the initial poetic in- For their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay, I would like to thank David Roskies, Jeremy Dauber, and Walter Grünzweig. 1 Heine Kronfeld 1996 :

8 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט 130 novations of די יונגע who, in their attempt to broaden the forms of Yiddish poetry, introduced a stronger sense of individual subjectivity and pushed the Yiddish language to new levels of emotional depth and complexity to a new level of irony and self-reflectivity, and to a new conception of poetry s relationship to the world. This new conception found its strongest expression in the poets associated with the movement and journal known as אין זיך ( literally, Within Oneself ) and the circle of poets often referred to as אינזיכיסטן or Introspectivists, but Halpern initiated the shift. Halpern s own centrality in modern Yiddish poetry means, in turn, that the complexly positioned fijigure of Heinrich Heine cosmopolitan, Jewish apostate ( but publicly identifijied as a Jew ), exile in France, provocateur, Saint Simonian celebrator of the flesh and its liberation, political critic, consort of Lasalle, Marx and Engels also ultimately played a central role in modern Yiddish literature. To be sure, Halpern is represented in די ווערק ון הײ נריך הײ נע with only one translation, his version of Deutschland, ein Wintermär chen. 3 But he also helped pave the way for this edition with the series of translations he published ( under the pseudonym Hel-Pen ) in the New Yorkbased satirical journal דער גרויסער קונדעס ( The Big Stick or The Big Prankster ) in 1913, including, besides Deutschland, selections from Buch der Lieder, the Neue Gedichte, Atta Troll, Das Sklavenschifff and Der Apollogott. 4 Indeed, די ווערק ון הײ נריך הײ נע needs to be seen not as the endpoint of Heine translation in Yiddish, but as a pinnacle within a continuum : this continuum includes, e. g., Bialik s translation of Prinzessin Sabbat, reprinted in this collection, but fijirst published in Russia in 1907, as part of a protest against a law that would require Jews to close their businesses on Sundays ; 5 at least two earlier versions of Heine s anti-religious poem Disputazion, the third of his Hebräische Melodien ( 1851 ), which, in satirizing this medieval institution, set in this case in Spain, targets both rabbi and monk, and ends with the declaration that alle beide stinken ; 6 a selection of Heine s works translated by one Leon in New York in 1909 ; Zalman Reyzen s translation of Die 3 Heine 1918 ( viii. 2 ) : ; Reuven Ayzland translated much of the prose, including Der Rabbi von Bacherach and Die Reisbilder, as well as the epic poem Atta Troll, while Avrom Reyzen, Zishe Landoy, Mani Leyb, Liliput, and Naftali Gros translated much of the lyric poetry. 4 Heine 1913 a : 5 ( 5 ) : 7 ; 1913 b : 5 ( 12 ) : 7 ; 1913 c : 5 ( 14 ) : 7 ; 1913 d ; 1913 e : 5 ( 20 ) : 7 ; 1913 f : 5 ( 21 ) : 7, 5 ( 22 ) : 7, 5 ( 23 ) : 7, 5 ( 24 ) : 7, 5 ( 25 ) : 7, 5 ( 26 ) : 7, 5 ( 27 ) : 7, 5 ( 29 ) : 7, 5 ( 30 ) : 7, 5 ( 31 ) : 7, 5 ( 32 ) : 7, 5 ( 33 ) : 7, 5 ( 34 ) : 7, 5 ( 35 ) : 7 ; 1913 g : 5 ( 43 ) : 9, 5 ( 44 ) : 7 ; 1913 h : 5 ( 45 ) : 7 ; 1913 i : 5 ( 46 ) : 7, 5 ( 47 ) : 7 ; 1913 j : 5 ( 48 ) : 7, 5 ( 49 ) : 7 ; 1913 k : 5 ( 49 ) : 7. 5 Shmeruk 1988 : Heine ( iii. 2 ) : 172 ( hereafter abbreviated to dha ) ; Sol Liptzin discusses Shimen Frug s softening of the dispute in his version of the poem ; Liptzin 1992 : 69 f.

9 Jefffrey A. Grossman : The Invention of Love? 131 Harzreise ( Warsaw, 1911 ) ; B. Shimin s version of Der Rabbi von Bacherach ( New York, 1913 ) ; a one-volume edition ( 160 pages ) calling itself Heine s ( געזא מלטע שרי טן 1915 ) ; collections of the lyric poetry translated by S. J. Imber ( Vienna, 1920 ) and Ezra Korman ( Kiev, 1929 ) ; and a 1936 translation of Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen, published in Moscow. 7 All of this raises the question of what drove the enthusiasm for Heine, an enthusiasm often cited but only rarely explored in any detail. 8 The obvious answer is that Heine was internationally the mostly highly regarded and visible European writer of Jewish extraction and hence acquired eo ipso the status of literary model. 9 Indeed, the introduction to the 1918 Heine edition would seem to confijirm this view when its author, Socialist-Zionist Nahman Syrkin, argues that despite his baptism Heine is at the root of his soul Jewish, exclusively Jewish. 10 This claim, to be sure, runs up against Heine s own writing and actions his immersion in German and European culture and society, his complex relationship to Jews and Judaism, as well as his conflicted set of afffijiliations personal, ideological, and otherwise. 11 Yet, this claim also shows, those seeking to promote Heine in Yiddish as model Jewish writer had little trouble dispensing with such inconvenient details as Heine s apostasy or conflicting cultural afffijiliations. Still, whatever purposes it may have served ideological, rehabilitatory, and so on Syrkin s account ultimately remains unsatisfactory. It does so because it fails to explain specifijically what Yiddish writers as writers responded to in Heine s work ; what, for instance, about Heine mattered for them in terms of poetics and cultural repertoire of language, form, meter, style, use of metaphor and irony, or motifs and cultural references. By focusing on the specifijic case of Moyshe Leyb Halpern, I hope to begin a mapping of this response. To be sure, as the 1918 edition suggests, others responded in signifijicant ways to Heine, however provisionally This list draws in part on the bibliography compiled by Amy Blau in her dissertation, Afterlives : Translations of German Weltliteratur into Yiddish ; Blau 2005 : 294 f. 8 Detailed treatments include : Shmeruk 1988 ; Liptzin 1992 ; Levinson 2008 : ; Pareigis 2008, focusing specifijically on the translation of Heine s Hebräische Meolodien in the 1918 Yiddish edition ; Gruschka On Heine and Halpern, see : Steinberg 1930 : 205 f ; Greenberg 1942 : 17 ; Hellerstein 1980 : ; Wisse 1988 : 76, Liptzin 1992 : 67.. הײ נע איז אין דעם שורש ון זײ ן נשמה יי דיש, אויסשליסלעך יי דיש,8 : ) i 10 Syrkin 1918 ( 11 There is a minor industry focused on the question of Heine and Judaism/Jewish culture. One can begin to gain a sense of the debates if one consults the following : Rosenthal 1973 ; Robertson 1988 ; Gelber 1992 ; Holub 2002 ; Briegleb Besides Perets and Edelstadt, whose poem מײ ן צווא ה ( My Last Will and Testament ) recast Heine s paean to Napoleon as liberator, Die Grenadiere, as an international working-class protest song, Sol Liptzin notes, for instance, Sh. Frug and Sweatshop Poet Joseph Bovshover ; from די יונגע he cites only Moyshe Nadir, who, Liptzin claims, learned from Heine Weltschmerz, sweet melancholy, and sentimental love for all mankind, as well as

10 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט 132 Yet Halpern represents an especially important case, both because of his peculiar relationship to Heine and because of his unique position in Yiddish literature. Halpern s response went beyond a question of mere influence or emulation, and seems to have consisted in a personal, even uncanny afffijinity. In ( יונג א מעריקע 1917 ), his critical essays on writers associated with יונגע,די Noah Steinberg stresses that Halpern, who knew Heine by heart and quoted him at every opportunity, learned much about poetry ( perhaps too much, in Steinberg s view ) from Heine. 13 Eliezer Greenberg further suggests how this afffijiliation operated at the afffective level, suggesting that Halpern ( and Morris Rosenfeld ) had Heine in their blood ( אין זייער בלוט ), something expressed in their ). בײ סיקייט און היציקן טעמפּערא מענט ( temperaments biting tones and hot Later critics, like Ruth Wisse and Kathryn Hellerstein, similarly suggest Heine s importance for Halpern. 14 Additionally, as noted above Halpern s sometime association with די יונגע notwithstanding he occupies a transitional position in modern Yiddish poetry : something that makes Halpern s attachment to Heine, likewise a transitional fijigure in nineteenth-century German literature, all the more signifijicant. It suggests that one key to tracing Heine s impact on Yiddish consists of tracing his impact on Halpern. Or, in asking : What did Moyshe Leyb Halpern learn from Heine? In the following, I will seek to show that Halpern s relationship to Heine operates on two levels he exerted on Halpern a personal pull ( the uncanny afffijinity ) and he served for Halpern as a model to respond to and indeed to appropriate from productively. It is almost as if something about Heine beyond the printed word might inform and shape Halpern s writing and relationship to poetry, and that something also fijinds expression elsewhere in Halpern s life. To make this case, however, we must fijirst briefly consider the fijigure and poetry of Heinrich Heine. Excursus on H. Heine Until three decades ago, Heinrich Heine who was born Harry and who always signed his name to his works as H. Heine was one of the most controversial fijigures in German literature, a status he has sometimes occupied for many Jewish readers as well. It was a status that Heine himself at times seems, to have intentionally cultivated. This controverthe sobering irony needed to subvert the sentimentality ; Liptzin 1992 : Steinberg 1930 : Greenberg 1942 : 17 ; Hellerstein 1980 : ; Wisse 1988 : 76, 84.

11 Jefffrey A. Grossman : The Invention of Love? 133 sial status derived from several factors, but if one were to try to defijine the source of it, one might begin with Heine s complex relationship to both power and writing. In a recent three-volume documentation of Heine reception, for instance, the editors note that if Heine is internationally known mainly as a poet, responses to him in Germany and Austria always revolved around allgemeine literarische, kultur- und gesellschaftspolitische Fragen, and that even literary debates about romanticism and realism, for instance are nicht selten bereits zu Lebzeiten politisiert, Heines Schreibweise mit seinen Verhältnissen zum Französischen und zum Jüdischen erklärt und identifijiziert, with the result that Nationalismus und Antisemitismus become Kernzonen der Heine Kritik. 15 From the outset, for instance, Heine expressed sympathy in his poetry and prose for the common people, even as he antagonized both German nationalists and the Prussian state with his biting satire. That satire found its perhaps most famous expression in his narrative poem, Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen ( 1844 ), in which the speaker, like Heine, returns to Germany for a visit after many years abroad, and reflects on conditions there as he travels through its cities and towns. Eventually, he arrives in Hamburg where Heine himself had once lived and, as a young man, failed in business and encounters the fijigure of Hammonia, a mix of lady of the night and prophetess, who offfers to provide the speaker with a view of Germany s future, to be glimpsed in her chamber pot. Refusing to share this vision with his readers, the speaker does go on to describe emphatically its putrid smell. While representing Heine's most sustained satire of German nationalism, Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen was by no means the only one ; nor was German nationalism the only object of Heine s satire indeed, he also targeted the middle classes, poetic movements, the objects of his own desire, and even the emotional states he would evoke in his own poetry. On several occasions, Heine also managed to overshoot the mark doing it so drastically that even his adherents found it diffijicult to defend him, as, for instance, when he attacked for his homosexuality the poet August von Platen, who had disparaged Heine with an anti-semitic remark. 16 The scandals notwithstanding, Heine s early, partly fijictionalized travel narratives, Die Reisebilder ( ) and, with its second 1837 edition, the Buch der Lieder ( 1827 ), made him immensely popular in Germany and abroad. While often striving to achieve a folk tone, Heine s poetry also appealed to a largely middle- and upper-class read- 15 Goltschnigg and Steinecke 2006 ( i ) : For two diffferent accounts of this scandal, see Hermand 1993 : and Mayer 1977 : ; on the logic of such attacks by Heine, see Holub 1981.

12 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט 134 ing public, his satires of such classes notwithstanding. 17 Poem 50 of the Lyrisches Intermezzo cycle ( Sie saßen und tranken am Theetisch ), for instance, depicts a desiccated upper-crust salon culture in which everyone speaks efffusively of love, while all passion is suppressed for the sake of good form and the adornments of wealth and refijinement. 18 Many of the details of Heine s life are now well known. 19 Beyond his baptism in 1825 at age twenty-seven, in the hope of attaining a professorship a civil service position at that time barred to Jews Heine s move to Paris in 1831, following the July Revolution of 1830, was a signal event. In Paris in the 1830s, he turned increasingly to prose journalism and essays that sought to mediate between France and Germany. Having failed to secure an income by other means, Heine became in this context one of the fijirst German writers to earn his living from writing, an income supplemented by support he ultimately received from his Uncle Salomon, a self-made millionaire, with whom he had a complex, but important, relationship. Known for his radical politics, Heine also upset progressive colleagues when he challenged received views or satirized a fijigure like Ludwig Börne in Ludwig Börne : Eine Denkschrift ( 1840 ), whose ascetic view of politics Heine attacked, even while implicating Börne in a ménage à trois with Börne s friend Jeanette Wohl and her husband. In that same work, Heine distinguished between pleasure-seeking, sensuously oriented Hellenes ( like himself ) and austere, ascetic Nazarenes ( like Börne ), a distinction opposing traditional monotheism, but which Heine grasped primarily in conceptual terms ( there could be Hellene Jews or Christians, Nazarene atheists ). 20 In 1848, before the revolution, Heine was struck by a mysterious paralyzing illness that would soon confijine him to what he called his mattress grave for the last eight years of his life. Although in the 1840s Heine had published his collection of lyric poetry, Neue Gedichte, and the satirical epic poems Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen and Atta Troll, his poetry after 1848 acquired a new quality published during his lifetime in the volume Romanzero ( 1851 ), containing the three Hebräische Melodien, and in Gedichte 1853 und 1854 ( 1854 ), and posthumously. While some of the late poetry, which often dwells on death and, later, physical decay, has repelled some critics, others fijind it to be among his strongest work. 21 In his Geständnisse ( 1854 ), Heine declared his belief in God and rejection of atheism, claims that upset some readers and con- 17 Klusen 1973 : dha i. 1 : 183 f. 19 See the biographies by Hauschild and Werner ( 1997 ) in German, and by Sammons ( 1979 ) in English. 20 dha xi : 17 19, 31 f. 21 Kruse 2002 :

13 Jefffrey A. Grossman : The Invention of Love? 135 fused others, since he seems to have held pantheistic beliefs earlier and because he ascribed his return to religion to his reading of the Bible, though he had long held it to be important. Heine s religious turn has prompted some to view it as a return to Judaism ; it seems just as likely that, whatever his beliefs in a personal God, Heine continued to reject organized religion. 22 A signifijicant point in Heine s poetic development came with his declaration of the end of the period of art ( das Ende der Kunstperiode ), a term he applied to Weimar Classicism and German Romanticism, which, by adhering to ideals of aesthetic harmony or, in the case of Romanticism, withdrawing into the Middle Ages, stood in contradiction to the present from which they isolated themselves. 23 Along similar lines, Heine declared himself both the last of the Romantic writers and the onset of something new, a point that, beyond showing Heine s capacity for immodesty, also suggests a view of poetry s embeddedness in problems of the everyday and of power, however complex the connection may be. Heine thus often took up the imagery and motifs of the Romantics for example, the interest in love as an uplifting experience, the fascination with irony, with exotic imagery, medieval knights and maidens, and with folk poetry only to undermine the Romantics poetic strategies and attitudes. In this way, Heine set out both to renew German poetry and to challenge Romantic poetics and ideologies. One can glimpse this practice in his famous Loreley poem, Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten : 24 Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, Daß ich so traurig bin; Ein Mährchen aus alten Zeiten, Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn. Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt, Und ruhig fließt der Rhein; Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt Im Abendsonnenschein. Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet Dort oben wunderbar, Ihr gold nes Geschmeide blitzet, Sie kämmt ihr goldenes Haar. I do not know what it means that I am so sadly inclined; There is an old tale and its scenes that Will not depart from my mind. The air is cold and darkling, And peaceful flows the Rhine; The mountain top is sparkling, The setting sunbeams shine. The fairest maid is reclining In wondrous beauty there; Her golden jewels are shining, She combs her golden hair. 22 See, e. g., Sammons 1979 : dha xii. 1 : dha i. 1 : 209 ( Heine 1982 a : 76 f ).

14 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט 136 Sie kämmt es mit goldenem Kamme, Und singt ein Lied dabei; Das hat eine wundersame, Gewaltige Melodei. Den Schifffer im kleinen Schifffe Ergreift es mit wildem Weh; Er schaut nicht die Felsenrifffe, Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh. Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen Am Ende Schifffer und Kahn; Und das hat mit ihrem Singen Die Lore-Ley gethan. With a golden comb she is combing, And sings a song so free, It casts a spell on the gloaming, A magical melody. The boatman listens, and o er him Wild-aching passions roll; He sees but the maiden before him, He sees not reef or shoal. I think, at last the wave swallows The boat and boatman s cry; And this is the fate that follows The song of the Lorelei. The poem contains all the elements of a typical German Romantic poem the use of folktale, the rocky clifffs along the Rhine possessed by a spirit, the longing of the lover, the Rhine itself but it combines them in such a way as to result in complete disaster for the boatman, driven mad by erotic desire, and to suggest as well the speaker s own troubled sense at the scene he has placed before us. 25 While these features, together with its musicality, gained for the Loreley its status as popular folk song, other poems, to be discussed later, point even more to Heine s modernity, his marking the advent of something new and beyond the Romantic movement. Halpern and Heine : An Uncanny Afffijinity In 1915, nearly a century after Heine declared the end of the Kunstperiode, Moyshe Leyb Halpern sought to defend the new poetry of with a critique of the older Sweatshop Poet Morris Rosenfeld די יונגע ( ). Responding to both Rosenfeld s ( בוך ון ליבע 1914 ) and to other critics responses to that volume, Halpern agreed that Morris Rosenfeld s recent attempts to write love poetry had failed ; he disagreed with other critics about the reasons. 26 Where they wondered what had become of the old Morris Rosenfeld, worrying that he had broken down or been destroyed ( קא ליע געווא רן ), Halpern maintained that he was alive and well. Rather, he argued, the love poems failed because Morris Rosenfeld s métier was the protest poem, and while he had 25 Altenhofer 1982 : Halpern 1915 : The title of Rosenfeld s volume seems calculated to evoke Heine s Buch der Lieder, see Rosenfeld 1914.

15 Jefffrey A. Grossman : The Invention of Love? 137 long mastered the versifijied form of political protest and hammered out poems like a blacksmith, he lacked the receptive capacities, sensitivity to language, and emotional complexity of a poet like Heine, a point Halpern reinforces by citing the opening lines of Die Loreley. 27 Rather than recover his old self, Rosenfeld would truly need to destroy or overcome that self if he wanted to write good love poetry. Beyond the Heine reference, Halpern supports his criticism by comparing Rosenfeld s love poems to those of such poets as Mani Leyb, Zishe Landau די and Joseph Rolnik, thus suggesting his efffort to defijine a poetics for Additionally, one that emphasized the qualities Rosenfeld lacked.,יונגע the metaphors of breakdown, self-destruction and self-overcoming signal in quasi-nietzschean terms the desire for a poetry that will project a new sense of subjectivity. They signal Halpern's desire for an expanded repertoire of tropes, motifs, and poetic strategies that would in turn expand the capacities of the Yiddish language itself. Harsh as it was, Halpern s criticism here was nonetheless far tamer than his earlier attack on Rosenfeld one that in its excess, if not in its specifijic content, evokes Heine s attacks on opponents like August von Platen and Ludwig Börne. Responding to a satirical jibe that Rosenfeld directed at the poets of יונגע,די Halpern likened Rosenfeld to a tin clown in the Wurstelprater, an amusement park in Vienna. The clown, in Ruth Wisse s account of this barb, would roll on the ground and squeal like a pig when you fed it a coin and pushed the pig button. 28 At a later date, the button has turned rusty, and though the clown still rolls on the ground when you put in your penny, he can no longer squeal. 29 In other respects, Halpern s persona also seems to recall Heine for example, his reputed provocations of friends and colleagues, his struggles with fijinding gainful employment, his resentment at having to ask others for money, especially when he felt it due him as a writer, and the criticism of his poetry for its crude language. 30 Like many Yiddish writers, and Heine himself, Halpern also parodied religious orthodoxy, a point indicated, for instance, by his translation of Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen. When, for instance, in the poem s thirteenth chapter, the poet-persona comes across the image of Jesus nailed to the cross, he declares : Halpern 1915 : Wisse 1988 : 91 f. 29 Ibid. : Ibid. : 75, 81 f, 98 f, dha iv : 118.

16 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט 138 Sie haben dir übel mitgespielt, Die Herren vom hohen Rathe. Wer hieß dich auch reden so rücksichtlos Von der Kirche und vom Staate. Halpern rewrites the strophe thus : 32 עס הא בן דיר אוי געשפּילט לײ טיש די לײ ט ווא ס הא בן א רנומען דעם אויבן : נו, טא קע, ווא ס הא סטו א רדא מט א זוי רײ די איידעלע היטער ון גלויבן...? [ They ] played mischief with you respectably, the people Who occupied the top place Now, really, why did you damn so freely The noble protectors of faith? hence allowing the criticism to be directed at religious Jews. 33 Yet whatever criticism or even contempt he directed at the Jewish world, Halpern, like Heine, vigorously opposed anti-semitism, just as they both subjected to criticism not just Jewish tradition, but also lapsed Jews. 34 Additionally, Halpern, like Heine, had the capacity to vacillate between political gravity and sensual lightness; after penning a poem on a worker s strike in Montreal, he soon wrote again about the same place, but dwelt instead on sexual exploits there. 35 Such instances from Halpern s critical writing and biography would indeed seem to suggest what I have called an uncanny afffijinity, conscious or unconscious, with Heine, one that manifested itself in various ways. To be sure, such an afffijinity would have little relevance here if it did not also bear on Halpern s writing itself. In exploring that ques- אין poetry, tion, one might begin by turning to Halpern s fijirst volume of.ניו יא רק Halpern s Innovations Reconsidered Halpern s publication of אין ניו יא רק in 1919, one year after the Heine edition, constitutes in itself a veritable event in Yiddish literature, a point suggested by Seth Wolitz s penetrating analysis of the text. 36 Taken to- 32 Heine 1918 ( viii ) : dha iv : 118 ; Heine 1918 ( viii ) : Wisse 1988 : 78 f, Ibid. : 89 f. 36 Wolitz cites, e. g., literary critic A. Tabachnik, who called אין ניו יא רק an epoch- making book, and poet Itsik Manger, who described it as one of the great books of poems in modern poetry whatsoever ( איינס ון די גרויסע ביכער ון דער מא דערנער פּא עזיע בכלל ) ; Wolitz : 56.

17 Jefffrey A. Grossman : The Invention of Love? 139 gether, Wolitz argues, the poems of אין ניו יא רק present a dark world view, one in which the poetic voice wanders endlessly between walls of stone and iron, among circling streets peopled by human wrecks surrounded by flora and fauna. 37 New York City becomes in this view a labyrinthine wasteland, ironically called the Golden Land, a world of alienation and deformation from which there is no escape. 38 Yet this initial view is spatial and static ; Halpern, as Wolitz goes on to show, took great care when collecting his poems to arrange them in fijive sections or cycles, which, as such, offfer a response to this initial view on the temporal level. 39 Their arrangement thus allows Halpern to offfer an alternative programmatic expression, in which In Nyu-york becomes an epic journey that launches a protest however tragic against the predicament of the wanderer and his universe, one that culminates in the apocalyptic vision of the concluding fijifth section, the long narrative. 40 א נא כט poem Whatever other influences and creative impulses Halpern s poetry displays Chana Kronfeld emphasizes expressionistic ones, while Abraham Novershtern locates א נא כט within the context of modern apocalyptic Yiddish writing ( e. g. of Bialik, Y. L. Perets and Perets Markish ) the importance of In Nyu-york s arrangement as an aesthetic construct charting the journey of a poet persona recalls in signifijicant ways Heine s poetic practice. 41 It evokes, for instance, writing strategies found in Heine s Buch der Lieder ( 1827 ), perhaps most overtly in the cycles Lyrisches Intermezzo and Die Heimkehr though the arrangement of the poems plays in important role in the later collections Neue Gedichte ( 1844 ), Romanzero ( 1851 ), and the Gedichte 1853 und 1854 ( 1854 ) as well Wolitz : Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Wolitz : 64 f. 41 Kronfeld 1996 : 33, 173 ; Novershtern 1993 : To be sure, one might point to other similarities : the depiction of disillusioned love in the בלא נד און בלוי ( Blonde and Blue ) cycle of In Nyu-york ; the sense of an indiffferent nature in Heine s Nordsee cycles as reiterated in Halpern, though now set against the urban space of New York City ; even the dark apocalyptic vision of A nakht, which for all its expressionist imagery sufffused with death and destruction, also recalls aspects of Heine, the late poetry as in the Lazarus sub-cycles of both Romanzero and the Gedichte 1853 und 1854, or in poems like Schlachtfeld bei Hastings and Vitzliputzli, among others with its own abundance of ghostly fijigures, death imagery and destructive moments, not to mention the general presence of ghostly knights in much of Heine who perhaps provided the model for the messianic white knight of א נא כט all of which is not to suggest that Heine constitutes Halpern s sole source or inspiration.

18 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט 140 This aesthetics of arrangement is one whose importance for Heine the late Norbert Altenhofer, among others, has lucidly analyzed. 43 Its source, Altenhofer contends, resided for Heine in two conflicting desires : fijirst, to document his own poetic development, and, second, to respond to the urging of friends ( so Heine claimed ) that he give in his collection a psychological-chronological portrait of the author an act that for Heine brought the danger of lapsing into crude biographism, a charge that Friedrich Schiller had notably laid against a popular collection of poems by G. A. Bürger ( ). 44 Heine s aesthetics of arrangement provides a response to this conflict, allowing him to undertake a self-reflective literary historical situating of his own production. 45 Perhaps more to the point is how this aesthetics expressed itself in the Buch der Lieder, Heine s internationally most influential collection, and how it fijinds parallels in In Nyu-york. On the one hand, Heine shapes the poems of Buch der Lieder into cycles that themselves contain narrative trajectories Wolitz s central point about In Nyu-york ; on the other hand, Heine also introduces ironic ruptures that allow for reflection and retrospection on the poems, together with a reworking of the motifs both serving to historicize his literary production. Thus, for instance, to the Lyrisches Intermezzo Heine appended a prologue that, in depicting a knight who succumbs to a revivifying love fantasy, ultimately exposes that fantasy for the illusion it is. Thus exposed, it becomes a reflection on literary conceits prevalent, for example, among the German Romantics, and something to which Heine s own early poetry was prone. The prologue additionally sets up a frame for the Lyrisches Intermezzo, more generally, which charts the poet persona s movement from the opening hopefulness of Im wunderschönen Monat Mai across a series of embittering encounters, and which concludes with a poem that retrospectively reinterprets the whole project aesthetic and psychological of writing such poetry, a project that can now be laid to rest : 46 Die alten, bösen Lieder, Die Träume schlimm und arg, Die laßt uns jetzt begraben, Holt einen großen Sarg. The old songs fijilled with anger, The bad dreams fijilled with woe, Let s bury them now get hold of A mighty cofffijin, ho! 43 See Altenhofer 1982 ; also Prawer 1960 : ; Perraudin 1989 : Altenhofer 1982 : Ibid. : dha i. 1 : 201 f ( Heine 1982 a : 75 ).

19 Jefffrey A. Grossman : The Invention of Love? 141 Wißt Ihr warum der Sarg wohl So groß und schwer mag seyn? Ich legt auch meine Liebe Und meinen Schmerzen hinein. Do you know why it s so heavy, So great and long and wide? I put my love and sorrow And all my pain inside. Although in a diffferent vocabulary, Wolitz s argument about Halpern similarly points to the importance of an aesthetics of arrangement, one in which Halpern s programmatic expression follows a sequential flow of time, serving as a poetic organizing principle. As such, it increases the power of the repeated central metaphors weaving them into the general fabric, so that [ what ] appears static in one poem [ ] is but the preparation for the coming peripeteia in the next. 47 The term peripeteia, deriving from the Greek for sudden turning, suggests, in turn, a writing practice central to Heine s aesthetics of arrangement with its repeated ironic ruptures, and which manifests itself throughout In Nyu-york as well. One need only think of the motifs in the fijirst cycle, toiling ( Our Garden ), of gold, the golden land, and אונדזער גא רטן קנעכ ], 48 Chimneys [ Between Smoking צווישן קוימענרויכן ( in poems like [ In the אין גא לדענעם לא נד!, Step [ Servile Blood ], Watch Your טיש בלוט Golden Land ], up to the long, concluding poem Pan Jablowski ), or of birds and flight ( as both physical act and escape ), that similarly recur there : hence, one can follow the bird of the opening title poem of that section, which flies offf and רגעסט זײ נע קינדערלעך אין נעסט א ( forgets its birdlings in the nest ), to the various reworkings of these motifs 49 in מיר, א ז דו וועסט ליגל געבן, / וועל איך ווי געבונדען /) koymenroykhn Tsvishn א ; Life Ot-azoy-o (That s 50,(זיצן אין א שטײ ג ון אײ זן / אין געהא קטע וווּנדן ווינט, ווא ס טרא גט א שטיק פּא פּיר א רויף / ון קענדלעך מיסט, ווא ס שטייען אוי ן ]), back [ A wind lifting a paper scrap/ By trash cans in the yard out הויף זינגט דער ויגל רײ און ריילעך, / ציטערט אויף זײ ן טרא ן ( gasnpoyker to Der [ Freely, happily the דער מלך, / ציטערן איז ניט כּדא י, / זינג איך, ווי דער ויגל, רײ bird sings./ Trembling on their thrones sit kings./ Trembling isn't worth זא ג איך צו מיר of a thing/ I sing, free as a bird ]), 51 to the poet-speaker ( Talking to Myself ) dreaming of escape into a natural world beyond the city, or the ironic דער ערשטער רילינג טא ג which recasts earlier references in the cycle : Wolitz : 63 ; cf Perraudin ( 1989 : 60 ), who makes a similar point about the subcycle of Heine s Fischer poems in Die Heimkehr. 48 Translations of אין ניו יא רק from Hellerstein Halpern 1954 : 14, 16, 17, 35, 19, Give wings to me, and I ll stay/ Gagged and bound/ In an iron cage,/ Nursing my wounds ( Ibid. : 25 ). 51 Hellerstein 1980 : 65; translation modifijied. 52 Halpern 1954 : 22. Translation from Hellerstein 1980 : 38.

20 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט 142 נו, וועט ער שוין, במחילה, מוזן שרײ בן נא ך א רילינגליד א ר אונדזער וווּנדערלעכער וועלט, ווא ס גא רט א זוי צו הערן ון א בלום ווא ס בליט און ון א געלן ייגעלע ווא ס טרעלט און טרעלט און טרעלט נא ך א ביסל. So sorry he will need to write One more spring song For this our marvelous world Craving to hear about a flower blooming, About a yellow bird that trills and trills And trills a little more. Yet In Nyu-york recalls Heine in more specifijic ways, as suggested, for instance, by Halpern s poem א מא דנע מחשבֿה ( A Strange Thought ), which bears more than thematic resemblance to a poem like Heine s Lyrical Intermezzo 51, Vergiftet sind meine Lieder ( Envenomed are my songs ) : 53 Vergiftet sind meine Lieder ; Wie könnt es anders sein? Du hast mir ja Gift gegossen Ins blühende Leben hinein. Vergiftet sind meine Lieder ; Wie könnt es anders sein? Ich trage im Herzen viel Schlangen, Und dich, Geliebte mein. Envenomed are my songs, How could it be otherwise, tell? Since you trickled poison Into my life s clear well. Envenomed are my songs, How could it be otherwise, tell? My heart holds many serpents, And you, my love, as well. א מא דנע מחשבֿה א מא דנע מחשבֿה: איך קוק אויף דער פּען און קוק אויף מײ ן הא נט, ווי זי שרײ בט, און מיר דא כט, א ז איך בין געשטא רבן אין הײ נטיקער נא כט. געשטא רבן א ט דא בײ דער גויע אין הויז, און מער ניט די פּען איז געבליבן ון מיר, א פּען און א ליד אויף א שטיקל פּא פּיר. דא ס ליד איז ילײ כט נישט דערענדיקט געווען, וווּ איז עס? עס ליגט אויף דער שוועל א רן הויז, עס איז מיטן ווינט דורכן ענצטער א רויס. און מא רגן קען זײ ן, דו וועסט קומען צו גיין און טרעטן וועסטו אויף מײ ן ליד מיט דײ ן וס, און ווא רטן ון ענצטער זא ל קומען מײ ן גרוס. A strange thought : I look at my pen And it seems to me, as I watch my hand write, That I died last night. Died right here, in the house with the landlady And only this pen is left of me, A pen and a poem-scrap. The poem was not fijinished, perhaps, And it lies on the front steps Where the wind carried it. And maybe you ll come by tomorrow And with your foot will step on the poem. And wait for my greeting to come from the window. 53 dha i. 1 : 185 ( Heine 1995 : 25 ). Halpern 1954 : 123. Translation modifijied, based on Hellerstein 1980 : 280.

21 Jefffrey A. Grossman : The Invention of Love? 143 און בייז ווערן וועסטו און שילטן ילײ כט, און לא זן מיר וועסטו א צעטל אין טיר, א ז דו וועסט שוין קיין מא ל ניט קומען צו מיר. And you ll get angry and maybe you ll swear And leave me a note on the door Say you ll never come to me again. In both cases, the poems address themselves to the subject of disillusioned love as it relates to the writing of poetry, and present instances of the object of the poet s love going beyond the act of rejection to that of destroying the poetry itself. Such images contain multiple le vels of irony, as destruction of an illusion, or of exposing an illusion to be indeed nothing other than that, as in the Lyrisches Intermezzo prologue. On one level, the irony here consists of the fact that the speaker maintains the illusion that in somehow reaching poetically toward the desired love object, his poems might have some positive efffect, an illusion that is exposed as such when it turns out that it is she who will afffect his poetry by poisoning or treading on it, even stamping it out. At another level, however, both poems treat the traditional notion of the poetic muse ironically subverting the notion that the love of this feminized form inspires the male poet to compose his lyrics even while they recuperate the muse in a kind of negative image of herself : rather than her love inspiring the poet to write, it is her contempt that inspires his pen. 54 The Halpern Heine intertextuality suggested here could be extended further additional examples, for instance, would show Halpern s emulation of Heine s trochaic meter, which helps Halpern to achieve an idiosyncratic musicality not unlike Heine s as in such poems as און דו א רעמדנס רוי or לבום רא זן,א both to be found in the מא volume In Nyu-york. Or one could cite Halpern s free-verse poem which bears multiple intertextual relations to Heine s work, and,דא ם ultimately expression of debt to Heine s Nordsee ( or North Sea ) poems, especially to Heine s poem Seegespenst ( Sea Apparition ), although the anonymous addressee Madame recalls what many consider to be Heine s most innovative prose work, the partly fijictionalized, partly autobiographical travel narrative Ideen : Das Buch Le Grand ( 1827 ). 55 It is, however, to two other poems by Heine and Halpern that we must turn if we want to understand the depth of Halpern s poetic response to Heine. The fijirst is Heine s Lyrisches Intermezzo 37 ( Philister in Sonntagsröcklein ) : That such depictions of a feminine object of love invite feminist criticisms of both Heine and Halpern goes without saying. 55 For a translation, see Ideas Book Le Grand, in Heine 1982 b : dha i. 1 : 169. See the translation ( modifijied ) by Hal Draper in Heine 1982 a : 63 f.

22 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט 144 Philister in Sonntagsröcklein Spazieren durch Wald und Flur ; Sie jauchzen, sie hüpfen wie Böcklein, Begrüßen die schöne Natur. Betrachten mit blinzelnden Augen, Wie alles romantisch blüht, Mit langen Ohren saugen Sie ein der Spatzen Lied. Ich aber verhänge die Fenster Des Zimmers mit schwarzem Tuch ; Es machen mir meine Gespenster Sogar einen Tagesbesuch Die alte Liebe erscheinet, Sie stieg aus dem Totenreich. Sie setzt sich zu mir und weinet, Und macht das Herz mir weich. Burghers in Sunday clothes strolling Through meadow and wood and lane, Like frisky young goats caracoling, Salute nature s beauties again. Their bleary owl-eyes blink in The romantically blooming spring ; They cock long ears to drink in The song the sparrows sing. But I I am draping and glooming My windows with black like a pall The ghosts of the past are looming To pay me a daylight call. From the realm of the dead where s she s sleeping My old love shining appears ; She sits by my side and, weeping, She melts my heart in tears. The fijirst two strophes of the poem introduce a Romantic motif, adopting the perspective of the artist alienated from the world of philistine burghers, evoking romantic imagery of forest, flora and sparrow song, all painted, as it were, under the radiant light suggested by the blinzelnden Augen and blossoming world. While the misunderstood artist commands the language and vision to generate this imagery of an idyllic setting, the irony of the poem enters from the outset in terms of the satirical light the speakers casts on the setting the image of the philistine burghers sprightly hopping about like little goats and lacking the speaker s profound emotional sensitivity. 57 Yet beginning with the third strophe the poem adopts another perspective, one that self-reflectively turns the observing speaker into the object of his own observation. Oscillating between the subject and object of the poem, the speaker now casts his gaze upon himself, as he consciously adopts the position of the sensitive poet of authentic feeling alienated from the philistine burghers. His gesture of draping the windows in black cloth and exaggeratedly defijiant use of the words ich aber ( but I I ), however, point to his own emotional posturing, 57 Cf. Prawer s ( 1960 : 37, 44 ) apposite comments on Die Heimkehr 20 as a poem depicting the dilemma of a post-romantic poet who has lost even the naiveté of sufffering, and about Heine s tenderness toward the philistines in holiday mood.

23 Jefffrey A. Grossman : The Invention of Love? 145 his desire to stage a mournful emotional state while cultivating an aura of death in spite of and perhaps also to spite the burghers happily frolicking in the sunshine. The fijinal evocation of the alte Liebe climbing out of the realm of the dead, recalling again a classical motif one thinks of Eurydice, whom Orpheus must retrieve from the realm of the dead reinforces the literariness, the staging, of the speaker s emotional state. Even more explicitly than in his Loreley poem, Heine seeks here to invoke and adopt the language, imagery, and motifs of German Romanticism, even as he moves radically beyond it into a modern literary discourse and sensibility one that ironizes the speaker s impressionistic style, his own ostensibly special receptive powers to the natural world. Rather than one who merely experiences and records that world, the speaker becomes an active producer of it, one who generates its imagery and the reality of his emotional experience from within his own mind and language. Moreover, he reflects critically at one remove, as it were on the purposes, which are both artistic and social, for which he generates that world. Although set in the context of a New York beach ( presumably Coney Island ), Halpern s Memento Mori proceeds along similar lines : 58 און א ז משה לייב, דער פּא עט, וועט דערציילן, א ז ער הא ט דעם טויט אויף די כווא ליעס געזען, א זוי ווי מען זעט זיך א ליין אין א שפּיגל, און דא ס אין דער רי גא ר, א זוי א רום צען צי וועט מען דא ס גלייבן משה לייבן? און א ז משה לייב הא ט דעם טויט ון דער ווײ טן בא גריסט מיט א הא נט און גע רעגט ווי עס גייט? און דווקא בעת ס הא בן מענטשן יל טויזנט אין ווא סער זיך ווילד מיט דעם לעבן גע רייט צי וועט מען דא ס גלייבן משה לייבן? און א ז משה לייב וועט מיט טרערן זיך שווערן, א ז ס הא ט צו דעם טויט אים געצויגן א זוי, א זוי ווי עס ציט א א רבענקטן אין א וונט צום ענצטער ון זײ נס א א רהייליקטער רוי צי וועט מען דא ס גלייבן משה לייבן? And if Moyshe-Leyb, Poet, recounted how He s glimpsed Death in the breaking waves, the way You catch that sight of yourself in the mirror At about 10 a.m. on some actual day, Who would be able to believe Moyshe-Leybl? And if Moyshe-Leyb greeted Death from afar, With a wave of his hand, asking, Things all right? At the moment when many a thousand people Lived there in the water, wild with delight, Who would be able to believe Moyshe-Leybl? And if Moyshe-Leyb were to swear That he was drawn to Death in the way An exiled lover is to the casement Of his worshipped one, at the end of the day, Who would be able to believe Moyshe-Leybl? 58 See the translation by John Hollander ( Halpern 1987 : 174 ).

24 לקט יי דישע שטודיעס הײ נט 146 און א ז משה לייב וועט דעם טויט א ר זיי מא לן ניט גרוי און ניט ינצטער, גא ר א רבן רײ ך שיין, א זוי ווי ער הא ט א רום צען זיך בא וויזן דא רט ווײ ט צווישן הימל און כווא ליעס א ליין צי וועט מען דא ס גלייבן משה לייבן? And if Moyshe-Leyb were to paint them Death Not gray, dark, but colored-drenched, as it shone At around 10 a.m. there, distantly, Between the sky and the breakers, alone. Who would be able to believe Moyshe-Leybl? The similarities between the two poems is something one need hardly rehearse. The self-reflectivity whereby the speaker functions as both subject of the observation and observed object here, the poet Moyshe-Leyb amidst the waves ; the preoccupation with death and indeed attraction to it as a lover to a worshiped woman ; the poet s desire to remove himself from the people caught up in mundane pleasures the multitudes wildly frolicking about in the water ; and the poet s incessant asking about the credibility of the experience itself all recall aspects of Heine s Philister in Sonntagsröcklein. There is, though, an important diffference, signaled by the two poems diffferent structures and trajectories. Whereas Heine s Philister begins with the image of the philistines in the park and then redirects focus onto the solitary speaker staging the encounter with death, not least as a means of undermining the idealized image of artist versus philistine, Memento Mori stages from the outset the allegorical encounter with Death. It thus also situates the ensuing encounter with the מענטשן יל טויזנט / אין ווא סער זיך ווילד מיט דעם לעבן גע רייט everyday the within this allegorical framework, hence underscoring from the outset the text as a staged alternative world and foregrounding its status as poetic construct. The diffference from Heine s Philister is one of degree, not of quality or essence since both depict the poet-persona s break with the world and overt staging of the death encounter but it does suggest that Halpern stands more fijirmly within the aesthetics of the modern in contrast to Heine, who stands at its threshold and who, indeed, helps initiate it. One might make a similar point about the focus in א מא דנע מחשבֿה ( A Strange Thought ) on the pen, a form of reference absent from Vergiftet sind meine Lieder, but that amounts to a laying bare of the apparatus ( or device ) of text production, something that recalls, for instance, Russian formalist aesthetics, among other modern movements. What, though, was the nature of Halpern s modernity, and how, if at all, did Heine fijigure in it? Chana Kronfeld proposes a response in her incisive treatment of Halpern s innovations in Yiddish poetry, where she underscores Halpern s modernity, in particular. 59 Her analysis relies 59 Kronfeld 1996 :