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Culture

 

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The poet Yaakov Fichman, a native of Beltz

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This is the city of Beltz, where I first saw water and grass. It was not endowed with any charm. On this hill, father's house stood, It was so dreary, a tree was not seen growing there. And a vegetable patch did not gleam in the yard – pleasant to the eye. Only on the slope, in the gentile suburb, did the gardens cast shade, Indeed they were surrounded by fences of reeds, and in every gate There was a dog snarling in fury, ambushing the cheder lads. But no grove grew within the town's boundaries, With good shade, offering a hiding place for a child in distress. A flat, monotonous steppe and even in the bright light It lay there spread out to the blue horizon, fields stretching on endlessly. The whole world here lay abandoned – open to the sun; The days of the Shavuot festival have just passed, on which we decorated with the beloved blossoms of the fields; the silvery boughs From the bare rooftops -- and every green was touched by the summer haze, The whole plain lay open, and cattle lowed in the meadow. Even the river shrank, for the Tammuz sun touched it. But would that the earth's own beauty could be given, for has thawed All the remnants of snow in the valley, and every clod has warmed and dried. Each plant brought forth its own blossom, and golden flowering spread over the valley, As though every hidden treasure had been scattered here in the sun's generosity. Small pools of light still gathered there in the hollow, And they trembled, gazing like a heart undiminished toward the earth's blossoming. There I loved, alone, to send forth my thoughts upon the waters, For I believed that here lay the shore of my life, and that only here had I been sent…

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Then, at the end of a difficult winter, the spring with the blessed sun came early, And the heavy snows there in the Carpathians melted; An abundance of water flowed into the Dniester. And the Răut overflowed Before its time and flooded the entire expanse of meadows. Nevertheless, the flood left a blessing behind – grassy lands Sprouting green for the grazing of the hungry lambs. When the fields dried from the sun and the wind The ploughing began – father no longer sat in the house. The spring that came early that time brought salvation with it. There was a different spirit in the house, as if in it recovered Someone who had been ill, in a wondrous manner. And the aroma Of the eve of the festival arose in it. The chirping of the nestling Pure as gold filled every corner of the yard and the storehouse, And Grandmother labored joyously, as if her wrinkles straightened. That was the spring then, a world that first called out to me. And I did not know to where. And I wandered in the meadow, In the abundance of my inner stirrings, a sweetness played within my blood – a secret and a sorrow within it. And how kindly this green earth did me good! I pressed myself Into its cool grasses, as into a pure bosom, my face aflame. And to the moist earth I listened, as though I asked it: What will become of my life, I who have withdrawn from people, And I do not know for what my heart stirs so, unless it is the sweetness Of a mountain stream that sings sadly as it flows among the grass; – Thus an eternal light rose within me, and its hidden darkness shadowed me. It was good that the beloved sat by the sheepfold's fence, keeping watch. He came in those days, my heart would wander in me, Time after time from the fields of the plain back to our house. This man understood my bewildered heart without a word. He too did not care for the heavy beam of a roof above him, And the grass and the silent sheep gladdened his heart as they did mine. And these were the Sabbath nights, when he dined in our house. Suddenly my spirit grew light, and Mother too was very happy, For the special Sabbath dish would be served to her brother[1], Though she did not add a piece of fish in sauce to his portion. – Great then was the quiet, and pure the Sabbath light within the house. Silent and pure was this heart, for the stillness came to dwell in it; All the more so on the nights when we went out with the horses On Saturday night, to the valley beyond the Răut. A night unique in its marvels – how good, that even now I remember it, And it is among the choicest of my nights, for childhood stamped its treasures upon it.

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A spring night, dusky and warm. No breeze and no wind. And so we rode in silence, drawn toward the deep, As though into the hidden bosom, until we came to the Răut, And strange, like some ancient murmur, rose every rustle of the water. But when we trod upon the grass, we lengthened our stride, As though the night itself, encouraging us, drew back before us. The field breeze, the spacious breath of nearby waters, as though caressing, From somewhere it rose up, and we were alone with the world. But we rode on – the night and the wide distance cast their spell upon us, And the heavy town still crouched close behind us – Until we stood, as though in the midst of a thicket, in the tall grass.

Translator's footnote

1. A few lines earlier, the Hebrew word used for ‘beloved’ is dod. The Hebrew word dod can mean both “uncle” (in everyday usage) and “beloved/dear one” (in biblical and poetic usage – e.g. in Song of Songs). English does not preserve this ambiguity. The poem uses both senses, and the relationship between them is left open in the original. Later on, it becomes clear that it is referring to a real uncle. Return

More than seventy years ago, Beltz, a district capital in northern Bessarabia, was little more than a large village of several thousand residents, set in the midst of a broad plain of malaria-infested marshes and rich, fertile soil. This is a typical southern landscape – a plain flooded with light, spreading over thousands of kilometers, stretching out to a deep, far-off horizon. Among the Jewish settlements of Bessarabia, the Jewish community of this small town was small in number. Despite the city's position at the center of the region and the authorities' designation of it as a district capital, it retained the provincial character of the Pale of Settlement. The Jewish population was immersed in detachment, and forged for themselves a physical, healthy village reality, which seemed to the eye as no different than that of the gentile farmers of the area. Yet as a stray offshoot on the soiled and distorted edge of the fabric of Russian Jewry, this community drew its nourishment in hidden and remarkable ways – a clarity perceptible only to one who guarded the nation's inner essence, its marrow, and its warmth. Invisible bridges stretched out over the expanse of the plain, connecting the small Jewish settlements that were scattered over the southernmost part of the Pale of Settlement of Russian Jewry. Beneath the Cossack coats and sheepskin hats (the lamb-wool cloaks and caps) the traditional Jewish patriarchal types were preserved within their Moldavian dress. Thus did these Jews preserve the “ancient kernel” cleaving to tradition and to the Jewish essence, adding on their own distinctive character, coming from the withering plain, from the toil that had worn down their tall frames, and from their backbreaking labor. The little bit of Torah they received in the storm of their childhood came from the Lithuanian “melamdim” – men narrow and dry by nature, who were stirred only by the bounty of their patrons' well-laden tables, rather than by the abundance of light or the sharp, penetrating changes of the world around them. Before their inner eye still hovered the memory of the poverty and the implied destitution of the marshes of their native hamlets, on the far northern edge of the map of Russian Jewry.

Beltz was not different, indeed, from other towns of the Pale of Settlement. It preserved all the values that were normative at that time in the Jewish community: Jewish domestic warmth [heimishness], the cheder, the synagogue, boundless love of Jewish cantorial arts, which in its expression absorbed a pastoral thread, full of longing. The “Haskalah, daughter of the heavens,” which had stepped with such gentle grace across the boundaries of the Jewish settlement, here seemed to take on the character of a genuine blessing over something enjoyable. The Bessarabian Jews, it seems, never quite made room for Haskalah. The few who did, in any case, never joined any sweeping, contagious public fervor.

Fichman's appearance in this cut-off world was a wonder. How did this cultural growth, of the finest stock, take root, grow, and rise up in soil so arid and impervious to spiritual revelation? Indeed, some hidden destiny was at work in this desolation, nurturing the garden beds of a heart whose turmoil was already subsiding toward healing, preparing him for an exalted mission; the one who appointed him to be the mouthpiece of the renewing Hebrew literature, when not even the faintest hint yet appeared of its end and its promised shore, was the same one who charged him to give voice as well to another great experience:

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the encounter of a scattered Jewish community with the sorrow of the fields, their grief and their quiet joy.

It seems that the annals of Fichman's life were among the first in the biographical ranks of Hebrew poets and writers, aside from Tchernichovsky, who were not affected by the static situation of the Jewish milieu during the latter half of the 19^th century in Eastern Europe. Indeed, in the greater Jewish world, the battle of Haskalah had already reached its end, and all the heroic struggles of Lilienblum and Fayerberg were already a thing of the past. [This was so] even though the rays of the dawn of the national movement had not yet penetrated through Bessarabia, and the echoes of the great revolution had only reached the residents of Bessarabia in fragments. As well, the [generational] war between fathers and sons, which was well-known on the Jewish street that was awakening, was as if it was neglected here. With the yoke of work and the peace of the blessed soil in which Bessarabian Jewry was immersed, it seems that a ceasefire was declared in the battle that embittered the life of the generation. Fichman was raised in the midst of a Jewry that was far from the communal storms. He grew up in a working family, and the spring of his life was not clouded or affected by internal battles, entanglements, escape to the unknown, concealments, and misunderstandings. The storms of childhood and youth certainly affected him as well – for who can avoid them? However, Fichman's status within his family and within his community was free of family flare-ups and difficulties. It was like a lone green tree standing on the horizon of the plain – a solitude that bestowed on him the very melody of poetry and sharpened his senses, enabling him to “see the voices” and to listen to the murmurs of a landscape then so foreign to our literature.

His childhood merited to have a warm, vibrant, hearty family nest. The family, a family of Bessarabian Jews, even though they did not deviate from educating their children in the spirit of tradition and accepted paths, this did not embitter him, nor did it make him old before his time. As with all children, he too was affected by all the vexations caused by parents who do not want the child to be spoiled, and who look poorly on childhood antics and unusual pranks that do not please adults. Young Fichman's heart was certainly also pinched by restrictions and reprimands, but they always ended on notes of reconciliation and indulgence. It was always the way of Jewish parents, from way back, to reprimand a “lad who studies Talmud” when he spent his time on childlike pursuits, playing with nuts, and racing pigeons^[1]. However, the sting of that reprimand was blunted in the Bessarabian environment, where even the adults acted like children, and were attracted to the “simple” values of the reality of the Jewish farmer. In his children's stories and autobiographical chapters, scattered in essays, poems, and memoirs, Fichman's childhood world is revealed. It is completely festive, wondrous, polished, and decorated with primal charm without any feelings of the chasm that existed between the Jewish child in the diaspora and existence in general.

It was at the beginning of the spring – And I am seven springs old And I made a covenant in secret With the lovely blue blossoms. I still recall: That spring now Found me alone in the mountains; Around me soft blue blossoms Beckoned to me in strange fields. And I wove the blue blossoms Since then in my pleasant dreams In the spring, in the spring I seek them Already so many springs have passed. And also the black cloud Hung over the roof Of father's house – in its wings were bound The tidings of the festival.

Apparently, the family was a nest of warm, pleasant dreams. “Father's house” – the motive that repeats and recurs from his first poems until his last ones – appears to him as completely bright and festive, with no obstacles in its bright blending with its surroundings.

The father, Reb Eliyahu, was a gentle, diligent man, broad-boned and sturdy, a Jew who tilled the earth and tended sheep, a merchant, who harvested the bounty of the fields and the yield of the sheep and shipped them afar, especially to Odessa. He was a rooted Bessarabian Jew, pleasant with his fellow,

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immersed as always in his business, and made sure to give his children a basic, traditional Jewish education. Reb Yitzchak Zlotnik, the chosen teacher from Lithuania, made his way to Beltz and found lodging in the home of Reb Eliyahu Fichman. As he was at the bountiful table, full of delicacies, he imparted sections of his Torah in Tanach and Gemara to his students. Even though Reb Eliyahu had relieved himself of the need to teach his children, having given it over to the teacher, he used his free time to direct his children in the ways of the world. He was exacting with their manners, and he instilled within them good traits and politeness. He knew how to imbue a calm spirit, a gracious spirit, and a tolerant attitude in the spirit of those days. He taught the little children to be careful with respect for their father, and they did not behave lightly in his presence. This seriousness in the Fichman home did not impose fear. The relationship between the father and the children was heartfelt, and a quiet, gentle love was woven from heart to heart. He was always calm and close. He knew the hearts of his children and took part in all their games. Even Grandmother's threats to bring them to judgment did not hit their mark, as they were sheltered beneath Father's lofty, protective presence. Their affectionate clinging to him, especially after a long journey, covered over all their “misdeeds”. For every journey the father made to distant places, it seemed to the children as though a holiday had begun and all restraints were lifted. But in the end, longing prevailed, and once he returned it seemed as if only then did the house truly know the joy of a festival. It seemed that the entire world was enveloped in a festival at the sight of the ship of the family returning to its port.

That which captivated the attention of young Yaakov was the calm temperament and seriousness of Father. Reb Eliyahu was inwardly turned, and the melancholy of the earth would cloud his face, like the shadow of a cloud sweeping over the steppe on bright days. A silent strand of melancholy spread to all the members of the family from Father. This melancholy suffused the atmosphere of the house. “This was not melancholy at all, but rather thoughts of the steppe, in the light of the still stars” – in the language of the poet. Fichman inherited this melancholy: Day after day it dripped upon him, drop by drop, until it found a dwelling in the hidden recesses of his soul, and later in his poetry. This is the same soft, lyrical melancholy hidden away in the folds of the pastoral and the idyllic. It does not spring forth from lack or hunger, from disgrace and poverty. No, this melancholy did not have the defining characteristics of the nineteenth century Jewish street.

Little Yaakov maintained the intimate contact with Father even outside the house; every time he traveled with him to a nearby village, to the fields around the city, and to the sheep pens and pasturelands into which Father invested the finest of his love and energy. On these journeys, the world was revealed to the Jewish child in all its splendor and glory. Every secret of the soil, every wonder of the land and living beings was revealed to the child, as his soul and senses opened wide and absorbed the surroundings in their original, unmarred freshness. The young tourist, the enthusiastic traveler of the future, saw in it his first revelation of the divine.

Indeed, this is nothing other than the choicest soil The soil that preserves its beauty; its innocence remains unmarred. And there was a long hour where the child was privileged to see it And he will not forget it all his days; His soul would throb with it. And this is the secret of the soil; Ah, I could not leave its Silence, the softness of its grass and the preciousness of its sheaves, Here the entire world was revealed to me, and I desired it.

Father did not talk much during those conversations. However, his entire essence exuded astonishment to that wondrous land, to which he brought his young son. With a short conversation, he would enjoy introducing his son into practical issues, and directing him in the ways of the world. He would give him the reins during the journey, a sign that it was not only a propitious hour for him, but also that he was showing that he trusted his son. They would stop on the journey next to the edge of the well, and Father would even permit him to give the horses to drink. Indeed, few are similar experiences which were experienced by young poets in their childhood. The blessed cooperation with Father resonates to this day in Fichman's sections of poetry and prose: his steady, diligent hands and faithful work. In the meantime, before the poet determined that his heart would be captivated in a different world in the future; for more than he drew water from the well, he drank in the dusky hollow that held its compressed secrets. While his father's horses were still drinking their fill, he was drinking in the secrets of existence – embedded among the grasses, the wonders of growth and blossoming, the play of lights and shadows, the tricklings of sorrow, the revelation.

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Mother Feiga as well, a sprout grown like a modest fruit, did not easily take root in the “large city” that Beltz was. From the village in the Prut Valley, she brought with her the essence of longing, and from it she suffused the entire house. In her yearning for the variegated colors of the steppe, she adorned her home with carpets and embroidered coverings, and with their profusion of colors she made the spacious house bloom, at the edge of the city, facing the great Raut ridge. Full of grace and gentle in her ways, she moved about the house wrapped in melancholy. The finest of her feelings were expressed in her pleasant voice, for she sung well, and there was something far-off and strange in this song in the quiet, silent house. As long as the elderly grandmother was alive, the mother was less watchful over the ways of her household, and the children, Yaakov among them, cleaved to her because of her personal charm, the maternal warmth that flowed from her. She lived within a temperament of restraint and endurance, yet she moved through it as though the gray, everyday reality had never touched her. Of all the older members of the household, she was the least likely to intrude on the children in their comings and goings. Whenever Fichman gave poetic voice or spoke about his mother, it seemed as though he were reliving his early immersions in the clear streams that had poured so abundantly from that refined queen – from her love and from her yearning.

And again, as then, in the pale dust-light, You sit with the afterglow of the Sabbath, And I do not know why you are so heavy hearted, What shadow it is that so weighs upon the house. When I returned at twilight from running about outside I loved the light of your peace, all the grace of your blossoms Before the kindled hearth, only the flash of your eyes Darkened like a frozen droplet, your cheek grown faint…

Indeed, it was only when the children grew older and Grandmother passed away that it became obvious that she was not strange and far-off as she appeared. Rather, she was loving, worried, and concerned for their wellbeing – even within the grey, weekday atmosphere of the mundane, and though she was torn between her inner world and her obligations, she carried herself like a Sabbath queen… After time, when Fichman, after much wandering and difficult crises, stood before the most decisive moment in his life, before he took the woman he loved into his house, he took the familiar back-way home to his parents' house. He returned especially to receive the blessing from Mother's delicate, soft hands.

Grandmother played an important part in the education of the child Yaakov. She was a woman of valor, and her wisdom sustained her throughout all the afflictions of the larger world. From her, Fichman learned diligence, and love of order and cleanliness – traits that stood with him later on as an editor and poet. Grandmother had a clean body and pure soul. She loved wholesomeness and was careful to fix every defect. It was she, and not Mother, who oversaw the management of the household constantly and carefully. She was diminutive, pleasant, and her entire essence exuded youthful energy. She would appear at the right moment and expose any defect. She was especially conscientious to return the young ones to good behavior when she caught them misbehaving. Whether they snatched potatoes to roast over a fire on the bank of the Raut, or they made use of whatever scraps they could find to build kites, she would appear with her stern rebukes. Yet more than once she herself was won over by the charm of the children's mischief and found herself joining in their “naughty” doings. What she found hardest to accept was the indulgence of the grown-ups, who pampered the children and spoiled them beyond hope. On the other hand, she showed herself full of understanding and overflowing with encouragement for the unusual inclinations of her little grandson Yaakov. The more this little one grew, the more his attachment deepened to books, to learning, and to his dreams that were not of this world. Every step he took beyond the firm framework of the home appeared to her, the old woman, as promising and full of good portent. “The only one in the house who foresaw a future for me,” Fichman bears witness to her with trembling and faithful gratitude.

Into the family idyll there always came a few passing guests, whose short or long stay in the Fichman home brought a generous rain to the tender sapling while he was still in bud. There were the melamdim who had become a part of the essence of the homes of the wealthy people in the remote settlements of Bessarabia. There were three: Reb Yitzchak Zlotnick, Reb Yaakov Yosi, and Reb Tavil. We run into the three of them here and there in the poet's children's stories, poems, and autobiographical impressions. Whether they had come from Lithuania

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and Podolia, or whether they were local – these and those quickly became perfumed from the pure village atmosphere that pervaded in the area and the home. In such a light-suffused setting, there was no place for that stock type of melamed who has secured for himself a fixed place in Hebrew literature. Nothing here is drawn from the poet's imagination in his tales of the rebbe absorbed with a runaway calf, or a brooding hen, or delighting in the scent of the roses his pupils bring him from the nearby garden. The rebbe was not strict, and even with voices around him his teaching continued, as he walked together with his pupils, intoxicated by the Aggadah that hovered in the air of the steppe. Its sounds and its good, enchanting scents seemed to mingle with the ancient fragrances of the biblical world, whose springs had only now burst forth. Reb Tavil or Reb Yosi were happy to give freedom to the students, especially during the days of the spring and the summer, so that they could draw together with them from the wellsprings of the bounty of light and lush blossoming. Secular and holy kissed together… Therefore, young Fichman's transition to Haskalah that was not accompanied by family crises can be understood. The environment also did not protest strongly to his interest in secular literature. The Maskilim of the area, A. D. Rosenthal, Mordechai Finkelman, and Shabtai Lerner, who were attracted to the writer's pen, appeared in the remote city. In a nearby town in the region, Marculesti, in the home of the scribe Reb Avraham Elimelech Fishman, there emerged young men of natural bent: Yehuda Leib (later Rabbi Y. L. Maimon) and Gavriel, both of them bold writers of serious Hebrew prose and audacious stylists. These, and others like them, used to frequent the home of the shochet, Reb Elazar Auerbach; and there too were two young brothers, Shalom the elder and Ephraim the younger (the poet E. Auerbach of the United States), whose world revolved above all around the book. He cleaved to this group, and found friends who were also driven to seek out the discovery of every new book. That is where his great thirst for reading grew and burned. We can imagine how great the efforts were to find reading material in a city such as Beltz, which was devoid of books and libraries. Only later did he become involved in enthusiastic reading: “I still remember the impression of the first book that I read,” Fichman once told Bialik, “However, this was not a book, but rather a tiny booklet, ‘The Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ that Father brought when he returned from Odessa, along with some popular calendar of Y. Y. Linitzki. Even so, this was indeed a great moment in my life. I was then about seven years old, perhaps even less. The impression was stirring. For a long time after that, I became emotional every time I entered the dark granary in our yard, for even though it was full of barrels, I imagined that a robber was hiding in each one of them”… His soul thirsted for the revelation of new worlds, with unimaginable wonders. He searched and each time miraculously found books that aroused interest, enchanted him, and even conquered him forever. Without being early or late, without a methodology of guidance, in the ways of great, enthusiastic readers of the previous century, he would devour anything in Hebrew, Yiddish, or Russian that came his way – for the latter, almost with the understanding that he gained from his own powers. As a continuation to the Tanach, Ein Yaakov, chapters of Aggadah and exegesis, he added Josephus, and Sefer Hayashar. After those, the anthologies of Shalom Aleichem and Peretz, the novels of ShM”R [Mendele Mocher Seforim] in Yiddish, Kor Haoni [The Furnace of Poverty], Misterei Paris [Les Mystères de Paris], Misterei Hechatzer Hasephardit [Los Misterios de la Corte de Madrid], “The Count of Monte Cristo”, Dos Vintsh-Fingerl [The Wishing Ring] and Fishke der Kremer [Fishke the Peddler] by Mendele (Emek ha-Bakha and Sefer ha-Kabtsonim), Zichronot Lebeit David [Memories of the House of David], Emek Haarazim [Valley of Cedars] and Yaakov Tirda, [the preceding three] being poems by the father and son Levinson, “Robinson Crusoe”, and the early Russian classics… “We were a small group who, with a kind of self-sacrificing devotion, managed to get hold of a single booklet of Ha-Shiloah, a tattered copy of Ha-Pardes. We were bound together by that same fervor that swept us after Al Parshat Derachim [At the Crossroads] and after the books of Belinsky, the well-known Russian critic. But there was no one in the town by whose light we could warm ourselves.”

With his first contact with world literature, the heart of the maturing youth broadened, attracted him to a wonderful world, and within it promise was giving rise to wonders. Even within his narrow circle he delighted in the marvels and wonders that unfolded before him; marvels and wonders that stayed with him into old age. Yet with the revelation of new worlds, it became difficult for him to remain confined to the modest corners of his native land. With the first signs of maturity, he would now and then slip away from home, a simple backpack over his shoulder, disappearing into a distant village for several months before returning to us. It was no longer enough for him to rely on the knowledge he had inherited from his beloved teachers and older companions. At the age of fifteen, he reached Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, and as the custom in those days, he began structured studies in order to qualify for the high school matriculation exams. He earned his livelihood in Kishinev by giving Hebrew lessons in the homes of wealthy wine merchants in return for generous meals of roast lamb and aged Bessarabian wine. Along with his rapid advancement in the Russian language, he found the city library, rich in its book treasury.

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This time, he was able to enjoy exemplary Russian literature and plentiful translations from world literature, especially from French and German literature. In the delightful civic garden of Kishinev, at the foot of the statue of Pushkin, who also once exiled himself to that city, he was intoxicated by the scent of acacia and lilac, and drank his fill, almost to the point of drunkenness, forgetting all restraint as he lifted his voice in the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov, and immersed himself with diligence in the forceful prose of Turgenev and Tolstoy. Fortified, he walked with confidence along the long, narrow corridor that led him to the gate of poetry and the [literary] essay…

Translator's footnote

1. A Mishnaic term (Sanhedrin 3:3) for pigeon-racing or pigeon-flying, considered a frivolous or dubious pastime and listed among occupations disqualified from testimony. Return

The writer Chaim Hochman

Fichman, a native of Beltz, was a member of a wide-branched patriarchal family that set up deep roots in the soil of Bessarabia. While still in the morning of his life, he displayed an inclination to spending time alone in the bosom of nature, in the expanse of the plain and the splendid pastureland that spread out in the full glory of its greenery in that district. Introverted and immersed in his own world, he let his visions soar there, united in an undisturbed fashion with the strands of his soul. With landscape scenes that broaden the eye with their radiance, he ventured onward to gaze at the Raut River as it flowed with its calm waters to the edges of the horizon, with its steep banks, where reeds rustled with the murmur of life; the marsh reeds and the willow trees with their drooping crowns swaying to the gusts of wind, all washed in a pale glow on moonlit nights. An elegiac note pulsed at that time in the clear conditional lines of his lyric verse – a sequence of hidden harmonies, lofty to the point of soul rapture.

“The expanse of the plain and its sweet agony I absorbed from the fields of Bessarabia, the landscape of my birthplace” – he expressed in one of his interviews, stressing the source of inspiration for his poetic work.

The landscape of Bessarabia, the cradle of his birthplace, with its abundance of vineyards on the slopes of its hills, with the image of its produce and the way of life of its residents – people of [rural] settlements, tillers of the soil – hinted to him with the grace of their charm from a far off land when he lived in the metropolis of Odessa, and later when he came to anchor at the last station on the route of his wanderings in the Land of Israel.

Fichman visited the area of his childhood several years after permanently settling in the Land. At that time, changes had occurred that placed their stamp on his hometown. Many of the low, humble houses, sagging and on the verge of collapse, had partly vanished from view, and in their place tall, splendid stone buildings had risen. The outward aspect of the home of the parents of the poet had also been renovated. Only the vegetable garden that encircled it from all sides imparted a unique, village-like, natural appearance to it. However, Fichman was not taken by the technical innovations that amazed the eyes of the viewers with their refinement. Rather, he was nostalgic for the views of the past, which, even though they had been partly removed and changed with the passage of time, still remained in the recesses of his mind and refreshed his heart with the pleasantness of their memory.

At midday during the summer, when he would wind his way to the Raut, Fichman would turn aside to Levatov's bookshop on the corner of Nikolaevski Street on the lower quarters of the city. There, jumbled heaps lay piled on wooden shelves whose undersides had sagged under the load: worn, faded ritual objects encrusted with the dust of generations; heaps upon heaps of pamphlets and assorted ephemera, handed down to successive cohorts of enlightened youths. Spread out on a counter near the entrance were newspapers

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and manuscripts that gleamed from afar with the freshness of their color, before the smell of the print had melted away. These especially aroused the attention of the poet who constantly followed the process of development of literature. He leafed with seriousness through issues of HaOlam, HaKtuvim, or booklets overflowing with words of literary criticism and poetry published in Warsaw or Vilna. At times, the poet Ephraim Auerbach appeared there. He moved abroad during his youth, and came during vacation periods to visit his native city. Bonds of faithful friendship, forged by a closeness of hearts, were formed between him and Yaakov already during the days of their bright youth, and their encounters aroused echoes of far-off, nostalgic memories within them, stirring in their emotional intensity.

My acquaintance with Yaakov Fichman is etched deeply in my memory. It took place at twilight, in a railway car that was carrying me to my post in the border forests of the Bessarabian region. Resting on the windowsill and caught in anxious thoughts, he took in with curious glances the plains of the steppe as they unfolded before his eyes and trembled with the pangs of parting. Where now, in the heart of the plain, enwrapped in silence, bonfires grew bright and glinted, their pale lights drifting in the dim, misted air. Shepherds of flocks clustered around them, taking shelter near them. Even a gnarled oak, heavy with its majestic crown, stood out in its desolate, orphaned solitude by the roadside.

During this period, I was occupied with teaching, and alongside my work at the provincial school I completed the literary chrestomathy^[1] Lashon VeHasefer [Language and the Book], which appeared under Fichman's editorship. That textbook, in a fine volume, was edited with a sense of esthetics and care. Not only did it impart a knowledge of the fundamentals of classical and modern literature to the students, but it also enhanced their horizons and embraced foreign cultures in its teachings.

It is no wonder that such a pedagogical endeavor, important in both form and content, was worthy to be edited by one of the priests in the field of education.

During the period that he lived in Israel, Fichman continued to dedicate his time and energy to emending and editing literary manuscripts and works of criticism. Nevertheless, the crowning achievement of his wide-branched creativity was his lyric poetry in which the wondrous fusion of feeling and reflection was revealed and came to its full artistic expression. In the best of his poetry, he nurtured a reverence for working the land, whose great value he saw in shaping the human being and his traditional character within society. How deep and sensitive were his impressions of the landscape of the homeland [Israel], upon which a biblical, ancient splendor is lavished in abundance, and toward which his cherished longings pressed with a thirsty yearning as he walked through the sands of the desert.

His impressionist approach in its essence was also expressed in his essays, in which he revealed his outlook on the events in the world of literature and the creations of writers and people of spirit. “Come to me with reproaches if you must – say afterward that I am too light in my judgments and assessments – but I give my primary attention to the established writers, those who have secured a real foothold in the realm of literature, and I find myself, as it were, recoiling from the priestly novices, the young acolytes in their midst. There is a touch of certainty in this preference of mine, though I have granted myself the liberty – and let this be the broader measure – to choose, at times, the very youngest of the earnest craftsmen, the promising talents.” After a few moments of reflection, his response gained further clarity: “Is it not in the nature of things that a spiritual, traditional kinship should exist between me and the writers of my own generation? After all, they were the ones who paved the way for our literature in the course of its formation, and their works continue to serve as a model for those who come after them.”

Years have passed since the day I met Fichman. However, what remained in my memory was the charm that shone forth in his natural, spontaneous manner, an urban manner, touching in its sincerity to the depths of the heart, while the soft, evening dimness rose in his eyes; dim shimmers drifted over the vistas of the landscape, the landscape of his origins.

Translator's footnote

1. Chrestomathy: an old-fashioned word for a curated collection of selected literary passages, typically compiled for instructional use in language or literature teaching. Return

Ephraim Auerbach

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Ephraim Auerbach was born in Beltz and grew up in the same Bessarabian region, with its distinctive landscape, where Fichman was born and raised – that same broad plain, and along the edges of the same marsh pools from which the city took its name. Beltz is a plural form, derived from the word balta, meaning “marsh” in Romanian and in the Moldavian–Bessarabian dialect. Ephraim Auerbach was a product of the same typical Jewish environment of southern Russia, with all its warmth and heartiness, with the Bessarabian distinctive character arising from its agricultural and pastoral way of life. All the folkloric, social, and emotional foundations of Fichman's birthplace were, of course, his heritage as well.

Nevertheless, Auerbach's world was slightly different from Fichman's. The vibrant era at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century – framed by the years of Yaakov Fichman's birth and his emergence as a poet (5642–5670 / 1882–1910), and by the years of E. Auerbach's birth and maturation (5652–5670 / 1892–1910) – brought further changes to the Jewish street, and new melodies reached even that remote corner that was Bessarabia. The rise of Yaakov Fichman as a recognized poet, his being a native son of the city, close to the home, and a friend from youth of Shalom, Ephraim's older brother, shaped Auerbach's beginnings – certainly epigonic ones – and encouraged his early steps. Indeed, E. Auerbach regarded Fichman as his first mentor and guide in the pathways of poetry.

The place, the timeframe, and the closeness of the poets bring us glimpses through an open window into the poet's formative world. Their parental homes were close to each other, they were close neighbors but different from each other, yet a wonderful friendship was woven between the youths. Fichman's parental home, even though it was lively and tense, was heavy and immersed within itself. The family members – his father, mother, and brother – were working, active people, and a subdued, ideal quiet pervaded everything: a pent-up silence; subdued impulses; a dim, unassuming world. The parental home of E. Auerbach stood on the same street and shared the same climate of fine traits and manners. Yet unlike Fichman's, it was not marked by exacting strictness – [a moderation that] befitted the status of the head of the family, a shochet among his people. According to the sections of poetry and various essays that we find with Auerbach, interwoven with autobiographical depictions and details, it was an open home, always bustling and lively. In our attempt to retrospectively reconstruct the spiritual structure of the home and peer into its internal world, we will immediately discern that the house was a bit unruly. The head of the household, along with the rest of the family members, formed some sort of Bohemian group, a bit dreamy and drifty, in the manner of people of eccentric temperament. It is difficult to explain how this spirit in the home of Elazar, the honorable shochet of the community, took shape, and how it held its ground while in the synagogue, the street, and the home a

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stringent social reality, bound to tradition and traditionalist norms, prevailed. Even though the way of life of the Jews of Bessarabia tended toward more modern paths, remaining moderate and accommodating, this compromising lightness of the house of Elazar the shochet was regarded with a condemning eye^[1].

The home of Elazar the shochet stood on Peterburg Street. There was a wide yard behind it, surrounded by a fence with a gate that was ready to collapse. E. Auerbach related, “All houses in Beltz had such fences.” He adds, “All the houses had windows. There were houses whose doors were always closed, and there were windows that, even though they were open during the summer, seemed to be sealed and begging: do not peer into us; we are closed. But there were houses that were always open.” Their house was one of the open houses. Its windows, even during the winter, when the custom in those days was to place double boards over them to protect from the cold, and the panes were covered with an opaque, patterned layer of frost, were as if they were begging: Please, peer into us – we are open, just as the hearts of the residents of the house were open. Indeed, the door was open to all types of guests, occasional and regular. Among the regular visitors were neighbors, customers, and ordinary Jews from among the residents of the city. Next to the table, where the ever boiling samovar never left its place, we would meet scholarly Jews, tradespeople, and wealthy estate owners. An ordinary Jew wandering through the marketplace and freezing from the cold would see no wrong in entering the home of Reb Elazar the shochet to revive his bones with a hot cup of tea, and incidentally to listen to the ordinary conversation of scholars. Even if Father and Mother were not at home, the children would hurry to welcome the guests. Love of their fellow was engraved in their blood.

People came from near and far to that house that was open to strangers. The level of hospitality, which was a part of the family essence among the Jews of Bessarabia, reached the pinnacle of its expression. “From as far back as I remember,” relates Ephraim Auerbach, “our home was open to guests.” And there was a special meaning to the word “guests” [orchim], as it is embedded in the Yiddish language and stressed on the penultimate syllable, and with a soft chirik^[2]. The most important of these were the wandering booksellers. Such guests came from afar. They appeared in our small, innocent eyes as bearers of tidings of renewal, clandestine emissaries of a hidden revolt, secret couriers carrying with them the underground spark of the haskalah. In the home of the shochet in Beltz, they felt themselves in a good place, and they remained for an extended period. They would bring with them Kedushat Levi and Shivchei HaBesht [Praises of the Baal Shem Tov], volumes of Hebrew books of Haskalah, and Yiddish storybooks. Along with these, they would bring the romantic Zionist poems of the beginning of the century, those by the national poet Elyakim Zunzer: Kol Ashrei Yerusahti in Bemacharashati, and others.

Mordechai Talesnik was a special, very welcome guest at the home. Reb Mordechai would appear in Beltz as an agent for a tallis merchant. He would spend weeks and months in the home of the shochet. That wonderful, straightforward Jew had a dreamy, poetic soul. To him, Ephraim dedicated one of his first lovely poems, from which the aroma of the old homeland rose up. Reb Mordechai was a Bohemian as well, and was given to hearing every internal impetus and every call of the heart. The heart of that impassioned man did not rest until he traveled to Warsaw specially to shake hands with Nachum Sokolov, the editor of Hatzefira, whose name had become a legend. The admiration for the famous editor, which was widespread among the Jewish public, took hold of Reb Mordechai as well, even though he was not particularly fluent in reading the new Hebrew. Reb Mordechai gave thanks to G-d for contracting typhus, and thereby meriting to taste Carmel wine that came from the Holy Land. He accompanied the caravan of wagon drivers who were leaving the vineyard area of Bessarabia (Codrii) to load the barrels of new wine there. He was enthused by the appearance of the harvest, and learned from the vintners the doinas [Romanian folk songs] and lovely wine songs. Reb Mordechai fell in love with all of Bessarabia, its vineyards, its wines, and its straightforward Jews, to the point that he decided to settle in Beltz. As has been said, he was one of the regular visitors to Reb Elazar the shochet. Among those who came from outside the city were the Fishman brothers (Rabbi Yehuda Leib HaKohen Maimon and his brother the bibliograph Zecharia, and the teacher Gavriel), their sister Ada (Maimon), and their father Reb Elimelech the scribe and polymath. All of them had a heightened spirit. They enjoyed the atmosphere of the house and imbued it with their spirit.

Indeed, that house had a unique attractive power due to its owners, Reb Elazar, a tall Jew, with black eyes,

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overlaid with a tinge of melancholy. Those eyes continued to grow more melancholy as the man aged, and his black beard began to show strands of silver shining with a dignified brightness. He was bony, broad shouldered, with a straight posture, and a pleasant gait. His first grace was toward the women, who would come to enjoy his gentle countenance when they brought him their fowl for slaughter. He received his hormena [ordination] for shechita [ritual slaughter] from a yeshiva in Lithuania, and in Kopust [Kopys], he merited to “pour water on his hands” [figuratively] for the Tzemach Tzedek, Reb Mendele of Lubavitch, a descendent of the author of the Tanya and the founder of Chabad. He inherited a leaning toward the Chabad movement from his father. This devotion to the pure, intellectually oriented Hasidic current of White Russia, with its noble grace and original contemplative spirit – a path followed by only a few among the Jews of Bessarabia – cast its spirit over the home. When the maternal grandfather Avraham would come from Ukraine to Beltz and sit down with his son [likely means son-in-law] to study Tanya – relates the grandson Ephraim – it seemed to them and to me that we were redeemed from the exile.

Reb Elazar himself was one of the fortunate ones. The entire livelihood of a shochet, fowl and cattle, was not in accordance with his spirit. However, he was an only son, the son of a shochet, and it was his destiny to preserve the chazaka [hereditary tradition], so that he could support his mother to marry off his eldest sister. Thus he was yoked to it, though it never became routine for him. He was entirely immersed in debts and interest payments, when his livelihood was insufficient to the point of [being unable to] maintain his deteriorating house, and was forced to put it up for sale. He perhaps hoped that the sale might pave the way for a more pleasant livelihood for him. However, when he took the first bench in his hand, and intended to transport it to the new house, he began to weep. He stood there weeping, and his wife and children joined him breaking down in sobs, as if murderers had attacked them. At that point, he decided to remain in the house, and of course he remained hitched to the chazaka…

Poverty pervaded the home. The family had many children, and the father was weighed down with debts. Yet despite all this, the vibrant spirit and the kindness toward others that prevailed in the home were not diminished. The meager table stood at the service of everybody, and all the visitors to the house felt the heartwarming simplicity and the attentive ear. When strife broke out, when trouble gathered, they would at once go to Rabbi Elazar for counsel and sound advice. He had no dealings or conversation or commerce with the gentile peasants. Yet his involvement in the lives of the simple Jews – the tillers of the soil, the craftsmen, the merchants and peddlers – was so immediate, so unmediated, that whenever a scorching year struck and drought threatened man and beast, and especially the Jewish ploughmen and vine growers, their distress became his own. Then veils of sorrow would descend upon the house.

The mother, Chaya, also fit in to the essence of the household nicely, as a proper Jewish woman, so that many women of her age were jealous of her. As a mother of sons and the mistress of a house open wide to guests, her lot was not fortunate amid the bitter poverty. However, she had a sense of humor, and knew how to accept that lot with a good spirit and inner steadiness. Eyes were raised to her as well. In particular women would approach her to ask for advice and comfort. She was also the daughter of a Chabad family, and everything in the house was full of warmth. She was prepared to assist and support – she was a mother in Israel.

An honorable place in the family tapestry was reserved for Grandmother – Father's mother. She was supported at the table of her only son, who took her support upon himself with love after the death of his father, and bore the burden of marrying off the oldest sister. When she was old, she took upon herself the role of charity collector. She would collect and distribute to the poor of the city. When she would return to her room in the evening, she would pray a great deal. Her entire comportment in the house was shrouded in an air of mystery. In the evening, it appeared as if she was wholly given over to another world, far, far away from life in this world. All her thoughts were toward her late husband. In her imagination, he was walking about in a world that was all good, basking in the splendor of the Divine presence, and serving as a righteous intercessor for all of Israel, and certainly for her son and his family. All her prayers and requests were directed toward him. The grandchildren would listen, with a childlike tremor and with an instinctive excitement, to her talk and to her exchanges with that imagined world. The passing of the old woman from the world at the conclusion of the Sabbath was also marked by a certain drama. With the silence of the departing Sabbath day, from her sickbed, she asked to call for her son, who was in the synagogue at that time. She wanted to listen to his Havdalah. The son fulfilled her wish, recited Havdalah, and, as was the custom, extinguished the burning wick in the little pool of wine, and sparks flew. He dipped his fingers in the wine and passed them over her lips, as she gave up her soul with a blessing.

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Childhood in a Melancholy Lot

Ephraim was born in a melancholy lot. He was the third son. The joy was great on the day of his circumcision. A great feast was arranged in Reb Elazar's house, and when the guests grew merry with wine and the spirits rose, they broke into dance. Elderly Jews, whose heads were already dizzy from the strong Bessarabian wine, reached the heights of enthusiasm with their dance. Tens of Jews joined hand to shoulder in the narrow, crowded room. While their heads were still clouded with wine, lifted upward in their exhilaration, and their mouths bursting out in enthusiastic song, the guests paid no heed to where their feet were falling. They trampled over the three-year-old Moshe, who had been caught among the forest of legs. By the time they realized what had happened, it was already too late. The older brother fell victim to the joy surrounding the birth of his baby brother. He did survive, but a lasting injury was inflicted on him for all the days of his life. His spinal cord was damaged and twisted, and his tongue, too, was taken from him. Hunchbacked and mute, yet keen-minded and perceptive, he moved about the house, and from his shining eyes there looked out the unspoken reproach at a joy that had not known how to restrain itself. And Ephraim, once he grew older and learned the secret of the disaster, would look at his brother, and in his heart there flickered a feeling of guilt.

The home played an important role in the education of the child Ephraim. He was raised in an expressionist atmosphere, somewhat lively, expressive to its core, seeking human connectedness, and filled with the joy of communal sociability. From this stems his connection to the community, his involvement in social circles, as well as the receptive ear and discerning eye of the future journalist; the investigative curiosity that always grows within such people. A note of sadness, not always of the lyrical kind, ran through him at the sight of the everyday cruelty in which cattle and sheep were slaughtered. The second strand – the bloodletting that flowed from the severed throats – planted in him a philosophical reflection on the nature of life, on the cruelty by which “the stronger prevails,” on helplessness and the absence of just reward; and despite the optimism ingrained in him, it instilled in him a proper measure of pessimism and reflective wonder. Later, when he made aliyah and, when in Ben Shemen, happened to see trees that had been cut down by Arabs, he wrote, “When I approached the grove after that, the trees that were cut down were laid out there like slaughtered ducks. The white blossoms scattered about seemed like feathers in my eyes. It seemed that I was even seeing drops of blood dripping from the cut throats…” The order that governed the parental home did not especially instill bitterness in the children. He already saw his older brother Shalom become a maskil [an adherent of the haskalah movement]. As has been said, Shalom was a close friend of Fichman, whose rise in talent was beginning to show. These were days of storm and upheaval in Russia. Bessarabian Jewry, too, was not spared; it was swept along by the social movements and historical events – Zionism, the Bund, and the Kishinev pogrom. There were many circles of maskilim and progressive people, and in their milieu, several names with a local character stood out. They would take up the pen and attempt to follow the paths of the writers who grew and became known on Bessarabian soil – Yehuda Steinberg, and Sh. Ben-Tzion, whose appearance was both tidings and a call together. Shabtai Lerner, Y. Finkelman, and A. D. Rosenthal sprang up and rose. Their desire outstripped their ability, and most of them remained at the margins, leaving no noticeable contribution; and as suddenly as they appeared, they were forgotten. Yet their imprint was evident in the innocent provincialism that prevailed in Bessarabia. The Yiddish theatre, which was at the height of its flourishing and whose amateur troupes reached Bessarabia and drew from it a measure of artistic strength (Fishzon, Michalsko, Davidov, the Eirleib brothers, and others), also stirred and called.

With all this, Ephraim was fully immersed in Gemara study until the age of fourteen. With a clear voice and the traditional chant, he would, without realizing it, reveal a kind of poetry even in the Talmudic passages studied at yeshivas. Aside from chapters of Tanach, sections of religious hymns and prayers, and popular poems that burst forth from the windows of the apprentices and tradespeople, he did not yet know of the existence of great, universal poetry. At that time, his ear absorbed a great deal of stories and Hasidic tales at home and in the synagogue, from Mother or Grandmother, and from the children at cheder. In Beltz, houses and manor-houses from the days of Turkish rule had survived into that period, with their arched ceilings and their hewn cellars, dark and seemingly bottomless. There was a legend about one such cave-like cellar, that it was one of the hidden tunnels through which one could reach the Land of Israel. But to reach it one needed daring – the strength to move through darkness, along a path of shadow and gloom. The power of this legend suited the poetic awakening that would come to Auerbach; years later he immortalized it in a dramatic poem, Hamearah [The Cave].

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First Steps

Ephraim only began to learn Russian after 1905, with the influence of his older brother Shalom and his friends. This step was not particularly difficult. Since he read constantly, he absorbed it all after a short period of getting accustomed to Russian reading, almost as an autodidact. From that, he circled to Hebrew and Yiddish. That was his first summer of enthusiastic reading: Peretz and Mendele, Smolenskin and Yehuda Steinberg, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol. All of them, in a harmonic blend, contributed their part to broadening the horizons of the future poet.

At that time, his brother Shalom was already living as an extern [a non-resident student] in Odessa. Fortune smiled on Ephraim: a cat scratched him, and he ended up in the large city to receive injections at the only Pasteur Institute in all southern Russia. Though still young, the queen of poetry had already taken note of him. His desire to be in Odessa and to meet writers and scholars who had become renowned in those days was finally realized. Yet he appeared too young, unsteady in comprehension, and provincial in his manner to approach and stand before the princes of Yiddish and Hebrew literature to whom his soul aspired. His attempts to reach them failed, for there was no shortage of diligent youths who streamed to the southern capital of Hebrew literature, and not all the luminaries of Hebrew literature of that time – not at all times – were willing to show a welcoming face. He did not even dare approach Bialik and Ahad Ha'am. Y. Linetski, the elderly Yiddish humorist, did not satisfy him; he was a grumbler, filled to the brim with complaints on the ways of the world and the world's treatment of him – the heart of the youth was not captivated by him. The sour reception he received from Mendele has remained with him to this day. “Young man, what do you want?” With thunderous irritation, Mendele Mocher Sefarim drove off the very youth who, many years later, would cleave to his legacy. Had the old man possessed a touch of prophetic insight, he would have discerned in the boy one destined to become an emissary of Yiddish in a distant, foreign land teeming with millions of Jews. Without doubt, he would have softened and armed himself with patience. But at that moment he did not realize he was driving away one of his future, faithful heirs. The young man fled, wounded by disappointment, but not disheartened.

The disappointment the great men of the generation, whom he so deeply revered, had dealt him pained him and embittered the festive feelings that accompanied him in the southern port city, a paragon of beauty, known to all its residents and visitors as “Odessa Mama.” The “Passage” at the city's center, with its profusion of lights and its polished, gleaming streets, opened his eyes to the shabby provincialism in which he had been living in the district town. By contrast, they succeeded in making it clear to him that he was a stranger here, a foreign plant there. This was a common feeling in all the writers who came from Bessarabia. Feelings of strong longing and the desire to return were always aroused within them immediately after their first appearance in the city. It was the charm of the land that pulled them to return. The small plots of his uncle Chil, the farmer in Alexandrani (a Jewish agricultural colony near Beltz), and the flowers tended by Bina, the Jewish woman from Bartujani (also an agricultural settlement), together with the scents of acacia and lilac, drew him: return, lost son.

Meanwhile, a new longing germinated in his heart. In the Zionist Yavneh synagogue, the youth kindled flames of longing for the Return to Zion, while at the seashore, there were ships anchored, preparing to sail for Jaffa. Whenever he would go down to the promenade at the seashore, he was suddenly seized by a vague yearning for distant horizons. This time, he did not desire a return home to the Bessarabian steppe, but rather to remain in the city and bask in the shadow of writers and poets. For any one of the ships anchored in the Odessa harbor could carry him off – and not only along the winding, difficult path that led through the cave beneath the Turkish House in town – but all the way… to the Land of Israel.

The period of treatment at the Pasteur Institute passed very quickly, and Ephraim returned to Beltz. He returned and did not know what to do in his stormy youth, with his surging yearnings and hands that had no work. Despite the father's tolerant attitude toward the children's behavior, he did not agree that his son could attend the gymnasium. For a few months, Ephraim went out to what in those days was called konditzia–that is, to serve as a melamed or a private teacher for a Jewish family or several families in a remote village. But the konditzia did not suffice for the lad, and he returned to his parents' home, the question of what he should do standing before him in all its seriousness.

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However, Froiko (Ephraim's Yiddish nickname) was not silent. He studied a great deal to train himself as a poet, and the best training was writing itself. Already in 1909, he published a Hebrew story for children in M. Krinski's Ben-Shachar, and wrote a Yiddish poem in Zangn (an anthology published in Vilna).

In 1927, Auerbach set out on an extended trip through Bessarabia, the Land of Israel, and the Soviet Union. When he visited Beltz, he saw his remote hometown in its full provincial desolation. A dense and heavy fog had settled over it. The reign of terror – the oligarchy of reactionary, anti Semitic Romania – ran rampant in all its malicious force. In the alleyways familiar to him from the springtime of his life, he encountered frightened residents, in chains, Jews walking like shadows under the dread of the Siguranţa, the secret police. When he visited the Soviet Union on that trip, he also saw Odessa Mama, which had been revealed to him during his early youth in all its charm as the southern metropolis. There was no trace in it of that vibrant Jewish life from before the First World War. Even though a Jewish newspaper was still published in Moscow and Yiddish books were published, the spiritual drought stood out and was obvious. There was a disturbing conformism in Yiddish literature, drying out any drop of talent. The Jewish writers were already then going about as people sentenced to death and ascending the gallows. The Jews were overtaken with fear, and any power of collective cohesion had been stripped from the Jewish corpus. Only then did he realize that the Land of Israel was the only one – the sum of all solutions. His mission as a poet was strengthened sevenfold. All his growth and development in Yiddish literature, and in its journalism, under the sheltering roof of American Jewry, stood under the sign of the great sun in the East. Like a Bessarabian sunflower, he always turned himself toward the sun.

His origin was from Bessarabia. The landscape of his childhood was implanted in him from way back, and accompanied him throughout all phases of his creativity. The wholesome, doubled melancholy that was blossoming in the world and shifting its aspect; the light, free, natural humor; the candor and the heart opened wide; his gift for grasping sights and sounds, and all the other elements of his poetry – all these were what carved him from that same world of truth, both concrete and symbolic. His images were forged from a quarry of abundance; they were revealed to him like treasures from legend. This world was saturated with sights and images that stir the pathways of the soul. He drew out an inner music and sharpened every faculty of perception and every means of expression. But not only the region's natural landscape – also the Jewish social landscape, healthy and distinctive in its character, and even the landscape of home and family – were refined and absorbed into the fabric of his art and enriched its lifeblood. The layered images drawn from the living fabric of Jewish society in the south of Russia – especially in Bessarabia – together with its ethnographic and folkloristic treasures, added their own fragrance to the scents of field and garden, lifted the melody of the poem and enriched its finest textures.

To the rich possibilities for deciphering the landscape – possibilities that accompanied him in his poetry on Israel and on the charming corners of the United States – there was joined a trembling affinity for imagery. It is always chiselled in his work as though straight from the harsh, wild rock of Bessarabian life. We have seen, in the classic literature of Yiddish and even in Hebrew in the Diaspora, how the pursuit of the social theme often blurred the figures into a single haze of archetypes, in a society drained of vitality and meager in passion. In the heat of social reformation, the individual was forgotten. Even Peretz and Bergelson seemed to follow Mendele Mocher Seforim's method of “this is not my concern,” for there was always one matter higher than all others – Jewish society. Even when they multiplied details and minute particulars, it seemed that everything was directed toward a symbol, toward a ruling archetype – toward “my mare”^[3]. Auerbach too is not free of symbols; his whole expressive impulse found its release chiefly in his dramatic poetry (“The Cave”, “The Tale of the Seventh Beggar”, “Brothers”, and others). Yet not infrequently, from the forest of lyricism in Auerbach's work, the characteristic figure rises sharply into view. It does not lose itself in the thicket of symbols; it belongs to itself, to the blood in its veins. Its inner drive disperses the fog that hangs over the experience – over the stirrings of the soul, over the philosophical awakening. And even when it sometimes appears in a fleeting, elusive way, it does not vanish but returns and takes its stand again – solid, flesh and blood, rooted. Surely you would count among its ethnographic markers that Bessarabian ness – it is the very foundation of it. Yet it is also a signpost along the pathways of the poem,

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without which the poem hangs slack and flutters like the shimmering, scorching air of midsummer.

“Moshe Hirsch – a Pleitze” [a lash of a man]. Moshe Hirsch, – bent his shoulder: shoulders made for sacks and burdens / children gathering around him as playmates. His eyes always held a spirit of shyness, as though they were ready… Indeed, the shoulders were ready to bear the yoke, but the eyes, to bear guilt.

Ephraim Auerbach has no intention of shaping a character in order to bring him, Shneior style, to the pinnacle of a fervent apotheosis of Noach Pandri's legendary power^[4]. For “Moshe Hirsch – a Pleitze” himself is no mythic hero in the mold of Samson, Hercules, or Ilya Muromets. He was an ordinary Jew, with soft teeth and the head of a learned man, whose strength and vitality lay in his broad shoulders. “Moshe Hirsch – a Pleitze” possessed this strength not for display, even if sociology and Jewish literature might wish to enlist him for one. In his resistance and in his response to the attacks of the non Jews, there is no act of heroism – only a natural reaction. In the end, it was Moshe Hirsch who absorbed the blows, not the many attackers who fell upon him. And even this does not excite Moshe Hirsch. What matters here is his raw response, the natural act, the boldness and the capability. Auerbach elevates his protagonist and those like him not through poetic embellishment, but out of an intention to preserve their memory – so that this incarnation of a Jewish figure will not sink into the abyss of oblivion, even though it has disappeared from reality.

In the end, Bessarabia bequeathed to him the Yiddish language on its own level and with its distinctive idioms; only a few of the Yiddish poets drew upon the enchanted regional treasures of Bessarabian Yiddish. This language is woven from quivering material, always fresh, as if it had only yesterday been lifted from the lips of the people in their speech. Its texture is coarse woven, yet it preserves a popular warmth throughout. For a hundred and fifty years, this was the language spoken by children who learned in the cheder and heard the blessing “G-d of Abraham” from their grandmother's lips, but who also ran through the fields, played along the riverbank, and climbed trees in the orchards. It was the language spoken by adults for whom it was the sole mother tongue – at home, in the synagogue, and in the marketplace – but who spent most of their days in the villages, walking behind the plow and the flocks, milking cows, making cheese, and stripping tobacco leaves. This was a popular dialect whose every absorbed element was digested smoothly. The good neighborliness with the Moldavian peasant, who tended to name animals, birds, plants, actions, and conditions that the Jewish street had not previously known – these are what add a graceful accompaniment to this linguistic formation, which Auerbach succeeded in perpetuating in his literary work. This language acquired distinctive shades through its enrichment with many Hebraisms, with scraps of the casual conversations of learned men in the father's house, and with modes of speaking from the Land of Israel alongside echoes of the Bible, Mishnah, and Talmud. All these pursue him in song – in the title, in the image, in the stanza, and in the dense, sparkling linguistic embroidery – like the Bessarabian countryside itself, and lend every poetic structure a melody of its own.

Translator's footnotes

1. i.e. it was overly eccentric for the prevailing norm. Return
2. i.e. pronounced with the short i vowel (a soft chirik) rather than the usual long e. Return
3. “My mare” refers to the allegorical mare in Mendele Mocher Seforim's “The Mare” (Di Kliatshe), a symbol for the Jewish people in his satirical fiction. Return
4. Shneor Zalman Shneour (1887–1959) was a Hebrew- and Yiddish-language modernist known for elevating his protagonists into emotionally charged, quasi mythic climaxes. Noach Pandri was a folkloric Jewish “strongman” of Bessarabian storytelling, a local shtetl analogue to the great heroic figures of world legend. Ilya Muromets was the central strongman hero of the Russian bylina epic tradition, famed for superhuman strength and moral fortitude. Return

From Ephraim Auerbach, Funem alten bronen, Songs and Poems. Hebrew translation by Eliyahu Meitus in Era Ha'arava. Introduction by Dov Sadan, in [the series] Ma'ayanot Kedumim. Mossad Bialik, Jerusalem, 1967, p. 120.

Dafim Mereishit[1] Ephraim, the son of Elazar and Chaya, Born on Kislev 7 of the year 5653 [1893], In Beltz, a city, like a granary, there the wine Is sold by the ladle, the wheat by the sack. The father was a shochet, Heavy-browed – with the quick impulses that spring from the womb, His speech – scholarly , balanced like scales; Never would he allow himself to act like one of the fools.

[Page 464]

From Molev [Molovău], from across the Dniester, Mother came To Beltz, dressed in silk and brocade, Her step high and lifted, her figure slightly drawn in, With a copy of Menorat HaMaor[2] and Chabad lineage. The chazaka [presumptive right] my father inherited early, in his youth, Together with the family line of the grandfather, the dark one, The grandmother – her eyes with cherry-blossom grace, The kerchief she tied with modesty over her head. The grandmother dwelled in the little room set aside for her, With windowpanes, the sun at sunset gilding them, – A queenly step was then beside her, A queen, who lost her kingdom in her prime. And for Father, Grandmother was his top concern The apple of his eye, her only son, her eldest child, But she specially guarded her property, Goblets, candlesticks – with hair-breadth exactness. The grandmother bore her widowhood like a crown, Which was destined for her, and she carried it then with pride, And her loneliness she polished thus, to an excessive shine, So that when the sun struck it, it sparkled like a tear-bead. In her little room at night, crowned with shadows, She opened her lips in words of supplication, She spoke to the window, to the alleyway, To her husband, who had left her before his time: “Chaim-Shmul, it is well for you there, in the world of truth, If among the patriarchs you sit, behold, you are content, – And I, Esther-Leah, with a palate sort of parched, It is a mitzvah to make the heart within me burn.” And once, when sadness stilled her over her meal, she cried out in a bitter voice: “Chaim-Shmul, how can you be at ease? You know full well that I suffer here, And you sit there upon your golden throne!” On a winter night I heard her grievances, and I buried my head in the bed covers, Though I knew well it was of no use, For she was speaking then to Grandfather in the World of Truth. This made me close to Grandfather – the conversation, From my childhood I already connected the two worlds; A joy I cannot even now put into words, In winter found its warmth in the little room at night. This was the end of summer, a flickering sunset. With the end of the Sabbath, night fell, darkness. Grandmother was ill, and called out, “my only son,” A voice pensive, sorrowful, yet pure. They hurried Father from his Beis Midrash then, He stood at Grandmother's bedside. “I am so tired, I must lie down,” she whispered then To Father, and closed her eyes at once. Afterward she opened her eyes again, and with wonder with wonder, And with a clear, lucid eye she looked at him: “Make havdalah, Luzer my son, for perhaps Something will happen and I sleep longer than you would wish.” In the house a faint brightness hovered, Like a patch of sunlight on a dim wall, The greenness of the field outside drifted in, With Grandmother's quiet wisdom and the nourishing rain. Grandmother asked that they bring her water, She washed her hands, and moistened her lips, I so wanted then to caress her face, But my hands did not move, as if paralyzed. My hand held the havdalah candle, And I repeated after Father, “Between the holy and the everyday,” The flame gleamed in thin tongues of light, Which intertwined into a single twisted thread. Grandmother took the words as one takes wine, To her dry lips, to her thirsty mouth , Her voice rang clear and fresh, rising upward To the final havdalah blessing, responding “Amen.” She cast one more glance to Father, With a love whose tremor I still feel today, And at once her life faded, That had shone for eighty summers, in modesty, and in their strength.

Translator's footnotes

1. Pages from the Beginning Return
2. Menorat HaMaor: a classic medieval ethical work by R. Yitzhak Aboab, widely used in traditional homes as a guide to piety and proper conduct. Return

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