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A poet, pedigreed yet plain

By Ofer Dynes

"Hamenuddim she hadallim" ("Melech Rawitch, Poems"), Keshev Publishing House, NIS 69

Galicia, Vienna, Warsaw, London, Johannesburg, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Mexico City, Montreal, Tel Aviv and again Montreal - or, alternatively: love affairs with various women, forbidden romances that are best left unmentioned. This is the story of "the naughty boy," the rebel of Yiddish literature, who became the figure most identified with Warsaw's literary establishment, an avant-gardist who turned his coat and became a reactionary, then switched loyalties again, only to do so again, and yet again.

To a large extent, the dizzying, wild, restless biography of Melech Rawitch (1893-1967) is also the story of 20th century Yiddish literature. Rawitch's personality embodied the vast space of possibilities that opened up for Yiddish literature in the first half of the 20th century, at a time when its readers were scattering all over the world in large waves of emigration and literary journals were making their way to places like Santiago and Shanghai. But Rawitch's work also incorporated the process of shrinkage, the convergence that was so painfully swift, of those same amazing spaces after World War II - from the tangible-geographical to the textual, the imagined and the reconstructed, into memory, the writing hand, the card file, the archive.

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Anyone who wants to know more about Melech Rawitch's official and "proper" life story should have a look at the fascinating autobiography he wrote and which was translated into Hebrew, "The Book of Stories of My Life." Yet, above all else, Melech Rawitch personified the myth of Melech Rawitch. As such, it was said of him that he kept two card files: In one of them he would carefully note down the biographies of Yiddish writers, whereas in the other he would file all the graphomaniacs. After his death the truth came out: The nasty rumor was true. The person who had the privilege of confirming and refuting quite a few esoteric traditions concerning Rawitch was the late writer Yossel Birstein, who was put in charge of his catalog at the National and University Library in Jerusalem. His long acquaintanceship with Rawitch and his intimate perusal of Rawitch's archive provided the material for the novel "Face in a Cloud."

Yossel Birstein did not have to invent much when he set about recreating the character of Melech Rawitch. The letters, the adventures, the recipes, the diaries, the dozens of stories of squabbles and sub-squabbles, dark secrets that turned into acid on yellowing paper - all these were compressed into the rendering of the book's protagonist. Birstein found hilariously funny letters in the archive. "Melech Rawitch," a London-based Yiddish poet wrote to him, "you must remember me, because I haven't been talking to you for 23 years now!" Birstein's novel is both a distorted and grotesque but also a clear and reliable mirror, as befits Rawitch's character.

Jewels of a peculiar sheen

Rawitch began his literary life as an epigone, as a pale imitator of German neo-Romanticism. However, those looking for the "Rawitchian" spirit will not have to search for long: In his third book, "Ruinsgrasses" ("Swordgrasses"), we find jewels with a peculiar sheen, like the sequence "From my Vegetarian Gospel," a nightmarish vision of butcher figures. Two years later he published a long poem that rejoices in Spinoza's history alongside boastful and challenging poems: "Yiddish - For speech I speak in simple language / of plain, boorish people - and my father is as it happens a Jew - an idler from the land of idlers - For writing I write in the holy noodle tongue (lukshen koydesh) - (I'm) pedigreed and a prince by right: I'm the poet, the plain man!"

At the start of the 20th century Rawitch was identified with the Expressionist avant-gardism of the Di Khaliastre ("The Gang") school, a literary group to which Peretz Markish and Uri Zvi Greenberg also belonged. Rawitch was never a great innovator as far as form and artistic means are concerned, but he made up for what he lacked on the aesthetic side with a dizzying variety of contents. In the 1930s he roamed the world, taking his poet's pen with him. His book "Continents and Oceans" is an invitation to a dream-like ramble around the globe: tropical hallucinations in Singapore, a frantic train journey on the trans-Siberian railway, visits to China, Canada, Poland, Australia - a trip that culminates in no less than "eternal sexual love," which ends the volume.

The brilliant, pioneering, half-baked ideas also made their way into his prose commentaries and his public activity. In the mid-1930s he sent hundreds of letters to Yiddish writers in Poland, begging them to flee the country: "Get out of Poland and if possible save the graves as well!" Some of the writers heeded his advice and were saved. After World War II he proposed redacting and sanctifying new Scriptures, in Yiddish, which would comprise all of Jewish literature, from ancient times to its destruction.

Rawitch, who was a crucial individual in his own right and at times also a most central figure in the world of Yiddish literature, has been afforded too small a presence in the field of Hebrew culture. Even though he was a known figure in Israel, inter alia thanks to his son, the painter Yosl Bergner, and although he lived here between 1954 and 1956, it seems that there are still not yet enough translations that will enable the reader of Hebrew (or English) to form an impression of his works. The first and last publication of his is a selection of his poetry, "Fifty Poems," in Hebrew, which appeared in a translation by A.D. Shafir in 1969.

Welcome initiative

Keshev has recently re- issued this collection and has added another 30 poems to it, most of them reprints of old translations, although a few have been added to this edition especially. At present there is no translator willing to undertake re-translating Rawitch's work from Yiddish. This is why the initiative to collect the existing works and reprint them for the Hebrew reader is welcome. Shafir did a great job and the translations have maintained their vivacity even after 30 years.

The poems are accompanied by a rich collection of drawings and photographs, and it is clear that great efforts have been invested in this edition. The editor's choice to print Nissim Aloni's essay on Rawitch also adds to the book. Perhaps it would have been good to add other texts as well, including the moving obituary poet Rachel Koren wrote about him: "Melech Rawitch is an institution in and of himself." Some of the appendices look a little strange: Why, out of all of Rawitch's extensive correspondence, hundreds and hundreds of letters that are kept in Israel, did the editor choose to include a short postcard, without a translation, addressed to the volume's editor, Yisrael Har. Also lacking is a broader introduction to acquaint the Israeli reader with Rawitch's work. The interesting afterword about the relationship between Rawitch and theatrical personage Michael Weichert is not sufficient, although it provides a rather tangential look at his character.

In 1953, during the days of the great despair in light of the swift decline of Yiddish, Rawitch published his elegy "Dialogue in the Home of a Yiddish Poet in America," a heart-wrenching conversation between the poet-father and his son, which consists of an expression of worry about the future of a literary work that had been written, it emerges, in the wrong language and is therefore destined to be forgotten:

Who will be singing your beautiful songs

My father, Father, will the wind sing them -

And who will sink himself in your thoughts

That you pondered so much in the nights?

Today, about 50 years after these lines were written, it seems to me that Rawitch's sophisticated, boundary-breaking writing, his clever avant-gardism, his intellectualism and his sharp public commentary definitely do have an Israeli audience, interested in grappling with them and enjoying them.

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