[written october/november 2021]
i was poking around in an anthology the other day, and found something about one of my favorite poets’ work that kinda blew me away. i saw in the table of contents that among celia dropkin’s poems was one called “tsu lutsifer / to lucifer”. that wasn’t surprising; part of why i adore her work is its gothy edge. the surprise came when i turned to it and found not a single poem but a triptych: a first section addressed (as promised) to lucifer, and then two poems i know quite well. they’ve been printed under a few titles; their first lines are “ikh hob dikh nokh nit gezen / i still haven’t seen you” and “du kvelst, ikh kvel / you rejoice, i rejoice”.
both are intense and erotic: in “ikh hob dikh nokh nit gezen”, dropkin declares “i want to see how you sleep / when you lose your power / over yourself, over me / … / i want to see you / helpless… / i want to see you / dead.” in “du kvelst, ikh kvel”, she demands “burn me up, be burnt up / take up all my desire”. but seen as parts of a larger piece, especially one dedicated to the light-bringing fallen angel, they take on a whole new dimension.
i’ll put the triptych below, in yiddish and english – you might want to skip down to read it now.
the three parts move from a cold, compelling, dominating object of desire to a fantasy of a lover stripped of all power to an image of sanctified purgation through excess. so far, so wonderfully goth: creepy, hot, disturbing, cosmic.
but what gets my head spinning in interesting ways is that all of this is done with specifically christian occult imagery. there’s not a jewish reference point to be found, and, as in a great deal of yiddish poetry by women, there’s barely a word from the hebrew/aramaic side of the language, which bears liturgical resonances as well as everyday meanings (to be precise, there’s one: “תל / tel” [ruin]).
now, plenty of other yiddish modernists in early 1900s used christian imagery. but dropkin isn’t trying to claim or explore mary or jesus as jewish figures, like anna margolin and sholem ash, or going for a self-aggrandizing shock effect, like uri zvi grinberg and other boy modernists. she’s not making a big deal out of it, in any direction.
she’s just writing a hot, disturbing, intense poem that uses the common reference points of post-Romantic, post-Decadent modernism to do exactly the same thing those reference points do in any european language’s poetry. as in blake or huysmans, dropkin’s lucifer is not the church’s oily tempter but a dry promethean power; her crucifixion not a moment of salvation but a scene of interwoven agony and ecstasy; and god no creator, lawgiver, redeemer, or “tate hartsiger” but a destroyer who forbids nothing. and desire moves through and across them all, ending with an ambiguous strangeness, a separate path.
but there’s more! when a leftist modernist poet connects a hunched figure and an unrequited love to the carven creatures of notre dame, we know what populist novelist is in the room. the dance of power and desire that fills victor hugo’s “notre-dame de paris” echos throughout “tsu lutsifer”. the state, the law, and their violence towards those they exclude for having the wrong bodies (as defined by blood, by shape, by gender, by desires…) aren’t named directly in the poems, as they are in the novel, but they are the negative space defining the boundaries the triptych stands in – the knives around its circus ring.
so why does this matter? because writers about yiddish poetry, and yiddish culture more generally, still insist on writing as if there is some essential separation between jewish writers and christian imagery. as if what’s happening when these images appear is exotic, transgressive, breaching a border that it takes a “password” (in amelia glaser’s phrase1) to cross. poems like these show that line of thinking for the nonsense it is.
dropkin’s lucifer, her crucifixion, aren’t A Jewish Writer Crossing Boundaries. they’re a modern writer writing in a modern way for modern readers. readers, who, from the bronx to barcelona to bobruisk, from kasrilevke to cedar rapids, are perfectly familiar with the myth of the light-bringer, the erotics of the cross, and the rest of the package handed down in the modern literary tradition and in the christian popular culture they lived amidst. the premise – functioning as an axiom in a lot of yiddish studies work – that jewish writers and readers lived and worked in some shtetl of a separate modernity, where christian images and figures remained eternally alien, only to be accessed in a fit of rupture or used as a mediating “password”, is not even a fantasy, it’s just a lie. it would be laughable, if it weren’t such a distortion of our families and communities lives.
the mass audience for yiddish modernist poetry – the hundreds of thousands of readers whose enthusiasm kept avant-garde writers present in the pages of yidishland’s daily newspapers and weekly supplements, as well as less-widely-circulating literary journals – were not less worldly than the yiddish writers who wrote for them. they’d read hugo, wilde, whitman, tagore: yiddish translators had made sure those writers (and many more) would be available to them. yiddish jews saw these writers (and the material they worked with and reworked) as part of their cultural inheritance, just as any other modern reader did – whether a new jersey puerto rican like william carlos williams, a black floridian like zora neale hurston, or a russian from georgia like vladimir mayakovsky.
(parenthetically: this isn’t just a modernist, or a modern, phenomenon. yiddish folklore and folk practice, in both its vernacular forms and the ‘high-culture’ ones monied men reserved for themselves, have never been separate from the cultures around them. to give two examples that bridge those spheres: the “heymishn nitgutn” max weinreich wrote about, the lantukh, was both part of a regional pattern of house-spirits and (as he established) the bearer of a name that had passed through the rabbinic literature on its way from greek. similarly, yiddish jewish women’s headscarves were the subject of rabbinic regulation and contestation, as well as part of a nearly-universal regional practice of covering married women’s hair, whether justified through appeals to jewish, muslim, orthodox, catholic, or anabaptist theology.)
so when dropkin begins a poem with “mayn sheyner lutsifer…” her first readers knew exactly what ride they were getting on. they might’ve been shocked along the way, but only because of the perversion, not because they were encountering symbology grounded in christianity. that imagery is simply the cultural medium she’s using – precisely because it is so thoroughly familiar – to stun us with what she can use it to say, now as surely as a hundred years ago.
there are a lot of ways that we can learn to read more deeply into dropkin’s “tsu lutsifer”. what language did dropkin read hugo in? if it was yiddish or russian, what were the translations like? what did the russian writers she’d’ve read do with the figure of lucifer? was he the light-bearer, the tempter, the adversary, the rebel? what writers – occultist, antinomian, theist, or nihilist – in what languages helped shape her phrase “god… who doesn’t know from forbidding”?
but we can’t get anywhere unless we walk away from the idea of yiddish writing as a walled garden, of christian images as “passwords” across a guarded frontier, of jewish cultures as closed worlds. that lie of essential separation is nothing but the myth of the “eybikn zhid” that sh. an-sky named 120 years ago as an old song sung by our enemies, repackaged to sell the fake freedom of nationalism. and now repackaged again to squeeze even explicit internationalists into an isolationist vision that refuses to admit that people can share cultural materials and reference points across demographic lines, and that for centuries millions upon millions of us have chosen to cultivate that sharing as a way of life.
much of this was thought out with my constant, and brilliant, interlocutor, v. m. rehberger.
a little publication history:
1) "du kvelst" apparently in in zikh 1:4 p173, 1920
2) yidishe dikhterins antologye
edited by ezra korman, 1928
with other poems by dropkin
two poems set on one page, titled "du kvelst, ikh kvel", "ikh hob dikh nokh nisht gezen"
3) in heysn vint
collected by celia dropkin, 1935
in the section "tsirkus dame"
three poems, listed in the table of contents as "du kvelst", "tsu lutsifer", "ikh hob dikh nokh nit gezen" – the first separated from the other two by 16 other poems
4) hemshekh: antologye fun amerikaner-yidisher dikhtung, 1918-1943
edited by moshe shtarkman, 1945
in the section "1918", with other poems by dropkin
one poem, titled "tsu lutsifer", in three sections with the first lines "mayn sheyner lutsifer", "ikh hob dikh nokh nit gezen", "du kvelst, ikh kvel"
5) in heysn vint
collected by the dropkin family, 1959
in the section "ikh bin a tsirkus-dame"
three poems, listed in the table of contents as "es vilt zikh mir zen", "tsu lutsifer", "zoyg oys" – the last separated from the other two by 11 other poems
the poems themselves
my english translations
to lucifer
my beautiful lucifer,
your cold-grey glance
looks fixedly at me,
and spun out, like a monkey
i stay on my knees,
and lick your narrow feet.
my back has become bent,
like a question mark,
but it doesn't matter,
as long as you look that way,
my beautiful lucifer,
fixedly at me,
i will sit bent
by your feet,
like a chimera
at 'notre dame'.
***
i still haven't seen you
sleeping,
i want to see
how you sleep,
when you lose your power
over yourself, over me.
i want to see you
helpless, weak, mute,
i want to see you with your eyes
closed, breathless,
i want to see you
dead.
***
you rejoice, i rejoice,
in us rejoices the god
who makes everything into a ruin,
who doesn't know from forbidding.
nail my hands,
nail my feet to a cross,
burn me up, be burnt up,
take up all my desire.
and leave me deeply ashamed,
suck out and throw away
and be made foreign, made strange
on a separate path.
- which, unfortunately, i think she uses to insist on exactly this kind of false border in a different sphere. yiddish-speaking jewish communists in the 1930s u.s. were doing nothing transgressive or border-crossing in articulating their solidarity with black targets of white supremacism, with spanish anti-fascists, with palestinian resistance to british and zionist colonialism. they were participating in a shared revolutionary culture and politics of solidarity, one that explicitly rejected the idea that “passwords” were needed between overlapping and parallel struggles. ↩︎