The View from the Jews’ Rock: Jewish Poetic Emplacement in Crimea

ABSTRACT

While not a central locale in modern Jewish poetry, Crimea nevertheless garnered the attention of several important poets in significant works. Their interest was galvanized at the intersection of their individual biographies and earlier classic literature on Crimea and the Black Sea. This article will focus on key works by the Hebrew poet Shaul Tshernikhovski and the Yiddish poet Perets Markish as writers in Jewish languages, and will then turn briefly to the work of a Jewish poet in a non-Jewish language, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, with the goal of understanding the ways in which Crimea became a focal site for Jewish literary considerations of emplacement.

KEYWORDS:

• Crimea
• poetry
• Yiddish
• Hebrew
• Russian
• emplacement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land.

2 My thanks to Prof. Valery Dymshits for emphasizing this significance. The Russian poet Ilya Selvinsky, a Crimean native, notes in the beginning of his poem “Kerch”: “In high school we divided Crimea / into Hellenic and Wild” — the southern coast was called “Hellas” while heading to the steppe was known as “going to Scythia” (Shrayer, I Saw It, 274; translation by Maxim Shrayer).

3 Two significant exceptions being Ester Shumyatsher and Khane Levin. See Glaser, Songs in Dark Times, 61–69.

4 Explicitly in sonnets 6–9.

5 Rimon, “Tshernikhovski mitkatev,” 24.

6 Dhar, “Travel and Mountains,” 359.

7 Finkin, An Inch or Two of Time, 63–64.

8 Tshernikhovski, Shirim, 308. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., 311.

11 Ibid., 311–312.

12 Cemeteries are the subject of considerable attention in Jewish literature contemplating connections to physical places. See, for instance, Finkin, An Inch or Two of Time, 50–51.

13 Tshernikhovski, Shirim, 305.

14 Tshernikhovski, Shirim, 305–306.

15 Finkin, “Footsteps,” 127–128. And the “heap” (gal) emphasizes less an architectural construction than a pile, in this case a pile of rubble or debris.

16 Kalinowska, Between East and West, 29–38.

17 See, for example, Rimon, “Tshernikhovski mitkatev”; idem, “Tsomet hazikhronot”; Finkin, “Footsteps.”

18 At the time there were virtually no translations in Jewish languages of the Crimean sonnets. (Duker, “Mickiewicz in Hebrew Translation”; Kon, Przekłady Mickiewiczowskie).

19 The book was published in Berlin in 1924.

20 Tshernikhovski, Shirim, 305.

21 In Romantic poetry on Crimea, the seascape is almost as important as the mountainscape. See O’Neil, “Childe Harold in Crimea,” 94–99.

22 Tshernikhovski, Shirim, 310–311.

23 Valery Dymshits, however, maintains that it was unlikely that Markish visited Crimea around that time – see his article in this issue, “Peretz Markish’s Chatyrdag,” especially the section “Did Peretz Markish visit Crimea in 1919?”

24 The editions of Stam (1921 and 1922) contain the complete 24 poems of the sequence. A version of Chatyr-Dag also appeared a decade later in Markish's collection Vokhnteg (1931). Significantly, it lacks the eighteenth poem of the earlier version, but adds an additional 12 poems between the twenty-second and twenty-third poem of that version. The result is a 36-poem sequence instead of the original 24. This paper focuses on the Stam edition, because the superstructure of the 24-poem sequence is undermined by the later augmented version. Valery Dymshits (in his article in this issue, “Peretz Markish's Chatyrdag”) maintains that, based on archival evidence and the afterword to the collected Russian translation of his work, the 36-poem sequence represents the full original cycle. As I noted, the various editions published in his lifetime do not only add material but also remove material. It is therefore perhaps more accurate to conceive of these not as fragments but as individual instantiations of the work, similar to Walt Whitman’s various reworkings of his Leaves of Grass.

25 Finkin, “Footsteps,” 135–136.

26 Markish, Stam, 142.

27 Finkin, “Modern Jewish Sonnet,” 96.

28 For Markish’s technical modernist innovations, see the essay by Valery Dymshits in this issue.

29 Markish, Stam, 127.

30 Ibid., 131.

31 Ibid., 133.

32 Ibid., 134.

33 Ibid., 135.

34 In fact, in several instances, it is in the first-person plural, indicating a party of tourists.

35 Markish, Stam, 143 (“un shaylt zikh liske goldene fun mayne bakn”).

36 Ibid., 144 (“un naket oysgeton hot er mikh, naket hoyl/Un zayn brenendike shtroy in mir fartribn glaykh vi tseyner”).

37 Kalinowska, Between East and West, 22–23.

38 Cf. Exodus 19:16.

39 “Czatyrdachu, ty zawsze głuchy, nieruchomy, / Między światem i niebem jak drogman stworzenia, / […] / Słuchasz tylko, co mówi Bóg do przyrodzenia.”

40 Keirstead, “Travel and Poetry,” 448. For how this works with specific reference to Mickiewicz, see Olga Lenczewska, “Adam Mickiewicz’s ‘Crimean Sonnets’: A Clash of Two Cultures and a Poetic Journey into the Romantic Self” (2015). Online at: www.readingsjournal.net/?s=mickiewicz (accessed 6 February 2022).

41 See Keirstead, “Travel and Poetry,” 448, with his discussion of Keats' sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

42 Markish, Stam, 146.

43 See Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land.

44 Glaser, Songs in Dark Times, 64, see also especially pp. 60–69.

45 Hofshteyn, “Fun Krimer tsikl,” 8.

46 Psalm 104:15.

47 Ovid, Tristia, III.10.23–24; Ovid, Poems of Exile, 56.

48 Finkin, “Consolation of Sadness.”

49 Eygns 2 (1920): 44.

50 Brown, Mandelstam, 74.

51 Terras, “Classical Motives”; Rayfield, “A Winter in Moscow,” 19; Brown, Mandelstam, 253–275.

52 That title, taken from the title of one of the poems in the collection, was given to the book by the poet Mikhail Kuzmin (himself no stranger to Classicism), but Mandelstam ultimately seems to have approved.

53 Rayfield, “A Winter in Moscow,” 19.

54 Terras, “Classical Motives,” 259. Ovid was “the archetypal exile for poets and especially for Mandelstam” (Freidin, Coat of Many Colors, 255) (emphasis my own).

55 Brown, Mandelstam, 79.

56 “It is ‘world culture,’ not ancient culture, that is the leitmotif of Mandel’štam’s poetry. […] Mandel’štam is not so much a ‘hellenist’ as a fervent cosmopolitan apostle of culture — Western culture, of its integrity and timelessness, a singer of its sanctity and beauty” (Terras, “Classical Motives,” 254). Clearly, by “culture,” he means “high culture.”

57 Rayfield, “A Winter in Moscow,” 19.

58 “Okruzhena vysokimi kholmami / Ovech’ im stadom ty s gory sbegaesh’”). For the full poem, see Mandelstam, Sobranie Sochinenii, 79–80.)

59 Shrayer, I Saw It; Shneer, Grief, 36–38; Murav, Music, 154–165.

60 Shneer, Grief, 36.

61 Shrayer, I Saw It, 268; translation by Maxim Shrayer.

62 Ibid. 263; translation my own.

Additional information

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Jordan Finkin

Jordan Finkin is rare book and manuscript librarian at the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. A scholar of modern Yiddish literature, he also serves as the co-director of the Hebrew Union College Press and is the founder and director of Naydus Press, a nonprofit publisher of Yiddish literature in English translation.