The Revolution is a City: Moyshe Kulbak’s Poem “The City”

ABSTRACT

The trajectory of Moyshe Kulbak's biography (1896–1937), drawing him from small town to big city, mirrors that of many in his generation. The image of the city in tension with that small town, or rather its replacement – nature – haunts so much of his greatest work. The urban dimension of Kulbak's work is both inescapable and tantalizingly complex. This essay analyzes the first of these works, his long poem “The City” – “one of the most popularly recited poems of its day.” Over four sections – sunset, midnight, predawn, and dawn – the poem follows the city's changes as it passes the overnight into the dawn. Equally dramatic, however, is the overlay of ambivalences toward this inevitable passage, as felt by a young poet drawn toward urban possibilities and revolutionary promise and repulsed by their cruelty. It offers us a distinctive Yiddish lens on a world in which the revolution is a city.

KEYWORDS:

• Kulbak
• modernism
• Yiddish literature
• poetry
• city

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Jordan Finkin is Rare Book and Manuscript Librarian at the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. A specialist in modern Jewish literature, he is the author of several books as well as numerous scholarly essays and articles. He is also the director of Naydus Press, a non-profit publisher of English translations of Yiddish literature.

Notes

1 “Smorgon’” in: Yevreiskaya Entsiklopediya, vol. 14, col. 409.

2 For a first-rate overview of Kulbak’s life and significance, see Adler-Peckerar and Rubinstein, “Moyshe Kulbak,” 121–9. See also Hrushovski, Sutskever, and Shmeruk, A Shpigl oyf a shteyn, 756–8.

3 This novel features much of the ambivalence and satirical edge that made him “unreliable” to Soviet authority. Kulbak was executed as part of Stalin’s purges in 1937. In translation, see Kulbak, Childe Harold of Dysna.

4 Kulbak, “Di shtot,” 38–48.

5 Adler-Peckerar and Rubinstein, “Moyshe Kulbak,” 124.

6 Ibid.

7 Kulbak was famously attuned to the rhythms and tonalities of Yiddish folk literature; his poem “Little Star” (Shterndl; 1916), for example, achieved the status of a folk song.

8 Finkin, “Lighter,” 33–49; Hofshteyn, “Shtot,” 3–4; also in: Hrushovski, et al., Shpigl, 235–7.

9 Kulbak, “Di shtot,” 38.

10 Finkin, “Lighter,” 39.

11 Kulbak, “Di shtot,” 38.

12 Ibid., 39.

13 Ibid., 40–41.

14 Hofshteyn, too, depicts the merging of voices: “My quiet breath / I have exhaled together with the breaths of crowds.”

15 Kulbak, “Di shtot,” 40.

16 Markish, Stam, 92.

17 Kulbak, “Di shtot,” 42.

18 Earlier in the section the City’s snake is referred to as rearing its “poisonous head.”

19 Kulbak, “Di shtot,” 43.

20 Reyzen, “Kulbak, Moyshe,” 603–4; Rozhanski, “Moyshe Kulbak,” 11–24; Adler-Peckerar and Rubinstein, “Moyshe Kulbak,” 122.

21 “Kegn byologizm un folkizm: vegn M. Kulbaks literarishn veg fun ‘Shtot’ biz ‘Zelmenyaner’” in: Bronshteyn, Farfestikte pozitsyes, 161–2.

22 Bronshteyn, Farfestikte pozitsyes, 162.

23 Ibid., 164.

24 Ibid., 166.

25 Indeed, given the importance of cafés, for example, to Jewish urban subjectivity in this period, at least in literature, we would expect to find them, but they are conspicuously absent. See Pinsker, A Rich Brew.

26 Kulbak, “Di shtot,” 44.

27 Ibid., 45.

28 Ibid., 46.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 48.

31 Ibid.

32 See, for example, Isaiah 29:6 and Ezekiel 13:11, and their respective contexts.

33 Job 28–41.

34 See, for example, other uses of this imagery in Kulbak, Montog, 10, 30.

35 Hofshteyn, “Shtot,” 235.

36 Nowersztern, Kesem ha-dimdumim, 225–52; Caplan, “Belarus in Berlin,” 89–104.

37 My thanks to a close reader for emphasizing this aspect of the reading.

38 Chipp, ed. Theories of Modern Art, 126–7.

39 Mendelsohn, “Preface,” vii.

40 Schlör, “Jews and the Big City,” 224.

41 Schorske, “The Idea of the City,” 95–114.

42 Schorske, “The Idea of the City,” 104. See also Timms, “Expressionists and Georgians,” for analogously competing responses in the models “demonic city” and “enchanted village.”

43 Schorske, “The Idea of the City,” 107–8.

44 Bechtel, “Babylon or Jerusalem,” 116–23; Valencia, “Yiddish Writers in Berlin,” 193–207; Nowersztern, Kesem ha-dimdumim, 225–52; Finkin, “‘Like Fires,” 73–88; Caplan, “Belarus in Berlin,” 89–104; Koller, “Jiddische Literatur,” 237–61; and Seelig, Strangers in Berlin, 79–100.

45 Finkin, “Yiddish Ethnographic Poetics,” 94–115.

46 Ibid., 112.

47 Bass, “Moyshe Kulbak,” 107.

48 Yunin, “Moyshe Kulbak,” 168–9.

49 Moss, Jewish Renaissance, 74–5.

50 Yunin, “Moyshe Kulbak,” 166.

51 Interview with Benjamin Harshav, Wexler Oral History Project.

52 Moss, Jewish Renaissance, 46.

53 Bass, “Moyshe Kulbak,” 110.

54 My thanks to a reader for this astute observation.

55 Kulbak, Ale verk, 65–106.

56 Starck, “Cross-Cultural Relationships,” 128.

57 Kulbak, Ale verk, 106.