Karen Alkalay-Gut
“Traces of Living Flesh:” The Poetry of Israel Emiot
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I began reading As
Long As We Are Not Alone, the new book of Israel Emiot’s poems translated
by Leah Zazulyer, and published by Tiger Bark Press, and thought casually that
more people might well be interested in this book. that it would certainly be
worthy of a review. But strangely enough I was halted from this intellectual
evaluation by a fit of uncharacteristic weeping. An image from the past rose
to my mind that just wouldn’t leave me: I saw myself about fourteen years old,
sitting at my parents’ dining table with the Yiddish writer Israel Emiot, as he
urges me to translate his poetry from Yiddish to English. I am
an obedient child. I begin with a poem entitled “Spring.” “Villing tzu efsher
nit villung,” that I struggle over. I, like the spring, was “Willing or
perhaps not willing.”
My translation effort doesn’t
sound right to me. Even though it is accurate, I am sure the sound, the
rhythm, the pace, doesn’t work, and even though I know little about poetry I
understand that my poetic efforts have not been at all successful. It doesn’t sound right to
him either. Perhaps, he thinks, I
could try another media. Perhaps I could be more comfortable with some of his prose.
After a few weeks he
returns to me with a draft of a typed manuscript called “The Birobidzhan
Affair,” about his life in exile in Siberia. This is even more of a challenge.
In a language in which I have read only fiction, he tells of how he was sent
by Stalin's government to start a Yiddish newspaper and, when he did, he was
arrested for doing so. The response to his claim that he did what he was
sent to do was "that was the policy yesterday.” Living in a democratic country
that has adopted me and given me freedom what do I know of official treachery?
I struggle with the
first paragraph, and soon relinquish all hope, knowing I have failed a man starving
for communication - so desperate to tell his story and forge a connection with
the American writers and critics he knows he must meet in order to create a
dialogue - that he would latch on to a gum-chewing teenager whose head was in
lipstick and boys. I had known Israel Emiot
since I was twelve, and know something of his tragedy and his loneliness. But in
my latter years in Rochester, he had finally found more literary environments,
was less present in my family’s home, and when I moved to Israel in 1972, we lost
touch. When he died on March 7, 1978, I was in the midst of a tumultuous
divorce and barely noted his passing. Nevertheless, a vision of him returns to
me every so often, like a wound that has never healed properly and must be
attended to again and again, and like a muse who prods me into poetry,
translating, academic writing. Just now when I searched his name on the
voluminous files in my computer there were tiny references to him everywhere.
But I never put my
memories in writing before this book reached me. I looked at the Yiddish, far
more sophisticated and beautiful and touching than I could have understood as a
child. Then my eyes went to the translation – so much more truthful and
beautiful than I would have known how to produce in those days when he was so
eager to make me grow up as a writer; and I remembered how one day I admitted
that I too wrote. “You must write,” he said, “only if you cannot sleep at
night without it.” Of course I had not heard of Rilke, and Emiot did not
mention his source, and it did not matter. The advice echoed in me for years.
And now, I write this memory because I cannot sleep without writing.
Perhaps I’m the only one
who knows, and probably he would have preferred to keep his life separate. Emiot
was forced, like most of us in different degrees, to choose some parts of his
biography and ignore others. The parts of his life he tried to show others
were real and true, painful and profound, sophisticated and sensitive. But
there were other details as well, some of which I witnessed, and the knowledge
of them emphasizes for me the greatness of his character.
Emiot was a name he took
on as his career developed, a name that fulfilled the person he became, more
than a pseudonym. His family name was Goldwasser. I know this because the illiterate
woman who cooked in our house when I was growing up always emphasized this
fact. “Don’t look at me like I’m nothing because I’m toothless and ugly,” Ida
Goldwasser would say to me, “I am married to a great writer who is only not
with me now because he is in a gulag in Siberia.” Obviously I had not been
behaving with the proper respect to the woman whose only interest for me was in
the question of whether she was bald under her kerchief. Ida had been matched
off to Israel Emiot before WWII, when they lived near Warsaw, but he had been
forced to leave during the war, she told me. I do not know when or how she
arrived in the U.S. with her son Nathan, but she lived with us for a few years
before Emiot was found.
My mother brought Ida to
the airport to be reunited with her husband, and I have often pictured the
scene. I am certain I saw him for the first time in our home as he walked in
from the porch to the kitchen, with blackened and missing teeth, and wearing an
elegant worn brown striped suit, far too big for his wasted figure. I remember
her babushka figure and apron and the look of terrible disappointment. He
arrived in Rochester in 1958, and soon after we moved to a far better
neighborhood, without Ida Goldwasser, the woman I had come to think of as a
babayaga – a Russian witch.
When I first saw him in
real life he was probably in his mid-forties, his face pale and deeply lined,
his expression tragic, a man who clearly had suffered greatly. And it was
clear to me his suffering could not be relieved by the short round woman with
an apron over her green flowered dress and that kerchief tied behind her head. It
was not a well-matched couple. “For this reunion you think you’ll get the
credit?” I would tease my mother, “No, you’ll get the blame!”
There was nothing for
it. This couple reminded my mother of a Russian saying, “God wore out his paws
(lappes) looking to match a pair like this.” There was no ‘pair’. Neither
was there any communication I could see with his rakish son, Nathan, who, as I
recall, preferred playing the horses in Batavia to any other activity. At our
house there were literary dinners all the time, and Emiot was always there. Although
I remember there were many Yiddish writers, the only writer who remains in my
mind is Haim Grade, noisy as Emiot was silent, drunk as Emiot was sober, and
joyful as Emiot was sad. They sat across the table from each other, but I
recall no interchange.
For Emiot Rochester was a
refuge and America a vast freedom. Only when he travelled to New York, he wrote
a postcard that rejoiced that he was in the city zolelet ve sova’at, that
devours and is surfeited. My brother pointed out that Emiot was
quoting Deuteronomy ( 21:20), about the rebellious son who seeks only
pleasure. I assumed he was the devourer and his
thirst had been sated, that getting away from his staid environment in
Rochester released his joy of life, but a few days later he was mugged and
beaten rather severely, and his taste for wandering freely was somewhat diminished..
I assume he managed to
make connections and forge friendships in New York because he began writing for
the Yiddish newspaper “The Forward,” and soon he began talking about a nun in
Nazareth College who was translating some of his poems. The Jewish community of
Rochester took him in and nurtured him, I fully believe, due to the efforts of
my parents. My parents were the intermediary between the refugee community, of
which they were a part, and the vast benevolent American Jewish organizations
in the neighborhood. Both of my parents, Louis and Doris Rosenstein, worked
separately and together to benefit and develop all Jewish organizations in
Rochester, and their efforts with Israel Emiot were one of the ways in which
they could link their old, almost vanished world, with the burgeoning present
in the city. Their investment in him was great, and my mother’s pride at the
employment of Israel Emiot in the Jewish Community Center was immeasurable.
Emiot took on the
establishment of a new journal, supported by the Jewish Community Center, or
what was then “The Jewish Young Men’s and Women’s Association of Rochester.”
The first issue was largely in Yiddish, but later issues included more
English. “Jewish Roots” was an attempt to build linguistic and cultural bridges,
but I can find no record of its existence on public databases. It ceased when
Emiot passed away.
So little remains of
Emiot that I pored through this new dual language book of poems As Long As
We Are Not Alone, as if it were an icon, a scrap of a saint’s linen, a peek
at forgotten greatness. >At last I return to the
poem I had failed to translate so many years ago, “Before Spring,” and
discovered Zazulyer had skipped a verse in the middle. The verse that was
missing, perhaps the only one in the book, made no sense to me and is still
seems to me untranslatable. I remembered that the third verse is where I originally
gave up, and returned to the translation of my youth which seems to have been
etched in my memory.
Willing or perhaps not
willing,
Zazulyer makes it much
more understandable and poetic; by revising and clarifying she returns the
spirit to the verse.
Willingly, perhaps
unwillingly, Zuzulyer describes and
discusses the rhyme schemes and verse forms of Emiot in introductions to each
section, so the problems of exact translation are somewhat overcome.
In thinking of how to describe
this memorable book I am reminded of Zazulyer’s translation of Emiot’s praise
of the beauty of Mona Lisa,
The deep emotion of all those
refugees, their suffering and loneliness, despite the enormous efforts of their
American friends to recover their lost happiness, is recaptured here in the
exceptional and succinct poetics of a profound individual, thanks to a
community that cared enough to preserve it.
with the heart and so distant
and strange
before the bright smiling
spring
>it had my spirit shamed.
despite my alienated and
remote heart,
spring’s suffusing smile
shames my spirits. (87)
Oh, Master, what is gone
is indeed dead,
But it has been
transformed by your brushstrokes
Into traces of living
flesh. (73)