[In the following essay, Madison provides an overview of Yiddish writers and poets from Israel.]

Yiddish was the speech of East European Jews from the time of their settlement there in the late Middle Ages, and was developed by them into a modern literary language during the second half of the 19th century. The pogroms and activated anti-Semitism of the early 1880's started an exodus of these Jews to nearly every part of the inhabited earth. For years it was a mere trickle, with most migrants going to the United States, but some settled in Western Europe and a few went to Canada, South Africa, and South America. A handful of dedicated Zionists departed for Palestine (hereafter referred to as Israel). After the widespread massacres of 1905, the exodus rose to a tidal wave, adding up to millions, and remained an outpouring in the 1920's. It ceased catastrophically after 1939 when around six million Jews were trapped and incinerated in the Nazi crematoria—only to resume as a pathetic outflow of the few thousand harrowed survivors.

Wherever these Jews gained a foothold, they were quick to establish their religious and cultural institutions. Not knowing the language of the land and unfamiliar with the social patterns of their native neighbors, at first they clung of necessity to their own intellectual and artistic resources. Where they were concentrated in sizable numbers they started their own newspapers and periodicals and imported or printed the available Yiddish books. In time each center had its own group of Yiddish writers who kept in close contact with colleagues in other parts of the world. The United States apart—its Yiddish activities having already been dealt with—major cities in Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and South Africa had their Yiddish writers adding their work to the mainstream of Yiddish literature. After World War II, with many Yiddish writers in Eastern Europe killed and Jewish presses stopped or destroyed, Jewish communities in other parts of the world printed and promoted books written by the survivors. This effort was made in the face of declining interest in Yiddish on the part of Jews who have become more or less assimilated into the cultures of their adopted lands.

In recent decades Israel has developed an active Yiddish publication program. This was a marked departure from conditions prevailing before 1950. The first Zionists who settled there in the 1880's and later were ardent Hebraists, and took pains to keep Yiddish from becoming the prevailing language of the Jewish community. This definite antagonism persisted until after the formation of Israel and the enactment of Hebrew as its official language. It is of interest that in 1931 Hebrew University in Jerusalem, greatly in need of support, refused the financial offer of a prominent American Jew for establishment of a chair in Yiddish. The sabris, or native born, were particularly inimical to the mother tongue of their parents.

This hostility became muted and largely dissipated as more and more martyrs from concentration camps arrived in Israel, most of them knowing little or no Hebrew and forced to communicate in Yiddish. Simultaneously, many writers who reached Israel from Poland and adjacent areas asserted their right to employ the language in which they were best able to express themselves. Sympathy with their harrowing ordeal under the Nazis favored them. President Khaim Weitzmann stated that “Hebrew is … the holy tongue, but Yiddish is … the martyr's tongue.” His successor, President Isaak ben Zevi, also declared: “The strength to build Israel did not come from heaven. It came here from the diaspora. … Hitler had burned the Yiddish speech. Stalin liquidated it. … This created an attitude to Yiddish as to a holy tongue.”

Although early Yiddish writers in Israel were ignored or disdained, so that some were completely discouraged, the more presistent had sufficiently established themselves by 1934 to issue a newspaper and form the Yiddish Writers Union in 1941. This early group was greatly strengthened by the larger number who reached Israel in the late 1940's. A scholar like Professor Dov Sdan, who holds the chair in Yiddish at Hebrew University, which was accepted from an American donor in 1951, has greatly stimulated a tolerance for Yiddish by the excellence of his linguistic and literary research. Born in Galicia in 1902 of a long line of learned forebears, he went to Israel in 1925. Highly erudite, endowed with a photographic memory, he has done much journalistic and critical writing as well as translations from several languages. It is his credo that the Jews must have “a pluralistic literature, a literature created through various orientations and powers.” To Jacob Pat he declared:

One requires a total literature: Haskolah, Hasidism, Enlightenment. The preacher's sermon is literature, as is that of the Mussar [Moralizer]. All of this is one great source for our literature to draw upon. In Hasidism there is a sea of literature: stories, parables, legends. So are all other sources. The current writer must draw upon all.

Foundation by Abraham Sutzkever and others in 1949 of Die Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), which quickly became the leading literary periodical in Yiddish, brought the language to a highly respected level. Of equal advantage was formation of the Peretz Verlag, which brings out Yiddish books of good quality. Israel also has a widely read Yiddish daily newspaper, and evenings of Yiddish readings and discussions are held in various cities and communities.

Among early writers who made Israel their home, Khaim Nahman Bialik was pre-eminent. Born in 1873, he had a very difficult childhood after his seventh year, when his father died and he had to live with a dour grandfather. Very bright, he studied in the Volozhin Yeshiva, which permitted an interest in mundane subjects. About that time he came under the influence of Ahad Ha'am (A. Ginsburg, 1856-1927), a leading Zionist and Hebrew writer, and turned to Hebrew as his medium of literary expression. A poet of strong feeling and intense imagination, Bialik made his words and images into sharp knives that cut to the marrow. Dr. Eliashev has written of him: “He is the first of our poets to discern and develop the poetic form for the mightiest feelings of our tortured spirit. … Bialik's poetry is the highest lyric, which expresses objectively not only the subjective suffering but the suffering and sources of an entire people.” Generally acknowledged as the greatest Hebrew poet in modern times, Bialik also wrote in Yiddish. His best-known poem, “The City of Murder,” is a dirge on the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 written with naked and natural indignation and with the moral fury of an outraged prophet. He also wrote numerous simple lyrics which read like folksongs. In 1924 he migrated to Israel and lived there until his death ten years later.

Among the largely Yiddish writers to settle in Israel in the early years of this century were Z. Brokhes, Moshe Stavsky, and Yakov Shtol. Brokhes, born in 1886, went to Israel in 1903, where he became a worker. Beginning to write in 1907, he published a number of stories and essays. In 1914 he left for Paris to study, but the war caused him to leave for Argentina, and later the United States. He returned to Israel in 1918, the year in which his first volume appeared. In later years he issued other of his writings in book form.

Stavsky (1883-1964), the first husband of Anna Margolin, with whom he went to Israel in 1911, developed a successful dairy business and wrote fiction in his leisure hours. In his view it was folly to depend upon one's writing for a livelihood: “Better to skin a carcass in the market than to depend on literature for bread.” Much of his fiction was about household animals and Arab life. After 1930 he wrote only in Hebrew.

Shtol (Simkha Eisen, 1897-1959) went to Israel in 1912. He served in the British army in both world wars. One of the first Yiddish writers in Israel and intimately familiar with the land and people, he wrote about both with deep love. His A Wedding in Kastra (1931) is a romantically original creation, describing with sympathetic sensitivity the moods of the natives and newcomers, their traditions and tendencies. His depiction of Arab life is poetically empathic.

At least a dozen Yiddish writers from Eastern Europe went to live in Israel during the 1920's despite the known antipathy to the language. Z. Onoikhi (Z. I. Aronson, 1878-1947), whose father was a rabbi and head of a yeshiva, had a strictly orthodox upbringing but became emancipated in late adolescence, took up general studies, and joined the radical movement. He began to write in Hebrew, but turned to Yiddish in 1905. His stories and monologues, collected in a volume entitled Between Heaven and Earth (1909), stressed the various psychological conflicts of enlightened intellectuals in an atmosphere of orthodoxy and oppression. He visited Israel in 1910-1911, left Russia for South America in 1923, and settled in Israel a year later. A number of his stories treat Hasidic life. After he became a tax collector in Tel Aviv he practically stopped writing.

M. T. Barr (Berman, 1889-1954) was born in Warsaw and remained in Poland until 1925, when he migrated to Israel. For a decade he worked in various kibbutzim, then returned to Poland as a Zionist representative. In 1939 he escaped from the Nazis and landed in Mexico. He did not return to Israel until 1953. His numerous stories and poems as well as articles are mostly on Zionist themes.

I. D. Berkowitch (1885-1967) was best known as Sholom Aleichem's son-in-law and translator of his writings into Hebrew, but he was also highly regarded as a writer of stories and plays in both Yiddish and Hebrew. He began his literary career as one of the editors of Die Neie Welt (The New World) in 1910. Four years later he came with the Sholom Aleichem family to New York and remained there until 1928, when he settled in Israel. He was an active writer of stories and essays to the end of his long life, and his multi-volume memoirs are a distinctive contribution to the history of Jewish life and literature.

Arya Shamri, born in Poland in 1907, went to Israel in 1929. Publishing his first verses in 1937, he evidenced a maturity of poetic expression. Bold and optimistic in attitude, he gave voice to the dedicated determination of the people to develop the land. Thus, in “In the Gate of Days,” he exclaims: “Enough the waiting on the doorstep with prayer, tearful, and not heard. See. Wolves in the clouds! Is it perhaps too late?” “A Star in the Field” presents broad pictures and ideas, emotions and moods, arising out of concrete situations and actual experiences. His motto in much of his poetry is: “Always the dream will move the heart.” “In Such a Night I Shall Not Die” tells at length about the power of dreams and the reality of hopes: “Only a human child am I, who goes from dust to dust and sees on the way the distant stars, yet with the daring of my suffering I say the hard word: In such a night I shall not die.”

Chronologically Uri Zvi Greenberg belongs to this group. One of the great Jewish poets of this century, he was born in Galicia in 1894, the son of a rabbi. After receiving a strict religious education, he became an uncompromising rebel. Drafted into the army during World War I, he served until 1918. While in Lemberg he witnessed the massacre and was traumatically affected by it. Already a writer, he went to Warsaw in 1920 and joined Die Khaliastra, termed by some “a group of reckless bums” but actually composed of young poets and storytellers rebelling against stultifying conventionality and voicing their insurgence in expressionistic form. In 1924 he went to Israel, where he became a leading revisionist of Zionism. Seven years later he returned to Poland to edit Die Welt (The World) for revisionist labor unions. In 1935 he went back to Israel and has remained there ever since.

From the very first Greenberg's verses evinced a Jeremian pessimism combined with Isaian indignation. Very early he exclaimed: “I stand against the rock of Jewish misfortune and strike at it with the hammer of song.” His first two volumes, In the Rush of Time (1919) and Twilight Gold (1921), contained numerous religious poems charged with “holy” sentiment and termed by him his “heart's song of songs.”

In Mephisto (1922), however, holiness is turned into diabolism. Unable to conceive of the world without a guiding force, and having rebelled against God, he assumes that Mephistopheles is in control: with the world sodden in suffering and bitterness, pain and shame, “there must be someone—other than God—who resides in the blue and breathes of evil.” This someone was Mephisto: “And Mephisto always conquers! If you doubt, you doubt forever! You let the grapes in the vineyard burst, the wine leaks into the grass, and you go seeking oases in the Sahara.” Temptation and allure assail human beings in every walk of life, and Mephisto boasts of being the tempter in everything and everywhere: “Well, the world is the world; but day turns to night—and then Mephisto is master. And millions of men become wild and hate. And the stone of grandfather Cain is still hot. And what further? People fructify, people run; it is all nonsense; and all hearts shudder in lust: gold and blood. …”

Shortly after settling in Israel, Greenberg stopped writing in Yiddish. In Hebrew he extolled the Halutzim who were dedicating themselves to building up ancient Israel. In a characteristic poem, “The Thirteenth Tribe,” the first stanza reads:

Don't ask our blood, it might tell you: it's old. … It is quite a distance between Abraham and today's Halutz! (Old blood, it trembled in Christian coldness of fear.) Ask our hand, the hard-working hand—it will surely tell you as with a map with signs: our development and our spread over fields and swamps and sand wilderness—over the high-risen stony curse—from the flatlands to the heights of Galilee.

After 1956 he resumed writing in Yiddish, which had become to him “the language of martyrs.” In numerous poems he depicted the terrible ordeal of the Jews under the Nazis. To Jacob Pat he said: “Before my eyes lie dead Jews, Jewish martyrs, great Jews. How can I sing of birds? I had a family. I had a city. Where are they? All were killed. I live and they are dead! What happened to me, to you, is deep inside of us. My Jews were killed. I was killed. …” And his poetic outcries were a dirge bewailing the millions dead in Jeremian lamentation and a call to anger and rebirth.

Another prominent poet who came to Israel in the same year as Greenberg was Yosef Papiernikov, born in 1897 and deeply devoted to Yiddish. Son of one of the early “Lovers of Zion,” he grew up imbued with a yearning to live in the “Land of Israel.” In Warsaw after 1918, he joined the Poale Zion party. On arriving in Israel in 1924, he worked hard to earn a bare living, but his love of the land made him sing with joy and enthusiasm—but also with a clear perception of things as they are. At one time he stated: “I knew that in my new land, in my new home, no milk and honey would flow from the walls, but I did not know that bread would cost dear only to those who raked fire with bare hands. …” Yet he gloried in the blood and fire with which Israelis have had to build the land. “When I shall cease singing about you—it will be that a poet has died, who had through you—spoken to God.” In the Sunny Land (1927) and Red on Black (1929) give poetic voice to his joy in and hope for Israel. His enthusiasm is evidenced in the brief poem, “What My Father”:

What my father, lover of Zion, dreamt into his silver-white hair—I have realized without a dream, in actuality; without Zion—longing, without Zion—pain. I have lived to eat the fruit of my own planting: the fruit of sweat and blood, on my own soil, which my brothers have delivered—with the sharpness of the plow and sword.

This paean to Israel he sang again and again. In “On the Way to Jerusalem” the first stanza reads: “In the hills of Jerusalem, where the roads hide and scatter like snakes—I, riding, saw you, mother—mother earth.” Similarly, “In Blood and in Fire” extols the work of the Halutzim:

In blood and in fire we build our homes, in blood and in fire—lay bricks and steps, and grow and rise upon them in the blue skies which lie aflame on the roofs, on the towers, and on the heads.

In blood and in fire we march against everything, in blood and in fire—to lead the plow in the field, and throw, as bridges, paved scattered roads, and feel in achievement—the axis of the world.

Papiernikov has been the staunchest Yiddishist in Israel. In his resentment against those who belittled his mother tongue he has refused offers of editors of Hebrew periodicals, preferring to remain isolated and poor. “For more than 30 years,” he told Pat in the 1950's, “I've lived in poverty, loneliness, and love of the land, and almost alone I wrote songs to Israel in Yiddish.” And he added:

The new land did not receive me together with my child, the Yiddish poem. And it let me remain outside. As one impoverished at a wealthy man's celebration, I am in my own land, where after decades I've not yet become a part of it. I remain as outsider with my abashed poem: my Yiddish song of love, praise, and thanks.

The 1930's brought several more Yiddish writers into Israel. Abraham Lev, born in Wilno in 1911, came to work in a kibbutz. He tilled the land and rejoiced in nature. His poems sing of the soil and of his physical exertion in its cultivation, and of the fragrance of growing plants. Quiet and modest in expression, he writes with rustic solidity and idyllic lyricism. “Of course I'm tired, weary in my walk … but through the years my Yiddish song always accompanied me.” In “How Good” he praises the simple life of the kibbutz: “The effort here is healthy and fresh as the clear, joyous spring. The joint table smells with the blessing of sweat and stable. … Who works in the garden, in the kitchen, who works in the large orchard: alone—how small the ‘I,’ together—how great the miracle.” And of himself he intimates in “The Peasant-Poet”: “Solid is the earth on which the peasant-poet works, and although the body is tired and weary—yet his song and his speech are filled with the light and joy that is in him.”

Samson Meltzer, born in Galicia in 1909, studied Hebrew for many years and graduated from a teachers' seminary. He began early to write in Hebrew and Yiddish, but when he went to Israel in 1933 composed his lyrics mostly in Yiddish because he felt a greater intimacy with his mother tongue. He earned his living as a builder, painter, and teacher, and was also connected with the Hebrew newspaper Davar (The Word) for many years, for which he translated numerous poems from the Yiddish. In his own verses he dwelt largely on reminiscences of his youth. He also wrote popular stories for children. His novel On Grandfather's Fields, which depicts an old Jew who clings to the soil in the face of loneliness and fatiguing exertion, also provides a realistic description of Jews and gentiles living together in rural friendliness.

Yoel Mastboim (1884-1957) was born in Poland and became a house painter at the age of 15. He joined the revolutionary movement in 1904 and suffered imprisonment. His early literary efforts were not liked by Peretz, but others found them promising. His first collection of stories, Of the Red Life, appeared in 1912. He lived in London between 1919 and 1922, where he was active in literary affairs and published two additional volumes. He had brought out five more books by the time he reached Israel in 1933. There he continued his literary activity, and among his published works are My Stormy Years (1950), a Hebrew account of his youth, and The Power of the Soil (1951), a novel describing the daily toil and Sabbath spirit of newcomers in Israel and the orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. As a writer he tended to be careless of style and uncontrolled of form, yet musical and picturesque in his prose diction.

Malkeh Locker, wife of Berl Locker, the Zionist leader, was born in Galicia in 1887 and grew up steeped in Hasidic piety. Yet she early became intimately familiar with European literature and was an enthusiastic admirer of Jean Arthur Rambeau, whose biography she published in 1950. She went to Israel in 1937, but left the next year with her husband for London, where he held an important Jewish office, and did not return until 1948. She wrote about Israel with mystically symbolic affection. In a poem on Jerusalem she declared: “I seek in your memory the song of the world that existed before the Flood and what will be—the song of recognition, the song of love.” Among her published volumes are World and Man (1931), Thou (1932), Cities (1940), and her diary, The World Is Without a Keeper (1947).

Moshe Gross-Zimmerman was born in Galicia in 1891 of a Hasidic family. In his late teens he began to write articles on politics and literature. In Israel, where he settled in 1937, he published fiction and criticism. A characteristic story, “The Grandfather,” is a mildly humorous account of an elderly Jew who lost his wealth in 1939, went to Israel, and found satisfaction in making his living as a watchman. Jews Among Jews (1956) is a work of literary criticism noted for its Heinesque ésprit and his caustic view of Peretz's writing.

The European cataclysm of the early 1940's, in which millions of Jews suffered martyrdom, made Israel the logical and unique asylum for the surviving thousands who could no longer remain in the land of their birth. Overcoming extreme difficulties and endangering their lives in leaky and overloaded tubs, many defied British antagonism in order to steal into the land of their ancient forefathers. Among them were a number of Yiddish writers. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, many more entered the land, and most of them persisted in the use of Yiddish until they succeeded in gaining for it the position and prestige it now enjoys.

Foremost among the present protagonists of Yiddish is Abraham Sutzkever, who entered Israel illegally in 1947. Born in Smargon in 1913 of a rabbinic family, he was taken as an infant by his father to Siberia to escape the ravages of war. There he lived until 1920, when his father died and the family returned to Smargon and then settled in Wilno. Young Sutzkever early manifested an interest in writing, first in Hebrew and then in Yiddish. In 1932 he went to Warsaw, where he published his first poems. During the next few years he wrote a notable group of poems about the Siberia of his childhood. He was caught in the Nazi net in 1941 but succeeded in escaping and found shelter with partisans in a nearby forest. Owing to enthusiasm for his poem “Kol Nidre,” which he managed to send to Jewish writers in Moscow, a Russian plane brought him to that city, where he was warmly welcomed.

In 1946 he was flown to Nuremberg to be a witness against the Nazi crime of genocide in Polish concentration camps. In Israel he served as a correspondent in the war for independence in 1948. The following year, with the uneasy armistice arranged, he started Die Goldene Keyt together with Abraham Levinson and Eliezer Pines, and the financial backing of Joseph Shprintzak, secretary of Histadruth, the Israeli labor organization. All the while—before and since—he wrote much verse as well as magazine articles.

Sutzkever is a poet of effervescent emotion and social depth. His verses on Siberia established him as a lyricist of nature and master of the picturesque phrase. His series of 28 poems entitled “Ecstasy” give tender expression to his sensibility of longing, desire, and beauty. In the early 1940's he wrote poems almost daily in which he described the agony of the Wilno ghetto and the haphazard hardships of partisans in the forest. Thus, while in a wood near Wilno in December, 1941, he wrote:

At a warm hill of horse dung I warm, warm my icy hands. I warm my hands and thereby resent: until now I have apprehended, recognized, the greatness of smallness. It can happen that the warm breath of a hill of dung can produce a poem of noble beauty.

“Kol Nidre,” written in February, 1943, is a long poem of anguish about a father of five sons who finds his eldest in the concentration camp of his own imprisonment—a wounded Red Army soldier betrayed as a Jew. When ordered by the sadistic Nazi officer to cut his son's tongue out, he plunges the knife into the heart of the youth, the last of his living sons.

A different kind of poem is “A Little Flower,” written in May, 1943:

My neighbor paid seven lashes for bringing a little flower through the gate. How dear to him is now the blue spring—the little flower with the eye of gold! My neighbor carries the memory without regret: the spring breathes in his skin—he wishes it so. …

In his dejection at that time Sutzkever wondered if he were the last poet in Europe—“singing for the dead, singing for the crows.” In the midst of his misery in hiding he thinks of his father's death and writes in “To Thirty Years”:

My father's heart, when he was thirty, broke one evening while playing Rabbi Levi Itzkhak's tune on his violin. The violin on his shoulder trembled like a child, and its speech—a bright magnet—attracted the wide world in the shadowy farm, while I, a seven-year-old dreamer, wound about my father's knees.

Secret City, written in 1945-1947 and published in 1952, is a long verse narrative about a group of Jews who have escaped from the Nazis “in the abyss of canals” (sewers) and live there as best they can by appointing duties to each and by depending upon friendly gentile partisans to provide them with food. When a child needs milk, one of the men steals into the nearby village and procures a goat from a peasant. An unhappy youth, unable to satisfy the hunger of the sick girl he loves, commits suicide, and on a board over his grave this epitaph is written: “His life was torture, death—heaven's relief.”

The group experiences other dire events: members sicken and die; a Lithuanian informer, losing his way in the tortuous canals, is not killed but sent on to perish in the distant sewers; a child is born and somehow survives; a man cheats by not contributing to the common food fund money he had swallowed when searched by the Nazis and then rescued from his feces—only to be driven away by his conscience the next day; a tubercular girl is taken into a convent as a Christian; a pious Jew insists on returning to the abandoned synagogue in the city to pray on Yom Kippur. The Nazis at last discover the hiding place and begin to attack it, but are frightened away by the coming of the Red Army. Once freed, the refugees go their separate ways. These and other episodes are related with poetic fervor and sympathy, and with an implicit epic indignation at the beastliness of man and a warm admiration for the nobility suffering brings out in some of its victims.

In 1947, having spoken with dignity and effectiveness on the witness stand, he wrote “Before the Nuremberg Tribunal”:

They say that I demand justice for the millions. That the hour will forever remain—only the millions are gone—so what kind of justice can I demand?

I should be a Shylock a thousand times over to cut out the evil on earth. My people! You will still forge such a sword, if God is too weak to demand this portion.

Spiritual Soil (1961) treats poetically the emergence of Israel as a nation. “On the Sea” describes refugees seeking to reach port and what happens to them on the way. “Sabras Bloom” tells about the expiration of the British Mandate and the diplomatic and terroristic events leading up to independence. “A Dream of a Goldsmith” depicts Israel in the throes of war with the Arabs. “Epilogue” is dedicated to the occupation of the Negev and the commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the Warsaw uprising. Here, too, Sutzkever writes epically and emphatically about experiences which have ignited his imagination and inspired his enthusiasm.

In his 20 years in Israel he has written much incisive prose and several volumes of poetry not only about the life around him but also about his experiences in Poland and Russia. He sings with an overtone of chagrin, for instance, about the Polish mistreatment of Jews: “If I were now, after my sacrifice, not born anew with the land, where every stone is my grandfather—bread would not sate me, water would not quench my palate. …” And as late as 1966 he writes of Germany: “Don't tell me about good Germans. … I have seen how good Germans murdered unconscionably and simultaneously performed on a silver flute. And play football with a Jewish child. May its spilt blood forever and ever penetrate their thick skulls.”

As a poet Sutzkever has achieved a prominent place in Yiddish literature not so much by his exceptional sensitivity or depth of imagination as by his epic breadth and his giving passionate voice to the tragic events of his time. If his poetry is sometimes more rhetorical than purely lyrical, it is nevertheless imbued with a sympathy and sensibility that give it the stamp of lyrical authenticity. And as spokesman for Yiddish in Israel he has no peer. As he told Pat: “I am more and more certain that in our time, after the destruction in Eastern Europe, Yiddish can nowhere be as free as here. This mysterious land reveals itself to the Yiddish word. Yiddish in Israel flows like the Jordan.”

The number of Yiddish writers who have reached Israel since 1947 is too great to permit comment on each one, but a brief discussion of several will suggest their general range and character.

Rivkah Bassman was born in Lithuania in 1925 and graduated from a gymnasium. Trapped in the Wilno ghetto in 1941, she was fortunate enough to survive the ordeal of imprisonment in concentration camps. She went to Israel in 1947 and has since published numerous poems. “Birth of a Song,” “In the Field,” and “Generations Look” are perhaps most suggestive of her lyric gift. To quote from the first: “When a song is born, a little star is lost, and in its empty place sparkles, lights up a pure word. Over seven distant countries I have gathered words. And I placed them in the sky over the great, great world.” The second poem expresses the loneliness of the early pioneers in the kibbutz: “Let us go and cry out! Mama! Lonely and lonelier are we: Mama! … Why do we feel a yearning when we come to the field and our steps weep?” The third is very brief: “Generations look silently into my windows. When the sun disappears—my little room is gray—they flutter like doves.” Her latest publications are Doves at the Wall (1959) and Leaves along the Way (1967), both works of solid merit.

Abraham Rintzler, born in Bukovina in 1923, also reached Israel in 1947. He has become an acknowledged poet, and his “Credo” voices the uncertainty and danger felt by Halutzim over the years. “And where will this way lead? And are we truly the first newborn, or still the thousand-year ones? And from which corner will the reflection of the enemy's knife glisten? Will we with our bit of belief, our meager effort, further have the strength to nurse eternity?”

Moshe Yungman, born in Poland in 1922, managed to find asylum in Soviet Russia during World War II. He arrived in Israel in 1947 and became a teacher. Some of his verses have a bucolic wholesomeness, but his awareness of the enmity surrounding Israel is expressed in a number of poems with patriotic fervor. “Ode to a Cow” is an artless and grateful acknowledgment of the cow's goodness to man. In “Bees” he wishes his poems would hum like bees and attain their honey. “My Hands” reveals the common fear: “My hands, my hands, mine white from prayer—I'll extend them today like two spears against the enemy; I'll spread them wide, shut like gates—to hide my land from eyes that lurk. …”

Abraham Karpinowitch, born in Wilno in 1913, spent two years in Cyprus before he was able to enter Israel in 1948. Like other writers, he has taken his material from early observations in Poland as well as experiences in his new environment. “The Black Leyke” is about a brothel in Wilno. A journalist has exposed it by using Leyke as his source of information—she having told him her life story. Sometime later, while hunted by the police for his radicalism, he becomes sick and seeks shelter with Leyke. She nurses him back to health at a considerable cost to herself. When he leaves she cannot resume her harlotry and becomes an honest worker. In “Do Not Forget” a Jewish soldier in 1948, fresh from Cyprus, captures an Arab soldier and does not know what to do with him, but finally kills him. In other stories Karpinowitch describes newcomers whose morality and honesty are at an ebb but who feel the urge to begin a new and better life.

Yakov Friedman, born in Galicia in 1910, entered Israel in 1948. His poems are characterized by simple lyricism and Hasidic piety. Some depict uniquely the various times of day from the standpoint of a highly imaginative boy. Other poems of childhood dwell on the mysteries of nature and the complexities of mind. In “Night,” the first stanza reads: “When my mother turns off the light in the room, darkness climbs like an animal into my bed. I feel its heavy body, alive, with flesh and limbs, as it reaches its paws out to caress and stroke me. The silence breathes like a living clock and billows mysteriously far, far. …” In “A Shepherd's Prayer” he says in part:

Be good to me, God, I do not ask for much: I want to feel your love resting on my roof.

And at the doorstep of my house, when I open the door, let the sun and the rain speak of you.

And let a spring and a field and a herd of cattle tell me “good morning” every day.

As I come in my linen garment with my wooden fife toward the Jordan.

Similar faith but greater piety is expressed in “Moshe-Leyb the Nister,” which tells about a shoemaker who is full of pity for every living creature:

“What is my guilt, dear God, when my heart cries with compassion. … I ask no questions, I only pray—accept my prayer, o Creator: I want to partake of the suffering of a spider, of the suffering even of a moth. And when a pigeon is destroyed, let my blood flow with hers. And when an ant is crushed somewhere, let my flesh suffer with it.” Thus speaks Moshe-Leyb the shoemaker to God, and the mountain waters burst in song: Praised be the dear Name who gave priority to man.

Although Mendel Man left Israel in 1961 and has resided in Paris since then, his association with Israel remains close. He was born in Poland in 1916 and studied painting before he turned to writing, and published his first literary efforts in 1938. A year later he fled to the Soviet Union and was drafted into the Red Army. At the end of the war he returned to Lodz, and his volume, The Stillness Calls (1945), was the first Yiddish book to be brought out in postwar Poland. He entered Israel in 1948 and many of his stories deal with life in his new environment. In 1954 he became secretarial editor of Die Goldene Keyt, and most of his fiction was first printed in that periodical. By the Vistula River (1958) has for its protagonist an energetic and dynamic youth who flees from Poland during the war and organizes the local defense against the enemy. The life and attitudes of Russian peasants are described with realistic clarity. This novel precedes an engaging autobiographical trilogy of the war period, which goes back to his early life in the 1920's, and deals with his friends and enemies at school, the rising fear among Jews in the face of aggressive anti-Semitism, and the events leading up to the holocaust.

Man's Israeli stories in Awakened Soil (1953) are less dramatic but more picturesque. Of significance is the narrative of how an abandoned Arab village is settled by refugees from both concentration camps and Arab countries. It tells sensitively and sympathetically how they appropriate the mean huts and begin to farm the fields; how they overcome the antagonistic attitude existing between the two groups and establish a viable social life. The discouragement of certain individuals and their painful adjustments are treated with understanding and compassion. Here, as in his other writings, Man manifests a painterly view of nature and a bold conception of his characters.

Yeshayahu Shpiegel, born in Poland in 1906, went to Israel in 1951. A writer of simple yet sensitively symbolic fiction, he has depicted at length and painfully the martyrdom of the Jews during World War II. As he summed it up: “In each dewdrop I see my mother's tear. In each flutter of the wind—my father's prayer. And I myself—I carry in my heart the blessing and the curse of all, all times.” One of his popular stories, “The Bridge,” symbolizes the merger of destruction and resurgence. Jews from various parts of the world are at work on the building of a bridge; the one from Poland finds the heat unbearable, but he persists with his last bit of strength—until he is struck by an enemy bullet.

Shpiegel dedicated his latest novel, Stairs to the Sky (1966), to his only daughter Eva, who perished in the ghetto during the war. No doubt autobiographical, it is written from the point of view of a naive but sensitive boy and describes what he sees and hears and how he reacts to the people close to him and to the events he witnesses. Thus he is puzzled when his mother is away and he hears that she is sick and that his new little sister is dead; he is equally perplexed when his father puts up a mill in the house and says: “Blessed be God in Heaven! From the mill we'll surely have bread.” When he is taken to his grandparents temporarily and hears his scholarly grandfather talk, he cannot make any sense out of his words:

These strange, peculiar words put me in a misty, heavy darkness, where it is always night. None of the grown-ups around me made any effort to tear the black veil which hung about these unintelligible words and events. It always seemed to me that the world of grown-ups is a world of all black and obscure signs which they, the grown-ups, have devised only for themselves, in order to live in their own groove, which is full of magic—and then they die mysteriously.

A great deal of action takes place in his family: love-making among the younger members; an aunt is hunted by police for suspected radicalism, but they arrest her sister by mistake and thus enable her to escape across the border; his father is arrested for his involvement with the aunt; his mother becomes ill from aggravation—these and other incidents, taking place in a Russian town in the 1900's, are described from the standpoint of an ingenuous boy, but with clear implications of the poverty and persecution experienced by Jews under the Czar.

A. M. Fuchs, born in 1890, for many years the Austria correspondent for Der Forverts, is a gifted storyteller who came to Israel in 1951. Although most of his writing was naturally done in Europe, he now has a number of stories about Israel. Many of his fine, realistic stories have their setting in his native Galicia and in Russia. Typical of them is “Difficult Days,” a story of civil war in Russia shortly after the revolution. A young Bolshevik in the Petlura area risks his life by agitating young men to form partisan groups against the “Whites.” To his worried parents he explains that he is doing what former Jews have done: striving for justice in the world. When he is danger of arrest by Petlura hooligans, his hostess assures them that he is her son and not the agitator they are seeking. In “The Day” Fuchs describes life in Israel, especially as it manifests itself in the farmlands, stressing the picturesque ways of animals and plants and farmers; the description of sunrise over the hills achieves poetic beauty. In 1961 a collection of his stories, The Night and the Day, was published in New York.

Yekhiel Hofer, born in Poland in 1906, reached Israel in 1951. He has written notable verse, fiction, and literary criticism. Since coming to Israel he has published several novels, many poems, and a provocative volume of criticism, With Others and With Oneself (1964). A representative story, “The Death of Reb Tankhum,” depicts an elderly Hasid who is separated from his wife. He grieves at the lack of piety in his own children as well as in those of others, but is most distressed to see his estranged wife, who would not divorce him, doing better in business than he does.

Binem Heller was born in Poland in 1908. Becoming a communist in his adolescence, he had to flee to avoid arrest. He returned to Warsaw in 1947 and was active in the Jewish Writers Club. A writer since 1930, he published much verse and numerous essays—collecting them in several volumes. By the time he arrived in Israel in 1956 he had become disillusioned with communism and expressed his contrition in a pathetic lyrical outcry: “Oh, How My Life Was Broken!”

In writing of his early youth he expressed a nostalgic guilt toward his pious parents and toward his people: “And perhaps part of the guilt falls on me—because I too was silent? Fear had numbed and confused me and I did not oppose the lie.” He has also dwelt on the holocaust and on Israel's insecurity, intimating that although he was no longer in Europe he continued to feel enmeshed in “the dark shadow of the demon”; that in Israel “I am between desert and ocean—a place of safety in a narrow pass—a wall of water and a wall of fire must save my life from hate.” Singing of the destruction in Europe with bursts of pain and anger, he intimates a resignation saturated with woe. “Now I must rinse with silence the last trace of false belonging. As long as I'll remember a sound it will be difficult to believe in myself.” Yet he takes comfort in the feeling that “the new song will come. … In the garden of my Yiddish speech ripens the fullness of small flowers.” In much of his verse there is the lyric magic of natural song, even as there is a keen-cutting edge to his critical essays. In his latest volume of poems, Generation and Endurance (1967), his poetic vein flows rich and pure.

Of significance to the survival of Yiddish literary activity is the adherence to it of some of the younger writers in Israel. One of these is Rokhel Fishman, who was born in the United States in 1935 and settled in Israel in 1954. Writing lyrical free verse, she exudes a deep love for both Yiddish and Israel. Her nature poetry expresses her personal feeling for the land:

The moon rises in the east. Heavy with itself, with sin. Orange red, it tears itself over trees. The higher—the yellower. And in an hour, pale and white, it will deny everything.

Do not ask her where she lay all day. She rises in the evening and the entire horizon is aflame with her.

The second stanza of “In the Beginning” is also characteristic of her imaginative flair: “When the sun looses its tresses and the black hair spreads over the cushion—night appears. Only we know its rosy ear which moves out of the coverlet—it is the dawn, the new beginning.” “Sabbath” eloquently intimates her emotional lyricism:

Only now, when I lie in the shade, cool and covered with shadows, my eye dares, and my palate dares, to take the suns of the week, all suns of the week, and with cool Sabbath hands imprison them in a drop, all suns in a drop. O, how hot, o, how red.

I dip my pen in the deep drop—and it flows. Sun-song flows, flows with hope, only it burns, it burns, it burns. When a song is written with sun, it does not mean that it is good. But one thing is certain, certain: the sun will enter the blood, a steam will rise from the lines, and their breath—hot. Who will put them to his heart will feel the sun with sweat. I dip my pen in the red drop and will—burn your fingers with all the suns of the week.

O, the full sun week.

Israel is now the home of scores of Yiddish writers. Their union in Tel Aviv has around 130 members, and among them are young Yiddish poets and storytellers who belong to “Young Israel” and have definite literary promise. The writings of many appear not only in Die Goldene Keyt but in Yiddish periodicals in other parts of the world. Their work is also being brought to the favorable attention of Israeli readers unfamiliar with Yiddish, and a substantial volume in Hebrew translation was brought out in 1966. M. Halomesh, a writer and secretary of the Yiddish Authors Union stated recently in a report of a trip to Europe and the Americas: “In no other country in the world does Yiddish throb with so much life as in Israel. Not only is a live and juicy Yiddish spoken there in various dialects but it is also read widely, and Yiddish books and periodicals are published there.” Indeed, more books in Yiddish are now being issued in Israel than in the United States. With the roots of Yiddish as a language and literature obviously, and perhaps inevitably, drying up in the diaspora, its chance of survival as a living linguistic expression of the Jews depends on its likely pullulation in Israel. And of that only time can tell.