H. Leivick

H. Leivick (. Jidd. ה לייוויק ) is the pseudonym of Leivick Halpern ( born December 25, 1888 in Igumen in Belarus, † December 23, 1962 in New York ), a Yiddish-language poet of the modern age. He belonged to the group of poets Di Yunge. He chose his pseudonym to avoid confusion with Moyshe - Leyb Halpern, who was a member of the group Di Yunge also.

The most famous work of H. Leivick The Golem, a dramatic poem in eight scenes from the year 1921.

Biography

Childhood and youth in tsarist Russia

H. Leivick was established in December 1888 in Igumen (now Tscherwen ), a small town in Belarus, born as the eldest of nine children. The father, a " Kohen and a raging man ", came from a family of rabbis Minsk. He worked as a teacher at a low rank of Jewish Education: He taught maids is to write letters in Yiddish.

From the age of five years H. Leivick received a traditional Jewish education in the cheder. At age ten he was sent to the yeshiva in the nearest large city, where he met the study of the Talmud from early morning until late spent several years in the night, slept in the yeshiva, and was in several private Jewish households for dinner guest. He was often hungry and sick and suffering from ulcers on the legs, which he attributed to the hungry, as he in his drama - Poem " The chains of the Messiah " vividly described later. However, the study in the yeshiva gave him a good deal of secular education, as the Rosh yeshiva of, an enlightened man, besides the traditional Talmudic study was informed Hebrew grammar and reading secular books promoted in Hebrew and in Hebrew translation.

During the Russian Revolution of 1905 H. Leivick visited illegal gatherings and joined the Confederation, one operating in the underground Jewish Social Democratic Party to. The federal government promoted Yiddish as the national language of the masses against the " clerical language" Hebrew. Leivick, although Kohen, no longer went into the synagogue and moved in his poems from Hebrew to Yiddish.

In 1906 Leivick was arrested by the czarist police. He refused to accept the services of a famous Russian defense, and declared at his trial. "I 'm not going to defend me Everything I 've done, I've done with full awareness I am a member of the Jewish revolutionary party of the covenant., and I will do everything in my power to overthrow the tsarist autocracy and their bloody henchmen. "

He was sentenced to four years hard labor and life in exile in Siberia. In his Minsk prison time he wrote his first dramatic poetry: " The chains of the Messiah." In March 1912, after verbüßter prison time, he joined the deportation trip to Siberia, a march from prison to prison, which lasted four months. Finally he came on board a prison ship, after weeks of driving the Lena River up to the place of his exile, the village Vitim.

With the help of an organization of living in exile in America revolutionaries who sent the young poet money, H. Leivick escaped from exile in Siberia. With a sleigh, he traveled for several months until the next train and eventually sailed, after he managed to escape through the European Russia to Germany, in the summer of 1913 to America.

Exile in America

In America H. Leivick lived first in Philadelphia, where he worked in a textile company and published his first poems in a Yiddish newspaper. Shortly afterwards, he moved to New York, where he joined the group of poets Di Yunge joined, an avant-garde association of young jiddischsprachiger writers who published their work in common anthologies.

Like the other members of the group Di Yunge H. Leivick published in the 1920s, his poems and dramatic poems in the communist daily newspaper Frayhayt and the monthly The Hamer. He visited the Soviet Union and its belorussiche home, and a book of his poems was published in Moscow, however, has been criticized for having included the " pessimism ". In 1929, when the Communists saw the pogroms against the Jews in Palestine as an expression of the Arab revolution that broke Leivick like other Jewish authors with the Communist press. In remarks that time H. Leivick was the deep concern of the Jewish intellectuals for the preservation of ethical values ​​in the face of the deified Revolution expression.

Like other writers of his generation was active as an editor and journalist H. Leivick. From 1932 to 1934 he was Associate Editor of Yiddish. Between 1936 and 1952 he was, together with Joseph Opatoshu eight major anthologies out the Zamlbikher, compilations of the best Yiddish writers of the time. From 1936 until his death he was a regular writer of poems and articles in the New York Yiddish daily Der Tog.

In 1936 took Leivick the Yiddish PEN Club on the International PEN Congress in Buenos Aires. In his address he said: "The main problem of our literature in the twentieth century: How to find a synthesis between the national and the universal ... Jews and world - that is the central drama of our life and literature." In 1937, H. Leivick participated in the World Congress for Yiddish Culture in part in Paris and was there one of the founders of the YKUF ( Yiddisher culture Farband ), an influential, based on a popular front model association of writers and cultural workers of different political persuasions from all over the world. 1939, after the Hitler -Stalin Pact, Leyvik broke off relations with the Left and resigned from the YKUF. 1958 Leivick received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew Union College, and in 1961 an honorary medal from the National Jewish Welfare Board. He died in 1962.

Literary work

H. Leivick became in exile in America to one of the most prominent poets figures in the world of Yiddish literature. Sublimated suffering messianic zeal, a mystical sound, a naive humanism, neo-romantic musicality and harmonic lines, marked by the Russian Symbolism, characterize his poems. He transformed the humiliation and hardship of his father in the apotheosis of a father figure. His childhood suffering, coupled with the agony of his prison years, he translated into the language of traditional Jewish mythology. Job, Isaac binding, the Golem of Prague, the Messiah in chains - these are the objects of his visions, especially in his dramatic poetry. For his readers, the stations of his biography were part of a symbolic suffering person. In his verses are echoes of Dostoevsky, of them speak messianic longing, frustrated revolutionary dreams and sensitive individual sensibility in a world full hardness. Exile and revolution, the experience of a whole revolting against oppression and constriction of Orthodox Judaism generation, found in the neo-romantic language of the poet their lyrical counterpart in " Goles un Geule " ( galut and Geulah ), exile and redemption.

Between 1917 and 1920 Leivick wrote four apocalyptic, visionary poems which reflected the terrible pogrom waves in Eastern Europe. One of them, "The Wolf ", was rediscovered during the Shoah as a symbolic foreshadowing.

H. Leivicks poetic drama The Golem, published in 1921 in a time of revolution and of the messianic expectation, had an enormous influence on Yiddish literature. The lexicon of the New Yiddish literature results: "The objects of the read people and read again, discussed and wrote: liberation and salvation of the Jewish world, the role of matter and the role of the mind in the process of salvation, the Jewish Messiah and the Christian Redeemer, the Maharal and the Golem of Prague, the masses and the individual creator and creation, realism and symbolism - all this touched in the 1920s by Leivicks Golem ago ".

In the last four years of his life Leyvik was paralyzed and unable to speak. During this time his house was a place of pilgrimage of many writers and friends. The lexicon of the New Yiddish literature describes: "His appearance, his behavior to its visitors over as he hugged and kissed his friends recalled the sufferings of Job, the agony of the sacrifice of Isaac, recalled the starets Zosima in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov ."

Works and editions

( The inscription follows for better searchability of the books of transcription in American library catalogs )

Volumes of poetry

  • Lids. New York: Island, 1919.
  • In keynems country. Warsaw, Farlag culture Lige, 1923.
  • Lids. New York: Fraynt. 1932
  • Lider fun Gan eydn, 1932-1936, Poems. Chicago: Tseshinski, 1937.
  • A blat OYF to eplboym. Buenos Aires: Kiyem, 1955.

Dramas and dramatic poems

  • The goylem. A dramatishe poeme in akht pictures. New York: Farlag Amerike, 1921.
  • Shmates. Drame in fir AKTN. Vilnius: B. Kletskin, 1928.
  • Shap. Drame in fir AKTN. Vilnius: B. Kletskin, 1928.
  • Geklibene verk. Keytn: drame in dray AKTN. Hirsh Lekert: dramatishe poeme in Zek pictures. 2 volumes, Vilnius: B. Kletskin, 1931.
  • Di england komedye. The goylem Cholemt. Dramatishe poeme in eleven pictures. Chicago: Farlag L. M. Shtayn, 1934.
  • Abelar un Heluis. Dramatic poeme in dray stsenes. Warsaw (?): Literary Bletter, 1936.
  • Mehar'm fun Rutenberg. Dramatishe poeme in zibn pictures. New York: H. Leyvik Yubiley Fund, 1945.
  • Nit- gedrukte Drames. Buenos Aires: Alveltlekher Yidisher Kulter - Congress, 1973.

Writings

  • With the sheyres ha - pleyteh. [New York ?] H. Leyvik yubiley - fund, durkhn Tsiko - Farlag, 1947.

Collected Works

  • Geklibene verk. Ale verk fun H. Leyvick. 5 volumes. Vilnius: B. Kletskin, 1925.
  • Ale verk fun H. Leyvik. 2 vols. New York: H. Leyvik yubiley - komitet 1940 / 1942.
  • Oysgeklibene shriftn. Buenos Aires: Yosef Lifshits - fond fun der literary gezelshaft Baym Yivo, 1963.

Anthologies

  • Reuben Eisland, Halper Leivick, Mani - body include: The hopping. Literarishe Zamelbikher. Ershter book. New York: Island, 1918 ( SSDYL 0-657-05669-3 ).
  • Joseph Opotashu, H. Leivick: Zamlbikher. 8 volumes. New York, 1936.

H. Leyvick in the "1000 Essential Yiddish Books" the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library

  • Ale verk fun H. Leyvik. Jubiley oysg. 2 volumes: Vol 1: Lider un poemes 1914-1940, ( SSDYL 0-657-00162-7 ). 2 Bd: Dramatishe poemes 1914-1940, ( SSDYL 0-657-00163-5 ), New York, H. Leyvik Jubilej - Komitet, 1940.
  • Di chasene in Fernvald. Dramatishe poeme in eleven stsenes. 186 pp. New York, Tsiko - Farlag, 1949 ( SSDYL 0-657-00160-0 ).
  • In di teg fun Iyov. Dramatishe poeme in SiBN pictures. 210 p 23 cm. New York, Tsiko - Farlag, 1953. ( SSDYL 0-657-00193-7 ).
  • With the scheyres ha - pleyteh. 300 S. New York, H. Leyvik Jubilej - fund, Tsiko - Farlag, 1947. ( SSDYL 0-657-00048-5 ).
  • Nit- gedrukte Drames. 320 S. Buenos Aires, Alweltlekher Yiddish Kulter - Congress, 1973 ( SSDYL 0-657-08250-3 ).
  • OYF tsarischer katorge. 478 pp. Tel - Aviv. Farlag Y.L. Perets. In 1959.
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