Avoth Yeshurun

I was a vineyard watchman
and descended at the end of the vintage from the hut
from the vineyard. And all the watchman with the bundle
and with the raiment descended from the hut from the vineyard.

I see a man here
and his bundle come to a bench
on the avenue. Sleeps his night
and goes and to the avenue he returns.

Until autumn comes. Coat
he wore shoe
but
has no place

to lie on a bench. The shoes are open on the side
where he lies
on boards four
to breathe deep.

To lie on a bench
on the purity of the boards
like coil of the bare nest
at the side of the tree.

Two steps from here lies the sea
smooth on the date 8 December.
And on the horizon around nations and states and clouds
and the two shoes open.
...

I bring everything I find.
Not everything that glitters is gold.
But I pick up
everything that glitters.

In the drawer an old-clo'-man's collection.
Bits of chrome. A key without legs.
A multiple-toothed nail. Which I run from outside,
like a cave strange beast, which I cross like an arrow in the brow.

Which I entirely outside watch. In everything multiple-eyes.
Bits of nickel, chrome, iron,
I can't tell from what it comes.
Leftover bones. Leg hair. From whom?

All this laid out when I cross streets.
Lessen our flesh from car lust, thoughts on the way, a turn, a trap,
iron falls from the powers.
Everyone says his. Everyone stares me in the hands.
Not everything that glitters is gold.

But everyone wants for the collection.
All this floodfall, all this yield, all this weevilrat, to enter
the collection. And I pick up
everything I find.
...

The sages say, that at the time the Syrian-African Rift
occurred, the celestial inhabitants were not
up-to-date. Each man was engaged
at his trade. In grinding hatchets. In splitting beasts.

Ancient humanity and land of the axe.
And when those wanted some change on the earth
they have to do it by putting to sleep.
After that they waken the earth.


Like they did to me once in isolation in narcosis
under the plywood and the roof
in Beilinson Hospital: "Yeshurun, you underwent an operation!"
And here I am. Yom Kippur.
...

Ask her if she remembers the summer - no.
Her evening is for nest snatchers from fear of shedding leaves
from rain sheaves of autumn
now.

The margosa tree is the night house of the shade. For the shade
is a house. An immigrant house for wild doves and other
summer wings. An immigrant house of wild bodies
and wild beasts ascend the tree. And now there is no one.

The violence of the rain from the autumn on the window.
Her lot fell. Sheds from her falls from her.
She can't. With bared arms got as far as the window.
The Yoreh is her death.

Leaves shed are like migrating birds.
In the winter shed and in the summer redress. But birds outside
and leaves within. And in the case before us leaves may also not return.
Believe it.
...

The Christian cannot
be the pitying one
because he is
the one pitied.

From a dusty road
in a straight line
from przedmiescie to Krasnystaw
at the entrance to town

at Zhitkovski's
in his house we lived,
he makes coffins
with crosses.

On the threshold
I sat as a boy
opposite a building
held together by nails

facing the church
the cloister the impurity,
my mother says,
I sat as a boy.

On the wall
Jesus and Mary.
Jesus and his mother
were never parted.

My mother's son
left her
not to be
on the wall.

Mary's son
never left,
and he paid
the price.
...

Avot Yeshurun was the pen name of Yehiel Alter Perlmutter, who was born in Neskhyzh, in western Ukraine, in 1904, to a family of Hasidic lineage. When he was five, his family moved to Krasnystaw, which he later immortalized in his poetry. As a young man he read Hebrew and Yiddish literature voraciously—not exactly a Hasidic curriculum of study—and also European literature in Polish translation. (He recalled that the first Hebrew book he read was Les mystères de Paris in Hebrew translation.) Called first to Hebraism and then to Zionism, he immigrated to Palestine—again, not what a child of Hasidism was raised to do—in 1925. For many years he kicked around in various menial jobs, eagerly Levantinizing himself, and becoming sympathetically fascinated by Arab life. He published his first book of poems in 1942, and his last book appeared in 1992, on the day before he died.

Harold Schimmel, who was the first to bring this prodigious poet into English, has justly remarked that Avot Yeshurun has "the most individual tone in Hebrew poetry." Some of this is owed to his lexical and grammatical originality, which never fails to startle. There are no other Hebrew rhythms like his. He regularly shatters Hebrew words into little syllabic cups of meaning. Arabic, Polish, and especially Yiddish words are scattered everywhere in his verse. In his later works he even devises his own system of vowelization. He was, in sum, a great experimentalist—an eccentric giant of Hebrew modernism. And yet his power is never merely formal. The exotic and gorgeous quality of Avot Yeshurun's verse is owed to its raw juxtaposition of experiment with sentiment. Though he writes about the Israeli-Arab realities in which he finds himself, the paramount obsession of his work is nostalgia and its literary transfiguration. The poet is memory's uncannily resourceful servant. Memory provokes rapture, and—since the family that he left behind was destroyed in the Holocaust—it provokes guilt. The "" of which he writes are almost always retrospective—backward yearnings for what is no more. Yet the most common emotions are transformed by the most uncommon poetics. Extraordinary words are discovered or devised for ordinary emotions (ordinary, that is, for a Jew of his time and place). He misses his mother so much that Hebrew cannot remain the same. The low sentimentalist as high formalist: these are pleasures that do not often go together.

These two poems are taken from Adon Menuhah (Lord of rest), my favorite of all his books, which appeared in 1990. The dates at the bottom of the poems appear as they do in the originals (where the Hebrew dates appear alongside them). In "The Son of the Wall," the Polish word przedmiescie denotes the outskirts or suburbs of town (I know this gratefully from Professor Gershon Hundert): and the unexpected centrality of Jesus in the poet's account of his unhappiness prefigures a significant theme of his final book. In "Memories Are a House," the Yiddish words in the last lines, quoted from his mother's letter, mean "I've become sleepy." "Yehiel alter lebn," which may be translated as "Yehiel, may you have a long life," involves a bit of wordplay, since it is also a pun on the son's given name. These Yiddish and Polish words function like relics, like salvaged objects—things from the past that the poet pastes onto the poem, almost as in a collage. The distinction between the abstract and the concrete is magically dissolved in an art consecrated equally to language and longing.
...

Stars by the power of their orbit
are stars in the order of the sun.
But if they are not figures of orbit,
they are not in the sun.

Exactly like me: by the power of my yearnings
I am in the family.
And if I will not yearn,
I am not in the family.

Memories are a house.
Time is a roof. All the time a roof. All the time time.
I would like sometime to die
unto them and see them.

Benno Rothenberg related
that when he saw some archaeology,
he had a feeling of
homeland. As if he were in his house.

I do not deny that a man who reaches a certain age
can no longer hope
that those from whom he came will remain
still alive with him, as my mother once

wrote to me in one of the letters
of her twilight. From the fadings of her letters
into the fatedness of man: But when can they.
After all there's no chance of seeing you.

And once, in a discarded and forgotten letter:
'Good night, Yehiel alter lebn. Slumber has descended upon me.
I am caught in the throes of sleep. Khbin
shlayferig gevorn.' Said in a letter that nobody reads, that nobody read.
...