Blame Nothing But The Night Poem by gershon hepner

“Why do you ruin all my years? ” Forlorn
is this lament that we associate with aging.
In Yiddish vos dergeystu mir di yorn?
sounds far less powerful than Dylan’s raging
against the night, the blame cast not against
the people who have been the cause of tsorres
rather than the horror, that past tensed,
prevents us seizing every day as Horace
commanded when declaring carpe diem.
It’s not the fault of others that our years
are ruined. By being transformed into P.M.,
A.M. disintegrates and disappears
and we look for a target we can blame.
Vos dergeystu mir di yoren? isn’t right.
Old age, while putting everyone to shame,
is when we should blame nothing but the night.

Inspired, of course, by Dylan Thomas’s famouse poem, “Do Not Go Gentle, ” and an obituary on the Yiddish actress Mina Bern by Joseph Berger (“Mina Bern, Versatile Yiddish Actress, Dies at 98, ” NYT, January 13,2010) :
Mina Bern, a plucky and versatile actress and singer who was one of the last links to the scrappy world of Yiddish theater in New York, died Sunday in Manhattan. She was 98 and lived on the Lower East Side. She died of heart failure, said her friend Eleanor Reissa, a Yiddish entertainer who directed Ms. Bern in four shows. The fabled world of the Yiddish theater on lower Second Avenue, where stars like Jacob Adler, Paul Muni and Molly Picon offered laughter and melodrama to factory workers and tenement dwellers in at least 14 theaters, was in steep decline when the Polish-born Ms. Bern arrived in New York in 1949. She and Ben Bonus, who was to be her second husband, helped keep it breathing a good while longer. “Yiddish stopped being the lingua franca of the immigrant community, so the Yiddish theater held on with just a few people, and she and her husband were among those people in the 1950s,1960s and 1970s, ” said Zalmen Mlotek, artistic director of the National Yiddish Theater — Folksbiene, which, at 95, says it is the world’s oldest continuously producing Yiddish company. Others who pitched in were Menashe Skolnick, Joseph Buloff, Seymour Rexite, Miriam Kressyn, Zypora Spaisman, Fyvush Finkel and Shifra Lerer, the last two still alive.
Ms. Bern was known not as much for her dramatic powers as for her cabaret singing and comedic flair. She would play a coquette in one sketch, a small-minded busybody in another and, in a third, an old mother whose children will let her live with them for only a short time. Nahma Sandrow, author of “Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater” (Harper & Row,1977) , said Ms. Bern “was adorable in sketches.” “She had these lively blue eyes and used to act very innocent, even when she was playing someone who was irritating, ” Ms. Sandrow said.


1/13/10