צוויי לידער

“Gates, Open” is the first poem in Leivick's book Lider Fun Gan Eydn: 1932-1936 (Lyrics from Eden: 1932-1936), a collection of poems written during a stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Colorado a few years after his return from the Soviet Union. The steppes of Siberia and of Colorado are fused and confused. Part of the poet is still in the snow of exile, even as his body is in the flames of tubercular fever in Colorado. The poem calls to mind the ninth part of his long cycle In Snow about his Siberian experience. In that poem, he comes to a gate and asks to be allowed in, to warm himself from the freezing cold, but is denied after people ask who he is and why he is on the road. Here, after having door on door shut to him, as a Russian Jew, as a political prisoner, then again as a Jew rejected while freezing his way through Siberia, he finds the gates and doors open to him in America—a country that he came to love probably more deeply than any non-immigrant ever could. But what do these gates and doors in “The Land Colorado” lead to? Life or death? Unknown. As he survived the snow of Siberia, can he survive the tubercular fire here in Colorado? America is also where in the end he is to lay down his burden, his zak mit geshrey, the sack of ache and screams he has borne on his proverbial shoulders. The first line also calls to mind the Nileh, the prayer recited on Yom Kippur, which reads psakh lonu shaar b'eys nilas shaar ki fono yoym [open to us the gates at the time of closing gates wherefore the day has turned]. The referent is the gates of heaven, which are about to be closed, but the supplicant asks that they be open for just a bit longer to receive the final prayers. Here, however, he asks the gates themselves to open, not God (as in the prayer) or any corporeal resident (as in In Snow) to open them for him. The celestial is supplanted by, transformed into, the terrestrial. The original text expresses a hopeful note with the phrase s'iz shoyn ofn toyer un tir. This is a play on an idiom. In Yiddish ba im iz ofn tir un toyer [door and gate are open to him] is a way of saying “he's doing well in life, he's made it.”