from To Clear Shores

Rajzel Zychlinsky

Samson

It was in a quiet dusk.
In a window a small jug with honey,
on the table a shaker with salt.
Delilah’s knees were white and round,
and Samson’s lips
thick and sad.
All already was:
the wife,
the lion,
the honey;
three hundred foxes incited with fire,
the gates of a sleeping city
hefted on his shoulders
up Mt. Herman at dawn,
a thousand men smitten
by the jawbone of an ass.
He had kissed valleys
and carried mountains in his hands.
All already was.
Oh, you wife from the Sorek Valley,
see, I am strong,
but I am sorrowful.
Absolve me!
Dissolve me!
See my locks?
Grab them, lop them off!
Bind my hands for me,
bind my feet for me;
I want so much to be like you,
like you all,
like everyone.
I want to fear the lion
and I want to kneel before the mountain.
Oh, you wife from the Sorek valley!
And Samson kissed Delilah’s knee.
And Samson wept on her knee.





January

Six dogs have met
at her door
and are wailing together.
Will she go out or not?
The white dog
with a yellow stain on its back
sits on its haunches
and shivers.
His skinny shadow lies beside him
blue on the snow.
The black dog has found a bone;
only his ears flutter in the wind.
The brown dog doesn’t budge
from the doorstep.
The fourth,
the fifth,
the sixth,
throat next to throat.
The night is bright.
Bark on the willow trees
bursts,
all the stars are in place.
Through the frozen river
gleam the green eyes
of the drowned.
She will go out—
or not?






From a Cloud
Kazan, 1943.

From a cloud my mother looks at me
with bloodied eyes—
daughter, bind my wounds.
Her grey head is bowed.

My sister calls amidst the leaves
of all the green trees:
My little girl, my daughter, where is she?
Rajzhl, gather her bones together.

My brother swims in the waters
days, weeks, years.
A stone is lashed to his throat.
The sky is lit with blue tears.

My neighbor wakes me in the nights:
They hanged me head down.
Take me from the gallows—hoist me.
Oh, how has each hair on my head turned white?

May. I walk around among shadows
holding my small son by the hand.
So many shorn lives clinging
to me, to my corners,
to my walls.

So many shorn lives shiver
on my child’s long eyelashes,
so many shorn lives resound
in May, in spring wind.





My Sister Chana

On green grass,
behind a tall mountain,
my sister Chana wanders.
I call her in the nights:
My sister, come—
She answers nothing.
There is a rustling of chestnut trees.

On a cool cloud
in a blue ship
my sister Chana floats around.
I call her in the days:
My sister, wait—
She answers nothing
and floats away from here.

Only sometimes the mirror weeps.
I look there deep inside,
in the sad eyes
of my sister Chana.
The hair is already grey—
no, it is ash,
white, grey ash
of my sister Chana.





In the Strange Country

It is not my window,
it is also not my patch of snow.
In a strange house
I wake
in a strange night.
In a strange land
I beseech
a strange god.
From where?
To where?—
a star screams from heaven,
deep.
But I am silent
as it is silent.
A hopelessly lost letter.





Autumn

Now come the rainy days.
The potatoes, already dug
from the fields.
The last leaf falls.
The tree stands naked
and waits
for wind.
People! If you have a home
you will seal your window
with putty and with clay.
And in the evenings you will
light a lamp.

Whoever has no home
will open their eyes wider,
will drift with the clouds
from land to land
with an upturned collar
and a skeletal hand—
Whoever has no home.

translated from the Yiddish by Susan Cohen

Read the original in Yiddish

These six poems appeared in Tsu Loytere Bregn, Rajzel Zychlinsky’s third collection. Scans of the originals can be found in the Yiddish Book Center’s digital library, where the yellowing pages with marginal pencil notes drew me into history. Zychlinsky wrote almost all of these works during and just after the war, while she was in the Soviet Union where she gave birth to her son, or in Poland where she was repatriated before emigrating to Paris and then New York. Although she spoke at least five languages, she wrote her poetry in Yiddish and continued to do so during her long life in the United States. Her later volumes contain revisions of some of these poems, and several of those appeared in English in God Hid His Face, translated by Barnett Zumoff, Aaron Kramer, and Marek Kanter (Word & Quill Press; 1997). I felt compelled by their immediacy to translate these first versions, published in Poland, and written while she was learning the true extent of both the personal and broader horror. I’m not a scholar of Yiddish, but I’m an enthusiastic student of the language, and a poet drawn to Zychlinsky’s work by its economy and precision, its clarity and under-stated diction—all of which contribute to its remarkable power. I have tried to be faithful to these characteristics of craft, and above all to the emotions that drove Zychlinsky’s poetry. It was only after I began to learn Yiddish that I understood the full impact of genocide: the millions of people, with all they might have done in the world; the purposeful destruction of a culture that wrote and read its own rich, lively literature; and the near-loss of the very language itself.

I would like to thank Marek Kanter for his permission to translate his mother’s work.

Rajzel Zychlinsky was born in 1910 in Poland, where her first book appeared in 1936 with an introduction by renowned Yiddish poet Itsik Manger. She became celebrated early for her originality, including her re-interpretations of biblical stories. Zychlinsky and her husband fled from Warsaw to the Soviet Union in 1939. Before her death in California at the age of 90, she had published seven collections of poems in Yiddish—in Poland, France, the United States, and Israel—and received Israel’s prestigious Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature. Her third book, Tsu Loytere Bregn (To Clear Shores), from which these poems are taken, was printed in Lodz, Poland, in 1948, and is dedicated “to the holy memory of my mother Dvoyre, my sister Chana, my brothers Yankev and Dovid, and their children, my mother’s grandchildren—victims of Chełmno and Treblinka.”

Susan Cohen is the author of two full-length collections of poems: Throat Singing and A Different Wakeful Animal. Her poems have appeared in dozens of journals, including Poet Lore, Poetry International, Salamander, Southern Poetry Review, and The Southern Review; and in many anthologies, including the Atlanta Review 25th Anniversary Anthology and the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She has an M.F.A. from Pacific University and lives in Berkeley, California.