The concept of a “world” does something similar. Philosopher Sean Gaston observes that the basic elements of any concept of “world” are “the easy assertion of a discrete and contained world-like domain, sphere or realm and the claim for a secure perspective or vantage point of the world as a whole.” Allotted access to a portion of everything, I imagine the rest as it follows from my local knowledge. I project myself beyond the part to see the whole. Roland Barthes, like Kermode, considered such projection entirely natural, almost reflexive. “The fracture of the world is impossible,” he writes in “The Plates of the Encyclopedia,” “a glance suffices—ours—for the world to be eternally complete.” Barthes’s example is the Enlightenment-era Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. A systematic attempt to index the world, the Encyclopédie breaks down names, events, and processes to their component parts and, well, compartmentalizes them. All it takes is a reader, who connects these things to still other things, to restore them to the mess that is everything else. A sense of the part, then, lets us grasp the whole.
World literature always and already presumes a world. So far, however, the pole of literature in the phrase has received greater scrutiny. And while every world literature critic or scholar holds at least an implicit concept of world, such ubiquity does not prevent gross simplification. Underlying too much talk about world literature is a belief that the world is self-evident. The danger is that how we imagine the world (reversing Franco Moretti’s line) is a mirror of how we see world literature. The tenuousness of the one has troubling implications for the other.
Rather than adding my own concept of world to the mix, I want to consider the end of the world. The “end of the world” is by no means an apocalypse, at least not in any teleological sense. It may instead be the end of a life, which, Jacques Derrida claimed, is the end of the world not only for the one who died but also for all the living, every time. Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin (1898–1973), who was in New York City when the Nazis invaded his home and native country of Poland, might have subscribed to this view. His poem “A Shadow in Warsaw,” written in 1944 and translated by Morris Faierstein, concludes:
I’m a person in New York and a shadow in Warsaw,
an eternal shadow in a non-existent house.
No, I cannot leave here,
from this non-existent house,
in a former Warsaw.
Life might very well be “with people,” as the title of a famous book on the Jewish shtetl would claim eight years later. Yet this shadow-Zeitlin spurns company, preferring a home that no longer exists. His dilemma, starkly put, is that the world is over—and somehow he is still among the living.
An enfant terrible before he became a leading light in the literary world of Jewish Warsaw, Zeitlin was the son of neo-Hasidic mystic Hillel Zeitlin and brother of journalist Elkhonen Zeitlin, whose memoir, In a Literary Home (1937), documented their extraordinary upbringing. In the interwar years, Zeitlin earned a reputation as a polemicist and innovator, publishing a steady stream of poems, plays, essays, and fiction in Yiddish and Hebrew, and teaming up with future Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer to savage the trends and values of their contemporaries. While in New York to oversee Maurice Schwartz’s production of his play Esterke (1932), he was left stranded abroad when Polish borders closed in September 1939 following the Nazi invasion. After several years in Cuba, where he applied and waited for a visa for the United States, he settled in the Bronx and taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Before the war was over, Zeitlin correctly predicted he would never again see his father, brother, wife, or son. All were murdered. The rest of his life was devoted to a body of work constituting one of the most sustained reflections on the Holocaust and the subsequent fate of Ashkenazi Jewry and letters. His death in 1973 came on the eve of an international celebration of his achievements, today much less widely known.
In his poem “Six Lines,” written after the war, Zeitlin succinctly expressed his predicament as a poet in a language half of whose speakers had been wiped off the face of the earth. In Robert Friend’s translation: “I know: that in this world nobody needs me, / me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard. / Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?” What Zeitlin wrote after the Holocaust, he wrote, in a sense, without an audience. His poetry appeared in journals like Avraham Sutzkever’s Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), and his books were reviewed in periodicals such as Yiddish kemfer (Jewish Fighter), but the poem “Six Lines” captures the futility that suffuses his postwar oeuvre: Neither the project of poetry nor the Yiddish language escape Zeitlin’s thoroughgoing pessimism.
“I must say, I don’t understand your isolation,” archivist Avraham Tabatshnik once said, expressing his surprise over Zeitlin’s perceived loss of audience. To the end, Zeitlin refused to avow any particular “love of Yiddish literature.” He rejected all literary “patriotism,” a position that astounded Tabatshnik. Given that Zeitlin and Tabatshnik were products of the same literary project—that is, the project of modern Yiddish literature—the latter’s surprise is, in fact, the more surprising. Yiddish literature’s nonexclusive relationship to any state served to attenuate its participation in the nation-building projects of modern literature writ large. A certain post-Holocaust mentality (of which Tabatshnik and his “archive fever” happen to be paradigmatic) worked a reversal on this implicit consensus. The idea was that a nation that had been decimated, as Yiddishland had been, was obliged to preserve and perpetuate itself, and to do so in forms, if need be, reminiscent of prewar cultural nationalism.
For Zeitlin, this was an alien point of view. It presumed an audience that in his eyes no longer existed. “They completely lack the Jewish-historical background,” he snarled in a 1957 essay, summarily reducing American Jews to the status of hardly Jewish parvenus (my translation). Unlike the American Yiddish writers, whose readership had always been an idiosyncratic blend of Jewish Americans with sometimes middling literacy in the language, Zeitlin had been a prodigy and then a leader of Yiddish modernism in Warsaw—the heart of Yiddish European letters, as novelist Dovid Bergelson argued in his landmark essay on the “Three Centers” of Yiddish culture. If literature has had a vaunted status (and poetry especially) in the project of nation-building, Aaron Zeitlin’s perceived lack of real audience (“nobody needs me”) unsettles what we might expect or demand of such work. And as literature comes into question, so too does its world.
To this end, we can observe that none of scholar David Damrosch’s three conceptions of world literature apply to Zeitlin’s body of postwar poetry. In What Is World Literature? Damrosch, a doyen of the field, explains these conceptions as follows: “World literature has often been seen in one or more of three ways: as an established body of classics, as an evolving canon of masterpieces, or as multiple windows on the world.” Zeitlin’s poetry has neither the historic “cultural force” nor the imperial pedigree of the classics, and if the renowned Yiddish literary critic Avraham Novershtern’s remarks to me on Zeitlin’s “too metaphysical” poems are anything to go by, their status as masterpieces are at least contested. We are left with Damrosch’s third conception, which would take Zeitlin’s poems as “windows on the world,” glimpses of a culture and a way of life. On what world do we gaze, however, when the poet himself believes the world is over?
Nishto mer amol un amolik!—“There is no more once and former!”—exclaims the Angel of Death in “An Echo of ‘At Night at the Old Market.’” Here, Zeitlin’s Angel of Death forfeits the vantage point of retrospection, the security of postness, which Kermode said we rely on to understand our place in time. Indeed, the statement reads as categorical, implicating all retrospection, not merely the Angel’s own. The Angel seems to rebuke the titular premise of a book like Yaffa Eliach’s account of pre-Holocaust European Jewry, There Once Was a World (1998). In forfeiting retrospection, the Angel abhors the concept of even a former world. And where, after all, is the world of a bygone Jewry to be found in Zeitlin’s surreal, grief-stricken verse? The parts he gives us do not add up to a world.
Zeitlin’s aesthetic project may be contrasted with that of the Holocaust survivor Chaim Grade. In the Bronx after the war, just a train-ride from Zeitlin, Grade wrote an epic two-volume novel, The Yeshiva (1967–68), which takes a documentary and memorial approach to the lifeways of East European Orthodox Jewry. As in the majority of his fiction, Grade’s artistic mission was to record something of the world he had lost. His relationship to anteriority is not untroubled, but the narratives and vignettes add up to something like a vision of the whole. By contrast, Zeitlin refracts the past through shattering negations. “My name is conflagration,” the Angel of Death intones at the end of “An Echo of ‘At Night at the Old Market’”:
No more cemeteries,
no more shrouds,
no more Kaddish,
no more Jewish grave,
no more quiet shudder,
no more magical flame,
gatherings of the dead,
no more otherworldly melodies,
otherworldly rest.
No more corpses, who revive in feverish nights
on the conjuring of those like you.
None of yours is here—Not old, not young,
not religious, not irreligious, not rightists, not leftists.
I am not an angel, but the last “oy”of a Jew burned in Treblinka.
(Trans. Faierstein)
In this swelling litany of negation, the Angel of Death itself is unseated, made over into an “oy,” the most ordinary and loaded exclamation of Ashkenazi Jewish vernacular. And if Death lacks staying power, what hope is there for the rest? And speaking of the rest: If I removed all the negations from the text—oys, keyn, nisht—would what was left compose a world? Only in the vaguest sense: a congeries of objects, ages, dispositions, practices. Accumulation does not a world make. Still missing is the integrity of the whole, what makes it all come together. This is precisely what Zeitlin denies us. This is not “a window on the world,” in Damrosch’s terms, but the refusal of a position that would make a world cohere.
To return to the issue of audience—or rather, its absence—Zeitlin’s verse proves recalcitrant to another aspect of David Damrosch’s vision of world literature: circulation. World literature is not, Damrosch opines, “an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and reading.” This turn from canon to mode responds to the vulgar perception that world literature is nothing but “literature, bigger,” as Franco Moretti put it. But what does circulation assume? For one, the term evokes The Communist Manifesto’s vision of capital’s “intercourse in every direction.” More to the point, circulation assumes a readership. Circulation assumes a text can be read. While Zeitlin’s postwar poetry circulates in the broadest sense (take this essay for example), it has arguably never been received.
“Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?” to quote again from “Six Lines.” Who indeed? A more-than-ethical inversion haunts Zeitlin’s verse: the dead, not the living, need his poems. “Music blares / from the car, / as if the dead were there / declaring a eulogy / for those who are alive,” read a few lines from a poem written in Cuba (my translation). “Holy souls say holy Kaddish for me, / who is dead and at large upon the earth,” he writes elsewhere (my translation). In another variation on this theme, the poem “With Them,” we read:
I’m all alone.
Completely alone. . .
In myself
I will meet my grandfather,
meet all grandfathers
to Adam, to Eve,
to the Garden of Eden.
I will socialize with them.
I will speak with them.
(Trans. Faierstein)
In these poems, the dead eulogize the living, the living are the “living dead,” and the only genuine community is memorial. This wholesale inversion of the normative order points up the glibness of circulation. “Intercourse in every direction” takes on a different meaning when no direction has a starting point, when people wander homeless and wayward from DP camps to immigration offices to cities like Havana, where the perpetually visa-less wait out their lives.
There is a tendency to elide the aporias created by post-Holocaust Yiddish poetry, an urge to link this poetry to national or group traditions, which then can circulate and receive it in the expected ways. Is post-Holocaust Yiddish poetry still, ultimately, European, as some have felt? Is it French or American or Israeli because of where the jettisoned landed and continued to write? Is it Cuban when written in Cuba? Is it Jewish in some placeless way? Each of these questions defers the reality that Zeitlin’s verse, in particular, makes plain: This is poetry without a world, and every attempt to “world” it puts it further out of reach.
Here, Dionne Brand’s reflections on Black travel are apposite, if not analogizable to the experience of postwar Jewish dispersion. “So having not ‘left,’ having no ‘destination,’ having no ‘self-possession,’ no purpose and no urgency, their departure was unexpected,” she writes in A Map to the Door of No Return. “What language would describe that loss of bearings or the sudden awful liability of one’s own body?” Black diasporic travel shares with postwar Jewish homelessness resistance to models of circulation. Instead of circulation, we witness unarrival, disarray, derangement, and, yes, worldlessness. The Holocaust literally halved the audience of Yiddish-language poetry. And for a Varsovian Yiddish writer like Zeitlin, the portion of that audience that remained and whose horizon of experience lined up with his own was, in sum, almost nil.
In Zeitlin’s rejection of a European modernism that the Holocaust had shown him was corrupt, and in his failure to acculturate to U.S. literary norms, no less than in his peripatetic career—over the course of several decades residing in Cuba and Israel, Miami and the Bronx—we encounter a poetry that has no clear starting-point. What would it mean to translate, adapt, and assimilate this literature whose origins are not only uncertain but resistant to retrieval? Between the glibness of circulation and the failure of reception, whose world is constituted in and by this verse?
I don’t have an answer to these questions. They are meant as provocations for the field of world literature. What I can say at this point is that Aaron Zeitlin, in the last analysis, wrote conditional perfect poetry, “what-would-have-been” poetry. What would have been had he cancelled his trip to New York in 1939? What would he have written if his audience still existed? What would he have done had he embraced a different path? Failure is the (conceptual) condition of the work.
It will be almost fifty years ago.
Zichron Ya’akov. I’m sitting on the balcony and I’m leafing through Heine.
Why Heine? I don’t remember. Almost fifty years—
and the memories cry.
The teacher from the ICA school walks by and stops:
“I saw your last poem. Your Hebrew—a thousand charms!
Remain in the land—and become my son-in-law, young man.”
And the memories cry.
(Trans. Faierstein)
A different path, the path of a Hebrew poet in Israel, where his writing might have reconstituted and been reconstituted by a Jewish world (but at whose expense?), beckons to him across five decades. The poem dwells in the possibility of a different temporality, a foreclosed trajectory. The refrain (“and the memories cry”) sets the tone of this hopeless time travel because what he mourns never existed. In this way, worlds arise and disappear. All the visions of wholeness these conditionals intimate are revoked in their very framing. Zeitlin did not become the Hebrew teacher’s son-in-law; he did not remain in the Land. The memories cry, and a world flickers out.
