6 - “A Nightingale Whose Tongue Was Chopped Off”: The Melancholic Writing Machine in Ya'acov Shṭeinberg's and Ḥezi Leskly's Poetry, after Kafka

Summary

All riddles are rejected, the wall of words bends down— and grief still makes soul's late ripening grapes

—Ya'acov Shṭeinberg, “Aḥarit” (Epilogue), 1947

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

—Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, January 14, 1918

The Bidirectional Metamorphosis between Man and Text

WHILE KAFKA's INFLUENCE on Hebrew and Israeli prose fiction is well known and much discussed, his imprint on modern Hebrew poetry is seldom mentioned. Indeed, to do justice to that imprint would be a large-scale effort, one that would require not only exploring the possible relations between Kafka's ideas and Hebrew poetry but also reading these relations in light of Hebrew and Israeli prose. Perhaps a more interesting approach would be to choose a modest entry into this unexplored territory. My intention, thus, is not to demonstrate Kafka's influence on the two Hebrew poets to be discussed here, Ya'acov Shṭeinberg and Ḥezi Leskly. Nor am I presuming to outline a thorough or even a preliminary map of Kafkaesque incarnations in current Israeli poetry. I intend, rather, to read all three writers together. It is my contention that this joint reading can illuminate each of them in new ways.

Ya'acov Shṭeinberg was born in 1887 to Yiddish-speaking parents in Ukraine and died in Tel Aviv in 1947. Ḥezi Leskly was born in Israel in 1952 to Czech immigrants and died at the age of forty-two. The only child (after a series of miscarriages) of elderly Holocaust survivors, Leskly told his parents when he was six years old that he would no longer speak Czech with them. As I will argue, in his poetry he refused to speak any language whatsoever.

I would like to suggest that for all three writers, literature belongs to the realm of the real. It is real not in the sense of true or false but as contrary to ordinary language, which functions as a means of communication and is based on representation of verbal conventions and shared concepts. The real in literature—as it is experienced by these three poetic personae—is not a simile or an image but a concrete object. Nevertheless, literature cannot describe or point at itself without betraying that concrete quality and leaving this inner world to become language.