Amelia Glaser's Songs in Dark Times is a tour de force, joining literary studies and political history to evoke the power of poetry at times of catastrophe. Focusing on Yiddish poets who wrote from their adherence to communism in the 1920s and 1930s, Glaser tells the story of how these poets responded to key violent injustices throughout the world, from the pogroms in eastern Europe, to the 1929 Arab uprising against Jews in Hebron, to the lynching of African Americans in the US around the Scottsboro trials, to the rise of fascism in Spain and the Spanish Civil War, to the Soviet suppression and persecution of Jewish culture and Ukrainian nationalism. The international range of these world-changing events during decades of crisis is reflected in the poets themselves, who lived in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union, and who subscribed to and embodied in various ways the communist ideas of internationalism.
Glaser organizes the book into six chapters, through which she traces the concept of “Yiddish passwords,” a term she defines in the Introduction as meaning “a culturally coded word, name, or phrase that conveys group identity” (3). She argues that with these passwords, which appear as motifs or metaphors in the poetry, the diverse poets “developed and merged a vocabulary of collective Jewish identity with a poetics of internationalism” (4). What this means is that the poets, all born in eastern Europe, all adhering to various degrees to left-wing politics devised through passwords to link collective Jewish trauma with the sufferings of others supported by communist believers. These others include Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed in the US, Chinese workers during the Chinese civil war, Blacks under American racism, Arabs in Mandate Palestine, Spanish Republicans during the Spanish civil war, and Ukrainian nationalists under Stalin. While the Yiddish passwords created empathy in a Jewish audience for other groups who suffered injustice while promoting the ideology of workers’ internationalism, they also presented problems for the poets facing Soviet efforts to suppress or silence minority identities. Some of the most gripping sections of this book are where Glaser uncovers the struggles of poets such as Esther Shumiatcher, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Moishe Nadir to reconcile the Jewishness of their very language with Soviet ideology and policy that sought to erase it.
The brilliance of this book lies in Glaser's ability to present the distinct stories of the struggles that Yiddish poets joined and accounted for in their poetry, from China to Ukraine, Palestine, the American South, Spain, and again to Ukraine, and then to connect them. The chapters are: Ch. 1, “From the Yangtze to the Black Sea: Esther Shumiatcher's Travels”; Ch. 2, “Angry Winds: Jewish Leftists and the Challenge of Palestine”; Ch. 3, “Scottsboro Cross: Translating Pogroms to Lynchings”; Ch. 4, “No Pasarán: Jewish Collective Memory in the Spanish Civil War”; Ch. 5, “My Songs, My Dumas: Rewriting Ukraine”; and Ch. 6, “Tshuvah: Moishe Nadir's Relocated Passwords.” Crossing geographical borders, the book shows the mobility and unsettledness that these Yiddish writers experienced. For literary scholars, the book also brings into dialogue such forgotten poets as Esther Shumiatcher, Hannah Levin, Aaron Kurtz, Moyshe Teyf, with poets more extensively studied and translated, such as H. Leivik, Peretz Markish, and Berish Weinstein.
Glaser identifies the three moments of greatest crisis for these poets: the 1929 pogroms by Palestinian Arabs against Jews living in Hebron; the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; and the 1952 murder by Stalin of Yiddish writers, including key poets in this study. The crises posed by these violent antisemitic events resulted in a clash between the particularity of Jewish identity and the international and class-based ideology of communism. It took the Holocaust, though, to disrupt Moishe Nadir's dogged loyalty to Soviet communism and to turn his poetry toward the Jewish people by relocating his poetic passwords into the language of (still secular) prayer.
Chapter 5, featuring Dovid Hofshteyn's Yiddish poetry and his translations of poetry by the nineteenth century Ukrainian nationalist Taras Shevchenko, is enlightening and disturbing to read at this exact moment, when the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin's Russia dominates the news. Glaser shows how Hofshteyn, in his translations, adapted Ukrainian aspirations for nation and culture as a way of expressing collective Jewish cultural desires that avoided the danger of explicit articulation in Stalin's Russia of the 1930s. Glaser's analysis of how treacherous it was for minority cultures to assert their identities in Soviet Russia gives insight to what is going on today.
Despite Amelia Glaser's careful and often inspired translations (and transliterations) of the Yiddish (and Ukrainian and Russian) poems, it is discomfiting to read the poems, especially by poets who were members of the Communist Party, such as Moishe Nadir in New York and Peretz Markish and Dovid Hofshteyn in Moscow, whose crafted, passionate poems expressed such misguided hopes for humankind, the betrayal of which we see so clearly in hindsight some eight decades later.
