A Poetics of Statelessness: Avraham Ben Yitzhak after World War I

DOI 10.1515/naha-2013-0006  Naharaim 2013; 7(1–2): 111–130 Maya Barzilai A Poetics of Statelessness: Avraham Ben Yitzhak after World War I Abstract: After World War I, Avraham Ben Yitzhak had all but ceased to publish the modernist Hebrew poetry for which he is famous. He continued, however, to compose literary drafts in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish well into the mid-1920s. This essay interprets a selection of these unpublished writings in the context of his criticism of wartime technology and nationalist fervor. Ben Yitzhak’s early poetics of dissolution and decadence underwent further radicalization in the post-war years; experimenting anew with expressionist and cinematic styles, he cast apocalyptic images of a dying world abandoned by God and characterized above all by the mass statelessness of its denizens. Maya Barzilai, E-Mail: brmaya@gmail.com In her 1952 memoir of Avraham Ben Yitzhak, Leah Goldberg relates an exchange she once had with the poet about his earliest writings, those he composed when he was still living in his Galician hometown of Przemyśl. Here she gives Ben Yitzhak’s own words: ‘I had notebooks full of writings and attempts to express things. Everything was lost during World War I. Behind our city there lay a field of red cabbage. One day…I was walking and saw a small pond, and above it a hill, and below the hill this red cabbage field. All the possible hues of red were there: from a light pinkish red to purple. The human tongue – any tongue – is too weak to express the visions of our eyes. What words do we have to convey the color accurately? For whole days I would sit in front of that field and try to convey with my tongue what my eyes saw. I filled pages and pages in that notebook.’ ‘In Hebrew or in German?’ [Goldberg] asked. ‘In both languages,’ – he was silent for a while and repeated what he had said: ‘Everything was lost during World War I.’1 The young poet’s sublime experience unfolds before a mundane cabbage field (albeit one framed by the natural landscape, by a pond and a hill). But the visual impression made by the field’s remarkable palette of color also leads to a linguistic impasse. Aligning his task to some extent with that of a painter who  1 Leah Goldberg, Pegisha ‘im meshorer: ‘al Avraham Ben Yitzhak Sonne (Merḥavya: Sifriyat po‘alim, 1952), 53–54. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 112  Maya Barzilai seeks “to convey color accurately,” Ben Yitzhak’s notebooks in this pre-war period were filled with experimentations in literary impressionism, attempting to “make language the act of perception…to make language experiential activity.”2 The repeated phrase “everything was lost during World War I” frames this anecdote and reinforces Ben Yitzhak’s sense of a dual disappointment or failure: not only did he find it difficult to “convey with [his] tongue what [his] eyes saw,” but the very record of his literary struggles and achievements was lost. Following a prolonged siege on the fortress-city, Przemyśl was occupied by Russian forces, and the notebooks that the poet had left behind for safekeeping at his mother’s home went missing. Seen from this perspective, the red cabbage field becomes an ominous portent of the bloody battlefields of the approaching war.3 From 1908, Ben Yitzhak intermittently resided and studied in Vienna, all the while maintaining a close connection to his hometown and continuing to be active in its Zionist circles.4 During World War I, he found himself “cut off from any possibility of employment” and “forced” to perform all kinds of tiring “duties” on the home front “without [thereby] having any income at his disposal.”5 The poet also encountered more directly the devastating effects of the war and pogroms on Jewish populations in Eastern Europe. In 1917 he was sent to appraise the economic conditions of the Jews in the Polish territories of the AustroHungarian Empire, and after the 1918 Lemberg (Lviv) pogroms performed by Polish soldiers he traveled to the city to investigate the situation of its  2 Clive Scott, “Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism,” in Modernism, 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James Walter McFarlane (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), 222. 3 During World War I, the occupying Russian forces deported the Jewish population from the city of Przemyśl; when the city became incorporated into independent Poland after the war, the Jews returned en masse – by 1921 they constituted close to 40% of the city’s population. On wartime Galicia and this region’s liquidation, see Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 351–382. 4 Hannan Hever, “Aḥarit davar: ‘al ḥayav ve-yetsirato shel Avraham Ben-Yitsḥak,” in Kol hashirim (Tel-Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uḥad, 1992), 84–85. 5 In a letter to a doctor friend, Ben Yitzhak contends that he has worked up the courage to write him concerning a “vital issue” (“Lebensfrage”). The letter continues: “Die Sache ist übrigens kurz erzählt. Der Krieg hat nur Lasten und Pflichten gegenüber mir nahestehenden Menschen auferlegt in einer Weise die geeignet wäre manchen ganz zu erschöpfen ohne eigentlich über Geldmittel zu verfügen. Ich war nicht mittellos, aber infolge des Krieges von jeder Verwertungsmöglichkeit abgeschnitten. Bei der Natur der Menschen aber musste ich alles vermeiden. Die Existenzfrage einer durchaus würdigen Familie und mein guter Name hängen jetzt von der Möglichkeit ab nur M 6,000 also Anlehen zu beschaffen. Ich würde dieses 6 Monate nach Kriegsschluss ... zurückstellen. Wäre aber für einen erleichternderen Zahlungsmodus dankbar. Ich wende mich vertrauensvoll an Sie Herr Doctor mit dem Bewusstsein dass Sie nicht mit einer unwerten Sache belästigt zu haben.” The Central Zionist Archive A165/22 (hereafter shortened as CZA). Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM A Poetics of Statelessness  113 Jews.6 For him, part of what had been “lost” was the very fabric of Jewish prewar society in these areas. In a short, undated text entitled “Critique of a Period” (“Le-bikoret tekufa”), Ben Yitzhak describes World War I as causing a catastrophic breach, particularly for the Jewish population in Eastern Europe, marked by the simultaneous “destruction” of war and the “liberation” in Russia.7 After publishing his poem “Bodedim omrim:” (“A Few Say:”) in the Hebrew journal Ha‘ogen toward the end of the war, Ben Yitzhak all but ceased writing for publication in the post-war years, with the notable exception of his famous “Ashrey ha-zor‘im velo yiktsoru” (“Happy are they who sow and do not reap”). The poet’s minute output during his early creative period and his silence in the later decades of his life have spurred much speculation and interpretation, in attempts to assess Ben Yitzhak’s overall achievement. “Not everything was lost,” Tuvia Ruebner has pointed out, as most of the poet’s works appeared prior to the war; these influential writings, even though few in number, shaped Hebrew poetry for decades to come. Moreover, from his very first steps as a poet, Ben Yitzhak seemed to hesitate about, and even recoil from, allowing his poems to become accessible to all.8 Still, the notes and literary writings to be found in the poet’s archive reveal that, deeply affected by World War I, Ben Yitzhak continued to privately compose works of literature well into the 1920s, experimenting with form and style in German, Hebrew, and even Yiddish writings. Ben Yitzhak’s published Hebrew poems and unpublished drafts of the 1900s and 1910s were composed under the decadent sign of decline, of youth’s end, epitomized by the sunset hues of the landscape and downward motion of the “last leaf” in “Elul ba-shedera” (“September on the Avenue”), or the “robe’s train” spilling down “the marble stairs” in “Malkhut” (“Royalty”). The unpublished “Al ha-sefarim yashavti” (“I sat by the books”), written in 1912 in Przemyśl, conveys an intense desolation and self-alienation, matched by the world’s “empty and forgotten” state. The impending end of things in Ben Yitzhak’s poetry stands in dialectic tension with the revelatory possibility of finding beauty and continuity in nature, song, or in the presence of a (female) other. In “Kinetot yom” (“Day’s Decline”), for instance, “white blossoms” suddenly appear in “the current of reddish twilight;” they are swept “with laughter” “from a joyful  6 Hever, “Aḥarit davar,” 96. 7 8 Tuvia Ruebner, “Ha-tamid bli omer: ‘al Avraham Ben Yitzhak,” Meḥkarey yerushalayim Besifrut ‘ivrit 9(1986): 311–323, esp. 312. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 114  Maya Barzilai garden’s border.”9 Not only the poems’ contents, but also their tone or “voice” is “quiet and formal,” in the words of the poet Natan Zach, “creating the appropriate framework for ‘majestic’ expressions.” Goldberg has even claimed that Ben Yitzhak’s writing expresses the “undying glory of poetry,” evoking for her the rhythm of prayer and psalm while simultaneously forging a new Hebrew musicality.10 The “white flowers” of transcendence are few and far between, however, in the incomplete texts Ben Yitzhak composed in the post-war years. His already nascent poetics of decline and crisis was intensified in this period, as the poet witnessed the material and spiritual “catastrophe” of the war and its aftermath. More radically, these writings rarely exhibit impressionist tendencies or hymnlike musicality; Ben Yitzhak pushes further his development of an expressionist mode that was already present in a “restrained” or understated manner in his earlier poems.11 Not organized around a “mood” or “mental state,” the later, wartime and post-war works give a “kaleidoscopic view of the artistic subject (as both person and theme) from all its contradictory inner and outer angles,” to quote Chana Kronfeld. The passivity of impressionism is replaced by the activity of a (self-conscious) speaker intent on creating reality anew within the self, thereby yielding new combinations of “traditional poetical oppositions” such as life and death, internal and external reality, metaphor and literal meaning.12 Most importantly, Ben Yitzhak’s later writings elaborate the “apocalyptic extremity” that lent expressionism, according to Walter Sokel, its “distinctive note.”13  9 Avraham Ben Yitzhak, Collected Poems, trans. Peter Cole (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2003), 31. 10 Natan Zach, “Lifney sha‘ar ’im ne‘ila (le-shirat Avraham Ben Yitzhak),” Davar 6.10.1960; Goldberg, Pegisha ‘im meshorer, 57. 11 While noting Ben Yitzhak’s “retrained expressionism,” Zach claims that one cannot find in his poems certain features that differentiate the German expressionists, such as “social allegory and symbolism, urban landscapes, a wild and magical musicality, the ‘European’ despair…the formal rebelliousness and daring.” Precisely such characteristics are to be found in the unpublished wartime and post-war experimental drafts discussed in this essay. Zach, “Lifney sha‘ar ‘im ne‘ila (le-shirat Avraham Ben Yitzhak).” 12 Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 184, 179. 13 Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 4. In his introduction to the 1920 collection Menschheitsdämmerung (Dawn of Humanity), Kurt Pinthus designates the shared property of the included poets as “the intensity and radicalism of feeling, world-view, expression, form.” These poems, moreover, do not paint or praise the landscape, but rather the landscape is “humanized: it is horror, melancholia, confusion of chaos; it is the shimmering labyrinth from which Ahasver longs to wrest himself from….” Kurt Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung. Ein Dokument des Expressionismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1974), 29, 37. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM A Poetics of Statelessness  115 The expressionist mode emerged in Ben Yitzhak’s poetic experimentation in conjunction with a sense of political disillusionment, with both Zionist and European national politics. He grappled in his post-war writings with the destruction of both the natural and the manmade world, recognizing but not privileging the plight of the Jews of Europe. Ironically, even though many of these texts were composed in German rather than Hebrew, potentially allowing them to be read by Ben Yitzhak’s (Viennese) contemporaries, they remained unpublished. Unclaimed and unprinted to this day, these writings not only describe but also enact the condition of statelessness, of being-in-exile. Himself never completely at home in either Galicia or Vienna, the poet was forced to immigrate to Palestine in 1938, where he continued, orally, to convey his sense of the catastrophe that had taken place: “‘Do you remember [David] Fogel: “All my chickens have been slaughtered”…What a terrible and accurate expression of the destruction of that Jewish world.”14 Wohinaus will die “Geschichte”? On August 1st, 1914, Germany mobilized its armed forces and declared war on Russia. This date coincided with the Shabbat Ḥazon, the most mournful Sabbath of the year, which immediately precedes the fast of the Ninth of Av. On this Sabbath Isaiah 1 is recited, in which the prophet reproaches the people of Judah and Jerusalem for their sinfulness and wrongdoing. Signing a letter from Vienna to the geographer Avraham Yaakov Brawer with the date noted directly as “Shabbat Ḥazon,” the poet Ben Yitzhak conveyed the “grief of destruction” and expressed his fear for “our poor Galicia, the first that will be ravaged in a Russian war.” He claimed that the notion and implications of a total “European war” simply cannot be fathomed by most, because it represents a matchless event in terms of the “cold and advanced intelligence of its means” and its ability to “devour and crush economic and civil values.”15 On August 28th, 1916, he wrote, similarly, in his diary: “Romania declared war against Austria yesterday. After that, on the same day, Germany and Italy declared war…disgust [Ekel], the  14 Goldberg, Pegisha ‘im meshorer, 53. The lines from Fogel’s 1923 poem that appeared in the collection Before the Dark Gate (Lifnei ha-sha‘ar ha-afel) are misquoted in Goldberg’s memoir. They read as follows: “The chickens have already been slaughtered,/or devoured/their chicks have flown away.” David Fogel, Kol ha-shirim (Tel-Aviv: Hotsaʾat agudat ha-sofrim al yede hotsaʾat maḥbarot le-sifrut, 1966), 81. 15 Avraham Ben Yitzhak, “Letter to Avraham Yaakov Brawer from the Brawer Archive,” Genazim 89:6(1975): 466–467. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 116  Maya Barzilai war of political prostitution. Which way is ‘History’ headed?” (literally, “where does ‘History’ want to go?”).16 In the letter, Ben Yitzhak voiced his desire to leave Vienna, which has “not shown its good face to him,” but it would in fact take a second World War to force him to leave Europe. The language of his war-related notes is rather blunt (“disgust,” “prostitution,” “hypocrisy”), not resembling the poet’s subtle idiom in his published works. Ben Yitzhak’s intense preoccupation with the war and its effects on the Jewish and non-Jewish civilian populations of Europe nevertheless made its way into several unpublished wartime and post-war poetic writings. One of the notebooks found in Ben Yitzhak’s archive contains German-language reflections entitled “War” and “The Overcoming of War” alongside a Hebrew and a German draft of the same poem, later published under the title “Bodedim omrim:”. The notebook’s contents are only sporadically dated, and Ben Yitzhak appears to have written the texts in it over a period of several years. The entire German draft of the poem has been crossed out but it nonetheless remains for the most part legible. At the top of the Hebrew poem, he wrote in German in a different pen “Beginning? of the war” (“Anfang? des Krieges”), most likely in a hesitant attempt to date the draft, sometime after the fact. Because the final, published, version of the Hebrew poem appeared late in 1917, towards the end of the war, the two Hebrew versions frame most of the war period, according to the poet’s own dating. Ben Yitzhak ultimately avoided any explicit reference to current historical events, opting, in the published Hebrew poem, for a more distanced, philosophical meditation on life and death. The two drafts from the notebook read as follows: ‫שֶמשׁ דּוֶֹעֶכת‬ ֶׁ ‫יוֹם ְליוֹם ַיְנִחיל‬ ‫ְוַליְָלה אַַחר ַלְיָלה ְיקוֵֹנן‬ ‫שּ ֶלֶּכת‬ ַׁ ‫ְוקַיִץ אַַחר ַקיִץ ֵיאֵָסף ַּב‬ ‫ְועוָֹלם ִמ ַצֲּערוֹ ִמְתרוֵֹנן‬ ‫ַוֲאִביִבים יְִפְרחוּ ִויָלִדים‬ ֶֹ ‫ְוֵע‬ ‫שָּלִדים‬ ְׁ ‫שב ַרעֲָנן ַיֲעֶלה ֵמַעל ַל‬ ‫ְמחוֹלוֹת ַהֹּנַער ְוַתְעתּוֵּעי ַה ְקָּרבוֹת‬ ‫שְׁגעוֹן ַה ְלָּבבוֹת‬ ִ ‫ֶאְנקוֹת ַהֶחְדָוה ְו‬ ‫ֱענוּת ָהַעזּוּת ְוִנגּוֵּני ַהָיגוֹן‬ ‫ַנהֲַמת ַהגּוְֹסִסים ְוִצִוחוֹת ָהִעגּוּן‬ ‫שׁאוֹן ָעִרים לוֲֹהִטים‬ ְ ‫שְקִטים‬ ֹׁ ‫ְוִגיל ַּפֲעמוֵֹני ֶהָעִרים‬ ‫שֶבר ְלַחי ָהעוָֹלִמים‬ ֶ ‫שׁיר ָו‬ ִ ‫שֶמשׁ בּוֶֹעֶרת‬ ֶׁ ‫שא‬ ָֹּ ‫יוֹם ְליוֹם יִ‬ ‫ש ֹפְּך כּוָֹכִבים‬ ֹ ‫ְוַליְָלה אַַחר ַלְיָלה יִ‬  16 CZA A165/5. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM A Poetics of Statelessness 17  117 ‫שׁיָרה ֶנֱעֶצֶרת‬ ִ ‫שְפֵתי ַהבּוְֹדִדים‬ ִֹ ‫ַעל‬ .‫שִבים‬ ָׁ ‫שְׁבָעה ְדָרִכים ִנְתֵַּפֵּלג וְּבֶאָחד אָנוּ‬ ִ ‫ִבּ‬ Day unto day bequeaths its fading sun and night after night laments for night summer after summer is gathered in fall and the world in its sorrow gives song And springs will blossom and children and fresh grass will rise over the skeletons the dances of youth and battlefield phantasms the groans of joy and the madness of hearts the response of courage and the sad melodies of grief the gasp of the dying and the screams of the wives left behind the din of cities burning and the joy of town bells growing quiet a song and severance for life everlasting Day unto day gives rise to a sun that burns, and night after night pours forth its stars, and poetry comes to pause on the lips of a few: on seven roads we depart and on one we return.18 Der Einsame [erased verb] The Lonely One Tag reicht dem Tag verglimmende Sonne Nächte wollen in Schwarz ersterben Alle Sommer neigen und [erased: verenden] Welt [added: meine Welt] jauchzt vor Schmerz Day extends to day a dying sun Nights shall die away in black all summers decline and [die] World [my world] rejoices in pain Aber Frühlinge und Kinder blühen grünes [erased: grass wächst] über Leichen [in pencil: Skeletten] Jugend glüht im Kämpfen Jugend schreit vor Lust Und getroffenem Herzen Empörter Mut und bange Lieder Laut der Vergehenden Schrei der Gebornen Grosse Städte glühend Sausen Glocken gellen scheuer Dörfer But springs and children blossom green [grass grows] over corpses [carcasses] Youth seethes in battle Youth cries out from desire And a struck heart Outraged courage and fearful song The sound of those passing away The cries of those being born The din of cities aglow Bells of timid villages ring  17 Avraham Ben Yitzhak, Kol ha-shirim, ed. Hannan Hever (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-me’uhad, 1992), 65–66. 18 Ben Yitzhak, Collected Poems, 41, 101. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 118  Maya Barzilai Ein Lied vom Leid Der Herr der Welt A song of sorrow To the Lord of the world Tag hebt brennende Sonne Nacht verschüttet Sterne Pilger gehen aus Auf sieben Wegen Werden alle Auf dem einen wiederkehren19 Day hoists a burning sun Night spills stars Pilgrims depart On seven paths They will all Return on the one The opening and concluding stanzas of the Hebrew draft are almost identical to those of the final published poem, although in the draft Ben Yitzhak omitted most punctuation. The first two lines recall Psalm 19:2 (“day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge”), but, as Dan Pagis has noted, “where the Psalmist’s is a joyous celebration…Ben Yitzhak’s poem opens with a dirge.”20 In the Psalm, the skies and the heavens, the day and the night, all bear the message of “God’s glory;” they are cosmic witnesses to the splendor of creation as an ongoing, daily craft, as God’s handiwork. In the different versions of the poem, by contrast, “day extends to day an extinguished sun,” and night, in the German version, dons the black of mourning. Nature and the heavens play the role of mourners bearing witness to death and to the end of things, rather than to life and creation. This breakdown of nature’s ability to attest to God’s creation is explained, in the unpublished versions, through the middle stanzas, which depict the cycles of human life in the context of war and violent mass death. From the temporal notation of fall at the end of the first stanza, the drafts transition to springtime, but they do so not in order to celebrate the rebirth of nature, but rather to accentuate the grotesqueness of death and of the life that follows death. In Hannan Hever’s analysis of the Hebrew draft, the middle stanza consists of a series of dynamic, dialectical oppositions that move the reader forward through space and time. The “children” turn into “youth” and then into combatants, but these men are already prefigured as “corpses” nourishing the “fresh grass” just as the “gasps of the dying and the screams of the wives left behind” replace the “groans of joy.”21 The rhyming of the four internal lines, starting with “the dances of youth,” as well as their similarity of structure – each consists of two possessive phrases connected through a form of biblical  19 CZA A165/22. 20 Dan Pagis, “The Lonely Say,” in The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, ed. Stanley Burnshaw, et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). 21 Hannan Hever, Periḥat ha-dumiya: shirat Avraham Ben Yitzhak (Tel Aviv: ha-kibbutz hame’uhad, 1993), 101–102. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM A Poetics of Statelessness  119 parallelism – enhance the overall cohesion of these lines. Dancing and warmaking, love-making and dying: all thus become paradoxically intertwined. The wartime frenzy seems to dictate a lengthier, almost unruly, middle stanza, which then contrasts with the symmetrical structure of three four-line stanzas in the Hebrew poem ultimately published that elides the war events altogether. For Hever, Ben Yitzhak creates, through these short descriptions of critical events, an anti-mimetic “expressive” “modernist collage.”22 The notion of “collage” comes, of course, from the sphere of modernist art; its use is associated predominantly with the pre-war Cubists and later Dada circles. The fragments that Ben Yitzhak links through parallel structures are, however, bits of sounds and motion that evoke entire worlds on the home front and battlefield. His poetic practice here can thus be compared also to film montage.23 The result of this cinematic writing is a danse macabre, an erotically charged death dance composed of multiple, fragmented motions that swiftly merge states of life and death, copulation and decaying bodies. If the Hebrew draft was indeed composed at the beginning of the war, it critically transforms the famous fervor or “spirit” of 1914, especially as this spirit briefly infected the expressionist circles, into such a danse macabre of the dying youth. In the German draft, “youth” (“Jugend”) is repeated twice in the first position of the poetic line, heightening the association of the lust for war with this generation. In a note he jotted down in the same notebook, and which precedes the Hebrew draft, Ben Yitzhak contended that the next great European war will finally do away with the “hypocrisy” of the distinction between “walled and open cities, between combatants and non-combatants.” With regards to the “war of modern countries,” everyone and every work place is “responsible” – “men and women, laboratories and newspaper editorial offices, barracks and movie theaters, poets and ministers.” Including the poet/author (Dichter) on this list, Ben Yitzhak does not merely criticize others but fingers himself and his generation of writers as equally responsible and no different from those working in labs, newspapers, or churches. He then turns to the children (“Kinder”), pronouncing that “school is the [distilling] retort of tomorrow’s war” and that the  22 Ibid., 99. 23 As Sabine Hake explains, already in the early 1910s, “Jakob van Hoddis and Albert Lichtenstein introduced the possibilities of montage into lyric poetry, creating a style alternatingly referred to as ‘three-second style,’ ‘telegram style’ or ‘cinema style’ (Kinostil).” They found in cinema features of literary modernity, such as the “emphasis on vision” and movement, the “acceptance of fragmentation,” and the affinity for the big city. Sabine Hake, “Expressionism and Cinema: Reflections on a Phantasmagoria of Film History,” in A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, ed. Neil H. Donahue (Rochester: Camden House, 2005), 332. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 120  Maya Barzilai children are the potential “war leaders of tomorrow.” Before they decide to embark on war, therefore, adults should think first of their children.24 Children, as war leaders and cannon fodder, figure prominently in the above drafts of “A Few Say:”. Opening the middle stanza of both the Hebrew and the German versions with the image of flourishing children, Ben Yitzhak ironically links such flowering with the sprouting of grass on skeletons. Not only is European society raising children to be slaughtered on the battlefield, but this cycle might continue undisturbed, just as grass grows over the dead and children are born to widowed women. Undermining the boundaries between the sphere of war and that of home, and, in German, between “the sounds of those passing away” and “the cries of those being born,” the poems enact the intertwinement of the supposedly distinct realms of military and civilian life (“combatants and non-combatants”). Through his use of the verb glühen (to seethe or burn), Ben Yitzhak further associates the battlefield and the big city, since both are burning. The “din” and “heat” of the big city aligns it with the landscape of war, in contrast to the village with its ringing (church) bells. Children provide the crucial link between these realms, destined as they are to become the lusting youth who “seethe in battle.” In the context of these German-language notes on the war, the presence of the German poetic draft is not surprising, although it remains unclear whether it constituted a rewriting of the Hebrew draft or vice versa. The question that arises regardless is why was the German poem doubly rejected, crossed out in pen within the already private notebook? To begin to answer this question, we need to consider both Ben Yitzhak’s bilingual practice and the specific poem at hand. The poet’s archive contains unpublished German versions of several of his famous published Hebrew poems, such as “Royalty,” “Psalm,” “I didn’t Know What I Wanted…” and “A storm will pass.” In the particular case of “When Nights Grow White” (“Laylot ki yalbinu”), Ben Yitzhak’s correspondence reveals that he wrote the poem first in German and then self-translated it into Hebrew for publication in the journal The New Hebrew (Ha-‘ivri he-ḥadash).25 Translating himself back and forth between Hebrew and German, as well as writing free-standing poems in both languages, Ben Yitzhak forged his modernist poetic idiom through such hidden bilingual practices. He experimented across languages, not only “grafting a radically modern [Hebrew] idiom onto an  24 CZA A165/22. 25 Ben Yitzhak communicated with his mentor, Eliezer Meir Lipschütz, regarding the translation and publication of the poem “Laylot ki yalbinu” (CZA A126/26). Ben Yitzhak’s postcard to Lipschütz is found in the Avraham Schwadron (Sharon) Archive, the Jewish National and University Library, ARC. 4º 1215. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM A Poetics of Statelessness  121 ironically biblical, strongly antirabbinic Hebrew,” but also drawing on and reworking the echo-chamber of German poetry and biblical translation into this tongue.26 A committed Zionist and active Hebraist in his early years, Ben Yitzhak was sought after for his “synthesis of prophetic and modern [Hebrew] verse,” and the German poems remained a formative but concealed element of his creative process.27 A comparison of the German and Hebrew wartime drafts for “A Few Say:” also reveals that the poet managed to convey the upheaval of war and its accompanying poetic crisis most effectively in the tongue in which these events did not take place. The last lines of the middle stanza (in both Hebrew and German) overturn the praise given to God in the Sabbath morning prayer, which couples “song” and “praise” (shir va-shevaḥ). Ben Yitzhak maintains the alliteration in Hebrew but replaces the celebration of God with “shever,” a break or crisis – “severance” in Peter Cole’s translation – in the relationship with the divine. The German wordplay of “Lied” and “Leid,” “song of sorrow,” similarly contains the alliteration and consonance of “shir” and “shever,” but the result is a more predictable transition: “sorrow” merely describes song’s content, while “severance” suggests a potential total cessation of song. Even more dramatically, in the final stanza of his German draft, Ben Yitzhak did away with the Hebrew line about arrested song: “and poetry comes to pause on the lips of the few.” This line transforms the “song” (shir) of the previous stanza into “poetry” (shira) while self-reflexively suggesting, as Hever writes, that the ultimate form of expression might indeed be silence.28 Because poetry has “paused on the lips of the few” in both the earlier draft and the published Hebrew poem, the final line of the poem in Hebrew is paradoxical, the utterance of the silent. Similarly, Hebrew, the only language in which Ben Yitzhak published his poetry, was also the primary tongue of his unheard expression. Hence, if the expressionist montage of battlefield and city, conveying the grotesque eroticism of war, was left on the bilingual editing table, the German poem was doubly censured, for it did not express the poetics of “severance” or crisis that remained central to this poem even in its pared Hebrew version. It was in his poetic drafts of the post-war period that Ben Yitzhak began to experiment with the ability of the German language to convey the poetical and ontological breach brought on by the war.  26 Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism, 16. 27 This phrase appears in a letter from the poet Ḥaim Naḥman Bialik to Ben Yitzhak, as quoted in Hever, “Aḥarit davar,” 94. 28 Periḥat ha-dumiya, 104. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 122  Maya Barzilai Unheard Songs Between 1917 and 1921, “Dr. Sonne” pursued a career in Zionist circles, rising in the ranks of the Zionist Organization in London from Secretary to Executive Secretary of the Palestine Department. Upon his resignation from the Organization in 1921 – the outcome of his contribution to a controversial report criticizing the Organization’s settlement project – Julius Simon wrote to Ben Yitzhak that “he [has] combined in a unique way unlimited devotion to the Cause with clear and sober judgment of the intricate questions of the Organization in its manifold aspects…and an outspoken antagonism against every weakly compromise.”29 Ben Yitzhak’s unwillingness to compromise did not lend itself well to a political-administrative career, but the writer had also unofficially resigned from the “position” of a Hebrew poet. While earning a meager living from teaching, the 1920s and 1930s saw him composing for himself a few drafts of texts in Hebrew, German, and even Yiddish. These later works often begin with the stated premise that the “world has died out already,” probing what can be said from this point onwards. In his unpublished post-war writings, Ben Yitzhak’s modernism shifted from a minimalist modernism to a maximalist one; with broad strokes and stark colors, he painted apocalyptic scenes of the world’s destruction. If his writing had previously wavered “in the space between impressionism and expressionism,” a place where the “soul” appears as “a world of sunlight and broken hues, / a colloquy of things seen and trembling,” he later opted for a foreboding vision of a dark world, expressed through fragmented poems that consistently deploy stark, symbolic imagery.30 A German poem dated January 16th, 1925, presents the speaker’s “planet” as falling “deeper into the darkness.”31 Similarly, a rare Yiddish poem from December 1st, 1925, opens with the stanza: “World (how) you have already died away!/Oh, your colors, paled/silence is indeed being heard/mountain and sea already level.”32 With the dying out of the world, color and sound also fade away, and topographical differences of landscape are leveled. The Yiddish poem cannot be described as an impressionist “attempt to  29 The letter was composed on March 1st 1921, pursuant to Ben Yitzhak’s resignation from the Zionist Organization. CZA A165/19. In 1926, Ben Yitzhak wrote bitterly in his diary concerning the wave of immigration to Palestine, “and now began the ugly miracle of the gathering of the exiles.” CZA A165/22. 30 Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism, 16, 14; Ben Yitzhak, Collected Poems, 37. 31 “Da die Götter über dem kristallenen Reifen zogen / Fiel tiefer mein Planet ins Dunkel.” CZA A165/22. 32 Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM A Poetics of Statelessness  123 make language the act of perception.”33 Instead, it testifies only to the death of the perceived world. Another unpublished poem in German exemplifies the intensified atmosphere of emptiness and pessimism in Ben Yitzhak’s post-war writing, as expressed through a series of disquieting images that together form an apocalyptic scene. Lieder an den abgewandten Gott Abend im Zug Songs to the Turned-Away God Evening on the Train Vergessner Erde abwärtsgleiten Rabenschwarm vor roter Abendwand Totenfelderweiten Sterbenston vom blinden Turm Was spulend speiend Dampfgepanzer Schleifend nach verrammte[n] Wagen In fahler Leere an die Wand geschlagen Starren Gesichter Im Zug des Zieles selbstverloren O Pfiff aus Angst gestossen O toter Nachhall aus der Verdammung34 Forgotten earth gliding downwards Flock of ravens before the red wall of evening Expanses of death-fields Dying tone from the blind tower What spooling spouting steam-tank Scraping towards rammed cars Beaten against the wall in wan emptiness Frozen faces In the train of destination lost in oneself O whistle blown of fear O dead echo from damnation With its dense and foreboding imagery of utter demise, this doubly titled poem takes the wartime German draft of “A Few Say:” one step further. It opens with a downward motion (“abwärtsgleiten“) and an image of a flock of black ravens dotting the red sky. The evocation of sunset and decline was typical of Ben Yitzhak’s earlier poetry as well, as in his 1913 Hebrew poem “Malkhut” (“Royalty”). That poem ends with a postponed call to a female addressee who might “rise and rejoice” or “cry out” (“kumi, roni”). With this call, the earlier Hebrew poem affirms, even if hesitantly, the connection between the caller and his addressee, between his voice and her action.35 In “Songs to the TurnedAway God,” the land has become “death-fields,” and Ben Yitzhak evacuates the  33 Scott, “Symbolism, Decadence and Impressionism,” 222. 34 CZA A165/22. Although this particular poem is not dated, the surrounding poems in the same notebook were written between 1924–1925. 35 The 1924 Hebrew draft, “Behind me disgrace and thistle” (“Me-aḥaray dardar ve-dera’on”), exemplifies the persistence of the figure of a female addressee throughout Ben Yitzhak’s writings, even those of this later period: “come now/and my banner will wave its splendor/to whatever comes.” Ben Yitzhak, Collected Poems, 53. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 124  Maya Barzilai poem of any human subject or voice, mentioning only “frozen faces.” There are no potential addressees in this later German poem, either human or divine. Furthermore, unlike the sounds of cries and bells in the middle stanza of the wartime drafts, Ben Yitzhak depicts in this later German poem the “dying tone of a blind tower.” Not only is death announced but sound itself appears to be on the brink of dissolution. “Silence is indeed being heard,” as the 1925 Yiddish poem states, and the tower is likewise blind, anthropomorphized but at the same time divested of any perceptual abilities, even that of perceiving “broken hues.” The evocation of the train distinguishes this poem from Ben Yitzhak’s often timeless Hebrew poems, which avoid registering current technological or historical developments. In the middle section of the poem, Ben Yitzhak also describes a “steam-tank” and a “rammed car,” transforming the setting of “deathfields” into a scene of grating wartime industry and transportation. Nevertheless, the train of modernity at the end of the poem does not transport materials or people; rather, it is a symbolic train headed towards death and damnation. Like the tower, the train too is animated through the “whistle blown of fear,” a sound answered by a “dead echo.” Other poems composed in the mid-1920s describe, similarly, the demise of the world and the “corrosion” of the world’s “skeleton” when its “heart went cold.”36 The wartime drafts of “A Few Say:” also end with the evocation of death – “they will all/return on the one” – but this death appears as a culmination of a rich and variegated existence lived along “seven paths.” The poem “on the train” depicts, by contrast, a more extreme voyage through emptiness towards utter loss and desecration. Ben Yitzhak’s post-war poem reveals how the deployment of wartime “means,” which “devour and crush economic and civil values,” has reduced the world to a landscape of death and barrenness. Ben Yitzhak further contended in his notes that “all the idioms concerning international legal and compliant measures for the humanization of war conduct are in their very nature a contradiction in terms.” Every available means that could swiftly break down the opposition of the other side will be immediately taken up and used, in his view. Even “radical means,” possibly referring to chemical and biological warfare, will not be put aside in favor of “boring ‘humane’ means,” because that would “rob [the warring side] of its power.” The “unleashed sense for murder” entailed in warfare cannot be rendered more humane, Ben Yitzhak argued, or made compatible with “controlled conscientiousness.”37 “Songs to the Turned-Away God” depicts  36 “Met ha-‘olam” (“The world has died”) in Ibid., 60–61. 37 CZA A165/22. Although this note is undated, Ben Yitzhak might have written it in response to the signing of the Geneva Protocol in 1925, prohibiting the use of gases and bacteriological Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM A Poetics of Statelessness  125 a world that has lost both its humans and its humanness. En route to damnation, the poem does not even sing “a song of sorrow” to God, for the deity has cast this world and its inhabitants utterly aside. Hence, Ben Yitzhak’s pessimism regarding the possibility of controlling the conduct of war went hand in hand with this mode of apocalyptic writing concerning catastrophic times that are not resolved in redemption. Yet, while this particular German poem does not evoke the possibility of regeneration, other poems composed in the 1920s suggest that after the “death of the world,” the subject’s heart might still continue to “beat” or “grow,” to “redden its flowers.”38 Ship Stateless: Post-War Cinematic Visions Throughout his œuvre, Ben Yitzhak contended with the condition of wandering, with being nowhere at home in the world. In “Ashrey ha-zor‘im velo yiktsoru,” those who avoid reaping also “wander in extremity” and “shed their accoutrements at the crossroad.”39 Similarly, an unpublished German poem entitled “Ein Ganzes?” (“A Whole?”) depicts the person “who was a guest in the world” as one who “rises and leaves it untilled.”40 Ben Yitzhak recasts the trope of the wanderer or guest as the subject who does not strive to accumulate possessions or to leave his/her mark on the world, whether through long-lasting deeds or their remembrance. Because of the deeply ingrained association of wandering and Jewishness in the European literary imagination, Ben Yitzhak’s ethics and poetics of wandering can be understood as a response to the antisemitic image of the Eternal Jew.41 He posits being-not-at-home as a universal condition, but he does so in the context of Hebrew-language modernist poetry intended for a Jewish readership. The trope of the (Jewish) wanderer needs to be distinguished, nonetheless, from the historical condition of the enforced exile or stateless outcast, as it evolved particularly after World War I. In a surprising text found in his archive, an experimental screenplay entitled “Schiff Staatenlos” (“Ship Stateless”), Ben  war methods. He apparently did not believe that a simple end could be put to the use of such “radical means.” 38 “Met ha-‘olam” in Ben Yitzhak, Collected Poems, 60–61. 39 Ibid., 43. 40 CZA A165/5. 41 R. Edelmann, “Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew: Origin and Background,” in The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend, ed. Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 8. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 126  Maya Barzilai Yitzhak negotiates the relationship between these notions, considering how Europe’s designated “guests” and “wanderers” (Jews, revolutionaries, minorities of the pre-war Empires) could become stateless subjects, prohibited from free motion and unwanted in most countries. The screenplay is not dated, nor are the circumstances of its composition known, but it can presumably be ascribed to this later time period, since it depicts a ship populated by a group of smuggled passengers who have lost their statehood due to the new “post-war borders” (“Nachkriegsgrenzen”).42 The term “montage” is explicitly used in the screenplay, moreover, linking this text to Ben Yitzhak’s textual experiments with the technique of cinematic montage, as in the German wartime poem discussed above. The film starts out in Southern France onboard a smuggler’s steamer. The passengers are described as nameless “Passlose,” people lacking any passport or state affiliation, and as “Heimatlose,” people without a homeland. The Peace Treaties of 1919, the dissolution of Austria-Hungry, and the establishment of the Baltic States, produced the first wave of “stateless people” as Heimatlose, subsequently joined by post-war refugees, stateless as a consequence of revolutions and/or acts of denationalization.43 Russians, Armenians, Hungarians, Germans, and Spaniards constituted the majority of these stateless masses, whose predicament could not be easily resolved through repatriation or through naturalization in another country. As one of the sailors aboard Ben Yitzhak’s “stateless ship” pronounces: “Nobody inquires about them, no papers, no land, probably not a single person. How dreadful.”44 Historically, such undesirable, unwanted noncitizens were stripped of their basic rights to work and to residence and lived outside the protection of the law. “Outlaws by definition,” in Hannah Arendt’s words, they stood at the mercy of the police, and were often illegally smuggled into neighboring countries, resulting in jail sentences for the homeless.45 The post-war stateless also lost any officially recognized identity, in addition to their citizenship, but they nonetheless retained a strong attachment to their original nationality if not to a particular state or government. They preferred not to be lumped together as a group, and, according to Arendt, “the more they were ex-  42 “Schiff Staatenlos,” 8. CZA A165/5. 43 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 277–278. 44 “Schiff Staatenlos,” 2. 45 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 283–284. Arendt considers the phenomenon of mass statelessness as a symptom of the failure of the nation-state and its devolution into totalitarianism. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM A Poetics of Statelessness  127 cluded from right in any form, the more they tended to look for a reintegration into a national, into their own national community.”46 The passengers in Ben Yitzhak’s screenplay appear initially as just such a lumped-together group, as an indistinguishable, fearful mass hidden in the dark hold of the ship. The action of entire screenplay takes place on board the ship, which itself becomes “stateless” when it cannot reach the safety of any port. As soon as it is discovered by port authorities the smuggled passengers are sought after by police on sea and land. This plot, however, is secondary to the screenplay’s emphasis on atmosphere and setting. Ben Yitzhak strives to capture the condition of statelessness, of not having a home to return to or a destination to arrive at. He also conveys the dehumanization of the stateless passengers and their existence at the mercy of the police and of the crew, even when they attempt to take over the ship as a last resort. In the course of the action, these “homeless” are gradually differentiated, and divisions arise among them. Initially, the distinctions are those of age and gender: aside from the men, there are three women, a youth, a boy, and an old man. A subsequent dream sequence of the sleeping passengers provides a glimpse into their varying national origins. This dream scene consists of images from different parts of Europe: we see a rural road in Southern Italy, a Jewish cemetery on a hill, a German journeyman traveling in the region of the river Main, peasants outside of a Russian country church, and men driving cars in Berlin. From countryside locations that alternate between languid mourning and joy, the dream sequence shifts to the city in which a more frenetic mood prevails. In Berlin, gun shots are fired between the racing cars, following which there ensues a dizzying montage of different capital cities around the world (New York, London, Paris), depicting their institutions and modes of transportation. Finally, the film returns to the countryside and its roads, along which a “lonesome wanderer” is seen walking, but now one hears the barks of dogs behind fences, growing louder and more menacing. A rapid succession of “more and more fences, barriers, and borders painted at different angles” is supposed to appear onscreen, and these forms of obstruction intersect with each other “from all sides” to press against the figure of the wanderer, producing a deep sense of anxiety and claustrophobia. The dream logic of this scene reaches its climax with the final image of a “mammoth spider-web” in which a human being flounders, ending with the “blood-curdling scream of the dreamer.”47  46 Ibid., 292. 47 “Schiff Staatenlos,” 3–5. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 128  Maya Barzilai Intermixing scenes from Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe, Ben Yitzhak uses crosscutting to merge the various backgrounds of the passengers into one dream about Europe’s transition from pre-war to post-war life. The largescale curbing of human freedom is associated here with the shift from rural to urban societies. After many traditional images of farmers, mothers with children, and manual laborers, the film picks up speed as it moves on to urban spaces, reaching a frenzied climax with the multiple forms of barriers. The “einsamer [solitary/lonesome] Wanderer” serves as an anchoring subjectivity at the end of the dream scene. Neither “pilgrim,” as in the German draft (“Der Einsame”), nor soldier, this displaced person is not identified by his religion, nationality, or profession, in contrast to the other prototypical figures that were shown earlier in the sequence. The Eternal Jew or Ahasverus was cursed, as legend has it, to wander the face of the earth forever because he had mistreated Christ. In a reversal of sorts, the European wanderer is now blocked off, sequestered and motionless because of ramifying border divisions.48 The wanderer can no longer wander, being condemned, instead, to a life trapped in the web spun by the modern nation-state. Including the Jew as one figure among many in the dream sequence, Ben Yitzhak purposefully focuses on the larger human disaster accompanying the loss of citizenship. Within the “community of fate” shared by the stateless people on the ship there are nonetheless divisions and demarcations of status. Certain “aggressive individuals” “jostle around” a Jewish man, as though in jest, while the Jew bears on his face a “resigned” expression. One of the older passengers, who is always reading the Bible, remarks that “the borders, the barriers [are] here as well,” referring to the stratification according to origins (“Herkunft”), with the Jew being at the lowest rank.49 At the very end of the screenplay, however, when the ship must finally surrender, the passengers group themselves “instinctively” into new affiliations: there are the “only stateless” who have nothing to hide, the political refugees from the Left and the Right, and the simply criminal, such as an aging “swindler.” Jews are no longer distinguished here as a minority. The crew, moreover, treat the entire group of smuggled refugees as one entity, even referring to them as “the vermin” (“das Pack”). Ben Yitzhak himself pointedly describes them disappearing “like rats…through the hole” when another steamship appears in view, thereby reinforcing the crew’s perspective, even as he represents the different nationalities and stratifications among the passengers.50 When hounded by the authorities simply for being “stateless” outlaws, they are indeed  48 Ibid., 4–5. 49 Ibid., 6. 50 Ibid., 8, 7, 6. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM A Poetics of Statelessness  129 reduced to this inhuman status. At the same time, these unwanted people are also Europe’s “lost children,” as the ship’s cook puts it. With its combination of montage and stark, symbolic imagery, deployed in service of a realistic plot treating the stateless subjects of post-war Europe, Ben Yitzhak’s screenplay is an experimental and even avant-garde text. It calls to mind Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927), which depicts a day in the life of the city, animating it through documentary shots and enacted scenes. Ruttmann’s film captures individuals at work or during their leisure time, and rather than telling the story of any particular person it portrays the urban masses as they pursue different activities according to their class, gender, and ethnicity. Ben Yitzhak’s ship is, similarly, an enclosed city of sorts that brings together people of different walks of life and backgrounds. Nationality, class, ethnicity, and age all play a role in the dynamics on board the ship, but at the end of the day the passengers are lumped together as a “cursed lot,” all equally at the mercy of both local authorities and greedy smugglers. One of the last images of Ben Yitzhak’s film reveals a helpless woman standing “on the rail, bent over with raised arms” as the steamer moves away from our stationary viewpoint. The screenplay ends when a “shore” and a “palm tree” are sighted, but it remains unclear whether or not this supposed “garden of God” will serve as a haven for the stateless people or bring about their doom. The final words leave the viewer in suspense: “spell-bound silence.”51 If writing in Hebrew denied Ben Yitzhak entry to the European modernist canon, while nevertheless establishing his position as one of the foremost early modernists in this tongue, his turn to German writing in the post-war years served private and experimental ends, even when the final result was a potentially filmable screenplay. Moreover, German-language writing was no longer, in this later period, primarily a means for advancing his Hebrew poetics through self-translation; rather, Ben Yitzhak wrote several free-standing German literary texts, and even one Yiddish poem, highly innovative works in the context of the poet’s multilingual œuvre. The texts discussed in this essay have not been published posthumously, either. They are stateless in their own right, never claimed by Israeli or any other literary “authorities.” As a whole, they reveal that while the poet resigned from public Zionist politics, he remained highly engaged with world affairs and even sought to convey his sense of heightened despair and disillusionment through his writings. Starting with the unpublished wartime drafts of “A Few Say:”, Ben Yitzhak’s literary experimentations after 1914 tended, albeit belatedly, towards the  51 Ibid., 7–8. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM 130  Maya Barzilai critical expressionist mode, transposing his previous aesthetics of decline and emptiness into an apocalyptic-prophetic register. Unlike his early impressionist attempts to convey the minute differences of hue within a field of red cabbages in Galicia, these texts juxtapose cinematic “shots” from different locations across Europe in an attempt to capture the political and social networks connecting village to city, battlefield to home front. Ben Yitzhak’s post-war silence might therefore be considered a “spellbinding” one, encompassing many untold possibilities that go against the grain of his widespread image as an innovator solely in the realm of Hebrew poetry. Appearing perhaps “lost in [himself]” (“selbstverloren”), the poet was in all actuality highly attuned to the devastating effects of the Great European War on the overall population and on the Jewish minority in its midst. He developed a poetics of statelessness that explored this new human condition while also attempting to write poetry that could bear witness to the death of the world. “But never will I come home from the funeral,” Ben Yitzhak wrote in his 1925 Yiddish poem quoted above. This inability to “come home,” either from the battlefield or from the site of emigration, is one of the central tropes of his late, unclaimed writings. Brought to you by | University of Chicago Authenticated | 128.135.12.127 Download Date | 4/4/14 7:02 PM