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• 102 Moyshe Leyb Halpern On His Tenth Yortsayt Among Moyshe Leyb Halpern’s colleagues, I was not the closest to him. At one time there had even been a quiet but bitter argument between our circle and him. We accused him of arrogance, bombast, melodrama, and burlesque. The last referred to his satirical poems. He, for his part, accused us of recycled lyricism and slovenliness because of our “resignation ” and especially because of the “ordinary” that some of us then demanded in poetry, as a reaction to the clichés of which our poetry was then so full. This demand for the ordinary resulted in simplicity and clarity of expression, which was perhaps Di Yunge’s most important contribution . But Halpern wasn’t impressed and said so at every opportunity. That was twenty-five years ago, when we were still relatively young and, like all young poets, were great zealots who thought that only our way was the right one and that all others were false. With time, not realizing it ourselves, we changed roles. We, Di Yunge, abandoned our “ordinary ” theory when the method of opposing clichés itself became a cliché, at which time Halpern took it up. On his way to ordinariness, he went so far as to use vulgar language, but any vulgarity he used was only for effect, to be flirtatious. All of this I have already mentioned. I need to say that over time he and I grew closer. Indeed, I was the only one among all his colleagues to see Moyshe Leyb in the last moments of his life. That was a coincidence, but not entirely so. Members of his family knew that a short time earlier there had been something of a bond, a bit of closeness between us two, so when he collapsed and was taken to the hospital, they told me. Moyshe Leyb Halpern | 103 In the preceding months, I had been meeting with Halpern more often than before. I’m not sure whether he had actually changed much, or whether it simply seemed that way to me, but in those months the Halpern I encountered became entirely different from the one I had known for twenty-five years. Measured in his speech and his movements. Still sure of himself, and still sure that his way was the true one, but also more tolerant of others’ opinions and, more important, more inclined to listen to others. His face still expressed strength, though this was a distraction from the truth; as those closest to him tell it, he was then very ill. Those blue eyes no longer expressed brazen arrogance. Fifteen days before his death, I spent perhaps ten straight hours with him. We had gone to a summer colony near Peekskill, where the I. L. Peretz Writers Union had arranged an evening for unemployed writers. With us were Avrahm Moyshe Dilon, Mark Shveyd, Beyle Belarina, Noah Nakhbush, and a musician whose name I have forgotten. Before and after that evening I saw Moyshe Leyb in a very different light than before. In his interactions with people, there flowed from him such a quiet goodness and lyrical gentleness that I sat there gaping. Was this the same Halpern whom I had known for twenty-five years? Was this the same man who, that evening, read poems that were exactly the opposite of all the others? In the earliest years, Halpern was, for me, a poet whom I had to fight against. In the last years he was, for me, a mystery that I could not solve. The mystery became even greater that evening in Pine Lake Park near Peekskill. On Monday it will be ten years since Moyshe Halpern left us, and for me, the Halpern mystery is still not solved. Moyshe Halpern was a very great poet, possibly the greatest after Morris Rosenfeld, against whom he fought so hard, perhaps because he was in more than one detail similar to him. But it was just as clear that his poetic powers were not always as well organized as they should have been and that he very often squandered them on nothing. His admirers talk about the “strong” Halpern, and when they do, they mean mainly the satirical Halpern. But that is exactly where he is weakest as a poet. The argument I mentioned earlier ended many years before Halpern’s death, and in one detail, also mentioned earlier, we had even changed roles. But what I and the poets of...

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