From Our Springtime: Literary Memoirs and Portraits of Yiddish New York

Introduction

• xiii Introduction In the early years of the twentieth century, a number of young Jewish poets immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe. They came together in New York City and formed one of the most important groups in Yiddish literary history. Reuben Iceland, who was a central member of the group, tells us the intimate stories of these poets’ lives. He writes of their struggle to find their voices as poets and how they sought to formulate their revolutionary approach to Yiddish poetry. He tells us of their loves, their friendships and their feuds, and how they struggled to survive and provide for their families. Most of them had grown up in traditional, religious Jewish communities where secular culture was discouraged and people lived according to long-established rules and customs. Although they had different reasons for leaving their homes to come to America, they all found themselves in the same environment where they were no longer bound by the old rules, where competing ideas were passionately held, challenged, and defended, and where differences of opinion could lead quickly to personal and intellectual rivalries. Reuben Iceland arrived at Ellis Island on September 15, 1903 at the age of nineteen. He came from the small town of Radomysl in Galicia, which at that time was part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire and is now in Poland. Although he was brought up in a traditional Hasidic family, he became interested in secular culture while still a teenager, a tendency that met with disapproval from his parents and the townspeople; and when he began to introduce other young people to his secular books, the animosity became more intense. He had already begun to write poetry when he left the constrained life of his provincial town and immigrated to the United States. xiv | Introduction Five years after his arrival, he married Minne Gottfurcht, who lived in the same tenement as he. They had three children, two sons and a daughter . In their early years together, they lived in small, crowded apartments in rundown neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Like most of his contemporaries, Iceland was forced to take jobs in factories or engage in other forms of manual labor in order to support himself and his family. During much of this early period, he worked as a packer in a hat factory. He describes the heavy toll this took on him: In the corner where I worked there were constant clouds of uncoiling steam, hissing from huge four-cornered copper vats and from monstrous hydraulic machines. With the eternal gloom, the eternal choking stench, the constant pain in my back, and the burning in my feet from standing every day for ten or more hours, my mood was always bleak. (p. 2) One year, having been laid off his job at the hat factory and having no other prospects, he opened a small delicatessen in Brooklyn with financial backing from his brother, but he could not make a go of it. Giving away food to his hungry friends also did not help his bottom line, and he was, much to his own relief, forced to close. In a later period of unemployment he worked in a large delicatessen owned by his brother on the Lower East Side. Because of the very long hours he had to work, he moved his family into an apartment near the store to avoid commuting to his job. The contrast between his intellectual and literary aspirations and his physical struggle for survival was summed up succinctly by his wife, who, seeing him one day from their window carrying a heavy barrel, said to their daughter, “Look at the poet, carrying pickles on his back.” The poets of that time had to have tremendous energy and resilience to withstand the punishing work they did, find the strength to raise their families, stay out late at night discussing literature, and still find time and stamina to write their poetry. These difficult circumstances were reflected in their poetry: [Zishe] Landau held that by poeticizing the mundane, poetry would show that joy exists and can be everywhere in all kinds of circumstances . I preached the poetry of the mundane in order to show how Introduction | xv gray, how impoverished, and how dull the atmosphere was in which we were sentenced to live. Mani Leyb did not want to hear of bringing into...