Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers

Kadya Molodowsky

68 Kadya Molodowsky Sometime during a summer in the sixties, Joseph Landis, editor then and through all these years of Yiddish, a precious journal out of Queens College in New York, invited me to speak at Camp Boiberek in Rhinebeck, New York. I had published an article on Abraham Cahan a few years earlier and he wanted me to talk about Cahan’s Yiddish fiction. I had previously only heard of the camp and its funny name, and that it was dedicated to the use and perpetuation of the Yiddish language. Its summer denizens were supposed to study and speak the language all the time. A great cause, so I readily accepted. No fee, but very good old-time Jewish food, and the chance to meet Kadya Molodowsky, a legendary figure in the world of Yiddish poetry. She and her husband came there year after year. Then quite advanced in age, they still edited their journal, Surroundings, published bimonthly from 1941 until 1974, out of their home on the Lower East Side. The journal was devoted to Yiddish poetry, with strict and careful attention to the correct usage, grammar, flavor of the language. Steadily smoking a cigarette, she accepted graciously the homage rendered her by person after person who knew her poems by heart and remembered them from childhood. There had been few poems in my childhood home, only Hebrew ones that I could read but not understand in the siddurs and other religious texts 69 that were our only books. Though my parents spoke Yiddish almost all the time, I never knew about Yiddish poets until years later. I owe Kathryn Hellerstein, one of my co-editors on Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, for much of that knowledge. Kathryn describes there in concise form all of Molodowsky’s many works, in poetry, novels, plays, essays, as well as her life in Russia and Poland, until she came to America in 1935 already over forty, up to her death in 1975. I am most grateful for her poem “God of Mercy,” that I invariably teach in Jewish literature courses. Thirty-nine lines long, in four verses, here in Hellerstein’s translation, in very small part, is the gist of it: O God of Mercy Choose— Another people. We are tired of death, tired of corpses We have no more prayers. Choose— Another people. It concludes: And O God of Mercy Grant us one more blessing— Take back the divine glory of our genius. Very bitter, very sad, and how could it not be? Yet she was a delight in person, enjoying the summer camp, the people, the survival of the language, and in a quiet, dignified way, the homage. Kadya Molodowsky 70 Another gift of that two-day stay was meeting Shlomo Katz, then editor of Midstream, a monthly Zionist review, published by the Theodore Herzl Foundation. I wondered that he should be coming to a camp devoted to the perpetuation of Yiddish, which I thought Zionists had for years, in its early days, considered anathema, the language of the Diaspora Jews and of centuries of defeat and persecution. Well, that was too simple on my part, and Katz echoed my own view, that the language embodied a thousand years of Jewish history and could not be dismissed or forgotten. He enjoyed speaking and reading it, his first language. Like so many early Yiddishists and Zionists, who knew, wrote and read, and valued both languages. We got on very well, and he asked me to do a review for his journal, which I did, of Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out In the Thirties. I regret not following up on that wonderful experience with more work for them, or never again visiting Boiberek. To mitigate my guilt, I have to say I did since then publish in Yiddish and have continued to be named on their editorial board, a point of pride for me. God of Mercy—and Justice. Kadya Molodowsky ...