Touching Time: Poetry, History, and the Erotics of Yiddish

In response to hearing from the doctor that "there is nothing" that should pain her, Yiddish poet Rivka Basman's speaker replies, "[H]e doesn't understand, it is the nothing that pains me"¹ (der nito tut mir vey). Though both name a "nothing," the doctor and the speaker each experience this absence differently. For the speaker, the lack is a source of pain, whereas the pain-causing lack is illegible to the doctor. This illegibility characterizes the state of the poem itself because it is written in Yiddish.² Indeed, in its current state, Yiddish is as much nito (not here, nonexistent) as it is do (here), rendering lack and absence central to the present existence of the language. In this essay, I turn to the figure of the fetish to explore the interplay of lack, pain, and pleasure in order to generate a new way to encounter the Yiddish past and feel its present. I want to open the possibility of having an erotic interaction in and with Yiddish across history. By erotics, I mean sexual desire, arousal, and consummation, embodied in poetics and practice. Tying queer and explicitly transgressive practices of sex to historical desires, desires in history and of history, I use poetry to create an erotic practice of touching time, to borrow the title of Basman's 1988 collection, Onrirn di tsayt.³

Once the most widely spoken Jewish language, Yiddish was used in central Europe, Eastern Europe, and finally in the wider Jewish diaspora (for example, North and South America) for over a thousand years. However, the turbulent events of the twentieth century—namely, the Khurbn (the Nazi extermination project)—Stalinism, Zionism, and more gradual and less violent processes of assimilation, have all dramatically diminished the language. As a spoken vernacular, the language is primarily the property of Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Jews, who are neither producers nor consumers of Yiddish literature. Outside these circles, one is most likely to encounter Yiddish as a "fragment of a language, an accent, or a sensibility evoked by means of other languages—anything but a full, vernacular language," as Jeffrey Shandler writes.⁴ It appears as "a translated language, an unintelligible language, a secret language," invoking in its utterance what it is not by that which is not there. Identifying this absence, Shandler follows Cecile Kuznitz's definition of the current stage of Yiddish as "postvernacular" rather than a full language of (secular) life and literature.⁵

From the perspective of this current state, this essay reaches back to two moments in the literary history of Yiddish by examining two poems: a poem by Celia Dropkin, one of the most striking woman poets of the 1930s, the heyday of Yiddish poetry; and a poem by the radical lesbian bilingual Yiddish–English poet Irena Klepfisz, a representative of the 1970s' Jewish American attempt to repurpose Yiddish. My reading will examine how these texts activate body, memory, and fantasy. Generating what Elizabeth Freeman calls erotohistoriography, I will use the past and historicity itself "as a structure of tactile feeling, a mode of touch, even a sexual practice."⁶ As in the erotohistoriographic method, my reading of Yiddish texts "admits that contact with historical materials can be precipitated by particular bodily dispositions, and that these may elicit bodily responses, even pleasurable ones, that are themselves a form of understanding."⁷ Taking up erotic poetry written when Yiddish was still a vernacular used in a secular sexual context, I deploy erotic touch both as historical method and object of study, simultaneously a theoretical metaphor and a corporeal reality. I will use this erotic touch to examine how the body of the reader becomes implicated in the interaction with (and understanding of) Yiddish literary history, forging a new path to the Yiddish past—one that can be followed far beyond questions of eroticism. In turn, this past and the path to it offer literary theory a unique perspective on cultural transmission outside the time of reproductive heteronormativity and the linear history it dictates.⁸

Celia Dropkin: The Poetic Scene of Yiddish Fetishism

In the corpus of...