Mixed Into Nothingness: Moishe Nadir and the Poetics of Teshuvah

Ikh gedenk keyn nemen nit, gornisht-nisht.S'iz alts in mir shoyn oysgemisht.Aleyn mikh misht der shternshtoyb

Fun gots fargiltn hengl-troyb

I don't remember any names, nothing.Everything is mixed up in me.I'm mixed, myself, by the stardust

Of God's gilded grape cluster.¹

The American Yiddish writer Moishe Nadir signed and dated his poem, "Neenter" ("Closer") "Miami Beach, Florida, May 1943." The poem, which was included in Nadir's posthumous collection, Moyde Ani (Confession), was likely the last one he wrote: Nadir died the following month in Woodstock, New York of a heart attack at the age of fifty-eight. With its references to God and its existential uncertainty, the poem scarcely resembles the satirical verse that endeared Nadir to readers in the 1910s or the exclamatory revolutionary poems he published in Communist Party-aligned newspapers and journals throughout the 1920s and 1930s. It is, like many of Nadir's late writings, a poem of teshuvah—a public acknowledgment of return to the Jewish community following a period of apostasy.

Despite its ideological departure from Nadir's communist poems, "Neenter" still bears the familiar "Nadirish" virtuosic word play, with sounds leading seamlessly to new words and ideas. The repeated "misht" (mixes/mixed) and the rhyming "nisht" (not) create a sense of uncertainty and even self-negation, as though the individual is being mixed into nothingness. Nadir's penitent tone also recalls the confessional element of his communist period, when he professed his support of the Party and announced his departure from his bourgeois modernist phase. Nadir's hyperbolic self-fashioning and refashioning were part of his trademark as a poet-provocateur. "Neenter" is a product of Nadir's final transformation, this time from communist atheist to anticommunist Jew. Nadir's performative conversions dramatize the struggle of many Jewish writers to align themselves with justice in the decade leading up to World War II, a decade of extremism, populism, and nationalism. His turn from party-aligned political declarations to self-negating religious declarations exemplifies the crisis of group identity among Jewish modernists during World War II.

The critic Alexander Mukdoni, in his review of Nadir's last poems, wrote of Nadir's two acts of teshuvah: "Actually Moishe Nadir was already a ba'al teshuvah: when he became a communist, he did teshuvah for his bourgeois past."² Traditionally, teshuvah—a Biblical Hebrew word meaning "turn back"—refers to repentance, either in the context of atonement before and on Yom Kippur, or a return to the Jewish covenant with God after a period of non-observance.³ Nadir's teshuvah for his years of party-alignment is in keeping with the instruction of the medieval Jewish commentator Moses Maimonides, who outlined the need to verbally confess one's transgressions, even at the end of life: "Were a person to have been a sinner all her life and yet repent on the day of her death, and to have died while still repenting, all her sins would be forgiven."⁴ However, it is also similar to the confessional mode employed within the Communist Party, a mode that Oleg Kharkhordin has identified with medieval Christian exomologesis (a process of seeking absolution for apostasy; Michel Foucault calls it "recognizing the self as a sinner and penitent"), by which a new party applicant publicly confesses and atones for past sins.⁵ For Nadir, as for other American fellow travelers, even informal alignment with Soviet communism required publicly disavowing affiliations that the Party condemned, including Zionism and what Soviet authorities called, in the early 1930s, "bourgeois modernism."⁶

Nadir has long been an enigma to scholars, for he moved between extremes, and used exaggerated rhetoric during all stages of his political and creative life.⁷ He is most often associated with his humorous sketches, his foppish displays, his aphorisms, and his folk-inspired songs. His 1927 "Der Rebbe Elimelekh," based on the English "Old King Cole," quickly entered the Jewish folk canon. Born in Narayev, Galicia in 1885, Isaac Reiss, who took on a variety of pseudonyms, was eventually exclusively identified...