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“a definite and peculiar destiny” 5 1 “A Definite and Peculiar Destiny” 1923-1946 In the work of a living poet the dominant personal myth may, in early or even in mature work, be only half formed; the poet himself does not yet know the whole story—if he did, he would stop writing. . . . Yet from the first his bent, his cast of imagination, has declared itself. “The Sense of Pilgrimage”1 From a very young age Denise Levertov had a definite sense of her “peculiar destiny,” a personal myth that derived from her ancestors, Schneour (Schneur) Zalman, the Rav of Northern White Russia,2 who was reputed to understand the language of birds, and Angell Jones of Mold, a Welsh tailor, who stitched meditations into coats and britches. She believed that these ancient ones were joined to her by a “taut” line across almost three centuries. They inspired her to make, as these ancestors did poems direct as what the birds said, hard as a floor, sound as a bench, mysterious as the silence when the tailor would pause with his needle in the air.3 The legacy of these two visionaries4 was transmitted to her by her parents , the Welsh-born Beatrice Spooner-Jones, descendant of Angell Jones, and the Russian, Feivel Levertoff, whose ancestor was Schneour Zalman. Angell Jones lived in northeast Wales on the River Alyn. His shop on High Street in Mold was not only his work site but the place where this Methodist preacher taught his apprentices scripture as well as the skills of the tailor. For a time David Owen, later acclaimed as one of Wales’s greatest novelists , worked with Jones as an impoverished apprentice. The tailor’s craft was handed down by Jones to his sons, and one grandson, Walter Spooner-Jones of Caernarvon, turned his manual dexterity to surgery, working as a junior doctor for a mining company in Abercanaid. Spooner-Jones married Margaret Griffiths, and soon after in 1885, Beatrice was born. When Beatrice was 6 chapter 1 two and a half, her mother died in childbirth and her father remarried. It was not a fortuitous match in that the new wife became addicted to drugs and young Beatrice was neglected for several years. When she was ten, her stepmother died, and two years later her father did as well, leaving her an orphan at age twelve. At that point she was taken in by relatives, the Reverend David Oliver, Congregational minister of Holywell, and his wife, Bess, who cared for her and provided a good education. She had lessons in painting and voice, attended secondary and teacher training school, and absorbed the tenor of the Oliver household, which was strict, orderly, and deeply religious . But as an orphan Beatrice felt set apart from the other Oliver children .5 Although she loved the natural beauty of Wales, she longed for a more adventurous life. Her dream was to teach in Paris, but that was considered unacceptable work for a young woman. In the end she secured a position at a Scottish Mission school for girls in Constantinople, arriving there on the Orient Express. In that distant, exotic city Beatrice Spooner-Jones would meet Feivel Levertoff, her future husband. If Beatrice Spooner-Jones’s early life was tragic, it was matched by that of Feivel Levertoff, who traced his heritage back to a rabbi of Lyady, Schneour Zalman, born in 1745 and later founder of Habad, an offshoot of Hasidism . By 1800, Zalman had been arrested several times, imprisoned in St. Petersburg by civil authorities, and denounced as a heretic by religious ones. He taught a consciousness of God’s presence in all things and affirmed that even the most humble Jew had intellectual access to the divine. He believed life was worship and service and that all beings contained sparks of God. He embraced the material world in order to restore it to his creator. The exaltation and joyfulness of Habad were expressed in story, dance, and song. Three generations hence, Feivel Levertoff would transmit to his children the stories of this ancestor, Schneour Zalman. Feivel Levertoff was born in either 1875 or 1878 in Orsha, what is now Belarus, to Shaul (Saul) and Batya Levertoff. According to one rendering , Feivel was related to Schneour Zalman through the paternal line as his great-grandson. Another story is that Zalman was Feivel’s mother’s uncle.6 Stories of his early life focused on his religious identity and the conflict...

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