Jews and Ukrainians in Russia's Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop

Chapter Five: The Market Crucified: Peretz Markish’s Civil War(1917– 1921)

111 Chapter Five The Market Crucified: Peretz Markish’s Civil War (1917–1921) Hey, come to this night market of silence, To the nighttime trade for beards and for bones! —Peretz Markish, The Mound1 I N 1 9 1 7 T H E PA S T was symbolically frozen and the future seemed frighteningly open-ended. That year a twenty-two-year-old Yiddish poet attempted to capture the expendability of the individual at the revolutionary moment. Take it off, this tattered shirt, Rags—up off the body! . . . I too am a fine guest here, Buy my head for a groschen! . . . Tu zikh oys, di hemd tsekhraste, Shmates funem leyb arop! . . . Ikh bin oykh a sheyner gast do, Far a groshn koyf mayn kop! . . .2 The transient guest, already an important actor in Jewish literature, was becoming a figure symbolic of the modern condition more broadly. The futurist generation had put on a poet’s mantle that could suit its wandering. A few years earlier, in 1914, Vladimir Mayakovsky had sewn himself “black pants from the velvet of my voice [chernye shtany/iz barkhata golosa moego]” and “a yellow shirt from three yards of sunset [zheltuiu koftu iz trekh arshin zakata]” and paraded up and down Nevsky Prospect.3 Peretz Markish, who in his earliest poems borrowed heavily from Mayakovsky’s verse and performativity , was not only calling attention to his own “tattered shirt” (hemd tsekhraste) but was also introducing the rural material culture of the Ukrainian commercial landscape to the literary avant-garde. Markish would re- Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands 112 introduce threadbare clothing and corpses as merchandise in the opening section of his 1920–21 pogrom poema, The Mound (Di kupe), which Seth Wolitz has called Markish’s “Modernist dirge.”4 The poema centers on a mound of corpses piled in a marketplace. The mound of bodies confronts the heavens, and with common marketplace phrases closes a sale on (now unnecessary) Sabbath shirts: . . . May they suit you for many years these Sabbath shirts! And wear them in good health, proudly, all, all! . . . Aykh tsu lange yor di shabesdike hemder! Un trogt gezunterheyt, in nakhes, ale, ale!5 The three years that separated Markish’s short, declamatory poems of 1917 from The Mound were years in which he was developing his voice as a Yiddish poet of the avant-garde. They were also disastrous years for the Jewish shtetl. The pogroms of the 1880s, 1903, and 1906 now seemed trivial in comparison to the loss of Jewish lives and property in World War I, during which thousands of Jews were killed or expelled from their homes. In the borderlands of western Ukraine, Galicia, and Poland, the Civil War (1918–20) was accompanied by an even larger wave of genocidal violence: over 60,000 Jews were massacred in small towns over the course of a few months.6 Markish based The Mound on one of the many pogroms in Volhynia in 1919 and published versions of it in 1920 and 1921. Markish was active in Yiddish modernist groups, including the KulturLige and the expressionist Khalyastre (The Gang) in the late 1910s and early 1920s. He nonetheless remained outside the inner circle of Soviet Yiddish writers until the 1930s.7 (In 1939 he was given an Order of Lenin medal, a distinction generally bestowed upon good writers who had become Stalinist court poets.) Markish’s writing in the 1920s, while still stylistically in flux, is steeped in a uniquely modernist presentation of a Ukrainian commercial landscape. Whereas assimilated writers fled the metaphorical Jewish market for the metaphorical church of high culture, Markish combines high modernism and shtetl Jewishness and reclaims the voice of the market vendor as the epitome of the disenfranchised modern subject. Here, the old commercial landscape expresses a very new collision of the self, religion, violence, and modernity. Markish defamiliarizes the marketplace, weaving its objects and vernacular phrases into a fragmented poetics of war. Following in the footsteps of the futurists, he was fascinated by religious blasphemy and the cathartic power of suffering, and he often combined the quintessential elements of Jewish tradition with Christian iconography. Markish’s early work reveals his radical focus on the here and now; his poetics, in many The Market Crucified: Peretz Markish’s Civil War (1917–1921) 113 ways, reflects the futurists’ dissociation of the present from past forms and social values. Markish’s use of...