PAPER BRIDGES: SELECTED POEMS OF KADYA MOLODOWSKY

Poems by Kadya Molodowsky, 1999

The final two lines of "Dzshike Street" (from the volume bearing the same name) reveal a tension that looms large throughout Kadya Molodowsky's poetic volumes and the poems selected, translated, and edited by Kathryn Hellerstein for inclusion in Paper Bridges : "And although tears well up behind my eyes,/I am in love with life like a bitch." The "although" in the line indicates something of the challenge that Molodowsky puts out to her readers: despite, and perhaps because of, pain, suffering, grief, loss, and an increasingly terrifying sense of abandonment, to love life, to embrace the body, to continue to speak directly to God. At the same time that her poetry bears witness and gives voice to this pain, it also demonstrates a vehement affirmation of life. The contrasts and oppositions that generate the movement of these volumes are many: the landscape both urban and pastoral, Molodowsky's tone both compassionate and caustic, despairing and uplifting, her governing motifs both deeply traditional and playfully heretical.

The selections from Kheshvndike nekht (1927; "Nights of Heshvan") include the entire "Women-Poems" cycle. The voices in this cycle ache with contrition, self-judgment, and conflicted longing—longing for lost love and lost youth but, most of all, longing to give birth, to be fertile. The maternal voice of tradition comforts, but cannot ameliorate, the varieties of sadness that these women face. The highly personalized experience of loss is carried into the other selections from this volume; the threat of death hovers barely concealed, broken only periodically by moments of tremendous intimacy with nature, family, and community, and even the rebellious exclamation of "At Blue Dawn"

I'll start to run
And overturn the tombstone,
Mock the mourners,
Kick dirt into the grave and dance on it,
Clap my hands
And call up the young and the strong,
I will come and, then won't the graveyard have fun!

does not suppress an escalating uneasiness. Quiet is increasingly undercut by impending doom; time creeps up, taking its toll not only on the body but on memory as well. There is a cynicism in this volume, a resignation that moral corruption is pervasive, that we are, in some sense, fallen creatures. At the same time, Molodowsky displays a painful nostalgia for a life and time on the brink of destruction, and she claims a responsibility to speak for those in this diminishing world:

Sometimes I turn my face, as to an Eastern wall,
Toward my tiny shtetl,
Almost entirely devastated,
And pray for every single person
left behind.

Her prayers continue, but they are conducted to a deepening silence, a silence becoming ever more threatening.

Molodowsky's Mayselekh (1931; "Tales") are poems written for children. As such, they provide a telling contrast to those of the previous volume. The selections from this volume portray the magic of the everyday, the promise of wonder tugging at the stark reality of daily life. This magic itself restores, just a little bit, the lost world that Molodowsky laments in the previous volume. Thus, in "Tale of a Wash-tub," a well-meaning washtub, voluntarily washing the clothes of all the world, performs tikkun olam, serves a sanctifying purpose: "Friday the washtub became quite devout,/And did nothing else but wash itself out." The selections from Afn barg (1938; "On the Mountain"), "Marzipans," and "A Letter," also written for children, promote self-sufficiency and creativity. The selections from Freydke (1935), similar in tone to the poems of these previous volumes, provide a glimpse into the shtetl; but the menace here is more defined

the last bit of blue in the sky fades and fades—
I hid it somewhere
From the stones of enemies,
From the cold in the room,
From the dark nights of pogroms.

Dzshike Gas (1933; "Dzshike Street") continues to pursue the possibility for hope—for belief—even in a world tinged by devastating poverty and persecution, so that, in the title poem, Molodowsky hesitantly claims, "almost, it almost/Seems that God is there." In this volume Molodowsky is more deliberate and self-conscious about the writing process, a tendency that becomes more pronounced in her final volume, Likht fun dornboym (1965; "Light of the Thornbush"). She begins here to bemoan the inadequacy of language, of poetic language in particular, to capture depth of feeling, and presents the danger that the writing process will cheapen feeling:

You leave. I can't recall the streets, alas,
And those I recognize are strange, inert.
The first line can be rhymed with Montparnasse,
The second, with a shirt.

Though gently mocking, these lines contain a fundamental caveat that guides this volume and those to follow: language can exploit just as it can bear witness.

In land fun mayn gebeyn (1937; "In the Country of My Bones") reflects an intense ambivalence, and, as Molodowsky explains in her autobiography, the fragmentation of identity that is almost inevitable for the East European Jewish émigré in America. In New York she is at once at home in a community of Jewish émigrés, in a community of Yiddish writers, and profoundly displaced, uprooted, separated from the country she carries with her but will never again be able to experience as a living reality. The final selection from this volume, "Legacy," drips with an almost palpable regret, with a haunting self-doubt that swings perilously close to despair:

Who knows if a poet, who knows if a fraud
In borrowed shoes,
In a meandering bed.
No thing is a symbol—
Nothing to reveal.
Maybe life is all wrong, a raw deal.

Molodowsky's last two volumes, Der melekh dovid aleyn iz geblibn (1946; "Only Kind David Remained") and Likht fun dornboym (1965), directly confront the Holocaust; the unnamable threat of the early volumes had shown itself as a terrifying reality, and the poet, in exile, commits herself to bearing witness. On the far side of the Holocaust, Molodowsky attempts, tentatively, to find a suitable language to depict the near-complete annihilation of her world, a language driven at once by rage and the deepest sorrow. Central to these volumes is a return to the spirit of the "Prayer" of her first volume, to a deeply traditional frame as a means of both challenge and comfort. In "The Rivalry of Writers Increases Wisdom," for instance, she casts herself as Job, accusing and implicating God in the devastation. To her surprise the grandmothers, the matriarchs, answer her instead of God. And their answer—"believe us, we are able/To open Paradise"—in some ways announces the task of these final volumes: to give voice to horrific devastation at the same time that they hold out the hope for a kind of redemption. This hope, she insists, cannot be blind. In one of her final poems, "I Am an Echo," Molodowsky places the words that both Abraham and Moses speak, "Here I am" (hineni ), into the mouth of a fiddler, who fades into a mere echo. The world of Tevye becomes Scripture, and this world, she warns us, is rapidly disappearing, even as memory. And yet, as this fiddler's voice becomes more and more faint, he speaks a fragile hope, projects a future:

You don't need what is real.
My voice will reach you.
Here I am, here I am,
Take along my echo to the walls of Jericho.
Soon I will play
By the walls of Jericho.

Reality is ousted by the wish for renewal.

—Beth Hawkins