Pogrom and Avant-Garde: Peretz Markish's Di kupe

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Pogrom and Avant-Garde: Peretz Markish’s Di kupe

Roy Greenwald

AbstrAct

Through a close reading of Peretz Markish’s Di kupe (The Mound), this article sug-gests that the avant-garde is less a movement directed at a determined future than one that escapes an impossible past. One of the major works of the Yiddish avant-garde poetry, Di kupe reflects a materialist vision of history, repudiating thereby an age-old Jewish tradition, its martyrology, and its concept of history. Di kupe, I argue, high-lights the avant-garde as a subversive gesture that not only repudiates the past but also flouts any order as such. The article traces the ways by which the cubo-futuristic and constructivist aesthetics of the poem reflect Markish’s materialist vision.

Key words: Yiddish literature, Peretz Markish, Di kupe, avant-garde

T he French term avant-garde designates those troops advanc-ing before the main camp, paving their way forward. Yet the term could also be understood to describe less the action of

forging ahead of the camp than that of escaping from it. In this sense, the avant-garde might depict the movement of setting forth from a past in which it has no place to an uncertain and unknowable future. Only in retrospect does the avant-garde movement appear to be part of a coherent historical continuum. If we apply this meaning of avant-garde to literature, the term could be understood both as an expres-sion of purposeful action and as the written trace of that which escapes its past. These are the two faces of the avant-garde: the one as seen from the past it left behind, the other as seen from the vantage of its own future.

In his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger has stressed the open-ness of the avant-gardist work of art.1 The open and, as Bürger terms it, “nonorganic” form of the avant-gardist work of art implies that the

Roy Greenwald, “Pogrom and Avant-Garde: Peretz Markish’s Di kupe,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 16, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2010): 65–84

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work is not fully conceptualized, much less predetermined, before its production. Thus, by its very openness, the work of art reflects the avant-gardist movement toward an undetermined future.

It is this movement, I would argue, that characterizes the works and lives of the members of the Yiddish avant-garde in Eastern Eu-rope. Its members entered adulthood at a time of great upheaval: many of them were thrown into the trenches of World War I and wit-nessed the October Revolution and civil war that came in its after-math. Moreover, members of the Yiddish avant-garde, unlike their non-Jewish counterparts, were particularly affected, whether directly or indirectly, by hundreds of pogroms perpetrated during the civil war years in which tens of thousands of Jews were killed in a wave of violence unparalleled in magnitude since the Chmelnitzki pogroms of the seventeenth century. The rise of the Yiddish avant-garde in Eastern Europe is therefore impossible to dissociate from the ex-treme violence by which it was generated. And yet its poetry was di-rected not so much against the perpetrators as against an age-old Jewish tradition—its martyrology and the theological comfort it sought to offer to the faithful.

This is the tenor of Peretz Markish’s Di kupe (The Mound). One of the major works of the Yiddish avant-garde in Eastern Europe, Di kupe was published in Warsaw in 19212 and refers to a pogrom that took place in the town of Horoditch in September 1920. According to testimony given by two survivors, the perpetrators of the violence en-tered the town, assembled the Jews at a public square in front of the theater, and shot them. As the victims fell one on top of the other, their bodies formed a pile that still stood untouched two days later on Yom Kippur.3 Markish was not an eyewitness to the massacre but chose to focus on this event for its symbolic date.

A reading of Markish’s poem after World War II might be inclined to situate Di kupe not only against the atrocities committed during the revolutionary time in which it was written but also against the devas-tation that came later. Such a reading would almost inevitably place Di kupe within a Jewish martyrological corpus that begins with the Bible and extends to the literature written after the Holocaust, and it would be disposed to underscore the continuity in Jewish literature of catastrophe over and against discontinuity and rupture. Yet it is this very continuity that Markish’s poem disavows. Indeed, as I dem-onstrate in what follows, Di kupe offers a decisive repudiation of tradi-tional Jewish martyrology.

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* * *

Towering above the Hebrew and Yiddish poetic scene at the time that Markish began writing poetry was the figure of Hayim Nahman Bialik. In particular, Bialik’s poem on the Kishinev pogrom, “Be-‘ir ha-haregah” (In the City of Slaughter; 1903), had set a commanding ex-ample of poetic representation of the pogrom. Any subsequent such representations were therefore bound to be a daunting challenge.

An insight into the poetic unease that attended Markish as he wrote Di kupe can be gleaned from the recollections of the Soviet Yid-dish critic Nokhem Oyslender, who recalls the time that Markish brought him sections from the poem to read. In one such meeting, Oyslender asked Markish if he had ever thought of visiting Horo-ditch, the site of the pogrom, before composing his poem. Markish, Oyslender notes, answered in the negative, declaring, “What for? I see the mound from here.” To which Oyslender responded, “Yes, you see the mound from here, but you might see more from there.”4

In proposing that Markish travel to Horoditch, Oyslender was urg-ing his friend to follow Bialik’s example. Bialik had been sent to Kishinev in 1903 on behalf of a historical committee in order to collect evidence from the survivors and to write a report on the pogrom; this had led him to write “Be-‘ir ha-haregah.”5 By dismissing his friend’s proposal, Markish refused to follow the example of Bialik, and, indeed, Markish’s disapproving (if also reverent) attitude toward Bialik resonates throughout Oyslender’s account. Oyslender qualifies Markish’s poetry as “anti-Bialik” and includes a telling anecdote about Markish’s conflict with the commanding figure of Jewish poetry at the time. Recalling the occasion on which he gave Markish a copy of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Oblako v shtanakh” (The Cloud in Trousers; 1914–15), Oyslender de-scribes Markish’s turning to him and exclaiming: “If I had enough money, I would have bought a train ticket to Odessa and visited Bialik, given him this book, and said: ‘Here, genius. Take this book and enjoy it.’” Oyslender seems to interpret this as a kind of oedipal plot in which Markish, upon reading “Oblako v shtanakh,” recognized in Maya-kovsky a poetic brother capable of freeing him from the authority of Bialik, the father. Oyslender relates this episode in order to provide us with a key to appreciating the profound difference between the “po-grom poems” of the two poets: a difference that marks the leap that Markish, along with his fellow members of the Yiddish avant-garde, took away from the poetry of Bialik.6

This difference can be seen in the way Bialik and Markish repre-sent the heavens (in both senses of the word: sky as a perceptible phe-

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nomenon, and providence as an abstract concept) above the site of the pogrom. Bialik’s earlier poem “Al ha-shechitah” (On the Slaughter; 1903)—which, like “Be-‘ir ha-haregah,” was written in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom but months earlier than the more famous poem of Bialik’s—opens with the following lines:

Heaven, beg mercy for me! If there is a God in you, and an orbit through you to this GodWhich I have not discovered—Then pray for me!7

Bialik’s relationship to God here is strikingly ambiguous. If the speaker addresses heaven, why does he question the presence of God? And if there is a God in heaven, how dare he question God’s pres-ence? Bialik’s poem conjures up a heaven that is both a perceptible phenomenon (sky) and an abstract one (providence).

Whereas Bialik’s heaven could, simultaneously, symbolize and not symbolize divine providence, Markish’s heaven is devoid of any di-vine presence. The most striking expression of this negation of divin-ity can be inferred from the opening sonnet of Di kupe:

After you, the killed of the Ukraine;After you, butcheredIn a mound in Horoditch,The Dnieper town…

—Kaddish

No! Heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards,Out of my mouth’s brown streams of pitchSob a brown leaven of blood and sawdust.No. Don’t touch the vomit on the earth’s black thigh.

Away. I stink. Frogs crawl on me.Looking for mother-father here? Seeking a friend?They’re here. They’re here, but taint the air with stink.Away. Awkwardly they delouse themselves with hands like warped brass.

From top to bottom, a mound of filthy wash.Claw, crazed wind. Take what you want; take it.Before you, the church sits like a polecat beside a heap of Strangled fowl.Oh! Tallow skies! Enjoy your Sabbath shirts!And wear them in good health, in pleasure, you all, you all.11 Tishrei 5681.8

In this opening sonnet, which with some variation also closes Di kupe, heaven can no longer be perceived as a symbolic site of divine

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providence. Heaven is represented merely as tallow—that is, the fatty substance of the animal, which is its lesser part and is, among other things, prohibited for eating by the halakhah. If heaven is tradition-ally figured in transcendental terms, here it is materialized to the point of being emptied of any metaphysical meaning. The tallow is not only the matter of heaven but also the material that fuels the fire. Put differently, heaven as a symbol of providence here is not so much opposed to history but is itself part of history. Hence the fire consuming the victims’ bodies also consumes every kind of transcendence while earth and heaven collapse into a single material figure.

The dismantlement of the binary opposition between earth and heaven—that is, between the materiality of history and transcendence—is evinced also in the figuration of the heavens as an animal straying around the mound of corpses and licking them (“No! Heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards”), as if heaven had become a link in the food chain of the historical event. Indeed, this same ecological prin-ciple explains the interpellation to the wind—which might also stand for some kind of metaphysical entity—to descend and loot the leftovers (“Claw, crazed wind. Take what you want; take it”). This is blasphemy, of course, and not merely in the defiance against a monotheistic deity—which we can find also in Bialik—but also, and perhaps more provoca-tively, in the very materialization of God.

* * *

In an article titled “Mit farmakhte oygn” (With Closed Eyes) and pub-lished in Bikher velt in Warsaw in 1922, Markish situates the enthusiasm with which the Yiddish avant-garde embraced materialistic representa-tion within the context of Jewish religious tradition. Describing the Jewish avant-garde as breaking the Second Commandment—the pro-hibition to make an image—Markish writes:

In Jewish literature, the Word always appeared in its abstract meaning. Except for some chapters in the books of the prophets and a few other places in the Bible, we have a literature of va-Yoymer, va-Yedaber [“And God said,” “And God spoke”]. The image was foreign to the Jewish tongue. . . . It is important to emphasize that already in ancient times the ability among Jews to materialize an abstract idea in the form of an image became atrophied. If we remember the prohibition “Thou shalt not make yourself an image,” we will understand why the image has re-mained so alien to Jewish art, why the longing for the image has been so tragic, and why a people that has given to the entire world the abstract

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god suddenly created, in a rash of religious ecstasy, the golden calf and worshipped it. And indeed why the Imaginist movement, which essen-tially consists of an image, found expression in Yiddish poetry.9

According to Markish, the passion for the material image had been repressed following its eruption in the story of the golden calf, and it did not become visible again—at least not in Jewish culture—until Yiddish modernist poetry gave it form. Yet for Markish and other members of the Yiddish avant-garde, this act of creation must also be understood as a repudiation of the monotheistic law. In fact, the very repudiation of the law enabled the eruption of art.10

The point is strikingly made in a sequence of Di kupe where the pile of bodies is depicted “spitting back” the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai:

Ah, Mount Sinai! In the upturned bowl of sky—Lick blue mud Humbly, humbly as a cat licks up its midnight prayersInto your face, the Sovereign Mound spits back the Ten

Commandments.11

Here the act of spitting back all Ten Commandments, including the second one, at Mount Sinai signifies the liberation from moral obli-gations. Nihilism thus becomes the necessary condition for the cre-ation of art.

In his yearning for representation, Markish envies the opulence of Russian Orthodox religious art:

The Russian national style—the church—which founds its highest ex-pression in the [Russian] imaginists, has always been for artists of all times the everlasting source for creative emotions and excitement, be-ginning with ordinary church ornaments and ending with the image of festive religious liturgy. And whence do Russian poets take the form for their great and awful experiences if not from the church? For it was in the church that Russian primitive folk art was created, and it was in the church that the Russian people saw an image, the form of their God.12

This appreciative depiction of the Russian church is striking, given that a year earlier Markish had described the church as a polecat slouching in front of the mound of Jewish corpses. Markish’s relation to the Christian world was one of ambivalence. Indeed, the relation between Jews and Christians in Eastern Europe could be described as perverted intimacy and might explain the way Markish and his fellow members of the Yiddish avant-garde often represented the church

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and its rituals: not just as a place in which anti-Judaism was promul-gated but also as a constant source of appealing, if illicit, physicality.

* * *

The blasphemous element in Markish’s aesthetics, though anti-mar-tyrological, should not be construed as anti-religious, let alone secu-lar. If anything, Markish’s blasphemic aesthetics could be read as ritualistic gesticulation, perhaps even articulation. His poetic move-ment is one in which the repudiation of abstract representation tends toward the ritualization of the material.

Indeed, Markish’s Di kupe may strike the reader as paradoxical: on the one hand, the poem shuns Jewish tradition and liturgy; on the other, the poem is defined in its epigraph as a kaddish—a prayer of mourning, that is, in praise of God. Moreover, the poem contains nu-merous quotations from Jewish prayer, especially from the Yom Kip-pur service.13 Markish keeps quoting texts from the very corpus that he also repudiates. Marxist critics did not find any apparent paradox in this. “Neither Markish nor his readers believe in God anymore,” argued Itskhok Nusinov. “For this reason, God was never more than a spectacle.”14 And Dov Ber Malkin affirmed: “It was natural and un-derstandable that, in the wake of the calamity that had befallen his time, Markish did not seek consolation in heaven, which the tip of the mound had pierced.”15

Yet the presence of liturgical references in the poem cannot be dismissed as if they were merely intended for ironic effect. In fact, Markish himself addressed theological questions with considerable gravity. Thus, for instance, readers of the Literarishe bleter in Septem-ber 1924 would have seen a notice announcing a public lecture by Markish on, among other issues, “blasphemy as the quest for God.” And the language of this notice was significant, for the transition from religious search to blasphemy is a theme that Markish takes up in the third sequence of Di kupe:

Sunk to his loins in silence, the town sitsLike an upturned empty wagon in a marsh.Ah, if only one would come To say something.

Ah, grief and woe. The sunset, like a weeping hawkSits on the blind roof of an entreating palm. Ah, almightiest of the world,

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Open—open your starry title page. Hineni, he‘oni. Unworthy, here I stand. I yearn to merge with you in prayer And yet my heart, my lips are moved Only to blasphemies and curses.

Ah, my prayer-exhausted,Tenfold desecrated hands turn.Take them, take them.

Caress them, lick them, as a dog Licks its scabby, suppurating hide. I pledge them to you.

I’ve built you a new ark In the middle of the marketplace A black mound, like a blotch. Seat yourself upon its buxom roof Like an old raven on a dungheap.

Take my heart, my prayer-exhausted heart, And all such leftovers. Take itAnd peck, peck what the chariot of twenty generations brought. I pledge it to you.16

The quest that someone “would come / To say something” might call to mind the verbal ritual of invoking prayers and dirges in order to infuse meaning into calamity and to revalidate the bond between God and His people at a time of trial.17 Indeed, the speaker answers his own quest by later posing as a cantor, which can be deduced from the Hebrew words “Hineni he‘oni” (“Unworthy, here I stand”)—the words opening the prayer traditionally recited by the emissary of the congregation who pleads to God to accept his imminent prayers.

This religious practice, however, results in blasphemy: “And yet my heart, my lips are moved / Only to blasphemies and curses.” In this syna gogal scene, that is, the cantor’s wish “to merge with you in prayer” turns out to be a stream of cursing. Can such a stream of blasphemy be termed a prayer at all? Beyond the poignant irony underlying the depiction of the hands of the dead stiffening in the moment of their extreme agony as praying hands, the poem begs us to ask how to read this gesture of devotion against the blasphemous words of the speaker. After all, these words might well undermine the very gesture of the dead bodies. Yet a certain difficulty persists. It is not at all clear how to define this moment in which gestures of piety and devotion are intermingled with words of blasphemy. Is it a religious moment or

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a secular one? The very question calls to mind the notice published in Literarishe bleter by which blasphemy was construed as a way of seek-ing God.

Markish’s poem thus undermines the oppositional relations between religiosity and secularity. The two concepts are no longer mutually exclusive possibilities—as they are within any system of orthodoxy (be it rabbinical orthodoxy or, mutatis mutandis, a Marxist one)—but rather the extreme impossibilities between which the modern subject is doomed to exist. As Franz Rosenzweig has put it,

Modern man is neither a believer nor an unbeliever. He believes and he doubts. And so he is nothing, but he is alive. Belief and unbelief “hap-pen” to him and all that he is required to do is not run away from what is happening but make use of it once it has happened.18

This shuttling between heresy and faith is well presented in the way that this synagogal scene is displayed. In the beginning of the sequence cited above, God is addressed in the traditional manner by way of words taken from Jewish liturgy; later, the divine being is represented as a dog (“Caress them, lick them, as a dog / Licks its scabby, suppurating hide”). Thus, within a few lines, the monotheistic deity is subjected to a materialistic realization and is reduced to a mere animal—a hungry mammal that takes its place within the ecological system.

* * *

These apparent oppositions need not necessarily be reconciled. Rather than trying to affix a single meaning to the words of the speaker, as critics of various schools have done, we might look at the ritual depicted in Markish’s poem as mere performance—that is, as a heterogeneous cluster of signs (like speech and gesture) that cannot be subjected to one ineluctable meaning. Reading Markish’s ritual as performance might illuminate the tension between the gestures and the words that the body produces. The ritualistic form is what re-mains when the religious intention in its strict orthodox sense is no longer present at the very place where, as in Markish’s poem, gestures are still being made and prayers are still being recited.

One of the distinctive features of Di kupe is the presence of several types of discourse—that of the speaker and, within it, remnants of li-turgical texts (opvarfekhtsn, or “leftovers,” in the poem’s language)—lifted from Jewish prayer. The effect of these concomitant discourses

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is a dissonance that is difficult to resolve. One example of such disso-nance appears in the last stanza of the fourth sequence, where the blasphemous tirade against heaven is followed by a blessing from the Jewish morning service:19

Already rears the head like a middle finger from BethlehemAnd pierces the heavensAnd peels it bare,Borekh she-omar ve-hoyo ho-‘oylem! [Blessed be He who spoke, and the

world came into being!]20

The paratactic structure of these lines places the Yiddish words of the present speaker next to a Hebrew citation from past tradition, with only a comma separating the two discourses. It is a lot to ask from a comma, and yet the absence of any more meaningful linguistic signs capable of negotiating the relation between such competing dis-courses is not specific to these lines alone. It is pervasive in Di kupe.

The clustering of different discourses, in fact, betrays an artistic in-tention that exceeds any syntactical style. It serves as a deliberate poetic device that is critical to Markish’s poetics and could best be understood as verbal collage. A succinct description of how collage might operate in literature was provided by the 1978 Group Mu manifesto:

Each cited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the dis-course and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists also of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition.21

Indeed, the linearity of the discourse in Di kupe is interrupted by cita-tions from Jewish liturgy that are themselves part of the poem’s col-lage, because the act of citing, in this context, means both quoting and summoning before a court. The speaker is not merely quoting these verses but also summoning them just after Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment, to bear witness to a past that has expired or to face his own blasphemous accusation.

The collage accords an equal status to multiple discourses in that they all emanate from the same speaker. This is true in Di kupe and for the poet himself, who, like his entire generation of young Jews, stood at the crossroads of two periods in twentieth-century Jewish his-tory. They were the bearers of two discourses: that of Jewish liturgy, which they repeated over and again in their youth (and it is note-

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worthy that, as a child, Markish was a member of a synagogal choir in Berditchev), and that of the revolutionary avant-garde. Di kupe cap-tures the collision of these discourses—a collision that can be bio-graphically situated within the few years when Markish and his Jewish peers found themselves mobilized and thrown into the trenches of World War I and when, moreover, many of them were overtaken by the liberating ideas of the revolution.

Yet the displacement of liturgical citations onto a new discourse—one that is fundamentally alien to their original context—poses an interpretive problem. One possible way to answer it might be found in Bürger’s analysis of avant-garde art and one of its most identifiable techniques: the montage as the creative act that results, among other products, in the collage. As he explains, this compositional principle undermining the organic wholeness of the work of art is connected to its avant-gardist character:

The avant-gardist work of art is defined as nonorganic. Whereas in the organic work of art, the structural principle governs the parts and joins them in a unified whole, in the avant-gardist work, the parts have a sig-nificantly larger autonomy vis-à-vis the whole. They become less impor-tant as constituent elements of a totality of meaning and simultaneously more important as relatively autonomous signs.22

According to Bürger, avant-garde art is nonorganic because its mate-rial is devoid of any “living” meaning. Having been dissociated from the context that gives it meaning, the material becomes lifeless. Viewed in this light, the citations from the liturgy as well as the ritual gestures in the poem appear to be remnants of a lost world; they are severed from their literary context and transposed into a foreign verbal land-scape. The integrity of meaning in Di kupe ceases to exist once the work loses its organic wholeness. In this sense, the liturgical citations and ritual gestures in the poem might be said to be the textual mirror image of the mound of limbs on the marketplace of Horoditch.

In his book Farbaygeyendik (Passing By), Markish describes Jewish tradition in its moment of breakdown and disintegration:

What can we young people say on the graves of the last pillars on which the paralyzed spirit of an old culture reposes? Like chimneys that re-mained standing after the houses burned down . . . when the fire, the storm, has not yet quenched its thirst? Mixed with blood from the great devastation of the world—all those broken pieces have become dear to us—whether they came from our houses or not—and the ways leading to them are all covered with rubble.23

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Much as he does in Di kupe, Markish expresses here ambivalence to-ward the tradition on whose grave he claims to be standing. This same ambivalence might explain Markish’s decision to define Di kupe in the epigraph as a kaddish, which he believed should be said not only over the slaughtered Jews of Horoditch but also over the tradition that was to give meaning to their lives and, even more so, to their deaths.

Insofar as Di kupe, then, provides an answer to Markish’s question about what he and his generation should say on the graves of past cul-tures, it is a formal one at best: that of the collage. The collage reflects the historical period in which Di kupe was written: shortly after the Oc-tober Revolution, during the civil war, at a time when the old order had collapsed and the new one had not yet fully come into being.

* * *

It is difficult to associate Markish with one specific stream in the Rus-sian avant-garde because his poetry seems indebted to several of them. The intimacy between literature and the plastic arts was characteristic of a number of avant-garde movements. This was true of the Yiddish avant-garde, as exemplified by the Kultur Lige, whose books joined writers and artists in a union of text and illustration. This relationship between writers and artists was entirely reciprocal; since art illustrated literature, literature itself could be said to have illustrated art.24 In her study of the poetry of Anna Margolin, Barbara Mann has described the relationship between the visual and the verbal:

Thematically and formally, visual poetics challenge the division be-tween image and voice at the basis of Jewish culture’s understanding of itself and of its relation to other cultures. Treating visual motifs and the related themes of the body and the natural landscapes explicitly, visual poetics also attempted to close the material gap between image and voice—to make language, and literature, visible.25

In the case of Markish, it seems that the material gap between image and voice not only closes but fuses the two elements in a veritable communion. At such moments, Di kupe itself could be read as a repre-sentation of a work of the plastic arts.

Among the many avant-garde groups that rapidly succeeded one another and changed their names at a dizzying rate were Russian cubo-futurism26 and constructivism. Russian cubo-futurism exerted considerable sway over Markish. Constituting an attack on the whole-

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ness and integrality of the represented object, Russian cubo-futurism bears greatly on Di kupe. Indeed, nothing in the poem escapes dismemberment.27

The opening sonnet is a case in point. One of the most elaborate and distinct literary forms, the sonnet under Markish’s hand is sub-jected to extreme literary violence as if reflecting the violence suffered by pogrom victims themselves. Both Avraham Nowersztern and David Roskies have pointed out that the language of the sonnet resonates with the brutality of its images. Thus, the use of guttural and palatal consonants might be said to echo the sounds of dying bodies in the mound suffocating in their own vomit.28 In this sense, the opening and closing sonnets of Di kupe might be viewed as a cubo-futuristic transfor-mation of its literary conventional form. And the cubistic dismember-ment affects not only the formal aspects of the sonnet but also its figurative language. Thus, the description of the victims’ hands as “warped brass” is itself a cubo-futuristic composition. The depiction of what used to be a limb of a living body as twisted metal is a cubistic image whose sharp lines trace the mechanical indifference of a new kind of brutality, one that violates the contours of the human body.

* * *

It is no coincidence that the biblical image of Samson appears in the end of the second sequence of Di kupe in the composite figure of revo-lutionary and artist:

Ah, you, my blind fathers,How many bloated wombs,How many debaucheries have borne me?Then why am I afraid to takeA step into the ripped world?

Hey, boundaries of the earth! Spread.The circle turns from Nile to Dnieper now.You, with spiked eyes,Leap, mound, wild fever,Over threshold, over ditches.

Blind Samson, blinded hero,Hair’s sprouting on your head again.Leap upon a millstone; leap upon an arc;Make the distance trembleAnd topple all the world.29

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The figure of Samson depicts the artist liberated from the chains placed on him. His hair growing back and renewing his strength, Samson is able to shake the edifice and bring it down. As he does so, Samson as artist sets loose such geometric forms as a millstone and an arc from the demolished edifice.

Yet the appearance of geometric forms in Markish’s poem should not be interpreted merely as cubistic analysis. When Markish wrote the poem, the constructivist movement, which had begun taking root in the mid-1910s and reached its height in the years following the Oc-tober Revolution, was dominant among members of the avant-garde of Eastern Europe. In an article published in the Yiddish avant-garde review Ringen, the Jewish constructivist artist Henryk Berlewi—who was also the illustrator of the Warsaw edition of Di kupe—spelled out his view on the tasks of the artist:

The form—as an element of expression—is deeply wronged and is re-stricted by the other elements of art. If we examine the form as such, we must try to peel off and liberate it from all other artistic elements and see it in its nakedness. If we succeed, we will have the key to the question of form. Then, if we see that which until now was melted within the art complex, the way between the idea and the form will not be disguised anymore by other elements, and we will already be able to deal only with the pure form. . . . We must therefore master the form—that is, to redeem it from side pres-sure. That we can do only when we regard it [the form] as a self-standing art factor, as the direct heir to the idea, independent from the content, that is, of that which this very form expresses by itself.30

According to Berlewi, the form supplants the place of the idea. Whereas the idea transcends the work of art and guarantees its wholeness from the outside, the form is identical with the art itself.

This conception of art defines Markish’s poetic expression. His materialistic vision rejects the tradition that holds the coherence of history to be guaranteed by an all-embracing meta-historical idea. Instead, Markish strives to discern in history its dynamics and to de-pict them in purely geometrical terms: “Hey, boundaries of the earth! Spread. / The circle turns from Nile to Dnieper now.” If the circle is bounded by the Nile and the Dnieper rivers, it is because they are the geometric extremities—or, to use a geometric term, the tangents—of the circle of Jewish history. Yet insofar as the Nile and Dnieper represent the past and the present of Jewish history in Markish’s time, they delineate not only the geographical but also the temporal space

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of Jewish history—the space, that is, within which the circle of Jewish history turns and returns in an endless repetition of catastrophe.

Markish was not the first to conceive of Jewish history as a circle. The historian Simon Dubnow wrote in the wake of the Kishinev po-grom: “Once again we are witnessing events which testify that the path of history is cyclical and not linear in evolution.”31 Dubnow iden-tifies the linear and the cyclic as the two possible ways of describing Jewish history. Yet there is also a third possibility: a dialectical one that claims to see progress and change precisely at the moment when Jewish history appears to continue in its cyclical repetition. Within such a reading of history, the “circle” that “leaps” would suggest that the closed loop of the circle was broken and that history has taken a new direction. If the word “leap” indicates that the direction of the movement is also upward, then Markish’s circle has opened up a third dimension and becomes a spiral.

This possibility is significant, given that the figure of the spiral was typically used by revolutionary thinkers to describe the dynamics of epistemological progress.32 In this sense, the transformation of the cir-cle into a spiral would have carried revolutionary significance for Mark-

Figure 1. Yosef Tchaikov’s cover illustration of the 1922 Kiev edition of Di kupe by Peretz Markish. Used by permis-sion of Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris, 2010.

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ish as well. It is as if, through these geometric figures, Markish proposes that precisely at the moment when history appears to be nothing but catastrophe, it actually uncovers its revolutionary potential.

The union between the plastic and the verbal found particular ex-pression in the 1922 Kiev edition of Di kupe. The cover illustration, created by Yosef Tchaikov (see Figure 1), depicts a circle being pene-trated and broken up by the tip of a black pyramid. Inside the circle are two figures carrying a corpse, thus serving to identify the cycle of Jewish history with calamity and loss. Yet if the circle stands for Jewish history, what does the pyramid represent? By figuring the mound of corpses (presumably in Horoditch), the pyramid clearly represents Jewish history as well—or at least one of its calamities. Moreover, the two different geometrical representations—circle and pyramid—stand for the same history. Indeed, the Horoditch pogrom, according to Tchaikov’s interpretation of Markish, is part not of the repetitive and cyclical movement of Jewish history but rather of its moment of interruption and change. Both the circle and the pyramid stand for Jewish history; they signify in their mutual presence Markish’s dialec-tical concept of Jewish history. Figured as both circle and pyramid, the illustration reveals the dialectical view of history: precisely at the point when the catastrophe seems to be merely the continuity—that

Figure 2. Propaganda poster by El Lissitzky, “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” (1919). Used by permission of VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2010.

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is, a cyclical repetition—of the same, the present calamity becomes the wedge that breaks the circle.

Should we need any further corroboration for the dialectical rela-tion between the circle and the pyramid, we might briefly examine El Lissitzky’s well-known propaganda poster “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” from 1919 (see Figure 2). In Lissitzky’s poster, which might well have inspired Tchaikov’s, the intrusive triangle (which is red in the original) penetrating the white circle symbolizes the Bol-sheviks (the Reds) beating their opponents (the Whites) during the Russian Civil War. And indeed, the comparison between Lissitzky’s and Tchaikov’s graphic works suggests the following analogy: Just as the circle in Lissitzky’s poster symbolizes the ancient political order that has to be destroyed, Tchaikov’s circle represents the cyclical his-torical dynamic that has to be interrupted.

By comparing the illustrations of Lissitzky and Tchaikov, the dia-lectical concept of Jewish history in Markish’s poem is thrown into high relief. Whereas Lissitzky’s wedge stands for the Reds in opposi-tion to the circle that symbolizes the Whites, Tchaikov’s illustration does not offer such a binary opposition in that both the circle and the pyramid represent the same thing: Jewish history as an endless repe-tition and as a mound of corpses, respectively. These figures suggest the dialectical intention underlying Markish’s Di kupe: the pyramid of corpses in Horoditch is not just the most recent repetition of catas-trophe but also the last one. The civil war during which the corpses of Horoditch had piled up is the historical event that, by ushering in the triumph of the Revolution, will once and for all interrupt the cycli-cally catastrophic course of Jewish history.

Of course, Horoditch was not the last atrocity, and the pogrom at its marketplace was soon overshadowed by calamities on another scale altogether. Yet the significance of Di kupe lies in allowing us to read history not as a chain of discrete and definable events but rather as the interval between these discrete points—an interval whose only certainty is that of the movement itself. In this respect, Di kupe high-lights the avant-garde as a subversive gesture that both repudiates the past and flouts any order as such.

Notes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual conference of the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig. I would like to thank its director,

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Dan Diner, for giving me the opportunity to present my work. My reading of Peretz Markish began under the guidance of Delphine Bechtel. Her feed-back has helped shape the ideas presented here. I am deeply thankful to Hana Wirth-Nesher for her sharp critical commentary in the latter stages of this article and, as always, to Yonatan Touval, whose scholarly rigor and deep literary knowledge bear greatly on my work. Except as indicated otherwise, all translations from foreign-language sources are mine.

1 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minne-apolis, 1984), esp. 55–82.

2 A parallel version of Di kupe was published in Kiev in 1922. Markish scholars usually treat the Warsaw edition as the definitive one for a number of reasons, including the fact that it contains two sections the Kiev does not (i.e., 24 sections as opposed to 22). I share this scholarly preference for the Warsaw edition and will follow it throughout this article. For discussion of the different versions of Di kupe, see Avraham Nowersztern, Kesem ha-dimdumim: Apokalipsah u-meshichiyut be-sifrut yidish (Jerusalem, 2003), 309, and Seth L. Wolitz, “A Yiddish Modernist Dirge: Di Kupe of Perets Markish,” Modern Jewish Studies 6 (1987): 56–72.

3 The testimony was published by Eliezer David Rosental in his Megillat ha-tevach, 3 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1927–31), 2: 24–25. David G. Roskies is the first to have pointed out this source. See his Against the Apocalypse: Re-sponses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 330.

4 Nokhem Oyslender, “A kapitel zikhroynes vegn Peretz Markishen,” Di yidishe gas 2 (1993): 49–75. For more of Oyslender’s recollections, see Nowersztern, Kesem ha-dimdumim, 144–45.

5 Bialik wrote a Yiddish version of the poem, “In Shkhite Shtot,” in 1906. 6 Chana Kronfeld has already pointed out the literary closeness of Markish

and Mayakovsky. For an analysis of Markish’s modernism, see her On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley, 1996), 202–7. For a discussion of Markish’s relationship to Mayakovsky, see also Ame-lia Glaser, “The End of the Bazaar: Revolutionary Eschatology in Isaac Babel’s Konarmiia and Peretz Markish’s Di Kupe,’’ Jews in Russia and East-ern Europe 2, no. 53 (2004): 5–32.

7 Ch. N. Bialik, Shirim: Mahadurah mada‘it be-livyat mevo’ot ve-chillufei nosach, ed. Dan Miron, 3 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1983–2000), 2: 156.

8 Peretz Markish, Di kupe (Warsaw, 1921), 5. Except for the last stanza, the translation above is that of Leonard Wolf and appears in The Pen-guin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, ed. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk (New York, 1987), 352–54.

9 Perets Markish, “Mit farmakhte oygn,” Bikher velt (May–June 1922): 228, 230–31.

10 For the relationship between the quest for materialistic representation

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and the Jewish tradition in the poetry of Anna Margolin, see Barbara Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” Modern Language Quarterly 63, no. 4 (Dec. 2002): 501–36.

11 Markish, Di kupe, 30. Translation by Wolf in Howe et al., Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, 366.

12 Markish, “Mit farmakhte oygn,” 234–35. 13 Wolitz is interested in exploring the liturgical structure underlying Di

kupe. Although Di kupe repays such an exploration, my own reading of the poem suggests that any attempt to situate the poem within a single organizing structure is undermined by the poem’s formal openness. See Wolitz, “A Yiddish Modernist Dirge.”

14 Itskhok Nusinov, “Fun natsyonaln troyer tsu sotsyaln mut,” Di royte velt, no. 8 (Aug. 1929), 95.

15 Dov Ber Malkin, “Oyf der grenets fun doyres,” Bikher velt 6–7 (July 1929): 3.

16 Translation by Wolf, except for the second line in the fourth stanza and the second line in the last stanza. In the first instance, I prefer to ren-der geshendt as “desecrated” rather than “dishonored” (as in Wolf’s translation); in the second, I prefer to render opvarfekhtsn as “leftovers” rather than “rubbish” (as in Wolf’s translation). Howe et al., Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, 356–58.

17 In this context, it is important to note Roskies’ argument that residual elements of Jewish tradition inform the reactions of even the most osten-sibly secular Jewish Yiddish writers to catastrophe: “Yet even of Markish it can be said that the liturgical framework creates a construct as timeless as the texts it sets to subvert” (Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 100).

18 Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York, 1961), 257.

19 More specifically, the tirade is followed by the blessing that opens the section of the morning service called pesukei de-zimra’.

20 Markish, Di kupe, 9. In the first line, the Yiddish word “fayg” denotes not only the middle finger but also a fig. The double meaning is signifi-cant since it both invokes a piercing finger and calls to mind the bibli-cal landscape.

21 Group Mu manifesto, 1978, cited in Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Mo-ment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, 1986), 47.

22 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 83–84. 23 Peretz Markish, Farbaygeyendik: Oyf di vegn fun yiddisher dikhtung (Vilna,

1921), 31. 24 Circumstantial evidence of this intimacy between artists and writers

can be found in the series of discussions that the Kultur Lige orga-nized with Yiddish writers and poets, including Markish. See Seth L. Wolitz, “The Jewish National Art Renaissance in Russia,” in Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928, ed. Ruth Apter-Gabriel (Jerusalem, 1988), 39.

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25 Mann, “Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin,” 503. 26 The term “cubo-futurism” originally designated a group of Russian

poets influenced by French cubism and Italian futurism. It was later applied to a group of Russian artists.

27 Glaser, “The End of the Bazaar,” has already pointed out this futurist aspect of Di kupe.

28 See Nowersztern, Kesem ha-dimdumim, 145, and Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 99.

29 Peretz Markish, Di kupe (page not indicated). Translation by Wolf, with the exception of the line “Leap upon a millstone; leap upon an arc.” For Wolf, see Howe et al., Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, 356.

30 Henryk Berlewi, “In kamf far der nayer form,” Ringen 1 (1921): 31–33. 31 Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on New and Old Judaism,

ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia, 1958), 192 . 32 Lenin’s language is illustrative: “Human knowledge is not (or does not

follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a se-ries of circles, a spiral.” See his “On the Question of Dialectics,” in Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow, 1965), 38: 221.