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MEMORIES OF MY
FATHER
My father has always
been a large presence in my heart and mind...and even now well into
the third decade since his death at the age of eighty-five my memories
of him are as vivid as any memories can be. I write about him with a
familiarity that comes from having been very close to him all through
the years, and most especially during the last twenty years of his life
when we worked together on these translations of his poetry. . He was a man who
lived his life in accordance with his own special view of what was important
in his life. And he was a perfect exemplar of the adage, poeta nascitur,
non fit. Poets are born, not made. If ever a man could be said to have
been self taught and self made, it was Alter Esselin. He was born in
Tchernigov in the Ukraine in April of 1889 and died on November 22nd
1974. The only formal
education he ever had--the conventional cheder of the Ashkenaz Jews--came
to an abrupt end when his father was gored to death by his prize bull.
My father was then a very lively ten, the eldest of five siblings. His
widowed young mother, Tzivia, in her despa ir decided that she had too
many mouths to feed and fearing she would not be able to take care of
all her children decided that she had at least to minimize somewhat
her burden, and decided to send her eldest child--her lively ten year
old--off into the world as an apprentice. My father told me of that
event without complaint, but his quiet description of what he went through
was unforgettable, rendered perhaps all the more poignant since I was
myself ten when he told me the story.
The story of his
apprenticeships--please note the plural--was one he told me at bed times,
and the accounts held my interest because he was a master story teller.My
memories of the stories he told me are among the most vivid of my childhood.
He knew the power of language, and he used words with such power that
the scenes of his Tchernigov childhood were as vivid to me as the Milwaukee
neighborhood we lived in then. The first years
of his life in that shtetl in the Ukraine on the outskirts of Tchernigov,
were evidently quite pleasant. It was a close-knit family with a father,
Yosel Serebrebenik, who was somewhat older than his mother, Tzivia.
Even more interesting
to me was my father's description of the act she would put on of a Saturday
night. For this performance she would enlist the help of my father.
Together they would carefully put a small quantity of ordinary table
sugar into pieces of paper folded the way apothecaries would wrap medicines.
The young peasant girls of the neighborhood would be invited into the
Serebrenik household for a kind of séance. Tzivia would put on
a "gypsy" scarf, seat herself on a bench near the fireplace,
and proceed to read the palms of the wide eyed girls and to predict
their futures. Naturally, this almost always concerned the likelihood
of their marriages in the near future. And to help bring about her prophecies,
she would allow the girls to buy the "love potions" which
my father had helped her to prepare. The girls were told to serve a
prospective suitor some tea into which they had secretly poured the
magic potion, and all their dreams would come true. My father told me
that watching his mother weave the spell of fantasy for the peasant
girls had given him his first inkling of the power of language and imagination. There was another member of the household who loved language, Tzivia's father, Nachman Zalman Wilenchik. He had been a lehrer, a teacher, but had lost his post because he was that anomaly, a Jewish drunkard. However he must have had a lively spirit because he managed to earn a bit of money by writng little morality fables intended to entertain and enlighten a fenale readership. I have often wondered about the several generations in my ancestry that seemed to involve the delight in language effectively used, and whether there was a genetic aspect to the tendency. My father always
described the very early years of his life as a short lived idyll. He
delighted in running across the fields and swimming in the nearby rivers,
he was not so pleased however by his father's insistence that he accompany
him regularly to the synagogue in order to help him to follow the passages
in the prayer book-Yosel Serebrenik was very nearsighted, and for some
reason never got corrective glasses. It was, alas, a condition that
may have been partly responsible for his untimely death. He was gored
by a prize bull, and died immediately. The neighbors who had seen the
encounter brought his body back to the home on a door that served as
an improvised stretcher. ( Steps and
Kaleidoscopic )
Off
to Work at the Age of Ten She found another
apprenticeship for him, this time to a cigarette maker. The ten year
old arrived to find that he was the only male in the cigarette factory…all
the other employees were young women who spent the whole day filling
paper tubes with tobacco. The new "apprentice" had to do all
the errands that the girls asked him to…and there was a malicious
spirit to the tasks and the way the orders were given. In their misery,
the young girls found some solace in making the boy even more miserable
than they themselves were. After a short time, my father, again in the
dead of night, took his pillow and marched home, again a matter of twenty-
five or more miles. This time his mother
was not so sympathetic. She found another apprenticeship for him, to
a carpenter, and when he left, his mother said to him, "Orkeleh,
kum nisht tzurik." My dear Orkele, this time don't come back."
And my father went off to five years of what amounted to indentured
slave labor. Throughout the years of his servitude he had to arise at
dawn, build the fires, sweep the floors, sharpen the tools, and make
himself available for every task required till the sun went down and
he was allowed to sleep. Particularly onerous was the sawing of logs
to create boards. It involved his being at one end of a two man saw,
the other end of which was usually wielded by a particularly sadistic,
embittered old man. s father) was very nearsighted and had to lean forward
to see the marked line for the cut they were making. This made it possible
for the older man to have the pleasure of pushing the saw into my father's
chest. The procedure occurred repeatedly over the years and caused him
to have a permanent indentation in his chest where the saw handle at
his end was so often pressed into him by the force of the other man's
deliberate thrusts.
Off
to America He traveled by train across Europe, a trip that took several days and got to Antwerp, the city where the ship to take him across the ocean was anchored. The ship wasn't ready when he got to Antwerp, and the passengers had to wait for several days before boarding, During all this time he had not eaten any of the cheese…it was all he had been given by his mother and despite his hunger, didn't want to eat it out of a childish sentimentality. Instead he made do with any snacks he could find. But he did not eat any of the cheese. Finally the ship was ready for boarding, and it went off on its voyage, with Orkeh Serebrenik and hundreds of others deep in the steerage section of the ship. They were midway
across the Atlantic when a delegation of bearded, solemn Jewish men
approached my father and his large cheese. He was sitting down and they
stood over him, with grim, unsmiling faces. They told him quite simply
that he had a choice, either the uneaten very moldy cheese would go
over the side of the ship into the ocean…or he would himself be
tossed over the side. Reluctantly, my father said farewell to the only
souvenir he had of his mother. He arrived in America
to find that sudden death had made another visit to his family. This
time, it was his uncle, his mother's brother--the relative that was
to be his sponsor in the New World, who had died. And, to complete the
symmetry. The uncle had left behind another young widow with five small
children. Once again, my father found himself thrust into an unfriendly,
inhospitable world. His aunt could not keep him in her household with
her husband gone, so she sent the young boy to live with one of her
own brothers, a man who had no direct relationship with my father. The new situation
was very uncomfortable for everyone. My father according to his own
description was then a very cocky youngster, temperamentally unable
to be calculating or diplomatic. The uncle quickly arranged for the
boy to be enrolled in the Carpenter's Union--it was the occasion for
his re-naming himself because the beefy clerk at the Union office had
trouble dealing with the name Orkeh Serebrenik. My father chose the
first name Artur--in honor of the pianist Artur Rubenstein--and he chose
the surname Solomon in honor of "the wisest man who ever lived."
Thus for most of the time he was in the Carpenter's Union he was Art
Solomon. And as Artur, the
uncle got him a job in a millwright shop. Alas, my father had no sense
of his place in the household. He took the first pay envelope he got
and bought some clothes with it instead of bringing it to the household
as the family expected him to. This action, and some silly things he
said, made the atmosphere in the household very chilly. In a short time
it became necessary for him to move out and he had trouble finding himself
in this confusing world. He made a very bad choice. After a couple of
years of being a fancy free youngster he married a girl as young as
he. Her name was Faegeleh, Yiddish for little bird. And she was evidently
somewhat birdlike from his description of her. They were both very young
and quite foolish. The marriage was-- not surprisingly-- rather shaky
and came to a quick end when Faegle, as bird like as her name, ran off…with
a circus acrobat. My father was devastated,
and so shaken that he took to a life as a wanderer, which meant that
for a while he became a hobo, riding the rails, accompanied by another
immigrant Jewish carpenter. They traversed the country, going wherever
the trains happened to go, and ended up one morning in the railroad
yards in Montreal…where they were seen disembarking from the freight
car they had occupied, and were shocked to find that shots were fired
at them. My father and his friend then and there decided to stop riding
the rails right then and there. My father found a way to get back to
the U.S. and set off on another pattern of life. For the next several
years, he would work as a journeyman carpenter in various cities in
the eastern part of the country. Such towns as Wheeling West Virginia,
McKeesrocks Pennsylvania, Canton Ohio, and so on. He would work for
a few weeks, saving enough money to keep himself alive for a month or
two and would then spend day and night reading voraciously. He read
world literature, adventure stories, history, poetry…anything he
could lay his hands on. Thanks to the benefactions of Andrew there were
libraries almost everywhere that provided him with the means to satisfy
his hunger for words, words, words.
Once when I asked
him what writing poetry meant to him at that time, he was silent for
a minute or two, and then with great vehemence, he raised his arm and
struck his closed fist on the table and said to me, "Yosel, it
is what saved me from suicide. I could not have survived if it had not
been for being able to create di lider - the poems." From then on he
would compose poems during his wanderings, stopping for a time in one
town or another whenever he had saved enough to last a few weeks. One
such town was Canton, Ohio, where there was a community of immigrant
Jews from Poland and found some encouragement from them in regard to
his poetry. This took the concrete form of publication. One of the women
translated a poem of his--Di Fodim fun Gloibn-(The Thread of Belief)--into
Polish, and arranged to get it published in the community's newspaper.
This event so delighted him that he became brave became brave enough
to send some of his compositions to a Yiddish newspaper in Detroi-t-Der
Veg {The Way). And to his great delight, one of his poems appeared in
one of the next issues, and then a second.
By then my father
had devised for himself a pen name--it evidently was a very fashionable
thing to do among the Yiddish writers of the time. For the time being
he continued to use the first name, Artur, but as his surname, my father
took most of the consonants of Solomon - S, L, N - and got Esselin as
a euphonious result. Seeing himself in
print, and so highly praised, the newly minted Artur Esselin decided
that he had to go to Detroit and thank the editor of the newspaper.
He told me that he just took the train from Canton, Ohio and got to
the office of the newspaper so early in the morning that nobody was
there as yet. He sat in the doorway in his work clothes and when the
young woman who was the editor's secretary arrived, she was visibly
unhappy to see this unshaven fellow on the steps. My father quickly
moved aside, and waited for the arrival of the editor, a certain Mr.
Gordon, who asked him what he wanted. My father said, "I am Artur
Esselin." And the editor embraced him, invited him in, and that
was my father's modest entry into the Yiddish literary world. An entry
that was always to be a relatively quiet one because of his temperamental
inability, or perhaps an unwillingness, to play the "literary game."
In 1927 my parents moved back to the Midwest, settling permanently in Milwaukee where my mother's family lived. My father felt very much at home in that middle sized city, and was happy to have a circle of good friends in the Jewish community there. Even though the Jewish population of the city was not a large one, it provided him with a number of people who were aware of his special voice and talent. All through the years there were a good many occasions where his work was celebrated with "evenings" in his honor, especially at the time of publication of his three collections of verse. Knoitn (Candlewicks) was published in 1927; Unter der Last (Under the Yoke) was published in 1938, and Lider fun a Midbarnik (Poems of a Hermit) appeared in 1954. The latter was awarded the Harry Kovner Memorial Prize for the best book of Yiddish poetry, presented by the Jewish Book Council in 1955. He was published by most of the major literary periodicals in the world of Yiddish, including Di Zukunft, Di Literarishe Bletter and Di Goldene Kayt. In 1969, a collection of fifty-three of his poems was published in English translation. The present selection of translations include the fifty-three previously published plus another twenty done since then. I believe that the seventy-three poems represent pretty well the range of his work, although a good many of those not translated simply presented too many difficulties because of such factors as obscurity of subject matter and intricacies of rhyme scheme.
The wit and inventiveness
of his images, the freshness of his metaphors serve to counteract the
effect of his themes. And there is an underlying strength which defies
the sadness-- the reader knows that the very act in writing about such
themes is an act of defiance. There are other paradoxes. He lived in
cities ever since he came to the United States when he was only a boy,
yet his poetry is filled with images of nature, ( Caprice
and Elegy for a Tree ) and the
reason is not hard to see: his poetic attitudes were formed during his
childhood years in the Ukraine, a rural and highly poetic place. Another
paradox: although his very limited formal education stopped when he
was only ten, his work has shown him to have an educated mind. His references
to the classics of world literature are frequent and accurate. The explanation:
he educated himself by voracious reading. Still another noteworthy
surprise in his poetry. He was not after his boyhood years, a formally
observant Jew, and yet in poem after poem, Alter Esselin speaks as a
religious man. He addresses many of his poems directly to God--pleading
for help, asking for mercy, denouncing Him and praising Him in a way
that only a religious man would employ ( Open
the Door ). In his poetry he adopted the tone of a prophet writing
often from the edge of an abyss ( Interlude
), perched on the very brink of existence. His third book is called
Lider fun a Midbarnik (Poems of a Hermit), and the metaphor is clear--
the poet is letting us know that his circumstance is self-created. Milwaukee
is not a desert; but to a prophet it doesn't matter where he lives,
isolation is the result of his vocation. ( If
I am Like the Worm ) Esselin was self-made,
a product of his own will and craft. He earned his living as a carpenter,
a maker of things- a matter of some importance to his view of himself.
Take as an example of this, his poem To
the One on the Cross, which speaks of the joy of making beautiful,
useful things. In a reminiscence
by Yitzhok Hurvich we get a vivid picture of the combination of a carpenter
and poet:
Esselin writes about subjects that are usually called sad or melancholy-- loneliness ( Desolaton of Soul ), decay, the death of a bull engulfed by a snowstorm ( A Bull in the Snow ), the desperation caused by poverty ( On Our Street ) and the sufferings caused by the persecution of the Jews ( Come Enemies Disperse Us ). Yet his poems do not make one fell depressed. The wit and inventiveness of his images, the freshness of his metaphors serve to counteract the effect of his themes ( My Shadow ). And there is an underlying strength which defies the sadness--the reader knows that the very act in writing about such themes is an act of defiance ( Death ). This paradoxical aspect of Esselin's work has been described by Rapoport:
ABOUT
ALTER ESSELIN'S TOOLBOX AND HIS TOOLS The toolbox and the hand tools pictured here belonged to my father and they reflect a bygone time. My father made the toolbox for himself about eighty years ago. He hand crafted it to a design that he drew up himself and its dimensions were such that it could hold the tools he would need for most jobs. Fully loaded with the tools you see in the pictures-saws, hand drills, files and so forth-the whole thing weighs forty pounds. It is an artifact from an era that is almost lost to memory. Nobody makes their own toolboxes, and carpenters don't use hand tools very often. These days. It's understandable.They require strength and great skill. I used to watch my father making something useful for our home-a step stool, a mailbox, a picture frame-and was always impressed by the care he would apply and the speed with which he would work Once I asked him why he was working so hard at the task. He said, "I'm so used to the foreman standing there watching me-I can't help working hard when I use tools. If the foreman sees you not working at full speed, he'll tell you to go home and he'll replace you." Nor was he ever slipshod. Looking closely at the construction of the tool box, one can see that all the corners are precisely fitted, the hinges work smoothly, the drawer slides in and out without a sound. There is a special tool in the group that my father used to align the teeth of his saws. He was well known to be expert in saw maintenance, and other carpenters paid him to attend to their saws. His concern with precision of craftsmanship extended to his poetry as well. I think there could be no better quote to demonstrate both his passion for true craftsmanship as well as his physical vigor than this reminiscence from Yitzhok Hurvich, an editor of a Yiddish literary journal:
I can see in my
mind's eye an image of my father returning from his day of heavy labor
as a carpenter. I would have been four or five, and I would be sitting
at the front steps waiting to see him as he would appear turning the
corner, walking with that same box of tools on his shoulder. I would
run to him and he would lift me up onto the other shoulder, and carry
me that way to where we lived.
I hope that the poems speak for themselves, but, of course, translations are a poor substitute for the originals. In the case of Yiddish, however, the loss of Yiddish speaking population has made translation an imperative necessity. It is an irony and still another paradox of Alter Esselin's poetic career, that he had always expressed the conviction that Yiddish had a short life expectancy--even at the time when he first began to write. It is a measure of the strength of his devotion to his mission that he spent a half century writing poetry in Yiddish despite his certainty that the world of Yiddish speakers was coming to an end. It was not that he anticipated the Holocaust, he simply understood that his beloved language was not going to survive the easy assimilation available to the generations that would come after the immigrant population. I well remember the many late night arguments he had with his Yiddishist friends who accused him of being just a pessimist…and the accusations were often made with voices raised high. And he would reply with equal vehemence that he was not a pessimist…just a sad realist. And, sadly enough, he was right and they were wrong. The translations
are the product of more than thirty years of work. In most cases the
translations substantially duplicate the rhythmic structure and the
rhyme scheme of the originals…a task made all compromises as possible,
keeping away from the temptations of "free" the more demanding
because of Alter Esselin's fondness for structured verse with meter
and rhyme schemes that required work. I've tried to be faithful to the
originals. Making as a few compromises just for the sake of an easy
rhyme, yet still striving to retain the aspect of careful craftsmamship
of the original. . Another aspect of
Alter Esselin's work was his economy of language. He would often say
to me as we were working on the translations, "Yosl, vas veniger.
( The Simple Word )" The
equivalent of what in English is often heard, "Less is more."Or
also, "Small is beautiful." In that same spirit,
he loved craftsmanship whether it was in his work as a carpenter or
as a poet or a story teller. When I was a youngster I would often find
on waking from a good night's sleep that my father had been up all night,
bent over his writing desk, a huge mound of cigerette stubs in a the
big bowl he used as an ashtray, and a pile of paper…drafts of one
poem that had gone through dozens of changes during the night. He would
ask me to listen to the most recent draft, and wouldn't even wait for
my reaction…he was already working on a new revision. Later in
the week we might take the ceremonial walk to the nearest mailbox, a
block away, and with some hesitation he would drop the poem in the slot,
standing silent as it disappeared from view. He would think about the
poem for a couple of days, and often would have to send a telegram asking
that there be a line change. He would perhaps get a payment of two or
three dollars for the poem (it was the Depression after all) and the
telegram would have cost more than that. Another picture
I have is of my father preparing a speech for some literary occasion
(which often enough would be a local celebration of his work) and I
would see the successive versions of the speech being written out and
then read aloud with my mother and me as his audience. The first versions
of the speech might be twenty minutes long. Each successive draft shorter
and shorter…until the final one would last at the most three or
four minutes.And he had learned a lesson early in life from his mother.
When he would get up to give the talk--almost always he would have chosen
to be the very last one on the program--he had a special trick which
always seemed to work. He would deliberately speak in a very soft voice,
so soft that people had to lean forward to hear him. He felt that forcing
them to make the effort to hear him also gave them the incentive to
think about what he was trying to convey. And he strove always to be
done before anybody in the audience realized that he was finished. He
would say to me afterward, "You see how grateful they were for
my being so careful not to keep them any longer from their beds." There is one more
anecdote that is amusing and significant.While my father received a
certain measured respect within the Jewish community of Milwaukee, he
was not among the influential people-the "smetana" (the cream)
of the Jewish community. However, there was a certain revision of his
place in their world as a result of a visit that the influential members
of the community paid to the then young state of Israel. In due deference
to their being influential people--the group was granted a visit with
the then President of Israel, Zalman Shazar. When they had been ushered
into his presence, Shazar looked them over and said that he noticed
they had all come from Milwaukee, a city which had a very good reason
to be proud of one of their own. Naturally, they all thought he would
go on to mention Golda Maier, who indeed had spent her girlhood years
in Milwukee. To their astonishment, he said that he was referring to
the distinguished Yiddish poet, Alter Esselin. Shazar was himself a
man who wrote some poetry, and needless to say, the delegation on their
return let my father know that they had more reason to regard him with
added respect. My father felt a certain understandable glee that they
had been given the small surprise. My father was fond of quoting the frequently cited notion that "poetry is what is lost in the translation." I have more recently run across a contrasting notion, to the effect that "poetry is what survives the translation." I hope that a good deal of the poetry has indeed survived the translations. In doing these translations I had considerable help from the poet himself, and the collaboration was a most interesting adventure for me. As his son, I think there could have been no more pleasant literary task. Nor was it solely a literary one--as must be obvious. I acknowledge the help of many others who have suggested solutions to a lot of the problems which translating poetry must impose. Howard Weinshal a ver devoted friend of my father was most helpful. And in addition I am most especially grateful for the multifarious help provided me by Dr. Ernest Rappaport. Joe Esselin May, 2000
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It had been noticed that Tzivia had taken to talking and joking with
"shcotzim"-- non-Jewish boys, and it was decided that she
should be married off as quickly as possible, before she could get into
trouble. The nearest candidate had evidently been this "alter bocher",
a somewhat long-in-the-tooth but mild and pleasant fellow, Yosel Serebrenik,
a cattle dealer. Not a very successful one evidently. The family lived
in a large room on, literally, the ground floor. There was only earth
under their feet. They weren't prosperous which was probably why Tzivia
found it necessary to earn extra money. One way she did this was to
huckster produce and chickens at the open air farmer's markets. My father
said that it was a scene worth seeing when she would declaim the virtues
of her poultry…"fat, fat, the wings will melt in your mouth"…she
would announce, holding the birds high in the air and swinging them
by their legs. And her celebration of her vegetables was equally eloquent.
