God Hid His Face
Selected Poems of RAJZEL ZYCHLINSKY

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
The Poetry of Redemption through Compassion

Emanuel S. Goldsmith
(Professor of Yiddish Language and Literature Queens College of the City University of NewYork)
 

In 1928, the Yiddish poet Ezra Korman of Detroit published a beautiful volume of 390 pages in small type entitled Yidishe Dikhterins (Yiddish Women Poets). It contained selections from the work of some seventy Yiddish female poets from the late sixteenth to the twentieth century. The book made Yiddish readers in America and elsewhere aware of the significant contribution of women to the Yiddish literary heritage.
Rajzel Zychlinsky was not included in Korman's anthology. Although she was already writing and actually had her first poem published in the same year in which the anthology appeared, she was only eighteen years of age at the time. The distinguished Yiddish poet and memoirist, Melekh Ravitch, later wistfully recalled that Zychlinsky's earliest poems were "extremely tender, romantic, unclear, scarcely melodic and absolutely illogical." Nevertheless, by the time that her first book of poems appeared in 1936, the celebrated poet Itsik Manger wrote a foreword in which he hailed Zychlinsky's work as "a new, authentic revelation of the feminine poetic countenance in Jewish Poland."
It was clear from Zychlinsky's first volume that she was the true heiress of generations of Yiddish female poets in Central and Eastern Europe and a worthy representative of the finest women poets of the twentieth century the world over. Most remarkable was her strong individuality in terms of both her poetic persona and poetic gift. As the present volume indicates - even in translation - her unique voice has elevated her to a position of prominence among the very best writers in Yiddish  - both female and male.
What Zychlinsky was able to do in her first book of poems, she has managed to do in all of her work. She continually demonstrates the indispensability of poetry - and especially of the short, short poem - in capturing and conveying the flavor, aroma, and impact of the interior, the hidden, and the transcendent aspects of human experience, and in situating them in the cosmos. She also excels in plumbing the depths of human loneliness, on the one hand, and in charting its redemption in ethical
moral responsibility, on the other.
Rajzel Zychlmsky was born in Gombin, Poland on July 27, 1910. Her father, a tanner by trade, made several trips to America before settling in Chicago where he died in 1928. Her mother, on the other hand, was a religious woman who feared that the secular blandishments of the Golden Land would entice her children to abandon their piety and therefore refused to emigrate. She met her death, together with her remaining children, in the gas chambers of Chelmno.
Rajzel received her education in a Polish public school and from private tutors. She ran an orphans' home in 1935. From 1936 to 1939 she lived in Warsaw, until, together with her husband, the psychiatrist and author Dr. Isaac Kanter, she managed to escape to Russia where their son, Marek, was born. After the war she lived in Poland and France until her arrival in America in 1951. In the United States she continued writing Yiddish poetry while working in a factory, obtaining a high school diploma, studying at City College, and raising her son.
Zychhnsky published seven volumes of Yiddish poems between 1936 and 1993 in Poland, the United States, France, and Israel. The present volume is the first in English translation, although sensitivity and translations of individual poems have appeared in various anthologies.
In his foreword to Zychlinsky's Lider (Poems) of 1936, Itsik Manger noted that the things the poet wrote about could be counted on one's fingers: "mother, cat, willow, wolf, poplar, beggar, child, and well ....It is, however, not the external poetic inventory that counts, but rather the nuancing, always illuminating the object with a different light, evoking a different mood ...in brief, the ability to vary the [same] material to infinity, always repeating basic motifs in ever new ways." Manger also drew attention to the fact that the central figures of almost all of her early poems were mother and child, and that everything in her mother's house was deemed worthy of a poem.
As the horizons of Zychlinsky's world broadened, the intensity of her poetry deepened both technically and existentially From the intimacy of her parental home the poet went on to extend a warm hand of intimate friendship to her sorely tried people, to human beings everywhere, to the animate and inanimate worlds, to nature  empathized simultaneously with the loneliness of all that is and extended the caring of her own warm motherly heart to all of existence. Her poetry, which had excelled in discovering the all in the small, now commiserated with the small in the all, the micro in the macro, the perishable in the eternal.
She abandoned her sometime reliance on rhyme to adorn and buttress the power of her poems and committed herself to the more difficult but more rewarding paths of free verse, to the fires of poetic imagery, dream and hallucination. The moral stance of her poetry became clearer and the purity of her voice among the poets unmistakable. 
The Yiddish literary critics began to pay greater attention to Zychlinsky's poetry The widely respected S. Niger praised her poems on Jewish and biblical themes. Shlomo Bickel characterized her as a unique and original poet who was simultaneously related to every other Yiddish poet and distinct from all of them. He also found a sensuous intensity in her lines. Jacob Glatstein was similarly taken with her concealed eroticism, original imagery, and sparse diction. He admired the profound intimacy of her verse as well as her ability to hide her emotion behind images and her longings behind surprising lines.
For Yitzkhok Yanosovitch, Zychhnsky was the most original and authentic of Yiddish female poets and the poet of "associations and images that take intellectual leaps and lead us from reality to illusion and from illusion to a higher, more essential reality." Yitzkhok Goldkorn characterized her as a medium through whom the spirit of poetry, premonition, and vision speaks, bringing nature to life and identifying herself with it. The female critic Gitl Mayzil saw her work as embodying the essence of women's poetry: moral indignation at the injustices perpetrated against women, intimate association with the phenomena of nature, and impressive female tenderness which great poets view as one of the most powerful forces in the world.
In addition to her remarkable poems of womanhood, motherhood, the world of the lonely individual (identification with black people is a frequent theme in her work), and the world of nature, Zychlinsky has been most widely commended for the profound and proud Jewishness of her poems in general and of her poems related to the Holocaust in particular. It seems unnecessary to state that these poems are her most emotional, most profound and most universal even as they constitute her most elegant (yes, elegant) work.
Since those horrible days, Zychlinsky has lived with the Holocaust in her house and in her heart. When one reads her poems, one is convinced that only poets can rescue this most tragic episode in the life of the Jewish people from the jaws of meaninglessness and absurdity. Her Holocaust poems, as Yitzkhok Goldkorn observes, lack the expressionistic dimension of a mourner's weeping and wailing over his loss. They do, however, possess the impressionistic dimension of vision which recalls the biblical prophecy that one day "the very stone will protest from the wall" (Habakkuk 2:11). Rajzel Zychlinsky's Holocaust poems, like all of her work, resounds with the spirit of modesty, piety and compassion of generations of Jewish women. Indeed, the Yiddish and Hebrew term for compassion, rachamim, is derived from the word for "womb." Zychlinsky's poetic legacy bears testimony to the possibility of human redemption through ethical indignation and tenderness, moral responsibility and compassion.
Barnett Zumoff, Marek Kanter, and Aaron Kramer deserve our gratitude for bringing to completion this noble and significant venture - the publication of Rajzel Zychlinsky's Yiddish poetry in English translation.

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