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[Page 635]

The Rebi, Rov Mendl Morgnshteyn, a son of the Sokolov Rebi Rov Yitskhak Zelig Morgnshteyn and a grandson of the old Kotsk Rebi Rov Mendele Kotsker, lived in Vengrov. The pious Jews of the town took pride in their rov.

On the morning of yomkiper the Nazis attacked the Rebi while he was standing in his kitl [white gown] and talis praying, and dragged him into the market square. Soon they began to drive all the Jews from the shuln and study houses and shtiblekh into the market space.

The Nazis began to mock the Rebi and, with cat-o'-ninetail whips in hand, forced him to dance for them. The Jews who saw this wept quietly in their hearts. But they were too frightened to say a word.

The Nazi commander began to beat the Rebi with the whip and screamed that he should dance. Every time that he hit him with the whip it clutched the Rebi's heart. The Rebi tried with his last strength to obey the Nazi's order.

But suddenly the Nazi commander stopped beating the Rebi with the whip and ordered him to take off his fur hat and pick up the horse dung that was laying on the square's stones and put in into his hat, in order to put it on his head.

The Rebi carried out the order, without even bending. His lips were mummering a prayer throughout.

But this was not enough for the Nazi commander, and he further ordered the Rebi to dance for him, with the horse manure and the hat on his head. The Rebi did this as well, he danced again. And Jews tell that they heard how the Rebi quietly whispered, “Master of the universe, may all these insults come before you, may they be an atonement for all our sins and may a redeemer come soon for the Jews,”

In the end the Nazi commander stabbed the Rebi with a bayonet. His white gown was soaked in blood.

Officially he was the secretary of the “Poaley Tsien” Zionist-Socialist pary in Sokolov, but in fact – he was the central figure and leader of the party, organizer of all its cultural undertakings, leader of the rich Brener Library and the standard speaker at all party meetings and other Zionist events in town. Being a person with a full education and a gifted speaker, he quickly advanced to the first ranks of the Zionist movement in Sokolov. He was also in demand by the Central in the surrounding areas as a speaker on party and literary themes.

Henokh Zayants was completely permeated with the Zionist ideal of the Hoveyvi Tsion atmosphere that dominated his home life. A son of the revered and venerated by all Aron Asher Zayants of blessed memory,

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Henokh, along with all Reb Aron Asher's children, was educated in the spirit of Jewish and national values. There were no conflicts between the parents and the children. The blue and white Keren-kayemet collection box was always on the desk at Aron Asher's bookhandling shop. And if someone came into his office to write a “proshenye” to the government or an address out of the country, he did not take any payment for it, but told them to put something into the collection box.

In 1936 he was requested by the Party Central office to work in the Central Committee of the “Frayhayt” movement in Warsaw, and also became a general collabortor in the party organ “Bafrayung – Arbeter Shtime” {Workers' Voice}.

After long efforts on his side he finally managed to arrange aliye to Erets Yisroel in 1938. However the certificate that was designated for him was given by the party to someone else in Sokolov. They promised to give him the next certificate, but it did not seem to arrive…

Henokh Zayants was designated by the Central Committee to work for a certain period as secretary of the professional society of the trade employees in Brisk. The war caught him there and he was murdered in 1941 along with all the Brisk Jews by the Nazi murderers.

Restoring a Yiddish library in Sokolov

Yosl – that is what his parents called him, as did everyone else around him.

A spoiled and mischievous boy, full of fire and impetuous, who could hardly ever sit still in one place. His hobby was horses and wagons. Whenever Yosl could get out of the house they already knew that he was with the horses and wagons in the big market square. There, he wrangled with the wagon drivers to let him ride with them, and the point – to hold the reins of the horses. Perhaps a personality trait for the later development of a dominant personality.

Dr. Zilberman

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So it was natural that Yosl in his early youth exhibited an understanding of and connection to social issues and in particular to cultural questions.

By the time that he was a pupil in the Tarbus school in Shedlets he had already begun his social activity in the youth organizations, where he dedicated himself to the questions of the Hebrew language and literature. After finishing the Tarbus school he went to study in the teachers' seminary named for Sh. Poznanski in Warsaw. There he developed a feverish cultural activity in the Zionist youth organizations.

I often asked my intimate friend, his father Khayim of blessed memory: “Khayim, what do you say about Yosl? Will something ever come of him?” He would say, in order to get a confirmation of his hopes, that “something” would certainly become of his mischievous and fiery son Yosl.

The Nazi cataclysm met Yosl in a very youthful blossom, but his moral and spiritual determination held him up in the terrible years of devastation, from which he came out spiritually stronger, with an accomplished academic education.

And when after an interruption of seventeen years of pain and suffering I saw him again, with us in Israel, the first thought that came to mind was: Yes, “something” has become of Yosl.

His wonderful slender figure, the deep impression of his intelligent personality, the noble appeal and simplicity that breathed out with such human warmth, brought everyone, in the first minutes of meeting him, to want to be near him.

He was a very promising strength for the family and the society, a person with a broad Jewish-human comprehension.

I merited having him as a guest in my home in Gevatayim only a few times. In our talks about Jews and Jewishness he blazed with wisdom and deep erudition. During those discussions I thought: He is the satisfaction of life for his tragically-murdered father, the Zionist romantic, who did not merit seeing Yosl in his wonderful adult blossom.

Rather, a murderous fate had it that the young and so full-hearted Yosl would be torn out from among us so suddenly, leaving us in deep pain and longing.

May his memory be for a blessing.

Khayim Bar-Sholem (Fridlub)

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Son of Khayim and Sasha, born in Sokolov in 1921, a student in the Shedlets Tarbus school, later in Bialystok Hebrew high school and a graduate the Poznanski Seminar in Warsaw. During his time of wandering, he attended the University of Munich.

In Munich he became the founder and chairman of the surviving-remnant Jewish student union and a collaborator in the local Yiddish press, “Landsberger tsaytung”, ”Undzer veg” and“Af der Vakh”.

Before his aliye to Israel in 1950 he worked in the Israeli embassy in Paris.

Dr. Yosef Zilberman died at the beginning of July 1951 at the age of 28, in Tel-Aviv.

It is very strange to write a eulogy for him.

A eulogy, of all things.

I should open the door and he will, as usual, fall into the room, will look at my writing and say, with that constant bitter irony, “Ekh, foolishness.”

That is why the pen trembles so in my hand now, because it knows: He will not “fall into” his room anymore; his critical smiling irony will not stab, not soothe anymore; he will not take part with his thoughts about books, writers, “big” people with small souls; his word will not whip out any more over the heads of the conventional “great intellectuals”; I will not go deeper with him on questions of life and death.

No, all that will not happen anymore, because he himself is dead, dead.

What kind of strange word – to apply to him!

Who could believe it. How could it happen and – why?

I stand by his dead body (how horrifying to express those words) my heart beating like a fist: May it be possible, may I bend over his dead body and say “You were right”.

In his free time, when he was my guest, I took pains to show him that law does exist and that there is judgement here in our land, and that young grass is growing, and that no one dies without a higher order of reckoning.

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But he said, “I was 'shut in' once, wanting to see the practical purpose, feeling it, fathoming to the very end of infinity.”

And now? –

How can judgement still be. How should I just say everything: There is law. When your death disrupted me and screamed: Absurd, absurd.

By your sickbed Bialek's searing words came to me and to my lips: “If there is justice…”

Woe is me, it was not.

Twenty-eight years devoted to a goal, preparing, coming, and now, when all goals are already achieved – you are no more.

A life of difficult journeys through pain, through hunger and wandering, in teaching, studying, education. And then even more than that: your will was to get to the bottom of that which could not be written in black and white.

And now?

Who will comfort your aging mother, where can one find a comforting word for an orphaned mother?

And where is comfort for a bride who instead of standing up a khupe, has placed her beloved in a funeral casket.

You said: I have taken most beautiful bloom from the bouquet. Now the head of the queen bloom is bowed in a waterfall of her own tears.

And brothers, sisters, friends – how can we find a word of comfort!

A wildly savage fate has torn you away in the midst of a new blossoming and it is hard to sing praises for you, and fear your hard-truth critical irony. Because you were not one of those who flattered or who wanted flattery. Your word – spoken or written – was glowing with truth, courageous honesty– as sincere as your suffering.

We will remember you – because we do not have you. And so we will – all who knew you and loved you – with your name in our hearts – bear our lives to you.

(Leyvi – Tel-Aviv, 1951)

One of the survivors, who suffered his grief and his health like all of those

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survivors, and like them too, hoped even there in the German concentration camps to merit a home in Erets Yisroel and begin a new life here.

Suffered, hoped, and merited – and after arriving here in Israel, was felled by a hard, bitter illness. He wandered around the streets of Israel and knew that his days were numbered; and with a clear conscience tallied the accounting that brought him close to the end.

“Perhaps you would take part in a literary presentation one evening for the new arrivals?” I asked him several weeks before his death (and I wanted by this very invitation to demonstrate that we see him as a healthy man capable of these activities, so that he would give a literary presentation…). “With great pleasure! In a few weeks from now; first I want to rest a little, and I will choose a topic.” (And his response showed me that he did not, ostensibly, expect what would happen in a few weeks; that he was calm; he made plans for a literary evening to come.)

He was an intellectual. Gifted with an elevated talent for literary criticism of a wide scope.

The literary essays that he published every Friday in the newspapers for the survivors in Germany had aroused us, thanks to the power of his expression, his light style, abundant knowledge in the area of Old-World literature, and a deep penetration into the author's spiritual atmosphere.

We were inspired: A literary critic, an essayist, was also growing in the camps in Germany – since not every literature is so blessed.

That beautiful talent was torn apart in the beginning of its new blossoming. And it is the debt of all of us who knew and treasured his literary powers, that they should collect his literary heritage, which is dispersed in the newspapers of the survivors, and publish them here in Israel. So that the name of a blessed talent, who disappeared from among us too soon, does not disappear.

Dr. M. Dvorzshetski, Tel-Aviv, 1952.

An oven in a corner of a house, which is engraved in the memory and embellishes all the memories of your youth; a broken step that you stepped over, up and down, every day of your life, the sign of the snack shop that you used to hop into to buy a big lollipop or a newly-arrived kind of red “ice”, or nuts, with the nickel you begged from your father! Real ones that crack merrily between your teeth, and small, round ones that roll into the hole by themselves; an picture of a girl – the first time signing with a shaking hand; an old-fashioned wall-clock that strikes with a homey familiarity in the long winter nights. All these are parts of one's own life.

Various things, moveable or unmovable, of metal, wood or paper, various colors, you live with, they serve you for years, braided into your life.

Things, just like people, have their fates. Good and bad times; they are new, they give joy, they become tired and die, get torn or are broken.

Rokhl'ke is charmingly dark and lovely. In the creases between her large dark eyes there is a Jewish charm, a kind sense of sharpness. Rokhl's head is adorned with a black “corona” and her face is always alight and open.

The fresh breeze at the Jewish“dacha” where we are meeting is far from fresh. Thousands of paper bits and clouds of flies hurry around, swarming from the people in the sparse woods where Jews prepare the dacha.

But rye grows around the edge, and sways playfully in the evening and among them winds a narrow footpath. The sun sets red, and we sit for hours along the narrow path and read Yekhiel Lerer's “A heym” about Friday evenings and havdales; as people lie back softly and comfortably. The red ball of the setting sun among the rye seems so close, so close, and Rokhl takes her hand and goes smoothly, evenly, over the fields up to there, not far, where she, the sun, lies almost on the ground.

Rokhl is young and restrained. She has heard that things are

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not going smoothly for me in the big city where I am studying. People say that I was thrown out of the student dormitory; they say that the gold buttons of my school uniform twinkle in the late evening hours in the dark streets of the shtetl during the holiday visits home. They say, they say…

But other people bite their lips, eyes close passionately, hands fold themselves into arms.

Now it is Shabes afternoon, a blinding sun pours out over the roofs and hedges of the little small-town houses in the empty market square. Everything is dreaming the Shabes afternoon nap, from the panes over the greenish curtain, slanting toward the polished floor, thousands of dust bits play in the sun's rays. The clock tick-tocks over my sofa.

Rokhl arrives at night. How quickly it gets dark, one can ride out on a bike to the train station, which the tsar has just built close to the town. And then – so many impressions to detail, so many to tell about, so many “huge” little nothings.

Pinkhas-Yankev, the father, is not angry. His reputation as a good grain merchant and a clever Jews is not for nothing. He is tolerant and has sent his daughter to study “outside”. He sits immersed in a holy book when she arrives in the middle of the night. He barely raises his eyes and says to his pride and joy, “Why did you come on the last train? It's already several hours after Shabes. You could have come at eight-fifteen!” He specially mentioned the train that she really did take from the nearby school town.

The morning is Sunday, a long day, a good Sunday, when Jews take a turn around the market square, hands clasped behind them, and talk passionately about community issues and world politics, when the shops are closed and only at around one or two o'clock can one “look into” one's shop, because people are leaving the Catholic church and a regular customer might pass by.

Then comes a Monday, eve of a holiday, and Tuesday and Wednesday are Shavues and Rokhl does not leave for all of four days. Four days of butter-cookies and guest visiting. So many small-town pleasures, so much of meeting the community activists, the Warsaw lecturers hold their own, and so on.

But my father! He was always agitated, he

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went grey and old at a young age. As written in Bialik's booklet, which he gave him, “The one who has the remaining soul”.

In sleepless nights and with deep sighs, plowed-through days, he always regrets and is sorry, searching unsuccessfully for something and waiting for something in vain. The world becomes coarsened. Everything leads to the abyss. The children are away, hopes are not perceived.

To me he was ever worse and more withered: “I was once educated; not as you are, with money from your father! I did not have any brass buttons, I studied in the cellars, learned in the attics! And you? What will become of you, since you are pulled out by the roots, since you are not nourished by the sap?”

Suddenly, just as I was lying on the sofa, it occurred to me: and as soon as it got dark I went to see Khayim Shlosser. Khayim'l the locksmith is a small, wide-boned little Jew, with a head of thick curly hair, with lame legs and an eternally rumpled jacket.

“A good week to you, Yosele!” he welcomed me. “What? A key to the door? You are going with a girl? You are afraid to go home late because of your father…”

When I ride that evening to the station, I have in my pocket a new metal key; I will take off my shoes in the corridor and unlock the door myself, and I will spare waking my father.

This year it is Shavues again. Today is also a Shabes afternoon. Once again I lie on a sofa. Outdoors a fine rain is dripping and plays out a strange monotonous melody

on the windowpanes. It is sharp and one-toned – outdoors and in my heart. A strange Spring this year, but it is raining.

An autumnal Spring!

In this strange city, on earth that burns under the feet, the sun's rays do not play across the China cabinet. No more the tremble of expectation. The hope of love and happiness and punishing talk from a father, like snakes in an ancient picture attacking a thick-armed hero, so the memories and thoughts attack and gnaw and do not stop.

How many days of my life would I give up to see my father, my grey father, as they lead him in his shirtsleeves over the town with another ten householders to the pit and shout out “Father! I understood you, late – but I understand!”

Of course I must still have a picture, I think. Let me look in the old suit! The suit has lasted for years. German camps and forced labor, horrible moments and foolish hopes for good, that did not come. It was long ago when the suit lost its first color, became short and narrow, often served as a pillow, as bed clothes. But it served.

Let me look in a pocket, there must still be a picture rolling around in there.

Akh! How old the suit is now! And the lining almost falling out from age! Let's try to tear it! Dust! Whole, compact clumps of it, gathered over the years. Just like my bitterness and hate…. Suddenly a metallic clang. Something falls out, that was lying stuck someplace under the lining. What is it?

-– ?

A key. An almost new metal key.,br> A key to a lock, that exists no more.

From “Undzer veg”, Munich, 1948.

Born around 1900 in Sokolov Podlask to far from well-to-do parents. He studied in a kheyder but most of his learning came from self-education groups. In 1916 he began his work as a lecturer and publicist. He visited all over Poland and lived in Lithuania for a short time. He published articles of literary criticism. By 1928, he was in Paris. He collaborated at the “Hamer”, “Morgn-frayhayt”, “Tsukunft”, “Lit. bleter”, “Vokhenshrift”, “Naye prese”, “Parizer dzhurnal”, and was arrested in 1941. He left manuscripts of more critical articles, besides several longer essays about Yiddish literature.

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His countless manuscripts have vanished, important articles that have waited for years to see the light of day. Will they be recovered in a hidden grave, or were they torn up by bloody Nazi-paws?

What we have managed to search out up til now – a few numbers of the Warsaw “Vokhenshrift” with Vinogura's works, a set of the “Parizer dzhurnal”, a couple of issues of “Bleter” (both journals were published under his editorial collaboration), a series of his articles in the pre-war “Naye prese” which were hard to successfully transcribe at the Paris National Library – are only a small part of the creations of Borukh Vinogura, the name of a spokesperson in Yiddish cultural Paris.

Vinogura's childhood and youth was hard, just as in his whole life his struggled then too with his material situation. A son of religious, poor parents, he was drawn into the political left (“Poaley tsion”). He was a good speaker, and his political articles attracted notice with their clarity, pertinence and elegance.

Along with the political questions, he began to be even more interested in literary and cultural issues. After his coming to Paris around 1928, he was involved almost exclusively with literary criticism.

His critical works about the classic Yiddish writers, his handling of Visenberg, Ash, Opatoshu, Glazman, Markish, Fefer, Itsik Kipnes and dozens of other older and younger writers, made a name for him. He excelled in his thorough analyses and demonstrated that in concise, spare sentences; he brought out the essence of the writer and his works. He did not use any flowery language, any standard phrases, he always had to say something special, something that had not been said before. He saw the writer through the prism of his time and environment. He took the trouble to establish the social sources from which the work was drawn. Thus his literary criticism approached scientific analysis, progressive education.

As an editor of the “Bleter” and later of the “Parizer dzhurnal” B. Vinogura displayed much taste and insight for the

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organization and publication of a literary journal. He selected each article with great rigor and responsibility, each story, each poem. He labored over the works of his friends with the same care as over his own creations.

He was strict with himself and with others. Even among his friends B. Vinogura was someone who applied the rules rigorously. He made many requests of his writers. He did not make “friendship reviews”. He made no fewer demands of his close writer friends. But when he came upon talent, if a young writer wrote a beautiful novella, a good poem, he found the warmest words to encourage the writer, and introduced him to the literary world.

Borukh Vinogura helped many Parisian writers in their development, gave them learned advice, presented them at the evening events to continue their work, turned the interest of the readers to them and acquainted them with the Yiddish literary world.

The difficult material worries that had laid their stamp on his childhood and youth also accompanied him up to the war. Writing was, from a material standpoint, a sideline business for him. He labored as a knitting worker during the busy season and so was exhausted during the off-season. That without doubt had no small effect on his person and on his health.

With his wife, the painter Khane Kovalska, he took two narrow rooms in Monparness. In that artists' neighborhood they had many friends, writers and musicians, painters and scuptors, Jewish and non-Jewish.

In 1941 he and Khane Kovalska were arrested among the first victims of the Nazis. His residence on the street Fier Leru was sealed off.

So ended the tragic 42-year old life of the literary critic Borukh Vinogura.

(“Yisker bukh”, Paris, 1946)

The deepening of social differentiation in the life the Jewish folk and the increase of the Jewish proletariat have, among a long list of other positive appearances, also broken open the sources of modern Yiddish poetry. The potential creativity that has for long years been imprisoned in the deep earth of the Jewish masses and bursts out onto the surface from time to time in the anonymous folksong, have, with the ripening of new social energies, together begun concrete artistic forms. Instead of the primitive raw material, constructed artistic work has begun to appear.

The outpouring of modern Yiddish poem has taken two principal forms: the folkish (Etinger, Goldfadn, Mikhl Gordon and others), and the social (Vintshevski, Edelshtat, Bavshaver and others). These are two literary directions are very different in content and in character. Those are the two artistic expressions, that are inspired by two different social strata in the Jewish masses themselves: The vast poverty and the working class.

As an expression of the thick stratum of the Jewish working class – which for many years has remained the outweighing majority in the life of the Jewish folk and possesses an established lifestyle with particular forms and specific coloration – folkish Yiddish poetry was an epic of everyday life, filled out with concrete descriptions of things. Everything in the relationship of the artist to the milieu is a negative or a positive, the manner is generally in the style of depicting a narrative and reflects in it the established, enduring lifeways of the poor Jewish folk masses. It is a type of speaking from the heart, unburdening. It narrates about joy and troubles, splendor and hypocrisy, love and hate. Beginning with Sholem Etinger's “Shmates” up until M. M. Varshavski's folkish genre-songs, the whole production of the poetry is almost entirely filled with writer-narrator stuff, as in a kaleidoscope, the whole life of the poor Jewish masses goes through the work.

Being the artistic expression of the same social stratum that has carried out Yiddish folksong, the folkish poetry is formally a direct continuation of the folk primitive.

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It leans on it and carries all the characteristics – positive and negative – from the element. It is simple in form and plain, even to naiveite, in the rhyming.

The parallel and the image – if in general it is there – is taken directly from the mouth of the folk, from its living language.

It possesses a uniform atmosphere and has particular coloration – a “Jewish” one. All of its works are enveloped in the dark grey atmosphere of the poor Jewish masses.

In accord with the mentality of that stratum whose artistic expression that is, the folkish poetry does not possess any concrete, positive ideal to strive to. The highest richness it can hope to reach:

Its sentences are abstract as if to say “human morality”:

“Our life is the ferry,
The river –
The abyss.
People – I do mean you.”

(M. M. Varshavski)

It has no revolt and not even any rebellion it. Lostness and despair emanate from it. The joy that sometimes comes from it does not flow from the same depth, but is mostly a “manufactured”, drunken kind of the “happy pauper” type.

The tangible everyday-narrator's material; the folksy primitive as a formal base; the lack of a positive fighting ideal – these are the three chief moments that characterize the folkish direction in the Yiddish poem.

Exactly the opposite is the material, the form and the character of the social poetry.

The Jewish working class that nonetheless pecked its way out of the eggshell of Jewish poverty, possessed a lot of impetus and gusto, and struck out with endless vibrations. But it did not yet have any clear, vivid face or enduring customs.

The sudden stratification of the Jewish masses, the rapid leap from unproductive drifting to working-class (which was largely thanks to the huge immigration); the unbearably hard living conditions into which they were thrown

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(the American “shvey system”) – caused open revolt, fear and confusion among the young Jewish working class all at the same time, there was no longer any clearly- defined and lasting resolution, everything was in a state of “becoming”. The social poetry that came as a result and echo of that social process was thus not able to be any concrete custom. It necessarily became a rhetorical abstract.

That poetry is not descriptive and it is hard to make from it any clear image of the life-style of the Jewish working masses of that time. The poetry does not sing about the day-to-day life itself, but about the feelings that their hard life calls up. This is not epic poetry, but emotional. Revolutionary impetus and resigned depression go hand in hand in this poetry.

“How can I, brothers and sisters, sing,
With hate and struggle everywhere?
It seems that deep suffering resounds
Even in the nightingale's song.”

(Dovid Edelshtat)

Whipped-up confusion and feelings of loss in the sudden, newly-created conditions of life.

As an expression of a new worldly class in Jewish life – a class whose interests fall together with the interests of the same classes in other peoples – the poets of the social direction cannot base their form on just their own folk creativity but must use the foreign, prepared examples similar to the genre. Nadson, Nekrasov, Heine and others were the models, according to whom the Jewish social poets formed their own work. Not yet possessing any of their own artistic traditions, the first Yiddish poets faced a dilemma of leaning on the folk-primitive or the social direction. Being driven by the worldly international tendency that the class carries within its essence, they – consciously or unconsciously – elected the latter. In the first diversion tendency of the social from the folkish, the current went with an impetus separate from their own. There could be no talk about a synthesis. They easily took from the foreign existing, that was more expressive for the content of their work.

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Because of that, the form of social poetry does not possess the soft flexibility of the folkish poetry. It does not possess the warm atmosphere and particular coloration of the latter. It is mostly hard, cold and stiff.

Therefore, however, their verse is for the most part more fully ripe and certain, and the rhyme higher and more developed.

But if in that material the verse of the folkish poetry is on average of a more significant quality, the social poetry idea stands on a higher level.

The verses of the social poetry hit with a powerful breath of rebellion and revolt.

“World robber, smithy of pain,
Hear my voice, strong ruler,
And may trembling start
In your fat-covered limbs.”

(Y. Bovshover)

One hears in them the cry of a class that is suffering, bloodied, struggling and will in no way make peace with their situation.

The poetry also hits a high tenor of heroism and tragedy.

“The night is dark, no stars to be seen;
The sky is black as the earth;
The sea of human tears roars wild,
Only the sword and hangman rule.”

(Dovid Edelshtat)

It is a poetry that is laid over with aspiration and strives toward a higher ideal – the ideal of liberty. And although both the goal itself and the path that leads to the goal are still, partly – and for the poet himself, for the most part – foggy and unclear it does not change its essential worth as a poetry of a high-idea content.

But disregarding the great formulaic and idealistic differences that divide the two literary directions, there is still a cardinal moment that unites the two. That is the collective local coloration. In both directions the leitmotif and the mover

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are not the individual, someone torn from his social environment, but just – the community, the collective. The “hero” in both styles of poetry is not the lost one, the uprooted personality. With its isolated joys and pains, only – the community. It plays the chief role in both forms of poetry. The individual here has only so much importance, to the extent he is part of the whole collective. Not that which separates him from his social roots but that which unites him with them. Through the prism of the individual the community is seen. It is an art, in someone's deepest perspective, it always sees the life, pains and hopes of the class or stratum. These are not individual creations in the strict sense of the word but collective works, construed through the hands of a single master.

From Yisker-bukh, Paris (edited)

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