A Yiddish Poet Wasted:  Anna Margolin and her Epitaph

Karen Alkalay-Gut

(first published in Jerusalem Review, volume 9, 146-152

In writing this I worry that I have gone against the command of the epitaph of Anna Margolin that entreats the passerby to say nothing.  As clearly as her tombstone begs us to pity her, walk away, and be silent, I found it impossible to for me to obey her, sought her grave, stood there transfixed, and mourned in her mourning.

I almost didn’t find her.  Asking at the cemetery offices – as I always do – for the poet, knowing that her Yiddish pen name heads the epitaph, it did not occur to me to look for her under her married name.  I did not remember that a Jewish cemetery would list her under her husband’s name, or the name of her last partner, or perhaps her maiden name, since she is not buried next to any of the men in her life.

The computer in Mount Carmel cemetery in New York did not find her name at all, and no one in the office knew who she was.  It is, after all, an enormous cemetery, with numerous sections, each one the size of a respectable urban cemetery.  Three of these sections belong to the Workmen Circle, and contain the graves of numerous Yiddish writers, from the well-known (Sholem Aleichem) to those whose names are familiar but their works not in print, to the numerous writers now forgotten and unread. 

It was only when we began to search for her husband’s name that the computer found her, Iceland.  Her pen name, written in Yiddish, tops the tomb, but her maiden name, Rosa Leibensboim is there.  Her other two husbands are not mentioned.

And the grave is not among the rows of poets who were the pride of the Workmen’s Circle, but set back in the fourth row among the crowded anonymous masses.

But the poem is there.  The poem she had written in 1932, when she was forty-five, instructing her husband to have this carved on her tombstone, without the first two lines.

She, [with cold marble breasts

And with small bright hands]

Wasted her beauty on garbage, on nothing

Perhaps she desired, perhaps just

Permitted sadness, the seven knives of pain,

And spilled the sacredness of life’s wine

On garbage, on nothing.

Now she lies with shattered visage.

The disgraced spirit has abandoned the cage.

Passerby, have mercy and be silent.

Say nothing.

While the second to the last line may recall Yeats’ “Horseman, Pass By,” the rest of the poem is quite the opposite.  Yeats urged his visitors to ignore his grave because he thought his soul and his poetry were eternal and he would somehow be reincarnated, but Margolin thought the opposite of herself.  Her epitaph exhibits her enormous regret for terrible deeds, shame at the attention she received – in her youth for her beauty and later for her writings – and a strong sense that the poet had, indeed, led a dishonorably wasted life.  

An earlier epitaph she had written would have been much more appropriate to a person who saw themselves first as a poet,

Say this; until her death

She faithfully protected

With her bare hands

The flame entrusted to her

And in that same fire

She burned

(trans: Shirley Komove, Drunk from the Bitter Truth)

But I would never have looked for her grave so desperately and randomly had she not chosen such poetic words.  I would never have found the articles by Barbara Mann and David Roskies had written about her grave, nor sought the enlightening words of  Avraham Novershtern about her work.  The praise of Izik Manger and Hana Mlotek would have been unknown to me.

Margolin’s poems in Yiddish, published in 1929, had been given to me by a friend, Rina Barkai, who mentioned that she was somehow related to her.  The poems themselves, although wonderfully moving, modern and impressive, would not have been enough to call me away from my warm hotel room in Manhattan to the silent snowy cemetery in between Brooklyn and Queens.

How could I find out what brought Anna Margolin to create such a disturbing stone under which to rest?  There were some facts, but no real biographies.  Her last partner, Reuben Iceland, tried to fill this lack of information in his Yiddish memoirs of the flowering of Yiddish poetry in New York, “From our Springtime.”  Although all the sketches in his book are personal and authentic, his writing about his beloved Anna tries (without revealing the tragedies in their relationship) to recreate not only his life with her, but also her confessions and her intimacy to him.  “It was my good fortune,” he wrote, “to be the person who helped her endure the suffering.”

The suffering was integral to her poems.  And the suffering came from her commitment to truth.  Rosa Leibensboim always told the truth.  It did not win her friends but it helped to create poems that wrench the heart.  Even though she wrote stories and columns under various pen names, such as Khave Gros, Khane Barut, Sofia Brandt and Clara Lenin her true identity it seems was as poet.  The pen name of Anna Margolin allowed her this most honest identity.

But the narrative of her life can appear in many ways to be the opposite of honest.  Her betrayal of those who loved her was prominent in the stories about herself told to Iceland.  The lovers she teased, loved and forgot were numerous, in Brisk, in New York, in Odessa, and then in Warsaw.  Her greatest betrayal, however, the one that must have torn her heart in two, was not to a lover. 

In Warsaw, she married the writer Moshe Stavski (Stavi) and together they moved to Palestine, where her only child, Naaman, was born on November 28, 1911.

Unhappy in her marriage and stifled by the loss of her intellectual identity, Margolin promised that after her son was weaned she would leave.  Her departure was so painful for her that Iceland noted she could not look at the photograph of her and her son without paroxysms of grief.  The photograph indeed exhibits the pain she must have felt as she boarded the ship from Jaffa to Warsaw.  This pain must have intensified greatly when her new-married father rejected her, and she escaped to America.

Although it had been thought that all contact with her son was broken at that moment, the connection with her son and her first husband continued in correspondence. Not an avid or legible correspondent, Stavi nevertheless described to her the development of her son, his examinations in mathematics and English, his beauty and strength. And when he was thirteen Margolin sent him a bicycle, provided him with money from America frequently, and later corresponded with him directly in English for years.  Teaching him Yiddish, Stavi had declared to her, was a losing battle.

This partial, but totally alienated connection with her son must have been even more painful to her.  Even the language barrier could only add to the pain.  Yiddish had become Margolin’s life.  As a child she had only spoken Yiddish to her mother and the women, perceiving the educated language to be Russian.  But in the foreign land of New York to which she returned in 1913, after having been rejected by her remarried father, her home became the home language of women. 

She was not only writing stories and articles for the Yiddish papers under various names, she was also helping to create Yiddish culture.  In 1923, Margolin edited a poetry anthology entitled Dos Yidishe Lid in Amerika, and in 1929, published a volume of poetry.  Praised in Warsaw, it passed relatively unknown in New York at the time.  The lack of recognition might explain why she only published six more poems, including her epitaph in her lifetime. The dialogue she held in her poems with American culture and society remained a monologue, and the American society in which she existed knew nothing of her involvement.  One example:

The Gangster

In the tenement doorway, where from the stairwell

The eye of a lamp tears open the dark,

His head rises up as if in haloed radiance.

In his stone face, the metallic eyes

Round without light, without memory,

Devour each passerby, each headlight into the void.

He hitches his shoulder lightly, sharply,

A shuffle, a twist, in his pocket a cool stiletto,

The street lies before for him like a golden harp,

And his wild fingers rush to play it.

She gobbled up the American landscape and culture around her, read English and American contemporary poetry and criticism and responded in letters, in articles.  But even her poems of American society, like her portrait of a gangster, were a kind of monologue to herself and not a dialogue with the culture.  Like William Carlos Williams’ “The Young Sycamore,” her poems describe the hope in the sidewalks of Manhattan.

FALL

Fall descends upon the city and me

Dark heart, be quiet and wonder.

See, a naked twig with a leaf,

Blooms from the asphalt tender as a lily.

Heavy Fall, heavy steps.  I am old.

My dark heart; do not curse, believe in wonders:

Somewhere in a city, in a world,

I bloom now like a lily.

Despite her attempts to find hope in the strange urban environment, it is not surprising that she stopped communicating poetically with the world, becoming a recluse in the last years of her life.  Not only did she exist in a kind of cultural isolation, and apart from her only child, but she was, at 45, no longer the ravishing beauty of her youth, no longer able to bridge the language barrier from her new society, no longer able to bear more children.   

How can one be a mother to an absent child?  How can one be a woman when beauty fades and it is beauty that determines feminine notice and power? How can one be a poet in a language that is disappearing, and in a land whose culture doesn’t acknowledge this language?  And how can one have any kind of identity having lost these titles? 

I passed on from the grave of Anna Margolin with a new knowledge of the agony of these questions. 

Photograph of grave: Ezra Gut

English translation of Gangster and Fall: Karen Alkalay-Gut