Hanging Out With Zalman Shneour ||| Zalman Shneour's Vilna Cantos Aleph & Bayt

Escape! That has always been a prime aspiration for Jews from Eastern Europe. Indeed, for most people, since the greater flows of migrations have been geotropically from east to west, representing the dual imperatives of the single source which governs the universe. Some follow the sun; others want to see where it comes from. No one pursued the phallic principle better than the once well-known poet Zalman Shneour (1887-1959).
     Together with Chaim Nachman Bialik and Saul Tchernichowsky, Shneour is considered to be one of the great figures in Hebrew poetry of his generation. The main road to the Israel Library in Jerusalem is named after him. As a young man Isaac Bashevis Singer recalls having read Shneour's poetry "enthusiastically" with "an insatiable desire for more."
     Although of the same generation as Anglo-American authors Wyndham Lewis/T.S. Eliot/Ezra Pound, or the Frenchman Jean Cocteau, the Danish-African Isak Dinesen, the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa and the German Gottfried Benn, Shneour's life and career was more like that of a fictional zeitgenosse, Jasper Milvain. This symbolic herald of the coming twentieth century--a gifted and energetic hustler, the hungry ghost, who seeks to draw a lucky number in the talent whirlpool--was created by George Gissing for his novel New Grub Street (1891) exposing the nether world of literary life. Like the imaginary Milvain, the real life Shneour was the quintessential unconscionable good-guy who made all the clever moves, ever cognizant of the market, the right form. What is dished these days as "a survivor." We all can name someone like this. Everyone's got their little list. Known as poet of heroism, the embodiment of revolt against the conventions of the shtetl, at the same time Shneour successfully peddled "the old home" a kind of village nationalism--and ran with the herd.
     Zalman Shneour's literary journey began at age thirteen when he left Shklov, a wooden town on the banks of the River Dnieper, presently in Belarus, and traveled south to Odessa on the Black Sea which was the great intellectual center. There he was particularly attracted to Chaim Bialik who usually befriended young writers.
     Upon Bialik's recommendation he was employed at Tudhiyyah, a publishing house in Warsaw. And it was during this time (1902-04) Shneour published his first poems and short articles in Hebrew and Yiddish.
     At the age of seventeen Shneour moved to Vilna (Vilnius). As we shall see, this proved pivotal to his literary progress. Here he worked on the editorial staff of the Hebrew daily Ha-Zeman and published his first book of poetry, his first novel, Marvet, and a collection of stories as well as contributing poetry and prose to periodicals. Precociousness has always been very important for artists from eastern Europe. In addition, it was here too that Shneour created his image, gaining a wild boy eminence with Bialik calling him "a young Samson whose seven locks have all grown overnight." Preferring to be portrayed in profile, adorned with an unparted mane of swept back hair, thick mustache with a full yet carefully trimmed goatee--… la Herzl--the sobriquet "young Samson" was to follow Shneour throughout his life.
     When Ha-Zeman folded after the repression following the military defeats by the Japanese and anarchist uprisings of 1905, Shneour took off to Switzerland, a current hot spot for exiles from the Russian Empire. (See Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes, for example.) There he wrote about the soul and temper of nature unbound, moving to Paris in 1906 to study briefly at the Sorbonne before going on the road again, traveling constantly in Europe and North Africa until almost the beginning of the Great War.
     One of the remarkable works in Hebrew from this youth period was Manginot Yisrael ("Melodies of Israel") where Shneour describes the Jews' revenge on the gentiles as bequeathing a conception of God requiring them to abandon their beautiful and sensuous pagan deities. Another poem published in 1913 was inspired by the notorious trial of Mendel Beiles, the night watchman from a Kiev brick factory, who was charged with the killing of a child found nearby. Supported by the personal interference of Nicholas II--the last Czar--the court alleged that the Jews had a "horrible commandment" to ritually murder and drain the blood of Christian children to be used to bake matzos for Passover, else their religious obligations would not be fulfilled. Shneour's Yemei ha-Beinayim Mitkarevim ("The Middle Ages are Returning") sensed the return of medieval anti-Semitism, which in the twentieth century would be expressed in the name of atavistic patriotism rather than mainstream religion. Moreover, he predicted the liberals' bullshit response to this challenge encumbered by positivism, realism, necessitarianism and a gloomy, cynical, restless rationality.
     When the war did break out, Shneour found himself in Germany where he was interned as an enemy alien. However, like many other Russian Jews he was released after the Jewish organizations rightly convinced the German government that these Russian Jews were far greater opponents of the Czarist Russian regime than of Germany--that they were, in fact, decidedly Germanophile. In the case of Shneour, he was discharged to study medicine at the University of Berlin through the intervention of no less a figure than Gerhart Hauptmann, a Nobel Laureate in literature.
     There's a snapshot taken in 1918 showing Shneour in a photo opportunity. He is in Lithuania posed together with members of "Vilna Troup," a repertory theater group which premiered the much copied famous expressionistic production of S. Anski's play The Dybbuk, about a soul condemned to wander in this world because of its sins. To escape the perpetual torment inflicted upon it by evil spirits, the dybbuk--a Cabalistic conception--seeks refuge in the body of some pious man or woman over whom the demons have no power. Some dybukks don't know they are dead; they get married, do business, write books even.
     The revolutions that transfixed Europe after this war, nevertheless, caused the market for Hebrew writing to shrink to the point where authors were compelled to seek other ways of earning a living. Communist/Socialist cadres who dominated cultural circles at the time condemned Hebrew--often brutally and violently--as the language of the bourgeoisie and of clerical, political Zionists. Yiddish was praised and promoted then as the innately natural and organic, international language of the genuine masses. Nonplused, the Commissar for Public Enlightenment and architect of "proletarian culture," Anatoly V. Lunacharsky admitted with some discomfort: "I do not know who would doubt the value of Hebrew, except for our Jewish comrades. And they, after all, are our allies and we can hardly disbelieve them." This influence of radical atheist "Jews" became crucial for the consolidation of power during the early Bolshevik period. Even Maxim Gorky, well connected as he was in Soviet circles, found it impossible to obtain exit permits for celebrated Hebrew writers. Trapped without a permitted language, distinguished poets like Bialik and Tchernichowsky escaped from this future-of-history only when Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder and chief of the Soviet secret police, moved on their behalf. So...
     Faced with these hysterical historical turnabouts, in 1919 Zalman Shneour visited New York to make contacts with various Yiddish newspapers with the object of becoming a regular contributor. Ironically, one of the first fruits of this trip was the long Hebrew language poem Vilna expressing his affection and reverence for this city. [1]
     Here Shneour's writing is extremely rich. Published in the now old fashioned Askenazi Hebrew--with square script and the vowels indicated below relevant consonants--the language of this poem is evocative of the Bible, the prayer book and popular piety. References are everyday and vernacular ranging from hilarious reminiscences, myth, local legend, landscape, to deeply tragic recitals of sufferings in the lands of exile. The generosity of Vilna's young women side by side with schnorrers, scholars and shipwrecks. It is at once ecstatic and sardonic, an "illocutionary" act (expressing an interactive setting between utterer and recipient--e.g. promising, greeting, asserting, and so on), and the "perlocutionary" act (one producing intended effects in the hearer such as fright, conviction or courage). Sparkling with vibrato and rodomontade in the manner of the Badchonim, itinerant bards, Shneour wanted to entertain, make the reader weep and dance. His long breath-centered style might appear oratorical to some, but it aims straight at the heart--and pierces it.
     Having said this, Vilna: The Poem might be compared to William Blake's Jerusalem: To the Jews, or to the Eagle Feather School of certain contemporary costumed-versifiers with a taste for Asianism. As a city hymn it predates William Carlos Williams' "Paterson" and Charles Olson's "Gloucester." The first two cantos ("Aleph" and "Bayt") of the six part poem by Zalman Shneour follow this essay.
     After a few years back amongst the frenetic period of post-war expatriate literary activity in Berlin, he finally domiciled himself in Paris in 1923 and there harvested honey from another temper of the age beehive. It was from this base that Shneour transformed a flamboyant reputation into a firmly established international career. He became one of the most widely read Yiddish authors now tunneling in on a wave of the Ostjude cult.
     Bobbed hair, the Charleston, "we moderns," surrealism, Freudianism, Fascism, yoga, jazz, shared roaming and leather Chekaism--to name just a few searches for the absolute, pursuits of virtual epiphany--these are all acknowledged fads flourishing during this fractured period of European history. Less generally recognized, the roaring twenties also spawned an equally intense longing in this lust generation for a parallel primitivism in the obsession among assimilated Jews from the West for contact with their Eastern brethren. "Half-Asia." Kafka wrote about it often in his Diaries; an interesting pamphlet might be compiled from this plunge of his into Yiddishkeit. Gershom Scholem devoted a whole chapter, "Pension Struck," to Ostjude fascination in his autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem. Shneour directed his energies toward this target market, writing for the widespread Yiddish press on both sides of the Atlantic.
     One of his big successes was introducing Ein Ghetto im Osten (Wilna).[2] Issued in a number of different editions, this extraordinary album of delirious magically realistic late 1920s photocompositions by Moise Vorobeichic still has the aesthetic power to focus amazement. Using a scissors as well as the light and shadow of film, Vorobeichic depicts a disintegrating negation on the surface, a creative affirmation in depth, attempting to give photography a syntax, a capacity to argue with the world. Cities too have their lucky stars in the visual arts. Vitebsk has Chagall; Vilna has Vorobeichic. To borrow a phrase James Joyce Himself used about the medium of photography, these compositions and cut/ups are an abnihilization of the etym: a particular kind of dismembering, a snatching of moments out of their context and a juxtaposing of people, events and things. The many double exposures, duplications, fold-ins and telescopic extensions infer crossroads and getaways. No one can remain immune to the spirit of place in Vilna, its nervous light, where angles become angels, nothing is congruent and everything appears to be in the opposite direction from the way you think. As Shneour wrote in the Preface: "He has looked at life as it pulses on the spot." Floating books fill one frame surrounding and encompassing everything, an Ein Sof, as in Borges' infinite library. Quiet corners. Crowds on the market. Young and old faces. Flappers intersect with luftmenschen along wet arched alleys. Grilled windows. Shuttered shops multiplied. There is a collage of a phonograph record next to street people listening to music. What is far is near, what is near is far. Magritte or de Chirico would have been proud to have painted this image. This world is waiting for disaster; Vorobeichic records the events before they happen. Looking at these images induces vertigo, stimulates dreams and revelations, like most worthwhile creative forms. His photoworks present an intense devotion for a world my family once abandoned and that had been destroyed while we were away, no longer present to defend it, or perish with it. Recently a knowledgeable critic from the Lithuanian Weekly (Vilnius: June 17-23, 1994) called these Vorobeichic's photographs: "Masterly pieces of art presenting the true vision from an insider of the Jewish Quarter."
     The greatest hit for Zalman Shneour, however, drew inspiration from his hometown of Shklov-on-the-Dneiper. [3] In the country where he spent his youth, listening to stories from old people, these tales about Noah Pandre became icons of typical shtetl life, now disrupted by wars, emigration and revolutions. They also delineated the new Jewish type, endowed with other qualities than passivity, fatalism and resignation, which began to emerge in the last century. "Pandre" in Yiddish suggests mystery, self-confidence, the unconquerable infused with Nietzschean will. Full of juice and power, this novel combined the then fashionable blubo--a neologism synthesized from the German words blut and bodem, as the blood-and-soil theme has been called--plus our-town genres. Heroic characterization, like the seminal personality Rakhmetov in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, along with the local color of the small, provincial town made popular by Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Shneour's Yiddish writings were translated into most European languages. Noah Pandre was published in English in 1936, in Germany as late as 1937 and into Dutch, translated by Simon Koster, in 1939 where it had a short shelf life.
     When France was invaded in 1940 Shneour decamped quickly and succeeded--where Walter Benjamin failed--in escaping via Spain to the USA. He lived in New York from 1941 until his immigration to Israel a decade later.
     The Second World War literally decimated the market for Yiddish writing. Moreover, the Hebraists triumphed over the Yiddishists in what would be the official tongue of the new State of Israel. Within a single generation mass languages appeared and disappeared and appeared anew. At this temporal website the winning argument in the Kulturkamp was that Hebrew, the loshen (ha) koydesh, the tongue of holiness and heaven, enlivened everyday existence with sound of the sacred Bible. Yiddish evoked the affliction of being born in exile, earth bound chatter, merely a slave jargon from the narrow confines of the ghetto. A language, so the wags say, is a dialect with an army. Shneour easily switched back to Hebrew.
     In 1948, Shneour uncharacteristically broke ranks with his politically incorrect poem cycle Luhot Genuzim ("Hidden Tablets"). Fired by the "Dead Sea Scrolls" found at Qumran in the Judaean desert, he fantasized archaeological excavations would discover works written by opponents to the tradition. This publication aroused much controversy. Shneour's critics accused him of identifying with these hermetic authors. Shneour backslided, defending himself by claiming the work was a product of his invention, that he had no intention of substituting the ideas of heretics and "false prophets" for those of the scriptural version. The spin was--that he merely presented the suppressed opinion of the opposition.
     Before formally settling in Israel, Shneour had visited the country five times. He busied himself there with translating his own works, adapting his own stories for the theater, writing for several daily papers in Israel as well as composing lyric songs about Jewish pioneers rebuilding the Promised Land. As prolific as ever, Shneour engaged in collating his enormous output--he published forty volumes during his lifetime--and was planning new projects when he died in New York. His corpse was transferred to Jerusalem and reinterred in a grave next to those of Bialik and Tchernichowsky.

Footnotes:
     1. The poem Vilna was printed first in the monthly Miklat (New York, 1920), and later as a limited special edition book by Hasefer publishing house (Berlin, 1923) with illustrations by prominent graphic artist Hermann Struck. Predominately an etcher, Struck (1876-1944) was born in Berlin. Stationed with the German occupying army in Lithuania during the First World War, he was deeply impressed with the life of the eastern European Jews. Portfolios such as Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland (1916) and Das ostjuedische Antlitz (1920) reflect this experience. He was also a portraitist who included among his sitters Ibsen, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein as well as Shneour. As a pedagogue Struck taught graphic technique to Marc Chagall, Max Liebermann, Isaac Israels and even the misanthropic and reclusive Lesser Ury (a favorite of no less an author than Martin Buber--see Juedische Kuenstler, Berlin 1903.) Struck's Die Kunst Radierung (The Art of Etching) remains a standard reference on the subject. Together with jugendstilist E.M. Liliem (1874-1925), Herman Struck was a master who inspired a whole school of graphic artists in central and eastern Europe.
     2. See, Ein Ghetto im Osten (Wilna), 65 Bilder von M. Vorobeichic, Eingeleitet von S. Chneour, Schaubucher 27, Herausgeber: Dr. Emil Schaffer, (Zurich-Leipzig: Orell Fussli Verlag, 1931); and also, A Vilna Legend, Sixty-four Photos by Moise Vorobeichic, Original Preface by Zalman Shneour, Edited, and with Accompanying Words by William Levy, (Amsterdam: Transactions of the Invisible Language Society no. 8, 1994). Besides these photographs of Vilna/Vilnius, the only other references to the life and work of Moise Vorobeichic I was able to find are as follows. The Dictionary Catalog of the Klau Library of Cincinnati lists a book by Vorobeichic together with Meir Bogdan entitled Working Youth in Palestine. It was published in 1935 by the Histadrut and is described as "sixty-four pages, chiefly illustrations." So it is safe to say the photographer had immigrated to Palestine during the British Mandate where he was active in moderate socialist, Zionist circles. Another entry in The Harvard University Catalog of Printed Hebrew Books cites a 1947-48 work by Vorobeichic called Massada with "twenty plates." In other words, he escaped the European war, photographed the two thousand-year-old remains of the mass suicides from the wars of liberation against the Romans--as chronicled by Josephus--and witnessed the resurrection of the State of Israel.
     3. Zalman Shneour was a direct descendent of Shneur Zalman (1745-1813) the founder of HaBaD Chassidism--an acrostic of the cabalistic term hokhmah, bibah, da'at ("germinal, developmental, and conclusive knowledge"). This branch of Chassidism sought to systematize and democratize the movement. In 1774, during the early period of the opposition to Chassids by traditional Jewry, Shneur Zalman went to Vilna in an attempt to meet Elijah ben Solomon, and reach some understanding between Chassidism and the Mitnagdim. But he was snubbed: the Gaon absolutely refused to meet him. The first and primary work of the Habad system, widely known by the name Tanya, was published in Shklov between 1796 and 1814.
Shneur Zalman's son became leader of the majority of his father's flock and settled in the little town of Lubavich. Through a series of transmissions from both the male and female line, the seventh dynastic head of this movement now known as the Lubavitch Chassidim--was Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson of Brooklyn who believed quiet rightly that "we are already living in the Messianic Age." His death in the summer of 1994 received international top story attention.

VILNA: The Poem
by Zalman Shneour
Translated from the Hebrew by Angus R. Shamal and William Levy

Aleph
Vilna, my great grandmother, city and mother in Israel
Jerusalem of the Exile, comforter of an ancient nation in
          the north!
Your patchy skull-cap, like the old synagogue's roof,
sublime in your great-grandson's eyes when viewed from
          golden tower tops;
How often you dry tears with a torn apron,
That is embroidered like the holy Torah with lions and
          crowns,
With your praised Purim sweets and with the Pesach mixture
you've sweetened their afflictions and you amused them with
          your writer's floridity.
Your juice from the source of Torah experts has been
          pumped out,
every wall soaked with tradition smelling of Sabbath dishes;
Tunes of "The Little Horse Owner" will vibrate on a canopy,
          the visions of the poet will rhyme curses with whispers;
And the face of Elijah, the Gaon, and the faces of the
          charitable Montifiores
accepting your face with compassion when you pass every
          Jewish door.

I've been remembering your generosity in my youth, the love
          of the daughters of your Jewish people,
walking and dreaming with them by the shadow of your green
          hills;
And the explosive canon-shot from your mountain at noon,
the sound of a busy thunder encouraging: Be strong!
The day is long and long is the guarantee of life's struggle
And the same gloomy and wonderful tree on Ger Zaddik's
          grave,
That looks like a huge mourner, extending palms to the
          prosecutor;
A moment more and he delivered his sigh and it was wrapped
          in his pain 'cause it grew.
Strashun Library--big fossilized brain, gathering
rationalities of a scattered and scattering nation and will
          be as one;
Like the bones of Ezekiel's valley turned into armies that
          live.
The brains that gave birth already had been annihilated and it goes and pronounces itself
their thoughts, the thoughts of a world nation, in the slang of God.
I remember your supporters the beautifully-bearded and
          high-foreheaded,
Faded glory from the intellectual's generation still covers
          their peaceful faces.
Listening and nodding, their baldness for greatness and
          besiegement they will broadcast
these impatient men of Israel to the future of the Russian
          farmer.
And your beggars pulling the coat of every new face,
as if it's their rich uncle who came back from a faraway
          place, settling
to remove them from this land, and they are justifiably
          protesting and demanding
Every passer by on the street will judge and the earth
          and sky are witnesses...
Your rotten apples become delicious,
before the autumn comes, sold with screams and cries of
          victory, like vintage Aspamia wine.
And legumes and broad beans flow from baskets at Pentecost,
believe it, it's true--this man-child won't stop celebrating
          the faithful city,
where everyone who wants goes and tastes from the ritual
          meal for a penny-
And pleasantly remembered is that steamboat, which used
          to fluster
And row along the Vilna stream and would run aground on a
          reef every time;
full of Jews longing for their wives at the summer houses,
and Sabbath evening is about to come, it is dripping
          humidity and the hour is pressing...
The captain on the bridge is showing an angry and grumpy
          mug:
Have mercy! Sit down! Don't be nervous! Otherwise my ship
          will fall on its side!

Bayt
I loved the sights from Temple Mount--your height:
Towers and streets harvesting flying gold dust,
which is the rising yeast dust of legends...
Is this the smoke of the righteous goy Count Potocki being
          tortured and sacrificed as a burnt offering?
Or the wagon trains of Chmielnicki and his bandits emerging
           from the dust to abuse you?
Or the steaming horses of Napoleon fleeing from the snow?
And Catholic processions hurrying, crawling each evening,
Along the river bend, like unfurled bolts of cloth from the
          Middle Ages,
with incense and songs and waving white flags;
Passionate their singing that comes closer, but worry it is
to the Jewish ear, the poison in his blood forever
from fear in believing passing Christians with a cross in
          their hands.

At the clearing on the Mount, there will rise
          remnants of swords
within the Temple of Perkunas; there Gedimin was commanded
          in a dream by an iron wolf,
there the bones of princes were cremated with dancing and
          prayers,
and below, the cries of victims echoed from the
          " Calf's Garden,"
But layer upon layer dead eras have accumulated,
and on the surface, on the foundation of the west wall,
lads are playing croquet and laughing, cheeks flushed
and blithe screams rise and become the eye of a dream
like the wild sweet grapes, clustered together, being fed
          with temple dust, -
and like goring young stags playing without fear
on the lip of a volcano, this mountain of generations whose
          lust became limp.
I loved Trakai, wonderful village, behind your mountains,
and the seven rivers around it, thought you look at them
          you won't capture their beauty
Of the Karaites--our inferior foster brothers
Jews and yet not Jews. With their strange prominent eyes
they gaze but don't recognize us...
The charm of Ruth to their daughters. Moabite-looking and
          tanned, but they won't go
After the sons and daughters of Boaz. Hebrew prayers on
          their lips,
their black eyes ambush the chosen people.

You can come and hear their prayers at their fundamentalist
          synagogue;
singing refrains, till a sad breath comes out,
sucking, and it has a single snap and a mournful Arabian
          tone;
the sound of a limb that has been torn from the Lord's
          mother, adorned in pain,
it can not even die, or live. How will it cure us?
There is only the idea that will pass as lightening, and an
          arctic pride will rouse you:
If a mottled twig will still grow--the vine congratulated
          for nothing.
If this weak limb will yearn--how profound the life in the
          corpse!