With Rake in Hand: Memoirs of a Yiddish Poet

By Joseph Rolnik

Joseph Rolnik is widely considered one of the most prominent of the New York Yiddish poets associated with Di Yunge, an avant-garde literary group that formed in the early twentieth century. In his moving and evocative memoir, Rolnik recalls his childhood growing up in a small town in Belarus and his exhilarating yet arduous experiences as an impoverished Yiddish poet living in New York. Working in garment factories by day and writing poetry by night, he became one of the most published and influential writers of the Yiddish literary scene. Unfolding in a series of brief sketches, poems, and vignettes rather than consistent narrative, Rolnik’s memoir is imbued with the poet’s rich, sensuous language, which vividly describes the sounds and images of his life. Marcus’s elegant translation, along with his introduction situating Rolnik’s poetry in its literary historical context, gives readers a fascinating account of this under-appreciated literary treasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9780815653936

Book preview

1With Rake in Hand

The wagon is loaded, the horse in its harness;

the peasant holds the reigns wrapped ’round his hand.

He smacks his lips—the wagon takes off.

Across the meadow’s rugged ground

like a drunkard tramps the horse,

a step here and a step there.

And like a beast just emerged from water

shakes the cargo off; down it falls

a blossom here, a stalk there.

But the peasant has no eye for each straw’s fall,

and he leads horse and wagon straight to the barn.

And so wagon after wagon ’til evening.

Only when the last one is brought in

does he lean the rake against his neck again

and with a slow step and a vigilant eye

returns to the places where the wagon bowed

and gathers each bit of hay he finds

and puts it with love onto the rake

as if that which in his hurry he had overlooked,

had now become his greatest treasure.

2Our Village

Our village was small and remote—in all, eight or nine Jewish families. But the people behaved as if they were living in a huge land. And they believed that the village itself was an entire country.

There were ranks or classes—higher and lower. The higher classes feuded among themselves, like the aristocratic families in Italy or Spain. They were at daggers drawn. But in an unusual event, when an outside enemy attacked the village, such as a death in one of the families, or a fire, they remembered that they were one household, one community, and they forgot for a while all the grievances that they had, one against the other.

The fathers quarreled among themselves and the children had love affairs. True, the señor did not stand with a guitar under the señorita’s window and he did not serenade her. Instead, they sat until day on the doorsteps of the houses, or they lay in the fragrant hay in the barn, and the señoritas came out of the gate flushed, with disheveled hair and sometimes with a broken button in their hand.

I said higher and lower classes. The higher were Yude-Ore with a big household of sons, daughters, and learned grandchildren. He held the lease from the landowner; my father, with a married son and a son-in-law who had the makings of a wealthy man; and the innkeeper Chaim-Gedalye, who was indeed a rich man and lent money at interest. They all considered themselves part of the upper class.

And then there was Leyzer the smith; Aba the shopkeeper, from whom the Gentiles bought salt and kerosene; Yude, our miller; and Bentshe, who had a tavern at the other end of the village. They were considered the lower class. Although Leyzer the smith was not more of an ignoramus than his neighbor the tavern keeper, and Bentshe from the edge of the village was quite refined and was the Torah reader for the minyan; and my father’s younger brother, Aba, was just as respectable as my father; nonetheless, the two groups of families were considered two different classes. When one said Zhukhovitz, one meant a few chosen families. Who had spoken ill of someone? Who was quarreling with whom? That was among the four or five families of the upper class.

Only once in the history of the village did it happen that both classes—the upper and the lower—became like family to each other. That was when tall Yoshe, the miller’s son, came from America in a rubber overcoat, with a gold watch and chain and spoke with a foreign tone, half singing, and they forgot for a while that three years earlier he had worked for us in the mill.

He arrived Friday afternoon. After dinner he met with Vikhne on the long bridge. Shabbos night they wrote the wedding contract, the wedding was at the end of the month, and the morning after the wedding they were already sitting in the carriage that took them to the train. The whole village accompanied them until the end of the dike, shed a tear, and soon forgot the whole story as you forget a bad dream.

Yoshe took Vikhne the tavern keeper’s daughter with him to America.

What the difference was between the two classes of families is hard for me to say. Perhaps it lay in the fact that those in the upper class lived in bigger houses, were dressed better, and gave bigger donations for the High Holidays prayer leader, for the village teacher, and for other needs of the community; and perhaps in the fact that the boys in the upper class went to yeshiva or went to class and later went into their fathers’ business, or remained loafers and did nothing until their wedding. And the boys from the lower class became craftsmen soon after they finished heder and the girls went away to the city to become sock-knitters and housemaids. They used to come home to their parents only on holidays and were almost strangers in the village.

But one day a year on Simchat Torah, everyone again became one family. They walked together in procession around the bimah, the adults with the Torah scroll in their arms and the children, all the children, with flags, and sang Tshues Yankev (Deliverance of Jacob) all together. In the morning they went to visit one another. And since it was a whole mile from the mill to the inn (the village with the two groups of houses looked like a long stick with two weights at both ends), they went the whole long way singing and dancing, their coats unbuttoned, their galoshes smeared with thin mud, their hands on their hips or on someone’s shoulder. They went from one house to another, omitting no one. And, of course, the lower class served better food and drink. I remember one Simchat Torah night. I was so small, my father led me by the hand. We left Yude-Ore’s house and went to Uncle Aba’s little house; a long table, on the table all kinds of treats: honey cakes and pastries sprinkled with honey, turnip and radish preserves, seasoned with cloves. The brilliant colors of all these things blinded our eyes, and the wine fogged our heads. What I saw before me was both real and a dream.

At Chaim-Gedalye, the tavern keeper’s, they served whiskey, beer, and sausage with salted cucumbers. He had an expression that he repeated the whole time in order to encourage the guests: If you eat, may you live to a hundred, if you don’t eat—may you live to a hundred twenty. And the guests didn’t begrudge him the twenty years and, out of spite, ate even more.

3Our House

I was born in a house built of rough fieldstones. It was wide and gray. Through the years, the plaster fell off here and there, and some of the stones stuck out quite dramatically.

The house had double walls. In addition to the outside stone walls, it also had inner walls made of thick boards like the Ark,¹ if you’ll excuse the comparison, a box within a box, with empty space between them both. The space between the plaster window posts, the lateral walls of the windows was, at first, very wide, so that a child of ten or twelve could fit there and sleep on the fifty or sixty large, square, dark-red bricks. But as it got deeper it became much narrower so that the wooden window frames were quite small with six panes of glass framed in each of them.

The millstones made a constant racket, the walls shook and fine gravel leaked out from the cracks between the boards and was strewn upon the benches near the windows. And all kinds of crickets and other insects ran around in the void between the wooden and stone walls. It was never still in our house. When the mill was working we constantly heard the rumbling of the walls and the clanging of the chains that held the lamp. When the mill was idle, the concert between the walls filled a young boy with dread. In the summer evenings when the sun was setting in the west, a pillar of golden dust stretched from the window to the door. It seemed as if you could not go through it unless you cut it with a knife.

The whole building was divided into two parts. One part was occupied by the mill, where there were three pairs of wheels, and over them in an open attic that was called vishkes, there were three pairs of millstones. The floor of the mill was made of worn-out millstones that were very wide, round and flat, and between them—smaller field stones.

There were always sacks of grain that had not yet been milled, standing or lying on the floor. In the distance, near the back wall, stood a large, long box made of thick wooden boards and divided inside into four larger and smaller compartments into which the mill workers poured the tithe that the Gentiles brought to be milled. The largest compartment was for rye, the second after that for barley, another for oats, and the smallest, a very narrow one, for wheat.

A thick brick wall separated the mill from the house. In one place the wall was broken open to half its thickness. It looked like a hearth, as I picture it today. A tripod stood there, and my father used to cook fish on it Friday evening for Shabbos. I used to help him, constantly bringing more salt and pepper from the house.

At the beginning of that wall, just as you entered from the outside, there was a paneled door that led into the house. Short rays of thin light filtered through it on summer mornings and in winter it let in frost. So we used to stuff the cracks with tight wads of felt to keep warm. Nonetheless, on cold days the door was covered inside with ice until the heated ovens warmed the house, and then the ice used to melt and run like tears onto the floor. And because of that we wore large boots made of felt and leather and we used to kick our feet on the side of the door so that the floor there was always wet and moldy.

During the flood that always took place a few weeks before Passover, we had to move to the village for a whole week or more because the house was inundated. The water came inside from the cracks in the floor, from the chicken coop and from the hall. The two men who were left to watch the house had to lay down short planks as a boardwalk. The beds were also put on boards. At night, torches burned outside in front of the mill to light the way for people who were traveling on the dike, which was completely covered with water the entire way.

Our house had two large rooms, one behind the other. We didn’t have separate names for them. When we were staying in the first room, we called the second the other room; when we were in the second room, we called the first room the other room. But I will give them names. The first room I’ll call the Gentile room, and the second—the Jewish room. The non-Jews were in the Gentile room: those who came with their wagons to grind their rye for bread; the mill workers who were there to eat; passersby, poor people and peddlers who often went with wooden baskets on their shoulders and big, peeled white sticks in their hands that they held not at the top, but a little lower, like shepherds that we see depicted in the Jesus paintings.

The Jewish room was occupied by our own household and people who came on business or just a welcome guest. There we slept, ate, and prayed. And there the minyan gathered on Shabbos. Both rooms had two smaller rooms on the side. The Gentile room had two smaller rooms with windows that faced west. The small rooms on the Jewish side faced east and had no windows and drew their little bit of twilight from the big room. In one of those rooms, sometimes the one with light sometimes the darker one, a couple boarded with us. Sometimes with a small child.

Gardeners and orchard keepers used to stop at our house in the summer at dawn, our relatives who were bringing their merchandise to the city. They used to stop so they could pray in a Jewish home and sometimes also to eat a piece of bread with milk. The prayer shawls and phylacteries, the loaves of bread and the small jug of milk spent the night in front of them on the table.

In the first room, the Gentile room, there were two ovens—the large oven and the small one—with their backs turned toward the Jewish room. The large oven was heated twice a day, winter and summer. All kinds of vegetables were cooked in a huge, patched pot, with grains of cereal and potatoes; also, in the winter, water was heated twice a day for the tubs. The little oven was heated mainly in winter for warmth and sometimes in summer when we didn’t want to heat the large oven. The little oven was also affectionately called the cooking plate though it didn’t have a cooking plate in it, just as the fish chowder didn’t have any fish. The big oven had a hearth as big as the stage in a small theater that was always hidden with clay and cast iron pots and pans. My mother was the stage director who commanded the pots. In a corner between the oven and the wall, stood several forks: very large ones for the cast-iron pots, and smaller ones for the clay pots; and two shovels—one wide and heavy like Tshize the baker, for the sixteen–eighteen one-pound loaves of bread, and a smaller one, a white one, refined with a long face like a young girl, for the Shabbos challahs. Nearby there was also a poker and a hearth broom. The hot coals were raked out of the oven with the poker and the hearth broom was used to sweep out the oven before the loaves of bread were put in.

Two very long and very wide benches—one for dairy products and one for meat—were made of boards that were nailed together and stood against the walls in the first room.² They were always white and well-scrubbed. On the wall over the meat bench hung copper pans of all different sizes, a copper mixing spoon and a brass bowl to knead dough for challah. Over the dairy bench two sets of shelves for utensils—one for dairy and one for meat—hung from chains fastened to the wall. On the shelves, plates and bowls, porcelain cups and saucers were laid out on thin strips of molding, and on the lower ledge spoons and forks were stuck into cracks sawed into the wood.

A white table stood at the only window in the room where the Gentiles, the wagon drivers, always sat while waiting their turn. At night, they told stories about ghosts, wolves, and distant journeys, or played cards. With great zest and fervor they covered the table with faded, dirty cards. Every card fell with a resounding slap. The game was called the wagon. Whoever lost had to gather up all the cards, the whole wagon.

A tall, wide cupboard, divided in the middle for dairy and meat, stood against the wall between the two rooms. Near it, a covered trough to knead bread; and sometimes, once a week, tubs with lye for soaking wash, covered with a sheet and tied all around with a strap. On the sheet there was a mound of coals doused with hot water. In the summer months a large barrel stood filled with cider in which there swam little pieces of black bread. On the wooden cover there was a clay pitcher. Whoever wanted to, removed the round board, like Jacob the stone at the desert well, and drew cider, cold and winey.³ We called the barrel the כּלי (keyle). (We called all the barrels, large and small, the כּלי, though in my memory the word was written קײלע. ⁴)

Half-pushed under the dairy bench, there was a slop pail, a large tub where the remains of food and water from ritual hand-washing⁵ were poured. The slop pail used to become full several times a day, and two men carried it outside by the ears and spilled it out on the dung heap opposite the house. There was another institution in our house: that was the chicken coop under the large oven, a kind of cellar with a bed of dark gray ash. The chickens were driven there at night and the entrance was closed with a board that was called the lock. They spent the night there and lay eggs with sweet, tasty yokes. In the morning they were let out, and my mother often sent me to gather the abandoned eggs. That was one of the jobs that I did gladly. (I must say, each time I crawled in I expected that I would find something new there.) More than once I rummaged around in the hidden corners of the house and the mill with a secret feeling that I would discover a mysterious old-new thing that I had never seen but that my heart longed for. It always seemed to me that somewhere in the hidden places in the mill, covered with thick dust, boys and girls in colorful costumes were sitting, waiting for me to arrive. When I was already a boy of twelve, my mother showed me a short jacket with a black velvet collar that I wore when I was four or five years old. I took it into both my hands and looked at it not as at an old piece of clothing, but as, in the eyes of a child, a friend that had gone away somewhere and had now returned.

A second job was beating butter in a butter churn. True, my hands always grew weak from beating, but the task provided a stolen pleasure: when the butter was ready and gelled, I licked the drops of butter from the stick. For the first job, my mother caressed my face with a warm egg and paid more with an omelet; for the second—with a glass of foaming buttermilk. But there was also a third job that my mother used to entrust me with in the long, sleepy, summer Shabbos days. That was to recite psalms from her prayer book. It was not something I took pleasure in. I didn’t see any secrets in the psalms, and drops of butter didn’t run from the prayer book, and she had to ask me repeatedly to do it.

In the Gentile room, twice a day, morning and evening, they brought the tubs for the animals and filled them with chaff soaked in hot water. I always helped take the tubs outside and stood with a stick to make sure that the bigger, stronger cows wouldn’t drive away their weaker sisters from the tubs after they had quickly finished their own meal, just like our rich neighbor, who often used to show up in the middle of Shabbos dinner for another helping of kugel.

From the Gentile side of the building to the Jewish side, there led a narrow corridor around eight feet long. We called it the little street. One side of the little street was occupied by the wall of the little oven. In the winter evenings we, the men (the women didn’t have time), used to stand with our arms clasped behind us and warm ourselves and think all kinds of thoughts. I could stand for hours and think of cities I had never seen and only knew their names. I imagined them in my fashion; or I remained alone with the heroes of books that I had read.

In the second room, the Jewish room as I call it now, there were two small windows, one facing west and the other facing north. It was dark all day long. Only in the evening a melancholy sun peeked in; especially in the Shabbos evenings when the striped, red sky reminded one of hell-fire, and the pale melody of the Shabbos afternoon prayers saddened my heart. I held the second window in high esteem for on its sharp brick edge my father stuck the wax candles for Chanukah, and melted drops of wax stuck to the bricks for weeks afterward.

The furniture in the room consisted of a red sleeping bench against one wall, and a hard sofa against a second wall. Along the other walls were a tall, wide wardrobe with shelves inside for religious books and Hebrew books, and a bed where I slept.⁶ (Later, when I went out into the world, I preferred the hard, flat sofa. When everyone was asleep, I used to throw off the pillow from under my side and sometimes from under my head in order to get used to strange, hard beds.)

At a wooden partition that divided the large room from the smaller dark rooms there stood a very old commode with drawers for tablecloths and sheets. The very top drawer was divided into secret little boxes that contained: the lease for the mill, my older brother’s discharge papers that freed him from military service, and other important papers written in Polish whose meaning I didn’t understand. Above the commode, the Holy Ark hung on chains. There was a Torah scroll in it wrapped in a violet satin mantle with gold embroidered lions and leopards and hung with silver chintz and an ingeniously carved wooden pointer. Every inch was covered with carving like the rings of a throat. There were also several old, worn-out mantles that hadn’t been thrown away because of their holiness and our attachment to them. When I looked at one of them I was transported to the years before I was born.

The red dining table occupied a large, honored place. It was surrounded on two sides by the sleeping benches and the sofa where we sat when we took our meals. At the third side of the table there was, when I was a small boy, a long, white bench. But in later years, when the new spirit of the times had begun to penetrate our area and my sisters were looking for husbands, Roman the miller with the golden hands made small rectangular stools and painted them red. They took the place of the old bench at the table.

Gradually, other new things were introduced to us. A small vent was cut into a window that we opened every morning for half an hour to air out the room after it was cleaned. By the way, after cleaning the room the floor was strewn with yellow sand. It looked very attractive indeed, but when we unintentionally scraped our boots it raised a dust that stuck in our throats and flew in our eyes. Another innovation my father allowed at Shabbos dinner: the kugel was served after the meat. According to custom, the kugel should be eaten in the middle of the meal between the courses in memory of the manna that lay between two layers of dew. We even contrived to drink tea on Shabbos, not from a cholent pot but from a warm samovar, which the Gentile maid knew when to serve.

Our Gentiles, the workers, were literally scholars. They worked for us for many years. And once, while covering the sukkah, I heard how Matshey and Yezeb deliberated about the roof. Matshey said that it should let the daylight in and Yezeb said the twinkling of the stars should be visible through it at night. Eylu v’eylu divrey Elohim Khayim.⁷

The regular minyan met in our room, and during the week before Rosh Hashanah I was awakened at dawn by the sweet melody of the aneynus (answer us) and selakh lanus (forgive us).⁸ I loved to get up in those cool dawns, to see the sky in the east becoming pale and feel like a grown-up man.

1. Ark of the Covenant; see glossary.

2. Jewish dietary laws require that meat and milk products be stored separately; also, they may not be eaten together.

3. The Patriarch Jacob rolled a large stone away from the mouth of a well to allow Rachel, his future wife, to draw water for her flock; Genesis 19:10.

4. כּלי is the traditional spelling of the word, which is of Hebrew derivation, whereas קײלע is a phonetic spelling. Rolnik does not explain why he pictures the word written