Exile, Imprisonment and The Literary Imagination

Exile, Imprisonment and the Literary Imagination
Author(s): Glenda Abramson

Source: Jewish Studies Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2006), pp. 171-191
Published by: Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40753397
Accessed: 28-05-2017 00:43 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Jewish Studies Quarterly
This content downloaded from 132.74.95.19 on Sun, 28 May 2017 00:43:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Exile, Imprisonment and the Literary Imagination
Glenda Abramson
Authors who write about exile have defined it in various ways: banish-
ment from a country or a home, forced relocation, migration, or the
voluntary absence from one's country. The type of exile discussed in
this paper is the result either of war or of political force and control,
leading to the loss of a native country, customs and family and of per-
sonal freedom.
Exile seems to stimulate a form of literary imagination like no other
experience. This is compounded by the writer's detachment from home
and roots, the attempts to transcend time and space and the need in
extremis to access and imagine other places or to idealise the real past.
While some scholars argue that exile activates artistic creativity (Seidel
, xii; See also Gready 273) Said claims that the unreality and unnatur-
alness of the exile's world in itself resembles fiction (Said 181). The
Israeli writer Anton Shammas takes the view, probably somewhat ton-
gue-in-cheek, that The Divine Comedy would not have been written had
Dante not been banished from Florence. "And sometimes . . . you must
face two equally painful decisions: either to be banished from your Flor-
ence and write your Divine Comedy, or to stay at home and enjoy your
obscurity. There's no middle ground" (Glad 85). While exiled writers
rarely have such a choice, there is certainly a connection to be made
between exile and "a fictional state of being" (See Gready 188), and
between exile and the literary imagination.
Siberia was the paradigm of an exilic location. It was the place of
prisoner-of-war camps and barracks during the First World War, and
the gulags, which reached their most significant numbers during the
Stalinist period. Many Jewish soldiers were among the troops taken
prisoner by the Russians from 1914 tol916 and, two decades later, the
Soviet rulers exiled thousands of Jews whom they deemed to be Zionists
from the Russian Empire to the most inhospitable parts of Siberia. Yet
only two major writers, Haim Lensky (1905-194?) and Avigdor Hameiri
(1890-1970) wrote in Hebrew about their incarceration in Siberia at
Jewish Studies Quarterly, Volume 13 (2006) pp. 171-191

Mohr Siebeck - ISSN 0944-5706
172 Glenda Abramson JSQ 13
different times and for different reas

1916-1917 and Lensky was victim of S
the early 1940s. For them exile was an
creative achievement. Both writers por
poetry and fiction, both describe the
to their exile. Lensky imaginatively es
fabricated "home" while Hameiri views
much from any landscape or motherlan
in his work by European literature.
The Lowest Hell
Siberia had been a dumping ground for undesirables and prisoners well
before the October Revolution. Between 1754 and 1885 nearly 1.2 mil-
lion prisoners were deported to provide cheap labour in the mines
owned by the emperors. About 8.5 million soldiers, of whom about 2
million were Austro-Hungarian, were captured by Russian forces be-
tween 1914 andl917, to be transported to Siberia and parts of European
Russia. Hameiri, a Hebrew poet and novelist born in Dvidhza, then in
Hungary, was among them.
When the First World War broke out in August 1914 Hameiri was in
his twenties and already a published Hebrew poet. He worked as a jour-
nalist on a Budapest newspaper and wrote stories, plays and articles in
Hungarian. He was active in the Zionist movement in Hungary and in
September 1913 he took part as a journalist in the 1 1th Zionist Congress
in Vienna where he met a few of the great Hebrew writers of the day,
including Bialik. Both as a Hebrew poet and a Hungarian author
Hameiri was involved in the bohemian life of Budapest. In 1914 he
joined the Austro-Hungarian army and fought as an officer against the
Russians for about two and a half years until he was taken prisoner and
transported to Siberia in the autumn of 1916. After the revolution in
1917 he was liberated and immediately moved to Odessa and then to
Palestine. His war experiences gave rise to two long novels, two volumes
of short stories, a series of poems and a play.
Hameiri's second autobiographical novel,1 entitled Bagehenom shel
mata2 is the record of his experiences as a Jewish prisoner-of-war pre-
1 The generic definition of these books presents a problem: despite the general des-
ignation of both works as "novels", they are rather more memoiristic or perhaps auto-
fictive. The exact definition of Bagehenom shel mata is further confused by its subtitle:
"Notes of a Jewish Officer in Russian Captivity" indicating a memoir based on a
(2006) Exile, Imprisonment and the Literary Imagination 173
dominantly in Siberia. It is the chronicle of his imprisonment and of

wandering through both a physical and an emotional landscape of tor-
ture and suffering. Three comrades, all lower-ranking soldiers, accom-
pany the narrator and one by one they die, leaving him alone. These
companions, who were present in Hameiri's first novel Hashiga'on haga-
dol (The Great Madness) set in the trenches of the Eastern Front, may be
based on reality, but they also construct a single multifaceted personal-
ity, reflecting the fragmentariness of the narrator's experience and the
fracturing of his own self.
Bagehenom shel mata was published in 1932, some years after the
events it describes.3 The author presumably organised his notes, and
added a visionary ending once he was safely in postwar Odessa prior
to his departure for Palestine in 1921. Hence the novel's traditional
structure of oppression - due both to the war and to anti-Semitism -
followed by redemption in Eretz Yisrael: paradise after hell, redemption
following affliction. Yet while he might have completed the book after
the war, Hameiri made constant notes and journal entries while in the
camps, which give his narrative a memoiristic immediacy.
. . . There at the Front, I wrote down what I had seen and felt as a living
human being. I began my first note two days after meeting the first sergeant.
The final chapter I wrote in Chortkov, the first stop in my internment [as a
prisoner-of-war] in Russia, thirteen years ago. I haven't improved on the
facts or made them uglier: I haven't added or subtracted anything from
them. I made notes and waited for the end: for the great recovery to come.4
While it is clear that Hameiri intended his two narratives to constitute a
faithful record of his experiences, his statement, "I haven't added or
subtracted anything from them" is somewhat disingenuous in view of
the many digressions he employs throughout both narratives. Still, his
journal. Yet the account contains many fictional elements. Avner Holzmann defines the
first volume, Hashiga'on hagadol - a definition which applies equally to its sequel - as a
"non-fiction novel" that possesses two fields of reference: the internal world of the
narrative, and the outer world "in its experiential context" which possesses the
"authoritv of realitv" (Holzmann 55). Translations throughout the text are mine.
2 Literally this means "in the Hell below". I'm grateful to the anonymous reader of
this paper for pointing out the relationship of the title to the idea of Yerushalayim shel
ma'ala and mata (Heavenly and eathly Jerusalem); because of the contrast between
ma'ala and mata, and the book's allusions to Dante's ninth circle of Hell in The Divine
Comedy, I have translated the title as In the Lowest Hell. Alon Rachamimov inge-
niously translates it as Hell on Earth {POWs and the Great War. Oxford; New York:
Berg Publishers, 2002).
3 Hameiri writes in his introduction to the novel that he wrote the book in 1920 but
that it remained in his desk for some years.
4 Preface to Hashiga'on hagadol. Tel Aviv: Joseph Shrebek, n. d.
notes provide an authentic picture of d

and the journeys on foot and by train
As the story progresses the four pris
are bundled into cattle trucks without
vicious guards in constantly worsening
tances in the snows of Russian Emp
brutality that has been expressed grap
caust, some of it, in Hameiri's accou
point the narrator asks:
Who is this who enjoys hell, for whom
agony to the point of a bizarre death? W
pose do they do this? Through hatred cer
the Circassians or the Russian soldiers or
the Austrians? (86).
One of his companions remarks, "Ther

enjoy it" (185).
Apart from the dreadful privations o
prisoners had to endure the added tr
meiri's descriptions of anti-Semitic inc
gime founded on it, complement his Z
this," he writes, "there is another dise
amongst the rotting prisoners. There
in normal life" (109). The brand of ant
Jewish prisoners consists of the enduri
ing millions from the sufferings of ot
to spy for the Germans, a primitive, a
Jewish ability rise above the laws of n
Yet it isn't only this or even Siberia its
is the idea of losing touch with his Eur
of the other Hebrew writers of the tim
humanity. In this rests his true exile. If
all, it is not that of his past life or the
texts. The highest aspiration of assimi
time was their integration into Wester
5 There is, however, a difference between th

it takes place within the recognisable framew
war. Most importantly, the prisoners could a
some kind of moral order ultimately prevailed
examine the prisoners and his nurse helps the
tration camps. The prisoners-of-war, even the
their Russian captors, still retained the identit
the reshaping of Jewish identity. Hameiri's imagination was largely tex-

tual, that is, he sought his survival not only in his own writing but in the
writing of others. It was only after the Holocaust that the moral value of
art in the wake of the disaster was questioned. Hameiri lived in a period
which may or may not already have realised the complicity of the huma-
nities in barbarism, but he - perhaps naively - retained his reliance on
the humanising powers of art. Literature - a metonym for him of Eur-
opean culture - is an agonising reminder of the world from which his
protagonist has been severed. In fact he worries that his qualities as a
human being are diminishing after describing his growing insensitivity
to illness, the stench of their barracks, his own degradation and the
suffering of others. Siberia and Europe are diametric opposites:
I'm travelling in Siberia .... I remember that a few weeks before I had
crossed this Siberian border, meaning the border of Europe, the sentry
warned me that the signpost is close by. This is the signpost that signifies
the border. The signpost was there and the word "Europe" was written on it.
A few moments later we came upon the second signpost and on it "Asia"
was written . . . Who has set down this great and terrible border and divided
this land into two worlds? . . . even the train doesn't stop for one moment on
this important border, on the border of world culture and the eternal wild-
erness (289).
His story takes place within an intertextual network which frames his
experience, as if he wished the events of his life to be given validity by
the writing of others, or as if he used other texts as a means of construct-
ing meaning for himself. Many author-prisoners similarly showed a need
to attach themselves to a written tradition in order to write; the number
of literary references made by imprisoned writers is surprising (See Witt
19). Hameiri utilises literary texts almost systematically, seemingly as
reminders of the world from which he has been exiled. Moreover, his
novel-memoir is interspersed with discussions about literature, possibly
added between the time of writing and the book's publication in 1932
because of their interruption of his narrative.6 He uses the intertexts as
an interpretive frame, to clarify the chaos of his imprisonment. Great
European works illuminate his own experience. The brothers Grimm
represented evil, Poe, a man's need - even desire - to face the abyss,
which is also a symbol of descent, de Maupassant, fantasies of revenge,
6 Although many war novels were written after the event when subsequent judg-
ments and events had altered the focus of the war experience, this does not mean
that all the evidence in them was worthless. Collectively they add up to a testimony
which should not be ignored. See Bond Brian. "British 'anti-war' writers and their
critics" in Hugh Cecil and Peter H Liddle (Eds.) Facing Armageddon. London: Leo
Cooper, 1996, p. 819.
176 G lenda Abramson JSQ 13
the Book of Job, works by H G Well

objective correlative of violence, fantas
tones of sadism. Referring to the priso
remarks, "All this is trapped in a curse
Dante to describe even a little" (185).
As for Solzhenitsyn's The First Circ
constitutes for Hameiri the existential,
frameworks of his novel, the allusion n
hell", but also in numerous comments t
gehenom shel mata displays the most g
tean model in modern Hebrew literat
cending to greater horror and violence.
visited the ninth circle of Hell, the lowe
to Paradise. In an inversion of Solzh
"Dante's idea" (Solzhenitsyn 8) one of
shel mata comments that even the "upp
would be a paradise compared to where h
only in hell, but in the lowest circle of
and his three companions come across t
filled with wounded and dying men
chorus" of misery, he makes a judgmen
Dante's journey of tranquillity and phil
the torments of Hell, the narrator comm
"What cruelty!" (7)
One of the central thematic structures
recurring confrontation between literat
ence brings to mind a fictional prece
example, the narrator meets a woma
through reference to a character in Ch
counters are mediated through fictiona
others. He also sometimes comes perilou
experiences as his own. Yet at the same t
ambivalent and perhaps self-reflexive s
because he doubts its ability to improve
about Dante's cruelty exemplifies his view
(sifrut). He states in the introduction to
novels he did not mean to offer work
describes the death of one of his three
corporal called Latzy, holding his bod
comes to take it away and, in a strange
the wet straw and asks: "If I write this
and adds "even in these jottings I didn't mean to offer 'literature'". 7

Ultimately he has a paradoxical dissatisfaction with the ability of fiction
and poetry to tell the truth. In his view, fiction is the antithesis of life
and he complains that authors are existentially/experientially removed
from the reality of their narratives.
Whoever wrote the Book of Job didn't really know about torture. What is
the sickness of boils as opposed to the Spanish Inquisition or the German
Inquisition? Oscar Wilde never tasted the taste of imprisonment in Russia.
Knut Hamsun wrote his book on hunger. How ridiculous it is. Let Mr
Hamsun come here for a month (380).
By contrast, Hameiri implies, his novel, which he denies the status of

literature, is the truth. It seems, however, that even in this defiantly
"non-literary" novel there is no escape from literary strategies: analogy,
allusion, metaphor, structure and the rest of the accoutrements of an
artistic work. Yet, however convoluted, Hameiri's argument is a perti-
nent one when considering the post-Holocaust problem of representa-
tion.
In contrast to his contradictory views on literature Hameiri's narrator
- and undoubtedly Hameiri himself - finds an unexpected, and entirely
positive, revelation in the East European Jewish communities. During
the prisoners' erratic movements through the Russian provinces the nar-
rator meets Jews in a variety of circumstances, even being billeted with
families on occasion, and he remarks on their communal cohesiveness.
His sudden comprehension of the shared fate of the Jewish people, and
his and their shared exile, graphically crystallises the Zionist solution for
him; in fact, his already well-established - but, in this book, infrequently
articulated - Zionism both frames these encounters with the East Eur-
opean Jews and is shaped by them. His harsh and realistic descriptions
of the treatment of prisoners are interspersed with either faithful render-
ings of Russian Jewish life, or sentimental representations of Jewish
stereotypes. His admiration for them is fulsome, for their family life,
their religious steadfastness and their generosity. The prisoners are often
saved by the kindness of Jewish characters, a nurse who helps them
escape, families who give them food and shelter (without knowing that
7 In his introduction to Bagehenom shel mata Hameiri writes: " Within the waning
of strength and hope that afflicted us there and turned us into twitching dead men - a
tiny spark of hope fluttered in me: perhaps after all I shall return to a clean bed and the
arms of my sister and I'll tell her something of my suffering, whose nightmare no
writer's fantasy can ever achieve" [My italics GA] "How ridiculous literature is gener-
ally. People sit and create theories about morality and suffering, joy and sorrow. They
twist the screws of their minds and squeeze out fantasies of man's suffering" (398).
there are Jews among them), the imp

the Russian Jews at the mercy of thei
the enemy to liberate them. They seem
of redemption, as if paradoxically thi
confronted with his own true identit
tion. True to form, he had been carryi
construct of the East European Jew:
In the town of Holmetz. Finally a typ
have yearned to know for years - after
foot ones] by Sholem Asch and after B
Berdyczewsky. . . . What is the nature o
their walls and utensils, how do they e
The many kindnesses of "these Jews"

the remainder of his ordeal until towa
defection from the prison camps in th
he discovers that he has received a
meiri's book ends, therefore, with th
over he resolves his story with a scen
protagonist encounters a particularly
street and performs an act of forgive
the victim, and for the perpetrator.
"Somewhere a Nightbird Mo
For Haim Lensky there was no such r

premature death. While some historia
of-war camps "could be considered pr
the communists" (Rachamimov 67) t
Convention and, to a certain extent, b
ceivable in the Stalinist gulags. These
lished only a few years after the war
peak of perverted efficiency in the 19
who were neither political nor milita
because the authorities deemed them undesirables or criminals. The
term Gulag (Russian acronym for "Chief Administration of Corrective
Labour Camps") had been largely unknown in the West until the pub-
lication of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 (1973). At
its height, during Stalin's purges, the Gulag consisted of many hundreds
of camps, with the average camp holding 2,000-10,000 prisoners. Most
of these camps were "corrective labour colonies" in which prisoners
felled timber, worked on general construction projects (such as the

building of canals and railroads), or in the mines. At least 10 percent
of the Gulag's total prisoner population was killed by starvation or ill-
ness each year. Estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in
the period from 1918 to 1956 range from 15 to 30 million. The reasons
for the expansion of the camps during the Stalin era are not entirely
clear: Stalin might well have intended the arrests both to eliminate ene-
mies and to create slave labourers. He might have been motivated by his
own paranoia or by the labour needs of regional leaders. Whatever the
reason he proposed the labour camps and selected the victims (See Ap-
pelbaum 72).
Haim Lensky spent about seven years in one or another form of im-
prisonment either in an urban prison or in the gulags. The most telling
difference between him and Hameiri is that Hameiri could be reasonably
certain that his exile was not permanent. As a prisoner-of-war he could
expect to be released sooner or later, with thousands of others, a hope
denied to Lensky.8 Lensky was born in Slonim in Belarus in 1905 and
spent his childhood and early youth in Dereczyn. In 1921 he left to
study at the Hebrew Teachers' Seminar in Vilnius where he published
his first poem in a student magazine, and later he worked in a steel
factory founded by the Hehalutz Zionist movement in Moscow and Le-
ningrad. Lensky the factory worker was the perfect proletarian, despite
his deep suspicion of the revolution and the Soviet utopia. He was ar-
rested in 1924 when he attempted to cross the border to reach Baku in
order to meet his father, and was imprisoned in the Malaya Vyshera
prison camp near Leningrad. Later, in 1934, despite his unimpeachable
proletarian credentials, he was arrested for being a self-professed He-
brew writer at a time when the mere possession of Hebrew manuscripts,
books and newspapers represented to the authorities a "Zionist conspi-
racy". Lensky was sentenced to five years imprisonment with hard la-
bour in camps in Marinsk in Eastern Siberia and Gornaya Shoriya on
the Siberia-Mongolia border, in addition to others. Gornaya Shoriya
was known for the brutality of its regime and its punishing hard labour.
Prisoners laid a railway track with inadequate implements and in diffi-
cult terrain. The death toll in this camp transcended the norm during
Stalin's terror.
From 1934 to the early 1940s, relieved by only a short period of free-
dom, Lensky was interned in the gulags and throughout this time he
8 "The treatment of POWS proves that even though the Hague Convention was not
a perfect document, it did ensure that over 90 per cent of those captured during the
conflict would return home" (Rachamimov 125).
continued writing poetry which was ga

friends and fellow inmates. Under the
out some of his Hebrew manuscripts t
living in Leningrad. In 1958 a number
reached Israel where they were publish
We know very little about Lensky's
ence other than from isolated reference
railway, to the Siberian landscape, p
Gornaya Shoriya - and through a few
include an engineer called Joseph Rech
probably died of starvation in a Gulag
Exiled writers have argued that lan
their condition as writers (see Glad
one of the most pertinent signifiers o
Writers in prison find a way of writin
which the rules of imprisonment have
ky's case this is quite literal: he was im
language he was using, which he the
tance. While affirming his identity as
function, being the language that non
or read, and in which he could enjoy f
in writing at all. Lensky chose his lang
in Hebrew despite the fact that he was
spoken language and despite its having
incarceration. It also represented a dial
as a Jew and his homeland: the Belo
language.
Lensky's Hebrew is difficult, the language not of speech but the high
register of Lithuanian scholarship, enriched by biblical allusions and
including some Yiddish constructions, a combination of Nusakh and
linguistic modernism.11 His commitment to Hebrew also indicates his
9 In 1940 he had entrusted the manuscript of an important collection of poetry to

friends in Leningrad and Moscow, from where they were smuggled out to Israel some
time later. For a full account of this activity see Shlomo Grodzensky, Preface to Hayim
Lensky. Me 'ever nahar haleti. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1986; also Judd L Teller, "Chaim
Lensky's Ordeal." Commentary, vol. 30, no 3. ( September 1960), 249-251.
10 Shlomo Grodzensky. Preface, Hayim Lensky. Me'ever nahar haleti. Tel Aviv: Am
Oved, 1986. p. 15. Page numbers following poetry quoted in this article refer to this
edition.
1 1 Anton Shammas comments that Dante's language was the Florentine vernacular
rather than Latin which he referred to as "the tragic style". He called his work - written
in exile - Commedia. For his own exile, Lensky chose the "high" language rather than
the vernacular (See Glad, (85)
awareness of the language as a flexible vehicle for the expression of a

modernist poetics little different from that of the poets he admired.12 In
the combination of classical Hebrew and modern vocabulary he fre-
quently combines registers (for example the outdated word shur (see)
and oto (automobile) in the same sentence [62]), juxtaposing the neces-
sary vocabulary of his modern environment with classical constructions
and archaisms.
Lensky conforms to the profile of the exile who inhabits one place
while remembering and projecting the reality of another (See Seidel ix).
He is cast into the locus horridus, the labour camp, creating the locus
amenus as a work of art and an aesthetic, reacting to confinement by
turning inward to imagine the natural world, experiencing it as intensely
through a barred window as he would in freedom.13 As a contrast to the
reality of the Leningrad prison and the Siberian barracks he offers an
evocation of nature and the Russian landscape, a glossed Russian land-
scape, memory reconstructed to derive comfort from its transformative
possibilities.14 Idealised memory served as his means of creativity, his
transposition of exile and the imaginative control over his space of con-
finement. According to Avraham Kariv, some of Lensky's brightest po-
etry was written from prison. He claims that "there was not even a single
note of depression or dejection" (Introduction, Me' ever nahar haleti 23).
This is untrue, but many of the poems are indeed astonishing for their
exaltation in their re-creation of the natural world.
Lensky's presentation of landscape in his poetry is threefold: first, the
real countryside of memory, remembered from his youth in the forests of
Belarus where his grandfather was a woodcutter; second, the landscape
of imagination, created as a refuge from his actual situation, and, third,
the landscape of mood in which he expresses his own states of mind in
metaphorical or constructed panoramas. His scenes of nature are fre-
quently mediated by biblical texts, often for the purpose of appropriat-
ing descriptions that serve the redemption of his constructed world.
12 Lensky was a voracious reader of German and Russian poetry, including Goethe
and Rilke, and much admired for his vast knowledge of this and other literature. Yet he
did not conform to any specific poetic period or school although his work is influenced
by Pushkin and Ysenin and also contains elements of symbolism and even of the short-
lived acmeism of Mandelstam and Akhmatova, particularly in his lucid representations
of St. Petersburg.
13 Lensky writes about the branches of an apple tree reflected on a wall seen
through a window: "A strip of light, a strip of shadow, a strip of light, a strip of
shadow ..." like the bars on the window of a cell ("You, whose window", 73).
14 Conversely, it is probably because Hameiri, the prisoner-of-war, had a reasonable
hope of release that he did not idealise his homeland or its landscape; in fact he cut out
many of his descriptions of landscape from the finished work.
Landscape for Lensky is, therefore, not on

place, but place as representative of emo
of symbolic connotations: birds, snow, t
threefold strategy of memory and imagin
the temporal barriers of the prisons a
future. For example, after a long descrip
home after years of wandering, and reca
("This I saw in my mind - a lonely reflec
a vision of a homecoming in which his la
. . . God has left me a sanctuary

In my abandoned town,
Hidden in the shadow of the ruined fences
A dwelling in my homeland still is kept,
From a hundred branches apple trees will still offer me
Their pink-cheeked fruit,
And at my town's entrance mighty trees will welcome me

With a rustling consolation:
Believe, do not falter,
The years will mend your twisted star. (Lensky 40) 15
In fact this is an equivocal, if not ironic, welcome, one which, as in most

of his poems, lacks any human agency. Earlier in the poem the speaker
laments the loss of his family: his grandfather will not bless him, "No
sister or aunt will offer me a cup of tea,/ No pink-cheeked bride." The
"pink-cheeked apples" have taken her place and his town is deserted
(nidahat). In other words, his home is irrevocably lost. Even the word
"homeland" (or "birthplace") (moledei), and its conjunction with Eli,
"my God" is ambiguous for there is only one "birthplace" for the
Jews, even if it is no more than ideological: mo lede t generally refers to
the Jewish homeland and other terms, such as mekhora, have been used
to indicate the diaspora birthplace.16 Yet throughout Lensky's poetry the
moledet portrayed is his real homeland: the province in which he was
born and where he spent his childhood; the forest of Belovezh, the Ne-
man River in Belarus, all given greater poignancy by their unavailability
to him. They are, perhaps, as unavailable in his imprisonment as is the
notional homeland of the Holy Land.
15 My translation throughout. I have not attempted to reproduce the strict rhyme

and rhythm (in this case anapaests) of the original.
16 See Tchernichowsky, "Mimangenot hazeman". Shaul Tchernichowsky: Kol shirav.
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Schocken, p. 278.
The association of iri (my town) and pleta (refuge, sanctuary) in the
poem is equally evocative. In the Bible the "cities of refuge", arei hapleta
(Joshua 20: 1-9), served as sanctuaries where those who had killed by
accident could live without fear of "blood vengeance" from the victim's
relatives. According to the biblical text the elders will welcome the fugi-
tive at the city's gates and give him a dwelling place until such time as he
"come into his own city and into his own house ..." (Joshua 20, 6), and
end his exile. The notion of a divinely sanctioned dwelling place is re-
inforced in Lensky's poem by the word daliyot (branches) which occurs
in Ezekiel (17:23): "In the shadow of the branches shall they dwell" - the
tree being a mighty cedar under whose sheltering branches all manner of
birds gather in peace. It is nature, rather than family, that shelters and
consoles Lensky's speaker, and his world, even in imagination, is lonely.
Throughout his poetry the speaker is burdened by the passage of time,
the realisation that the static time of exile does not translate to time in
the world. But meanwhile time has emptied the speaker's town and
destroyed its structures, his family will be lost to time, and he returns
to an unpeopled world where only nature has survived. "The house" in
Adorno's words, "is past" (Said 184).
Lensky's poetry has remarkable resonance with the writing of other
exiles. For example, during his incarceration for political "crimes" the
South African writer Breyten Breytenbach described "an intense aware-
ness, like a hitherto unexplored sense in yourself, for knowing exactly
when the sun rises and when it sets, without ever seeing it" (Gready 90-
91). This re-drawn space is no less tangible or real to the prisoner for
having been constructed by the imagination. By extension, an entire
landscape can be realised "without ever seeing it". Lensky's constructed
landscapes are described with the immediacy of physical encounter, his
"knowing exactly" the contours of a countryside partly both remem-
bered and largely imagined. For example, while immured in the Lenin-
grad prison in 1935 he describes a lake at evening, the day's sun having
set, the silvering of the water, and
The wind will blow
from the lightening east,
a bird's wing poised in flight,
treetops will bow, tree to tree.
A rosebush will curl its shoots
dew will drop from bloom to bloom
mulberry trees will shed a seed of sap
in the winding stream ... (58)
Composed in quatrains in rhyme and half

series of short visual moments written
eternal future encompassing an eternal s
man is replaced by the mutuality of the
and flowers, dew uniting bloom and b
scape offers a primeval and edenic scene,
in the early morning. Yet the series o
spring, for example, a bird signifying fr
roses, dew, is subverted by the vocabu
word for mulberry tree, bekha'im - also
to a tree in the Bible from which the mo
Moreover this mulberry tree will sow
word dema is both "sap" and a tear. This
of Psalm 137 in which the exiled Jews we
also redolent of a greater pathos in the
the sad wishfulness of a man who know
the future he has described. The verse continues:
I'll see without joy or sadness

The setting of my nights' stars.
But I'll weave a ray of splendour,
A golden net behind my eyes.
Only when he closes his eyes is he able to "see" something greater than
the reality of his night. Therefore, one positive continuity will define his
future: the ability to create with his eyes closed:
Twilight on the lake,

Fish doze in the deep.
Birds have ceased their prattle;
How sad the reed in its rustling.
Whose voice's echo
Grumbles in these embossed reeds?
For the shore is deserted, no foot
Has trodden there since time began.
Of the sun setting on seas,
Of silvering that has no word,
Of the wandering swallow and the wild goose -
Of this the reed whispers to the river. (57-58)
Also written in the Leningrad prison in the same year, this scene, inten-
sely experienced through a barred window, is far from the actuality of
whatever landscape Lensky was able to see. The vocabulary suggests

absolute tranquillity, but this is misleading, for the sense of the poem
is that of the speaker's own isolation, melancholy, a world devoid of the
sounds of fish and fowl, and - as in much of Lensky's nature poetry -
deserted by humanity, and silent except for the "telling" of the reeds. On
the other hand, the third stanza can be read as an evocation of the
sublime music of nature based loosely on Psalm 19, particularly verses
1-3. This psalm is dedicated to the glory of God which the heavens
themselves declare, whose "firmament sheweth his handywork" and
who speaks through the natural world. The psalmist tells us that "There
is no speech (omer) nor language where their voice [that is, the voice of
God's creations] is not heard." The literal translation (almost impossible
to render into English) of line 4 of Lensky's poem is "Whose and what's
voice's echo grumbles in these embossed reeds?" The only sound is the
whispering of the reeds, but they whisper to the river of God's glory. So
not only do the heavens declare God's glory, but his creation glories in
itself. Moreover, this is a glory without man, because "no foot/ Has
trodden there since time began." The repetition of words of speech,
"prattle", "speak" or "word" (omer), "whispering" indicates not only
the "telling" of God's handiwork but also that Lensky is drawing
upon both his imagination and his tradition to mediate his own speech
- his creation anew of the world.
This poem and Avraham Kariv notwithstanding, Lensky's nature po-
etry - whether of memory, imagination or mood - is not invariably as
exultant as his admirers believe it to be. There is very often a worm in
the pink-cheeked apple, the vocabulary of sadness or bitterness that
strikes at many of the most fervent nature poems. Generally, his verse
is infused with his consistent sense of his life in stasis while time passes,
days that will never return, his youth lost, years wasted in pointless
labour. As in the univers concentrationnaire, there is also a suspension
of normal time and the speaker's apprehension of a morality designed
only for the prisoner's world. In Lensky's mood landscapes the beauty
of the world is seasoned with melancholy. One of his best known and
most ambiguous poems describes the speaker's attraction to the charm
of wormwood (lacana) ("the bitterness of its strong-smelling juice")
which he sees ironically as representative of himself. There is also the
obvious contrast between his natural situation and the landscape's
indifferent, patrician permanence.
The South African activist Steve Biko once stated "The most potent
weapon in the minds of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed"
(Cape Times Friday 8th April 2005). Lensky signed a "confession"
when forced to by the KGB who threa

pencil and deprive him of the abilit
ironically the writing of lies allowed h
poems (Me'ever nahar laleti 77-78) allud
tuously describing "them" who are inc
and who mock him as nothing but an in
the derision of his captors and their a
own image, Lensky believed that "even
of imagination in the nights ..." (78) H
mocking philosophy of art and the im
splendour behind his eyelids:
Open a peephole to the city, see, liste

skies of smoke, a car's screech, a sme
Shut yourself in and write about a bl
oh, wise one by night, fool by day. (6
In exile literature "night" is often the

introspection, the inner world and the
For Lensky writing, which constitute
source of survival; not only was it a
ginary confinement in its ability to ma
scape poetry, therefore, he is able to o
repression, and control not only the o
inner space of the self. According to Ma
prison cell can, like the monastic cell,
tion which leads to the experience of l
liberty unconditioned by space and tim
... .the incarcerated body became an a
remaking of body and space facilitated a
and of their various textual representat
Lensky explored both prominent form
action (See Witt 50): Because the act of
illusory assumption of power, and resi
able to console himself with his con
over the sword:
I'm still alive, I still exist

My pen has not been harmed
My enemies [oppressors] be prepared
For a day of reckoning
Be prepared. (175)
Various memories, or constructions, of the past, his home village, a Jew-

ish family and the celebrations of Jewish ritual and festivals, appear in
Lensky's poetry. He writes of the shtetl in verse that is nostalgic, fond
and compassionate, and lacking in his usual irony. And together with his
elegiac, mystical nature poetry, Lensky did provide factual details of his
life in the camps, working on the railway line, building roads, sawing
wood for roof-beams, being beaten, the indifference of his guards, his
prison space, lack of sleep, the suffering of his fellow prisoners, like
Hameiri travelling in freezing cattle cars from camp to camp, deprived
of his identity. His understanding of his permanent exile permeates even
his most lyrical verse: he writes bluntly, in a section of poetry entitled
Moleded unedudim (Birthplace and wandering): "This is not the first
time we have wandered through lands,/ but we shall not find our birth-
place (moledet) again" (81). Like the speaker in Tchernichowsky's Mi-
manginot hazeman who mourns the forced exile of his family from their
own farmlands, Lensky contemplates the roads he has paved and won-
ders who will tread on them, knowing "not for me, it is not mine to
stride/ to my light-filled land./ That is clear, it is clear ... (70)
In his incarceration Osip Mandelstam wanted his "thinking body to
be changed into a thoroughfare, a country." (Davies 153) Like Mandel-
stam, Lensky was also able to realise himself through a kind of material
extension: "This is the road, my hands have paved / these gutters, day by
day, the Siberian road" (70). Ultimately, he inscribes on the page what
has been inscribed on his body:
Among these backs, stooping

To their suffering in stone and concrete
My back is sentenced to stoop, to stoop for years
Under the fervour of steel daggers (70).
"Cain, accursed"
loan Davies refers to the theology of incarceration which is founded on

violence and death to such an extent that it must be coupled with the
theology of the afterlife (Davies 16). Lensky and Hameiri sought an
afterlife - or perhaps a transfiguration - only through textual re-creation
of the self in one form or another. One would have hoped that these
Jewish writers, dedicated to the Hebrew language, would have had the
consolation of their faith but the kind of salvation represented by reli-
gion was not relevant to their thinking. In fact, despite their occasional
biblical allusions, God is absent from L

Hameiri's poetry and fiction. The divi
the clearest indication of a kind of pre-c
ference is signalled by the eternal future
human suffering through the coldness o
on the world from "on high". Apart from
of his strongest allusions to the Bible is h
in a poem dated 1935:
We are destined for years of wandering

Abandoned like Cain, accursed
On whom to depend, whom to believe?
From behind the Ural's peaks
The days of my youth go crouching by.
What shall I suffer tomorrow?
What have you hidden, oh fate?
In the bosom of Siberia, in the purity of its snows?
More affliction - give it me! Trouble: let it come!
I will no longer ask: from where.
I am ready. (72)
The experience of exile is encapsulated in this poem: the passage of time,

isolation, wandering, a lost past and a terrifying future. His life is sus-
pended in a godless world defined only by the arbitratriness of fate,
signified by the numerous question marks in the text. The purity of
Siberia's snows is juxtaposed with the prisoner's suffering, in an indict-
ment of nature's indifference, a theodicy common in Lensky's poetry as
in Holocaust writing. All ideas of causality and logic have been sus-
pended: fate acts as it will. The absence of God signifies the chaos of
a disordered world.
Hameiri, on the other hand, sees God as implicated in the break-
down of universal order. Despite his novel's structure which is based
on the Christian idea of the torments of hell, throughout the book Ha-
meiri challenges God with his lack of faith and mocks not only God's
divinity but denies his existence.
And God? This is the sadness that in the matter of his existence I have
come to a complete and total compromise. I no longer need to know about
his existence and his image, certainly not. And if there is anything about this
that arouses any an interest in me it is the latest conclusion I have come to
not from his existence or image, but through his deeds and my own logic and
the conclusion is - nothing. Zero (287-88).
Sarcastically he tells God (185) that his atrocities are boring and repeti-
tive and that he should try something else. Later he describes an encoun-
ter:
Outside the wind is shrieking. First in a whisper, afterwards more and

more powerfully. I think: in spite of this, God, you lack talent. In the matter
of torture, you could have invented much newer things. Cold, pain, rats - yes
these things are torture but after all you can do anything. You have the
intelligence and the ability. Even your blizzard is old hat.
And I hear the clear reply: Old hat but painful, aren't they? First of all,
my friend, get over them and don't feel them! At the moment you are still
feeling them (409).
Hameiri's protagonist again alludes - implicitly it is true - to Dante by

begging for transfiguration, for a belief in a spiritual afterlife "in the life
of the soul." At the same time he demands, "don't give me religion, give
me faith!" (322)17
There are many differences in the responses of these two writers to
their exile and imprisonment, conditioned both by the times and the
circumstances of their incarceration. Yet perhaps the most telling simi-
larity between them, apart from the shared theodicy implied in their
writings, is their use of Hebrew as a marker of their identity as Jews.
For Lensky Hebrew, and the Hebrew Bible to which he often alludes,
assumed a symbolic function, embodying for him a mtonymie, idea-
lized homeland, a place from which he could never be in exile. While it
is not the language of his shtetl or his family it provides him with an
intimation of the continuity of Jewish life. For Hameiri the choice of
Hebrew was impractical since it considerably narrowed his readership
of a story that was not only timely but that had universal appeal and
significance. Yet this was also the story of the confirmation of his Jewish
identity. The Hebrew language and the allusions to sacred texts were for
Lensky and Hameiri an echo of Jewish continuity. Both writers, there-
fore, recognized Hebrew as both an instrument of defiance and a symbol
of the national future.
Using the Exodus as a paradigm, Dante made his own exile into a
redemptive experience and a necessary perspective from which to speak
to the world (Lagos Pope 52, 53, 60, 61). Exile was not a redemptive
17 Like the Anglo-Jewish war poet Isaac Rosenberg, Hameiri wrote poetry which
passionately indicted God, clearly inspired by the conditions of the war: "Perhaps in
the dim light of the moon you will creep towards me .../Master of all horror, a curse of
all strength/ In the orchard of pain." Kol shire Avigdor Hameiri (The complete poetry
of Avidgor Hameiri). Tel Aviv: Am hasefer, 1933, 279. This can be compared with
Rosenberg's lines: "Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn .../Oh this miasma of a
rotting God!" (Isaac Rosenberg, "God").
experience for Lensky because he was un

For him the past did not configure the f
Jewish history as a salvatory promise. Ye
of renewal. In his new surroundings he re
before his imprisonment (See Seidel 8)
home with its normality and beauty, as if
representative. This was his mechanism,
Hameiri, on the other hand, exile was a r
for the future was presented to him, iron
imprisonment itself. His encounter with
cial element in the affirmation of his iden
became concrete in a kind of epiphany of
Jews themselves, the actual communities
his wandering, rather than the standar
that he strongly denigrated, that reinfor
determined his future. It is perhaps for
long and distinguished career in Palesti
scholar and translator, he did not ever
his army service. In the paradise which h
terpoint to brutality was humanity, and
"the land of the prophets" (484).
References
Applebaum, Anne. Gulag, A History. London Penguin Books 2004.

Davies, loan. Writers in Prison. Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Glad, John (Ed.). Literature in Exile. Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1990.
Gready, Paul. Writing as Resistance. Life Stories of Imprisonment, Exile and
Homecoming from Apartheid South Africa. Lanham, Boulder, New York and
Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003.
Hameiri, Avigdor. Bagehenom shel mata. Tel Aviv: Yosef Shreberk, n. d.
Hameiri, Avigdor. Hashiga'on hagadol. Tel Aviv: Yosef Shreberk, n. d.
Katznelson Shazar, Rachel. eAl 'adamat ha'ivrit. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1966.
Lagos-Pope, Maria-Ines. Exile in Literature. London; Toronto: Associated Uni-
versity Presses, 1988.
Lapidus, Rina. Between Snow and Desert Heat, HUC Press, 2002.
Lensky, Hayim. Me'ever nahar haleti. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1986
Pike, David. Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds.
Cornell University Press, 1997.
Rachamimov, Alon. POWs and the Great War Captivity on the Eastern Front.
Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002
Rutherford, Andrew. The Literature of War. Studies in Heroic Virtue. Hampshire:

MacMillan, 1989
Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. Lon-
don: Granta Books, 2001.
Seidel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1986.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The First Circle. Tr. Thomas P. Whitney. Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Teller, Judd L. "Chaim Lensky's Ordeal." Commentary, vol. 30, no 3. (September
1960), p. 249-251.
Wisse, Ruth R. "The Last Great Yiddish Poet?" Commentary (November 1983),
o. 41-48.
Witt, Mary Anne Frese. Existential Prisons - Captivity in Mid-Twentieth-Century
French Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1985.

Exile, Imprisonment and The Literary Imagination

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Exile, Imprisonment and The Literary Imagination

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Exile, Imprisonment and the Literary Imagination

Author(s): Glenda Abramson

Jewish Studies Quarterly, Volume 13 (2006) pp. 171-191

different times and for different reas

The Lowest Hell

dominantly in Siberia. It is the chronicle of his imprisonment and of

notes provide an authentic picture of d

One of his companions remarks, "Ther

5 There is, however, a difference between th

the reshaping of Jewish identity. Hameiri's imagination was largely tex-

the Book of Job, works by H G Well

and adds "even in these jottings I didn't mean to offer 'literature'". 7

By contrast, Hameiri implies, his novel, which he denies the status of

there are Jews among them), the imp

The many kindnesses of "these Jews"

For Haim Lensky there was no such r

felled timber, worked on general construction projects (such as the

continued writing poetry which was ga

9 In 1940 he had entrusted the manuscript of an important collection of poetry to

awareness of the language as a flexible vehicle for the expression of a

Landscape for Lensky is, therefore, not on

. . . God has left me a sanctuary

And at my town's entrance mighty trees will welcome me

In fact this is an equivocal, if not ironic, welcome, one which, as in most

15 My translation throughout. I have not attempted to reproduce the strict rhyme

Composed in quatrains in rhyme and half

I'll see without joy or sadness

Twilight on the lake,

whatever landscape Lensky was able to see. The vocabulary suggests

when forced to by the KGB who threa

Open a peephole to the city, see, liste

In exile literature "night" is often the

I'm still alive, I still exist

Various memories, or constructions, of the past, his home village, a Jew-

Among these backs, stooping

loan Davies refers to the theology of incarceration which is founded on

biblical allusions, God is absent from L

We are destined for years of wandering

The experience of exile is encapsulated in this poem: the passage of time,

Outside the wind is shrieking. First in a whisper, afterwards more and

Hameiri's protagonist again alludes - implicitly it is true - to Dante by

experience for Lensky because he was un

Applebaum, Anne. Gulag, A History. London Penguin Books 2004.

Rutherford, Andrew. The Literature of War. Studies in Heroic Virtue. Hampshire:

Вам также может понравиться