“A New Tabernacle in the Middle of the Market”: Irreverent Theology in Atheist Yiddish Poetry of Atrocity

• In Event: Mysticism as Resistance

Abstract

In Yiddish literature of horror and atrocities, there is a recurring pattern of poems addressed to God by atheist writers. In Peretz Markish’s “The Mound” or “DI KUPE,” he refers to a heap of bodies left in the middle of a town after a pogrom by saying “we erected a new MISHKEN for you in the center of the market / a black mound like a blister.” In the context of modernist Soviet Yiddish writers, which included at once Markish’s cheerleaders, comrades, and detractors, explicit mention of God was uncommon in their work and is most frequently found in literature following atrocity. Similar examples of this phenomenon arise in the work of other poets, such as Avrom Sutzkever who speaks to a God he cannot see in “Under Your White Stars,” or Itzik Manger in “‘The Lovers of Israel’ at the Belzhets Death Camp,” which depicts three prominent rabbis striking God’s own name from the list of ava Yisroel. This paper will analyze several of these examples from Yiddish literature of atrocity to argue that in their address of God, these atheistic writers are in fact making theological claims. To theoretically reinforce my argument, I will look to Yiddish poet Arn Tsaytlin’s essay “The Cult of Nothing and Art as It Must Be,” published in 1926 in Warsaw, which describes a kabbalistic writing method that values revelation and concealment over clarity. Here, Tsaytlin argues that in our modern world, poetry cannot be justified on the basis of what it means–rather, he espouses the “art of seeing,” which reveals without ascribing meaning. By convening these texts, my paper will offer a reading of the theological claims made by atheist Yiddish writers in the context of describing atrocity. As Derrida invoked in his notion of the trace and the present absence, as well as his writing on the limit of death in Aporias, the “presence” of anything–in this case, God–is always accompanied by its non-presence, and thus it is no coincidence that atheist Yiddish poets only chose to speak to God when they bemoaned his inability or refusal to intercede against violence.

Author

• IRIS MALKAH MORRELL, University of California, Irvine