“I am the city”: Embodied do’ikayt (Hereness) in Kulbak’s “Vilne”

• In Event: Jewish Difference Across Borders

Abstract

Moyshe Kulbak’s 1926 poem “Vilne” is one of the author’s most enduring works, an ode to the city celebrated by Kulbak’s contemporaries as well as later critics. Aaron Glants-Leyeles wrote that Kulbak’s poetic Vilna was “the real, the authentic Vilna, the Vilna where we lived,” and praised the “earthiness” of Kulbak’s language. And yet Glants-Leyeles’ description is puzzling, because Kulbak’s poem is also a work of mystical modernism, far from any kind of realism as it might be traditionally understood. It is a poem in which the city is made of parchment, ink, and Jewish text; humans are made of wood, worms, spiders, and moss; nature is the yearly flooding of the river personified as a naiad-like female spirit. What does it mean to say this is the “real” Vilna? Through close reading, engagement with previous scholarship on the poem, and theories of literary representation of “lived Jewish space,” I will explore the poem’s thick engagement with Vilna built up from a “web” (to use the poem’s term) of reference to local folklore (Jewish and non-Jewish), local ecosystems, local language, contemporary Yiddish culture and politics, and Kulbak’s characteristic interest in a blurring and merging of the human, the natural, and built space. I will argue for a reading of this poem as poetic do’ikayt (hereness), a term I have borrowed from Bundist historiography and use to describe Yiddish modernist representations of the places and spaces of “Yiddishland.” I read these modernist literary engagements with “lived Jewish space” as part of the cultural and political trends of the period to build diasporic Yiddish culture.

Author

• Madeleine Cohen, Yiddish Book Center