Sing, Stranger. A Century of American Yiddish Poetry. A Historical Anthology.
Edited by Benjamin Harshav. Translated by Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav
Stamford University Press: Stamford, California 2006.
Menke Katz
(1906-1991)
During the 1930s, Menke Katz was a stubborn voice for a Yiddish poetry freed from political dictates within the New York leftist Yiddish writers’ group Proletpen, from which he was briefly expelled after his first book, Three Sisters (1932), offended the party line with its erotic and mystical imagery.
Katz emigrated to America in 1920 and studied modern literature at Columbia University, doing rabbinic studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary with a specialty in Kabbalah. A larger scandal erupted on publication of his two-volume epic, Burning Town (1938), which told the story of World War I in his hometown, Svintsyán (now Švenčionys, Lithuania) and his mother’s shtetl Micháleshik (now Michalishki, Belarus), where he spent the war years. He responded to the attacks with a poetic manifesto for a free Yiddish poetry, "The Brave Coward" (1938), which provoked a series of sharp attacks on the poet in the Communist Yiddish daily Frayhayt.
After years of poetic loneliness, his life changed radically in the 1950s. He remarried, severed all ties to the left, and spent three years in Israel. In the early 1960s, he turned to English, where he found rapid success with publications in the Atlantic, Poet Lore, and other poetry journals. He founded and for thirty years edited his own English poetry magazine, Bitterroot, and published several books of poetic dialogue in English with Harry Smith. He used various European strophic forms with free variations, notably the triolet and the sonnet, and introduced several novel forms, including the Menke Sonnet and the Menke Chant Royal. In his lifetime, he published nine books in Yiddish and nine in English. The translations here are from Menke: The Complete Yiddish Poems of Menke Katz, translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (Brooklyn, The Smith, 2005).
[Note: Sing Singer includes fragments of The Lynching
Crow (pp. 591-599), not included in Menke (2005).]