Amazon.com
6 July 2005
The Complete Work of a Modern Yiddish Poet
Reviewed by Henry Berry (Southport, Connecticut)
Two of the people who knew Menke Katz (1906–1991) best write introductory
essays to the hundreds of pages of collected poems-the poet's son and his long-time
publisher. Dovid Katz's biographical and literary introduction is over 100 pages.
In Harry Smith's seven-page Preface, he notes that Menke Katz's poems "spanned
the alleys of Michaleshik [in Katz's homeland of Lithuania] and the streets
of New York-folklore and factories, the Hill of Svir and skyscraper, the Kabbalah's
mysticism and the Talmud's reaching, against the horrors and wonders of the
20th century." Katz was a lifelong refugee, not only from the mid twentieth
century troubles of Europe in which Jews bore the brunt, but also from many
of the trends and conventions of modernism. Although Katz's poems are unmistakably
modernist, they maintain a pronounced singular touch. Because he was a freethinker
who would, for example, begin experimenting in his late poems, Katz cannot be
pigeonholed with any school, style, or group; although he was a friend or associate
of many writers and artists who were. The restlessness, ambivalences, yearnings,
and disappointments of this status of being an outsider of history and nationalities
surface in the poems–e. g.
In my alleys-the gray houses
clamor for light
Like blind crows with shorn wings
[…]
from Night in Downtown
Lest you cry recall
That a stray spark of light goes out somewhere
Lully-lully-lullaby, my orphan,
Lully-lullaby.
from A Kind of a Lullaby
The course of Katz's long poetic career embraces the horrors, sadnesses, and
hopes of the twentieth century, the pains and perspectives of the Jewish emigre
crystallizing those of multitudes of moderns in the conflicts and the rush of
the 20th century, and the particular wisdom, wit, and expression of Yiddish
culture. Comprehension and appreciation of twentieth century Jewish and Yiddish
literature, and of poetry in particular, without familiarity with Menke Katz's
poetry is incomplete.