Mendele
III
Date: 8 September 2005
Subject: Re: Menke
I am writing to add to the comments of Frank Handler to Prof. Prager's review of the English translation of Menke Katz's poems. I am not a Yiddish scholar, but have been a professor of U.S. history for the past 33 years, currently at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I have purchased the book in question and read the introduction by Dovid Katz, which I found informative and well balanced. I have not met Dovid in person, but recently established email communication with him to discuss his father.
From 1956-1958, I attended the Workman's Circle School #10 on College Avenue between 169th and 170th Streets in the Bronx. My grandparents, Abraham and Sarah Parker, along with their friends, had founded Branch 133 of the Arbeter Ring, which ran the school. For two years, Chaver Katz tried his best to illustrate the beauties of Yiddish history, language, and culture to a tiny group of six ten-to- twelve-year-olds. He managed to do so, but through no fault of his own ultimately fought a losing battle against the forces of assimilation and secularization that kept us from pursuing further studies after we graduated, as he wished. But although my Yiddish language facility remains at about the first grade level, I have never forgotten what an inspiring and towering figure Menke was. He cared about his heritage, he cared about his students, he demanded excellence, and he was devoted to the State of Israel. Menke did not confine himself exclusively to Yiddish. He gave me Bar Mitzvah lessons and worked with me on my haftora in the Hebrew language, which he had also studied extensively.
I knew nothing then of conflicts between Hebrew and Yiddish speakers or what the position of Israel was on the subject, but I remember vividly Menke's affection for the Biblical homeland. In fact, he brought in a man- suppose a friend-to recruit us to go to Israel and live on a kibbutz. If anyone doubts that he was a Zionist or that anyone who writes about internal conflicts in Israel (as does Dovid) is anti-Zionist, then I believe he is sorely mistaken. Menke was a citizen of the world-an American, a resident of Brooklyn, a sojourner to the Lower East Side and the Bronx, a Lithuanian, a Russian, an Israelophile. His work transcends geographical boundaries or rigid doctrines, that is why he was such a thorn in the side of the Communist left (linke). However, he never became an informer or a blacklister: he differed from his comrades, but he did not turn his back on them lightly. He finally did in the 1950s, when they refused to acknowledge the murder of fellow Jews in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Maybe he waited too long, he probably did for my taste, but Menke was never a blind partisan; he was an iconoclast.
He had too much of a sense of humor (and a grim sense of reality as well) to be doctrinaire. And besides, as Dovid has told me, Menke was a fan of Little Richard and rock 'n' roll, which defied Communist puritanism. Menke is a hero of mine, though I never saw, spoke, or wrote to him after the two years I was in his class. He defies simple labels. To me he is a democrat with a small "d." He cared about the well being of ordinary people, not as some abstraction, but as individuals who should know their past and imagine their futures. He was a real mentsh. My grandparents probably would not have liked Menke's politics, but they would have liked him as a man!
Steven (Shimen) Lawson