The Touch of Leah’s Hands

By NAOMI SEIDMAN

In its main currents, modern Yiddish literature was as proudly and aggressively secular as it was proudly and assertively Jewish. But it was not secularity as such that shaped this literature and lent it its distinctive energy. It was rather secularization, that is, the break with tradition. With rare exceptions, Yiddish writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were raised in traditional homes and received religious educations; in adolescent or early adulthood, they broke away from their homes in pursuit of the capitalized ideals of their time: Enlightenment, Freedom, Literature, Socialism, Palestine. In the heyday of the Yiddish haskole, the 18th-century Eastern European Enlightenment, this break with tradition was as recognizable a feature of the literature as riding off into the sunset is a staple of the American Western.

Some of the movement’s avatars were rebellious yeshiva boys for whom heresy became something of a new religion. But they were not alone, for girls and young women, too, abandoned traditional homes and transposed their own experiences into secular midrash. Kadya Molodowsky published a long song-cycle in 1924 called “Froyen-Lider” [Women-Songs] that touched on both aspects of this experience: the painful break and the creative reclamation. The first poem of the cycle makes it perfectly clear that the abandonment of tradition carried a particular flavor for Jewish women, or at least for Molodowsky:

Es veln di froyen fun unzer mishpokhe
Beinhakht in khaloymes mire kumen un zogn:
The women of our family will come to me at night
In dreams and say:
We have modestly borne our pure blood through generations
to bring it to you like a wine preserved
in the kosher cellars of our hearts.
And one will say:
I was left a grass widow, when my cheeks—two red apples—
still stood on the tree.
And I ground my white teeth in the lonely nights of waiting.
And I will speak back to the grandmothers:
Your sighs whistled like whips
driving my young life from the house
to flee your kosher beds.
But you continue to follow me, wherever the street is dark
and a shadow falls.
And your stifled sobs chase me like the autumn winds,
and your words are silken cords bound around my brain.
My life is like a page plucked from a book,
the first line torn off.

In a haunting image, Molodowsky presents her female ancestors as appearing to her with the reminder that she comes from a long line of “kosher” blood, that is, of women who have kept themselves free of sexual taint. But the poet hears not only the pride of having fulfilled the Jewish woman’s exalted sexual modesty and the implicit demand that she keep up the good record, but also half-spoken murmured complaints, rumbles of dissatisfaction, even from the most pious of these women. One ancestor was an agune, an abandoned woman, held sexual prisoner by her husband’s very absence. And in a phrase that seems to me to exemplify what our psychological age would call “passive-aggression,” Molodowsky speaks of being driven from her home by sighs that whistle like whips. In the final lines, the poet acknowledges that leaving home has not severed her connection with these women, or with the books in which this connection is enshrined. Intermixed with a rage young rebellious women shared with their male peers, Molodowsky’s poem-cycle suggests, is a loyalty to the women, the grandmothers, they have left behind but whose words are the silken cords, a feminine form of tefillin, bound around the poet’s temples.

Like many modernist Jewish writers, Molodowsky turned to traditional forms in a form of secular midrash, in particular to the genre of the tkhine, the personal prayers that women had traditionally directed not only to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but also to the four biblical matriarchs—Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah; in the classics of this premodern genre, Jewish women beseeched the matriarchs to intercede with God on their behalf. In his autobiographical novel, S.Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim) describes his mother reciting such a prayer during a candle-making ritual:

She would read with great emotion, her melody melting the soul and pulling at the heart strings... “May these candles which we are about to make... arouse the holy patriarchs and matriarchs from their graves so that no evil, trouble and suffering befall us... This thread I am laying down in the name of our mother Sarah. May God remember in our favor what she suffered when her dear son Isaac was taken from her and bound to the altar. May she intercede for us before You that our children not be stolen from us, that they not be led away from us like sheep.”

Molodowsky rewrites the tkhine literature in her Froyen-Lider to forge a new kind of literary link, between the secular poetry of the granddaughter and the petitionary prayer of her grandmothers, and between the godless Jewish women of the modern street and the matriarchs they nevertheless continue to address.

For poor brides who were servant girls
Mother Sarah taps sparkling wine
from dark barrels and pitchers.
She who is destined to have a full pitcher,
for her, Mother Sarah carries it with both hands;
and she who is given only a small goblet
has Mother Sarah’s tears that fall into it.
And to the street girls dreaming of white wedding shoes,
Mother Sarah brings clear honey
on tiny trays
to their tired mouths.
To poor brides of noble birth,
ashamed to lay their trousseau of patches
under their mother-in-law’s eye,
Mother Rebecca brings camels
heaped with white linen.
And when darkness spreads out around them
and all the camels kneel down to rest,
Mother Rebecca measures out ell after ell of linen
from the rings of her hand
to her golden bracelet.
for those whose eyes are weary
from gazing after every neighborhood child
and whose hands are thin from longing
for a small soft body,
and a cradle’s rocking,
Mother Rachel brings healing leaves
from faraway mountains,
and comforts them with a kind word,
at any hour God may open the closed womb.
To those who weep at night on lonely beds
and have no one to bring their grief to,
murmuring to themselves with burnt lips,
to them Mother Leah comes softly
and covers their eyes with her pale hands.

In Molodowsky’s modernist version of the tkhine God plays no role, and the matriarchs are not intercessors; when Rachel speaks of God, it is only as mysterious agent of fate, not as one who may be addressed; the matriarchs are not called upon to intercede in the divine plan but only to share their human experience—they deal in healing leaves, not prayer. And the women they come to are not the pious grandmothers of Molodowsky’s dreams but the lost souls of the urban street. Molodowsky insists, though, that the living link expressed in the tkhine literature, whose outlines are discernible even within its strictest pieties, remains available for the street women, poor brides, and servant girls of her day. Behind the grandmothers’ prayers that the matriarchs intercede for them with God was the recognition that, over the long reach of generations and history, there were a series of experiences shared by these women. That God is absent or can no longer be counted on to respond to those needs makes the connection more rather than less valuable. The cure may never be found, but the touch of Leah’s hands brings some solace to her descendant.

Molodowsky was far from the only writer who drew from Yiddish women’s literature; Itsik Manger, for instance, also used it as a source for his own work. I came to this literature late—long after I’d left my own Yiddish-speaking home in Boro Park, Brooklyn. It wasn't until I was a graduate student at Berkeley, in fact, that I discovered Manger and Molodowsky.

Yet like them I’ve returned to the language if not the prayers of my life, and I hope also like them on my own terms.