The review below appeared in the first issue of Lunar Poetry (August 2014), a new monthly poetry magazine edited by Paul McMenemy.
http://www.lunarpoetry.co.uk/
To Sing Away the
Darkest Days
Poems re-imagined from Yiddish Folksongs
by Norbert Hirschhorn
Holland Park Press, 124pp
ISBN 9781907320354
Reviewed by Wynn Wheldon
Folk songs tend to address the quotidian. Daily life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, on the
Russian pale, was hard, and folksongs were a means both of expressing this
hardship and of coping with it, of calling the monster by a name, to sing away
the darkest days.
Sha,
still, the Rebbe’s about to sing. When
he chants the holy songs, our whole
earth rings and the Devil will die.
[WHEN OUR REBBE, p.47]
Hirschhorn is well qualified to write about suffering, and
the suffering of large numbers of people, for he is an epidemiologist by
profession, now retired. He also has several books of poetry to his name.
The thirty-odd poems of the present volume are based on
Yiddish folk songs, hundreds of which Hirschhorn studied in rediscovering his
own cultural Jewishness. The chosen songs
are given in transliteration and literal translation in the second half of the
book. I’m not sure that was entirely
necessary. Is the autobiographical act
not confused by the scholarly? I have
chosen to read the poems as Hirschhorn’s own.
They reveal a civilized, liberal sensibility, concerned with
inequality, but amused too by the quirks of human kind. Underlying all however is the great
existential melancholy that the Jews know better than anyone. A greater Jewish
poet, Joseph Brodsky, once wrote that “the reason why a good poet speaks of his
own grief with restraint is that, as regards grief, he is a Wandering Jew”*. Folk songs
are not known for their restraint, but Hirschhorn’s complaints are never
raucous, and they are not for his own plight, but for the pains of others. The voices of these others he inhabits with
enviable ease, employing an eclectic prosody.
There are prose poems and poems in free verse, poems that rhyme, and
metrical poems that don’t rhyme. There is the song-like use of repetition and
nonsense (oy-doy-do-diri-diri-tam). The voices are those of both men and women,
young and old, their terms sometimes formal, sometimes demotic.
Hey pussy cat, why such a pout?
You just checked up your pedigree?
So, what did you find out? Your daddy
greases palms at City Hall. Your
momma’s
a shoplifter. Little brother
fixes ball games,
and sister’s run off with a grafter.
Uh huh.
[A PUNTER’S LAMENT, p. 31]
There are poems with two voices, asked and asker:
…who will save you
when our foes hear your singing?
When inquisitors come to seize me
I will drown them in my song.
[CAVE SONG, p. 17]
Hirschhorn, writing in English, is as happy to place his
characters in Leicester Square as in Union Square. These occasional references pull the
English-language reader back into the ambit of the poems as a whole: we are not
allowed to lose ourselves in eastern Europe or Czarist Russia. The gentile reader
recognizes universal themes: the pains and joys of motherhood, life-changing
decisions, oppression, sisterhood, teaching, working, aspiration, wealth and
poverty, exile, and the imperishable ability to keep dreaming of a better life.
just a wee nip to keep that
fragrance, l’khayim, on
your lips; one
last nip, l’khayim, for what
we
always dream of.
[TO LIFE! P. 49]
Norbert Hirschhorn has pulled off a kind of transformative
magic in this collection. The lyrics of
songs, of prayer, learned in childhood, are more often remembered as sounds
than as words. The reason lies partly in
the communality of the act of singing or chanting. One is driven along by a collective noise. It is one of singing’s pleasures. What reader has not grown up unsure as to the
correct words of, say, Desmond Dekker’s ‘Israelites’, while knowing with utter
confidence the correct sounds?
In these “re-imaginings” Hirschhorn has turned songs to
poems without sacrificing their communal power, and has found a way of relating
common experience without slipping into cliché, and has furthermore reminded us
that art is almost as vital to humanity as a woollen coat in winter.
Now nothing’s of use to me, except this little song.
[A TAILOR’S SONG, p. 55]
Many thanks for this lovely appreciation!
ReplyDeletecheers,
Norbert Hirschhorn