Zishe Weinper
Born 15 March 1893 in Trisk, in Volhynia. Died 27 January 1957 in New York.
Why?
Each of us is at times a branch That the wind sets trembling, At times, we are a little foam That drifts blindly on Above the abyss of the seas, But in his dream, Each of us is a ship That presses forward and fights Furious, blind, against the wind.
In a duel by day and by night, Here we cut a rope, There we cast back a glance, And very often we tear From our own garden a rose That we ourselves trample underfoot.
Such is the order Now of the days and the nights. They cry out to you: it is allowed, It must be so, But often enough we weep for sorrow, Why must it be so?
Translation by Charles Dobzynski in Le miroir d’un peuple (The mirror of a people) (Gallimard).
Moyshe Kulbak
Born 20 March 1896 in Smorgon (Lithuania). Died 17 July 1940 in a Soviet internment camp.
Raysn (Belorussia) — fragments
A. The grandfather and the uncles
Oh! my forebear of Kobylnik is a plain Jew, A peasant in a sheepskin with his axe and his horse, My sixteen uncles, like my father, Simple Jews, Jews like so many clods of earth, Who push the timber down the river, who drag the trunks out of the forests, And all the day long they have toiled like serfs, Together they take the evening meal from the same bowl, And into the sixteen beds they collapse like sheaves. The forebear, oh! the forebear, he can scarcely climb alone onto the stove, The little old man dozed off just now at the edge of the table, But his feet, his feet know well, all on their own, how to bear him up there, The sturdy feet of the forebear, servants for so many years.
B. The hay is being mown
Across the fields the tide of autumn mists is already rising, And the forebear goes out into the tangle to mow the hay, We were tipsy from dawn, true fiddlers all, And we spread out eighteen strong, the forebear at our head, forward, march! Backs straight, backs bent, a whistling like lightning over the ponds. “For a crust of bread,” said the forebear, “one has to sweat, my children.” The glittering scythes whistled, coats cast off, hairy limbs Like shaggy trees — an old father and seventeen brothers of his blood.
Translated by Charles Dobzynski in Le miroir d’un peuple (The mirror of a people) (Gallimard).