February 1, 2008
'I, unneeded, a poet among Jews'
As the proprietor of a blog about Jewish books, I have plenty of reasons to envy the success of Nextbook.org.
Chief among them is Nextbook's ability to consistently put out quality essays such as this one by Jacqueline Osherow (pictured right).
Osherow, the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, “The Hoopoe's Crown,” wrote a piece about Mani Leib, a Yiddish poet who spent most of his days making shoes in the early 20th century.
Read the complete essay on Nextbook. Here's just a taste to whet your appetite:
Reading Mani Leib, I understood that it no longer mattered that I couldn’t sound like Emily Dickinson. My problem was I couldn’t sound like Mani Leib.
And so I stole my favorite of his lines, made a poem around it and brought it, excitedly, to a bunch of writers with whom I used to meet in a Chelsea apartment. Here was a poem, I thought, that was entirely mine, even if I had stolen it from Mani Leib. To a person, they hated it, with one exception: a Venezuelan lawyer of German extraction who would die a few years later on a rock-climbing expedition in Yosemite. Only this man understood what I was after in that first attempt at a poem called “The Yiddish Muses.” Mani Leib’s line—“I, unneeded, a poet among Jews”—resonated with me for a thousand reasons, all of which I wanted to express at once. Mani Leib, I suppose, had enabled me to see that I could be my parents’ daughter and my grandparents’ granddaughter and still write poetry. Reading him, I realized that not only did poetry not require the abandonment of my true linguistic inheritance—the inimitable Yiddish inflection—but that poetry could absolutely soar with it.
If you want to read even more about the life of Mani Leib, Ruth R. Wisse wrote a biography of this self-described “poet who makes shoes” back in 1988. Her book, “A Little Love in Big Manhattan,” tells the history of Leib and another Yiddish poet from that time, Moshe Leib Halpern.