Jehanne Dubrow

Fragment From A Nonexistent Yiddish Poet
Ida Lewin (1906–1938)

AlwaysWinter, Poland

24.
On Rosh Hashanah, I try
the trick of making honey cake —
not walnuts mixed with dough
which mama recommends,
which mamaor candied orange peel,
not apples from the peasant’s field,
nor cloves and cinnamon, scented
as a Shulamite
— the trick, as with all women’s work,
is disappointment,
is disappointment,an old letter
is disapptied shut with silk ribbon
then stitched into my apron hem,
each sentence syrupy
with promises,
the words my dearest love
the words my dearest lolike fat
dissolving in the mouth to leave
an oily taste behind,
and every last goodbye, a pinch
of salt stirred in the recipe
of salt sto make it sweeter still,
but with a bitterness
that sticks like honey on the tongue.

Companion Piece — Ida Lewin: Poet, Visionary, Jew

Ida Lewin, little known outside academia, is now viewed as a Yiddish poet of great promise whose life was cut short by the Shoah. Her writing, of which only a few tantalizing pieces remain, is characterized by a subversiveness quite unexpected in a woman of her generation and religiously conservative upbringing. Although she received little more than a few years of formal education, Ida’s poetry demonstrates a profound sensitivity to Talmudic thought, Jewish tradition, and even the outside world of “present-day” Poland, a crowded, ever-modernizing landscape of trolley cars, shortening hemlines, and syncopated music.

*

Born in 1906 and raised in the Galician town of AlwaysWinter, Ida wrote of an insulated Orthodox world, a place with its own mythology. Not a dragon or a mermaid like the larger Polish cities but a bird, a shadowy crane, coal-black except for its red beak. People called the crane “December,” because its feathers were as dark as any winter night. “I saw December perching near the church,” the picklemaker whispered to a customer on market day. One week later, the new priest — a man of perfect health and irrefutable Christian charity — died in his sleep. If December settled on your roof or (god forbid) built a nest beside your chimney, then the evil eye would soon turn its blue gaze in your direction. When December flapped its wings, the wind spat frozen rain.

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Scholars have wondered if Ida had the gift of Sight. Too many of her poems seem to prophesy a darkness spreading across AlwaysWinter, a thick fog that clung to the ankles, preventing action and escape.

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Ida is thought to have died in 1938, during a winter flu epidemic that killed thirty-one other Jews in AlwaysWinter, including her only child, a six-month-old daughter named Rivka. Ida missed the town’s first Aktion by eleven months. In 1986, two schoolchildren discovered her manuscripts as well as a collection of diaries, accounting ledgers, and a handmade book of kosher recipes, buried in an alleyway behind the former site of the Great Synagogue in AlwaysWinter. A sheaf of nearly forty crumbling pages of verse is all that remains of Ida Lewin’s poetry.

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As for translators, they have been slow to address Ida’s work. Her outsider status — as female poet, as dissident Orthodox voice — has also caused hesitation. Like other fragmented poetries, Ida’s words are both pleasure and challenge, a puzzle that needs solving but can never be fully pieced together. What remains? What sentences have insects eaten from the page? What has rain washed away?