I Have My Mother’s Black Hair

Mani Leib was the pen name of the American Yiddish poet Mani Leib Brahinsky. Born in Nizhyn in the Russian Empire, now Ukraine, he ended his formal education at the age of eleven, when he was apprenticed to a bootmaker. While still in his teens, Mani Leib was twice arrested for revolutionary activities. He emigrated in 1905, spent a year in England, and settled in New York in 1906. He worked throughout his life as a shoemaker. A central figure in Yiddish poetry’s first avant-garde, New York’s Di Yunge (The Young Ones), Mani Leib proved that Yiddish could be used to create poetry of delicacy, subtlety, and beauty. His poetry was remarkable for its sound, using alliteration, cadence, repetition, and sibilance to create effects both of stillness and harmony and of love, joy, and bravado, as in “I Have My Mother’s Black Hair.” Leib also wrote much poetry for children. His weird and joyful story of a fearless heder boy, “Yingl-tsingl-khvat,” became a classic and made its way to East European Yiddishist circles, where it was illustrated by the great cubo-futurist and constructivist artist El Lissitzky in 1918.