The Madonna in the Subway

A. Leyeles was the pen name of the American Yiddish poet Arn Glanz, one of the greatest American Yiddish poetic modernists who wrote in an Anglo-American vein. Leyeles was born and raised in Russian Poland, where he received a modern Hebrew education but also grew interested in Russian and German poetry. In 1905, he went to London and, in 1909, to New York. He worked in Yiddish education and, from 1914, was on the staff of the Yiddish daily Der tog. In 1919, Leyeles cofounded the In-zikh (Introspectivist) movement, which demanded that Yiddish poetry be liberated from any determinate political, national, social, aesthetic, or formal demands and that Yiddish poets be free to write wholly individualistic poetry attentive to any aspects of their personal experience in the modern world, as well as freedom to experiment with form and style. Over five decades, Leyeles continuously experimented, simultaneously cultivating classical forms largely foreign to Yiddish poetry such as the sonnet, writing short free-verse works in an imagist vein, and long, reflective poems about the great political and aesthetic questions as they intertwined with personal, Jewish, and human questions of nature, desire, and death. He frequently battled with critics who demanded more politically engaged, socially relevant, and accessible verse, insisting instead that Yiddish poetry had to strive to be great art if it was to be worthwhile as both a collective Jewish and modern individual creation. Leyeles published the journal In Zikh from 1920 to 1940 with fellow Introspectivists Jacob Glatstein and Nahum Baruch Minkoff. Although his postwar poetry offers some of the most searing verse about the Holocaust in Yiddish letters, Leyeles also renewed and even deepened his attention to the theme of Jewish life and fate in America generally and New York City particularly.