A Stubborn Back—and Nothing More

Born in the town of Igumen/Humen in the Russian Empire (now Chervyen, Belarus), Leyvik Halpern became a central figure in interwar Yiddish poetry and drama under the pen name H. Leivick. Revolutionary activism in the Bund as a young man earned him internal exile in Siberia from the tsarist regime; both the revolutionary activism and the punishment became an important fount of his poetry thereafter, as in “Zayt gezunt.” Escaping to the United States in 1913, he emerged as the leading poetic and dramatic voice of the socialist, anti-capitalist, and humanist social vision that predominated in American Yiddish culture in those years. In work that ranged from powerful and sometimes strident prophetic declamations to his fellow Jews, to realist accounts of labor exploitation and social suffering, to expressionist work filled with foreboding, Leivick was seen by many in Yiddishist circles as the leading voice of suffering, illness, and exile. Drawing close to the Communist Party in the 1920s, he broke ties to the New York communist newspaper Di frayhayt (Freedom) in 1929 when it defended the August 1929 outburst of Palestinian attacks on Jewish civilians in Mandatory Palestine as revolutionary. Leivick’s most celebrated work, the expressionist verse drama The Golem (1921), is still performed. The offices of the Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Israel are based in Bet Leyvick, established in 1970 in Tel Aviv.