He Who Calls Himself Leader

The American Yiddish poet and satirist Moyshe-Leyb Halpern was born in Zlotshev in Austro-Hungarian, Galicia (now Zolochiv, Ukraine). He moved to Vienna in his youth and while living there began to write modernist poetry in German. Halpern immigrated in 1908 to New York City, where he remained for most of his life, living in great poverty. In New York, he was associated with the Yiddish poetic movement Di Yunge (The Young Ones), although his anarchic line and often brutal tone differed sharply from the aestheticism and harmonious poetics favored by others in the group. In Halpern’s early poetry, a biting portrait of the pathologies of immigrant city life and deep alienation from American capitalism were conjoined with equally firm rejection of any nostalgic move to idealize East European Jewish life. Indeed, his depictions of the shtetl were often brutally hostile. But far from being merely critical, much less socially critical, Halpern’s poetry is full of boisterousness, self-mockery, a devil-may-care attitude, and arresting sound and rhythm. After 1915, personal woes, a sense of cultural loss, and horror at the suffering of East European Jews during and after World War I deepened his poetry. Strange meditations on eros and death and tenderness toward his wife and son run through his poetry as well. Halpern published much of his significant verse in satirical magazines, as well as small poetry journals associated with Di Yunge. He later gathered much of this poetry into two carefully composed volumes. Late in life, Halpern would be affiliated for a time with Frayhayt (Freedom), the chief Yiddish-language communist journal, although his poetry could hardly square with their aesthetic-political demands. Halpern continued to write until his death, in New York City.