From dark naked fields

“On the dark naked fields”, writes the Yiddish-language poet David Hofshteyn in one of the lyrics in his debut volume, On the Road (1919), “in the middle a ditch lies / a threshold to nowhere in the desolate distance”. In the original the final line includes two occurrences of the word hefker, the concept at the centre of Harriet Murav’s innovative studyAs the Dust of the Earth: The literature of abandonment in revolutionary Russia and Ukraine. The term is rooted in rabbinical law, where it was first used to refer to ownerless objects, but through metaphorical usage its meaning has expanded over time. It has come to encompass states of the human condition, for we too can be unclaimed, ownerless, left radically free and, by virtue of that very freedom, radically vulnerable. As Murav notes, the range of meanings embedded in the notion of abandonment – one may be abandoned or act with abandon – gives anglophone readers a fair sense of the multiple valences of hefker.

Murav argues that, in the early twentieth century, hefker became “the watchword of poetic experimentation” among Yiddish-language writers from the Russian Empire. It holds a key to the works of Hofshteyn, his fellow modernist poet Leyb Kvitko and the novelist Itsik Kipnis, to whom Murav dedicates substantial chapters, as well as to those of the novelists Der Nister and David Bergelson, and the poet Kadya Molodowsky, whom she discusses at length. Through well-contextualized, convincing close readings, Murav analyses how these writers variously embraced a programme of artistic freedom, abandoning traditional realism and other outmoded schools while confronting the horrors of the Russian Civil War, which left the Jewish population of what is now Ukraine abandoned by any stable form of law and order, and rendered them vulnerable to a wave of pogroms in 1919 that claimed some 100,000 lives in the most brutal fashion.

In addressing the extraordinary conditions of the pogroms and their effects on the psyches of those who lived through them, Murav draws not only on the notion of hefker, but also on the theoretical framework of biopolitics worked out by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Of course, one needn’t be conversant with poststructuralist philosophy to appreciate the feeling of helplessness the abandoned victims and witnesses of pogroms experienced, to know that their senses were thrown into disarray, that their perception of time was shattered. The image that best captures the way 1919 set time out of joint comes not from a poem, but from a letter Kvitko sent to a colleague in New York in 1922. The poet writes of a life spent between “stone suddenlys” – a life of crushing, unpredictable present moments.

When the horror of reality outstrips the imagination, the boundaries between them blur. One may not even know, like the speaker of Kvtiko’s poem “Look, I’m Blinking”, whether one is living or dead. This doesn’t diminish the value of first-hand testimony, but rather makes it more affecting.

Murav devotes the second half of her book to an analysis of the efforts of Jewish relief agencies and authors of nonfiction to record and, perhaps, to find meaning in apparently senseless events. She focuses in particular on the Russophone Jewish authors Victor Shklovsky, whose memoir Sentimental Journey (1923) relates and refracts the violence he witnessed during his service in the tsarist and Red armies, and Doyvber Levin, whose story cycle Ten Wagons (1931) is based on true accounts of suffering by Jewish children he had interviewed at a Leningrad orphanage, as well as on Rabbi Fischel Schneersohn’s Yiddish-language study Catastrophic Times and Growing Generations (1923).

The chief aim of As the Dust of the Earth is to show “that both writing lists and writing poems are ways of remaking the sense of order necessary to live in the world”. Indeed, the literature that sprouted from the “dark naked fields” of 1919, which indicated a path beyond the “horrifying threshold to nowhere”, was born of a universal impulse. Murav fruitfully relates Kvitko’s cycle of pogrom poems, 1919, to a cycle of the same name that appeared a century later, in which the poet Eve L. Ewing wrestles with the documentary history of the race riot in Chicago in July 1919. The parallel between these works, and between the events that inspired them, is all too clear.

Sadly, one needn’t look far for other parallels. Kvitko closed his cycle with a poem entitled “Forgiveness?” For many descendants of those who lost their lives in the pogroms and race riots, that question remains open. For those struggling to survive in present-day Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan and elsewhere, such questions are altogether premature.

Boris Dralyuk is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa and the translator, most recently, of Andrey Kurkov’s The Silver Bone, 2024, and The Stolen Heart, forthcoming in 2025

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