“Yet Over the Edge Is a Hand With a Hand”: The Border and the Body in Peretz Markish’s Poemas

• In Event: Yiddish Literary Legacies

Abstract

In his epic poema Der fertsikyeriker man (The Man of Forty), Soviet Yiddish author Peretz Markish writes: “Any minute now the world already streams over its border / Anointing with beauty and golden drink. // Just to reach out the hand and tug at the mouth / of the bare body, of the bare skin…” In this verse, as throughout his work, Markish links the dissolution of territorial borders with lush eroticism, coupling liberated embodiment with utopian vision.
This paper examines the imagery of borders and bodies in two of Markish’s long poemas: Tsu a yidisher tentserin (To a Yiddish Dancer) and the cryptic, epic Der fertsikyeriker man. While Tsu a yidisher tentserin (1940) is recognized as a turning-point in his work towards more profoundly Jewish themes, Der fertsikyeriker man (composed and rewritten between 1923 and 1950) has been almost wholly unstudied. The manuscript was hidden hours before Markish’s arrest at Stalin’s order and smuggled out of the USSR, to be published in Tel Aviv in 1978. Although he was subjected to surveillance and censorship by the Soviet state, his subversive visions of nature without borders lead to his being heralded by anarchist audiences, who claimed him “as much our comrade as our poet.”
Markish’s metaphors of nature, though sometimes gendered, are not stereotypically feminized: land is not a mother, but varyingly a brother or a beloved. It is only the relation between bodies that dissolves borders: “Right here is a border, right there is the edge / Yet over the edge is a hand with a hand. / …From us—over the edge, from us—under the edge, / Roads dissolve away towards every land…” Markish’s verse interweaves the iconography of labor with the recalcitrance of nature, thematizing a felt sense of being in the world beyond both the ‘party ticket’ worldview of Communist industrialization and gendered Romantic transcendentalism.

Author

• Anna Elena Torres, University of Chicago