OSHER SHVARTSMAN (SCHWARZMAN) (October
7, 1890-August 1919)[1]
He
was a poet, born in the village of Vilnia, Kiev district, Ukraine, not far from
Zhytomyr, into the family of an office employee. In 1893, when he was three
years old, his family moved to the nearby town of Korostyshiv. His father,
Meyer, was connected to the Hassidic court of the Twersky dynasty. Osher was
raised in the Hassidic environment, and in that town he began attending
religious primary school for four years. Over the years 1896-1905, the family
lived in the rural village of Novinke, near Kiev, where his father was employed
in the nearby forest bureau. A few Jewish families lived here with their
children, and together they jointly imported schoolteachers and tutors. At age
fourteen, he himself became a teacher of Russian for the Novinke children. From
late 1905 he was living in Kiev where he was working as a teacher; then, in
1908 he moved to Berdichev, where he gave Hebrew lessons and taught in a
Russian evening school. In 1909 he settled permanently in Kiev and became acquainted
with circles of Yiddishist youth and progressive intellectuals: Nokhum
Oyslender, Borekh Glazman, Arn Kushnirov, D. Volknshteyn, and his cousin Dovid
Hofshteyn. From 1911 he was drafted into the army and served in the cavalry in
the Polish city of Kalisz, near the Russo-German border. He remained in Kalisz
until the start of WWI. He was mobilized in the summer of 1914, serving on various
fronts until the summer of 1917, rose in rank to an officer, and was wounded in
1915 (after which he recuperated in a Moscow hospital). After the February
Revolution in 1917, he was selected onto a soldiers’ committee of his regiment.
During the July days of 1917, the provisional regiment summoned the cavalier division
in which Shvartsman was serving to Petrograd, where they were promptly revolutionized
to Bolshevism. The revolutionary events of 1917 and his brother Dovid, a leader
among the social democrats, exerted a large influence on him and his work.
In late 1917, he
was demobilized and returned to Kiev where he worked as a proofreader for the
Bundist daily Folks-tsaytung
(People’s newspaper) and published poetry in the press. Shvartsman belonged to
no political party, but because of the pogroms against Jews in the Ukrainian
and White armies, he joined the Red Army in 1919, and in the fighting with a Polish
military group, he fell near Sarny, Rovno district. He was interred in a
communal vault in Rafalivka, outside Sarny.
He
began writing poetry in 1907 in Ukrainian, later switching to Yiddish. According
to Shvartsman’s first biographers, Nokhum Oyslender and B. Spivak, he felt a
deep dissatisfaction with his Slavic writings—and he began virtually
instinctively to write in Yiddish. His first poem in Yiddish, “Di kretshme”
(The shop), was written in early 1909 but only published in 1918 in Kiev’s Folks-tsaytung. His first published
poem, “Un s’volt dem sod bay nakht di erd” (And would at night the earth be
secret), appeared in Di yudishe velt
(The Jewish world) (Vilna) 2 (1913), edited by Dovid Bergelson, whom Shvartsman
befriended in Kiev. Elsewhere, he published poetry in: Naye tsayt (New times) in Kiev, the anthology Eygns (One’s own) (Kiev) 1 (1918/1919), and the collection Oyfgang (Arise) (Kiev: Kultur-lige,
1919). A number of his poems were published after his death in Eygns II (1920). In all, Shvartsman’s
heritage consists of sixty-one poems, which are included in the full collection
of his work, Lider un briv (Poems and
letters). In the first edition, Ale lider
(Collected poetry), only fifty-nine poems appeared—two poems erroneously (by
Dovid Hofshteyn).
Shvartsman
belonged to a group of Yiddish writers in Kiev, who were impressive with the
new and modern tone in their Yiddish poetry. They wrote with subtlety,
refinement, lyrically, and at the same time they composed epic poems impressive
for their originality, picturesqueness, and sensitivity. There is a gentle
sorrow in his poems, although there is as well in them an echo of war and
revolution. Although Shvartsman published no books in his lifetime, Soviet
Yiddish literary critics and researchers have created a kind of cult
surrounding him. Soviet Yiddish literature was in need of a father figure, and
so the critics declared Shvartsman to be a revolutionary poet, a founding
figure in Soviet Yiddish poetry, although foreign Yiddish critics would contest
such claims. He only wrote two poems which can be reckoned as revolutionary:
“In oyfshtand” (In resistance) and “Shvartse muter-nakht” (Deep at night). One
can perhaps add to these: “Mayn bruders lipn” (My brother’s lips) of 1918. The
first translation of his poetry was into Ukrainian by the poet Pavlo Tychyna
who learned to read and understand Yiddish. A second Ukrainian writer, Dmytro
Kosaryk, discovered in 1948 Shvartsman’s grave not far from the Palitse (?) train
station. A great contribution to finding and publishing Shvartsman’s poems was
made by his cousin Dovid Hofshteyn.
“However,
he was not a singer of revolution,” noted Shmuel Niger, “but its echo, its
refined echo. He was a deep feeling Yiddish poet, as one can sense in his
poetry cycle on the Sabbath.”
“Thanks
to the talented poets—Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Osher Shvartsman—Yiddish
literature received a powerful push forward,” wrote Bal-Makhshoves. “Osher
Shvartsman is a major poet thanks to his profound, ethical world view, which
does not dwell upon the purely external suffering of a people or a class of
people, but his ethical sensibility reaches to the highest level and with its
majestically constructed verse touches the deepest of men’s souls.”
One
could already see from his first book of poems that he “greeted the entire
world,” commented Yekhezkl Dobrushin, “like a newborn, joyfully awakening, a
rising sun. Of course, such a world conception was new, fresh, and healthy for
those times of petit bourgeois, intellectual decadence and despair. From his first
steps forward, Osher Shvartsman proved to be an intellectual of the people, a
man of the people, who brought forth a fullness of character, a belief in the
beautiful completeness of mankind.”
His
works include: Fun goldene vaytn (From
golden distances) (Kiev: Jewish Section, State Publishers, 1921), 31 pp.; Ale lider, ed. Nokhum Oyslender and B.
Spivak (Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1923), 125 pp.; Osher shvartsman tsum 10tn yortog
(Osher Shvartsman on the tenth anniversary of his death) (Kharkov, 1929); Lider un briv, ed. Mikhl Levitan and
Maks Erik (Kiev: Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 1935), 220 pp., with a
bibliography by Shloyme Bryanski; Ale
lider, comp. Dovid Hofshteyn (Kiev: Ukrainian State Publishers for National Minorities, 1938), 143 pp.; Ale lider
(Moscow: Emes, 1944), 96 pp.; Ale lider
un briv (Collected poems and letters) (Moscow: Emes, 1961), 155 pp.
No comments:
Post a Comment