On the Threshold of Anglo-Hebrew I’m in uniform fresh from basic training Frank

all leanness of thighs moves to a bass-beat with a glass of Jim Beam (his partner) on ice Edwin presents me

(this anonymous soldier) and we speak of a mutual philosopher- friend’s fairness and decency “And when he wants his boy” O’Hara attacks . . . “Wham.” I come-to-after through splintery seconds of catching deer

like river minnows nipping at my toes Jane Freilicher descending her ladder smiles wily sexy and Frank devotes himself to pulling at his absent dinner-tie You in all of this are where? In the corner

in the Whistler’s rocker — holding court with both your hands heterosexual and learned . . . “ten dollars” “car keys” and “thigh” in your poems were arranged with Chardin-like precision or the floral exhibitions (set to the botanic-calendar) at the Isabella Gardner Museum

—Harold Schimmel “I’m in Uniform”320

320 _{Translation is Peter Cole’s.}

The contemporary Hebrew-American poet, Harold Schimmel, was born in 1935, a

generation and a half after Yeshurun, in Bayonne, New Jersey. Like Yeshurun, he too had Yiddish in his ears from a young age, though his mother-tongue was English. After studying with some of the most prominent American writers of the mid-century, he was poised to become one of the major New York School poets of his generation, but instead left the United States for good, emigrating to Israel in 1962. In 1963, he published his first chapbook of Hebrew poetry, “Ha-shirim” (the poems), an event which he describes as the “rebirth of his poetics”. Since then he has become one of the most important avant- garde practitioners in Hebrew poetry, having brought “the sounds of American English vernacular into the mouths of Hebrew readers.”

Schimmel was the first translator of Yeshurun’s poetry into English, publishing a selected volume, entitled The Syrian African Rift and Other Poems, with the Jewish Publication Society in 1981. These two poets cast into relief a powerful alternate narrative of modern Hebrew poetry, one which is both translingual and diaspora-facing (against monolingual Hebraist norms) and which chooses to foreground the languages of its past rather than erasing them.

Of Yeshurun’s writing, Schimmel writes, “Yeshurun carries over the feel of Yiddish into his Hebrew. He doesn't ask, he takes the new language in his hands. The mouth is pried open as the mouth of a child at the hands of a doctor who knows what’s

good for the child more than the child can.”321 _{Schimmel’s idea here is highly interesting}

to me, since it reverses the terms of anti-Yiddish rhetoric: Yiddish in Schimmel’s sense of Yeshurun’s poetics is not a sickness at all, but becomes a “cure” we might say, for the sickness of a young nation state already pushed to catastrophe. “[I] felt inclined to take it whole,” Schimmel writes, thinking it seems to me, of translating Yeshurun’s intensive creole-Hebrew opacity, “I have never glossed the odd or excised the difficult. I have tried to keep the difficulty in (a closeness of thinking, or poetic argument, I have discovered)” (from Jacobs 168). The nexus of Schimmel’s expanded-Yiddish relations span from Yeshurun’s spectral creole-Hebrew to the praxes of four generations of New York school writers, starting with the Yiddish-born Objectivists. It was the Yiddish inflection of New York, through the Objectivists, in/to the New American Poetry, that created the

possibility for a volume of Avot Yeshurun in English. “For Schimmel, translation

participates in the expansion of a “poetic map,”’ writes Adriana X. Jacobs of Schimmel’s Yeshurun, “that reflects varied, and sometimes incongruous, lines of influence and affiliation, and this results in a complex and rich reciprocity between target (English) and source (Hebrew) languages” (Jacobs 168). The expansion Jacobs describes is that of Schimmel’s expanded-Yiddish, the language which taught him the richness of mixture (with English and Hebrew) from early-on, as well as what drew him to Yeshurun, and

321 _{Translation is Adriana X. Jacobs’s (167).}

compelled him to translate the elder poet’s Yiddish-Hebrew-Arabic poems into English. Schimmel positions himself through the precedent of Yeshurun’s translingual poetics, “in a tradition of poetic translation that is transhistorical, transnational, multicultural, and fundamentally multilingual and creative.” I would add that this translational multilingual creative impulse was for Schimmel steeped in Yiddish as a “third space” in language, in which one could live in more than one language at once. Take for example Schimmel’s translation of Yeshurun’s “The poem on the Africs”:

Plump a door opens. A soldier pulled a reservist outside.

Straightened the tallith from street to street and listening to the soldier’s story.

Walked with the soldier cat and cat and cheek and cheek.

The two reservist guys went to the Syrian- African Rift: You came to us to escape the white. But you be the villain? Loathsome to me is death because an Afric’s in your grip.

We have a problem of a sacrifice of Isaac.

And yours, you’re inclined to think, the sacrifice of Isaac. For us it comes out as a father has mercy on his children. For you it comes out as a father has mercy on himself.322

The first thing to note about this expanded-Yiddish translation is its first word: “plump.” Translating Yeshurun’s Yiddish“plutsim,” Schimmel uses an unlikely term, “plump” which signals in multiple directions at once in English without suggesting a definitive definition for Yeshurun’s word, though nodding to the suddenness it inducts.323 _{There is}

a distinctly New York School and Yiddish Modernist style to Schimmel’s translations of

322 _{1980: 32.}

Yeshurun, invested as much in Yehoash as in Louis Zukofsky, as much in Yankev Glatshteyn as in Frank O’Hara. In particular I am thinking of “cat and cat // and cheek and cheek.” We might also notice here Schimmel’s translation and transformation of the mongrel-Yiddishist echoes in this work, which call into question Jewish nationalist exploitation of the ancient myths, and the stakes of reified and misdirected violence. As Likht’s “gentile zion’s earthly hands” and Loy’s “goy israels,” Schimmel’s translation of Yeshurun’s version of the ancient myth of the sacrifice of Isaac, raises an elemental “problem.” It is the problem of monolingualism as the heir of monotheism itself, and the limitations of tribalist imperialisms, projections of the “unity” of language and culture, as a narrow trap and worse, a falsified map. It “comes out” in multiple tongues at once, so how can it come out in only one language? The work of the poet, then, in Schimmel’s as much as in Yeshurun’s work, is an expansion of the networks of language beyond the highly regulated sphere of nationalist monolingual canons. I offer this reading and annotation of Schimmel’s singular New York-School poetics therefore as yet another coordinate upon a constantly expanding “poetic map” of expanded-Yiddish, which Schimmel and Yeshurun, but also Likht, Zukofsky and Loy, constellate in wide spiraling relations.

Poetry is not only Hebrew; it is inclusive. When one says “Hebrew” there is also another which stands to its side and also precedes and follows it.

— Harold Schimmel 324

I first encountered Harold Schimmel in the pages of Paideuma, in a special issue

dedicated to the life and work of Louis Zukofsky. Schimmel’s essay in that issue, “ZUK. YEHOASH DAVID REX” —later collected in Carroll F. Terrell’s “Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet”—addresses in detail the Yiddish modernist tenor of Zukofsky’s early verse: “the music is Yiddish,” Schimmel writes, “not yet contrapuntal, not yet Bach: Jewish Folk Song despite the typically New York School-Yiddish modernism, ‘Plash. Night. Plash. Sky’” (referring to Zukofsky’s “Ferry”).

When I searched for Schimmel on the web, the most I could find was his ITHL (Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature) bio, which simply said he was an American-born poet and translator living in Jerusalem. The other thing that came up was a Jacket interview with David Shapiro, in which Shapiro casually remarks that Schimmel is “one of the ten best artists of the Hebrew language,” and that he should win a Nobel and “share it with a great Palestinian”. But what was Schimmel’s connection to

Zukofsky, I wanted to know—and had he known my cousin, Charles Reznikoff?—or to Yehoash and the Yiddish-American modernists, for that matter? And why was he

included in this special issue of Paideuma, alongside so many eminences from the New American Poetry and after?

The following year I was living in Tel Aviv, writing and translating and studying multilingual poetry in Israel/Palestine. I had gotten in touch with an old friend of my parents, Zali Gurevitch (a poet and anthropologist—the sole translator of John Ashbery, Charles Olson and Jerome Rothenberg into Hebrew), and he and I would often meet for coffee at a little café near his apartment, on Yehuda HaLevi St. During one of these meetings, the topic of Zukofsky’s yidishkayt came up and Gurevitch mentioned

Schimmel’s name. I was floored. Schimmel was, according to Gurevitch, both an eminent American writer, and also a leading figure in the contemporary Hebrew avant-garde, as well as an important mentor and friend to many of the radical Hebrew writers and artists of Gurevitch’s generation.

A week later, Schimmel and I met. It was at the old Templar home of the Jerusalem poet, Gabriel Levin. Levin had prepared some light food and drink and he, Gurevitch, Schimmel and I, spent the afternoon talking across Hebrew, Yiddish and English, noshing and drinking.

After that, Schimmel and I would meet often, usually in south-Jerusalem (Arnona) on Yarden street, in the Schimmel’s third-story walk-up apartment, covered wall–to-wall in paintings and sketches and photos and books. We talk of friends and