Itsik Manger: Bard

photo from https://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com

The “Father of Yiddish Theatre”, Avrom Goldfaden, and the Jewish bards Velvel Zbarzher, and Elyokem Tsunzer, came back to life in the 1930s via the poet Itsik Manger. Born Isidor Helfer in 1901, son of a poor Yiddish-speaking tailor in Czernowitz — the family of five lived in one cellar room — his childhood was filled with Broderzinger tunes, Gypsy melodies, Goldfaden songs, and plots. A turbulent, badly behaved youth, a prankster, he claimed his education was completed in the backstage theatre world where, in exchange for moving scenery, he participated in all the dazzle. But Helfer was also a man who invented diverse versions of his story with ease — he claimed he’d been born in Berlin, to have learnt Yiddish at age fourteen, to have been born in a train, which made him a lifelong itinerant. During the First World War, the Helfer family left Czernowitz, and settled in Romanian Iasi.[1] It was this city that nurtured Isidor’s creative genius.

Imagine Iasi as it was before the destruction of historical buildings, before the streets on which Jews lived — the old city centre, or the poorer quarter of Târgu Cucu — became today’s bleached, windy plazas, shopping emporiums, and high rise towers. That other Iasi, the former capital of Moldavia, was a city of grand official buildings, of crooked back lanes. It was a metropolis where Romanians, Armenians, Greeks, Galician and Romanian Jews rubbed elbows, where 35,000 Jews made up over forty per cent of the population. In this magical city, insistent ghosts whispered quite audibly: Velvel had sung and caroused in these disreputable bars, had published his poems here. Berl Broder, alcoholic and impoverished, had died in Iasi. Goldfaden’s theatre had begun in this city. On these streets, Maskilim had fought Hasidic repression, worn modern dress, opened progressive schools. And now, in the early twentieth century, Iasi was a centre of Yiddish literature, home to Jewish musicians, to many Jewish cultural associations. Here, in 1921, Helfer published his first poem: Portrait of a Young Girl.

Allying himself with the Bund, Helfer left for Warsaw where he took on his new name, Itsik Manger, and adopted Velvel Zbarzher’s image — that of a rebellious, marginal troubadour, hard-drinking, and itinerant. Described as “a Romanian poet with thick, dishevelled flowing hair, blazing eyes, and a lighted cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips,”[2] Manger flew to fame. At public readings, he recited his poems from memory; he gave lecture tours, published articles, and fiction. He modified two Goldfaden plays — The Sorceress, and Three Hotsmakhs — for a modern audience, honoured Goldfaden, Tsunzer, Broder, other troubadours, in his fictionalized, Intimate Portraits. His homage to Velvel came in a collection of poems: Velvel Zbarzher Writes Letters to Malkele the Beautiful:

I see you by your sewing machine
A waking dream
And a golden stripe shines
In your black hair

On the windowsill a flower pot
Two carnations and a rose
And my longing by your threshold
Takes off its sandals

It goes to you inside the house
With quiet pious steps
And, Malkele the beautiful, see
You became a poem. [1]

Soon, Manger was so well known, he was admitted to the Yiddish P.E.N. club, but he was forced by growing anti-Semitism to leave Poland in 1938. He squeezed out a living in Paris as a lecturer of French literature to Yiddish-speaking audiences until the arrival of German troops, then headed for Marseilles. Drinking heavily with ship’s captains met in bars, he convinced them to carry him to safety in Gibraltar, then London. Charismatic, but treating women badly, he moved restlessly from Montreal, to New York, back to London, to Marseille, Tunis, Liverpool. In 1958, he immigrated to Israel: “I’ve been hanging out all over the world, now I’ll hang out at home.”

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[1] http://yidlid.org/chansons/karshnboym/

[1]

 

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[1] http://yidlid.org/chansons/karshnboym/

Soon, Manger was so well known, he was admitted to the Yiddish P.E.N. club, but he was forced by growing anti-Semitism to leave Poland in 1938. He squeezed out a living in Paris as lecturer of French literature to Yiddish-speaking audiences until the arrival of German troops, then headed for Marseilles. Drinking heavily with ship’s captains met in bars, he convinced them to carry him to safety in Gibraltar, then London. Charismatic, but treating women badly, he moved restlessly from Montreal to New York, back to London, to Marseille, Tunis, Liverpool. In 1958, he immigrated to Israel: “I’ve been hanging out all over the world, now I’ll hang out at home.”

 

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[1] Better known in the Jewish world by its Yiddish name, Yas

[2] David G. Roskies and Leonard Wolf in, The World According to Itzik: Selected Poetry and Prose

[3] http://yidlid.org/chansons/karshnboym/