Rosa Nevadovska and Home in Exile

Merle Bachman’s lovely translation of “A Home in the Bronx”

Over the last few months I’ve started doing some marketing work for Ben Yehuda Press, the press that published my book of poems, Not Akhmatova (buy it now!)

One fun part of working for the press has been reading some of the rest of their catalog. One of my favorite discoveries has been Merle Bachman’s So Many Warm Words, a collection of translations of the Yiddish poetry of Rosa Nevadovska (1890-197?).  I’m going to be reading with Merle in Bloomington, IN next week (per the poster at the end of this post). So it seemed like a good moment to talk about one of my favorite Nevadovska poems, “a Home in the Bronx”.

(Note that the press is not paying for me to write this; they will be as surprised as anyone!)

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Rosa Nevadovska lived a peripatetic life. She was born in Bialystok in 1890 where she spoke Yiddish and Russian. She lived in Ghent, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and Moscow. She was married briefly and had a daughter who died as an infant. Otherwise she had few familial connections or romantic relationships we know about.

Nevadovska moved to the US in 1928 when she was 38. Here she continued traveling, living in New York City and LA and reading and lecturing throughout the country.

In her introduction to Bachman talks about Nevadovska’s relationship to place, home, and diaspora.

“Home” is not a word that appears in more than a handful of Nevadovska’s poems, and then, only in connection with Bialystok, her parents and the world she’d left behind. In addition to poems engaging, often painfully, with Old Country memories, one finds poems relating poignantly with the American cityscape around her. More significantly (at least to me), are the poems involving an interior world, sensed late at night or in the spaces of contem- plation in which silence itself speaks.

One of the clearest examples here is “A Home in the Bronx”. This is Bachman’s translation.

A Home in the Bronx

In these rooms, there is no one — just silence.
It’s a home in the exile of memory.
An hour flutters quietly by like a lonely bird —
The years have kept this silence undisturbed.

You call this home, but it’s foreign,
Not the Jewish city where I was born.
Such a home gives no warmth. Like a borrowed shirt
It was made for someone else.

The poem (like most of Nevadovska’s work) is plainspoken. Nevadovska’s home in New York is contrasted with her home in Bialystok. She is a traveler in diaspora; her home isn’t her home, which means she also is not herself. When she is in her own rooms, “there is no one” there except for memory and silence; her presence is an absence. The home in fact is “made for someone else”; it is a “borrowed shirt” which she wears knowing it is not hers, and therefore in some sense she is another person.

The sense of displacement creates a feeling of melancholy and mourning. But I think it’s also ambivalent. Nevadovska argues forcefully that her home is not her home, (“You call this home, but it’s foreign.”) But who is she arguing with? There’s no one there except for Nevadovska herself, who titled the poem “A Home in the Bronx” and refers to the apartment in the first stanza as “a home in the exile of memory.” Similarly, Nevadovska first says that the “home gives no warmth”, but then says it is like a “borrowed shirt”—which would in fact provide warmth, even if it is “made for someone else.”

Nevadovska is writing about exile and homesickness. But in exile the sense of not belonging is in part in the poem a discomfort with belonging, a struggle with a feeling of self-betrayal linked to the fact that Nevadovska is in fact home here and not there; is in fact wearing this shirt designed for someone else, and deriving from it warmth she is maybe not (according to herself) supposed to. She has to specify, “not the Jewish city where I was born” because she is in a Jewish city, writing for Jewish Yiddish speakers who are her neighbors.

The translation in this context adds or extends Nevadovska’s themes. The poem itself has been pulled from its Yiddish self and placed in an English home (“but its foreign.”) You could call a translation “a borrowed shirt” that is “made for someone else,” and you could also perhaps think of a translation as a kind of exercise in silencing and erasure: “a home in the exile of memory.” The translation “flutters quietly by like a lonely bird,” moving through the original language without touching it or generating its warmth. The feeling of loss, of emptiness, of distance from oneself, is mirrored in a translation which is also not itself—which is distanced from its Jewish roots and its Jewish meaning.

If the poem is about not being home in itself, though, then a translation which is not itself is in fact more the poem than the original. Or to put it another way, an exiled self is most itself in exile.

Shaul Magid, in his book The Necessity of Exile, notes that “Isaac Bashevis Singer, the renowned Jewish-American writer, thought exile was necessary to perpetuate a longing that produces Jewish genius—and for Singer, Yiddish was the language of exile.” Singer thought that “Yiddish expressed a sense of Jewishness, a religious longing, and an embodiment of Jewish soul—in short, exile.”

You could argue that this longing and exile is lost in a translation. But if the essence of Yiddish is longing, loss, and a distance from self, then losing and distancing from the language itself is arguably a further inhabitation of an essence which is no essence. “The years have kept this silence undisturbed” is a lament for a lost home, which cannot be reached. But it’s also a lament for a language, an expression, which is closed across generations because people like me don’t understand it anymore.

In speaking what can’t be spoken, the translation returns to its place—just as “A Home in the Bronx” settles into itself. I love that last line break in Bachman’s translation—"Like a borrowed shirt /It was made for someone else.” The simile clicks shut, or buttons up, with a satisfying flourish, easing into exile like a comfortable room.

The shirt may be borrowed, but it does provide warmth. The language is wrong but we can use it to speak about its wrongness, which is also its rightness. In an America increasingly obsessed with policing who does and doesn’t belong, Bachman and Nevadovska remind us that sometimes not being from here is home.

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And again, Merle and I will be reading in Bloomington, IN. Details below; come out and see us if you are in that neck of the country!