“Against the gentle, flowing gray of evening the skyscrapers argue, like naked giants, with dark brows and fiery eyes.”
This description of the New York City skyline from Reuben Iceland’s 1922 poem, “Night Reflex,” could easily describe the New York of today. In many ways this New York is eternal. Though millions of people come and go, though fortunes are won and lost, and though buildings are raised and leveled, New York’s essence as the metropolis of all metropolises, its impossibly dense skyline, and its electric glow in the evening, never cease to strike us with awe.
And yet, some things have changed. For one, this poem by Reuben Iceland was written in Yiddish. Yiddish was the language that my great grandparents brought with them to this country and spoke at home. It was a central language of Jewish civilization for nearly a thousand years. It was the language not just of shop signs and kitchens, but of poems and novels, plays and operettas. Today, almost 100 years after Iceland wrote of his New York, Yiddish has become a distant memory to most.
This song cycle sets to music Yiddish poems by poets Morris Rosenfeld, Anna Margolin, Naftali Gross, Celia Dropkin, and Reuben Iceland which reflect on New York City from the perspective of Jewish immigrants building a new life here. The Hudson river “lost in thought in its cold silver-bed” murmurs a lonely good night to the setting sun in Rosenfeld’s “Evening.” The last sounds of day dying away on Broadway form a tragic metaphor in Anna Margolin’s “Broadway, Evening.” The city lights mirror the heavens in Gross’s “New York”, and are depicted as a giant honey comb and a tree with golden fruit by Celia Dropkin in her “New York Evening by the Hudson Shore.” The man-made wonders of the city rival the divine in Iceland’s “Night Reflex.”
Today, the Yiddish language world of Jewish immigrants in New York is often remembered with nostalgia and kitsch, but in reality it was rich and multifaceted, encompassing the full range of human experience from the quotidian to the sublime. The literary reflections of these modernist Yiddish poets capture New York as the incredibly beautiful and inspiring place that it remains today. As Reuben Iceland writes in the closing of his poem: “And life, drained from days / and dreams, enchanted in the nights, / flow golden through steel veins / from wonder to wonder, / where people have illuminated a window to heaven.”
