| SVINTSYAN * (from the Yizkor book0 Heersha-Leyb Tarshish
 by MENKE KATZtranslated from the Yiddish by
 BENJAMIN AND BARBARA HARSHAV
  And you are rich, my small town Svintsyan –Rich with fire, your blazing earth,
 Rich
 With darkness, your anguished sky.
 I saw your heart on every spear.Midnight in conflagration I thought:
 In Hell
 There was a sunset.
 So you're rich, my town Svintsyan,Oh, rich with blood as your twilight with gold.
 Rich –
 My rag town Svintsyan.
 How many abysses in your fear?How much doubt – in the expiring light?
  That you are big, my little town Svintsyan –Is shown by two synagogues and three baths,
 Is shown
 By ten alleys and so-many courtyards.
 That you are big, the carters brag about it,Waving their swishing whips:
 Your roofs
 Cannot be reached with pokers.
 But what measure will take the size of your desolation,At night, in the hollow of suicide attics –
 When with white
 Hair of fear, boys and girls hang themselves.
 Oh Earth – where can you be gloomier,Than behind a graveyard fence – at the suicide graves?
 
  Big you are big – oho, my small town Svintsyan –With the ruin demons and the poorhouse beggar,
 You're almost
 A whole little dot on the map.
 Who else but the madman – Heersha-Leyb TarshishThe under-beadle of the Hasidic minyan
 Laments here
 Every sigh of your collapsing walls.
 He curses the hands that set you on fire,He's tired of chasing the crows
 That blacken
 The crusts of sun on the poorhouse panes.
 When conflagrations carry sunsets through the night,He bends to kiss the ash of your wounds.
  At the holiest prayers in the Hasidic minyanHeersha-Leyb ponders, how many pillars of smoke
 Will be missed on Sabbath Eve
 In the twisted chimney of the cold bath in the synagogue-yard.
 How many dead are registered in the town Chronicle, How many stars will fall: odd, how many even,How many tears
 Still remained in the eyes of the mourners.
 Night after night, he is bent in sorrowFor he cannot say the confession with the sun –
 Because even
 In the quietest leaves of April
 Unrest blossoms – Because even in the rustle of Yuritshka's forestThe voices of future screams are whispering.
 Twilight. With the horror of the ruined Holy ArkHe sits, a sick piece of evening, at the pump near the Church,
 Amazed, how bright is Svintsyan.
 You cannot chase the sun from the whole market place.
 How beautiful is Svintsyan: at night, every stone is a star.From the well, you cannot draw out all the shining water.
 But when he hears
 no angels singing in the old synagogue –
 Only the stamping of wounded horses, deafeningThe violated synagogue with their neighing prayer,
 As if
 Lamenting their horsy luck to an illusory God –
 Heersha-Leyb remembers that Svintsyan is the Hell,And deeper than the night here is the well of blood.
 How tired he is, Heersha-Leyb Tarshish, the Under-Beadle ofThe Hasidic minyan – King of the lice-infested poorhouse,
 Tired from his forty
 Old springs, tired from dragging God in his pious rags.
 The evening winds fire-skeins in his thoughts.In the West, the sun clamors again to the kingdom of light –
 And minute after minute,
 The day sinks fast, as if buried in a heavenly grave.
 The dog-catcher on Zablotna Street deafens the howl of the dogs.Heersha-Leyb Tarshish thinks that, with evening, the world too dies.
 Only he and Death – alone,
 And even God is scared in His sinful heaven.
 He knows: his soul is begging out of the cursed body,Like a tormented flower under a gruesome stone.
 
 Heersha-Leyb Tarshish hears an old silence resounding from the twilight
 In the shofar of the wind. He sees executed armies carry
 The corpse of the sun
 Through the ovens of Hell – in the coffin of Og-King-of-Bashan.
 With shut eyes he sees: former humans hammerWounds and darkness into an endless cleansing-board,
 And wash the dead sun
 With the ink of night and the blood of their own bodies.
 He sees the alleys shrink in horror,And he suddenly weeps a desolate prayer of demise,
 To the first stars –
 Heersha-Leyb Tarshish, the Under-Beadle of the Hasidic minyan .
 A windy nothingness carousing in the abandoned market place.Heersha-Leyb guards the sky: lest God flee the world.
  Cursed April, do not step over the desolate thresholds.In your brightest lights, all the dark will stand up.
 The barking of empty butcher shops
 Will deafen the shimmering chatter of your brooks.
 How will you pair your wind's laughter – with children snorting?How will you raise, soft and cool, evil thorns instead of rye?
 In the spiderweb of attics
 You will wither in the blood of raped twelve-year-old girls.
 Cursed April, do not step over the desolate thresholds.The chain-clatter of imprisoned Russians will assault you
 With their skeleton-eyes –
 Through the moldy blindness of prison-cellars,
 They are seeking one beam of light.
 On the cheeks of anemic girls, your sky will be blue.The shadows will exile the sun. Your night will never dawn.
 
  The virgin night of April spreads death in stars over the town.Heersha-Leyb Tarshish plods – a shadowy prayer near the dog-catcher's
 shed.
 He strokes the praying tails
 Of the flogged dogs, the dog-catcher will flay them at dawn.
 With his corpse hand he conducts a choir of sixteen dogs.He asks each dog where is Hell and the hottest place in Hell –
 And from the dog-catcher's death shed,
 The dogs respond with a terrifying howl: there, t – h – e – r – e.
 Heersha-Leyb asks: are there depths beneath the deepest depth –And the dogs in the shed answer
 With hoarse wailing, clamoring from the catcher's axe – to the light.
 Dulled with barking, the dogs merge with the silence, with stars' anguish.
 Heersha-Leyb Tarshish counts and counts the torments of their final
 sleep.
  April eternally-in-love. Children blow through a straw – rainbows of soap.
 Pale, thin little girls ripen in the anguished passage to womanhood.
 Grass shadows are childish-cool.
 At Badonna's house, the tree with shy berries is flaming red and raw.
 Elchik and Dveyrka huddle in the orchard of Hotel Italia .They step lightly, like thieves, their unrest rustles in apple-trees.
 They hear harps play in their blood.
 Dveyrka undid her fresh hair from her knot to her pretty loins.
 They watch the leaves being born. The apple-tree understandsDveyrka and Elchik's thoughts, and hides them with blossoming branches.
 They are alone – so much spring,
 And as through the roots of the tree, April sings through their senses.
 Night – mystery of Creation. Dveyrka caught herself in Elchik's arms.Generations of tomorrow flash like lightning in her shining eyes
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