Songs in Dark Times

A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples.

Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth--Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans--in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.

The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York-based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee's "God's Black Lamb," Moyshe Nadir's "Closer," and Esther Shumiatsher's "At the Border of China."

These poets dreamed of a moment when "we" could mean "we workers" rather than "we Jews." Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.

Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftists reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth--Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans--in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.
Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and an award-winning translator. She is author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia's Literary Borderlands and has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Quarterly, and Times Literary Supplement.
Songs in Dark Times arrives at just the right moment. The internationalist visions of cross-ethnic, multiracial solidarity that Glaser finds in Yiddish poetry of the 1930s are more urgent than ever in our own dark times of crisis. Her original account of the multilingual 'passwords' that allowed left-wing poets to connect Jewish experiences to those of other minority groups grows out of an acute sensitivity to the way literary language can forge powerful political affiliations.--Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators
Songs in Dark Times impresses and delights with close readings, careful analysis, breadth of vision, and unmistakably transnational sensibility. Glaser uses the key term 'passwords' to enter a radically reconfigured space in which Yiddish writers of the interwar period used markers of Jewish identity to embrace other marginalized groups. This welcome intervention in Jewish studies and comparative literature has an added bonus: Glaser's translations of ten Yiddish poems, with work by women writers not readily available elsewhere.--Harriet Murav, author of David Bergelson's Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity
Before there was Google, there was poetry. This is a book about passwords that performed not in the technical but in the aesthetic realm: words that allowed for the crossing of the border from Jews to others who suffered. Today, when the uses and abuses of historical comparisons are so intensely debated, Glaser reminds us that thinking through analogies--translating untranslatable suffering--is inextricably bound up with empathy. Though set in the catastrophic 'long 1930s, ' Songs in Dark Times speaks uncannily to our present moment.--Marci Shore, author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life And Death In Marxism, 1918-1968
Glaser takes us on a truly international journey: from China to riot-torn Palestine to the Jim Crow American South to war-torn Spain to Soviet Ukraine. It is a compelling journey guided by an astute literary scholar with a keen sense of historical context. Intriguing, original, and acutely intelligent, Songs in Dark Times will take its place as one of the finest analyses of Yiddish literature to have been written in several decades. It is a joy to read, and I recommend it heartily.--Joshua M. Karlip, author of The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe
Glaser tells the story of too-little-known interventions in modernist Jewish and North American poetry, chronicling the ingenuity of Yiddish communist poets, who used their ethnic and social particularity as a means to join international struggles against injustice, racism, and economic inequality. Chock full of provocative poems, still simmering debates, and irresolvable contradictions, Songs in Dark Times is fascinating, informative, challenging, exuberantly archival, and necessary.--Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss