A Secular Prayer

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Among the books digitized by the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Project is a volume of Yiddish verse from the YIVO Library in New York entitled Un du bist Got (And You Are God) by the poet A.N. Stencl (1897-1983).

The book, published in Leipzig in 1924, contains many poems that straddle the boundary between secular art and prayer, such as this one, which we are posting on the day before the start of Yom Kippur 2017 (5778).

I fall in the dust of my sin before you
God!
Must I die a sinner?
Is a remorse-life not crueler than death?

I fall into the grave of my sin
Serpents of eternal repentance
Eat out my eyes,
Rip my despair-heart into shreds for me by feasting on it!

God!
I crash my heart into you!
See:
A nest full of poison serpent-eggs---

Is a remorse-life not crueler than death?

You,
Who keeps count unto the fourth generation
Divide my life into four generations,
Divide my life into four deaths--
I fall in the dust of my sin before you!

Let me live with my remorse,
Is my life not crueler than four times dying?
God---

Translation by Roberta Newman, with assistance by Irena Klepfisz, Yankl Salant, Daniel Soyer, and Eddy Portnoy

Stencl, born in Czeladz, in Galicia, had a yeshiva background. He left Poland for the Netherlands after serving in the Tsarist army in World War I and moved to Berlin in 1921 where he became a member of the bohemian art scene, associating with the likes of Franz Kafka and Kafka’s lover Dora Diamant. Translations of his poetry into German were acclaimed by Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig.

Stencl later escaped Nazi Germany and settled in London, where he became a leading Yiddish cultural activist, founding the group Friends of Yiddish and editing the Yiddish literary journal Loshn un Lebn. And he continued to write and publish Yiddish  poetry.

Roberta Newman is YIVO’s Director of Digital Initiatives.