Yiddish Mexico, in New Translations of Works by Modernist Poet Yitskhok Berliner
Modernist Yiddish poet Yitskhok Berliner was born in Łódź, Poland in 1899. He immigrated to Mexico in 1923. He sold images of saints for a living. Berliner’s best-known poetic subjects were the destitute and forgotten people of Mexico City’s alleyways. The detailed, ethnographic language of Berliner’s speaker is also an expressionist voice in spiritual crisis. He is a tormented, simple Jew who—having become European exactly as he departed the continent for Mexico—reluctantly improvised a persona sensitive to the severe social disparities of his new home. The poems emphasize the anguish and disorientation of thinking and writing Yiddish in a Nahuatl and Spanish linguistic environment.
Berliner died in 1957, in Mexico. Published in 1941, the verses that follow include three poems in their first English translations. The language is marked by its subversive use of allusions to the Jewish past. Two dark bodies bend over like “reyshes” as a new immigrant rides in a wagon through the alleyways of Mexico City. We encounter the image of a sudden, frantic search for tefillin inside a Hasidic overcoat as naked children play in the sandy streets. We pass by dreams impaled on picket fences. The last poem from Berliner’s best-known book, City of Palaces, about marijuana’s effects on the perception of abject poverty, was published in English translation in 1996 and appears here in a new translation.