1522. Is there a practice to hold the marriage ceremony of a widow by the
oven?
I sometimes stand near a vent when circulation is urgent
Or a breeze is needed
I’d like giant waves to come along more often
And upend without any reassurances
The community. Point me in the opposite direction.
Like when a sparrow lands on the shoulder of a poor girl
With no prospects and then she’s President
That sparrow is an actor
Who embodies desire
And nullifies the question of belief
1449. What is the attitude toward a family in which there are apostates?
We all have uncircumcised
Hearts, undocumented aunts.
Our seals are a little bit
Broken, we spoil fast.
The kids fervently wave their
Birthright. Birds land where
They like. We long to renounce
A god; we flutter toward light.
We go where the miracles are
And yes we are easily taken in.
Sometimes a stranger heals,
Has an ethos. Yes
It sometimes happens
That one runs away only
To come running back
With his love in a sack
And an inward gaze, but
Other times one goes for good,
Settles in profane places. It’s fine
With me, though I don’t say so.
1590. Does it ever happen that an old man takes his own life?
The country is cruel
And he failed
The small animals
He looked for ethics
In rock gardens
He converted and later
Converted back
Had to face
The same animals
He conversed only
With people he
Used to know
They understand
How his mind recurs
How it returned
How stupid and stubborn
He is but also
How charming
Some of the people
He used to know say
“I used to know this guy
Who suffered as much
As he was blessed.”
They threw books
At him and he fell
To the ground
Apologizing
1638. Which illnesses are considered disgusting?
Those that cause an itch or an odor
Or worse – a sound:
Sounds like a battlefield.
Someone’s bleeding out.
*
It’s not the blood but the hole
That’s disgusting
It’s not the blindness but
The lost eye
I can’t stop looking at
Those missing parts saying
You’re sick, you’re sick
Those scars are
The inside of God
*
I can’t stop feeling that rotten
Foreign object
They’ve inserted
To siphon something out
Or pipe it in
*
Sudden weight loss reminds us of a blighted tree
A rash evokes the work of bugs and worms
Tremors are associated with gross uncertainty
The confusion and imbalance of children
*
When an organ is reduced to a pathetic animal
Or when it’s engorged as a happy bug
When there’s any discoloration or tenderness,
From blockage or leak, explosion or exposure
When something washes up wrong on the shore
Like a bloated or a shriveled fish
We try to throw it back in the water
Between 1912 and 1914, the Yiddish and Russian writer and ethnographer known as S. An-sky developed a massive questionnaire he hoped to disseminate among Jews living in the Russian Pale of Settlement. The document included over 2,000 questions, covering every aspect of life from pre-conception to post-mortem. No responses to the questionnaire were ever collected because World War I and then a heart attack cut An-sky’s work and life short, but the collection of unanswered questions is widely considered to be one of the most significant contributions to our understanding of Jewish life in the Russian Empire. The scholar Nathaniel Deutsch translated the entire questionnaire from Yiddish into English and discussed its significance in his 2011 book The Jewish Dark Continent. The titles of the following poems are An-sky’s questions, as translated by Deutsch.
Lesley Yalen lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and works at the Yiddish Book Center. Her book of poems The Hearts of Vikings was published by Natural History Press in 2015.