The Song Remains
דאָס ליד איז געבליבן
Welcome to our collection of Yiddish poems with English translations from Nazi German occupied Poland. We’ll be publishing one new poem per week into 2027, so be sure to subscribe to get free weekly updates.
The sun shone brightly in a festive way:
today is the king of Chelm’s birthday.
He observes from the terrace on high
if the folk with the new gift are drawing nigh.
Here they come, here they come, the shoes made of gold
forged of real ducats, ready to behold!
The folk crafted this golden footwear
for the king in pride and joy to wear.
Whosoever encounters the king in passing
would clear the way as was certainly fitting.
Alter-Sholem Kacyzne (Katsizne) (1885-1941) was born in Vilnius (Vilno) to a working-class family. Yiddish was his mameloshen or mother-tongue, but he taught himself Hebrew, Russian, German, Polish, and French. At age 14, he went to work in his uncle’s photography studio in Dnipro (Ekatrinoslav). He became a professional photographer, and documented Jewish life in Poland, Palestine, and North Africa. Many of his striking photographs are available online.
Kacyzne is well known for his photography, literary works and plays, but lesser so for his poetry. He founded his own Yiddish literary journals, and also contributed to the Yiddish Forward, and a number of periodicals with Communist leanings including Literarishe Tribune, Der Fraynd, and Literatur.
He lived in Dnipro, and later Warsaw where he became a good friend of Y L Perets. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he fled to Lviv (Lemberg), and as the Nazi armies advanced, fled further east to Ternipol, where he was tortured to death by Ukranian collaborators in July 1941.
Sources:
Little things snowy white,
round as tiny stars
and sweet as sweet can be,
like saccharine pearls for tea.
Don’t cry little boy, wipe away your tears, it will soon be good.
We will heal the wounds that drip with blood.
We stand alone in this wide world against the sun that sets
Alone, alone with our pain and our poverty
Between tree and tree exists the sky,
between sky and sky – stars
(everything taking form must ignite and be extinguished…)
leading up to houses along milky roads.
Here – a reminder, there – the stone’s blue glow.
– For so long have my eyes been seeking,
awaiting some letter of yours, my son –
in the nights my heart was wakeful
and quaking like a leaf in the wind.
The sky’s rouge
drew back
beneath their steps
overgrown with the sidewalks,
mingled with the dust of asphalts.
They entered the grey.
Debora Vogel (1900-1942) was born in Bursztyn (Burshtyn / Burštýn / Бурштин), then part of the Austiran Empire, now in Ukraine. During the First World War her family fled to Vienna (Wien) and then to Lwów (Lemberg / Lviv), where she spent most of her life. She studied philosophy and Polish literature and received a Ph.D in Philosophy in Kraków, and later taught and lectured on topics including psychology and Yiddish literature. She wrote poetry in German, Yiddish, and Polish. She had strong ties with the avant-garde artistic community, which strongly influenced her own work, which has been said be analogous to cubism and geometrical abstraction.
She was murdered in Lwów with her husband and young son in the Great Action of August 1942.
Sources:
The sky today is a radiant
pale blue
and lamb-cloud white.
The sun is smiling
its last, sorrowful smile.