MIKHL GORDON (November 4, 1823-December 24, 1890)
He was born in Vilna. His father Arn-Dovid was the author of the
religious text Apik neḥalim
(Course of the rivers) (Vilna, 1836), written in imitation of Moshe Chaim
Luzzato’s work “Layesharim tehila”
(Praise be to the upright). His great
uncle, Yisrael Gordon, was a rabbi in Vilna.
As a child, Mikhl studied in religious primary school and later in
synagogue study halls where he acquired proficiency in Tanakh and Hebrew
grammar, studied Russian and German, and also began to write poems. He was a frequent visitor to Avraham Dov
Lebensohn and became a close friend of his son Micha-Yosef—people used to call
them: “big Mikhl” (Gordon) and “little Mikhl” (Lebensohn)—as well as with other
followers of the Jewish Enlightenment in Vilna.
At age twenty he married the sister of Yehuda-Leib Gordon, the
subsequently famous poet, and lived for several years with his in-laws. Six years older than his brother-in-law, he
had a major influence on him, awakening him to the need for an education and
the Enlightenment; he also inspired in him the desire to write. The friendship between the two Gordons was
not torn asunder even after Mikhl’s wife died and he remarried. His second wife was a daughter of a prominent
family in New Zhager (Žagarė), and he moved
there to take up residence. He lived
there for over ten years. At that time
he began to write poetry which “he would read in front of a circle of followers
of the Jewish Enlightenment,” wrote Y. Shatski.
“Shiye Shteynberg, the censor and lexicographer, offered him a piece of
advice not to have those [poems] published, while his brother-in-law,
Yehuda-Leib Gordon, was encouraging him to write and publish in Yiddish.”
(Shatski, Kultur-geshikhte fun der haskole bay yidn in lite [Cultural
history of the Jewish Enlightenment in Lithuania], p. 145). From that time, Yankev Dinezon recounted in
his memoirs (published in Spektor’s Hoyzfraynd [House friend] 1 [1888]
and in Shmuel Niger’s Pinkes [Records] in 1913) many interesting things
in the life of Mikhl Gordon, who was then living with Dinezon’s parents “in one
house, under one roof,” and the young Dinezon “had [him] on his hands.” Gordon always lived under difficult economic
circumstances: he had learned no trade, received no systematic education, was unfit
for the life of a merchant, and he lived a life of want. Early in the 1860s, he received a position as
a bookseller from Baron Ginzburg, in Poltava, but he was unhappy with this
employment. He refused to be a business
representative of a large Moscow manufacturing form in Shpole (Shpola), Kiev
region. He preferred to take the harsh
road full of misery of a teacher and educator of the younger generation, and he
had therefore to come under the support of enlightened patrons. He remained in Ukraine and was a private
tutor to elite families in various cities, and in Zlatopol (Zlatopil) he earned
a salary for high school students. In
1884 his second wife died in Cherkasy, and in 1889 he himself became ill with
cancer. At that point in time, he was
living in Pyriatyn, and from there he was brought to a hospital in Kiev where
he died a half-year later. He was buried
in the old Kiev
cemetery, not far from the Malbim (Meyer Leybush
ben Yeḥiel Mikhl Viser). On his
gravestone was etched the last two stanzas of his poem “Mayn letster tog” (My
final day). His death passed unnoticed
in the Yiddish and Hebrew press of the time.
Then, in 1891, at the time of his first yortsayt, Y. L. Peretz
published a short obituary for him in the first volume of Di yudishe
biblyotek (The Yiddish library). In
the third volume of Spektor’s Hoyzfraynd, Shimen Frug published a poem
entitled “Af mikhl gordons keyver” (At Mikhl Gordon’s grave), and Yitskhok-Yankev
Vaysberg, a close friend of the late poet, published in three issues (287, 289,
and 292 [1891]) of Hamelits (The advocate) a detailed appreciation
concerning him. Gordon’s first published
poem appeared in the Hebrew anthology Kol bokhim (Voice of crying) in
1846. The anthology included Kalman
Shulman’s translation from German of the censor Jakob Tugendhold’s eulogy at
the death of Mordechai-Aharon Ginzburg, which also involved four poems by four
Hebrew poets, among them Mikhl Gordon.
He later published short notices and notes in Hamagid (The
preacher), Hashaḥar (The dawn), Kokhve yitsḥak (The stars of
Isaac), Haboker or (Good morning), Hakarmel (The Carmel),
and the like. He also brought out Hebrew
essays, Tiferet banim (The glory of children), a textbook for youth (St.
Petersburg, 1881), and Shever gaon (Pride before a fall), a critical
work on the Talmudical text Ḥad veḥalak (Plain and simple). He first published Shever gaon in 1883
with Y. Y. Vaysberg’s Gaon veshevro (Pride and its fall), also a
critique of Ḥad veḥalak but in a witty form (“Halatsa” or witticism),
and one year later (1884) he published Shever gaon as a separate
imprint. His popularity as a writer,
however, was not thanks to his Hebrew tracts, but to his Yiddish poems with
which he opened up a new, distinctive chapter in the history of Yiddish
poetry. He wrote a great part of his
Yiddish poetic output in his younger years.
The Enlightenment surroundings with their attitude toward Yiddish,
however, was such that a Yiddish poet regarded his own Yiddish poetry as so
much mischief, and this may have been one of the reasons for why so many of his
poems were lost. In his poem, “Mayne
liderekh” (My little poems), the first in his collection Yudishe lider
(Yiddish poems) of 1889, he wrote: “I must tell you, my children, / You had
many brothers, / I misplaced them as poor sinners / and have no longer set eyes
on them.” In 1868 he first was willing
to publish a collection of his poems under the title Di bord un dertsu nokh
andere sheyne idishe lider (The beard and other beautiful Yiddish songs),
“all by a great Hassid” (Zhitomir, 1868), 96 pp. He hid his identity behind the ironic
signature of “a great Hassid,” because he feared revenge from Hassidim whom he
ridiculed in the poems. He only signed
the introduction to the collection as “Ger dal makh ani” (wretched
stranger, poor me), which was an anagram for “Mikhl Gordon.” B. Voloderski, the author of the “Kurtse
byografye fun mikhl gordon” (Short biography of Mikhl Gordon), published in Hoyzfraynd
2 (1889), wrote that Gordon did not sign his name to his first collection of
poems, because he was ashamed of having written them in Yiddish. Zalmen Reyzen later repeated this contention
in his Leksikon (Biographical dictionary). However, Gordon himself wrote in 1869 in his
approbatory poem to Sh. Berenshteyn’s Magazin fun yudishe lider far dem yudishn folk
(Storehouse of Yiddish poems for the Jewish people): “My poems have been
published for the world, / As meticulously as contraband; / I have not placed
my name upon them, / I feared a malicious hand.[1] / Your Storehouse is
full of kosher goods, / Sweets little poems, written in zhargon; / so I can
sign my name without fear or trepidation, / your true friend Mikhl
Gordon.” And, in a well-known poem, “Di
bildung, di vare bildung un di falshe bildung” (Education, the true education
and the false education)—in the first edition of Gordon’s poems in 1868, he
titled this “Di bildungs pilin” (Education’s ??)—he wrote of teasing a young
girl who can “scratch a little bit on the clavier and had already read books
three and four,” wickedly and painfully: “The heart takes a turn for the worse,
full of poor manners, as the first sacrifice is a bit of Yiddish.” Evidently, Gordon had a deep and abiding love
for the Yiddish language, although he regarded the folk language like all the
other followers of the Jewish Enlightenment, and in his famed poem of the
Enlightenment, “Shtey oyf mayn folk!” (Arise, my people!) of 1869, he wrote: “You
aren’t speaking a language, which anyone understands, / Your language is alien,
confused, garbled, / The language of the land is clear and pure.”
In his first collection (1868) were
seventeen of his early songs and poems, among them: “Der yud in goles” (The Jew
in exile), “Di bildung” (Education), “Di bord” (The beard), “Der get” (The
divorce), “Di mashke” (The booze), “Di shtifmuter” (The stepmother), “Di
getlekhe hant” (The divine hand)—all poems known from earlier and popular due
to their spread in manuscript form. In
1869 his poem “Shtey oys, mayn folk!” became well-known, and it appears that,
over the course of the 1870s, no more of his poems were forthcoming. Then, in the 1880s he published his new poems
in Tsederboym’s Yidishes folksblat (Jewish people’s newspaper)
(supplements 8 and 9), in Spektor’s Hoyzfraynd (book 1 of 1888 and book
2 of 1889), in Familyenfraynd (Family friend) (supplement to Hoyzfraynd,
1887), and in Sholem-Aleykhem’s Yudishe folks-biblyotek (Jewish people’s
library) 2 (1889). The great majority of
these new poems, together with twelve of the seventeen poems from his first
collection, were included in the second, enlarged edition of his poetry, Shirey
m. gordon / Yidishe lider fun mikhl gordon (Poems of M. Gordon, Yiddish
poems by Mikhl Gordon) (Warsaw, 1889), 112 pp.
Twenty-seven songs and poems were included in this edition. The difference between the two collections was
not simply in the number of poems, but also in the poet’s mood and vision which
marked a change in the intervening twenty-year period. In 1869 in his approbatory poem to Berenshteyn’s
Magazin
fun yudishe lider far dem yudishn folk, Gordon expressed his poetic
self-characterization: “I have sung a handful of songs, / Not because I have
the nature of a singer, / But when I see the cases of my brothers, / My heart
within me bursts.” Gordon witnessed his
poetic publications in those years in protest, awakening, reproving, and
instruction. In 1889, though, in his
aforementioned “Mayne liderekh,” one sees something else: “There lay Yisroelik
bruised, beaten, / He had to be consoled, entertained; / What good is his
crying, his lamentations, / To stir his wounds.” He accompanied the old poems which he reissued
in the new edition with notes and annotations with the goal of correcting and
clarifying many of his previous notions, because he was already disappointed in
himself. In his poem “Der yud in goles,”
for example, he had written in the 1860s: “Soon it will be 2,000 years that I,
a Jew, will have walked around—despised everywhere, moaning like a worm…, but
people have now become wiser…. Quick,
make a blessing to the redeemer of Israel.”
In 1889, he added in a comment here: “Owing to our great sins, suddenly
a new wild beast with iron horns [meaning: anti-Semitism] has been born atop
the Jew…. All magnificent hopes have
burst like a vial of soap bubbles.” At
the time, Gordon adapted this widely known and oft recited poem to his changed
viewpoint, and in a newly added stanza he wrote: “The troubles have overcome my
strength; strengthen me, God, to bear up under the troubles and remain a
Jew.” In the great Enlightenment program
poem, “Shtey oyf, mayn folk!,” in 1869, he had courageously sought to awaken
the Jew from slumber, because “The sun long ago set on the world.” In 1889, it would appear that the poet did
not conform to the new times: “It was good”—he wrote by way of annotation—“in
1869 when the Jew had good prospects, good hopes.” In 1889 he no longer believed in the “good
will of the government,” and was generally disappointed in life. His lyrical, philosophical poems of the 1880s
“Mayn letster tog,” “Mayne yorn” (My years), and “Mayn lebnstsayt” (My vital
years), which demonstrated that his poetic talent was so much stronger that in
his Enlightenment poems, had an elegiac, melancholy Koheleth-like tone. In the 1889 edition, Gordon included his
oldest Yiddish poem—“Fun der khupe” (From the wedding canopy)—“from the wedding
canopy to the feast, I’m left, I’m left holding the bag”—and “Mayn deye” (My
influence), which was also in the first edition, and for both poems he added a
long introduction concerning the old-fashioned Jewish lifestyle, with the early
weddings, with their bringing into the world large families without worry and
without planning for the future, and with the veil on the young girl against
her will. In the later edition were also
included: the popular poems, “Di bord” and “Der get”—“You’re still here, Mr.
Jew, in Poltava, and so you’ve seen my husband”—the anti-Hassidic poems “Mayn vide”
(My confession of sins), “Mayn tshuve” (My penance), “Der borsht” (The borsht),
“A naye moyfes” (A new miracle), and others; the anti-heder poem “A moshl” (A
tale); the touching poem “Di shtifmuter”; the popular song “Di mashke” which is
still sung today as a folksong (in the arrangement of M. Varshavski); the
poignantly social poem “Yoytse zayn far der velt” (Repaying the world), and
others as well.
With the publication of Gordon’s
collection Yudishe
lider in 1889, Shimen Frug in his poem “Tsu mikhl
gordon” (published later with his poem “Af mikhl gordons keyver” in Spektor’s Hoyzfraynd
3 [1894]) wrote to Gordon: “I see your Yiddish muse dressed in ordinary,
old-fashioned Jewish clothing; they are, though, sewn well with strong and kosher
thread…. The Yiddish muse!... The ancient orphan without a father and
without a mother carrying on their shoulders a sack of rhymes.” Gordon succeeded in transforming this “sack
with rhymes” into robust verses, and he thereby opened the way for Frug and
other Yiddish poets. In the 1860s he
carried around a plan to publish in Yiddish a series of popular scholarly
booklets on history, geography, and natural science, but he lacked all material
means and ultimately only succeeded, with partial help from the society
“Mefitse haskalah” (Society for the promotion of enlightenment [among the Jews
of Russia]), in publishing the first part of Di geshikhte fun rusland
(The history of Russia)—“here we shall recount in ordinary Yiddish language the
entire history of the Russian people, all the stories that have transpired in
Russia since it became a state until contemporary times”—(Zhitomir, 1869), 214
pp. This book was an adaptation from
Russian, and it was written in a nationalistic spirit of devotion to the
government that characterized the Jewish Enlightenment. A. Kupernik wrote in detail about this book
in Kol mevaser 11 (1869), and later Zalmen Reyzen did as well in his Leksikon.
Sources:
Yevreyskaya entsiklopediya (Jewish encyclopedia) (St. Petersburg), vol.
6, pp. 696-97; Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1 (with a bibliography); Y.
Dinezon, in Hoyzfraynd 1 (1888); Dinezon, in Der pinkes (ed.
Shmuel Niger) (Vilna, 1913), pp. 149-54; Y. Entin, Yidishe poetn (Jewish poets), vol. 1 (New York, 1927), p. 79; Nokhum
Shtif, Di eltere yidishe literatur (Older
Yiddish literature) (Kiev, 1929), pp. 143-67; A. Litvin, in the anthology Lite
(Lithuania), ed. Y. Yeshurin (New York, 1935), republished from Tsukunft
(New York) 1 and 2 (1915); Itsik Manger, Noente geshtaltn (Proximate
images) (Warsaw, 1938), pp. 153-60; Kh. Gordon-Mlotek, in Yivo-bleter 35
(1951), pp. 299-311; Dr. Y. Shatski, Kultur-geshikhte fun der haskole
bay yidn in lite (Cultural history of the Jewish Enlightenment in
Lithuania) (Buenos Aires, 1950), see index; Shmuel Niger, in Lite 1 (New
York, 1951), pp. 799-816; Y, Fikhman, Regnboygn (Rainbow) (Buenos Aires, 1953), pp. 227,
228; B. Wachstein, Die hebräische Publizistik
in Wien (Vienna, 1930).
Yitskhok Kharlash
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