A Yiddish Bard in Berlin: Moyshe Kulbak and the Flourishing of Yiddish Poetry in Exile

Abstract

In 1920 the Yiddish poet Moyshe Kulbak left his native Vilna to resettle temporarily in Berlin. His three-year sojourn in the Weimar metropolis was both the loneliest and the most prolific time of his life. Propelled into the heartland of European Kultur yet consigned to the margins of both German society and his native realm, Kulbak's inconspicuous position enabled him to absorb new poetic trends while achieving the physical and psychic distance required to cultivate an imagined "Yiddishland." Indeed, if Kulbak was relegated to the sidelines of Berlin, it is equally striking that the metropolis makes no appearance in the poems he penned there. His Berlin lyrics reflect an escape from his urban environs and retreat into an idealized White Russian landscape. As a transitional space between his youth in the rural outskirts of Vilna and his future in Soviet Minsk, the Weimar capital provided Kulbak both the inspiration and the isolation needed to reclaim a usable past and to cultivate a new poetics. This article traces Kulbak's poetic development alongside his geographical trajectory from the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union via Weimar Berlin. Using Kulbak's oeuvre as a case study, it argues that Berlin, as the site and symbol of transfer and transition between east and west and between dissolved empires and newly emerging nation-states, was a productive environment for the Yiddish poet to develop his own voice and to enrich a Yiddish literary culture that transcended Europe's newly drawn borders.