The Revolution is a City: Moyshe Kulbak’s Poem “The City”

Abstract

ABSTRACT The trajectory of Moyshe Kulbak's biography (1896–1937), drawing him from small town to big city, mirrors that of many in his generation. The image of the city in tension with that small town, or rather its replacement – nature – haunts so much of his greatest work. The urban dimension of Kulbak's work is both inescapable and tantalizingly complex. This essay analyzes the first of these works, his long poem “The City” – “one of the most popularly recited poems of its day.” Over four sections – sunset, midnight, predawn, and dawn – the poem follows the city's changes as it passes the overnight into the dawn. Equally dramatic, however, is the overlay of ambivalences toward this inevitable passage, as felt by a young poet drawn toward urban possibilities and revolutionary promise and repulsed by their cruelty. It offers us a distinctive Yiddish lens on a world in which the revolution is a city.