“With footsteps marking roundabout paths”: Jewish poetry on Crimea

Abstract

Published within two years of each other in the early 1920s, the Hebrew poet Shaul Tshernikhovski’s sonnet sequence “Crimea” and the Yiddish poet Perets Markish’s sonnet sequence “Chatyr‐Dag” are important studies in the image and significance of wandering in contemporary Jewish literature. Crimea holds a powerful interest for these two poets as a locus of discussion about land and territory, about the connection (or lack thereof) of Jews to a landscape that is in a sense “beyond the Pale,” both familiar and exotic, and a place of personal escape or refuge in these poets’ own biographies. Moreover, their conscious engagement with the great Eastern European literary landmarks of Crimea –Alexander Pushkin’s “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” and Adam Mickiewicz’s “Crimean Sonnets” – makes these important texts for understanding Jewish cultural movement in the early twentieth century.