Itzik Manger coined the term “literatoyre” to describe his work. It's a playful, irreverent amalgam of literature and Torah

  

Itzik Manger, The World According to Itzik: Selected Poetry and Prose. Trans. and ed. by Leonard Wolf; With an introduction by David G. Roskies and Leonard Wolf . Yale New Yiddish Library, 2002.

In the years between 1929 and 1939, when Itzik Manger wrote most of the poetry and fiction that made him famous, his name among Yiddish readers was a household word. Called the Shelley of Yiddish, he was characterized as being drunk with talent. This book—the first full-length anthology of Manger's work—displays the full range of his genius in poetry, fiction, and criticism. The book begins with an extensive historical, biographical, and literary critical introduction to Manger's work. There are then excerpts from a novel, The Book of Paradise, three short stories, autobiographical essays, critical essays, and finally, Manger's magnificent poetry—ballads, Bible poems, personal lyrics, and the Megilla Songs. These works, which have the patina of myths acquired ages ago, also offer modern psychological insight and irrepressible humor. With Manger, we make the leap into the Jewish twentieth century, as he recreates the past in all its layered expressiveness and interprets it with modernist sensibilities.


A troupe of Yiddish-speaking actors once came to a Polish shtetl to perform the story of Joseph and his brothers. Just as the brothers were about to throw Joseph in the pit, a man in the audience stood up to object, imploring others around him not to tolerate such behavior.
The eminent Yiddish poet Itzik Manger would have appreciated the man’s impulse to recast a familiar bible story. It is that sort of recasting—making living midrash of biblical legends—which showcases Manger’s genius. Among his better-known works is a group of poems aptly called “Itzik’s Midrash,” as well as his brilliant rendition of the Purim megillah as told in “Songs of the Megillah.” Manger is honored for these and other writings by Leonard Wolf’s deft and inspiring new translation of his work, The World According to Itzik: Selected Poetry and Prose by Itzik Manger.
The book is the result of a collaboration between the National Yiddish Book Center, the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, and Yale University Press to translate Yiddish classics into English. The goal is not only to revive these classics through sturdy translations, but to have the translations stand as “second originals.” It’s a formidable task to render the idiosyncrasies of Yiddish into English. But as articulated in an anecdote from the late Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, it remains a vitally important task. Yiddish writers, noted Singer, “were all haunted by an appalled awareness that they were facing the end of their language, their culture, and their world. To cite an illustration from my personal experience, I helped lift to his feet the incomparable Yiddish poet Itzik Manger, drunk in a Brooklyn stairwell, as he clutched onto me: ‘Ikh bein a dikhter for toyte—I’m a poet for the dead.’”
Itzik Manger was born in 1901 in Czernowitz in Galicia, during a period when Yiddish literature and theatre were thriving. Czernowitz was also the birthplace of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, and Aharon Appelfeld, a place where many of the Jews educated their sons in German. Manger’s family was of modest means. His father was a tailor, yet the son was sent to Gymnasium. But Manger eventually exchanged a traditional curriculum for a backstage education in Yiddish theatre. Manger’s love for all things Yiddish was further nurtured when the family moved east to Jassy. It was in that Romanian landscape that Manger found himself as a Yiddish troubadour, a calling he fulfilled when he arrived in Warsaw in 1927.
Manger’s time in Warsaw marked some of the most productive years of his life, a personally enriching period that abruptly ended in 1938. From Warsaw, Manger fled to Marseilles and then on to Liverpool, living in England for eleven years, much of the time desperately unhappy. By 1958, Manger was in the midst of an identity crisis that would take him to his final home in Israel. “For years I wallowed about in the world, / Now I’m going home to wallow there. / With a pair of shoes and the dirt on my back, / And the stick in my hand that goes with me everywhere.”
Manger’s retelling of the Purim story, featuring the lovelorn Fastigrosso, anchors this new collection. Fastigrosso the tailor pines away for his true love Esther and eventually hangs for attempting to assassinate King Ahaseurus. In his introduction to the “Songs of the Megillah,” Manger asserts that “the author [of these Songs] has worked diligently to rediscover the personages that have been thus overlooked.” In Manger’s rendition Mordechai is a schemer, Esther a pawn, and Haman and Ahaseurus even more ridiculous than in the original. In his elegy, Fastigrosso portrays a weak Esther who has capitulated to her Uncle Mordechai rather than elope to Vienna with her true love. “But see what you’ve let your uncle do / You’re a queen surrounded by guards. / And I hold the wreck of my youth in my hands / Like a gambler who holds bad cards.” Manger conflates the past and present in this masterpiece. And throughout the poetic sequence, Fastigrosso’s personal tragedy eclipses national triumph.
In his comprehensive introduction to Wolf’s translation, David Roskies, the editor of the New Yiddish Library series, points out that Manger coined the term “literatoyre” to describe his work. Roskies describes literatoyre as a playful, irreverent amalgam of literature and Torah. Manger was a voracious reader and his work was also influenced by the French symbolists’ highly metaphorical language, Charles Dickens’ social realism, and Cervantes’ allusions. Manger’s midrash poems are perhaps the finest example of literatoyre at work. Manger introduces these poems as a “a sort of mischievous toying with the gray beards of the patriarchs and the head-shawl corners of the matriarchs.”
Manger is affected by the plight of biblical women, whom he sees as buffeted by the winds of fate, subject to the power of men. Leah’s eyes are weak from crying over her True Romance stories that she sneaks away to read. The young and beautiful Abishag, wife to the elderly and self-absorbed King David is “…the royal warming-flask / And warms the old man’s bed. / She had supposed—such notions as / A country girl conceives. / Often at night, she sees her fate, / And silently, she grieves.”
Abraham is Sarah’s hen-pecked husband who bullies Hagar into leaving his home in “Hagar’s Last Night in Abraham’s House.” He negotiates with a teamster to deposit mother and son at an abandoned railway station. In the background is the jealous, vengeful Sarah. “It was Sarah who egged him on, / That proper deaconess, / Saying, ‘you get rid of the girl / Or give me a divorce.’” Hagar’s words were frightfully prescient for the Jews of Europe when, spurned and alone, she grieves: “How like the smoke of a chimney, /How like the smoke of a train / Is the love of a man, dear mother, / The love of any man.” Manger is alluding to the on-again, off-again romance between God and his chosen people. Like Hagar, the Jews of Europe were abandoned by their master and protector. But Manger probably knew of the traditional midrash that claims that Hagar returned to Abraham as his wife after Sarah’s death.
Manger’s ballads most completely bring together his gifts as a poet and self-described Yiddish troubadour. In an essay, Manger describes the ballad as “the befuddled aimless laughter of human despair. The great mystical vision of our blood...” For Manger the ballad also “screams a primordial hysterical scream, that is the bizarre cry of our blood and fear.” Roskies points to “The Ballad of the Necklace of Stars” as one of Manger’s finest achievements in the form. Manger creates a surreal level of drama and pathos, where the real world of Jassy and the metaphorical world of myth co-exist: “A necklace of stars in the windowpane hung / Like a silver melody.” A young girl is courted by the four seasons, each bearing gifts of flowers and foliage: “And there was Spring with a lilac branch / That he had plucked for her.” In this fabulous world, the stars align to determine tragedy and death.
Among the prose selections in this volume is an excerpt from Manger’s novel The Book of Paradise. The book is narrated by sweet-tempered Shmuel Aba, an angel selected to leave Eden to be born on earth. Manger gets much dramatic and ironic mileage from the folktale that angels are hit hard on the nose to knock out any memory of Eden during their life on earth. Shimon-Ben, an alcoholic angel assigned to perform the task, punches a fake nose that Shmuel-Aba has fashioned over his own. His memories remain intact and he eventually relates them to his parents. The result is an allegorical farce in which Shmuel-Aba describes Jewish and Christian Edens existing side by side in a cold peace.
In Jewish Eden both social and socioeconomic hierarchy exists. The three Patriarchs frequently argue among themselves. King David, the indifferent master of a large estate rife with discrimination and unfair labor practices, attempts to rape his daughter-in-law. Elijah the prophet bemoans the fact that ever since the appearance of “soshialists,” the poor no longer need his help. Shmuel-Aba and his friend Pisherl end up crossing the border into Christian Eden to rescue the Messiah Ox, coddled and fattened and ready for slaughter when the Messiah arrives. In a fit of madness, the ox escapes into Christian Eden. The Christians hold the ox hostage and Saint Peter gently attempts to convert the Jewish angels. Pisherl falls in love with a Christian girl angel named Anyella. And the two are escorted from place to place by an anti-Semitic angel named Dmitri who forces them to eat pork. Like many of Manger’s ballads his fiction mixes folklore with daily life, creating a compelling portrayal of Jewish vulnerability in the Diaspora.
When Itzik Manger died in Israel in 1969, he was mourned by hundreds but forgotten by thousands. It was a sad contrast to Sholem Aleichem’s funeral in 1916, which was attended by thousands in New York; a reflection of how anachronous Yiddish culture and literature had become in Jewish life by the last half of the twentieth century. But Leonard Wolf’s magnificent translation of Manger’s poetry and prose does more than ensure a revival of classical Yiddish literature. It puts to rest Itzik Manger’s fear of becoming a poet only for the dead and designates him as a poet for all time. - Judy Bolton-Fasman




From “Childhood Years in Kolomey”
Several years before the Second World War, my grandfather Abraham was revealed to me as a tragic extension of the Abraham figure in the Five Books of Moses, but this time he was not taking his son Isaac to the place of sacrifice. Instead, it was his grandson, Isaac. The later sacrifice was not averted by a miracle. The Isaacs of Poland, Lithuania, Russia, and Ruthenia—of the entire European continent—are now heaps of ash in those sites of sacrifice.
(pages 114-115)


From The Book of Paradise
We resumed our journey and said our morning prayers in flight. At precisely five o’clock in the evening, we arrived at the border. At its farthest edge, Shimon-Ber ordered me to stand on one foot and to recite all the Torah that I had learned. I did as he ordered. When I had finished, he took out a huge pair of shears and began to clip off my wings. While he was clipping, I managed to stick on the clay nose. He was so drunk from the Messiah wine that he noticed nothing.
“Now let’s have your nose, and let’s give it a snap.”
“Reb Shimon-Ber,” I said pleading, “please. A light snap, Reb Shimon-Ber.” In fact, I had found favor in his eyes and so he gave my nose so gentle a snap that I all but did not feel it.
“And now—off with you.”
I looked back for the last time. I saw the entire panorama of Eden as it was being dipped in pure gold. I took a final look at my wings lying on the ground.
“Good-by, Reb Shimon-Ber,” I said to the angel with the cottony wings, and I descended.
(page 144)


Hagar Leaves Abraham’s House
The dawn is blue at the window,
Three times the rooster crowed.
Outside the horse is neighing,
Impatient for the road.
Hagar is worn with weeping;
Her child lies in her arms:
Once more she casts her eyes around
The gray, familiar room.
Outdoors, the teamster haggles
For his fare with Abraham:
“All right, six dollars, even,
For hauling both of them.”
The pony scrapes the gravel
As if it were saying, “Come on!
Give me a chance to show you
How to make the highway tame.”
“This is our portion, Ishmael;
Darling, dry your tears.
This is the way of the Fathers
With their long and reverend beards.”
She foresees herself abandoned
In a railroad waiting hall
In a foreign country and she sobs
Into her Turkish shawl.
“Hagar, stop that sniveling—
Woman, do you hear me or no?”
Hagar takes her bundle,
Hagar turns to go.
He stands with his silken cap on,
The pious Abraham—
“Dear mother, tell me, does he feel
My heart’s defeated pain?”
The whistle blows; they’ve started.
She sees, through tear-rimmed eyes,
The village houses slowly
Scrape backward in a haze.
(pages 13 – 15)


Musing, I’ll stand before your great desert,
And hear the camels’ ancient tread as they
Sway with trade and Torah on their humps.
I’ll hear the age-old hovering wander-song
That trembles over glowing sand and dies,
And then recalls itself and does not disappear.
I’ll not kiss your sand. No, and ten times no.
How can I kiss your sand? I am your sand.
And how, I ask you, can I kiss myself?
—An excerpt from For Years I Wallowed