TWO POEMS by ANNA MARGOLIN

(I DID NOT KNOW, MY LOVER)
(IKH HOB NIT GEVUST, MAYN LIBER)

I did not know, my lover,
That with slow, longing fingers
I etch you into my poems.

Now they have the heavy gleam
Of your eyes, the sharp line
Of your mouth, of your
Stubborn hand.

The wonder,
When my own word
Touches me with your hand.

When near, oh near you grow
From a severe, bright chord.

The wonder...

(OFTEN I WALK AS BEHIND A VEIL)

(OFT GEY IKH VI HINTER A SHLEYER)

Often I walk as if behind a veil,
And my step mingles with your steps
You invisible walkers,
Sorrowful, beautiful, bloom and blood
Of my demented spring.

And through the noisy streets
I bear in my wakeful mood
Your voices, grimaces, and smiles,
As a song is born on the lips,
As, worn on a finger, a costly ring.

Anna Margolin (pseudonym for Rosa Lebensboym) (1887-1952), was born in Brest-Litovsk, Byelorussia, and died in New York, where she had come to live in 1914. Margolin was a writer, editor, and columnist for the Yiddish newspaper Der tog. Encouraged by her third husband, the Yiddish poet Reuven Iceland, Lebensboym began to write poems under the pseudonym Anna Margolin, which she published from 1921 onward, in the prominent Yiddish papers and literary journals of New York, Warsaw, and other Yiddish centers. A single volume of her own poems, Lider was published in 1929.

Translator

Kathryn Hellerstein teaches Yiddish at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include a translation and study of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's poems, In New York: A Selection, (Jewish Publication Society, 1982), Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky (Wayne State University Press, 1999), and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, of which she is co-editor (W. W. Norton, 2001). She is working on Anthology of Women Yiddish Poets, to be published by Stanford University Press. Her recent poems and translations have appeared in many places, including Prairie Schooner, The Drunken Boat, Tikkun, and Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality.