“Industrial Scene” by Todros Geller. Courtesy of the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. Retrieved from: https://issuu.com/spertus/docs/todros-geller-exhibit-guide.
Ezra Korman
Ezra Korman (1888-1959) was a poet, editor, and translator who migrated to Detroit from Kiev in 1923. Korman promoted and anthologized the work of other Yiddish writers, especially women, while organizing Jewish cultural life in Detroit. A prolific author, he published several volumes of his own Yiddish poetry, much of which he translated into English himself.
Korman also translated the poetry of Heinrich Heine and Sergey Yasenin from German and Russian into Yiddish, respectively. In fact, his Yiddish translation of Yasenin's poems was first published in Detroit in 1946. Consequently, Korman's contributions remain a pillar of Yiddish literary production in the Midwest.
Korman was well-known for his urban poetry. His poems“City” and “Springtime Jazz,” featured below, provide a glimpse of Korman's fascination with the Motor City, which he would call home until his last days.
Ezra Korman posing in his neighborhood in Detroit. Photo courtesy of the author's granddaughter, Nina Korman, and the Yiddish Book Center.
City
שטאָט
By Ezra Korman
Translation by Julian Levinson*
I have affixed my gaping eyes,
And pinned my ears, O city, to your braided wires,
And I see and hear the working folk,
Trampled underfoot, hauling bricks to your spires.
You have sharpened my eye and nailed my ear
To the jamb of your unbolted door,
And before my gaze the roads appear,
With millions of slaves in Babylonian uproar.
A restless spirit lives in your beating sound,
And the threat of death lurks within you, heedless one --
Wall atop wall amid smashing steel beams,
O city, this prison you build, beneath a shining sun!
* Julian Levinson is Samuel Shetzer Professor of American Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan. He is part of the movement to preserve knowledge of theYiddish language and its culture, and he has translated and written a commentary of Flames from the Earth, a novel about the Lodz Ghetto written in Yiddish by Isaiah Spiegel.
Springtime Jazz
by Ezra Korman
Translation by Mikhl Yashinsky*
The sun beats jazz on its cymbals
in the blue-dyed sky.
With wild springtime rhythms,
lilac scents the bright outside.
Spring’s tuning the slenderest strings
of all its violins
and answering heaven’s trombone
in a song with sun therein.
The polished brass of horns drags
out a wah-wah shofar-blow.
And copper from the sunshine jazz
flames up in fire-bows.
(Yiddish from p. 153 of 1933’s Mitvest-mayrev, with the last verse as it appears on p. 79 of 1959’s Tseykhns un tseyrufim. Translation by Michael Yashinsky,* source: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/yiddish-literature/signs and-symbols-ezra-korman-detroits-soulful.)
*Mikhl Yashinsky was born in Detroit and works as a theatre artist, writer, and translator in Manhattan. He formerly served as Lecturer in Yiddish at the University of Michigan and is a co-author of the new multimedia Yiddish language textbook In eynem. Yashinsky has directed operas at the Detroit Opera; written original Yiddish-language plays that have premiered at the Lower East Side Play Festival and New Yiddish Rep; and performed with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, including in its Yiddish-language "Fiddler on the Roof" directed by Joel Grey and in the title role of the Goldfaden operetta "The Sorceress." www.yashinsky.com