The Kentucky Review Volume 3 | Number 1 Article 3 1981 I. J. Schwartz in Lexington Joseph R. Jones University of Kentucky Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the United States History Commons, and the Yiddish Language and Literature Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Jones, Joseph R. (1981) "I. J. Schwartz in Lexington," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 3 : No. 1 , Article 3. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol3/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. I. J. Schwartz in Lexington Joseph R. Jones For Louis Birch Unlikely as it may appear, a volume of poetry once described as the "first important work of Yiddish literature in America"1 was written in Lexington between 1918 and 1922. The author of this gathering of narrative poems, issued in New York in 1925 with the title Kentucky, was an immigrant named Israel Jacob Schwartz, who came to Lexington to open a millinery shop, which he operated until the beginning of the Great Depression. When he arrived in Lexington in 1918, he was already a distinguished figure in Yiddish literary circles, a member of an influential group of poets who had, a decade earlier, set out to sing America's praises under the inspiration of Walt Whitman, 2 and he deserves recognition among the lesser-known authors who have contributed to the rich and varied literature about Kentucky. The awarding of the 1978 Nobel Prize to another Yiddish-American author, Isaac Singer, called the world's attention to the part America has played in fostering this literature without a country. This year, 1981, is the tenth anniversary of Schwartz's death and seems an appropriate time to remember both his contributions to Yiddish literature and Lexington's place in the elaboration of his most original writings. Schwartz was born in the Lithuanian town of Patrasiunai, in the province of Kovno, 3 in 1885, second son of an Orthodox rabbi. Educated at home, at a yeshiva, and-after he came to America in 1906-at a high school in New York, Schwartz had both the traditional Jewish religious learning of his backgrounds and the modern learning of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. 4 He was familiar with Russian and Polish literature, and within a few years of his arrival in America, had learned English well enough to publish Yiddish translations of parts of Milton's Paradise Lost (1911), Whitman's "Salut au monde" (1912), and Shakespeare's Hamlet and Julius Caesar (1918). Schwartz's intellectual companions in New York were a youthful group of immigrants like himself who were determined to give Yiddish literature a respectable place 23 among progressive European literatures. They published three anthologies of their works with the title ]ugend (Youth), 1907-08, including a manifesto of their program, and critics soon applied the name "youngsters" (Di Yunge) to the group. 5 By the end of World War I, and at the age of thirty-three, Schwartz was an established poet and translator. He was living in a city that had a huge Yiddish-speaking population, a press, theater, and religious and educational institutions that kept the immigrant culture alive within the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture of America, as it had coexisted with Polish and Russian in the Old World. Leaving New York for Lexington meant that he was leaving the Yiddish intellectual community to become a shopkeeper in a town of forty-six thousand people where few spoke his native tongue and fewer still could read his poetry. It would be interesting to know how he felt the change, what literary friends he made, how he kept up his contacts with Yiddish writers. But all that is left of his stay in Kentucky, besides the poems written during the first five years, is the spare account of his domestic and commercial movements, a few photographs, and blurred recollections. Schwartz came to Lexington at the suggestion of his sister Lena, wife of Rabbi Samuel Krasne. The Krasne family had preceded him to Kentucky by fourteen years, coming from Corry, Pennsylvania, around 1904. Rabbi Krasne was lured by an overoptimistic friend (Nathan Rogers, a local rug dealer), who assured him that Lexington's Jews could support a kosher butcher shop. Krasne thus became the city's first shohet (kosher butcher), and, when plans for the shop failed, he functioned as a rabbi and Hebrew teacher as well. 6 With his wife Mary and their daughter Sylvia (called Tselia in the dedication of Kentucky), I. J. Schwartz moved in with the family of Jacob Alperin, to whom he was related by marriage and whom he had known in Kovno. The Alperin house, at 377 South Upper Street, still stands in a block almost unchanged since the Civil War, amid low-rent apartments and expensively restored town houses. It was the first of at least five rented houses into which the Schwartzes moved during their residence in the Blue Grass. 7 When Mrs. Schwartz and her daughter returned to New York in 1928, the poet went back to live with the Alperins until he could close down his shop and leave Lexington. Schwartz and his wife, who was the business-minded member of the family, opened the New York Wholesale Millinery (which also 24 sold expensive ready-to-wear clothing for women and children) by 1924, first at 335 West Short Street, and, in 1927, at 317-19 West Main Street. 8 The locations of the shop were in the same block, back-to-hack. Schwartz's former customers would now find a dreary parking lot where the New York Wholesale Millinery once stood. In 1928, Schwartz seems to have reduced the size of his store: the telephone directory lists only 317 West Main Street, and the number disappears entirely from the directories in 1929. Beside the rented houses and stores, the Schwartzes also had, for a while at least, a summer cottage at the river beach near Boonesboro, a few miles from the city, to which their daughter often invited her friends. During her eleven years in Lexington, Sylvia attended public schools and, for one summer session and two semesters, the University of Kentucky. Family tradition says that she fell in love with an English instructor and that her mother took her back to New York to put a stop to the affair. 9 Mrs. Schwartz had a reputation for strong convictions as well as for business acumen, cooking, and generosity. The few Lexingtonians old enough to remember Schwartz invariably mention his exceptional learning, his fine looks, and charming manners. No one, however, seems to remember his works, though it is possible that he had already begun lecturing on his own poetry, traveling around the country and as far afield as Cura~ao. If he did begin his lecture-tours while he still lived in Lexington, he must have done so after 1925, the publication date of Kentucky, his most important work. 10 Schwartz's poems are written in Yiddish, a language closely related to medieval German. Yiddish developed its own special character after the thirteenth century, and migrating Jews took "Jewish" -which is what Yiddish means-with them into Poland, Russia, and other Eastern European countries. Several million immigrants brought it to America, where its literature continued to flourish with such writers as Scholem Aleichem, whose characters are familiar to all Americans in their reincarnation in the popular musical comedy Fiddler on the Roof. This essay does not deal with the original text of Schwartz's book, however, but with a translation made by a doctoral student at Columbia in 1972, and thus it makes no judgments about the literary merits of the original language. But Schwartz's narrative poetry has authentic historical and local elements important for the total effect of the poems, for their plausibility, and for the implied criticism of the society they 25 I. ]. Schwartz and his daughter Sylvia on the steps of their duplex at 115 West Second Street portray. The identification of contemporary landmarks, figures, or occurrences that provided material for his fiction allows a tantalizing glimpse of the process by which Schwartz translated banal reality into the imaginary world of Kentucky. The volume contains nine poems, three of which are short lyrics (the dedication, the poet's autobiography, and a twelve-line poem­ the oldest of the collection-which introduces the narratives about black life). Of the six remaining poems, by far the longest is a two­ hundred page narrative called New Earth, which is the biography of Joshua, a Lithuanian immigrant who comes to the Blue Grass soon after the Civil War, selling housewares and trinkets from a backpack. The story of his hardships in New York and separation from his wife and child touches the farmers of the community 26 where he spends a night, and they offer him a dilapidated house and barn. Joshua starts a hides and scrap metal business, sends for his wife and young son Jacob, and begins to prosper. His first American-born child dies and is buried in a Christian cemetery, but soon there are other children to take her place. Within a few years, more Jews begin to arrive in the now thriving town: first a small group of Germans and then a number of Lithuanian families.