(Author: Maurice Skikne, Vol. 71, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2016)
I have a particular fascination for the Yiddish language, one cultivated since toddlerhood. In later life, there has been born in my ‘Neshoma’ a desire not only to speak it, but also, a will and ability to write blank verse poetry in Yiddish (not in Hebrew script, but in Roman alphabet). Fifteen years ago, I acquired a treasured copy of David Fram’s A Schvalb ofen Dakh, but battled to ‘farteitsh’ (translate) his beautiful work into sensible English. Very fortunately, I came across an essay on Fram by the late Joseph Sherman in the American Jewish journal Midstream.1On reading it, I was transported back into the earlier 20th Century by this masterful and erudite analysis.
Fram was born in Ponevezh, Lithuania, on 14 October 1903. By the time he immigrated to South Africa, he had already established himself as a young poet of renown in Europe, having published not only in Lithuania (Kovno) but also in Warsaw, Poland. His education at a state school culminated at the gymnasium in Vilkomir, under the tutelage of Yudel Mark, a great Yiddish linguist who had an important influence on him. With the publication of his epic Reb Yoshe in zayn Gorton (Reb Yoshe in his Garden) in the prestigious Oyfkum (Rebirth, New York), he graduated to international fame. Fram had become a restless soul, due possibly to the Russian Revolution and World War I. He moved initially to France and then, at the behest of an uncle, to South Africa.
Jolted by the differences in lifestyle between white and black people, Fram was inspired to pen his first South African stanzas, which emphasized the disparity between the races. For this, he was roundly censured by other Yiddish writers, including Richard Feldman. He then took a different tack, leading to the publication of his anthology Lider un Poemes, sponsored by some locals and appearing in Vilnius in 1931. His approach was a lyrical one:
From the Spaciousness of Russiato Africa’s lone plains,
From far-off places and snows of gleaming white,
To the sun-swept distances where endlessSummer reigns!
How deep the self-division in mysolitary plight2
Fram’s colleagues in Europe persuaded him to help found a society, named ‘The Unicorn’, which met on a regular basis at a restaurant in Johannesburg. Members ranged from poets and writers to artists, sculptors and the like. The society was distantly modelled on a famous Russian society in Moscow – the Stoila Pegasa.3 Inspired by the likes of such Afrikaans poets as Vincent Swart and Uys Krige, Fram composed further poems. His talent for lyricism led to his scripting two well-received operettas in Yiddish – A Tsigayner Fantasia (A Gypsy Fantasy, 1932) and the satirical Fun Fordsburg biz Parktown(from Fordsburg to Parktown, 1933), with music composed by Hirsch Ichilchik and Francis Bohr. These activities brought him to wider notice, and led to his being appointed editor of Afrikaner Yiddishe Tsaytung. From there, he and Abel Shaban founded their own paper Der Yidisher Ekspres. This unfortunately lasted barely two years, closing in 1937.
Fram never felt comfortable living in South Africa. A trip to London in 1934 to assist Gaumont-British Picture Corporation’s Michael Balcon in filming Jew Suss convinced him he felt most at ease there. He returned to SA with his second wife, Pamela, just before the eruption of World War II. Fram’s response to the horror of the Holocaust included two of his most powerful poems: Efsher (Perhaps) and Dos Letste Kapitl (the Last Chapter). The former questions accepted values, whilst the latter laments the destruction of Jewish life in Lithuania. To quote Sherman, Dos Letste Kapitl “recalls a harmonious, and largely mythical, time when Jew and Christian lived peacefully in brotherhood, before the shocking reality of the present”. These lines and those immediately following quote from the poem (Sherman’s translation):
Oh Lithuania, I had looked to you
To help the hunted Lithuanian Jew.
But joining the hunters, with upraised own hand,
You struck down the brother born in your own land.
You allied yourself with the bloody invader,
Transforming yourself into robber and raider……
On this, Hazel Frankel comments, “The speaker is torn between love for the land in which he was born and the fearful realization that its natives-those Lithuanian Christians he had longed to call ‘brothers”-were also implacable enemies of the Jews:” What a rude realization for David Fram to grasp that his former playmates harbored the same for kin as did those Nazi barbarians! Oh woe must have been his crass hurt, for those implacable killers of the Jews!4
Of the friends of my childhood, the men
I once knew,Is not left alive one Lithuanian Jew.
What have I there now without Jewish Young
Without Jewish song, without Jewish tongue
Without Jewish scholars, without Jewish lore,
With no Jewish Heart and no Jewish door?
Of my Lithuania there is left to me
Only a desolate vast cemetery.
Frankel (2013) cites Fram’s various writings on the Shoah, in particular those written well after the war (in 1969, 1971 and as late as 1984). Unsere kedoyshim (Our Martyrs, 1969) records the continuous persecution of the Jews. Frankel quotes the rending of a garment as a sign of mourning. By literally tearing his garment, the writer connects himself to the victims.
In An entfer der velt (An Answer to the World, 1971), Fram refers to Jews being forced to wear the Yellow Star and how they were exterminated:
I wear the yellow star once again
In the distance there still billows
the smoke from the lime-kiln—-
In Dos Letste Kapital (1984) Fram expresses his personal anger towards the perpetrators:
Your hands today are drenched with blood,
That blood you will never be able to wash away,
Your shame became extinguished within you
And you’re your streets are rotten now with murder.5
One can imagine how Fram must have felt when writing these lines. At the same time, he felt similar outrage over events in his new country, where the Nationalist Party, led by hardened right-wingers who had sided with those very barbarous beings who had eliminated almost all the Jews of his homeland, were in control. This was not only his own feeling; almost all Jews in South Africa felt similar concern over the pro-Nazi Afrikaner leaders. It took writers like S I Mocke6 and Herman Charles Bosman7 to attempt to placate the local Jewish community. Correspondence between Fram and Mocke led to Fram’s contributing to the latter’s bilingual journal Horison.
While continuing to write, Fram involved himself in the diamond and Persian carpet trades, a relic of his first wife’s father’s business. This made him wealthy and enabled him to attempt farming in the Hekpoort district for a while. However, this did not satiate his restless spirit. After a couple of years, he sold the farm and joined his brother in Zimbabwe, becoming a food producer in Harare. Concomitantly, this forged another direction in his writing. Living in Zimbabwe influenced him to be more conscious of what was happening to the black peoples, and led to a number of poems about them. Thus, African titles like Matatulu,Matabelaand Matumba appeared, published in Dorem Afrike in the 1950s. These typified for the first time in Yiddish the bush, primitive farming, kraal life, traditional weaponry and the like. Fram also wrote pieces such as Boeren8 which created the portrait of the rural Afrikaner, both in South Africa and Zimbabwe. William Scott was an insightful tribute to whites who toiled to advance the emancipation of Black people, particularly in Kenya, Namibia, Malawi and Botswana as changes swept throughout Africa. Much of the farming activity reminded Fram of visits to his own grandfather in Lithuania, which had spurred him to write Baym zeydn (at Grandfather’s, in Lider und Poemes).
Fram recorded the racial schisms between the Afrikaner, the Jew and the black people in such works as Volkns iber Hekpoort (Clouds over Hekpoort) and In Afrike (In Africa – one assumes, this was never completed). In 1983, for his 80th birthday, Fram produced an anthology of his work, entitled A Shvalb oyfn Dakh (A swallow on the roof), which seemed to have attributed to his earlier life in Europe.9
As Sherman points out, this publication made available much of Fram’s Lider tsu a froy aza vi du (“Lyrics to a Woman such as you”, possibly alluding to his first wife), which illustrated how deeply lyrical and passionate his compositions were.
To illustrate more of his prowess and nostalgic longing for his home, Lithuania, here is another piece of Fram’s insight (entitled My Departure):
The Shirt-I still remember-my sister sewed it.
I know her tiny stitches, the careful seams.
She breathed her quiet sincerity and longing into it
While sitting alone for long, long evenings until late.
And after that my mother quietly made a parcel
Packed with oranges and sweets.
I remember, such a tiny woman in the autumn evening,
As she worriedly escorted me to the stretched out, broad road.
My father stood tiredly with thin, long arms,
His white head bowed, without word and silent.
A bloody sunset burned in our hearts,
As a dark night separated us all,
And in that autumn night I left them alone,
A dry, sharp pain cut through my silent heart,
And many desperate tears we moan
Muffled by dismal loneliness we cry out desolately.
And here in Far-off Africa, it is painful and hard
Wandering in a strange land filled with pure longing…
My sister dressed me up in a nice-smelling shirt,
And mother’s tear accompanied me along t he way.
One can imagine Fram’s anguish at leaving his family, home and land, little visualizing what was to befall those he was leaving behind. One can also understand why writers and poets of his generation never allowed themselves to bend to prescribed religion, such sensitive people being unable to address themselves to the enormous hurt of oppression and suffering engendered by the horrors of pogroms, the 1917 Revolution and the Holocaust. It was only later, when time had helped to heal the torn spirit, that love transcended the bitterness. As Fram wrote:
To Whom shall I address my yearning –
I know not whom – to God or thee?
I only know my soul in burning –
I ask you both to set me free.
And this will be my last ambition,
A plea you both can well afford.
But who will grant me my petition –
Will it be you? – will it be God?
One initially thinks that that Fram was addressing his plea to his wife and to G-d. But on reflection he could have meant – Thee/You – to mean Mankind, the cruelest being on this planet! Sherman comments that Fram’s verse is the pain, the loneliness and suffering the Neshoma endures. Did King David in his Psalms (such as 5, 7 and 12) put forward the very same ideas found in Fram’s poetic philosophies, beseeching G-d to save his soul?
With Fram’s passing on 10 July 1988, aged 85, South Africa lost one of its most prolific Yiddish language poets. The great pity of it all is that until someone undertakes the complete translation of his poetry his work remains in limbo. We, the modern Jewish generation, and non-Jewish appreciators of the poetic word cannot otherwise revel in some of the most beautiful wordsmithing of this truly brilliant mind. There is another problem and that after his death all Fram’s archival material was sent to the University of Texas, Austin. This is a huge pity, for to either journey there to study, translate or even to make copies, would at today’s monetary exchange rates, plus airfares cost a veritable fortune. This writer is at a loss to understand why it was necessary to have moved such valuable material to another continent!
Maurice Skikne, a frequent contributor to Jewish Affairs, has for many years been a student mentor and consultant at Johannesburg universities. He is chairman of the Jewish Genealogical Society of South Africa.
NOTES
- Sherman J., ‘“What balm for the Heart…?”: The Yiddish Poetry of David Fram (1903-1988)’, Midstream, July/August, 2006, pp.7-11.
- Translated from Lider and pemes by Amelia Levy, Jewish Affairs, January 1949, p28.
- A bust of Fram was sculpted by Lippy Lipschitz and Irma Stern painted his portrait.
- Frankel H, ‘David Fram: Lithuanian Yiddish Poet of the South African Diaspora’, Doctoral Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 2013.
- This and the foregoing extract translated by Hazel Frankel (see ‘David Fram: Lithuanian Yiddish Poet of the South African Diaspora’, Jewish Affairs, Pesach 2013, pp.26-34).
- SA Jewish Times, 30 July, 1948.
- Bosman, H C, ‘The Nationalists and the Jews’, SA Jewish Times, 6 August, 1948.
- Fram D, ‘Boeren’in Lider un Poemes, pp 210-249.
- Fram, D, A Shvalb oyfn dakh, Johannesburg, Kayor, 1983
