STUDY QUESTIONS

David Roskies, "A Revolution Set in Stone: the Art of Burial" (chapt. 7) in The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, 1998): 120-145

In modern times, pantheons are also built, not for mythical figures, but for great men who brought new worlds, spiritual realms, into being. In our days a pantheon is a temple of glory dedicated to the spiritual leaders of one's people.

M. Ivenski, 1939

 

Among Jews, there is no such thing as a potter's field. Regardless of their place of origin, Jews have always regarded burial as a khesed shel emeth, the supreme act of loving kindness for which there is no earthly reward. Wherever they settled, they organized a Hevra Kadisha, or Holy Society, to secure and oversee a Jewish cemetery. For reasons of ritual purity, the dead were segregated from the living and the Jewish cemetery occupied a hallowed space outside of secular time. However far Jews wandered, the Hevra Kadisha always retained its absolute control over the rites of burial and preserved the eternal resting place of the dead.

Of all the changes modernity wrought -- in the way Jews remember, record, sing, talk, work, dress, and educate their young -- the last and most stubborn holdout of tradition is the way they bury their dead. The surest sign, then, of an irrevocable break with the past was when Jewish burials began to ape those of the Gentiles. This first occurred in the very cradle of Jewish modernity, Berlin.

They called themselves Die Gesellschaft der Freunde (the Society of Friends) and, having acquired their own burial ground in 1792, set about introducing innovations. The dead were buried in coffins instead of shrouds; to prevent the possibility of premature burial, the event was postponed for three days; epitaphs were written in German, not exclusively in Hebrew; the dates of the deceased were given according to the Gregorian, not only the Jewish, calendar; modest-sized tombstones were replaced by ones that far exceeded the height of a human being; and allegorical motifs lifted from Greek and Roman iconography came into fashion: obelisks, urns, bas-reliefs of sword-wielding, bare-breasted women.

But only in the New World could Jews wipe the granite slab completely clean. Here they could redefine the meaning of being a Jew altogether by joining a fraternal order organized by place of origin or by political persuasion, or both. Landsmanshaftn began as benefit societies meant to provide for their members from cradle to grave, with burial aid listed as a main attraction. "Our cheverah kadishah," wrote the president of the Ponevezher landsmanshaft, "not only assumes the responsibility for burying the body according to the laws of Israel but also immortalizes the name of each member by repeating the prayer in memory of the departed soul on the day of yiskor. They do everything in their power to prevent the name of a member from being erased from the memory of the living."

Through voluntary membership in a neo-traditional society organized by place of origin, the Old Home reasserted itself in the New. But secular workers' orders -- the Workmen's Circle (1900), the Jewish National Arbeter Farband (1910), and the International Workers' Order (IWO, 1930) -- offered a completely new form of Jewish affiliation. For the first time in history, burial was removed from the most conservative wing of society and placed in the hands of agnostic radicals.

With full awareness that a new chapter of Jewish life had begun, the Workmen's Circle established a New York Cemetery Department in 1907 and boasted in its first Yearly Report that henceforth the religious establishment would no longer be able to bar freethinkers and other iconoclasts from proper burial. The latter had found a noble resting place at last, one that was fully consistent with the revolutionary ideals by which they had lived. Soon the Department began to issue literary supplements in Yiddish and English that offered nonreligious words of comfort and printed eulogies for secular heroes. Whether writing in Yiddish or English, whether neo-traditional or radical, the new fraternal orders dispensed with one key word: the Old World besoylem was permanently replaced with the New World semeteri.

The time had come to break ground for a cultural revolution. First to go was the traditional Hebrew, replaced in whole or in part by Yiddish and English. Gone too was the prayer for the immortality of the soul, abbreviated taf-nun-tsadik-bet-hey; even the initials pey-nun, for po nitman, ("here lies"), were all but banished from the grave. Gone, more often than not, was the Jewish date of death, without which the surviving family would not know when to recite the kaddish. And almost nothing remained of the old iconography. Instead of two hands raised in priestly blessing, to denote a Kohen, or a hand holding a water jug, to denote a Levite, a new set of symbols appeared: eagles, feathers, torches, lyres, sheaves of wheat. A hierarchy made up of "lerer/teacher," "khaver/comrade," "pionir/pioneer," and "kemfer/fighter," replaced "Rabbi," "the wealthy," "the noble." The party faithful were buried with the insignia of the Workmen's Circle, the Jewish Labor Band, the Yugnt-Bund, or the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).

With one tomb, that of Aaron Shmuel Liberman, several taboos were broken at once. The thirty-five-year-old "Pioneer of Jewish Socialism" had arrived in America in 1880, only to shoot himself in the head a few months later in Syracuse, New York. There he lay until 1934, when his body was reinterred with great pomp and circumstance in the Workmen's Circle Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens. According to tradition, a suicide must be buried untern ployt, beneath the fence, as an outcast whose soul is consigned to perdition. But the Workmen's Circle buried Liberman in the Honor Row, the second grave to the right of the archway. What's more, a beautiful, stately bust was commissioned -- in violation of the Second Commandment.

Liberman's burial was part of a trend toward funerals as pageants --celebrations of the collective struggle for redemption. The First Amendment right of freedom of assembly combined with the unprecedented concentration of so many Jews in small urban areas like the Lower East Side had given rise to a new form of communal observance, a ritual of collective affirmation: the mass public funeral. The first to mobilize were Orthodox Jews, thousands accompanying the plain pine coffin of their beloved chief rabbi, Jacob Joseph, in 1902. Unique to the New World was the mass public funeral of Kasriel Sarahson, the dynamic editor of the Orthodox Tageblat who died in 1905. Not until 1909 did the secular street get its moment in the sun, when the great Yiddish dramatist Jacob Gordin, author of Mirele Efros and God, Man, and the Devil, passed away. Hoping for a funeral that would eclipse that of Ulysses S. Grant, the secular Yiddish press mobilized the masses, and the veteran labor leader Joseph Barondess presided over a gala memorial meeting that included the Halevi Choral Society singing the "Pilgrims' Chorus" from Wagner's Tannhaeuser. Gordin's stately coffin stood open on the stage in flagrant violation of Jewish law.

Radical Jews in America sorely lacked martyrs of their own. The East European Jewish Labor Band, still in its infancy, already boasted the cobbler's apprentice Hirsh Lekert of Vilna as one of its martyred sons. Since the tsarist police had buried him in an unmarked grave, the Band turned the anniversary of Lekert's hanging into an occasion for commemorative protest gatherings. Nothing comparable occurred in New York City until the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of March 25, 1911, most of the 146 victims of which were Jewish women. Protest rallies growing in size and vehemence took place for three days in succession, culminating in a mass funeral march and public burial of the last seven unidentified bodies on April 5. In the Mount Zion cemetery, the Workmen's Circle erected a large monument in memory of all those garment workers, Jews and Italians, who, in the words of the Forverts, "were murdered by the profit fiend named capitalism."

Only one man succeeded in uniting all sectors of the Jewish community, from Orthodox to anarchist, and he did so only in death. That man was Solomon Rabinovitsh, universally revered as Sholem Aleichem. His funeral, on Monday, May 15, 1916, drew close to a quarter of a million mourners. The event itself was a unique blend of rigorous adherence to Orthodox rite and Yiddishism. The ritual purification of Sholem Aleichem's corpse was performed by "three old Jews with long beards" from the Pereyaslev landsmanshaft society, but from that moment until the start of the funeral procession, one hundred secular Yiddish writers working in shifts guarded the body. Children from both the Orthodox Talmud Torah and the National Radical schools accompanied the coffin while reciting chapters of Psalms.

Overlooked at the event was the fact that Sholem Aleichem had neither wanted to die in American exile nor to be turned into a secular icon. He had left instructions that he be reinterred in Kiev after the war. Going against tradition, however, he had insisted on being buried "not among aristocrats, but among ordinary Jewish working folk." His epitaph, which he himself had composed after an earlier run-in with death, drove home this self-effacing message: "Here lies a simple-hearted Jew," it read, "In whose Yiddish womenfolk delighted; / And all the common people, too, / Laughed at the stories he indicted."

In 1921, when it became clear that Kiev was destined to remain under Soviet domination, the Cemetery Department of the Workmen's Circle made the family an offer it could not refuse. An Honor Row was to be established at the entrance to its new Mount Carmel plot, and the first occupant was to be Sholem Aleichem. For the first year, his large black marble tombstone stood there all by itself. But as the Row started filling up with the graves of Jewish labor leaders and other, less famous, writers, the "simple-hearted" Jew from Russia became, retroactively, the founding father of secular Yiddish culture in the New World. From that pageant, an American Yiddish Pantheon was born.

Of Sholem Aleichem's closest neighbors, only Meyer London, the first Socialist to be elected to Congress (d. 1926), and Boruch Vladeck, a founder of the American Labor Party and the Jewish Labor Committee (d. 1938), were to receive a hero's burial of even grander proportions. During the interwar years, the Jewish labor movement continued to rally the masses around its dead leaders with a secular rite commensurate with its radical ideology: the exposed body lay in state in an open coffin in the Forward Building the entire day prior to the funeral, under the protection of "red" honor guards, and the graveside ritual concluded with the singing of revolutionary hymns.

How did Sholem Aleichem, a synagogue-attending, card-carrying Zionist who called himself "How-Do-You-Do" come to rub headstones with the likes of such radical men? By the right of his very pen-name. The most revered figure in the Workmen's Circle Honor Row was neither "Solomon Naumovitsh Rabinovitsh" from Kiev nor "Sholem, son of Nokhem-Vevik" from Pereyaslev, but a self-invented "Sholem Aleichem" from Yiddishland. Were it not for his wife, Olga Rabinovitsh, who was buried at his feet, and the Hebrew translation of his epitaph on the obverse side, to which his son-in-law L. D. Berkowitz added his full Jewish name, there would be no evidence whatsoever of his "true" identity. Thus did Sholem Aleichem pioneer a major trend in modern Jewish culture, whose history was in large part the history of its hidden identities.

The persona, mask, or assumed identity obliterated one's real origins, whether geographic, linguistic, or genealogical, whether for reasons of secrecy, as in a nom de guerre, or for reasons of artistry, as in a nom de plume. Three brothers lie buried in the old and new Honor Row of the Workmen's Circle; only one of them, Daniel Charney (1888-1959), carries his family name alone. The other two--the literary critic S. Niger (1883-1955) and Boruch Charney Vladeck (1886-1938)--provide their family connection in parentheses. Except for a husband-and-wife, family members are scattered here, there, and everywhere in both the old and new Workmen's Circle plots. Whatever group allegiance the individual claimed transcended the parochial boundaries of family, religious faith, or place of origin.

Most astonishing is the grave of the pioneer of Yiddish socialist poetry, Morris Winchevsky, a.k.a. Leopold Benedict (1856-1932), or so claims his stone. Once upon a time, there was a Russian Jew named Lipe Ben-Tsiyon Novakhovitsh. Of him the only trace that remains is the distant, vaguely Central European "Leopold Benedict," who in turn made one more stopover in England, to become "Morris Winchevsky," before immigrating to the United States of America, there to be buried in what one recent visitor dubbed a Yiddish "witness protection cemetery."

The Honor Row in the old Mount Carmel cemetery is a silent community that bears false witness to an apparently seamless chronology. Although everyone buried there was born outside the United States and came over at different times, their birthplaces are never given. And although they often fought on opposite sides of the barricades, they now make up three consecutive generations of Yiddish writers who seemingly worked in harmony with a unified Jewish labor movement. These are the generations of Adam.

First come the pioneers of Yiddish secular culture: Sholem Aleichem, Mordecai Spector (1858-1925; immigrated 1921), and Morris Winchevsky. The bronze bas-relief of Spector was unfortunately vandalized some ten years ago, during a spate of similar acts all over Queens, which were economic, not antisemitic, in motive. What remains is the epitaph: "His whole life Yiddish, Jews, yidishkayt." Like his close friend Sholem Aleichem, Spector's burial in America was an accident of history.

The generation of the classicists begat the Yiddish poets and prose writers who were nothing if not American: Avrom Lyessin, a.k.a. Avrom Valt (1872-1938; immigrated 1896); Phillip Krantz, a.k.a. Yankev Rambro (1858; immigrated 1890); and Morris Rosenfeld (1862-1923; immigrated 1882, 1886). They, in turn, begat the generation of aesthetes called Di Yunge, who, as befits young upstarts, are not buried in the Honor Row: Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Zishe Landau, the folklorist J. L. Cahan, and the theatrical director, David Herman. They were the harbingers of the aesthetic revolution, as each of their tombstones eloquently testifies. Halpern's is in the shape of a scroll. Zishe (and Reyzl) Landau's bear only their names in the distinctive typeface used in his volumes of poetry. Cahan's is in the shape of a book, with his dates on the spine and the following inscription on the cover: "The wellsprings of the folksong / he did open / the charm of the folktale / he did reveal." The standard square lettering is here replaced by stylized Ashkenazi script. The bas-relief on David Herman's tomb recreates a theatrical poster for his most famous production, "The Dybbuk," featuring the Rabbi of Miropolye and the lovers Khonon and Leah.

Aaron Shmuel Liberman's regal bust, meanwhile, still stands alone, as befits the progenitor of the Jewish socialist idea. The first-generation leaders of the socialist and anarchist movements in England and the United States are located mostly to the left of the archway: Winchevsky, Krantz, Benjamin Feigenbaum, Abraham Cahan, Saul Yanovsky, and the founders of the Band, Vladimir Kosvosky, a.k.a. Nokhem Levinson, Yekusiel Portnoy, a.k.a. "Noyakh," and Vladimir Medem.

Their origins are not the only thing that is effaced. So too the deep divisions that split their ranks. The schism during 1890-95 [?] between the anarchists and social democrats was mere child's play as compared with the communist putsch within the trade union movement during the late 1920s. One grave tells the whole story, even as it covers it: that of Morris Winchevsky who, in the last years of his life, betrayed his socialist roots and went over to the communists. A year before he died, the Jewish section of the Communist Party celebrated Winchevsky's seventy-fifth birthday in Madison Square Garden. After the funeral, however, when Winchevsky's family refused to have him buried in a Party-approved cemetery, the New York City police were called in to protect the cortege from stone-pelting Party faithful.

Less dramatic was the fate of Morris Rosenfeld, who spent several years lecturing at Ivy League universities only to outlive his welcome in the New World and die an embittered, lonely man. The Germanicized verse on his obelisk-style tombstone, topped by an enshrouded eagle and urn, bears eloquent testimony to an aesthetic whose time had come and gone. "The poet's pure soul has risen supernal," his long epitaph reads in conclusion, "To glow there, amongst lights eternal."

What began, in 1921, as an ad hoc decision to honor the greatest of Jewish émigré writers, and quickly evolved into an Honor Row for the socialist aristocracy, became, in the wake of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler, a memory-site of national significance. By then, the front ranks of the Jewish labor movement were rapidly thinning. It was easier to buttress them from behind, by resurrecting the memory of Aaron Shmuel Liberman, for instance, than it was to recruit new leaders. By the mid-1930s, moreover, America was becoming the refuge for an increasing number of already-established Polish- and Russian-Jewish intellectuals and labor leaders. The Honor Row was indeed honored to boast the likes of I. J. Singer, who immigrated from Poland in 1933, or the historian Shoyel Ginzburg, who reached these shores in 1930. Two leaders of the Band were rescued from Poland when the war broke out, both to die almost upon arrival: Yekusiel Portnoy and Vladimir Kosovsky. Several glorious chapters in the history of Jewish self-determination were coming to a very rapid close. It was time to cast the revolutionary past in stone and elevate it to a new status.

"What the Pantheon is to France," declared M. Ivenski, a member of the National Board of Directors of the Workmen's Circle, "what Westminster Abbey is for England, the Victory Boulevard in Berlin's Tiergarten for Germany, and Arlington Cemetery--for the United States of America, the Honor Row on Mount Carmel has now become for the Jews." Dispersed among the nations, the Jews are united behind a set of ideals, the crown of which is the twin ideal of justice and brotherhood. This is the banner under which the Jewish labor movement has always fought. But because the American-Jewish community is so relatively young, and because it has been so derelict in honoring its spiritual leaders, it is incumbent upon organized Jewish labor to enter the breach. It alone can and must "repay the national debt of the Jewish people." Henceforth and in perpetuity, the Workmen's Circle cemeteries will memorialize the Jewish people's greatest spiritual heroes.

The next-to-last to be buried in the Honor Row in the Old Mount Carmel cemetery, imperious in death as he was in life, was the long-time editor of the Forverts, Abraham Cahan (1860-1951; immigrated 1882). Not coincidentally, his was the last funeral pageant to be staged by the Jewish labor movement. When Yoysef Baskin died (1880-1952; immigrated 1907), his being the final gravestone to be unveiled, the Jewish immigrant masses could look upon the Honor Row as a collective monument to their secular ideals. His epitaph summed up their credo in three languages: "Fighter for Truth, Justice and Brotherhood," it read in English, Yiddish, and very flowery Hebrew.

Few of those buried in the Honor Row had espoused the Jewish national cause; most were socialist internationalists. But once again, thanks to Sholem Aleichem's presence, it was possible to retroactively impose the new national consciousness of the Jewish radical sector. His universal Jewish stature rubbed off on his neighbors. An unending stream of dignitaries and pilgrims would deposit pebbles and rocks on his grave as a sign of respect: personal memory on top of national memory.

In the early 1950s, a new Honor Row began to take shape in the new Mount Carmel Cemetery just up the hill; fifty-one monuments from start to finish as compared to the thirty-seven down below. But the new Honor Row was much more than an extension of the old. The Row was now evenly divided between professional writers and political activists. Writers who had been young upstarts in the decades before had achieved preeminence; Yiddish culture was now as precious--and endangered--as the fight for truth, justice, and brotherhood. Here and there, an (English) epitaph still memorialized an "Internationalist" (Meyer Davidoff) or "Humanitarian" (Louis Goldberg). In the case of I. N. Steinberg, the English recalled him as a "Man of Letters, Man of Action, Man of Faith," while the Yiddish allowed for a more parochial legacy: a "Fighter in Word and Deed for Humanity and [his] People."

The people--what had happened to the people? Most had perished in Europe. And this terrible fact cries out from epitaph to epitaph, whether the deceased had witnessed the slaughter from afar, had miraculously survived it, or had borne witness to it--by taking their own lives.

"Over the mound of the Jewish catastrophe," reads the inscription on Yankev Pat's stone, "over the mighty ocean of Jewish anguish and calamity / a great light will yet shine!" (from Ash and Fire, 1946, his travelogue about postwar Poland). "O Lord," begins the more muted inscription on Khayim Liberman's grave, "preserve the sun for the sake of the world / and my people for the sake of the nations" (from his only nonpolemical work, De profundis, 1942). Zusman Segalovicz (1884-1949), identified as a "Yiddish poet and threnodist of murdered Polish Jewry," similarly displays a passage from his Holocaust-related work, which appears in cursive script just below the traditional abbreviations, dates, and data, duly reinstated. Khaver Bernard, a.k.a. Bernard Goldstein, is memorialized as a "Leader of the [Jewish] Self-defense, a Fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto," and as one who "Dedicated his Life to the Band."

It is the heroism and tragedy of the Bund, the leading Jewish movement in interwar Poland, that is given pride of place in the new Honor Row. Thanks to his compatriots in America, the "Pioneer and Builder of the Bund," Franz Kurski, a.k.a. Shmuel Kahn (1877-1950), found a safe haven, as did the popular "Yiddish Writer Thinker and Bundist" I. J. Trunk (1887-1961). The golden chain of dedication to the cause had never been severed, for here lay Emanuel Nowogrodzki, "Builder of the Bund in Poland and America / General Secretary 1920-1961." But Nowogrodzki's headstone also honored his wife Sonia, "Teacher in the TSISHO Schools. Bundist Leader Active in the Warsaw Ghetto / Murdered in Treblinka."

Separated spatially and architecturally on the extreme left is the tomb of "Artur (Shmúel Mordecai) Zygelboim 1895-1943 / Member of Central Committee of the Jewish Labor Band in Poland / Band Representative in Polish Parliament in Exile." Containing his ashes that were brought over from London after the war, his tomb is the first memorial to the Holocaust on American soil. Martyrdom is its operative term. The biographical side of the tomb concludes with the words: "May 1l, 1943, in London Chose Martyr's Death." The liturgical side speaks of Zygelboim's "free heroic suicide," which is read as an expiation for the involuntary martyrdom of "The 6 Million Jews / Victims of Nazi Genocide." The flame atop his stone is their Eternal Light.

Martyrdom and suicide bracket the legacy of the Jewish labor movement. On the other side of the ocean lay the unmarked grave of Hirsh Lekert of Vilna, the Band's first martyr to the cause. Magnificently entombed in America lay Arn-Shmuel Liberman, who had given birth to the Jewish socialist dream in Russia-Poland, before taking his own life. In the new Honor Row lay Artur Zygelboim, who took his own life rather than preside over the burial of that dream.

All the American-Yiddish writers buried in the new Honor Row lived long enough to see their own dreams come to naught as well. Yet a lyrical, almost liturgical, tone informs their epitaphs. The most irreverent is Daniel Charney's (1888-1959):

Keyner veyst nit dem. eygenem sof vi er veyst nit de». onheyb fun zikh. Eyner shtarbt beneshike in shlof der tsveyter in kragn un shikh.

(No one knows how he'll reach his end / nor how he was begat. / One dies in his sleep with a divine kiss / the other--in starched collar and spats.)

The most upbeat is Abraham Reisen's:

Zing, neshome, zing! Kurts der veg tsi lang. S'endikt say vi say vi a vayt gezang.

Zing, neshome, zing! Lebn heyst gezang un dernokh vet zayn sheyn der viderklang.

(Sing, my soul, sing! / Whether life's road is short or long. / Either way it ends / Like a distant song. // Sing, my soul, sing! / The meaning of life is song. / And thereafter a beautiful echo / will resound.)

Nearly all the key figures of Di Yunge, most of whom died in the 19[?] and 19605 [?], are reunited here, with samples of their own verse: H. Leivick, a.k.a. Leivick Halper, and Mani Leib, a.k.a. Brahinsky, among them. In death, as in life, they are accompanied by the noted critic and literary historian S. Niger. Just behind the Honor Row lie the poet David Ignatoff and prose writer Joseph Opatoshu. The Inzikhistn, or arch-modernists, who sought to supplant them, are represented by A. Glantz Leyeles in the Honor Row (right next to Zygelhoim) and N. B. Minkoff the second tier.

A rhetorical self-confidence emanates from their epitaphs, the confidence of a generation that had achieved two radically different goals: the sanctification of the lowly jargon called Yiddish, and the shaping of this folk vernacular into a supple and modern vehicle of self-expression. While the writer Pat and the activist Liberman used Yiddish to express their national-collective yearnings, the epitaphs of H. Leivick and Mani Leib are statements of faith in themselves as the anointed by God:

Ikh lig a fardekter un her vi mayn shtern git iber mayn nomen tsum har fun di shtern.

(I lie covered over and hear my own star / conveying my name to the Lord of the Stars.)

and

Fun shtoyb hot got mikh flfgeheybn un mikh derhoybn iber aykh az ikh zol ayer koved loybn az ikh zol greysn ayer nomen az ven ikh vel nit zayn mit aykh zol zayn mit aykh mayn nomen. Omeyn.

(God raised me from the dust / set me above other men / to have me sing your worth / to have me praise your honor / that when I returned to earth / my name remain among you. Amen.)

Yiddish culture had laid claim to both the heavens and the earth. The earthly claim, represented by its revolutionaries, labor leaders, and martyrs, was now a thing of the past. Only a pantheon remained to the fallen gods. The poets, most of whom had eked out a living at the margins of organized labor, laid claim to the heavens. Judging from their epitaphs, that claim was still pending.

Two women lie among them, separate from their spouses, and just behind the Honor Row. One is the sculptor, prose writer, and poet Rosa Walinsky (1888-1953), whose epitaph celebrates the lasting magic of a poem of life experiences and of the sun's play on a person's eyelids.  The poet's last gaze is directed upward. Not so the epitaph of Anna Margolin, a.k.a. Rosa Lebensboym Ayzland (1887-1952), written twenty-one years before she died. So brutal is its downward spiral and so explicit its imagery that the Cemetery Department of the Workmen's Circle expunged the first two lines:

[Zi, mit di kalte marmorne brist un mit di shmole likhtike hen~,] zi hot ir sheynkayt farshvendt af mist, af gornisht. Zi hot es efsher gevolt, efsher geglust tsar flmglik, tsar zibn masers fun payn un fargosn de». lebns heylikn vayn af mist, af gornisht.

Itst ligt zi mit a tsebrokhn gezikht. Der geshendter gays~ farlozt di shtayg. farLaygeyer, hob rakhmones un shvayg-- zag gornisht.

[She with the cold marble breasts / and the narrow bright hands,/] She wasted her life / on trash, on nothing. // Maybe she looked for misfortune / and lusted for the seven knives of pain / and poured out her life / on trash, on nothing. // Now she lies with a shattered face / her dishonored soul has quit the cage. / Passerby, pity her and be still. Say nothing.

It was the fate of modern artists to be misunderstood and to fail in their own self-estimation. How much more so the modern Yiddish artists, sons and daughters of a people who had squandered their treasures left and right. Anna Margolin's epitaph is different only in degree but not in kind from the first epitaph unveiled in the old Honor Row back in 1916, that of Sholem Aleichem. The world-class artist who, in the opening stanza, passed himself off as a simple folk writer for women, went on to portray himself as Pagliacci, smiling on the outside, crying inside: "Most often when his audience / applauded and was laughter-ridden, / he ailed, which God's omniscience / alone remarked. He kept it hidden."

Yet all of them--men and women, poets and politicians, cosmopolitans and nationalists, aesthetes and arch-modernists, rebels and martyrs--had found a collective, sanctified, resting place, a memory-site made of granite and marble, so designed that decades later, when all their own aspirations had been ground to dust, young Jews in search of models of self-determination and self-transcendence might know where to look.

Ivenski was wildly off the mark when, in 1939, he compared the Workmen's Circle cemetery in Queens to the French Pantheon, Westminster Abbey, Arlington National Cemetery, not to speak of the Victory Boulevard in Berlin. The radical sector of the American-Jewish street bore no resemblance to nation-states that had coalesced over centuries. Rather, the Yiddish cultural revolution invites comparison with the other Brave New Worlds of the twentieth century: the Soviet Union and the Palestinian Yishuv. There too cemeteries took shape to honor revolutions.

The vast Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow is where Khrushchev and Mikoyan, Soviet generals and fighter pilots all lie buried in sumptuous tombs. There is but one Hebrew gravestone, that of the nineteenth-century landscape painter Isaak Levitan. Otherwise, the price of admission to the Soviet pantheon was to expunge all signs of one's Jewishness; the price paid by the popular composer Dmitri Pokrass so that he could lie just down the row from the Russian opera star, Chalyapin, and by the great film director Sergei Eisenstein, that he might lie a stone's throw away from Gogol.

The mass exodus of Russian Jews, among them many doctors, engineers, painters, filmmakers, and composers, suggests that they got tired of waiting for the Revolution to deliver on its promise. Most ended up settling within commuting distance of Tel Aviv, the "First Hebrew City." So rapidly has it grown that no one even notices the small, walled-off cemetery smack in the heart of town, and not the nicest part either. Here the Zionist leadership had carved out a properly segregated space for the major Hebrew writers, the mayors and councilmen, the martyrs of the Arab pogroms, and the most influential Zionist ideologues. A native-born generation sick and tired of ideology and martyrdom is not beating down the cemetery's gates to revisit the past. Yet even as I sit here writing in New York City, theatergoers in Tel Aviv are enjoying a new play, 'Al hahayim ve'al hamavet (A matter of life and death) by Eldad Ziv, set in the Old Tel Aviv cemetery. By all accounts, Ziv's play rescues the forgotten Zionist writers and politicians as people of flesh and blood.

That is why I lead a biannual pilgrimage of students to the Workmen's Circle plots in Mount Carmel: on the chance that the gravestones will lend new life to the spirit that animated the men and women they memorialize and inspire young Jews today in search of a usable past.

A cemetery isn't much to show for such colossal effort, for such utopian dreams, for so radical a reinvention of Jewish life. Still, there is reason to hope. According to tradition, when the People of Israel left Egypt, they salvaged only the remains of their ancestor, Joseph; but look at what they went on to create in their Promised Land.