Grinbergs Abschied Von Europa

Karin Neuburger
Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Farewell to Europe

In August of 1923, at the age of twenty-six, the Galician poet Uri Zvi Greenberg
traveled from Berlin via Italy to Palestine/Eretz Israel, arriving in December.
Greenberg, who grew up in Lemberg (i.e., Lvov, or Lviv), had already made a
name for himself as a poet. By mid-1910, he was recognized as a talented and
ambitious composer of neo-romantic Hebrew and Yiddish verse and later, in the
aftermath of the Great War, as a prolific and vocal representative of a circle of
Yiddish avant-garde poets in Warsaw. There, in the capital of the newly re-
established Republic of Poland, he launched an Expressionist literary journal
entitled Albatros, in allusion to Baudelaire’s famous poem. The second issue of
Albatros was banned as blasphemous by the Polish censor due to representations
of the figure of Christ in Greenberg’s poetry. Greenberg was forced to flee Poland
overnight. It is likely that he had already been entertaining the idea of joining the
Yeshuv, the Jewish community, in Eretz Israel, but it seems that he needed time to
prepare himself properly for the move. Thus, after fleeing Warsaw, he stayed for
several months in the metropolis of Berlin, which at the time was a center of
Yiddish cultural life and a transit station of sorts for migrants making their way
from east to west (Dohrn/Pickhan 2010). Indeed, Berlin afforded the young poet
an ideal abode. While there, he succeeded in publishing the third and fourth
issues of his Albatros (in one volume) and then began what would become his
first book of Hebrew poetry; this book would be published later, in the spring of
1925, just sixteen months after he reached “Earthly Jerusalem.”1
Greenberg wrote this poetry not in Yiddish, the vernacular of Eastern Eu-
ropean Jews, but in Hebrew. This abrupt shift to a language that many of his
Zionist contemporaries regarded as the original Jewish tongue and therefore
reserved exclusively for Jews living in their homeland2 was just one of numerous
artistic measures that Greenberg employed to dramatize his transition from Eur-
ope to the Middle East as an act establishing an independent Jewish self, i.e., a
Jewish self liberated from its European “other.” A similar motive is evident in the
journalistic writings that Greenberg published alongside his poetic writings in
Albatros. These texts were intended to function as a “reflective summarizing
1 “Earthly Jerusalem” is the title of a section in Greenberg’s first book of Hebrew poetry, “Great
Fear and Moon” – “Eima G’dola veYareakh” –, which he published in Palestine/Eretz Israel in
April 1925 (Greenberg 1990).
2 After his arrival in Palestine/Eretz Israel, Greenberg returns to writing poetry in Yiddish only in
the years 1928–1930, 1933–1939, and 1955–1958. See: Greenberg 1979 II (481–612).
DOI 10.1515/YEJLS-2015-0006
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Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Farewell to Europe 65
comment to that which is presented in full articulation in his poetry” (Lipsker

2010, 122; my translation), thereby delineating a movement leading straight from
Europe to Eretz Israel, from Yiddish to Hebrew, and from Diaspora (Galut) to what
he considered to be salvation (Ge’ula). As a result, the vast majority of Green-
berg’s readers were inclined to experience his writings from the late 1910s and
early 1920s as a teleological narrative. His journalistic and poetic formulations
both mirror and bolster one another to such an extent that their combined force
overpowers textual components that might interfere with this goal-oriented nar-
rative. This reciprocity intensifies the impression of life’s conformity with litera-
ture, and consequently of the identity between speaker and poet, between Green-
berg’s biographical and his poetic “I”, and ultimately between his biographical-
poetic persona and his self-identification as the Messiah.
The messianic pretension that underlies Greenberg’s writings throughout this
period culminates in the apocalyptic vision presented in the long poem “In
Malkhuz fun Tzelem” [In the Kingdom of the Cross], which was published in the
final issue of Albatros. The poem was followed by a programmatic essay entitled
“Bayim Schluss” [At the End], in which Greenberg announces both the journal’s
termination and his decision to leave Europe. Beyond this autobiographical
message, “Bayim Schluss” is presented as an epilogue to the two-thousand-year
era of Jewish existence in Europe. It constitutes the discursive counterpart to the
utterances of the Messianic figure in “In the Kingdom of the Cross,” who pro-
claims that he, who once walked in the center of Berlin with a pipe in his mouth,
brilliantine in his hair, and patent-leather shoes on his feet, would now relinquish
that and everything else acquired in Europe and would, once again cloaked in a
Tallit [Jewish prayer shawl] and Arab dress, turn his steps towards the desert.3
Greenberg’s poetry performs a clear break. He consciously positions his
poetic “I” in opposition to European culture, and in doing so inverts their relation.
He refutes Judaism’s inferior status in relation to Christian culture by asserting
the primacy of a new Jewish – Hebrew – religion. Indeed, the last word uttered by
the speaker of “In the Kingdom of the Cross,” is ‫אהבה‬, or “love.” This not only
functions as a clear reference to Christian doctrine; it also claims the command-
ment of love for the real Messiah, for the one who understands the commandment
in its full meaning for the historical present and is thus able to bring this world to
its end. As with all apocalyptic literature, a genre that gained particular popular-
ity during the first decades of the twentieth century, what is at stake here is the
claim to a monopoly of interpretation (Brokoff/Jacob 2002, 13).
3 See: Greenberg (1979 II, 473–478; here: 478; “Bayim Shluss”). See also: Greenberg (1979 II,
457–472; here: 472; “In Malkhus Fun Tselem”).

66 Karin Neuburger
By conceiving of himself as the Messiah, Greenberg inscribes himself both

within a long tradition and a contemporary network of literary alliances. How-
ever, while he illuminates some traditional texts and enters into dialogue with
them, he tends to suppress the relationship between his work and contemporary
literature – for good reason. The claim of singularity, such as that of the Messiah,
is incompatible with others claiming that very same position or interfering with
that claim in other ways.
Thus, in retrospect, Greenberg’s writings of the late 1910s and early 1920s
explicitly convey a teleological narrative that culminates in the author’s messia-
nic arrival in the land of Israel, an arrival associated with the establishment of a
Jewish “self” detached from European culture. Yet often these works implicitly
appear as a series of failed attempts to claim the privileged position of the
Messiah. As such, they seem to reaffirm an inferior position for Judaism – that of
“Other” – in relation to European culture. Indeed, the two narratives – that which
sanctions the Messianic position and that of the failed Messianic figure – correlate
directly with the interaction between Greenberg’s journalistic and poetic writings.
The narratives’ interplay affirms the rhetoric of a clear demarcation between
“self” and “other,” a relation that is presented as mutually exclusive. One is or is
not the Messiah; there is no alternative and nothing in-between. In this rigorous
correlation, the narratives suppress and deny the apocalyptic traditions and
literary alliances in relation to which Greenberg’s text develops.
Transcending the “Middle”

On January 17th, 1918, about ten months before the end of the Great War,
HaMitzpe, one of the most important Hebrew literary journals in Europe at that
time, published a series of poems in prose by Uri Zvi Greenberg. They formed the
first part4 of “BaHarim (Mitokh Pinkassi)” [In the Mountains (From My Notebook)]
(Greenberg 2001, 16–20) and present sketches of the life of a young soldier who
managed to live through fierce battles and then, not knowing what the future
would bring, served in the mountainous regions of Bosnia. The connections with
the author’s biography are clear. In June of 1915, Greenberg was recruited to the
army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was based close to the Sava River,
making his way on horseback between outposts in the mountains of Serbia,
Bosnia, and Montenegro (Miron 2002, 20). Now, after fierce battles, it was calm,
4 The second part of the work has been published in HaMitzpe on April 11, 1918. In the following.
I refer to the two parts as to a whole.

with few people and plenty of time to recall and reflect. The speaker-narrator
ponders what he endured during years of war. Referring back to his life-experi-
ence prior to soldiering, he also asks himself how he could possibly relate to his
former life in the wake of all that has happened – a question which certainly
occupied the thoughts of many Europeans in the aftermath of the Great War.
Silence in the cleft, and eerie night-depth. The campfire climbs and flares up. I throw the
tattered thistles into the fire; and I talk to it. For sure, my face blushes in its light with that
very first ruddiness in my visage, when I was a child in my father’s home, huddling in front
of the hotplate and eying the rose flame. And I listen to an arcane rustling in the gloom, and
it is as if I hear around myself a twitching of something living and torn to shreds – –
(Greenberg 2001, 16).5
Unlike the speaker in Greenberg’s first cycle of poems Ergetz oyf Felder [Some-
where in the Fields] published in Lemberg at the end of 1915,6 the speaker-narrator
in “In the Mountains (From My Notebook)” does not struggle with the possibility
of death in the near future. He knows that he has survived – and he knows the
guilt of the survivor in relation to comrades who were lost in action as well as in
relation to the “other” soldiers – those whom he himself has killed (Greenberg
2001, 19). Haunted by horrific sights from the battlefields, it is clear to the
narrator-speaker that, although his surroundings seem unchanged, nothing is as
it was before:
– – ah, evening also here. But there is not such a gentle and sore redness, which has been
whispering in former evenings, at home, at the window pane. And there is no such holy
wind7 – the wind at dusk which makes shiver the silk-clothes at both sides of the skylight,
and evenings the delicate, comforting hand on the piano… And there is even not that
particular pain, soft and sweet, which turns one’s whole being into a full and deep pool
ready to spill waves into the dimness. – –
Expanse. A middle, deep and distant, for lack of relation to past and to future. And the life
flowing in between – recalls river-water, all bridges having broken off and sunk down…
From one riverside to the other, only one’s eye can see, but one’s foot cannot reach there.
(Greenberg 2001, 16)
The first lines of “In the Mountains (From My Notebook)” clearly relate to Green-
berg’s earlier poetry, especially to the poem “Play!” (Greenberg 1992, 34), a
serious attempt to break with neo-Romantic poetics (Neuburger 2012) and more
5 All quotations from Greenberg’s works cited in this article are my translations (from the Hebrew
and the Yiddish respectively).
6 See the anecdote concerning the publication of Greenberg’s first book of poetry: Miron (2002,
16–17).
7 The Hebrew has ‫ רוח‬here, which is “wind” but also “spirit”.

68 Karin Neuburger
specifically with the view of a separation between poetry and politics, between
spiritual and material worlds. This separation was advocated by the leading
Hebrew national poet Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934).8 History seemed to
reinforce Greenberg’s standpoint. The fact that he, Uri Zvi Greenberg, was now in
the Bosnian mountains in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army, forced to go
to war in the name of a political entity that had scarcely respected his or his
community’s interests, and that this war had written itself into his life, attested to
the impossibility of separating individual from political concerns. Indeed, Green-
berg’s decision to write in Hebrew after years as a poet of Yiddish verse9 suggests
that he felt prepared to resume his former attempts to expand the scope of Hebrew
poetry and to overcome a perceived aloofness. These attempts often entailed a
transition from “metaphoric” to “metonymic” (Jakobson 1995, 116–133) forms of
poetic speech as a way of conflating that which had been set apart (Neuburger
2012, 126–127). Transforming his sketches of a soldier’s life into a series of prose
poems, Greenberg departed from a tradition of modern poetry barely established
in the realm of Hebrew literature and aligned his writings with the modernist
tradition associated with Charles Baudelaire.10 It was Baudelaire who had fero-
ciously challenged poetry’s aura by intertwining the beautiful and the atrocious
in a manner that generated valuable images for a poet confronted with traumatic
war experiences.11
And meanwhile, the infinite continues, the infinity dominates everything […] Yet, you feel
cramped, you are standing in the middle, and you do not conceive the infinity; and more
than infinity – inside yourself you feel confused and irritated. Except for that – everything is
petrified and frozen. And mercy stopped being a soft feeling which makes the strings of
one’s heart tremble and brings forth poetry and emotional outpourings out of devotion
toward the other. – – Behind the fence of a white painted house I went by, and I heard from
inside the voice of a crying baby, and the heart was not touched even for a moment. And
when I sit on the boulder in front of the dim crevice and I remind myself of the cask of blood,
which I filled before, and of those wide-open eyes, which at my feet asked for mercy, when
their owners were wallowing in their blood, I do not talk and I do not shiver… Yet, when my
friend came back from his hunt today, and a slain doe hung over his shoulder – I glanced at
his face: laughing, ha… If you knew how it happened… ha… I hit the skull […] ha…
8 On the discussion of the relation between culture and politics in Hebrew and Yiddish literary
circles at that time, see Moss (2009).
9 Except for a few poems in prose and three lyrical poems, Greenberg did not publish Hebrew
poetry in the years 1916–1919 (Arnon 1980, 7–15).
10 The fact that he named the literary journal he launched in 1922 Albatros suggests that Green-
berg was well aware of Baudelaire’s work and its significance to the history of modern poetry.
11 On this aspect of Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s poetry, see: Ryan (1993, 1129).

And when I took my eyes off him and saw the doe and the bare brain which protrudes – the
heart quivered, and it was so mournful,12 so mournful, almost weeping, and close to hatred
of every man. However, my friend was laughing […] And again I was reminded of the cask of
blood which I filled […] and laughter rang out of my mouth and rumbled wildly through the
air of the mountains, and found an echo. Yet also some pink-colored warmth ran through
me, tears were coursing, tears – – – (Greenberg 2001, 19–20).
The shocking realization that he had lost his human face in the war is paired
with the narrator’s rejection of the need to transcend the human that Friedrich
Nietzsche put in Zarathustra’s mouth (Nietzsche 1977, 348). Though the narrator
and his comrades overcame the all-too-human emotion of empathy, he does not
consider this an achievement. Recognizing the atrocities he committed, he sets
himself apart from a comrade who prides himself on hunting game while unwit-
tingly conveying his bestiality: killing is his nature and he cannot stop even
though the war is over. And yet, although the narrator differentiates between
the inhuman state of war and the human condition, as well as between non-
Jewish and Jewish morals, he acknowledges that the Great War marks a funda-
mental and irreversible transition in the history of mankind. The cask is full of
blood.
Similar to Zarathustra, who spent ten years in the mountains, Greenberg’s
speaker-narrator utilizes the solitariness of the Bosnian heights and prepares for
his role as the initiator of a new era. And similar to Zarathustra, he does so by
presenting himself as Moses’ successor, albeit on different terms. When he calls
for smashing the old Tablets of Law (Nietzsche 1977, 449), Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
interrupts the biblical narrative at the point when the Torah is received on Mount
Sinai. Greenberg’s speaker-narrator, by contrast, takes up the narrative in the
Book of Exodus both prior to and after this event, relating to the character of
Moses and also to Moses’ brother, Aaron. These two are related in turn to the two
animals that accompany Zarathustra on his journeys, the eagle and the serpent.
At the crack of dawn, sitting close to a fire in a rock crevice, the narrator-
speaker in “In the Mountains (From My Notebook)” views a “black and thin bush”
(Greenberg 2001, 17). The use of the Hebrew “‫ ”סנה‬immediately connects it with
Moses’ sighting of the burning bush, which remained unconsumed within the
flames (Exodus 3, 3–4). The speaker-narrator, on viewing the burned bush,
glimpses the sign of recent fire. The ashes are still red-hot, and in contrast to the
redness of the horizon at dusk, they move him. He perceives these remnants of
12 The Hebrew has here ‫ צר‬which is “narrow” or, as I translated above, “cramped,” but also
“mournful” or “sad.” This is to say, that the text does refer here back to the beginning of the
paragraph. I will come back to this poetic technique of repetition in the following.

70 Karin Neuburger
fire as “something living and giving pain to the heart…,” something, which makes
him aware not only of his bare existence – he cries out loud “I am alive, alive” –
but also, and more significantly, of the mission connected with the burning bush:
to lead the Jewish people to freedom. It is at this point that he sees a vulture
(probably meant to be an eagle)13 drinking from a waterfall. He describes the bird
as “hanging in the air, flapping its wings, putting its head into the water, again
lifting it lustfully toward the open space […],” and finally soaring through the sky
(Greenberg 2001, 17). The bird’s breaking forth is paralleled to the human soul,
and more specifically, to the soul of the “I,” who realizes in the course of the text
that he is caught in the “middle,” in “infinity,” and who interprets the eagle’s
flight as his need to free himself and to escape from the “middle.”
Before relating this scene to the concept of the “middle” in kabbalistic
tradition,14 I shall elaborate on the link forged between his protagonist’s feeling
ensnared in the “middle” and the people of Israel’s wandering in the desert. The
burning bush appeared to Moses at Mount Horeb, which, according to tradition,
is Mount Sinai. Moreover, the speaker-narrator’s surroundings are likened to the
desert traversed by the people of Israel on their way from Egypt to Israel, as the
crevice in front of which the speaker-narrator is sitting is equated with the last
resting place of Moses’ brother. It is written that Aaron found his death in a
crevice at Mount “Hor” [“‫ההר‬-‫]”הור‬, which one version situates in the land of
Edom (today’s Jordan; Numeri 33:37) and another in the very north of the land of
Israel (Numeri 34:7–8). Apparently, Greenberg is alluding to the latter version, for
when he mentions ‫הור ההר‬, he has his protagonist say he “feel[s] three corners of
the world in the mists at his back, while [his] face and [his] heart are turned to the
South” (Greenberg 2001, 19). These words reverberate with Yehuda Ha Levi’s
famous line “My heart is in the East, and I am in the West,” even more so in view
of the distinction between body and soul explicitly stated some lines later in
reference to the serpent that meets the narrator’s eye. At first it creeps around, but
then, apparently noticing a flock of birds, it tries to stand upright. It fails to
accomplish this and falls back down to the ground (Greenberg 2001, 19). It seems
13 The Hebrew word ‫ נשר‬which literally means “vulture,” is often mistakenly used in order to
signify an eagle (see: http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A0%D7%A9%D7%A8). Indeed, the
connotations of the bird of prey depicted in Greenberg’s text seem more indicative of an eagle than
of a vulture. Moreover, the serpent, the animal immediately associated with the ‫ נשר‬suggests it is
an eagle – like in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – and not a vulture, as a literal translation would
suggest.
14 My warmest thanks to Prof. Jonathan Garb, who generously referred me to the relevant
material in kabbalistic literature and in research, and who, by investing his time not only saved
me time and trouble, but also improved this article substantially.

to the narrator that the serpent screams in jealousy, as he felt when he saw the
eagle (vulture). Wings flapping, yet suspended in the air, the bird seems to
epitomize the narrator’s human condition, “the oscillation of the yearning soul
that is closed in the middle and wishes to arrive at the calm borders beyond
infinity” (Greenberg 2001, 17). However, the narrator ultimately grasps that while
his body’s existence is similar to the serpent’s condition, his soul is comparable to
the eagle’s (vulture’s) flight. His soul is not doomed to remain stuck in the
“middle,” but is able to transcend it.
The speaker-narrator catches sight of the serpent just as it is slithering up
Mount Hor. Its bodily nature, associated with its sticking to the “middle,” is thus
linked to Aaron, who followed the divine word by turning his staff into a serpent
(Exodus 7:9). In other words, it is insinuated here that Aaron failed in his mission,
as did his brother Moses, whose bush eventually ‘burned up’ in the sense that he
did not manage to maintain the spiritual power that the image of the burning
bush symbolized. It is not the covenant that is attacked here. Rather, it is made
clear that the covenant, and more specifically the gathering of the Jewish people
in the Promised Land, has yet to be accomplished. It is Greenberg’s “I” who is
commissioned to finally carry this out.
The privileging of the eagle (vulture) as epitomizing spiritual power parallels
the separation of the animal couple that jointly preaches the doctrine of eternal
recurrence in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Nietzsche 1977, 463). The “middle” is the
realm in which this doctrine is realized. This is manifested not only in the time-
lessness mentioned above (“Expanse. A middle, deep and distant, for lack of
relation to past and to future”), but also in a deeply felt ennui that stems from a
lack of sense of self:
Ah! And since there is no future and not even a ‘later’ – the body is struggling in some
opened-up middle that stretches between sunrises and sunsets; there are no feelings, but
only one feeling (…) as if it were vacuousness itself that penetrates the brain and buzzes:
nothing passes by – everything stands still, this is the way the middle is! (Greenberg 2001, 17)
Greenberg’s text falls into line here with the discourse of the disintegration of the
self that was voiced by representatives of the Expressionist movement in the years
prior to World War I (Vietta and Kemper 1990, 30). In the narrator’s world, no
difference can be made between one’s self and another, and there is no distinction
between the various impressions that enter one’s inner world, or between outer
and inner worlds. Hence everything is as one and nothing appears to move. In
this state of stasis, the narrator notices some minor differences and thus move-
ment in his world, thereby gaining a sense of time and consequently also a sense
of identity. The rocks he sees along the way seem to him to represent the faces of
people he once knew (Greenberg 2001, 18).

72 Karin Neuburger
The strategy of introducing minor differences into a surface perceived as

being basically homogeneous corresponds strongly to the poetics of the prose
poems discussed here. The text of “In the Mountains (From My Notebook)”
develops on the basis of the reiteration of certain notions (for instance, the
notions of “middle” or of “ruddiness”) whose implementation introduces some
slight disparity, thereby producing a movement like that between the ruddiness
of the sinking sun and the ruddiness of one’s face in the scene cited above, or
between the speaker-narrator and Moses or Aaron. However, Greenberg’s spea-
ker-narrator is not willing to make do with discrete movements on the surface.
Doing so would mean that the only just chosen leader of the Jewish people might
turn out to be ‘merely’ a second Moses, another failure. Accordingly, the “faces”
at the stony walls are revealed as mere projections of the beholder (Greenberg
2001, 18). In order to constitute a change, there must be a difference in essence, a
radical rupture. With intent to bail himself out of a life under the condition of
eternal return, which is based in the principle of essential sameness eradicating
even such distinctions as that between man and animal, Greenberg again en-
croaches upon Nietzsche’s terrain. Paradoxically, he thus re-employs the pattern
of discrete movement delineated above. In preparation for writing that is intended
to generate radical rupture, he adheres to Zarathustra’s prophecy as envisioned
by so many Middle-Europeans at the onset of World War I.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a line is drawn between a dog and a man.
Zarathustra inadvertently steps on a man who lies on swampy ground and
equates him with the four-legged creature by asserting that both are “solitaries”
(Zarathustra 488). Greenberg takes up this statement and allows his protagonist
to encounter a dog that strolls about solitarily. Like him, the dog is an “orphan”
(Greenberg 2001, 16). Yet, the speaker-narrator immediately severs this linkage
between the dog and himself by ostensibly talking to the dog. He asks the canine
“‫[ ”?מה יתרוני עליך‬What advantage do I have compared to you?], and in doing so,
he cites a phrase from Qohelet [Ecclesiastes].15 The question, rhetorical at first
glance, emerges as a proclamation of both the sovereign power of the speaker-
narrator, who alludes to King Solomon, traditionally identified with Qohelet, and
the temporal status of the “I”’s migration.
At a time when Nietzsche was appropriated by nationalistic forces in Ger-
many, with the philosopher’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche leading the way, it
15 The phrase “…‫ ”מה יתרון‬is unique to Qohelet/Ecclesiastes in the framework of the Hebrew
Bible. Used several times in this scroll (see for instance Eccl. 1, 2; 3, 9), Greenberg’s use of it must
have immediately evoked in his readers association with the deliberations on life uttered by King
Solomon. This association is underscored by the attitude of the narrator towards his surround-
ings, which could be summarized in the phrase “all is vanity” (Qohelet, 1, 2).

is difficult to assess the extent to which Greenberg perceived of Nietzsche as an

opponent of nationalism. It is, however, clear that Greenberg sympathized with
the national movements of Europe’s minorities – like the Bosnians and the Serbs.
Indeed, in one of the passages in “In the Mountains (From My Notebook),” he
depicts his protagonist listening to the Gusle, a folk instrument of the Dinaric Alps
region. It is played by a young Bosnian woman juxtaposed with the female
juvenile mentioned in the opening lines who plays the piano with her delicate,
comforting hand. As in the national discourse of the time, Greenberg connects the
right to self-determination to the concept of rootedness. Indigenous folklore is
confronted here with the degenerate culture of Middle Europe, and Greenberg,
whose work contains within itself elements of both, offers another cultural option.
Once again, his “I” is juxtaposed with Zarathustra, who in the very beginning
of his peregrinations meets “the old man” in the mountains, who confesses that
he loves God – and not humans (Nietzsche 1977, 278). Zarathustra – stating that
God is dead – insists on his love for humans and decides to go down to them.
Greenberg’s “I,” by contrast, chooses to set his heart not on God or humans, but
on the moon:16
… the moon [‫ ]סהר‬above. Clusters of clouds become more silver with each passing minute,
and their splendor [‫ ]זהר‬also takes on the faint sheen, and that oscillating splendor falls onto
every rock and turns it pale, at the time when the darkness splits down the middle and
withdraws into the deep clefts…
And while the heart soars from its depths and while the one in the heart covets the other of
you – you will not think any more about: human… but it seems to you that every rock points
to you in the light of the moon [‫]לבנה‬: come and hold me close to you! Ah, would you deal
with humans? – – And with holy devotion you fall onto it and embrace it, and given the
hardness in it you feel all the softness, for which you longed your life long in the desert, and
you feel the pure truth in the cold inanimate in this moon-night. – –
And you press your heart against it, and you reveal all the pain and all that is concealed in it
without words and without voice, and you feel that there is an ear which hears you, and very
good that there is no mouth talking to you… (Greenberg 2001, 20)
These lines, which constitute the penultimate prose poem of “In the Mountains
(From My Notebook),” set the speaker-narrator in a cosmic relationship. The
terms of the setting partly replace, partly continue, and partly incorporate in an
altered fashion, discourses that informed Greenberg’s writing to this point. In
addition to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the book of Exodus, and Zionism, Green-
berg’s text alludes to apocalyptic traditions with a distinction between a realm of
16 Greenberg first uses here the word ‫ סהר‬for “moon,” but for reasons on which I will elaborate
later in this paper, the word ‫ לבנה‬immediately supersedes ‫סהר‬.

74 Karin Neuburger
darkness and a realm of light, as produced by the shining moon. The moon, as we
will see later in this paper, refers to messianic traditions and to the notion of
‫גאולה‬, i.e. redemption, salvation. The final prose poem makes it again clear that
salvation is associated with transcending the “middle.”
The notion of “middle” is a key concept in Sefer Yetsira, a very early esoteric
treatise that constitutes one of the beginnings of the kabbalah.17 Indeed, similar
to Sefer Yetsira, Greenberg’s text represents the “middle” as a closed realm amidst
the four cardinal directions, at the watershed between up and down, top and
bottom, as well as between the depths of beginning and ending (Liebes 2000,
190). However, in stark contrast to Greenberg’s text, Sefer Yetsira conceives of this
realm in positive terms. It is the realm of divine presence, the site of godly
creation, and as such opposed to “infinity” [‫]אין סוף‬.
“In the Mountains (From My Notebook)” presents the “middle” as the realm
of mere presence, of stasis, which has to be overcome as an obstacle to the flow of
history. The “middle” is the “desert” stretching between Egypt and the land of
Israel; it is the Galut, which indeed has often been interpreted in Zionist thought
as existence of the Jewish people outside history and thus a form of non-
existence; it is Europe, which has to be left behind in order to reach the Jewish
homeland. However, in Greenberg’s work, this is not a process with exclusively
national ramifications; rather, it is a cosmic event. It cannot be achieved solely by
means of worldly politics. A creative act is needed, emanating from the “middle.”
It seems that Greenberg’s text seizes here on a concept of Tikkun Olam [repairing
the world] developed in the Zohar [The Book of Splendor], a pivotal kabbalistic
treatise, which according to Gershom Scholem was authored in 13th-century Spain
(Scholem 1949, 14). Other than Sefer Yetsira, the Zohar conceives of the “middle”
as a realm which is transcended in virtue of the expansion of God, his fluttering
from the middle to the ends of the world, in order to effect Tikkun Olam (Liebes
2000, 191). Yet, according to “In the Mountains (From My Notebook)” and in
accordance with the conception of the “middle” as configuration of the biblical
desert, it is not God himself who resides there, but the narrator-speaker, who thus
has to perform the creative act of transcendence. His transcendent capacity
derives from his relation to the moon articulated in a discourse of the heart. This
discourse refers back to Yehuda Ha Levi’s “My Heart is in the East,” and to the
“Song of Songs,”18 but also to the poetic tradition of Romanticism to which
17 It is assumed that the book has been authored between 200 AD and 800 AD; according to
Liebes, however, it stems from the first century BCE (Liebes 2000, 229).
18 Including its allegorical interpretations as a discourse of love between God and his people; see
in particular “Song of Songs” 5:2 beginning with the famous words “I sleep, but my heart
waketh…”

Greenberg aligned himself in his earliest works. With the figure of the genius – of
Prometheus, Mahomet [Mohammed], and others (Wellbery 1996, 287–345) – this
poetry inscribes itself within a history of salvation (Berlin 1999, 26–78) which,
when related to “empathy” and “compassion” for “ordinary” humans, also con-
nects to Jewish19 and Christian narratives of redemption.
In the following, I refer to a few instances in the work of Uri Zvi Greenberg
written post-World War I before his immigration to Eretz Israel, which in retro-
spect appear part of a process intended to concretize the poetic endeavor of
transcending the “middle” to arrive at the salvation of the Jewish people by
means of apocalyptic breakthrough dividing “European” from “Jewish.”
The Birth of a Messiah

Uri Zvi Greenberg deserted from the army a few weeks before publication of the
second part of “In the Mountains (From my Notebook).” He reached his home-
town Lemberg, which soon became the arena of fierce battles between the local
Polish population and the legion of Ukrainian soldiers who in World War I fought
for the Habsburg Monarchy. The Jewish population of Lemberg was caught in the
middle, between two rival national entities who claimed the town as their terri-
tory. In November 1918, a couple of months after Greenberg’s return, soldiers of
the Polish army together with Polish civilians looted and burned much of the
Jewish and Ukrainian quarters of the city. In the course of the pogrom, which
lasted three days, more than three hundred people were killed, Jews and Ukrai-
nians. In July 1919, the Polish forces gained control of Lemberg and the Polish-
Ukrainian war came to an end. It made Greenberg and other Eastern European
Jews aware that in a Europe of nation-states there would be no place for the Jews
as a people without a homeland. Following the war, changes heralded by moder-
nization in Europe, experienced especially strongly in Eastern Europe, and the
reorganization of the European world, including the disintegration of the Habs-
burg Monarchy, deepened the estrangement between the generation to which
Greenberg belonged and the parental generation – an estrangement which found
expression in many works of contemporary German literature.20 In two further
short prose sketches written in Hebrew and published in August 1908, Greenberg
draws on this motif and, mediated through the moon’s splendor, also counters it.
19 Thus, according to the narrative of the Book of Exodus, God’s decision to lead the people of
Israel out of Egypt is motivated by their “groaning” at their suffering under Egyptian rule.
20 Famous examples are Franz Kafka’s “Das Urteil” (1913) or Walter Hasenclever’s “Der Sohn”
(1914).

76 Karin Neuburger
His narrator tells of coming home after “a painful period of wanderings and
suffering.” He meets everything as it was – the house and the Holy Ark with the
Holy Book inside, the mother, and the father. The latter is chanting the morning
prayers. Although he finds the singing comforting, the son distances himself from
the kind of religiosity his father embodies, a religiosity oriented towards the past.
Greenberg’s speaker-narrator – in clear affiliation with the mother – relates to the
present and the future. The second sketch reads thus:
My Mother’s Dream
The stories my mother occasionally related are worthy of being heard and written in a book.
Every story is an extract [of life] and an essence in itself. A crystallized piece of a brain, that
has been spilled, growing stiff and remaining in its complete form in one’s memory. When
she tells a story, her eyes take on the expression of a deep sylvan dolorousness, and the
incandescence in them is the same doleful incandescence which one sees insinuated in
nocturnal clouds among tree stumps.
It is not by accident that her temples are so wrinkled, and that her jaw is so thin: the pungent
and sharp sense that conceived and felt so much over long periods of time absorbed all the
moisture and the coursing blood in the tendons.
And sometimes, seldom, when she is content with me so much that the brightness of pleasure
hovers on her gaunt face, she will self-confidently and moderately tell about my birth: … the
days of the pregnancy were hard. Harder even were the labor pains in the course of the last
night. And when it was midnight, the moon rose and was shining through the opposite
window. I was falling asleep and it seemed to me that I was standing in a delicate rose garden,
and suddenly I saw Grandfather. I was startled, since I knew he was dead. Grandfather
peeked and took notice of this and called me by my name. I approached him and he presented
me with a sprig of fresh roses covered in dew. He smiled and said to me: go… a quarter of an
hour afterwards I was giving birth to you. I looked into your face: for some reason it was
shining. Your little eyes were directed toward moon and stars beyond the window; and I
understood the intention behind all this: great bliss had been bestowed on me.
Like this. However, sometimes, when my mother becomes depressed and gives up on me
and sees my winding way of life, she retells the dream and in the end adds some words:
‘Should I say that it deceived, the dream deceived?…’
Ah, and tears are flowing. (Greenberg 2001, 21)
Originally authored in Hebrew, this story was rewritten in Yiddish and published
more than a year later, on November 28th, 1919, in a Lemberg journal (Arnon 1980,
12–17). In its Yiddish version, it is embedded within a number of Messianic stories
picking up on motifs interwoven in “In the Mountains (From My Notebook).”21 It is
21 Thus, for instance, in the story “‫( ”אין טאָל פֿון געוויין‬In the Valley of Crying), Greenberg not only
insinuates that the narrator is the successor to the biblical figure of Moses, but presents his
narrator expressly as an incarnation of Moses. He is chosen by God to be the leader and Messiah of
the Jewish people, but he recoils, because – similar to Moses (Exodus 3–4) – he is afraid that the
people of Israel will not accept him as the Messiah. However, while Moses is given signs in order

followed by a prose sketch entitled “Kislev 24th,22 1919 (The Last Chapter in My
Book ‘Lemberg’s Devastation’ [khurban]),” which relates to the above-mentioned
pogrom perpetrated by Polish soldiers and others in Lemberg. Finally, in Novem-
ber 1920, when Greenberg was already preparing to leave Lemberg, a last series of
short prose sketches was published in Yiddish under the title “Golgatha” [Calvary].
This hovering between Hebrew and Yiddish reflects Greenberg’s affiliation to
two different, sometimes even contradictory Messianic patterns in Jewish litera-
ture, shaped in the first decade of the twentieth century by Bialik, on the one hand,
and by Y. L. Peretz, on the other. In his pivotal study on ‘Apocalypse and Messian-
ism in Yiddish Literature,’ Avraham Novershtern points to the affinity of Green-
berg’s “In the Kingdom of the Cross” with the prophetic modus of Messianic writing
launched by Bialik. This is reflected in various elements: the ethical dimension of
the poetic speech; the shaping of the speaker according to the prophetic model; the
choice to address the Jews as a people; the recourse to the paradigm of the people
wandering in the desert in conjunction with a historically removed setting; and
finally, the accusation inherent in the poet’s speech, according to which salvation
is impossible because the people do not listen to the poet’s prophecies. However,
in some respects, Greenberg amalgamates the two patterns. Thus, for instance, the
biblical setting is layered with a strong relatedness to the historical present, which
is characteristic of Y.L. Peretz’ model of apocalyptic-Messianic writing. Green-
berg’s prose and poetry just prior to 1920 and in the early 1920s also adheres to this
model in its effort to appeal not only to intellectuals but to lay Jews. In addition, in
some of his works of that period Greenberg follows the Yiddish model in addres-
sing the Jewish reader less as the representative of the Jewish people than as the
representative of mankind. The stepwise extension of the network of relations into
which the hero of “My Mother’s Dream” is introduced in the hours of his birth
reflects an opening from the past through the present to a future.
Relation to the past is initially established by virtue of family ties that link the
grandfather to the mother and through her to the son. Yet, in the course of the
story, the family ties are revealed to be a link in a greater chain that extends back
to the dawn of history. In the birth scene, the newborn is immediately positioned
within this context. The narrator’s relation to the moon, which in Jewish tradition
is a symbol of redemption, marks him as a Messianic figure. The story creates a
to show that it is God who sent him to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt, Greenberg’s narrator
is left with the divine answer that if he does not agree to the mission, God will wait another two-
thousand years before redeeming the people of Israel. See Greenberg (1979 I, 291–292).
22 The date is symbolic: not only does it bring to mind November 24, 1919, the day the pogrom at
Lemberg ended, or December 24, the day of Jesus’ birth, but it is also the eve of Hanukkah, the
feast celebrating Jewish resistance to Seleucid oppression.

78 Karin Neuburger
personal or familial myth which concerns the Jewish people and, ultimately,
humanity as a whole.
Corresponding to its hovering between Hebrew – the language of the Scrip-
tures and, in its modernized form, the language of the Jewish nation – and
Yiddish, the language of (Eastern) European Jewry, the story remains undecided
as to the relation between the “Jewish” and the “European” aspects of the myth it
conveys. It suggests that the narrator is an incarnation of Jesus, who as a Jew and
as the Savior of mankind bears within himself the tension between the particular
and the universal. In “My Mother’s Dream,” this tension is present, for example,
when a messenger – the less loaded translation for the Hebrew “‫מלאך‬,” usually
translated as “angel” – announces the birth of a chosen one. This is an archetypal
topos that appears both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, but can
hardly be exclusively associated with a Christian or a Jewish tradition. The figure
of the mother in the story is similarly suspended between the Christian and Jewish
traditions. On the one hand, the absence of a biological father (none is mentioned
in the story) when she is giving birth to the Messiah associates her with the figure
of the Virgin Mary. On the other hand, the appearance of the grandfather in her
dream compensates for the father’s absence and connects the infant to his Jewish
ancestry. The Jewish aspect is also strengthened by the nexus between the new-
born and the moon. Admittedly, the moon is a cosmic and therefore universally
known phenomenon, but Greenberg’s use of the Hebrew “levana” rather than the
formerly used “sahar,” reminiscent of “zohar” [splendor], or the relatively neutral
term “yareakh,” immediately evokes association with the “Blessing of the Moon,”
“Birkat Ha-Levana,” and thus not only with redemption, as noted above, but also
with a tradition, which appears, at least in the European context, decidedly
Jewish.23 Moreover, by assigning her son to the female figure of the moon, the
mother asserts not only her motherhood, but also the affiliation of her son with
Judaism, traditionally conveyed through the biological mother. Such an assign-
ment contrasts with the Christian tradition, in which the Messianic designation of
Jesus occurs by virtue of his relation to God the Father. This divine paternity
23 The “Blessing of the Moon” [‫ ;קידוש הלבנה‬Kiddush HaLevana] is traditionally prayed once a
month, at full moon. Its central text reads as follows: “Praised be our God Almighty, King of the
Universe, who created the heavens by His word and the stars by His command. He implanted in
them fixed laws and times… . And He ordered the moon to renew itself, as a crown of beauty over
those He sustained from childhood [Israel], and as a symbol that they, likewise, will be regener-
ated in the future, and will worship their Maker in His glorious kingdom. Praised be the Lord who
reneweth the moon!” Cited from: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=241&le-
tter=N.

entails a dissolution of biological family bonds, i.e. of blood relations.24 Green-

berg’s story, by contrast, emphasizes the close relationship between the narrator
and his mother. Her shining visage corresponds to the gleaming face of the
newborn child. Moreover, the intimate relationship between mother and son is
expressed in the reciprocal telling of the story: he is telling her story, which is his
story, i.e. the story she used to tell about his birth. Finally, the story relates what
both his and her lives are actually about: their Messianic mission.
Indeed, the mother and the female figure of the moon have both contributed
their share toward fulfilling this mission. While the mother has provided the
narrator with a body, the moon has given him his spirit. “She” has been casting
“her” light on him, thereby attesting to the narrator’s inherent potential to enter
the world as the Messiah. It is now up to the narrator, who has grown into
adulthood, to incorporate the Messianic spirit into his body and to transform the
promise of a future into a fact of the present. The end of the story, in which the
mother voices her despair at the son’s failure to reveal himself thus far as the
Messiah, only increases the pressure on the narrator. He is hard-pressed to
demonstrate an ability to unite body and spirit and to thereby verify both his
mother’s claim and his own claim about the narrative. If the mother’s story is, as
he says, “an extract [of life] and essence in itself,” then the poetic endeavor
Greenberg is proposing is to enable word and world to become one.
The poetic purpose of putting world and word in one echoes the divine
creative act in the Book of Genesis. It again highlights Greenberg’s commitment to
the kabbalistic concept of the creative act as emanating from the “middle” men-
tioned above. Concomitantly, it interweaves Greenberg’s poetry within the con-
text of the literature and culture of his time. As noted above, in setting his sights
on overcoming the separation between poetry and politics, and between the
spiritual and material worlds, Greenberg stood opposed to Bialik’s poetics. Bia-
lik’s ascendancy in the realm of Hebrew literature stands in distinction to an
openness and flexibility in Yiddish literature at a time when the leading authors
of the father generation were passing away.25 The young generation reacted to the
strained atmosphere in post-war Eastern Europe with innovative literary forms.
Some– for instance Yung-yidish, a group of poets and artists created in 1919 in
Łódź, and Khaliastre, the Varsovian group with which Greenberg associated
himself in 1921 – joined the European avant-garde. Together with a broad engage-
24 See, for instance, the Gospel according to Matthew 12, 46–50, where Jesus explicitly states that
his family is not the one with which he is biologically aligned. His brother, sister and mother are
those who act in accordance with the will of his divine Father.
25 Yitzchak Leibush Peretz (Y.L.Peretz) died in 1915, Shalom Rabinovitch (Sholem Aleichem) in
1916, and Shalom Ya’akov Abramovitch (Mendele Mocher Sforim) in 1917.

80 Karin Neuburger
ment with apocalyptic and Messianic motifs in Yiddish literature (Novershtern

2003, 12), the negation of the autonomy of art (Bürger 1992, 47–54) espoused by
the avant-garde movements certainly complemented Greenberg’s literary aspira-
tions.
A further important reference-point for Greenberg prior to and during his stay
in Warsaw is Expressionism. Its cultural criticism and especially its rendering of
the disintegration of the “I” complemented Greenberg’s own poetic analysis of
European culture and conditions. This affinity is brought to bear in the long poem
Mephisto published in a first version in Lemberg in 1921 and in a second, longer
version in Warsaw in 1922. The work presents a “detailed existentialistic anatomy
[…] of the modern nihilistic condition” (Miron 2002, 34). In this context, Green-
berg’s poetry often comes close to Expressionist verse and sometimes even seems
like a Yiddish translation of a line from the German. Yet the speaker’s awareness
of his condition and, more importantly, of the way in which this condition is
created in and by Western culture allows him to deviate from it. Western culture
is exposed as a destructive power which manifests itself in the dissociated life-
world of the speaker, who juxtaposes himself to it and marks it as his “other.”26
Thus Expressionist poetry is seen by Greenberg as a means of demonstrating a
way of being which is no longer the way of being of his “I.” By contrast, there is
hardly a line related to the Messianic current in Expressionism (Roberts 1983)
reflected in Greenberg’s writings. Its rhetorical patterns failed to provide convin-
cing devices which would allow him to deal with the difficulty of integrating word
and world. Yet the very connection of cultural criticism and Messianism (Vietta/
Kemper 1999, 18) brings his work close to the Expressionist movement, as do his
experiments in the field of graphics (Lipsker, 2010).
Seen in various historical contexts as well as in the literature of his time,27 the
graphic arrangement of characters and words which yields “concrete poetry” was
little used by Greenberg. However, he did have recourse to this technique in a
poem published in Warsaw in 1922 as part of the second volume of Albatros
(Greenberg, 1979 II, 431–433), probably inspired by a work of Tadeusz Miciński
(Lipsker 2010, 23–25). The poem is entitled “Uri Zvi in Front of the Cross” and
displays Greenberg’s deep involvement with the figure of Christ as Messianic
(counter) model:
26 For a detailed interpretation of this work, see: Neuburger (2007).

27 Concerning the production of concrete poetry by authors associated with Expressionism, see:
Hartung (1975, 27–30).

Figure 1: Uri Zvi Greenberg. “Uri Zvi Farn Tselem” [Uri Zvi in Front of the Cross]. Albatros. Vol. 2.
Warsaw: M.Y. Fraid, 1922. 3–4.28
28 I would like to thank the poet Aliza Greenberg Tur Malka, Uri Zvi Greenberg’s widow, for her
permission to print the poem here from the original.

82 Karin Neuburger
In his introduction to an anthology of “concrete poetry” written by German-

language authors, Hansjörg Schmitthenner (1969, 5) writes that the technique of
arranging language graphically is meant to allow for the experience of language
itself – of the signifier and not of the signified. This is certainly not the case of
Greenberg’s poem, which is characterized by a strong rhetorical thread (Lipsker
2010, 23; footnote 10). Here, he is apparently attempting “to create material
language and language material” (Hartung 1975, 26; citing Raddatz 1972, 160).
Telling and showing coincide to an extent determined by the poem’s display of a
rigorous correlation between “self” and “other.”
The typographic design of the poem materializes the speaker’s relation to the
figure of Jesus Christ. Its first part is organized in such a way as to actually depict
a cross, thus indicating that the speaker’s utterances are in conformity with Christ
and his beliefs. Its second part, however, unfolds into prose, with the text spread-
ing across the entire line. Here, Greenberg breaks away from the form of the cross
and also from the figure of Jesus Christ, whom he seeks to supersede together
with the world of Christian Europe, including traditional Judaism.
According to this design, the rhetorical movement in the poem corresponds
to that in “In the Mountains (From My Notebook):” against the backdrop of a
basic sameness, the text introduces a difference. However, in contrast to the
former prose poem, “Uri Zvi in Front of the Cross” reiterates this movement
repeatedly, both in form and content. The text repeatedly asserts the sameness of
its speaker in relation to Jesus Christ. Time and again, it introduces a minor shift.
It takes a run-up and prepares itself for a major shift, meant to vault the speaker
out of the “middle.”
The beginning of the poem’s first line depicts the basic sameness of the
Crucified and the speaker by expressing their common pain: “– – Why am I one in
the line of those who are racked with pain….,”29 but even as the reader compre-
hends that the speaker is presenting himself as a kind of Jesus who entered the
collective cultural memory of the Western World as the epitome of human suffer-
ing, the speaker denies any close relationship to Jesus by asserting that he is “not
hanging next to [him]….” It then continues: “…., the sun desiccates me, and the
night falls down on me?” On the one hand, this can be interpreted as an assertion
of the difference between the speaker and the crucified one, establishing that if he
were hanging on the cross, he too would have been desiccated by the sun and
29 The first sentence of “Uri Zvi in Front of the Cross” reads as follows: ‫למאי בּין איך איינער פֿון דער‬
‫ זון טרינקט מיך‬,‫וועג‬-‫ וואָס הענגט נישט אין שכנות מיט דיר אוֹיף אַ דאָרפֿשן סלופּ בּײַ אַ צלם‬,‫שיירה צעווייטיקטע‬,
?‫“ – נאַכט לייגט זיך אויף מיר‬Why am I one in the line of those who are racked with pain, who is
not hanging close to you on the village pile on crossroads, the sun desiccates me, and the night
falls down on me?”

girded by the night. On the other hand, it can be understood as discovering that
even though he is not hanging on the cross, he is nonetheless similar to Jesus
Christ because, like him, he is dried out by the sun and immersed in darkness.
Accordingly, Greenberg’s speaker continues by saying that Jesus is “[his] broth-
er.” But again, the proximity is immediately transmuted into distance. The word
“mayin” [my] is followed in the next line by the word “guf” [body] suggesting that
the two are close to each other only in their Jewish origin, but not in their spiritual
orientation. A few lines later the speaker encapsulates their difference, claiming
that he is the one who articulates the authentic cry of Jewish misfortune, and that
he is therefore the true king of the Jews, the real Messiah.30 This he does by
alluding to the universal character of Jesus’ cry, which is a “za’aka far alemens
weyen-necht,” i.e. “a crying out which expresses everyone’s painful nights,” or as
Hannan Hever (1977, 47) suggested, “everyone’s Christmas-Nights.” In other
words, Jesus lost his Messianic power because he became one of “edom,” i.e. a
Christian,31 and thus “a domem,” i.e. taciturn, someone who denies his Jewish-
ness. In this manner, he parallels the traditional Jew, introduced here in the
person of the speaker’s father, who also chose to suppress Messianic Judaism,
albeit not by claiming that the Messiah has already arrived but by postponing his
coming.32
Alienating himself from the figure of Jesus Christ as well as from the figure of
the traditional Jew, Greenberg’s speaker presents himself as the Messiah standing
amidst his people,33 who are in a disastrous state. But – and tellingly it is here
that Greenberg’s text departs from the form of the cross – having hit rock bottom,
their situation can only improve. The time for the Messiah’s arrival has come. That
is to say, the Messiah must come now, immediately. However, this cannot occur
on European soil, i.e. not within the context in which Jesus and traditional
30 Here again, Greenberg underscores his poetic expression with typographic devices. He posi-
tions the compound word “Yiddish-Umglik-Geschrai” precisely at the center of the horizontal
beam, paralleling this outcry to the “INRI” (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews) which occurs in
the title of the poem as well as in the middle of the last line of the horizontal beam.
31 The equation of Christianity with the people of Edom mentioned in the Hebrew Bible goes
back to Talmudic literature.
32 “My Mother’s Dream” has been published as the second of two prose sketches. The first one,
entitled “My Home,” highlights at the end the abovementioned difference between father and son.
This theme is dealt with further in the Yiddish story “Eretz Israel” (Greenberg 1979 I, 297–298).
33 In her article on the Jesus-figure in Greenberg’s poetry, Neta Stahl shows that the relationship
of the speaker towards Jesus in “Uri Zvi in Front of the Cross” is highly ambivalent. It oscillates
between a Christian and a Jewish Jesus, but remains “fixed on the border between ‘brother’ and
‘other’.” (Stahl, 2008, 15) I argue that read in its contemporary context, Greenberg’s text refutes
this duality.

84 Karin Neuburger
Judaism are located. In order to connect the necessity of leaving Europe with the
need for a solution for European Jewry, Greenberg’s speaker points to three
groups of European Jews who are searching for alternative ways of living: Com-
munists, Zionists, and those who take their chances in the New World. But at this
point, the speaker of Greenberg’s text shows himself unable to maintain the
distance between himself and the figure of Jesus Christ, for he must concede that
these three groups of Jews will not acknowledge that he is the Messiah. They will
be doomed to failure, as will he: a people without a Messiah and a Messiah
without people. Greenberg’s text at this point echoes the allegation against the
people who do not listen to their prophet, which Bialik put into the mouth of his
speaker, and at the same time the idea of the people whose task it is to redeem the
Messiah (Novershtern 2003, 28–36). However, he will not confine himself to one
of these options.
In the three final stanzas of the poem, the speaker wrestles with his defeat
and seeks to reinforce his Messianic aspirations. Its last line, following a final
address of the failed Messiah at the Cross, reads: “Lemai is kain Likui-Khama
nisht?” [Why is there no solar eclipse?]. Like the question that the narrator of “In
the Mountains (From My Notebook)” addresses to the dog, it is ambiguous. It can
be read as rhetorically taking up the theme of the desiccating sun from the first
line, which still blazes down on Jesus and speaker. It can also be read as an
earnest question, or even an imperative, that would re-establish the speaker as a
Messianic figure. Requesting a solar eclipse entails not only invoking a rupture in
time, but also a displacement of the sun, i.e. of enlightened Europe,34 which will
then make way for the moon and “her” reign over the earth. In short, it can be
read as an invocation of an apocalyptic turn and thus as an anticipation of the
scenario in the long poem “In Malkhuz fun Tselem” [In the Kingdom of the Cross]
published in Berlin in 1922, as part of the last issue of Albatros.
The Messianic Turn: Epilogue

In the opening poem of “In the Kingdom of the Cross,” the speaker presents
himself as a shepherd in the valley of tears and fear. He is standing aside and
watching his sheep being slaughtered in the kingdom of the cross, in Europe.
However, in contrast to other Yiddish literary texts of the time, Greenberg’s
34 Already in Greenberg’s first work of literature, the sun appears as a symbol of modern Western
culture (Neuburger 2011, 164). The symbol recurs in “In the Kingdom of the Cross” (Greenberg
1979 II, 466).

apocalyptic scenario refers only marginally to the precarious situation of the

Jewish population in Eastern Europe and the increasing anti-Semitism in Europe.
Greenberg’s speaker asserts that which was presented in “Uri Zvi in Front of
The Cross” as an invocation. Language and reality eventually seem to meet each
other:
‫חמה בײַ אײַך אין אייראָפּע‬-‫עס איז ליקוי‬

[…]
(Greenberg 1979 II, 466)
“There is a solar eclipse among you in Europe.”
These words uttered by Greenberg’s speaker echo a widespread discourse in

German-language culture, which reached a peak with the outbreak of World War
I. In this discourse, in which intellectuals – Jewish and non-Jewish – predomi-
nated, the war is interpreted as the beginning of an apocalyptic event which will
eventually lead to the manifestation of the guiding role of the German spirit in the
history of humankind (Vondung 1988, 191).35 Though enthusiasm for war de-
creased significantly at the sight of the battlefields, and although Germany and
Austria lost the war, cultural discourse in the German-speaking countries contin-
ued to convey salvation-framed historical content. During the Weimar Republic,
political discourse in the German language was theologically loaded (Brokoff/
Fohrmann 2003, 10)36 and “apocalyptical forms of speech” (Brokoff/Jacob 2002,
13) were in wide use – also in literature.37
Greenberg was distinctly aware of the inferior status often allocated to Juda-
ism and Jewish culture in Europe in the context of this discourse. Similar to Zionist
thinkers, with Theodor Herzl at the helm, Greenberg realized the difficulties
inherent in the status of the Jews as a people without a homeland in a Europe of
nation-states (Greenberg 1979 II, 425). He was also sensitive to the tendency to
ignore the Jewish heritage of Christianity (Greenberg 1979 II, 467).38 And it did not
escape him that, notwithstanding the kinship between German and Yiddish, and
despite the high quality of contemporary Yiddish literature, there was practically
35 Klaus Vondung gives an account of the historical and social forces behind this discourse
(Vondung 1988, 189–207).
36 See, for instance, Brokoff (2001); Brokoff/Fohrmann (2003); Schmidt (2009).
37 See, in this context, Daniela Gretz’s intriguing article on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Speech
on ‘Schrifttum’ [Literature]” (2003).
38 For an account of the ongoing discussion concerning the relation between Judaism and
Christianity in the context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth century culture in
Germany, see: Wiese (2005).

86 Karin Neuburger
no German readership for it (Greenberg 1979 II, 476). From this angle, the apoc-
alyptical vision presented in “In the Kingdom of the Cross” appears as a counter-
movement to the repression and exclusion of the Jewish “Other” by a European
majority, which seeks to constitute itself as a uniform entity, i.e., as a “self.”
…
‫הענן‬-‫פֿון אונדזערע טאָלן וועט אויפֿגיין דער עמוד‬
!‫מירס‬-‫פֿון אונדזערע פֿינצטערע אָטעמס און ביטערע וויי‬
.‫און איר וועט דעם גרויל נישט דערקענען אין אייערע לייבער‬
:‫און איר וועט נאָך פּלוידערן אַלץ פֿון די בראַנדיקע גומענס‬
!‫די ייִדן! די ייִדן‬
‫בשעת ס'וועלן גיפֿטיקע גאַזן אַריין אין היכלות‬
.‫און ס'וועלן זיך פּלוצעם צעשרייען אויף ייִדיש איקאָנעס‬
(Greenberg 1979 II, 459)39
From the Jews’ valleys, a cloud will arise – a cloud consisting of the Jews’ somber
breath and their bitter wailings – which, transformed into toxic gases, will so
permeate the church-halls that the icons will cry out in Yiddish! Thus, Christianity
reveals its Jewish “origin.”40 However, according to “In the Kingdom of the
Cross,” the calamitous connection between Jewish and European culture has to
be overcome much more radically:
‫באַשטראָפֿט זיי די פֿופֿצן מיליאָנען וואָס שווייגן‬

.‫און גייען פֿאַרבײַ אײַך מיט פֿינצטערע אויגן‬
‫וואָרט פֿון דורות אין בלוט אום‬-‫זיי טראָגן אַ סם‬
– – ‫און זאָגן אײַך גאָרנישט‬
:‫איך זאָג עס אַצינד אײַך‬
.‫אַ ייִדישער דיכטער אין מלכות פֿון צלם‬
[...]
‫ באַשטראָפֿט זיי די ייִדן וואָס שווייגן‬,‫באַשטראָפֿט זיי‬
!‫ וואָס איך האָב געזאָגט אײַך‬,‫און זאָגן אײַך דאָס נישט‬
(Greenberg 1979 II, 464–465)
As in Uri Zvi in Front of the Cross, the speaker here accuses Jews of having become
“a domem” [taciturn], i.e. “edomem” [Christian]. Instead of crying out and claim-
39 The apocalyptic scenario invoked here has often been interpreted by Greenberg’s readers as
predicting the Shoah, as a verification of the poet’s prophetic self-image. In his interpretation of
“In the Kingdom of the Cross,” Avraham Novershtern maintains by contrast that Greenberg’s
reference to “toxic gas” here is reminiscent of the use of gas in the battles of World War I
(Novershtern 2003, 174).
40 On the pivotal notion of “origin” in nineteenth and twentieth century European and especially
German intellectual discourse, see Foucault (1966, 343).

ing their right to an honorable life in Europe, they have remained silent and have
ultimately collaborated with the Christian perpetrators of their abuse. This is why
they will share the same fate. Like their Christian ‘neighbors’, they will be
extinguished until no more than ten of them remain (Greenberg 1979 II, 470). So
by announcing that there will be a solar eclipse over Europe, the speaker actually
prefigures Europe’s total destruction – except for himself. Juxtaposed to the
image of utter devastation, the speaker rises from the ashes as a phoenix. On
reaching the Land of Israel he announces, as I noted in the beginning of this
paper, his teaching of “love.”
The adversarial structure of Greenberg’s text places its speaker in the position
of someone who sounds a voice in the wilderness. In fact, this position is mani-
fested in the bizarre situation of a Yiddish-speaking “I,” who addresses both a
Jewish and a non-Jewish European reading public, i.e. a public whom his voice
does not reach. As such, Greenberg’s work was certainly unusual in the context of
Yiddish literature (Novershtern 2003, 173), although its readers undoubtedly con-
nected to the topos of the “voice in the wilderness” through Isaiah 40:3, which
Greenberg utilized here in its popular meaning of ineffective speech as well as in its
literal meaning of a voice which summons the people of Israel to make its way from
the Diaspora to the Land of Israel.41 The relation to the prophet and to prophetic
speech, however, does not make it representative of Hebrew literature or of German
literature, references to the character of “Zarathustra” notwithstanding.42 In fact,
Greenberg’s speaker eludes attribution to any national literature. Rather, his posi-
tion evinces the complex interlacing of various discourses in Greenberg’s poetry:
Referring to the language of Jewish tradition, it also speaks the language, and
reflects the literature, of the developing Yishuv; it articulates itself in Yiddish, the
language and the literature of European Jewry; it develops against the backdrop
and within the tradition of European literature, as the address to a European read-
ership makes clear. Indeed, to a certain extent, Greenberg’s writings of the early
1920s evolve from a break which severs “self” from “other.” Concomitantly, how-
ever, they emerge from repeated ruptures in this break. As such, they bespeak the
41 In English, the two meanings are conveyed in different translations. The King James Bible
translates – not adequately – “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of
the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” The English Standard Version
reads, by contrast, “A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight
in the desert a highway for our God.’”
42 The relation to Zarathustra is ambiguous. However, Greenberg’s speaker in “In the Kingdom
of the Cross” seems closer to Zarathustra than the speaker-narrator of “In the Mountains (From My
Notebook)” before. He, too, goes to the people. And he, too, wishes to bring forth a new kind of
humanity – albeit on decidedly different terms.

88 Karin Neuburger
complexity of relations which cannot be defined along clear-cut static lines; in-
stead, as the writing of Greenberg’s farewell to Europe reveals, the relational weave
of Greenberg’s poetry invites commensurately dynamic description and response.
Acknowledgement: Research for and writing of this article has been made possi-
ble by the generous support of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and the
grant of a Peter–Suhrkamp Fellowship. I am very grateful for this support, KN.
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Grinbergs Abschied Von Europa

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Karin Neuburger

Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Farewell to Europe

comment to that which is presented in full articulation in his poetry” (Lipsker

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By conceiving of himself as the Messiah, Greenberg inscribes himself both

Transcending the “Middle”

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The strategy of introducing minor differences into a surface perceived as

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is difficult to assess the extent to which Greenberg perceived of Nietzsche as an

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The Birth of a Messiah

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entails a dissolution of biological family bonds, i.e. of blood relations.24 Green-

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ment with apocalyptic and Messianic motifs in Yiddish literature (Novershtern

26 For a detailed interpretation of this work, see: Neuburger (2007).

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In his introduction to an anthology of “concrete poetry” written by German-

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The Messianic Turn: Epilogue

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apocalyptic scenario refers only marginally to the precarious situation of the

‫חמה בײַ אײַך אין אייראָפּע‬-‫עס איז ליקוי‬

“There is a solar eclipse among you in Europe.”

These words uttered by Greenberg’s speaker echo a widespread discourse in

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‫באַשטראָפֿט זיי די פֿופֿצן מיליאָנען וואָס שווייגן‬

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