Basic HTML Version
WALDMAN /GLIMPSES OF JESUS IN YIDDISH AND HEBREW LITERATURE
237
flowers and the crystal apples,/ kiss with your mouth Mary Mag
dalene.”
On a snowy day in Jerusalem Jesus walks and is followed
by women: “Mary Magdalene who loves him, walking with tears
of snow./And Miriam his mother, and Miriam mother of James,
and the other Miriam, and a Miriam of snow./ Follow him, dear
women, for the man is cold all alone in the snow.” In the final
poem, the poet states: “I saw the man of love/ walking to and
fro on the water./ The sun was the crown of his head./ The
earth was illuminated by his light.” He sees Jesus measuring
the earth and time, past and future. Jesus explains the mystery:
“The earth is a woman/ betrothed by her suffering./ The Mes
siah’s flower out of her pain/ will bloom, its name is love./ And
I, who was dead,/ know that there is no other truth:/ I shall
be what I shall indeed be,/ only through love will I revive from
death.” While the soldiers guarding the grave are sleeping, Jesus
ascends to heaven, “melted in the light of his love.”
MOZART AS SYMBOL
Finally, a work by Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971) goes beyond
Jesus in its identification of a universal, positive cultural motif.
In the poem
Mozart
(1946),32 the one crucified is not the Gal
ilean but the great Austrian composer. The language ironically
reflects Christian idiom: “I dreamed that/the gentiles crucified
Mozart/and buried him in a pauper’s grave./ But the Jews made
him a man of God/and blessed his memory./ I, his apostle, ran
all over the world,/ converting everyone I met,/ and whenever
I caught a Christian/ I made him a Mozartian.”
The background o f this poem is the Holocaust, led by another
Austrian, with its rejection of humanity and culture. The de
voted apostles of general European culture, far beyond their
proportion in the population, have been the rejected Jews. West
ern culture, represented by Mozart, has been crucified by anti-
Semitism, which has historic links to Christianity. Mozart, who
poured human warmth into his music, also has a Christ aspect:
he died young, penniless and neglected.
The poem continues ironically, “How wonderful is the mu
32. Ruth Whitman, editor and translator,
An Anthology of Modem Yiddish Poetry
(New York: 1966), 9.