Two Poems by Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman
translated by Moshe Zeilingold
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From our Summer 2022 issue, guest edited by Jose Diego Medina. Click here to purchase the print edition and click here to purchase the digital version
Futilities
Oh, we sit at the tables
at the banquet and we listen
and we wait and it goes on
like a great chain, for hours
and we speak and we’re quiet
and we understand that we are all trapped,
who is tied with an undoubtedly long string,
who in lace, sharp and thin,
who awake, who nodding off
or half asleep through the moments
and can hear it all as a song
and we want, yes, we want
maybe now or maybe later
to take off for the skies
or to other far-flung spaces
as yet unknown places
somewhere we will doze all the time
and we are, so it seems
perhaps in a dream, swimming
amongst the stars and yearning
but it seems to be too late
and we let ourselves be distracted
in this hazy domain
where there is no one
where there isn’t anybody
where you are not present.
Just a Butterfly
I’m too tough on myself this time,
Carrying such a heavy burden.
It’s not my problem,
Not my business,
Why do I get in the middle?
Honestly,
I’m just—delicate,
Sunny
Just a butterfly—
Nearly bodiless.
I perform a heavenly ballet,
Floating on the wind.
Sound colors my swoops.
And I am drawn
To burning intensities
Until eventually—
I fall.
And am again
Cadaverous still
And my two legs jerk like cannons.
Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman (1920–2013) was born in Vienna, raised in Tshernovits (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine), and lived in the Bronx after World War II. She was a Yiddish poet, songwriter, educator, children’s author, painter, folklorist, singer, and community activist. She published poems, stories, and reviews in many Yiddish journals, including Di goldene keyt, as well as three children’s books and six books of poetry. Her songs have been performed by many of today’s leading Klezmer musicians. In 2005 she won the National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Moshe Zeilingold, writer and translator living in Brooklyn, has translated a collection of poems by Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman as a Yiddish Book Center translation fellow.
