I. J. Schwartz

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Schwartz was born in the village of Petroshun (today, Petrošiūnai), Lithuania just outside the city of Kovno (today, Kaunas). The son of a rabbi, he received a traditional education in the kheder and then in yeshiva. While being trained in the study of classical Hebrew, the young Schwartz found himself drawn to contemporary (and secular) Hebrew texts, especially modern Hebrew poetry. He made his literary debut with a translation of a poem by the renowned Chaim Nachman Bialik in 1906, shortly before his immigration to America. In New York, Schwartz became a popular and successful translator of Hebrew poetry, translating entire volumes of his contemporaries Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky and the Golden Age Hebrew poets of Spain.

Schwartz worked as a Hebrew teacher and initially associated with the group of Yiddish poets who called themselves Di yunge (The Young Ones), but his deep-rooted attachment to classical Jewish motifs and themes led him to make a break with these radically secular poets.

Schwartz, his wife, and young daughter packed up and headed southwest, to Kentucky, in 1918. In Lexington, Schwartz started a large business and later remarked that only after arriving in Kentucky did he first find "the requisite tranquility that allowed me to see people, things, and images differently ... here I became aware of real people and recognized in them prototypes I would later portray."

In 1925, Schwartz published his 260-page epic poem, Kentucky, which immediately became a tremendous success. Constructed mainly in the traditional blank verse of classic English poetry, Kentucky tells the story of a young Litvak pioneer, Joshua, who leaves the East Coast for the bluegrass meadows of the American frontier. Describing Schwartz's amazing poem, the critic Shmuel Niger wrote:

"In the hands of a 'national' lyric poet, the emphasis in Joshua's life story would be on his de-Judaizing; such a work would exude the scent of decay, of death, it would be a lament. I.J. Schwartz, rather, lets us feel more how Joshua becomes an American. This poem is a poem of striking roots and blossoming; it is a poem of life. Some may see in it the tragedy of a moribund Jewish community... and may find in it an opportunity to bemoan or poke fun at 'assimilation.' I.J. Schwartz neither moans nor mocks; he writes exactly as he sees it — the fullness, the breadth, the abundance, the vibrancy, the rootedness, and the great simplicity of life.

And so, the poem is not sad at all; on the contrary, it extols vitality and springs with vivacity and freshness. The plot isn't what is particularly important, the main thing is the tone in which the story is told."

Schwartz's masterpiece was embraced by Yiddish readers in America as a sort of homegrown, Yiddish Leaves of Grass. Schwartz once told an English translator that he frequently read Whitman and even translated him. "He is a great poet," Schwartz said of Whitman, "He is open, and you feel that he says what he wants to say. Open. Free. Generous. That's Walt Whitman."

It is that same openness and freedom that Schwartz celebrates in the American landscape. In the first section of Kentucky, "Antebellum," Schwartz begins:

Wide, open, free, the land laid out,
Unfurled itself into the far horizons.
The dusty, sandy-red dirt road outstretched
Remote and strange and solitary
And flecked with stubs of wild low-lying foliage
Of unfamiliar, wildly growing leaves
      Of outspread grasses...

— Robert Adler Peckerar