"Red Dew" and "Red Dew, Again"

Pessie Pomerantz-Honigbaum (also known as Pessie Hershfeld-Pomerantz) (1900–1978) was a prominent figure in the Chicago Yiddish scene and a member of the group of modernist poets known as Yung Shikage (Young Chicago). Born in Kamenobrod, Volhynia, she immigrated to the United States in 1913 and settled in Chicago, where she initially worked in a sweatshop. She began publishing poetry in 1918 in a variety of Yiddish journals based in New York, as well as in local Chicago publications and anthologies of Chicago Yiddish poetry. She was a key figure in the Chicago Yiddish cultural activist community. She published several books of poems including Royter toy (Red Dew) (Chicago, 1939), in which this poem appeared. The poems in Red Dew exhibit the deep melancholy she felt as violence encroached upon the Europe she had left behind. They often integrate her relationship with nature together with her somber feeling about the world around her.  

I discovered her poetry due to my growing interest in Chicago Yiddish writers (I myself live in the Chicago area). I had just finished translating "Red Dew" the night before I wrote the companion poem that appears alongside it here. I wrote it in the middle of a jog—I stopped and dictated the poem into my phone while panting and staring at an autumn tree in my Oak Park, Illinois, neighborhood. My poem articulates how the work I read and translate seeps into my daily life and refuses to stay safely tucked away in my computer files where I left it. More importantly, it is a reflection on the same disconcerting sense of doom that Pomerantz-Honigbaum expressed, updated for our time. 

—Jessica Kirzane

Red Dew, Again 

Jessica Kirzane 

Red leaves fall, 
Leave red ground. 
Jogging under pale blue sky 
I admire decorated earth. 
 
Last night by eerie laptop glow 
I read a poem of red dew –  
The royter toy of far-off slaughter 
Seemed to haunt the poet's ground. 
 
October, and I'm jogging past 
Friendly ghouls, quiet streets, 
Red leaves golden in the setting sun 
In the city where she wrote. 
 
I toy with the idea of red dew – 
What am I to make of scattered leaves? 
The ripening of things and their decay? 
The setting of the sun this autumn day? 
 
She wrote of Hitler's rise, her brothers' falling 
Far away across a deep dark sea, 
And eerily I'm here with happy ghouls, 
Decaying country, skies of blue. 

Leaves, illumined gold, are falling. 
I cling to memories of words I read. 
A sharp breeze whisks my panting breath 
Adrift across mowed lawns and plastic ghosts. 
 
In the city where she wrote, 
Far from slaughter she held close,   
Red leaves fall, leave red ground. 
October evening of red dew, again. 

Jessica Kirzane is an assistant instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. Jessica is the editor-in-chief for In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Her translation of Miriam Karpilove’s novel Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love (Syracuse, 2020) was supported by a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship. 

Read the other poems in the collection "Royter toy" in the Yiddish Book Center's Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.

Artwork by Andrew Stevovich