Raisa Trojanker (1909-1945) was born in the family of the Uman synagogue shames. At thirteen, she ran away from home with a tiger tamer and performed with him at a circus in a deadly number: every night, she would put her head into the tiger's mouth.
Her love for the poet Volodymyr Sosiura prompted her to write her poetry in Ukrainian. Her affair with journalist and writer Onufriy Turgan resulted in marriage and the birth of a daughter, which caused a conflict with her parents, especially with the father. In the mid-1920s, the young family moved to Kharkiv. In 1928, she published her first collection of poems.
Literary Kharkiv of the 1920s was a motley collection of unconventional, often extravagant personalities. But Raisa Trojanker stood out even against such a background because of her temperament, irrepressible energy, and unconventional actions, often verging on epatage. Moreover ... her busy love life provided grounds for persistent rumors of nymphomania.
Raisa Trojanker's poetry of that period is indeed rich in eroticism, as well as in revolutionary pathos of new world-building, as well as the idea of a modern, emancipated woman, and all this is spiced up with... nostalgia for the Shtetl.
Another love affair and marriage in 1930 to the Russian poet Ilya Sadofiev and the move to Leningrad marked the end of Raisa Trojanker's career as a Ukrainian poet. She kept writing poems for some time, already in Russian and even produced a Russian-language collection during the war. Following her divorce from Sadofiev, she left for Murmansk, where she worked as a journalist and in the war years as a frontline reporter. She died of illness in 1945.
Onufriy Turgan was executed in 1938, as were many of Trojanker's friends from Kharkiv. The fact that she had "quit" Ukrainian literature and moved to the north saved Trojanker's life but also destroyed her as a Ukrainian poet.
Oh, my daddy is quiet and worn,
A hunchbacked, old and tired Jew.
From coughs his lungs are torn (suggestion)
And at night he whispers: "wey, wey, wey."
Just of peace he dreamed all his life,
whining on a violin in beer halls,
Dimly, darkly years passed by
On their leaky everyday yawls.
But Father still has eternal hope
For Zion that is gold and blue.
He says: "Here must live and grow,
the dreamy soul of a Jew "
.
He calls me foreign and remote,
For I don't dream of fierce Zion's swelter,
I reject mezuzah and Torah as well,
And in the evening visit a Party cell.
Father, Canaan is far away,
It’s a fiction, a mere dream,
To the factory I go every day
And my kid is a young pioneer.
I know not waters of Jordan,
Cedars’ sadness and the legends old,
Tales of Moses and of Kanaan,
I know not the songs of an ancient world.
Someday the old will die forever,
And Zion will be blue no more.
It will make its color red,
And go knocking on the commune’s door.
Until that day l don’t want to know.
So Daddy, please, do not chastise me so.
Your eyes may be faded with tears,
But mine stay cheerful and clear.
To the factory I go every day
And my kid is a young pioneer.
Like an ancient and alien tale,
Blue Zion is far away from me.
Little, contemptuously spitting Golta,
Or maybe Berdychiv? I cannot recall...
Disturbed memories flicker in the heart.
Rise. Fall.
Narrow unswept streets.
The terrible longing of small shtetls,
Where to the walls sadness clings,
And at four o'clock it’s already night.
Mother's life. Dirty duvets.
Grocery store. Children hungry.
Toil for a pittance humped
A once-slender young back.
My mother died. There were no speeches,
Mozart’s music and roses white.
I just remember, someone saying:
— The old chatterbox died.
An old, red-haired shomer came.
Shouted some prayers over my mom,
The evening shadows were striped and gray, —
Some wonderful ancient dome.
The old Jews did not walk, but ran.
On a black bier the body swayed.
And above her stiffened corpse
Whined endlessly the lifeless day.
Mom, you were buried so simply.
The old Jews quickly went away
On the yard cried young September,
On a black bier the body swayed.
My father turned me out and left me cursed
because I have a child from a "goy".
He told us to fall through the earth
You and me, my Olenka, both of us.
My dad! He is as aged
as Talmud’s yellowed pages.
He cries: "People will laugh at me.
Because of my daughter’s sin"
Mom cries: "she’s an Olenka
not a Deborah, not a Leah or Nehama."
Ah, I know, for my gray-haired mother
It's a huge, huge drama.
My dear mother, so old and frail,
With hands coated in fish scale,
To earn some bread for herself
She has to cook for others whole day.
But my Olenka has blue eyes
and fair hue of hair.
And what I have to say to her,
When the “national question’ arises?
Yet my Father still can't forgive
that my child from a "goy" was born.
But my mother said: ‘Hey, you
May you come sometime with "this one"’.
To Rayag Rabur Zeiler Jakson
Unforgettable Leonid Jordany
Do you remember the town small
in a distant, remote province,
where there was no tram’s clamor,
And love flooded the eaves?
Do you remember the circus small?
A beast tamer I was there.
I can’t forget these times
indescribably painful and sincere.
Do you remember - the silent stall
(after the first bell - one more)
You rubbed up against my legs
The stripes of your coat.
Recall our golden dreams
My mute striped lover
Recall the night after the performance,
So prayerful and scary.
I'm in a cage.
The silence is thick.
Your paw on my thigh.
(even now a secret blue sign
crosses my stomach).
Do you remember;
There was in the circus
A young and fiery tigress golden-brown.
I could not tame her -
And quit,
Not wanting to put her down.
Do you remember the last performance,
“A new tamer" announced the drunken clown.
You felt that my public farewell it was
You looked at me, broken-down.
As usual Jordani played his two-step
And the music was angry and tense
You fiercely rubbed up against my legs
The stripes of your coat then.
We had a hell of a game that time.
(recalling still gives me a fright).
Even my enemy, the clown Strulep
Twirled his fingers in excitement.
The public, as if it could smell the blood,
Froze holding their breath.
The next trick performed a young acrobat,
He crushed himself to death.
I’ve forgotten the town small
in a distant, remote province,
But your claws I still recall,
And love floods the eaves…
A big city.
And in the zoo
The man who was loved
said -
"Look!
What a handsome tiger"—
And so desperately,
So eagerly,
I shouted:
"It’s you!”
You recognized me, as did your lips,
(I felt, my Zero, I know),
Like on our last night,
Three times “Ray-a!” roared!
Life was a golden storm…
Now I compose poems.
The head of the zoo informs: —
"The tiger is sick. His health is getting worse."
Kyiv, 1927.
Just like in days past, the balagula old
carries me from the station, a mile an hour.
The evening quietly hums a lullaby sad,
And beds sun bunnies tired into a sky’s cradle.
Black wheels drank the swamp like giant gluttons,
they splashed, squished, sloshed the water,
Like a one-legged cripple the old carriage loitered,
and sun bunnies slept in their cradle beyond horizon.
Soon it will be the shtetl. (It's like an ancient salop,
Taken from an old chest, all smelling of mothballs)
The eyes of the houses are clouded and hollow;
Eyes where eons of sadness lurk.
The wheel squeals. Come on, old balagula!
Faster! Flick the reins rusty and tattered,
...The first house. Signboard: “Yankel Simon Gula’s
Chic venue for curling, shaving and cutting".
The next houses, humpbacked, blind dwarves.
Only the old stone synagogue towers.
It seems it blinded its neighbors
In the name of its God, ancient, cruel and mad.
Oh sholom aleichem, the age-old shelter of narrow-minded!
Do you, side-locked melamed Avrum, wait for the Messiah still?
On the day of Yom Kippur are you praying to God and fasting?
Do you read on Purim about Mordecai and Esther?
A rumor will run through the alleys faster than a mouse:
"The daughter came to our shomer from Kharkiv."
Shomer's eyes are filled with tears and sadness,
For the old man would get such a solace unexpected.
Here he is in his old glasses tied with threads,
Unshod, in a blue yarmulke and a yellow tallit,
So excited and his voice is spastic.
Dad is old and frail, like a wearied autumn;
Here’s the daughter. The child which is loved and hostile.
(Two sons work the land in Crimea several years,
They are Jewish peasants, and not for the shomer grey haired,
And eyes of the old man are filled with sadness and tears).
In the dark blue, ovine Saturday evening,
Dad reads the Pentateuch, as ancient as his years.
With pity I see his shoulders tired and hunched.
Stern and tender is his gaze and dark is the house.
Pity for the old man and what’s left of my love,
may force me to stay the whole week.
Old Malka will serve me peppered fish for such an occasion,
Will bake the kugil and slaughter the only chicken.
I am in the Komsomol, but my love for Father I hide not.
Only in pain for the young ones, I nervously break cigarettes.
In the evening, silent and striped like a coat of a tiger,
I will dream of the bustle, the editorial office and Kharkiv.
I will return to the station one cheerful eve.
Fiery wind of July blowing right in my face.
To drive away mustiness shtetls need fresh air
Shtetls need fresh air!
