One of our Moristotelians, Michael Brownstein, had a poem recently that referred to Lilith [“In the Morning It Will Still Be OK,” November 15], according to some the first wife of Adam. Created at the same time, she bristled at being put in a subservient position to her husband. After much fighting, she was sent away from paradise and Eve was created from Adam’s rib to take her place. Her appearance in the scriptural canon is sketchy, with some translations using her interchangeably with a night demon or a screech owl, sometimes as other types of birds. Here is my poetic take on the plight of the first wife.
Ah, poor Lilith
as she wanders in darkness,
creeping and stirred to flight
with the nightjars,
wailing among the poorwills
she bore into the world,
howling with the screech owls and demons
that she was cursed at creation,
that her man was no leader,
that her god was no saint
to give her spirit
then send her away
to haunt the dreams of the lonely,
to bear the fodder of wars.
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| Lilith (1887) by John Collier in Atkinson Art Gallery, Merseyside, England [We discovered this in the Wikipedia article about Lilith.] |
| Copyright © 2020 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He also dabbles in short fiction and may be onto some ideas for a novel. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there. In September 2020, he started the blog “Disturbing the Pond.” |
I was delighted that you picked that up about Lilith in Michael H. Brownstein’s poem. I looked into Lilith myself. One thing I did, after finding the Collier painting, was to send the image to a friend in San Francisco. I was further delighted by his reply:
ReplyDelete“Lilith - now there's a name I haven't heard in years. In fact my one encounter with it was via a short story by Issac B. Singer -- ‘A friend of Kafka.’ Lost somewhere in my archives is a cassette tape, recorded off the air, of IBS reading that story. (In this day and age it's also possible that the recording exists on youtube, though if so, I've not been able to find it.) In any case the written text of the story is easy to come by, and is a delightful read.”
I found a copy of IBS’s story and read it – a provocative, highly philosophical, humorous, colorfully character-based story, with historical allusions. The word “Lilith” appears ONCE, is never mentioned again in the story. My San Francisco friend seems to have been a VERY close, careful reader, and I assumed that he must have looked “Lilith” up when he read the story those many years ago.
But no, he explained,
“As I remember, I knew who she was at the time! In 1964 I was living in Cambridge, Mass. One of my neighbors had worked as a Yiddish-to-English translator for several of I B Singer’s books and stories, and she told me a little about how the process worked...which was one in which Singer himself only occasionally participated. As a result, in the recording I taped off the air of Singer reading ‘A Friend of Kafka,’ he mispronounces several words, such as Juan in the phrase ‘Don Juan.’
“So at this point your task, ‘if you accept it,’ is to try to find that reading on a YouTube file somewhere! Bon courage!!”
I hope someone reading this comment will be able to find the recording and supply a link up it.
It was a fun research dive. I, too, read the piece by Singer but failed to find the recording. I was impressed by his memory since Lilith was only mentioned once in the story. Thanks to Michael Brownstein again for sending my mind down this rabbit hole of exploration.
ReplyDeleteCaptured her perfectly--from the images with birds to the dreams--no, nightmares--of the lonely.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing!
I agree with Maik, heck I didn't even know there WAS a Babylonian Talmud. The story of Lilith reminds me of a theory I formed from my old psych and Comp Religion courses, when "Western" vs "Eastern" was all the rage: that not only do Judaism and Christianity get more esoteric, and frankly weirder, the farther east one goes, but that in fact they are not Western religions at all. Their mythological roots come from the East, both Near and Far. The farthest west they go is maybe Egypt, and as these religions themselves travelled east, they took on the flavor of the places their converts were from and their myths and legends as well. The story of Lilith sure seems to make the question of who married Cain and Able fade into the absurdity it so richly deserves.
ReplyDeleteI also had the idea the Talmud was more of an interpretation of the laws laid out in the Torah, in excruciating detail I gather, but apparently it-or they-contain stories and legends as well. That little nugget right there is qworth the price of admission.
ReplyDeleteRoger--
ReplyDeleteMost of the Talmud is made up of the Old Testament.