A sense of doom and the macabre runs through the work of Yiddish poet and playwright Leivick Halpern, who went by the pen name H. Leivick. Over his lifetime, he became personally familiar with the political prison camps of Czarist Russia, the tuberculosis sanatoria high in the Colorado Rockies, the dread of fascism’s rise and the desolation of its aftermath. He first published “האַרטער נאַקן – און גאָרניט מער” (“A Stubborn Back – and Nothing More”) in a 1937 anthology, and the poem displays an extreme pessimism, even by Leivick’s own standards.

The poem’s speaker appears so disillusioned and dismayed with the state of human civilization to the point of imploring his readers to dwell in caves and purposefully leave no historical record other than their own bones: specifically, the “nakn” or cervical spine. He doesn’t mention his motives, but instead focuses on how best to be forgotten. This aspirant to oblivion knows what “clues” future archæologists and historians will be looking for: “No one shall find, hard though he look, / one shred of a dress, one page of a book.” Not only does the speaker want to destroy all physical evidence of his prior life, but he also aspires to erase “the last words of our distress.” He imagines (with some pleasure perhaps) a curious human of the future, “horror struck dumb,” foaming at the mouth and fleeing the incomprehensible bit of bone that reveals nothing except that it perhaps once belonged to a human. What’s not clear is whether the poem’s speaker feels spite or mercy toward this unborn discoverer, or some combination thereof.

Leivick’s reaction to the unfolding horror of European fascism contrasts with the actions of Jewish historians who lived under German occupation: Emanuel Ringelblum’s Warsaw Ghetto “Oyneg Shabes” archive comes to mind, as does Simon Dubnow’s legendary last words during the liquidation of the Riga Ghetto: Shrayb un farshrayb! – Write and record! As a poet, Leivick must have known the contradiction of rendering his sentiment in the form of a poem. As a Jew, he surely understood the cultural impulse of Ringelblum, Dubnow, and others to write and record, and he knew that material evidence would certainly survive the destruction taking place. Something always survives. Maybe in writing “A Stubborn Back,” Leivick was expressing an impossible hope that future generations would not have to face the evil their human ancestors did to one another, and would not know enough about destroyed civilizations to be able to mourn them.

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Though Leivick predicted that “fear and consternation” toward the unknowable past would run “from generation to generation,” Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” proves that this would not be the case. Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore, and published her first collection in 1951. Over the course of her career, Rich’s work took a radical turn in both form and content, as she became increasingly involved in feminist, anti-war, and civil rights activism. Published in 1973 in a collection with the same title, the “Diving into the Wreck” takes the perspective of the sort of explorer that Leivick may have imagined while writing “A Stubborn Back.” Instead of entering a dark cave, Rich’s speaker is scuba diving to the ocean floor, a quest that brings its own perils. The discoverer’s journey begins with a reflection on her solitude and self consciousness at her “absurd flippers / the grave and awkward mask.”

I love the image of the boat’s ladder, crossing the barrier of the water’s surface. It is a symbol of the human impulse to dive and to delve, a reminder that, though the diver is alone in her current mission, she is not the first to undertake it.

Rich carefully describes the intense physical sensations of entering the ocean and reflects on the adaptation and humility necessary for a human who wishes to move through this alienating medium: “the sea is another story / the sea is not a question of power / I have to learn alone / to turn my body without force / in the deep element.” The diver is searching for “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” The physical encounter with the remains inside the wreck does not produce a terrified frothing in the mouth, but rather an absolute identification between the diver and the drowned: “I am she: I am he / whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes.”

I wonder at the distinction Rich makes between “the thing itself” and “the myth.” If myths serve to answer unknowable questions about the past, then material evidence and archæological interpretation have the potential to answer those questions and disprove those myths. But there will always be gaps in the historical record that are impossible to fill: the diver’s impressionistic encounter with “the thing itself” is not objective or scientific, nor does it claim to be. It takes imagination and empathy to identify with something that has been destroyed, to commune with it across the thresholds of time and death. In such deep waters, one might even begin to channel “the half-destroyed instruments / that once held to a course” and dare to wonder what that course may have been, to dream of a time line in which the wreck never occurred. I say “dare,” but Rich clarifies that we may find ourselves facing the wreck either “by cowardice or courage.” For some, it may be fear of the myth and the willful ignorance that rules above water that draws us down into the deep.

Given Adrienne Rich’s activism and poetic interests, we can interpret the book of myths held by the diver as histories from which women, lesbians, and other marginalized people have been excluded or erased. The myth could also be what the historian Salo Baron called the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” which reduces millennia of civilization to “a stubborn back” and not much more — without H. Leivick’s pathos or irony. I find particular resonance between “A Stubborn Back” and “Diving into the Wreck” in the fact that Adrienne Rich, though she did not grow up in a Yiddish-speaking environment, herself became an accomplished translator from Yiddish to English. I like to picture Rich diving into a flooded cave and finding the cervical spines of H. Leivick and other Yiddish poets. Maybe she also finds the Oyneg Shabes archive, stored in milk jugs for posterity. Even if she finds just “one page of a book,” she will emerge illuminated: “The words are purposes. / The words are maps.” If not, if she finds “a stubborn back and nothing more,” her dive won’t have been in vain. At the very least, she’ll be able to write herself into the ever-evolving book of myths.

Luckily for us, H. Leivick did not to take to the caves to die, decay, and be forgotten, and neither did his contemporaries. Luckily for us, Adrienne Rich was not the last poet to dive into wrecks and confront the unknowable past.