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Rooted in Poetry<\/strong><\/p>\n Kops Returns to Russia to Assassinate the Tsar Bernard Kops, the doyen of European poetry, has issued a great new Holocaust novel steeped in rhythms and rhyme. It tells a fantastic and entirely believable tale with warmth, humour, empathy and depth reminiscent of the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. Its text pulsates like some pieces from the immortal pen of the Jewish-Soviet master Isaac Babel. But Kops gives us more even than his towering antecedents because he is also, quintessentially, a poet.<\/p>\n His story is about the present. Its characters are those among us whose forebears struggled through the great European migrations since the expulsion of Jews from Spain at the dawn modern European literature as well as the giants whose explosive imaginations came to formulate the self-image of much of the world in our own time. Its hero Samuel Glass is probably the only lad in all literature who manages to shed his skateboard as well as his innocence several times in succession, because he does so in his poetic fantasy.. and then to lose a flesh-and-blood beauty next door to some lucky New Zealander.<\/p>\n Our adventurer turns up in 19th century Vitebsk, the town of his forebears, to confront his destiny but finds himself trapped in the wrong country and the wrong century of a confusing world. Yet the real world proves even more confusing when the sounds of the Holocaust horror follow him all the way back to the idyllic Thames Valley of London.<\/p>\n Kops\u2019 universe, like that of Sholem Aleichem, the author of Fiddler on the Roof<\/em>, is centred around wise, passionate and magnetic matriarchs at the peak of their power, surrounded by weaker men and whores and witches defending a place in their orbit.<\/p>\n One such matriarch is Lisa, Sam\u2019s gorgeous widowed mother, who is about to embark on a love affair a year after the untimely death of her beloved husband, Sam\u2019s father. Another is Sarah, Lisa\u2019s equally young and desirable great-great-great grandmother who summonses our heartbroken hero back into history to assassinate the tsar. Which he does, in the company of a team of bombers.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, the tyrant is less initially loathsome to Sam than Lisa\u2019s chosen David and Sarah\u2019s new husband Akiva…<\/p>\n Many writers familiar to a budding North London poet pop up in the story unexpectedly and always on cue. Sam meets a best-selling author named Anne Frank who wonders why he had to run away from home, since \u201cmine,\u201d she recalls, \u201cran away from me.\u201d<\/p>\n Lovers of freedom like Lorca and Shelly stroll through the brutalized Russian lands soon to come under the yoke of the Soviets. Sam, who has never experienced a single act of anti-Semitism on Muswell Hill Broadway, watches T. S. Eliot climb off his pedestal to seek out the Jews \u201cunderneath the piles\u201d. Shakespeare even helps out when the protagonist must eventually sing (literally) for his supper.<\/p>\n The novel is Kops\u2019 10th. The 86-year old poet was first catapulted to world fame as an originator of Britain\u2019s new wave, \u201ckitchen-sink\u201d theatre by his 1958 play The Hamlet of Stepney Green. This author is extraordinarily prolific and, at long last, commercially successful. The 2010 publication of his collected poetry This Room in the Sunlight <\/em>(<\/strong>David Paul Publishing, London, \u00a39.99p., Paperback, 132pp.) was a major event for English literature. He has also issued more than 40 plays, two autobiographies and six previous volumes of verse.<\/p>\n All of Kops\u2019 writing is rooted in poetry, which may perhaps explain his ability to make his prose throb with passion, as famously done by the short story writer Isaac Babel in his classic 1920s Russian collection Red Calvary<\/em>. How does Kops do that in English? Let us enter his workshop.<\/p>\n English poets know that in any copy prepared for public recital, the language demands a pause or at least one unstressed syllable, and does not tolerate more than two unstressed syllables, between two stressed ones.<\/p>\n A writer ignoring this may expose the text to awkward stresses of pronunciation or unintended pauses in the performance. But properly used, this formula gives us something like blank verse, the most versatile metre in the language favoured by Shakespeare and many others. Its commonly employed five-footed line easily lends itself, depending on the mood of the text, to the expression of anything from light musings to cutting satire or pulsating tension.<\/p>\n In the following example chosen almost at random, I have edited only very slightly a passage of Kops\u2019 prose about the spread of panic at Vitebsk railway station to turn it into vibrant descriptive poetry: A long queue of ragged, silent and lifeless humans Now consider Kops\u2019 unedited prose below, describing a real pogrom raging amidst a theatrical performance: Chaos was smiling on his rostrum, conducting the scene. The hall was alight and the crowds from outside rushed in with burning torches. The cast huddled together on stage. The audience was a tangled, screaming, unbelieving crowd. The hall ignited and the slavering flames licked at the bundle of actors upon the stage…<\/em><\/p>\n And down in the hall, peasants cried and fought each other and tore at each other desperate to get outside.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cDeath to the Yids! Death to the Yids.\u201d The chorus continued outside.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re finished. We\u2019re finished. God help us. They are burning us. They are turning us into smoke.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n They cried and a vacuum of silence rushed in from the world; and the woman with her baby was sliding in the blood where the dead lay, gushing their innards; the baby still sucking the breast, and as she sang softly a lullaby. \u201cSleep my baby sleep. Roshinkers mit mundelan, almonds and raisons, sweet and bitter, sleep my baby sleep.\u201d Before he is allowed to return to his prosperous, modern reality, Sam must still experience the poverty of Kops\u2019 native East End of London. Despite the squalor and degradation, Sam feels almost comfortable there. In a moving nod to his own, deprived childhood, Kops observes that \u201ccompassion and caring was still alive in the shtetl<\/em> (a Yiddish-speaking East European village) that was the old East End\u201d. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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\nIN 1881, the St. Petersburg cell of the notorious anarchist organization Narodnaya Volya <\/em>(The People\u2019s Will) assassinates the tyrannical anti-Semite Tsar Alexander II of All Russia, the flames of murderous pogroms sweep through the abused Pale of Settlements and a Jewish boy from Muswell Hill in 21st century London is rescued by the banned Yiddish Jericho Players company of Latvia… What?<\/p>\n
\nLike a fateful refrain, the menacing sound of Holocaust cattle-trucks clanging through the frozen Russian terrain, and the crying of the people inside, are audible throughout the narrative. But it is also a very funny coming-of-age story.<\/p>\n
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\nKops hails from the now bygone, destitute European Jewish immigrant settlements of East London that sheltered there from the Holocaust during the Second World War. Sam\u2019s Russian Odyssey<\/em> is full of autobiographical turns.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/em>were shuffling forward, one shoe at a time,
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\n<\/em>everyone trying to get away from Vitebsk.
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\n<\/em>The Red Rabbi sniffed… checking the atmosphere:
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\n<\/em>\u201cI fear there is pogrom in the air.\u201d
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\n<\/em>\u201cThere is always a pogrom in the air and more often
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\n<\/em>a pogrom on the ground,\u201d Akiva retorted.
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\n<\/em>The creatures in the queue seemed barely able
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\n<\/em>to rub two kopeks together. Where were they off to,
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\n<\/em>and why? As they approached the ticket hatch
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\n<\/em>some urgent whispers started to circulate.
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\n<\/em>The voices of the lumpen stragglers were
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\n<\/em>morose and suddenly fearful. \u201cDid someone say pogrom?\u201d
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\n<\/em>An old hag cackled: \u201cI see it with my own ears…\u201d
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\n<\/em>A toothless man muttered: \u201cI\u2019ve heard it with my own eyes…\u201d
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\n<\/em>\u201cWhen, WHEN?…\u201d \u201cAnytime you like… Tonight! Tomorrow
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\n<\/em>or yesterday!…\u201d But, \u201cIt is all a tall story,\u201d
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\n<\/em>uttered a heavily pregnant Jewish dwarf.<\/em><\/p>\n
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\nAnd the mob went in amongst them. \u201cDeath to the Yids. Pogrom! Pogrom! You bastard Jews. Christ murderers. You\u2019re finished in this country.\u201d And daggers and breadknives were doing their job, a flashing flood; and blood was fountaining, pouring down and hammers were crashing, and smashing and nightmare was king.<\/em><\/p>\n
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\nAs a boy, Sam had slipped into the past to get away from home; as a man, he must seek his future on board an immigrant ship with the touring Jericho Players dreaming of their own, permanent Yiddish theatre on the old Commercial Road of London. In real life, several Jewish theatrical companies from the Pale of Settlements were badly received in19th century England, but they travelled on to set up the American film industry in Hollywood. The British film industry was created only during Kops\u2019 childhood by the poets, actors and directors brought together by the famous Jewish-Hungarian Korda brothers.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/strong>THOMAS ORSZ\u00c1G-LAND <\/strong>is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent writing from London and his native Budapest. His next book will be The Survivors: Holocaust Poetry for Our Time <\/em>(Smokestack\/England) to be published in 2014.<\/p>\n