translated by Yerra Sugarman

Hard thoughts, hard thoughts, 
Bite my mind like poisonous snakes, 
Writhing deep inside my heart. 
I see my home so bloody and black; 
Now my home is so bloody and black. 

My people plod and bleed. 
Germany’s atrocious hand 
Has ravaged and ruined every garden, 
My sister, that little tree, the most beautiful in our garden. 
How I would have wanted to be together and suffer,  
To live in the same city as my sister and mother, 
With them in the same house — if there still is a house. 

And if the house is a dark grave, 
How I would have wanted to be with them in that grave.  

Celia Dropkin was born in 1888 in Bobruisk, White Russia, and died in New York in 1956. She wrote verse in Russian until about 1917. Approximately five years after immigrating to the United States in 1912, Dropkin, innovator of the erotic modernist love poem in Yiddish, began writing poetry in her mother tongue for the first time. Masterful in its invigoration of meter and rhyme as well as in its, less often, exploration of free verse, the radically passionate and personal lyric that establishes Dropkin’s stature in Yiddish literature is groundbreaking in its candor about sex, love, death and relationships between men and women. Dropkin was also an accomplished painter during her last years and a short story writer, but had only one volume of poems published in her lifetime, In heysn vint (In the Hot Wind), in 1935. After her death, her children oversaw the publication of a more comprehensive collection of her poetry in 1959, by the same title, which included later and previously unpublished poems, her short stories and reproductions of her paintings. In 1994, with the guidance of her granddaughter, Frances Dropkin, a French translation of selected poems, Dans le vent chaud, was published. 

Yerra Sugarman is the author of three volumes of poetry: Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, 2022), which won the American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Award for General Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award as well for the New England Poetry Club’s Motton Book Prize; The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow Press, 2008), poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow Press, 2002), winner of PEN American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Her other honors include the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, and a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Nation, New England Review and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. She is an American poet, essayist, and teacher, living in New York City. The daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, she grew up in a community of Holocaust survivors in Toronto, Canada. She serves as a board member for Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.