The Fig Tree Read Free Page B

custom of mourning, of sitting shiva .
    For seven days the family of the deceased sit on a small bench, their clothes rent, the mirrors in the house covered so that there is no reflection of ego to distract the mourners from focusing their thoughts upon the departed. I sit in the same chair on which my father spent so many hours, during his final years of life, immersed in his work, lifting his head occasionally to view the passage of the seasons. He marked the turning of time by the leaves of the poplar, the migration of birds, the subtle shifts in daily light, just as I now mark the passage of his life through his poems.
    In the months before his death, Meier arranged his work in order of publication, beginning in 1925, when he was twenty years old. The early poems are full of exuberance. They celebrate the forests and streams of White Russia, the swamps and river valleys of the borderlands. Others sing the praises of his loved one, Hadassah Probutski, ‘the pale flower of the Chanaykes’, the slum quarters of Bialystok where she was raised. He sees her walking on a road ‘woven out of stars’. She wears ‘a silk blue dress embroidered with stars of green and red’. She moves within an aura of stillness. She walks with quiet grace.
    Hadassah becomes his muse. She joins him on his evening strolls to the forests. They share a love of solitude. They also share a social conscience. Like so many of their times, they are drawn towards the ideals of the left. After all, they were nurtured in the midst of mass poverty and unemployment.
    In a poem entitled ‘Need’, Meier opens with the lines: ‘In a cellar somewhere, lies a woman with her infants; thousands of miles from the land of joy.’ The children suck ‘at their mother’s yellowed fingers, instead of bread’. Such scenes, writes Meier, ‘cut into my heart’. The poet can taste the essence ‘of their desperate need’.
    In ‘An Encounter with an Unemployed Man’, Meier identifies with the plight of those who wander the streets in search of work. They are outsiders, invisible to those who have their place, their measure of worth. Those who are more fortunate rush about the streets, and in their self-absorption they push aside the people who walk about the city without purpose. Instead of stopping to help them back onto their feet, they glance at them with contempt, before hurrying on.
    In subsequent poems Meier depicts the plight of other outcasts, those who live in the shadows, street walkers and the destitute, ‘broken women hidden behind smiling masks’, and lonely drunkards bereft of love. He writes of children, born into poverty, and fated to live ‘like flies trapped in a jug’. Their ambitions are condemned to ‘whirl about like chaff’. The poet fears for their future. He foresees a time when their desire for freedom, for a place in the sun, will be worn down and silenced.
    Meier writes also about his own sense of unease. Perhaps he too is fated to work in menial jobs. Perhaps he will not be able to practise his vocation as a poet. Like so many of his generation, he must find work wherever he can. He is subject to the whims of his superiors. He is selling his longings for a mere pittance while, in the recesses of his being, he burns with a desire for expression and knowledge.
    One of Meier’s most striking poems, ‘On the Death of Sacco and Vanzetti’, published in 1927, is a fiery lament over the execution, by electric chair, in the United States, of two Italian socialists whose crime, it seems, was a desire to help their fellow man.
    News of the execution was received with dismay worldwide, and it struck a chord in young Meier Zabludowski. He takes on the pain of Sacco and Vanzetti’s final moments, and writes of the ‘eighteen-hundred-volt current’ that silenced them ‘like a snake, cutting through the black horizon of the world’.