H. Leivick

Leivick was raised in a traditional Jewish household and attended a yeshiva for several years, an experience he thoroughly disliked and depicted in his dramatic poem Chains of the Messiah.

I am a member of the Jewish revolutionary party, the Bund, and I will do everything in my power to overthrow the tsarist autocracy, its bloody henchmen, and you as well.Leivick, then only eighteen, was sentenced to four years of forced labor and permanent exile to Siberia.

Leivick was involved with Di Yunge, a group of avant-garde American-Yiddish poets who praised Yiddish for its artistic and aesthetic possibilities, not merely a conduit for disseminating radical politics to the immigrant masses.

Leivick's style was neo-Romantic and marked by a deep apocalyptic pessimism combined with an almost naive interest and yearning for the mystical and messianic, themes that continually appeared in his writing, particularly The Golem, which depicted the Jewish Messiah and Jesus Christ as representatives of a peaceful redemption, only to be chased away by the Maharal of Prague and his violent Golem, who ultimately rampaged through the streets of Prague injuring large numbers of people.

The poem was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled critique of the Bolshevik Revolution and caused Leivick to be criticized by the Soviet Union and Communist Yiddishists.

Leivick stopped writing for the Communist papers in 1929 following their public support for the Arab riots in Palestine and broke off all connections with the left following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.