Di ḳupe

Peretz Markish, 1895–1952

“Di ḳupe: poeme” (The Heap: Poem)

Kyiv: Ḳooperaṭiver farlag “Ḳulṭur-lige,” 1922

A Ukrainian Yiddish poet, Peretz Markish was one of the leading representatives of expressionism in Yiddish literature. His highly innovative and intense poetic style was shaped in the period of deep historical and political changes brought about by World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the massive waves of violent Jewish pogroms in Ukraine in 1918–20 that took the lives of more than 100,000 Jews. Markish wrote the poem “Di ḳupe” (“The Heap”) in the immediate aftermath of the atrocities in the town of Horodyshche, in Ukraine’s Cherkassy region. There, following the pogrom, the perpetrators deliberately left the bodies of the victims in a pile on the street for two days until after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most significant Jewish holiday that calls for repentance and forgiveness. 

The poem was first published in Warsaw in 1921, where Markish lived at the time, but its second edition, with the cover designed by the Ukrainian Yiddish avant-garde artist Yosef Tchaikov (1888–1979), was produced in Kyiv’s publishing house Kultur-lige (Cultural League) in 1922. This edition, while small in size, is significant for its unique synchrony between the poetry and image. The Cubo-Futurism of Tchaikov’s cover is highly symbolic: the figures of two murderers carrying the dead body are placed inside a circle that represents the cyclical repetition of history. However, the circle is broken by the top of the pyramid, which brings in biblical allusions of Exodus and the revolutionary change that will inevitably take place. The title of the poem is also placed inside the circle, but upside down, to reflect the calamity and devastation of the event.