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| Austrian troops advancing in the Carpathians (image from Library of Congress) |
“How many of you have had the pleasure of seeing your own grave dug?” So begins the first story in Avigor Hameiri’s collection Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry (translated by Peter C. Appelbaum and Dan Hecht).*
Hameiri wrote from the experience of a Jewish soldier fighting for Austria-Hungary on the Eastern Front in the First World War. His poetry is “gruesome and unforgiving” as he documents “the slaughter of an entire generation of Europe’s best and brightest young men,” and his work laments that “nobody in authority seemed to care.”**
Come to me now and caress—
In vain, youth’s song has dried:
Here do I stand, my pale beauty,
Under a bloodred sky.
Come to me now and taunt me—
In vain, here all eyes are blind:
I am occupied here, my pale beauty,
within me millions die.
Come to me now, soft as dew—
In vain, I shall not embrace:
I tread your winepress, my pale beauty,
lest I defile your faded grace.
Come to me now and admonish—
In vain, sanity has escaped my mind;
Here I stand, my pale beauty,
under a bloodred sky.
—Avigdor Feuerstein Hameiri
Almost ballad-like in form, the poem is a lament of loss and despair. The horrors of war have killed the caresses and songs of youth, while men blinded in battle see only death endlessly replayed. God’s judgement is inescapable, as alluded to in the poem's third stanza: “I have trodden the winepress alone, and from the peoples no one was with me; I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath; their lifeblood spattered on my garments, and stained all my apparel” (Isaiah 63:3). Under the bloodred sky of total war, the narrator stands alone and insane, yet still able to recognize that all is hopeless and futile.
Echoing throughout the collection is the question Hameiri posed in his 1935 speech “On Facism and Its Goal”: “What do you know of the nature of man’s inhumanity to man?”*** In the same address, he challenged his audience, “you cannot even imagine the war that has passed, or the one that is to come.” Hameiri’s war writings are his attempt to address that failure of imagination. Most of the work in Under a Bloodred Sky has not been published since the First World War, and this volume marks the first time Hameiri’s poetry has been translated into English. Chilling and unforgettable, Hameiri’s fiction and poetry is deserving of a much wider audience—those interested in war writing, Jewish literature, and international modernisms.
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* Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, edited and translated by Peter C. Appelbaum and Daniel Hecht, Academic Studies Press, 2023.
** “Introduction” by Appelbaum and Hecht, Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, p. 12.
*** “On Fascism and Its Goal” in Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry, pp. 167 – 173.
