ABSTRACT
This essay reveals that the filial burdens of inheritance for David Markish, the son of the epochal Yiddish poet Peretz Markish, murdered by Stalin’s soldiers in 1952, remain evident. Whether living in Moscow or banished to a remote Kazakhstan village, Markish’s fate seems “eternally beset by problems.” Even now, comfortable in his new homeland, Israel, a sense of restlessness appears. Writing in Russian, not Hebrew or Yiddish, he remains cognizant about the twin problems of finding a readership and being well-translated. Striving to balance past and present—mother Russia and his Promised Land—he responds in literary form to transplantation.
