ABSTRACT
Moyshe Kulbak, the talented Yiddish poet, novelist, and teacher, has been a curiously little- and under-studied artist. This neglect offers us the opportunity to add a 'new' and distinctive voice to the polyphony of the emigre community in Berlin, a polyphony which grows louder with the increasing scholarly interest in such communities in recent years. In a similar fashion Kulbak's contemporary poet Peretz Markish opens his first volume of poems with a thematic manifesto, 'Ikh zegn zikh mit dir', which sets out Markish's philosophy of 'nowness'. The example of Kulbak and his specific poetics of this brief period must be fitted into our understanding of a Jewish outsider's experience of Berlin. Given the absence of cities from the poems themselves, this erasure of the metropolis can give us some insight into both the positive and the negative power of that experience.
