ABSTRACT
Radyo (Radio) places Yiddish modernist verse on full display. The poem’s aesthetic space provides a point of convergence for both communal and personal concerns built around the persona of the poet whose role is prophetic in three ways: to announce the arrival of the new age of Communism and to agitate for its acceptance; to lead the Jewish people to abandon their old ways and progress towards this new truth; and to express the personal isolation and contradictions within the poetic persona on the lonely path to the new Utopia. Radyo expressed Markish’s determination to resist having his ardour dampened. This new long poem would be the final form of a triptych that comprised Volin as the past; Di kupe as the present, and Radyo as the future. The persona is disconcerted by the bourgeois world he encounters in Warsaw and needs to mock it in order to agitate the masses to action.
