Overview

In Raysn, Moyshe Kulbak reclaims the landscape of present-day Belarus as a mythic homeland for Jewish culture. First published in 1922, Raysn blends biblical allusion, folk imagery, and modernist poetics to imagine a shared past between Jews and Belarusians - a symbolic union rooted in forests, rivers, and ancient ties. Kulbak's poem lives as both a literary epic and a political vision. Writing in the wake of war, revolution, and the brief independence of the Belarusian People's Republic, Kulbak situates Yiddish in the heart of European literary tradition and stakes a claim for Jewish belonging in the region's cultural history. Drawing on Romantic forms and his own ideals, Raysn offers a poetic response to the national movements reshaping Eastern Europe. Set against the backdrop of early Soviet indigenization policies and the flourishing of Yiddish culture in 1920s Belarus, Kulbak's work stands as a hopeful vision of multicultural coexistence. Jason Wagner's lively translation invites readers to rediscover Raysn as a modern epic of memory, identity, and imagined futures.

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9781734193657

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Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937), one of the great virtuoso poets of the modern explosion of Yiddish creativity in the early twentieth century, was born in Smogon, in the Vilna Province of the Russian Empire (today in Belarus). The author of six volumes of poetry, he was also a successful playwright, novelist, and translator. Committed to the ideals of the revolution, he left Poland for the Soviet Union in 1927. He settled in Minsk where he lived for the next decade until his arrest in September 1937 on charges of disloyalty to the state at espionage. He was executed the following month.

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