Metropolis New York!
translated from the Yiddish by Daniel Kraft
Metropolis New York!
At your wide shores
I lie, a weary wanderer,
broken and facing you.
I sing and sing my own rhymed plea:
rescue me from the high seas.
Expelled from nations, tortured
and consumed,
I lie and wait
all day and night, all night and day
for your
“please, come inside.”
But you are deaf to my lament,
you city of millions.
What do you care
if one small mite passes away
in pain
beneath your lurid concrete?
Used with the permission of the translator.
Itshe Slutsky
Yiddish poet Itshe Slutsky (pronounced IT-shuh, SLOOT-skee) was born on April 12, 1912, in the small and impoverished Jewish community of Lakhva, in what is now Belarus but was then the Russian Empire. Slutsky was the youngest of four siblings in an Orthodox family. As a child, he was recognized as a prodigy in traditional Jewish learning and sent to study the Talmud at the prestigious Mir Yeshiva, then located in Poland.