Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Ruth Wisse reflects on “Good Night, World,” a 1938 poem by American Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein, which stunned readers by urging Jews to turn away from a hostile world.
In 1914, Jewish teenager Jacob Glatstein immigrated from his native Poland to New York. There, he joined a thriving community of Yiddish poets and co-founded a literary magazine, In Zikh, a journal devoted to “introspectivism,” to filtering poetry through the prism of the self. This was the type of expression available only in America, where national and international political problems became temporarily less urgent for the immigrants fleeing them.
But by the 1930s, the dual threats of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union were reaching fever pitch. This period, which Winston Churchill described as “The Gathering Storm,” was even more ominous for Jews. When pogroms erupted in his native Poland, Glatstein published a poem, “Good Night, World,” dated April 1938 and here translated by Marie Syrkin. Its opening was startlingly aggressive.
