In 2018, just prior to publishing his second book of poems, Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky returned to his birth city Odessa. His friend and fellow poet, Carolyn Forché, accompanied him on the trip. A meticulous journal keeper, Forché recorded the following entry in her notebook:
“Beside me on the plane, he [Ilya] is reading Man and Language by Max Picard, and from time to time, he looks up from his book to tell me what Picard has to say.
“He says that ‘when a word is spoken, the air is filled with light.’ He says that ‘in reward for its services to the spirit, the spirit allows sound to be as free as the spirit itself; in other words, sound is allowed to become music.’ Do you agree with this, Carolyn? He says, ‘Language comes from sound and turns into light. Sound becomes light in language.’ Do you think so?” Ilya asks, as the wing beside me dips into the clouds, banking toward Vienna, “He says that ‘in poetry, language seems to forget its despair: the space left empty by God is filled —.”
Absence resounds as a fruitful silence for Kaminsky in both his work and his life — the absence of sound, the absence of his parents, the absence of his native Odessa. The things of Odessa he renames Vasenka in Deaf Republic take on a phenomenological quality as particulars that play an instrumental role in their witness to the atrocities that take place at the hand of the Nazis who persecuted the Jews in his hometown during WWII:
Deafness is suspended above the blue tin roofs,
And copper eaves; deafness
Feeds on the birches, light posts, hospital roofs, bells;
deafness rests in our men’s chests.
Kaminsky turns deafness into a communal trope that serves as a sounding board for the images, words, events that he witnesses. The sounds of the fascists’ atrocities echo in the conspiratorial deafness of the Vasenkans’ insurgency. Deafness becomes synonymous with Kaminsky’s compassion throughout Deaf Republic. When Kaminsky states that the “deaf have something to hear that not even they can tell,” he acknowledges that lyrical poetry aspires to the unsayable. In making the citizens in Deaf Republic deaf in their “insurgency,” he personifies them as the lyric itself who’s “silence” speaks inscrutably in transcendently perceptive ways, while the fascist soldiers hear only their brutal orders in their literal hearing.
In a moving personal essay Kaminsky wrote for the August 9thissue of New York Times Magazine in 2018 titled “Search For A Lost Odessa — And A Deaf Childhood,” he posed this daunting question to himself: “If my parents are dead, what is here for me in this now empty city?”, and then answered his own question with this apophatic affirmation: “When I say the word nothing, I name something that is there.” The names for the things that are “there” for Kaminsky in the wake of his familial and national losses are the names of those he left behind when he emigrated with this family from Odessa to Rochester, NY in 1993, many of whom are specters from Ukraine’s tragic 20thcentury history that includes Stalin’s genocidal campaign in Ukraine called Holodomor and the Nazi’s occupation of Ukraine during WWII that claimed his grandfather, Ilya, along with his grandmother, Natalia. Ilya, after whom Kaminsky was named, was shot in the street, while Natalia was disappeared in a concentration camp. Kaminsky’s father almost perished as well when, as a child, he was dragged from his home by Nazi soldiers but then miraculously saved by a “fat Ukrainian man” who appeared out of nowhere to save the boy. Kaminsky recounts his father’s childhood memory of this harrowing event in the New York Times essay cited above with biblical economy:
Out of the snow of Odessa, a fat Ukrainian man appears. What are you doing? You bastards! Why are you taking away my child? Give me your names! You bastards. I will go to the authorities. Your names! His spit flies in the angry air. I want to see your documents! He can’t stop spitting.
Soldiers pause, bewildered. This is a child of a Jew — can’t you see?
You morons! Do I look like a Jew? The fat Ukrainian stomps his foot, he shakes his large body around the young woman on the pavement.
The windows begin to open. Who speaks to German soldiers like this in the occupied city? People stare. The soldiers steal a look at the windows. Now they walk quickly to the van. The child is left in the snow.
The fat man gathers the boy in his hands, wraps him in an overcoat. I will complain to the authorities! To the woman: a lingering, frenzied kiss. The van with soldiers disappears into the streets.
As a poet of witness, Kaminsky, who is deaf without his hearing aids, has followed up his highly celebrated first book of poems, Dancing In Odessa in which he pays homage to his literary mentors — Osip Mandelstam, Paul Celan, Isaac Babel, Joseph Brodsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Montale, along with several of his Ukrainian family members — with a hybrid drama about his metaphorical, titular country, Deaf Republic. In this occupied country the citizens feign deafness after a deaf boy named Petya is shot and killed by a fascist soldier. Kaminsky recasts the story of his father’s childhood experience with Nazi soldiers by altering his father’s rescue into an execution and depicting “the boy” as deaf, like himself. (Kaminsky actually never heard his father’s voice as his father died in Rochester, New York shortly after emigrating to the U.S. and just before Kaminsky received hearing aids.) By turning himself into his father, Kaminsky inserts himself directly into his family’s history, containing the multitude of himself, his father, and his grandfather. As the omniscient narrator of his verse play and director of his familial and hometown cast, Kaminsky creates an allegorical drama about persecuted puppeteers whose puppets mimic their persecution, hanging as they do with broken arms in the windows of those who have perished. “Deafness is theater,” Kaminsky claims in his succinct commentary of Deaf Republic. “Here the deaf person is the audience. Everyone else is an actor. No need to worry about the silent world to which the hearing people think we are exiled. The deaf do not believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.” The resounding irony on which Deaf Republic turns, therefore, stems from Kaminsky’s assertion that “language comes from sound and turns into light.” The light that shines from the language in Deaf Republic illuminates the terrible truths about what Philip Larkin called “the misery that man hands on to man.”
The “imaginary” town of Vasenka, which serves as the stage for Deaf Republic, is Odessa. In one scene after another, the puppeteers of Vasenka are arrested and executed. These scenes are heartbreaking as they involve the murder of a young boy, Petya, who spits on one of the fascist solders at the start of the drama, and then a young couple, Alfonso and Sonya Barabinski, who are also new parents, and finally Momma Gayla Armolinskaya, the puppet theater owner and instigator of the insurgency against the fascist occupiers. After Petya is shot for spitting at the fascist soldier, the townspeople, at the prompting of Momma Gayla and Sonya, instigate an insurgency in which the townspeople of Vasenka conspire to adopt a sympathetic deafness and communicate only through the code of an invented sign language, the signs for which are illustrated throughout the book. So “the sound of words” that “turn to light” in Kaminsky’s mind remain sequestered in silence throughout Deaf Republic, although they still resonate in the elements themselves, particularly the sky and snow, reminding one of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees who beseech him to rebuke his disciples: “I tell you … if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” For Kaminsky, silence, like the stones in Jesus’ response to the Pharisees, “cry out” as “the nakedness of a whole nation … in Sonya’s open mouth,” in snow falling “in the ears of the town,” and in the stick with the which Momma Gayla “beats” the soldiers. But silence is also the ineffable transcendent in Deaf Republic, “something of the sky in us” that resounds as an audible image.
The paradoxical nature of silence as both sound and things themselves — snow, sky, sun — occurs throughout Deaf Republic as a synesthetic phenomenon, a communal trope for resistance, and a shadow government of the persecuted. Although multifaceted in this way, it also functions as an effective singular device for Kaminsky’s via negativa strategy of betraying the legacy of the prophetic imagination, particularly Amos’, in its brutal honesty. Despite the profound tragedy of Vasenka’s atrocities, Kaminsky has found an uplifting, canny way to memorialize his hometown’s martyrs, while simultaneously erasing the names of the Nazi fascists from human memory.
In addition to devising an effective method of insurgency against fascism, Kaminsky also makes the point by direct implication that fascism in its intolerance of art forces it into hiding and equates artists with the enemy. When the soldiers kill Petya, Sonya, Alfonso, and Momma Gayla, they’re also killing exactly that which resists the “orders” of “mind-shackled” potentates, namely the creative qualities and expression that make us most human.
Although Deaf Republic is an allegory about an historical horror in a real town with a fictional name, it also contains two poems that provide a diachronic arc between then and now. Acutely aware of fascism’s historical recurrences, Kaminsky bookends his theatrical allegory with poems that indict any notion of American exceptionalism. In his proem, “We Lived Happily During The War,” Kaminsky indicts America’s soul-numbing addiction to money and then concludes with an equally strong indictment of American blindness to its racist disregard that leaves “a boy shot by police … on the pavement for hours” in his poem “In A Time Of Peace.”
Deaf Republic is stringent medicine for all nations, especially powerful ones that have grown slack in their apprehension and practice of the “categorical imperative.” With its lapidary, figurative conceits, this poem that weaves in and out of poetry, drama, and prose as a hybrid and liminal tour de force works on both the stage and page as a poignant reminder for our present age of the proverbial dangers of fascism’s recrudescence.
[Published March 5, 2019 by Graywolf Press, 80 pages, $16.00 paperback]