Bluma
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bluma.bsky.social
Bluma
@bluma.bsky.social
150 followers 81 following 2.8K posts
Werewolf advocate, Golem appreciator. Writes a little about H. Leivick on https://blumalangerobertson.substack.com/
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bluma.bsky.social
The cover of the Chanukah issue of the Feldafinger Magazine of the Feldafing DP camp, scanned during my trip to the USHMM archives.
A man lighting Chanukah candles as his son and wife look on
December 14, 2025 at 6:43 PM
bluma.bsky.social
I am married to a glow in the dark Presbyterian guy, and even he knows this some WASPy bullshit.
December 13, 2025 at 4:25 PM
bluma.bsky.social
I haven’t done this in a long time because of my eye issues and my tremor, but I think this will work ok for little’s group skate routine to KPop Demon Hunters.
December 12, 2025 at 5:30 PM
bluma.bsky.social
A John Le Carre advent calendar, for those of us who live on these miserable, rain-drenched shores and pray for death. Or the next bus. Whatever comes first.
December 8, 2025 at 5:20 PM
bluma.bsky.social
I think I would be bolder if I were a real academic. But it wouldn’t make me a better/nicer person, and I am pretty rock-bottom as it is.
Seems like a promising poet, this Leivick Halper guy. Wonder what ever happened to him. Did he ever get out of Siberia?
December 7, 2025 at 2:55 PM
bluma.bsky.social
I nearly came home today with a dress that had an ad for a bagel shop in Bushwick on it.

I still might go back for it.

But I did buy some actual bagels, too.
He tells me more about his mother. She used to get up before daybreak for her baking. Bagel baking is a difficult livelihood. He prides himself that she also taught him to bake bagels. He knows — he says — the trade. To bake a pood of flour took five or six hours. Having baked, his mother took the baked goods to market. Whether summer or winter. She had to bring the greatest portion of the income into the house. They were very poor. He recalls when he and his little sister lay sick with measles in one bed. ‘So both children should go through the measles together.’
December 2, 2025 at 4:57 PM
bluma.bsky.social
This is a Jewish house, of course it’s not, it’s a yahrzeit calendar that ran out decades ago.
An incomplete— naturally — yahrzeit calendar.
November 21, 2025 at 6:09 PM
bluma.bsky.social
A Friday game of ‘what’s in the box?’ Is it nylons?
A box of nylon stockings from the…70s?
November 21, 2025 at 6:09 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Called for help, got wolves. Please advise.
November 20, 2025 at 10:51 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Someday I am going to tell this guy, but not today.

(I am not allowed to adopt another)
November 19, 2025 at 7:09 PM
bluma.bsky.social
That picture’s from 1925 and he’s already got that rather recognisable look there, but if we go back to the mid teens, here he is looking a bit different (if still a bit intense)

(Do I have more pictures of Yiddish writers in my camera roll than of my children? Maaaybe 🤐)
A young H. Leivick.
November 16, 2025 at 10:12 PM
bluma.bsky.social
The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. Grover: Hello, everybodeee!
November 14, 2025 at 3:51 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Quit bogarting the Frankenstein, man.
Recently the Paragod Players produced the ‘Golem,’ a play by H. Leivick who undoubtedly read Mary Shelly’s story of Frankenstein. Created out of clay and mud from the river….
November 12, 2025 at 3:50 PM
bluma.bsky.social
I keep saying that repetition in Leivick isn’t a bug, but a feature, and I think this poem (just including the end here) proves the point.

Even if you can’t read Yiddish, you can see the visual repetition of the same words, the same letter beginning every line of the last section.
The last part of a poem about a ruined house and an abandoned dog on a sunny day, in newly-fallen snow, in Belarus about a hundred years ago.
November 9, 2025 at 2:44 PM
bluma.bsky.social
I believe this is slightly relevant to the parashat hashavua…and the fact that school plays have always been a little bit special.
Once, a novel idea for how to close the celebration at the siyyum for a tractate at the end of a term occurred to the head of the yeshiva; an idea which almost has a relation to our current situation. The Rosh Yeshiva, R’ Itche Frades, he was called, was quietly a devotee of Zion. Had a sharp mind. An even sharper eye. Was a singular intelligent man. This was around 1899. (Incidentally, S. Charney also studied at the same [Berezin] yeshiva the year before I arrived there) — Do you know how it occurred to the head of the yeshiva that those distinguished in study should close the celebration? — That they should act out, before a large yeshiva audience, ‘The Binding of Isaac,’ over a couple of evenings. I, too, was asked to be amongst the actors. I was about eleven years old then. Most of the students were older bochurs. The Rosh Yeshiva himself prepared the script for us. And here was the role he assigned to me: When the Angel cries out to Abraham that he should not put his knife to Isaac, who lies upon the altar, a sheep needed to appear near Abraham’s feet and the sheep would to be the offering. I was given the role of the sheep, who didn’t need to utter a word, only lie under a chair, not far from Abraham’s feet, and await the slaughtering knife. They dressed me in an inside-out sheepskin jacket and on my throat was hung a bladder of red beet vinegar. When the moment came, Abraham slashed the bladder and, it seemed, slaughtered me instead of Isaac. All around me was drenched, so it seemed, with sheep’s blood. That moment left an impression upon my entire life.
November 7, 2025 at 12:42 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Are we cheering for ‘the Champ’?

Of course we are, with mezuzah pendant in hand, and embroidered star on his short and a blue and gold robe, the Bronx boy who learned to box at the YMHA.
— You ready to put on the gloves? — Ready — and Barnet went over to the steel locker and took a pair of padded leather gloves from the shelf. Giovanno felt the gloves, squeezing, opening them and looking inside. — OK! — He gave them back to Barnet. Barnet approached and slipped one glove onto the bandaged left hand. — What do you have in your right hand? — Giovanno went over to them. He took his hand, opened it. In the palm of his hand, on the white bandages, lay the little mezuzah. — What’s that? — I always carry it in my glove, it’s lucky. — You’ll really need it tonight. You could use ten of ‘em! — Giovanno flashed a mouth full of white teeth. — Tell me, Giovanno — he offered Barnet his right hand for him to put the glove on it — do you want me to knock your boy out in the first thirty seconds, or do you want me to let him look around a bit first? — Knock it off — Giovanno leaned in close — they’ll carry you out of here feet first! — Enough, Giovanno! — Barnet pushed Giovanno away — Milty will be witness when your boy puts his gloves on. Now go. Get out! — Feet first, you hear? — Giovanno left. He got down from the table. Struck one glove against the other, pulled up his shorts, and danced across the room. He threw lefts, rights, shadow-boxing.
November 3, 2025 at 12:38 PM
bluma.bsky.social
When we’re no longer shocked by the horrifying, we’re all in trouble.
We are already accustomed to the crying of humiliated people. Already far too accustomed. Now we are even accustomed to the gassing of people, to the burning of the living in crematoriums, to liquidation, to SS processing, to totalitarian disappearances, to death by torture. So are we impressed when we see a person lying on the street, on the bare sidewalk? Enough people, for instance, lie thrown-out on the street; lying beside walls, in doorways, and thousands pass by them and don’t even give them a glance. And amongst the passersby, there are more than enough world-saviours, world-changers, redeemers! Not one of them takes the least glance at those who need, without any doubt, to be rescued, to be redeemed.
November 2, 2025 at 2:47 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Oh my good Lord, look what they sent me to stabilise my actual purchase!

Yes, I am having some sort of midlife crisis.
October 30, 2025 at 1:34 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Incidentally, I have never been an apikoros, not in the official secular understanding. I therefore never needed to be a God-seeker; simply because I have — this I know in myself — never lost and abandoned God. If something did happen between me and God, it was, I would say, entirely the opposite: God abandoned me at many moments, not I him. I would therefore call my sense of God not God-seeking, but God-longing, God-loneliness.
October 28, 2025 at 2:20 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Flash back time. I was annoyed that the official illustration left her nose out of the mask, so I painted my own.
October 28, 2025 at 10:00 AM
bluma.bsky.social
Well, you can’t keep them home on the farm once they’ve seen Mrs Singer!
One night in the middle of August, Bill sat on his step and quietly dreamed. The people from the hotel had long ago twisted their pillows into knots and smoothed them out again. Bill was lost in thought. Suddenly, a hand lightly touched his shoulder and smouldering green eyes quenched themselves in his blue ones. And her lips spoke softly, inviting him for a walk. Bill happily sprang up from his step, and stood by the red-haired woman’s side. At first the both of them went slowly, quietly conversing. Later, they held hands and she spoke even more softly. They sat beside the river and she lay his head in her lap, silently stroking her fingers through his soft, white-blond hair. Then she put her glowing lips to his fresh ones, and Bill was left shivering with joy, covered in gooseflesh from head to toe. Her hand, trembling, took his and laid it longingly on her breast, pressing it there. Bill didn’t understand when the blood began to pound in his temples. Nor did he want to understand when two pairs of legs twined together as one and Bill the boy was cast aside, becoming Bill the man.
October 26, 2025 at 9:34 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Mrs Singer, you minx, you.
The summer weeks wore on, and the wives hadn’t seen their husbands in a long while. It was hard for them to sleep at night. And the women’s eyes opened and considered Bill in an entirely different light. Especially the auburn-haired Mrs Singer, a woman in her early thirties. One evening, her green eyes opened wide and suddenly saw a man in Bill. From that evening on, Bill’s love of people started to grow larger and larger. People were so kind, pleasant, friendly. Hadn’t Mrs Singer sweetened the evenings with chocolate, met him often with packs of cigarettes? She’d even given him a tie and a pipe. And her stories, there weren’t any other stories like them in the world.
October 26, 2025 at 2:38 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Behold — the ‘Spanky Plate’
A medieval copper plate featuring a woman riding reverse-cowgirl on a man’s back and spanking his bare buttocks with a whisk-broom. Yee-haw.
October 24, 2025 at 2:20 PM
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He changed again into punishing speech, scolding the Jews for occupying themselves too much with this world, with luxury and pleasure, and concluded with a fine story: In the temple, there was a musical instrument, it was made of mere wood. And it became fine and smooth. And it was made in the days of Moshe Rabbeinu himself. And it played marvellously sweetly. A king later came and covered the instrument in gold, and the instrument immediately lost its sweet tone. The gold was removed from it, and the instrument regained its previous sweetness.
October 24, 2025 at 12:30 PM
bluma.bsky.social
As always, *mood*
I am very often envious of the novelist who is successful in submerging himself totally in the being of another’s character and figure and completely nullifying himself, entirely surrendering. If a novelist truly surrenders himself entirely — I greatly doubt it. But on the face, it seems so. And because the face appears so, I oftentimes assail myself with hard reprimand and curse the lyricist in me, why I am seemingly occupied only with myself and solely with myself and but with myself and I ask myself: How does a person not have enough of endless occupation with their own figure, of shaping it, bending it, twisting it and breaking it and then suddenly hurling it to the ground and starting to trample it with one’s own feet and kick it in the sides with the tips of one’s shoes? — Why don’t you occupy yourself— I say to myself — with the lives and characters of the classical, model subjects, Reuben and Simeon or X and Y? Instead of occupying yourself with the eternally certain, eternally existing, like the classically-rooted Reuben and Simeon, you concern yourself entirely with such a shadowy, doubtful, marginal Levi — entirely with yourself.
October 21, 2025 at 1:55 PM