Translation of sonnets and Nathan Bistritzki's article by Sheli Fain
Translation of poems from Russian to English by Michael Romm
Contents
Preface about the Author 5
Who is Eliyahu Meitus 5
A Word on My Data Sources 7
Eliyahu's Family and Bio Summary 8
Eliyahu's Life in Literature 30
Poems from the Book 'On the Edge of the Second Bridge' 36
(Page 7) On a swinging bridge 38
(Page 8) On the other end of the bridge 39
(Page 9) This is the fragrance of sunrise 40
(Page 10) My Boat 41
(Page 11) The ghastly lake 42
(Page 12) ...And the circle is closing again 43
(Page 13) In the river of my life I see my image 44
(Page 14) Spirals of smoke 45
(Page 15) I said: - In my goblet... 46
(Page 16) You, Whom Suddenly I Met 47
'The Evening Lights' by Nathan Bistritzki 48
Poems from 'Jewish anthology - a collection of young Jewish poets' 55
At Night 56
From the Songs of the Fall 57
Preface about the Author
Dear readers,
My name is Ella Romm. I was born in 1966, in a southern Russian town of Sholokhovskiy of the Rostov-on-Don region. My paternal grandmother Anna Vaysman, whose maiden name was Meites, immigrated to the United States from Chisinau, Moldova. Our family joined her in 1993. I had been living in New York for 15 years and then moved to San Diego, California in 2007. I am a medical doctor, a poet, a researcher. I and my husband, also a poet, published a number of poetry books in Russian. At some point I grew a major interest in my heritage and eventually published two volumes of the family genealogy. Eliyahu Meitus was one of the brightest stars in the family constellation. He became the subject of my next research.
Who is Eliyahu Meitus
My granduncle, Eliyahu Meitus (אליהו מייטוס), lived through the first three quarters of the XX century, the turbulent times in the history of the European Jews. His live began in Bessarabia, a distant province of the Russian Empire, and ended in the state of Israel 85 years later. He was a poet and writer, a teacher and translator, a polyglot and Zionist. My interest in Eliyahu Meitus was sparked when I found his poetry book in the family library. The book was written in Hebrew a language I do not know. Translations into English or Russian were not available either, with one exception of thee short poems in a Jewish writers' anthology book. In any case, this was the starting point of my journey into the poet's biography, mind and passions.
Eliyahu Meitus (photo from the Internet)
A Word on My Data Sources
I used both the oral and written sources of information on Meitus while working on this book. The oral stories were passed to me by my father (Eliyahu's nephew) and my grandmother (Eliyahu's sister). The written sources included those I found on the Internet in the Russian, English and Hebrew languages (with the Hebrew sources, I used Google translation and help of the Hebrew-speaking friends). In some cases my sources contradicted each other. Over time, I was able to recover bits and pieces of Eliyahu's live but there are still white spots in the story, while some facts need confirmation.
It is appropriate in this introduction to pay my respect and gratitude to the late Mable E. Meites (1913 - 2013), the wife of Dr. Joseph Meites (1913 - 2005), Elyahu's cousin once removed. Mable was 97 years old when we met online. She shared information and family photos with me, and we communicated regularly until her death.
I also appreciate some help received from Eliyahu's grandchildren Oren, Liora and especially Yoram. My special gratitude extends to Sheli Fain who translated the sonnets and closing article of the book 'On the Edge of the Second Bridge' from Hebrew to English, as well as to my husband Michael Romm for his help in writing this book and translating Eliyahu's poems from Russian to English.
Eliyahu's Family and Bio Summary
Eliyahu Meitus was born in Chisinau (Kishinev), Bessarabia on the September 27, 1892 (Hebrew year 5653) in a large and prosperous family of Yoil Meites and Tseytl Averbuch. Our family is not sure about the exact year of his birth, but all Internet sources give 1892. I also found an alternative year, 1893, in his handwritten note "My Chronicles" sold by Kedem Public Auction House in 2011 in Tel-Aviv along with other personal documents collection of Eliyahu. Additionally, the collection had:
- his high school graduation diploma from Odessa, 1910;
- a handwritten Ketubah celebrating Meytus's union with his wife Lea (Aliza's Hebrew name) (Ungheni, Moldova), 1921;
- a student certificate from the St. Petersburg University, 1917;
- 5 documents related to his educational endeavors in Romania;
- a photograph of the Meytus family;
- Tree Certificate of Donation to Jewish National Fund (certificate of planting a tree in Israel to recognize or memorialize friends, family or loved ones);
- a photograph from the Eschweg Displaced Persons camp (a former German air force base in the Frankfurt district of the American-occupied zone that became a displaced persons camp in January 1946.);
There were 12 items total, varying sizes and condition.
"My Chronicles" and photo from above mentioned auction
We do not believe that this photo depicted the Meites family, nobody could recognize any relatives on it. Who owned the items before the sale and who was the buyer, we do not know.
Interestingly, the vital records of Eliyahu's siblings and other family members available online use various spellings of the last name, changing between Meites, Meitis and Meitus. Here is the data from the birth certificate of Eliyahu's younger brother Kelman:
NAME: Kelman Meitis
GENDER: Male
BIRTH DATE: 1894
BIRTH TOWN: Chisinau
BIRTH UYEZD (DISTRICT): Chisinau
BIRTH GUBERNIYA (PROVINCE): Bessarabia
FATHER'S NAME: Yoil
REGISTRATION NUMBER: M612
REGISTRATION PLACE: Chisinau
REGISTRATION YEAR: 1894
FILM: 2292603 / 2
ARCHIVE: NARM/211/11/371
I could not locate a birth certificate of Eliyahu himself.
Meites is a metronymic surname based on the Yiddish female name Meita, meaning a girl. So Meites means son of Meita.
Eliyahu's grandparents Baruch and Ester Meites lived in the town of Balta, Bessarabia (now Ukraine) and had many children, among them Yoil, Eliyahu's father. According to some sources, Baruch could have been a rabbi or came from a family of rabbis.
Yoil Meites was born in Balta in about 1870 but moved to Chisinau (Bessarabia) later in his life. He belonged to a middle-class ('petty bourgeois') group of the city population and had a family business of buying and selling recycled goods to the factories. Based on the Russian Duma Voters List (1907) below, he also was a property owner.
NAME: IOYL MEYTIS
AGE AT VOTE: AT LEAST 24
YEAR OF RECORD: 1907
GENDER: MALE
COUNTRY: MOLDOVA
GUBERNIA (DISTRICT): BESSARABIA
UYEZD (REGION): CHISINAU
TOWN: CHISINAU
[CHISINAU]
VOTING QUALIFICATION: PROPERTY OWNER (HOME,
REAL ESTATE, BUILDING,
OTHER IMMOVABLE PROPERTY,
ETC.)
DATA SOURCE: ROMANIA - BESSARABIA DUMA
VOTERS LIST
VOTER LIST NUMBER: 58-29
At the age of 21, Yoil married Tseytl Averbuch, daughter of Geyhikh Averbuch and Rukhl Tepper. Tseytl came from a family of rabbis and was a descendant of the famous rabbi Ben Sarah who was born in 1791 in Poland.
Yoil and Tseytl Meites (photo from author's archive)
Yoil died in Chisinau at the age of 55 of heart attack. Yoil Meites and Tseytl Averbuch had six children: Eliyahu, Kelman, Avrum (who died in infancy), Khaya, Genya and Yakov.
Let us now turn to the memoirs of my father, Yuliy Vaysman, Eliyahu's nephew:
Yuliy Vaysman (photo by Alexander Gofayzen, from author's archive)
The earliest memories about my family are linked to the pre-war years, when my parents, Genya Meites and Lev Vaysman, and I lived in Chisinau, in my grandmother Tseytl's house. It was several years after my grandfather Yoil's death.
The city of Chisinau was first mentioned as the capital of Moldavia in 1436. After the war with Napoleon, Chisinau (Bessarabia) became a part of the Russian Empire until 1918, and then, after the First World War, it became a part of Romania. In 1940, due to the rearrangement of European territories between Germany and the USSR, Moldavia became the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic that moved to independence (as Moldova) in 1991.
Yoil Meites(Eliyahu's father) was born in the town of Balta (near Odessa) that in the beginning was a small outpost on the northern border of the Ottoman Empire (in Turkish "Balta" means "axe"). From XVIII to XX century most of the townspeople were Jews. The city survived two pogroms, a plague and a major flooding during this time. The Meites family moved from Balta to Chisinau in the late XIX century.
Grandfather Yoil had a family business, mainly to collect and utilize secondary materials that were then sold to factories. After his death (around 1925) his wife Tseytl and children (mostly his son Kolman) were running the business. I remember the piles of worn cloths in the backyard and the workers who loaded them into numerous bags using primitive machinery. I also remember how animal bones were processed into bone coal and sold to the sugar factory as adsorbent.
Grandfather Yoil ran his business together with his brother Yos (Yosil). While on a business trip in Warsaw, Yos was accidentally killed in crossfire of bandits and police. Yos had five children. His wife died young from cancer. After these tragic deaths, the care of Yos' family was placed on Yoil's shoulders who by then already had three sons: Eliyahu, Kolman (or Kelman as in his birth certificate), Yankel, and two daughters: Khaya (Кlara) and Genya (Anna). Successful business allowed Yoil to provide not only for the large family but also to educate all the children. Even one of his nieces, who had shown interest in education, completed four grades of the elementary school, although formal schooling for girls was not popular in those days.
Meites' house was located on the outskirts of Chisinau, on Pavlovskaya Street, next to the railway station Visternicheny, on the small river Bik. Memories of the river and the bridge across will inspire one of the most vivid metaphors in his poetry. Presumably, his book of sonnets, 'On the Edge of the Second Bridge', was named after it.
There was prosperity in the house. I remember large rooms filled with heavy wood furniture. Each summer Yoil sent his family to the countryside. In 1903 this saved Meites from the infamous Chisinau pogrom, known as the pogrom on Asian Street, triggered by the murder of a 14-year-old boy. The newspaper "Bessarabetz" blamed the Jews. (As Wikipedia suggests, 49 people were killed, 586 were wounded or injured and over 1500 houses that made up one third of households in Chisinau were destroyed.) The Chisinau pogrom received great public outcry in Europe and Russia in the beginning of the XX century. Writer L. Tolstoy and professors at Moscow University V. Vernadsky and S. Troubetzkoy accused the Russian rulers of acquiescence of the murderers.
Living in USA, my daughter Ella Romm met Mable Meites, the widow of Professor Joseph Meites, my second cousin. Thanks to her memoirs, I learned that my grandfather Yoil had three brothers: Solomon, Jacob and Joseph. In 1920, Baruch Meites, the son of Solomon, immigrated to the United States along with his family. One of his sons, Joseph Meites (Mable's husband and great-nephew of Eliyahu), later became a major American neurophysiologist who studied the processes of aging.
Dr. Joseph Meites and Mable Emily Meites (Rumburg) (photo from the Mable Meites' archive)
As Wikipedia suggests, his studies served as the basis for his disciples (Guillemin, Schally, and Yalow) who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1977. His brother, Samuel Meites, became an American biochemist, a historian of medicine and a specialist in laboratory diagnostics.
But let us go back to Meites family. Eliyahu's younger brother Kolman, who was also involved in the family business, was a bulky man with big smile. I remember his petit wife Pesya wearing her colorful housecoat.
On the 28 of Jul, in 1940, after Soviet troops entered Chisinau, Kolman Meites and his wife were arrested and sent into exile, where Kolman died of typhus in the town of Samarkand (Uzbekistan).
Kolman Meites gravestone (photo from the Internet)
Grandmother Tseytl escaped such a fate. Luckily, she was not home at the time the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs during the era of Joseph Stalin) visit and her son's arrest.
My grandmother Tseytl, Eliyahu's mother, came from the family of Averbuch, well-known in Chisinau. She had four siblings. Tseytl perished in Holocaust. She died of starvation trying to flee from Chisinau and was buried in a village of Tibitkinerovo of the Volgograd region in Russia. She was 68 years old.
The oldest son of Yoil Meites, Eliyahu (or, as he was often called, Ilyusha), at the age of two, trying to wash his cloves, fell into a wooden water keg and almost drowned. Thanks God, the ordeal ended safely.
At the age of thirteen Ilyusha began to write poetry. In 1911 he was sent to study at the Sorbonne University in France. He left it before completing due to the outbreak of the First World War.
Eliyahu Meitus (photo from the Internet)
Continuing his education in the Petrograd University, where he received his master's degree in humanities, Ilyusha joined the other Jewish poets of the Southern Russia region, led by Khaim Bialik, a poet who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish.
During the February Revolution, Ilyusha was on the Interim Government's side, but grandfather Yoil saved his son from the revolutionary fire by transferring him to the Odessa University in 1917. After the Brest Peace Accord between Soviet Russia and Germany, Bessarabia (Moldova) was ceded to Romania and Ilyusha was called to return to Chisinau immediately and stay with his family. By that time he was married, but his wife Betty did not want to follow her husband and stayed on the other side of the border. Eliyahu met Betty in Brussel (Belgium) where he briefly stayed and studied philosophy. In 1921 Eliyahu Meites became a principal of the Jewish school in Soroki. He also worked in the Romanian cities of Iaşi and Buzău. In 1935 he went to Palestine with his second wife Lisa. There he published his own poems and translations while working as a teacher.
One time uncle Ilyusha visited us in Chisinau. He
brought a colorful oriental dress for my mother and a whole book of postage stamps for me. This became my first stamp collection that, unfortunately, was lost in the mayhem of the Second World War. In 1946, I began collecting again. Now my collection includes thousands of stamps and is waiting to be continued by my descendants.
Eliyahu Meitus (photo from the Internet)
During the war and especially in the difficult post-war years, we repeatedly received parcels from the Red Cross with clothing and food, and it seemed to me that they were coming from my uncle in Palestine. But that was not the case. My uncle Ilyusha explained that, while working as a teacher and financing and publishing his own books, he was not able to help us. I also remember how before the war my father sent some packages with paper for the publishing purposes to Palestine.
Eliyahu Meitus (photo I found inserted into the Meitus' book 'On the Edge of the Second Bridge')
Eliyahu Meites died in 1978, one year before my father. (Coincidently, his son Darrel died on the same day with my brother in 1992.) The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Eliyahu Meites still live in Tel Aviv.
Eliyahu Meitus' gravestone (photo was emailed to me by a volunteer from findagrave.com)
Not only his poetry and translation works remind us today about Eliyahu Meitus. One of the streets in Tel Aviv was named after him.
Eliyahu Meitus street in Tel Aviv
Eliyahu's sister Klara died in childbirth, leaving a baby girl Ester in the care of her father. In 1939, Ester was visiting us in Chisinau, and I experienced my first romantic feelings towards her. By that time my father already rented a 4-bedroom apartment on Prunkulovskaya Street (that continued as General Inzov Street). General Inzov was the Governor of Bessarabia during Pushkin's exile in Chisinau. Ester had visited us at the time when my father bought a wagon of apples in Romania for resale, and the entire apartment was soaked in a fragrant odor and filled with numerous boxes. Later, our family had learned the tragic story of Ester's death. At age 16, she had married a Romanian engineer. In 1940 the fascist regime of General Antonesku came to power in Romania. In 1941 Ester and her husband tried to flee from the regime but their ship was sunk in the Black Sea. Perhaps it was the Bulgarian ship "Struma" that was hired to evacuate the Jewish refugees to Palestine but was hit by a torpedo from a Soviet submarine on February 24, 1942.
The youngest brother of Eliyahu Yankel died at the age of 20 from complications following his bike accident.
My story of the Meites family ends with my mother Genya (jet another sister of Eliyahu) who was called Anna most of the time. My father affectionately called her Kutzala, from the Romanian name Anikutza. The exact date of my mother's birth is unknown. Although her passport pointed to the year of 1906, I think that she was born closer to the dawn of the century because she remembered some episodes related to the 1903 pogrom in Chisinau.
Anna Meites, Eliyahu's sister (photo from the author's archive)
The Meites and Vaysman (my father's last name) families lived side by side, and after my parent's marriage, they stayed in the grandmother Tseytl's house, where I was born in 1928. I was named Yuliy after my grandfather Yoil. When I was 3, we moved from the Meites' house to the two-bedroom apartment on Prunkulovskaya Street in the yard of Mr. Katz. In this apartment, my brother Yefim (Khaim) was born in 1934.
In the memoirs above, my father mostly covered the Eliyahu's biography. I will just briefly review the milestones now.
Eliyahu (Eliya, Ilyusha, Ilya) Meitus was born on September 27, 1892 in Chisinau to Yoil Meites and Tseytl Averbuch. In 1906, his father sent him to Odessa where he graduated from the high school in 1910. In the same year, with Bialik's support, an eighteen-years-old poet published his first poem in Hebrew. After graduation, he went to the Sorbonne University in Paris but, because of the beginning of the World War One, returned to Bessarabia and went to the Petrograd University that he graduated in 1917 (with his major in history and philology). He also studied in Brussels, Belgium (the years unknown). Sometime during his education years, he married his first wife Betty (last name unknown) but they parted soon in the confusion of the Russian revolution (Betty stayed in Russia while Eliyahu went to Bessarabia). In his early life, he was a member of Tze'irei Zion (Youth of Zion) party, also active in Romania among Yosef Sprinzak, Haim Grinberg, Yosef Baratz, who were the 'Zionist emissaries'. From 1921 to 1923, he was a Principal of the Jewish school in the town of Soroki. In 1921 (or 1920), he married his second wife Lisa (Aliza) (1890-1964, her last name is unknown). From 1923, he worked as a teacher of Hebrew in Yassi and Buzău, Romania. In 1935, he went to Palestine where, after his wife's death (sometime after 1964), he married Batya (her last name is also unknown). Living in Tel Aviv, he continued to teach Hebrew literature and grammar in the Montefiore and Ge'ula high schools, translated and published his books. He died in Tel Aviv on June 19, 1977 at the age of 85, and was buried in Kiryat Shaul Cemetery.
Eliyahu Meitus and Lisa had two children: Doriel (Eliyahu's adopted son by marriage) and Yiel (Fifi). His grand- and great-grandchildren still live in Israel. I was in contact with some of them and received this beautiful photo of Eliyahu and one of his grandsons.
Eliyahu Meitus with his grandson Yoram. (Photo from Yoram Tamari's archive)