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A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov
A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov
A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov
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A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov

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This first full-length biography of Anglo- American poet and activist Denise Levertov (1923-1997) brings to life one of the major voices of the second half of the twentieth century, when American poetry was a powerful influence worldwide. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and interviews with 75 friends of Levertov, as well as on Levertov’s entire opus, Donna Krolik Hollenberg’s authoritative biography captures the full complexity of Levertov as both woman and artist, and the dynamic world she inhabited. She charts Levertov’s early life in England as the daughter of a Russian Hasidic father and a Welsh mother, her experience as a nurse in London during WWII, her marriage to an American after the war, and her move to New York City where she became a major figure in the American poetry scene. The author chronicles Levertov’s role as a passionate social activist in volatile times and her importance as a teacher of writing. Finally, Hollenberg shows how the spiritual dimension of Levertov’s poetry deepened toward the end of her life, so that her final volumes link lyric perception with political and religious commitment.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 17, 2013
ISBN9780520954786
A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov
Author

Donna Hollenberg

Donna Hollenberg is a Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is the author of H.D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity and the editor of Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson and HD and Poets After.

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    A Poet's Revolution - Donna Hollenberg

    S I M P S O N

    IMPRINT IN HUMANITIES

    The humanities endowment

    by Sharon Hanley Simpson and

    Barclay Simpson honors

    MURIEL CARTER HANLEY

    whose intellect and sensitivity

    have enriched the many lives

    that she has touched.

    The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of

    the Simpson Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of

    California Press Foundation, which was established by a major

    gift from Barclay and Sharon Simpson.

    A Poet’s Revolution

    A Poet’s Revolution

    The Life of Denise Levertov


    Donna Krolik Hollenberg

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

    BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

    University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

    University of California Press

    Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

    University of California Press, Ltd.

    London, England

    ©2013 by The Regents of the University of California

    Grateful acknowledgment for permission to reproduce material is made to the Denise Levertov Literary Trust and co-trustees Paul A. Lacy and Valerie Trueblood Rapport.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Hollenberg, Donna Krolik.

    A poet’s revolution : the life of Denise Levertov / Donna Krolik Hollenberg.

    p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-27246-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

    eISBN 9780520954786

    1. Levertov, Denise, 1923–1997. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Jewish Christians—Biography. 4. Levertov, Denise, 1923–1997.—Political and social views. I. Title.

    PS3562.E8876Z674 2013

    811’.54—dc23

    [B]2012025828

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    22   21   20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13

    10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

    In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

    To the memory of Howard Fussiner

    What is the revolution I’m driven

    to name, to live in?

    Denise Levertov, from Staying Alive

    CONTENTS

    Acknowledgments

    Prologue

    PART ONE.LISTENING TO DISTANT GUNS (1923–1948)

    1.The Walls of the Garden, the First Light: Beginnings (1923–1933)

    2.When Anna Screamed: Levertov’s Response to Nazi Oppression (1933–1939)

    3.The Double Image: Apprenticeship during World War II (1939–1946)

    4.Recoveries: Abortion, Adventure, and Marriage (1947–1948)

    PART TWO.A COMMON GROUND (1949–1966)

    5.Dancing Edgeways: Coming of Age as a Poet in the New World (1949–1955)

    6.The True Artist: Levertov’s Engagement with Tradition (1954–1960)

    7.The Poem Ascends: Taking a Position (1960–1963)

    8.To Speak of Sorrow: Levertov’s Emergence as a Social Poet (1963–1966)

    PART THREE.LIFE AT WAR (1966–1974)

    9.Revolution or Death: Living in the Movement (1966–1970)

    10.The Freeing of the Dust: The Revolution Hits Home (1970–1974)

    PART FOUR.SLEEPERS AWAKE (1975–1988)

    11.A Woman Alone: Beginning Again (1975–1981)

    12.The Task: Social Protest and Liberation Theology (1982–1988)

    PART FIVE.RESETTLING (1989–1997)

    13.Of Shadow and Flame: The Re-cognition of Identity (1989–1992)

    14.Beauty Growls from the Fertile Dark: Facing Death (1992–1997)

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    ILLUSTRATIONS

    1.Paul Philip Levertoff, London, ca. 1930

    2.Denise Levertov at one and a half years old

    3.Olga Levertoff with dolls

    4.Betty Mitchell, June Mitchell, Audrey White, and David Mitchell, summer 1939

    5.Stephen and Olive Peet, London, 1948

    6.Norman Potter, ca. 1940s

    7.Mitchell Goodman and Denise Levertov, Paris, 1948

    8.Denise Levertov, southern Europe, early 1950s

    9.Howard Fussiner and Barbara Bank Fussiner, 1963

    10.Denise Levertov and Nikolai Goodman, ca. 1968–1970

    11.Richard Edelman, Cochituate Park, summer 1973

    12.Beatrice Levertoff

    13.Swan in Falling Snow, photograph

    14.Guemes Island Sunrise, photograph

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    A great many people have contributed to this book. I could not have written it without the generosity and trust of members of Denise Levertov’s family: Nikolai Goodman and his partner, Emily Cartwright; Nefertiti; Howard Goodman; the late Sandra Gregor; Richard Strudwick; Iris Granville-Levers; and Julia and Francesca Levertoff. They graciously shared their memories and granted unlimited access to family papers.

    I am also deeply grateful to Denise Levertov’s many friends, who shared memories, letters, interviews, photos, and conversation. In Australia, Ian Reid. In Canada, the late Margaret Avison and David Bromige. In England, David Mitchell, David Hass, Dannie Abse, Sally Potter, the late Stephen Peet, Stanley Robertson, and the late Herbert H. Lockwood. In France, Jean Joubert and Maureen Smith. In Ireland, Catherine Boylan. In Italy, Jehanne Marchesi. In Mexico, Maria del Carman Abascal de Perea and Dr. Alfredo Jimenez Orozco. In the United States, Steven Guttman, Stanley Karnow, Mark Linenthal, Barbara Fussiner, the late Howard Fussiner, Saul Fussiner, Albert Kresch, the late Robert Creeley, Eavan Boland, Seymour Gresser, Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich, Eugene Smithberg, the late John Bicknell, the late Ted Enslin, Albert Gelpi, Barbara C. Gelpi, the late Grace Paley, Estelle Leontieff, Kathryn Maldonado, Kathleen Fraser, Paul Lacey, Jerome and Diane Rothenberg, Mark Pawlak, Phyllis Kutt, Richard Edelman, Richard Lourie, Paul Lauter, Henry Braun, Elizabeth Kuhlman, David Shaddock, Toby Furash, Isak Lindenaur, Judy Katz-Levine, Linda Falstein, Jean Stewart, Suzy Groden, Marge Piercy, X. J. Kennedy, Mike True, Sam Hammil, the late Jon Lipsky, Liebe Coolidge, Sam Green, Virginia Barrett, Carlene Carrasco Laughlin, Emily Warn, Jan Wallace, Mark Jenkins, Mary Randlett, Lou Oma Durand, Sister Jane Comerford, Valerie Trueblood, Karen Henry, David Ferry, Beth Frost, the late Michael Mazur, and Colleen McEllroy. Still others offered hospitality and moral support. They include Michele Sullivan, Barbara Celone, Gerry Wilkie, and Dr. Jerome Gans.

    I am fortunate to have had excellent research assistance at Stanford University from Christy Smith, Lauren Caldwell, Maia Goodman, Amanda Thaete, Elspeth Olson, and Megan Rowe. This assistance was supported by a series of grants from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. I am also grateful to my colleagues Lynn Bloom, Ann Charters, and Jonathan Hufstader, for reading parts of the book along the way, and to my children, Ilana Hollenberg and David Hollenberg, who helped with both research and reading. My husband, Leonard M. Rubin, accompanied me to many interviews, read drafts of the manuscript, was my interpreter in Mexico, and provided constant, invaluable perspective and support.

    I have benefited from the guidance of curators and librarians in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. I would like to thank, in particular, Maggie Kimball and Polly Armstrong at Stanford University, as well as all the good-humored staff in Special Collections there. I have also drawn on the manuscript collections of the Henry and Albert W. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library; the Washington University Libraries; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas; the Thomas Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut; the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library; the archives of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association of New York City; the Poetry Collection of the University of Buffalo Libraries; Special Collections at the University of Victoria Library; the Young Research Library at University of California, Los Angeles; the Houghton and Schlesinger Libraries at Harvard University; the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University; Special Collections at the University of Vermont; Special Collections at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, San Diego Libraries; Special Collections at the University of Kentucky Libraries; the Beinecke Library at Yale University; Special Collections at the University of Toronto Library; Special Collections at Flinders University Library; and the Swarthmore Peace Collection.

    Finally, at the University of California Press, I would like to thank my editor, Rachel Berchten, for her steady encouragement, and Kim Hogeland, who helped me with the manuscript’s final preparation. This book also benefited from the careful work of my copyeditor, Emily Park, to whom I am very grateful.

    Permission to quote from published works and unpublished material is granted by the Denise Levertov Literary Trust, Paul A. Lacy and Valerie True-blood Rapport, Co-trustees.

    PROLOGUE

    Take responsibility for your words, Denise Levertov admonished her students in the late 1970s. She sat in her office in the erect posture of a ballet dancer, brown eyes sparkling, curly hair unruly, speaking to her graduate poetry seminar about Hopkins or Williams, or perhaps H. D. She chose her own words very carefully, often pausing between them, sometimes even calling our attention to their sounds: "Meeasure, she said, mischievously drawing out the vowel sound in the first syllable, it rhymes with pleeasure." Once, after class, when I showed her a poem of my own that anticipated future changes in my life, she turned to me and repeated the word revolution, trilling the r and flashing her gap-toothed smile in conspiracy. "It’s from the Latin, revolvere," she said, offering historical validation.

    Many years passed before I understood the importance of that word to Levertov. Not only did it connote political activism and momentous cultural change, as in the Beatles’ song, but it also meant something more radical: a reawakening of the spirit, of understanding, of empathy, and of the capacity for transformation. This is what poetry achieves for both poet and reader. As Levertov said in the late 1960s, responding to the political crises swirling around her, If I speak of revolution it is because I believe that only revolution can now save that earthly life, that miracle of being, which poetry conserves and celebrates.¹ The title of my biography, A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, reflects this range of meanings.

    My book also attempts to portray Denise Levertov’s creative development. Who am I? was an endlessly generative question for this poet. When she was asked to contribute to a collection of self-portraits by writers in the early 1970s, Levertov sent a paragraph she had written as a writing exercise with her students titled Incomplete Monstrous Self-Portrait.² The prose was accompanied by a drawing of the creatures she had described, and above the drawing she scrawled, It was beyond my capacity to depict the total monster, but please accept this account of the parts instead. In this paragraph, she defines herself as having the traits of numerous creatures: In certain relationships she waddles clumsily, like a swan on dry land; in others she frightens people, like a violently affectionate dog. In her element, she can glide regally, like a dark-plumaged waterbird, and in the past she has been a chameleon, differing in form and type depending on her company. She concludes on a minor chord of astute capability linked with fervid vulnerability: she can carry burdens from forest to sea as sagaciously as the elephant, yet she beat[s] on lit windows with the wistful passion of any moth.

    Playful and high-spirited, this piece illuminates Levertov’s state of mind at the time that it was written. To construe oneself as a monster, even in fun, is revealing, to say the least. The early 1970s was a period of profound growth for Levertov, a time of pain and guilt as well as of renewed artistic commitment. She had just completed the poems in Relearning the Alphabet (1970), having emerged as a social poet out of the protest movement during the Vietnam War. The title poem is an exploration of the meanings of relationship, both with others and, more deeply, with an estranged self that is newly recovered. Its context is Levertov’s close connection with students at Berkeley and at MIT, who helped her to relearn the alphabet / relearn the world, as she put it.³ When one considers the romances and political activities in which she was engaged then, one can well understand her feelings of self-division and monstrosity.

    Levertov’s whimsical paragraph also foreshadows lasting issues of self-definition. Just two years before she died, she published a collection of memories and suppositions titled Tesserae (1995), referring to the small individual pieces of glass or stone that make up a mosaic. This book is the closest Levertov came to writing an autobiography. Although the playful sense of monstrosity is gone, the self-division remains: she chose to present her life in vivid pieces rather than as a coherent narrative. What are the implications of this choice? On the one hand, it presents a unique opportunity: Levertov offers these rich, discrete materials and the challenge is to discover and reveal the pattern implicit in them. On the other hand, it serves as a reminder that a person’s selfhood is fluid and unstable, dependent not only on social and political forces but also on shifting ways of seeing and thinking. Not only does a biographer have the challenge of discerning the relationship between public and private, official and secret selves. There is also the challenge of considering the extent and manner in which views of the self, as distinct from the biographical record, develop over the course of a life. My ultimate objective is to observe the connections between life and work in a way that illuminates the greatness of major poems, which are, after all, the most important facts in a poet’s life.

    These challenges coalesce and intensify in Levertov’s case when we consider the implications of her various names throughout her life. These begin with her first given name, Priscilla, which was dropped in early childhood. (Even her mother stopped using it after Denise reached the age of two.) In one of her first pieces of juvenilia, Levertov adopted the nom de plume Tittles, with which she signed a charming, illustrated novel about an eleven-year-old heroine, which she began at age twelve but never finished. She also signed this name on letters to her mother, some of them also illustrated, well into early adulthood. In its playfulness, Tittles is reminiscent of the Incomplete Monstrous Self-Portrait above. That she used it in letters to her mother is appropriate because it was her mother, from the very beginning, who encouraged Denise’s artistic and literary gifts.

    Another early nickname that Levertov used, first as a child in England and then as an adult in the United States, was Denny, or Den. Neutral in gender identification, it reminds one that, like many young girls and women of her period, Levertov downplayed her femininity in relationships with friends, presenting herself as a tomboy. Although she never signed her work with this nickname, she did call attention to the lack of traditional female paradigms for an adventurous life. As she put it in her poem Relearning the Alphabet:

    In childhood dream-play I was always

    the knight or the squire, not

    the lady:

    quester, petitioner, win or lose, not

    she who was sought.

    In Levertov’s case, this male identification is particularly poignant because her most important female role model for a life of pilgrimage was her sister Olga, nine years her elder, who was the troubled daughter of the family. In the 1950s, Denise changed the spelling of her surname from Levertoff, which is how it appears in her first book, The Double Image, published in England in 1946, to Levertov, and it remained so for the rest of her life. She made this change in order to distinguish herself from her sister, who had published her own first book, Rage of Days, one year after the publication of The Double Image. Although Denise had greatly admired Olga in her childhood, she disapproved of her sister’s later behavior, and the two became estranged. In 1964, shortly after they reestablished contact, Olga died prematurely. As we see in the moving poems about Olga in The Sorrow Dance (1967), her death prompted Denise to reevaluate her own roles in the family and in the world, and she later wished she hadn’t changed her surname.

    After Denise’s marriage to Mitchell Goodman in 1947, she often signed business letters with her married name, Denise Goodman or Denise Levertov Goodman, and she sometimes signed letters to friends Denny Goodman. Self-possessed professional that she was (and she was always self-confident as a poet), she still deferred in her private life to the conventions for married women of that day. She stopped this practice sometime before she and Mitch divorced in 1975, and she began to use her own name exclusively, reflecting the impact of the women’s movement on women’s public presentations of themselves.

    Beginning in the 1970s, Levertov increasingly referred to herself both in private and public simply as Denise, or Denise Levertov. By this time she had fully realized the legend implicit in her preferred middle name. In her 1967 essay The Sense of Pilgrimage, she claimed Dionysus as her name-patron, a mythic association that blends well with her father’s Hasidic forebears and her mother’s Welsh ancestor, Angell Jones of Mold.⁴ Dionysus is, of course, a savior-god identified with festive, rustic worship. In one of the many myths associated with him, he was a beautiful youth, torn to pieces by a bull and reincarnated as a grapevine. His later hero incarnation, Orpheus, was the same sacrificial god, torn to pieces by the Maenads.⁵ The agony implicit here is part of the paradigm for Levertov’s ongoing spiritual revolution.

    Orpheus is also a poet and musician, instrumental in several founding myths of poetry. Both qualities inform Levertov’s poem A Tree Telling of Orpheus, which was first published in 1968 with drawings by the author. Taking the persona of a tree who bears witness to an earth-shaking experience of the god, Levertov shows here what poetry means to her (and potentially to all of us). She dramatizes its power of transformation. The speaker is wrenched from the earth root after root as she follows the lead of Orpheus’s music along with her brothers, the other trees in the forest.⁶ In this, the most gestic of Levertov’s poems, the speaker, as animated tree spirit, finesses the contradictions of gender identity, becoming rapt in the wars, passions, griefs of humankind. This neutrality enhances her freedom of movement as well as her courage, for she stumbles, leaps, and winds in and out in an unrestrained dance that is ecstatic in its reach and intensity.

    Most important, after the presence of Orpheus fades, she and the others are changed forever by the memory of their experience:

    But what we have lived

    comes back to us.

    We see more.

    .........................

    The wind, the birds,

    do not sound poorer but clearer,

    recalling our agony, and the way we danced.

    The music!

    The splitting apart, the uprooting, although occasionally painful in the living, was nevertheless necessary for the poet in the world that Levertov became. It was also necessary for the future revolutions that characterized her later spiritual struggles and transformations. Levertov grew from the precocious child who signed her work Tittles, to the young Denny Levertoff, who sometimes found femininity and family ties constraining, to the mature artist who transformed monster into myth. She fully embraced the Dionysian associations of her given name, Denise. In the lasting vitality it implies, revolution felt and remembered, this process of growth is the key element of her life story.

    PART ONE

    Listening to Distant Guns (1923–1948)

    1


    The walls of the garden, the first light

    Beginnings (1923–1933)

    Ilford, Essex, with its two large parks, east and west of the River Roding, is notable for its semirural setting, yet it is only fourteen kilometers northeast of central London. A spirited six-year-old, Denise Levertov could easily walk the three blocks from her home at 5 Mansfield Road to the gates of Valentines Park, with its cultivated lawns and ample plea sure grounds. There, along the Long Water canal, she could wander alone among the stately London plane trees she grew to love and, seated in a leafy alcove, admire their reflection in the green water. Or she could pause in the romantic rose garden and imagine a scarlet bouquet gleaned from its pickings. Best of all, she could sit in a brick alcove at Jacob’s Well and make a wish, poised in reverie before the clear water. (This wishing well would inspire future poems.) If she wanted to play in a more ancient, wilder landscape as she grew older, she could ride on her scooter farther, to Wanstead Park, with its dense forest of firs and pines, its mysterious grotto, and its larger ornamental waters. She could pretend to sail grassy seas in the three-masted barque Emanuela and undertake daring adventures with a friend.¹ In both parks there were hidden paths amid the hedges to stimulate her imagination and old mansions to awaken a historical awareness. Accompanied by her older sister, Olga, she could walk in the lush fields and farms beyond the town’s borders, which were then easily accessible by foot, or travel deeper into the countryside on the red double-decker, open-topped buses. Unencumbered by a regular school day—she was homeschooled by her mother—Denise roamed this landscape until age twelve and returned to it frequently thereafter in her work.

    In A Map of the Western Part of Essex in England, a poem she wrote after emigrating to the United States in 1947, Levertov adds depth and nuance to the emotional importance of this region:

    the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,

    Roding held my head above water when I thought it was

    drowning me....

    Wanstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry.²

    Levertov’s birthplace provided a fundamental refuge from danger, an interest in the past, and a lasting penchant for imaginative transformation. As a child, Denise could not articulate the source of that danger, but she certainly intuited it, for, in the poem above, she links herself with her parents, who were themselves outsiders and immigrants in England. Estranged in a new environment, she now understands their predicament in her childhood. A sense of hazardous alienation lingers here, but Levertov does not dwell upon it. Rather, she reinforces a primary kinship with the places and people she loves, and she invests her childhood home with the remembered sweetness of a golden age: the walls of the garden, the first light.

    Priscilla Denise Levertoff was born at 9:15 A.M. on October 24, 1923, at 24 Lenox Gardens, in the town of Ilford, Essex. She was the youngest of three daughters born to Beatrice Adelaide Levertoff, née Spooner-Jones, an artistic Welsh school teacher, and the Reverend Paul Philip Levertoff, a scholarly Russian Jew who had converted to Christianity and been ordained as a priest of the Church of England. Her parents had met in 1910 in Constantinople, where her mother was teaching in a secondary school run by the Scottish Church and her father was lecturing as a visiting scholar. They were married in England, lived in Warsaw and Leipzig before and during World War I, and settled in England soon after the war ended. Their first child, Philippa, born in 1912, lived only six months before dying of a respiratory ailment. She was buried in Leipzig, where in 1914 their second child, Olga Tatjana, was born. Nine years later, Denise arrived, the only one in her family born in England.

    Cultural heterogeneity and personal loss marked the lives of Levertov’s nuclear family. Her parents (especially her father) were exotic birds in this ordinary English thicket. They had endured religious persecution, expatriation, family tragedy, and war, which could have crippled people with fewer intellectual and spiritual resources. Downplaying their privation, Levertov lauded these resources: not only were they all writers, her mother sang lieder and her sister was a fine pianist, and Denise emphasized the impact of the household’s foreign atmosphere upon her evolving identity. Even though she grew up with a passion for the trees, churches, and wildflowers of rural England, she viewed herself as an outsider: Among Jews a Goy, among Gentiles . . . a Jew or at least a half-Jew . . . among Anglo-Saxons a Celt; in Wales a Londoner . . . among school children a strange exception. This sense of anomaly continued into adulthood—Levertov often felt English, or at least European, in the United States, where she was usually considered American, and American in England—but it did not inhibit her artistic development. Her family had given her such confidence that, though often shy, she experienced the sense of difference as an honor, as a part of knowing (secretly) from an early age—perhaps by seven—that she was an artist-person and had a destiny.³

    What were the attributes of the members of this family who invested the child Denise with such inner strength, despite their own earlier suffering? What clues to her future do we find in their backgrounds? A richly textured robe of family legend envelops each of them.

    •  •  •

    Paul Philip Levertoff was a traditional patriarch. Both his perceptions of the world and his emotional attitudes derived from the Russian Jewish shtetl in which he was born and raised. In that world, as a boy of exceptional intellectual ability and linguistic talent, he was devoted to the divinely decreed obligation to study Scripture, a duty and a joy that offered a means of escape from dark reality, whether it be domestic troubles or religious persecution.⁴ He also had a bold heart and a rebellious personality.⁵ As he grew into manhood, his theological studies carried him beyond the Pale of Settlement, areas in Eastern Europe in which Jews were allowed to live, and away from the mainstream of his people. After he read the New Testament, he became convinced that Jesus was the Messiah and embarked upon the project of reconciling the two faiths. For the rest of his life, he considered himself a Jewish-Christian.

    In adulthood, Levertov saw this bold heart, the certainty of wings for the soul, as the essence of her father’s personality. In her poem Wings in the Pedlar’s Pack, and in her essay The Sack Full of Wings, she compares her father with Marc Chagall, his contemporary. Both men saw, as children, an old pedlar . . . carrying a big sack over his shoulder, trudging along the streets of Orsha, her father’s hometown, or through the city of Vitebsk, Chagall’s birthplace, which he made famous in his painting Over Vitebsk. This figure may allude to the Christian, anti-Semitic image of the Wandering Jew, who, in medieval legend, taunted Jesus en route to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth as a beggar until the Second Coming. Paul Levertoff’s Hasidic beliefs, imbued with the ardor of ecstasy inherited from his rabbinic ancestor, the Rav of Northern White Russia, contravened this noxious stereotype. He knew that the pedlar’s sack contained wings which would enable people to fly like birds, and he later interpreted that knowledge to incorporate the Gospel of Jesus as the Messiah.

    Paul Philip Levertoff was born in Orsha, Belarus, a town south of Vitebsk on the Dnieper River, to Saul and Judith Levertoff.⁷ His birth date is unclear: one source states October 12, 1875; another states October 14, 1878. He preferred the latter. His birth name was not Paul Philip, a Christian name. In a letter in Hebrew, his father, Saul Levertoff, employs the Hebrew-Yiddish name Feivel, which was probably Paul’s given name.⁸ His family were originally Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Spain to Russia after the Spanish Inquisition and there intermarried with other Jewish families noted for their piety and learning.⁹ According to family legend, he was a descendant of the founder of Chabad Hasidism, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, who was his mother’s uncle.¹⁰ The family thus had strong Hasidic roots, part of Paul’s heritage that he never rejected. He cherished an inherited copy of his great-uncle’s central treatise, The Tanya.

    Hasidism was one of two major social currents within Eastern European Jewry. Founded by Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem Tov (known as the Besht), Hasidism was a popular communal mysticism that arose in Poland in the eighteenth century, and despite bitter opposition by the traditional rabbinate, spread rapidly.¹¹ The Besht emphasized the importance of prayer and obedience to the Law above the study of the Law, where such study degenerated into mere intellectual exercise. Contrary to classical Jewish philosophers, the Besht also taught that divine providence extends not only to every individual but to every particular in the inanimate world as well, a view not unlike that of the pantheism of the Romantic poets whom Denise Levertov came to love. Further, "in the tradition of the Kabbala, the Besht taught that the end of Divine worship is attachment to G-d (devekuth), which is essentially a service of the heart rather than the mind. Since God cannot be understood rationally, it is by means of emotional commitment and obedience to the divine will that the human being can come closest to his Creator. Hence the Besht emphasized the intention of the heart (kavannah) in the performance of the Divine precepts. . . . Above all, the Besht endeavored to instill the quality of joy into Divine ser vice."¹²

    Dancing and singing are intrinsic to Hasidic religious worship, with special tunes for various occasions, such as the religious festival of Simhat Torah, which celebrates the completion of reading the Pentateuch. Hasidim may also dance after seeing their beloved rebbe face to face, honoring his leadership. Olga Levertoff fondly remembered that, in her childhood, her father often rejoiced upon reuniting after a separation from his family by dancing with her. In tune with his childhood, he sang a Yiddish-inflected nonsense song—Yachiderálum, pûzele, mûzele—in accompaniment.¹³ The Hasidim even dance in mourning, in loving memory of the deceased. In this context, as in Levertov’s poem In Obedience, written after she learned that her father rose from his bed shortly before his death to dance the Hasidic dance of praise, dancing allows a free expression of grief, which often includes guilt, and takes one beyond these feelings.¹⁴ As Levertov wrote, Let my dance / be mourning then, / now that I love you too late.¹⁵

    Hasidism spread across political borders. By the nineteenth century, half of all Eastern European Jews had joined its ranks, although different Hasidic groups interpreted the principles of the Besht idiosyncratically. Schneur Zalman was known for his intellectual enthusiasm. He insisted on the three pillars of wisdom, understanding, knowledge (which in Hebrew form an anagram for Chabad), and eventually became the leader of the Hasidim of Belarus. By the late nineteenth century, when Paul Levertoff was born, the breach between the Hasidim and their rabbinic opponents had been healed, and the Chabad branch had come to represent the ultra-Orthodox position in Jewry.

    The Levertoff family was prosperous. Despite pervasive anti-Semitism, the czar had awarded Paul’s father, Saul, the status of Hereditary Honorable Citizen, a classification that customarily applied to influential or very wealthy townspeople.¹⁶ He is listed in one source as a sometime Principle of Theological College, Poltava.¹⁷ The Levertoff family claimed relationships by marriage to several wealthy Jewish business families in Saint Petersburg, including the Poliakoffs (bankers) and the Günsbergs, who acquired titles. Saul Levertoff read and spoke Russian as well as Yiddish and Hebrew, and he was a good mathematician. He was acquainted with the local Christian intelligentsia, with whom he conversed, and as Levertov wrote in her unpublished Notes on Family, Most unusual for a pious Jew, he seems to have read some Russian literature—Tolstoy for one.¹⁸ Thus, he probably was receptive to the ideas of the Haskalah, a second important Jewish movement in Eastern Europe.

    About the same time as Hasidism was born in Poland, the Haskalah originated in Germany. The followers of this movement, the Maskilim, encouraged Jews to abandon their exclusiveness and acquire the knowledge, manners, and aspirations of their national homelands.¹⁹ They emphasized the study of biblical Hebrew and of the poetical, scientific, and critical parts of Hebrew literature, rather than the Talmud, and they opposed the superstition they associated with Hasidism. In turn, they were denounced as destructive heretics in Russian Jewish communities, where they were accused of hastening assimilation. By the mid-nineteenth century, when the Russian government began to introduce secular education among the Jews, the tide turned toward the Maskilim, and at the end of the century, all the new movements in the modern era grew out of the Haskalah. Jewish nationalism, and even Orthodoxy, adopted elements of its legacy.²⁰

    Both Hasidism and Haskalah existed in the context of the greatest threat to the Jewish world, a particularly virulent wave of anti-Semitism that pervaded Russia’s political factions after Jews began to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Among the radical Left, Jews were portrayed as Western urban foreigners who live at the expense of the Russian people. Among conservatives, Jews represented the West, introducing modernism into Russia . . . and undermining the old order. Ironically, the reforms of Czar Alexander II exacerbated this situation, as Jews were granted new economic powers. According to the anti-Semitic press, which the government encouraged, the Jewish exploiting leaseholder of the old type, who served the Polish aristocracy, was now the new Jewish capitalist, who inflicted damage in his modern metamorphosis. The Jews of Russia were deeply disillusioned by these sentiments, but they could not stop their escalation. The pogroms that broke out in 1881, after Czar Alexander was killed, were a virulent culmination. Further, under the rule of the next two czars, Russian nationalism identified itself with the Russian Church, and religious persecution continued to assume brutal and anti-Semitic forms.²¹

    This was the turbulent, dangerous world into which Paul Levertoff was born and from which he extricated himself. Not surprisingly, he seemed to have few childhood memories. Typical of Orthodox Jews, he was one of many children. He spoke with emotion of one little sister . . . who died at an early age, Levertov recalled in Notes for Nikolai. Later, after Paul’s own first child died in infancy, his wife, Beatrice, thought his deep depression revived this earlier loss. Paul also remembered that one much older sister . . . had gone to study medicine in Zurich, which Denise interpreted as meaning that she must have been among the "enterprising young proto-revolutionary women [Peter] Kropotkin writes about so movingly in his wonderful Memoirs. Every year, when Denise was a child, a certain delicious apple called Cox’s Orange Pippin would remind her father of the shtetl garden, where similar apples grew. He also recalled that when the ice was breaking up in the spring he and other boys used to jump from ice floe to ice floe for a ride down-river—very dangerous and of course strictly forbidden. Denise treasured this memory, in particular, because she loved to think of her studious father, who seemed so sedentary," being so audacious.²²

    Like other boys of his time and place, Paul Levertoff began to study the Torah and Talmud at a very early age. He was taught by his father and in a traditional Hebrew primary school (cheder). He first encountered the New Testament and Jesus when he was eight or nine, on the way home from playing with friends. Levertov later recalled this family legend as follows:

    As he trudged homeward my father’s eye was caught by a scrap of printed paper lying in the gray, trampled snow. Though he was a playful, disobedient boy . . . he was also . . . a little Talmud scholar, respectful of words; and he saw at a glance . . . that this paper was not printed in Russian but in Hebrew. So he picked it up and began to read. Could it be a fragment of Torah? Never before had he read such a story about a boy like himself who—it is said—was found in the Temple expounding the scriptures to the old, reverent, important rabbis!²³

    He took the rescued page home to show his family, but instead of praising Paul, his father became very angry. He tore the page into pieces, thrust the pieces into the stove, and told his little son to avoid such writings, but did not explain why. The child was, of course, awed to see written words destroyed—Hebrew words, and his curiosity was awakened about the boy in the story.

    After his bar mitzvah, Paul was sent to the Volozhin Yeshiva, in nearby Vilna, to continue his studies. He acquired an exemplary rabbinic education there, receiving his diploma early, in his midteens. Unsure about a rabbinical calling, he then considered becoming a doctor, but when he returned home and found the family mourning the passing of his little sister, he felt a great horror of death and rejected medicine as a career.²⁴ Paul was sent instead to the University of Königsberg, in Prussia, to obtain a broader university education. A center of the Haskalah, Königsberg was a world of cafes and open lectures and libraries and concerts, a world where Jews and Gentiles mingled in bewildering freedom.²⁵ There, two sons of a Lutheran pastor befriended him, taking him to meet their family, who made him feel welcome.²⁶ On one occasion, when he went with them to church, Paul found in a pew a copy of the New Testament in Hebrew, and he was enraptured by the Gospel of Saint John, which he felt to be Hasidic. He was reminded of his childhood curiosity, and always a devout person, he felt that God had guided him to this new knowledge of Jesus as the Messiah.

    Thus Paul Levertoff redefined his Jewish identity at a time when the traditional frameworks of social life had been undermined, but he felt this change as a deep religious experience, a spiritual revolution. As Levertov would explain, her father thought that those Jews who did not recognize Jesus were mistaken because at the time of Jesus they had come to imagine the Messiah as a political leader who would free them from Roman rule, rather than as the spiritual reformer prophesied by Isaiah. Paul’s Jewish scholarship strengthened his conviction, and he didn’t—then or later—feel that he was turning his back on his own Jewish people, but on the contrary, that belief in Jesus Christ, a Jew, . . . was the fulfillment of Jewish hope.²⁷ When he went home to share his discovery with his family, however, they were dismayed. At first they thought he had gone mad; then they were terribly angry. Paul broke off relations with them, returned to Königsberg, and was baptized on August 11, 1895. He chose the name Paul to express his affinity with the most passionately Jewish of Apostles.²⁸

    Since he was now without financial aid from his parents, Paul supported himself by tutoring and undertaking translations to and from the various languages he knew, which included Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew, German, and Greek. Also, because of his new religious status, he was now a full Russian citizen, and since he was of military age, he returned to Russia to do military service.²⁹ Beatrice remembered Paul telling her that, while back in Russia, he stayed for a few days in Vilna with relatives who secretly telegraphed his presence to his father. When the two were re united, his father persuaded Paul to return home and was almost reconciled to his son’s baptism. But when they went to the synagogue, which Paul did willingly, his father tried to prevent him from disclosing to the congregation that he was now a Christian. Paul could not accept this denial, and he left home abruptly a second time. Early one morning, he packed his belongings, climbed out of the window, and fled to Saint Petersburg. There he became acquainted with the librarian of the Royal Library, himself a Jewish scholar, who advised and helped him. First Paul did military service at Tzarskoe Selo, site of one of the czar’s palaces near Saint Petersburg; as a university student, Paul was automatically a noncommissioned officer. He served there for ten months in the cavalry and taught the peasant recruits to read and learn their drill. This duty over, Paul assisted the librarian until he had saved enough money to travel to Palestine, where he went to study Aramaic in the place where it was spoken at the time of Christ.

    Levertov gives us an alternative version of the motive for her father’s excursion to Palestine, a version that conveys his youthful charisma as well as his independence. According to her, during Paul’s stay in Königsberg, it was arranged for him to lodge with an Evangelical pastor who had assisted in his baptism. Such was Paul’s piety and reputed academic success that, despite his Jewish birth, this pastor began to think of him as a highly eligible son-in-law. His elder daughter welcomed this prospect heartily, for although he was not tall, Paul was handsome, with curly dark hair, deep-set dark eyes, and rosy cheeks. The pastor encouraged Paul to approach his daughter by commending the security and comfort of a German academic career and suggesting that he may be blessed to take holy orders. Eventually matters became critical. When Paul realized that a marriage proposal was expected, he rushed upstairs to his bedroom and began stuffing books and clothing haphazard into his trunk. He fled from this essentially hypocritical society. His religious faith was intense and unwavering—but it was not in order to be absorbed into a Gentile world that he had broken, in sorrow, with his father and mother, but to be, as he believed, the more fully a Jew. After this experience, according to Levertov’s story, Paul left for Jerusalem.³⁰

    In a scholarly account of Paul’s early career, Jorge Quiñónez wrote that, soon after his baptism, in 1896, Paul found employment as a missionary with the London Jews Society, a Protestant organization. He worked full time in this new vocation until 1901, when he changed mission organizations and joined the staff of the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel (HCTI).³¹ It is not clear why he made this change, but Levertov speculates that her father found the first group culturally ignorant and felt he had been manipulated into working for them as a speaker at meetings.³² The HCTI had been founded in 1893 by David Baron and Charles Andrew Schönberger, themselves Jewish believers in Jesus, and Paul was more comfortable there. Its headquarters were in London, which suited Paul, Beatrice Levertoff later remembered, because he could use the British Museum’s library to work on his doctoral thesis.³³ He traveled throughout Europe and the Mediterranean with David Baron, and he contributed essays to their periodical, The Scattered Nation, beginning in 1901.

    For nearly a decade, Levertoff served as the HCTI’s principal Hebrew translator and writer. He was prolific, publishing seven original works and translations in Hebrew between 1902 and 1909 with several London publishers, including HCTI. In 1910, Baron announced in The Scattered Nation that Paul had accepted an invitation from the United Free Church of Scotland Jewish Committee to take the position of Evangelist in Constantinople and thus had resigned from their missionary board.³⁴ Perhaps it was before assuming this position that Paul journeyed to Palestine, continuing on to Constantinople from there. In any case, in Constantinople in 1910, he met Beatrice Spooner-Jones, whose dark hair, intelligent brown eyes, and fervent soul complemented his own.

    •  •  •

    Denise’s mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones, was born on June 29, 1885, in Abercanaid, Glamorganshire, South Wales. Her father was Walter Spooner-Jones, MD, and her mother was Margaret Griffiths. Just as Paul Levertoff was of distinguished Hasidic descent, Beatrice claimed the mystic Angell Jones of Mold as an ancestor. (Walter Spooner-Jones was his grandson.) A master tailor by trade, Angell Jones was also a famed expounder of Scripture, and young men came from throughout Wales to work with him and to discuss the Bible in an exegetical style similar to that of the Eastern European Jews. Beatrice’s ancestry shared other similarities with Paul’s. Like the Jews, the Welsh were a conquered people, and for several centuries they remained quite untouched by English language and laws except along the border. They did not share the same class hierarchy that existed in England, and also like the Jews, they had the typically Celtic reverence . . . for learning and for poetry and music.³⁵ People who excelled in these pursuits were considered Welsh aristocracy, even though they might be poor shepherds or shoemakers. In an early poem, Levertov proudly claimed the values of the Illustrious Ancestors on both sides of her family tree.³⁶

    Beatrice’s father, Walter, studied medicine and surgery in Scotland, and after graduating, he married and brought his bride to the coal-mining village of Abercanaid, where he was the junior member of a medical team employed by the mining company. The safety conditions at the mine were poor and the incidence of tuberculosis and early death among the miners and their families high. Walter often had to go down the pit to operate at the site of an accident, despite the danger to his own health.³⁷ When Beatrice was two and a half, her mother died in childbirth. Dr. Spooner-Jones, a young widower with a young child, soon remarried, but his second marriage was unhappy. Beatrice was increasingly neglected by her stepmother, who became a drug addict and lay in bed most of the day. When Beatrice started school, she would arrive unkempt and usually late.

    Despite these circumstances, Beatrice didn’t have an unhappy childhood in other respects: she enjoyed her freedom even though it stemmed from neglect, and she had happy times with her father. She sometimes accompanied him on house calls in the evenings, passing groups of miners singing on the streets.³⁸ He also took her along when he socialized with friends, where she was frequently the only child, silent in the midst of adult conversation. Thus Beatrice developed habits of observation and reflection that made her an excellent storyteller. As Levertov wrote, The music and the stars must have been mysteriously connected for the little girl, out and about when the other children of the village had been put to bed.³⁹ They later became connected for Denise, too, as she listened to her mother reminisce.

    When Beatrice was ten, her stepmother died and she and her father went to live in an apartment above his office in nearby Methyr, where his coachman’s wife cooked for them and looked after Beatrice. When Beatrice was twelve, her father—still in his early thirties—passed away, another stunning blow. Now an orphan, Beatrice was taken to live in Holywell, Flintshire, where her maternal aunt Elisabeth (Bess) was the wife of a Congregational minister, the Reverend David Oliver. They were older and poorer than some of the other relatives, but they were more willing to take in a girl reputed to have 7 devils, meaning that she had opinions and a certain adventurousness. Holywell was a big change for Beatrice: Neglect and freedom were replaced by strict care and many duties, in a house hold from which most of the older children had gone . . . but in which her two youngest cousins were close to her own age. Eventually the cousins went to a special boarding school for clergy daughters, while Beatrice had to settle for the local high school. Now the only child at home, she had to do domestic tasks alone. She felt like a ‘poor relation’ and resented it.

    Beatrice was fortunate to have teachers in high school who recognized her ability and encouraged her love of history and English literature. She wanted to go to university, but lacked money, so she became a pupil teacher and earned a teaching certificate. In these years in high school and teacher training, Beatrice developed her beautiful singing voice, read widely, and drew and painted. She loved Mount Snowdon, with its sheep-cropped grass and tiny flowers and the sound of the distant sea you could hear in a clump of pines if you closed your eyes.⁴⁰ She also enjoyed the people of Holywell, whose eccentric behavior she described later in tales that she would perform, imitating their speech and manners in a comical way. Levertov persuaded her to record these tales and tried unsuccessfully to interest a publisher.

    In 1904 and 1905, when she was around twenty, Beatrice was influenced by the religious revival. People began to cry that something had to be done about the lost who attended services but then left without hearing an invitation . . . to repent and believe. All over Wales there arose congregations longing for revival, led by charismatic preachers who imparted new energy and vision. Young people were very much part of the excitement, which now included women as well as men.⁴¹ Before long, the twin principles of worshipping and obeying the Spirit gave dynamic force to meetings held in every village chapel and town hall. Seized by this fervor, Beatrice, like her husband, experienced a spiritual revolution early in life. Although its form of expression changed, it was an authentically deep experience and provided the foundation of an enduring faith she and Paul would later share.

    When she finished teacher training, Beatrice wanted to go to Paris as a governess, but Reverend Oliver, her guardian, thought it a sinful and dangerous place for a respectable young woman. He consented when she applied for a teaching post at the Scottish Church School for Girls in Constantinople, however, because of its church auspices. Just before Beatrice left on this adventure, an old washer-woman expressed the sentiments of others in her small community when she cried, "Oh Miss Jones, I do admire your bravety! The sights and experiences of that journey through the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1909 remained with Beatrice for life, Levertov remembered, and when her mother described the handsome, Serbian or Albanian, mustachioed young men in full ethnic regalia she had glimpsed, her father got quite jealous," decades later.⁴²

    Beatrice interrupted the long train journey in Budapest, where she was met by representatives of the Scottish Church who escorted her to their home-in-exile to spend the night in a flat on an upper story of a local building. In her vignette about that stay, called A Dumbshow, Levertov conveys her mother’s characteristic curiosity and imagination, which were, in addition to courage and pragmatism, key elements of her personality. When Beatrice awoke in Budapest early in the morning, she raised the unfamiliar Venetian blinds . . . and looked forth into the summer morning from her lofty window. She was amused to see a maid on one of the balconies below, hanging out feather beds and a pillow on the balus-trade, something simply not done in the British Isles, lest the neighbors suspect fleas. Beatrice enjoyed the exoticness of this custom and the feeling of being far from home.

    When she arrived in Constantinople in 1910, Beatrice had to acclimate herself to the awkward situation of being an unveiled woman there. The western Europe an teachers could not walk alone in the streets but walked in twos, and even then they were exposed to rude remarks and pinches on their upper arms, so that they would sometimes return black-and-blue from a shopping or sightseeing trip. Beatrice had signed a five-year contract with the school, but after just a few days there, she met Paul, who had arrived in Constantinople for a lecture series.⁴³ All the church-related groups were eager to hear this young converted Jew from Russia who was reputed to be an excellent speaker, and he was entertained by the head of Beatrice’s school. Thus Paul and Beatrice met and fell in love, and he remained in Constantinople and courted her over the next few months. He proposed, and she accepted, but there was consternation at the school both on the part of the administration, who were understandably angry, and the students, some of whom wept at her departure.

    Beatrice and Paul wanted to marry in Britain amid a gathering of her relatives, but to travel alone together would have been scandalous, so a teacher returning home to Germany agreed to chaperone them. Their route differed from the one Beatrice had taken on the way to Constantinople. They traveled by boat to Piraeus, then along the coast of what is now Croatia, and then to Venice. On the boat was a large party of wealthy Roma, who, in their gorgeous embroidered clothing and gold jewelry, flashed about the deck like birds of paradise. One of them, the elderly Gypsy King, was very sick, but he could not make his needs known to the captain because of a language barrier. Fortunately, Paul, who spoke both languages, intervened on his behalf. The invalid received what he required, and when the ship docked, the leader of the whole group—tall, moustachioed, jacket aglitter with silver braid—made Paul and Beatrice a promise that became family legend. He said that because of their help on this voyage, gypsies anywhere . . . would be grateful . . . : it would be necessary only to describe the event, and any Romany would be at their service.⁴⁴ Beatrice took this promise seriously.

    After traveling through Germany, Paul and Beatrice arrived in Wales. Paul was duly introduced to Aunt Bess and Uncle David Oliver, but Beatrice thought Paul was not adequately appreciated because he was a foreigner, without family or secure income. So Beatrice went to Liverpool to stay with her cousins, the Barkers, during the customary time between engagement and wedding, while Paul went to London to undertake some paid scholarly work. According to a family story, the wedding did not take place on the original date, because Paul lost some of the money with which they were to embark on married life. How this occurred was vague, but the version Denise loved, probably apocryphal, is that Daddy was gleefully counting his well-earned payment while crossing London Bridge, and the wind blew it up and tore it away! Another version, which she felt was more likely—because he was "a lifelong magnet to schnorrers (freeloaders)—was that he gave the money away. While he was in London, Paul sent Beatrice a love letter in Welsh, which greatly impressed her relatives. He had found the words by correlating passages in the Welsh Bible and patching them into sentences."⁴⁵

    Paul and Beatrice were finally married in England, on March 1, 1911, by another of Beatrice’s cousins, a nonconformist minister, who performed the ceremony at his church.⁴⁶ The reception was held at his home. The next morning they left for Warsaw, where Paul had a job lined up with a missionary society. The start of their honeymoon engendered another family legend. In the hotel, hours after the wedding, Beatrice wondered if she had married a madman, as Paul started to rush frantically around the room exclaiming, ‘Where’s the, where’s the, where’s the . . .’ He had mislaid the key to his briefcase with the money, tickets, passports and everything in it.⁴⁷ That phrase—Where’s the, where’s the—passed into family idiom, and Denise and Olga would exclaim it to express utter exasperation.

    •  •  •

    Warsaw in 1911 was very sophisticated, and though under Russian rule, resembled Paris. Beatrice was impressed by the stylish Lajenki Allée—equivalent to the Champs Élysées—with its glittering shops, smart carriages, beautifully dressed people, and elegant cafés. Amused by the Polish language because it seemed all consonants, she asked Paul to teach her Russian. He told her to repeat after him, Llubyu, lyublyu, dorogoi moi, which she did enthusiastically, and when a passerby beamed broadly, Paul confessed that the words meant, I love you, I love you, my darling. That she returned the embrace of this new world is evident in the signature in her 1911 diary, Beatrissa Pavlovna Levertoff. (She also called her husband Pavel, his Russian name.) One vivid memory was of a Sunday walk in the outskirts of the city, where Beatrice and Paul saw a long line of Russian conscript soldiers—peasants—being marched back to barracks from the Russian Orthodox Church, who sang marvelously as they walked. In the late poem Representations, Levertov fondly recalls this story of her mother’s. She pictures the bride from a distant country watching these singing Russian soldiers and feeling nostalgia for Wales, where one would hear the dance of voices of the colliers practicing for an Eisteddfod, twilights of summer.⁴⁸

    Warsaw was also an important book publishing center, and it is probably in that connection that Beatrice accompanied Paul on a visit to the home of Zeitlin, whom she describes as a great man. This was probably William Zeitlin, the Russian scholar and bibliographer, author of Bibliotheca Hebraica Post-Mendelsshnonia. Beatrice was dismayed by the disarray of Zeitlin’s home and by his unkempt appearance, but she enjoyed following the subtleties of his conversation with Paul about Hasidic and Kabbalistic literature. She was especially pleased that Zeitlin had not only read Pavel’s books but alluded to them in his work.⁴⁹ In a later newspaper article, Paul mentioned having also been welcomed into the home of the late Shalom Aleikem, the Jewish Dickens, and that [Joseph] Brenner, the famous Hebrew novelist, had favorably reviewed his life of Christ.⁵⁰

    There were also other trips to spread the word in the surrounding area and abroad. On one memorable occasion in 1911, Beatrice accompanied Paul on a monthlong journey to Scandinavia and Germany. The trip’s purpose was the International Jewish Missionary Conference held in Stockholm from June 9 through 11, but they stayed on to sightsee in other parts of Sweden and then traveled to Copenhagen and Berlin before returning home to Warsaw.

    When Beatrice and Paul arrived in Stockholm, they went immediately to the conference location to socialize with other delegates. Beatrice attended several of the learned sessions at the conference, sketching some of the participants in her diary and commenting on their papers. (She was a talented amateur artist who later researched, wrote, painted, and published a foldout panorama of first-century Jerusalem.) She was delighted with the men’s choir, with the many languages spoken, and with the warm reception given to her husband’s work. Indeed, Professor Hermann L. Strack, one of the most distinguished attendees, confirmed her sense of Paul’s success among his colleagues. In the conference proceedings, Strack praised the work done recently in the presentation of the life of our Lord to the Jews by Loewen, Levertoff, and Landsman, mentioning also "Levertoff’s St. Paul: His Life, Works and Travels, 1907 (in modern Hebrew)."⁵¹

    •  •  •

    Considering his strong reputation, it is not surprising that Paul soon obtained a post more suited to his scholarly abilities. As Quiñónez writes, He was appointed to the position of teacher of Hebrew and Rabbinics with the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum, a postgraduate institute for Jewish missions founded by Franz Delitzsh in Leipzig, Germany.⁵² The institute’s director publicized that Levertoff was relocating from Warsaw to Leipzig on April 1, 1912, to replace another distinguished Maskil, of Romanian Hasidic descent. Between 1912 and 1917, Paul taught a variety of courses, including ones on the Yiddish language, on the New Testament in Hebrew, and on various books of the Tanach based on traditional rabbinical commentaries.

    Paul Levertoff flourished in his new job and the couple were very happy together. Their lives were soon filled with additional joy when Beatrice gave birth to their first child—a daughter, Philippa—on October 4, 1912. Denise remembered being told that Philippa was a beautiful brown skinned baby, and she added perceptively, Two orphans had now founded a new family.⁵³ Then, when only six months old, Philippa became ill. She died within days, on April 9, 1913. Beatrice recorded her burial in her diary as follows: "Little body laid in the ‘Kindergarten’ April 12. We went up there to see it 13th . . . the record of a short, but Oh! so lovely little life. The victim of ignorance, for which God has forgiven but for which we can[not] forget or forgive ourselves till we see her again. Our darling!"⁵⁴

    This death would have distressed anyone, but because Beatrice and Paul had no close family, it was especially grievous. Levertov felt that her father was particularly depressed because he did not have the experience with death that her mother had acquired early, first in the mining village and then in Holywell, with its high incidence of infant mortality. Paul became so run down in his depression that he lost all his teeth, she wrote. However, it was not only her early experience with death that made Beatrice the stronger of the two in some respects. Hers was also the more grounded personality. Now, as in the future, she was the one in the family who reassembled the pieces of their temporarily shattered lives.

    Beatrice went to Wales to visit her relatives in October 1913 while Paul traveled in Russia and

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