Bay nakht afn altn mark / At Night in the Old Marketplace (1907) is a modernist phantasmagorical play by the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz. In 1925, it was staged for the first time at the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, remade to fit the Revolution. Solomon Mikhoels played the Badkhn. Later Mikhoels was executed with the other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In 2007, the play was remade again as A Night in the Old Marketplace by Frank London and The Klezmatics.
Something is always missing.
This is a story: there’s a marketplace
at midnight. Your voice
calls the dead to awaken.
You’d been a wedding jester here, a Badkhn,
with a tender, slightly mocking cadence
giving the poor bride to the rich groom,
a merchant.
She wanted someone else,
someone younger, rosy-cheeked, but you joked
you lamented
you told off-color parables to the guests:
and, so the story goes, she fled,
threw herself into the well
in the middle of the marketplace.
The merchant—well, he got himself a bear,
became a recluse. That rosy-cheeked fool
of a lover of hers—
he drank himself to redness.
This is not a story: kaleidoscopic.
Dancers, sex workers, revolutionaries, merchants,
Kabbalists, Cossacks, undoubtedly somewhere a goat
nibbling on the roof; it would eat the moon, too, and
standing on the roof, the goat
would play the violin, but the singers
of Brod, one with his own violin, another with a red banner,
have scared the goat away. A house of study.
The moon clutches
the town to its translucent bosom.
You dream of revolutions
and dust; you dream
of your own story.
This is a story: you regret
her death.
Regret
outweighs the moon and all the goats that dance on it.
You blow the night watchman’s whistle;
the sounds of the shofar—
t’kiah—
t’ruah—
t’kiah—
mix with the wedding melody.
Above the town, where once there was a moon,
a cemetery now hangs in midair.
The mechanical rooster
turns. The dead
begin to spill out of their graves.
Sheyndele, too cold for any wedding,
has arisen
from her well.
This is not a story: a Recluse with his bear.
He once was a merchant, successful, tall,
bearded, in a tailored kaftan,
married—almost—
but she wanted someone else. Anyone
else: blood, rifles,
the nuptial kiss of water: anything.
The bridegroom—
he, too, was reluctant.
That’s a different story.
This is not a story: There is no resolution
but the Word. And bird:
the mechanical rooster
in a town of fragments.
There is no resolution
but this kaleidoscope
of forgettings, and then questions:
words, awaiting
that single Word. An order. An ordaining.
Waiting—forever, it seems.
This is a story: somewhere above the town
dead Sheyndele and her drunk fool
dance under the black canopy
in the cemetery in the sky.
But you—the wedding jester—are not there.
You’re wondering about the bear.
There hasn’t been a bear
before. This is the grand rehearsal
of a play that’s never been performed
as written (or even fully written: always changing).
There is a further
disintegration in this, a story that collapses
into itself like a burning Torah scroll
into ash, like regret
into a well, like revolutions
into murders, like a hand motioning
downwards—
Ah. That was you,
trying to take a different tack. “Go back–”
you cry, and the cemetery
vanishes.
The bride returns to dust, her drunk beloved
fast asleep under the gibbous moon.
You are still here—a Badkhn with no wedding.
no canopy: not for the living or the dead,
no roof. No town. No banner,
no promise of a brighter time;
no wedding klezmer.
The Recluse hangs around.
Tell me a parable—
he says. His voice scrapes low
at the white moon-gate of the garden of the night:
tell me a riddle,
a divination,
a secret.
He, too, had hidden things. One must
become a recluse
to conceal a bear
and all that goes with it.
This is a story: this is always the story,
but just queering it is not enough
to ease the sheer impossibility of history
or even change much,
if you’re honest with yourself –
because the tale undoes all moods except this one.
The no-escape. The crushing melancholy.
It swallows all—
the living and the dead,
each time the moon, and all the revolutions,
the stage set with its rooster, and the town,
and all the losses and regrets:
even itself;
even the hidden Word.
The Recluse says,
Tell me a story which is not a story.
You say,
Ask me a question from this silence.
You’ll try again.
You’ll tell and you’ll untell this one
—no jest—
under a different canopy
(sometimes it’s yours)
in each disjointed time and tangled way,
until a tiny bit, however small, is mended
of this devoured, despairing world
and maybe not alone
and maybe even now
R.B. Lemberg (they/them) is a queer, bigender immigrant from Ukraine to the US. R.B. is an author of six books of speculative fiction and poetry, an academic, and a translator from Ukrainian and Russian. R.B.’s work has been shortlisted for the Le Guin Prize for Fiction, Nebula, Locus, Ignyte, World Fantasy, and other awards. You can find R.B. on Instagram at @rblemberg, Bluesky at @rblemberg.bsky.social, and at their website rblemberg.net.
