Zechariah Choneh Bergner זכריה חנא בערגנער, better known by his pen name Melech Ravitchמלך ראַוויטש, was a Yiddish poet, essayist, playwright, and cultural activist, one of the world's leading Yiddish literary figures both before and after the Holocaust. His poetry and essays appeared in the international Yiddish press and in anthologies, as well as in translation. Born into an artistic family in Radymno, eastern Galicia, to Efrayim and Hinde Bergner, he received a general secular education as well as schooling in Jewish religion and ethics. At fourteen, he left home to begin a life of travel that would take him to the four corners of the earth. His 1937 volume, Continents and Oceans: Songs, Ballads and Poems Asiatic, American, and African…, was the culmination of travel to more than 46 countries.
As a young man, he lived in Lemberg and Vienna, working in a bank and serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I.
Emboldened by the 1908 Czernowitz Language Conference, he became involved in the Yiddishist movement and began writing poetry. His earliest poetry appeared in Der yidisher arbeyter in 1910. Other work of the period included the 1912 collection Oyf der Shvel – On the Threshold, and Spinoza in 1918.
In 1921 he moved his young family to Warsaw, which he believed was the world centre of Yiddish literature, and where he was strongly influenced by Peretz Markish and Uri Zvi Greenberg. The three writers belonged to the modernist literary ‘Gang’, Di Chaliastre. During his intense years in Warsaw, Ravitch edited the journal Di Vog – The Scale; he was literary editor of the Bundist daily, Naye Folkstsaytung – New People’s Newspaper; he was co-founder of the Yiddish literary journal Literarishe Bleter. Between 1924 and 1933, he served as secretary of the Yiddish Writers' Union at the famous 13 Tłomackie Street, the centre of the Jewish secular cultural movement, which then included Sholem Asch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I J Singer. The union sent its writers all over Poland to lecture to the Yiddish-speaking masses on every subject. Ravitch was a charismatic character feted wherever he went.
Melech Ravitch was a vegetarian, and patron of the Jewish Vegetarian Society.
In 1933, after witnessing the rise of Hitler and anti-Semitism, and following his wanderlust, Ravitch persuaded the Bundist Central Jewish School Organisation – TSYSHO, to send him on a fundraising mission to Australia, where, on his own initiative, he intended to look for a homeland for the Jews in what seemed to him the furthest and safest place in the world. He visited all the mainland capitals before travelling overland from Adelaide to Darwin. There was a train to Alice Springs and another from Birdum to Darwin. From Alice to Birdum there was no train and barely a road, so he undertook a bold, rugged journey of nearly 1000km in a small mail-truck.
Melech Ravitch with a young Aboriginal woman in Darwin
Tragically, for the persecuted Jews of Europe, despite further interest in an Australian homeland from the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, and the presence in Australia from 1939 to 1943 of its co-founder, Dr Isaac Steinberg, the plan to establish a Jewish settlement in the “never-never” did not eventuate.
Ravitch documented his journey in a journal with photographs. He tells of farblondszetter camlan (lost camels), kanguru gayug (kangaroo hunting), and a naches tzu zen vi er fligt mayn bumerang (the pleasure of seeing my boomerang fly). He thought that the problems of the outback could be solved with mer vaser, veyniker bier (more water, less beer)! The diary became articles for the Naye Folkstsaytung in Warsaw, which in turn became a book, Across Australia.
Melech Ravitch’s artist son Yosl Bergner, in 1990, was inspired by his father’s outback adventure to create a series of paintings called Melech Ravitch in the Kimberleys, conflating his father’s journey with Steinberg’s later one. Thus began the persistent myth that Ravitch went to the Kimberley, which the evidence of his writing tells us he seems not to have heard of. He certainly never went there. He got as far as Darwin and never tried to go further west.
Melech Ravitch (centre) in Birdum with his Italian mailman driver and Aboriginal assistant
Ravitch left Australia after his outback quest, but returned again in 1935, progressively bringing his wife Fanye, dancer daughter Ruth, and artist son Yosl. His brother, Herz Bergner, also a Yiddish writer, settled in Melbourne in 1938. Ravitch couldn't save his people but he did save his family. He helped establish the first, Yiddish, ‘I L Peretz School’ in Melbourne, and was its inaugural headmaster. He was also the founding editor of the Australian Jewish Almanac.
He left Australia again in 1937, after Yosl arrived. As a self-declared ‘citizen of the world’, he subsequently travelled to Argentina, Mexico, and New York before settling in Montreal in 1941, where he became a catalyst for Yiddish literature, education, and cultural activities. He spent the rest of his life there with the librarian Rokhl Eisenberg, until his death in 1976.
Sources: YIVO Archival Resources; Melekh <http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/8559/Melekh-Ravitch.html> Ravitch Biography; Rosa Safransky, “The impossibility of translating Yiddish” Directions, March 1991; Hilary McPhee, “Looking beyond economic ambition” The Age, 3 August, 2002.
Updates thanks to Anna Epstein, author of Melekh Ravitsh The Eccentric Outback Quest of an Urbane Yiddish Poet from Poland