Bluma
LightNews LightNews
banner
bluma.bsky.social
Bluma
@bluma.bsky.social
150 followers 78 following 2.6K posts
Werewolf advocate, Golem appreciator. Writes a little about H. Leivick on https://blumalangerobertson.substack.com/
Posts Replies Media Videos
bluma.bsky.social
Quit bogarting the Frankenstein, man.
Recently the Paragod Players produced the ‘Golem,’ a play by H. Leivick who undoubtedly read Mary Shelly’s story of Frankenstein. Created out of clay and mud from the river….
November 12, 2025 at 3:50 PM
bluma.bsky.social
I keep saying that repetition in Leivick isn’t a bug, but a feature, and I think this poem (just including the end here) proves the point.

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

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

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

It’s like watching tv with my grandfather. I love it.
Mack and Junior lay on their bellies in the tall Philippine grass. Lying — legs outspread, rifles ready, at the foot of Bloodbath Hill. Twenty-four hours now that the battalion lay at the foot of the hill and could not reach its rounded top. They had assaulted the hill four times in twenty-four hours. The air was full of torn up earth, bits of stone, bits of flesh. And close behind the artillery barrage, the battalion had started to crawl uphill on their bellies, slithering from stone to stone, debris to debris, on uncovered, churned-up earth. But as they’d reached the halfway mark, mortar shells, the flames of machine guns began to rain downhill from the other side. And all around, there were blazing steel and iron flames, handfuls of tropical earth, the squealing, sighing and gurgling of wide-open, torn-open mouths. The battalion had retreated. Ten men were left lying here, there — five men, and they hid at the foot of the hill. And Bloodbath Hill, as the men has named it, was still again, sat, massive, unmoving, under the sizzling sun, as the day before and the day before that. Only here and there, on its grey, bowed sides, amongst the jungle grass, a stiff hand with curled fingers, a hunched back, an outstretched leg, an open eye, stared up at the sunny, blue, silent sky. The battalion lay on one side of the hill and the sons of the rising sun waited on the other side. Waited with mortars, sat on the top of the hill, hidden behind machine guns, embedded in trenches. Four times in twenty-four hours, and now the clock moved towards three ‘zero’ hour, the second-hand moving mercilessly toward the minute, the moment for attack number five. Behind the battalion, cracking and thundering, artillery began to tear apart the top of the hill, and the earth rose up to the sky, the sky descended to the earth, and the sun disappeared behind clouds of dust and smoke. And the battalion began to move, moving behind the barrage, the wall of fog from the explosions.
October 16, 2025 at 1:38 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Next up, ‘Bloodbath Hill’

(These are all about the invasion in the Philippines)
— We’re going into hell. The harmonica wheezed: I’ll be seein’ you ——————— — Brooklyn! — your girl, the one who’s down for half your insurance, she’ll be having a ball right now. She’ll be splashing out with five thousand of your smackers. — Her? — Brooklyn laughs — She won’t get a dime. The broad’s joined the WAVES and didn’t even ask me. Me, a soldier. The least she could have done was enlisted in the WACS in my honour. But no. Only the sailors with their light feet that attract them. To hell with her. I changed my insurance right away. Let her make some sea-bird happy. — That’s wifely gratitude. — And how, and how — Brooklyn sighs — she was great in bed. A demon, a she-devil… The harmonica sang again: I’ll be seein’ you ———————
October 15, 2025 at 12:00 PM
bluma.bsky.social
A small boat floated amongst the ship. A boat called an LST, built to sail right up to the shore, open its wide mouth, and spew trucks, jeeps and soldiers from its innards. Supply trucks, guns, rifles, ammunition rest in the belly of the LST, and the deck is loaded with war materials. And amongst the vehicles, crates of rifles, young men lie staring in the dark. Eight days they had been cutting through the sea, and tomorrow, on the ninth, the bloody shore must appear from the blue of the ocean. The youths lie in the LST, packs under their heads like pillows at night. Rifles resting close by their sides. Young men lie, thinking thoughts, rocked on the waves. In the darkness, a harmonica plays. The thin, yearning notes draw out across the length of the boat. The tune — a story of a girl and her soldier-boy: I’ll be seein’ you In all the old familiar places… The harmonica weeps, creeping into the eyes, into the throat — until —————— — Give it a rest, Okie — a hoarse voice shouts from somewhere in the darkness.
October 14, 2025 at 1:11 PM
bluma.bsky.social
October 6, 2025 at 4:43 PM
bluma.bsky.social
An Ahsoka Black Forest cake
October 4, 2025 at 7:34 PM
bluma.bsky.social
More than once I saw how you would, In the middle of the shtetl street, stop and speak, I heard your complaint well, how you asked Why you deserved to be driven from Eden. If someone, in their foolishness, once, once, An Adam, or an Eve, was a sinner — Why should their punishment remain as a yoke Forever, tormenting their children? The question, true, asked more than once, Even before you, but your pained words Awakened particular anguish in me, And from then on, you were the one I desired. I swore I’d bring you back there, From where the first Adam Was chased — to the land of joy, And now I’ve come to do it, as I swore. Quiet your fear, get up and come, I’ll take you to the gates of Paradise.’ So he spoke, the Snake, soft and pious, And I listened and believed his words.
October 3, 2025 at 9:57 AM
bluma.bsky.social
From 1949 and still pretty relevant.

(The entire article is very good, complete with its recollection of attending a Lubavitcher shul as an eleven year old just before the turn of the last century.)
I still think today: What wondrous bliss lies in ‘On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,’ in the deep belief that there is a divine eye which sees all, and a book where all that Man does is inscribed; that in the authority of the inscription, your life and your fate are decided, and in the awareness of this judgement, you turn to the further course of your days. I also think: Into what an unhappy darkness people, nations, all of us, all of us, are fallen, and fall further and further, when we remove from ourselves the vision that we all stand equally before judgement, that our deeds are meticulously recorded, and that we must give accounting of all our deeds. Everyone, everyone, equally. Without this vision and without belief in judgement over us, the world has attained its present catastrophes, its destruction and wars, the world has achieved gas chambers and crematoria, bloody Nazism, the painful desecration of mankind, the denial of its freedom and its character. We have written so much, it appears, in the recent era; we have written entire libraries of philosophy, of scientific works, so many histories and chronicles. We already have entire mountains of chronicles about the deeds of our present era, and — why? What do they alter? They aren’t pages of a record book for the judgement of the world; they aren’t ‘inscribed’ by a divine hand which perceives all in order to try mankind in its own accounting. Oh, a judgement certainly doesn’t come down upon the world today. The world is full of trials and prisons and with the liquidation of life. But who judges Man today? He sentences others. Continually, continually, others — but not himself. We have ceased to judge ourselves. Mankind no longer wants to hear as a divine power calls out and reads aloud the account of his own deeds, his own sins and crimes.
October 1, 2025 at 1:26 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Today Yiddish is drunk, on shore leave in Manila, and has gone home with a girl.
— All right, then. She stood before him naked. Frank remained sitting, shaken, his mouth open, his eyes starting from his head. Conceptión was tattooed from throat to knee. A wild riot of bizarre colours. Two butterflies rested on her breasts. A black cobra girded her hips, the head, with its fiery silver eyes, between her thighs. —I told you you shouldn’t look.
September 25, 2025 at 6:50 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Killing me is not going to bring back your apples.
September 24, 2025 at 12:23 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Rather be a tree.
I thought to myself: How good it is to be a tree in a garden, or a stalk, or even a blade of grass, but to be, to stand in one place, rooted deeply, and fulfil that which nature has decreed; to sprout, grow, blossom, ripen and — to die, and be sowed anew somewhere. In truth, there’s no difference, neither in life not literature, between large and small, between grass and tree. We have created that difference with our foolish pride and envy. Nature knows nothing of it. It’s good for the tree, as well as the stalk and the blade of grass. How terrible, though, it is for the wind, the meandering from plant to plant, unable to stop anywhere, not knowing what to do with itself, and losing itself in its own confusion; even worse, though, and more bitter, is the one whose only aim becomes hurling sand and stones at the vineyards. The vineyards are large and unfenced. And whoever wants to come and throw stones may come. A stone — sometimes it strikes, sometimes not. Even when it hits — so, the tree, or the stalk, or the blade of grass bends, bows, and straightens back up and again does as nature has decreed: To grow, bloom, ripen, die and — be sown anew somewhere; but the stone remains lying alone, silent and lonely; and even the hand which threw it doesn’t come to stroke it. The hand doesn’t grant its own stone a caress.
September 17, 2025 at 12:29 PM
bluma.bsky.social
Anyway, I got a new one for the box!

Leo! So close!
September 15, 2025 at 5:24 PM
bluma.bsky.social
in other news, how do Xenomorphs wear hats?
Do they balance them in the middle of the phallic head-fin thing? Over their face? Like a little felt foreskin at the back? One big hat over the whole shebang? A tiny little hat on the head that comes out of their mouth? Inquiring minds need not apply.
September 13, 2025 at 2:13 PM