The Golden Peacock’s Gift

“You must have heard about the golden peacock: It used to be quite famous . . .” Benny Mer, a gifted and prolific translator from Yiddish to Hebrew, knows very well that his young Israeli readers have probably never heard of the golden peacock, but that’s the point. His new children’s book, Notzat ha-zahav (The Golden Feather) reintroduces the famous bird.

The golden peacock, or di goldene pave, is a recurring figure in Yiddish folk culture, the subject of legends, poems, and popular songs. It isn’t like the peacock we know, whose magnificent blue-turquoise tail is so heavy that it can barely fly. The golden peacock is a mythical golden-reddish bird whose main trait is its ability to fly very long distances across land and sea$. The golden peacock carries letters between separated lovers and delivers messages of yearning between separated parents and children. It is also the object of fantasies about journeys to remote, beautiful realms.

The magical peacock makes frequent appearances in the poems of Itzik Manger (1901-1969). Like peacocks, Manger said, Jews cannot really fly: Their lives are too bound by oppressive realities. But the Yiddish folk tradition gave this peacock, and those who sang about it, wings of imagination that allowed them to rise high above the ground and dream of other lives and places.

For authors who wrote during and after the Holocaust, the golden peacock was a symbol of the world that had been destroyed. In a poem by Aaron Glanz-Leyeles, the peacock now delivers messages only to those who are dead:

There it flies, the flaming bird,

With the force of the most distant stars.

Send greetings to the millions of dead ones,

Who cannot see or hear.

In a poem by H. Leivick, the golden peacock itself has been murdered:

On the stone the peacock lied, strangled,

Both its wings plucked off,

And the crows, in a scorching murderous act,

Have devoured our golden peacock.

In an especially beautiful and gut-wrenching poem, Manger describes the golden peacock as flying everywhere in search of “bygone days.” Wherever it goes, it asks, “Have you seen the bygone days?” No one knows what it is talking about, and the peacock is ridiculed: “a goldener foygel un a nar aza!” (a golden bird, and such a fool).

Like Manger, Benny Mer sees the golden peacock as an embodiment of Yiddish culture and language. But for him, Yiddish is alive and vibrant. Mer has played an important role in the Yiddish revival that has been quietly taking place in Israel for the past twenty years or so. After decades in which Yiddish was rejected in Israel, and in the early days even sanctioned (it was once forbidden to publish daily newspapers in Yiddish), Israelis are rediscovering it. A growing number of people of all ages are now seeking Yiddish lessons, Yiddish theater, and Yiddish books. For some, it is a way to reconnect to the world of parents and grandparents; for others, it is a way of deepening their Jewish identity in a new and unexpected way.

In Mer’s book, the golden peacock finds itself alone and goes searching for new friends. It “rises like a phoenix” and takes flight. On its path, the peacock makes stops in Greece, in the Caucasus, in Siberia, in Japan, in Argentina, and even in Eritrea. Much to its surprise, the peacock repeatedly encounters children who speak some Yiddish. Through these encounters, the readers learn a good number of phrases and words, from a dank (thank you) and kum aher (come here) to in der heim (at home) and zei gesunt (be well).

Grateful for the warm welcome of Yiddish-loving children, the peacock leaves each of them with a gift: a golden feather from its magnificent plume. This is an interesting reversal of a traditional motif. In Yiddish lore it is a bad sign for the golden peacock to lose a feather, a marker of grief and shame. In Mer’s book, the peacock generously leaves a part of itself wherever it goes.

Like the feathers of the di goldene pave, Yiddish continues to live in the most unpredictable of places. At some point along its journey the peacock runs into a flock of myna birds who mock it, calling it ugly and “exile-like” (galuti), the derogatory Hebrew term for anything reminiscent of the diaspora and especially the old Eastern European world. But the golden peacock doesn’t care: It soars even higher.