Brecht and Life: Two Poems [updated]

Here for your consideration are two short pieces by the German communist playwright, Bertolt Brecht.

I had been going to include death in the title of this post, because I decided to write it on Sunday, while I was at the memorial service for Annette Rubinstein, a personal hero, but in reading the two pieces, I realized they are really about something else. That something is what my friend Kathy Chamberlain calls the question of "how to be in the world."

I've have posted four pieces here at FotM in recent weeks about Dave Cline who died recently (and there's one more coming, for sure). The first one I crossposted at the left liberal DailyKos site, where several comments referred to this Brecht piece:

In Praise of the Fighters

Those who are weak don't fight.
Those who are stronger might fight
for an hour.
Those who are stronger still might fight
for many years.
The strongest fight
their whole life.
They are the indispensable ones.

That's from the version of The Mother that Brecht did with composer Hans Eisler in 1931.

While it is true, and provides a concise reminder of what we have lost with Dave's death, it also sets the bar a little higher than most of us are going to be able to reach.

So I was very glad that the cover of the little memorial book at Sunday's event for Annette featured another Brecht fragment:

Everything Changes

Everything changes. You can make
A fresh start with your latest breath.
But what has happened has happened. And the water
You once poured into the wine cannot be
Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water
You once poured into the wine cannot be
Drained off again, but
Everything changes. You can make
A fresh start with your latest breath.

Annette, who loved Brecht, was particularly partial to this poem, saying that in it Brecht has "succeeded in summing up the law of dialectics."

I don't know about that, but dialectical it is.

Yet as we know from our own experience, and from recent developments in cognition theory, fresh starts aren't always so easy to make.

But it's worth trying. And if it can help us make contributions like Dave and Annette did (and Bill Davis and Gideon Rosenbluth, and other fighters we have lost recently), it's worth trying hard...

UPDATE: I have revised the translation of "Everything Changes" to keep it materialist and not just dialectical.

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Annette Rubinstein, ¡Presente!

On Wednesday morning, June 20, we lost an amazing woman--an organizer, a scholar and a mentor to three generations of activists: Dr. Annette T. Rubinstein, who died at age 97.

Many New York City leftists, from the 1960s onward, encountered Annette as a teacher of literature and politics at the New York Marxist School, or a supporter of struggles for community control and prisoners’ rights in the Black and Puerto Rican communities. A previous generation knew her as a teacher at the Communist Party-led Jefferson School, a leader of the vital American Labor Party during the 1940s, a top aide to the radical East Harlem Congressman Vito Marcantonio, and a forger of united left electoral efforts through the 1950s. Throughout Eastern Europe and China, where she frequent taught, Annette was known as the author of two important Marxist literary studies: The Great Tradition in English Literature: From Shakespeare to Shaw, and American Literature: Root and Flower.

Annette was a model of someone who kept her commitment to the working class and to socialism through history's twists and turns--from the mass upsurges (like the 1930s unemployed councils which inspired her as a young woman) through the times of reaction (like the McCarthyite red scares that devastated the American Labor Party and ended her work in state-licensed schools). And she always emerged ready to reach out to a new generation of radical youth.

If I had to pick three things I most admire about Annette, I would say: she had great political line; she was a mensch; and she believed that working class people have a right to beauty and to a rich intellectual life.

Annette had an independent spirit and political compass that enabled her to struggle with an organization when she thought its line was wrong, leave if necessary (as when the CPUSA abandoned the ALP and other mass groups), and find new comrades and projects. Over the years, her political practice recognized the interconnection of class and racial oppression, never falling in to the race-blind populism so common in U.S. politics. She organized and authored eloquent pamphlets—models of great political writing-- on behalf of the young Black men imprisoned after the Harlem Riots, the Panther 21 and the Attica Brothers.

Annette had a rich emotional life as a single woman and never stopped making friends. She lent younger activists her time, her name and her home, embracing their projects without second-guessing or controlling but offering constructive criticism when you were ready to hear it. Without sentimentality or the psycho-babble of the boomer generation, she was always there for friends who were going through hard times.

As a teacher of literature, Annette brought people of all backgrounds into her classes to appreciate so-called high-art as well as popular literature, never dumbing down but always rejecting elitism and obscurantism. She always had the perfect poem for any political or personal occasion—called up from memory, of course.

She was cool. I’ll miss her a lot. R.I.P. Annette.

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