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ou have probably heard about Solomon Fishkin of Dnepropetrovsk who dropped his poetic works down a dumbwaiter shaft in a tenement building off Gorki Prospekt in November 1941 moments before a Waffen‑SS commando bashed in his door and carted him off to his final solution. The consensus of his friends—and enemies—was that Fishkin probably would have avoided that fate—had he made the effort. Not only had he received ample warning about the likelihood of the raid, he also had had a variety of palatable opportunities to escape the city, including a personal invitation a year earlier from Abraham Cahan to come to New York and work for the Jewish Daily Forward. But true to character, this vainglorious “Yehuda Ha‑Levi of the Ukraine”, as he has been called, jockeyed his public image to the brutal end. “I hope this won't take long, gentlemen. You see, I have a very important meeting with my publisher this evening”, he is reputed to have remarked to the steel-helmeted soldiers as he raised and heaved the door to his apartment, half off its hinges, back into place, even making a clownish attempt to bolt the lock with a heavy skeleton key—at least that is how his neighbor, Vera Prokovna, described the scene when interviewed shortly after the War.

You may recall his poem:

Death cannot break down my door
or wrap his shroud around my daily habits.
Not me, my friend.
I've ordered a predictable end.
It's been waiting for me
unseen, like all things future.
Think of it as a lover's sweet kiss
and a shared glass of wine.
That is all I shall reveal:
a few hints about an intimate reunion,
expressed in simple Yiddish words.

Most admirers doubt he received his lover's sweet kiss or shared that glass of wine (Crimean champagne would have been more to his taste) with anyone, no matter how broadly one interprets the cosmopolitan coquetry of this poem, “My End” (“meyn sof” in the original Yiddish), a piece which tends to confirm that Fishkin's prophetic skills seriously lagged behind his poetic insight. Still, the fact that the bulk of this urbane poet's work—much of it unpublished in his lifetime—did manage to survive remains one of the minor miracles in the history of literature, comparable to the discovery of the vanished works of Catullus under a cask of wine in Verona around 1300, or finding Bacchylides’ elegies on a papyrus roll wedged between a mummy’s feet in Egypt in 1896.

It is truly an astonishing story which till now has only been partially revealed by the only person who could possibly know it, my neighbor—and I’m proud to say friend—Shaya Rachmanov. He has given me permission to tell it in its entirety . . . 

In those dark days, Shaya was a dental technician and lived one flight up from Fishkin in that building off Gorki Prospekt, his apartment on the opposite side of the landing. Fishkin was barely aware of Shaya’s existence, acknowledging him usually (if at all) with a perfunctory nod when they chanced to run into each other on the staircase. What he saw was a man, more or less his own age, but lacking in charisma or good looks. Probably if he had known Rachmanov was a dental technician, he might have been more inclined to exchange a few friendly sentences or proffer bits of flattery in the hope of currying some professional favor should he ever need dental work, dental appointments being notoriously difficult to get in those days.

Somehow Shaya was Fishkin’s antipode. Whereas Solomon delighted in crowds and radiated a charm that made most everyone who had any dealings with him—in particular women and homosexuals—swoon, Shaya had a sullen character that might easily have been misinterpreted as misanthropy. For the most part, he remained invisible to his surroundings.

Of course, like many introverts, Shaya too probably would have enjoyed letting his hair down sometimes or being quick‑witted and popular with the girls the way his downstairs neighbor was. He just didn’t know how to go about it. On the whole though, he was content with his bare-bones asceticism and comfortable nurturing a quietly pessimistic worldview à la Schopenhauer. My guess is: had Solomon Fishkin gotten to know Shaya, he would have probably—like all extroverts—been attracted—or envied—the latter's outer quietude and the inscrutable depths of what appeared to be a melancholic soul, imagining the other as the calm eye at the center of the storm of existence. In other words, an utter contrast to himself. Most likely, Fishkin wouldn’t have been able to cope with that sort of inner solitude for more than four hours running. He was as addicted to his audience of solicitous, pampering admirers as they were to him—even if deep down any true mutual affection was questionable. Moreover, it would have been impossible for him to forgo the attention he received from the coterie of spoiled and well‑heeled industrialists' daughters who constantly attended him.

Making the acquaintance of Rachmanov might have interested Fishkin for another reason as well: Shaya, like his popular downstairs neighbor, was just like himself a poet, an industrious wordsmith, whose lyrical and erudite manuscripts were etched out in the privacy of his sparsely furnished tenement apartment, works of great power, unread, unpraised, unknown. A fact that would have pleased Fishkin, for he always showed great respect for other literary craftsmen.

It should be added here that the two poets were neighbors not merely by chance. Shaya Rachmanov had taken the initiative, being seriously interested in finding a suitable means of crossing paths with Fishkin without appearing to be pursuing him in some unctuous way. Managing the move into Fishkin’s building, especially when you consider the housing shortage that prevailed in the city in those days, demanded unerring willpower. But Shaya, a pragmatic person, solved the problem easily by organizing an urgently needed bridge for a gap‑toothed commissar at the Bureau of Habitations.

Like many introverts, Shaya was not afflicted by a blanket shyness. In situations that did not depend on “social skills”, particularly when his survival was at stake, he was always a skillful player, ever ready to take all necessary risks—which explains, I should add, how he escaped his antipode’s horrible fate.

You see, on the day Solomon Fishkin was arrested, that same commando also had orders to ascend one more flight in order to fetch him as well. Had they achieved that goal, I suppose Shaya would have finally had the opportunity to meet his neighbor—and perhaps they might have discussed poetry, at least briefly.

But Providence had other plans for Shaya Rachmanov. For at the very moment the Einsatzkommando was bashing in his downstairs neighbor's door, Shaya chanced to open his own door, ready to leave for work. Hearing the ruckus below, he immediately understood the urgency of the situation, which is to say that they were coming for him next. With only seconds to plan his escape, he dashed into his apartment and snatched what he most valued: his manuscript. He locked the door behind him and hurried across the hall to his neighbor, Madame Vizhenskaya, an officer's widow in her early nineties. Because of her hearing impairment, he bellowed his predicament into her good (relatively speaking) ear—speaking Russian so the Germans wouldn’t understand should they take note of the talking upstairs. He had no doubt she would be willing to help him. Not only had he fixed her up with dentures—a practical profession like his is truly a godsend in hard times—he’d also regularly fetch wood from the basement for her stove and do some marketing for her. He entered her apartment and with cool‑headed alacrity dropped his manuscript down the dumbwaiter shaft in her apartment only minutes after his famous colleague had done the same. Then, from behind his neighbor’s door, he waited and listened. It was just as he had imagined: they were already hammering at his door. He heard a crashing and the snapping of wood, then the muffled sound of the harried Germans ransacking his apartment. He could not make out everything they were saying although he understood their language fairly well. When he heard them shuffling towards Madame Vizhenskaya's door, he reacted immediately. Not wasting a moment, he leapt into the dumbwaiter shaft and shimmied into the pitch blackness down the pulley rope, waiting silently below until he was certain the stymied storm‑troopers had left the building obviously frustrated that they had accomplished only half their mission.

Groping in the dark, he felt around for his manuscript, tucked it into his pants and shimmied up the rope to Madame Vizhenskaya's apartment. He bade his faithful neighbor a triste farewell, packed a small suitcase and settled for the only option available to him: to head for the countryside and link up with the partisans.

It was only after he had joined ranks with a group of Jews and antifascist Ukrainians in a forest outside of Pavlograd that he realized his error: the manuscript he had smuggled out of Dnepropetrovsk was not his own, although outwardly it resembled his, which is to say, it was the same standard school notebook sold at every stationery shop in town. His heart sank and his stomach juices turned bitter. That was his first reaction, followed by flurries of panic, desperation, mourning, confusion and disbelief. Not necessarily in that order. He closed the notebook a couple of times and opened it again, each time almost willing to imagine that his eyes had been playing tricks on him as a result of the enormous strain of the past days. But no. As he leafed through the pages, it became indelibly clear to him: he had not saved his own manuscript but a volume of Solomon Fishkin's unpublished works.

Once the initial shock, a state difficult to describe in words, had loosened its grip—and that took a while—he began leafing through that notebook and reading the pages, poem for poem, marveling at the high quality of the work. Naturally, the more brilliant the piece, the more the sharp edge of envy and sorrow pierced his heart. Still, he knew he was in possession of something valuable, noble, something he felt obliged to protect like he might a helpless child or a rare jewel until the madness around him abated and he could return this cuckoo's egg to its rightful nest. And yet, those pages, as precious as they were, never ceased to feel alien in his hands. Moreover, they served to remind him how much he pined for his own lost notebook, filled with so many words he had struggled so hard to find, to formulate, to fix in sweat and ink. Had circumstances been different, Shaya Rachmanov might have seriously considered returning to the dumbwaiter shaft in the tenement off Gorki Prospekt in Dnepropetrovsk to retrieve his own work. A wishful fantasy. A war was raging, and he and his comrades were slogging northeastward, daily drifting ever farther from his city on the Dnepr. Moreover, the enemy was sweeping across the countryside, and the continental winter was weighing in mercilessly. What could he do but tramp with his comrades through the snow, Fishkin's manuscript packed under his coat and fastened to his belly by a thick cord like a nursing infant, a captured German Karabiner 98k slung over his shoulder?

That was 1941. The War dragged on till one forgot it might ever end. Rachmanov veering ever farther from his city, first northward to Charkov and Kursk, then westward towards Smolensk and Minsk and southward to Bialystok and Bucharest. In the fall of 1944, he was entrenched at the west bank of the Vistula outside Warsaw along with the Red Army, poised for the decisive attack against the enemy. Finally, in April 1945, he rumbled into Berlin at the controls of a clunky Russian tank, rolling over the rubble of a city which lay in ruins like his own literary dreams. It should be mentioned that Rachmanov was not a poet whose subject matter had ever evoked any war between nations. He portrayed the struggles that raged within souls, a battlefield he had been seriously neglecting since fleeing Dnepropetrovsk. For four long years he did not hold a writing instrument in his hand. Instead, he had become eminently skilled in weaponry and had learned to kill with cannons, rifles, knives and even his bare hands. When the somber, battle-hardened dental technician from the Ukraine rode into Berlin, Solomon Fishkin's manuscript was still safely fastened to his belly, continually a cause of joy and sorrow. And yet, all those years, he had never given up hope of returning to his building off Gorki Prospekt to retrieve his own lost works from the dumbwaiter shaft. You might say it became his raison d’être to imagine a reunion with those abandoned poems whose content he could barely recall except to know that they incorporated the distilled expression of his soul through language. Years of yearning had transformed them into the fabric of an identity that had been frayed and torn by the exigencies of war. He couldn’t even be sure they existed anymore, or whether the house where they had been hidden was still standing. What's more, or better said, what's worse, the world in which they had been conceived—the inner and the outer one—now seemed as distant and irretrievable to him as some ancient, buried civilization. And then there was that other question: would his poems still mean anything to him?

Now, wandering through the ruins of Berlin and knowing the War was in its final throes, he dared to imagine that soon it would be possible for him to return to that place of his dream cravings. But what if he discovered that during that terrible winter of 1943, when fuel had been most scarce, his wispy old neighbor, Madame Vizhenskaya, had fished his manuscript out of the dumbwaiter shaft and burned it. Could he hold it against her? “Gospodin Rachmanov”, she would say to him, “I am very sorry to have to report this to you, but I used your lovely words to heat my kitchen. As you know, I do not understand your Jewish language, but I wish to tell you that your words were warm. They glowed and radiated heat for hours during the darkest days of the struggle to save the motherland”. Or what if rats had eaten his words for lack of alternatives, or if the rain had leaked through the roof and liquidated his pages? What if someone had discovered the manuscript and tossed it into a rubbish bin or published it under his own name? What if I die now, and my work is still nestled in its hiding place like a seed waiting for its season to come? Maybe one day someone will discover it, but will they be able to trace the authorship back to me? Maybe a critical edition will appear, accompanied by scholarly footnotes and various hypotheses about the references. If the manuscript is anonymous, as I expect it will be, they'll attribute it to the “Poet of Dnepropetrovsk” or to the “Dumb‑waiter Poet”. Or maybe to Solomon Fishkin!

Shaya Rachmanov did not make the journey to the Ukraine when the War ended. He continued on to Munich and Stuttgart and eventually emigrated to New York. There, thanks to him, the works of Solomon Fishkin he had salvaged from obscurity were published in Yiddish accompanied by an excellent English translation along with Fishkin’s early works. In the introduction, the publisher thanked the dental technician profusely and briefly described the daring odyssey that had saved the precious cache of poems. Granted, he only knew part of the story. As for Shaya, he too contributed something to the book: a few lines of verse he had once scribbled down in a Manhattan hotel room, the first and perhaps last poem he had written since the War began. It served as a kind of motto to Fishkin's work:

Some say the word came first,
others the soul.
God makes clay from both
and potters turn them
into pots and shards.

Shaya Rachmanov never returned to Dnepropetrovsk. He stayed in America, married, had three sons, the oldest named Solomon, and became a successful dentist in a mid-sized New Jersey town. Meeting him today, it is hard to imagine him as a partisan. Nor would most people suspect the poet in him. You see a quiet, aging man in an American suburb who speaks English with an accent. His downstairs neighbor, Vera Prokovna, confirmed in a letter to him written shortly after the War that the house off Gorki Prospekt had survived unscathed. Madame Vizhenskaya had died in the winter of 1943. According to a recent query I made, the house is still standing. Sometimes I wonder whether his manuscript may be there in the basement, waiting to be discovered, unless of course someone has already found it.