One of Itzik Manger’s great contributions to Yiddish poetry was a style he termed literatoyre — a portmanteau of “literature” and “Torah.” In developing this genre, he was tapping into a longstanding Jewish tradition of both formally and informally translating biblical text into vernacular languages, as well as the creation of novel Rabbinic-styled legends and extrapolations on Biblical stories. Manger (1901–1969) wrote his own poetic retelling of the Book of Esther, as well as a volume called Khumesh-lider, both of which transfigures Biblical characters into Yiddish-speaking Jews. The effect is obviously humorous, but it also serves to shrink the cultural and historical distance separating Eastern European Jews and the characters they considered to be their patriarchs and matriarchs.

“Our Father Avrom Holds a Sholem Zokher” imagines a biblical episode occurring after the birth of Isaac, when his parents Sarah and Abraham were 90 and 100 years old, respectively. The previous poem in Khumesh-lider depicts Sarah and Abraham being visited by three strange men who predict that the elderly couple will, in all unlikelihood, conceive a child. In “Our Father Avrom Holds a Sholem Zokher,” Manger imagines Abraham observing an Ashkenazic custom of hosting guests on the first Friday night of a newborn boy’s life (Sholem Zokher literally means, “peace upon the male”). The ceremony itself is anachronistic for the Biblical Patriarch, and Manger in typical style lays heavy on the details. Some are ethnographic, like the hanging of protective amulets engraved with Psalms (shir-hamaylesn), the round, sable-lined hats (shtraymelekh) worn by the singing guests, and the eating of peas, a round food associated with the Jewish life cycle. Manger’s other innovations create dissonance between the “modern” Eastern European setting and the ancient, Middle Eastern source material. In describing the three guests in Abraham’s vision as well as the niggun sung at the ceremony as “Turkish,” Manger toes the line between cosmopolitanism and Orientalism and also creates a parallel to the Christian tradition of three kings or wise men coming “from the east” to visit the newborn Jesus.

What is interesting about Manger’s depiction of Abraham is that the new father doesn’t seem particularly aware of his covenant with God or identity as a Patriarch; he and Sarah just seem a regular Jewish couple who have been inexplicably surprised with a child in their old age. There is an unsettling element to Abraham’s vision of the Turkish guests, the way they are “Holding on tight to the thread / Of the small child’s cries,” how they tell Abraham to remember their previous visit and Sarah’s disbelieving laughter. It’s as if Abraham doesn’t know the guests are angels, or if he does, he doesn’t understand why these angels should be so interested in him and his son Isaac. The amulets on the walls which bookend the poem link the Patriarch Abraham to King David the Psalmist to any old Avrom (or young Itzik) in 1930s Poland.

Manger may be bringing Abraham into the Yiddish reader’s cultural landscape, but at the same time he is giving the reader a unique glimpse into Abraham’s psychology at the moment. By removing some of the foregone conclusions of Abraham’s destiny and zeroing in on a scene outside the official biblical narrative, Manger allows pious and secular Yiddish readers alike to see Abraham as an ordinary man in rather extraordinary circumstances. We have the opportunity, not always allowed in a traditional Jewish setting, to ask what we as individuals might have thought, felt, or done in the Patriarch’s place. Like any literature, the poem has the capacity to deepen one’s faith or one’s cynicism.

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“San Gabriel” first appeared in Federico García Lorca’s 1928 poetry collection Romancero gitano. García Lorca (1898–1936) described his poems as comprising a “retablo,” or carved church altarpiece, of Andalusia, his native region of southern Spain. As the book’s title suggests, the poet placed particular emphasis on the folklore of the Andalusian gitanos, as Romani people are called in Spanish. “San Gabriel” is the third in a triptych of poems about three major Andalusian cities – Granada, Córdoba, and Seville — and three biblical archangels — Michael, Rafael, and Gabriel.

On its face, “San Gabriel” is a ballad retelling the Gospel story of the Annunciation, in which the Archangel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary and tells her that she will become pregnant with Jesus Christ. But in Federico García Lorca’s version, the setting is now a street in Seville, and the woman being visited is a “well moonlit and poorly dressed” gitana named Anunciación de los Reyes. Some elements are taken straight from the Gospel text, like Gabriel’s greeting, “Hail…” (“Dios te salve…” in Spanish) which became the opening of the Ave Maria prayer. Like Itzik Manger, García Lorca playfully incorporates some material anachronisms – such as Gabriel’s patent leather shoes. But what is truly anachronistic are the many indications that Anunciación is already immersed in a world of Andalusian folk-Catholicism, similar to how Manger’s Abraham seems to be some sort of chassid. Take her own name: Anunciación literally means “Annunciation,” and is a name that might be given to a girl born on the feast day commemorating the biblical Annunciation. De los Reyes means “Of the Kings,” and could refer to the “Three Kings” who visited the infant Jesus or “La Virgen de los Reyes,” another epithet of the Virgin Mary who is a patron saint of Seville. Of course, none of these names are logical if we are to read this ballad as a simple retelling of a biblical story. Neither does it make historical sense for Gabriel to be the “great-grandson of la Giralda,” the latter being the tower of the Seville Cathedral, which was originally built at the turn of the 13th century as the minaret of a mosque. And if Anunciación is a stand-in for Mary, to call her “mother of one hundred dynasties,” is, in the literal sense at least, rather unorthodox. Throughout the poem, García Lorca switches between past and present verbal tenses, intentionally confusing the narrative.

We’re left to wonder what García Lorca’s overall intentions may have been. From the narrator’s descriptions of Gabriel’s otherworldly beauty and Anunciacion’s erotic response: “Your gleam spreads open the jasmine / Upon my flushed face,” we could interpret the encounter as a sexual one, maybe ending in a non-immaculate conception. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to definitively trace out any kind of coherent heresy or Gnosticism in the poem. If nothing else, García Lorca is raising up a “dark-skinned and wondrous” yet ordinary gitana woman to a position of near-divinity, rewarded for her and her people’s piety by becoming a mother, maybe not of the Messiah, but of a child “more lovely / than the stem of the breeze,” whom she will still love divinely.

At the end of the poem, Gabriel disappears up a ladder into the sky, and the stars “became then everlasting.” This is Federico García Lorca at his cleverest and most poignant: in Spanish siempreviva literally means “everlasting,” but it is also the common name of a Mediterranean flower with bright, golden blooms. Sometimes heaven and earth do meet, and well-known stories take surprising paths. Such miracles do happen from time to time, at least in García Lorca’s retablo and Itzik Manger’s Midrash.