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Lekoved Halloween, I’m thrilled to publish my first guest post – this feldmestn-inspired Yiddish poem by Jake Schneider, the English translation of which is published here for the first time. The poem follows an introduction written by Jake, describing the feldmestn-ritual-meets-Halloween-cabaret-act that inspired it. With huge thanks to Jake for sharing this with me and giving me permission to post it here.

Our Astronaut: A Report from the Gravestone Sales Yard

by Jake Schneider

The poem below was written in 2022 for a performance at one of the bars where Berlin’s Yiddish-speaking social club, Shmues un Vayn, often gathers. Robert the bartender had put out a call for performers to make “experiential stuff happen” at their “fully candlelit” Halloween party, and I thought I could bring some Yiddish culture into this pagan holiday and perhaps wear one of the frumpy frocks I often pull out this time of year. Thanks to Annie Cohen and this website, I had recently learned about a near-forgotten tradition of Jewish women communing with the dead in a mystical ritual known as feldmestn (graveyard measuring), which uses thread to measure out wicks for “soul candles.” I’d also been learning about the history of Yiddish drag and had just watched a video starring Mikhl Yashinsky as the sorceress Bobe Yakhne – a Goldfaden character traditionally played by a man since 1878. It all fit together somehow. I sent a message to Robert proposing a performance along these lines, adding: “I should warn you my drag is TERRIBLE.” Nevertheless, he agreed.

I soon enlisted my friend Rose, a fellow Berlin Yiddishist, as an accomplice. On the Sunday night before Halloween, we pondered the possible contours of the performance. Eventually, with our ideas still hazy, we found some thick green thread in my sewing kit and carried a printout of Annie’s guide towards the nearest (non-Jewish) cemetery. But it was late, and the cemetery gates were locked. 

I was partly relieved to be shut out of the real cemetery at that moment. It didn’t feel right to simply cut and paste this neglected tradition into a Halloween party. We were running the risk of mocking such a serious practice, especially with me, a man, participating in one of the few Jewish rituals led exclusively by women. But there was also a thrill in making this intimate tradition our own, in affectionately queering its mysticism. Throughout the week, I tried to balance artistic playfulness with a somber reverence for both the ritual and the dead.

And so, improvising, we crossed the street from the locked cemetery to the sales yard of a stonemasonry company, H. Albrecht (est. 1883). On display was a selection of uninscribed headstones for sale in different styles and materials: classic arched slabs, rectangular prisms, and sinuous shapes in polished granite, laser-cut quartzite, or hand-chiseled limestone. The yard itself resembles a kind of cemetery-in-waiting, a stark reminder of our collective destination. (Undz tsu lange yorn; may we all live long lives – not to tempt the evil eye here.) Suspended above it is a permanent crane on metal tracks, something like the arcade game where you try to manipulate a “claw” with a joystick to grab a prize, except the crane is for hoisting gravestones into the air before they are inscribed with a person’s name and shuttled to that person’s new resting place. Some prize! (And again: Undz tsu lange yorn!)

With the green thread, Rose measured out the fence of the stonemasons’ yard. As she worked the thread along its crossbeam to ascertain its precise length, I read a tkhine from Annie’s guide aloud. In the silence and darkness of that hour, the measuring ritual was altogether solemn, though we were afraid someone might walk by and spoil the atmosphere with curiosity or, worse, laughter. Fortunately, nobody did. We remained alone with the stones.

But being alone was not enough. I needed kavone, presence of mind. A marble sculpture of an astronaut in the middle of the yard kept pulling my thoughts away from the words I was reading.

Feldmestn, in my limited understanding, creates tangible ties between the living and the dead, between the human remains underground and a spiritual world overhead. The dead act as heavenly representatives, advocates with our best interests at heart. Measuring graves and graveyards is one way of making contact with them, first by remembering and visiting them (the main point in my view), second by determining the dimensions of their resting places and by extension their bodies (a practical task that helps us engage with them more fully), and third (all practicalities aside) by burning the measured thread as a wick, sending smoke into the immeasurable sky.

But here was this astronaut, suited up for the vacuum of space. Instead of taking a “spacewalk” through the void, as humanity’s representative to the heavens, he had planted his feet firmly on the ground of my own neighborhood. He had brought the heavens back to earth.

These two sets of thoughts – the mystical Jewish ritual and the idolatrous distraction – mingled in my mind, and on Monday they became the poem.

On Wednesday, Rose came over to my apartment again. In my kitchen, we coated the lengthy green thread in warm white wax, folded and braided it, and molded rustic soul candles with our hands while invoking the names of ancestors and lost loved ones.

As a fire-safety test, I lit the first completed candle over the sink as we listened to the folksinger Lifshe Schaechter-Widman’s 1954 version of an obscure Yiddish song that had been sung, in some form, since at least 1891.  The recording begins

and culminates with a verse addressing the biblical Jacob, my namesake:

The three simple stanzas, which I’d found by searching the keyword “death” on the Yiddish Song of the Week database and listening to many of the results, haunted the run-up to Halloween. In my efforts to master the lyrics and the intonation and the Bukovina accent, I had Lifshe on repeat in my earphones and sang the song constantly, especially in the shower.

On Saturday night, the bar was an unrecognizable place full of cobwebs and flickering candles. Robert the bartender was sporting a papier-mâché headdress bearing thirteen eyes, unknowingly reminiscent of the Jewish Angel of Death. I was there as a new grandmotherly persona, Bobe Kosmos, clad in a long black dress, with a modest headscarf over my curly wig. I was also wearing an absurd number of jangly necklaces, including faux-brass beads worn by my late mother and a ceramic eagle pendant from my late grandfather’s kiln.

The other party guests were a cross-section of the bar’s regulars, including several Yiddish-speaking friends, one of them, Jordan, likewise in drag.

I set up an impromptu shrine in one corner, which I arranged with an assortment of mementos, including photographs from Sunday night, a steel kiddush cup, a terra-cotta oil lamp made by my late grandmother, several bowls of fresh herbs from the supermarket, and of course our soul candles.

The performance in the main room of the bar had four segments:

1. Rose explained the basic principles of feldmestn to the audience, then asked everyone to cluster in the center of the room, away from the wall, an act that turned them from spectators into participants. 
2. In character as Bobe Kosmos, I walked clockwise around the crowd incanting my new astronaut poem in Yiddish out of an old book. Meanwhile, Rose circled the spectators in the opposite direction, carefully measuring their circumference with more green thread and thus summoning their collective, living energy for a future candle.
3. Back on stage, I asked everyone to blow out all the candles around them, darkening the room. I lit one of the many-threaded soul candles from Wednesday and led the post-Shabbos havdole ceremony in the half-forgotten Ashkenazi Hebrew of my childhood. Instead of spices, Rose passed around the fresh herbs from the shrine for everyone to sniff. As usual, we paid attention to the shadows of our fingers and the glow in our fingernails, and soon I put the candle out in a puddle of wine in my steel saucer.
4. Rose passed around sparklers, and as I mournfully sang “S’iz shvarts in himl,” each person lit their sparkler on their neighbor’s, spreading the sparks across the dark room and turning the bar into a microcosm of a night sky.

In the two years since, on the few occasions when I’ve read the poem in public, I’ve never been able to match the fervor in Bobe Kosmos’s voice as she orbited that crowd, her necklaces rattling, or quite capture the productive tension between the poem’s playfulness and its morbid subject matter.

All that week I had been thinking about my late mother Betsy, who taught me many folksongs growing up and now has a song title on her eccentric tombstone. My younger brothers who live nearby had already been gardening her grave for years. I live in another country, too far to tend her garden myself. But when I do visit, my brothers and I sing to her from the old songbook as I hold the shoulder of her stone.

And I had been thinking about my stepmother Susan, a trained opera singer who, since her diagnosis of breast cancer in 2011, had discovered her even greater love of teaching songs she had found to her choir. During the pandemic, she would coach the singers over the phone and painstakingly stitch their voices into a shared recording. She had recently entered palliative care in my childhood bedroom after eleven years of managing her cancer. Her own voice was fading.

Not quite a month later, in the “family room” in New Jersey, Susan exhaled her final breath surrounded by my father, my brother Josh, and myself. 

That day was my mother’s “Gregorian yortsayt.” My two maternal figures, very different people, were born exactly two days apart on the 16^th and 18^th of August 1956 and died exactly five years apart on the 29^th of November, 2017 and 2022. Besides each marrying my father fourteen years apart, there seemed to be some poetic thread linking them.

If I were a believer or a real Jewish mystic, the coincidences in these Gregorian dates wouldn’t mean much to me. All Jewish rituals follow the Jewish calendar, with its shorter year and sporadic leap months, so the dates don’t line up evenly. But my sentimental moments, like this astronaut poem, like this Halloween performance, and like Yiddish culture itself, are syncretistic: they harvest meaning from all sorts of cultural sources. Just as my mother and Susan did with music.

The night after Susan’s funeral, having lit candles for them both, I sang “S’iz shvarts in himl” to everyone who had gathered in the family room to remember her. I was grateful to have memorized a song that perfectly expressed that terrible moment, joining the voices of the women who had passed it down for 131 years. I had no mothers anymore, but I was not alone. There were still ways of making contact.

Koved zeyer ondenk. May we honor their memory.

Undz tsu lange yorn. May we all live to 120.

I often pass the astronaut on my bicycle. Last month someone saw me staring at him over the fence and informed me he was Neil Armstrong, carved to the precise measurements of that particular human frame. I didn’t want to know. For me, he remains the universal astronaut of this poem, stranded between heaven and earth, looking out for us. He’s nameless. He’s ours.

October 2024

אונדזער אַסטראָנױט (לאַנג זאָל ער שװעבן)
נאָכן פֿעלדמעסטן

אונדזער אַסטראָנױט (לאַנג זאָל ער שװעבן)
מיט זײַן אײביקן בליק אױף אונדז מוראַשקעס
זאָל ער אונדז חבֿריש באַגריסן מיט דער הענטשקע
אין די שעהען נאָך שלש־סעודות װען מיר זוכן שלש־שטערן
כּדי צו מעגן אױסלעשן די ליכטיקסטע לאָמפּן אָדער אָנצינדן
די פֿינסטערסטע, אױ אונדזער טײַערער אַסטראָנױט מיט זײן קנױט
װאָס פֿירט אַװעק פֿון זײַן פּופּיק צו אַן עק ערגעץ װוּ אין דער װײַטנס
צו אַ פֿלעמל װאָס האַלט אין אײן ברענען אָן זיך צו דערנענטערן
אױ ער איז תּמיד די סאַמע סמעטענע פֿון קאָסמאָס, זאָל ער זײַן
אַ גוטער בעטער פֿאַר אונדז, זאָל ער נישט חס־ושלום דאַרפֿן
דעם קאַלטן קבֿר װאָס מיר האָבן פֿאַר אַ יאָרן צוגעגרײט פֿאַר אים
דאָ אונטן אױף דער פֿראָסטיקער ערד, פּו פּו פּו, לאַנג זאָל ער לעבן
און צום 120סטן יאָר װען זײַן װײַסע באָרד װעט דערגרײכן די װײַסע שטיװל
װען ער װעט בעכערװײַז גיסן שאַמפּאַניער־שױם פֿאַר זיך אַלײן
זאָל ער האַלטן אין אײן הענגען דאָרטן צװישן די שטערן און קאָמעטן
זאָל ער האַלטן אין אײן שמײכלען הינטער זײַן פֿענצטערל
און בלײַבן שװעבן אַזױ װײַס און אַזױ ליכטיק װי אַ לבֿנה
אַז מע זעט אים אַ מאָל נישט אין הימל, בענטשט מען ראָש־חודש


דזשײק שנײַדער, אָקטאָבער 2022

undzer Astronoyt (lang zol er shvebn) 
nokhn feldmestn 

undzer astronoyt (lang zol er shvebn)
mit zayn eybikn blik af undz murashkes
zol er undz khaverish bagrisn mit der hentshke
in di shoen nokh shaleshudes ven mir zukhn shaleshtern
kedey tsu megn oysleshn di likhtikste lompn oder ontsindn
di finsterste, oy undzer tayerer astronoyt mit zayn knoyt
vos firt avek fun zayn pupik tsu an ek ergets vu in der vaytns
oy er iz tomid di same smetene fun kosmos, zol er zayn 
a guter beter far undz, zol er nisht khas-vesholem darfn 
dem kaltn keyver vos mir hobn far a yorn tsugegreyt far im 
do untn af der frostiker erd, pu pu pu, lang zol er lebn 
un tsum hundert tsvantsikstn yor ven zayn vayse bord vet dergreykhn di vayse shtivl 
ven er vet bekhervayz gisn shampanyer-shoym far zikh aleyn 
zol er haltn in eyn hengen dortn tsvishn di shtern un kometn
zol er haltn in eyn shmeykhlen hinter dayn fensterl
un blaybn shvebn azoy vays un azoy likhtik vi a levone
az me zet im a mol nisht in himl, bentsht men rosh-khoydesh

our astronaut (long may he float)
after cemetery measuring

our astronaut (long may he float)
forever looking down upon us ants
may he wave at us with his white glove
after the third sabbath meal when we search for three stars
for permission to switch the brightest lights off
or the darkest lights on, oy our beloved astronaut with his wick
that leads from his bellybutton to a tip far far away
to a little flame that burns and burns but never comes closer
oy he’s the crème de la crème of the cosmos, may he be
our friend in high places, may he never, heaven forbid, need
the cold grave we prepared for him a year ago
down here on the frosty earth, spit spit spit, long may he live
and on his 120th birthday when his white beard reaches his white boots
when he pours himself goblet after goblet of champagne foam
may he keep hanging there among the stars and comets
may he keep smiling behind his little window
and go on floating, just as white and just as bright as a moon
if he’s ever out of sight in the sky, we bless a new month



by Jake Schneider alias Bobe Kosmos

Jake Schneider is a cultural activist, poet, translator, collagist, and researcher. He is the founding gabbai of Berlin’s Yiddish-speaking social club Shmues un Vayn and organizes events for the group Yiddish Berlin. He also gives talks about Yiddish culture and walking tours of Berlin’s Jewish immigrant history. His poems have appeared in Yiddish Branzhe, Afn Shvel, Stadtsprachen, andYiddishland as well as several zines, most recently Queer Lefty Yiddish Futures Vol. 1. jakeschneider.eu