American Jewish Poetry, Familiar and Strange: A Review

Abstract

American Poetry, Familiar and Strange: A Review Singing in Strange Land: A -American Poetics, by Maeera Y Shreiber. Stanford University Press, 2007. 287 pp. $24.95. Those of us who write as poets commonly have reason to notice that critics and teachers of Jewish Literature typically neglect poetry. What, we often think, are we chopped liver? For Maeera Shreiber, this marginalization is no accident. As she sees it, elided status of poetry (as against narrative) parallels that of Jew-in-exile, women within Judaism, and sacred in secular world, and for parallel reason: poetry is disruptive, subversive, troubled and troublesome. Where fiction gives us tale of tribe, poetry is (she quotes poet-critic Charles Bernstein) agent of turbulent thought (p. 2). In this long-awaited, powerful and layered study, she is herself such an agent. Shreiber is both an acute close reader of poems and theorist fascinated by questions of tradition and modernity, of individual versus identity, and of place of poetry in history. She is also feminist. Structuring her work less on individual poets than on interlocking issues of genre (psalm, lyric, lamentation, elegy, prayer, as they play out in contemporary esthetics) and gender (looking at ancient and modern configurations of masculinity and femininity), Shreiber makes an amazing and persuasive case not only for seeing exile and alienation as crucial marks of poem, hence book's title taken from 137th psalm, but for connecting this motif with the emergence of Shekhinah as shaping esthetic force speaking to and for a culture in flux (p. 25). Among early delights of this book is an account of rabbinic disapproval of poetry in late ancient and medieval world. Arabic-inflected meters? Not kosher! But this is not simply an ancient problem, for debates over purity versus contamination (alca assimilation) and religion versus culture, ethnicity and secularism continue to rock world, and continue to be reflected in its poetry. And poetry continues to engage in shaping culture. Demonstrating complexities, ambiguities, and discontinuities of American poetry is major aspect of Shreiber's work. Thus she pairs very different poets Emma Lazarus, author of socially conscious poem at base of Statue of Liberty, and Jacqueline Osherow, author of witty theological-midrashic poem in Paradise. Both poems negotiate ethnic borders; Lazarus' of Exiles is an avatar of Shekhinah while Osherow boldly posits feminized Moses and an embodied God replacing disembodied voice (p. 32) of Scripture and rabbinic dogma. Another pairing is that of Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg as poets of maternal Muse. Following superb examination of various versions of maternal in Henry Roth's CaU it Sleep, film The Jazz Singer, and Cynthia Ozick's story Virility, Shreiber demonstrates how figure of Mother in ReznikofF and Ginsberg in a world of boundless violence (p. 73), is simultaneously foundational and demonic, rejected and inspirational, personal and collective, sacrificial victim and cultural critic-and how both these poets in shadow of Mother overturn traditional liturgy in their treatment of Kaddish prayer. Other pairings follow, each thematically/generically bound. How to re-imagine history is issue when Shreiber looks at Louis Zukowski and George Oppen as they challenge modernist ferishizing of (classical. Christian) past-Zukowski turning to maternal story and possibility of future, Oppen's counternarrative (p. 127) negotiating the relation of individual to collective (p. 132), which for Jew involves tension between choosing and being chosen. Lamentation, with its biblical models in 137th psalm and Book of Lamentations, undergirds Shreiber's discussion of two firmly secular poets, Adrienne Rich and Irena Klepfisz. …