The Historical Imperative in Contemporary Jewish American Poetry: Enid Dame, Michael Heller, and Nikki Stiller

Abstract

The basic situation of the post-World War Two American Jew is one conditioned by the Diaspora, the Shoah, and both a religious and otherwise a cultural tradition marked by letters. American Jewish poets who represent a third generation from the point of immigration, Enid Dame, Michael Heller, and Nikki Stiller take history as their backdrop and often as their subject in their poems, as a way in which to define themselves, to locate themselves within a heterogeneous society that both beckons to them and threatens to vitiate their traditional identities. Their voices, peculiarly American and then again peculiarly of New York City (the point of entry into the new world), are nonetheless Jewish for all their modernity, but Jewish in a way not seen before the present.