MLR, I03.3, 2008 8I9 panorama of recent criticism devoted to italophone migrant writing (pp. 87-I IO). The central sections are organized intowide geographical areas towhich writers are assigned according to their origins. These include (Eastern) Europe, theMaghreb, black Africa, theHorn ofAfrica (singled out for its colonial connections to Italy), theNear Orient, Asia (with the inclusion ofRom writers), and Latin America. This subdivision, though at times necessarily arbitrary, constructs its own logic. Yet the following sections demonstrate how any selection of criteria is inevitably destined to appear too narrow for a type of artistic production which is,by definition, highly mobile and composite. So Pierangela Di Lucchio's portrait of francophone writing is largely dedicated to young beur writers, while Luisa Carrer's description of an increasingly 'internationalized' English literature (pp. 409-34) cannot avoid dealing with second-generation writers who, likeHari Kunzru, consider theirhybridity as a constitutive element of theirown Britishness (p. 429). It isperhaps in the finalsection of the book, devoted to cinema, theatre, and music, that the creolizing potential of migrant writing is most evident: here not just nationalities, points oforigin, languages, and traditions, but also genres and media can hardly be kept apart, as composite in dividuals form transnational and intercultural groups devoted to the production of highly original, innovative art forms capable of linking, for instance, the richness of Italian regional cultures with themultiple intersections ofMediterranean musical traditions and theoral roots ofAfrican storytelling.Their impermanence is a sign of the enduring marginality of such artistic production (amarginality often voiced in thePlanetario), but it may also be a cipher of its intense, uncontainable productivity. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK LOREDANA POLEZZI The Polyphony of JewishCulture. By BENJAMINHARSHAV. Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress. 2007. viii+288pp. $6o. ISBN 978-O-8047-55I2-2. Using 'polyphony' as itsunifying thematic thread, this book addresses the dynamic cultural systemswhich form thekaleidoscopic core of themodern Jewish experience. In this collection of articles, introductory essays, andmemoirs culled from a body of work spanning over fortyyears,we are given a richdiversity of access points (including history, literature,visual arts, poetics, and cultural criticism) towhat Benjamin Har shav calls the 'Modern JewishRevolution'. This refers to the fundamental changes in Jews and Jewish culture beginning in theRussian Empire of the late nineteenth century and its ramified after-effectson Jewish societies ever since. The book begins with a pair ofwhat are essentially thematic outlines. One isof the Modern JewishRevolution itself; theother details the significance ofmultilingualism to theculture thatparticipated in that revolution, both as an inherent featureof Jews' language use in this period and as a figurativeway of understanding their engage ment with European culture. In addition to brief overviews such as these we find more magisterial studies, such as 'American Poetry inYiddish and itsBackground'. Originally the introductory essay of thevolume American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, I986), this lengthy exploration is still an essential text forunderstanding the poetics and world-views not only in one of themost fruitfulperiods and one of themost vibrant centres ofYiddish poetic production but also inYiddish poetry ingeneral. The broad palette of that essay-and of the introduction to a new edition ofHer man Kruk's diaries from theVilne ghetto, as well as of an exposition on the lifeand significance of theYiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever-is complemented bymore de licate tones. These include sensitive readings of several poems by theHebrew poets Natan Alterman and Abba Kovner, and the brief but pithy and densely informative 820 Reviews precis of thehistory ofHebrew versification. Apropos the latter subject, though the one apparent omission from this collection isHarshav's significant contribution to the fieldof poetics (having established, forexample, theDepartment of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University, famous for the so-called 'Tel Aviv School of Poetics', as well as having founded the journal Poetics Today), there is a companion volume from Stanford University Press collecting exactly these works, entitled Explorations inPoetics (2007). Though the range of topics nimbly covered is enviably wide-I have mentioned only some of the highlights-beyond the obvious and important scholarly contri butions we are also given glimpses into the very real and often poignant human dimension of the issues and figures involved from someone who...