Reviewed by: “I Am to Be Read Not from Left to Right, But in Jewish: From Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky by Marat Grinberg Ludmila Shleyfer Lavine “I Am to Be Read Not from Left to Right, But in Jewish: From Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky By Marat Grinberg . Borderlines: Russian and East European-Jewish Studies . Boston : Academic Studies Press , 2013 . 482 pp. Boris Slutsky’s debt to his Jewish roots is largely ignored in the Soviet and the post-Soviet periods. Marat Grinberg fills this gap by contextualizing Slutstky’s poetry in the framework of the World War II poet’s Jewishness and Jewish Studies in general. According to the author, Slutsky should interest readers not only for introducing the Holocaust into the Russian historical memory—a taboo subject in the Soviet Union—but for the Judaic elements, more generally, in the poet’s work. Grinberg reads Slutsky as an exegetical poet, where the sacred text is the Soviet canon, while the poet’s worldview aligns with the Pentateuch rather than with the later prophetic biblical texts. The book is divided into three parts. In the introduction, the author lays the framework for reading Slutsky’s poetry as a type of midrash on his immediate reality and contemporary history; the poet engages the poetics of translation, at the center of any experience of assimilation as well as of interpretation, while also addressing what Naomi Seidman terms the Jewish resistance to translation. Slutsky’s verses illustrate this tension perfectly: “I cannot entrust translation with my poems’ cruel freedom . . . / I, as one converts from faith to heresy, / converted into Russia / with abandon” (34). Though Slutsky was a typical assimilated Soviet Jew, the author argues that the Russian linguistic veneer of his texts evokes an underlying original, namely Hebrew, to be read, as the study’s title verse from the poem “Uriel Acosta” suggests, “from right to left.” In “Part One: Historiography,” Grinberg examines Slutsky’s lyric responses to the Holocaust and Stalinism. As Theodor Adorno famously claims, “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbarous” (86). According to the critic, Slutsky manages to communicate the unspeakable, such as the early experiments in sterilization of Jewish girls. In his poem, “How My Granny Was Killed,” the poet adopts a reporting device of transmitting another’s story. When addressing Stalinism, Slutsky is wary of the prophetic mantle that envelopes his contemporary Anna Akhmatova in her poetic responses to her age. Grinberg relates the notion of prophesy to the Christian mode that is utterly foreign to Slutsky’s poetics. [End Page 125] This idea continues into “Part Two: Polemics,” where Slutsky’s authorial position is contrasted to Dostoevsky’s messianic tradition, in which an entire nation stands in the place of God as a supreme value. The author instead places Slutsky’s poetics in the context of Chekhov’s everyday reality, where people’s “blessedness and downfalls are intertwined and inevitable” (213–14). Grinberg discusses Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as the ur-text of the Western collective psyche on the issue of the opposing worlds of Christianity and Judaism, where the “Christian” concept of mercy is contrasted to the “Jewish” insistence on the law. Shakespeare’s Portia, who falls on the side of Christian love, opposes Shylock’s preoccupation with justice. According to Grinberg, Slutsky answers this Christian myth with a specifically Judaic understanding of divinity. Using Michael Wyschogrod’s formulation, Grinberg posits that in Slutsky’s poetry, the “undifferentiated love,” that is, the love for universal humanity, is replaced with the Jewish notion that “divine love is concrete” (258). According to the author, this orientation to the particular is epitomized in the poem “The German Losses”: “Their losses do not affect me a bit! . . . / I pity only one: / that one / who played a waltz / on his harmonica” (258–59). “Part Three: Intertexts” places Slutsky among his immediate contemporaries, David Samoilov, Il’ia Sel’vinskii, and Ian Satunovskii. The opening and concluding chapters provide a superb analysis of Slutsky’s more distant contexts: the American Objectivist poet, Charles Reznikoff, and the “father” of Russian literature, Aleksandr Pushkin. As the critic notes, Reznikoff, another diasporic poet, provides an illuminating...
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Nov 28, 2023
Amir Muhriz Abdul Latiff + 6
Open Access
