Jewish Poet Research Articles

The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975 (review)

Poems of Reznikoff 1918-1975, edited by Seamus Cooney. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. 460 pp. $45.00 (c); $21.95 (p). When Reznikoff was born in 1894 in Brownsville, the Jewish ghetto of Brooklyn, his parents, Satah Yetta and Nathan, recent immigrants from Russia, wished to name him after his maternal grandfather, WoIvovsky. Sarah Yetta asked the Jewish doctor, who was also an anarchist, for the English equivalent of the Hebrew Yehezqel (Ezekiel), and the doctor replied, Call him Charles. Reznikoff felt throughout his life that his given name created a dynamic gap between Hebrew and English, a void he dedicated himself to filling. This symbolic space between Charles and Ezekiel, English and Hebrew, American culture and Jewish culture, marks the unstable territory where poetry can be found - in company with the cultural endeavors of many other Jewish intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth centuty. In a gemlike poem Reznikoff catches the emotional tenot of the quandary in which he and others found themselves: How difficult for me is Hebrew: even the Hebrew for mother, for bread, for sun is foreign. How far have I been exiled, Zion. (p. 58) Wanting him to adapt to the new land, mother insisted that he speak English at home, even though the family language was Yiddish. Likewise, he was sent to public school father than to the Jewish heder, which was conducted in Hebrew. Like many children of recent immigrants, Reznikoff felt estranged from the languages and traditions of his ancestors, although he was in close enough proximity to them that areturn of sorts was still possible. return did not take the shape of Zionism, as it did for many Jews of his generation; instead, he was drawn to the history of Jewish survival in the dias- pora. Writing about Jewish history was more than an issue of identification-although he admitted the importance of an ethnic identity; what moved him most in Jewish history were the tenacity and inventiveness that made survival possible and the compassionate virtues that arose out of religious and ethical confrontations with adversity. The Jews typify, he said, perhaps more than any other people, constant and often victorious struggle against a hostile environment and hostile elements within itself, a struggle which has constantly evolved Jews that are symbols of the admirable (Tom Sharp, Reznikoff's Nine Plays in Milton Hindus, ed., Reznikoff: Man and Poet [Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984], pp. 272-3). Having identified a subject matter, an American Jew of generation who wanted to write modern poetry in English had few models. Eschewing Yiddish, Reznikoff chose not to follow the radical Yiddish poets of New York City, and Emma Lazarus seemed a distant, old-fashioned example. most prominent Jewish poet when Reznikoff began publishing was James Oppenheim (1882-1932), who wrote a vatic, exclamatory verse, deeply indebted to Whitman and Freud. Although championed by critic and anthologist Louis Untermeyer, Oppenheim was as distant in temperament and style from Reznikoff as one could imagine. Rather than look to contemporary Jewish poetry, Reznikoff found a serviceable model for verse in English in the lesser-known (at that time) Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement. Imagist verse was spare and versatile, not freighted with social and cultural associations from which Reznikoff might feel excluded; it was a seemingly objective style that did not prescribe a particular subject matter or a self-conscious poetic voice. …

Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers

Reviewed by: Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers Rochelle Tobias Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers. By Katja Garloff. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. xii + 252 pages. $49.95. Katja Garloff takes the title for her study from an essay with the same title by Adorno in which the philosopher defends the use of foreign words (Fremdwörter) in German. Adorno argues that foreign words introduce a dissonance into language that exposes, [End Page 591] in turn, the heterogeneity at the heart of any language, such that no language can ever be native to a people (26). The title could not be more fitting for this remarkable monograph in which Garloff demonstrates the displacement that postwar German Jewish writers inscribe into the German language. At once an historical and a literary project, the book investigates the ways in which Peter Weiss, Nelly Sachs, and Paul Celan responded to their reception in West Germany. That all three authors lived abroad throughout their writing careers contributes to, but is not essential for Garloff's argument. Even if Sachs, Weiss, and Celan had returned to their "native" lands, their relation to the German language would have been irrevocably altered by the Holocaust which made the German language an uneasy, if not impossible, home for a Jewish poet. Drawing equally on Postcolonial Studies and trauma theory, Garloff contends that all three writers "perform for an imagined German audience the violent rupture between the subject and its place of origin" (11). One of the many feats of this learned and highly readable study is the dialogue it creates between postcolonial theory and Holocaust Studies, which for too long have remained separate fields. In her theoretical introduction, Garloff indicates that postcolonial theory brought to the foreground the idea that the voices of postcolonial subjects call into question any national identity conceived as the outgrowth of a common origin. Diaspora experiences undermine all fixed narratives of the past and projections for the future. In this manner they subvert existing models, while at the same time creating new possibilities. While sympathetic to this position in general, Garloff cautions that German-Jewish literature after the Holocaust cannot be interpreted in such a positive light as the articulation of difference for two reasons that are related but not identical. First, German-Jewish writers cannot stand apart from the models or narratives they critique or, more precisely, disarticulate since these models entail their annihilation as Jews or the complete erasure of their difference. Secondly, they cannot generate "new" possibilities, such as fashioning alternative communities, since the Holocaust destroyed any future for German Jewry. (As Garloff notes, the Jews in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s came mostly from Eastern Europe via displaced persons camps and hence do not represent a continuation of prewar German-Jewish culture [112–13].) In the absence of either a past they can recuperate or a future they can imagine, German-Jewish writers are left in a double bind. On the one hand, they "attempt to transform their own displacement into a critical stance" (11); on the other, their efforts attest to "their inability, or unwillingness, to arrive at a position of strength and detachment" (11). To elucidate precisely this resistance to exile from a position of vulnerability and entanglement, Garloff examines the works of Weiss, Sachs, and Celan with attention to the contexts in which they wrote and published their texts. The first chapter explores essays by three diverse thinkers (Adorno, Günther Anders, and Jean Améry) that directly address the issue of exile for German Jews after the Holocaust. Although the chapter is divided into three equal sections, the section on Adorno occupies the thematic center, if for no other reason than because Adorno uses the word trauma and outlines what could be called traumatic temporality in his essay "Die Wunde Heine." As Garloff points out, the word trauma is a foreign word, the Greek for wound referred to in the title of the essay (33). The title additionally permits two interpretations: it could indicate either the wound that Heine has, as in "Die Wunde Heine," or the one that he is...

Yehuda Amichai's Old-New Words: Five Fragments and a Note

Even in one's enthusiasms, one must be wary of legends. They are impediments to understanding. Haydn was not just diligent and sweet; Wilde was not essentially frivolous; Mondrian never silenced his heart; Frost was anything but a country sage. We invent the masters we need. Reverence, too, is an interpretation. Sometimes the artist is complicit in the myth that establishes his reputation, and even his immortality; and it is the duty of his admirers to rescue him from a certain falsifying pressure of admiration. Perhaps the clarification that results is itself animated by need. Needs are not always blinding; sometimes they are revelatory. New needs often reveal new elements. The more we need, the more we see. But the more we need, the less we see. So which is it? Eventually, or so one hopes, there appears still another need: the need to get it right—the emotion of scholarship, which may help to rectify the foundations of love. The legend of Yehuda Amichai is that he usurped the power of the formal with the power of the informal, that he overthrew the public voices and grandiose cadences of his predecessors and in their place established the rule of common words and ordinary experiences. His revolution in Hebrew poetry, according to the conventional account, was a vernacular revolution. When he addressed himself to lovers, for example, Amichai recommended not the light of the moon or the light of the fire but (as in a famous early poem) the light of the refrigerator. In a language as quick with ancient echoes as Hebrew, as easily lyrical and as effortlessly numinous, this was an exhilarating recommendation—an emancipation from uninvited and unwelcome echoes. But as I have been studying Amichai's literary remains, the gemlike scraps in his archives, I have been struck by the incompleteness of the legend. Amichai was never only demotic. His invincibly secular verse is replete with the language and the imagery of the Jewish tradition. The Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew prayerbook were also in the poet's refrigerator. His last book, Patuah Sagur Patuah or Open Closed Open, is really [End Page 522] an extended humanist midrash on a wide variety of biblical and liturgical passages. (I was once startled to observe two haredim reading and discussing it in a bookshop, and I recall with particular glee one of the gentlemen knocking over a volume by Ratosh as he stroked his forelocks.) Amichai's keen entanglement with the verbal and symbolic resources of classical Judaism is everywhere, in all his books—playfully and seriously, affectionately or angrily. He was not only a great Hebrew poet, he was also a great Jewish poet. Is it possible to be a great Hebrew poet and not be a great Jewish poet? But that is my own need speaking, and I will stifle it for now. What follows are five poems from the Amichai archive at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. They were transcribed, with the paleographical and interpretive sensitivity that comes from a life of intimacy, by Hana Amichai, and then translated by me. We do not know when or where these lines were written, and we have no way of knowing how finished any of them are. Some of them are quite obviously fragments. But they are also quite obviously Amichai—new Amichai, six years after his death—an unexpected benediction. * * * First Love I was blind to you when you loved me long ago. I switched you with another, like Isaac, for a smell, and a taste, and an appetite for meat, for a fragrance of the field, and a house, and some heat. I have forgotten the words of the only letter I wrote to you. All that I remember is the taste of the glue of the stamp on my tongue. The fate that determined us was not really destiny, but it was as strong and as sure as the finger...

Catorce canciones en romance como modelos de poemas hebreos del siglo XV

The beginnings of the Judeo-Spanish lyric in the Iberian Peninsula have so far remained om the dark due to the lack of tangible documentation. On the basis of two manuscript collections of Hebrew sacred songs ( piyutim ) from the Bodleian Library in Oxford, it is possible to illuminate some of the formative processes of the Sephardic lyric song prior to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal. Careful readings of the first verses of poems in Castilian and Catalan appearing in these manuscripts as melodic codes for the singing of piyutim show some aspects of the lyric repertoire in romance languages known by Jewish poets and singers before 1492.

The Holocaust in the Hebrew Poetry of Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews

Many studies of the Holocaust focus exclusively on European Jewry. It is essential to mention what happened at the time of the Holocaust to Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews. The fate of Near Eastern Jews would have been similar to the fate of their brothers in Europe had the Germans been successful on the North African front. One of the means by which Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews reacted to the tragedy of their brothers in Europe was through folk poetry and poetry. Near Eastern Jews expressed deep feelings of brotherhood with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust both at the time and after. Poets from Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, and other countries wrote poetic responses to it at the time. In Israel, Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews published poetry about the Holocaust. On June 1-2, 1941, there was a pogrom against the Jews in Iraq as a result of Nazi incitement and propaganda and nationalistic-religious instigation. Jews were injured and murdered, Jewish women were raped, Jewish property was looted, and Jewish houses were burnt down. Jewish poets of Iraqi origin wrote poetic responses to this pogrom in Hebrew in Iraq and in Israel. In the poems of Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews about the Holocaust, the poets identify completely with the victims ("Us"—not "them"); the "crime" of the Jews was that they existed. A religious crisis was inevitable for some people, who asked where God was. The yearning and fight for a Jewish state was inevitable.

The Holy Letters, and: My Jewish Name (review)

greatunpublished.com, 2000, Title No. 65. 86 pp. $11.99 (p); $7.99 (e-book). greatunpublished.com 2002, Title No. 251. 127 pp. $11.99 (p); $7.99 (e-book). Nancy Shiffrin's poetry, collected in The Holy Letters, is reminiscent such feminist poets as Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, and, especially -- because the highlighted Jewish themes -- Adrienne Rich. The Holy Letters is a book to set alongside these other writers' and to cherish for richness emotions and vividness metaphor. There is no shrinking or prudery here; the author confronts the body frankly, patriarchal repression with rightful anger. The contemporary world, environmental depradation, poverty, inner-city suffering, is harsh and cruel, and the poet responds with great sadness and a search for hope, ending her book with a section entitled For Life. Other sections deal with geography and memory, pregnancy and abortion, unhappy or traumatized children, aging, love, death, and multiple longings: for art, for skill, for erotic adventure. Several poems indicate Jewish themes explicitly through their titles -- Yom Kippur, Shabbat, Kosher, Seder, My Holocaust, Yahrzeit, and Rosh Chodesh -- and many others grapple with Jewish culture and history. Interestingly, the poems most concerned with Jewishness are clustered near the beginning and end the volume, suggesting that the author finds her origins in Jewish culture and returns to those origins ineluctably. One poem is actually entitled Return, and describes the poet's visit to Romania, where her zada came from. The penultimate the volume's ten sections, Covenant, deals exclusively with Jewish religion. Shiffrin clearly falls into a tradition politicized Jewish poets alert to abuses power. The little girl who speaks to us in her naive child's voice mysteries such as the Passover story, neighborhood Jew-hatred, and the gas chambers mutates into the grown woman who feels within her own self the universality human cruelty. In Grief, the persona seeems almost faux-naive, observing the savagery cats and nasty children, reading of Pol Pot's Butcher, research[ing] theories evil, witnessing a murder virtually on her own doorstep, yet unable to name or fully inhabit her own response. A few pages later, though, in Gardening, she is haunted even as she weeds by the idea genocide as weeding-out, and feels implicated in such evil merely by her human tendency to seek cleanliness and control, and therefore to destroy some living things while nurturing others. The poem ends in anguished, disappointed hope: I want to place stone on stone, restore myth rebuild grand processional stairways. …

<strong>A More Contemporary Voice:</strong> A. M. Klein's Original and Revised Translations of the Hebrew Poems of Hayyim Nahman Bialik

In 1936 – 37, A. M. Klein, the distinguished Montreal Jewish poet, translated into English thirteen of Bialik's poems, including "Be'ir hahareigah." Some twenty years later, during 1953 – 55, Klein retranslated four of the poems that he had translated in the 1930s, including part of "Be'ir hahareigah," as well as translated for the first time Bialik's poem "Kokhavim metsitsim vekhavim." This essay first accounts for the differences in style between Klein's 1930s translations and the revised 1950s translations and for the general superiority of the latter over the former by examining the shift in poetics that is manifest in Klein's writing of original poetry. It then shows that Klein's revised translation of "Be'ir hahareigah" is an exception to this general superiority, suffering from exaggerated, strained, and fervid diction and an overly jagged, splintered, and fragmented style untrue to the original, and suggests that these flaws may result from an attempt on the part of Klein to rewrite "Be'ir hahareigah" as a Holocaust poem. Finally, it suggests — to be sure, speculatively — that the reason Klein never completed that revised translation is that at some point he realized that his post-Holocaust audience was not emotionally ready for the poem's indictment of the victims of Kishinev for their cowardice, passivity, and non-resistance — particularly since it would likely view the poem by extension as an attack on the victims of the Holocaust.

A More Contemporary Voice: A. M. Klein's Original and Revised Translations of the Hebrew Poems of Hayyim Nahman Bialik

In 1936 – 37, A. M. Klein, the distinguished Montreal Jewish poet, translated into English thirteen of Bialik's poems, including "Be'ir hahareigah." Some twenty years later, during 1953 – 55, Klein retranslated four of the poems that he had translated in the 1930s, including part of "Be'ir hahareigah," as well as translated for the first time Bialik's poem "Kokhavim metsitsim vekhavim."

Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England (review)

Reviewed by: Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England Virginia H. Blain Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England, by Cynthia Scheinberg. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, gen. ed. Gillian Beer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 275 pp. $55.00. This is a very timely publication. There has been a huge revival of interest in Victorian women's poetry in the last ten years, and it has led to a major reconfiguration of the English poetic landscape of the nineteenth century. Many of those feminist critics engaged in the recovery work of lost female voices from this period have had agendas far removed from the religious sphere. Yet religion and religious devotion were one of the major motivations driving many women poets towards publication of their work at a time when self-display of this kind was severely frowned on for women. Cynthia Scheinberg's excellent volume clearly demonstrates the importance of the religious element in the work of some of the most well-known of female poets, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, where these elements have not been so much overlooked by earlier critics as perhaps, too homogeneously interpreted. For the angle introduced by Scheinberg is that of Jewish identity within Christian cultural formations in the Victorian period. She has chosen two poets from the mainstream Christian [End Page 152] (Protestant) culture to compare with each other, and with two Anglo-Jewish poets, Amy Levy and Grace Aguilar. Her readings bring to light some unexpected and highly illuminating insights, and cast a different interpretation on some aspects that have previously been too quickly assimilated into a "normative" Christian reading. Scheinberg's research has taken her beyond the more obvious figures in the new canon of women poets; her chapter on the remarkable Jewish poet Amy Levy, and one on the less well-known Grace Aguilar, show an impressive breadth of research. Her work on Aguilar is particularly valuable as she is so little known—and less understood, as an openly Jewish writer occupying space within a Christian tradition—and I found the discussion of Aguilar's poetic project judicious and illuminating, having only known her previously through her best-selling Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters (1847). Amy Levy's remarkably fine poetry has been taken up with avidity by critics anxious both to pay tribute to its understated intelligence, depth of feeling, and musicality and to decode the evidence of same-sex desires in pre-twentieth-century verse. Scheinberg accepts this evidence, but her extensive and finely tuned readings help to inflect the poetry towards another of its deeper interests, that of Jewish identity and its meaning for a young woman with a more problematic relation to her own Jewishness than Aguilar's, a relation which has often been traced in her novels—especially the remarkable Reuben Sachs (1888)—but seldom in her poetry—until now. Both Aguilar and Levy, of course, were grappling not only with issues of Jewish identity in a Christian culture, but also with an often openly expressed and virulent antisemitism which pervaded mid-Victorian British culture. "Run to Earth" is an early Levy poem (not noted by Scheinberg) that might well repay a reading of this kind, dealing as it does with the horrific hunting down and destruction of a gypsy woman and her baby by a pack of stag-hunting aristocrats, starved for their usual prey on a day out in the forest. Of its kind, it is a chilling study of the roots of racism. Scheinberg's tracing of the multiple explorations by non-Jewish women poets of the archetypal Jewish figure of Miriam, prophetic singer of womanhood, is especially interesting. She shows the different inflections given to this figure by the Christian poets, arguing that there was a tendency to project upon the Jewish woman an erotic and public power of performance denied to "the angel in the house." Here I wish Scheinberg had been able to include a discussion of the extraordinary Adah Isaacs Menken, Jewish convert, actress and poet, whose one volume of poems Infelicia (1867) makes some unusually powerful indictments of Christian women's culture, seen as complicit with...

George Eliot, Judaism, and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism (review)

Reviewed by: George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism Tamar Heller (bio) George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism, by Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton; pp. vi + 216. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, £55.00, $69.95. "My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews," declared George Eliot in 1848, adding that "everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade" (25). Almost thirty years later, however, she would speak of the "peculiar debt" Christians owe to "the Hebrews": "Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called educated making small jokes about eating ham....They hardly know Christ was Jewish" (171). The Eliot who learned to challenge, rather than to echo, the pervasive anti- Semitism of her day is the subject of this study, by Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton, which argues for the influence of Jewish mysticism on Eliot's novels. While Daniel Deronda (1876) is unsurprisingly the text Nurbhai and Newton analyze most thoroughly, they depart from earlier criticism that dates Eliot's interest in Jewish thought only from this later work. Instead, Nurbhai and Newton claim that "throughout her fiction, at least from Adam Bede, one can discern a substructure shaped by kabbalistic ideas" (2). According to this study, Eliot's greatest debt to kabbalah lies in her appropriation of the Jewish myth of the golem—Hebrew for "unformed mass" (1)—which, like Adam, symbolizes the created being that needs to be given both life and spirit by its creator. Nurbhai and Newton connect Eliot's use of Jewish mysticism to her desire to elevate the status and aesthetic value of the novel; as they see it, kabbalah provided "the metaphorical and allegorical potential to enable the novel to compete in complexity and philosophical range with tragic drama and epic poetry" (2). Joining critics who have perceived the limitations of reading Eliot solely as a realist, Nurbhai and Newton focus on how mythology enables Eliot to create a "unifying sub-structure" (190) that addresses issues of individual, national, and even transnational well-being central to her narrative project. Such an underlying mythic structure, Nurbhai and Newton argue, would have been particularly important to Eliot because of her own loss of faith, which drove her to search for alternative philosophies to lend meaning to human aspirations. Usefully summarizing some of the ways in which Eliot—moving away from her shallow dismissal of Jewish culture—would have become familiar with Jewish mysticism, Nurbhai and Newton [End Page 692] mention a variety of influences in the 1850s, including Eliot's admiration for the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (himself influenced by mystical thought) and her exposure to German-Jewish intellectual life on her trip to Germany in 1854. While eventually she became, according to George Henry Lewes, as "profoundly versed in Jewish history and literature" as "learned Rabbis" (15), Eliot would also have been aware of the Romantic narratives influenced by kabbalistic thought, such as Frankenstein (1818)—the classic golem tale—which she revises in her own Gothic, The Lifted Veil (1860). Nurbhai and Newton identify a number of themes in golem myths that appealed to Eliot: the symbiotic relation between creator and created—a relationship that, as in Frankenstein, can go radically awry; the need for wholeness both of body and spirit; the search for perfection not only of the individual but—as the golem can signify the Jewish community—of an entire people. By acknowledging Eliot's debt to Romantic versions of the golem myth, however, Nurbhai and Newton make their argument less convincing; Eliot may not be so much influenced by kabbalah as by Mary Shelley's revision of it. Given this caveat, however, Nurbhai and Newton locate a number of perceptive parallels between Eliot's narratives and golem myths. In Middlemarch (1871-72), for example, Rosamund is a golem figure whom Lydgate wishes to mold into the ideal decorative woman but who instead destroys her would-be creator. In Daniel Deronda Mirah "represents the soul of Judaism," the "'Shekhinah' or feminine potency" that, in uniting with Deronda, enables his assumption of a Messianic role for his people (162). As these...

Difficult Passengers: Jews and Poetry

Asked who has been Britain’s best-selling Jewish poet people might come up with Dannie Abse, or Elaine Feinstein, or, wondering if the question inferred long-dead poets, Amy Levy. None of these … she was born in Nottingham and she wrote poems about fairies. Remember the line ‘There are fairies at the bottom of our garden …’. Britain’s best-selling Jewish poet was the late Rose Fyleman, whose work still has a half-life on Internet sites about fairies. There was no particular Jewish content to her work which immediately begs the question as to what Jewish poetry, as opposed to poetry written by Jews, might be.

The new moses: A Ukrainian–Jewish poet in the making

Ukraine is God‐given and God‐chosen. And it will survive, for God wants it to survive. I do not know why I, a Jew, was given this knowledge. But I know. Moisei Fishbein, Den’, Kyiv, 10 January 19...

A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry (review)

University of Chicago Press, 2001. 193 pp. $46.00. Stephen Fredman demonstrates that for Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), a paradigmatic modernist poet and first-generation Jewish American of Eastern European (Russian) origins, Hellenism represented a site of desire, an approachable but untouchable reservoir of symbolic capital, something beautiful, like Keats's urn, but encased in museum glass. However much he tried to access Greek culture through his intellectual labors, Reznikoff continually felt he could observe it only from the marginalized perspective of an ethnic outsider. Reznikoff's anxiety emerged over his relationship to Hellenism in poems from the 1920s. In poetry, he addresses the issue of his access to symbolic value. His poems express his wish to prove his worth to the Protestant gatekeepers of the academy at places such as Harvard, where young Jewish intellectuals from the Menorah Society helped found the Menorah Journal (1915-62), a highly influential journal that crucial contributions to the negotiations between Judaism and the emergent cultural modernism (p. 7). The Menorah Journal was an early forum for Reznikoff's work (p. 7). By emphasizing a Jewish poet's relationship to Greek literature, Fredman in A Menorah for Athena makes an important contribution to our evolving sense of how modern literature can be interpreted through the lens of ethnicity. He shows that Reznikoff was, like H. D. [Hilda Doolittle] and Pound, fascinated with Greek poetry, but that his relationship to the material differed from theirs even if The Greek Anthology informed Reznikoff's objectivist style. H. D. and Pound interpreted the Greek texts as examples of a purely aesthetic model from which to build a new kind of poetry -- verbal concision, formal density and suppleness, and eschewal of subjective effusions -- , as a way to inform their Imagist goals (p. 2). H. D. and Pound, in other words, adhered to Matthew Arnold's influential association of Hellenism with aestheticism, and Hebraism with a Puritanical strain of English culture that privileged right doing at the expense of a celebration of beauty for its own sake. For Reznikoff, the Greek materials registered what Fredman calls his liminal position between cultures (p. 2): Placing himself in a symbolic position of betweenness -- between Hebraism and Hellenism, between Judaism and modernism,...Reznikoff joins not only the other Objectivist poets but also an entire generation of American Jewish intellectuals. Sensing an opportunity to overcome a two-thousand-year history of marginalization, these Jews are hungry to enter the mainstream of American culture. The most ready route that presents itself involves refiguring the authoritative dichotomy between Hebraism and Hellenism in such a way that it supports rather than impedes their entry. (p. 7) Reznikoff held a law degree from New York University, worked as a script analyst for a major film producer in Hollywood, and was an influential poet and chronicler of American legal history and of the places where Jews had made an impact on colonial American life such as in Charleston, South Carolina. …

Jew d'Esprit

This essay is an offshoot of a memoir recently published with the title Confessions of a Secular Jew. Here is a confession that did not make in the memoir: the title was an afterthought. did not set out to write about being a secular Jew -- as if it were a phenomenon as definable as being an Orthodox or Conservative or even Reform Jew. We know what a secular Jew is not, a religious Jew. We might rest perhaps with the positive idea that he is a worldly but is that sufficient to define him? Religious Jews may also be worldly. Hasidim, for instance, are famous as diamond merchants. If worldliness were all that secular Jewishness comes to, it would seem not to come to very much. Notice refrain from speaking of secular Judaism, because of the religious connotations and associations of Judaism. Abstract definition is a fruitless effort. So perhaps should begin by describing how came to write the memoir and how after much straggle arrived at the title -- that is, at the meaning of secular Jewishness. The germ of the memoir is a personal essay published with the title I am a Jew, enclosed in quotation marks because it is a translation of the title of a Yiddish poem by a once famous Soviet Jewish poet, Itzhik Feffer. The poem is a celebration of Jewish straggles for liberation from the time of Moses through the Maccabean uprisings against the Syrian-Greeks, from Bar Kochbah's revolt against the Romans to the struggle against Nazism. Here are two of the many stanzas of the poem (my translation.) The forty years in ancient times suffered in the desert sand Gave me strength. heard Bar Kochba's rebel cry At every turn through my ordeal And more than gold did possess The stubborn pride of my grandfather am a Jew. am a Jew who drank From Stalin's magical cup of To those who wish to destroy Moscow And turn us out of our land To them shout, Down with you! march together with the peoples of the east. The Russians are my brothers. am a Jew. As a kid, attended a Yiddish shuleh where learned to recite, better to declaim, Yiddish poems in public. One of the poems learned was Ich bin a Yid. When Feffer came to America during World W II to raise money for the Russian War Relief, he visited Camp Kinderland, a summer camp in upstate New York where was a camper. One of my gifts was the possession of a Yiddish diction that one hears on the Yiddish stage. How acquired this precocity cannot say, but had an extraordinary ear for the words and cadences of Yiddish poetry and was in demand by Yiddish-speaking clubs to recite Yiddish poems. When Feffer arrived at Camp Kinderland, was asked to recite the poem to a large audience in his presence. As you can imagine, it was one of the great events of my childhood. have a photo of myself age twelve reciting the poem with clenched fist in the air on a stage draped with Soviet and American flags. Ich bin a Yid is not a good poem, filled as it is with banal sentiments, but it has an impressive and stirring sound in Yiddish. Its most memorable line is the unfortunate: I am a Jew who drank from Stalin's magical cup of happiness. What a terrible irony! Feffer was an apparatchik and a wordsmith. He knew more than he spoke. He certainly knew enough or thought he knew enough to survive in Stalin's Russia. Despots love to be celebrated in poetry. While Feffer focuses his bravado on the grave the Nazis are preparing for him and his fellow Jews, without his knowledge a grave is being prepared for him by his own god, the being from whose hand he has received, so he tells us, the cup of Some time after he wrote the poem, Feffer was denounced under the red flag. Joshua Rubinstein of Amnesty International has recently published a book, Stalin's Secret Pogrom, about the persecution and prosecution of fifteen Soviet Jewish writers on trumped-up charges of treason. …

Giovanni Pellegrino and Salomone: A Fifteenth-Century Tenzone between a Christian Writer and a Jewish Poet

Giovanni Pellegrino and Salomone:A Fifteenth-Century Tenzone between a Christian Writer and a Jewish Poet Fabian Alfie The fifteenth-century codex Udine 10 presents a wealth of information for those interested in the literature of the Tre- and Quattrocento in northern and central Italy. Compiled sometime between 1460 and 1470 by Lunardo da Brissa,1 the manuscript contains writings by such renowned authors as Dante (f. 127v), Petrarca (f. 129r), Cecco Angiolieri (f. 148v; f. 209r), Georgius Sumaripa of Verona (ff. 51r-87r; ff. 98v-107v; ff. 120r-124v; and ff. 229r-246v), and Domenico di Giovanni, nicknamed "Il Burchiello" (f. 150r; f. 190r; ff. 199r-207r; f. 249r).2 It also contains numerous anonymous and minor poetic works (e.g., ff. 21r-23v; ff. 39v-40v; ff. 43r-44v; ff. 47v-51r; ff. 64v-68v; ff. 83v-85r; f. 107v). Among the latter, the manuscript presents two sonnets that form a tenzone, a poetic correspondence. The exchange takes place between the Ferrarese poet Giovanni Pellegrino and an unknown Jewish writer named Salomone. According to Marco Santagata's Incipitario unificato della poesia italiana (IUPI), a research tool that lists the incipit verses of Italian poems, the tenzone only appears in the Udine 10 manuscript.3 Aside from its poetic merits, it is of interest because it constitutes communication across the invisible border separating those of different faiths in Italian society of the Renaissance. It provides a unique glimpse into the cultural, literary, and interpersonal relationships that may have existed between the Christians and Jews of Ferrara—or at the very least, between those two particular individuals—sometime during the first half of the fifteenth century. In his published description of the Udine 10 manuscript, Giovanni Fabris includes an appendix that presented some of the then-unedited works of the codex. The tenzone figures among the lyrics transcribed therein, appearing without commentary or notes of any kind.4 Although not unpublished,5 there is only scant [End Page 94] criticism of the literary exchange.6 Little has been written about Salomone, and all of it relates to the tenzone under consideration. The scholar Paolo Norsa examines the two poems insofar as they relate to the history of the Norsa banking family. He deduces that one participant in the tenzone, identified in the manuscript only as "Salomonem hebreum" (Solomon the Jew), might have been Salomone Norsa (b. ca. 1385-d. ca. 1462). The historian's rationale for arriving at this conclusion is due to the fact that the sonnets mirror Salomone Norsa's name, correspond to the dates that he resided in Ferrara, and demonstrate his high degree of learning.7 If Paolo Norsa's conclusion is true, then he provides valuable information about the life of the poet: born in Rimini, he became fattore (steward) of a bank in Padua in 1432, was named socio (partner) of the Banca de la Ripa of Ferrara in 1434, and is mentioned by the ruler of Ferrara, Lionello d'Este, in a document dated 1449.8 About the tenzone itself, Paolo Norsa has very little to say. He describes it as the documentation of the environment that existed between Ferrarese Christians and Jews and asserts that it demonstrates Salomone's knowledge of the classics and of the church fathers.9 The historian of Italian Jewry, Cecil Roth, also mentions the tenzone but seems to base his findings upon the work of Paolo Norsa and Giovanni Fabris. He writes: [T]here was living in Ferrara in the fifteenth century a Jewish poet named Solomon (Salamone [sic]), whose love-lyrics were highly esteemed and whom Giovanni Peregrini (secretary to Lionello d'Este 1441-1450: this helps to fix the date) compared in an enthusiastic sonnet to the gifted poets of the dolce stil nuovo. Salamone's reply, also in sonnet form, is preserved. He boasts his knowledge of the writings of Sallust, Livy, Valerius Maximus (the moralist) and even of the Church Fathers Augustine, Ambrose and Firmianus. But this vaunted erudition does not conceal the fact that he shows extraordinarily small poetical genius.10 Fabris, Roth, and Norsa represent the extent of the scholarship about Salomone and about his tenzone with Giovanni Pellegrino.11 [End...

<strong>Giovanni Pellegrino and Salomone:</strong> A Fifteenth-Century <em>Tenzone</em> between a Christian Writer and a Jewish Poet

<strong>Giovanni Pellegrino and Salomone:</strong> A Fifteenth-Century <em>Tenzone</em> between a Christian Writer and a Jewish Poet

Names of Accents and Diacritical Punctuation Signs in Poems by North African Jewish Poets

In several Sephardi printed editions of the Pentateuch one can find a list of thirty-four names of accents and diacritical punctuation signs. This list is called the Zarca List, named after its opening accent. I have come across four poems based on this list:פלאד קיוויחי, written by the Tunisian poet Fradji Shawat (sixteenth century);וי כי חזקה האמה, written by the Moroccan poet Shmu'el Elbaz (nineteenth century);קודר הילכחי , probably written by the Moroccan poet Amram Bar-Yehuda Elbaz (nineteenth century); and אהה עלי כי נקף, written by the Moroccan poet Rafael Aaron Monsonego (nineteenth century). In all four poems both literal and figurative meanings may be ascribed to the names of the signs. The first three poems follow the Zarca List almost accurately; «form» is an important element in these poems, and it seems as if their purpose is to help memorize the Zarca List. As for אהה עלי כי נקף the poetic freedom concerning the order of the sign names (and to a certain extent their contextual interpretation) creates a more balanced poem in terms of relationship between «form» and «content».

Difference at War: Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, U. Z. Grinberg, and Poetry of the First World War

"Difference at War" is a comparative study of three Jewish poet-soldiers of the First World War: Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and U. Z. Grinberg. The article traces the development of poetic expression in relation to wartime and other experiences and argues for a necessary dichotomy between global occurrences and their representation in local cultures. The poetry of each of these Jewish poets was transformed by the War, but each was very differently transformed, even in the face of similar experiences in the trenches.

Opening Up a Tradition, a Return from Exile: The Vision in Charles Reznikoff's Jerusalem the Golden

In Jerusalem the Golden, Charles Reznikoff becomes one of the first members in a "tribe" of American-Jewish poets who have helped found and continue a Jewish-American poetic tradition. This watershed book, his fourth of six pre-Holocaust poetry books, more fully integrates and reconciles the American and Jewish experience for Reznikoff. In general, the poems in this collection seem to divide into three distinct groups even though Reznikoff doesn't explicitly indicate this division. The first group of poems destabilizes his identity as a Jewish poet in America. The second group grounds his poetic vision as American and Jewish. The third group transforms place and history, negotiating between America and Jerusalem. In essence, he enacts a return from a Jewish and literary exile, incorporating his objectivist style and transforming it into something that is not just American and not just Jewish.

A menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish dilemmas of objectivist poetry

The first major Jewish poet in America and a key figure of the Objectivist movement, Charles Reznikoff was a crucial link between the generation of Pound and Williams, and the more radical modernists who followed in their wake. A Menorah for Athena is an extended treatment of Reznikoff's work, in it Stephen Fredman illuminates the relationship of Jewish intellectuals to modernity through a close look at Reznikoff's life and writing. He shows that when we regard the Objectivists as modern Jewish poets, we can see more clearly their distinctiveness as modernists and the reasons for their profound impact upon later poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bernstein. Fredman also argues that to understand Reznikoff's work more completely, we must see it in the context of early, nonsectarian attempts to make the study of Jewish culture a force in the construction of a more pluralistic society. According to Fredman, then, the indelible images in Reznikoff's poetry open a window onto the vexed but ultimately successful entry of Jewish immigrants and their children into the mainstream of American intellectual life.