Jewish American
Poetry
Is there something
uniquely Jewish about the poetry of Jewish Americans?
The question of Jewish American literature (i.e., what is
Jewish American literature?) applies to all genres. That being said, the
question may be less pressing when it comes to fiction. Some of the greatest
American novels and stories of the 20th century--works by Bellow and Roth and
Malamud--are obviously about Jewish characters and concerns. If they don't
qualify as Jewish American literature, then the category is probably
meaningless. The answer to the question of Jewish American poetry is less
clear. The substance of a poem has as much to do with its wordplay and emotive
qualities as it does with content. Can we judge the Jewishness of these
elements? Is it meaningful to do so? The following article is reprinted with
permission from Jewish
American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton &
Company.
The Sorrows of American Jewish Poetry, Harold Bloom put it in a 1972
essay, or The Question of American Jewish Poetry in John Hollander's 1988 title: It is a vexed matter,
more so than with fiction. What of Emily Dickinson's kvetchen zikh mit
Got, a constant quarreling with the Bible, as in her stanzas on Jacob
and the angel: "And the astonished wrestler found / That he had worsted
God." Isn't this more Jewish, or at least Hebraic, than Emma Lazarus'
verses before the 1881 Russian
pogroms stirred her to compose Songs of a Semite (1882)? Were Louis Zukofsky, Stanley Kunitz, I.J. Schwartz,
Muriel Rukeyser, David Ignatow, Howard Nemerov, and others writing Jewishly
only in their few biblical or historical ethnic poems fit for anthologies? Do
Moyshe-Leb Halpern's Yiddish and Gabriel Preil's Hebrew poems ipso facto
qualify, even when their subject is a bird or a sunset?
Does
"subject" or "content" identify Jewish poetry or possibly
something less overt: angst, irony, self‑doubt, nostalgia, parental
ligature, ethical passion, apostasy? Or is it, more likely, a restless,
wrestling reverence for the text, for the word, a reverence more chary and
spare than lavish?--though Allen Ginsberg's breath and Denise Levertov's
inspiration seem never to give out.
At
bottom maybe the question of Jewish American poetry resides in the question
itself, the questioning spirit ingrained through centuries of marginalized
exilic chosenness. This would account for a lot: Ginsberg giving Walt Whitman's
prophetic line a new Hebraic torque to elegize his wretched mother, Naomi;
George Oppen dumbfounded when his young daughter asks about b'nei Yisrael,
"the children of Israel" in Exodus: "Where were the
adults?"; Shirley Kaufman opening her first book's opening poem, on Lot's
wife: "But it was right that she / looked back."
John Hollander's essay focuses on
a phrase the German‑speaking survivor‑poet Paul Celan took from
Marina Tsvetayeva: "All poets are Jews", or, more accurately,
"All poets are Yids." Every true poet lives "a kind of Diaspora
in his own language," says Hollander, and thus "all poetry is in some
way or another unofficial midrash," a searching and revising, even of
one's own language. In that sense, a Jewish American poet cannot "write
Jewish poetry without thereby writing American poetry." Witness the pared
verse of Niche Narrows (2000) by
Samuel Menashe, as in his Promised land:
I know Exile
Is always
Green with hope—
The river
We cannot cross
Flows forever.
And the ever‑inceptive lines of Gustaf Sobin, as in Odèss
(where his father was born):
nowhere's too far, you'd
written, if the fingers a-
light amongst letters, and the
letters,
bearing the weight of their own
impression, still
smoulder with must
"Must", that is,
frenzy, new wine, and necessity. Or take, in translation, Celan's Psalm,
which is already translating sacred Scripture under the sign of the Shoah
[Holocaust]:
Blessed art thou, No One.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.
Celan's unappeasable honesty, his
charged language, has become a touchstone, and not only for Jewish poets in
America. An anthology of world Jewish poetry, Voices within the Ark
(1980), took its title from Celan's line Stimmen im Innern der Arche, "Voices in the innards [or bowels] of the ark."
On the question of identity, we keep coming back to the
title, as it were, of this anthology. Our authors, are they Jewish Americans
(with the memory of a demeaning hyphen, like Irish‑American, Polish‑American),
or are they American Jews, Jews living as such in America?
During the immigrant surge, Jews
and others were considered "unassimilable." As if to disprove that
suspicion, the musical sons of New York City immigrants had the chutzpah to
newly conceive of American life, even American hinterland--George Gershwin's Porgy
and Bess (1935), Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's Oklahoma!
(1943), Aaron Copland's Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring
(1944), Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957)--and these works
swept the country.
What gave their composers such
native surety? Hammerstein's Oklahoma corn farmers were not singing for
themselves only: "We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to
is grand."
Jewish second‑generation
children grew up hearing (or intuitively knowing) that they were to have what
their parents did not--the American birthright: equal entry into college,
society, culture, business, professions. Many of them did achieve life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But eventually, in the 1970s, with Holocaust
and Israel becoming quasi watchwords of the faith, a kind of dialectic
kicked in. Those children began wanting for their
children what they themselves had not had, namely, rooted Jewish
affiliation, particularist if not parochial. No longer deemed unassimilable or
a minority group, Jews might well feel the difficulty of not
assimilating. Call this, after Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents,
"Assimilation and Its Discontents."
On September 16, 1919, smarting
from the Versailles Treaty's "stab in the back" of German
nationalism, Adolf Hitler complained in a letter, "It's the Jew who never
calls himself a Jewish German, Jewish Pole, or Jewish American but always a
German, Polish, or American Jew." To be an American might mean
(de)nominating oneself noun-wise, kin to Russian and Iranian Jews as well as to
Canadian and English, while making one's national adjectival, circumstantial.
A few writers seem to have done
that, such as Cynthia Ozick and Shirley Kaufman (and, being European‑born,
Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel). Most other writers have not. Of course,
if all men are Jews" (Malamud) in suffering or "all poets are
Yids" (Celan) in alienation, their Jewish difference gets either
universalized or effaced, depending on your vantage point: the more Jewish, the
more human, and/or vice versa. Now arrogance, even a pariah's arrogance,
arrogating radical humanness primarily to Jews, will not do. It was Franz
Kafka, after all, who wrote in his diary in 1914: "What have I in common
with Jews? I have scarcely anything in common with myself." Was he, then,
being quintessentially Jewish or merely, starkly, human? Kafka also wrote this
in his notebook one day: "Writing as a form of prayer."
What form and what future belong
to Jewish American literature? One view has it that the cultural community such
writing must draw from and speak to was vanishing in the 1970s. Irving Howe,
fresh from his masterly Our Fathers (1976), declared that Jewish
American writing had "passed its peak." Admittedly, the immigrant
years, becoming the memory of a memory for people born after 1930, could no
longer yield the vital stuff of storytelling. Nor could "the historic,
moral and religious weight of Judaism," Ruth Wisse said.
It's true, the Jewish American
community has had no great scribe like Ezra bringing it out of exile,
rebuilding the Temple, reading aloud from Sefer haTorah so that
"all the people were weeping as they listened to the words of the
Teaching" (Nehemiah 8:9). Nor a Vilna partisan poet such as the Israeli
Abba Kovner: "When I write I am like a man praying…with the
community."
In 1973,
Charles Leibman's The Ambivalent American
Jew asserted, "If the Jewish community is to survive, it must become
more explicit and conscious
about the incompatibility of integration and survival." (Later, a misguided analogy arose: the
"Holocaust" brought about by American Jewish intermarriage and
assimilation.) Yet in 1973,even as the Yom Kippur assault in
September again threatened Israel's survival, most American Jews, like others
in the once‑vaunted "melting pot," did not sense a clear and
present need to choose between integration and survival.
Then, as always, it was
probably premature to announce the exhaustion of Jewish content in literature.
And, anyway, how can such content be measured or identified? Can you pick up a
poem and turn it around the way you do a package in the grocery store, to read
a label with its content itemized? Total fat (or let us say schmaltz) 49%, sodium 50%, protein 1%. And what
would be the minimum daily requirement of Jewish content? In the foreseeable
future, there will probably always be someone looking up from a moment of hard justice in the Bible
and saying, with Carl Rakosi,
I have stumbled
on the ancient voice
of honesty
and tremble
at the voice
of my people.
Or, as Cynthia Ozick ventured in 1970, "if we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather
than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us
America will have been in vain."
