Tongues "loosened in the melting pot": The Poets of Others and the Lower East Side

While in most studies of modernism and "race" the focus has been on the significance of African and African American arts, language, and music to Euro-American writers, in New York City modernist poets also turned in their ongoing constructions of the modern to affiliation with the huge population of immigrant Jews living on the Lower East Side, a population perceived at the turn of the twentieth century as racially alien in the U.S. Ill at ease with dominant American culture, poets saw themselves as similarly "alien," and as similarly attempting to establish new kinds of communities, foreign both to their (generally middle-class) upbringing and to contemporary consumerist culture. Some critics of modernity condemned exactly this quality of foreignness in their work. As Michael North reports, literature and art departing from traditional forms was branded with epithets of disease and miscegenation or "mongrelism": "The United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute so many acute perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperiling the republic of art in the same way," art critic Royal Cortissoz writes.¹ Some poets shared their sense of doom: from London, T. S. Eliot described New York as "invaded by foreign races"; poet and fiction writer Ben Hecht puns on "lice" and "life" to identify a dense population of immigrant Jews on Chicago's Halsted Street with disease; and Dada poet Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven writes a diatribe against William Carlos Williams, associating him with "Jews" as "unsettled since aye," "parasites upon soil foreign," "forever pariah of races," "only lost soul in void—jew—American possesses—with mere selfish desires . . . mismated happily to peculiar distinct jewish tactlessness . . ."² For the most part, however, poets living in Greenwich Village (as the Baroness did but Eliot and Hecht did not) saw the immigrant Jewish population thronging the adjoining neighborhoods as representing an admirable cosmopolitanism, social and intellectual progressivism, and general willingness to experiment with the "new."

This essay explores modernist response to the Jewish diaspora both through a focus on New York's Lower East Side and through the little magazine of poetry that had the closest ties to the city and that embraced a local poetics in ways distinct from some of the strains of international modernism—namely, Others, edited by Alfred Kreymborg from 1915 through 1919. While Kreymborg and his coeditors did not set out to embrace a particular social agenda, it is hardly coincidental that the contributors to Others celebrate a linguistic and cultural mixing echoing the popular idiom of America as melting pot and affiliated with the figure of the immigrant. Deliberately in the poetry of contributors Lola Ridge, Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore, and ironically through the parody of the Spectra poets' intended hoax, Others represents the hybrid position of the immigrant and Jew as vitally associated with that of the new poet.

As has been amply and accurately demonstrated, Euromodernism was profoundly anti-Semitic, and anti-Semitism appears in much of the writing of New York poets as well.³ Adam McKible has even persuasively linked the Little Review's at times open anti-Semitism to its move from Chicago to New York in 1916—where it remained until its demise in 1929.⁴ Several features, however, distinguish the Little Review's aesthetics and politics from those of Others and explain their differing responses to the local milieu of the Lower East Side. The Little Review prided itself on its internationalism, understood as placelessness or "exile"; as McKible argues, its community of writers "became consciously modernist by disassociating themselves from their local sites of literary production, which had the consequence of transforming them into a wandering 'tribe' of self-hating 'Jews'"—"Jews" in quotation marks insofar as the trope of eternal exile was based on the stereotyped figure of the Jew (SPM, 79, 81). References to Jews in the Little Review were typically unplaced, presenting "the Jew as a tropological figure" or "a point of intellectual identification, physical repulsion, and potential self-loathing...