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  • The Terror of Our Days: Four American Poets Respond to the Holocaust
  • Susan Gubar
The Terror of Our Days: Four American Poets Respond to the Holocaust, by Harriet L. Parmet. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001. 268 pp. $43.00.

Because, next to Israel, the United States contains the largest population of survivors from Nazi Germany, it is hardly surprising that so many American writers have found themselves drawn to the subject of the Shoah. Much of their work has dealt with eye-witness accounts, and with the tension between the literal and the literary that generates suspicions about imaginative representations of the disaster. Historians and literary critics, as well as autobiographers and biographers, novelists and film-makers, dramatists and cartoonists dwell on Adorno’s axiomatic condemnation of the barbarism of creating art after Auschwitz. By focusing directly on the genre Adorno himself singled out, poetry, and specifically on verse produced by Americans removed from any direct experience of the disaster, Harriet L. Parmet broadens the grounds of this discussion.

With their aesthetic contributions established mainly in the nineteen sixties, the four poets Parmet studies—Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Gerald Stern, and Jerome Rothenberg—were shaped by the confessional school of verse founded by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell. Perhaps because Plath and Heyen wrote as non-Jews, Parmet deals with them in a single chapter, whereas Stern and Rothenberg receive separate and more sustained analyses. Despite this organizational decision, however, Parmet firmly refuses to accept the idea that only Jews have a license to write about the Holocaust. Especially in defense of Plath’s “Mary’s Song,” “Daddy,” and “Lady Lazarus,” and of Heyen’s volume Erika, Parmet argues that “those self-appointed guardians of the culture and destiny of a martyred people—who insist on considering the Holocaust as a unique horror, totally unrelated to any other acts of organized brutality or to any form of personal suffering—are in fact denying the legitimacy of the very process by which events of the past become the shared heritage of humanity” (pp. 75–6). Plath’s imaginative identification with the victims (especially during the Eichmann trial) and Heyen’s troubled familial connections with the victimizers (his uncles fought on the fascist side) generate mordant nursery rhymes that recycle the imagery of “trains, wheels, chimneys, children, parents, wedding rings, gold fillings, soap, ash, fire and smoke, concentration and death camps” to illuminate the psychosexual dynamics of victims and victimizers (p. 107).

The subsequent chapters of The Terror of Our Days, devoted to Gerald Stern and Jerome Rothenberg, begin to rectify a dearth of criticism that has kept these poets from being better represented in anthologies and syllabi. Through sustained readings of Stern’s many volumes of verse, Parmet demonstrates that “a multifaceted Judaism stands at the core of Stern’s sense of poetry, as well as of his meditative essays, and his interviews” (p. 111). The Kabbalah, his Polish ancestors, Judaic nostalgia, Bible stories and images, Seder services, Psalms and the Kaddish: all result in a “rabbinical” tone (p. 128), in ethnically self-conscious pieces like “Behaving Like a Jew” and “The Jew and the Rooster [End Page 161] Are One,” as well as in the powerful Holocaust laments “Soap” and “Adler.” About as distinct in tone from Stern’s sometimes comic, sometimes satiric voice as conceivable, Rothenberg’s poetry nevertheless also grapples with Jewish suffering. An anthologist and theorist of what he called “ethnopoetics,” Rothenberg initially approached the Shoah in the volume White Sun, Black Sun, specifically as a response to Leni Riefenstahl’s movie Triumph of the Will, and Parmet maps his subsequent evolution from his meetings with Paul Celan and his Broadway adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy to the “dis quieting inelegance, often miring itself in its own revulsion,” of his two books Poland/1931 and Khurbn (p. 192). Parmet’s interpretations of individual poems justify her judgment that Rothenberg’s imagery of “excrement, blood, screaming women, dismem bered men, the skeletons of children” gains impetus through Yiddish passages “resurrecting the dead language from its own grave” (p. 212).

According to Parmet, poetry, which “should lure the reader away from...

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