Apocalyptic Messianism and Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry

Introduction

Introduction A quirk of Jewish-American literary criticism is that it is almost exclusively about prose fiction. Since poetry is a major genre in all Jewish diaspora literatures and since Jewish-American literature has a history of approximately one hundred years, the absence of poets in the tradition would at least be worth noting. But the absence has rarely been noted, much less discussed, in studies of Jewish-American literature. Harold Bloom, in the forefront here as elsewhere, acknowledges the possibility of such a genre when he writes "though it causes me real grief to say this, the achievement of American-Jewish poets down to the present moment remains a modest and mixed one."1 But Bloom speculates on future achievements. He sees promise in some of the poets writing in 1976, including Irving Feldman and John Hollander, and he predicts the quality that will characterize mature Jewish-American poetry: a combination of devotional intent and romantic vision.2 Bloom's sympathy for Jewish-American poetry, reiterated in his evaluations of Hollander's Spectral Emanations, is an anticipatory one: the poetry shows some promise, but only at some future point will it become a worthy genre. The accuracy of Bloom's analysis of the poetry is limited only by his implication that Jewish-American poetry is without a history. He does not see that this poetry did not spring full grown from the heads of such contemporaries as Jerome 2 Apocalyptic Messianism and Jewish-American Poetry Rothenberg, David Meltzer, Irving Feldman, or John Hollander. Earlier poets, like Emma Lazarus and Charles Reznikoff, get short shrift from Bloom. The poetry discussed in this study, influenced by esoteric sources from subterranean cultures, must be understood as a subsection of the third, and most recent, era in the history of Jewish-American poetry. The first period of Jewish-American poetry includes mostly lyrics by nineteenth-century precursors of such secular JewishAmerican gurus as Saul Bellow and Bernard Mulamud. These poets wrote as much for the Gentile audience as for the Jewish. Their forms showed significant debts to western literary traditions and their diction and rhetoric either aped their Christian counterparts or assumed the mask of Culture Jew. Even their ideas of Jew owed much to the Christians' definition ofJew. Emma Lazarus and Penina Moise are representative of this period.3 Interestingly enough, these two poets derive not from the Ashkenazic but from the Sephardic past. Therefore, they are in no way tied to the Yiddish culture or the East European sensibility that was to be such a significant factor in the Jewish-American literature of the twentieth century, particularly the fiction. The Sephardim have been established in the United States for almost two centuries, whereas the German Jews immigrated primarily in the middle of the nineteenth century. Since the Sephardic assimilation was apparent even in the mid-nineteenth century,4 these poets are quite predictably knowledgeable of the English literary verse popular in America during their lifetimes. Penina Moise lived all her life in Charleston, South Carolina, where she belonged to the old Sephardic community. Though her life was hard after her father's death, she avoided bitterness by dedicating her life to the service of the Jewish community. Some of that service was her poetry. In 1833, she published Fancy's Sketchbook , a collection of original verse, which was religious and quite traditional. Her hymns, for which she is still remembered, are included in the Reform Jewish Union Hymnal. One of her best known, "Into the Tomb of Ages Past," a Rosh Hashanah hymn, often sung to a traditional "Adon Olam" melody, is written in iambic tetrameter; each of the stanzas includes three masculine rhymed couplets.5 The topics of the mutability of human life, the speed of Introduction 3 time's passage, the dedication to God's laws, and the prayer for peace are all typical of and appropriate to the New Year season. The language is the elevated rhetoric of the nineteenth-century religious poets, both Jewish and Christian. In fact, except for the melody, which is distinctively Jewish, and the absence of the name Jesus Christ, this hymn might have appeared in any Protestant hymnal of the 1830s. Emma Lazarus' earliest poetry shows no Jewish influence, but her Songs of a Semite (1882) has been called the birth volume of Jewish-American poetry. Her most famous poem, the sonnet "The New Colossus" (1883), describes the new Statue of Liberty and the new country as "Mother of Exiles," resting place...