Passing Through: A Review

"Passing Over," the long title poem of this new collection by Norman Finkelstein, the noted poet and critic (not the notorious Norman G. Finkelstein, the author of books on the "Holocaust industry"), is written as a kind of descant on and accompaniment to the Passover story and ritual. Its elegiac tone and the religious/philosophical problem animating it are, however, very far removed from the spirit of the ancestral holiday. As not everyone knows or remembers, Passover derives its name from the fact that in chapter 12 of Exodus Moses tells the people that when the Lord strikes down the first born of the Egyptians he will "pass over" the houses of the Hebrews; thus the holiday celebrates our joyous deliverance not only from bondage but from death as well. In Finkelstein's poetry, however (and in this respect he speaks not only for Jewish-American poetry in general but for a crisis of modernity that continues to afflict us all), presence is always shadowed by absence, life by death, memory by oblivion, and desire by loss. For Jewish poets of Finkelstein's persuasion (the term "secular" is not entirely accurate), the source and site of presence is not God but the text; and so poetry—language—is entrusted with a memorializing function that can never express gratitude without an overlay of irony. The very title of Finkelstein's poem, "Passing Over," is elegiac in a way that the name of the Passover holiday is not: the participle applies not so much to God or the Angel of Death as to the poet and to us; it connotes a world in which everything is transient and ungrounded and in which we are all perpetual sojourners, passing over and passing through.

Tennyson called Ecclesiastes "the greatest poem of ancient or modern times." The relevance of this perspective on life and literature is far-reaching: it signifies, among other things, that the "sorrows of American-Jewish poetry"—to borrow the title of an essay of the mid-seventies by Harold Bloom—are endemic not only to American Jewish poets but to modern poets in general.¹ Bloom argues that American-Jewish poetry is split between a Jewish content or vision and an American form or idiom, which cannot therefore adequately serve as its vehicle. Writing of the Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff, for instance, he asks, "Why attempt to translate Yehudah Halevi into the idiom of Pound and William Carlos Williams?"² I happen to agree with what Bloom is saying about Reznikoff here (and am therefore in disagreement with Finkelstein himself, who, in an essay entitled "Tradition and Modernity: Charles Reznikoff and the Test of (Jewish) Poetry," takes issue with Bloom's strictures);³ but it seems to me that Bloom's essay misses the larger point that Tennyson's remark reveals—i.e., that insofar as the "displaced Protestantism" (this is Bloom's term) inherent in Romantic poetic tradition increasingly embraces the kind of perspective that we find revealed in Ecclesiastes, this tradition is already in a certain crucial sense "Jewish."

Not that "American-Jewish Poetry" is a distinction without a difference (it obviously has sociological as well as historical significance), but it is certainly revealing that Finkelstein's most important poetic precursor in "Passing Over" is none other than T. S. Eliot—the Eliot of Four Quartets. (Eliot is not a Romantic, of course, but he too begins from the standpoint of Ecclesiastes, even as he attempts to transcend that standpoint by immersing himself in orthodox Christianity and Hinduism.) In Four Quartets, Eliot found a way to construct a long religious poem by varying abstract philosophical or discursive sections, in which the rhythm is a kind of loose prosi-metrum, with more closely-packed sections in traditional rhyme and meter. And Finkelstein in "Passing Over" (this is a simple observation, not a criticism) does something of the same. His attempt in the poem is partly to "redeem the time" (to borrow Eliot's phrasing in "Ash Wednesday") and partly to register the fact that it cannot...