Going Native, Becoming Modern: American Indians, Walt Whitman, and the Yiddish Poet

Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, American modernists demonstrated their commitment to a national artistic culture through their constructed sense of "Indiannness." Just as European modernists turned to so-called primitive art for inspiration, American moderns turned to the Indian, whose poetry came to be read as both authentically "American" and naturally modernist, resembling the newest and most radical experiments in free verse. This turn to the native was additionally conditioned by anxieties caused by the massive influx of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe at the turn of the century. Thus, American modernism, in its search for an authentically native form of expression, came increasingly to rely on troubling racial and cultural typologies: if the Indian was natural, authentic, artistic, and "American," then the Jew was commercial, sterile, intellectual, and alien.

This essay recovers the response of Jewish immigrant writers to this opposition through an examination of Shriftn, a Yiddish literary journal published in New York from 1912-1926. Several Shriftn issues featured translations, and later imitations, of Walt Whitman and of Native American song, both considered to be exemplarily modern and "American." The Yiddish translators had found their sources in the pages of Harriet Monroe's modernist journal Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, which was divided between Monroe's explicit desire to cultivate a "strongly localized indigenous art," and foreign correspondent Ezra Pound's cosmopolitan and international offerings, both of which resolutely excluded the Jewish, much less Yiddish poet. The editors and writers of Shriftn carried on a one-sided dialogue with Poetry through translation, imitation, and subtle critique, thus both entering into and complicating Poetry's ongoing, unresolved negotiation concerning native identity, language, and literature. I thus re-cast Yiddish literary "redface" as not so much an effort to fix an unstable racial identity as white and American, but rather as an intervention into the elitism and racism of Euro-American modernist literary practices.