From Where Our New Song Rises: Jewish American Poetry in the Century Past: An Introduction

The essays in this special issue of Shofar, with one exception, focus on Jewish American poetry in the twentieth century, exploring its development and perhaps suggesting where it may go in the new century. The poems in a section entitled “A Scroll of Contemporary Poems” are the work of living poets. The work of two of them—Helen Degen Cohen and Michael Heller—is illuminated by essays in the journal, while another—Norman Finkelstein—has also contributed the concluding review-essay.

This issue offers just a taste of what has become one of the richest veins of American contemporary literature, a literature in which ethnic writers of many back grounds continue to create astounding bodies of work available to all readers of English. Jewish American poetry has its roots in Yiddish immigrant poetry like that examined by Merle Bachman in her essay. Many poets were affected by the same forces set loose by World War I and evidenced in the work of the only non-American poets to be discussed: Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Uri Zvi Grinberg, the subjects of Avi Matalon’s essay. In the period before the Holocaust, American poets, modernists like the young Charles Reznikoff, were often conflicted about their identities, a subject Robert Manaster has explored in his analysis of Reznikoff’s Jerusalem the Golden. Even a poet like Louis Zukofsky, deeply influenced by Objectivist American poets including the antisemitic Ezra Pound, and generally disinterested in Jewish themes, found it impossible to be indifferent to issues of Jewish identity after the Holocaust, as Mark Scroggins observes in his essay.

Helen Degen Cohen’s powerful post-Holocaust poetry is examined by Miriam Dean-Otting in an essay which makes reference to, among others, poems published for the first time in this issue of Shofar. Burt Kimmelman looks at the work of three contemporary poets, Enid Dame, Michael Heller, and Nikki Stiller. Not only is Heller’s work included in the poetry section but, additionally, Heller discusses his memoir Living Root in a conversation with Kimmelman following the essay. Norman Finkelstein looks at two new books by long-established contemporary poets, Allen Grossman and Harvey Shapiro, in his essay “How To Books.”

While this issue provides an excellent introduction to the subject of Jewish American poetry, there are some topics these essays ignore that I hope will be examined in future issues of Shofar. Religious themes are represented here by the midrashic poems of Bonnie Lyons, “How to Resist Temptation,” by Linda Zisquit, and a section of Norman Finkelstein’s longer work “Passing Over.” The journal might welcome a study of the work of poets like Anthony Hecht and Marge Piercy, whose poems, with the work of other contemporary poets, are frequently included as liturgy in prayer books and hagadot of the Reform and Reconstructionist movements. Examinations of family relationships and life cycle events, as seen in Stephen P. Schneider’s “The Expectant Father” and Linda Zisquit’s “Orphan,” inform much late twentieth-century Jewish- American poetry. The influence of the past, particularly the Holocaust, on the thinking of contemporary Jews is a topic explored in Daniel R. Schwarz’s “Utz” and Benjamin Friedlander’s “Against the Tide,” while the effect of Israel and Israeli writing on Jewish American writers is represented here by William George Wallis’s poem “Fathers.” Work of Joseph Lease, Stephen Paul Miller, and Hugh Seidman are additional examples suggesting the thematic breadth and formal richness of Jewish American poetry.

Missing in this issue of Shofar is an exploration of the enormous influence of Jewish American women poets on American poetry generally. Among the most impor tant poets in American literature, Maxine Kumin, a former Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, has explored with great poignancy the importance of her heritage on the one hand, and her skeptical and feminist arguments with Judaism on the other. Linda Pastan, whose brilliant poems about the ambiguous qualities of family life fill her volumes, regularly explores religious questions. Chana Bloch, Louise Glück, Shirley Kaufman, Alicia Sorkin Ostriker, and Myra Sklarew are just a...