Opening Up a Tradition, a Return from Exile: The Vision in Charles Reznikoff's Jerusalem the Golden

In Jerusalem the Golden, Charles Reznikoff becomes one of the first members in a "tribe" of American-Jewish poets who have helped found and continue a Jewish-American poetic tradition. This watershed book, his fourth of six pre-Holocaust poetry books, more fully integrates and reconciles the American and Jewish experience for Reznikoff. In general, the poems in this collection seem to divide into three distinct groups even though Reznikoff doesn't explicitly indicate this division. The first group of poems destabilizes his identity as a Jewish poet in America. The second group grounds his poetic vision as American and Jewish. The third group transforms place and history, negotiating between America and Jerusalem. In essence, he enacts a return from a Jewish and literary exile, incorporating his objectivist style and transforming it into something that is not just American and not just Jewish.