There Are Less Jews Left in the World: Louis Zukofsky's Holocaust Poetry

Louis Zukofsky's poetry rarely addresses the Holocaust directly, for reasons that stem both from Zukofsky's natural reticence and from his conflicted relationship with his own Jewishness. The Holocaust, however, drove him to reconsider a Jewish identity to which he had given little consideration in his poetry since the 1926 "Poem beginning 'The.'" In "Song for the Year's End," Zukofsky ties the Holocaust to reflections on American antisemitism. In "A"-12, he mourns the death both of his father and of European Yiddishkayt in general. Through a series of biblical and contemporary allusions, "Nor Did the Prophet" addresses Zukofsky's relationship with his mentor Ezra Pound and attempts to come to terms with Pound's antisemitism by reconsidering the rhetoric of Pound's controversial Pisan Cantos.