Tracking the Word: Judaism's Exile and the Writerly Poetics of George Oppen, Armand Schwerner, Michael Heller, and Norman Finkelstein

This essay examines the work of four recent Jewish-American poets of successive generations (respectively, George Oppen, Armand Schwerner, Michael Heller, and Norman Finkelstein). In documenting and elucidating their interrelationships, the essay argues simultaneously for the central, and fundamental, role literacy plays in the formation of the self and in the structure of Jewish identity, and in doing so the essay reveals a core ideological value and even an essentialized aesthetic the four poets share. The essay rests on a basic assumption developed by Walter Ong and other theorists of literacy—that writing, in creating the self and thus self-awareness, also gives rise to alienation. Such alienation can be seen to be if not synonymous with exile then at least intimately involved with it, and so, in reading these four poets, the Jewish Diaspora is given full exploration, and is related back to a considered Jewish sense of exile from the Divinity.