Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics (review)

A persistent item on the agenda of American Jewish culture, at least since the publication of Cynthia Ozick’s 1970 manifesto “Toward A New Yiddish,” has been to figure out how to conceptualize literary works by modern American Jews in relation to broader, more established Jewish traditions, from liturgy to rabbinic commentary. Many critics and readers have followed Ozick’s lead in considering that even in modern-day America, where acculturation to dominant norms has proceeded apace and where Yiddish and Hebrew have been largely displaced by English, it is possible to discern signs of distinctly Jewish creativity in the realm of imaginative literature. Such writing would be Jewish not merely because it might occasionally refer to the Bible or because it might depict characters eating bagels or complaining to their zaydes, but because it would truly ruminate upon, engage, and contest traditions that are central to Jewish self-definition. The Jewish novel might then be a new midrash; the contemporary Jewish poem a new piyyut. The notion that some works of Jewish American literature might indeed be considered Jewish in this strong sense has already been accepted in many corners: synagogues and community centers regularly sponsor reading groups on Jewish American literature; canons have been assembled and disseminated by organizations such as Nextbook and the National Yiddish Book Center; new liturgies have been assembled using recent works by Jewish American writers. But while literature has thus assumed a central role in contemporary Jewish culture, several questions remain. Are we truly justified in incorporating literary texts written under “secular” auspices into a tradition defined largely as “religious”? How should modern Jewish writing be read in such a way that neither ignores its novelty in the history of Jewish culture nor discredits the significance of its contribution? What happens to established Jewish traditions when they are refracted through modern literary texts?

It is because such questions are vital to Jewish culture today that Maeera Y. Shreiber’s Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics comes as such a welcome book. Whereas scholarship on Jewish American literature has tended to focus on writers of fiction, Shreiber calls attention to the achievement of Jewish American poets, which, as she demonstrates, is remarkable by any measure. Among the figures discussed in this engaging study are Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, Allen Ginsberg, George Oppen, Adrienne Rich, Irena Klepfisz, Louise Glück, and Allen Grossman. Evoking Psalm 137, which recurs like a leitmotif throughout this study, Shreiber shows how these and other poets have variously risen to answer the psalmist’s question: “How can we sing God’s song in a foreign land?”(v. 4). She makes a strong case that Jewish American poetry constitutes a body of work that might be productively mined by anyone interested in questions central to Jewish identity, questions about the status and meaning of covenant, about the idea of nationhood, and about strategies for sustaining collective memory during the long night of exile.

What makes Shreiber’s study particularly useful is its guiding premise that poetry and Judaism always have had a vexed, even antagonistic, relationship to one another. Poetry, in her account, is “the site of strong individuated utterance” (16), and it might be seen as both symptom of and response to cultural breakdown. “When human experience becomes otherwise unintelligible, when we are uncertain as to the terms by which we become known to each other, it is poetry we find in the rubble” (18). Risking historical anachronism, Shreiber reads Jewish American poets against the backdrop of other transitional moments in Jewish history, particularly medieval Spain, which gave rise to its own brand of innovative and theologically suspect poetry. Shreiber argues that modern America has similarly brought forth dynamic and challenging responses among Jewish poets, responses that, as she writes, “trouble even the most sacred claims about Jewishness and belonging” (234). If anything unites the Jewish American poets under discussion here, it is an acute awareness of geographical and...