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What Makes a Poem Jewish?

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2833719

2164-0041

David Danoff,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

What makes a given poet a Jewish poet? It may be stories about Hebrew school and holidays, memories of the shtetl or the Lower East Side. It may be a focus on ethics rooted in the prophetic tradition, or mysticism rooted in the Kabbalah. It may be an engagement with political issues pertaining to Israel and the peace process. Whatever it is, read a selection of a poet’s work and the Jewish aspects usually cohere into some kind of pattern.But what constitutes Jewish poetry? Round up a large enough sample of different writers, and any of the above elements may start to cancel or contradict one another. Any observation you can make, the opposite is also likely to be true. Factor in a scattered set of allegiances to different schools of poetry or different styles of writing, and it becomes almost impossible to separate Jewish poetry from the main currents of poetry in general.Deborah Ager and M.E. Silverman, the editors of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, have chosen to present a broad selection and let the contradictions speak for themselves. “We wanted to share distinctly Jewish American voices,” they explain in the introduction, “which include second-generation Jews, converts, those who’ve made aliyah, and others. We included poems that both do and do not focus on Jewish themes, and we did that to convey the breadth and depth of Jewish personhood.”The book covers writers born after 1945, which excludes many of the twentieth century’s best-known Jewish poets (Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, Robert Pinksy, et al.). The focus is on more contemporary voices, offering a vision of where Jewish American poetry may be headed in the early twenty-first century. But that vision is not entirely in focus, due to the wide internal variations of the book.With birthdates extending from the late 1940s to the 1970s and even the 1980s, several distinct generations are represented. Widely published poets such as David Lehman, Edward Hirsch, Alan Shapiro, and Jacqueline Osherow rub shoulders with those just beginning their careers, and the level of accomplishment varies. Experimental poems that push at the edges of syntax and semantics sit alongside more traditional first-person lyrics, including some poems written in traditional forms such as sonnets and pantoums. (Whichever style you favor, there are sure to be at least a few poems in the book you find meretricious.) Poems depicting scenes from Jewish history—the destruction of the First Temple, Sandy Koufax sitting out game one of the 1965 World Series—in a forthright manner are mingled with others that take a far more jaundiced, anguished, or capricious attitude toward their Jewish themes. (Are you a believer, or not so much? Either way, there’ll be something to annoy you.)This variation is probably unavoidable, unless an editor preferred to establish much narrower parameters. (And who would want to publish—or read—say, the Anthology of Associate Professor Gen-X Neo-Formalist Jewish Skeptics?) The best way to approach the book is either as a buffet of possible options from which to choose and assemble one’s own preferred course (decide where you think Jewish poetry is likely—or should be—going, and enjoy the poems that agree with you), or as a menagerie of specimens gathered from many populations, many diverse territories, revealing common traits and behaviors among a range of writers who might at first seem completely unrelated. Either way, some assembly is required. But there are plenty of interesting pieces to work with.One of the techniques employed by many of the writers is to adapt traditional observances—prayers, holiday rituals—into incongruously modern terms. In “De Profundis,” Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet balances the forcefulness and clarity of the psalms against the messy flux of daily life, the wavering “middle” where most of us spend most of our time:This mixing of registers often entails a certain amount of wrestling with the tradition, even wrestling with God. In “Aglow,” in a chatty, blustery, and slightly aggrieved tone, Matthew Zapruder directs a wide-ranging monologue (touching on Paul Celan, Neko Case, and his father building a boat from a catalog) toward an unresponsive “you,” indicting the reader, the Almighty, and possibly others who don’t understand or won’t respond:Such juxtapositions can also be used for chiefly comic purposes, as Philip Terman does in his narrative poem “The Shank Bone”:A number of the poems strike sparks by bringing Judaism into contact with specifically non-Jewish elements. In Cheryl Fish’s “Generation X, Crown Heights (1995)” the cultural references, names, and slang tumble deliriously together, celebrating (with a certain amount of irony) the strength that comes from heterodoxy:Elizabeth Coleman’s “Prayer in Anticipation of a Guitar Recital,” before ending with a glimpse of a ghetto and violence, paints a more rarefied picture of transcultural harmony:Parents and grandparents make regular appearances, as one would expect in any collection of poetry. But here they come bearing the familiar tropes of Jewish parenthood: stories of immigration and privation, worry, overbearing concern for their children’s well-being (and material success), as well as sustaining love and a certain strand of mystical wisdom. In “Dancing in Odessa,” with a mixture of the fanciful and the ominous, Ilya Kaminsky remembers:In her pantoum “Hyacinths for the Soul,” with the form’s prescribed repetitions of lines marching systematically forward before ending back where they began, Joan Siegel ponders a mysterious saying that connects with larger mysteries about her family’s life in the old country: “Bake two loaves of bread, my mother used to say. / Give one away and plant a hyacinth for the soul.”And Joy Gaines-Friedler’s “How We Love Our Parents” begins simply: “We leave a list of disasters by the telephone / in case they call.”There are only a few poems that touch on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and these, like Jeff Friedman’s “Somebody,” generally do so obliquely:Others, like Norman Finkelstein’s “Allegory of the Song,” feature images of immigration and displacement that encompass the common experience of many groups:Many of the poems in the book have no apparent Jewish content at all, and for certain stretches the book seems hardly different from any anthology of early twenty-first-century poetry. Poems about nature, love, travel, or aging proceed in the usual way, and the Jewishness of the writers can start to seem incidental. It’s a little bit puzzling. Anyone reading this anthology is most likely looking for poems about Judaism and the Jewish experience (however broadly construed). Why not make more of an effort to deliver that experience?One possible benefit is that a poem with no obvious Jewish connection, like Jane Hirshfield’s “In A Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed,” can take on unexpected resonances when read in a specifically Jewish context:On encountering this poem previously, I’ve thought about the war in Iraq, the lingering effects of a relationship after it’s ended, the link between sensory details and memory. Here, unexpectedly, it made me think of the Jewish element in American poetry:Jewish poets have been largely absorbed into the mainstream of American poetry. Watered down, blended with other national and ethnic traditions, overshadowed by the much wider differences of style and subject matter between individual writers, a distinctively Jewish element may seem impossible to quantify. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. This scattered but engaging collection helps clarify both the distinctiveness of Jewish American poetry and its prolific dispersal, inviting the reader to discover patterns and attempt to make his or her own sense of this multifaceted, often contradictory body of work as it moves into a new century.