Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics 9781503617728

Citation preview

SINGING IN A STRANGE LAND

STUDIES IN POETICS

Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy, Editors

SINGING IN A STRANGE LAND A Jewifh American Poetic.:~

MAEERA Y. SHREIBER

Stanford Universi1y Press

·

Stanford, California 2007

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Published with the assistance of research funds granted by the University of Utah. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shreiber, Maeera, 1956Singing in a strange land : a Jewish American poetics I Maeera Y. Shreiber. p. cm.--(Verbal art : studies in poetics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-8047-3429-5 (doth : acid-free paper) r. American poetry--Jewish authors--History and criticism.

2. Jews in literature. 3· Jews--United States--Identity. 4· Group identity in literature. 5· Literature and history-United States. 6. Judaism and literature--United States. I. Title.

PSI53.J4S57 2007 8n '. 50808924--dc22

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in rolr3.5 Adobe Garamond

Thi.J book i.J dedicated to my father, Ben Zion Shreiber Zaycher Chasdei Avot RecaLL the Kindne.M of Fatherd

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction "Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

II

2 "You still haven't finished with your mother": The Gendered Poetics of Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg

3 "Speaking about epics": Zukofsky, Oppen, History, and the "Tale of the Tribe"

46 98

4 "Where are we moored?": Adrienne Rich, Irena Klepfisz, Lament, and Its Diasporic Aftermath

143

"Unreachable Father": Exploring the Boundary Between Poetry and Prayer

179

6 "Do not be content with an imaginary God": Poetry as a Preface to Prayer

208

Notes

237

WOrks Cited

257

Index

279

Acknowledgments

I always read a book's acknowledgments first. It is often the one place, in scholarly writing, where the fiction of impersonality is inoperative, and the author's "self" makes itself known, with a string of names marking a range of connections, personal and professional, that attest to something that most of us who write know: that virtually every book is born, sustained, and realized with the help, insights, and kindness of others. Therefore, it is with enormous gratitude that I offer a list of my own. I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues who at strategic moments offered advice, read chapters, and expressed support for this project: Charles Berger, Kate Coles, Aryeh Cohen, Craig Dworkin, Tamara Eskenazi, Stephen Fredman, Norman Finkelstein, Corrinne Harol, Kathryn Hellerstein, Chana Kronfeld, Cristanne Miller, Tania ModJeski, Marjorie Perloff, Keith Tuma, Mark Scroggins, and Eric Selinger. Special thanks to Priscilla Wald, who read the manuscript for Stanford University Press and made some crucial recommendations; it is a better book for her insights. Special thanks also to my dear friends Rachel Adler and Miriyam Glazer, who shared their deep knowledge of Judaica, reading the manuscript from cover to cover with an eye toward textual accuracy. Thank you also to another dear friend, Andrea White, for her support. Andrea

x

Acknowledgments

Vargo has been a presence in my life since this book was first conceived; her wisdom is a treasure. I am deeply grateful to Allen Grossman for his powerful work and for being, quite simply, the most effective teacher I have ever known. His influence, and central conviction in poetry as a special kind of knowledge, are evident on every page. I began this work as a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and completed it with fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Tanner Humanities Center-! can't imagine having written this book without these gifts of time and intellectual camaraderie. I also benefited enormously from the opportuniry to present parts of this work at several academic institutions, including the Graduate Theological Union, Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, the Universiry of California at Santa Barbara, UCLA, the Universiry of California at Irvine, and the Universiry of Utah. And I am very grateful to Norris Pope, Mariana Raykov, and Peter A. Nelson at Stanford Universiry Press for all their help. My family has steadily cheered this book along. Deep thanks to my mother, Ida Shreiber; my sister, Davida; my brother-in-law, David; and their children, Sara, Micah, and of course Jacob-who challenged me to write more quickly. This book is dedicated to my father, Ben Zion Shreiber, who actively contributed to this book not only by making specific suggestions but by modeling a love for learning and for Jewish thought throughout my life. Finally, I have been gifted with the love, fierce intelligence, patience, determination, and friendship of Vincent Cheng. This book would never have been a realiry without him. He has read every page, numerous times-always in an effort to help me realize my own voice and also to consider a readership larger than the one I often narrowly imagined. He is also a most marvelous father to our son, Gabi. His support and love have made this book possible.

George Oppen's "Psalm" (from George Oppen, Collected Poems, copyright © 1975 by George Oppen) and "Till Other Voices Wake Us" (from George Oppen, New Collected Poems, copyright© 2000 by Linda Oppen) are reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Passages from Mary Oppen's "Jerusalem Journal," in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the Universiry of California, San Diego, copyright© Linda Oppen, are used by permission of Linda Oppen. Louise Gluck's "Matins" (p. 3), "Matins" (p. 26), and "The White Lilies" (p. 63), from The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck, copyright© 1992 by Louise Gluck,

Acknowledgments

xi

are reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and of Carcanet Press Limited. Permission to quote from "How to Do Things with Tears" and "Flora's ABC" from Allen Grossman, How to Do Things with Tears (New Directions, 2001), was granted by Allen Grossman. A portion of Chapter I appeared in Maeera Y. Shreiber, "A Flair for Deviation: The Troublesome Potential of Jewish Poetics," in jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections, edited by Jonathan N. Barron and Eric Murphy Selinger, copyright © 2000 by Brandeis University Press. Reprinted by permission of University Press of New England, Hanover, NH. Portions of Chapter 4 are reprinted from Maeera Y. Shreiber, "'Where Are We Moored?': Adrienne Rich, Women's Mourning, and the Limits of Lament," in Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, edited by Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber, copyright© 1997 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. Portions of Chapter 4 were previously published in Maeera Y. Shreiber, "The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics," PMLA n3.2 (March 1998): 273-287. Reprinted by permission of PMLA.

SINGING IN A STRANGE LAND

Introduction

As the fifth book of the Pentateuch, the book of Deuteronomy, draws to a close, God appears for the last time to Moses "in a pillar of cloud" and speaks to Israel's prophet of what is to befall his people upon his death, which is imminent. Rather than comforting the aging leader with promises of his people's glorious return to the long-lost land of Israel, God predicts a grim future: "You [Moses] are soon to lie with your fathers. This people will thereupon go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My Covenant that I made with them" (31:16). In anticipation of this seismic rupture, God instructs Moses to "write down this poem and teach it to the people oflsrael" (31:19). Counter to what the situation might seem to call for, the poem is not meant to ease exilic pain by ensuring Israel of God's enduring presence. Rather, offered as a "witness against the people oflsrael," the poem works to aggravate the wound-to remind the wayward people just how far they are from the divine principle of being who legislates the terms of their very existence. Turning to the poem itself, which God dictates to Moses, we discover that only in the last strophe is there any indication that the sacred Covenant, the guarantor of continuity, will remain intact. Most of the song's forty-three verses are devoted to chronicling God's largesse, Israel's ingratitude, and the violent chaos

2

Introduction

that is inevitable. That is, just as the people oflsrael are poised to claim the fabled land of "milk and honey," they are obliged to take on, and to transmit to future generations, the knowledge rhat their return is doomed to sour; exile is inevitable. And a poem is the means by which this terrible knowing is to be conveyed. As one scholar memorably puts it, the poem "is a kind of time bomb" (Fisch 1988, 51) ticking away as the people lose their sense of vulnerability and, intoxicated by a sense of limitless power, grow "fat and gross and coarse," without a thought for the God to whom they owe their existence (Deuteronomy 32:15). Then, after a long period of forgetfulness, this explosive utterance will set off a terrible avalanche of memories, as the people will once again suffer dispersion; for the poetic sound track accompanying the people of Israel into exile, comprised of the song Moses imparts to the people, is crafted to remind them just how desperate the "empty howling waste" will be. This narrative sets the scene for my own inquiry into the contours and dynamics of a Jewish American poetics in at least two critical ways. First, it suggests that in the story of Jewish discursive practices, poetry is inextricably bound up with the exilic condition. Insofar as the story of Jews in America is so often read as an exilic phenomenon, the story of their poetry must be read under the sign of dispersion-if only to ultimately call this claim into question. Second, as the biblical episode makes clear, the Jewish poem can work to profoundly unsettling ends; for rather than holding out a promise of spiritual and material restoration, the poem dwells upon and aggravates the very conditions of estrangement that engendered it. This very idea of the Jewish poem as "an agent of turbulent thought" (to use Charles Bernstein's formulation [1995, 378]) is central to my methodology. Throughout this study I seek to show how poetry provides an opportunity for complicating and therefore thickening our understanding of a range of issues activated by the discourse of Jewish American identity, including our collective investment in terms such as exile and home. Furthermore, I maintain that poetry is a powerful strategy for disrupting the strong masculinist narrative rhat has long underwritten the story of Jewish writing in general, and Jewish American writing in particular. Indeed, poetry's elision from the "canon" of Jewish American writing indicates a broader politics of gender. The link between the poetic and the feminine-an ancient and ubiquitous aspect of the genre's history-has important implications for Jewish American literary culture, with its own well-rehearsed troping of the Jew as effeminate and feminine. One strong marker of the troubling and troublesome place poetry plays in the story of Jewish writing generally, and in Jewish American writing specifically, may be found in the relative silence surrounding rhe subject. To put it another way, my

Introduction

3

book begins with a lacuna. Whereas Jewish American fiction has long been recognized as a fit subject for critical inquiry, Jewish American poetry has largely been overlooked. Until very recently, those who wanted to consider the subject found themselves, like the speaker in Virginia Woolf's classic 1929 essay A Room of One's Own (1981), "looking about the shelves for books that were not there." For a long time, when the question of the silence surrounding Jewish American poetry was even broached, the enterprise was declared to be all but impossible, beginning with Harold Bloom's infamously funereal essay "The Sorrows of American Jewish Poetry'' (1975a, 247-62). Cynthia Ozick defers the subject, maintaining that it will be a long time before Jewish American writing is "ripe enough for poetry" (1994, 32). More lately, poet-critic Allen Grossman, in the interest of provoking, rather than preempting, discussion, has written that "there has never been any Jewish poetry''-precisely in order to effect the very kind of quiet requisite to thoughtful reformulation. Although this silence has certainly begun to be filled with the recent appearance of valuable studies-such as Stephen Fredman's A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry (2001), Norman Finkelstein's Not One ofThem in Place: Modern Poetry and jewish American Identity (2001), and Jonathan Barron's and Eric Selinger's collection jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary and Reflections (2000)-I propose that the phenomenon itself is well worth investigating as a marker of Jewish American poetry's troubled and troublesome status. The process of establishing a canon of Jewish American writing is well underway: the last five years have seen the publication of both a Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature (Chametsky et al., eds., 2001) as well as a Cambridge Companion to jewish American Literature (Kramer and Wirth-Nesher, eds., 2003), two strong indications that Jewish American writing has been at long last institutionally recognized as a significant strain in American literary history. I would like to defer this process of canonization, however, by suggesting that instead of asking, Who is a Jewish American poet? we might ask, What is a Jewish American poem?-by focusing on questions of form and genre as part of a sustained effort to describe the field of Jewish poetics. In this respect my study is meant to be broadly suggestive, and I hope generative, rather than comprehensive-a desire inscribed in the book's subtitle, A jewish American Poetics. Like Jewishness itselfwhich, as poet Irena Klepfisz puts it, is "always arguable" -its poetry is dynamic and restless. Read closely, these texts demand that we scrutinize our relation to such structures of belonging as community, nation, and religion. To appreciate better what may be learned from such poetries, aesthetic models and ideological and theological paradigms of poetic discourse need to be identified

4

Introduction

and explicated. But there is more at stake than just intellectual, theological, or aesthetic gain. As I will argue more fully in Chapter r of this book, the marriage berween Americanness and Jewishness has made for some problematic negotiations. With its particular affinity for tropes of tribelessness, homelessness, and above all exile, American poetics aggravates, indeed accelerates, the loss of ethnic specificity. This universalizing trend, a kind of "trouble" in which poetry is conspicuously implicated, lies at the heart of a deeply problematic claim that has become ubiquitous in contemporary Jewish American poetic practice-rather like a slogan or mantra, a one-line ars poetica, invoked by poets as different from one another as John Hollander, Jerome Rothenberg, and Eleanor Wilner: ''All poets are Jews." The phrase, equating poetic art with the condition of Jewishness (both trading on an "outsider" status), in fact diminishes what may be distinctive about Jewishness as a particular cultural and religious affiliation. In the interest of restoring the material difference Jewishness makes to the poetic enterprise, I concentrate on specific aesthetic dilemmas or concerns, such as those attendant upon metaphor as a rhetorical strategy potentially at odds with the Jewish allegiance to a disembodied deity. Further, I am interested in tracking how poetic texts draw on biblical and rabbinic traditions, sometimes to radically new interpretive ends, in order to make their meaning. To put it another way, many of the poems examined here participate in what historian YosefYerushalmi calls an act of "anamnesis"-an imaginative retrieval of the past conducted in the interest of transforming the future. Readers will immediately notice my commitment to aesthetic and formal concerns, since the book is shaped around particular conceptual problems, rather than specific poetic careers. Each chapter concentrates on genres, forms, and distinctive kinds of rhetorical occasions-such as piyyutim (medieval prayer-poems), psalm, lyric, lamentation, elegy, and kaddish-in order to generate a lexicon for Jewish American poetic practice. In this way I mean to deploy one of the most powerful explanatory tools available to the student of poetry, because a focus on genre helps illuminate the specific cultural function of a given text. By investigating how certain specific paradigms of Jewish discursive practice play out in the work of a wide range of rwentieth-century poets, this book explores the making of a poetics that both illuminates and actively participates in the making of that complex, ever-changing category of identity known as Jewish Americanness. Responding to philosopher-critic Susan Stewart's call for a thorough and ongoing consideration of how literary forms may shape and constitute, not just illustrate, culture, I am committed to asking, What is the relation berween aesthetic and cultural transformation? In other words, although the reader will certainly find extended discus-

Introduction

5

sions of such well-recognized poets as Allen Ginsberg and Louis Zukofsky, I am less concerned with demonstrating how they do or don't fit into that slipperiest of categories, "the Jewish Writer," than with showing how their poems illuminate issues central to the making of Jewish identity. This line of inquiry leads to one of the book's strongest efforts: an ongoing dramatization of how poems may be used to effect cultural transformation. For the poems examined here do not merely describe ritual practices or identity positions; instead, they actively interrogate the function of deeply entrenched prayers (such as the kaddish, the mourner's prayer) and cultural concepts (such as the notion of Israel as "home"). Moreover, in demonstrating how it is that poetry aggravates a crucial and fruitful tension between Judaism as a religious category of identity and Judaism as a cultural one, the book contributes to the fast-growing fields of both Jewish and cultural studies, and also serves as a limit case for theories of literature and culture, which have focused on narrative and have tended to occlude poetry altogether from their considerations. Ruth Wisse's decision to ignore poetry completely in the single chapter devoted to Jewish American writing in The Modern jewish Canon (2000) only deepens my commitment to making a place for poetry in the story of a literary tradition that has just celebrated its 350th anniversary. But again, rather than simply making a case for a specific set of poets, I want to begin by scrutinizing the silence surrounding Jewish American poetry; for the presence of this silence may well be a practical outcome of a generally assumed distinction and long-standing opposition between narrative (as the realm of the secular, and thus of natio and community) and poetry (as the supposed realm of the sacred and transcendent, of "spilt religion" [Hulme 1936]). The assumption thus is that poetry is ill-suited to discussions of "imagined communities" and other such rich cultural tropes and frames of analyses. Jewish American poetry, which is both formally and thematically interested in making manifest what poetcritic Charles Bernstein calls the "holiness of the ordinary," offers an important corrective to this binary, employing "secularized" versions ofliturgical forms (such as the kaddish). With such moves, the poetry represented here demands that we think hard about the relation between the sacred and the secular and resist the sort of easy displacements that color our use of a term like chosenness. In the history of Jewish discursive practice, the genre of poetry itself has long been identified as troubling and troublesome, serving as what I have already described as "an agent of turbulent thought." This troubled history provides a rich theoretical framework for discussing the material specificity of Jewish American aesthetic practice. I contend that Jewish poetry's inaugural moment may be traced

6

Introduction

to the destruction of the Temple (587 B.C.E.), an event documented with the crucial query "How can we sing God's song in a foreign land?" (Psalm 137=4). The notion of poetry (the act of singing in a strange land) as both a response to and a consequence of exile, a condition of radical displacement, is particularly relevant to the condition of modern Jewish American verse. This dynamic helps focus our attention on how modern Jewish American poetry at once aggravates as well as compensates for the demise of founding social institutions-the very catastrophe (exile) that calls the poem into being. In the exilic space where poetry resides, the potential emerges for speaking not only toward, but sometimes against, the community's dominant institutions. Thus, such moments of rupture in the poetry mark a disturbance that offers insight into both the poetics and the culture(s) of which it is a part. Indeed, this book contends that the tradition of Jewish poetic writing makes vivid and apparent an irresolvable and ongoing, even sustaining, tension between individuated and collective models of voice and identity. This may be otherwise construed as a tension between the conditions of estrangement and those of belonging-a tension between "dwelling" and "displacement" that this book means to embrace. One of the most far-reaching claims of the book concerns the ways in which the condition of displacement or exile ultimately becomes the grounds for an alternate account of belonging. With this move, I mean to join other cultural critics-such as Daniel Boyarin and, more recently, Ranen Omer-Sherman-who value literary studies as an important strategy for imaginatively disentangling ideas about community and belonging from those of nationhood and homeland. In this way my account of a "diasporic" poetics means to interrupt the dominant cultural narrative that views "Jewishness" as a recognizably unified whole-a precept that is complicated further as Jewishness bleeds into Americanness, making for the loss of cultural specificity. For the specific subset of jewish American poetry requires a renewed consideration of the extent to which the story of American poetry is itself one of discontinuity and of loss, preoccupied with questions of tradition, authority, and origin (as described by Mutlu Blasing [1987] and Susan Howe [1993] in their revisionary accounts of American literary history). My study thus means to consider both how Jewish writers contribute to a polyphonic American literature and how America contributes to the making of a polyphonic Jewish literary culture. Early in the process of writing this book, I discovered that it was necessary to use an interdisciplinary approach in order to describe some of the many roles poetry plays in the making of a Jewish American consciousness. Therefore, in these pages readers will find discussions of poetic and cultural theory alongside Jewish

Introduction

7

theology and philosophy. Grounding this kind of layered account is my sense of myself as both an insider and an outsider, particularly when it comes to Jewish Studies. For nearly all of my intellectual life, I have tried hard to "dance at two weddings" (the Yiddish version of"being in two places at once"). My early college years were spent in Israel studying Jewish texts. Although I eventually shifted my attention to English literature, my decision to focus on poetry, a kind of discourse that yields itself only under the closest kinds of scrutiny, was most certainly influenced by my ongoing immersion in a textual tradition rich in important ambiguities and in which the act of interpretation truly matters.

The first chapter, "'Jewish Trouble' and the Trouble with Poetry," serves as an introduction to many of the book's major themes and concerns, establishing both a historical context and a theoretical frame for understanding the problematic status ofJewish poetry as a marginalized discourse. With this context in place, I then focus on two poems as sustained examples of the kinds of "trouble" poetry can make for the construction of Jewish American identity, and as a way of naming some key issues that I explore in greater detail elsewhere in the book. Jacqueline Osherow's "Moses in Paradise" shows how the act of poetic speech may challenge the profound distinctions that, according to Jewish tradition, set the divine apart from the human, proposing that both may be of the body. Osherow's example of poetry's capacity for radical theological and aesthetic subversion is followed by a discussion of Emma Lazarus's signature poem, "The New Colossus" (better known as "The Statue of Liberty Sonnet"), as an example of how Jewish American poetry mediates between two crucial poles of identity, religion, and culture. Although the book focuses largely on twentieth-century writers, the inclusion of this nineteenth-century poet strengthens the growing recognition of Lazarus's role as an originary voice in Jewish American writing. By offering discussions of both well-established and relatively unknown writers, this chapter establishes a precedent for complicating an emerging account of Jewish American poetry as a discrete canon-and for showing how poetics provides a dramatic site in which the intersections of culture, history, and theology come into striking relie£ Further, in this chapter I introduce one of the book's founding figures, the Shekhinah, the kabbalistic term for the feminine figuration of the Godhead-a figure who, in the story ofJewish American poetics, serves in the capacity of muse. Known also as the divine presence who dwells with her people in exile, the Shekhinah presides over a diasporic poetics-an aesthetic enterprise committed to representing a culture whose boundaries are perpetually in flux.

8

Introduction

ter

2,

The gendered aspect of Jewish American poetics takes center stage in Chap"'You still haven't finished with your mother': The Gendered Poetics of

Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg," in which I investigate the infamous but insufficiently theorized Jewish Mother-not merely as a thematic or stereotypical figure but as part of a deep structure in Jewish American culture that illuminates the gendered narrative underwriting poetic institutions-thus forcing us to rethink issues of masculinity as well as of usable traditions. Chapter 3, '"Speaking about epics': Zukofsky, Oppen, History, and the 'Tale of the Tribe,"' takes up the paternal function as played out in the work of two Jewish late-modernist poets, as I explore the tensions (and ambiguities) between myth and history in Jewish poetry and suggest that history can neither be escaped nor contained. In these pages I examine the difference Jewishness makes to the modernist preoccupation with what James Joyce describes as "the nightmare of history." This chapter also provides another opportunity to expand upon the relation between individuated models of belonging and those grounded in the idea of a unified collective. Collective models of identity formation continue to be at issue in Chapter 4, '"Where are we moored?': Adrienne Rich, Irena Klepfisz, Lament, and Its Diasporic Aftermath," which begins by examining Rich's efforts to reappropriate the biblical genre of lament (a genre deeply implicated in the sexual politics of mourning). Reading the book of Lamentations in the context of feminist revisionary readings of poetic mourning provides a frame for considering how this Jewish American poet mourns her nation, even as she questions it as a viable ground of collective well-being. Rich's interrogation of nation sets the scene for a discussion oflrena Klepfisz's experiments in Yiddish-English bilingual verse as an aesthetic strategy devoted to imagining the possibility of an alternate, "diasporic" account of Jewish belonging and identity-an account of "home," whose boundaries exceed the dictates of national policy. This discussion also affords the opportunity to explore more fully the place ofYiddish, a distinctly "absorbative" linguistic construct, in the making of a Jewish American poetics. Throughout this book, I suggest how-because of the emphases on displacement, estrangement, exile, and diaspora-Jewish American poetry illuminates some of the central political tensions of our time (from the Holocaust to the Palestinian intifadas), especially the relationship between national and extranational modes of belonging. In my analysis of Klepfisz, the focus is clearly on reading Jewishness as a secularized cultural phenomenon; but in the final chapters of this study, the emphasis shifts from the secular to the sacred, as I concentrate on exploring the relation be-

Introduction

9

tween poetry and specific liturgical forms, including that of the psalm. In broaching questions of a theological nature, my book asks that literary studies, especially those devoted to modern and contemporary writing, scrutinize and ultimately overcome a deeply entrenched resistance to institutions of religious knowledge. It also seeks to make vivid the ways in which poetry can contribute to contemporary Jewish theology. Even as I argue for the importance of liturgical forms in the shaping of a Jewish American poetics, I maintain that it is important to understand what makes poetry distinct from prayer; such is the focus of Chapter 5, "'Unreachable Father': Exploring the Boundary Between Poetry and Prayer." In examining the boundaries, the distance and the difference, between poetry and liturgy, as played out principally in the work of George Oppen and Louise GlUck, I again scrutinize the sacred/secular dichotomy so central to discursive assumptions about the poetic. Merely to insist upon reading poetry and prayer as functionally different kinds of discursive practice, however, risks oversimplifying the relation of these potent genres. Therefore, in the interest of producing a more nuanced account, I turn to the work of Allen Grossman, expanding upon his notion of the "theophoric," or God-bearing, poem. In the final chapter, '"Do not be content with an imaginary God': Poetry as a Preface to Prayer," I argue not only for how Jewish poems facilitate prayer but also for how, as constitutive utterances working in the service of a diasporic consciousness, these poems can compel us to interrogate our investment in any given land, any specific place in time, and help us instead to imagine alternative sites of belonging, including that of a "Jerusalem of the mind." In other words, theology and the poetry it engenders give us new ways of thinking about matters of urgent political concern. The chapter affords a renewed opportunity to consider how Jewish American poetry illuminates the limitations of exile as a dominant trope in Jewish identity and aesthetic production. Taken as a whole, the book explores the (sometimes fruitful) frictions and intersections between Jewish history, theology, American identity, and cultural production.

I

"Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

"Jewish Trouble"? Some years ago Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, introduced the term trouble to destabilize the trope of the "feminine" in the service of a full-blown interrogation of gender as a fixed category of identity (1990). Using the historical and cultural configuration of "female trouble" against itself, Butler showed how what had long been perceived as the site of abject anxiety-the feminine--can be used to "trouble" the very epistemologies upon which such constructions depend. So, trouble should not necessarily be avoided. Indeed, sometimes it is to be embraced, cultivated as constitutive of a subject's given complexity. In my own study I want to extend Butler's term to include the tendency of certain cultural forms or productions to cause trouble, to be troublesome. Keeping this heuristic principle in mind, I want to suggest that the roles Jewish American poetry play in the making of cultural, ethnic, and religious identities are both troubled and troubling ones. I mean to consider the kinds of trouble that Jewish American poetry both marks and makes for dominant accounts of Jewish Americanness-as well as for certain mappings of American aesthetics. One of the contentions in this book is that the larger body of work-the tradition of Jewish poetic writing, with its own troubled aesthetic history-makes apparent an irresolvable and ongoing, even sustaining, tension between individuated and

12

Chapter One

collective models of voice and identity. This may be otherwise construed as a tension between the conditions of estrangement and those of belonging, insofar as a given text may interrupt the dominant theological and cultural narrative with a variant account of its own. Such interruptions necessarily call into question the prospect of "Jewishness" as a recognizably unified whole-a prospect that is complicated further as Jewishness bleeds into Americanness, making for the loss of cultural specificity. In the interest of generating a theoretical frame for such inquiries into the cultural status and functions of Jewish American poetry, I want to start by turning briefly to the ancient past, to what is arguably an originary moment and rationale for Jewish poetics. 1 My story begins with the destruction of the Temple (586 B.C.E.), an event amounting to a catastrophic assault on the sacred, securely boundaried locus of those divine principles that bound the community together and sponsored effective collective speech. The catastrophe makes for a crisis in the conditions of aesthetic production, as famously chronicled in Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept as we remembered Zion. We hung our lyres upon the willows in its midst. For there they who carried us away captive asked us for a song .... How can we sing God's song in a foreign land? (my emphases)

The psalm opens with a stutter, a syntactically superfluous "there" (we've already been told where), which calls attention to the difficulty of aesthetic utterance that the song documents ("How can we sing ... ?"). But it also indexes the solution, as Sidra Ezrachi explains: " There defines exile as the place that is elsewhere. And being elsewhere becomes the precondition for poetic production" (2000, 465). What begins as a liability becomes an asset; loss is recovered as gain, poetically speaking. "Elsewhere" becomes somewhere, at least as far as poetry is concerned. The question "How can we sing God's song in a foreign land?" is also itself the answer, as the song of exile becomes the master narrative in which all Jewish poems begin. Less extravagantly put, radical displacement turns out to be a real aesthetic boon. But the relation between text and pre-text is not without its own complications or consequences. The poem that records loss may also aggravate and sustain the very situation that engendered it. After the crucial query "How can we sing God's song in a foreign land?" there is a revelatory shift as the first-person plural "we" gives way to the first-person singular: "If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem." In the space of the "there" that is elsewhere, in the exilic space where poetry resides, the potential emerges for a kind of speaking that occupies a contested relation to the social order-a potential for speaking not only toward but also some-

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

13

times against the social order and its dominant institutions. The song dramatizes how in the act of poetic speaking, the individual subject may break off from the whole, the communal (even where, as in Psalms, the first-person speaker is a conventional Everyman). The potential thus exists for a divisive, individuated voice and sensibility, a condition of aggravated separation. 2 In this way poetry may be said to move between belonging and estrangement-with an indelible desire, or longing to belong, underwriting both positions. Such an aesthetic dynamic, with its profound social consequences, already signifies and makes for a certain kind of fundamental "trouble." Upon closer consideration, Psalm 137 attests on a number of counts to poetry's troubling proclivities. Generically speaking, it is importantly atypical. It is a song neither of praise nor of petition. Rather, it is a cursing psalm, an "imprecatory psalm, the only one of its kind in the entire collection" (Interpreter's Bible 1995, 703). 3 This lack of conformity, in language as well as sentiment, suggests that the text before us may not really be a psalm or song at all, strictly speaking, but rather an individuated expression, something closer perhaps to poetry. 4 Discovering one form to be fundamentally unavailable ("How can we sing ... ?"), the speaker goes on to pursue its alternative. 5 In this way the crisis may be said to precipitate a generic shift or substitution, one that is problematic in its own right. For Psalm 137 does not end with the crucial query "How can we sing God's song in a foreign land?'' Instead, the speaker goes on to question the possibility of memory-one of poetry's principal cultural activities-and thus of poetry itself: "Ifi forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, I let my right hand wither; I let my tongue stick to my palate I if I cease to think of you" (137:5-6). That is, should memory turn out to be utterly unreliable, then poetic action itself-singing and playing the lyre ("my right hand")will be forfeited. Faced with this terrible prospect, the poet addresses God (the custodian of memory), praying neither for forgiveness nor for a speedy return to the homeland, but for bloody revenge: "0 Daughter of Babylon, you predator, blessed be he who repays you the evil you have done us! I Blessed be he who seizes and shatters your nursing babies against the rock'' (Psalm 137:8-9). The trouble therefore does not end with poetry's potential failure or instability, but extends to include the possibility that it may well contribute to the violence that engendered it. Alerting us to the violence underwriting the discourse of exile, the psalm provides yet another iteration of the aggravated position poetry occupies in relation to conditions of belonging and those of estrangement, inviting us to consider how sometimes poetry may work to shore up such terrible linkings, and how sometimes it may also work to dismantle them by imagining alternate, deterritorialized models of collective being.

14

Chapter One

Such themes of discontinuity and loss are a frequent strain in Jewish American poetics, a subset of American poetry. Read within this context, the study ofJewish American poetics leads to a renewed consideration of the story of American poetics, which is similarly haunted by an anxious preoccupation with questions of tradition, authority, and origin. In this respect, I mean to pursue and contribute toward that strain in contemporary American studies devoted to reexamining certain long-standing assumptions regarding literary history and tradition. Consider, for example, John Irwin's rather quirky investigation (1980) of Egyptian hieroglyphics as a favorite nineteenth-century American trope for representing an abiding concern with origins. Mutlu Blasing provides a less oblique, and finally more effective, example of such an inquiry in American Poetry: The Rhetoric ofIts Forms, where she argues for a "decentered" account of American poetic history shaped by "the loss of the English literary tradition and the political and metaphysical assumptions underwriting the very idea of a legitimate historical authority" (1987, 1). Indeed, American literary history, like the proto-Jewish one, takes "the stutter" as its "plot" (in poet-critic Susan Howe's words; 1993, r8r). This "sounding of uncertainty" serves as the ground for Howe's own "unsettling of the wilderness" that is American literary history. Engaging writers who stand outside the patriarchal social order, such as Emily Dickinson and Anne Hutchinson, Howe shows how the stutter belongs to "the antinomian" poet who holds an aesthetic and ideological position akin to lawlessness, or outsidedness, a position that may be read as gendered: "Lawlessness seen as negligence is at first feminized and then restricted or banished" (1). This same figuration, I shall argue, becomes quite prominent in Jewish American poetic practice. In such reconfigurations, American poetry is not a patrilineal (not to mention linear) narrative written under the sign of the cogent Father, as Harold Bloom, for example, would have us read Emerson, but a decentered story mediated by the scattered and scattering Mother. Such gendered reconfigurations and troublings become especially apparent when read through the lens of a subtradition, that of Jewish American poetry. To put it another way, "Jewish trouble" may also be a certain kind of "gender trouble." The troubled and potentially troubling status of my subject-Jewish American poetics-is marked by the relative silence that surrounds it. Although the recent publication of several critical studies focusing upon Jewish American verse has done much to correct the omission, the phenomenon is itself still worth investigating. For while Jewish American narrative has enjoyed all kinds of attention, little has been said about the poetry. This is not to suggest that the entry ofJewish American fiction into the taxonomy of American writing has been in any way

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

15

simple or obvious. As Hana Wirth-Nesher writes, "criteria for admission into this canon remain problematic, as recalcitrant as criteria for determining definitions of Jewishness itself" (1994, 218). Nonetheless, Jewish American fiction has emerged as a recognizable corpus, worthy of extensive critical attention-from full-length studies of such "major" authors as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud, to thematic studies, including Allen Guttman's The jewish Writer in America (1971), Mark Shechner's After the Revolution (1987), Murray Baumgarten's City Scriptures (1982), and more recently, Andrew Furman's Contempory jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma (zooo), among numerous others. As I understand it, the comparative silence around Jewish American poetry is not a matter of benign neglect. Instead, it is one of purposeful occlusion; asMarianne Moore tells us, "omissions are not accidents" (1982, title page). The significance of this occlusion is of great interest to me, and I will return to it at various turns throughout this study. At this early juncture, I want to suggest speculatively that the elision is one practical outcome of a generally assumed distinction and contrast between narrative (as the realm of the secular and thus of natio and community) and poetry (as the supposed realm of the sacred and transcendent, of "spilt religion''). Such is the position implicitly assumed in Homi Bhabha's collection Nation and Narration (1990) and explicitly at stake in Timothy Brennan's reading of narrative (specifically the novel) as a "composite" Bakhtinian text that may function as the site of a dialogic (indeed, polylogic) enactment of "the nation's composite nature"-which contains "a jumble of poetry, drama, newspaper report, memoir, and speech; a mixture of the jargons of race and ethnicity'' (Brennan 51); or what Bhabha calls "the national life ... [that] becomes the site of writing the nation" (Bhabha 297). However loosely and diversely contained, narrative allows a given community to imagine and sustain a mythos of belonging, even in the face of potentially splintering differences (Brennan 44-51). Such generic distinctions, including Bakhtin's own, may, however, be far too simplistic, for poetry, with what Bakhtin calls its "ritualistic" engagement with the ancient past, is itself as likely to be an account of irresolvable discontinuities, of the fissures and multiple voices of a community or tradition, as one of reassuring continuity and community (1981, 13). Indeed, one only has to turn to the Hebrew Bible, itself a notoriously fragmented text, to discover how poetry may work to disruptive ends, interrupting the narrative of which it is often a part. 6 Yet, there may even more going on here than generic misreading or a twentiethcentury reversal of an ancient literary hierarchy. For poetry's elision may be also construed as symptomatic of what Ann Douglas calls "the feminization of American culture." In her chapter on "Ministers and Mothers," Douglas describes how

16

Chapter One

American women and clergy, otherwise "confined to kitchens and churches, ... could sit down at the kitchen table or desk and send out sermons and poems to compete, as they themselves were forbidden to do, in the markets of the masculine world" (1977, roo). But as Tania Modleski points out (1991, 24), not all aesthetic productions are assigned equal value in Douglas's analysis. Poems and sermonic tracts, along with romance fiction, are pitted against the more serious (read: masculine) aesthetic achievements of Melville and Hawthorne. This trajectory of associations-which puts the poetic, the religious, and the feminine in opposition to narrative, secularity, and the masculine-has important consequences for Jewish American literary culture, with its own well-rehearsed legacy and trope of the Jew as effeminate and feminine. While such an opposition is well worth questioning, my point is that Jewish American writing is affiicted with an anxiety provoked by this discursive strain of intellectual history. That is, read in the context of American literary history, the elision of poetry from the "canon" of Jewish American writing may be a mark of a broader politics of gender: "Muscle Jews" write big, muscular novels.? On those few occasions when the silence surrounding Jewish American poetry has been broken, it has been largely to declare the enterprise all but impossible. The subject itself elicits a stutter, a critical stammering. For Cynthia Ozick the question of Jewish American poetry must necessarily be deferred. As she sees it, the future of Jewish American writing depends upon its ability to generate a shared vision of communal well-being, grounded in a culturally distinct language, a "New Yiddish." And, while novels that fulfill this vision may well be in the offing, it will be a long time before this new language is "ripe enough for poetry" (1994, 32). Such an aesthetic ideology, based upon potentially coercive ideas of cultural and religious unity, certainly complicates the possibility of the poetic, a kind of speech that often serves as the site of strong individuated utterance. But with her focus on language, Ozick identifies what ultimately emerges as a defining feature of Jewish American poetry. This view is articulated by John Hollander, who is perhaps the most optimistic among Jewish American poetry's early diagnosticians. He argues that, writing out of an irrecuperable sense of loss or estrangement from an "original language," the Jewish American poet stands to make a singular contribution to a larger American aesthetic. 8 At the core of Hollander's argument is an allegorical or perhaps midrashic equation between the Jewish exilic position and poetry itself: "Every true poet is in a kind of diaspora in his own language" (1994, 43). Toward the end of this chapter, I will return to consider how this sort of comparison potentially leads to the problematic erasure of the specificity of]ewish po-

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

I7

etic practice. For now, however, I want to stress how, by identifying language-or more precisely, the memory of language-as a central feature of Jewish American poetic discourse, Hollander initiates what I take to be requisite in studying this emerging field: the theorizing of its aesthetics. That is, even as we are well on the way to establishing a canon of Jewish American poets, we would do well to specify the material difference that Jewishness makes to poetic practice. It is in the interest of such theorizing that I offer this chapter-and this book. Rather than making an argument for one group of poets instead of another, I want to explore some key aesthetic issues that help define the various identity positions, aesthetic dilemmas, and formal innovations that distinguish this complex body of writing. Hollander's relative optimism may be understood as a redemptive response to Harold Bloom's decidedly funereal essay "The Sorrows of American Jewish Poetry." Writing in 1972 (publ. 1975a), Bloom declares that the requisite process, which entails an agon--or a wrestling-between a would-be poet and his precursor, is utterly alien to a Jewish sensibility. Bloom's dismissal is startling, initially perhaps because his model for such wrestling is based on a paradigmatic scene from the Hebrew Bible, that ofJacob wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:25-33). The suggestion then is that while Jews can name the game (as critics), they can't play it (as poets). 9 Bloom's brief remarks contain even more provocative claims: first, that there is something transgressive in this poetic struggle involving a Jewish poet fraternizing with a "Gentile precursor" (like Milton), of the Jewish self mixing with a foreign other (r975a, 253). Second, insofar as Bloom's account gives priority to masculine figures, telling a story of "males engendering males, fathers begetting sons" (Cheyfitz r98r, 86)-a story from which the Jewish poet is barred-he bears witness to my earlier claims concerning the gendered narrative underpinning the institution of Jewish American poetics, implying, in other words, that Jews are just too wimpy or feminine to overcome the anxiety of influence. 10 Finally, for Bloom, subscribing to this "pragmatic religion-of-poetry'' means discipleship from a would-be poet-a discipline profoundly at odds with Jewishness, even in its most secularized versions (r975a, 253); Jews cannot write the "high" genre of poetry, a "spilt religion" implicitly coded as Christian and Gentile. 11 Grounded in a strong attachment to a post-Romantic aesthetic, these claims are thoroughly partisan; nonetheless, they speak powerfully to the idea of poetry as a troublesome genre, with its capacity to threaten the integrity of Jewishness and to vex its normative values. Nearly fifteen years later, poet-critic Allen Grossman makes explicit what Bloom implies: the prospect of a Jewish poetics, meaning a poetry belonging to and spoken in the service of sustaining a specific theological and cultural practice,

r8

Chapter One

is an altogether impossible enterprise (1997b, 159). But whereas Bloom's remarks are dismissive and preemptive, driving poet Jerome Rothenberg to call him "The Critic as Exterminating Angel" (1981), Grossman's observations mean to invite further discussion. His definition of what might qualify as a "Jewish poetics" is ultimately quite different from my own, since I am principally interested in poems that contest and complicate long-standing accounts of such "belonging," and these are the texts that constitute the bulk of my analysis. Nonetheless, Grossman's formulation importantly points toward a larger theoretical frame within which to read the specific case of Jewish American poetry. His recent reconsideration of the Arnoldian tension between poetry and religion as oppositional kinds of knowing, a paradigm in which poetry and religion vie for the same social space and function, resonates powerfully with a certain trajectory in the history of Jewish poetics. As Grossman would have it, poetry and religion are not merely proximate modes capable of mutual accommodation. Instead, the relation is one of rivalry, hostility-indeed, "spiritual warfare" 12-for both are committed to the "eidetic" or presence-making (from Homer's eidos: the image, "the form, fashion, or the shine of the person")-a concept that owes something to Levinas's formulation of le visage (the face) as the emanation of pure or true presence (Grossman 2002, 43), what Levinas calls "signification without context" (1969, 86). In other words, poetry and religion both function to confer meaning and presence to a particular life, thus providing it "personhood." According to Grossman, poetry is the outcome of an "eidetic crisis": the poetic, which like religion is a value-bearing construct, is activated upon the deterioration or destabilizing of the social institutions that previously served this function. That is, when the institutions and norms of a culture or a community are threatened or found wanting, poetry happens. According to this logic, 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 that we find in the rubble-as it records, promotes, and tries to come to terms with the social upheaval. To put it another way, poetry may mark, respond to, seek to compensate for, as well as aggravate the passing of one system of meaning. In Jewish history, of course, this is precisely the dynamic activated by the destruction of the Temple, with its attendant aesthetic crisis: "How can we sing God's song in a foreign land?" Such formulations-with their emphasis on poetry as a viable, socially constitutive force-need to be taken in and reckoned with. And like most abstract (and vatic) claims, they also need to be scrutinized, interrogated. Given that not all institutions are alike, I would want to ask at least two questions: Assuming that poetry moves in, establishing occupancy of the space once occupied by religion,

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

19

in what ways does the space then change? How is the description of the "person" that poetry provides finally different from that as proposed by other (competing) institutions of knowledge? Furthermore, Grossman's paradigm potentially leaves intact an identification of the poetic as sacred. 13 At a moment in literary history when critical discourse tends to favor narrative, treating poetry as ineligible when it comes to the reading paradigms proposed by cultural studies, such identifications are especially problematic. Such prejudices may in part be a reflection, or even a consequence, of a generally assumed distinction between narrative and poetry: narrative as the realm of the secular, and poetry as the supposed realm of the sacred and transcendent. With this theoretical frame now in place, I would like to consider some of the aesthetic consequences of the postexilic condition, by looking at some highly charged moments from the history of Jewish poetic writing, moments which will serve as a context for my concluding discussion of two paradigmatic instances of Jewish American verse.

The kferJieiJa! Moment and Jewi.1h American Poeticd Even as one can identifY a rationale for Jewish poetry, it is nevertheless tellingly difficult to determine precisely when poetry emerges as a genre in the history of Jewish discursive forms. In the interest of making this difficulty readable, I want to propose a selective, highly speculative account of the development of Jewish poetry, by considering, retrospectively, the relations and disjunctions between poetry, prayer, and liturgy for both the individual and the religious collective. Looking at the "Hebrew Poetry'' entry, an ordinary subset of "Jewish Poetry," as provided by the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Preminger and Brogan 1993), one gets the impression of a long, unbroken tradition, beginning with biblical texts, clear through to contemporary Israeli achievements. Such mappings have the effect of smoothing out what is actually a lively, fissured, and often contentious set of developments. Consider, for example, James Kugel's calculatedly extravagant argument in The Idea ofBiblical Poetry (1981), in which he protests the very idea of "poetry'' as a category of biblical aesthetic practice. As a philologist, Kugel is primarily interested in redressing the tendency among Bible scholars to flatten out distinct prosodic features by subsuming texts under the category of"the poetic." 14 Although it is certainly true that Kugel's idea of poetry is limited to the classically formal lyric (he objects to the generic designation on the grounds

20

Chapter One

that biblical verse is neither metrical nor an expression of private, individuated speech), his argument reflects a timely commitment to reading and understanding poetry's place in the specific culture of which it is a part. Moreover, it underscores poetry's potentially problematic, or troublesome status. Insisting on its otherness, Kugel represents poetry as alien, a foreign import, rather than a native achievement-and therefore not wholly assimilable. Indeed, even while objecting strenuously to Kugel's generic exclusions, Robert Alter agrees that we need to be more precise when it comes to describing biblical poetry, recognizing how it is distinct from what Western literary tradition typically means by poesis: poetic making (1985, 4). Though the West frequently links poetry to prophecy (meaning predictive speech), the Hebrew Bible represents prayer as poetry's closest kin. We might think here not only of the Psalms, but of such poetic interludes as Hannah's prayer, Deborah's song, and Moses's Song of the Sea-passages that interrupt the biblical narrative as the human voice directs itself toward God. 15 To speak of poetry, then, in Jewish discourse, is to speak of what is human, malleable-at a necessary distance from the divine. 16 The humanness of the poetic is important to keep in mind when considering how, to use an evolutionary rather than a creationary metaphor, poetry crawls out of the sea of Hebrew discursive forms. Generically speaking, this alliance between poetry and prayer is specifically manifest in the development of the piyyut, the liturgical poem, which began as a supplement to the fixed, or statutory, prayer service. The history of this literature is enormously interesting-well-suited to cross-cultural inquiry, as evidenced in the recent work of such medievalists as Ross Brann and David Nirenberg. For the most part, however, the story has been left to Hebrew medievalists, who have been largely absorbed in a thicket of details and only rarely step back and address some of the larger ideological issues implicit in their archival excavations. Turning, for example, to noted liturgical historian Ismar Elbogen's description of the genre, one discovers a striking drama that speaks to contemporary poet-critic Charles Bernstein's formulation: "Poetry is turbulent thought" (1995, 378). 17 Early in his account Elbogen explains that liturgical poetry served as an "escape," a way of relieving the tedium of the fixed synagogue service (1993, 221). But taken as a whole, his account suggests a considerably less benign function, for he frequently likens poetry to an epidemic, a "contagious disease" that is beyond restraint (225). Poetry is figured as a colonizing or "conquering" force that works to violate or trouble the integrity of the synagogue ritual, the dominant religious institution. Interruption becomes disruption: once restricted to festivals and special Sabbaths, poetry "also took control of the minor festivals and fast days" (225). 18 His descrip-

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

21

tion thus contains the possibility of reading prayer (and by association, poetry) as a way of speaking back at dogmatic and institutional discourses. In terms of content, however, most of these early prayer-poems could hardly be construed as expressions of radical discontent or interrogation. Instead, for all of their elaborate expressiveness, the earliest examples of these piyyutim (in the first centuries of the Common Era) basically affirm authoritative rabbinic positions on God and Israel. At the outset this commitment to collective well-being was marked structurally, as well as thematically. Many of the poems were comprised of acrostics, arranged alphabetically or indicating biblical verses. Predictably orderly and precise, the acrostic poems served in a mimetic capacity to remind their auditors of a securely boundaried, knowable world-the very thing that in fact was in peril. But the collective surfaces of these poems begin to crack and buckle, and the human hand begins to make itself known, when in time the acrostics start spelling out the poets' own names. Although the prayer-poems' content and positions may still subscribe to standard theological doctrine, the possibility for poems to serve as a forum for distinctively individuated voices, and thus for this genre of liturgical diversion or interruption to become a disruption, is not far off. 19 This possibility similarly informs the piyyutim's characteristic tendency to exploit an instability inherent in all language (even the sacred tongue) through extended linguistic play. Finally, the troublesome potential of these texts becomes that much more apparent with a small body of liturgical verse Raymond Scheindlin calls the "New Synagogue Poetry," prayer-poems that break with convention, both thematically and stylistically. One of the most obvious departures occurs with the shift from the "we" speaker to the 'T', as compositions come to serve as expressions of a "distinctive religious personality" (I99J, 24). These liturgical innovations, and their attendant potential for disruption, were variously received, depending on the community. In Palestine, for example, where issues of exile were perhaps felt less acutely, prayer-poems were tolerated rather easily, even encouraged. But in Babylonia, where anxiety about God's enabling presence reached an absolute fever pitch, it was altogether another matter. Viewed as a "foreign" and hence dangerous element, piyyutim were subject to serious opposition. The extent to which these poems represented a subversive presence is evident in a brief Talmudic fragment (B. Berakhot 8a), which begins with the well-known claim "From the day that the Temple was destroyed, the Holy One of Blessing has no place but the four cubits ofHalacha [the Law]". In other words, God dwells only in the Law, not in other sorts of aesthetic productions, including prayer-poems. This Talmudic fragment continues with Rabbis Asi and Ami responding to this claim, determining that "even though there were thirteen

22

Chapter One

synagogues in Tiberias" (presumably where they lived), they would pray only "in between the pillars where they studied," shunning the synagogues where prayerpoems occur. 20 Having been contaminated by the poetic, synagogues are thus figured as transgressive spaces to be studiously avoided. Rabbinic disapproval of poetry is similarly at work in another Talmudic gloss, this time based on Psalm 119:54, "Your statutes have been as songs to me within my dwelling place." Kugel notes, "At face value, this verse is a pious assertion of the psalmist's total devotion to divine law; here he relates that his zeal is such that he recites, even sings, the sacred statutes." But the Talmud takes another view entirely, arguing that David, as the psalm's presumed author, was punished by God precisely because he treated sacred doctrine so casually (1990,10). Narratives such as these suggest that the virtual absence of poetry from Talmud cannot be simply attributed, as T. Carmi would have it, to the "absence of a bond between the poetic creation of the period and standardized religious practice" (1981, 15). Instead, it may be that such omissions mark an effort to deliberately suppress poetry as a kind of countertext-a dynamic that corresponds to a fundamental hostility between the discursive frames of religion and poetry. 21 As time went on and the genre became more distinct and its practitioners more accomplished, the antagonism toward the poetic as problematic or troublesome became that much more pronounced. Consider, for example, the responses to the rich body of poetic writing composed mostly in the Spanish region of Andalusia during the period in Jewish history known as the Golden Age, spanning roughly the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. As studies such as Ross Brann's The Compunctious Poet (1991) have shown, the period was marked by a remarkable confluence of creative activity and cultural ambivalence-a period during which the boundaries between the secular and the sacred, the Jew and the other, were explicitly being put in question by the poetic. Indeed, the period could be understood as a historical instance of what Mary Pratt calls a "contact zone," a social space where peoples typically separate from each other come into a relation characterized by "copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, ... often within radically asymmetrical relations of power" (1992, 7). 22 David Aberbach seems to speak directly to Pratt's vision in describing how during this period "Hebrew entered into a mostly one-sided relationship of ambivalent imitation of and competition with a powerful culture [medieval Spain] which was almost totally ignorant of it and whose treatment of the Jews varied from tolerance to suspicion and violent persecution" (1998, 18). This contact had transformative consequences for Hebrew verse and its aesthetics. Most notably, its practitioners began to experiment with metrical verse,

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

23

an instance of what I would call aesthetic exogamy or miscegenation. In terms of Hebrew aesthetics, meter and rhyme were construed as foreign imports, learned or borrowed primarily from Arabic writings, hence frequently targeted for sharp critique. According to one school of Hebrew poets writing in the eleventh century, meter, as a mark of exile, indicated an irrecoverable loss of origin: "For each and every people has its own rhythmic structure and grammar, but ours was lost to us because of our many sins and hidden from us for our great transgressions ever since we were exiled; what had been of such breadth was now diminished and hidden and become lost" (Kugel 1981, 190). The implication for Jewish aesthetics is not only that its origins are irrecoverable but that the notion of a Jewish poetic practice was regarded by some, from very early on, as already Other. Not only is metered poetry contaminated; it is contaminating, diluting the "native integrity'' (190) of Hebrew, the holy tongue. The great poet Yehudah Halevi, who infamously repented of having ever written in the Arabic meters for which he was known, inspired one of his students to write, "But surely it was after our exile that we saw the Arabs making rhymes and metered poems and we began to do like them and caused our Holy Tongue to go astray and enter into a place where it ought not to go" (Kugel 1981, 191). Throughout the Middle Ages such debates about origins, purity, and authenticity, as well as questions about Judaism's shifting status as culture or as religion, bubble and churn-debates that resonate with the sometimes hand-wringing discussions characteristic of American Jewry's ongoing concern with its own identity and future. As Arnold Eisen has noted, "Imagining Jews has been a central activity of Jews in America" (1988-89, 3). 23 By linking two periods separated from one another by at least one thousand years, the Middle Ages and twentieth-century America, I mean to invoke and practice the sort of history Walter Benjamin describes when he writes how one may "grasp the constellation" that one's "own era has formed with a definite earlier one" (1968, 263). I am not the first to propose such a discontinuous, transhistorical frame of analysis. In 1907 the German-born historian Israel Friedlaender delivered an address proleptically titled "The Problem ofJudaism in America." After quickly diagnosing the problem as one of cultural disintegration or decay-loss of specificity, a problem endemic to Western Jewry at large-Friedlaender suggests that a remedy is to be found by way of historical precedent: "The great and glorious Jewish-Arabic period deals a deathblow to the dilemma besetting the problem of Judaism, and is in itself an overwhelming proof and shining example of the compatibility of an active participation of the Jews in the life and culture of the nations around them, with a strong vigorous, genuine development of Judaism" (1961, 170).

24

Chapter One Despite his soaring rhetoric, Friedlaender's turn to the past is much more than

a naive effort to recover an authentic version ofJewishness. He quickly notes how those Jews of the "Arab Epoch," who participated in the public life of the host nation, were subject to all kinds of gloomy laments, the sort "which sounds quite familiar to our own ears": "Every day"-thus runs the lamentation which, characteristically enough, has a Karaite for its author and is written in Arabic, the language of the new culture"every day we commit a number of sins and make ourselves guilty of a great many transgressions. We mix with the Gentiles around us and imitate their doings. Our chief aim is the study of the Arabic language and its philology, on which we lavishly spend our money, while we leave aside the knowledge of the holy tongue and the meditation in the commandments of the Lord." (1961, 170-71)

As Friedlaender understands it, what fuels such wailings are fears ofhybridity and an attendant loss of specificity-fears that are countered by the enormous amount of"spiritual productivity" for which the era is known. He then proceeds to offer a long list of writers and scholars whose work speaks to a conception of Judaism not as "a creed, the summary of a few abstract articles of faith," but as a "culture, the full expression of the inner life of the Jewish people" (1961, 173). What is of particular interest to me is how poetry emerges as a central player in this paradigm shift: When the Jews came in contact with Arabic culture the only poetry they had created outside the Bible was the so-called Piyyut, a more or less uncouth form ofpoetry which merely served liturgical purposes. But the Judaism of the period, which embraced all that had any connection with Jewish life, soon took cognizance of a new factor. It introduced the form and spirit of Arabic poetry into the Hebrew language, and the medieval Hebrew poetry, ... sprang up, singing not only of God, His land, and His people, but also of matters far less divine-of wine, women, and all moods and passions of the human heart. (1961, q6; emphasis mine) Taking on the famous philosophic dictum of Moses Maimonides-who, following Plato, would banish the poets for their seductive distortions of the truth-Friedlaender argues that just as Maimonides made Judaism safe for "the philosophical skeptics," so the poets are to be credited "for attracting and attaching to Judaism the beaux esprits of the period" (1961, rn). 24 Friedlaender's observations are remarkable on at least two counts. First, they recognize the potential for difference within a particular incarnation of community. Second, they identifY the poetic as what one might call a "border" discourse. This kind of writing not only resides on a cusp, occupying a liminal position between nations and communities-enabling them to touch and perhaps to in

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

25

some way modify each other-but also challenges these ontologies or very categories of identity. In this case religious differences give way to cultural differences, a profound shift in which poetry plays a part. 25 This paradigmatic shift begins to answer, at least speculatively, the question posed earlier: If poetry moves in, how does the space once occupied by religion change? Written in the early part of the twentieth century, Friedlaender's argument is a utopic one. The shift from religion to culture promises to be part of a glorious new social order where differences are, if not negligible, at least easily negotiated. But as the terrible brutalities of the twentieth century ultimately taught us, differences are not readily overcome-a recognition that at once poses a real theoretical problem and provides a site of resistance for poetry's universalizing aspirations. Indeed, Friedlaender's exhilarating vision of historical relevance, positing a continuity between the ancient past and contemporary experience, tends to elide the tensions and anxieties that necessarily occur as religion gives way to culture, and as paradigms of belonging based on notions of sacredness give way to those of secularity. In my own reading of the relation between the medieval and the contemporary, I want to address the points of contiguity or continuity, as well as those of difference and discontinuity. I want to note in particular the contrast between the medieval position and that of modern and contemporary Jewish American aesthetics, in which exile becomes not the contaminating mark of the loss of identity, but rather the cherished grounds of identity itself. The condition of exile and alienation gets naturalized as the mark of the modern Jewish self; loss is reclaimed as meaning; separation and distance become enabling conditions. 26 In Jewish American literary history, this move gets consolidated with the emergence of the Shekhinah as a shaping aesthetic force, particularly in respect to poetry. She is the Divine Presence who dwells with the people of Israel in exile. As represented by Kabbalistic cosmology, the Shekhinah is a liminal figure; she is last of "the upper worlds" (the region of divine revelation) and first of "the lower worlds" (the region of the human, the temporal, and the fully embodied). Invoking the discourse of postcolonial studies, we might say that the Shekhinah resides in "the border zone." Further, as a feminine figuration of the divine, the Shekhinah invites consideration of the gendering of the poetic, as well as introduces potentially troublesome questions about the body of God, who in the dominant tradition is viewed as acorporeal-beyond history, invulnerable to changeY According to traditional rabbinic Judaism, the Shekhinah is a relatively minor figure. But in contemporary Jewish American poetic practice, this once-esoteric figure has been celebrated and embraced by writers as different from one another as Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Grossman, Eleanor Wilner, Nathaniel Tarn, Adrienne

26

Chapter One

Rich, and Alicia Ostriker. 28 She has even entered popular culture, appearing regularly, for example, in the popular songs of Cantor Debbie Friedman as a standard alternative to more problematic (read: paternalistic or imperialistic) kinds of"Godlanguage." For some, the focus has been on her gendered status, while for others, the interest lies with her exilic position. Not only is the Shekhinah a feminized presence, but-since she dwells with her people in exile, in the very condition of a diasporic identity-she embodies the founding principle of poetic creation, serving as a muse figure that demarcates the discursive space of poetry. With the Shekhinah comes the recognition that gender is the third term by which poetry and exile are linked: just as poetry has been long represented as a feminized position, so it is with exile. Indeed, there is much evidence for this claim, beginning with the association linking the Shekhinah with the biblical matriarch Rachel, who is said to weep with the people oflsrael in exile. Amy-Jill Levine pursues the gendering of exile, writing, "Woman is in effect in perpetual diaspora; her location is never her own, but is contingent on that of her father, husband or sons" (1992, no). The arising of this figure thus brings renewed attention to a gendered narrative underwriting American poetics, for the Shekhinah may be understood as an ethnically and theologically inflected incarnation of that steady presence in American literary culture which poet Susan Howe has taught us to call the "antinomianism" or "Lawlessness" that is "at first feminized and then restricted or banished" (1993, r). In this way the figuration secures poetry's marginal status, as a kind of text that, according to one account of Jewish discursive history, is outside the law, the legal texts of Mishnah and Talmud. Resisting absolute classification, her position indeterminate, the Shekhinah extends and amplifies poetry's potential for trouble (trouble already suggested by the piyyutim), helping us to name as its objectives such issues as the relations between home, exile, nation, and community, and the roles gender plays in such constructions. Her emergence helps us understand what it means to speak of a discontinuous model of history, for this distinctly American phenomenon cannot really be read as part of a linear tradition. Rather, it must be read as a consequence of contiguity-an outcome of two distinct moments, the medieval Hebrew and the modern American, being made to touch within the context of Jewish American poetry. The associative linking between the Shekhinah and poetic art is, uncannily, at the core of folklorist Raphael Patai's rendition of a Talmudic passage in which the Shekhinah's journey into exile is represented as a series of displacements: From the ark-cover she moved onto the Cherub; ... from the altar onto the roof of the Temple;

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry from from from from

27

the roof onto the wall; the wall into the city of Jerusalem; the city into the Mount of Olives; the mount into the desert.

(1990, IO)

(Although the paratactic repetitions are original to the Talmud, the lineation certainly is not; as noted previously, poetry as such is virtually alien to the Talmud.) Though some might accuse Patai of imposing or importing a "foreign" form, it could be argued that Patai is ferreting out, and making manifest, the potential for poetic rupture that the tradition already contains (but just barely) in the Kabbalistic figure of the Shekhinah. Indeed, the latter gloss seems to inform contemporary poets Eleanor Wilner's and Nathaniel Tarn's decisions to use Patai's text as a mandate or manifesto, a way of announcing their own aesthetic positions. 29 In Patai's rendition the emphasis is on distance, on separation-an enabling position, according to poet Jerome Rothenberg, who hails the Shekhinah as the muse of a "Great Subculture" that includes the sixteenth-century poet Isaac Luria and the modernist writer Gertrude Stein (1978, xii). An evocatively conflicted image, the Shekhinah at once connotes home and loss of home, for she is the Presence who dwells with the people of Israel in exile-with her mythic lineage dramatizing the "marginality" of the poetic as a kind of speech that is outside the boundaries of sanctioned meaning. This emergence or recruitment necessarily provokes the question, Why now? What is it about our own moment that calls this figure forth? The Shekhinah has long been part of an esoteric mystical tradition, one already out there, which suggests that the marginal and the other are already part of the institutional. The particular enabling function of the Shekhinah, however, seems to have become readable only recently-even as different poets offer different readings. For Allen Grossman the distance afforded by the Shekhinah offers the Jewish poet an opportunity to escape the burdens of ethnic specificity and of history (1997a, 155). Rothenberg, by contrast, places her at the center of an "alternative" history, a repressed tradition that includes "previously downgraded figures like the paytanim" (1978, xv). For her part, Eleanor Wilner is most interested in the moral possibilities unleashed by this "female aspect of the Divine," reading the Shekhinah as a figure who engenders a dynamic alliance between mercy and disobedience (1997, 319). 30 Although each of these positions focuses on the Shekhinah differently, they share a modernist orientation toward the poetic as the site of longing, disruption, and cultural ambivalence-a predisposition informed perhaps by the absence of a patently recognizable, "commonly" Jewish language, such as Hebrew or Yiddish.

28

Chapter One

Insofar as these readings wilfully elide what Kabbalistic scholar Elliot Wolfson calls the "thoroughly androcentric nature of medieval Jewish mysticism" (1994, 166), they go against the grain of the Shekhinah's originary culture. Even while Wolfson expresses sympathy for the larger ideological and political project informing the contemporary interest in alternate, especially feminine, images of God, he feels obliged to counter these efforts with the authentic version: "The redemptive task (of the kabbalists) ... is to reintegrate the female in the male, or ... 'to make the female male"' -asserting thus the spiritual superiority of masculine identity (169). I do not mean to challenge Wolfson's reading of Kabbalah. Nonetheless, it seems that instead of construing contemporary glosses of the Shekhinah as simply wrong or misguided-however well-intentioned-one might take such figurings as an instance of what historian YosefYerushalmi calls collective anamnesis, or recollection. Whereas memory (mneme) serves to maintain or preserve that which is "essentially unbroken," anamnesis entails retrieving what has been lost or forgotten. More importantly, this retrieval is not simply a wholesale recovery of the past as intact and unchanged; on the contrary, it effects a metamorphosis, a cultural and theologic transformation: "Every 'renaissance,' every 'reformation,' reaches back into the often distant past to recover forgotten or neglected elements with which there is a sudden sympathetic vibration, a sense of empathy, of recognition. Inevitably, every such anamnesis also transforms the recovered past into something new" (Yerushalmi 1982, n3). In this sense the emergence of the Shekhinah again speaks to a Foucauldian notion of history as contiguous rather than continuous. This distinctly American phenomenon cannot be easily read as part of a linear tradition. Rather, these two distinct moments, the medieval Hebrew and the modern American, complicate and illuminate each other when made to touch. By invoking this frame, my study means to consider both how Jewish writers contribute to a polyphonic American literature and how America contributes to the making of a polyphonic Jewish literary culture. To put it another way, American Jewish poetic practice is engaged in an act of anamnesis, recognizing the fundamental mutability of this figure (the Shekhinah possesses a profoundly unfixed nature) as deeply resonant with its own moment (Tishby and Lachower r989, 371). The Shekhinah may be understood as correlative to, but importantly different from, the Greek-Western muse, thereby expanding our notion of the poetic function (Grossman 1997b, 163). Whereas Mnemosyne signifies poetry's function as the site of memory (preserving culture), the Shekhinah signifies a poetics that is about a culture in flux, under negotiation. 51 Like Julia Kristeva's chora, the Shekhinah makes her presence known along culture's fault

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

29

lines. Both figures speak to poetry's subversive capacities. Indeed, the poetry that interests me does more than chronicle the loss of founding institutions; it actively participates in making a shambles of them, leveling the ground so that something new may "spring forth"-which is, after all, the Latin definition of exilio.

A Flair/or Dec•iation: The Art of' Theological Inquiry Thus far I have been working to craft a historically inflected narrative within which to consider some of the aesthetic and ideological dilemmas characteristic of Jewish American verse. With this context in mind, I now want to focus on two very different poems, both written under the sign of the Presence (the Shekhinah), as sustained examples of the different kinds of trouble that poetry can make-and as further introduction to the sorts of issues I will explore in greater detail in later chapters. To begin, Jacqueline Osherow's "Moses in Paradise" (1996) shows how the act of poetic speech may put in question the profound distinctions that traditionally set the divine apart from the human, proposing that both may be of the body. In this way she trains her attention on matters of sacred concern, probing the difference between the human and the divine. This exploration, and the challenge it brings, contains the suggestion, however speculative, of an alternate model of poetic production. Poetry is not represented here as a consequence of pneuma, the breath of divine inspiration that comes from without-the dominant model of the West. Rather, poetry is generated or driven by a desire to see, as it were, the "face" of God-to know the Other as a distinct presence. If Osherow demonstrates how the Shekhinah may facilitate inquiry into poetry's radical capacity to interrupt a dominant theological and aesthetic narrative, then it is to Emma Lazarus one must turn for an example of the mediating role of Jewish American poetry: naming the tensions and elaborating the relations between Jewishness as religion and Jewishness as culture and ethnicity. With this text my focus shifts from the sacred to the secular, as in "The New Colossus"

(1967) Lazarus shows how Jewishness may make for some troubling representations of Americanness and how, in turn, Americanness can mean trouble for notions of Jewish specificity. Osherow's "Moses in Paradise," a bit of high exegetical fun, is most easily classified as an example of midrashic verse, a poem that performs an act of biblical interpretation-a speculative response to, or interrogation of, a fissure, a gap, or a soft spot in the precursor text. Midrash and poetry are indeed proximate genres,

30

Chapter One

insofar as both make new text by transforming earlier ones (Boyarin 1990, 23-24). In this instance the point of entry is one of the more extravagantly unintelligible verses in the Hebrew Bible, one of the first reports of a theophany-a "God sighting" in the book of Exodus: And they saw the God of Israel and underneath His foot it was like a brickwork of sapphire and the sky itself for purity. (Exodus 24:ro) What is striking about this particular vision, especially for my purposes, is the focus on God's feet, a topos for divine revelation that rabbinic writings have imaged as the ragle shekhinah-that is, the feet of the Shekhinah or the Presence (Wolfson 1992, 146). Osherow's revisionary treatment in "Moses in Paradise" amplifies how such an immanence may license a certain amount of trouble, beginning with Moses's opening lines: "You'll laugh when I tell you how I spend my time here ... I I read poetry: Ezekiel's, David's, Isaiah's" (1996, 78). Poetry, and the body of God that it takes as its subject, is an occasion oflaughter-in Kristeva's epistemology, a "bodily eruption'' that disrupts the official story (1984, 224). It breaks through prohibition, introducing a countertext rich with multiple transgressions, beginning with the radical reclassification of prophecy (the texts of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and David) as poetry. 32 As Osherow would have it, poetry-which is generated by a desire to know of the divine and to say the unsayable-is the mark of full-blown intimacy. Ezekiel and Isaiah, two poet-prophets whom Moses holds in high regard, are renowned for their own masterful God-sightings (Eilberg-Schwartz 1994, 124). It is David, though, the most gifted of them all, who finally outrivals him for God's affection: "I don't blame God for growing so remote/ And spending all his spare time coaching David" (Osherow 1996, 81). Posing an alternative to the traditional generic hierarchy, Osherow suggests that when it comes to God's love, poets are the winners. The light tone belies the subject's severity. At its core the poem makes a critique of God as remote, beginning with the speaker, Moses, calling attention to terza rima as the meter of choice: I remember an Italian one we made a lot of-

It's a pity I'm too old to learn

to

speak

But it was enough to hear those smooth vowels move In and out of cadences, like muffled chimes. Still, I suspect they dwelt too much on love Which is not--despite those clever triple rhymesTake it from me-really a divine motive.

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

31

God doesn't much go in for simple themes And I don't think He ever bothers to give Particular thought to how a person feels, For example, what it might be like to leave Whatever it is you know. (1996, ?8-?9)

The lines suggest that those medieval rabbinic commentators, whose fears of foreign forms and influences I discussed earlier, indeed had something to worry about: strange meters make for strange stories. The terza rima belongs, of course, to Dante-the prototypical poet of the West-an association that speaks immediately to the ongoing conversation about Jewishness as a fit subject for ethnic studies, since it raises thorny questions about Judaism's status as an Eastern import or a "native" Western construct. 33 But the trouble does not end here; Dante is not simply a Western poet; he is also Catholic. In positing an affinity between the Italian patriarch and the Hebraic one, Osherow's poem suggests that Jewishness may pose a particular kind of challenge to American (post-Protestant) poetics, which, with its own doctrine of antiformalism, may register as aesthetically, if not ritually, impoverished. 34 The strongest critique, however, is not national, but theological. Dante devised the terza rima, a triplet form based on the Holy Trinity, for his Divine Comedy, a poem that concludes with a spectacularly luminous return to God's love (agape), mediated by Lady Beatrice. Christian agape, courtly love, the Trinity: what could be more treif, more forbidden, to a Jewish patriarch? And what could be more alien to the sometimes wrathful, wholly inscrutable (male) God of the book of Exodus, Who Is What He Is? 35 It is precisely this distance between an arbitrary, unknowable God and human longing for intimacy that seems to activate Moses's own poetic longings, that prods him to act, explaining that "I was never very good at taking dictation" anyway (Osherow 1996, 79). These poetic longings are realized not in the Song of the Sea nor in the blessing of Deuteronomy 32, which are traditionally ascribed to Moses, but in the poetic rendering of the theophany that serves as the epigraph. In Osherow's revisionary text, it is Moses who interrupts the divine narrative thus: It was afi:er the strangest thing I heard him dictate And they saw the God ofIsrael He then went on With something else entirely and I blurted out But surely you won't just leave it hanging there? Then I looked up and underneath His foot

32

Chapter One It was like a brickwork ofsapphire And the sky itselffor purity ... and God Humored me and murmured in my ear You like that? Write it down. Go ahead. My eight words in Exodus. My poem. (1996, 78-79)

So Moses composed the foot-sighting. What needs to be stressed here is that poetry is represented as the exception rather than the rule; it interrupts the dominant discourse (God's own word, no less), deviating from the norm. The poetic here is not strictly a matter of divine inspiration; it belongs to that which is wholly human. Indeed, poetry is spoken in the interest of bridging the distance, and mitigating the difference, between God and humanity-by imagining the divine to be of the body. Such an account suggests that poetry may contest one of the central tenets of the Hebrew Bible, in which the place of the human is the body, whereas the place of God is the disembodied voice (Scarry 1985, 198-206). (In this way Osherow provides a strong example of how Jewish American poetry can trouble-more extravagantly than the piyyutim--and even displace such canonical stories of sacred origin as contained in the book of Exodus.) The humanness of the voice is among the poem's more conspicuous features. Each word portends change, bringing with it what Moses terms "a flair for deviation." This flair makes for a singularly social, rather chatty text-an effect achieved through slant rhymes and a heavy use of enjambment. The poem is also characterized by a stylistic heterogeneity, an interweaving of different voices and dictions into what Bakhtin might recognize as a "composite text." Moses's own garrulousness is particularly remarkable in light of his traditional reputation as a disabled speaker-a leader who, at the outset of his career, is denied the power of efficacious speech (Exodus 4:14-16). Indeed, according to rabbinic tradition, Moses is a chronic stutterer, suffering thus from a disability that, as I have argued, signifies a poetic predisposition. Poetry can entail crossing all kinds of boundaries, including those of language, of culture, of institutions, and of gender. Such traversings and transgressions are put into motion when the poet, Osherow, shows her hand as Moses's "slightly bumbling scribe," when the patriarch recounts how it is that his poem came to light: It's a pity you can't know them all without the scars Of my slightly bumbling scribe's English translation ... I found her working out the cantillation

"jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

33

She's stopped at my eight words, overthrown, So I had to use her, though her Hebrew's imprecise. (1996, So)

Translation is a "scar"-a gash in the textual body that locates itself at the site of an aesthetic and theological disturbance, only to aggravate it further. The question becomes who indeed is using whom, as translation turns out to be transgendered and in the service of Osherow's own purposes (after all, she writes herself into the text). In the ensuing gap between poet and persona, upon which Osherow insists, resides the notion of poetry as a feminized and feminizing enterprise. Historically, translation has long provided women with a strategy through which a reading subject, one who works "out the cantillation," becomes a writing one (Simon 1996, 39). In this instance the emphasis is on translation as an act of creative transmission. It is a dialogic model of making, a relational exchange through which the translator-poet seeks to understand and make audible the very mind of the "other," who, in this case, is divine (Simon 83; Galli 1995, 329). In linking poetry to translation, Osherow brings us back to John Hollander's claim that the Jewish American poet suffers perpetually from a chronic sense of linguistic estrangement or loss. Indeed, Osherow's depiction of Moses as a standup comic (he is given to nonstop wisecracks) may well be a displaced expression of this loss. Later in the book I return to consider the role translation plays in Jewish American poetics more fully; for now, however, I want to concentrate on how the idea of translation points the way toward a model of poetic production other than the one that Jed Rasula, in his own recent inquiry into the gendering of poetry, rather chillingly describes as the "confidential insinuation of another's voice into the poet's own mouth" (1994, 160). Writing under the sign of the Shekhinah, Osherow interrupts the dominant narrative of poetry as the colonizing breath of divine inspiration, offering in its stead a model based on a desire to acquire intimate knowledge of the "other," to know the other reciprocally, "face to face." 36 It is a model narratively embedded in that part of the Bible where the profound intimacy between God and Moses is represented as a "face-to-face encounter" wherein the one addresses the other as "a man speaks to his friend" (Exodus 33:n). Yet, this countermodel, and the intimacy it presumes, can only be containedin a dominant rabbinic, heterosocial order-by reading Moses as feminine. Jewish cultural theorist Howard Eilberg-Schwartz puts it bluntly: "Because of his intimacy with God, Moses's masculinity is put in question" (1994, 142). This is a question to which Osherow's poem gives full rein, contributing to what is arguably a significant source of anxiety in American literary cultureY

34

Chapter One

The poem's close finds Moses off to perform at David's concert series-"He's got something booked for every evening"-hoping perhaps that his poem will draw God closer. Here one learns a bit more about the transgressive nature of the kind of knowledge to which poetry aspires: Did I tell you? David's asked for me tonight And, well, really, what have I got to lose? He's promised to accompany me on the lyre ... You never know-do you-who might come I was hoping I might catch a glimpse of sapphire Beneath a tapping foot, keeping time. (1996, 83)

The focus on God's feet is a detail that is neither simply whimsical nor predictably fetishistic; instead, it is a matter of serious theology. As noted earlier, to speak of God's feet is to invoke the Shekhinah-the Presence of God-who is generally construed as feminine. As it turns out, however, these feet complicate the sexual status of God's body, compromising the positions of both orthodox scholarship and revisionary feminism, making for a poetics of gender that is even more satisfyingly ambiguous. Although the Shekhinah is widely figured as feminine, there is a significant tradition within Kabbalistic literature in which the feet function symbolically as a euphemism for the phallus (Wolfson 1992, 164). The implications are rather wild, both theoretically as well as theologically. To begin with, the idea of a God whose gender is fluid has potentially critical consequences for whatever illusions one may harbor about the fixedness of human sexuality. (This is particularly true for Shekhinah, whose feet are "bipolar," sometimes marking masculinity, sometimes femininity [164].) In other words, the Shekhinah marks an instability that is in its own right purposively destabilizing, as are the texts it engenders. Reading, for example, Osherow's "Moses" within the matrix of Jewish mystical thought, at least two interpretive possibilities emerge in respect to God's sexuality: If one codes Moses as male, then the operative model of relations in the poem (vis-a-vis God) could be construed as homoerotic. But one can also read the poem within a heterosocial frame, a reading sanctioned not so much by dominant ideology (heterosexuality is the primary model of relation in Jewish discourse) but because the poet insistently writes herself into the poem, demanding that she be recognized as more than just a mediating presence, thereby short-circuiting the now familiar model of homosocial desire that is mediated either through women or "female" texts. 38 In such a reading (which privileges the partnership between the poet and Moses),

'Jewish Trouble" and the Trouble with Poetry

35

Moses's desire to gaze upon God's feet would seem to put him in a feminized position-a possibility already allowed for by virtue of his "poetic" inclinations (and the attendant affiliation with the Shekhinah). Either prospect is bound to stir up a certain amount of cultural anxiety, all brought to you by way of the poetic. Focusing on God's sexuality, Osherow's "Moses" calls attention to the role poetry plays in the feminizing of the masculine, a construction that has been understood (for instance, by Gilman 1986, Boyarin 1997, and Brod 1995) as historically central to accounts of Jewish identity. By emphasizing this gendered association and the anxiety it potentially provokes, the poem takes us that much further in understanding poetry's marginalized status in the history of Jewish American writing. This is a position that Osherow claims is an asset rather than a liability, for elsewhere she writes that since "There is nothing to be gotten out of writing poetry in America but the poetry itself," we ought to be "interested only in the extraordinary places of where the next blank page might be made to go" (1999, n2). In the case of"Moses," the freedom that comes with being materially insignificant makes for an opportunity to interrupt that trend in Jewish cultural discourse to read the "feminized Jew" either in the context of an analysis of anti-Semitism or as a "positive attribute" to be recovered and cherished in the face of narrowly construed, twentieth-century ideas about "muscular masculinity"-for in either instance women are only rarely heard to speak. In this way gender and poetry are mutually and fruitfully implicated in making trouble for Jewish culture.

"A1other 4 Exiled'~· Emma LazartM and the Malcin 73-78). 36. It is interesting to note that Charles Altieri, in his definitional essay on "The Objectivist Tradition," cites Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" as an example of the very kind of poetics that Objectivist poets sought to counter (1999a, 28). In claiming an ambivalent alliance with Shelley, Oppen's "Disasters" suggests both how much the poet's aesthetics had changed from the thirties and just how provisional any aesthetic branding, "Objectivist" or otherwise, must be. 37· Oppen introduces this distinctive use of white space in the 1972 volume Seascape: Needle's Eye (in Oppen 2002). Crafting what I call "word floats," Oppen intensifies the prospective meaning of particular words. It would be worth exploring further how other poets, including Adrienne Rich, extend this method. 38. Ilan Peleg describes this development in his essay "Otherness and Israel's Arab Dilemma" (1994). 39· When asked, in a 1980 interview, to assess Zukofsky's A as a "major work," Oppen responds by recalling the circumstances that brought their friendship to an end: "I said I thought he [Zukofsky] used obscurity in the writing as a tactic-which was not a very nice thing to say-but that was the end of our friendship" (Haden and Mandel 1981, 45). 40. Eric Selinger, in the essay "Shekhinah in America," discusses Duncan's role in introducing the Shekhinah into American poetics (woo, 256-57). CHAPTER

4

r. There is of course a strong tradition of laments authored by male poets, including

King David. 2. Emanuel Feldman notes that without exception laments sung by Jewish female professional mourners are in Aramaic, the lingua franca. By contrast, nearly all other laments (sung presumably by men) are in Hebrew, the sacred tongue. Furthermore, there are no records of women's laments being sung for specific individuals whose names are preserved. Instead, women's laments are notably generalized and formulaic in structure. 3· Although there is no single text documenting extensive cultural interaction between Greece and the Middle East in the early periods, there is plenty of textual evidence to sup-

Notes to Pages I47-I63

249

port the cross-cultural argument I have in mind. For example, the Mishnaic injunctions legislating against women's mourning rituals (Mo'ed Qatan 28b, 200 A.D.) are roughly contemporary with Plutarch's dismissive remarks about women's mourning, indicative of the rhetoric used to suppress lament (Holst-Warhaft 1992, 26). 4· These restrictions are limited to Hol Ha'Moed (the intermediate days between festival days). 5· The "long poem" may also be an operative category. For a fuller discussion of the genre, see Susan Stanford Friedman's essay "When a 'Long Poem' Is a 'Big Poem': Self-Authorizing Strategies in Women's Twentieth-Century 'Long Poems"' (1997). 6. Daniel Boyarin's and Jonathan Boyarin's recent efforts to recast the Jew as the "colonized" instead of the "colonizer" are a strong example of the trend I have in mind (1993). Peter Erickson similarly notes Rich's refusal to invoke Jewish ness as a way of mitigating her "whiteness" (1995, 104). 7· The authorship of Lamentations is the subject of extensive debate. It is traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, but scholars continue to argue the point. No one seems to dispute, however, the gender of the poet (or the poem's editor) as male (Hillers 1972, xix-xxii). 8. We should note that in Hebrew the word almanah (widow) and the word alaym (dumb or mute) share the same root, alm. So, the widow is one who is dumb; there is no one to speak on her behal£ 9· The word tumah is rendered in the Jewish Publication Society's translation as "uncleanness." However, this does not fully capture the stigma of the identification. I offer "pollution," another viable translation, as a stronger alternative. ro. Questions of nation continue to be at issue in Rich's 1995 volume, Dark Fields of

the Republic. II. This custom reflects the recognition that it would be terribly cruel to leave the community in a state of unmitigated despair. 12. Gail Holst-Warhaft concludes, in her study of Greek lament (1992), that the genre may have run its course. But then, as Fredric Jameson notes, genres never really die; they just get transformed. 13. In Hebrew the word tejUsa, which is also used to speak of the diasporic condition, carries the same duality as the Greek. For a complementary theoretical exploration of diaspora, see Michael Galchinsky's essay "Scattered Seeds: A Dialogue ofDiasporas" (1998)." 14. The extent to which loss and dislocation continue to function as operative tropes in contemporary Jewish writing is similarly evident in Gabriel Josipovici's essay "Resting and Going." He refuses the notion of exile "because there is no home to which I long to return'' (1993, 3n), proposing instead the trope "resting and going," which turns out to be a condition of chronic rootlessness. One authoritative image proposed by Josipovici for this condition is Shabbat, a brief, highly framed moment of respite before one is compelled to hit the road again. Even as he refuses the term, Josipovici's paradigm for Jewish writing looks a lot like exile (by this I mean alienation without Said's moral qualifications). Theresemblance grows more pronounced whenJosipovici, in pursuit of his definition, muses that "in a strange way the condition of modernism meshes with the condition of Jewishness," citing the usual suspects-Kafka, Benjamin, and Celan-as its founding figures (316). As

250

Notes to Pages I6J-I72

a British Jew, Josipovici may experience his position as considerably more embattled than that of an American Jew. Nonetheless, his essay seems to suggest that when it comes to exile, there is no way our; in other words, we're back to Steiner, An tin, and the inherent human condition. 15. It must noted, however, that Said is never wholly immune to the romance, the allure of exile. At the end of "Reflections on Exile," he celebrates the "originaliry of vision" that such a condition begets (2ooo, 186). r6. In "A Parable of Alienation" (1955), Daniel Bell argues for a sense of detachment or "alienation" as a valuable jewish moral position. In this respect he anticipates Said's position on exile. With Said, however, comes the defamiliarization requisite to breaking up an exclusively Jewish claim to the term. 17. The word tefosa (dispersion) is also used to signifY diasporic conditions. Like galut, however, its valence is principally negative. Consider Klepfisz's account of the Museum of the Diaspora (Beit Ha'Tefusot), housed in Tel Aviv, where visitors are confronted with the following decoded message: "If you're anything but observant and a Zionist, you're doomed, you're homeless" (1994a, 13). r8. In the transliteration of Yiddish words, I follow Klepfisz, who uses the transliteration system established by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (see 1990a, 213). 19. In contrast to Steiner, who regards Israel from a mythic distance, "new" readings of diaspora, such as those offered by Schwartz, Klepfisz, and the Boyarins, are characterized by a direct confrontation with contemporary Israel as an embattled and material realiry. 20. Hebrew's mystical status is being put in question by such contemporary Israeli writers as Anton Shammas, an Israeli Arab whose decision to write in Hebrew represents a significant challenge to the boundaries of]ewish Israeli culture (cf. Hanan Hever, "Hebrew in an Israeli Arab Hand: Six Miniatures on Anton Shammas's Arabesques," 1990). 2!. There are of course many Yiddish prayers, pious texts, and biblical translations, but the thrust of Klepfisz's investment in Yiddish is as a secular or cultural, rather than religious, discourse. 22. Although Fradel Schtok is certainly to be credited with introducing the sonnet cycle into Yiddish, it is not clear that she was the first to use the sonnet per se. In this respect, Klepfisz is participating in a common mythology about Schtok's literary contributions. 23. Laura S. Levitt, in "Reconfiguring Home: Jewish Feminist Identiry/ies" (1995), argues that the mythography of "home" continues to be a vital feature in the trajectory of Jewish feminist self-representation. In this respect there may be a distinction to be made between postcolonial feminism-such as practiced by Chandra Mohanry, who takes a celebratory view of "not being home" -and Jewish feminism's investment in "home." 24. Klepfisz writes of at least one joint reading in which she and Anzaldua participated. 25. I am aware, for example, of the need to be rhetorically cautious, insofar as I lived in Southern California for many years, a "border" communiry and "home" to millions of so-called illegal Hispanic immigrants. Anzaldua's "borderlands" are actual as well as broadly metaphorical. 26. The mortaliry ofYiddish is poignantly conveyed in a custom practiced at a temple in Los Angeles to which I once belonged. On Yom Kippur during the Marryrology Service,

Notes to Pages q2-I8I

251

a local scholar recites a poem in Yiddish. The gesture suggests that, in effect, the subject of mourning is the dead poet-and not only the dead poet, but the language itself. 27. Klepfisz's practice is distinct in that it takes a more skeptical view of the shted, which Benjamin Harshav suggests serves as a "stable" type of"mythological space" in much of classical Yiddish literature (Harshav 1994, 147). 28. I want to stress here that "anti-Zionism" does not mean anti-Israel. Rather, the term refers to the position taken by those who oppose the inequities that accompany Jewish nationalism. For a fuller discussion of the links between the queer community and this brand of radical opposition, see Alisa Solomon's essay "Viva Ia Diva Citizenship: PostZionism and Gay Rights" (2003). 29. Charles Bernstein argues that ethnicity and gender are more significantly operative at the level of form than that of theme (1995, 380). 30. In "Di rayse aheym!The Journey Home" (1990b, 216-24), Klepfisz uses both lyric monologues and fragments of descriptive passages to describe her effort to excavate a "dead language." The generic liminality of Klepfisz's work is discussed in some detail by Susan Stanford Friedman in "Craving Stories: Narrative and Lyric in Contemporary Theory and Women's Long Poems" (1994). 31. Although Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich similarly notes that Yiddish initially flourished as an oral tradition, there is of course a formidable body of written literature (271-74). 32. Klepfisz's antisentimentality can be understood in the context described in Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (1987), in which Doane and Hodges argue that nostalgia is a prominent strategy in antifeminist tracts. 33· Klepfisz cites this poem in the context of her essay "Di feder fon harts/The Pen of the Heart: Tsveyshprahikayt!Bilingualism and American Jewish Poetry." Her use of resolutely flat, quasi-prosaic language can be demonstrated with just a few lines. Consider the following: "I live here with my family. /The Jews come. I throw rocks" (2000, 333). CHAPTER

5

I want to make clear that the role ascribed to poetry here belongs specifically to the dynamics of Jewish prayer. The situation undoubtably changes when turning to other religions. 2. Ruth Langer usefully explains that most of the objections to piyyutim focused on those written for inclusion in the essential parts of daily statutory prayer. Nevertheless, it remains the case that for those rabbis (especially the Babylonian authorities) invested in establishing a fixed prayer service, piyyutim were seen as highly problematic. For a fuller discussion of my own understanding of this phenomenon, see Chapter r of this study. 3· In her essay "Some Considerations Underlying Jewish Liturgical Revisions," Debra Reed Black is pointedly critical of prayer book editors who use translation to downplay or sidestep potentially problematic utterances. For example, they will retain the theologically challenging phrase m'hayeh ha-metim but offer an interpretive translation such as "source of eternal life," instead of the literal rendering, "who enlivens the dead" (2003, 15). r.

252

Notes to Pages I83-203

4· fu discussed in Chapter I, this is part of a much larger argument laid out by Allen Grossman in his essay "The Passion of Laocoon" (2002). 5· The theological problems incurred by Falk's reworking, even from a feminist perspective, are thoughtfully explained by Lois C. Dubin in her essay "Who's Blessing Whom? Transcendence, Agency and Gender in Jewish Prayer" (2002). 6. Falk is hardly the first woman to identifY with Hannah. Chana Weissler, in her study of women's tekhinas (1998), shows how Hannah figures in that subtradition of women's writing. 7· Auden himself belies this position both through an ongoing commitment to political activism and with the writing of such prayerlike poems as "Petition" (1945). 8. John Taggart's essay "Walk Out" (1998) is one of the very few extended efforts to read Oppen as a Jewish American poet, but Taggart's portrait of the ambivalent Jew seems more suited to Louis Zukofsky than to Oppen. 9· fu Paul Naylor discusses (1991), Oppen's position on language is inconsistent. 10. For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 3· n. Peter Nicholls initiates such a reading in his essay "Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Oppen" (1999). 12. GlUck's own performance bears out this reading: when the volume first appeared in 1992, she gave a reading at UCLA in which she read the entire sequence without interruption or preamble. 13. One should note that Jewish Lights Press-a major source for innovative Jewish writing-is located in Vermont. Nevertheless, the biases against non-metropolitan-based Jewish communities persist. 14. In this respect my reading differs somewhat from that of Daniel Morris, who wants to makes a case for GlUck as a "Jewish poet" on the basis of what he describes as her midrashic verse (2006). 15. The term Everyman comes from Raymond Scheindlin's recent translation of The

Book ofjob (1998). 16. Arguably, the unmediated battle with GlUck's mother is explored elsewhere in earlier poems, including "For My Mother" and "Still Life" (Upton 1998, 124). q. In this respect GlUck's "Other" is more proximate to Emmanuel Levinas's conception of the Other than that of Martin Buber, who in I and Thou (1970) argues for a relation between God and humanity grounded in mutuality. See Levinas in Entre-Nous: Thinking

ofthe Other (1998, 105). 18. The elision of the Tahanun is the subject of extensive liturgical discussion. For one dear account of its history, see Lawrence Hoffman's" Tahanun and Penitential Piety: A Jewish View of Human Nature" (2002). 19. Walter Brueggemann explains the necessity of such renewal in his essay "The Costly Loss of Lament" (1986). 20. Indeed, lest one think that the dichotomy has been thoroughly dismantled in the years separating our moment from those bleak fifties when Shapiro wrote these lines, consider Geoffrey Hartman's most recent critical venture, Scars of the Spirit (2002). In these pages he devotes considerable attention to redressing what he views as the persistent no-

Notes to Pages

20J-2I8

253

tion that "spirituality" is absent from Jewish thought (see especially chapters 7 and 8). Hartman's response to those who would cling to this position entails engaging the work of thinkers including Buber, Levinas, Jabes, Derrida, and perhaps by implication himself to show what it means to release the spirit of the letter. 2r. Helen Vendler notes Gluck's strong interest in this motif in her review of The Wild

Iris (r995a, q). 22. The definitive authorship of the Song of Songs is unknown. Some scholars, however, speculate that some of the lyrics comprising the song cycle were composed by a woman, or perhaps that a woman was responsible for the final version of the song (Bloch and Bloch 1995, 2I).

CHAPTER

6

To be fair, Osherow (wor) recognizes that what she loves about Dante-his talent for the dailiness, the materiality of life, and the impact that poetry has on the real-has no analogue in Hebrew letters. But she chooses not to dwell on the absence, preferring instead to concentrate on Dante's achievements. For his part, Pinsky focuses his attention on Dante's analysis of the link between suffering and sin, acknowledging simply that as a "non-Christian," he was largely a stranger to the concept of sin until encountering it in the poetry of Donne, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Jonson, among others (Pinsky r.

200!, 308). 2. Here I mean to extend Norman Finkelstein's analysis (wor, 66). 3· The term speech-thought comes from Barbara Galli's analysis of Franz Rosenzweig's conception of prayer (Galli 1995, 428). 4· A visual correlative to Grossman's poetic project is suggestively represented in Nathaniel Kahn's film My Architect, a documentary devoted to the Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn. A visionary artist, Kahn actually completed relatively few buildings, because many of his designs were deemed impractical, too utopic for their intended function. But his commitment to making spaces where the light can dwell emerges as a signature feature of his work. The most striking episodes in the film focus on Kahn's aborted effort to build a sanctuary in Old Jerusalem where people from all the Abramic religions could come together in prayer. Not surprisingly, the project falls apart, defeated by centuries of injury and rage. In the wake of this disappointment, Kahn travels to the fledgling democratic nation of Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries, and designs a suite of buildings dedicated to housing this new democracy. In the film a government officer celebrates Kahn, calling him "our Moses," the one who enabled the Bangladeshis to envision and fulfill their dreams of a democracy by building what I would call a "Place where Light and Law are manifest." The analogy to Moses is apt. Like the Biblical persona, Kahn is a nomadic figure, a true practitioner of what Grossman calls a "homeless theology." The father of three children (including the filmmaker), each by a different woman, Kahn was unable to claim any single place as home. He died en route to Philadelphia from Bangladesh, in a bathroom of New York's Grand Central Station. His body lay unidentified in a morgue for several days because his address had been erased from his passport. The reason for this is finally a

254

Notes to Pages 2I8-227

mystery, but I think it may reflect Kahn's deep reckoning with his own fundamental sense of placelessness-the requisite condition of the theophoric maker. 5· Much of what I know about these references, including Cowper and the Psalms, comes from extensive conversations with Grossman. 6. Michael Fish bane proposes that the idea of death as a devotional act, invested with sacral meaning, needs to be understood historically as one response to the fear of persecution (1998, 150). 7· This point is borne out by the editors of Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentaries, a publication of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, who preface the biblical episode detailing the instructions for building the Tabernacle (a portable shrine containing the sacred Tablets of the Pact) by explaining that Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Torah on behalf oflsrael, is not intrinsically a holy place. It does not retain its holiness once the Israelites move on (Etz Hayim 2001, 485). 8. When I first began writing this chapter, Mel Gibson's infamous film The Passion of the Christ had just been released-another terrible instance of what happens when historical veracity is naively invoked at the expense of the spiritual imagination. 9· One recent example of the potentially reductive nature of this debate can be found in Janet Burstein's review (2003) of the Cambridge Companion to jewish American Literature (Kramer and Wirth-Nesher 2003). After briefly commending the overall quality of the volume, Burstein devotes the rest of the review to complaining that the book rehearses an unacknowledged bias-on the part of the volume's American-born, now Israeli, editors-against Jewish American writing as an exilic enterprise. IO. An expanded version of this argument is the focus of Grossman's essay collection The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic ofthe Poetic Principle (1997c). n. In this respect Grossman's use of vernacular should be understood as distinct from something like that of Whitman, who expands the language of blessing to include the familiar. I am grateful to Charles Berger for helping me understand the implications of this particular aspect of Grossman's idiosyncratic use of poetic language (personal conversation). 12. This particular use of the term Hester Panim (Hiding of the Face), to describe the theological crises precipitated by the Holocaust, can be found in Eliezer Berkovits's "Faith After the Holocaust" (1999). 13. Grossman discussed this connection linking his own aesthetics to that of Kant (naming in particular the third Critique [Critique ofjudgmen~) in a personal conversation (in October 2002). 14. Grossman's poetic interventions find their theoretical counterpart in the revisionary theories of Naomi Mandel (wm) and Sidra DeKoven Ezrachi (1996). For a full discussion of the iconographic valence of shoes in the story of Holocaust representation, see also Ellen Carol Jones's essay "Empty Shoes" (wm). 15. The Jewish canon of Holocaust writing is dominated by male survivors-with the spectacular exception, of course, of Anne Frank. The effort to make gender an explicit part of a wide reckoning with the Holocaust has generated a certain amount of hostility. See, for example, the remarks published in the pages of Lilith (1998).

Notes to Pages 227-233

255

r6. For one comprehensive account of the strain of Jewish thought that insists upon God as without form, see Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's "The Problem of the Body for the People of the Book" (1992, 17-46). 17. The Jewish body as a marker of Jewish difference has been discussed by a number of critics. Sander Gilman's The jew's Body (1991) is among the most well known of these inquiries. 18. Norman Finkelstein similarly stresses Grossman's commitment to poetry after Auschwitz (2001, 70-71). 19. With this image of"live coals," I mean to invoke Catherine Madsen's recent call for a renewal of strong liturgical language. 20. This colonial strain in Israeli consciousness informs both a steady resistance to the idea of the Palestinian refugees' right to return as well as the abuses suffered by "foreign workers" (nonresident aliens from the Philippines and Thailand who labor in jobs once occupied by Palestinians before the second intifada). The latter issue has only just recently become a focus of discussion and concern.

Works Cited

Aberbach, David. 1998. Revolutionary Hebrew, Empire and Crisis: Four Peaks in Hebrew Literature and jewish Survival New York: New York University Press. Adler, Rachel. 1992. "A Question of Boundaries: Toward a Jewish Feminist Theology of Self and Others." In Tikkun: An Anthology, ed. Michael Lerner, 465-71. Oakland, CA: Tikkun Books. - - - . 1998. Engendering judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. New York: Jewish Publication Society. Adorno, Theodor. 1967. "An Essay on Culture and Critical Society." In Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Sherry Weber, 19-34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. - - - . 1973· "Lyric Poetry and Society." In Negative Dialectics, 38-54. New York: Seabury. Alexiou, Margaret. 1974- The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Allen, Gay Wilson. 198r. Waldo Emerson: A Biography. New York: Viking Press. Alter, Robert. 1977· "Charles Reznikoff: Between Present and Past." In Defonses ofthe Imagination: jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis, II9-35· Philadelphia: JPS Press. - - - . 1985. The Art ofBiblical Poetry. New York: Basic Books. - - - . 1996. Genesis. Translation and commentary. New York: W. W. Norton. Altieri, Charles. 1993. "Self-Reflection as Action: The Recent Work of Adrienne Rich." In Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose Reviews and Criticism, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, 342-56. New York: W. W. Norton.

258

Works Cited

- - - . 1999a. "The Objectivist Tradition." In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, 25-36. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. - - - . 1999b. "The Transformations ofObjectivisim: An Afterword." In The Objectivist Nexus, Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, 30I-17. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Amichai, Yehuda. 2000. Open Closed Open. Trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. New York: Harcourt. An tin, David. 1992. "Writing and Exile." In Tikkun: An Anthology, ed. Michael Lerner, 95-106. Oakland, CA: Tikkun Books. Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands I La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters I Aunt Lute. Arnold, Matthew. 1960. "The Study of Poetry." In Selected Poetry and Prose, 299-325. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Atlas, James. 1997. Delmore Schwartz: The Lift ofan American Poet. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Attridge, Derek. 1988. Peculiar Language: Literature as Dijfirence from the Renaissance to james joyce. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Auden, W. H. 1945. The Collected Poems ofW H. Auden. New York: Random House. Austin,]. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University ofTexas Press. Bal, Mieke. 1988. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book ofjudges. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Balentine, Samuel. 1993. Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama ofDivine-Human Dialogue. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Barron, Jonathan N., and Eric Murphy Selinger, eds. 2000. Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary and Reflections. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press. Baumgarten, Murray. 1982. The City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bell, Daniel. 1955. "A Parable of Alienation." In Mid-Century: An Anthology ofjewish Lift and Culture in Our Times, ed. Harold U. Ribalow, 133-51. New York: Beechhurst Press. Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds ofLove: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, 253-64. New York: Schocken Books. Berkovits, Eliezer. 1999. "Faith After the Holocaust." In Contemporary jewish Theology: A Reader, ed. Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman, 355-73. New York: Oxford University Press. Berlin, Adele. 1991. Biblical Poetry Through Medieval jewish Eyes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bernstein, Charles. 1992. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Works Cited

259

- - - . 1995. "What's Art Got to Do with It? The Status of the Subject of the Humanities in the Age of Cultural Studies." In The American Literary History Reader, ed. Gordon Hutner, 37o-88. New York: Oxford University Press. - - - . 1999a. "Poetics of the Americas." In My mty: Speeches and Poems, 113-38. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - - - . 1999b. "Reznikoff's Nearness." In My mty: Speeches and Poems, 197-228. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bernstein, Michael Andre. 1980. Tale ofthe Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern verse Epic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. - - - . 1993. "The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha." In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 207-21. London: Lawrence and Wishhart. Bialik, Haim Nachman. 1989. "Alone." In The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself Twenty-four Poets in a New Presentation, ed. Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, and Ezra Spicehandler, 25-26. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bialik, Hayyim Nahman. 1945. Complete Poetic Works. Trans. Israel Efros. New York: Histadrurh Ivrirh of America. Black, Debra Reed. 2003. "Some Considerations Underlying Jewish Liturgical Revisions." CCAR]ournal5o, no. 1 (Winter): n-20. Blake, William. 1982. The Complete Poetry and Prose. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Anchor Books. Blasing, Mudu Konuk. 1987. American Poetry: The Rhetoric ofIts Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bloch, Ariel, and Chana Bloch, trans. 1995. The Song ofSongs: A New Translation. New York: Random House. Bloom, Harold. 1975a. Figures of Capable Imagination. New York: The Seabury Press. - - - . 1975b. Kabbalah and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press. - - - . 1990. The Book off Trans. David Rosenberg, interpreted by Harold Bloom. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Boland, Eavan. 1995. "When the Spirit Moves." New York Review ofBooks, January 12, 25-28. Boyarin, Daniel. 1990. Intertextuality and the Reading ofMidrash. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. - - - . 1994. A Radical few: Paul and the Politics ofjewish Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. - - - . 1997. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise ofHeterosexuality and the Invention ofthe jewish

Man. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. 1993. "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity." Critical Inquiry 19: 691-725. Boyarin, Daniel, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds. 2003. Queer Theory and the jewish Question. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

260

Works Cited

Brann, Ross. 1991. The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Braude, William G., trans. 1959· The Midrash on the Psalms. Volume 2. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Brennan, Timothy. 1990. "The National Longing for Form." In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, 44-69. London: Routledge. Brad, Harry. 1995· "Of Mice and Supermen: Images of Jewish Masculinity." In Gender and judaism: The Tramformation ofTradition, ed. T. M. Rudavsky, 279-93· New York: New York University Press. Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge. Brueggemann, Walter. 1978. The Prophetic Imagination. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. - - - . 1986. "The Costly Loss of Lament." journal for the Study ofthe Old Testament 36: 57-71. - - - . 1988. Israel's Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology. Philadelphia: Fortress

Press. Bruns, Gerald. 1987. "Midrash and Allegory." In The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, 625-46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bryant, William Cullen. 1945· Selections from His Poetry and Prose. Ed. Samuel Sillen. New York: International Press. Buber, Martin. 1956. Tales ofthe Hasidim. Trans. Olga Marx. London: Thames and Hudson. - - - . 1970. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Scribner. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics ofSeeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burstein, Janet. 2003. "Israeli Critics Comment-Problematically-on American Jewish Fiction: Cambridge Companion to jewish American Literature." Forward, September 26, 200}.

Buder, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity. New York: Routledge. Caraveli, Anna. 1986. "The Bitter Wounding: The Lament as Social Protest." In Gender and Power in Rural Greece, ed. Jill Dubisch, 169-94. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carmi, T. 1981. Introduction to The Penguin Book ofHebrew Verse, ed. and trans. T. Carmi, 13-56. New York: Penguin Books. Celan, Paul. 1995· Poems ofPaul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books. - - - . 2001. "The Meridian: Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Georg Buchner Prize." In Selected Poems and Prose ofPaul Celan, trans. John Felstiner, 401-13. New York: W W Norton. Chambers, Whittaker. 1952. Witness. New York: Random House. Chametzky, Jules, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein, eds. 2001. jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. New York: W W Norton. Cheng, Vincent J. 2004. Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Works Cited

261

Cheyfitz, Eric. 198r. The Trans-Parent: Sexual Politics in the Language ofEmerson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Clifford, James. 1992. "Traveling Cultures." In Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 97-n6. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Aryeh. 1996. "Reading, Exile and Redemption: A Meditation on the Talmudic Project." The Reconstructionist: A journal of Contemporary jewish Thought and Practice 61, no. 2 (Fall): 32-40. Cohen, Mortimer. 1984. "Remarks (from reviews of 'Kaddish')." In On the Poetry ofAllen Ginsberg, ed. Lewis Hyde, IOI. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Conte, Joseph M. 1991. Unending Design: The Forms ofPostmodern Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Corber, Robert. 1997. Homosexuality in Cold \Vtzr America: Resistance and the Crisis ofMasculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cowper, William. 1997. "The Castaway." In The Norton Anthology ofPoetry: Shorter Fourth Edition, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, 318-19. New York: W. W. Norton. Crosland, Alan, dir. 1927. The jazz Singer. Motion picture. Vita phone (Warner Bros. Pictures). Culler, Jonathan. 1981. The Pursuit ofSigns: Semiotics, Literature and Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cutter, William. 1981. "Ghostly Hebrew, Ghastly Speech: Scholem to Rosenzweig, 1926." Prooftexts 3: 413-43. Davidson, Michael. 1997. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World. Berkeley: University of California Press. - - - . 2002. "Notes." In George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson, 357-423. New York: New Directions. DeMan, Paul. 1983. "The Rhetoric ofTemporality." In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 187-228. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. - - - . 1984. '~utobiography as De-Facement." In The Rhetoric ofRomanticism, 67-82. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." In Writing and Diffirence, trans. Alan Bass, 278-300. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Des Pres, Terrence. 1988. Praises and Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the 2oth Century. New York: Viking Press. Dickinson, Emily. 1960. The Complete Poems ofEmily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little Brown. Doane, Janice, and Devon Hodges. 1987. Nostalgia and Sexual Diffirence: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism. New York: Methuen. Douglas, Ann. 1977. The Feminization ofAmerican Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Dubin, Lois C. 2002. "Who's Blessing Whom? Transcendence, Agency and Gender in Jewish Prayer." CrossCurrents 52, no. 2 (Summer): 167-77.

262

Works Cited

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, and Peter Quartermain. 1999. The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard. 1990. The Savage in judaism: An Anthropology ofIsraelite Religion and Ancient judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. - - - . 1992. "The Problem of the Body for the People of the Book." In People ofthe Body: Jews and judaism ftom an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, 17-46. Albany: State University of New York Press. - - - . 1994. God's Phallus and Other Problems for Man and Monotheism. Boston: Beacon Press. Eisen, Arnold. 1983. The Chosen People in America: A Study in jewish Religious Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. - - - . 1986. Galut: Modern Reflections on jewish Homelessness and Homecoming. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. - - - . 1988-89. "Imagining American Jews: Recent Visions and Revisions." Conservative judaism 41, no. 2 (Winter 1988-89): 3-20. Elbogen, Ismar. 1993. jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History. Trans. Raymond P. Scheindlin. New York: Jewish Publication Society. Eliot, T. S. 1967. The Collected Poems and Plays: I90f)-I9fO. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich. - - - . 1975a. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." In Selected Prose ofT. S Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, 37-44. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich. - - - . '975b. "Ulysses, Order and Myth." In Selected Prose ofT. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, 175-78. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich. EHmann, Maud. 1996. "The Imaginary Jew: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound." In Between ''Race" and Culture: Representations ofthe 'Jew" in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette, 84-ror. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1939. The Letters ofRalph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph L. Rusk. Vol. 6. New York: Columbia University Press. - - - . 1981. Selected Writings ofRalph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Donald McQuade. New York: Modern Library. Erickson, Peter. 1995. "Singing America: From Walt Whitman to Adrienne Rich." Kenyon Review 18 (Winter): ro3-19. Erkkila, Betsy. 1992. The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord. New York: Oxford University Press. Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary. 2001. Ed. David L. Leiber. New York: Jewish Publication Society. Ezrachi, Sidra DeKoven. 1992. "Our Homeland, the Text ... Our Text the Homeland: Exile and the Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination." Michigan Quarterly Review 31, no. 4 (Fall): 463-97. - - - . 1996. "Representing Auschwitz." History and Memory, vol. 7, no. 2 (Fall/Winter): !27-54·

- - - . 1997. "Brothers and Others." In Beginning Anew: A Woman's Companion to the High Holy Days, ed. Gail Twersky Reimer and Judith A. Kates, 8o-86. New York: Touchstone.

Works Cited

263

- - - . 2000. Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination.

Berkeley: University of California Press. Falk, Marcia. 1996. The Book ofBlessings: New jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Feldman, Emanuel. 1977. Biblical and Post-Biblical Defilement and Mourning: Law as Theology. New York: Yeshiva University Press. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises a/Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge. Felstiner, John. 1995. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fine, Lawrence. 1984. "Kabbalistic Texts." In Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic jewish Texts, ed. Barry W Holtz, 305-59. New York: Summit Books. Finkelstein, Norman. 1992. The Rituals ofNew Creation: jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. - - - . 1997. "Jewish-American Modernism and the Problem ofldentity: With Special Reforence to the Work ofLouis Zukofiky." In Upper Limit Music: The Writing ofLouis Zukofiky, ed. Mark Scroggins, 44-64. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. - - - . 2001. Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and jewish American Identity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Finkielkraut, Alain. 1994. The Imaginary jew. Trans. Kevin O'Neill and David Suchoff. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fisch, Harold. 1988. Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. - - - , ed. 1989. The jerusalem Bible. Jerusalem: Koren. Fishbane, Michael. 1987. "Prayer." In Contemporary jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements and Beliefi, ed. Arthur M. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, 723-30. New York: Scribner. - - - . 1998. The Exegetical Imagination: On jewish Thought and Theology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flanzbaum, Hilene. 1999. "The Imaginary Jew and the American Poet." In The Americanization ofthe Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum, 18-32. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 139-64. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fox, Marvin. 1996. "Prayer in the Thought of Maimonides." In Prayer in judaism: Continuity and Change, ed. Gabriel H. Cohen and Harold Fisch, n9-42. Northvale, NJ: Aronson Press. Fredman, Stephen. 2001. A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoffand the Jewish Dilemmas ofObjectivist Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freedman, Jonathan. 2000. The Temple ofCulture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

264

Works Cited

Friedlaender, Israel. 1961. "The Problem of]udaism in America." In Past and Present: Selected Essays, 159-84. New York: Burning Bush Press. Friedman, Melvin]. 1973. "Jewish Mothers and Sons: The Expense of Chutzpah." In Contemporary American-jewish Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Irving Malin, 156-75. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 1994. "Craving Stories: Narrative and Lyric in Contemporary Theory and Women's Long Poems." In Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, 15-42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. - - - . 1997. "When a 'Long Poem' Is a 'Big Poem': Self-Authorizing Strategies in Women's Twentieth-Century 'Long Poems."' In Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, ed. Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber, 13-37. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fry, Paul. 1980. The Poet's Calling in the English Ode. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Furman, Andrew. 2000. Contemporary jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return ofthe Exiled. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Galchinsky, Michael. 1998. "Scattered Seeds: A Dialogue ofDiasporas." In Insider/Outsider: American jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Hesche!, 185-2rr. Berkeley: University of California Press. Galli, Barbara Ellen. 1995. Franz Rosenzweig and jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, and Translators. Montreal: McGill University Press. Gibson, Mel, dir. 2004. The Passion ofthe Christ. Motion picture. Prod. Bruce Davey, Mel Gibson, Stephen McEveery, and Enzo Sisti. Icon Productions. Gilman, Sander. 1986. jewish SelfHatred.· Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language ofthe jews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. - - - . 1991. The jew's Body. New York: Routledge. Ginsberg, Allen. 1973. "How Kaddish Happened." In The Poetics ofthe New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman, 344-47. New York: Grove. - - - . 1977. journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties, ed. Gordon Ball. New York: Grove Press. - - - . 1984. Collected Poems: I947-I980. New York: Harper Row. - - - . 1986. White Shroud: Poems I980-I985. New York: Harper & Row. - - - . 1995· journals: Mid Fifties I954-I958, ed. Gordon Ball. New York: Harper Collins. - - - . 1996. Selected Poems: I947-I995- New York: Harper & Row. Ginsberg, Allen, and Louis Ginsberg. 2001. Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son. New York: Bloomsbury. Ginzberg, Louis. 1956. Legends ofthe Bible. Philadelphia: JPS Press. - - - . 1969. Ginzei Schechter. Volume 2. 1929. Reprint. New York: Hermon Press. Girard, Rene. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gittenstein, R. Barbara. 1986. Apocalyptic Messianism and Contemporary jewish-American Poetry. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Glatshteyn, Jacob. 1986. "Steal into the Prayerbook." In American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilin-

Works Cited

265

gualAnthology, trans. Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav, 367. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gliick, Louise. 1992. The Wild Iris. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. - - - . 1994. Proofi and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. - - - . I99 5. The First Four Books ofPoems. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. Gluzman, Michael. I998. "Modernism and Exile: A View from the Margins." In Insider/ Outsider: American jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susanna Hesche!, 23I-53· Berkeley: University of California Press. Goitein, S. D. I988. "Women as Creators of Biblical Genres." Prooftexts 8, no. I (January): I-33· Goldberg, Jonathan. 1992. '"Bradford's Ancient Members' and 'A Case of Buggery Amongst Them."' Nationalities and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, 6o-76. New York: Routledge. Goldfaden, Abraham. I972. "Teater Lid" (Theater Variation on "Raisins and Almonds"). In Mir Trogen a Gezang: Favorite Yiddish Songs of Our Generation, ed. Eleanor Gordon Mlotek. New York: Workmen's Circle. Golding, Alan. I999· "George Oppen's Serial Poems." In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, 84-I06. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Gordis, Robert. I967. "A Commentary on the Text of Lamentations." In The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Volume ofthe jewish Quarterly Review, ed. Abraham Neuman and Solomon Zeitlin, 267-86. Philadelphia: Center for Advanced Jewish Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Green, Arthur. I999· "New Directions in Jewish Theology in America." In Contemporary jewish Theology: A Reader, ed. Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman, 486-93. New York: Oxford University Press. Greenberg, Moshe. I987. "Job." In The Literary Guide to the Bible, 283-304. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Gregory, Elizabeth. 1996. Quotation and Modern American Poetry: Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads. Houston: Rice University Press. Grossman, Allen. 1997a. "The Jew as an An1erican Poet: The Instance of Ginsberg." In The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic ofthe Poetic Principle, 150-58. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. - - - . 1997b. "Jewish Poetry Considered as a Theophoric Project." In The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic ofthe Poetic Principle, 159-68. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. - - - . I997c. The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic ofthe Poetic Principle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. - - - . I997d. "Nuclear Violence, Institutions of Holiness and the Structures of Poetry." In The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic ofthe Poetic Principle, I68-78. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. - - - . n.d. "After Strange Gods: The Divine Comedy in the Life of a Jewish Poet." Unpublished manuscript.

266

Works Cited

- - - . 2001. How to Do Things with Tears. New York: New Directions. - - - . 2002. "The Passion of Laocoon: Warfare of the Religious Against the Poetic In-

stitution." Western Humanities Review 56, no. 2 (Winter): 30-60. Grossman, Allen, and Mark Halliday. 1992. The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gubar, Susan. 2003. Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guttman, Allen. 1971. The jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis ofIdentity. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1993. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 222-37. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Handelman, Susan A. 1991. Fragments ofRedemption: jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harlow, Jules. 1996. "The Siddur and the Contemporary Community." In Prayer in judaism: Continuity and Change, ed. Gabriel H. Cohen and Harold Fisch, 199-2!6. Northvale, NJ: Aronson Press. Harshav, Benjamin. 1990. The Meaning oJYiddish. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. - - - . 1994· "The Semiotics ofYiddish." In What Is jewish Literature?ed. Hana WirthNesher, 143-66. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1980. "The Sacred Jungle 2: Walter Benjamin." In Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study ofLiterature Today, 63-85. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. - - - . 2002. Scars ofthe Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity. New York: Palgrave. Haden, Burton, and Tom Mandel. 1981. "Poetry and Politics: Conversation with George and Mary Oppen." In George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Burton Haden, 23-50. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Hawkins, Peter S., and Rachel Jacoff, eds. 2001. The Poet]· Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Hellerstein, Kathryn. 1991. "Canon and Gender: Women Poets in Two Modern Yiddish Anthologies." Shofor 9: 9-23. - - - . 1995. "In Exile in the Mother Tongue: Yiddish and the Woman Poet." In Borders, Boundaries and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies, ed. Mae G. Henderson, 64-105. New York: Routledge. Henderson, Mae G. 1995· "Introduction: Borders, Boundaries, and Frame(works)." In Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Mae G. Henderson, 1-28. New York: Routledge. Hesche!, Susannah. 2003. "Imagining Judaism in America." In The Cambridge Companion to jewish American Literature, ed. Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher, 31-49. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hesiod. 1983. Theogony, Works and Days, Shield Trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hever, Hannan. 1990. "Hebrew in an Israeli Arab Hand: Six Miniatures on Anton Shammas's Arabesques." In The Nature and Context ofMinority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, 264-93. New York: Oxford University Press.

Works Cited 267 Hillers, Delbert R. 1972. The Anchor Bible: Lamentations. New York: Doubleday Press. Hindus, Milton, ed. 1984. Charles Reznikojf Man and Poet. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Hirsch, Marianne, and Evelyn Fox Keller. 1990. Conflicts in Feminism. New York: Routledge. Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1960. Psycho. Prod. Alfred Hitchcock. Motion picture. Shamley Productions. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. "Introduction: Inventing Traditions." In The Invention ofTradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, r-14. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Hoey, Allen. 1997. "Between Truth and Meaning." American Poetry Review 26, no. r (January-February): 37-47; r-15 in on-line version, available at http://findartides. com/p/artides/mi_qa3692/is_I99701/ai_n8743242 Hoffman, Lawrence A. 1979. The Canonization ofthe Synagogue Service. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. - - - . 1984. Gates of Understanding: Appreciating the Days ofAwe. Vol. 2. New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis. - - - . 2002. "Tachanun and Penitential Piety: A Jewish View of Human Nature." In Tachanun and Concluding Prayers, vol. 6 of My People's Prayer Book: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman. 7-18. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing. Hollander, John. 1984. "Review of Howl and Other Poems." In On the Poetry ofAllen Ginsberg, ed. Lewis Hyde, 26-28. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. - - - . 1994· "The Question of American Jewish Poetry." In What Is jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Neshcr, 36-52. New York: Jewish Publication Society. Holst-Warhaft, Gail. 1992. Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1997. "the woman's mourning song: a poetics of lamentation." In Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, ed. Yo pie Prins and Maeera Shreiber, 296-300. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Howe, Susan. 1993. The Birthmark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Hulme, T. E. 1936. "Romanticism and Classicism." In Speculations, ed. Herbert Read, n1-40. London: Routledge. Hyman, Paula E. 1995. Gender and Assimilation in Modern jewish History: The Roles and Representation ofWomen. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

The Interpreter's Bible: The Holy Scriptures in the King james and Revised Standard Ve-rsions. 1995. Ed. George Arthur Buttrick et al. Vol. 4, Psalms; Proverbs. New York: Abingdon Press. Irwin, John T. 1980. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol ofthe Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. lzenberg, Oren]. 2005. "Oppen's Silence, Crusoe's Silence and the Silence of Other Minds." Unpublished manuscript.

268

Works Cited

Jackson, Virginia. Forthcoming. "Bryant's Romanticism." In The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Trans-Atlantic Poetry. Ed. Meredith McGill. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. JanMohamed, Abdul R. 1992. "Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual." In Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker, 96-120. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Janowitz, Naomi. 1992. "God's Body: Theological and Ritual Roles of Shi'ur Komah." In People ofthe Body: jew and judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard EilbergSchwartz, 183-202. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Jewish Publication Society. 1969. Lamentations. In The Five Megi!loth and Jonah: A New Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. - - - . 1999. ]PS Hebrew-English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and the New jPS Translation, md ed. 1999. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Johnson, W. R. 1982. The Idea ofLyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jones, Ellen Carol. 2001. "Empty Shoes." In Footnotes: On Shoes, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris, 197-232. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Joselit, Jenna Weissman. 1994· The Wonders ofAmerica: Reinventing jewish American Culture r88o-I950. New York: Hill & Wang. Josipovici, Gabriel. 1993. "Going and Resting." In jewish Identity, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz, 309-21. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Joyce, James. 1964. A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man. New York: Viking. - - - . 1986. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler eta!. New York: Vintage. Kamenetz, Rodger. 1985a. "Realms of Being: An Interview with Robert Duncan." The Southern Review 21, no. r (January): 5-25. - - - . 1985b. Terra Infirma: A Memoir ofMy Mother's Lift in Mine. New York: Schocken. Kaplan, Mordechai. 1970. The Religion ofEthical Nationhood: judaism's Contribution to World Peace. New York: Doubleday. Kaufman, Shirley. 1985. "The Obvious and the Hidden: Some Thoughts About 'Disasters."' Ironwood 26: 1-7. Keller, Lynn. 1994. "Measured Feet 'in Gender-Bender Shoes': The Politics of Form in Marilyn Hacker's 'Love, Death and the Changing of rhe Seasons."' In Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, 26o-86. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Klepfisz, Irena. 1990a. Dreams ofan Insomniac: jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press. - - - . 1990b. A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New, I97I-I990. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press. - - - . 1994a. "Di Mames, Dos Loshn/The Mothers, The Language: Feminism, Yidishkayt, and the Politics of Memory." Bridges (Winter-Spring): !2-47· - - - . 1994b. Introduction to Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, ed.

Works Cited

z69

Freida Forman, Ethel Raicus, Sarah Silberstein Swartz, and Margie Wolfe, 21-58. Toronto: Second Story Press. - - - . 2000. "Di feder fon harts/The Pen of the Heart: Tsveyshprahikayt! Bilingualism and American Jewish Poetry." In jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary andReflections, eds. Jonathan N. Barron and Eric Murphy Selinger, 320-36. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press. Klingenstein, Susanne. 1991. jews in the American Academy I900-I94o: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kovner, Abba. 1986. My Little Sister and Selected Poems I965-I985. Trans. Shirley Kaufman. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin/Field Translation Series. Kramer, Michael P. 2003. "Beginnings and Ends: The Origins of Jewish American Literary History." In The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, ed. Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher, 12-30. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kramer, Michael, and Hana Wirth-Nesher, eds. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to jewish American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1986. "Revolution in Poetic Language." Trans. Margaret Waller. In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Tori! Moi, 89-136. New York: Columbia University Press. - - - . 1987. Tales ofLove. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kronfeld, Chana. 1996. On the Margins ofModernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kugel, James L. 1981. The Idea ofBiblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History. New Haven: Yale University Press. - - - . 1990. "Poets and Prophets: An Overview." In Poetry and Prophecy, ed. James L. Kugel, 1-25. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Landy, Francis. 1983. Paradoxes ofParadise: Identity and Diffirence in the Song ofSongs. Sheffield, England: Almond Press. Langer, Ruth. 1998. To Worship God Properly: Tensions Between Liturgical Custom and Halakhah in judaism. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press. Lazarus, Emma. 1888. The Poems ofEmma Lazarus. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton-Miffiin. - - - . 1967. Selections from Her Poetry and Prose, ed. Morris U. Schappes. New York: Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs. - - - . 1978. Selections from Her Poetry and Prose, 3rd rev. and en!. ed. Ed. Morris U. Schappes. New York: Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs. Lentricchia, Frank. 1988. Ariel and the Police. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Leverenz, David. 1986. "The Politics of Emerson's Man-Making Words." PMLA ror, no. I (January): 38-56. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. - - - . 1985. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philip Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. - - - . 1992. "Difficult Freedom." In The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand, 249-66. Oxford, England: Blackwell.

270

Works Cited

- - - . 1994. Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. Trans. Gary D. Mole. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. - - - . 1998. Entre-Nous: Thinkingofthe Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. Levine, Amy-Jill. 1992. "Diaspora as Metaphor: Bodies and Boundaries in the Book of Tobit." In Diaspora jews and judaism: Essays in Honor of, and in Dialogue with, A. Thomas Krabe4 ed. J. Andrew Overman and RobertS. MacLennan, 105-17. Tampa: University of South Florida Press. Levine, Herbert. 1995. Sing unto God a New Song: A Contemporary Reading ofthe Psalms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levitt, Laura S. 1995. "Reconfiguring Home: Jewish Feminist Identity/ies." In Gender and judaism, ed. Tamar Rudavsky, 39-49. New York: New York University Press. Lewalski, Barbara. 1979. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lichtenstein, Diane. 1992. Writing Their Nations: The Tradition ofNineteenth-Century American jewish Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lilith. 1998. "Women Scholars Speak Up." Lilith 23, no. 3 (Fall): ro-13. Linafelt, Todd. 1997. "Margins of Lamentation, or The Unbearable Whiteness of Reading." In Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and the Book, ed. Timothy K. Beal and David M. Gunn, 219-31. New York: Routledge. Langenbach, James. 1987. Modernist Poetics ofHistory: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense ofthe Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. - - - . n.d. "How to Do Things with Tears: Allen Grossman." www.bostonreview.net/ BR26. 5/longenbach.html Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 2005. "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport." In The Norton Anthology ofPoetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, 952-53. New York: W. W Norton. Lyotard, Jean-Francais. 1989. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Madsen, Catherine. 2001. "Kitsch and Liturgy." Tikkun r6, no. 2 (March-April): 41-46. - - - . 2003. "Spiritual Sobriety and the Iconic Voice: How We Recognize Language We Can Trust." CCAR]ourna/50, no.r (Winter): 3-IO. Maimonides, Moses. 2000. The Guide ofthe Perplexed ofMaimonides, rev. ed. Trans. Michael Friedlander. New York: Dover. Mandel, Naomi. 2001. "Rethinking 'After Auschwitz': Against a Rhetoric of the Unspeakable Holocaust Writing." boundary 2 28, no. 2: 203-28. Mankekar, Purnima. 1994. "Reflection ofDiasporic Identity: A Prolegomenon to an Analysis of Political Bifocality." Diaspora 3, no. 3: 360-71. Marom, Daniel. 2000. "Who Is the 'Mother of Exiles'? Jewish Aspects of Emma Lazarus's 'The New Colossus."' Prooftexts 20, no. 3 (Fall): 231-61. Maslan, Mark. 2000. Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality and Popular Authority. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Works Cited

271

Meltzer, David, ed. 1998. The Secret Garden: An Anthology in the Kabbalah. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. 1987. "History." In Contemporary jewish Religious Thought: Original

Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements and Beliefi, ed. Arthur M. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, 371-88. New York: Scribner. - - - . 1993. "Hebrew as a Holy Tongue: Franz Rosenzweig and the Renewal of Hebrew." In Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, ed. Lewis Glinert, 222-41. New York: Oxford University Press. Miles, Barry. 2000. Ginsberg: A Biography. London: Virgin. Miles, Jack. 1995. God: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Milosz, Czeslaw. 2001. New and Collected Poems, I9JI-200I. New York: Ecco Press. Mintz, Alan. 1984. Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Modleski, Tania. 1991. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Post-Femi-

nist" Age. New York: Routledge. Moore, Marianne. 1982. Complete Poems. New York: Penguin Books. Morris, Daniel. 2006. The Poetry ofLouise Gluck: A Thematic Introduction. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Naylor, Paul Kenneth. 1991. "The Pre-Position 'Of': Being, Seeing, and Knowing in George Oppen's Poetry." Contemporary Literature 31: 10o-15. Neher, Andre. 1987. "Silence." In Contemporary jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays

on Critical Concepts, Movements and Beliefi, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul MendesFlohr, 873-80. New York: Scribner. New, Elisa. 1993. The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Newfield, Christopher. 1996. The Emerson Effict: Individualism and Submission in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nicholls, Peter. 1999. "Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Oppen." In The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, 24o-56. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Nirenberg, David. 1996. Communities ofViolence: Persecution ofMinorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 1993. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Omer-Sherman, Ranen. 2002. Diaspora and Zionism in jewish American Literature. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press. Oppen, George. 1978. Primitive. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press. - - - . 1989. "The Circumstances: Selections from George Oppen's Uncollected Writing." Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Sulfor25 (Fall): 10-43. - - - . 1990a. "The Philosophy of the Astonished: Selections from the Working Papers." Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Sulfor 27: 202-22. - - - . 1990b. The Selected Letters ofGeorge Oppen. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2 72

Works Cited

- - - . 2002. New Collected Poems. Ed. Michael Davidson. New York: New Directions. - - - . n.d. "Notes, Jottings, Etc." In George Oppen Papers MSS 0016, Box 13. Mandeville Special Collections. University of California, San Diego, Library. Oppen, Mary. 1975. "Jerusalem Journal." Unpublished manuscript. Mandeville Special Collections. University of California, San Diego, Library.

Osherow, Jacqueline. 1996. The Moon in Transit. New York: Grove Press. - - - . 1999. "Scattered Psalms." In Dead Man's Praise, 51-88. New York: Grove Press. - - - . 2001. "She's Come Undone: An American Jew Looks at Dante." In The Poet's Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses, eds. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff, 265-76. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ostriker, Alicia. 1992. "Loving Walt Whitman and the Problem of America." In The

Continuing Presence ofWalt Whitman: The Lift After the Lift, ed. Robert K. Martin, 217-31. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Ozick, Cynthia. 1994. "America: Toward Yavneh." In What Is jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher, 20-35. New York: Jewish Publication Society. - - - . 1996. "Virility." In A Cynthia Ozick Reader, ed. Elaine M. Kauvar, 64-99. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Parker, Andrew, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger. 1992. Nationalities and

Sexualities. New York: Routledge. Patai, Raphael. 1990. The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Peleg, Ilan. 1994. "Otherness and Israel's Arab Dilemma." In The Other in Jewish Thought and History, ed. Laurence Silberstein and Robert L. Cohen, 258-8o. New York: New York University Press. Perloff, Marjorie. 1981. "'The Shape of the Lines': George Oppen and the Metric of Difference." In George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Burton Haden, 215-29. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Pinsky, Robert. 2001. "The Pageant ofUnbeing." In The Poet's Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses, eds. PeterS. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff, 306-r8. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1995· Poems and Essays on Poetry, ed. C. H. Sisson. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press. Pound, Ezra. 1960. ABC ofReading. New York: New Directions. Pound, Ezra, and Louis Zukofsky. 1987. Selected Letters ofEzra Pound and Louis Zukofiky. Ed. Barry Ahearn. New York: New Directions. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Prell, Riv-Ellen. 1990. "Rage and Representation: Jewish Gender Stereotypes in American Culture." In Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 248-68. Boston: Beacon Press. - - - . 1999. Fighting to Become Americans: jews, Gender, and the Anxiety ofAssimilation. Boston: Beacon Press. Preminger, Alex, and T.V. F. Brogan, eds. 1993. "Hebrew Poetry." In The New Princeton Encyclopedia ofPoetry and Poetics, 501-9. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Works Cited

273

Prins, Yopie, and Maeera Shreiber, eds. 1997. Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ramazani, Jahan. 1994. Poetry ofMourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rashkin, Esther. 1988. "Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Work of Abraham and Torok." Diacritics 18 (Winter): 31-67. Rasula, Jed. 1994. "Gendering the Muse." Sulfur 35 (Fall): 159-75. Ravtich, Melech. 1987. "Horses." In The Penguin Book ofModern Yiddish Verse, eds. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, 63-64. New York: Viking. Reif, Stefan C. 1993. judaism and Hebrew Prayer: New Perspectives on jewish Liturgical History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Reznikoff, Charles. 1934. Testimony. New York: Objectivist Press. - - - . 1963. Family Chronicle. New York: Charles Reznikoff. - - - . 1976a. The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff.Vol. I, Poems, I9I8-I936. ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press. - - - . 1976b. Holocaust. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press. - - - . 1977a. The Complete Poems ofCharles Reznikoff.Vol. 2, Poems, I937-I915· ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press. - - - . 1977b. The Manner ''Music." Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press. - - - . 1978-79. Testimony: The United States, I88S-I9IS: Recitative. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press. - - - . 1984. "A Talk with L. S. Dembo." In Charles Reznikoff Man and Poet, ed. Milton Hindus, 97-108. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. - - - . 1997. Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff. I9I7-I976. Ed. Milton Hindus. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press. Reznikoff, Charles, and Reinhold Schiffer. 1984. "The Poet in His Milieu." In Charles Rezniko./f Man and Poet, ed. Milton Hindus, no-26. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Reznikoff, Sarah. 1963. "Early History of a Seamstress." In Family Chronicle, ed. Charles Reznikoff, 7-99. New York: Charles Reznikoff. Rich, Adrienne. 1972. Diving into the Wreck: Poems I97I-I9J2. New York: W. W. Norton. - - - . 1979. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision." In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, I966-I978, 33-50. New York: W. W. Norton. - - - . 1983. Sources. Woodside, CA: Heyeck Press. - - - . 1984. The Fact ofa Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, I95o-I984. New York: W. W. Norton. - - - . 1986. "Notes Towards a Politics of Location." In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose I979-I985, 210-32. New York: W. W. Norton. - - - . 1990. Introduction to A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New, I9JI-I990, by Irena Klepfisz, 13-25. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press. - - - . 1991. An Atlas ofthe Difficult World: Poems I988-I991. New York: W. W. Norton. - - - . 1993a. Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose Reviews and Criticism. Ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. New York: W. W. Norton.

274

Works Cited

- - - . 1993b. "The Genesis of 'Yom Kippur 1984."' In Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose Reviews and Criticism, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, 252-57. New York: W. W. Norton. - - - . 1993c. What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. New York: W. W. Norton. - - - . 1995. Dark Fields ofthe Republic: Poems, I99I-I995· New York: W. W. Norton. Rogin, Michael. 1996. Blackface /White Noise: jewish Immigrants and the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1953. Lift and Thought. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books. Roth, Henry. 1991. Call It Sleep. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Rothenberg, Jerome. 1981. "Harold Bloom: The Critic as Exterminating Angel." Sulfor r, no. 2:4-26. Rothenberg, Jerome, Harris Lenowitz, and Charles Doris, eds. 1978. Big jewish Book. New York: Anchor Press. Rubin, Steven J. 2000. "Poets of the Promised Land." In Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary and Reflections, ed. Jonathan N. Barron and Eric Murphy Selinger, 197-215. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press. Rukeyser, Muriel. 1982. The Collected Poems ofMuriel Rukeyser. New York: McGraw Hill. Said, Edward. 1984. "The Mind in Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile." Harper's 269: 49-55· - - - . 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. - - - . 2000. "Reflections on Exile." In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 173-86. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Savran, David. 1998. Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking ofthe World. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Scheindlin, Raymond P. 1991. The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul. New York: Jewish Publication Society. - - - , trans. 1998. The Book ofjob. New York: W. W. Norton. Schenck, Celeste M. 1986. "Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5 (Spring): 13-26. Schiesari, Juliana. 1992. The Gendering ofMelancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics ofLoss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schimmel, Harold. 1979. "Zuk. Yehoash David Rex." In Louis Zukofiky: Man and Poet, ed. Carol! Terrell, 235-46. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Schwartz, Delmore. 1967. Selected Poems. New York: New Directions. Schwartz, Howard, and Anthony Rudolf. 1980. Voices Within the Ark: The Modern jewish Poets. New York: Avon. Schwartz, Regina M. 1992. "Nations and Nationalism: Adultery in the House of David." Critical Inquiry 19: 131-50.

Works Cited

275

Scroggins, Mark. 1998. Louis Zukofiky and the Poetry ofKnowledge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Searle, J. R. 1971. The Philosophy ofLanguage. London: Oxford University Press. Seidman, Naomi. 1997. A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics ofHebrew and Yiddish. Berkeley: University of California Press. Selinger, Eric Murphy. 2000. "Shekhinah in America." In jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary and Reflections, ed. Jonathan N. Barron and Eric Murphy Selinger, 250-71. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press. Shapiro, Karl. 1959. Poems ofa jew. New York: Random House. Sharpe, Jenny. 1993. Allegories ofEmpire: The Figure ofWoman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shechner, Mark. 1987. After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary jewish American Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1997. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers. New York: W. W. Norton. Shohat, Ella. 1992. "Antinomies of Exile: Said at the Frontier of National Narrations." In Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker, 121-43. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Silberman, A. M., trans. 1934. Chumash with Tragum Onekolos, Haphtaroth, and Rashi's Commentary. Jerusalem: Feldheim. - - - , trans. 1963. Pentateuch with Rashi's Commentary. Jerusalem: Silberman Family. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics ofTransmission. New York: Routledge. Simon, Maurice, trans. 1948. The Babylonian Talmud: Berakhot. London: Soncino Press. Solomon, Alisa. 2003. "Viva Ia Diva Citizenship: Post-Zionism and Gay Rights." In Queer Theory and the jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Danielltzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, 149-65. New York: Columbia Universiry Press. Spitzer, Leo. 2000. "Back Through the Future: Nostalgic Memory and Critical Memory in a Refuge from Nazism." In Acts ofMemory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, 87-ro3. Hanover, NH: Universiry Press of New England. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1962. "Tender Buttons." In Selected Writings, ed. Carl Van Vechten, 459-5!0. New York: Vintage Books. Steiner, George. 1985. "Our Homeland, the Text." Salmagundi 66: 4-25. Stephenson, Gregory. 1984. "'Howl': A Reading." In On the Poetry ofAllen Ginsberg, ed. Lewis Hyde, 386-93. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stern, Gerald. 1992. "Grossman's Lament." American Poetry Review 21 Quly-August): 7-12. Stern, Jose£ 1987. "Language." In Contemporary jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements and Beliefi, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul MendesFlohr, 543-52. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

2 76

Works Cited

Sternburg, Janet, and Alan Ziegler. 1984. ''A Conversation with Charles Reznikoff." In Charles Reznikoff. Man and Poet, ed. Milton Hindus, 127-38. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Stevens, Wallace. 1978. The Collected Poems ofWallace Stevens. New York: Knopf. Stewart, Susan. 1993. "The State of Cultural Theory and the Future of Literary Form." Profession 93: 12-15. - - - . 2002. Poetry and the Fate ofthe Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stevenson, John. 1988. ''A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula." PMLA 103, no. 2 (March): 139-49. Syrkin, Marie. 1984. "Charles: A Memoir." In Charles Reznikoff. Man and Poet, ed. Milton Hindus, 37-68. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation. Syverson, M.A. 1992. "The Community of Memory: A Reznikoff Family Chronicle." Sagetrieb n (Spring-Fall): 127-70. Taggart, John. 1998. "Walk Out: Rereading George Oppen." Chicago Review 44, no. 2: 29-93· Tarn, Nathaniel. 1978. Lyrics for the Bride of God. New York: New Directions. Tishby, Isaiah, and Fishel Lachower. 1989. The Wisdom ofthe Zohar. Trans. David Goldstein. Vol. r. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Tomas, John. 1990. "Portrait of the Jewish Artist as a Young Jew: Zukofsky's 'Poems beginning "The"' in Context." Sagetrieb 9, nos. rand 2 (Spring and Fall): 43-64. Trachtenberg, Marvin. 1976. The Statue ofLiberty. London: Penguin. Trible, Phyllis. 1978. God and the Rhetoric ofSexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Tsvetayeva, Marina. 1971. Selected Poems. Trans. Elaine Feinstein. London: Oxford University Press. Turner, Victor W 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Upton, Lee. 1998. The Muse ofAbandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 1992. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Vendler, Helen. 1991. "Mapping the Air." New York Review ofBooks, November 21, 50-56. - - - . 1995a. "Flower Power: Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris." In Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, r6-22. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. - - - . 1995b. "The Reversed Piedt: Allen Ginsberg's 'Kaddish."' In Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, 2-15. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Vogel, Dan. 1980. Emma Lazarus. Boston: Twayne. Weinberger, Eliot. 2002. Preface to George Oppen: Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson, vii-xi. New York: New Directions. Weinfield, Henry. 1988. "'Wringing, Wringing His Pierced Hands': Religion, Identity and Genre in the Poetry of Charles Reznikoff." Sagetrieb 7, nos. r and 2 (Fall): 225-32. Weinreich, Max. 1980. History ofthe Yiddish Language. Trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua Fishman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Works Cited

2 77

Weissler, Chana. 1998. Voices ofthe Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers ofEarly Modern jewish WOmen. Boston: Beacon Press. Whitman, Walt. 1964. "Democratic Vistas." In Prose WOrks: I892. Vol. 2, ed. Floyd Stovall, 361-426. New York: New York University Press. - - - . 1973. Leaves ofGrass. Ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: W. W. Norton. - - - . 1975. The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. New York: Penguin Books. Wiesel, Elie. 1980. "Myth and History." In Myth, Symbol and Reality. Ed. Alan M. Olson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. - - - . 1996. "Prayer and Modern Man." In Prayer in judaism: Continuity and Change, ed. Gabriel H. Cohen and Harold Fisch, 3-12. Northvale, NJ: Aronson Press. Wieseltier, Leon. 1998. Kaddish. New York: Vintage. Williams, William Carlos. 1951. Autobiography. New York: New Directions. Wilner, Eleanor. 1984. Shekhinah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - - - . 1997. "Wrestling the Angel oflnscription." In Dwelling in Possibility: WOmen Poets and Critics on Poetry, ed. Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber, 318-23. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wirth-Nesher, Hana. 1994- "From Newark to Prague: Roth's Place in the American Jewish Literature." In What Is jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher, 216-30. New York: Jewish Publication Society. - - - . 1998. "Language as Homeland in Jewish American Literature." In Insider/Outsider: American jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susanna Hesche!, 212-30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wisse, Ruth R. 2000. The Modern jewish Canon: A journey Through Language and Culture. New York: Free Press. Wolfson, Elliot R. 1992. "Images of God's Feet: Some Observations on the Divine Body in Judaism." In People ofthe Body: jews and judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, 143-81. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. - - - . 1994. "Woman-The Feminine as Other in Theosophic Kabbalah: Some Philosophical Observations on the Divine Androgyne." In The Other in jewish Thought and History: Constructions ofjewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn, 166-204. New York: New York University Press. - - - . 2005. Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination. New York: Fordham University Press. Wolosky, Shira. 1996. "An American-Jewish Typology: Emma Lazarus and the Figure of Christ." Prooftexts 16: 113-25. Woolf, Virginia. 1953. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich. - - - . 1981. A Room ofOne's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace. Wordsworth, William. 2002. Selected Poetry ofWilliam WOrdsworth. Ed. Mark Van Doren. New York: Modern Library. Yaeger, Patricia. 1988. Honey Mad WOmen: Emancipatory Strategies in WOmen's Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Yeats, William Butler. 1961a. The Collected Poems ofW B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan.

278

Works Cited

- - - . 1961b. Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan. Yerushalmi, Yosef Haim. 1982. Zahor: jewish History and jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Yezierska, Anzia. 1996. How I Found America: Collected Stories. Ed. Vivian Gornick. New York: Persea Press. Young, Bette Roth. 1995. Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1981. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zukofsky, Louis. 1931. "Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikojf" Poetry 37: 272-85. - - - . 1978. A. Berkeley: University of California Press. - - - . 1981. Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays, exp. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. - - - . 1991. Complete Short Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Index

Aberbach, David, 22 Abraham (biblical character), 36, 55, 92-94> 96, 129, 136-37· 214 Abraham, Nicholas, m, 123 Adler, Rachel, 172, 192 Adorno, Theodor, 67f, 164, 230 Alexiou, Margaret, 145f Allegory, 246n3 Allen, Gay, 37 Alter, Robert, 20, 55, 239m4, 239m5 Altieri, Charles, 6zf, 144, 243ni4, 248n36 Amichai, Yehuda, 98, 181 Anamnesis, 4, 28, 79, 85, 125, 244n25. See also Yerushalmi, Yosef Antin, David, 163, 250m4 Anti-Semitism, 35, 38, 56, II4, 127, 131, 229, 240n26 Anzaldua, Gloria, 171-73, 250n24, 250n25 Aquinas, Thomas, 189 Arnold, Matthew, 18, 183, 238m2 Asi and Ami, Rabbis, 21

Attridge, Derek, 243n9 Auden, W. H., II5, 153, 187, 215, 252n7 Augustine, St., 191, 209 Austin, J. L., zn, 214, 217 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15, 32, 243m2 Balaam, 232-33 Balentine, Samuel, 238n6, 239m5 Barron, Jonathan, 3 Bartholdi, Fredric, 40 Baumgarten, Murray, 15 Bell, Daniel, 25on6 Bellow, Saul, 15, 172 Ben Baboi, Rabbi, 239n21 Benjamin, Jessica, 61f Benjamin, Walter, 23, 283, 218, 249m4; "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 101-II, II6, II9f, 125, 131, 246n2, 246n4 Berger, Charles, 254flii Berkovits, Eliezer, 254fl12

280

Index

Bernstein, Charles, 2, 5, 20, 58-6r passim, 67, 174· 24InJ6, 25In29 Bernstein, Michael, roo, 246m3 Berryman, John, 8r Bhabha, Homi, 15, 176 Bialik, Haim, 65 Black, Debra Reed, 25m3 Blackface, 50-51 Blake, William, 183, 191, 201, 222 Blasing, Mut!u, 6, 14 Bloom, Harold, 3, 14, 6o-6r, IIJ, 238n9; "The Sorrows of American Jewish Poetry," J, 17-18, 6o, 238mo, 238nn BodyofGod, 25, 30-35passim, 240n27, 255lll6 Boland, Eavan, 183, 238m2 Boyarin, Daniel, 6, no, 126, r66f, 238n7, 242n37, 242n38, 246nn, 246m5, 247nJ0,249n6, 250n19 Boyarin, Jonathan, 167, 249n6, 250m9 Braidotti, Rosi, 169, 173f Brann, Ross, 20, 22 Brennan, Timothy, 15 Brodsky, Joseph, 43 Brueggemann, Walter, 159, r86f, 191, 252lll9 Bruns, Gerald, 228 Bryant, William Cullen, 37, 40f Buber, Martin, 75, 2n, 252nq, 253n2o Buck-Morss, Susan, IOJ, 246n2 Burstein, Janet, 254n9 Butler, Judith, n Canons and canonization, 2f, r6 Caraveli, Anna, 146 Carmi, T., 22 Celan, Paul, 43, 192f, 203, 210, 229, 249nr4 Chambers, Richard ("Ricky''), n5-r6 Chambers, Whittaker, n5, 247m6 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 38, 109 Cheng, Vincent, 240n23 Chosenness, 5, 128-31, 248n32

Clare, John, 24rn36 Clifford, James, 167 Cohen, Aryeh, 239n2o Cohen, Hermann, 107 Cohen, Mortimer, 87 Cooney, Seamus, 69, 72 Corber, Robert, 244n30 Covenant, r, 71, 128-31 passim, 2orf, 248n34; Ark of the Covenant, 227f, 230 Cowan, Elise, 96 Cowper, William, 219, 254n5 Culler, Jonathan, 245n33 Cutter, William, r68 Dante Alighieri, 31, 210-IJ, 217, 225, 24InJ4, 253ni David (biblical figure), 22, 30, J4, 125, 214, 248m Davidson, Michael, 66, 141, 248n3r, 248nJ4 Deborah (biblical figure), 20, 41-42 Defoe, Daniel, 130 Delacroix, Eugene, 40 DeMan, Paul, 56, ror, II4 Dembo, L. S., 189, 244n2r Derrida, Jacques, 253n2o Des Pres, Terrence, 152 Diaspora and dispersion, 2, 8, 43, 143, r6o75 passim, 190, 220, 244n27, 249m3, 25onq, 250m9; diasporic vision and poetics, 6-9 passim, 54, 144, r6o-67 passim, I75· rnf, 233· See also Exile; Home and homelessness; Klepfisz, Irena Dickinson, Emily, 14, 37, 53, 68, 24rn36 Doane, Janice, 25rn32 Donne, John, 184, 209, 253m Douglas, Ann, 15f Douglas, Mary, 149 Drucker, Joanna, 24rn36 Dubin, Lois C., 252n5 Duncan, Robert, 44, 142, 248n40

Index DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 247nr7 Durkheim, Emile, 2391113

281

Ezrachi, Sidra, 12, 231, 246nro, 254m4 Falk, Marcia, 184; The Book ofBlessings,

Eidos and eidetic function, 18, 67, 201; eidetic check, 67-68, 213, 231. See also

184-90, 192, 209, 252ns, 252n6 Father and the paternal, 50, 52, 62, 64f, 71,

Grossman, Allen Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, 126, 149,

89, 91, 96f, 127, 155, 169, 245n39; and Louis Zukofsky, 119ff, 121, n6f; and Louise Gliick, 198-203 passim, 213. See also Mother and the maternal Feldman, Emanuel, 248n2 Felman, Shoshana, 225

255ni6 Eisen, Arnold, 23, 163, 240n23, 248n32 Eleazar, Rabbi, 215f Elbogen, Ismar, 20 Elegy, 4, 87, 145f Eliot, T. S., 46, 99, 140, 189, 194, 198; and Louis Zukofsky 108-22 passim; and Allen Grossman, 210-n, 246n6. Works: The Wttste Land, 99, ro6f, ro9f, 112, n6ff, 124, 141, 246m, 246n7; The Sacred Wood, ro6; "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," 140f; The Four Quartets, 246m Elijah (biblical figure), 112, 138, 190, 199 Ellmann, Maud, 121 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 14, 42, 242n39; and Emma Lazarus, 37-39, 242n40, 242n41; and daughter Ellen, 38 Epic, 40, 66, 98, wof, rr9f, 127, 131, 224 Ephraim, Rabbi, 214 Erickson, Peter, 249n6 Erkkila, Betsy, 147 Erskine, John, n8

Etz Hayim, 254n7 Exile, 2, 4-16 passim, 21, 26, 29, 37, 43£ 74, 79, 87, 90f, 144· 242n42, 244n27, 249l114, 250lll5, 250nq, 254n9; and Louis Zukofsky, 122-27 passim; and Edward Said, 160-65; and Irena Klepfisz, 166-78 passim; and Allen Grossman, 221f, 233. See also Diaspora and dispersion; Home and homelessness; Said, Edward Exodus, book of, 30-33, 2411135 Ezekiel (biblical figure), 30, II2, 175, 222

Festiner, John, 44, 193 Finkelstein, Norman, 3, 6o, 75, rr6, 162, 253n2, 255ni8 Finkielkraut, Alain, 165f, 176 Fisch, Harold, 2, 62, 237n2, 243m2 Fishbane, Michael, 195, 254n6 Flanzbaum, Hilene, 44, 244fl28 Foucault, Michel, 28, 149 Frank, Anne, 254m5 Fredman, Stephen, 3, 56, n6, 247n21, 247n26 Freedman, Jonathan, 99, !09, n8, 238n9 Freud, Sigmund, 110 Friedlaender, Israel, 23-25, 240n24 Friedman, Debbie, 26 Friedman, Melvin, 48f Friedman, Susan Stanford, 249n5, 2511130 Fry, Paul, 216 Furman, Andrew, 15 Galchinsky, Michael, 249m3 Galli, Barbara, 253n3 Garden of Eden, 195, 199, 203f Gibson, Mel, The Passion ofthe Christ, 254n8 Gilman, Sander, 64, 255nr7 Ginsberg, Allen, 4, 8, 46, 48, 54, 80-97, n9, 233, 242n6, 244028, 244n29, 244n31, 244n32, 245n43; and mother, Naomi Ginsberg, 81-97 passim, 245n32, 245n42; and father, Louis

282

Index

Ginsberg, 89, 245n39. Works: "Howl," 81-86; "Kaddish," 8o--96, 150, m, 245n42, 245n43; "White Shroud" and "Black Shroud," 96f Ginzberg, Louis, 245n45 Ginzei Schechter, 239n21 Girard, Rene, 93 Glatshteyn, Jacob, 179-80, 183 Gliick, Louise, 9, 184, 189, 193-207, 210, 213, 252nr4, 252nr6, 252nr7. Works: The Wild Iris, 193-207, 252m2, 253n21; "Matins," 198-201, 204; "The White Lilies," 202-7 Gluzman, Michael, 124, 247n27 Goitein, S. D., 148 Goldfaden, Abraham, 124-25, 247n28 Goldberg, Jonathan, 155 Goldberg, Leah, 181 Golding, Alan, 131 Green, Arthur, 187, 191, 209f Greenberg, Moshe, 197 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 210 Greenleaf, Monica, 24rn33 Gregory, Elizabeth, 246n8 Grossman, Allen, 3, 9, 17£ 25, 27, 61, 68, 192, 199> 20!, 209-34> 239ni3, 243nn, 253n4, 254n5, 254lliO, 254nn, 254m3, 254nr4, 255nr8. Works: ''After Strange Gods," 21o--13; "Jewish Poetry Considered as a Theophoric Project," 212-13; How to Do Things with Tears, 214£ 230£ 233; "How to Do Things with Tears," 217-23; "White Sails," 223f; "Flora's ABC," 224-34; "The Passion of Laocoon," 252n4 Guttman, Allen, 15 Habermas, Jiirgen, 101 Hagar (biblical figure), 55 Halacha, 21, 64ff, 70 Halevi, Yehuda, 23 Hall, Stuart, 167 Handelman, Susan, 246n3

Hannah (biblical figure), 8o, 92, 94, 97, 245n45; Hannah's prayer, 20, 94-95, 185, 215, 238n6, 252n6 Hardy, Thomas, 202 Harlow, Jules, 182 Harshav, Benjamin, 25rn27 Hartman, Geoffrey, 183-84, 246n4, 252n2o Hawkins, Peter, 210 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 16 Heaney, Seamus, 210 Hebrew language, 22-27 passim, 33, 57f, 74, 83,122,168,243n8,248n2,249n8, 249lll3, 250n20 Hebrew poetry, 19, 22-24, 57, 75 Heine, Heinrich, 123, 126, 247n26 Hellerstein, Kathryn, 169, 247n25, 247n28 Herbert, George, 184, 209, 253m Hesche!, Susannah, 13of Hesiod, 24In31 Hester Panim, 226, 254m2 Higginson, Thomas, 37 Hirsch, Edward, 210 History, 8, 98-109, n4f, 122-29 passim, 133, 140; and myth, 8, 99-roo, 103, 121; and time, I04, ro9. See also Myth Hitchcock, Alfred, Psycho, 46 Hobsbawm, Eric, 162 Hodges, Devon, 25rn32 Hoffman, Lawrence, 240n25, 252nr8 Hollander, John, 4, 16f, 33, 44, 58, 87, 238n8, 245n36 Holocaust, the, 8, 68, 138, 160, 171f, 225-33 passim, 254m2, 254nr4, 254nr5, 255ni8 Holst-Warhaft, Gail, 249m2 Home and homelessness, 2, 4f, 8, 26£ 43, 161, 164, 221ff, 249n14, 250n17, 250n23, 250n25, 254n4. See also Diaspora and dispersion; Exile Homer, 18, 67, 219, 224 hooks, bell, 148 Howe, Susan, 6, 14, 26, 61 Hutchinson, Anne, 14

Index

283

Huxley, Aldous, n2

Kaddish, 4> 72f, nf. 83-89, I57ff, 244lll8,

Hyman, Paula, 48

245n32, 245nJ6, 245n37· 245nJ8. See also Ginsberg, Allen; Reznikoff, Charles; Rich, Adrienne; Prayer and prayers Kafka, Franz, zro, 249nr4 Kahn, Louis, 253n4 Kahn, Nathaniel, 253n4 Kamenetz, Rodger, 76f, 84, 245n38 Kant, Immanuel, 254n13 Kaplan, Mordecai, 130f Kaufman, Shirley, 134, 136, 138

Incarnation, 209-13, 227 Intifadas (Palestinian), 8, 156, 177 Irigaray, Luce, 187 Irwin, John, 14 Isaac (biblical figure), 55-57, 92, 94, 129, 137, 239nr5; Binding oflsaac, 93, 129, 214 Isaiah (biblical figure), 30, m, 241n32 Ishmael (biblical figure), 137-38 Izenberg, Oren, 130 Jabes, Edmond, 253n2o Jacob (biblical figure), 17, 214, 230, 232 Jacoff, Rachel, 2ro Jameson, Fredric, 249m2 JanMohamed, Abdul, 164 Janowitz, Naomi, 240n27 jazz Singer, The (film), 48-55, 96 Jew, the, as trope for the poet, 4, 16, 44, 47, 81; as trope for the modern, 43f, 47, r63, 249nr4; as feminized and effeminate, 2, r6f, 33, 35, 52, 54, 64, n2, 138, 147, 153, r66, 238n7, 238mo, 247n30. See also Masculinity Job (biblical figure), 195-99, 202 Johnson, Barbara, 77 Johnson, William, 193 Jolson, AI, 49 Jones, Ellen Carol, 254nr4 Jonson, Ben, 253m Joselit, Jenna Weissman, 243nr5 Josipovici, Gabriel, 249n14 Joyce, James, 8, 42f, 47, 99, nzf, 164, 24202. Works: Ulysses, 247n33; A

Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man, 49· !09 Kabbalah, 25, 27f, 34, 44f, 141, 158, 190, 229, 240n28, 240n29. See also Shekhinah

Keats, John, 24!1136, 242n4 Kessner, Carole S., 242n4r Kierkegaard, Soren, 129 Klee, Paul, Angelus Novus, IOJ-4, nr Klepfisz, Irena, 3, 8, 143f, r6o-78, 221, 233, 250nJ7, 250n19, 250n21, 250n24, 25In27, 25In33· Works: "Fradel Schtok," 169-70, 25onzz, 251n32; "Di rayze aheym I The journey home," 173-75, 25rn3o; "A Few Words in the Morher Tongue," 175-76; "Der Soyn I The Enemy: An Interview in Gaza," 177 Klingenstein, Susanne, 238n9 Kol Nidre, 5of Koestenbaum, Wayne, 242n38 Kollack, Teddy (mayor of]erusalem), 133, 136 Kovner, Abba, 136, 138 Kristeva, Julia, z8; chora, 28, 89; "Loving father," 89, 101, 125, 245n39; "Imaginary father," rzr Kronfeld, Chana, 43 Kugel, James, 19f, 237nr, 239nr4, 24rn32 Laboulaye, Edouard, 40 Lament and lamentation, 4, 8, 82, r61, 227, 245n35, 245n40, 248m, 248n2, 249n3, 249m2; and Allen Ginsberg, 86ff; and Adrienne Rich, 143-60; and Louise Gliick, zooff. See also Lamentations, book of

284

Index

Lamentations, book of, 82, 86ff, 90, 96,

Masculinity, 16f, 28, 33ff, 53f, 94, 126, 132,

143, 147-54, 159, r66, 249n7. See also Lament and lamentation Landy, Francis, 204, 206 Langer, Ruth, 25rn2

153, 237n7, 247n3o. See also under Jew, the (as feminized and effeminate) Maslan, Mark, 242m Medieval moment and middle ages, 19,

Lawrence, D. H., 49, 242n2 Lazarus, Emma, 7, 29, 35-45, 221, 233, 239nr6, 242n40, 242n41; "The New

23-28 passim, 179f, 238n8, 240n22 Melrzer, David, 2401128 Memory, 99, 101, 105, 108f, n6, n9, 121,

Colossus," 7, 29, 36, 39-43; and Emerson, 37-39. See also Emerson, Ralph Waldo Leverenz, David, 38

139· 220f, 223, 231 Melville, Herman, 16 Mendelssohn, Moses, r66 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 122 Menorah journal, 101, n9 Metaphor and metaphoric language, 47f,

Levinas, Emmanuel, 18, 71, 155-57, 24m36, 252nq, 253n20 Levine, Amy-Jill, 26 Levine, Herbert, 62, 216-19 passim, 238n4, 243n12, 245n46,248n35 Levitt, Laura S., 250n23 Lichtenstein, Diane, 243nr5 Liturgy, 19, 21, 47, 157f, 185, 200, 214, 225, 244m9, 255m9. See also Prayer and prayers "Long poem," the, 249n5 Langenbach, James, 223 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 36, 38, 40, II7 Longinus, 219 Lot's wife (biblical figure), 139 Lowell, Robert, 81 Luria, Isaac, 27 Lynch, David, 228 Lyotard, Jean-Fran 245n44, 247n26; and mother, Sarah Reznikoff, 56-57, 65, 74, 242n7; and legal discourse, 63-66, 95; and wife, Marie Syrkin, 68, 72, 244m7. Works: By the Well ofLiving and Seeing, 55-65;

Testimony, 65-72, 79; "Kaddish," 72-80 Rich, Adrienne, 8, 26, 143-60, 181, 233, 24In31, 245n40, 248n37, 249n6, 249mo; and husband, Alfred Conrad, 146, 157. Works: "A Woman Dead in Her Forties," 145-47; "An Atlas of the Difficult World," 148, 151-58; "Tattered Kaddish," 157-60 Rogin, Michael, 52 Rosenzweig, Franz, 168, 253n3 Roth, Henry, 48f, 70 Roth, Philip, 15, 165f, 242n2 Rothenberg, Jerome, 4, 18, 25, 27, 44, 117, 240n29 Rukeyser, Muriel, 153 Sacred and secular (relationship between), 5, 9, 19, 22, 25, 29, ro3f, 182-88 passim, 201, 213, 224, 229£, 233, 239n13. See also Secularization Sacrifice, 83, 93, 95, II5, 245n46 Said, Edward, 162; on exile, 162-65, 249ni4, 250n15, 250nr6. See also Exile Sarah (biblical figure), 55f, So, 92-94, 136f Savran, David, 244n31 Scarry, Elaine, 149 Scheindlin, Raymond, 21, 195, 239m7, 239l1I9, 244l1I9, 252l1I5 Schiesari, Juliana, 90, 91, 145 Schimmel, Harold, 247ni9 Schwartz, Delmore, 44, 163 Schwartz, Regina, 167, 250m9 Scroggins, Mark, 246n9, 246m4, 247m6 Searle, John, 217

Secular and sacred, see Sacred and secular; Secularization Secularization, 68, 192, 213. See also Sacred and secular Sedgwick, Eve, 242n38 Seidman, Naomi, 247n25 Selinger, Eric Murphy, 3, 24m3o, 245n41, 248n40 Shammas, Anton, 250n2o Shakespeare, William, 220, 253m Shapiro, Karl, 46; Poems ofa jew, 46-48, 153, 203, 209, 2nf, 228, 252n2o Shechner, Mark, 15 Shekhinah, 7, 25-29, 30-35 passim, 43, 45, 65, 78, So, 90f, 141£, 158, 185, 229-33 passim, 240n29, 24m30, 24In31, 248n40. See also Exile; Kabbalah Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 134, 216, 248n36 Shohat, Ella, 164 Showalter, Elaine, nz Silliman, Ron, 24m36 Silverman, Kaja, 158 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 210 Solon, 146f Solomon (biblical figure), 36, 214 Solomon, Alisa, 25m28 Song of Songs, 195, 204-6, 253n22 Spinoza, Baruch, II3, 246m4 Spitzer, Leo, n6 Statue of Liberty, 36, 40 Stein, Gertrude, 27, 61, 24m36 Steiner, George, 162-63, 221, 250m4, 250nl9 Stern, Gerald, 82, 88 Stevens, Wallace, 46, 152, 181, 194, 245n5, 246n7 Stewart, Susan, 4, 180, 206 Syverson, M.A., 66, 74 Taggart, John, 252n28 Talmud, 21f, 26f, 58, 147, 165, 185, 215f Tarn, Nathaniel, 25, 27, 240n29 Taylor, Edward, 209

Index

287

Temple, Destruction of the, 6, 12, r8, 65, 87f, 96, 143, 148, 165, r86, 208, 215, 238n5. See also under Psalms (Psalm 137) Testimony, 225 Theophany, 30-31, 214 "Theophoric" poems, 9, 214-33 passim, 254n4. See also Grossman, Allen Tomas, John, 246n9 Torok, Maria, nr, 123 Trachtenberg, Marvin, 40 Trible, Phyllis, 204 Trilling, Lionel, 247n20 Tsvetayeva, Marina, 44 Turner, Victor, 8o, 221 Tussman, Maika Heifetz, r8r

Wisse, Ruth, 5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 130 Wolfson, Elliot, 28, 240n29 Wolosky, Shira, 36, 41 Woolf, Virginia, 3, ro8f, n2, 156 Wordsworth, William, 39, 59-62 passim, 161,243n9, 243n10

Vattimo, Gianni, 183, r88

74· 135· 22!, 242n7, 243n8, 250ni8, 250n26, 25rn27, 25rn3r; and Louis Zukofsky, n6f, 122-27, 247nr9, 247n24, 247n25; and Irena Klepfisz, r6o, r66-77, 250nr8, 250n2r, 250n22, 251n30 Young, Bette, 242n41 Yovel, Yirmiyhu, 246nr4 Yuan Chen (poet), 120

Vendler, Helen, 91f, 151, 156, 193, 253n2r Warner Brothers, 49 Weinberger, Eliot, 128 Weinfield, Henry, 67 Weinreich, Max, II7, r68, 25rn31 Weiseltier, Meir, 133 Weissler, Chana, 252n6 Whitman, Walt, 38, 42, 46, 76, 91, 156, 24rn31, 242m, 254nn. Works: Democratic Vistas, 42, 154-56; "Out of the Cradle," 46, 84; Leaves ofGrass, 248n3J Wieseltier, Leon, 245n36, 245n38 Wiesel, Elie, 99, 179, 195 Williams, C. K., 210 Williams, William Carlos, ro6, 243n9 Wilner, Eleanor, 4, 25, 27, 240n29 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 15, 157, 244nr8, 245n37· 245n4

Yeats, William Butler, 67, 191, 2rof, 220, 223 Yehoash (Samuel Bloomgarden), ro6, ro8, n6ff, r22f, 126, 247n33 Yerushalmi, Yosef, 4, 28, 85, ror, ro8f, 244n25. See also Anamnesis Yezierska, Anzia, 243n7 Yiddish language, 8, r6, 27, 49, 57,

Zerubavel, Eviatar, 247n22 Zucker, Ilona Karmel, 231-32. See also under Grossman, Allen (How to Do

Things with Tears) Zukofsky, Louis, 4, 8, 98, nof, 104-27, 129, 140, 187, 189, 233, 243n9, 246n6, 246n9, 247ni6, 247ni8, 247ni9, 247n30, 252n8. Works: "Poem Beginning 'The'," roo, ro6-27, 132, 246n5, 246n7; "A," roo, n5, 127, 131, 247n30, 248n39