The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975 (review)

The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975, edited by Seamus Cooney. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. 460 pp. $45.00 (c); $21.95 (p). When Charles Reznikoff was born in 1894 in Brownsville, the Jewish ghetto of Brooklyn, his parents, Satah Yetta and Nathan, recent immigrants from Russia, wished to name him after his maternal grandfather, Yehezqel WoIvovsky. Sarah Yetta asked the Jewish doctor, who was also an anarchist, for the English equivalent of the Hebrew "Yehezqel" (Ezekiel), and the doctor replied, "Call him Charles." Reznikoff felt throughout his life that his given name created a dynamic gap between Hebrew and English, a void he dedicated himself to filling. This symbolic space between "Charles" and "Ezekiel," English and Hebrew, American culture and Jewish culture, marks the unstable territory where Reznikoff's poetry can be found - in company with the cultural endeavors of many other Jewish intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth centuty. In a gemlike poem Reznikoff catches the emotional tenot of the quandary in which he and others found themselves: How difficult for me is Hebrew: even the Hebrew for mother, for bread, for sun is foreign. How far have I been exiled, Zion. (p. 58) Wanting him to adapt to the new land, Reznikoff's mother insisted that he speak English at home, even though the family language was Yiddish. Likewise, he was sent to public school father than to the Jewish heder, which was conducted in Hebrew. Like many children of recent immigrants, Reznikoff felt estranged from the languages and traditions of his ancestors, although he was in close enough proximity to them that a"return" of sorts was still possible. The "return" did not take the shape of Zionism, as it did for many Jews of his generation; instead, he was drawn to the history of Jewish survival in the dias- pora. Writing about Jewish history was more than an issue of identification-although he admitted the importance of an ethnic identity; what moved him most in Jewish history were the tenacity and inventiveness that made survival possible and the compassionate virtues that arose out of religious and ethical confrontations with adversity. "The Jews typify," he said, "perhaps more than any other people, constant and often victorious struggle against a hostile environment and hostile elements within itself, a struggle which has constantly evolved Jews that are symbols of the admirable" (Tom Sharp, "Reznikoff's Nine Plays" in Milton Hindus, ed., Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet [Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984], pp. 272-3). Having identified a subject matter, an American Jew of Reznikoff's generation who wanted to write modern poetry in English had few models. Eschewing Yiddish, Reznikoff chose not to follow the radical Yiddish poets of New York City, and Emma Lazarus seemed a distant, old-fashioned example. The most prominent Jewish poet when Reznikoff began publishing was James Oppenheim (1882-1932), who wrote a vatic, exclamatory verse, deeply indebted to Whitman and Freud. Although championed by critic and anthologist Louis Untermeyer, Oppenheim was as distant in temperament and style from Reznikoff as one could imagine. Rather than look to contemporary Jewish poetry, Reznikoff found a serviceable model for verse in English in the lesser-known (at that time) Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement. Imagist verse was spare and versatile, not freighted with social and cultural associations from which Reznikoff might feel excluded; it was a seemingly objective style that did not prescribe a particular subject matter or a self-conscious poetic voice. …