"Palestine was a halting place, one of many": Diasporism in the Poetry of Charles Reznikoff.

"Diasporism" has long been a mainstay of postmodern Jewish philosophy and poetics. Voiced by George Steiner, Edmond Jabes, Paul Auster, John Hollander, Daniel Boyarin, and many others, it posits that language is the only natural homeland of the Jew.(1) These writers participate in a post-Holocaust literary culture in which (even for non-Jewish theorists), the ambivalent nature of Jewish identity has increased its value. When absolute national identities begin to show signs of decay, this ambivalence suddenly seems to be a universal condition shared by other Others. The cultural paradigm of diaspora has long had critical resonance for Jews, whose survival engendered a constant dialectic between homeland and exile, but it has also become increasingly important in postcolonial theory.(2) In the postmodern world, various groups of people increasingly identify their liminal status between home and homeland as one of diaspora. Recently, non-Jewish theorists such as James Clifford and Paul Gilroy have transvalued diaspora from a negative form of displacement to a positive condition of multiple location, temporality, and identification, while not effacing the violent histories that engender it.(3) But this creative paradigm is not often traced back to a pro-diaspora interpretive current that was articulated long ago in the works of a modernist Jewish American poet. In this study of selected works of Charles Reznikoff, one of the first identifiable Jewish American poets of the twentieth century, I hope to illuminate important dimensions of the evolving interplay between the modernist identity of the secular artist and a notion of diaspora dating to antiquity.

From the 1870s through the 1940s, the growing burden of the "Jewish Question" engendered a profound intellectual and political ferment among Jews over the redemptive possibilities of statehood that inspired the engagement of numerous polemicists and ideologues. Indeed, this debate demanded the attention of virtually anyone who was concerned with Jewish continuity. As Henry L. Feingold notes, the galvanization of the American Jewish community around the Zionist movement rapidly became a kind of center that held--and continues to hold--the increasingly fragmented community together: by the 1930s, Zionism "became a crucial element in a new kind of civil religion for American Jews when the purely religious modality was no longer tenable.... Today, whether it is called Israelism or Zionism, it is the cement that holds Jews to its corporate memory" (49). In view of the fact that so much Jewish creativity was suddenly harnessed to political solutions and ideological formulations, Charles Reznikoff's rather long view of the historical process still stands out as a notable exception.

Reznikoff's poetry responds to Jewish traditions that strain against coercive narratives of nationalism, revealing instead unexpected permutations of Jewish creativity, which are invariably located in eminently precarious Diasporic settings. In Reznikoff's long view of Jewish history, these sites prove to be temporary dwellings or ephemeral refuges, and in at least one notable instance that will be described, an exilic ethos is imported even into the Jews' sacred land. While making no claim to discovery of these features in Reznikoff's oeuvre, this study does bring them onto center stage in order to illuminate why Reznikoff chooses to eulogize Jewish wandering for a secular world of numerous ethnic enclaves.

The child of East European immigrants who had fled the 1881 pogroms, Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) was born in Brooklyn, spent his youth in Brownsville on the Lower East Side, eventually studied both journalism and the law, and served in the U.S. Army. In his early years he witnessed the arrival of his paternal grandparents from Russia and the emigrant struggle of numerous relatives. Many of his close relatives suffered anti-Semitism in the United States and their experiences, together with the childhood beatings Charles himself endured from anti-Semites, emerged as important themes in his later work. With Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, he founded the Objectivist Press in the early thirties and his poetic influences came from a diverse range of modernist movements, including Imagism, Objectivism, and German Expressionism.' Beginning in 1918 and throughout the next sixty years, Reznikoff published nineteen individual collections of poetry, as well as three novels, numerous translations, and historical and edited works. In most of this prodigious body of work, the poet emphasizes a subjectivity' linked to exile, exile from the Old Country as well as the dreams of his parents' generation, from Jewish ritual, and increasingly, from Zion. These exquisitely intertwined modes of exile form the landscape that I wish to describe.

At the end of the poet's life, an interviewer expressed bewilderment. How could it be that the husband of Marie Syrkin, "editor of Herzl Press and a prominent Zionist," who wears "the obligatory badge of Judaism" (her numerous trips to Israel), has himself never set foot in Israel? To which Reznikoff responded simply that "certainly I feel Jewish regardless." And then he proceeded to name a few of the Diaspora sites that he had commemorated throughout his poetry: "I would be Jewish whether it's here or whether I'd been born in Alexandria, Russia, Germany--anywhere" (Rovner 15-16). A thoughtful chronicler of the major currents in Jewish history, including the events of his time, Reznikoff refrains from mentioning the doctrine of Zionism directly in his Jewish poetry and fiction (and only rarely in his letters), an absence that provides an important window into his thought. For those who suspect that when American Jewish identity situates itself exclusively in relation to Israel or the Holocaust (frequently both), it diminishes the prospects of knowing the multifarious Jewish worlds before World War II, Reznikoff's poetry serves, more urgently than ever, as an alternative model of ethnic identity.

It has long been a common presumption, particularly among Reznikoff's earliest critics, that the highly ethical intersubjective mode of his poetry compensates for an apparent reticence toward the political world. The observation that Reznikoff's verse is distinguished by compassion for the plight of strangers, particularly ordinary people, the kleine menshele, has rightly been the catalyst for much critical commentary. Recently a few readers have begun to suggest that there is more, notably Michael Davidson, who persuasively argues that Reznikoff's magnum poetic opus of American history, Testimony (1934), constitutes a radically political act, "a critical reappraisal of nationhood" (138). Though Davidson may be somewhat reductive in his casual identification of Reznikoff as a political leftist, he nevertheless provides a valuable insight into the wider ideological significance of the poet's interest in the multiple voices of legal testimony when he situates Reznikoff as "part of a new documentary culture, that was trying to `brush history against the grain' by reading American history not as a narrative of Adamic discovery and perfectibility but as a material record of diverse constituencies" (140). For instance, a good case could be made for linking Reznikoff's counter-narrative of American history to the radical social criticism of the iconoclastic Randolph Bourne (himself a WASP), who challenged the solidarity of the "100% Americanism" of Anglo-Saxon culture in the second decade of the twentieth century by proposing a theory of "trans-nationalism" in which the diversity of ethnic identity and even cultural hybridity were elevated as values in themselves: "It bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men." He asserted that hyphenated Americans (Jewish-Americans, Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc.), would create an anti-assimilationist culture: "America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decides that America shall be" ("Trans-National America" 249, 255).

In carefully untangling and examining the actual historical record, Testimony acts as a unique aesthetic-expressive correlative to Bourne's challenge to the hoax of Americanization. An intrinsically American poet, Reznikoff would interrogate the ways that the nation meant danger and marginality to many of its inhabitants in spite of its claims to be a guarantee of safe haven and equal rights. Although Testimony does not figure in my discussion of Reznikoff's Jewish works, I mention Davidson's innovative argument because it broadens the ethical dimensions of Reznikoff's idiosyncratic resistance to another uncertain refuge: the collective narrative of Zionism. For Reznikoff, the linked concepts of race, homeland, and state fundamentally undermined the ethical possibility of dialogical openness and the realm of poetry itself. Openness to otherness and radical particularity are fatally compromised by the rhetoric of autochthony surrounding Zionism. I will make a case for a consistent correlation between what Davidson sees as the rejection "of a unified national [American] story" in Reznikoff's epic treatment of marginalized nineteenth-century Americans, and my sense that the poet was alarmed by Zionism's debasement of the multifarious history and ethical heritage of the Diaspora.

This study examines how the gradual ascendancy and ultimate triumph of Zionism created a challenging position for the Jewish writer who remained in "exile." The rearticulated ethnicity of national belonging that Zionism sought to impose provoked Reznikoff's counter-narrative, which consisted of an internalized geography of Diaspora fully capable of producing its own myths of ethnic heritage. The coercive narrative of Zionism is countered by a poetry that affirms a vigorous Diaspora as the proper intellectual and moral universe of the Jew. In the poet's shifting modes of playfulness and deadly seriousness, a complicated notion of Jewish "assimilation" is set forth. Instead of a shameful or unidirectional act of conformity, this paradigm is presented as an adaptive response to new conditions that sometimes brings unexpected rewards. This applies to Reznikoff's portrait of his immigrant parents' transformative struggle to acculturate in America just as it does to his meditation on the adaptive strategies of Biblical herdsmen in thwarting territorial conflict with other tribes. This is a poet for whom "Jew" does not represent a reified cultural identity or nationalist identification but rather a tradition of unexpected dialogical transformations that result through intercultural encounters. Reznikoff's Judaism opposes nostalgic nationalism with uncertainty and flux.

For Reznikoff, the Jewish imagination, stripped of territorial ambition or the exercise of force, exhibits an awesome range of symbolic and theological strategies. As Yaron Ezrahi declares, in the absence of military power, "the word of God, the Holy Scriptures, and the words of the rabbis became the ultimate means of world-making, of acting and interpreting, of shaping and protecting life, of resurrecting the mined Temple, the conquered Holy Land, and the Lost Kingdom"(178). Here then, is portion of an untitled 1944 lyric that elegantly underscores Ezrahi's contention and sets the stage for the argument that follows. In Reznikoff's simultaneous nod to both this spirit of the past as manifested in the enduring vitality of Judaism's textuality, and to his incomparable struggle to look ahead to a Judaism that might survive even the Holocaust, we find one of the most visionary moments in his entire oeuvre:

   As when a great tree, bright with blossoms and heavy with fruit,
   is cut down and its seeds are carried far
   by the winds of the sky and the waves of the streams and seas
   and it grows again on distant slopes and shores
   in many places at once,
   still blossoming and bearing fruit a hundred and a thousandfold,
   so, at the destruction of the Temple
   and the murder of its priests, ten thousand synagogues
   took root and flourished
   in Palestine and in Babylonia and along the Mediterranean;
   so the tides carried from Spain and Portugal
   a Spinoza to Holland
   and a Disraeli to England.
   God, delighting in life,
   You have remembered us for life.

   (CP II: 60)

Though its tone is somber, this lyric's confidence in recovery is undeniable. Depending on the reader's perspective, the allusive effect of the invocation of the Jews in the Diaspora as "seeds," "the sands of the sea," or "the stars of the sky," in spite of their "death by gas, in trucks, in railway cars, in chambers hidden in the woods," may be audaciously sanguine or simply heartbreaking. There is, at the same time, another layer of meaning that presses for our attention. For in the poem's fifth stanza we learn of the remarkably fecund properties that reside within the fertile soil of dispersion. The speaker asks: "Where is that mountain of which we read in the Bible--/Sinai--on which the Torah was given to Israel" and "Where was the Bible written?"(59), only to ultimately dismiss the significance of geography altogether. Ranging far and wide, the lyric underscores Reznikoff's persistent argument that there has never been one Platonic reading of Judaism that requires universal allegiance to secure Jewish continuity. Rather, Jewish history is one of constant tension as a new center of authority rises to wrest control over the shaping of tradition from its predecessor: hence Babylonia from Palestine; Spain from Babylonia; Portugal, Holland and the rest in their turn. Furthermore, this modernist's reference to Spinoza tells us that, though tradition is engraved on one's subjectivity, the individual (like the Jewish people's role in history on a larger scale) also creates new patterns in response to changing times.

Early Zionist rhetoric adapted its nationalism from a notion of a racial essence somehow inextricable from place. Zionism emerged at a time in which the prevailing views of humanity overwhelmingly regarded as axiomatic the continuity of race, place, and the biological determination of thought. Implicit in their debates was the problem of where the spirit of Israel was really shaped: in Palestine or perhaps the Sinai wilderness? In Reznikoff's recovery of the Jewish past there is never any attempt to wrest from it the promise of a nationalist redemption. In fact, this poem's geographical landscapes melt away inconsequentially, leaving in their wake only the textual dwellings of "the prophecies and the psalms," "the Torah and the prophecies/the Talmud and the sacred studies, the hymns and songs" (II: 61).

In the context of Zionism's reinventions of ethnicity, I will now consider Reznikoff's early poetic/political dramas, the foundational texts of his efforts to codify a linkage between ethics and the experience of dispossession. Reznikoff's first published exhibition of his awareness of Zionism as an exclusionary discourse occurs in a September 16, 1922 letter to a friend, Albert Lewin. After writing The Black Death, a short work that examines medieval anti-anti-Semitism during the time of the bubonic plague, he was momentarily vexed by the uncertain prospects for publishing the playlet in a Jewish venue. An editor has "read it, and accepted it, but then hesitated because some of it seems anti-zionistic and the special issue is to be very zionistic" (Letters 27).(4) This is one of the rare moments in which we can catch Reznikoff speculating on the stance between his own conception of Jewish history and that of classical Zionist discourse. In spite of his apolitical reputation, this already marginalized poet is very much aware of the political repercussions of his creativity. He has begun to face the unsuitability of his work for ideologically predisposed Jewish readers.

It is not difficult to locate the ways in which The Black Death would have aggravated the Zionist audience that Reznikoff imagined. For example, in the first scene, which takes place somewhere in western Europe at the beginning of the fourteenth century, two old Jews, the master of the house and his guest, converse pessimistically about the present. The uneasy host asks his guest: "Do you know that Christians, in debt to us/ Say that we spread the plague?" (Nine Plays 75). Inexplicably, their conversation abruptly shifts from the scene of disease, and from the immediate prospect of persecution that. faces them in the present, to a timeless exchange on the divine enigma of Judaism's extraterritoriality:

   The Guest. Had Israel a land? Was Canaan ours,
   Which we took a while and never held
   Against Assyrian or Roman?
   When Solomon was king was the land Israel's?

   (Nine Plays 76)

As if intoxicated by his sense of ethnic endurance, the guest's speech exhibits an increasingly cavalier attitude toward historical exigency. Even while recognizing the distinct possibility of destruction, this Diasporic voice becomes more resolute:

   Palestine was a halting place,
   One of many. Our kin, the Arabs,
   Wander over their desert. Our desert
   Is the Earth. Our strength
   Is that we have no land.
   Nineveh and Babylon, our familiar cities,
   Become dust; but we Jews have left
   for Alexandria and Rome.
   When the land is impoverished, as lands become,
   The tree dies. Israel is not planted,
   Israel is in the wind.

   (Nine Plays 76)

If "halting" in the first line denotes uncertainty or hesitancy, it also suggests a stumbling, perhaps even a momentary lapse from a chosen path. At this juncture we might take stock of Reznikoff's ironic reversal of Zionist rhetoric, for the latter conventionally constructs Diaspora itself as a lapse, an aberrant exit from history. At the same time, it seems something of a paradox that Reznikoff chooses a well-known instance of one of the Jews' most futile struggles against a hostile environment in order to present his case for Diaspora. If he means to persuade us of something, why not argue it in the context of the numerous instances of benign coexistence? And is the case not weakened further by the fact that the guest's rather idealistic exposition of his belief in Judaism's viability is preceded by the reader's awareness that it is spoken just prior to the cruel massacre?

Perhaps this apparent self-entrapment may best be understood as Reznikoff's determination to fully acknowledge the very events of Judaism's dark history, which were so often the privileged references of the Zionist polemicists, in order to produce an argument that could not possibly be accused of utopianism. In fact, the guest's speech is intertextually linked to Jewish literature's traditional symbiotic relation to catastrophe. For Reznikoff, the collective memory that recounts this grim history is understood as an emphatic affirmation of continuity. A keen knowledge of this literature of lamentation privileges the poet to argue: "Take no threats to heart/This may be the end of you and me/But for all the grains of sand blown/ From the desert, the desert is ..." (Nine Plays 76). For Reznikoff, "Israel is in the wind" signifies Diasporic "geography," the movement of Jewish civilization through time and space. It is around the time of The Black Death's composition that he wrote a letter to Albert Lewin on May 7, 1923, expressing his preference for the pristine tropes of "rocks," "sand," and "glaring sun," in short what he thinks of as "the Hebrew" (and this is the desert imagery of Sinai not Palestine), over "towns," "fields" "rivers," "lakes" and "woods," which he considers the comparatively tame pleasures of "the English" (Letters 38).

His Diasporism does not lead to a denial of the inevitability of evil in the universe. Hence it is entirely consistent that, some years after the Jews have been massacred for their "guilt" in the plague, two characters speak of the likelihood of future atrocities:(5)

   The Guest. Evil to Man--like the plague--and  evil men do,
   Like sores upon a healthy body,
   Scab and fall off.
   The Host. If the body is healthy--sores?
   The Guest. Those at least are gone, your city once
   more crowded.
   The Host. The disease is in the blood to break out
   again.

   (Nine Plays 84)

We have seen that, for the Zionists, such frequently invoked catastrophes justified their negation of Galut.(6) For his wife, Marie Syrkin, they were singularly "corrosive." But Reznikoff claims, again and again, that though persecution indeed poses a severe threat, far from discrediting the Jewish presence in Europe, more often than not it actually strengthened Jewish civilization by acting as a stimulus for its culture. His lyrics visibly avoid any suggestion that the trauma to which Jews have been subjected justifies or necessitates an embrace of nationalist identity. It is revealing that Nine Plays appeared in the wake of the 1929 Arab riots against the increasing Jewish presence in Palestine.

In this regard, Reznikoff's alteration of his original title for a 1934 volume of historical poems seems significant. Originally, the typescript that includes the full-length versions of "Babylon," "The Academy at Jamnia," "The Synagogue Defeated," "Spain," "Poland," and "Russia," bore the title "If I Forget You Jerusalem: In Memoriam, 1933."(7) But in the final revision, faithfully reproduced in all subsequent appearances in print, only the second phrase is preserved, and in two additional places, the phrase "If I Forget You, Jerusalem" has been vigorously crossed out by Reznikoff's hand. In this boldly Diasporic effacement we know that Reznikoff made an important choice. In spite of the growing crisis in Europe and Palestine (not to mention the severe admonition of the psalm), he elects to affirm the radical autonomy and creativity of Jewish dispersal, not its hopelessness. That decision underscores Reznikoff's awareness that the individual poet has broken off from the whole, the communal. The fracture produces a radically individuated voice and sensibility that is uncertain of regaining the uncomplicated piety of the poem's pre-text. And yet, as Maeera Shreiber explains, for a certain breed of Jewish poet, what "begins as a liability becomes an asset; loss is recovered as gain ... 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 poems begin." For Reznikoff certainly, "radical displacement" is transformed into an "aesthetic boon" (273).

In 1974, many years after writing The Black Death, Reznikoff would make several remarks to a succession of interviewers that greatly clarify his idiosyncratic attitude toward anti-Semitism and the entire tragic history of persecution: "occasionally you have situations like the Holocaust or during the Crusades, where there were lots of killings, or during, say, the Black Death, where they were blamed for the Black Death in Europe ... my own feeling about it is, that the effect of anti-Semitism is double; in one case you have assimilation, and in the other, you have a strengthening of whatever the person thinks is Judaism (Reznikoff and Schiffer 120). The phrase "Whatever the person thinks is Judaism" exhibits a radical openness to the unpredictable ways in which American Jews might respond to modernity and yet still draw from a genuine wellspring of Jewish textual traditions and belief systems. At the end of his life, he tells an interviewer that: "you know, anti-Semitism can sometimes bring out the best in you. In my case I know it strengthened my identity and my resolve. Americans are often spurred to do more precisely because of prejudice--blacks are a good example" (Rovner 16).(8)

Unlike many Jewish American intellectuals, such as Syrkin, Irving Kristol, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, Reznikoff did not, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, turn toward the right as an act of recovery. Instead, catastrophe sustained his earlier view, perhaps mediated by the socialism that had been the predominant Jewish discourse of his age, that society is always a war of the powerful against the disenfranchised. In the same interview he suggests a singularly unpretentious, yet profound, analogy. Although it would probably never have been voiced by most intellectual Jewish Americans of his generation, it might, one suspects, nonetheless have resonated with many of them: "Maybe it's something like a cold bath. It's unpleasant while you're in it but when you get out, you feel braced ... a warm bath can be too relaxing" (Rovner 16). In Hollywood, Reznikoff had experienced the stultifying effects of just such a warm bath. His preference for struggle is evident in his dismissal of his wasted months among the rich and privileged in what he called "Lotus-land,": "very little, if anything is done here" (Letters 174).

Nine Plays cleaves to a Diasporic ethic that somehow remains intact even when the poet examines the ancient Jewish relation to the Land. The epiphanies that he evokes for his readers might occur anywhere, but "Genesis" is inflected by the fact that in twentieth-century Palestine the "peoples of the Book" are poised to devour each other in order to possess the Land. It would be difficult to imagine a verse that would be less palatable to a territorial ideology than Genesis 26:15-31, a strange account of a series of submissive accommodations and withdrawals that Isaac makes to resolve disputes with local tribes over the rights to various wells and grazing lands. Reznikoff's imaginative discovery of the Biblical text's Diasporic intentions is typically understated:

   The Eldest of the Herdsmen. If Ishmael
   were the master, they would not dare this.
   The Eldest of the Shepherds. How gentle
   Isaac was beside Ishmael,
   When he was here to bury Abraham:
   Isaac has lived in booths and tents,
   His clothing woven from the hair of goats and camels;
   Ishmael was in the skins of the wild deer he has killed.
   Isaac's face is like honey, Ishmael's
   Like the black rocks among which he hunts;
   Ishmael's hair and beard are two bushes,
   His glances arrows and his hands fists;
   Isaac's eyes are like a father's on his grown son,
   His palms open as if to help or bless--
   Here he comes.

   (Nine Plays 110-11)

For the modernist poet this narrative represents a critical juncture in which the ancient Hebrew writers (possibly composing the text in exile) examined their relationship to God, the Land, and Others. Reznikoff interprets Isaac's refusal to act aggressively as a radical resistance toward the seductive power inherent in exercising control over the land. Where Zionists of his day stressed the minimal fact of affcient Jewish life in Palestine, Reznikoff enunciated the how, recovering the original text's special attention to the moral nature of that presence in the land, as in Isaac's patient willingness to wander to the next valley: land-loss does not mean the end of history or identity. Whenever Reznikoff turns to the past of the sacred text, he does so with a particular moral imperative situated in the present. After the desert chieftain, Abimelech, demands that he remove his flocks and herds from the very land God has promised to his father Abraham, Isaac instantly surrenders. The biblical text does not explain why. But in Reznikoff's lyric, "Isaac" seems to be a surrogate for the poet's modernist Jewish soul.

The characteristic sense of "apartness" is also present in "Isaac's" Bourne-like idealism, which is clearly incomprehensible to his herdsmen and shepherds:

   Isaac. My wealth is the wealth of the land in which
   I am,
   In a time of hunger yours as well as mine;
   My men in a time of need are also yours.
   My father, Abraham, took no man's, but if one said of
   his,
   This is mine, he answered, It is yours;
   Nevertheless, he grew richer.
   And this my father did, not out of fear--

   Abraham gave because of friendliness.
   I am my father's son in this:
   That I wish all men well;
   Surely the stars send them sorrows enough.
   But if you say that there is no room for us,
   My father, Abraham, and his father, Terah, wandered
   far;
   The Earth is wide,
   And as they prospered, their son may hope to prosper.

   (Nine Plays 112)

Undoubtedly, the ethical vision articulated in Reznikoff's lyrical drama was intended to be applied to contemporary Jews and Arabs, as if to suggest that these groups need to recover Isaac's diasporist skills to achieve accommodation and yet preserve difference. In suggesting this, I am reading Reznikoff against the grain of what Michael Lerner has called "Settler Judaism," whose adherents so distort Judaism that they not only believe that God gave them the West Bank as an eternal inheritance, but that whatever is done to hold on to it is also right (248). After digging a well, an action that declares sovereignty, Isaac's herdsman enters to complain that the men of Gerar have claimed its water as their own. The patriarch responds simply, "Let them have it." A second herdsman soon enters, to declare that he has gone on a "day's journey" from the first contested site only to have his rights to the well also challenged by the valley's inhabitants. Isaac announces that this well too should be abandoned. The play concludes with the arrival of another herdsman who observes: "We dug a well/ beyond the valley and are not troubled" (113). Reznikoff transforms this ambiguous moment in the ancient narrative into a triumphantly universal appeal: the Land must be shared by peoples with competing claims, rather than possessed.

Whatever the biblical source's original intent, Reznikoff has written a midrash (following the rabbinic tradition of revelatory commentary) about the cost of ideology in the present.(9) He imports an anachronistic ethos of Diasporic accommodation, rather than the force justified by divine intervention on behalf of a favored tribe. Though there is no visible instance in which Reznikoff directly refers to the conflict between Arabs and Jews, it is revealing that "Genesis," so consistently disruptive of territorialist hegemony, was chosen by Reznikoff to be his final statement in Nine Plays.

Even the poet's subtle deconstruction of American history, "The English in Virginia" (1930), written in the same period as the verse dramas, seems informed by the territorial tensions in the year following the Arab riots:

   They landed and could
   see nothing but
   meadows and tall
   trees--

The reverie of a lush landscape in an apparently empty paradise is suddenly broken by the revelation of a mysterious, hitherto unseen presence:

   In the twilight,
   through the thickets
   and tall grass,
   creeping upon all
   fours--the
   savages, their
   bows in their
   mouths.

  (CPI: 122-23)

Reznikoff reveals that the earth's ostensibly empty paradises are invariably informed by the presence of an Other. "Landing" and not "seeing" seems to unify the stories of all territorial interlopers. Palestine was frequently represented as essentially "empty," perhaps because it was not yet inhabited by Europeans. This conception was manifested in the early Zionist slogan: "A land without a people for a people without a land." Though deeply concerned about the plight of the Jews in the Yishuv, it is also likely that the poet of these lines, penned in the year following the Arab riots in Palestine, had grown uneasy about Zionist certitudes about the "empty" land they wanted to inhabit.

Reznikoff's radical interest in the narratives of Others is particularly visible in his reworkings of traditional Jewish sources. For example, his acknowledged source for his modernist lyric "Kaddish" (which appears as the introduction to the poem) is the traditional Kaddish de Rabbanan as translated by R. Travers Herford in 1925:

   Upon Israel and upon the Rabbis, and upon their disciples and upon all the
   disciples of their disciples, and upon all who engage in the study of the
   Torah in this place and in every place, unto them and unto you be abundant
   peace, grace, lovingkindness, mercy, long life, ample sustenance and
   salvation, from their Father who is in Heaven. And say ye Amen. (Kaddish de
   Rabbanan)

Reznikoff's version is more complex. In the lyric that follows, the speaker imagines himself as a being contented to be a guest and a stranger, committed to coexistence with other guests and strangers. Thus in "Kaddish" he wishes for all:

   who live
   as the sparrows of the streets
   under the cornices of the houses of others,
   and as rabbits
   in the fields of strangers
   on the grace of the seasons
   and what the gleaners leave in the comers;
   you children of the wind--
   birds that feed on the tree of knowledge
   in this place and in every place
   to them and to you
   a living....

   (CPI: 186)

Since America is filled with homeless outsiders, then the outsider poet might introduce a new/ancient modal embodiment of moral authority. His sense of homelessness as an enabling concept is perhaps not so distant from that of Gramsci: it can be a civil and political space that hegemony cannot suture. For Reznikoff, homelessness seems to be a situation wherein a utopian potentiality endures: something can be learned from this condition and applied to something resembling "progress," though this is not construed as a linear movement free of catastrophic setbacks.

In the original there is no explicit allusion to Others, but Reznikoff's alternative, while evoking the darkness that besets Jewish life in Europe during the 1930s, repeatedly beckons in every stanza to a reader with an uncertain identity: "to them and to you/peace." The xenophobic and racist shadow of fascism is all the more reason to resist an exclusively ethnocentric voice. On the one hand, it does no good to deny the need to belong to a community; in fact, it is futile to deny this claim of identity. There is nothing reprehensible about identity politics or about the desire to identify with a cultural tradition that has been responsible for some of the greatest products of human civilization. But for Reznikoff this does not mean that in our dealings with strangers we may neglect the principles of equity and equality. As "Kaddish" and other poems of the 1930s insinuate, rejecting these principles facilitates the deportations and exterminations of Others. There are times when, to remain human, one must speak and act outside the interests of one's group. So rather than preserve the original text's emphasis on the singular burden of Israel's "chosenness," he prefers a liturgical form that yearns for an abundance that might be enough to go around to all the earth's deserving, an urgent address that might speak to the crisis of any moment. Since the dispersal of humanity into separate nations no longer serves the poet as a satisfactory paradigm, in Reznikoff's direct references to Jews his lyric does not echo the traditional invocation of Jerusalem and Return, but rather pleads for a sovereign existence sanctified only by a living relationship with the Text. In his version of the Kaddish de Rabbanan, prayer is a direct address to a reader whose own identity remains an open question, rather than an assumption that it is something provisional and not reified. By failing to make any clear claims about who the Other is, Reznikoff wishes that the piety of the traditional prayer of Talmudic study might become an antidote not only to the fascism of the thirties, but to any form of ideological imperative that culminates in territorialism and the persecution of Others.

Just as Reznikoff's Jewish epics typically culminate not with the triumph of territorial redemption, but with the scattering that always engenders diversity and experience, his urban poems celebrate the city's shifting terrain of difference. Even Reznikoff's wryly humorous studies of birds and animals illustrate the unpredictably heterogeneous character of the metropolis. We find an instance of this in "Neighbors," where two species inhabiting a claustrophobic space and with irrevocably separate and hostile agendas, are forced to come to terms with the existence of the Other:

   the horse that draws a cab through the park
   now digs his mouth into the pail
   in front of him
   and is annoyed at the pigeons
   pecking away at the oats he scatters
   as they are at his active hoof. (CP II: 93)

Similarly, this seemingly inconsequential gaze at the beasts in the city zoo refracts onto the status quo on the other side of the cage:

   ... the camel and zebra are quarreling:
   trying to bite each other
   through the bars between them.
   Of course, they come from different continents. (CP II: 95)

Though whimsical, these Aesopian lyrics are inflected by the problem of nationalist identities and global strategies.(10) It is not difficult to see why Reznikoff might extrapolate from the tense encounters of the camel and zebra and other foreign species to comment wryly on the claustrophobic urban spaces that surround them. After all, the street was the place where the sheer fact of pluralism (as well as its promise), was most explicit and this is the theme of many of Reznikoff's recollections of his childhood.(11)

Leslie J. Vaughan's meditation on Randolph Bourne's attraction to the urban spaces of modernity lends support to my understanding of Reznikoff's own affinities: "In the city, one reaches another state of consciousness, expressing oneself in ways not directly reducible to the past, in particularistic blends of current and past cultures and traditions. Modern urban trans-nationalism contained elements of diversity and a little disorder" (457-58). Like Bourne, Reznikoff's poetry makes visible the presence of many diaspora communities in transnational America. It does not take us very far to confuse Reznikoff's poetics with conventional liberalism. Just as any obvious form of didacticism is noticeably absent from Testimony and Holocaust, these allegorical encounters between animal species issue no special plea for transcending racial and ethnic differences in the name of universalism. Rather they suggest a kind of immigrant cosmopolitanism that is not color-blind (or color-bound as current identity politics requires) but simply colorcurious. It acknowledges that difference might be a source of civilized attraction. For Reznikoff, the twentieth-century American city is an unprecedentedly promiscuous intermingling and dispersal of the world's peoples.

Reznikoff's reader is invited to form an identification with a wide-ranging humanity composed of differences: immigrants, the poor, minorities, especially with the powerless rather than the strong. Like Sholom Aleichem, Reznikoff conceives of these survivors as a kind of schlemiel people.(12) Though powerless, they are psychologically and sometimes even culturally the victors in defeat. Reznikoff, though he layers his relationship to tradition with irony and discontinuity, enlarges on this paradigm again and again. In the following lines from a variation on a verse of Zacharia, that anti-might ethos is plainly apparent:

   Go swiftly in your chariot, my fellow Jew,
   you who are blessed with horses;
   and I will follow as best I can afoot,
   bringing with me perhaps a word or two.
   Speak your learned and witty discourses
   and I will utter my word or two--
   not by might or power
   but by your spirit, Lord. (CP I: 68-9)

This lyric's seemingly mild repudiation of power will perhaps be best appreciated by those who read it against the grain of Zionism's mission of rejuvenating the bodily representation of the Jew. Disdaining the "weakness" and "femininity" of Diaspora Jews, the virile rhetoric of classical Zionism is distinguished, in part, by a deluge of body-building, hyper-masculine imagery.(13) In thinking about this lyric, Maurice Samuel's reflective analysis of Sholem Aleichem's ironic technique of reversal has proved especially helpful to my understanding of the significant role that weakness and disenfranchisement perform in Reznikoff's oeuvre:

   It is more than a therapeutic resistance to the destructive frustrations
   and humiliations of the Exile. It was the application of a fantastic
   technique that the Jews had developed over the ages ... to counter the
   torments and discriminations to which they were continuously subjected. It
   was a technique of avoidance and sublimation; also a technique of
   theoretical reversal. They had found the trick of converting disaster into
   a verbal triumph, applying a sort of Talmudic ingenuity of interpretation
   to events they could not handle in their reality. They turned the tables on
   their adversaries dialectically, and though their physical disadvantages
   were not diminished thereby, nor the external situation changed one whit,
   they emerged with a feeling of victory. (54)(14)

Reznikoff's language provides an important clue to his struggle against such totalizing ideologies and identities. In spite of Reznikoff's oft-stated love for the learning of Hebrew, he much prefers to write lyrics that declaim the difficulties it causes him than to actually gain fluency in it: "How difficult for me is Hebrew/even the Hebrew for mother, for bread, for sun/is foreign. How far have I been exiled, Zion" (CP I: 72). Yet instead of having a Jewish language he is far more interested in finding a fluid voice in English, the majority language, in which Hebrew and Yiddish might surface as oppositional forces. And this linguistic ambiguity precludes merely adapting an autonomous Hebrew that, since its revival by Chaim Nachman Bialik and Shaul Tchnerichovski in the 1890s, was increasingly associated with the reterritorialization of language and the ascendancy to a majority culture. Interestingly, as his poetry matured, Reznikoff often found himself working in the company of Zionist ideologues at the Jewish Frontier (the American Labor Zionism monthly), where he served alongside Ben Halpern, Hayim Greenberg, and his wife Marie Syrkin, who advocated such editorial declarations as "Eastern Europe and what it represents is no longer a viable symbol for us. We study Hebrew today not because Akiba did, but because the modern Israeli Jew does" (Israel 11). Reznikoff did not concur. In his creative work, he insisted that Rabbi Akiba was every bit as relevant to the modern Jew as is Ben-Gurion, not because he was nostalgic for a lost religious vocabulary, but because as a modernist, he respected Judaism's self-renewing capacity in the wake of catastrophe.

Keenly aware that Hebrew survived as a minority linguistic culture over three thousand years, Reznikoff is drawn to its layered strata of creativity and crisis, the mysterious way that it empowers the powerless.(15) In this regard it is revealing that his favorite Hebrew writers are those of the prophetic period, Jeremiah and Ezekial, who are exiled as a result of imperial conquests, as well as the authors of the Mishna, rabbis who were exiles or the sons of exiles from post-Bar Kokhba Judaea. Similarly he is attracted to the Hebrew poets of the "golden age" of medieval Spain, who are all self-conscious exiles in one sense or another.

There is a sense in which Reznikoff chose to be simultaneously an exile and immigrant. The child of people forced by circumstance to leave their original culture, he could operate effectively in the new culture--except that he did not become a full-fledged subject of the latter because he was a material failure, and even worse a poet, and even worse, not a refined modernist, but a Jewish poet. He is simply willing to not be at home, either on the dais of Jewish community or in the marketplace:

   Not because of victories
   I sing,
   having none,
   but for the common sunshine,
   the breeze,
   the largess of spring
   Not for victory
   but for the day's work done
   as well as I was able;
   not for a seat upon the dais
   but at the common table.

   (CP II: 75)

Clearly, Reznikoff did not rush into an uncritical gregariousness. On the other-hand, there does not seem to be any lost or abandoned culture he wanted to recover. Unlike the Jews who wrote and produced The Jazz Singer, he is not haunted by nostalgia. Reznikoff envisions the Diasporic tradition of the text as the locus of personal and national homecoming, but he severely qualifies his Jewish knowledge when he writes that "we had little Jewish learning and knew no Hebrew nor the prayers which our fathers had repeated since they were children," and so links his Jewishness to a distinctly modernist self-awareness of loss, distance, ignorance, and alienation ("Jewish Treasury" 3). Hebrew is frequently alluded to in his poetry, though chiefly as a trope of irrecoverable absence. But Reznikoff was hardly unique in his ignorance and eventual sense of a loss of spiritual language. For David Shearl, the young hero of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Hebrew is an untranslated and mystical beckoning, a "strange and secret tongue ... if you knew it, then you could talk to God ... that blue book--Gee! It is God" (227).

Reznikoff's representation of The Menorah Journal (1915-1962), the site of his earliest publications, as "a land where we were welcomed" is an implicit corrective to his own estrangement as well as a gentle subversion of Zionism's denigration of a Judaism in which the Text is recognized for its radically transcendent mobility, from one space to another, from one generation to the next.(16) For Reznikoff, like his forebears, the word remained the medium of this struggle, even if his idealized text was a site of translation and perhaps hybridity. The Menorah, once described by Robert Alter as "one of the most exciting episodes in the history of the American-Jewish intellectual community," did not embody a "pure" identity (Alter 55)(17)

More than a mere journal, the Menorah was an intellectual and cultural movement created by Jewish humanists who sought to put the question of their Jewishness into a language fully commensurate with American intellectual life. Reznikoff saw the journal as the very embodiment of how the Jewish intellect, though homeless and restless, could find fulfillment in the text. As George Steiner argues, "The `textuality' of the Jewish condition, from the destruction of the Temple to the foundation of the modern state of Israel ... has been seen by Zionism, as one of tragic impotence" (5). Zionism has no use for the "tensions, the dialectical relations between an unhoused at-homeness in the text," and its lust for "the territorial mystery of the native ground" represents a harsh repudiation of the meaning of Jewish culture for Diasporists. From the sacrifice of Isaac to Jacob's wrestling with an angel to Job's suffering, the Hebrew scriptures are filled with struggles over the agony of living in this world, rather than redemption.(18)

Reznikoff rejected Hebrew as the direct medium for his Jewish modernism (though he spent years trying to master it), but more surprisingly, he also chose not to experiment with Yiddish verse. After all, the Russian Yiddish of Reznikoff's childhood was a radically "cosmopolitan" idiom, even more so than the German Yiddish that earlier Jewish Americans brought with them. Encountering Reznikoff for the first time, Yiddishists to whom I have spoken, familiar with the vigorously international modernism of Yiddish poetry movements in American and abroad, invariably raise an interesting question: why did Reznikoff write in far greater isolation than was strictly necessary? I do not have a definitive answer, but I propose that Reznikoff's attraction to deterritorialization as an essential aspect of modernity is so radical that he is unwilling to contribute toward any pretense of full recovery of a native dimension. The identifiably Yiddish and Hebrew elements within his poetry serve to interrogate the homogeneity and wholeness of English.

Instead of enjoying the certainty of a Yiddish audience, Reznikoff was fully aware that his verse assumed a uniquely solitary form of writing. He intentionally constructed a perversely minor position within a hegemonic literary environment, which resulted in some of the earliest, and by far the most innovative, Jewish American poetry in English in this century. Just as his poetry claims partial affiliation with modernist poetry, his meta-textual narratives draw on interpretive forms available to him within both Hebrew and Yiddish literary traditions, including parable, midrash, and textual commentary (though these are often presented ironically). Thus his American poetry provides a space in which neither Hebrew nor Yiddish is privileged but rather both are exalted, and sometimes ironized. The latter invariably occurs because Reznikoff inscribes a visually-oriented conception of the idiosyncratic self that is located in the flux of Time, instead of the ahistorical understanding of the "Jewish people" as a coherent collective.(19)

As the following lyric affirms, the ideology that embodies a centeredness in space and the will to sovereignty is very different from the "powerless" people that reside only in time ("in every language") and the allure of the text:

   Those who lived in villages and alleys
   in huts and cellars,
   selling a calf shrewdly
   and buying a sack of wheat cheap
   to sell cupfuls
   for a copper--
   who were pillaged and murdered
   in the cities of Germany,
   in Spain and Russia,

   from York to Isphan--
   their sons
   stand up to plead--
   in every language--
   for the poor
   and wronged,
   teach by formula and picture,
   speech and music--
   heal and save!

   (CP II: 20)

Reznikoff regarded ethical action, not religious ritual, as the definitive realm of Judaism. He demonstrated the vitality of the ethical impulse throughout the history of Exilic Judaism with its rich heritage of choices and decisions, but ultimately through claiming this "calamity" as the basis for a compassionate civilization in the present. Reznikoff's numerous midrashim on Jewish history and scripture, though usually evoking one crisis or another, nearly always avoid a sense of doom or fatalism. Even a few years later, when darkness again descended upon the Jewish people, this time in Europe, Reznikoff found a mooring in language. The volume In Memoriam: 1933 does not deny that history has been challenging, even oppressive for the Jew, but it has often been a harbor of safety. The reader journeys through seven eras of cruelty and defeat, but notices that these victorious oppressors invariably disappear, leaving the Jew who gains from each era a vital concept, a new way of being a wandering people. But of the meaning of 1933 itself, the humble poet does not presume that he can write a line.

By now it should be evident that Reznikoff opposes absolutist identities, particularly insofar as they deny the likelihood of change, transience, and shared vulnerability as the only constants in human experience. Instead of home-coming or rest, Reznikoff dreams of his ancestor, always situated on the brink of departure, and of open doors:

   In my dream,
   long dead, he stood in front of me
   before an open door;
   head high and confident,
   looking as he used to
   when about to leave on a business trip.
   And, indeed, he had his hat and coat on
   and held a valise.
   At the moment I was as fond of him
   as I used to be when a boy; and I called out, "Uncle, uncle!"
   But he paid no heed to me
   and was going away.

   Through the open door I could look into other
   rooms with open doors
   that led into other rooms--
   all with open doors.

   (CP II: 100)

Through its epigrammatic imagery of the silent and heedless relative, its enigmatic suggestion of abrupt exits, determination, and freedom, this lyric seems to define Reznikoff's peculiar sense of "Diaspora": what the open door might lead to, neither the dreaming boy nor the adult poet is able to figure out.

For the poet, dwelling in Galut is a mysterious vocation: in the present moment he is only a limited creator, not privileged to know the unseen, which will only be revealed over a greater expanse of time than the poet himself will be privileged to witness, as his apparent riff on Psalm 90 reveals:

   The tree in the twilit street--
   the pods hang from its bare symmetrical branches
   motionless--
   but if, like God, a century were to us
   the twinkling of an eye,
   we should see the frenzy of growth.

   (CP I: 110)

Well acquainted with Job's protest and the celestial reply that is not an answer, Reznikoff is humbly content with the gift of a modest, human-sized reflective capacity, which means knowing that his own gaze (or even Marx or Herzl's) is not "like God's," that he cannot construe the final pattern of growth, must only have a kind of faith in its process. For Reznikoff, ours is not an intelligible universe but rather one that is brutally arbitrary. At best we are left with only a dim understanding that humanity is trapped in an enigmatic process of change.

But what may appear to be terrifying endings are invariably swept away by new beginnings:

   If there is a scheme,
   perhaps this too is in the scheme,
   as when a subway car turns on a switch,
   the wheels screeching against the rails,
   and the lights go out--
   but are on again in a moment.

   (CP I: 120)

And that is the cycle of Jewish history. Embodying a deep skepticism as to whether we can actually thwart fate through rational remedies, these lines are nevertheless something much more than a nihilistic argument. Rather than an outright dismissal of individual moral agency, this lyric invites us to read it as an interrogation of human wisdom, a "gentle" chastening (especially if we think of Job) of the intellect's natural enthusiasm for synthetic and deficient remedies inherent in all the collective ideologies that pretend to account for the future.

Reznikoff clearly preferred the wisdom of experience, a retrospective mood, to merely evoking the frenzy of the immediate moment. This preference is especially apparent in two versions, written decades apart, of a lyrical narrative of his family's experience with anti-Semitic street thugs. Published as part of Uriel Accosta: A Play and a Fourth Group of Verse (1921), the earlier version presents the events in terse detail, overlaid by the uncomprehending fear of the horrified narrator and leaving the reader with no comfort, only the visceral aftermath of brutality: "Uncle came, bare-headed, blood oozing out of his hair" (CP I: 46). But the 1969 version, without sentimentalizing what must have been a traumatic moment, suggests a hidden resource not explored by the first, as if the poet senses that there is something unvoiced in that familial scene, that something that had not been sufficiently integrated into his telling:

   My grandmother was muttering that this country
   was no better than Russia, after all;
   and my parents and I felt ashamed,
   as if somehow we were to blame,
   and we tried to explain that what had happened was unusual,
   that only the neighborhood we lived in was like that,
   and what a wonderful country this was--
   that all our love for it and our praise
   was not unmerited.

   (CP II: 155)

This time it is the ironic argument that takes place between the generations that completes the poem, conquering the vicissitudes of persecution through language. Now, having told his story, his wound washed and bandaged, the uncle leans quietly against the hot-water boiler. He is replaced in the foreground by the other members of the family, who, instead of being shocked into silence (as in the apparent resolution of the older poem), are prepared to argue, to struggle for the "meaning" that will somehow account for (or efface) raw experience. Clearly, Reznikoff has not set forth an idea of language as "redemptive" here. But he has hinted that language can perhaps render something besides unrelieved horror; there is also the sheer tenacity of one's own response. Still, the conflict remains between the cruel certainties of the shtetl and the immigrant's tentative faith in the new. Pogroms, atrocities, persecutions, and finally genocide are always filtered through the poet's present position in history, not to diminish reality but to affirm the need to experience the past through the dispassionate distance of time. At the same time, awareness of the vicissitudes of the Jewish past requires that we read the last four lines with the full weight of their intended irony.

In a much lighter moment, that almost gleefully perverse attitude wryly contends with the contingencies of a challenging universe:

   People think walking in autumn the
   pleasantest season
   but I don't.
   I was hit on the head by a falling leaf. (qtd. in Kaufman 56)

I pay special heed to the ironically titled "Pessimist" not only because it was apparently Reznikoff's last, composed shortly before his death, but because it amazingly distills the essential qualities of his anti-epic and measured response to vicissitude. Written by an eighty-one year old man who had in his last years suffered a brutal mugging, the poem points to a deep reservoir of quiet resistance. Perhaps only under trial, in the most severe circumstances, does the individual have the opportunity to discover the unexpected within:

   Now that black ground and bushes--
   saplings, trees,
   each twig and limb--are suddenly white with snow,
   and earth becomes brighter than the sky,
   that intricate shrub of nerves, veins, arteries--
   myself--uncurls
   its knotted leaves
   to the shining air.

   (CP I: 117)

Besides the initial amusement it provides (again we witness Reznikoff's perverse enjoyment in scaling epic truths down to the small), this lyric wryly reassures us of the poet's psychic resilience in the face of a lifetime spent becoming closely acquainted with an appalling textual tapestry of death, suffering, and cruelty, not to mention his own struggles. He knows that in its essence Galut indeed contains the "tragic." But it also constitutes a source of energizing influence for the world. It is the same kind of cavalier discovery made by an impassioned character in The Black Death, who, even as his community teeters on the edge of crisis, proclaims his willingness to dwell under the precarious circumstances of adversity rather than yearn for a return to Zion. Or like Reznikoff's favorite persecuted heretic, Uriel Acosta, on the verge of excommunication: "Now I am fixed within them like a weed/ That tom up, tramp, led, grows again/The hardier for its torments" (Nine Plays 11).

Whether allegorizing Judaism or America, it is clear that for Reznikoff a positive encounter is created whenever a culture has an inner, vital power that manifests itself as openness to elements from without. I believe that this ethos is particularly evident in a parable included in the volume Inscriptions: 1944-1956 where, though the insatiable yearning for recovery and wholeness is presented sympathetically enough, as an inescapable part of human desire, such nostalgia is gently undermined by a call for fully being in one's present moment:

   As I was wandering with my unhappy thoughts,
   I looked and saw
   that I had come into a sunny place
   familiar and yet strange.
   "Where am I?" I asked a stranger. "Paradise."
   "Can this be Paradise?" I asked surprised,
   for there were motor-cars and factories.
   "It is," he answered. "This is the sun that shone on Adam once;
   the very wind that blew upon him, too.

   (CP II: 75)

Earlier I argued that Reznikoff's quiet rebukes to insularity, bigotry, and indifference in his American urban poems form a corollary for his poetic examinations of Jewish history. Indeed they are inseparable. Idiosyncratically evoking both Hebraic exile and Wordsworthian romanticism, "As I was wandering with my unhappy thoughts," Reznikoff suggests that history flows out from Eden into Exile, into the modern wasteland strewn with "motorcars and factories." The present may or may not contain both Eden and Exile, that is for the individual to determine, but there is no return, no way to find your way back.(20) For a poet content to dwell in the gap between an inner and outer reality and between ideal and real worlds, nostalgia for the past must not monopolize one's identity. In contrast, the Zionist struggle with reality as unrealized utopia requires a more rigid binary structure. I mention this lyric's nod to rural romanticism because it is one of those instances that mediates both realities, whether he is resisting the monopolizing tendencies of pastoral sentimentalism or a politicized ethnic identity. As in the case of the urban setting, this means that he is not caught up in measuring the city of the present moment against some mythical ideal.

As the playwright Jon Robin Baitz recently argued, "One hopes that the lessons of all our centuries of travel, of searching for safe haven, is that they are part of the essential human business of being an expatriate. And one often hopes that to be a Jewish writer is to understand that most of the time, it's the same for everyone, no matter what their port of entry or final destination" (Baitz 338). Having taken the monumental step from the inner sanctum of the Jewish home into the unexplored urban spaces of New York City, Reznikoff proved to be such a literary voice, demonstrating how an ethnic poet might embrace the American experience of mobility, a peculiar sensation of extraterritoriality that was somehow enough to sustain inexhaustible lyrics of the lonely narrating self. What he observed in the American city reflected his Jewish modernism and vice versa: a sense of homelessness (literal and metaphysical). A sense of belonging to nothing and therefore everything feeds the humanity that persists in his poetry. The Jewish diasporic experience is deeply embedded in the way he imagines the economic, political, and cultural struggles of other human beings. The American urban experience suggested the liminality of a new way of thinking about Jewish identity, the paradoxical condition of organic continuity coexisting with ultimate estrangement. As such, his vocabulary of alienation is actually a profound claim to being-at-home. Reznikoff's historical poems invite the reader to interrogate the relationship between the Jewish ethical tradition and the paradoxes and limitations of nationalist or even group identity.

Perhaps Reznikoff's diasporism was as much a hybrid condition, formed in relation to the Western/Odyssean tradition where it is the searching that counts, as it was a traditionally Jewish concept. It is as if he intimates that, from the moment Jews successfully transcended various forms of tribalism and ghettoization in attaining the diversity of a full civilization in America, they would never again be privy to the kind of unified vision avowed by either Zionism or Orthodoxy. They would not be the same. This is one of the vital ways that his poetry speaks for an entire generation; his lyrics are deeply permeated by a knowledge of the weakening of the corporateness of Jewish life, the lessening possibility of truly belonging to one's people. That was apparently one of the necessary sacrifices that would have to be made by those who accepted a hospitality that was unparalleled in the history of the Diaspora. For the children of the immigrants, the historic memory that had bound them gradually dimmed. It is this challenge that serves as a stimulus for Reznikoff's poetry.

Celebrating the achievements of Diaspora does not mean this poet was explicitly anti-Zionist, but he did oppose the latter's tendency to impose a monolithic interpretation of Jewish identity. The here and now of one's surroundings, whether neighborhood or nation, will suffice. For Reznikoff, fulfillment must depend on interior life, as well as an openness to one's exterior circumstances. He may not find himself at home anywhere or is at least aware that the active intellect invariably makes foreign what is most familiar. The poet knows that there is a spiritual homelessness that cannot be conquered by any form of political intervention. Yet in the meantime there is the solace of one's present moment and immediate surroundings that invite closer investigation: the "familiar and yet strange." Desire is never satiated and so there is no thought of a return Home. All of which is to suggest that many of the boldest postzionist and postmodern debates over Zionism's limitations are already foregrounded in this poet's voice. Ultimately, the historical Judaism to which Reznikoff responded was more revolutionary than Zionism, which only succeeded in redefining the Jewish people for their participation in the age of nationalism. By acknowledging the multifaceted nature of identity without abandoning the significance of identity altogether, his poetry intimates that Jewish history might yet illuminate an age only now approaching, the uncertain times of the multiethnic society.

Notes

(1.) The term "diaspora" first appears in the Septuagint, the Egyptian Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek in 250 B.C.E. The literal translation, "to be scattered" (like seeds) derives from the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 28:64, v'hefitzcha ("you will be scattered"). Today it is most often used in the Jewish context by those for whom the condition of exile does not necessarily engender a feeling of exile.

(2.) See Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel.

(3.) Both Clifford and Gilroy offer nuanced readings of diaspora across black and Jewish histories.

(4.) The Menorah Journal published the verse drama two years later and Reznikoff privately printed and published it as part of the collection known as Nine Plays (1927).

(5.) As Simon points out, such a haunting prognosis might "have less impact ... if the play were staged realistically as if it occurred" in the time and place indicated in the first scene. "But he allows time and place to fade, so that in the final scene, `Years later' intrudes into our own time" (247).

(6.) Not merely "exile," this term connotes a humiliating condition of loss and servitude. Reevaluations of the past by Jewish historiographers and other scholars have replaced this disparaging term with the Greek "Diaspora." For many Jews the Holocaust brought a decisive end to Galut Judaism, shattering the European Jewish ethic of material powerlessness.

(7.) A few originals, as well as copies of these manuscripts, can be found in the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.

(8.) In these days of deteriorating black-Jewish relations it is worth noting that the Menorah Jews often referred to the plight of blacks, including the problem of lynchings in the South and their unfair treatment in the labor market in the urban North, many years before most Jews had entered the American middle-class.

(9.) Midrash, a term I often invoke to describe Reznikoff's poetics, denotes the vast tradition of creative commentaries, parables, and other rabbinic reflections on the five books of the Torah. This form of textual argumentation and filling-in-the-gaps has lately proven attractive to progressive movements within Judaism, particularly among Jewish feminists such as Ostriker

(10.) For a more thorough analysis of Reznikoff's urban parables see Omer, "Stranger."

(11.) See in particular an early untitled poem published in 1921: "It had long been dark, though still an hour before supper-time" (CP I: 45) and Fredman's commentary.

(12.) Though ostensibly weak and powerless, the schlemiel's verbal acumen enables him to mock his persecutor and enjoy a psychological victory in defeat. See Wisse.

(13.) In Biale's close reading of the Germanic origins of the Zionist youth movement, he notes how, influenced by the values of the German Wandervogel, (the neo-romantic youth movement which was also anti-Semitic), the Zionists often echoed the latter's call for a new body and psyche to be built up by a new relation with the land. In the early twentieth century, a popular song in Palestine exults, "We came to the land to build it and be built by it." Early postcards "typically featured virile young farmers in Palestine contrasted with old frail Orthodox Jews in the Diaspora." See Eros and the Jews (179, 185).

(14.) Samuel's reflections seem especially remarkable as a post-Six Day War document, from a euphoric era in which many Jewish intellectuals were hardly eager to think about traditional paradigms of Jewish passivity.

(15.) The role of Hebrew as the "authentic" voice of Jewish self-preservation and renewal in moments of crisis is manifest in a pre-war joke recalled by Aberbach in which an "elegant Parisian woman [is] about to give birth while trying to hide her east European origins. She does not realize that her doctor is also Jewish and knows her secret. As long as she groans in French, the doctor advises his assistant to wait. Finally, she shrieks, Ribbono shel olam! [Master of the Universe]. `Maintenant,' the doctor says, `le temps est arrive'" (12).

(16.) He goes on to say that the Menorah's editors "were always proud of the fact that they had never belonged to what they called the Jewish Establishment in America and their freedom from party, sect, or institution [provided] both a variety of perspectives on a given problem and the perspective of variety on the subjects which they regarded as Jewish."

(17.) Frequent contributors included Mordechai Kaplan (who first articulated his dream of Reconstructionist Judaism in its pages), Lionel Trilling, Maurice Samuel, Ludwig Lewisohn, Horace Kallen, Clifton Fadiman, and Cecil Roth. Even disaffected Jews such as Hannah Arendt were attracted to the Menorah's intellectual and cultural independence. Non-Jewish social thinkers, including Randolph Bourne and John Dewey also contributed to its cultural debates. Reznikoff's earliest books were reviewed in The Menorah. He published a staggering number of his poetry, plays, historical sketches, and reviews in its pages, and was a contributing editor for over two decades.

(18.) If anything, this experience of struggle had intensified by the time of the late nineteenth-century Yiddish-speaking milieu of Reznikoff and his Russian parents: "Poverty was one of the absolutes in Jewish life, a fact reflected in the language and literature of eastern European Jews. Yiddish ... developed innumerable words for poverty. A Yiddish thesaurus needs nineteen columns of fine print for all the synonyms for misfortune; good fortune needs only five" (Sorin 14).

(19.) I am grateful to Barbara Mann for this suggestion.

(20.) In a similar spirit he has Benjamin Sheftall, an immigrant Jew to the colonies in 1733 remark hopefully that "Georgia lay in the same latitude as Palestine, which God had chosen for His people" ("Jews in Georgia" 9).

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Ranen Omer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches courses in Jewish literature and is completing a dissertation on the history of diasporism in Jewish American writing. He has written numerous articles on Jewish American literature, most recently "`It is I who have been defending a religion called Judaism': The T.S. Eliot and Horace M. Kallen Correspondence" and "The Metaphysics of Identity in David Mamet's Homicide."