What makes a poem Jewish?

A review of Peter Lawson's book, 
Anglo-Jewish Poetry 
from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein,
Vallentine Mitchell, Middlesex, 2006

What makes a poem ‘Jewish’? Is it enough for it to have been written by a Jewish poet? Does it need to have a certain kind of subject matter: say, Pesach or the Shoah? Or is it subtly marked by an identifiable tone or attitude: a particular quality of humour or irony, an emotional timbre, a mode of engagement? And does it make sense to talk of a Jewish tradition in English-language poetry?

Peter Lawson, the author, and Anthony Rudolf, who wrote the foreword, are no strangers to such questions. The first major attempt to map a contemporary international Jewish poetry was the groundbreaking anthology edited by Rudolf and Howard Schwartz in 1980, Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. It contained 1200 pages of poems, in English, from 23 languages and 30 countries. Then, in 2001, came Passionate Renewal: Jewish Poetry in Britain since 1945, which included 20 poets, edited by Lawson.

The poets treated in this critical follow-up are Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, John Rodker, Jon Silkin, Karen Gershon and Elaine Feinstein. The oldest, Sassoon, was born in 1886, and the youngest, Feinstein, in 1930. So the book spans the period from the First World War to the generation that grew up during the Second.

Lawson shows how a specifically Jewish enquiry into each writer can cut across conventional readings and throw new light on their work. For example, Rosenberg and Sassoon have been wholly assimilated into the canon of English ‘war poets’, yet with scant attention to their Jewishness. While Sassoon went to public school and Cambridge, Rosenberg and Rodker were East End boys. As publisher and poet, the modernist Rodker – the least known of the six and worth rediscovering – knew and worked with Ezra Pound and the stridently anti-semitic Wyndham Lewis. Gershon was a Kindertransport refugee. Silkin is portrayed as a “post-Holocaust universalist” and Feinstein as a “diasporic” poet who transcends little-Englandism by being wholeheartedly international.

Lawson clarifies how seedy English versions of anti-Semitism affect all these writers in various ways, always profoundly. He explores how each of these poets feels ‘marginalised’ from mainstream English literary life.

But, while the book deals with six individual writers, it does not amount, as one might think from the title, to a full-scale study of a period. Many other substantial Anglo-Jewish poets who belong in its timeframe receive no mention, unless in passing: to name a handful, Emmanuel Litvinoff, Bernard Kops, Danny Abse, Al Alvarez, Ruth Fainlight, and Michael Hamburger. Hamburger, as both poet and translator, especially of Paul Celan, is a key figure.

Most of the time, Lawson seems more interested in what we can learn about society from literary texts than in responding to intellectual range and emotional depth in actual poems. themselves. He writes: “I approach [Feinstein’s] work relating to English insularity and delimited Jewish families with such socio-political concerns in mind.” (My italics) Yet we read poems for inspiration, consolation and illumination, not as sociological tracts or quasi-history. What is more, linguistic play, musical texturings, symbolic patternings and mystical resonances are inalienable from our Jewish poetic tradition. This book would have been deepened by closer focus on these aspects of the art of poetry.

Lawson argues that “in contrast to received critical opinion, there is an Anglo-Jewish poetic lineage” and he adds: “What becomes clear is the sense of ‘inbetweenness’ shared by Anglo-Jewish poets.”

So, the task of synthesising the distinctive patterns in Anglo-Jewish poetry has been sketched out, though not yet fully worked through. In this rich territory, there is plenty more exploration and mapping to be done.