Review: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff. 2, 1937-1975

The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff. 2, 1937-1975 by Charles Reznikoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading Reznikoff is like walking through New York on a grey day. It’s noisy, cluttered, and depressing – but every so often something breaks through and makes you happy, again, to be alive.

That’s not an idle metaphor since many of the poems here are about the day-to-day of New York, though it’s a New York of the 1950s and 1960s, for the most part. As I understand it, Reznikoff was an American version of a type I think of as Yiddish and European, one of those poets at home in cafes and coffee shops, writing and publishing work that only a handful will read – and then eating, drinking, arguing with, and celebrating that same small number of readers, most of whom wrote poetry as well.

There’s a term, Yiddishland, that I admire as a way of describing a transnational community of Jewish poets – largely interwar – who dealt with Modernism in a Yiddish language that created a space that existed more on paper than in the real world. Between Hitler and Stalin, they were almost all wiped out.

So, this is something like Yinglishland, though it’s more articulate than that term implies. It’s a man living to write poetry (poetry that few would ever likely appreciate) rather than writing to live.

I guess I am one of those of his grandchildren’s generation (though I don’t know that he had children of his own) who might most appreciate his work. And, among many poems that I dismiss as flat, there are a handful that absolutely sing.

I’ll just say quickly that I got tired of a lot of his life-in-New-York scenes. There’s historical interest, but not much more. Reznikoff writes in a largely imagistic style, giving us scenes that seem to speak for themselves, but they don’t always have the power he seems to imply.

I also don’t love all of his Jewish history poems. His reflections on the Book of Maccabees late in his life don’t really hold up. I suppose he has a theology, probably inflected by a soda-water-diluted socialism, but it doesn’t work to make these old stories come alive.

What I do love, though, is when he measures his sense of being heir to a Jewish tradition. At this best here, he rises to one of my real poetry favorites, saying more clearly than I can (and from the vantage of someone two generations before me) the challenge and compulsion of that legacy.

I found him because of this excerpt of a much-longer poem, an excerpt that appears in our Yom Kippur siddur and that I linger on every year when we come to it; from “Early History of a Writer,” 15,

I went to my grandfather's to say goodbye;
I was going away to a school out West.
As I came in,
My grandfather turned from the window at which he sat
(sick, skin yellow, eyes bleary –
but his hair still dark,
for my grandfather had hardly any grey hair in his beard or on his head –
he would sit at the window, reading a Hebrew book).
He rose with difficulty –
He had been expecting me, it seemed –
stretched out his hands and blessed me in a loud voice:
in Hebrew, of course,
and I did not know what he was saying.
When he had blessed me,
my grandfather turned aside and burst into tears.
“It is only for a little while, Grandpa,” I said
in my broken Yiddish. “I’ll be back in June.”
(By June my grandfather was dead.)
He did not answer.
Perhaps my grandfather was in tears for other reasons:
perhaps, because in spite of all the learning I had acquired in high school,
I knew not a word of the sacred text of the Torah
and was going out into the world
with none of the accumulated wisdom of my people to guide me,
with no prayers with which to talk to the God of my people,
a soul –
for it is not easy to be a Jew or, perhaps, a man –
doomed by his ignorance to stumble and blunder.

I love that one, just love it for its gentle approach to his grandfather (and to Jewish tradition) and for its straightforward prose verse. It feels like a poem that was always there, waiting for someone to find it rather than write it.

There are others here that come close to that, and I’m happy to have read this whole book to have uncovered a handful of those gems.

From “A Short History of Israel” XI,

I am the least of my house
and my house the least in Israel;
am I also among the prophets?
Or from his poem “Kaddish,” XI, when he has been reflecting on his dead mother,
I know you do not mind
(if you mind at all)
that I do not pray for you
or burn a light
on the day of your death:
we do not need these trifles
between us –
prayers and words and lights.

From “Meditations on the Fall and Winter Holidays,” IV, ‘Hanukkah,’

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.

And maybe my second favorite, one I might someday use as an epigraph, also from “By the Well of Living and Seeing,” I,

My grandfather, dead long before I was born,
died among strangers; and all the verse he wrote
was lost –
except for what
still speaks through me
as mine

Again, there’s too much hit and miss for me to want to wade through all of it again, but I’ll be back for these highlights.



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