“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. …