Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
9 - Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
Summary
And these same thoughts shall people this little world,
In humours, like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented.
— Shakespeare, Richard IIAt the end of the twentieth century, Jewish fiction is as inconceivable without the Holocaust as is the century itself without its two world wars, the Middle Ages without Christianity and Homer's Odyssey without the sacking and burning of Troy. Modern Jewish authors have either confronted the slaughter of their people and the elimination of Jewish culture in most of central and eastern Europe or they have not understood that they must confront it if they are to do important work. In either case, the cries of the doomed, however distant and muffled, are to be heard in and through their pages. The often terrible facts of history shunt like invisible trains across the landscape of the soul. It may not be superfluous to observe that these trains always arrive on time. Readers know about them, and await them, even if authors, or those who pretend to be authors, do not.
To say this is not in any sense to argue that contemporary Jewish- American authors ought to be religious Jews, or secular Jews, or Jews who consciously set out, either personally or indirectly, to deal with the consequences of the Holocaust. It is not to argue anything but the facts. Recognizably Jewish- American authors, like recognizably black American ones, are simply perceived, and usually perceive themselves, as emerging from a peculiar suffering and horror. The idea of ignoring their history of genocide and slavery respectively, however these authors choose to handle it, is difficult for most readers. The latest Jewish and black authors, too, usually find that scanting their history is well- nigh impossible. The tug toward superficiality and mordant wit is no longer as powerful as the need to pay some sort of homage, slack and skinny though it may be, to ineluctable human catastrophes whose legacies persist as wounds and poisons.
This is why Jewish- American fiction of the best sort— and what can this term possibly mean except fiction written about Jewish Americans, even when it is not, as in the case of John Updike, written by Jews?— has changed significantly over the past 30 years.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Poetry and FreedomDiscoveries in Aesthetics, 1985–2018, pp. 73 - 80Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020