Barbara E. Mann - The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History

This books idea was planted during my graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was fortunate to have mentors in Robert Alter and Chana Kronfeld. Years later, the idea became a full-fledged intellectual project in a summer writing group with my neighbors and colleagues Rebecca Kobrin, Rachel Mesch, and Gillian Steinberg, whose interest pushed me to expand the projects scope. Those conversations affirmed a truth of my workthat smart, kind colleagues make academic life worthwhile. Early exchanges with Vanessa Ochs reminded me of the difference between objects and texts. Jack Kugelmass encouraged my yizker book explorations over lunch in Tel Aviv. Yoni Brafman gamely endured my pestering about secularism. Laura Levitt helped me appreciate the affective power of objects. Ronit Eisenbach nudged me to get the images right. Leora Auslander, Laura Liebman, Anita Norich, Tahneer Oksman, Naomi Seidman, and Vered Karti Shemtov provided critical feedback on drafts of individual chapters and grant proposals. Nancy Sinkoff has been my yardstick for scholarly integrity, and so much more. Two candid anonymous readers of the entire manuscript challenged me; their thoughtful, generous comments helped shape the books final form. If any missteps remain in spite of all this excellent counsel, they are my own.

Books are physical companions. My comrades at the Salt Lake Community College NEH Summer Institute The Book: Material Histories and Digital Futures in 2018 nurtured my own bookmaking practices, as did workshops with Roni Gross at the Center for Book Arts, New York. Arik Kilemnik and the staff and artists at the Jerusalem Print Workshop welcomed me into their beautiful space. Learning about early modern Jewish books with Elisheva Carlebach and Michelle Chesner in the Rare Books Room at Columbia University confirmed my sense of how modernity has altered the material presence of books. Students in my spring 2020 seminar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic affirmed the essential role material objects play in our lives, evenor especiallyin the most virtual of settings. Their resilience and creativity are an inspiration.

A special thank-you to all the librarians and archivists who have aided and encouraged me, without whom this book would not have been possible. The staff of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary supported my research and made yizker volumes available to me during a period of tremendous transition. Agnieszka Reszka at the archives of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute provided easy access to important artifacts. Amanda Siegel at the Dorot Division, New York Public Library, graciously offered assistance at every stage, including some last-minute requests during the pandemic. I am especially indebted to Stefanie Halpern, whoas alwayswent above and beyond. The expertise of her colleagues at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research also supported my teaching of a class, Jewish Stuff: Objects from the YIVO Archives, an especially memorable haptic experience.

Research funds and sabbatical leaves from the Jewish Theological Seminary supported the writing of this book, as did summer grants and an annual award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sarah Eligbergs indefatigable, levelheaded work on securing permissions and Jennifer Bryness attention to the images were crucial to this books final laps. I also benefited from presenting portions to audiences at conferences of the Modern Language Association and the Association of Jewish Studies and in lectures at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Bar-Ilan University, Bard Graduate Center, and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Sarah Miller at Yale University Press believed in my proposal and trusted I could write the book. I am also appreciative of the professionalism-under-pressure of Heather Gold and Eva Skewes, who shepherded the book to publication.

Finally, I am abundantly grateful to family and friends who have unfailingly humored my ongoing fascination with stuff.

Virginia Woolfs famous observation that on or about December 1910 human nature changed has by now served as the point of departure for numerous explorations of modernist culture, mostly centered in and around the environs of Bloomsbury.

Adopting the prescriptive tone common in manifestos of the period, Introspectivism details what poetry should, and should not, look like: Each poem must have its individual rhythm. By this we mean that the rhythm of the poem must fit entirely this particular poem. One poem cannot have the same rhythm as any other poem. Every poem is, in fact, unique. While the list of requirements is not quite as punitively rendered as Ezra Pounds A Few Donts for the Imagiste (see below), its assessment is no less polemical and may serve as an introduction to the poetry discussed in this chapter. Though modernist Hebrew poetry in both Europe and Palestine drew more directly on the legacy of Bialik and Tchernichovsky, we can nonetheless locate significant parallels in the contemporaneous work of Yiddish modernists like the Introspectivists in New York; furthermore, poetry in English by young American Jewish authors was also shaped by a desire for writing that is new, precise, and object-driven.

According to their 1919 manifesto, the work of the Inzikhistnthe Introspectivistssignaled a firm break with an earlier, no less influential generation of American Yiddish poets, Di Yungethe Young Ones. Poets such as Mani Leyb may have led Yiddish poetry out onto a broader roadthat is, the path of secular, European literary formbut as a group the Introspectivists belong only to their own time, constituting a bridge to a new poetry. In terms of subject matter, poetry can be about anything, yet the poem itself must be a unique occurrence, the product of an interaction between the poets own individual internal panorama and the world around her or him:

We Introspectivists want first of all to present lifethe true, the sincere, and the preciseas it is mirrored in ourselves, as it merges with us.

The human psyche is an awesome labyrinth. Thousands of beings dwell there. The inhabitants are the various facets of the individuals present self on the one hand and fragments of his inherited self on the other.

We find in these lines a general principle of radical newness common to modernist poetry in other languages: within the rallying cry to make it new, we may also note the presence of it; in other words, the call is not for a rejection of history but rather a refashioning of ita process that treats the past as a collection of material artifacts, not well-rounded but in fragments. The poetic process involves an intuitive, deductive encounter with the world; its major tools are association and suggestion, an adherence to spoken language in [a poems] structure and flow, and an avoidance of superfluous adjectives: only these will lead to the creation of an authentic, individual image.

This drive for precision and clarity, together with a desire for an authentic, individual image, found expression in the work of a paradigmatic group of poets: David Fogel [Vogel] (18911943), working mostly in Hebrew in European settings; the Hebrew poet Esther Raab (18941981), writing in Palestine; the Yiddish poet Anna Margolin (18871952) in New York; and Charles Reznikoff (18941976), writing in English, whose Objectivisma central trend within American modernismis also considered a point of origin for American Jewish literature. The work of these poets is linked by a materialist concern for language as such; a devotion to minimalist form, precise descriptive terms, and the sparest of syntax; an interest in made objects and visual forms, especially the plastic arts of painting and sculpture; and a reverence for the essential it-ness of the material world. For each poet, I will consider exemplary poems from his or her debut volume in relation to contemporaneous manifestos and other documents that specifically address questions of poetic form in Jewish languages. For example, for David Fogel, Hebrew was a box to be creatively chafed against; for Charles Reznikoff, it was a haunting presence, an ideal form to aspire to. For both poets, Hebrew mattered as a Jewish language. To explore how these ideas shaped their poetic practice is not to go down the path of Jewish essentialism; on the contrary, it is an attempt to recover the diverse particulars of poetic meaning and to appreciate these details against the broader grain of historical context.