Hyam Plutznik (1911 – 1962) occu­pies a par­tic­u­lar place with­in the realms of post­war Amer­i­can poet­ry and mod­ern Jew­ish poet­ics. Social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and inter­est­ed in poet­ic for­mal­ism rather than in avant-garde exper­i­men­ta­tion, Plutznik died just as writ­ing on the Holo­caust was begin­ning to emerge, and before polit­i­cal con­scious­ness-rais­ing — empow­ered by the civ­il rights move­ment, fem­i­nism, and LGBTQ strug­gles — could influ­ence his aesthetic. 

The sev­en­teen schol­ars who have con­tributed essays to this col­lec­tion argue that it is pre­cise­ly because Plutznik resides at this inter­sec­tion of his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, and Jew­ish self-fash­ion­ing that he and his work are worth study­ing. The schol­ars offer expert takes on the poet­ics of Plutznik, main­tain­ing that the poet dra­ma­tizes his uncer­tain rela­tion­ship to Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture and his own Jew­ish iden­ti­ty. All of the essays are valu­able, but sev­er­al may be par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful to a non-aca­d­e­m­ic reader. 

In ​“The Uni­verse Is No Con­so­la­tion,” Cary Nel­son argues that Plutznik is a cru­cial poet to know about because he estab­lish­es ​“his iden­ti­ty as a Jew­ish poet in the imme­di­ate post-Holo­caust decade when many writ­ers, except those on the rad­i­cal left, avoid­ed direct and aggres­sive com­men­tary.” Using plans for an unfin­ished Holo­caust epic as the basis, Nel­son main­tains that — at least in one 1987 col­lec­tion — Plutznik presents a vision that is ​“postapoc­a­lyp­tic, explic­it­ly imbued with the themes and philo­soph­i­cal out­look that emerged from the rise of fas­cism in the 1930s and cul­mi­nat­ed in the defin­ing events of World War Two.” Sara R. Hor­witz offers the intrigu­ing infor­ma­tion that, at the end of his life, Plutznik under­took Eng­lish trans­la­tions of tra­di­tion­al litur­gi­cal poems for the Con­ser­v­a­tive Move­ment. Noah Simon Jam­pol presents the star­tling news that Plutznik also wrote sci­ence fic­tion, and demon­strates that at least one of these sto­ries may be read as a para­ble of World War II and the Holo­caust. Kristin Boudreau iden­ti­fies betray­al as a core theme in all of Plutznik’s writ­ing. Final­ly, Roger Kamenetz, him­self a poet as well as schol­ar, encoun­ters Plotznik in his own poet­ic attempt to deal with T. S. Eliot, whose writ­ing Kamenetz loved and admired as a young­ster, before becom­ing aware of the former’s antisemitism.

These and oth­er informed schol­ar­ly con­sid­er­a­tions empow­er the read­er to study the nine­ty pages of poems includ­ed in the book with more aware­ness and, per­haps, more empa­thy for Plutznik’s embat­tled sit­u­a­tion. Know­ing what we now know, we can bet­ter appre­ci­ate the his­tor­i­cal under­pin­nings haunt­ing a poem like ​“The Milk­man”: ​“One night they will knock on the milkman’s door,/Their boots crunch hard on the front-porch floor./One-two, open the door.// You are the thief of the secret flame,/The for­bid­den bread, the ter­ri­ble Name./Return what is left; go back where you came.” In ​“Por­trait,” the poet describes the pre­car­i­ous posi­tion of Amer­i­can Jew­ry in the US: ​“Notice with what care­ful nonchalance/​He tries to be a Jew casually,/To ignore the mon­ster, the moun­tain — /A few thou­sand years of his­to­ry.” The col­lec­tion ends with Plutznik’s strange, mag­i­cal-real­ism-infused epic ​“The Sev­enth Avenue Express.” 

In sum, this is a com­pelling assem­blage of schol­ar­ly texts and poems that give us insight into the process and sit­u­a­tion of a Jew­ish Amer­i­can poet writ­ing dur­ing World War II and the post­war years.