Rooted Cosmopolitans: Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, and the Ethics of Place

• In Event: Cultural Mobility in Jewish Literature

Abstract

Discussions of “the Jew” in experimental modernism have focused on the frequently anti-Semitic depictions in the works of non-Jewish writers. “The Jew,” in these readings, becomes the epitome of a placeless, wandering, and unethical modern being. Even philosemitic works, like Joyce’s ULYSSES, cast “the Jew” in this role. Whether cosmopolitanism should be emulated or abhorred varies among authors, but its “Jewishness” is a constant. This paper examines what happens when we turn from the cosmopolitan imaginary of Joyce’s, Pound’s, and Eliot’s Jews to the poetry of Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky. Their Jews and Jewishness—real rather than imagined—are deeply rooted in the physical space of New York City. I examine their poetry as correctives to the imagined Jews of their modernist mentors and forebears that grow organically from their Leftist politics. Skepticism of American political and economic power is a central component of their rootedness as they work to reclaim Jews as “placed” against the proto-Fascist condemnations of Pound and Eliot. Through calls to action that begin at the local level and depend on the ethics of personal encounter, they insist on an American and Jewish literary identity with its homeland outside the text. At once rooted in place and society (and devoted, therefore, to its betterment) yet nonetheless striving to avoid the pitfalls of political nationalism, they assert what this paper calls a “rooted cosmopolitanism”: a devotion to locale that comes not from chivalry or fetish, but a recognition that the betterment of the world, resting decisively in human hands, begins in specific places.

author

• Joshua Logan Wall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor