FYI. >> Arieh ~~~~~ SOURCE <http://www.forward.com/articles/7011>http://www.forward.com/articles/7011
<http://www.forward.com/articles/7011>The Leftmost Poets Sing Songs of Love POETRY/ review By zackary Sholem Berger December 16, 2005 ---------- Proletpen: America's Rebel Yiddish Poets Edited by Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub. Translated by Amelia Glaser. Illustrations by Dana Craft. University of Wisconsin Press, 192 pages, $45. ---------- "Proletpen," a new anthology of American Communist Yiddish poets, is a book divided against itself! . Dovid Katz's introduction, by turns eloquent, tongue-tied, hortatory and disingenuous, nicely illustrates the book's internal conflicts. On the one hand is the insistence of Katz that the work of these poets is a valuable instance of Yiddish cultural diversity, prevented by cultural McCarthyism from coming into public view in the 1950s, when Yiddish literature in translation was just becoming fashionable in America; the work of the American Communist Yiddish poets, he continues, should now be rediscovered because of their difference from their anti-Soviet (but socialist) counterparts, the victors who have written the history of American Yiddish literature. On the other hand, Katz also claims that the "leftmost" [sic] American Yiddish poets were not so very different from their anti-Soviet counterparts; after all, the "overwhelming majority" of these Communist writers had "little interest in party politics." In other words, these socialist poets are pretty much interchangeable. There's a problem with this tack. The pro-Soviet, American Yiddish poets, called ... MORE Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: Hasafran @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
