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Passionate Renewal, Jewish Poetry in Britain Since 1945, An Anthology,
Edited by Peter Lawson (Five Leaves Publication, UK, 2001)

Historic events of the Jewish people, their contacts with non-Jews, provide this poetry’s major point of reference. Peter Lawson, exploring ‘Jewishness’, argues in his excellent introduction: For the Jewish people, most of whom continue to reside in the diaspora, history remains a vital factor in constructing identity. History doesn’t refer only to the Holocaust legacy, but three millennia of suppression, persecution, dispersal and renewal.

Recent events are not ignored. The poems address the 20th C. anti-Semitics who carried ethnic based prejudice to genocide. Justly, the poems protest against the horror Jewish people have suffered. Each seems a memorial to the millions murdered for no reason except they were different. That ‘otherness’ can cause hatred is unimaginable. For a non-Jewish reader, the first task is to resist attempts to deny that the majority in western society have set out - if not to destroy - certainly to belittle and suppress Jews and their way of life.

The poems here act as an antidote to shifting the guilt on to one crazed leader, Nazi thugs, or one nation. These poetic discourses expose that western culture and behaviour is imbued with anti-Jewish tendencies.

In Joanne Limburg’s ‘The Nose on My Face’ the speaker at sixteen understands that her nose announces her ethnicity and social awkwardness. She tries in front of her mother’s mirror to obscure it with her hands. Her older self asks: What was it about my nose? Her questions that follow suggest disbelief often accompanies the discovery that one is being discriminated against. Michael Rosen’s youngster in ‘New School’ can fight or go along with the demeaning jokes of his peers.

And I played along with it
I thought it’d stop them hating me
but all it did
was make it easier for them
to hate all Jews.

The poem makes this reader feel involved in a global hatred forcing a young boy toward an intolerable choice. Discrimination is slick. Its consequences are everywhere. With alarming results authors draw on causal occurrences or objects. In Dannie Abse’s ‘White Balloon’ the poet addresses his love that Auschwitz made me/more of a Jew than Moses, but claims happiness exists. The carnivalesque mood turns to desertion in the line: abandoned for the night,/ the icecream van at Auschwitz. For the night implies joy is brief, while icecream van is a savagely telling image.

Ruth Fainlight uses a similar technique in ‘Archive Film Material’ when a bank of swaying flowers... becomes the turning heads of men/ unloaded from cattle trucks. In a hypersensitive manner, the victim turns humble object into reminders of past terror; individuals are drawn into the macro-history of Jewish suffering.

Jon Silkin adopts a direct style, confronting non-Jewish readers with universal guilt. England’s shown as a site of violence against his ancestors, when massacres in such cities as York preceded the 12th C. Expulsion. Silkin puts forth a polemic that implicates modern citizens in these atrocities. ‘In Coldness’ (from ‘Astringencies’) the writer still claims the citizens/ Indulging in stately pleasures,/...seem cold. And later states: Absence of Jews... – deadens York.

Silkin’s perspective carries overtones that Jewish people survived past persecutions and will overcome others. His didactic style interrogates British society and reveals the Jewish minority’s resilience. Some writers show pre-WW II England as a haven. In A.C. Jacobs’ ‘Immigration’ for a family who struggled to leave Russia, England is interpreted as far enough when Hitler went hunting. The Diaspora stretches to the west. Jewish authors in America have displayed heightened expectation that the new world would be the Promised Land, and voiced extreme disappointment faced with ghettoised poverty. British poets here rarely convey that level of hope and disillusionment. The poems seem to resist idealism. Also they fail to suggest the certainty prevalent in Israeli poetry, exploring the uncertainties implicit in cultural dispersal. Bernard Kops’ poem ‘Diaspora’ epitomises this indeterminacy:

How sad that I have found nowhere,
that I have found no dream,
that I come from nowhere and go nowhere.
This is a land without dream;
an endless landscape.

Endless infers the Promised Land may not be reached. The nihilistic tone reverses the Psalms: How sad that the sea beyond does not lift me,/ nor the hills. Few poets here express a wish to live in Israel or the USA. Sadness can be endured, if extreme disappointment is avoided. Yet the protagonist in ‘The Name’s Progress’ (Daniel Weissbort) wonders if America is preferable as there no one asks if his name is German or Jewish, though it concludes in a tantalising open-ended manner. In the Israeli case, Rosen’s ‘Burglary’ highlights hard feelings apparent in some groups: Anti-Zionist is not Anti-Semitic/ If all the Arab States/ Recognise the Zionist State/We would still oppose it. How such sentiments would strike a West Bank settler, remains unasked. The personae diasporic authors create shy from the polarities of America or the Middle-East, choosing instead to live in this ‘dreamless’ land. Elaine Feinstein’s ‘New Year’ emphasises this position: ...this September [I] hope at least for/perfumes rising from a scrubby hedge/ if not from flowering Birds of Paradise. Writers convey the complexity of Jewishness: the anthology presents a diverse range of strategies to endure and overcome the impact of adverse discrimination.

Most writers express empathy stretching back generations. In ‘Grandmother’ Lotte Kramer describes the linen she wove/ with sun-shy hand still cools/ And calms my face. Appreciation of the value and resilience of customs stimulates the voice of passionate renewal. Richard Burns conveys Jewishness directly in ‘89’ (from ‘The Manager’). The speaker inspects his deceased aunt’s freezer, finding: Boiled gefilte fish. An unsliced hunk of salt beef.... and dried filo pastry; declaring: Come, let us feast together, family and friends... may the Lord make us jewly thankful. Discourse shifts to Hebrew, distancing, whilst underlining the immediacy of ancient traditions.

All the writers are concerned about cultural survival. They protest, but uphold the meaning of Jewish for themselves and their communities. This commitment is presented as sacred, as in Jacob’s ‘In Early Spring’ where the phrase passionate renewal appears. Limburg in ‘Seder Night with My Ancestors’ portrays a dialogue between past and present. She exclaims: ...all I want/ is to live my life. Her ancestors reply: Without us you would have no life. The poem links post Holocaust generations with Jewish origins; implying a holding to this continuum prepares for renewal.

This is the first anthology of Jewish poetry in Britain, the back cover blurb says. As Britain is a multicultural society, the question arises: why specify difference, such as Jewish, why not present culture as coming from a homogeneous community of citizens, isn’t that the basis for building social and cultural acceptance? All policies of melting differences into some kind of conformity end in cruelness. Passionate Renewal is part of a global movement to specify cultural differences, to value and celebrate suppressed minorities. Jewish writers can only do so much; confront innate biases, assert the artistic value of Jewishness. The rest lies with a non-Jewish majority, to accept and welcome, to allow another culture to thrive, to honour the Jewish people’s right to exist, to share in creative interaction. Perhaps, an initial step, in that direction, is to read and accept this book.