The Objectivist poets, a title they reluctantly assumed, led me into deeper research of an era I have previously taken great interest in due to the writings of David Brooks. Raised in Manhattan by two liberal Jewish parents of the bohemian culture, he was educated at a traditional Jewish school in the city and developed a more orthodox ideology as he grew older, and has written at length about the varied subcultures of New York Jews that bore both him and his parents. The same world that greatly influenced the presence of this mostly Jewish group of radical poets–the Objectivists.
Rachel Blau Duplessis, in “Objectivist Poetry and Poetics,” notes Judaism as one of the common threads in Objectivist poetry, though she emphasizes that it isn’t necessarily a religious affiliation, but a cultural one.
Here a religious culture and not a religious affiliation is at issue – not affirmations of cultic particularism but an amalgam of attitudes: skepticism and critical negativity rather than redemptive fulfillment (for Judaism, no Messiah has yet come): utopian hope combined with a “quarrel with God” particularly about social justice; a use of such motifs as exile, exodus, diaspora, nomadism, along with historical debates over assimilation; frankness about anti-Semitism…; a metaphorically “Talmudic” textual intricacy…; and a resistance to the saturated Christianizing of literary culture propelled by T.S. Eliot in this period (92).
Mark Scroggins highlights the tension of the times in “The Objectivist and the Left” saying that Oppen’s poems appear to be plunder through a “shifting experience” of the world in “a search for certainties in a society that seems in terminal crisis” (740). These group of poets rose out of a tumultuos times, which led their their disenfrachisement with culture at large, and the way modernism weigh on literary tradition at the time.
In her book New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise, Beth Wegner writes a social history of this particular culture in New York City. Shelly Tenenbaum’s review offers a helpful summary of the main arguments of Wegner’s book. The book was meant to fill a void in information of this era, which was often undermined by another, more looming collective experience American Jews were facing, which was the treatment of there families back in Europe where Nazi regimes were growing. This looming Holocaust overshadowed a social historical account of the Jewish experience in New York during the Great Depression. This tension in the lives of Jewish youth offers great insight into why the likes of Zukofsky, Reznikkof and Oppen took such radical political stances in their poetry, as they lived within the world of both Great Depression, and antisemitism.
Tennenbaum points first to the diversity of experience at the time. There were many Jewish families, namely those in the wealthy Upper West Side, as well as the Orthodox community across the river in Williamsburg, whose stores of money kept them comfortable during these years of lack. While there were also working class Jews for whom daily survival was a risky endeavor. Many of the Objectivist poets came from working class, immigrant parents and had to fight seemingly treacherous odds to become the educated men and women they did. Wegner writes that this disparity “changed the way that Jewish youth approached the future” (Wegner 72) because they so desired to surpass their parents status–the very men and women who made up the “working-class Jewish neighborhoods [that] gave life to a wellspring of grassroots political activity” (Tennebaum).
The Objectivists were primed for the small, and brief uprising that they led, and this profile of Jewish life in New York during the Depression highlights the many reasons they had to take the radical political and social stances that they did. Brooks, the author whose work initially interested me in this topic, is tied to the Objectivists by being raised in Manhattan in the 60’s when the Objectivist movement resurfaced and his parents were there at the center, burning their wallets. Though Brooks’ views oppose his parents’, his thoughtful building of his own beliefs carries on this same tradition we see from the Objectivists–to ask questions of what is deemed normal or mainstream; to tip culture on its head.
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