Contemporary Jewish-American Women's Poetry: Marge Piercy and Jacqueline Osherow. - Review - book review

Judaism, Spring, 2001 by Steven P. Schneider

THE RECENT PUBLICATION OF TWO NEW COLLECTIONS of poetry, one by Marge Piercy and the other by Jacqueline Osherow, suggests that being a woman, a Jew, and an American poet is possible, however complexly intertwined these competing identities may be. Marge Piercy's The Art of Blessing the Day andJacqueline Osherow's Dead Men's Praise suggest in each volume's title an engagement withJewish tradition and culture. Piercy's title, of course, derives from theJewish custom of reciting blessings for nearly every occasion (preferably 100 per day), and Osherow's title is a reference to Psalm 115 and its famous verse "Neither the dead can praise God / nor any who descend into silence." That their work should converge in this way is particularly interesting because these two poets represent two different generations in American poetry, and each writer has come to her Jewishness in very different ways.

Marge Piercy is a prolific writer who has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and fiction. She may be best known for her novels Braided Lives and Vida. Although she has written many volumes of poetry, The Art ofBlessing theDayis the first devoted exclusively to Jewish subject matter and Jewish themes. While several of the poems in this collection were first published in earlier volumes, The Art of Blessing the Day marks a conscious effort by Piercy to make a unified poetic statement about what "Jewishness" means to her.

Jacqueline Osherow, on the other hand, has made "Jewishness" central to all four of her collections of verse. One of her obsessions is the Holocaust, and some of her best known work includes "Conversations with Survivors" and "My Cousin Abe, Paul Antschel and Paul Celan," poems that address Osherow's own post-Holocaust consciousness. "For my generation," she says, "those born in the aftermath of the war--the horror is a fact of life. Indeed, it defined the world to us. It is as a testament to this predicament that I wish these poems to stand."

Piercy, like other Jewish-American women poets born between 1929 and 1939, has long been interested in political concerns important to other women poets of her generation: feminism, environmentalism, and racism. These issues are addressed in work by several members of Piercy's generation, including Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), Eleanor Wilner (b. 1937), and Alicia Ostriker (b. 1937).

All four of these poets are especially concerned with female identity, and each works out their own distinctive strategies in shaping aJewish female identity. Rich, born in Baltimore to a Jewish father and a Protestant-born mother, writes of herself in an early poem that she was "split at the root, neither Gentile orJew." Despite feeling this split, a topic she addresses in depth in an essay entitled "Split at the Root," Rich has written many poems concerned with Jewish historical experience linked to her own sense of marginalization as a woman, as a poet, and as a Jew. Both Wilner and Ostriker have been acutely interested in midrash and use their poetry to create reinterpretations of traditional Biblical stories where women's voices have been muted or omitted. Thus, we find in their work poems like Wilner's "Sarah" and Ostriker's "The Opinion of Hagar" that retell Genesis stories from a strong female, and oftentimes subversive, point of view. A good source for a sampling of all these poets' work is Steven Rubin's recently published anthology Telling and Remembering.

Piercy, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit, was influenced as a child by the stories told to her by her grandmother Hannah, who grew up in a Lithuanian shtetl. Many of the poems in The Art of Blessing the Day are autobiographical and recall the poet's memories of her mother and grandmother. Piercy's work is also influenced by her working class roots, and her social consciousness was informed in part by her maternal grandfather, a union organizer murdered while organizing bakery workers.

Osherow's generation of Jewish-American women poets shares many of the social and political concerns of their predecessors. Poets of her generation, like Robin Becker (b. 1951) and Marcia Falk (b. 1946), also make Jewish female identity central to their work. Becker, like Rich, writes from a lesbian-feminist orientation. And Falk, like Wilner and Ostriker, is inspired to create new midrashim, poetic commentaries on female figures in traditionalJewish texts. Her poem, "Shulamit in Her Dreams," is devoted to the primary female figure in the Song of Songs, which Falk herself has notably translated. Like these other poets, her own poems reflect a commitment to bothJudaism and feminism.

Osherow, however, diverges in significant ways from both these generations of Jewish-American women poets. Unlike them, she often writes in formal verse forms. Many of her most recent poems are written in terza rima, an elaborate three-lined rhyming stanza that derives from Dante. Osherow also frequently writes sonnets, blankverse narratives, and even ghazals, an intricately rhyming form that originated in Iran. Her interest in poetic form may in part be influenced by a resurgence of formal concern by American poets at the end of the twentieth century. Also, while Osherow is interested in Jewish female identity, she does not write as explicitly about this in her work as these other poets. While concerned with antisemitism and its tragic consequences, she is less overtly political. Moreover, Osherow grew up in a traditionally observant Jewish household and as a child was well-versed in the Hebrew language, whereas Piercy acknowledges she did not learn Hebrew until the age of 50.