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Blessed Mythmaker: The Poetry of Hyam Plutzik [final]

Eric J. Sundquist

Let me begin with an aggadah of Hyam Plutzik—more specifically, with his poem “An

Agadah of Hyam ben Samuel,” which names him, according to tradition, the son of his father,

Samuel. The poem explicates its opening text: “It is the function of a match to be scraped against roughness, / To flare to fire, and to become ashes.” In mythic time when matches could speak, a match complained about such rough justice, wondering why the tribe of matches could not live safely in their matchbox “in comfort and amity.” Like the Lord speaking to Job out of a whirlwind, a gigantic voice looming over the match workshop replies: “Both the beauty and utility of a match / Are in their burning.” We might want to style this a parable or a legend, but in choosing aggadah, a mutable form of interpretive “telling” differentiated from halachah, the immutable “Law,” Plutzik returns us to its origins in the Talmudic texts and midrash, as well as non-canonical pseudepigrapha, produced in the centuries following the twin catastrophes of the

Jewish War of 68-70 CE and not many decades later the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt, which effectively ended Jewish national history in ancient times. With the Temple and its rituals gone, sacrifice and religious practices centered on Jerusalem were replaced by prayer, study, and textual interpretation marked by multiple, often highly inventive, readings, as well as fluid timeframes, such that patriarchs, prophets, and rabbis sometimes appear to inhabit the same worlds. Through collective acts of “exegetical imagination,” to cite Michael Fishbane,1 the sages !2 and other commentators created a mytho-poetic web of writing that laid a foundation for diasporic religious life.

We know from Plutzik’s quotations in several poems that he consulted contemporary texts such as En Jacob: Agada of the Babylonian Talmud,2 a medieval work by Jacob Ibn Chabib translated into English by S. H. Glick in 1916, and it is likely that he would have been familiar with the monumental Hebrew anthology Sefer Ha-Aggadah, edited in 1908-11 by Hyam Nahman

Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitsky.3 Whether or not Plutzik meant to establish a dialogue with such works, through both explicit citation and embedded allusion he called attention to the role of the modern Jewish poet as an heir to this rabbinical tradition—not least because the catastrophic watershed events that drove the Jewish people into a nearly 2000-year exile had, in his day, come full circle, so to say, with the Holocaust and Israeli statehood.

The parable of the match in “An Agadah of Hyam ben Samuel” invites several interpretations. It could refer simply to the brevity of life; or to our desire for sudden illumination; or to a poet’s burning into brilliance and then being forgotten. But these options are secondary to the poem’s historical trajectory. Here we have in miniature the story of the

Jews, reaching from the match of Creation struck by God, variously figured in scripture and commentary as “light,” “fire,” “flame,” “radiance,” and “sparks,” to the twentieth-century genocide of the European Jews. Along the course of that story God’s chosen people had many occasions to experience His4 rough justice—the barely sustainable burden of His covenant; His repeated chastisement through punishment and exile; His averted face and terrifying silence; His seeming refusal to let them live in comfort and amity among other nations—while at the same !3 time they believed their “utility” in God’s eyes and the “beauty” of life lived in His care were sacred.

We do not need a particular point of reference to determine that “An Agadah of Hyam ben Samuel” is a post-Holocaust poem. Putting the question this way, however, alerts us to the important fact that Hyam Plutzik, his life cut short in 1962, wrote his poetry before the word

“Holocaust” had come into common use and therefore before arguments about the etymological implications of “wholly burnt”5 had arisen. In the 1960 “Plan for Work” he provided when applying for a fellowship to support an intended long poem on the subject, he, like many others in his day, spoke of “the massacre of six million Jews by Hitler.” 6 He did, however, write in an era in which the question of Jewish resistance was much debated. These debates are not

Plutzik’s principal concern in the poem, but it seems he was inspired by “Blessed Is the Match,” the last poem written by Hannah Szenes, a Mandate Palestine paratrooper dropped by the British into Yugoslavia to rescue Hungarian Jews before she was captured, tortured, and executed for her crimes against the Third Reich. The line that opens and closes Szenes’s short poem, which provided the title of Marie Syrkin’s 1947 biography, subtitled The Story of Jewish Resistance, reads: “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.”7

With Szenes’s poem in mind, we might place “An Agadah of Hyam ben Samuel” in the centuries-long tradition of Jewish poems and songs addressing Kiddush Hashem (the martyr’s

“Sanctification of the Name”), from the Book of Lamentations through medieval piyyut and on to Shoah-era works such as Yitzhak Katzenelson’s “Song of the Murdered Jewish People.” At the same time, however, the poem’s comic dimension allies it with the Yiddish humor of someone like Scholem Aleichem, just as its lesson that only when it is struck does the match !4 produce “beauty” makes it one of Plutzik’s many studies in ars poetica. But this “beauty” is often severe, as we are reminded in the poem “Exhortation to the Artists,” which is prefaced by a

Talmudic exchange about the beauty, as well as the fragility, of the human form between the ailing Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Jochanan, who visits him and asks why he is weeping: “‘I weep,’ said Rabbi Elazar to him, ‘for the beauty which will decay in the earth.’ ‘For that indeed,’ Rabbi

Jochanan said, ‘you ought to weep,’ and both wept.’” Whereas the passage in Tractate Berakhot

(5b) from which Plutzik excerpts his epigraph deals more generally with suffering and chastisement, including the lesson that acceptance of suffering in this world may bring reward in the world to come,8 the poem offers no such consolation. Love, friendship, faith, knowledge, and no doubt art as well—all will fall before the demanding, impersonal judgment of an unnamed deity:

He crushes the sparrow fallen among the rocks;

The hunter is trapped with his quarry: the man and the fox—

Even the little mouse on the hill.

I.

Although Hyam Plutzik wrote a number of poems with biblical or rabbinical dimensions, he is best thought of as an American modernist accomplished in the arts of lyric and narrative poetry who often drew simultaneously on two distinct traditions: the classic works of the

Western canon, including its mythological resources, mainly Greek but also Egyptian, !5

Babylonian, Norse, and others; and the classic works of the Jewish canon that begins with the

Hebrew Bible, whose stories, he once said, “are the greatest and most powerful myths.”9 At times, his Jewishness is inseparable from his craft, as in his translation of the Sabbath song

“L’Cho Dodi” (Lekhah Dodi, “Come My Beloved”). At other times, it is less direct, as in “Next

Time I Shall Not Burn the Beehive,” in which first the gassing and then the immolation of a hive of bees evoke the Shoah. We can see his inspiration by dual traditions in small details such as his attention to the linguistic bifurcation in the Canaanite root Adon that, gives us, on the one hand, the Greek god Adonis, an important figure of death and renewal in his poetry, as in his

Whitmanesque poem “A Sprig of Lilac,”10 and, on the other, Adonai, the majestic plural signifying “Lord” that takes the place of the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) when the Ineffable Name cannot be uttered. Familiar as he would have been with the Talmudic formula “our masters said” or “our masters taught,” Plutzik likewise surely had this dual heritage in mind when he composed his own version of the traditional hymn “El Adon Al Kol,” rendered in a familiar text of his day as “The Lord Is Master over All His Works,”11 and when he titled one of his several tributes to the greatest of English authors “The Dream about Our Master, William Shakespeare.”

The duality appears on a larger scale in the rather elliptical titles of his first published volumes, Aspects of Proteus and Apples from Shinar. The first derives from the shape-shifting god of The Odyssey,12 though Plutzik would also have recognized Proteus’s role in Milton,

Shakespeare, Wordsworth,13 and Joyce, among others. As he wrote in a 1958 letter to fellow poet Donald Hall, he had considered using the title Poses of Proteus, which he thought might clarify that he was referring not to himself but to the world14—or at least to our “modern consciousness” of it, as he argued in an unpublished lecture titled “The Protean Universe.”15 In !6 that same lecture he alluded to Joseph Campbell’s widely influential The Hero with a Thousand

Faces (“the world is the man with a thousand faces,” said Plutzik), and so he would have been familiar as well with Campbell’s characterization of Proteus as a “wily god” who stands for mythology itself and “never discloses even to the skillful questioner the whole content of his wisdom”16—a figure surely appealing for a poet who devoted so much attention to forms of knowledge that were elusive or occult.

About Apples from Shinar Plutzik said in the letter to Hall that “the plain of Shinar was where the garden of Eden was located, and the apple eaten,” an assessment based not on the

Bible, where Shinar is repeatedly associated with Babylonia and not identified as the location of

Eden, but apparently on Christian iconography and vernacular wisdom about the fateful fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.17 Given Plutzik’s interest in Greek myth, however, we must likewise bear in mind two Greek gods in particular: Tantalus, one of his early favorites, who when

Odysseus encounters him in the Kingdom of the Dead is stranded forever in a pool of water from which he cannot drink, beneath overhanging fruit he is unable to grasp on “apple trees glowing red”;18 and Heracles, whose twelve labors include stealing golden apples from the Garden of the

Hesperides—in one version of the story he must first learn the location from the Old Man of the

Sea, known otherwise as Proteus—not to mention, in that same garden, the golden apple of discord that Paris, choosing among three beautiful women, awards to Aphrodite, who appears, along with Adonis, in several of Plutzik’s poems, most complexly in “The Priest Ekranath.”19 It was a different war, moreover, that Plutzik had in mind when he included the apple of America’s original sin in “To Abraham Lincoln, that He Walk by Day,” which ends with an allusion to

Billie Holiday’s famous 1939 lynching song, Strange Fruit: “Are we not already rotten? is not !7 the fruit falling already?”20 In the figure of the apple, then, Plutzik found a symbol that was itself protean, drawn from many sources but all loosely referring to things mystical and ungraspable, to pristine innocence lost, to what is forbidden or shameful.

Without discounting the skepticism signaled in his self-description as “The Unblessed

Mythmaker,” the title that Plutzik, before his death, was contemplating for a new collection, I would suggest that he wrote almost always in conscious reflection on both the blessings and the inescapable hazards of this double heritage. In the remarkable letter about the poet’s vocation he sent to his former Trinity College teacher, Odell Shepard, later published as Letter from a Young

Poet, Plutzik confessed that he found it “an awesome thing to be a Jew and to know that one is hated by so many of one’s fellowmen.”21 We see this exemplified in “Portrait,” a painful poem about the costs of Jewish assimilation. Wearing an “ill-fitting garment,” the “Greek shirt” that the poem reveals to be the poisoned shirt of Nessus,22 the young poet tries, without success, “To ignore the monster, the mountain— / A few thousand years of history.” Yet just as the monster of antisemitism is countered by what Jews have been given by the mountain, the Law delivered on

Mount Sinai—and note that the poem gives us the two figures not in opposition but, inseparably, in apposition—so too he found that same shirt of Nessus in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which invokes the “intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove.”23 If the Greek shirt was common cultural property, however, Plutzik was right to lament in his rebuke of Eliot’s antisemitism, “For T. S. E. Only,” that not all gentile writers were prepared to recognize the equal significance of his mythological property.

The title Apples from Shinar, in this regard, is not just elliptical but provocative. Shinar appears eight times in the Hebrew Bible,24 among them as the home of King Nebuchadnezzar, !8 who destroys the First Temple and carries Israel “into the land of Shinar to the house of his god” (Daniel 1:2). Most famously, of course, it is the setting for the story in Genesis 11 when the whole earth’s people, speaking the same language, migrate to a plain in the land of Shinar, where they build a city featuring a tower “with its top in heaven” to make a name for themselves lest they be “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth”—which, of course, is precisely the punishment the Lord inflicts upon them for their hubris in building The Tower of Babel. In doing so He also decides to “confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”25 After the dispersion of the Israelite people and the fracturing of Hebrew into alien tongues, the enumeration of the tribes of Noah resumes, concluding with the onset of

Abram’s trek toward the land of Canaan and the opening of Genesis 12 with the great drama of

Lekh Lekha, the Lord saying to the man who will become the patriarch Abraham:

Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show

you.

I will make you a great nation,

And I will bless you;

I shall make your name great,

And you shall be a blessing.

The biblical dialectic of punishment and renewal, to be repeated many times over, like the rise and fall of nations and their mythologies, or the seasonal cycles of the earth below and the !9 heavens above, all of them woven together—these are the wellsprings of Hyam Plutzik’s poetry.

In an early poem on the writer’s craft entitled “He Inspects His Armory” the gods of mythology seem dead,26 yet they are everywhere present throughout his work, whether as mythic actors or as the names of constellations in poems such as “A Letter to Someone at Mt. Palomar” and “God and My Father.” Nor was the Hebrew God dead. Unobservant though he may have been,

Plutzik wrote of Jews as exponents of their own rich mythology in which God, however inscrutable, was hardly less alive than He was for the prophets and rabbis. This will be my focus, but it is first necessary to give some sense of how Plutzik’s Jewish themes are inflected by his mode of lyric modernism and his attention to the classic works of Western thought and literature.

II.

Plutzik’s was a “mind attempting to reach out of itself into the heart of things,” as he said in Letter from a Young Poet, where he also characterized himself as “by nature a mystic,” condemned to use an inadequate language of analogy and abstraction to probe ineffable realms:

“what is the self that I am and who are the selves that I talk to? Are we nodes of consciousness in a larger infinite nebula of consciousness?”27 We feel here the significance of Plutzik’s odd unpublished poem “The Strange Case of Professor Renlow,” in which he quotes the shade of

Ulysses speaking in Dante’s Inferno of his fatal voyage to the edge of the known universe: “We were not meant to vegetate like beasts / But to follow virtue and knowledge always.”28 Plutzik drew on protean mythologies that often included the scientific discourses of his day, most !10 notably, perhaps, in those poems concerned with the enigma of time, which on more than one occasion takes the form of a coiled, serpentine figure. Such a figure may refer simply to everyday temporality, as in “The Symposium,” where the clock of life “is wound, projecting a sum of moments / Within its coils.” In “A Letter to Someone at Mt. Palomar,” however, the metaphoric equivalence between the astronomical observatory and a human skull suggests temporal dimensions wherein the universe of which we are a part also exists deep within us.

Cited in the unpublished lecture mentioned above as an illustration of the “protean universe,” the poem is a variation on “the nebula of consciousness,” with the uncoiling of human time in this case subsumed in a cosmological drama akin to the hermetic figure of the snake eating its own tail.29

That Plutzik’s sense of craft and vocation is everywhere bound up in the coils of time we may see in the early poem “An Equation,” which appears with a forbidding mathematical epigraph: “For instance: y– xa + mx2(a2 + 1) = 0.” (I cannot pretend to explain this equation, but as I suggest below we might parse it by means of several other poems.) The sixteen-line poem is a stretched sonnet in free verse in which we hear echoes of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian

Urn” and Yeats’s “Among School Children.”30 The title asks first of all that we notice a kind of equation between the first two parts of the poem. In the octet a coiled serpent made of hammered metal

. . . holds

Its implacable strict pose, under a light !11

Like marble . . .

apparently an artistic object, like Keats’s urn, that exists in a realm where “the rat of time /

Cannot gnaw” its form “nor event touch it with age.” In the sestet the serpent

. . . unwinds slowly, altering

Deliberate the great convolutions, a dancer,

A mime on the brilliant stage . . .

before shedding its skin and once again assuming the form of a statue. Perhaps this serpent is derived from the Egyptian goddess Wadjet, often depicted as a rearing cobra in a headdress

(Uraeus) signifying royal power in funerary art and elsewhere.31 But we may likewise find here an allusion to the “serpent of brass” that Moses makes an icon of faith before the “children of

Israel” turn it into a cult object.32 The poem resists such religious symbolism, however, and its last two lines— “It [the serpent] will not acknowledge the incense on your altars, / Nor hear at night in your room the weeping. . . .”—appear to disavow both the trappings of Temple worship and mourning for that Temple’s destruction.

The serpent’s seemingly implacable resistance to allegorical usage is further complicated by its emergence out of a paradox that is at once cosmological and theological: “Before it was, it existed, creating the mind / Which created it, out of itself.” Like the main parts of the sonnet, the !12 paradox of creation appears to cancel itself out, resulting, as in the epigraphic equation, in

“zero.” This lesson about genesis is elaborated in “The Zero that Is All,” where an acorn gives birth to “a forest / Of oaks that have no horizon,” a “still white egg” produces “the cackle of a universe of chickens,” and an abstraction referred to simply as “the Good,” probably borrowed from Plato’s Republic,33 is said to contain within itself all lesser mundane things, including the

“strangely planed / Creatures of eyesight and the sentient bones” known as human beings. The conclusion of the poem points to a temporal conundrum in which mythological time, evolutionary time, and cosmological time coexist in a tangled web:

And still it is hot noon on the sea Tethys

Where the protoplasmic slime begets Aphrodite34

Whose belly is history till the moon falls

And the last spore flames like Andromeda.35

To peer into the universe, to look into its unfathomable womb, is to go back in time and see the flaming constellations observed not only by ancient Egyptians and Greeks, but also by ancient Hebrews, whose sky-gazing and mythmaking was inflected by their own understanding of Creation. Unwilling to slight the stories of his childhood, Plutzik often resembles the poet in

“George Hobbs,” who, like Ahab striking through the pasteboard mask in Moby-Dick (“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks . . . If man will strike, strike through the mask!”36), seeks the secret under “each root” of the trees in his mythic garden: !13

I will strike to the living truth:

What is hidden, waiting for me—

The seed of another tree,

The farthest mystical father.

“Bereshit, begins the Hebrew Bible: “In the beginning.” But before the beginning? Theories of the pre-mundane and the nature of Creation could occupy us for some time, but note here only that Plutzik’s paradox is comparable to the Kabbalistic view that because God is infinite and without beginning, and thus, as Gershom Scholem puts it, “dwells in the depths of nothingness,”

Creation must have emerged from Nothing in an unfathomable action of the Divine Will that can only be hinted at through self-reflexive parables.37 It is unlikely that Plutzik thought deeply about Kabbalah, but the view of Creation expressed in “An Equation” finds resonance in the darker version dramatized in “Of Objects Considered as Fortresses in Baleful Space,” which erases the difference between the speaking “I” and his “brothers,” an oak tree and a stone, all such things existing as islands “Upon a plain of nothing” (a refrain twice repeated), “Emergent out of nothing,” and “Await[ing] the will of nothing.” The poem may count in the annals of mid- twentieth-century existentialism, but more to the point it elucidates Plutzik’s belief that by virtue of Einsteinian physics “matter has become nothingness,”38 while it also echoes Job (26:7), where

God, peering down into “naked” Sheol, the underworld of the dead, is said to “hangeth the earth over nothingness.” !14

If being emergent out of nothingness accounts for the paradox of the “grave serpent” in

“An Equation,”39 its diabolism is held in check by the poem’s sinuous aesthetic action and its classical form. But Plutzik was less interested in God as a hidden cause than as a tragic actor, and just as there is no serpent in his poetry that does not issue to some degree from the Book of

Genesis, so there is always the vexing nature of the “mystical father” to be taken into account. In the poem “Commentary, “ for example, he begins from what seem traditional points of rabbinical pedagogy. The title itself derives from the famous lesson of Hillel, who instructed a would-be

Talmud student: “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn it.”40 Preceding the poem is a no less conventional aggadah about the High Priest Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha41 drawn from Tractate

Berakhot (7a):

Once, when I entered the Holy of Holies to burn the incense, I saw the Lord of all Hosts

sitting on a high and exalted throne, and He said to me: “Ishmael, my son, bless me.”

In the poem, however, the Lord of all Hosts appears without anthropomorphic form as an abstraction called the “Enthroned Will.” Once, the poem tells us, this God had rivals in the

Egyptian deity Ammon and the Greek Zeus, but now he sits alone in his great palace watching over all that is evanescent—the “breath of the violet,” “Helen’s face,” “the gay moment the sun / touches the street . . . where children play.” As though a prisoner of perpetual ravaging, this god spends eternity at a single task: “to shape and reshape forever the crumbling substance . . . the !15 figurines / wasting in air . . . the dust, the dust.” These phrases are scattered through the delicately evanescent poem and framed by virtually identical stanzas about Time’s ceaseless assault on the deity’s empire:

O he is lonely in the pale of the palace—

The Enthroned Will, whose fingers must ever shore

The pitiful islands against the destroyer of all.

The “Enthroned Will” of “Commentary” seems to have little to do with God’s will as it is figured, for instance, in the Kaddish (“Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will”) or this midrash: “When Israel do the will of the Omnipresent, then His name is magnified in the world . . . and whenever they do not do

His will, His name is profaned in the world.”42 Rather, it has more in common with the pseudo-

Freudian death drive in Plutzik’s poem “The Geese,” where “the screaming that comes from nowhere” portends “the will toward destiny, which is death,” or the force animating the ominous figure in “The Milkman.” His reiterated promise of milk and honey43 transmuted into opaque menace, this God stalks a wintry landscape “translating will to energy,” empowered, like the

Golems of folklore, by one of the secret names of God:44 “You are the thief of the secret flame, /

The forbidden bread, the terrible Name.”

Enemies of God’s Will, not separate from but integral to it, like His fallen angels, appear for Plutzik in many forms of negation: the ravages of time, decay, and death; the dark forces !16 discovered by modern physics, psychology, and anthropology, all of which take part in what he called the “trip to the underworld” taken through discovery of an unconscious where identity is

“uncertain and shifting,” even “demonic”; 45 and at times, as in the final lines of “The Devil with the Minus Sign in His Right Hand,” fully personified as Satan himself: “But what black thing wings from the lower quadrant? / See where he nears, breaking the timeless bliss!”46 (As in “An

Equation,” “The Zero That Is All,” and other poems that call on a mathematical substrate, the figure of the “lower quadrant” implies not only an underworld but more specifically a Cartesian coordinate plane, which has zero at its center.) Plutzik’s parables of Creation and its negation may have derived from the Orthodox Judaism of his childhood, but he also wrote as someone who had witnessed the catastrophe that engulfed the Jews of Europe. “The barbarian arises in every age” and must be met with “cold steel,” Plutzik wrote of Nazi Germany in Letter from a

Young Poet,47 where he also depicted the Axis powers as the Camorra, a legendary Italian crime syndicate who later appear in the poem named for them as fallen angels who “plotted this before

Adam was born, / To track us like hounds till we falter at last and fall.”48 In a journal entry of

June 5, 1944, the eve of D-Day, Plutzik was more succinct, bluntly identifying Hitler as “the evil one.”49 Both immediately before the war and decidedly after it, in short, he wrote with a sense of evil rooted in tradition but now manifest in a contemporary world of totalitarian rule, radical antisemitism, and genocide.

III. !17

Let us therefore return to the scene of Creation seen from another point of view. “The

Begetting of Cain” opens with what seems a conventional account of the Fall:

Longing at twilight the lovesick Adam saw

The belly of Eve upon the golden straw

Of Paradise, under the limb of the Tree.

He thought that none was near, but there were three . . .

Yet the third party in the poem is not the serpent but rather a “creature of pointed ear, / Of the cleft hoof and the tight-mouthed sneer” who, in Plutzik’s depiction, catches Adam and paradise itself in a net of evil. “All were engulfed . . .

by the quenchless mind

Roaming insatiate on the lowland, blind

In its lonely hunger, lusting to make all things

One with itself.

The poem makes no mention of forbidden fruit or a serpent, not does it place blame for the Fall on Eve. Because Satan in the Hebrew Bible appears not as the incarnation of evil but rather as an “adversary” or “accuser,”50 and because the identification of the serpent with Satan as the !18 devil belongs not to Genesis but to the New Testament,51 Plutzik’s Satan stands outside the

Hebrew Bible’s account. The “flutter of wings” that accompanies his “mastery,” though it takes a side glance at Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” identifies him as a fallen angel—specifically as

Samael, who in rabbinical tradition refuses to bow down to God or, out of jealousy of God’s creation of the world, determines to avenge himself by seducing—or to be more exact, by raping

—Eve. According to this mythology, which takes various forms, Samael comes to Eve riding on the serpent, and whereas Adam is the father of Abel (and later of Seth), it is Samael who is the father of Cain, made in his image, not God’s or Adam’s.52

Out of the belly of Eve, in contrast to Aphrodite in “The Zero that Is All,” thus springs evil to come. “From Cain arose and were descended all the generations of the wicked, who rebel and sin,” in the words of Rabbi Eliezer.53 This tradition of the seed of Cain descending through

Israel’s enemies—Amalek, Esau, Edom, Rome, and so on—leads at length to Nazism, as in the

German émigré artist George Grosz’s 1944 painting Cain, or Hitler in Hell, where a giant ogre- like Cain sits amid a heap of skeletons. Cain’s lineage also appears in somewhat disguised form in other Plutzik poems, for instance, “Elaboration on a Phrase of Rabelais,” where Plutzik follows Rabelais in comically depicting his birthplace, Chinon, as the oldest city in the world, the city founded by Cain,54 or in “The Mythos of the Man from Enoch,” which refers not to the

Enoch descended from Seth, whose line, continuing through the generations of Noah, is associated with worship of the true God,55 but instead with Enoch the son of Cain, whose progeny are associated in post-biblical literature with evil, violence, and corruption. As “a great leader of men into wicked courses,” writes Josephus,56 Cain brought division and greed, guile !19 and calculation, into the world by building a walled city named for Enoch, and it is safe to surmise that this tradition played a role in a number of Plutzik’s poems.57

Cain and his descendants, that is to say, are not ancillary to Jewish history but essential to it, from Creation down to modern times. By the same token, Plutzik’s depiction of the Allies’ war against Hitler does not dwell on Amalek. Although we will never know what his unwritten long Holocaust poem might have included, it was intended, he wrote, “not to be primarily about

Jews,” let alone “a cry for vengeance,” but an “exploration of the areas of evil in the human heart

. . . so that men, all men, may always be aware of, and on guard against, their extraordinary capacities for evil.”58 Indeed, in Plutzik’s view, war casts its own net of evil from which no nation or individual combatant, however just their cause, is immune. Thus, “Hiroshima” questions the moral comfort of those distant from the dropping of the bombs but nonetheless implicated in it, and “Bomber Base” asks about the responsibility of those, like Plutzik himself, who armed the machines of destruction:

Hoist up the bombs carefully into the belly

Of this great monster and do not look too closely

At the work of your hands as you thread the fuse . . .

A different kind of conciliatory spirit may be inferred in other poems, written just a few years after the war, that adopt a more distant, more contemplative stance. From the perspective of “The Airman Who Flew over Shakespeare’s England,” inspired by Plutzik’s own postwar !20 flight over defeated Germany, the English landscape is now a pastoral composition of hayricks, woodlands, steeples, and pilgrims among “thrones of thatch ruling a yellow kingdom / Of barley.” “The Old War,” a mellow short poem with a lilting rhythm likewise circles around a few simple images summarized in the opening and closing stanzas:

No one cared for the iron sparrow

That fell from the sky that quiet day

With no bird’s voice, a mad beast’s bellow. . . .

Home again to the barley-mother—

Ten good sons, pilot and gunner,

Radioman and bombardier.

The apparent oblivion of those on the ground may owe something to Plutzik’s further observation in his journal entry on the eve of D-Day where, after he described the work of loading bombs, he noticed in the background “a farmer harrowing an adjacent field behind a plodding horse,” but the poem also circumspectly recalls, in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the farmer who “May / Have heard the splash of” Icarus plunging into the sea, though “for him it was not an important failure.”59 In any event, the deaths of the ten-man crew of a B-24 bomber !21 brought to earth somewhere in the theater of war now belong, not many years later, to a fading event—“the old war.”

The poem’s elegiac mood is deepened in the image of the “barley-mother,” which can be traced back to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the goddess of agricultural fertility, but which comes more immediately from The Golden Bough where, like the corn-mother, rye-mother, rice- mother, and comparable mythic guardians, she is represented symbolically as the last sheaf harvested, thus placing the fate of the bomber crew within a ritual cycle of death and renewal.60

For Plutzik, however, such folklore was everywhere rivaled by Hebrew traditions of equal consequence. It is probable, then, that “The Old War” also alludes to a fertility ritual predating the relative modernity of Frazer’s mythology, that of counting the omer (“measure”), the sheafs of barley harvested for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, during the fifty days between Passover and Shavuot, as described in Leviticus 23.61 We should add that the text that inspired “After

Looking into a Book Belonging to My Great-Grandfather, Eli Eliakim Plutzik,” devoted to the travails of Plutzik’s Jewish ancestors in nineteenth-century Russia, nearly anonymous and unmemorialized in “speechless graves,” is Tikkun Leil Shavuot, a compendium of passages from the Bible, the Mishnah, and other rabbinic commentary read by the observant in all-night study on Shavuot.62 In rabbinical tradition, Shavuot came over time to commemorate the giving of the

Law on Mount Sinai,63 but it was customarily also a time for mourning past anti-Jewish violence and martyrdom. It is also notable that although few, if any, of the ten-man bomber crew were likely to have been Jewish, their number makes the minyan required to say Kaddish, and in this way, too, Plutzik’s elegy suggests that mourning the dead is ameliorated by the prospect of new life to come. !22

It may seem that I have ventured far afield in my reading of this poem, but I am convinced that Hyam Pluzik’s view of the war, including the Shoah, cannot be appreciated without reference to a biblical and liturgical framework he takes for granted. Another seemingly elegiac poem, “The Miracle,” provides a further illustration. A postwar meditation beginning in the third person and modulating into the first, the poem is spoken in the voice of a soldier bathing in the “mild waters of Betterton” at the “firing of the sunset gun,” the time when the flag is lowered. Betterton is a resort town on the Chesapeake Bay where Plutzik camped during training exercises while stationed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground prior to shipping overseas.64

Now, however, the war has ended. Although a return to the normal rhythms of life is not yet complete, the soldier, hearing a gull “crying across the bay / On that day and another day,” emerges midway as the poem’s first-person speaker whose words and consciousness carry through to the end of the poem.

The soldier heard and hears that cry

To the running moment: Stay! Stay!

Over the valley of Ajalon! . . .

O and the one who cried was I.

War is done and that time is done,

But nothing changes at Betterton. !23

Much is lost but a strange thing won.

The miracle announced in the poem’s title takes off from the italicized lines, Stay! Stay! / Over the valley of Ajalon!, which paraphrase an instance of God’s miraculous intervention when

Joshua does battle with a coalition of Amorite kings (Joshua 10:11-14). First God rains “huge stones on them from the sky” and then, by making the sun stand still, He lengthens the daylight hours so that the conquest of Gibeon can be secured:

Then spoke Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before

the children of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel:

“Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon;

And thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.”

And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed,

Until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies.

. . . And the sun stayed in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole

day. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the

voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel.

By this account, the miracle surpasses even the parting of the Sea of Reeds, when Moses likewise assures the people that “the Lord will fight for you” (Exodus 14:14).65 Joshua is given !24 to us as a skilled military commander, perhaps the greatest in the Bible, and yet victory at nearly every turn in his campaign requires divine intervention: Joshua commands the sun to stand still, but in doing so he speaks not to the sun but to the Lord. For a Jewish poet and war veteran writing in the wake of World War II, the potential role of God in the Allied military victory was sure to be of paramount interest. But before considering the strange final lines of “The Miracle,” let us look at another postwar poem featuring the role of Joshua, “The King of Ai.”

In Exodus (17:8-14, 16) Joshua is counseled to do battle with Amalek, the shadowy archetypal enemy who first rises up against the Israelites during the journey out of Egypt and is subsequently named some half dozen times, perhaps most prominently in the Book of Esther in the person of the villain Haman who plots to exterminate the Jews but instead is hanged for his crimes, a victory celebrated on Purim. In Plutzik’s day, of course, it was Hitler, frequently compared by Jews to Amalek and Haman, who once again brought to the fore the admonition in

Deuteronomy (25: 17-19): “Remember what Amalek did unto thee . . . thou shalt not forget,” which reiterates the Lord’s paradoxical instruction to Moses when the Amalekites are defeated in

Exodus (17: 8-15): “Write this for a memorial in the book and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.”

With the Ark of the Covenant leading the way, Joshua, not Moses, leads the Israelites into the Promised Land. Insofar as archeological evidence does not give much historical credence to the Book of Joshua and the later Philistines seem more formidable opponents,66 the scripture should be read in ideological or mythic terms as a story of conquest, displacement, and settlement, justifying Jacob L. Wright’s suggestion that the Bible may be understood as a type of

“war memorial.”67 The devastation of Ai follows fast on that of Jericho, in which we find the first !25 instance of God’s intervention of behalf of Israel when the blasting of horns and shouting are enough to bring down the walls and expose the city to the destruction that ensues (Joshua 6:21).

A comparable slaughter, set forth in more detail, befalls the inhabitants of Ai (in Hebrew, ha-ʿAy,

“the ruin”),68 likewise put to the sword before the city is razed and its 12,000 inhabitants “utterly destroyed” (Joshua 8:26-9):

So Joshua burnt Ai, and made it a heap for ever, even a desolation, unto this day. And the

king of Ai he hanged on a tree until the eventide; and at the going down of the sun Joshua

commanded, and they took his carcass down from the tree, and cast it at the entrance of

the gate of the city, and raised thereon a great heap of stones, unto this day.

“The King of Ai” turns the mellifluous biblical word “eventide” (the same translation appears in the King James Bible) into a repeated refrain circling around the hanging of the king and the havoc wreaked upon the city. Plutzik does not touch on Joshua’s initial defeat by the soldiers of Ai, a punishment inflicted by God because one of the Israelites had violated Joshua’s injunction against looting Jericho (stealing, among other treasure, “a goodly Shinar mantle” [7:21]). History tells us, moreover, that the king and other dignitaries would not simply have been hanged but also impaled on stakes for public view.69 It may be details such as these that lie behind Plutzik’s darker account of the “ravished city”: !26

God, God, for the evil done at eventide,

For the bloody knife and the torch in the doomed city,

And the girls who screamed on the sand by the gates of the city,

And the strange seed within them at eventide—

And, indeed, it is not a partisan but a more beneficent God whom Plutzik addresses:

O God be merciful at eventide:

Remember him you condemned by the flaming city,

Where he lies under his cairn at the gates of the city,

And the vultures circle the sky at eventide.

Whereas the conquest of Ai in the Book of Joshua ends with Joshua building an altar, making burnt offerings, and reading to the assembled throng from “the book of the law of Moses”—that is, the Decalogue transported in the Ark (8:35)—here, in a shocking inversion, it is not the seed !27 of Amalek but the seed of the Israelites that is planted in raped women, and here Amalek is not to be blotted out but remembered by God.

What, then, are we to make of the final line of “The Miracle”—“Much is lost but a strange thing won”? Plutzik surely would not have agreed with Gershom Scholem, who wrote in a letter of May 8, 1945: “It’s difficult to greet this victory with a sense of jubilation, since everyone else has won; we [Jews] alone have lost.”70 Was the strange thing the very survival of

“the remnant,” the Sh’erit ha-Pletah, much discussed in the wake of the war? or the birth of the nation of Israel? or the Allied victory and, as it happened, the comparatively rapid assimilation of

Jews among those nations, especially the United States? Whereas some ultra-Orthodox Jews contended both during and after that the Shoah was God’s judgment upon the Diaspora,71 might one not suggest to the contrary that God, as He did in Joshua’s war with the Canaanites, intervened on behalf of Israel?72 Such a view might comport better with the idea that much was lost but a strange thing won, yet here as elsewhere in Plutzik the poem’s power lies in good part in painful ambiguities that would remain unresolved for years to come.

IV.

After his destruction of Jericho, Joshua decreed that the city never be rebuilt, and yet, by the era portrayed in “The House of Gorya,” the city has not only been rebuilt but is renowned for its agricultural fertility73 and the home of a priestly population large enough to rival Jerusalem.

Although “The House of Gorya” remained unpublished at the time of Plutzik’s death, it had the leading role in a manuscript entitled House of Gorya and Other Poems that he submitted to !28

Scribners, unsuccessfully, in 1945 or 1946 (what would later be published as Aspects of Proteus, with the title poem removed74). The title refers to a bet midrash, a “house of study,” located in

Jericho, which now suffers under the punishing rule of the Roman Emperor Hadrian:

In the house of Gorya, in risen Jericho,

Six dark men sat in heathen Hadrian’s hour.

The servant who brought them the black loaf of bread

And the wine as meagre as Rabbi Hanania’s face

Startled their talk of the slavish Empire

That stretched from Judea out to the great ocean.

Further depredations and idolatries that have taken place under “Caesar the fat-faced god” while

“the ruined temple greyed on the holy hill” are catalogued before the scene turns back to the house of study and the sudden appearance of a mysterious, source-less voice:

“There is but one—” As Rabbi Hanania poised,

Bending so that his black beard was thrust

Like an omen over them, they heard a voice speak forth:

“There is but one in this generation of man

Bearing such worth that the spirit of God touches him. !29

But this age is unworthy of him.” All turned as one

to where Hillel sat, as quiet as a boy

That listens to the memories of old men.

This aggadah about Hillel the Elder, a short version of which Plutzik typed in manuscript notes for the poem but never seems to have adopted as an epigraph,75 is Sanhedrin, which tells the story in the characteristic Talmudic form of transmission beginning “Our rabbis taught” (B.

Sanhedrin 11a):

Since the death of the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachai, the Holy Spirit [of

prophetic inspiration] departed from Israel; yet they were still able to avail themselves of

the Bath-kol. Once when the Rabbis were met in the upper chamber of Gurya’s house76

at Jericho, a Bath-kol was heard from Heaven, saying: “There is one amongst you who is

worthy that the Shechinah should rest on him as it did on Moses, but his generation does

not merit it.” The Sages present set their eyes on Hillel the Elder. And when he died, they

lamented and said: “Alas, the pious man, the humble man, the disciple of Ezra [is no

more].”77

With the patriarchs long gone, the prophets dead, and the Temple in ruins, what the rabbis hear is not the voice of God but a bat kol, an “echo” of prophecy (literally, a “daughter of the voice”) that in rabbinical literature typically praises particular biblical figures or sages.78 As we noted earlier, aggadah flourished following the watershed events of the Jewish War, concluded in 70

CE, and the calamitous Bar Kokhba Revolt in 132 CE, after which, as Stephen Mintz writes, it !30 became the task of the rabbis to “shore up the battered paradigm of the covenant” and, as though assembling debris from a shipwreck, to “recall to mind a splendor that has been forever dismantled.”79

The time of the poem would therefore seem to be important, but Plutzik leaves it ambiguous. On the one hand, the mystical event in the bet midrash seems to occur during the late life of Hillel, who is said to have lived from about 110 BCE to 10 CE. On the other hand,

Plutzik’s mention of “the ruined temple” locates the action in the interregnum between the destruction of the Temple and the failed revolt. A more specific reason to locate the poem between the events is the reference to “Rabbi Hanania,” presumably Rabbi Joshua ben Hanania

(also known as Rabbi Yehoshua), a leading sage who died in 131 CE on the eve of the revolt.80

His face is “meagre,” as we might expect of one known for his conciliatory intercessions with the Roman authorities and his dialogues with the Emperor Hadrian, who ruled from 117 to 138, which were so numerous that sages adopted the formula “Hadrian asked R. Joshua ben

Hanania.”81 By most accounts Hadrian was initially sympathetic to the Jews, to the point, it was said, that he intended to rebuild the Temple, but ultimately turned against them.82 At the same time, because “The House of Gorya” goes on to speculate about post-Holocaust Jewish life, the catastrophe of the revolt is an essential part of the poem’s context, nor can we ignore the oblique lesson of Joshua ben Hanania’s attempted conciliation of a tyrant who proves to be no friend of

Jews. Bar Kohkba’s resistance to Hadrian’s increasingly harsh anti-Jewish decrees, such as his interdictions against Torah study, circumcision, and holy festivals, and ultimately his erection of the temple of Jupiter on the site of the ruined Temple, ended according to tradition with some

580,000 Jews killed in what was depicted as a bloodbath (especially in Betar, says one midrash, !31 where Hadrian’s forces “slew the inhabitants until the horses waded in blood up to the nostrils” that flowed four miles to the sea, and wrapped each of three hundred Hebrew school students “in his book and burnt him”83), with many survivors sold into slavery and most of the remnant scattered in a exile lasting almost two millennia.

As in much Talmud and midrash, however, temporal precision in the poem’s setting matters less than the lesson conveyed. We see this clearly enough in the works of mourning that emerged in the aftermath, whether in Lamentations, the Tractate “Mourning,” or in the medieval

Midrash Eleh Ezkerah, known in English as the “Ten Martyrs” prayer or by its opening words,

“These I Will Remember” (from Psalm 42:5), which memorializes sages murdered by the

Romans around, but not confined to, the time of the revolt.84

The best known of these martyrs are Rabbi Akiva85 and Rabbi Hanina ben Teradion,86 but the longest section of Midrash Eleh Ezkerah concerns Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha’s ascent to heaven to learn whether it is by God’s decree that the rabbis are to be martyred. Rabbi Ishmael

(not the same one we saw earlier, who was likely his grandfather) is told by Gabriel that the Holy

One has not, until now, “found ten men in a single generation so righteous and pious as the fathers of the ten tribes.”87 Although an alternative Talmudic tradition identifies thirty disciples of Hillel who were “worthy of the Divine Spirit resting upon them, as [it did upon] Moses our

Master,” and another thirty who were “worthy that the sun should stand still for them [as it did for] Joshua the son of Nun” (B. Sukkah 28a),88 in the aggadah about the House of Gurya it is

Hillel alone who is worthy that the Shekinah should rest on him. Regardless of their worthiness, however, neither Hillel nor his disciples rise up to save Israel from ruin and exile. !32

In the poem’s second stanza, two millennia have passed. Hadrian’s horses are now

“Shadows, pressing silent hooves to the ground,” his road “sunken beneath the imperial grass,” and the name Hillel “beats thin / In the veins of history as a sleeper’s pulse,” while a new era awaits “the chosen one, its saint.” In this “epoch of great crimes and sanctimony” ruled by “the learned bigot, the well-groomed barbarian,” when “willing slaves” and “hungry children” abase themselves before wealthy “whoremasters”89—in this “time of unworthiness he will be hidden.”

Plutzik is drawing here on the idea of the Tzadikim Nistarim, the “hidden righteous ones,” one of whom may be the Messiah, who remains hidden because the age is not worthy of him,90 and in the poem’s final stanza the poet himself, perhaps the one now destined to hear the bat kol, emerges as the first-person speaker in search of the hidden saint: “I seek that house in all the streets of the world.” Plutzik was concerned about Jewish deracination, as we know from his self-incriminating depiction in “Portrait,” or the poem inspired by his great-grandfather’s Tikkun

Leil Shavuot, or “On the Photograph of a Man I Never Saw,” where his Russian grandfather, whose beard, like Rabbi Hanania’s, seems “blacker than God’s / Just after the tablets / Were broken in half,” foresees “the days / Of the fallen Law / In a strange place.” When he looked back some two thousand years in the wake of Hitler’s attempted destruction of the European

Jews, the challenge of restoring the covenant and the Jewish people was all the more acute. The lessons contemporary Jews might draw from the age of Hadrian and Hillel are not fully worked out in “The House of Gorya,” but Plutzik in any event seems equally concerned with the fate of a larger world that has just survived a cataclysm in which some 80 million people died, in which millions more were condemned to exile in alien lands, and in which colonized nations in Asia and Africa would soon emerge as sites of resistance and revolution. The contemporary poet !33 appears to be seeking not the Messiah but only a single person as worthy as Hillel—and maybe not even a Jewish saint, for this one, even though he “will not know for what he has been chosen” but will be recognizable for “his dignity, his knowledge and his suffering,” may well emerge in the Third World and may be, like the Isaac who served bread and wine in the house of

Gorya, a “lame servant waiting in the corner.”

As we know from Plutzik’s long narrative poem Horatio, which also in part addressed the

“great crimes” of the mid-twentieth century,91 he was fascinated by the processes of erosion and appropriation through which historical events, once they enter the protean realm of collective memory, are inscribed in what he called a “book of metamorphoses.” The world of Hadrian and

Hillel, at one time the subject of extensive commentary and interpretation—indeed, because of such commentary and interpretation—has been inscribed in such a book. So, too, the poem implies, will today’s barbaric regimes and immeasurable tragedies become an amalgam of history and myth. In the great remaking of the world that Hyam Plutzik’s generation was living through, mourning was not at an end, nor was the task of repairing the world. For the visionary poet, however, the work of storytelling had just begun. !34

NOTES

General note on sources: All quotations from the poetry of Hyam Plutzik come from The Collected Poems (BOA Editions: Brockport, N.Y., 1987). Because I identify each poem by title I have not cited them in endnotes or by page numbers in my essay. I have also drawn on materials by Hyam Plutzik and others available through the Hyam Plutzik archive and web site at the University of Rochester: http://www.hyamplutzikpoetry.com/. Letters, journal entries, and lectures by Plutzik deposited in the archive are identified below by a short title and the abbreviation HPP (Hyam Plutzik Papers). I am grateful to Edward Moran and Melissa Mead for making these materials available to me. Writings by others posted on the web site are identified by author and title, as well as the abbreviation HPW (Hyam Plutzik Web). All citations from the Bible, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Scriptures, According to the Masoretic Text: A New Translation, the 1917 Jewish Publication Society of America edition reprinted in 1946. This would have been the principle English version, other than the King James Bible, consulted by Plutzik, though in all likelihood he relied at times on a Hebrew text. Except for those instances where Plutzik himself relies on another version (see note below), Talmud citations are from the Soncino edition of the Babylonian Talmud, ed. I. Epstein (London: Soncino Press, 1935-52), online at https://www.halakhah.com/ (identified in all cases by the common abbreviation B. plus the name and folio of the tractate). Citations of Midrash Rabbah are from the print Soncino edition, ed. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, 10 vols. (London: Soncino Press, 1983). I have also benefitted from three books more often than they are cited below and so name them here: Efraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Israel Abrahams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); The Book of Legends [Sefer Ha-Aggadah]: Legends from the Talmud and Midrash, ed. Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitsky, trans. William G. Braude (New York: Schocken Books, 1992); and Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). General !35

2 The Talmudic passages that appear as epigraphs to “Exhortation to the Artists” and “Commentary” come directly (with one minor change in the first case) from Jacob Ibn Chabib, En Jacob: Agada of the Babylonian Talmud, 5 vols., trans. S. H. Glick (New York, 1916). My thanks to Anthony Wexler for tracking down this source. During Plutzik’s tenure at the University of Rochester, En Jacob was in the holdings of the Rochester Theological Seminary, where he might well have consulted it (at a later date it was transferred to the university’s library), but it is also likely that he knew these passages from his childhood education in Hebrew. The passages for these two poems are in Tractate Berakhot, in vol. 1 of En Jacob. See https:// catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012294188

3 By the time of his death in 1934 Bialik was widely recognized in the Hebrew-speaking and reading world as the outstanding Jewish poet of his generation, but Sefer Ha-Aggadah (revised editions of which appeared in 1936 and 1952; translated into English as The Book of Legends in 1992) probably reached an even wider audience, as did his important essays such as “Halachah and Aggadah” and “Revealment and Concealment” (the latter translated in Commentary magazine in 1950, though Plutzik may have read the earlier Hebrew version), among the essays later translated (by various hands) and collected as Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2000).

4 I will speak of God in masculine terms since the biblical and rabbinical literature on which Plutzik drew did so. !36

5 The term “Holocaust” is derived from holokaustos, “wholly burnt,” which in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible, corresponds to the Hebrew olah, the sacrificial offering dedicated to God. Whereas the connotations of passive obedience and sacrificial worship in “holocaust” might seem offensive, even blasphemous, the term, as it came to be used by many Jews, was often associated with acts of Kiddush Hashem, the martyr’s “Sanctification of the Name,” and thus was seen to have connotations of devotion and courage.

6 Plutzik’s phrase was by 1960 the most familiar shorthand of the day for events that had been variously referred to as the destruction or catastrophe (khurbn in Yiddish, hurbn or shoah in Hebrew), “Final Solution,” “Hitlerism,” “Auschwitz,” and “genocide,” the last coined by Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin in the midst of the war.

7 Hannah Senesh [Szenes], Her Life & Diary (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 256; Marie Syrkin, Blessed is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1947).

8 The extended passage reads (in the Soncino version, though Plutzik’s excerpt, as noted above, was taken from the 1916 translation of En Jacob): “R. Eleazar fell ill and R. Johanan went in to visit him. He noticed that he was lying in a dark room, and he bared his arm and light radiated from it. Thereupon he noticed that R. Eleazar was weeping, and he said to him: Why do you weep? Is it because you did not study enough Torah? Surely we learnt: The one who sacrifices much and the one who sacrifices little have the same merit, provided that the heart is directed to heaven. Is it perhaps lack of sustenance? Not everybody has the privilege to enjoy two tables. Is it perhaps because of [the lack of] children? This is the bone of my tenth son! — He replied to him: I am weeping on account of this beauty that is going to rot in the earth. In the meanwhile he said to him: Are your sufferings welcome to you? — He replied: Neither they nor their reward.”

9 Hyam Plutzik, “Poetry and Myth” (unpublished lecture of the 1950s). HPP: Box 34, Folder Public Lectures. !37

10 The title comes from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln (“Here, coffin that slowly passes, / I give you my sprig of lilac”), which is also an elegy for soldiers killed in the Civil War, but beyond that a meditation on death in which temporal limits give way to the ceaseless seasonal pageantry: “I see the lilac sprigs bending and withering. / Each year like Adonis they pass through the dumb-show of death, / Waxing and waning on the tree in the brain of man.” Plutzik has in mind here Adonis as the god of cyclic decay and revival depicted in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a god “who annually died and rose again from the dead.” Frazer also notes the etymological derivation from Adon. See James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1922; rpt. New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 378.

11 Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book (Rabbinical Assembly of America / United Synagogue of America, 1946), p. 88. Plutzik, however, chose to translate this first line as “God who is commander of all creation.” In the table of contents, the index, and the text alike of the Collected Poems the poem is inaccurately called “El Anon Al Kol.”

12 To discover what gods he has offended and so make his way home, Menelaus must seize Proteus, an oracle who knows the future as well as the past, and hold him fast, though “he will twist and turn into every beast that moves across the earth, transforming himself into water [and] superhuman fire” to escape. See The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 4:468-70, p. 137.

13 When he was keen to reject the turmoil of urban life in favor of the pastoral life on the Connecticut farm where he worked for a short time and wrote “Death at the Purple Rim,” the young Plutzik was surely drawn to Wordsworth’s famous sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us,” in which the poet complained, a century earlier, that in the rat-race of modern life we “lay waste our powers” and live “out of tune” when we might instead “have sight of Proteus rising from the sea.”

14 Hyam Plutzik, letter to Donald Hall (November 24, 1958); HPP: Box 5, Folder 10. !38

15 Hyam Plutzik, “The Protean Universe” (a title apparently supplied by archivists—the typescript bears no title). HPP: Box 34, Folder Public Lectures.

16 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 381.

17 Popular iconography notwithstanding, in Genesis an apple is not named as the fruit of temptation, although where it does appear in the Bible, the apple often stands out, as in the psalmist’s plea to God, “Keep me as the apple of the eye” (Psalm 17:8), and God’s similar admonition, “Keep my commandments and live, / And my teaching in the apple of thine eye.” (Proverbs 25:11). Other examples include the shopworn but still lovely figure in Proverbs (25:11): “A word fitly spoken / Is like apples in settings of silver.” !39

18 The Odyssey, 11:677, p. 268. Emily Dickinson adopted this version of the Tantalus myth:

“Heaven”—is what I cannot reach!

The Apple on the Tree—

Provided it do hopeless—hang—

That—“Heaven” is—to Me!

Tantalus appealed to Plutzik as early as his award-winning college poem “The Three,” where along with Ixion on his wheel and Sisyphus pushing his rock, the disobedient son of Zeus is condemned to endless, fruitless action, and he makes another appearance at the end of “The Strange City,” a dystopian poem seemingly spoken in the voice of a mad prophetic figure:

But Tantalus! Tantalus!

The phantasms enter

The inviolate mansion—

The high place.

Is this Plutzik’s modernist nightmare heaven? Perhaps so, in that the poem is strewn with images bearing out its struggle between “Myth and machine / Riddling a nightmare” and seems set less in its city of ruins founded on a “book of lies” or its garden “intricate / With monstrous numbers” than in what the poem calls “the house of the skull.” !40

19 In Ovid's Metamorphoses and elsewhere in ancient myth, Adonis was born of incest and fated to spend part of each year as Persephone’s lover in the underworld and part with Aphrodite, a story thought to descend from the earlier Babylonian story of Ishtar and Tammuz, which shows up in Ezekiel 8:14, where Tammuz is a god of vegetation mourned by women outside the Temple. The story of Venus (the Roman name for Aphrodite) and Adonis is reworked, among other places, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Adonis appears by name in “The Priest Ekranath,” whereas Aphrodite appears in the guise of the White Goddess, whom the licentious and idolatrous Philistines worship in presumably erotic rites. The rites alluded to may come from the acts of ritual prostitution in the temple of Aphrodite that Herodotus said was forced upon all women prior to marriage (although he locates this practice in the temple located in the city of Babylon, not the poem’s Ashkelon, which he identifies as the oldest such temple). See Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (New York: Penguin, 1954), pp. 49, 87-8. Frazer, citing Herodotus, says that the temple was supported by “the wages earned by this sanctified harlotry” (Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp. 383-4.) According to Robert Graves in The White Goddess, another source for Plutzik’s poem, the White Goddess has multiple incarnations, among them Demeter, Aphrodite, and others—more generally, she is “a priestess, a prophetess, a queen mother”—and he notes also that the apple was sacred to Venus. See Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948: rpt. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1997), pp. 250, 253, 501.

20 “Strange Fruit,” initially titled “Bitter Fruit,” was a poem by Lewis Allen (the pen name of Abel Meeropol) published in 1937, before he set it to music. It begins and ends: “Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze . . . Here is a strange and bitter crop.” Anti-lynching measures at the federal level peaked and failed in the 1920s and 30s, and as of 2019 the most recent legislation had still not been voted on and signed into law. !41

21 Hyam Plutzik, Letter from a Young Poet (Hartford, Conn.: Watkins Library at Trinity College, 2015), p. 68.

22 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, among other sources, Heracles (Hercules) escapes the unendurable pain of the Shirt of Nessus, stained with the blood of the centaur Nessus that Heracles himself had killed to save his wife from being raped, by throwing himself into a funeral pyre.

23 T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), vol. 1, p. 207.

24 In Genesis Shinar is first the site of the imperial kingdom of Nimrod, a great-grandson of Noah (10:10), and later the site of war among rival kingdoms (14: 1, 9), and it is featured in Zechariah’s strange vision concerning a “measure” of “Wickedness” carried by two winged women “to build her a house in the land of Shinar” (Zechariah 5:9-11), which the rabbis took to symbolize “hypocrisy and arrogance, which made their home in Babylon.” See also B. Sanhedrin 24a; Bialik and Ravnitsky, Book of Legends, p. 355:161.

25 The Book of Jubilees is more precise: “All of the land of Shinar is called Babel because there the Lord mixed up all the language of the sons of men. And from there they were scattered into their cities according to each of their languages and nations.” See The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed., James H. Charlesworth, (1983; rpt. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2016), vol. 2, p. 77.

26 The poem cites Phoebus (or Apollo, the god of poetry and music), Zephyrus (the god of the west wind), Cynthia (Artemis or Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt), Thor (Norse god of thunder), and Vulcan (the god of fire and metalwork). Near the end of Letter from a Young Poet (p. 79) Plutzik also took note of the death of Dmitri Merejkowski, author of The Death of the Gods, a novel which concerned the quarrel between Christianity and paganism (though Plutzik, perhaps thinking of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, called it The Twilight of the Gods). !42

27 Plutzik, Letter from a Young Poet, pp. 46-7. Somewhat more grandly, he wrote in late 1946 to Mark Van Doren, with whom he had shared some of his early work: “There is within me a cursed metaphysical monster who is waiting, if I permit him, to devour all.” Letter to Mark Van Doren (November 20, 1946), HPP: Box 5, Folder 4.

28 In Canto 26 of the Inferno Ulysses recounts what he said to his crew: “Consider well the seed that gave you birth: / you were not made to live your lives as brutes, / but to be followers of worth and knowledge.” See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 173. Although it is not likely that Plutzik had it in mind (his unpublished poem was probably written earlier), this is the lesson Primo Levi wished to impart to Pikilo in his chapter of If This Is a Man (English trans.1958; in the United States called Survival in Auschwitz) entitled “The Canto of Ulysses,” where he quotes Ulysses’s speech.

29 Symbolized by eighteenth-century French astronomer Charles Messier’s famous list of 110 nebulae and star clusters, this duplex universe is underscored near the conclusion of the poem where Plutzik rephrases the idea of the world as a metaphor without end. He warns that exploration of the cosmos without—what might portend a “new Indies,” the “secret mountain,” something beyond “the bounds of the world-symbol”—is self-reflexive: “The crooked mirrors hanging upon that sky / Will give you yourself only, a protean gargoyle.” The coiled serpent of time appears through mention of the constellation Ophiuchus (“Serpent-Bearer”), whose form is dramatized in Marcus Manilius’s Latin poem Astronomica as an eternal struggle between a serpent “which with its mighty spirals and twisted body encircles” him, and Ophiuchus, whose hands grapple always with the “loosened coils”—what seems another version of Tantalus. See Marcus Manilius, Astronomica, ed. and trans. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 31.

30 John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness . . . thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare”; W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children”: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” !43

31 See, for example, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wadjet; https://thetorah.com/nehushtan- the-copper-serpent-its-origins-and-fate/ ; http://www.egyptianmyths.net/buto.htm; https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uraeus

32 In Numbers 21:9, “Moses made a serpent of brass, and set it upon the pole; and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived,” but in 2 Kings 18: 4, Hezekiah “broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did offer to it.” Disavowing magic in their interpretation of Moses’s miraculous gestures, the rabbis said that it was the glance of the afflicted toward heaven that brought the cure. See B. Rosh Hashanah 29a. Although it is less likely, Plutzik might also have had in mind here Rabbi Eliezer, who, in naming events whose silence signals divine import, includes: “when the serpent sloughs off its skin, its cry goes from one end of the world to the other and [yet] its voice is not heard.” See Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, trans. M. Friedlander (Skokie, Ill,: Varda Books, 2004), p. 291.

33 In Plato’s Republic the “good” is likened to the sun and holds a superior position in his account of forms, as in 509b: “the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power.” See Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 744. !44

34 In Plutzik’s rendering Aphrodite is not exactly the “beautiful divinity” risen from the foam created when Cronus kills and castrates his father Uranus, throwing his genitals into the sea, as Hesiod portrays her in the Theogeny, but instead a more ambiguous deity spawned in the prehistoric muck of the Tethys Sea, a Mesozoic-era ocean named for another Greek sea goddess. Her association with sexuality and procreation, shared with her Babylonian incarnation Ishtar and portrayed across centuries of Western sculpture and painting, most famously in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485), is here contracted to the figure of her “belly,” less erotic than purely generative, a vessel perhaps akin to the acorn, the egg, and the Good. See Hesiod, Works and Days and Theogeny, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), p. 66.

35 Placed in the northern sky by Athena after her death, Andromeda, known also as the “chained lady” owing to her rescue by Perseus after being chained to a coastal rock, was one of the forty- eight constellations known to Ptolemy in the second century, and her galaxy is among the brightest of Messier objects.

36 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press-Newberry Library, 1988), p. 164.

37 “In the beginning—when the will of the King began to take effect,” according to the Zohar, “he engraved signs into the heavenly sphere [that surrounded him]. Within the most hidden recess a dark flame issued from the mystery of eyn sof, the Infinite . . . Beyond this point nothing can be known.” See “The Beginning,” in Gershom G. Scholem, ed., Zohar: The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah, p. 27, and Scholem, On Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Bernard McGinn (1961; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1996), p. 102; Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah [based on Scholem’s contributions to Encyclopedia Judaica] (1974; rpt. New American Library, 1978), pp. 92-3, 149. See also Schwartz, Tree of Souls, pp. 13, 118-19.

38 Plutzik, “The Protean Universe,” op. cit. !45

39 See Cary Nelson, who in “The Universe is No Consolation: Hyam Plutzik and the Ethics of

Post-Holocaust Reading,” HPW, finds in this serpent “an invincible will to evil.”

40 See B. Shabbath 31a. The teaching comes from Leviticus 19:18, what came to be known as the Golden Rule: “Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

41 As noted above, Plutzik’s source was En Jacob. This Rabbi Ishmael is sometimes identified as the sage of the same name, possibly his grandson, who was a contemporary of Rabbi Akiva and in the legend of the Ten Martyrs ascends to heaven to learn whether it is by God’s decree that the rabbis are to be slain (see below). Although it is unlikely Plutzik was concerned here with such details, if this rabbi was the High Priest, this story about him must precede the destruction of the Second Temple, after which there was no such role. See “Midrash Eleh Ezkerah, or The Legend of the Ten Martyrs,” in David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky, eds., Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), p. 162n2.

42 R. Simeon ben Eleazar quoted in Urbach, Sages, p. 360. See also the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:10 (“Thy will be done . . . ”).

43 God’s promise to deliver His people into “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8), the first instance, is repeated some twenty times in the Bible. !46

44 The Golem, a man-made creature typically formed from clay or wood and enlivened by secret words or incantations, was intended to act as a protector or servant of Jews, but was also capable of violence unleashed within the community (“running amok,” in a common phrase). The figure dates to rabbinical literature having to do with procreation but appears in more widely recognized modalities in medieval tales through modern media, most famously in the nineteenth- century Golem created by Rabbi Loew of Prague. In a number of versions, the Golem is activated by a “shem,” a secret name of God (in some accounts the Tetragrammaton) placed under his tongue or in his forehead. See, for example, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/ articles/6777-golem

45 “The Protean Universe,” op. cit. The word “demonic” is added in a handwritten emendation. In the “underworld” of “Those Who Write after Freud,” “original sin” now lies buried in “the fabulous gulf / Of the self,” but what is hidden “below” also includes the “protoplasmic slime” of “The Zero That Is All”; the “monsters with lipless death who lie there in wait” for the corpse of his dead sibling in his beautiful, terrifying elegy “My Sister”; the “inverse horrible shadow” that “wanders under the meadow” in “Abner Bellow”; and the literal mythic underworld into which Aeneas and Dante descend, both ferried across the Acheron by Charon, in “Dante in Our Time.”

46 Also titled “Tine and the Poem,” here the creation of a poem is as suddenly wondrous as the world might appear to an angel who had slept through the seven days of Creation or, in the allusion to a hermetical treatise called The Golden Chain of Homer cited by John Milton in Paradise Lost and Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, the alchemical transformations that turn chaos into divine spirit.

47 In 1941, however, Plutzik was not able to see what was to come, and thought only that Jews might be made slaves under Hitler, but because they would be thought beyond assimilation to an antisemitic creed, their spirit would be “left inviolate and unconquered as it has been throughout other periods of persecution.” See Letter from a Young Poet, pp. 75-6. !47

48 In Letter from a Young Poet (p. 63) Plutzik writes, about Pearl Harbor, that the war was started “by one of the lesser members of the camorra of the possessed,” a formulation that brings together the novel by Dostoevsky variably translated as The Possessed or Demons or The Devils with the mythology of fallen angels, whether in the Bible, the pseudepigrapha (the Books of Enoch in particular), or the Western canon of art and literature, notably in Milton’s Paradise Lost and various works by William Blake.

49 The entry reads: “The invasion of France began after all the years of preparation and all the wrongs suffered at the hand of the evil one . . . How cold it must be in the sky now, and on the coasts of France . . . On a bomber base in England, with a farmer harrowing an adjacent field behind a plodding horse, I pass the D-day of this war.” Quoted in Edward Moran, “The Life and Poetry of Hyam Plutzik,” HPW.

50 See Job 1: 6-12, 2:1-8; Zechariah 3:1; 1 Chronicles 21:1; Psalm 109:16.

51 Foremost in Revelation 12: 9: “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (King James Bible). !48

52 Citing Genesis 4:1, where Eve says “I have gotten man [a male child] with the help of the Lord,” commentators argued that Samael, sometimes in the form of the serpent, “conceived a passion” for Eve (Genesis Rabbah 18:6) or said “I will kill Adam and marry Eve” (B. Sotah 9b). In a variety of Talmudic readings, as well as pseudepigrapha such as the Second Book of Enoch and The Book of Adam and Eve, Samael is the prince of the demons or sometimes the Angel of Death who “injected a lust into” Eve (B. Shabbath 145b-146a; cf. B. Avodah Zarah 22b; B. Yebamoth 103b), thereby creating evil passions in mankind, but at the same time creating a remedy for the observant: “If God created the evil inclination, He also created the Torah as its antidote” (B. Baba Bathra 16a). In the Zohar, Samael, as the male force of evil, and Lilith, as the female force of evil, are primordial agents of sin, their life energy released through acts of transgression from “below,” whereas God and the Shekinah are their opposing couple. See Schwartz, Tree of Souls, pp. 109-10, 442-8; Bialik and Ravnitsky, Book of Legends, p. 333:7; Urbach, Sages, p. 170; Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 120.

53 Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, p. 183.

54 Mixed in with the absurd hash of archeology and mythologies in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel is the cracked etymological proof offered by Gargantua: “I have found it in the sacred writ, said I, that Cain was the first that built a town; we may then reasonably conjecture that from his name he gave it that of Cainon.” See François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1955), pp. 684-5.

55 Like Noah, this Enoch “walked with God,” and the scripture even implies that he was taken up to heaven without suffering earthly death, a view elaborated in early Kabbalah, The Book of Jubilees, and in the three further pseudepigrapha bearing his name (The Book of Enoch, The Second Book of Enoch, and 3 Enoch), where he is variously depicted as first among the archangels attendant upon God, an initiate into the secrets of Creation, and, as Metatron, the executor of God’s decrees. !49

56 “Nay, even while Adam was alive,” Josephus goes on to say, “it came to pass that the posterity of Cain became exceeding wicked, every one successively dying, one after another, more wicked than the former.” See Genesis 4:17; Falvius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews [trans. William Whiston], (Middletown, Del.: Renaissance Classics, 2012), pp. 2-3. None of this appears in the poem, except by way of its title, but the struggle between obedience to God and the allure of “wicked courses” seems to inform the peculiar exclamations in the poem’s last stanza, “God is brutish life! / God is the living ether!,” which should be understood not as opposites but rather as inextricably tangled. The poem’s first-person speaker cannot reach the “space pure as water / Upon a delectable mountain” but lingers “at each crossroads / Waiting the blow on the cheek.” Like him, all of us are condemned “to build our beautiful houses” within the “strange entrails” of matter and spirit, corruption and transcendence, coiled together.

57 Beginning with his early poem “Seventh Avenue Express” and Letter from a Young Poet, Plutzik expressed somewhat stereotypical Romantic skepticism about the city, while at the same time, like Hart Crane and Eliot, he was energized by it. His poems about the evils of division, walls, and other such materialistic and mechanistic impositions of the rational mind include “Divisibility,” “Identity,” “Entropy,” and “The Strange City.”

58 Hyam Plutzik, “Plan for Work,” op. cit.

59 Plutzik, journal entry of June 5, 1944, in Moran, “The Life and Poetry of Hyam Plutzik, op. cit.; W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Modern Library, 1991), p. 179.

60 Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp. 463-6. Plutzik cites The Golden Bough as an important influence on modernist thought and poetry in both “The Protean Universe” and “Poetry and Myth,” where he call it “a fabulous and exciting treasury of human belief.” !50

61 Barley was one of the crops indicative of Canaan’s fertility (Deuteronomy 8:8) and bears salvific qualities in the Talmud: “If one sees barley in a dream,” says B. Berakhot (57a), “his iniquities will depart, as it says: Thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin expiated.” Not that Plutzik needed such confirmation, but he likely noticed too that Robert Graves identifies the Feast of Unleavened Bread as a barley festival. See Graves, The White Goddess, p. 327.

62 The book is among those from Plutzik’s library donated to the University of Rochester after his death. It’s provenance is identified in a Yiddish inscription by Plutzik’s father translated as “My grandfather's Tikun Leyl Shavuot/Tikn leyl Shavues.” Thanks to Kenneth Moss for the translation.

63 See B. Shabbat 86b and Exodus Rabbah 31:16 (“the feast of the harvest on which the Torah was given unto Israel; the fruits thereof one eats in this life…”).

64 In a letter dated July 1, 1942, Plutzik wrote, in the letter to his wife, Tanya: “I write this sitting at the door of a tent under an apple tree. Since Sunday we've been on bivouac—which means we've been camping out. The name of this place is Betterton, and it’s across Chesapeake Bay from Aberdeen Proving Ground. We’re on the bay itself here, our encampment being on a cliff over the shore. We have a swimming period daily. The water is very mild; the vista wonderful. It’s really a vacation for me, despite the inconveniences of living in a tent and being roused up in the middle of the night to take part in sham battles.” HPP: Box 5, Letters to and from Hyam Plutzik, 1926-March 1955; thanks to Edward Moran for calling my attention to this letter.

65 So confident were the rabbis that God knew just when to offer and when to withhold His aid to Israel, they determined that the sun standing still for Joshua was one of the miracles experienced by Moses, Jonah, Elijah, Daniel, and others that God had commanded proleptically at the time of Creation (“I commanded the sun and the moon to stand still before Joshua”). See Genesis Rabbah, 5:5; Bialik and Ravnitsky, Book of Legends, p. 16: 68. !51

66 Despite the fact that the Philistines depicted in “The Priest Ekranath” are licentious devotees of the fertility goddess Aphrodite/Venus whose high priest hears thundering on the horizon the monotheistic tribes of Israel under the command of their severe God, and despite the fact that the biblical Lord promises to “destroy,” “punish,” “ravage,” “dispossess,” “lay waste,” and “uproot” them (Amos 1:8, Ezekiel 25:15, Jeremiah 47, Joshua 13:2, Zepharia 2:4-5, Zecharia 9:5-6), the Philistines are often God’s instrument for punishing the Israelites, whereas the nations defeated by Joshua often appear less as people than as archetypes. King David defeats the Philistines, turns Zion into Jerusalem, and sets forth elaborate plans for the Temple built by Solomon—and yet it is only Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who destroys the Temple and sends the Jews into exile, who finally extinguishes the Philistines as a named people.

67 Jacob L. Wright, “War and Peace in the Bible,” JSB, p. 2047.

68 Although the archeological evidence is not conclusive, Ai is located by most modern accounts at a site east of Ramallah (JSB, p. 2131).

69 JSB, p. 457.

70 The letter, in more detail, reads: “I’m thinking back over the past six years, which came upon us like a storm bringing total devastation. It’s difficult to greet this victory with a sense of jubilation, since everyone else has won; we alone have lost. And on this day of stocktaking [the day of Germany’s surrender], there are endless bitter thoughts directed at ourselves and others. Yet despite everything, something new yet at the same time old has come into the world. To be sure, the Messiah has not come and the world goes on as usual. But at least we’ve achieved one thing: good and evil will now be intertwined, as they were formerly, and it will at least be possible once again to fight as effectively for the good. . . . The wrestling match will start from the beginning; and the essence of our ‘success’ lies in the fact that it can begin at all.” Plutzik might well have agreed with this part of the letter. See Gershom Scholem, letter of May 8, 1945, in A Life in Letters, 1914-1982, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 324. !52

71 For example, Rabbi Rafael Eliahu Botschko, citing Deuteronomy 28 (“The Lord will bring a nation against thee from afar”) and Ezekiel 7 (“My wrath is upon all the multitude”), argued that Jewish emancipation and assimilation had failed, and that the Germans and their allies were “only a tool of God, and what is ordained by him will come to pass.” See Botschko, “The Mysterious Hand,” in Jewish Responses to Persecution: 1941-1942, ed. Jürgen Matthäus et al., vol. III (Lanham Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013), 384-5. In Chaim Potok’s bestselling 1967 novel

The Chosen, this position is represented by the Hasidic tsaddik Reb Saunders.

72 One might compare here Arthur Szyk’s 1943 illustration of a modern Moses exhorting resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. See, for example, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/ 170785010847890226/?lp=true. Thanks to David Roskies for this suggestion.

73 Owing, according to 2 Kings 2:19-20, to a miracle wrought by the prophet Elisha soon after inheriting the mantle of his father, Elijah.

74 Noting that it was “more explicitly religious than many of my poems,” Plutzik told Donald Hall that the poem still needed revision, which he apparently never completed. See Letter to Donald Hall, op. cit.

75 “Once they were assembled in the upper chamber of the house of Gorya in Jericho, when a Daughter of the Voice manifested itself, saying: ‘There is among you one who is fit that the Shekina should rest upon him, but his generation is unfit for it.’ They turned their eyes toward Hillel the Elder.” Unlike Plutzik’s quotations from Talmud noted above, this passage does not come from En Jacob, and I have not identified another source. It may be his own translation or adaptation of another available English version. For his several typescript drafts of the poem, see “The House of Gorya,” HPP: Other Poetry Projects and Prayer Translations. !53

76 Gurya, which Plutzik renders as “Gorya,” is also spelled in various sources “Guriyya,” “Guryo,” and “Guriah,” while the Jerusalem Talmud (Sotah 9) has “Gadia” or “Gadya.” See Urbach, Sages, p. 577; “Jericho,” Jewish Encyclopedia.

77 The same story appears in B. Sotah 48b, and in each case the tractate goes on in the next passage to tell a comparable story, set at Jabneh (Yavneh) rather than Jericho, about Samuel the Little, a disciple of Hillel. See also JSB, p. 1232. Hillel was said to be descended from David, and his legal rulings were held in high regard for their simplicity and tenderness. He is also associated almost exclusively with Jerusalem, and the House of Gurya in Jericho is apparently the only other place named in a story about him. Although this idea is unlikely to have been known to Plutzik, it was among Second Temple rabbis, according to Efraim Urbach, that “prophecy evolved into a mystical experience” available only to the sage of enhanced virtues. See Urbach, Sages, p. 518.

78 The bat kol is a successor to the Divine Voice heard, for example, by Moses: “When Moses went into the tent of meeting that he might speak with Him, then he heard the Voice speaking unto him from above the ark-cover that was upon the ark of the testimony.” [(Numbers 7:89) See JSB, p. 286]. In two typescript drafts of the poem, Plutzik capitalizes “Voice,” but he never writes “Daughter of the Voice” (as in his unused Talmudic manuscript note) or “bat kol.”

79 Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 57, 65.

80 In two drafts of the poem, Plutzik used in this line the name Rabbi Nachmani, which would have been anachronistic in that Rabbah Bar Nachmani (known in the Talmud simply as Rabbah) is thought to have lived between 270 and 330 CE.

81 See Urbach, Sages, p. 191; several such dialogues are recorded in B. Hullim (59b-60a). !54

82 Genesis Rabbah, 64:10.

83 Lamentations Rabbah, 2:4.

84 Imagined to have died together at the hands of an archetypal tyrant, writes David Roskies, a “motley of rabbinic heroes was recast into a mythical group of intercessors” whose memory became a paradigmatic instance of Kiddush Hashem during the Crusader massacres and was later incorporated into Yom Kippur services. See The Literature of Destruction, ed., David G. Roskies (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988), p. 50.

85 An ardent supporter of Simon Bar Kohkba, Rabbi Akiva apparently took him to be a possible messiah, based on Numbers 24:17 “There shall step forth a star . . . Israel,” and Akiva’s supposed recitation of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One”) during his torture made it the prayer of martyrs from medieval times through the Holocaust. (The full Shema includes Deuteronomy 6:4–9, 11:13–21, and Numbers 15:37–41.) This version of the story appears in B. Berakhot (61b). In the text of Ten Martyrs, however, Akiva recites a different passage from Deuteronomy 32:4.

86 As he was set on fire wrapped in the Torah, Rabbi Hanina ben Teradion declared, “I see scrolls of parchment and letters flying up” (Rabbinic Fantasies, p. 154). By one Talmudic account, he was punished not only for having studied Torah, as God commanded but as Hadrian forbade, but specifically for having uttered the Name, rather than substituting Adonai: “The punishment of being burnt came upon him because he pronounced the Name in its full spelling.” See B. Avoda Zara 18a.

87 “Midrash Eleh Ezkerah,” Rabbinic Fantasies, pp. 143-6l quote at p. 149.

88 See Yitzhak Buxbaum, The Life and Teachings of Hillel (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1994), pp. 248-51. !55

89 This section of the poem seems to sketch out what Plutzik might have treated at more length in his unwritten Holocaust poem—namely, a universalist memorialization of “the victims of the various terrorisms and tyrannies of our time . . . victims of injustice in states not ordinarily tyrannical,” so that all people will be on guard against “their extraordinary capabilities for evil.” See “Plan for Work,” op. cit.

90 More commonly, the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, the “thirty-six righteous ones” on whom depend the salvation, even the continued existence, of the world. The idea derives from the Talmud: “Abaye said: The world must contain not less than thirty-six righteous men in each generation who are vouchsafed [the sight of] the Shechinah's countenance . . .” (B. Sanhedrin 97b); and “Did not Abaye in fact state, The world never has less than thirty-six righteous men who are vouchsafed a sight of the Shechinah every day . . .” (B. Sukkah 45b). In Plutzik’s era the notion was dramatized in Andre Schwart-Bart’s widely read French novel The Last of the Just (1959; trans. 1960). The Messiah remains hidden, says Gershom Scholem, “only because the age is not worthy of him.” See, On Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, p. 6.

91 See, in particular, Edward Moran and Steven Sher, “Hyam Plutzik’s Horatio as Post- Holocaust Poem,” HPW; Nelson, “The Universe Is No Consolation,” HPW; and Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 153-59.