Blessed Mythmaker 12-19 Final

!1 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.

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