The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia to New York, Charles Reznikoff found himself at the intersection of modernist innovation, ethnic otherness, and economic hardship. He both appreciated the modernists’ formal radicalism and critiqued their political failings—a task he accomplished by writing short lyric poems depicting the hardship and charm of urban life, as well as long poems presenting histories of horrific violence, from factory accidents to the Holocaust. But despite his contributions to American poetry, Reznikoff has remained a somewhat secondary figure, in part because his work—at times—is painful to read.
A Jewish Word or Two recasts Reznikoff ’s poetry as pleasurable and masterful even when disturbing. In their humor, their encounters with Jewish history, holiness, and identity, as well as their use of drama, horror, joy, and beauty, Reznikoff ’s poems help us celebrate what is simultaneously strange, surprising, lovely, and uncanny in our everyday lives.
“Bettridge contends that Reznikoff finds the holy in the sacred spaces of New York City, portraying it as a New Jerusalem, where encounters with the divine can be as awe-inspiring and dangerous as those experienced by the prophets in the Bible. . . . This work will appeal to specialists in modern and postmodern American poetry and also to readers at any level interested in the impacts of Judaism and NYC on modern poetry.”—Stephen Fredman, author, A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry
“Reznikoff is indeed a funny poet, despite the unbearable darkness of much of his work, and Bettridge opens that dimension with nuance. Bettridge’s understanding and analysis of the violence presented in Reznikoff’s documentary poems is far reaching and profound.”—Norman Finkelstein, author, To Go Into the Words
