Hyam Plutzik and the Mosaic of Time: Essays and Selected Poems

This original collection of essays written by scholars and poets explores the life and work of Hyam Plutzik (1911-1962), whose poetry came to fruition at a time of cultural change set against the historical rupture of the Holocaust and World War II. The chapters in this volume explore in depth the influence of both modernist poetics and American Jewish identity on Plutzik’s richly figured poetry. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the third great wave of Jewish immigration, Plutzik’s poetic milieu is inflected with the linguistic mosaic of his cultural inheritance. With close focus on his most significant work, the individual chapters bring to light complicated issues of Jewish American ethnicity and identity in twentieth-century American cultural studies. This collection speaks to the legacy of this poet whose work continues to have relevance for Jewish literary studies and poetics.