Otherness and affiliation : Anglo-Jewish poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein

Abstract

This thesis explores the work of six Anglo-Jewish poets who wrote during the twentieth century:  Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), John Rodker (1894-1955), Jon Silkin (1930-1997), Elaine Feinstein (1930-) and Karen Gershon (1923-1993).  Where relevant to my arguments, the diaries, letters, short stories, novels, arts criticism, biographers and autobiographical works of these poets are also considered.

Otherness relates to a periperhal relationship with English and Jewish culture, and to what Rosenberg identifies as the ungraspable nature of poetry itself.  Associated with this is a prevalent sense of Jewish identity as similarly uncategorisable and unbounded.  Countering such otherness is a common Anglo-Jewish affiliation to the diasporic narrative of exile and deferred return to a textually-imaged homeland.

This thesis argues that the Anglo-Jewish diaspora is neither literal exile nor a specific home, but exists between the two.  Further, Anglo-Jewish poets adopt heterogeneous strategies for transcending the tensions of such inbetweenness.  Chapter two focuses on Rosenberg, as a minority Modernist and socialist Zionist.  Chapter three considers Sassoon, who affiliated to England’s dominant imperialist and Christian culture while consigning his Jewishness to a nostalgic past.  Rodker’s alliance with a frequently antisemitic Modernist minority, and his visions of a universalistic future, constitutes the subject of chapter four.  Chapter five examines Silkin’s biblically-inspired ‘Peaceable Kingdom’, while chapter six analyses the exilic paradigms deployed in Feinstein’s poetry.  Overlapping discourses of female and Jewish otherness are scrutinised in relation to Feinstein’s feminism.

The Holocaust is relevant to Silkin, Feinstein and Gershon.  Chapter seven considers the poetry and novels of Gershon, who was a refugee from Nazi Germany.  This final chapter argues that Gershon’s reconciliation to life in England signifies her acculturation to the Anglo-Jewish diaspora.

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