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

by Victoria Aarons (Editor), Holli G. Levitsky (Editor), Hilene Flanzbaum (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

Victoria Aarons is distinguished professor of literature at Trinity University where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. She has published thirteen books, including Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory and Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women's Graphic Narratives, recipient of a 2024 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award.

Holli Levitsky, Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, has authored and edited Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman's Experience; New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Reading and Teaching; The Literature of Exile and Displacement, and Summer Haven: The Catskills, the Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, among other writings.

Hilene Flanzbaum taught American, Jewish-American and Holocaust literature for over 30 years. She has edited three collections, The Americanization of the Holocaust, The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature, and The Holocaust Across Borders.