The promising Jewish poetry of a Pariah: Samuel Roth. (2024)

Samuel Roth (1894-1974) is known today as appellant in a key FirstAmendment decision, Roth vs. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957). It wasRoth's perseverance and idealism as he appealed his conviction tothe Supreme Court that won him high praise from Gay Talese in ThyNeighbor's Wife. Roth was the first publisher of LadyChatterley's Lover and Ulysses in the United States. These bookswere decried as piracies, although he may have had Joyce'spermission through Ezra Pound. Before becoming a disreputable publisher,Roth had attained stature as a rising man of letters in New York. GeorgeSylvester Viereck, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Aleister Crowley, JohnReed, Frank Harris, Mina Loy, and Charles Reznikoff were all friends andadmirers. He edited a successful little magazine, The Lyric, as astudent at Columbia University in 1916-1917 that sought internationalcontributors. In it, and in various newsstand and subscription magazinesin the 1920s, Roth not only published Robinson and Reznikoff, but alsopoets such as Clement Wood, Ralph Cheyney, Harry Roskolenko [HarryRoskelenkier], William Rose Benet, Laura Benet, Clinton Scollard,Babette Deutsch, and Louis Grudin. In 1930, Reznikoff published a novel,By the Waters of Manhattan, the protagonist of which--a poor, fiery, andambitious literary enthusiast, poet, and bookseller--was modeled on Roth(Roth founded The Poetry Book Shop in Greenwich Village in 1919-1920).The renowned Anglo-British writer Israel Zangwill (26) recommended himas one of the "young poets of the Diaspora" in a major speechon American Zionism in 1923.

Roth thought deeply about his youth in a Galician shtetl, thetenuous Jewish American moral balance in The Golden Land, the promisesof Zionism, and Diaspora history as nightmare. His themes "anxietyand loneliness, the experience of spiritual sloth, messianiccondemnation of moral expediency, the responsibilities of the future,and the ability to face God" are those of the Enlightenment, theDiaspora, and the Jewish American experience. One thinks of Kafka'sphrase, "Writing as a form of prayer."

Roth indeed lived in two worlds. It was the venal one of borderlineerotica with which most of his contemporaries identified him. After hisostracism from the literary community in 1927 due to his printings ofUlysses, Roth became an entrepreneur of popular literature, includingthe first American "men's magazine" and books about the"secret life" of celebrities. During the Depression, he turnedto underground marketing of "p*rno." From 1929 to 1961, hespent a total of nine years in prison for distributing obscenity and forpandering to prurience in circulars for mail order books and pamphlets.Tragically, Samuel Roth wrote Jews Must Live: An Account of thePersecution of the World by Jewry on All the Frontiers of Civilizationand self-published it in 1934. Furious at what he had witnessed as hispublishing house was forced into bankruptcy, he responded with what heprobably thought was a jeremiad meant for Jews whose cash-drivenAmerican dreams had undermined their sense of social obligation. Withfangs bared, he excoriated Jewish physicians, real estate brokers,entertainers, bankers, and, of course, publishers. The Nazis quoted thework in propaganda speeches and even advertised it via sky writingplanes over American cities. The work is, in fact, an intemperate andinchoate, if selectively well observed, study of the business tactics ofJewish middlemen and hostility toward them by the population ofcountries, especially America, in which they settled (Gertzman, 257-69).Roth spent the rest of his life trying to atone for "that tragicbook of mine." That atonement possibly includes the revisions hemade to the memoir of his boyhood, Count Me Among the Missing (hereafterCMAM), which was not put in final form until Viereck read it in themid-1950s. The manuscript glows with reverence for Jewish faith andTalmudic laws, of which young Roth was a student.

Samuel Roth told his father at age fourteen that his ambition wasto become a poet (CMAM 132). That was exceptionally strange for a LowerEast Side boy, for it was hardly a way to the financial security thatwould mean escaping the ghetto. From 1915 to 1917, he was a member of apoetry club, the "Ugerki," which included Marie Syrkin(daughter of labor Zionist Nahum Syrkin) and Maurice Samuel (Kugel,"Higher Education," In a Plain Brown Wrapper [hereafter PBW]14). Thanks to the contacts established by his friend and roommate, thelabor activist Frank Tannenbaum (Foner, 4: 442-48; Maier and Weatherhead4-9), early Anarchist as well as Zionist verses by Roth appeared inpamphlets and newspapers. He also wrote poems, stories, and anoccasional book review for the Jewish press: The Jewish Child, TheMaccabean, The Hebrew Standard. Roth met most of New York'sdowntown Bohemia during the years 1912-1916. They includedTannenbaum's many admirers and supporters in his Wobbly-inspired"direct actions" to help the unemployed: Emma Goldman,Alexander Berkman, Max Eastman, Thomas Seltzer, Floyd Dell, and ArturoGiovannetti (Roth, CMAM 130-36; Kugel, "Friendships,"PBW2-12). In 1916, Tannenbaum, then an honor student at Columbia,successfully advocated Roth's admission on scholarship. The twostudents founded The Lyric in 1917 ("Friendships," PBW, 20-24;CMAM 153-54; Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich, 252).

Roth gained a reputation as a hard driving and discriminatingeditor, capable of bringing to people's attention some of the bestpoets in America and England. There were six issues, which includedcontributions from faculty advisor John Erskine, Robinson, Samuel,Clement Wood, Sara Teasdale, Amy Lowell, James Oppenheim, Leslie N.Jennings, John Gould Fletcher, Babette Deutsch, Clinton Scollard,William Rose Benet, and D. H. Lawrence, most by written permission fromthe poets. During the years 1917 to 1921, Roth was extremely helpful inRobinson's behalf both in America and England, arranging for thepoet to be awarded The Lyric's five hundred dollar poetry prize,publishing a long appreciation of Robinson in The Bookman early in 1920("Edwin Arlington Robinson"), and writing to British critic J.C. Squire about arranging to meet him on his trip to England (Robinsonto Roth, 17 May; CMAM219; Squire to Roth, 21 Feb.). Robinson respondedgratefully to The Bookman piece, assuring Roth he read it "with avery real sense of obligation ... Your generally positive note issomething very rare. That comes in most cases when a fellow is from aquarter to a half century dead" (Robinson to Roth, 8 Dec.).

Before the War stopped publication, Sam and Frank had doneexceptionally well with The Lyric. A New York Times Book Review essay onrecent poetry praised it for attempting "a higher and moreambitious flight than most [college magazines], and with considerablesuccess" ("Some Recent Books of Poetry," 310). Thereviewer liked the high standard set by both the younger and thepreviously published poets. Those who wrote directly to Rothcongratulating him were just as impressed. Sam had sent some of thepoet-editors he included (as well as Harriet Monroe of Poetry andanthologist William Stanley Braithwaite) his own verses. They must haverealized that here was a promising young colleague (Braithwaite to Roth;Monroe to Roth). Giving constructive evaluations of The Lyric'scontents and grateful of how their poems looked in print, contributorsthemselves were universally enthusiastic. The distinguished set ofwriters with whom they shared space especially pleased them. Rothcontinued to publish and edit The Lyric independently of Columbia in1919-1920.

Charles Reznikoffand Louis Zukofsky were friends and employees inRoth's Lower East Side school for teaching immigrants English inthe early 1920s. Roth published Reznikoff's third book of poetryunder his Poetry Book Shop imprint in 1920. The vignettes and images ofLower East Side life in Reznikoff's Poems are full of the pathos ofimmigrants' struggles. Only because the images themselves implymore than pathos do Reznikoff's lyrics rise above sentimentalism.His subjects are a kitten's corpse twisted out of shape by pushcarts, sick and dying beggars and charwomen, a man who has a fatal heartattack while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to his apartment where hiswife has just set the dinner table, a father whose business has failedand who is a burden to his family taking the gas pipe, and a bedriddenmother whose son had just been killed in the war. While the snow is"thick about the arc lights like moths in summer," herson's body is being sent home "through fields and cities coldand white." (1) Not even Zukovsky, much less Roth or other poetsworking with the power of the image, dared this kind of horrificmelodrama, although they could have learned from Reznikoff how to conveywith lyric precision shock, impotence, and despair at what they hadexperienced as ghetto Jews in New York.

Roth published two of Zukofsky's poems in his Two WorldsQuarterly in 1925. While sensuous imagery with symbolic resonance wasnot his forte, Roth did write some lyrics that take their place alongwith those of poets whose works included early examples of imagism andobjectivism. In his Preface to An "Objectivists" Anthology(15-22), Zukofsky argued that "particulars" can embody thepoet's experience in the world in the political and historicalmoment in which he or she is immersed. One of his poems in Two Worlds is"A Parable of Time," which manipulates the concept of"Phenominalism" (the only reality is observable data).Zukofsky describes "A great house ... / With a face / Of paintedwood" in front of which an aristocratic old man and woman have apolite conversation. They moved away; there were rumors; decay set in:

 The great house lost its roof And is now a timber yard; The man who owns the walls Presents a shabby card.

And who cares, the poet concludes, if now people only see a houseabout to be demolished? All they miss is universal desire, adjustment toconvention, paths to fulfillment, and mortality.

Among Roth's acquaintances, those who cared included AlterBrody, Louis Grudin, Reznikoff, Harriet Monroe, and the Yiddish poetYehoash, in his "Woolworth Building":

 Evening falls Like a dead fly on the knot of blent wire and mortar and cement ... And high above all spires that scrape the sky, ... The temple of the god of iron and gold! (1920)

The images in some of Roth's best short poems are, like thoseof the poets just mentioned and like Alter Brody's, intended tomake a social reality integral to the picture, as Oppen and Zukofskyprescribed for fellow objectivists (Gitenstein 4-5; Heller, 216-17).Thus, the pushcart peddlers of "Hester Street" arepoverty-stricken Bar Kochbas, Moseses, Isaacs, and Hasmoneans; theallusions to ancient leaders suggest the pride and mysterious enduranceof a venerable people (Isaac was the longest-lived of the patriarchs).In "The Rain on Broadway," the subway and the sewer imply thesordid environment of "rain and man." "The BoweryWind" uses "shivering beggar" and "barefootedchildren ... flutter[ing] like silly dolls" to discomfort people"with warm houses and locked gates." "From theWilliamsburgh [sic] Bridge" describes the power of evening as abugle call:

 And they who move the vendor's cart and they who move the hand of fate Stir tremulously like the leaves of a wind-blown flower. (2)

Despite these tentative exercises in Modernist lyric, Roth was notan experimental poet. During his trip to England in 1921, he didcorrespond with Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and H. D., and met the latterand T. S. Eliot during a trip to England in 1921. There, he planned ahistory of modern American poetry. Pound, for whom teaching Europeansabout American creative genius was of paramount importance, agreed towrite marginal commentary for it. (3) When Roth founded the literaryquarterly Two Worlds in 1925 and the newsstand-distributed Two WorldsMonthly in 1926, some of the poets he published were avant-garde intheir sexual explicitness, terse diction, and suggestive images.However, most were conventional in phrasing and style: Arthur Symons, E.Powes Mather, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hardy. In an open letter to TheNation in 1920 (the contributor's note identified him as "apoet and essayist, and editor of The Lyric"), Roth identified hisfavorite English and American poets: only Pound and Eliot were devotedto "the revolution of the word." Others were Thomas Hardy, G.K. Chesterton, Ralph Hodgson, Masefield, Vachel Lindsay, Sandberg,Frost, and especially Robinson (Roth, "A Letter," 527; Roth,"Edwin Arlington Robinson," 507-11).

Roth's reputation as a poet of promise in his twenties isconfirmed by a score of talented writers who were contributors to TheLyric, fellow editors, and friends. Those not already mentioned includeMarguerite Wilkinson, Joseph Freeman, Thomas Moult, Louis Untermeyer,John Erskine, and H. D. He published poems in a large number ofperiodicals: Poetry, The Menorah Journal, The Boston Transcript,Contemporary Verse (the most successful poetry magazine after HarrietMonroe's Poetry), Minaret, and Midland. In these pages his fellowpoets included Untermeyer, Robinson, Samuel, Wilkinson, Babette Deutsch,Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Widdemer, Arthuro Giovannitti, MaxEastman, and Charles Reznikoff. Untermeyer, in a lengthy essay in TheMenorah Journal on "The Jewish Spirit in Modern AmericanPoetry," listed Roth among "younger poets" such as LouisGruden, Elias Lieberman, Arthur Guiterman, and Franklin P. Adams,praising his "sonnets and unrhymed philippics" (132).Wilkinson (347) printed one of his excellent "Nustscha"sonnets in her anthology of New Voices (1919); Stanley Coblentz (91)anthologized eight of these in Modern American Lyrics: An Anthology(1924). We have mentioned Zangwill's commendation.

Marie Syrkin was Roth's best constructive critic. She couldnot help being moved by a few of his solemnly meditative pieces,especially one she read in The Nation in 1920. However, she did take theoccasion to remind "the King [who] can do no wrong" of the"horrible lapses of taste and rhythm in other poems ... Of course,by now you are mortally offended and have consigned me to the ignorantrabble that dares dictate to genius ..." (Syrkin to Roth 1920).They had a special relationship, from the "Ugerki" group,which included her first husband, Maurice Samuel (she later marriedCharles Reznikoff), and the editors of The Jewish Child, Judith andSulamith Ish-Kishor. When Roth sent her three sonnets ("Whatchathink of these?"), one a imitation of the Elizabethan with touchesof Keats, she responded with praise for its "fine glowingspirit," followed by some significant demolition of the poem'sdiction and structure (Syrkin to Roth, n.d.). She was back again whenSam published a cleverly phrased bit of light verse poking fun at a poemby Arturo Giovannitti in The Liberator (a successor to The Masses) in1919. She wrote, "Why oh why do you do it? As usual you love aquaint conceit with a few pretty, successful twists, but most vilelybuttressed by an ingenious disregard for rhythm ... You could producebig stuff but thru sheer perversity and laziness you write verse inwhich flashes of real beauty and blatant amateurishness play hide andseek. Don't be angry," she concludes, "I write this foryour soul's sake" (Syrkin to Roth, 1919). (4) Her shrewd andwitty advice bore results, although sometimes she seems not to havegiven him sufficient credit for improvement.

One of the genres in which Roth concentrated was amatory verse. Onewould expect his work to consist of sensual and enthusiastic persuasionsto gather rosebuds, considering his extremely active, and furtive,sexual adventures. That is not what one finds, however. As one canimagine from his career as a publisher who took full advantage of laxinternational copyright laws and who knew better than any other howpruriently to titillate his customers, the contrast between SamuelRoth's literary output and how he chose to behave is more strikingthan is the case with most writers. According to Maurice Samuel, he wasseeing prostitutes regularly by the time he was seventeen (M. Samuel toRoth). For a time, he was fixated on a film actress whose adventures hecompulsively followed both in Lower East Side nickelodeons and uptowntheaters (Roth, "Open Plumbing," 388-90). Despite MarieSyrkin's engagement to Samuel, she was pursued avidly by Roth whileMaurice was working in Ohio. They kissed, which in that era signified anengagement, but the affair ended upon Samuel's return to New York(CMAM, 147; Kugel, "London," PBW, 18-22). In London, he livedwith a beautiful young woman whom he met on the street (CMAM, 223-29;Kugel, "London," PBW, 19, 22). One of Roth's editors, thefolklorist and bibliographer of erotica Gershon Legman, told AdelaideKugel that while her father was editing his two newsstand magazines in1926 and 1927, he reviewed night club productions and musical theater inorder to meet showgirls whose careers he was in a position to advance(Legman to Kugel, 5). One of his favorite actresses, with whom heexchanged letters and for whom he wrote a novelette, was stage starHelen Gahagan, later wife of Melvyn Douglas (Kugel, notes for PBW).Roth's daughter, in her memoir, wrote that his wife, Pauline,feared her husband would use his trip to England as an excuse to endtheir marriage. She did not see him off. And he did have a shipboardromance, he averred, with the daughter of the martyred Spanish anarchistand educator Francisco Ferrer (Kugel, "London," PBW 2-3; CMAM192-96). This frequently indulged sexual attraction to many women isremarkable because of the contrast between it and the ferventspirituality the persona in his poems yearns for.

The love sonnets appearing in The Boston Daily Transcript, TheMaccabean, and Contemporary Verse are meditative, rather like thepalinode or retraction-of-love sections of Renaissance sonnet sequences,in which the poet turns from eros to agape, or to memento mori. Thediction is similar also: "heart," "ashes,""moon," "trifles," "traitor." His themesare isolation, the futility of expressing desire in words, and thefragile macrocosm lovers construct against an indifferent or malevolentuniverse. Occasionally, there is a remarkable directness of statementthat prefigures Roth's later poems:

 How can you understand that this my heart Is but a sparrow in an eagle's nest? So far it is from both the sky and land It cannot rise, it dare not fall, so lives apart From fear of conquest and from hope of rest ... I will not speak; you could not understand. ("Trifles") Should you turn from me for a far-off clime And never more to me the sun should bring Your image; but in fine imagining; Only your name remain ... I fear that the fuel we gather here May yet turn traitor ... ... and dead of root Darkly will float down the eternal stream. ("Should You Turn from Me")

These poems are similar to some in James Oppenheim's 1914collection ("When in the Death of Love," 15; "Where LoveOnce Was," 16) and especially to Marie Syrkin's. The restlessuncertainty and foreboding in her "Trifles" leads only to theultimate sense of paralysis for a poet: the inability to speak. The lastline of Syrkin's sonnet "Insomnia" ("Written inYouth" 101) is "And you were only a remembered name." Itreflects the fourth line in Roth's "Should You Turn fromMe." Darkness in both poems is identified with loss and inabilityto retain not only the loved one but even the memory of what the passionwas like. Syrkin is more effective than Roth in weaving vital imagesinto the experience:

 And like a dream you left my pain's strong grasp. The dark grew empty of all dread and grace; All anguish went out like a wind-blown fame.

The sadness and suppressed longing in Syrkin's and Roth'slove poems (their affair was short and furtive) is, despite the genre,significantly related to the poets being American Jews. The tenor of thespeakers' emotion is rooted in an inability to give themselves to aloving, communal, and deeply spiritual creed. That creed is not only theChristian idealism embodied in the long tradition of the love sonnet,but also that of the eastern European Jewish community. If Roth andSyrkin reject the former, their identity as Americans makes the latterunavailable. "Sullen," "dry," "void," and"silent" are some of the adjectives Roth uses to denote thiscomplex of yearnings.

The poet's Jewish-themed verses are intensely revealingdepictions of inner tension, troubled awareness, and morose puzzlement.Written during his twenties, they are, it is important to note, no lessincongruous with his actual behavior than are his love poems. From 1917to 1921, Roth had gained a reputation among writers and patrons not onlyfor his editorial skills, but also for flamboyance, arrogance, andirascibility (Wood to Roth, 5 July 1921; Syrkin to Roth, 1920). When hisbookshop failed, he left precipitously for England, leaving a pile ofdebts behind (Freeman to Roth; Kugel, "London," PBW 3). Whilethere, his attempts at flamboyant self-advertisem*nt, according to hisfriend and companion, the journalist Joseph Freeman, included "J.M. Barrie moustache, fur-collared coat, heavy Malacca cane," and afaux-British accent and the booming voice of a Yiddish actor (Freeman,American Testament 207-29). Humility and spiritual focus were largely inabeyance in his life during this period, even without considering hisillicit affairs. Roth's poetry comes from a completely separatephase of his response to experience, as if intense piety and worldlyambitions had split off from each other with neither canceling out theother. However, as readers of The Counterlife will remember, "Lifeis and." Especially, perhaps, for the American Jew.

Roth's most impressive religious lyrics were published in TheNation and Poetry. They show more of E. A. Robinson's influencethan does his other work, and embody the eastern European Jewishawareness of faith in extremis. "Yahrzeit" is a dialoguebetween a man who appears on a rainy night to light mourning lamps, anda young man whose lover has abandoned him. The experience of paralysisof will is as universally Jewish as is the Diaspora setting: a stormynight, an ominous flickering of the yellow candle light, somberconversation. The lamp lighter spends the night, as does the young man,in the synagogue. They talk about the latter's need for hisbeloved: "Your youth is sad ... You should love less and set yourheart / upon more sacred things." The poem continues:

 Do roadways lift themselves toward the sky? Do stones roll passionately into brooks? And have you ever seen a hillside lift up arms And reach out to the passing clouds for love? You are a road, a stone, a hillside, brother.

The simplicity of the diction, imagery, and rhythm, and the freeverse medium give a dignity that show the poet learned from his critics,especially if those included Reznikoff (who could be seen usingSamuel's typewriter at the Poetry Book Shop [Kugel, "The NewYork Poetry Bookshop," PBW 10) and Zukofsky. And so does thewell-crafted ambiguity, which allows the reader to see not only a rebukedirected at the poem's speaker, but also a new way forward for him.The lamp lighter, whom the young man complains is "as merciless asGod," functions as the speaker's melamed, forcing him gentlyto translate a riddle into a revelation. As "Furies shook thenight," and the candles "wove shrouds and shrouds of yellowflickering sheen," the Yahrzeit man impresses on his host that ayearning road, a stone, or a hillside are valuable not as metaphors alovesick writer might use. A man might indeed come to intuit a commonbut transcendent purpose with a road, a stone, or hillside. All threemight be translated into magical symbols of the power of the soul totransform sensual passion into intoxication with what is too holy to beexpressed directly. What seemed sarcasm, then, could be essentially awarm-hearted brotherly offer. Roth touches the core of Hasidic piety. Itrecognizes the power of sensual desire but seeks its replacement withpulsating, pious ecstasy.

The poem "Kol Nidre" was honored by an appearance, afterrevisions, in 1918 in Harriet Monroe's prestigious magazine Poetry.It is about history as nightmare; being caught up in a mystery one isneither able to renounce, nor find one's way out of, howevervarious the paths seem: "There are only God and nothingness, myselfbesides." Hearing the chant on the eve of the Day of Atonementbrings to the speaker's mind armies "without a battlecry" retreating, "wrath of midnight storms," shofarssounding days of reckoning for heedless dead, ancient Israel losing itsfaith, life-long anxiety, and, still, the need to question. "God!Will this never have end?" With that, "a knock upon my windowpane, fumbling / Black flapping wings, a voice wild with despair; /Traitor! What have you mused in Ascalon?" The city mentioned is anancient Philistine seaport against which the Israelis fought. There wereatrocities on both sides. Guilt is as vivid as humiliation and confusionin Roth's poem; despair becomes a death wish.

 ... Hurl me, If so you will, down the ravines of death, Where every sunbeam is a thorn to prick, And every flower is a wound to bear, All loveliness a memory of wrath And spirit madness!

A convincing sense of spiritual agony is difficult to sustain andany decline into bathos would have been evident to the editors ofPoetry. Roth presents too strong a statement of endurance to let thathappen. The last stanza finds the singer of "Kol Nidre" movingon, and the speaker, with renewed vitality, finding in the evening astar he knows is his, and only his, destiny "in sterncreation": "There is my star!"

There's an integrity, intensity, and natural human voice in"Yahrzeit" and "Kol Nidre" that would make Robinsonproud. What it embodies in soulful Jewishness might make Zangwill proudalso. Among Roth's contemporaries, Emma Lazarus (there is noassurance Roth knew of her work, but it appeared in The AmericanHebrew), James Oppenheim, and H. N. Bialik achieved similar effects."Kol Nidre" is a distant echo of one of the best of KarlShapiro's Poems of a Jew, "The 151st Psalm" (1958), inwhich querulousness gives place first to direct statement aboutGod's presence in objects associated with both anxiety and dailysurvival and finally to prayer.

The sonnet was the predominant form Roth mastered. He publishedsonnets in Contemporary Verse, Minaret, The Boston Evening Transcript,and Poetry before he left for England. The elegiac sequence"Nustscha" is a triumph, although some archaic phrasing andforced rhyming is, despite Marie Syrkin's playful scolding, stillpresent. Roth published the entire eighteen poem sequence under hisWilliam Faro imprint in 1932, at which time it and the other thirtythree lyrics in the book functioned as a set of lovingly crafted relicsof a young poet's career. The Jewish experience they display is avindication of Untermeyer's 1921 inclusion of Roth with poets ofsimilar background and promise. A decade later, however, Samuel'stransformation from respected poet to erotica publisher was irrevocable;thus, the title of the 1932 volume, Songs Out of Season.

Marguerite Wilkinson wrote him that he had achieved in the"Nustscha" sonnets a "sincerity and naturalness"especially hard in a highly crafted form like the sonnet. He had madehis "words and phrases and sentences sound natural as if theybelonged to human mouths and voices." Jessie B. Rittenhouse, poet,anthologist, and influential critic for the New York Times and severalperiodicals, loved particularly numbers 11, 12, 13, about Roth'suncles (Roth had sent her a complete typescript of the sequence in 1918,by which time she knew him from The Lyric). The hunter, Raphael, hearingof the pogroms, "broke his weapons with his hands and sat /Thinking in silence of his real foes." Mendel, the shepherd, had a"calm and proud and deep" nature; at his father's deathhe immigrated. Aaron, the scholar, at the shivah (week long mourningperiod) for his father's death, opened "the yellow book":

 And slowly read into the trembling air And they leaned forward at the mellow sound, And glory lingered in their very look, And in their hearts they thought that God was there.

"Filled with the beauty of strange places and strangelife," Rittenhouse said of these sonnets and added that thecharacterizations lent both concreteness and empathy to the poems. Thiswas most notably true of the portrait of the speaker's father:stern, meditative, aloof, and the one chosen to chant blessings. Rothassimilates his own solitary wariness as a child with that of the magicof the town and its setting:

 ... He who on a wall Watched the boughs darken under drifting snow; In every opening blossom saw an elf, In each closed flower felt the darkness swell; And from each autumn leaf saw the light fall Over the earth "a sad, strange lad" myself.

The overwhelming presence in the sonnets is Roth's Galicianbirthplace, called forth in the first word and addressed directly inalmost every poem. In the last line in the sequence, the narrator is intears. But it is not sentimentality. The sadness is a universal adultresponse to the experience of loss and fallibility. It has alsosomething of a Jewish consciousness in the hints at self-reproach andpatient humility: "... One may come and beat / Loud at my door andclamor, and I shrink / To open lest he see how poor I am." Rothsets forth various kinds of sympathy. Only one other American Jewishpoem of the period rivals it in theme and feeling, the underappreciatedAlter Brody's vers libre reminiscence of his Russian birthplace,"Kartushkiya-Beroza" (A Family Alburn 13-17).

The five "Sonnets on Sinai" that The Menorah Journalpublished (288-89) show almost complete restraint of the posturing,cliched phrasing, archaisms, inverted adjective-noun combinations, andconsequent awkward heightening of tone, that make poetry of "thewarning voice" deflate. Exceptions include "for he will ceasethe wrack"; "Lo the name of God"; "Think ye ever ofhim"; "Foul dust is now this heritage divine." However,the epic force of the story Roth tells is well sustained, the imageryoccasionally graphic and mysterious ("world white to heaven'srim"), and Moses' voice scintillating. Moses returns the TenCommandments to God due to the failure of men to obey the Covenant:

 Suffer[ing] the stings of scorn and lowered pride, By saint and huckster mocked unto my face ... Know: I shall stand once more at Sinai's foot, Torah in hand, world white to Heaven's rim, Thunder shaking the highland to the root; At God's descent shall the heavens dim And as His voice will bid all earth be mute I'll rise and give the Torah back to him.

Roth follows the Talmudic statement that the Messiah may returnduring a time so vicious that no just men exist. The details from Exodus19 and 24 are expertly dramatized, although in the Bible the terror ofthe Israelites at God's voice, the "devouring eye" ofGod's presence, and the majesty of the black cloud on the Mountainimply a mystery which Roth's powers as a poet hardly touch. In thenext and final of the five sonnets, "chaos terrible and swift andblack" follows God's reclaiming the Torah as Moses holds it upfor him. Eventually, God relents, "dew and light and flowers"return. At this time, God's word, the Covenant, will be replaced by"his Sword." The line may allude to Moses' command to theLevite priests upon seeing the Golden Calf; he told the men to killtheir brothers and neighbors before the camp would be eligible forre-consecration (Exodus 32:26-29). Roth clearly implies that God Himselfwill be the messiah after Moses returns the Tablets, and humanity soaltered that the peace and justice of post-messianic would also be posthuman. If history itself had been nightmare, then the post-apocalypticmay be more stifling. Roth, despite the compelling diction of the poem,provides only the bare essentials of the story. The shock of the end oftime needs more than directly stated narrative, however; the awesomesights, sounds, and effects of supernatural cataclysm are absent. InExodus 19:16, the Israelites quake before the trumpet and the thunder.In 20:19, they tell Moses the voice of God will kill them. If Roth canonly approach the outer fringes of such mysteries, he does spotlight theguilt and uncertainty that is a source of Jewish piety.

He also has a fine appreciation of the contrast between the mortalpoet and the prophecy itself, the latter throwing the former deep intoobscurity. Roth contrasts the dubious value of an effective poetic imagewith the stark clarity of Moses's speech:

 Ye, who the vision twist through words of rhyme Color on color, sound on sound until Something of life appears to praise your will That ye are pleased to fancy verse sublime Think ye ever of him who once did climb The modest crest of Sinai's lowly hill (A world of violence quivering still) And spoke the quiet word which thrilled all Time.

As a poet, Roth once more attempted this kind of eloquence. Thiswas Europe: A Book for America (1919), the most ambitious poem of hisyouth, in which he attempted "the warning voice" he hadused--with more success--in the "Sonnets on Sinai." It isclear from the dedicatory poem to C. N. Bialik ("Look West / Andcall for me!") that the prophetic voice in the 107-page poem isRoth himself. His voice in the first half of the book is callous,contemptuous, vulgar, and sad*stic. It is also callow. Europe should befed a diet of dung; its people are degenerating into beasts who willsoon throw children from the Eiffel Tower for amusem*nt; they will sneerat women's suffrage and shorter work hours. Europe's leadersare worth only contempt ("You, Lloyd George, will say to Ireland:you are a people of warriors and statesmen..."). The poemcontinues:

 Europe, let me be your doctor. With a hammer let me break open those iron jaws And pour a pail of your bitterest spleen down Your throat. O I know a way to make eunuchs of the most terrible men;

All this in philippic stanzas of no more than twelve lines each.The Hebrew Standard's reviewer heard "a bruised soul, that hassuffered variously and vicariously through all the ages, that speaks nowpitifully, now boldly, now almost blasphemously, but at its best,reaches the nobility and optimism of the ancient sages and mostreverently declares its faith in the everlasting God"("N.K."). This reviewer and the New York Evening Post's("The Sick Man") seem to have been especially impressed by thesecond part of the book, where Roth appeals to the Zionist impulse:"The face of Israel will shine with power when Europe / Will be aname difficult to remember." The speaker also contrasts Americawith Europe, praising it as replacing the high culture of Europe withits own creativity. It is puzzling that Roth sees his own country'sgenius in the "terrible wisdom / Of Baseball, Football / AndBoxing," which are more important than novels and plays for acountry whose destiny "is to make earth a worthy habitation formankind." Only in America and Israel will the Jewish people behappy. Is that because they are allowed to play, and play fair, by therules of the game? Europe would appeal principally to an American Jewishaudience. Judging from the reviews, it did (although few Jewish parentsthought their children's interest in boxing, baseball, or footballto be wisdom). The Nation's reviewer thought Roth's "hardhitting" Jewish pronouncements ("the voice of deathlessIsrael") perfectly suited to his praise of native Americanidealism: "Mr Roth does not say all this as greatly as Emerson orWhitman did, but he says it with a bitterish, Old Testament concretenessthat will hold some ears a good while" ("M. V. D." 856a).

The volume's final poem, "Thus Saith the Lord," isthe longest and most audacious. God speaks to the Hebrew poets throughthe ages, who seem to morph with Roth himself. When God speaks with thisfigure, He becomes an admirer: "I, your God, whose earnest / Isonly of darkness and desolation, dared not look out often for fear ofmeeting your eyes." After years in the study house, or in thestreets absorbing beatings from the "gentiles" that "I,your God, was powerless to stop," America, and Zionism, happened.God actually prostrates himself in forgiveness for tolerating thecontempt "your own people" lavished on the poet as he"mournfu[lly] journey[ed] over the face of the earth." But Godwill "raise up [His] arms once more / And they will yet know that Iam the Lord."

This final poem justifies, perhaps, the tone and the prophesies ofthe previous ones. None of the critics comment on this bizarre finalmonologue, although a few do speak generally of the Europe'sblasphemousness? Only Herbert Gorman, in The Sun, and Nelson Crawford,in Poetry (Crawford 341), felt that Roth's disquisitions on historyand politics were without coherent purpose. Gorman, however, told hisreaders that they would find Roth's other works well worth reading.The New York Post review ("The Sick Man"), though mixed, wasprobably the one most likely to entice readers. Roth must have thoughtso, for he quoted these lines six years later in full-pageadvertisem*nts for Europe in several issues of his Two Worlds Monthly:"From his observation tower in that section of New York in whichEast and West meet, in which commerce and art and wild pleasure mixelbows ... Samuel Roth has looked up and down the world and seen manythings and prophesied." Reviewers in The Nation, The HebrewStandard, and the New York Sun praised the book as "visionary"and "reverent." Predictably, his friend Clement Wood'sreview, in The Call, was adulatory: "justifiable vituperation andgenuine prophetic poetry ... It may be the man's one great poem,though we hope it is not; but it is a poem." Elias Lieberman, inThe American Hebrew, concluded his lengthy appreciation by declaring:

 In its passages of tenderness for humanity and for his people, and above all in its ecstatic prophecy, it is indubitably Semitic. In my review of "First Offering," the author's first collection of poems, I spoke rather guardedly of his promise ... Here is the promise realized and it is far greater than anyone could possibly have expected.

However one evaluates Europe, Roth, for a few years, was apromising poet. This is why Rittenhouse and Wilkinson wrote suchgenerous and sympathetic letters (four hundred and one thousand words,respectively) to a young man who had been active for less than fiveyears, one whose dedicated pursuit of a poetic career, due to an uglyworld whose hostility he had himself called into life, would last only afew more. Roth never stopped writing poetry, and in that sense he didfollow Robinson's "gleam." But with the world'scontempt, the needs of a growing and beloved family, and a hunger notonly for financial security but also for the kind of notoriety thatsensation-seeking journalists, prosecutors of sexually explicitliterature, and showgirls could provide, his poetry had to be saved forperiods of enforced leisure, possibly in his cell at LewisburgPenitentiary during the periods of 1936-1939 or 1958-1961. After hisretirement, he wrote The Kingdom: A Book of Israeli Psalms. There were151 invocations and meditations. Sometimes David and sometimes Rothhimself is the singer. Is the spirit of Israel far enough removed fromNew York, he asks in one. It is hard for an old man, especially one whomissed a doctor's appointment to follow a beautiful woman on thestreet (he's proud of that, he tells us), to overcome restlessnessand the struggle between flesh and conscience. He sleeps, he says slyly,with all the confidence of an Arab preparing for battle. Why, he asksGod directly, does he still yearn to see His face, Whose back is all hehas seen? Roth, who in youth spoke as a lover, a prophet, and alawgiver, has the chutzpah to answer his own question: "Except formy devoted parents, who but you / Have I in Heaven?"

Works Cited

Braitwaite, William Stanley. Letter to Samuel Roth. 15 Sept. 1917.Roth Archive.

Brody, Alter. A Family Album and Other Poems. 1918. Rpt. Montana:Kessinger Pub, n.d.

Coblentz, Stanley. Modern American Lyrics. New York: Minton, Balch,and Co., 1924.

Crawford, Nelson. "Poet or Prophet?" Poetry. Oct.1920-March 1921: 341-42.

Foner, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in the UnitedStates. 4 vols. New York: International Publications, 1965.

Freeman, Joseph. An American Testament. A Narrative of Rebels andRomantics. New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1936.

--. Letter to Samuel Roth. 20 Oct. 1921. Both Archive.

Gertzman, Jay A. Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica,1920-40. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.

Gittenstein, R. Barbara. Apocalyptic Messianism and ContemporaryJewish-American Poetry. Albany: SUNY P, 1986.

Gorman, Herbert. New York Sun. Clipping preserved in Roth'sdummy copy of Europe. Roth Archive (stacks).

Heller, Michael. "Diasporic Poetics." In Jonathan N.Barron and Eric M Selinger "Diasporic Poetics." In Jonathan N.Barton and Eric M Selinger, eds, Jewish American Poetry: Poems,Commentary, and Reflections. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 2000.

Hoffman, Frederick l., Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich. TheLittle Magazine: A History and Bibliography. Princeton: Princeton UP,1947.

Kugel, Adelaide. In a Plain Brown Wrapper. Unpublished Biography,1982-88. Roth Archive. Cited as PBW.

--. Notes for PBW (spiral notebook, no pagination). Both Archive.

Legman, Gershon. Letter to Adelaide Kugel. 20 July 1988.6pp. RothArchive.

Lieberman, Elias. Review of Roth 's Europe: A Book forAmerica: The American Hebrew. Clipping preserved in Roth's dummycopy of Europe. Roth Archive (stacks).

Maier, Joseph, and Richard W. Weatherhead. Frank Tannenbaum: ABiographical Essay. New York: University Seminars, Columbia U., 1974.

Monroe, Harriet. Letter to Samuel Roth. 19 July 1917. Roth Archive.

"M.V.D." "Books: Anglo-Saxon Adventures inVerse." The Nation 26 June 1920: 885a-57a.

"N.K." "Europe: A Book for America by SamuelRoth." The Hebrew Standard. Clipping preserved in Roth's dummycopy of Europe. Roth Archive.

Oppenheim, James. Songs for the New Age. New York: Century Co.,1914.

Reznikoff, Charles. By the Waters of Manhattan. New York: BoniPaper Books, 1930.

Rittenhouse, Jessie B. Letter to Samuel Roth. 1918. Roth Archive.

Robinson, Edwin Arlington. Letter to Samuel Roth. 8 Dec. 1920. RothArchive.

Roth, Samuel. "A Letter to Mr. J. C. Squire." The Nation10 Nov. 1920: 526-27.

--. Count Me Among the Missing. Unpublished Biography, 1955-1970.Roth Archive. Cited as CMAM.

--. Europe: A Book for America. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919.

--. "Edwin Arlington Robinson." The Bookman Jan. 1920:507-11.

--. "Kol Nidre." Poetry: A Magazine of Verse June 1918:126-29.

--. "Open Plumbing" (autobiographical novelette). TwoWorlds March 1926: 367-96. [Signed "David Zorn."]

--. "Should You Turn from Me." Boston Evening Transcript19 May 1917: 2.3.

--. Songs Out of Season. New York: Faro, 1932.

--. "Sonnets on Sinai." The Menorah Journal Dec. 1917:288-89.

--. "Trifles." Contemporary Verse January 1917: 14.

--. "Two Poets on the East Side." The Maccabaean December1918: 356-57.

--. "Yahrzeit." The Nation 8 May 1920: 622.

Samuel, Maurice. Letter to Samuel Roth. 1 Aug. 1916. Roth Archive.

--. Letter to Samuel Roth. N.d. Roth Archive.

--. Letter to Samuel Roth. N.d. Roth Archive.

--. Letter to Samuel Roth. 22 Jan. 1919. Roth Archive.

"Some Recent Books of Poetry." New York Times 7 July1918:310 (Book Review Section).

Squire, J. C. Letter to Samuel Roth. 21 Feb. 1921. Roth Archive.

Syrkin, Marie. Letter to Samuel Roth. N.d. Accompanying typescriptof three poems by Roth. Roth Archive.

--. Letter to Samuel Roth. 1919. Roth Archive.

--. Letter to Samuel Roth. 1920. Roth Archive.

--. "Written in Youth" [section title]. Gleanings: ADiary in Verse. Santa Barbara: Rhythms Press, 1979.

Talese, Gay. Thy Neighbor's Wife. New York: Dell, 1981.

"The Sick Man." New York Evening Post. 21 Feb. 1920.Clipping preserved in dummy copy of Roth's Europe: A Book ForAmerica. Roth Archive.

Untermeyer, Louis. "The Jewish Spirit in Modern AmericanPoetry." The Menora Journal August 1921: 121-32.

Yehoash (Solomon Blumgarten). "Woolworth Building." InJules Chametzky et al. Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology.New York: Norton, 2001.

Wilkinson, Marguerite. Letter to Samuel Roth. 4 March 1919. RothArchive.

--. New Voices: An Introduction to Contemporary Poetry. New York:Macmillan, 1919.

Wood, Clement. Letter to Samuel Roth. 5 July 1921. Roth Archive.

Zangwill, Israel. Watchman, What of the Night? New York: AmericanJewish Congress, 1923. "Address delivered ... Carnegie Hall, NewYork City, October 14, 1923."

Zukovsky, Louis, ed. An "Objectivists" Anthology. LeBeausset, France: n.p., 1932.

--. "A Parable of Time." Two Worlds Quarterly 1.1 (Sept.1925): 56.

--. "The Sadness After." Two Worlds Quarterly 1.2 (Dec.1925): 126.

Notes

In 2005, Candy Kugel, New York City, and James Kugel, Jerusalem,Israel, Samuel Roth 's grandchildren, donated an extensivecollection of their grandfather's papers and books to theDepartment of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Columbia. In addition toRoth 's own publications and published and unpublished writings,there is correspondence to and, in some cases, from Pound, Sylvia Beach,Harriet Weaver, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Garfield Hayes, John Slocum, BenAbramson, and John Rodker. There are also drafts of Roth 'sautobiography, Count Me Among the Missing (CMAM), and hisdaughter's memoir of her father, In a Plain Brown Wrapper (PBW).Both are unpublished. This archive is hereafter cited as "RothArchive." I want to thank Ms. Kugel and Dr. Kugel for allowing meaccess to the archive. I also thank Michael Ryan, curator of the RareBook and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, and his staff fortheir help.

(1.) Poems (New York: The Poetry Book Shop, 1920). The poems inRoth's forty-eight page pamphlet are in a different order thatthose in Poems 1918-1936: The Complete Poetry of Charles Reznikoff, ed.Seamus Cooney, 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1976). Reznikoffplaced them in a different order in his Five Groups of Verse (1927), andCooney follows the order of selections in the later volume.

(2.) These four poems are found in Roth's Songs Out of Season(1932). The volume is a compilation of his early poetry. I have notlocated an earlier published source for them, except for "From theWilliamsburgh Bridge;" which appeared in the Midland: A Magazine ofthe Middle West (July/August 1919), 172 under the title"Sundown."

(3.) In his two-volume memoir, Stone Walls Do Not (New York: Faro,1930),1: 103-04, Both describes his concept of writing this history,which he therein calls "The Spirit of Modern American Poetry"and which in a letter to Roth from Richard Wilson (editor at Dent) of 20May 1921, Both Archive, he calls "The Imperial Motive in AmericanPoetry." A one-page typescript in the Clement Wood Papers at theBrown University Library, Providence, R.I., outlines the work. A letterfrom Both to Wood of 21 May 1921 (also at Brown) states the book hadbeen accepted by Dent. It had been provisionally approved, if anAmerican publisher could have been found (letters, Wilson to Both, 25and 28 June, 1921, Both Archive).

(4.) The Giovannitti poem "New York and I" appeared inthe Sept. 1918 Liberator, pp. 14-15. Roth's rejoinder "From aBus" playfully taking "Arthur" to task for too vehementcriticism of New York City, is in the Feb. 1919 Liberator, p.40.

(5.) Roth kept a file of reviews, including those in the New YorkTelegraph, The Call, Bookseller, Stationer, and Newsdealer, The AmericanHebrew (Elias Lieberman), The New York Evening Post, The New York Sun(Herbert Gorman), Poetry (Nelson Crawford), The Dial, The HebrewStandard ("N.K"), The Nation, and newspapers in St. Louis,Philadelphia, Detroit, Salt Lake City, and Chicago. These clippings arepasted into a dummy (otherwise blank) bound copy of Europe fromRoth's library now in the Both Archive.

Jay A. Gertzman, Emeritus Professor of English, MansfieldUniversity, Pennsylvania