[In the following review, Rosenthal calls Poems of a Jew uneven and desultory.]

Poems of a Jew, work mainly taken from earlier volumes, has Karl Shapiro's usual unevenness. Look hard at some of the pieces and their interest flies away like the white fluff of aged dandelions in the wind. The best ones, poems of an intense and brooding introvert, glow and crackle and burst into flame—unless the poet tries (as usually he does try) to fan them with his intellect. For it is matter of great sorrow that Shapiro, though his best work is that of an emotionalist sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, can't really think. When he makes the attempt he seems an inferior Auden, a decapitated Hamlet, or a flunked-out Talmudist.

I call to witness the mass of ill-fated assertions introducing these pieces on "the theme of the Jew." Example:

The Jewish Question, whatever that might be, is not my concern. Nor is Judaism. Nor is Jewry. Nor is Israel. The religious question is not my concern. I am one of those who views with disgust and disappointment the evangelism and the backsliding of artists and intellectuals towards religion….

I do not quarrel with these assertions in themselves. But they bear little relation to the actual experience of a Jew who, unless we are all mistaken, was for some time—and not too long ago—a Catholic convert (an experience to which a number of his poems seem to allude). Nor can they be said to describe the sentiments represented in this very book by poems like "The Synagogue," which quite explicitly exalts the unique "factual holiness" of Judaism and everything in it which "marks a separate race," and like "Israel":

When I see the name of Israel high in print
The fences crumble in my flesh….

As for "the Jewish Question, whatever that might be"—it must, insofar as it exists, have to do with the relations and attitudes toward each other of the Gentile majority and the Jews within a given nation or culture. Shapiro's poems certainly go at this Question in many ways; titles like "Shylock" and "The Jew at Christmas Eve" do not misled us, and scattered all through the poems there are enough such passages as the three that follow to make us cough discreetly at the disclaimer:

The letters of the Jews are black and clean
And lie in chain-line over Christian pages….
("Alphabet")

Grandpa, the saintly Jew, keeping his beard
In difficult Virginia, yet endeared
Of blacks and farmers, although orthodox
("The Southerner")

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew
Is the curriculum….
("University")

The many such confrontations, often combined with other motifs in brilliant and moving fashion, show how obsessed this writer is with just the Question he has shrugged away. In fact, he himself uses the word "obsession" in his introduction, though he tries there to generalize it out of all recognition. The poems, he says, are "documents of an obsession" that is "universal and timeless"—"the Jew is at its center, but everyone else partakes of it." Mr. Shapiro wants to resolve the Question by making the particulars of his own life into an ultimate symbol of essential Jewishness, which he can then equate with the naked modern sensibility:

The Jew is absolutely committed to the world…. This people beyond philosophy, beyond art, virtually beyond religion, a stranger even to mysticism, finds itself at the very center of the divine manifestation—man. The Jew represents the primitive ego of the human race…. The free modern Jew, celebrated so perfectly in the character of Leopold Bloom, is neither hero nor victim. He is man left over, after everything that can happen has happened.

It may throw some light on this for the most part pretentious nonsense to note that Leopold Bloom is, after all, a figment of the Irish imagination. What Mr. Shapiro is really talking about is the way he sees himself at this moment. "Poet" and "Jew" are terms almost interchangeable in his lexicon; in a piece not in this volume he has written that the poet

… is the business man, on beauty trades,
Dealer in arts and thought who, like the Jew,
Shall rise from slums and hated dialects
A tower of bitterness….
("Poet")

Another omitted poem, "The Dome of Sunday," is a brutal criticism of bourgeois Jewish life in Shapiro's native Baltimore; the social type there pictured does not fit his present thesis. Modern Jewish life is actually, and naturally, extremely varied, but one would never guess from this book that many of Saul Bellow's characters could exist, or the working people of our big cities, or the "solid" doctors and lawyers and other professional people whose ego is neither more nor less "primitive" than that of the next member of the American Dental Association.

"Obsession" remains an intriguing word, however. Perhaps the real clue to what the poet feels can be glimpsed in "The First Time." Here a boy is about to be initiated into sex by a prostitute. Absorbed in his self-consciousness, he does not notice that she has been scrutinizing his body in her mirror as he has entered her room after undressing outside it. Suddenly

…. she turns around, as one turns at a desk,
And looks at him, too naked and too soon,
And almost gently asks: Are you a Jew?

"Obsession" is surely the right word! In a note to another poem, Shapiro writes that "in Freud's view, as in that of every Jew, mutilation, circumcision, and 'the fear of being eaten' are all one." The generalization may be dubious, but it does indicate the sexual and traumatic aspects of the poet's conception of Jewishness.

Sometimes the horror of this conception is conveyed without specific sexual allusion. One of Shapiro's best poems, "Messias," recalls his shocked recoil as a child from an old religious Jew who came to the door seeking a "donation for the Holy Land" in the "hieratic language of the heart." The boy fled "in terror from the nameless hurt." More characteristic is the "Adam and Eve" sequence, which represents the Fall as essentially the discovery of sex. Fascinated by his phallic and vaginal imagery, which emphatically suggests at times "the fear of being eaten," and which is developed with a prurient, guilty, almost voyeuristic curiosity, the poet follows—as he says—his own interpretation, though influenced by cabalic symbolism and by Reich's ideas. A footnote justifies the inclusion of this sequence on the ground that its viewpoint "that man is for the world, not for the afterworld, is Jewish." It seems clear, however, that its connotations of sexually oriented violence and fear provide the truer rea son. (See also the first of the Five Self-Portraits, in which the poet tells, fairly humorously but with great sympathy for his own infant wounds, the story of his birth and circumcision amid all the echoes and symbols of American and Christian tradition.)

Fortunately, the Good Lord made Karl Shapiro a genuine poet even though He skimped somewhat on the logical and critical endowment. Despite the traumatic basis of their movement into compassion, a number of these poems reach beautiful resolution. Others explore ponderous themes—the ease with which we forget history's most dreadful lessons, the incommunicability of certain essential differences of tradition and life-principle, and so on—without losing their buoyancy and independent character as works of feeling with a design independent of doctrinal interests. Indeed, when Shapiro succeeds it is through his vibrant language and rhythm, his unabashed candor, and his irresistible emotional force that will bring out his true meanings even when he himself is not quite sure of them.