HYAM PLUTZIK AND THE MOSAIC OF TIME – POETRY

Join us for a panel with three highly regarded Jewish American poets as they reflect on the life and work of midcentury poet Hyam Plutzik (1911-62), a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize whose poetry came to fruition at a time of cultural change set against the historical rupture of the Holocaust and World War II. Rodger Kamenetz, Jacqueline Osherow, and Maxim D. Shrayer were part of a collective of 18 scholars working over a period of 15 years with editor Victoria Aarons to create  Hyam Plutzik and the Mosaic of Time – a collection of essays and selected poems. The book explores in depth the influence of modernist poetics and American Jewish identity on Hyam Plutzik’s richly figured work. The son of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States from the Russian Empire 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 poetry, individual chapters address complicated issues of Jewish American ethnicity and identity in twentieth-century American cultural studies. The collection speaks to the legacy of a major poet whose work continues to have relevance for Jewish literary studies and poetics. Moderated by Rebecca Friedman, founder and director of the public humanities program at Florida International University.

JEWISH LIFE & CULTURE PROGRAMS ARE PRESENTED BY

Buy Hyam Plutzik and the Mosaic of Time: Essays and Selected Poems – Aarons

Buy The Lowercase Jew – Kamenetz

Buy Zion Square: Poems – Shrayer