The Murdered Dreams of Aaron Kramer

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Science & Society, Vol. 80, No. 2, April 2016, 147–169

147

The Murdered Dreams of Aaron Kramer: A Marxist Poet in

the “American Century”

ALAN M. WALD

ABSTRACT: Aaron Kramer was the most prolific poet to emerge from the U. S. Communist movement in the mid-20th century, his earliest collections issued by International Publishers. In his last decades, he was chiefly known as a skilled and reliable contributor of verse, essays, and translations from the Yiddish to progressive Jewish magazines such as Jewish Currents and Outlook. Yet all efforts to revive his reputation through conventional means, including the publication of a major collection and appreciation in 2004, have been singularly unsuccessful. What might be gained through a deeper contextualization of his work, an attempt to inhabit his life as it played out in the changing contexts and fortunes of the left? Kramer was a minor poet, but there is still much to be valued by assessing him as the widower of a lost Communist faith who never truly remarried, an artist haunted by dreams murdered by Hitler and Stalin.

I

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM like the radical poet Aaron Kramer (1922–97)? In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx personally adored the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856),

despite the German romantic’s abominably morbid sensitivity to criti-cism and occasionally indeterminate politics. Marx defended Heine with a famous remark reported by his daughter: “Poets [ar]e queer kittle-cattle, not to be judged by the ordinary, or even the extraordi-nary, standards of conduct” (Marx, 1973, 148–9). A hundred years later, Kramer achieved distinction and some lasting acclaim as Heine’s

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English-language translator,1 but his own career as a poet in the mid–late 20th century was vexed by an acute sensitivity to neglect and disapproval (real or imagined), and an idiosyncratic muteness about certain issues of pronounced concern to the left.

Apart from scholarly fascination with Kramer’s life and work, I loved the guy for his sweetness, beguiling charm, and the sly smile on his face. We shared a fondness for bare-knuckles capitalist-bashing in verse, a selec-tion of which he assembled in On Freedom’s Side: An Anthology of American Poems of Protest (1972). Many of his own poems are beautiful, odd, and quite moving. Secular all his life, Kramer was nonetheless a personifi-cation of rebel Jewish consciousness. For him, “internationalism” was spelled with a capital “I.” Even now I get a little verklempt when recalling his account of how he “glowed with pride” after an African American writer christened him a Jew with a “Black soul” (Kramer, 1990b).

Yet it is not incidental to the relative marginality of his reputation and his art that Kramer’s temperament was sovereign and prickly,

1 Kramer’s 110 translations for Fredric Ewen’s The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine (1948) are still cited and reprinted, along with his landmark essay, “The Link Between Heine and Emma Lazarus”: Kramer, 1955–56.

Aaron Kramer, in his late 30s. Photo courtesy Laura Kramer

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often fiery and personalizing. Make a faulty move and he turned sensitive as a violin string, or headstrong and hot-blooded, acting in ways that could confound the expectations of friends and comrades who may only have been trying to assist him. Such behavior might suggest a personality that loved contention and courted conflict; but that is not true, either. After he became an English literature professor at Dowling College on Long Island in 1965, he chiefly lived a quiet life, albeit one rich in imagination. Many planets must align to get a fix on Kramer.

Let’s face it: Poets emerging from the Old Left, like Heine and other Romantics they so often admired, were less a coherent group (especially after 1956, when Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” imploded the Communist movement) than a patchy federation of idiosyncratic and sometimes cantankerous individuals. Kramer was not an author riven by vanity, but his customary generosity was sporadically blemished by literary snits, little bouts of bragging, and tirades at those he believed to have ignored or disrespected him. These traits self-sabotaged his reputation in the course of an offbeat and painful career in which he had a following of readers but little critical acclaim. His intellect was fiercely alert, but his own understandings of his perceptions and aims were at times quite partial, leading to unintended consequences.

A very public case in point can be found in the January– February 1990 issue of Outlook, a “progressive” secular Jewish periodical in Canada similar to Jewish Currents in the United States. (That is, an independent publication with pro-Communist ancestry; it was previ-ously called Canadian Jewish Outlook, and before that Vochenblatt.) The editorial board had just celebrated Kramer as “The Poet Laureate of the Jewish Left,” an honor surely unsurprising to many Outlook readers. Since the 1930s, Kramer’s life and work had been synonymous with the culture of Jewish–American radicalism, and the principal collection of Kramer’s writing at that time, The Burning Bush (1983), consisted of 253 pages of poetry and prose showcasing the “Jewish note” in his career. For at least a decade the magazine’s pages gave prominence to Kramer’s translations from the Yiddish of verse by once pro-Soviet authors, essays about 1930s Jewish Communist writers (Sol Funaroff, Alexander F. Bergman), and his own poems that were explicitly or implicitly on Jewish subjects. This 1990 representation of an aspect of his career was clearly intended by Outlook to prompt further awareness and discussion of his verse.

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Never mind all that. Kramer responded to this generous compli-ment in an “open letter” that bristled with overblown indignation. Both terms, he objected, “Laureate” and “Jewish Left,” were danger-ously misleading. Had he not written in 1964 that he was “laureate to none”? Has not his poetry, encompassing a wide range of themes, been translated and published in countries “without a single Jew-ish reader”? Kramer was gifted (or cursed) with an instant recall of perceived slights extending over decades; now, in his public outburst against Outlook, he reached back to 1943 and 1952 to recapitulate his appearance at a trade union meeting and then at Camp Kinderland (the official summer camp of the Jewish Section of the International Workers Order). Among the audiences, he reported with a still-vivid anguish, were unnamed individuals who allegedly criticized him for deviating from their expectations of what a “left” or “Jewish” poet should be writing. Enough, he remonstrated to Outlook editor Henry Rosenthal, is enough (Kramer, 1990a, 17). This seems to have closed down all discussion of Kramer’s poetry, apart from my own writing, as an expression of Jewish radicalism.2

Kramer also had a volatile history with Jewish Currents and its prin-cipal editor, Morris U. Schappes (1907–2004), which correspondingly destabilized another conceivable source of support. This is reflected in the oddity that Kramer’s verse, translations, reviews, and commentary abounded in its pages at the time it was called Jewish Life, from 1947 to early 1958, and then came to an abrupt halt after the name was changed, which was followed by thirty years of mostly silence. In the early 1980s Kramer was back contributing a few translations to Jewish Currents, but there were no original poems there until 1987. By the 1990s he was more visible than ever, sometimes seen in the majority of issues each year, and this presence was steadfast until Kramer died of leukemia at age seventy-five. Neither Kramer nor any editors of Jewish Currents ever provided a public explanation for such an erratic partnership. Jewish Currents’ too-brief anonymous obituary states only that “he appeared in our pages 100 times from Oct., 1947 to March, 1997” (Anonymous, 1997, 37), and there has been scant reference to him in the 17 years since. In truth, Kramer and Schappes were never

2 Kramer was pleased with my treatment of his work as part of the Jewish radical tradition in Writing From the Left, but did not live to read my more elaborate consideration of his Jewish radicalism in Trinity of Passion. See Wald, 1994; 2007.

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quite friends but something less than foes; “frenemies” might be the closest term.

Even tracking Kramer’s attitude toward his own vocation as a poet preferring traditional meters and forms can be a study in contradic-tions. As a Marxist student at Brooklyn College in the late 1930s, he was an ardent defender of the tradition of ballads over abstractions, direct communication over difficulty, and staunch collectivist opti-mism over individualist angst. His method was absorbed from the tutelage of the left-wing worker–poets (see Poems for Workers, 1925) and Proletpen (the Yiddish cultural group of the Communist Party), and he initially gained popularity in the Communist publications New Pioneer and the Daily Worker. Characteristic poems (“The Shoe-Shine Boy,” 1937; “Ernst Toller, Suicide May 1939,” 1940) display an artful plainness that married a simplicity of manner with controlled cun-ning. The latter concludes:

The door is opened, and everyone, dismayed,steps back, like birds who come to drink at a fountainand find the water stopped. You are dry and stilldangling alone in the paleness of a roomwith dreams of a lost land frozen in your eyes.We must make another fountain from ourselves.

(Kramer, 2004, 101.)

Nonetheless, Kramer’s was a conservative style that placed him at odds with the preponderance of other aspiring poets among his class-mates, principally practitioners of a modernism of irony, obscurity, and skepticism.

With his overdeveloped sense of grievance, Kramer obsessed for decades about the snobbish condescension to which he felt subjected by these fellow literary contributors to the Brooklyn College Observer. In the end Kramer expanded his repertoire, but he never repudiated his commitment to rhyme, affinity with the prophetic tradition, or aversion to what he called “the hoot-owls of darkness and decay,” a reference to disciples of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Kramer, 1950, 5). Then, in May 1991, he was invited to recite before his 50th Class Reunion. One might have expected him to reaffirm the integrity of his art, perhaps by choosing a piece from the best of his poetry of the late 1930s or early 1940s, and then something showing the maturation of his work even as he remained true to the inspiration of models like

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Robert Burns and Langston Hughes. Instead, the two items Kramer selected to read to his surviving classmates were an obscure modernist text (“Valedictory Ode,” self-described as Audenesque) he had writ-ten under duress for the Observer in 1941 (and never reprinted due to shame), and a verse from his most difficult latest volume, Indigo (1991), many parts of which read like condensed puzzles of secretive references. The former concludes:

and in our friend-to-friend farewella giant handclasp comes awake:the ecstasy of broken shellafter the light grows possible.

(Kramer, 1941, 18.)

Had the apostles of poetic difficulty won out? Almost certainly not, if one takes the complications of Kramer’s psyche into account.

For that problematical psyche, however, there is no magic key to unlock understanding. His career is mostly free of the Machiavellian calculation often associated with poets on the contemporary creative writing circuit, but the private Kramer is camouflaged all the same. In his verse and prose there were limits beyond which his imagina-tion never transgressed. This is partly a legacy of left-wing Puritanism; Kramer was assuredly no Allen Ginsberg, and when it comes to pro-miscuity, drugs, and profanity, he is as wholesome as a glass of organic fat-free milk. In his youth there was never a phase where he resembled the 20-year-old Bertolt Brecht, whose songs were of lust, alcoholism, and decay. In the mid-1950s Kramer veered toward the leitmotifs of trauma and depression — one can detect an oblique relation to the “Confessional Poets” such as Robert Lowell — yet there is nothing groundbreaking or shocking in his revelations. Of his deeply intimate life, then, there are only hints.

An excursion into amateur psychology is always dangerous, but it is intriguing that, over the years, one does have glimpses of erotic candor and intensity that are kept in restraint. Displacement of such feelings onto nature may have occurred in his initial work (“The Flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe,” 1954a), but what next? As his poetry matured, he began to swerve to unfamiliar interior space and push the boundaries of his customary poetic structures. Finally, in Regroup-ing (1997a), he moved further to a more personalized mode of verse

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with vividly imagined detail and less moralizing (“The Chair,” 1983a). Was he at last abandoning his masks and veils to record a new kind of consciousness (“On My Sixtieth Birthday,” 1997b)? Or was he still giving the reader vignettes of the self as opaque — at a time when one might expect greater self-knowledge (“Fifty-Eight Years Later,” 1994)? Critics need to have access to more information than what is on the page to pursue the slippery business of tracing the verbal patterns of feeling and thought back to the sources.

Much of what has just been described might not come as a surprise to someone who paid close attention to the evidence of Kramer’s life — which is where the difficultly lies. Who really knew the totality of Kramer? It may be no exaggeration to call Kramer among the least understood of poets emerging from the Great Depression left, which affords a partial explanation for his failure to attain the quality of public and scholarly recognition that a select number of admirers thought he deserved. I spent much of the 1990s winkling out personal information from Kramer and many who knew him — his mother, sister, and daughters; his Jewish Currents associates Schappes, Louis Harap, Annette T. Rubinstein, A. B. Magil, and David Platt; and some childhood friends and fellow poets. Still, even with his personal papers now deposited and catalogued at the University of Michigan, a great deal remains illusive, tantalizingly out of reach.

II

In 2004, two first-rate scholars, the dazzling poetry theorist Cary Nelson and bio-bibliographer extraordinaire Donald Gilzinger, Jr., set out to rescue Kramer’s reputation with a carefully edited door-stop volume, Wicked Times: Selected Poems. Four-hundred pages long, featuring a 40-page critical introduction (the finest essay about Kramer to date), 50 pages of notes, a dozen fabulous photographs, and bibliographies galore, the tome is offered “as evidence that the American poetry establishment has long neglected one of its most compelling and accomplished poets” (Kramer, 2004, xvi). Its heft notwithstanding, this beautiful volume (not to be confused with a 1983 chapbook by Kramer, In Wicked Times) can take in but a fraction of Kramer’s 28 collections of poetry, and offers nothing at all from his ten books of translations or three volumes of prose. (During the locust years of McCarthyism, Kramer also adopted pseudonyms to write some school

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texts and other works.) With a courage and confidence one can only admire, the editors chose 14 thematic categories (“The Poetry of Work,” “Friends and Family,” and so on) and selected what they believe to be the superior writings affiliated with each. One could quibble with what the editors leave out but what they leave in is largely repre-sentative and excellent; their choice reveals Kramer’s great strength as a poet in all phases of his career.

In every respect the Wicked Times edition of Kramer is a triumph of scholarly care. From love of poetry, the editors donated immense labor toward clarifying Kramer’s lush and wide-ranging legacy, as well as proposing grounds for its enjoyment. Above all, they make a resounding case in the lexicon of poetic technique that Kramer only put on a costume of what appears to be the straitjacket of conventions of versification in order to perform tricks of elastic unconventional-ity. These sleights-of-hand are accomplished through Kramer’s use of anapests (a type of metrical foot), feminine rhymes (a manner of matching syllables), and experiments in the ballad form. Yet this stun-ning volume arrived on tiptoe. In the decade since its publication there has been scarcely a review; a paperback edition is still awaited. Can it be that Kramer’s oeuvre is so foreign to the prevailing 21st-century ideals of poetry and the poet that a decline in his reputation can’t be reversed? Do we even have any evidence of a lasting readership for Kramer, beyond aging friends and acquaintances? What about his impact among poets? At the moment, an essay on “Heirs and Imita-tors of Aaron Kramer” would be very brief. The kindest judgment, which is also the conventional cop-out, might be to label him “an important minor poet.”

Call me a die-hard, but I find too much at stake in this man and his work for our literary history to throw in the towel. Since Kramer apparently remains an acquired taste for many poetry readers, the best place to cultivate it may be in the context of more intricate thinking about the social movement that shaped his life, mind, emotions, and art: U. S. literary radicalism. Such a framework is obviously necessary to value the terrifying landscape in which he set so many of his poems about Jews and African Americans — resistance against European anti-Semitism (“To My People,” 1940) and slave insurrections (“Denmark Vesey,” 1952). But the changing fortunes and internal complexity of the left is also the optic through which much of his other writing must be viewed in less apparent ways. Readers of today, challengingly, suffer

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historical amnesia of an acute kind. As Cary Nelson wisely observed in 1991 of the record of the poetry of Kramer’s generation, “we do not know that the knowledge is gone” (Nelson, 1992, 3).

Kramer’s work as a whole might be reprised in the new millen-nium as the 60-year political, psychological, and aesthetic response of a Jewish–American leftist to commitments passionately embraced in the 1930s but evolving under the agonizing conditions of the postwar “American Century.” Inasmuch as the verse is partly an almanac of the times, many allusions need clarification; far more than even Nelson and Gilzinger had the space to provide. Studies of the sound and rhythm of Kramer’s writing, grammatical analysis, and a collation of texts may all be necessary but are insufficient. To achieve a convinc-ing exploration of the sense and significance of his oeuvre, we need to deepen our knowledge of the author and his radical, cultural, and personal world, with empathy as well as criticism and candor.

Some of the potentials for more in-depth explorations of Kramer’s art may be suggested by a quick look at the biographical and historical constituents of one of Kramer’s best-known yet never-analyzed writ-ings, “The Thunder of the Grass” (written in late 1947, published in 1948a). This 44-stanza ballad memorializes the alleged August 1942 mass suicide of 93 female Jewish students at the Beth Jacobs seminary in Krakow, Poland, to escape being forced into prostitution by Nazi officers. Too long to be quoted in full, it begins:

In Warsaw, in the ghetto of the Jew,a schoolhouse stood, along whose ancient wallstendrils of ivy reverently grew —as though to guard the rare Hebraic scrollsasleep within — and greenly blushed their pridefor Friday’s candles blossoming inside.

(Kramer, 2004, 157.)

The depiction of events that follows comes off in a polished and straight-forward manner suggesting a historical reenactment. Kramer, after all, had long specialized in narrative poems with incidents taken from labor history (presenting heroines such as Lucy Parsons and Ella Mae Wiggins) and news reports (“The Ballad of Two Heroes,” 1940, depicting Chinese resistance to Japanese aggression). It makes sense that his aim might be to disseminate news of current wartime

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atrocities in a similar fashion. Yet “The Thunder of the Grass” has a more convoluted backstory.

In point of fact, five years had passed since the sketchy reports of the Beth Jacobs incident were published in papers such as The New York Times, and these contained many errors (such as placing the school in Warsaw) and probable inventions. Kramer, however, was not attracted on this occasion to creating a documentary; he was instead caught up in a trifecta of feelings. First, he was still in a state of shock at news of the holocaust, which had hit his circle of writers most profoundly in 1943–44. Then his father had died in February 1947, reigniting Kramer’s interest in Yiddish resistance culture so that he immediately translated the partisan hymn “Zog Mit Keinmol ” (“Never Say”), which afterwards became the official version. Finally, he was in that year immersed in a Master’s Thesis at Brooklyn College on Emma Lazarus, and particularly taken with “The Dance of Death” (1882), a graphic dramatization of a pogrom against Medieval Jews where the victims thwart their tormenters by suicidally dancing en mass into a pyre (Kramer, 1990c).

Kramer was a devout Marxist but with a life-long affinity for roman-ticism, evidenced by his conscious choice of “Thunder” for the poem’s title. The thunder is heard first in the military drums of the invading Germans, then reappears in the final stanza:

. . . on certain mornings you may meeta troop of silent girls, who slowly weaveand whirl like goddesses; and, if you passquite close, you will hear the thunder of the grass.

(Kramer, 2004, 164.)

“Thunder” is intended to be an allusion to an affiliation between nature and humanity in the manner of the writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Kramer aspired to communicate a colossal outrage at Nazi barbarism as well as colossal awe at the decision of the seminary women, whom he saw as steeped in the ancient and medieval lore of spirituality versus material existence. The grass, preternaturally aware, bears witness to the fusing of this enormous cruelty and courageous revolt that becomes embodied in its eerie “thunder.”

As this poem shows, there is a problem with applying political, ethnic, and other labels to Kramer — Communist, Jewish, Marxist.

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They are factually germane, yet encourage the reader and critic to approach the poetic texts with prefabricated expectations. The most frequent of these is that the writing must express or argue for or against certain positions, ones that are supposed to be held, promoted, or opposed by a poet so labeled. That is, the verse of a Jewish writer must convey Jewish values; a Marxist writer must argue for Marxism; a pro-letarian writer advocate for some idealized proletariat; etc. The work may even be perceived as a debate, automatically putting the text in a sub-literary category. Kramer, nonetheless, resembled other poets in seeing his aim as working with the reader’s imagination to create new worlds in the poems for one to contemplate. And the sources of these fictive realities can be highly individualized, as “Thunder of the Grass” establishes. Contrary to expectations, no specifically Jewish tenets or perspectives are dramatized in the poem, nor are there references to social class or the proletariat. And despite Kramer’s formal adher-ence to dialectical materialism, romantic tropes and an imagination stirred by Emma Lazarus prevail over historical verisimilitude. So let us proceed with caution, addressing a few select biographical matters before offering some comments on the aesthetic achievement.

III

Kramer was always of the left, although after the onset of the Cold War he became guarded if not cryptic about many past and present political opinions. A particularly vexing illustration of this mysteri-ousness is the difficulty one has in parsing the valence of his ethnic identity as “Jewish” during the course of his career. Growing up, he absorbed from his ultra-Bolshevik parents as well as like-minded teach-ers, such as the writer Yuri Suhl (1923–86), the notion that he was “Yiddish but not Jewish” (Kramer, 1990b). His first published poem was in a Marxist venue in 1934 (“My Song”) and that was nearly ten years before he began appearing in Jewish publications (the Brooklyn Jewish Examiner, the American Hebrew, Jewish Life). Following the 1958 breach with Schappes, there comes a remarkable eleven-year hiatus before Kramer is visible again in any Jewish venue. Then he links up with Midstream, an intellectual Zionist journal, establishing a relation-ship that lasts until 1993. Ten years into this Midstream association, Kramer also shows up in the non-Zionist Outlook, where his publica-tions eventually become more numerous and continue all the way

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to the last year of his life. So how did his thinking develop after the holocaust — from Yiddish to Jewish to nothing to Zionist to secular non-Zionist? To some degree Kramer intentionally picks his publica-tion venues, but he mostly elected to keep his motives to himself, and it is a fool’s errand to try to make him say what we want.

Other than the strong Midstream connection, which may have been based on pragmatic publication considerations, there seem to be no connections with Zionism. In 1948, he wrote “An Ode for the Jew-ish State” (reprinted in The Burning Bush as “Israel: An Ode,” 1948b). This is the only poem mentioning the state of Israel, at that time supported by the international Communist movement. What he felt about Israel’s subsequent evolution remains unknown. How troubled was he by its alliance with South African apartheid and the U. S. policy in Vietnam? Did he ever ponder the fundamental contradiction of a Jewish state on Palestinian land? There is no doubt that survival of Jews in the face of oppression is an abiding theme of his work (“The Rising in the Warsaw Ghetto,” 1962), but the focus is always on the resistance to European fascism and the need for a unity transcending nationality. Could it be that, despite a palpable increase of conscious-ness as a Jew and Jewish identification after the holocaust, on some quiet level Kramer remained marked as “Yiddish but not Jewish”?

At the least, a fervent belief that Jewishness in literature can be implicit and expressed through universalisms is evident in his 1958 discord with Jewish Currents. According to documentation that Kramer sent to me, a flare-up was precipitated by Schappes’ request that Kramer translate a poem by Proletpen writer Sarah Barkan (1902–57) as a memorial tribute. Kramer promptly submitted “I Learn by Watch-ing Flowers,” which depicts a sentimentalized landscape of the natural world teaching lessons for survival and hope (Kramer, 1958b). This was similar to some of Kramer’s own poems that Schappes, and fellow editor Louis Harap, had disparaged in the past. In a phone conference, Schappes requested that Kramer translate another poem by Barkan, one that related to a Jewish theme in a recognizable way. In the hostile exchange that ensued, Kramer responded that the magazine should use “I Learn” or nothing, and insisted that Barkan was expressing “racial pride” (Schappes, 1958a; Kramer, 1958a).

When Schappes voiced his understandable bafflement at this claim of “racial pride” in a follow-up letter, Kramer grumbled that the editor could only think in Jewish terms; that the racial pride to

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be admired in Barkan was of the human race, not alone of the Jew-ish people (Schappes, 1958a; Kramer, 1958a). Given no alternative, Schappes ran Kramer’s selection in the February 1958 issue, but in December he expressed some disapproval in his personal column of a Kramer poem that allegorically referred to his loss of Communist faith, “The Widower” (New York Times, 1958).3 Schappes had long been critical of Kramer for not having enough Jewish references in the writing he submitted to Jewish Life, and Schappes was still a Com-munist Party member; so it seems likely that literary and political displeasure were amalgamated in these instances to alienate Kramer from the magazine, although it is dumbfounding that the falling-out went on for so long.

I have often wondered where Kramer stood in 1967, during the Six-Day War. One can speculate, but facts are missing. At that moment he was disaffected from Jewish Currents, which was for the first time openly breaking with the Communist Party and the Party’s support of the Arab states. For his own reasons, presumably in solidarity with the African American freedom struggle, Kramer was in these years contributing to the stellar magazine Freedomways, which to my knowledge at no time challenged Soviet foreign policy (and may have been partially subsidized by the Party and the USSR). By all reports, Kramer never discussed Israeli politics with his two daughters in this period or after (Laura Kramer, 2013). One would expect to eventually see some sympathy for Palestinian human rights, or salutes to Arab poets; but all he told me, in the 1990s, was that he avoided Jewish old friends, including several once militant pro-Communists, who had turned “anti-Arab” (Kramer, 1994a). He and his wife, Katherine (“Kitty”), traveled extensively in the Mediterranean, yet never set foot in Eretz Yisrael.

The Soviet Union was another country he avoided during his many travels, although he came as close as Prague in 1968. In this case, we know that his private attitude toward the regimes of the Eastern Bloc was unremittingly hostile after 1956, even if public criticisms (such his signing a 1969 protest of the Polish government’s anti-Semitism) could be diplomatic. What we do not know is how he understood the cause and significance of the Stalinization of the Soviet Union; was it primarily a product of underdevelopment, or due to a dictator’s

3 Schappes wrote: “Several persons have asked me the meaning of Kramer’s sonnet in The New York Times (October 8). . . . I do not know. . . . What ‘belief’ died five years ago or with what ‘disbelief’ he now mates, I cannot tell.” See Schappes, 1958b, 24.

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lust for power? Was the Bolshevism of Kramer’s parents fulfilled or betrayed? Was China any different in his eyes? In contrast, Cuba was one nation proclaiming itself socialist that he both visited and warmly embraced, as evidenced by a subsequent poem, “Seven Days” (1979). Nonetheless, anyone looking for an explicit endorsement of the Cas-tro regime, or even a statement of “support with criticisms” of the revolution, will be disappointed. All he writes is: “In seven days / they had broken the blockade around my heart” (Kramer, 1979, 136). Kramer memorialized poets persecuted in many countries (Boris Pasternak, Pablo Neruda, Benjamin Moloise), but there is no record of his response to the 1971 jailing of Cuban poet Heberto Padillo, protested vigorously by Jean-Paul Sartre and others. These and similar lacunae suggest that certain forms of political analysis, or a need for rigor and consistency, may simply be alien to the cast of his mind, as in the case of many poets. Perhaps one should examine Kramer’s politics less with the hindsight of contemporary understanding and more through an attempt to inhabit his life as it played out in chang-ing contexts.

As a young man in the 1930s he was fighting a beautiful war on the side of the just (“Haven’t You Felt the Heart of America?”, 1938). The crises of the 1930s and 1940s were seen through religious and romantic allegories, with a master narrative redolent of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (“The Golden Trumpet,” 1949). Many were tales of desperate hardship followed by ultimate redemption:

Tom Mooney, imprisoned now these twentyyears and one;We’ll tear the old bars apart, and letyou greet the sun! (“The Ballad of Tom Mooney,” 1937; in Kramer, 2004, 25.)

Here his poetry tended to efface the self and elide ambiguities of the private. (“Peekskill,” 1951). So long as Kramer remained by choice a literary voice of the Communist movement, he, like others, had to negotiate the pressure that was felt to present himself as a committed artist-hero setting an agenda for his time and the nation (“The Golden Trumpet,” 1949). Irony could be misread as a marker of defeatism and passivity by the chair of the Party Cultural Commission, a man who was obviously partial to Kramer but at his worst operated like an

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official of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Although the left poets of Dynamo magazine (1934–36) were noted for economical lines, blunt natural-ism, and surreal terror, the gift Kramer exhibited from his early years was a melding of the lyric and the ballad, with overtones of Yiddish rhythms inspired by his mother’s singing of folksongs (“Thoughts on a Train,” 1937). Occasionally Kramer could harness his romantic impulse (suggesting Whitman or Latin American analogues) to forge a haunting elegance, even as he employed stock elements suggestive of a cartoon Eden of flowers and birds. This mixture functions well in one of his best-known poems, “Prothalamium” (1948c). Recorded by Judy Collins in 1970 and reprinted at the opening of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer in 2000, it concludes:

We’ll sweep out the shadows, where the rats long fed;sweep out our shame — and in its place we’ll makea bower for love, a splendid marriage-bedfragrant with flowers aquiver for the Spring,And when he comes, our murdered dreams shall wake;And when he comes, all the mute birds shall sing.

(Kramer, 2004, 81.)

“Prothalamium” is also a reprising of Edmund Spenser’s famous 1596 marriage celebration in sonnet form, repurposed here to present socialist revolution as a messianic “spring” that will redeem the dreams of brotherhood and justice murdered by fascism in the recent war.

By 1953, Kramer was frustrated with many aspects of the U. S. Communist Party and allowed his membership to lapse. Three years later, at news of Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalin, he was enraged at the Communist leaders for their deceptions, and by 1958 had sev-ered all ties except for family members and a few friends. Never again would he experience the kind of innocence expressed in “Prothala-mium.” From this point on, his “murdered dreams” also became the ones destroyed by Stalin as well as Hitler, and Kramer moved into a dark period of mourning and melancholy that are decisive for grasp-ing the totality of his oeuvre. For three or four years his poetry was in crisis; he seemed to travel in timeless space before finally reconciling himself to an unendurable loss that had to be endured. Most of the writing of the late 1950s and early 1960s eventually came together in a strange and riveting book — the two-volume Rumshinsky’s Hat and House of Buttons (1964).

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Kramer is most effective when he lets his emotional guard down. His earlier paradigms of perpetual hope, before the period inaugu-rated by his compound “murdered dreams,” can ossify into imprison-ing conventions. There really is no genre by which to describe either half of this post-Party book. One minute there is a folktale, the next a segment from an experimental novel in verse. The most intriguing cluster of poems addresses with elegant unease the loss of his Com-munist faith. Foremost among these are “Threnody” (originally 1956) and “The Widower” (originally 1958) in House of Buttons. The ache felt by the demise of Kramer’s beautiful vision is acute by the end of the former, suggesting everlasting muteness:

O friends, I tell you this: no face is finished;no sea has drawn a body to its beds;no stone’s been cut, no stone to mark what vanished —only the dream by which I lived is dead . . .and I, that bellowed so, must learned to besilent — except for this one threnody.

(Kramer, 2004, 309.)

However, by the sequel, two-years later, Kramer is framing a new persona:

Now disbelief lies warm upon my bed;for her I’ll sing, till one of us be dead.

(Kramer, 2204, 310.)

In many places Kramer creates myths out of what may be political deci-sions through a method of providing portentously unspecified dates: “five years have I . . . brought flowers to her grave”; “ten years ago I too began to miss”; “my faith still aches after nine years, / though yours healed in nine weeks”; “for twenty years I have not ventured there”; and “for seven years I shut the morning blinds” (Kramer, 1964, 87, 88, 100, 89, 66). Sometimes he takes us into a shadowy fairy kingdom of forbidding solitude where the totems have all been tipped over, their mystery drained and ancient powers annulled (“Lost Land,” “Short Letter to a Long Runner”). Other poems are memoiristic dissections (“Inheritance”), a record of the minute-by-minute fluctuations of his emotional temperature (“Rumshinsky’s Hat”), or moody chitchat as he mopes about in search of a new muse (“Rendezvous,” “The Ledge,”

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“Waiting Room”), or are haunted by hungry ghosts of his past belief (“The Leaf”).

What holds this odd assortment together is chiefly that each selec-tion belongs to the saddest fraternity on earth, a chorus of grief. One poem that should have been featured in Rumshinsky’s Hat and House of Buttons is “Disappointed Ghosts (For Shaemas O’Sheel),” drafted in the mid-1950s but not published until 1975, and never reprinted (a significant omission from Wicked Times). The biographical references in this short verse concern three of his Communist literary mentors: Maxwell Bodenheim (1892–1954), Shaemas O’Sheel (1886–1954), and Alfred Kreymborg (1883–1966). Behind Kramer’s palpable frus-tration at no longer being able to fulfill the role for which he had been trained, the reader may sense Kramer’s own confusion as to how and why his flame turned to ash, and the beginning of a consciousness about the part played by self-delusion:

After Bodenheim’s funeral you said(in a misplaced letter): “Max is dead:I and Alfred soon will lose the game;that leaves only you — lift high the flame!”I recall at how at those words I wept,mouthed a promise (which has not been kept).Deep in shadow now you crouch, all three,poised as if expecting light from me.How am I to merit such command?Lift high what flame? Ash is in my hand.

(Kramer, 1975, 49.)

Yet it makes little difference that this fine poem was omitted from the 1964 collection, because the book itself went essentially unreviewed.

IV

What kind of appeal might Kramer have for a reader today? How should he be presented? Kramer emerges at first as a poet with remark-able technical ability and consistency of purpose. His lyric models are mostly in the vein of the younger Heinrich Heine; he never excelled at the lyric technique of compressed metaphor and symbol that explode into a multiplicity of references, most notably exemplified by William Blake’s “The Tyger” (1794) and “London” (1794). It’s also fair to say

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that the content of his early writings isn’t too much given to subtlety and nuance; some stanzas even seem studied and staged more than lived. Where he is compelling before the mid-1950s is frequently in his ability to be a purveyor of decorative and melodious surfaces rather than a profound master of insight into the ironical workings of history or the darkness of the human heart. He plainly coupled his aspiration to become a recognized poet with the advance of the political cause with which he was enthralled.

His later works include more laconic pieces focusing on an acute observation — a small event that gains resonances from the images and poetic form. By the time of Indigo, his technically most accomplished volume, he creates meaning through a gradually evolving process; intertextual references come into play in several poems, without being labored. Others still resemble skinny short stories, and his efforts to take a theme from history and make it individual and living can feel more like an exercise than an immersion. But even these poems work differently when one knows more about the context, especially when a zone of anxiety can be uncovered and explored. One regret I have is that even though his 1950s period of “Murdered Dreams” remains pivotal and enriching to all his subsequent writing, I wish he had more frequently taken Communism explicitly as an imaginative challenge and artistic opportunity.

What I particularly admire about the later “Murdered Dreams” period is more personal: Following this crisis, Kramer’s trust in his imaginative powers allowed him to vault over that moment of disillu-sionment in the Soviet Union instead of reverting to another religion (anticommunism, conflating anti-Stalinism and anti-fascism into a facile “anti-totalitarianism,” Zionism, conservatism). On occasion he reacted scornfully against his own “fame” as a literary hero of the Jewish left, but his past was not banished. More often it was converted to the ghostly object of nostalgic longing, even expressing now and then a flash of that vitality and peculiarity of a vanished world. As he moves toward a reconstituted vision of himself in the 1960s as a radical who is laureate to none, he weaves in and out of light and dark, surprisingly graceful as he becomes pumped up on occasion with a delirious fortitude and a sense of mounting urgency about political causes populating the landscape of the 1960s and 1970s — Vietnam, Chile, South Africa.

An unanticipated virtue of the Wicked Times collection is that Nelson and Gilzinger’s non-chronological method of organization

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militates against seeing everything through the prism of a sharp break between Kramer’s earlier and mature poetry, allowing a reconsidera-tion of thematic unities. There is certainly no evidence that his later poems are uniformly superior to those of his Communist period, sev-eral of which are outstanding. Consciousness of craft is always a strong point in Kramer after his Observer days, and what saves the Kramer of the 1940s and 1950s from rehearsing the tediously prolific banality of a poet such as Edith Segal (1920–1997, whose best writing was for children) is not just his real immersion in poetic tradition, but also the complexity of his musical quality. “Denmark Vesey,” from its stentorian initial chords to the great waves of passion and austere lyricism that define the closing stanzas, expresses the mixed nature of Kramer’s early Cold War achievements. When publically performed, this story in verse form can be energetically dramatic.4 There are moments in this and similar long poems where Kramer displays a faultless ear for pacing. Sometimes the energy is from excitement, but other times there is the curiosity of tracing out allusions, as in sections about the work-day world in his twice reprinted “The Minotaur,” originally in Roll the Forbidden Drums (1954d):

There is no cafeteria in Hellmore clangorous, more foul of sight or smell.Yet at the stroke of clemency, we racefrom every labyrinth to that one place.

(Kramer, 2204, 31.)

Kramer’s narratives, nevertheless, might have benefitted if he had also exhibited a capacity to calm down in key moments before arriv-ing at his standard shocking culmination. In some stanzas Kramer does manage to create a halo of quiet compassion, but such passages are invariably delicate, possibly too allergic to advantages springing from a density of verbal texture. Lyric allure offset by ghastly power is Kramer’s trademark, as we saw in “The Thunder of the Grass.” What one can most consistently admire in the 1940s and 1950s is the power in Kramer’s directness, as in his depiction of a Paul Robeson concert:

Tonight Paul Robeson sings.His feet are enough of a stage.

4 I discuss a recording of a 1954 performance in “Cultural Cross-Dressing” in Wald, 1994, 157.

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His voice is a hammer that rings.His voice is a bull in rage.

(“Paul Robeson,” 1943; in Kramer, 2204, 39.)

Some of Kramer’s folk-tale verses are framed and focused by a natural setting, designed for a transcendental effect, and then disrupted by an evil nemesis, as in “The Tinderbox” (1954b). Poems of everyday work life provide a blend of grace and temperament progressively counterpoised to a danger that stalks victims with an unerring sense of measured menace, as in “The Real Ogre” (1954c): “the warbeast / who waits in the shade of my street” (Kramer, 2004, 24). The young poet Kramer projects an aura of aspiring to embody poetry with the rectitude of an archetype of socialist principles: “Will you rise up from your knees, / and roll the forbidden drums — / for your time in Egypt is over, / and the hour of judgment comes!” (“The Bell and the Light,” 1954e; in Kramer, 2004, 65). His poetic voice hits the reader as if uttered by a wide-eyed idealist with an animosity toward whatever is twisted, claw-crooked, or sinister: “Burn down, you rotten citadels / where death sings and the raven hatches! / We’ll make a sunrise of your walls, / an April of your ashes!” (“The Tinderbox,” 1952; in Kramer, 2004, 207).

Rallying his reserves for resistance in the McCarthy era, Kramer usually sketches his imaginative universe in his opening lines as an empty vessel that the class struggle and threat of reaction gradually fill. One is moved at first by the light rhythms and emotive descrip-tions in a piece such as “Neruda in Hiding”: “The tyrants of Chile are hunting Neruda: / They’ve ordered the police to the sea and the plains” (1949; in Kramer, 2204, 307). But more sustained readings disclose a tedious sub-text; behind his early poems too often are moral tales that embody directives for apprentices to live up to the maxims of Communist Party virtues, or risk being cast into the darkness of renegacy. Only in his last decades did Kramer break through to an occasional fluid release of the bursting sublimity of his poetic desire:

the blue ragethat summoned her day after day before day —let it be mine again, not ever to lose!mine, oh you something!why else would you choose me to choose?

(“Indigo,” 1985; in Kramer, 2004, 271.)

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Nelson and Gilzinger have done our homework for us in render-ing the breadth of Kramer’s achievement accessible. Now it is time for friends, fellow poets, and other scholars of the period to bring back the artist in all his complexity. The ideas and emotions of poetry are part of living personalities; neither exists separately from the other.5 Behind Kramer’s choices of what to praise and what to condemn, and how to use language to give a new identity and shape to a new social vision, there lies a private world of motivation that in Kramer’s case is only partially revealed. What we have at present are mostly allusory hints as to the sources of emotions that emerge furtively in certain cryptic passages of his poetry.

This is not to deny that Kramer also worked in a tradition of forms and a network of publication venues. Moreover, his life was buffeted by changing social circumstances and an abiding need to maintain his solidarity with the exploited and oppressed. In political matters, although much variety is showcased in emphasis as well as technical skill, there remain some haunting consistencies spanning his Com-munist and post-Communist years. One often finds the same tones and attitudes, made and remade under changing conditions, not to mention the ongoing dialectic of a yearning for a more private passion largely kept in check by the call of duty emanating from somewhere on the left. If his final poems of Regrouping suggest a chronicle of the undermined self, perhaps he was only coming to terms with how one’s narcissistic consciousness may turn many a pirouette in the dance of survival.

Nonetheless, hidden or overt, allegorized or finessed, this “wid-ower” of a lost Communist faith never truly remarried and there remains an inescapable despondency that love of family and small literary triumphs cannot erase. The writings that address his “Mur-dered Dreams” of 1956, and their afterlife, demonstrate that Kramer was not one who hastily entered a cocoon of willed amnesia about his Party experiences, an unfortunate feature of his talented colleagues such as Norman Rosten (1913–95) and Eve Merriam (1916–92). Even on this matter, however, he felt a sense of protective duty about what he could unguardedly divulge that loosened only slightly as he embraced the political culture of New Left activism. Now that Wicked Times allows

5 Theory is critical as well, although for reasons of space I have not recapitulated the complex arguments I have developed around modernism and the left in The Revolutionary Imagination (1983) and Exiles From a Future Time (2002).

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us ready access to an oeuvre of nearly six decades, the alternatingly celebratory, stoic, and melancholic poetry of Aaron Kramer might be seen, among other ways, as the overlooked and divided love child of Pablo Neruda and Howard Zinn.

Department of English3187 Angell HallUniversity of MichiganAnn Arbor, Michigan 48109–[email protected]

REFERENCES

Anonymous. 1997. “Aaron Kramer, December 13, 1921 – April 7, 1997.” Jewish Cur-rents, 51:5 (May), 37.

Kramer, Aaron. 1937. “Thoughts on a Train.” P. 26 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1938. “Haven’t You Felt the Heart of America?” P. 119 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1940a. “To My People.” P. 157 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1940b. “The Ballad of Two Heroes.” P. 194 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1941. “Valedictory Ode.” Brooklyn College New Observer, 15:1 (April), 18.———. 1948a. “The Thunder of the Grass.” P. 157 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1948b. “Israel: An Ode.” The American Hebrew (September 24), 4–5).———. 1948c. “Prothalamium.” P. 81 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1949. “The Golden Trumpet.” P. 122 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1950. Thru Every Window. New York: Williams-Frederick Press.———. 1951. “Peekskill.” P. 147 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1952. “Denmark Vesey.” P. 44 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1954a. “The Flowers of Georgia O’Keefe.” P. 299 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1954b. “The Tinderbox.” P. 207 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1954c. “The Real Ogre.” P. 204 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1954d. Roll the Forbidden Drums. New York: Cameron and Kahn. ———. 1954e. “The Bell and the Light.” P. 65 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1955–56. “The Link Between Heine and Emma Lazarus.” Publication of the

American Jewish Historical Society, 45, 248–57.———. 1958a. Notes from a phone conversation with Morris U. Schappes, subse-

quently annotated by Kramer. Copy in possession of Wald.———. 1958b. “I Learn by Watching Flowers.” Kramer translation of a poem by Sarah

Barkan. Jewish Currents, 12:2 (February), 14.———. 1962. “The Rising in the Warsaw Ghetto.” P. 176 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1964. Rumshinsky’s Hat and House of Buttons. New York: Thomas Yoseloff.———. 1972. On Freedom’s Side: An Anthology of American Poems of Protest. New York:

Macmillan.———. 1975. “Disappointed Ghosts (For Shaemas O’Sheel”). Xanadu 1:2 (Winter), 49.———. 1979. “Seven Days.” P. 136 in Kramer, 2004.

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———. 1983a. “The Chair.” P. 111 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1983b. In Wicked Times. Arlington, Virginia: Black Buzzard Press.———. 1990a. “Dear Henry.” Outlook (January–February), 17.———. 1990b. Interview with Alan Wald, New York City, September 12.———. 1990c. Letter from Kramer to Alan Wald, December 4.———. 1991. Indigo. New York: Cornwall.———. 1994a. Letter from Kramer to Alan Wald, March 12.———. 1994b. “Fifty-Eight Years Later.” P. 40 in Kramer, 2004.———. 1997a. Regrouping. North Point, New York: Birnham Woods Graphics.———. 1997b. “On My Sixtieth Birthday.” P. 63 in Kramer, 1997a.———. 2004. Wicked Times: Selected Poems. Edited by Cary Nelson and Donald Gilzinger,

Jr. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.Kramer, Laura. 2013. E-mail to Alan Wald, August 4.Marx, Eleanor. 1973. “Notes on the Friendship of Heine and Marx.” In Lee Baxan-

dall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. St. Louis, Missouri: Telos Press.

Nelson, Cary. 1992. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

Poems for Workers. 1925. Edited by Manuel Gomez. Chicago, Illinois: Daily Worker Publishing Co.

Schappes, Morris U. 1958a. Letter to Aaron Kramer, January 3. Copy in possession of Wald.

———. 1958b. “Poems and Drawings of New York.” Jewish Currents, 12:11 (December).Wald, Alan M. 1983. The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheel-

wright and Sherry Mangan. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Caro-lina Press.

———. 1994. Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics. London/New York: Verso.

———. 2002. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the US Literary Left. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

———. 2007. Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

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The Murdered Dreams of Aaron Kramer

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