Hyam Plutzik’s War

Abstract:Although there has been little scholarship to date on Hyam Plutzik, he was an accomplished poet unique in his interests and his demonstration that postwar Jewish identity might embrace poetry and ideas reaching from biblical antiquity to contemporary cosmology. A veteran of World War II, he responded passionately and imaginatively to both Nazism and the continued Cold War threat of totalitarianism, range of reference tells us that he felt the Shoah, as well as the world war of which it was a part, and that they could only be understood within the full sweep of Jewish history and culture.