Ginsberg and Roth Choosing Their Own Judaism :: Allen Ginsberg

Ginsberg and Roth Choosing Their Own Judaism I take these things for granted. Tradition and cultural awareness to me is some other thing I can shrug off like as well much homework. To my generation its fashionable to embrace other customs mendhi tattoos for the Italians, matzo junkie soup for the Pakistanis, McDonalds for the Nigerians. When did we learn to borrow from everyone else? When did I learn to come to damage with my own identicalness? The Civil Rights movement started it all. In quick succession, Asians demanded recognition, homegrown Americans wanted to carve a place back into their country, women wanted to swerve their bras. Why not the Jews in America? Allen Ginsberg used his own tradition and his mothers death to establish that identity, while Philip Roth used a fictional annals to tell the story of a Judaic family in America. Why comparison these works at all? Both are creative accounts of Jewish American culture, one finished poetry and one through a ficti onalized self. Both use Judaism to express feeling to either tradition or memory. Both are literary works in the 1960s that guide with Jewish self-identity rather than black, white, or other identities. But Im getting forrader of myself... Allen Ginsberg says his own work Kaddish is finally, completely free composition, the long line suspension up within itself into short staccato breath units - notations of one off-the-cuff phrase after another... (Allen 417). Kaddish is a prayer of atonement, making its point through rhythm, repetition and incantation. Ginsberg uses Kaddish to express his understanding of his own identity, and also to put that identity into the framework of Judaism. Ginsbergs mother Naomi went through a series of mental hospitals and mental outbreaks from Ginsbergs childhood, eventually receiving a lobotomy and dying shortly thereafter. The Ginsberg family never held a traditional Kaddish because too few men were present to do so. deuce years later, Ginsberg performed the ceremony with then friend Zev Putterman, and later wrote his own variant of Kaddish (Asher). He starts his Kaddish incanting the spirit of Naomi by pulling up memories of her and her identity. I qualifying toward the / Lower East Side - where you walked fifty years ago, little / girl - from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of / America - frightened on the quayage (Allen 195). In Part IV, Ginsberg then goes on to chant to his mother with the phrases O mother, with your, and with your eyes.