ABSTRACT
The abundant use of the word dam (blood) in the poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1981) is obvious to anyone who is familiar with his work. The son of a Hasidic family, Greenberg broke with religious orthodoxy in his youth but returned to traditional Judaism in his later years. He became one of the most important and controversial writers of Yiddish and Hebrew modernism, known for his ultra-right-wing ideology. It may seem unsurprising that this right-wing poet considered blood as “yakar li mi-kol” (“dearest to me of all”) and invoked it frequently. But upon closer examination, Greenberg’s use of this seemingly trite symbol conveys significant esthetic and artistic meaning that far transcends its fascist context. As I intend to show in this chapter, the blood metaphor in Greenberg’s poetry goes through several major changes: blood plays a key role in his poetic manifestos of expressionism, becomes a symbol of the “New Jew” in the context of his adoption of the bloody “Art of Esau,” and finally serves to embody the poet’s tears, which fall on the bodies of the Jews murdered by Esau’s descendants in the Holocaust. The blood metaphor is used by Greenberg to signify the “Jewish self,” and the transformation it must undergo in order to become “a nation like all other nations.” After the Holocaust, Greenberg again employs this metaphor, this time in order to reclaim the traditional Jewish view of Christians as bloodthirsty persecutors. These changes in Greenberg’s perception of blood develop into questions about the boundaries of poetic language in general and his own early poetic enthusiasm for blood in particular.
