ABSTRACT
Often, and in particular nowadays, the shtetl has pride of place in Jewish cultural geography, especially in literary analyses. The flowering of modern Yiddish literature, coinciding as it did with urbanization and modernization, reflected a set of anxieties about tradition both in contrast and in conflict with modernity. This chapter focuses on one exemplary case to highlight some of the primary features of Peretz Markish's urban poetics. Markish sometimes uses his bold and expressive idiom to describe a dark, even apocalyptic, vision of urban existence. However, in his very important poema ‘Shtot’ (‘City’), Markish dramatizes the complicated subjecthood of the urban citizen. He makes the City into a human presence in conversation with whom the poet-narrator comes to realize his bright revolutionary potential. In Markish the relationship between his two poles- city and desert wilderness - is less a dichotomy than a complicated metaphorical web.
