UnderstandingIsaac’ssacrifice
The Binding Of Isaac
Shoestring Press, £10
This is no ordinary book about the First World War poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918). It is part biography, part autobiography and part reflections on how Rosenberg has influenced other poets. Anthony Rudolf also indulges in alternative history, speculating on Rosenberg’s unlived future.
Divided into two distinct parts, the second half of The Binding of Isaac – “Isaac Rosenberg in Heaven” – moves away from literary criticism, presenting the first scene of Rudolf’s play, Nobody’s Romeo. Part One consists of 23 related essays. Rudolf is principally interested in Rosenberg as a poet, dramatist and prose writer. Yet he does not neglect the visual art. Essays (1), (8) and (13) consider Isaac Rosenberg’s SelfPortrait with a Steel Helmet, Isaac Rosenberg and the National Gallery and Isaac Rosenberg, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg and Solomon J. Solomon, respectively.
The book features several colour illustrations, although only one of these reproduces an artwork by Rosenberg (the aforementioned Self-Portrait with a Steel Helmet).
Rudolf shows how Rosenberg moved on from his poetical and dramatic influences (Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Blake, the Romantics especially Keats, and the Bible), partly because he was a painter. He was also a religious poet. From his first lyric, Ode to David’s Harp, to his final three poems – The Burning of the Temple, The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Hordes and Through these Pale Cold Days – the Bible and Israel (past and future) loom large.
According to Rudolf, proper Jewish verse comprises “poems… which wrestle with theological and existential dilemmas of Jewishness, not at all poems which merely happen to be written by a Jew”. And Rosenberg was one of the first Anglo-Jews to pen such poems.
For Part Two, Rudolf’s play Nobody’s Romeo assembles several English-language poets in Heaven, as though in a literary “club”. Here, Rosenberg, Silkin, Keats, Shelley, Keith Douglas, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Henry Newbolt — “All together” — recite Newbolt’s famous line: “Play up! Play up! and play the game!” Rather than being embarrassed by this public school paean to British Protestant imperialism, Rudolf plays with the reader’s expectations by having Newbolt remark that his “great-grandfather was Samuel Solomon” and so perhaps related to the Anglo-Jewish painter Solomon J. Solomon. Thus, Protestants and Jews merge harmoniously in Rudolf’s literary heaven.
Brilliant, maverick and hugely entertaining, The Binding of Isaac challenges us to think afresh about Isaac Rosenberg and his aesthetic legacies.
Peter Lawson’s books include the monograph, ‘Anglo-Jewish Poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein’ and ‘Passionate Renewal: Jewish Poetry in Britain since 1945’