SOURCE: "Allen Ginsberg: The Jew as an American Poet," in Judaism, Vol. 11, No. 4, Fall, 1962, pp. 303-08.

[In the following essay, Grossman discusses Ginsberg's contribution to Jewish poetry, focusing particularly on Kaddish.]

The Jew, like the Irishman, presents himself as a type of the sufferer in history. At a mysterious moment near the end of the nineteenth century the Irish produced a literature of international importance without having previously contributed a single significant poem in English. The Jewish poet in America today resembles the Irishman in England during the 1890's. From a literary point of view, he is emerging from parochialism into the mainstream of writing in English, and he is bringing with him a cultural mystery arising out of his centrality in history as a sufferer, and also out of his relation to a vast body of literature in another language. The Irish at the end of the...