SOURCE: "On the Road; or the Adventures of Karl Shapiro," in Poetry, Vol. XCVI, No. 3, June, 1960, pp. 171-78.

In the following essay, Fiedler explores the treatment of Jewish themes in Shapiro's poetry.

We live in a time when everywhere in the realm of prose Jewish writers have discovered their Jewishness to be an eminently marketable commodity, their much vaunted alienation to be their passport into the heart of Gentile culture. It is, indeed, their quite justified claim to have been first to occupy the Lost Desert at the center of the Great American Oasis (toward which every one now races, CocaCola in one hand, Martin Buber in the other) which has made certain Jewish authors into representative Americans, even in the eyes of State Department officials planning cultural interchanges. The autobiography of the urban Jew, whose adolescence coincided with the Depression and who walked the banks of some...