Letters

The Living Language

The last paragraph of Hillel Halkin's review of Alan Mintz's book ("Poets of the Tribe," Fall 2012) leaves the reader with the false impression that Hebrew poetry in the United States died with the demise of Gabriel Preil in 1993. My first reaction to this conclusion was: "What am I? Chopped liver?" My second reaction was, "Oh, well. Here we go again."

Either Halkin knows of my work and is dismissive of it, which is his prerogative, or (and I suspect this to be the case) he is unaware of it. If he is unaware, then he has most likely failed to read Michael Weingrad's American Hebrew Literature, published in 2011 by Syracuse University Press. There, Weingrad devotes a considerable portion of Chapter 7 to Preil's work as well as to mine.