to be sure. His Jewishness lies in how he mourns."Jew on Bridge" tempts you to read Williams backwards, from Wait to his first book 40 years ago. If you do, you can see that he has always been sitting shiva for the whole 20th century. He has had a strong tendency to view its public disasters through the scrim of the Holocaust. The first poem in his first book was dedicated to Anne Frank. He has written poetry about Auschwitz and translated Abraham Sutzkever, the Yiddish writer once described as "the greatest poet of the Holocaust."
from Tablet: View From the Bridge
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