Charles Reznikoff

Charles Reznikoff (August 31, 1894 – January 22, 1976) was an American poet best known for his long work, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915), Recitative (1934-1979). The term Objectivist was coined for him. The multi-volume Testimony was based on court records and explored the experiences of immigrants, black people and the urban and rural poor in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He followed this with Holocaust (1975), based on court testimony about Nazi death camps during World War II.

In 1930 Reznikoff married Marie Syrkin, a prominent Zionist and friend and biographer of Golda Meir. Although they did not live together at all times during the marriage, it lasted until Reznikoff's death.

When Louis Zukofsky was asked by Harriet Monroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, he contributed his essay, Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff. This established the name of the loose-knit group of 2nd generation modernist poets and the two characteristics of their poetry: sincerity and objectification.

Charles Reznikoff was born in 1894 in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, the son of immigrants Sarah Yetta (Wolvovsky) Reznikoff and Nathan Reznikoff, who fled the Russian Empire and its pogroms. His Hebrew name was Ezekiel, after his maternal grandfather. His father established a family business of manufacturing hats. He was young when he graduated from high school and had already started writing poetry. He spent a year studying journalism in graduate school at the University of Missouri, where Reznikoff realized he was interested in writing more than reporting news. He entered the law school of New York University in 1912 and graduated in 1916. He practiced law briefly. In 1918 as the United States had entered the Great War, he entered officer training school. He did not see active service before the end of the war.

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