The Murdered Dreams of Aaron Kramer: A Marxist Poet in the “American Century”

Abstract

Aaron Kramer was the most prolific poet to emerge from the U. S. Communist movement in the mid-20th century, his earliest collections issued by International Publishers. In his last decades, he was chiefly known as a skilled and reliable contributor of verse, essays, and translations from the Yiddish to progressive Jewish magazines such as Jewish Currents and Outlook. Yet all efforts to revive his reputation through conventional means, including the publication of a major collection and appreciation in 2004, have been singularly unsuccessful. What might be gained through a deeper contextualization of his work, an attempt to inhabit his life as it played out in the changing contexts and fortunes of the left? Kramer was a minor poet, but there is still much to be valued by assessing him as the widower of a lost Communist faith who never truly remarried, an artist haunted by dreams murdered by Hitler and Stalin.