Rosenberg, David 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born August 1, 1943, in Detroit, MI; son of Herman (in the popcorn business) and Shifra (a seamster) Rosenberg; married Rhonda (a public health scientist). Education: University of Michigan, B.A., 1964; Syracuse University, M.F.A., 1966; graduate study at the University of Essex, England, 1970-72, and at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1980-82. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—Lew Grimes Literary Agency, 250 W. 54th St., Ste. 800, New York, NY 10019-5586.

CAREER:

Writer and educator. The New School, New York City, assistant to Robert Lowell, 1961-62, online instructor in writing, 1993—; York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, lecturer in English and creative writing, 1967-71; Hakibubutz Hameuchad/The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, Tel Aviv, Israel, editor, 1981-83; Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, PA, editor in chief, 1983-85; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York City, editor, 1985-87; Fairchild Tropical Garden, Miami, FL, writer-in-residence, 1992; National Tropical Botanical Garden, Miami, Field Bridge fellow, 1994—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Hopwood Special Award for Poetry, 1964; Syracuse University graduate fellowship in poetry, 1965-66; PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize, 1992, for A Poet's Bible.

WRITINGS:

Disappearing Horses, Coach House (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1969.

Headlights, Weed/Flower Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1970.

Paris and London, Talonbooks (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1971.

Leavin' America, Coach House (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1972.

The Necessity of Poetry, Coach House (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1973.

Blues of the Sky: Interpreted from the Original Hebrew Book of Psalms, Harper (New York, NY), 1976.

Job Speaks: Interpreted from the Original Hebrew Book of Job, Harper (New York, NY), 1977.

A Blazing Fountain: A Book for Hanukkah, Schocken (New York, NY), 1978.

Lightworks: Interpreted from the Original Hebrew Book of Isaiah, Harper (New York, NY), 1978.

Chosen Days: Celebrating Jewish Festivals in Poetry and Art, with decorations by Leonard Baskin, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1980.

(Editor) Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1987.

(Editor) Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, Times Books (New York, NY), 1989.

(Translator) The Book of J, interpreted by Harold Bloom, Grove (New York, NY), 1990.

A Poet's Bible: Rediscovering the Voices of the Original Text, Hyperion (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor) The Movie That Changed My Life, Viking (New York, NY), 1991.

The Lost Book of Paradise: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Hyperion (New York, NY), 1993.

(Editor and author of introduction) Genesis as It Is Written: Contemporary Writers on Our First Stories, Harper San Francisco (San Francisco, CA), 1996.

(Editor and author of introduction) Communion: Leading Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1996.

The Book of David, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Dreams of Being Eaten Alive: The Literary Core of the Kabbalah, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 2000.

See What You Think: Critical Essays for the Next Avant Garde, Spuyten Duyvil (New York, NY), 2003.

Abraham: The First Historical Biography, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Editor of The Ant's Forefoot, 1967-73, and Forthcoming, 1981-84.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Rosenberg is a poet, translator, and editor who frequently delves into his own Jewish cultural history to create fresh translations and interpretations of classic works. Many of his publications derive from the biblical Old Testament, including translations from Hebrew from the Books of Psalms, Job, and Isaiah. Among his most controversial have been his "restorations" of the story of Adam and Eve in The Lost Book of Paradise: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and his exploration of the authorship of the first five books of the Bible in The Book of J, on which he collaborated with renowned literary critic Harold Bloom. Rosenberg's Dreams of Being Eaten Alive: The Literary Core of the Kabbalah explores the eroticism found in the sacred text.

With his background in poetry, Rosenberg has translated a number of biblical texts and psalms, infusing them with an updated aesthetic. Working from the ancient Hebrew Book of Psalms, he created Blues of the Sky: Interpreted from the Original Hebrew Book of Psalms in 1976. New York Times Book Review contributor Bill Zavatsky called Rosenberg's interpretation of this classic work "moving and full of skill," and praised the poet for his willingness "to step in with a contemporary simile where time or place have blunted the edges of the original." Rosenberg again went to biblical source material in the creation of his 1977 work, Job Speaks: Interpreted from the Original Hebrew Book of Job. The volume was discussed in the New York Times Book Review by author Anthony Burgess, who deemed Rosenberg "a considerable poet." Burgess also praised the author's interpretive skills. Delving into similar written territory, Rosenberg produced Lightworks: Interpreted from the Original Hebrew Book of Isaiah, in 1978, and A Poet's Bible: Rediscovering the Voices of the Original Text. The latter was honored with the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize in 1992, becoming the first English translation of the Bible to win a major literary award.

While Rosenberg's previous work earned considerable acclaim, his publishing activity of the early 1990s brought him his greatest recognition. For this work he returned to the biblical source material of his previous volumes. The first five books of the Old Testament, known collectively as the Pentateuch, are thought to be the combined work of four sources that were later merged. One of these sources, which is referred to as the Yahwist, is what concerned Rosenberg and Bloom and which they label "J" in their 1990 collaboration, The Book of J. For this work Rosenberg extracted and translated the Yahwist segments of the Bible, while Bloom provided commentary. Rosenberg's translations elicited varied reactions, with some critics praising his daring and others charging that he had taken too many liberties with the text. In the New York Times Book Review, Frank Kermode remarked: "This bold and deeply meditated translation attempts to reproduce the puns, off-rhymes and wordplay of the original." Washington Post Book World contributor Barbara Probst Solomon commented that Rosenberg "has given a fresh, interpretive translation of the salient portions of the ‘J’ sections of the Pentateuch." The authors' contentions that J was a female who lived 3,000 years ago in the court of the decadent king Rehobaom and who aspired to literary fame rather than a spiritual reward is likely to spark controversy for some time to come. "In The Book of J bright ideas gleam, vanish and are replaced by more," wrote Kermode, who added: "Believers, fundamentalists, may be shocked, but the effect on others will surely be refreshing, with just a little of the jolt that one sometimes gets from looking at a familiar painting newly cleaned."

The Lost Book of Paradise is based on the "Scroll of Paradise," or Sefer Gan Eden, which dates from the eleventh century B.C.E. Rosenberg reconstructed this creation story in prose and poetry and added his own commentary and that of a semi-fictional female personage, Devorah Bat-David, a scholar from ancient Jerusalem about whom there exists some archaeological evidence. As Robert Taylor described in the Boston Globe: "Rosenberg blends Devorah Bat-David's commentary on the Book of Paradise with his own remarks, framing a lucid prose poetry that conveys the sense of the story as both extremely old and intensely immediate." In Rosenberg's Garden of Eden, there are two serpents, one male and one female, and Adam is tempted by the female serpent rather than by Eve, a provocative contention. "Theologically controversial, The Lost Book of Paradise is also playful, erudite and stimulating," asserted Taylor. "Here and there the earnestness of its critical discourse infiltrates the poetry and mars its spontaneity," yet "however problematic, Rosenberg's innovative mix of poetry, exegesis and speculation reveals the story's enduring capacity to speak to the present and replenish the meanings of Eden."

As an editor, Rosenberg has assembled a number of collections: Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible brings together what David Lehman in Newsweek called "intense and sometimes quite intimate meditation[s] on a given Old Testament Book." "Not the least of the virtues of Congregation is the fresh witness it bears to the Bible's enduring power to inspire our days and haunt our dreaming nights," Lehman wrote. Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal includes twenty-seven essays from a wide range of authors, few of whom were directly involved in the experience of concentration camps. "We may be invited to a few too many, and too banal, Pilgrims' Progresses to Jewish identity," observed Edith Milton in the New York Times Book Review, "but in the aggregate these essays transcend the obvious paradox at the heart of any anthology that offers to recollect genocide in tranquillity." Milton closed with: "Whatever shortcomings some of these essays display individually, they add up finally to a useful compendium of the difficult disagreements in contemporary Jewish thought." Twenty-three literary critics, novelists, and poets reflected on the films that played pivotal roles in their lives in The Movie That Changed My Life. "As this book proves, movies can provide, especially when we're young and impressionable, far more than entertainment," remarked People contributor Leah Rozen.

Rosenberg also wrote the introduction for and served as editor of Communion: Leading Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives. The thirty-six writers represented in this compilation discuss how both the Old and New Testaments have affected them, even if they have fallen away from organized religions. Among the writers represented are Joyce Carol Oates, who ruminates on the story of Adam and Eve; John Barth, who writes about Genesis and its influence on ancient writers' work and his own Giles Goat-Boy; and Robert Coles, a Harvard psychiatrist recalling his mother's readings of Ecclesiastes and Matthew. "Unlike the methodology of trained Scripture scholars, these authors write about their own experiences of reading or listening to biblical texts and unwittingly present a challenge to the rest of us," wrote Patrick H. Samway in America. Steve Schroeder, writing in Booklist, called Communion "a wonderful collection of imaginative encounters."

In his 1997 book titled The Book of David, Rosenberg retranslates and, in the process, retells the story of the Biblical David, with an emphasis not only on David as a warrior and hero but also as a thinker and poet. For his version of David's life, Rosenberg also draws largely on the books of Samuel. Writing in Booklist, Jeff Ahrens commented that the author explains that the "Nomadic Hebrews' outlook … was very different from … [the outlook] of their descendants in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that the author's "translations and transformations of the text are powerful and moving."

Rosenberg focuses on the Kabbalah in his book Dreams of Being Eaten Alive. He discusses a wide range of topics within the Kabbalah, with a special focus on eroticism and sexuality and their relationship with the soul. He also writes of other issues addressed by the Jewish mystical book, including life after death and the continuation of self-identity. A contributor to Tikkun called Dreams of Being Eaten Alive a "thoughtful, insightful book." Jonathan Wilson commented in the New York Times Book Review: "Rosenberg has done a remarkable job in bringing to English some of the most unnerving and powerful passages in the early cabala." Wilson continued: "His translations, as his title suggests, brilliantly heighten and reproduce the literary and artistic effects of the text and provide spine-tingling illuminations."

In Abraham: The First Historical Biography, Rosenberg presents the founder of Judaism within a cultural context based on the archeological evidence and on his own speculation. Rosenberg contends that Abraham combined his Sumerian household god with the god of creation in Canaan to develop the new god Yahweh. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that "the book opens up into a compelling and moving interpretation that ponders the significance … of his [Abraham's] journey from Ur to Canaan." Bryce Christensen, writing in Booklist, noted: "Many devout Bible readers will resist those speculations as incompatible with traditional religious faith, but lively controversy … always attracts readers."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

America, March 16, 1996, Patrick H. Samway, review of Communion: Leading Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives, p. 18.

Booklist, March 15, 1996, Steve Schroeder, review of Communion, p. 1222; October 1, 1997, Jeff Ahrens, review of The Book of David, p. 290; March 15, 2006, Bryce Christensen, review of Abraham: The First Historical Biography, p. 7.

Boston Globe, September 22, 1993, Robert Taylor, review of The Lost Book of Paradise: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, p. 36.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2006, review of Abraham, p. 174.

Library Journal, April 1, 2000, Loren Rosson III, review of Dreams of Being Eaten Alive: The Literary Core of the Kabbalah, p. 107; April 1, 2006, James A. Overbeck, review of Abraham, p. 100.

National Review, December 9, 1996, Jacob Neusner, review of Genesis as It Is Written: Contemporary Writers on Our First Stories, p. 61.

Newsweek, January 18, 1988, Robert Taylor, review of Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, p. 72.

New York Times, December 25, 1997, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Book of David, pp. B20, E20.

New York Times Book Review, December 14, 1975, Bill Zavatsky, review of Blues of the Sky: Interpreted from the Original Hebrew Book of Psalms, p. 16; March 12, 1978, Anthony Burgess, "Job Speaks," pp. 4-5, 22; January 28, 1990, Edith Milton, review of Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, p. 27; September 23, 1990, Frank Kermode, review of The Book of J, p. 14; September 10, 2000, Jonathan Wilson, review of Dreams of Being Eaten Alive, p. 36.

People, February 17, 1992, Leah Rozen, review of The Movie That Changed My Life, p. 29.

Publishers Weekly, February 26, 1996, review of Communion, p. 96; October 13, 1997, review of The Book of David, p. 70; March 13, 2000, review of Dreams of Being Eaten Alive, p. 78; May 21, 2001, John F. Baker, "All about Abraham," p. 30; February 27, 2006, review of Abraham, p. 58.

Tikkun, January, 2001, review of Dreams of Being Eaten Alive, p. 61.

Washington Post Book World, September 16, 1990, Barbara Probst Solomon, review of The Book of J, pp. 5, 14.