The poetry of Hyam Plutzik is finding new meaning, new readers, and well-deserved recognition through a new book, “Hyam Plutzik and the Mosaic of Time: Essays and Selected Poems.” The volume brings together a careful selection of Plutzik’s published and previously unpublished poems, alongside original essays by scholars and poets who examine his life and work as a Jewish American writer in the mid-twentieth century.
Plutzik is a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the book is a celebration of his literary achievements and enduring influence. Co-edited by Holli Levitsky, professor of English and director of Jewish Studies at LMU, the volume reflects her long-standing research and teaching in Jewish American literature.
“My interest in Jewish American literature comes from a desire to understand how a writer’s Jewishness shapes their work, and how Jewish writing both reflects American culture and, to some extent, helps shape it,” says Levitsky. “This is the same approach I take in the classroom when I teach Jewish American literature.”
Levitsky situates Plutzik’s work within a broader historical and cultural context. “Like other American minorities, Jewish Americans have been part of the American landscape since the founding of the United States,” she says. “In my teaching and research, I ask questions about the Jewish American experience: What do those contributions look like? How have they changed over time, as reflected in the literature we read? And what, ultimately, makes writing Jewish?”
Outside of LMU, Levitsky has served for sixteen years as director of the annual Jewish American and Holocaust Literature symposium (JAHLit). It was through her work with the symposium that the idea for the book emerged—almost serendipitously.
When the symposium relocated from its longtime venue to a hotel in Miami Beach, Levitsky learned that the hotel owner’s father was Hyam Plutzik, an accomplished American Jewish poet who died unexpectedly at age 50. Recognizing a unique opportunity, she began a partnership with the family. With their support, Levitsky established the annual Plutzik Fellowship, which is awarded to a poetry scholar within the organization to produce a scholarly paper on Plutzik’s work.
Over time, the fellows uncovered a rich archive of Plutzik’s deeply Jewish poetry, along with critical commentary from leading American poets and poetry scholars, many of whom regard Plutzik as one of the most masterful American and Jewish poets of his era. As the scholarship grew, Levitsky and several colleagues proposed a critical collection that would pair essays with a curated selection of Plutzik’s poetry. From that collaboration, Mosaic of Time was born.
“One of the things I love about my work is that I can help recover lost literary voices,” says Levitsky.
That passion took Levitsky abroad during the fall 2025 semester, when she served as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) to study the work of Scottish novelist Muriel Spark. While in Scotland, Levitsky focused on a new research project examining Spark’s complex religious and cultural identity. Spark was born to a Jewish father and a half-Jewish mother and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1954, a pivotal moment that deeply shaped her fiction.
Levitsky’s research explores how Spark’s writing grapples with questions of identity, faith, and belonging, often featuring Catholic converts and Jewish heritage, most notably in “The Mandelbaum Gate.” Drawing on close readings of Spark’s novels alongside extensive archival research, including hundreds of letters between Spark and her devoutly Jewish son, publishers, and close associates housed at the National Library of Scotland, Levitsky argues that Spark’s Jewish identity plays a central, rather than marginal, role in her modernist writing.
By foregrounding Jewish language, memory, trauma, and cultural experience, the project challenges long-standing assumptions about Spark’s literary legacy and contributes to broader conversations about Jewish identity in modern literature. Levitsky’s research will culminate in scholarly publications, including an invited essay for the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Literature. While in Scotland, Levitsky also gave lectures to the IASH and the Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society on her research.
Levitsky embraced daily life in Edinburgh, especially her flat, owned by Scottish mystery writer Alexander McCall Smith, and the opportunity to walk to work each day. Most of her workdays were spent conducting archival research into Spark’s correspondence with her son, Robin, and writing her analysis.
“Spark had a complicated relationship with her son,” says Levitsky. “In their correspondence, they often skirt around the most problematic issues by talking incessantly about their cats. I made it my mission to read past the cat stories and uncover answers to my questions about Spark’s relationship to her Jewish identity.”
Her time in Scotland also allowed Levitsky to reconnect with her own Scottish-Jewish roots. Her great-great-grandfather brought his family from Belarus to Glasgow, where they settled, and which remains home to a vibrant Jewish community.
“I grew up around great-uncles with brogues and a very Scottish sensibility,” says Levitsky. She plans to return to Edinburgh to complete her research next summer.
