Nissim Ezekiel is often described as a founder of modern English verse in India, or as the leading writer to come out of the "Bene Israel" a long-isolated Jewish community in Western India. This is not really fair to a highly readable modern poet with affinities to Yeats, W.C. Williams, and others, although Ezekiel also wrote poems in an Indo-English dialect that anticipate the prose works of Salman Rushdie.