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5 comments about Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew.

1. This is one of the most powerful books imaginable, touching chords in the human heart that we would often choose to ignore. It is the story of a man whose courage and creativity helped him communicate truth in a world that was desperate to silence his voice. Please read this book....it will change everything.



2. I appreciate this book most for its study of the relationship between Paul Celan and his most famous poem, "Deathfugue." Before the English translation of that poem in this book is a photograph with the caption, "Orchestra playing 'Death Tango' in Janowska Road Camp, Lvov, ca. 1942." Prisoners used that term "for whatever music was being played when the Germans took a group out to be shot." (p. 30) Before reading this poem, I had read that it was impossible to get permission from the holder of the copyright to translate it into English and publish it, even if an American expert wanted to call it the best poem that had been written in the German language since World War II. The poem may have more meaning for those who already know what it means, and who would not be puzzled by, "We shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped."



3. Todesfuege (Death Fuge) is Celan's most famous poem, although he wrote it when he was only 24. Although it might seem cryptic, it is quite accessible in comparison with his later poems. Felsteiner does an excellent job of helping the reader to understand what Celan must have been like and further allows insight into his poetry in a straightforward, readable way. Because Celan is so difficult to understand, many critics, including Derrida, tend to interpret him in their own images.

   Felsteiner, on the other hand, is more concerned with portraying Celan accurately than using him as a platform to promote his own agendas. I would strongly recommend this book as an introduction to Celan.




4. Paul Celan was born into what soon became the wrong place and time. His family were German-speaking Jews from the eastern reach of the Austrian Empire. They lived in Czernowitz, capital of the Bukovina region, which passed to Romania just before Celan's birth in 1920. After a nine-month visit to his uncle in Paris where he was exposed to the Surrealists' influence in 1938, then his return to Czernowitz where his studies were interrupted by Soviet and then German occupation in 1940 and 1941, after forced labor in Romania's western mountains, his parents' deportation and death in German-occupied Ukraine, after the Red Army's return in 1944, Celan left home for Bucharest and then Vienna, where he first attracted recognition as a German-speaking poet, and in 1948 he settled in Paris. There he found a haven of sort at the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he taught German language and literature to generations of students (some of whom later contributed to his posthumous fame) and pursued his vocation as a poet in exile, estranged from his German mother tongue and survivor of a world that no longer was.
   
   Coming from a homeland that hardly existed anymore, writing for a German audience that he did not live among or trust, residing in France yet undervalued there, Paul Celan's native tongue itself was the only nation he could claim. Yet his relation to the German language was itself problematic, for the Nazis had abused and contaminated the words that once belonged to Goethe and Holderlin. Celan's austere idiom, mindful of death and horror, is rooted in his struggle to realize--by way of uninnocent language--"that which happened", the understatement he used to designate events of 1933-45. As he put it when receiving the City of Bremen's prize for his work in 1958, his language had to "pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, `enriched' by all this."
   
   The biographer gives detailed accounts of several episodes that took a heavy toll on the poet's sensitive feelings: the accusation of plagiarism that accompanied the publication of his first volume in France and that was to resurface later in his carrier; his almost paranoid belief that Nazism was again on the rise in post-war Germany and that Neo-Nazis were orchestrating a machination against him ("you can hardly imagine how things really look again in Germany," he wrote to a friend in 1960.) Paul Celan refused to submit a poem to Martin Heidegger for a Festschrift on his seventieth birthday, mindful of the philosopher's past complicity with Nazism and his enduring failure to recant after the war, but he nonetheless signed the Black Forest hermit's guestbook "with a hope for a coming word in the heart" during a visit to Todtnauberg in 1967.
   
   Recognition came late, and for much of his life was confined to the German-speaking world. When a European Jewish poet's turn came for the Nobel Prize in 1966, the more accessible Nelly Sachs got it, not him. His bouts of depression and psychic distress led to several hospitalizations. The poet concluded his life on the 20th of April 1970 by jumping from the Pont Mirabeau into the Seine, drowning himself. On his desk, a biography of Holderlin was found opened to an underlined passage: "Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart."
   
   John Felstiner devotes a whole chapter to Celan's most well-known poem, Todesfuge. Although similarities with Picasso's Guernica or Yeats's `Easter 1916' come to mind, no work of art has exposed the exigencies of its time so radically as this one, whose speakers--Jewish prisoners tyrannized by a camp commandant--start off with the words: " Schwarze Milch der Fruehe wir trinken sie abends"--"Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk"--and evoke the fate that awaits them: "Wir schaufeln ein Grab in der Lueften da liegt man nicht eng" --"we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped."



5. Much of Paul Celan's later poetry is hermetic, and acknowledge by many to be impossible to truly understand without knowledge of the poet's life. Nonetheless, for a long time English speakers had no biography of this influential modern poet. In PAUL CELAN: Poet, Survivor, Jew author John Felstiner covers the whole course of Celan's all-too-brief life, emphasizing the poet's Jewish identity above others. Besides a simple biography, Felsteiner also discusses a number of Celan's poems, which he himself has translated into English (the book assumes no knowledge of German), and also chronicles Celan's output of translations and his relationship to other (especially Jewish) poets.
   
   For Felstiner, Paul Celan's feelings as a Jew play an important role throughout his poetry, but it seems especially important in the early and late periods over the middle. Celan began his mature career as an orphan whose parents perished in the death camps and who himself served forced labour in wartime Romania. This of course, providing the impetus for not only his famous "Todesfuge", *the* poem on the death camps, but also the imagery of much of his first acknowledged volume. In the last decade of Celan's life, on the other hand, the poet was gripped by paranoia that Germany was not sufficiently acknowledging its sins and that neo-Nazis were plotting against him. This, Celan as representative of a race that has not only suffered before but is still hunted today, Felsteiner sees as an important part of the late works.
   
   If I give this biography only three stars, it is because I wish that there was more information about Celan's life and less exegesis of his poetry. Indeed, Celan's mental distress which sent him more than once to a psychiatric clinic is barely touched upon. Had Felsteiner split this into a more substantial biography and a separate work of criticism, the reader who wants to know about the whole of Celan's life would be better served. Nonetheless, for anyone trying to tackle Celan's poetry in English translation (e.g. Michael Hamburger's collection Poems of Paul Celan), this may be useful

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1 comments about Soundless Roar: Stories, Poems, and Drawings.

1. Quite simply, you will find it difficult to find another Holocaust text quite like Soundless Roar.
   
   Ava Kadishson Schieber, born in Novi Sad near Belgrade, was a teenager when her parents decided that the best chance of survival was for each family member to go his or her own way. In telling her memories of being forced into solitary hiding, Schieber unpacks her lost adolescence in a way that reveals both unimaginable loss and extraordinary acceptance.
   
   By inviting you to "construct your own image" from her collection of drawings, poems, and short stories, Schieber does not allow you to settle on simple interpretations or superficial lessons. Instead, readers will be taken on a frightening yet gentle journey - encountering Schieber's "friendly ghosts" along the way - that will leave them mystified, refreshed, and inspired.
   
   Somehow, Schieber takes her readers through the world of the Holocaust, including a brief glimpse into the Nazi death camps. It is as if she is leading each reader by the hand, as we discover with her the strength of the human spirit and her own personal tragedies.
   
   Schieber's astounding honesty challenges her readers' preconceptions of what being a survivor means. In a way, she also forces her readers to confront their understandings of oppression in society today. Importantly, her ability to write both simply and abstractly makes Soundless Roar a piece of art that is accessible to teenagers and scholars alike.

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1 comments about Days Of Rain.

1. Days of Rain
   By Enzo Tayar
   
   Originally published in Italy in 2001 as 1943: I giorni della pioggia and then again published in 2004 by Yad Vashem as part of their Holocaust Martyrs' and Heros' Remembrance Authority project.
   
   The book tells the story, through the eyes of Enzo Tayar, a Florentine Jew and son of Ugo and Dora Tayar and bothers to Franco and Liliana, of a family's life as Florence's society deteriorates and anti-sematism, descrimination and persicution set in.
   
   The tale starts with a short history of Enzo's father, his courtship and marriage to Enzo's mother. The start of the Tayar family and their middle class upbringing in Florence is dramatically contrasted in 1939 with the start of the restrictions on the Jews in Florence.
   
   By 1943, the family is forced to separate for their own safety.
   Franco is in Malta.
   Enzo goes off by himself and his parents and sister head in different directions and all go into hiding.
   During 1943, Enzo travels through the Tuscan countryside and seeks out and finds various levels of friendship and support from the rural famers in several remote villages and is kept hidden and safe until the end of the war.
   He is reunited with his family and miraculously all are safe and sound. That can not be said for all of the greater Jewish population of Florence.
   
   To add a personal note:
   
   In 1981, I began traveling to Europe as a retail buyer. The company for whom I worked, made a point of, whenever possible, seeking out Jewish export agencies to support our business actions in every European country where we did business. During my first trip I met Franco and Enzo Tayar and carried a business and personal relationship with them for many years.
   When my career changed, I stopped traveling to Europe and lost touch with them.
   About 2 years ago, I found myself thinking about the Tayars. I started searching for them on the Internet. The only result I could find led me to Days of Rain. Through another Italian friend, I got Enzo's email address.
   I sent Enzo a short note and he responded back saying that he was temporarily in NYC and gave me his US phone number. My conversations with him led me to Franco and now to this book.
   It's with great sadness that I say that I never knew anything about their experiences during the war or during the Nazi occupation of Florence. I would have loved to have had some conversations with them about the events so clearly brought to life in this excellent book.

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