Correspondences Read online

  and the word below,

  altered by a breath.

  and the water is engraved,

  and the sky,

  with the moving mark

  of birds,

  and all around your grave

  the shadow of hoof prints

  in the wet earth

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Text copyright © 2013 by Anne Michaels

  Artwork copyright © 2013 by Bernice Eisenstein

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com/poetry

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013001299

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96251-5

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-96249-2

  ANNE MICHAELS is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry, The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, and Skin Divers, and two celebrated novels, The Winter Vault and the award-winning international best seller Fugitive Pieces, which was made into a feature film. She has also published works for theater. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in translation in thirty-seven countries around the world.

  BERNICE EISENSTEIN is the author of the internationally praised graphic memoir I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, which has been translated into ten languages and won the Jewish Book Award. Eisenstein’s artwork has appeared in exhibitions in Europe and the United States.

  The biographies and endpapers were written by Anne Michaels.

  The quotes accompanying the portraits were selected and arranged by Bernice Eisenstein.

  In Anne Michaels’s poem, lines by Anna Akhmatova are from “Requiem” from Poems of Anna Akhmatova (translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward), translation copyright © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, granted by Darhansoff & Verrill, Literary Agents, on behalf of Gretchen Kunitz and the Estate of Stanley Kunitz, Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books, 1973; quote by Albert Camus is from his book-length essay The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (translated by Anthony Bower), Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1956; quote by Albert Einstein is from his lecture at the University of Kyoto in 1922, as it appeared in the magazine Physics Today, August 1922; lines by Franz Kafka are taken from Franz Kafka: A Biography by Max Brod (translated by G. H. Roberts), Schocken Books, 1947; quote by Helen Keller was taken from her essay “Three Days to See” in Atlantic Monthly magazine, January 1933; lines by Primo Levi are from Collected Poems (translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann), Faber and Faber, 1992; quote by Fernando Pessoa is from his poem “Henry, Count of Burgundy” in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (translated by Richard Zenith), Penguin Classics, 2006.

  Thanks to Ellen Seligman, Deborah Garrison, Helen Garnons-Williams. To Kendra Ward for her assistance. To David Ward for production expertise and support. A special thank you to CS Richardson for his valuable and insightful design contributions.

  v3.1

  Es hot undz dos lebn gerufn

  for

  John

  Anna and Ben

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Portraits

  Biographies

  Permissions and Sources

  Endpapers 2

  PAUL CELAN

  We

  don’t know, you know,

  we

  don’t know, do we?

  JOSEPH SCHMIDT

  My song

  goes round

  the world

  ROSE AUSLÄNDER

  They buried it

  in fire

  And we sit around

  the fragrant table

  Amazed that we

  are sitting here.

  Layer

  upon

  layer

  FERNANDO PESSOA

  I hear time fall, drop

  by drop, and not one

  drop that falls can

  be heard.… I breathe,

  sighing, and my breathing

  happens – it isn’t mine.

  We are two abysses –

  a well staring

  at the sky.

  FRED WANDER

  In the beginning

  was a conversation.

  Taste the grain in it,

  the rain, the storm.

  CHARLOTTE DELBO

  We were coming back.

  We had a tale to tell.

  Each with a pitcher

  of water,

  a washcloth,

  a sheet for the shroud.

  We washed their faces.

  ANDRÉ SCHWARZ-BART

  Our eyes register

  the light

  of dead stars.

  PRIMO LEVI

  Now we have found

  our homes again.

  The memories which

  lie within us

  are not carved

  in stone.

  DEBORA VOGEL

  white words

  BRUNO SCHULZ

  Could it be

  that time is too

  narrow

  for all events?

  FRANZ KAFKA

  I have never

  been here before:

  my breath comes differently…

  It is, after all,

  a communication

  with ghosts

  ANNA AKHMATOVA

  We don’t know,

  we are the same everywhere.

  I see you,

  hear you,

  feel you.

  ALBERT EINSTEIN

  I like to think

  the moon is there

  even if I am not

  looking at it.

  TERESKA

  I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  Are you – Nobody – Too?

  OSIP MANDELSTAM

  A pattern set down,

  until now,

  unknown.

  ISAIAH MICHAELS

  Ikh bin mit mein zikh, aleyn

  I am with my self, alone

  ITSIK MANGER

  Each takes the other by the hand.

  A cooling evening wind

  Swirls them in a firm embrace

  One moment and is gone.

  W.G. SEBALD

  And yet,

  what would we be without memory?

  NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM

  Hope

  Abandoned

  Hope

  JEAN AMÉRY

  nothing is resolved,

  no conflict is settled,

  no remembering

  has become

  a mere memory

  ETTY HILLESUM

  Strangely I heard a stranger say:

  I am with you.

  ALBERT CAMUS

  I know simply

  that this sky

  will last longer

  than I.

  HELEN KELLER

  Below, hidden,

  presses up…

  There: a feeling.

  Your eye and mine:

  they see

  to water.

  S.Y. AGNON

  Now

  to whom shall I turn

  who can tell me the words of the song?

  To the old cantor who knew

  all the hymns of the holy poets?

  CHARLOTTE SALOMON

  Dream, speak

  to me.

  NELLY SACHS

  If I only knew

  On what your last look rested.

  PAUL CELAN

  JOSEPH SCHMIDT

  ROSE AUSLÄNDER

  FERNANDO PESSOA

  FRED WANDER

  CHARLOTTE DELBO

  ANDRÉ SCHWARZ-BART

  PRIMO LEVI

  DEBORA VOGEL

  BRUNO SCHULZ

  FRANZ KAFK
A

  ANNA AKHMATOVA

  ALBERT EINSTEIN

  TERESKA

  OSIP MANDELSTAM

  ISAIAH MICHAELS

  ITSIK MANGER

  W.G. SEBALD

  NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM

  JEAN AMÉRY

  ETTY HILLESUM

  ALBERT CAMUS

  HELEN KELLER

  S.Y. AGNON

  CHARLOTTE SALOMON

  NELLY SACHS

  PAUL CELAN (Czernowitz, Romania, 1920 – Paris, France, 1970) In 1954, Paul Celan wrote to Nelly Sachs, praising her poetry, especially her “Chorus of Orphans.” Few correspondences have begun with deeper subtext and unspoken longing. For both, language was a leap of faith, staggering and minimal: the hope that experience might be spoken, in some way represented, even if there is no listener – a language the dead might understand and trust. Only in the particular space of their correspondence was there, for both, no exile. On May 25, 1960, Celan and Sachs met for the first time at the Stork Inn, a café on the river Limmat, in Zurich. They met once more, in Paris, where Celan lived with his wife and son. Their correspondence was essential, and lasted through years of, for each, intermittent breakdown. In April 1970, Celan left his apartment, crossed the street, and drowned himself in the Seine. Sachs died the day Celan was buried.

  JOSEPH SCHMIDT (Davideny, Bukovina, 1904 – Gyrenbad, Switzerland, 1942) The tenor Joseph Schmidt, “the tiny man with the great voice,” was popular throughout Europe but especially in Germany; he sang in forty-two operas on German radio before he was banned from broadcasting in 1937. He died, age thirty-eight, in a refugee camp outside of Zurich. “Ein Stern Fallt” is inscribed on his gravestone: “a star has fallen.”

  ROSE AUSLÄNDER (Czernowitz, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1901 – Dusseldorf, West Germany, 1988) The poet Rose Ausländer avoided deportation by fleeing to a series of hiding places. For the rest of her life, moving from country to country, she carried all her possessions in two suitcases. In the Czernowitz ghetto, Ausländer met Paul Celan.

  FERNANDO PESSOA (Lisbon, Portugal, 1888 – Lisbon, Portugal, 1935) Fernando Pessoa wrote using more than seventy heteronyms, which he created with an intricate tenderness. When he died, he left more than twenty-five thousand unpublished pages: poems, letters, fragments. The first translation of Pessoa’s work into German was co-translated by Paul Celan.

  FRED WANDER (Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1917 – Vienna, Austria, 2006) Fred Wander, born Fritz Rosenblatt, was interred in twenty camps, in Germany, Poland, and France, during the Second World War. Afterwards, he lived in East Germany, adopting the pseudonym Fred Wander. He began to write about the war only after the death of his ten-year-old daughter Kitty.

  CHARLOTTE DELBO (Essonne, France, 1913 – Paris, France, 1985) Charlotte Delbo was sent to Auschwitz, part of a convoy of women who famously entered the camp singing “La Marseillaise.” Soon after the war, she wrote about her time there but did not publish this memoir for another twenty years.

  ANDRÉ SCHWARZ-BART (Metz, France, 1928 – Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, 2006) Though barely a teenager, and proficient only in Yiddish, Schwarz-Bart joined the resistance and was a member of the Maquis. He learned French on the run and, after the war, from library books. In 1959, he won the Prix Goncourt for his masterpiece, The Last of the Just.

  PRIMO LEVI (Turin, Italy, 1919 – Turin, Italy, 1987) Like Jean Améry, Primo Levi’s camp number is recorded on his gravestone. Levi’s university research was on the asymmetrical properties of carbon. The carbon atom exists in several allotropes; at one extreme, the diamond – translucent and hard; at the other extreme, graphite – opaque and soft enough to stain a page.

  DEBORA VOGEL (Burshtyn, Galicia, 1902 – Lvov, Poland, 1942) Debora Vogel was an avant-garde poet who wrote in Yiddish, now known mostly for her correspondence with Bruno Schulz. She was a steadfast and acute friend, encouraging Schulz in the work that became The Street of Crocodiles (Cinnamon Shops), written by Schulz between 1930–32.

  BRUNO SCHULZ (Drohobycz, Galicia, 1892 – Drohobycz, Galicia, 1942) On November 19, 1942, the artist and writer Bruno Schulz was shot by a Gestapo officer in the ghetto of the town where he was born and had lived his life. Much of Schulz’s work – hauntingly original – has been lost, including the manuscript of an unfinished novel, “The Messiah.” There is no known gravesite; Schulz’s spirit rests in the art of many others, in the music, film, fiction, and poetry inspired by his life and work.

  FRANZ KAFKA (Prague, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1883 – Keirling, Austria, 1924) Franz Kafka’s request of his friend and literary executor Max Brod – that all Kafka’s unpublished manuscripts be destroyed, unread, after his death – is well known; as is Brod’s decision not to honour this request, not as a betrayal but as a deeper devotion to Kafka and his work. When Brod fled Prague in 1939, he carried suitcases filled with Kafka’s papers.

  ANNA AKHMATOVA (Odessa, Russia, 1889 – Leningrad, USSR, 1966) Akhmatova’s poems were banned for many years in the Soviet Union, but her readership remained devoted, circulating her work in samizdat and committing her poems to memory. She would write on a scrap of paper, wait while her guest memorized the poem, then immediately strike a match and burn it. Her poem “Requiem,” written in response to her son Lev’s imprisonment, was not published in the USSR until 1987.

  ALBERT EINSTEIN (Ulm, Germany, 1879 – Princeton, USA, 1955) In early 1933, Einstein was in the middle of a return crossing to Europe from the United States when he learned of the events in Germany; he made the decision never to enter German territory again, a resolution he upheld for the rest of his life. His ashes are scattered on the grounds of Princeton University. Einstein loved to sail and found the open water conducive to thought: he especially favoured windless days because, he said, calm is the greatest challenge to a sailor.

  TERESKA (Poland, 1948) Little is known of Tereska beyond her portrait, a photograph by David Szymin, pseudonym Chim. In 1948, on assignment to document the state of refugee children in Europe, Chim photographed a girl whose childhood had been spent in a concentration camp and who was now a resident in a home for “disturbed children.” She stands next to a chalkboard covered with a blur of white lines; her picture of “home.” This girl, Tereska, is one of “Chim’s children.”

  OSIP MANDELSTAM (Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russia, 1891 – Vtoraya Rechka transit camp, USSR, 1938) In 1933, Osip Mandelstam wrote a poem critical of Stalin, resulting in his exile to Cherdyn. In 1938, he was again arrested and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He died in a transit camp near Vladivostok. In 1977, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Chernykh discovered a minor planet, #3461, and replaced its number with the poet’s name.

  ISAIAH MICHAELS (Grodno, Poland, 1918 – Toronto, Canada, 2009) A life is inextricable from a time, place, language. If we seek it, if we are fortunate, our sensibilities and our grief find a true companionship – with certain writers, painters, composers, activists. To remember someone is also to remember this ardour, these allegiances, this necessity. The men and women gathered here inhabited an historical landscape Isaiah Michaels knew intimately; their times and their concerns are joined to his own. Together they represent a particular and profound relationship. Words from a place deeper than a single heart.

  ITSIK MANGER (Czernowitz, 1901 – Gedera, Israel, 1969) In the 1920s, the Yiddish poet Itsik Manger moved to Warsaw, where he gained rapid popularity for his work. He chose biblical themes, giving voice to the more minor characters in the Bible. In 1938, he fled Warsaw for Paris and from Paris escaped to England.

  W.G. SEBALD (Wertach im Allgau, Germany, 1944 – Norfolk, England, 2001) Until he was seventeen, W.G. Sebald “knew practically nothing” of Germany’s history during the Second World War. His father took part in the invasion of Poland in 1939 and never spoke of his experiences. Sebald maintained that one cannot write from a “compromised moral position,” however, one’s emotional position is almost always compromised, a truth Sebald tried to diminish by creating fictions th
at seemed grounded in factual event and narrated in an almost disinterested voice. In Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the character Amélie Cerf inhabits 6 avenue Emile Zola, Celan’s last address in Paris. Sebald died at age fifty-seven in a car accident.

  NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM (Saratov, Russia, 1899 – Moscow, USSR, 1980) Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two-volume memoir – Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned – bears witness to life in the USSR under Stalin. It is an extraordinary witnessing – of her marriage to the poet Osip Mandelstam and of the lives of Akhmatova and their friends. She memorized her husband’s poems, thus safeguarding his work. For many years, she lived one step ahead of arrest. The titles of the volumes are deliberately ironic; “Nadezhda” means “hope.”

  JEAN AMÉRY (Vienna, Austria, 1912 – Salzburg, 1978) Of Jean Améry, Primo Levi wrote, “One reads [him] with almost physical pain.” Born Hans Mayer, adopting his acronym after the war, Améry joined the resistance in Belgium and was captured in 1943. He was taken to Breendonk and tortured. He worked as a German-language journalist after the war but refused to publish in Germany or Austria for many years. Améry committed suicide by poisoning. His gravestone identifies him by his pseudonym and his camp number, 172364.