Correspondences Read online

  source

  Quote from Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kutter, Oxford University Press, reprint edition 2006.

  biography

  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.”

  source

  Lines from the poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, published by Little, Brown, and Company, 1960.

  biography

  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.

  source

  Lines from the poem “What shall I do with this body they gave me,” translated by A. S. Kline.

  biography

  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.

  source

  Quote is from Isaiah Michaels, with Yiddish translation.

  biography

  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.

  source

  Lines from the poem “The Patriarch Jacob Meets Rachel,” translated by Leonard Wolf, from The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, edited by Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, copyright © 1987 by Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  biography

  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 that 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.

  source

  Prose quote from The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse, New Directions Books, 1999.

  biography

  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.”

  source

  Hope Abandoned is the title of one volume of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs.

  biography

  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.

  source

  Prose quote from At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld, Indiana University Press, 1980.

  biography

  ETTY HILLESUM (Middelburg, Netherlands, 1914 – Auschwitz, Poland, 1943) For approximately the last two years of her life, Etty Hillesum kept a diary – from Sunday, March 9, 1941, to Tuesday, October 13, 1942 – eight exercise books she entrusted to friends, with her permission to publish if she did not survive. Her diary is a remarkable act of witnessing – a document of profound growth and depth of spirit, even as she experienced the conditions of Westerbork and her own deportation.

  source

  Quote is from Rilke’s poem “The Elopement” from An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941–43, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, Persephone Books, 2010.

  biography

  ALBERT CAMUS (Mondovi, French Algeria, 1913 – Villeblevin, France, 1960) The writer Albert Camus’ nom de guerre was Beauchard. He joined the French resistance and served as editor of the underground newspaper, Combat. Camus was meticulous in his political and philosophical positions; he was, he said, “looking for a method and not a doctrine” and believed in practising “methodical doubt.”

  source

  Prose quote from Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, translated by Justin O’Brien, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1955.

  biography

  HELEN KELLER (Tuscumbia, USA, 1880 – Connecticut, USA, 1968) Helen Keller was a radical socialist, a pacifist, and a suffragist. Her work, along with the works of Einstein, Kafka, Brod, and thousands of others, were banned and burned in the infamous book-burnings of May 10, 1933, in Germany. Keller believed that death was like passing from one room to another. And in that other room, she said, “I will be able to see.”

  source

  Quote is from Paul Celan’s poems “Homecoming” and “Flower,” from Paul Celan: Selected Poems, translation copyright Michael Hamburger, 1972, Penguin Books, 1972.

  biography

  S.Y. AGNON (Buczacz, Galicia, 1888 – Jerusalem, Israel, 1970) In 1966, the novelist and short-story writer S.Y. Agnon shared the Nobel Prize with Nelly Sachs. At the dinner following, in his banquet speech, Agnon said, “I will now tell you who am I, whom you have agreed to have at your table.”

  source

  Prose quote from short story “The Sign,” translated by Arthur Green, from A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories, edited by Alan L. Mintz and Anne Golomb, Schocken Books, 1995.

  biography

  CHARLOTTE SALOMON (Berlin, Germany, 1917 – Auschwitz, 1943, with her unborn child) In 1939, Charlotte Salomon’s father sent her to stay with her grandparents in France, where he believed she would be safer than in Berlin. There, Salomon, humming while she painted, made nearly eight hundred gouaches, with text and overlays, the basis of her memoir, Life? or Theatre? This work survived the war in the trust of a family friend, Dr. Georges Moridis. “C’est tout ma vie,” she told him. “This is all my life.” In 1943, she married an Austrian refugee, who relinquished his false identity and confessed himself a Jew so they could marry. Not long after, they were deported.

  source

  Quote is fr
om Life? or Theatre?, translation by Leila Vennewitz, Waanders Publishers, Zwolle, 1998.

  biography

  NELLY SACHS (Schoenberg, Germany, 1891 – Stockholm, Sweden, 1970) Nelly Sachs and her mother fled Berlin for Stockholm in 1940, with the help of the writer Selma Lagerlof, who intervened on Sachs’ behalf with the Swedish authorities. Sachs had received her deportation order only days before. Sachs lived with her mother, and continued to live after her mother’s death, in their tiny apartment in south Stockholm, Bergsundstrand 23. The Swedish Academy declared Sachs a “bearer … of solace.” When they met, Celan was forty; Sachs, sixty-nine years old. In giving something to each other, they made a place beside them for others. Sachs wrote, sitting with her typewriter, looking out over the water.

  source

  Lines from the poem “If I only knew” from After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets, by Eavan Boland, Princeton University Press, 2004.