John Felstiner in The New Republic:
Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe.” Why “must”? Writing from Paris in August 1948 to relatives in the new state of Israel, Paul Celan, having survived the “Final Solution,” explains that a poet cannot stop writing, “even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.” This fateful pledge, from a brutally orphaned son whose stunning poem of 1945, “Deathfugue,” intones, “Death is a master from Deutschland” and threads an ashen-haired Shulamith into the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Songs, throws a raking light over a recently discovered exchange of letters between Celan and the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
Born to German-speaking parents in Czernowitz, Bukovina, an eastern outpost of the Austrian Empire, Celan survived nineteen months of forced labor, eventually taking exile in Paris. There by hard degrees he became Europe’s most challenging postwar poet.
More here. [Celan shown in photo.]
