![]() ![]() His father, a Zionist, stressed the Jewish part and sent him unsuccessfully to Hebrew school. “Critical biography” is the book’s label in fact it is a pilgrimage to a hard place by a pilgrim who does all the walking we do and, astonishingly, gets us up there.Ĭelan was born in 1920 in Chernovitsythen in Romania and now in Ukraine, to a German Jewish family. It is the long way that makes “Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew” such a revelation to readers barred by the poetry’s double inaccessibility (it is in German, and it is difficult for Germans). It was a long way in, and-he was not a German scholar-he came from a long way off. “I knew,” he writes, “I would have to find my way into it before doing anything else.” John Felstiner, a professor of English and Hebrew studies at Stanford, came upon Celan’s poetry in 1977. Celan’s splendor has been brought to life, and his silence brought to speech, by a book that is a labor not just of love but of passion. ![]()
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