Content area
Full Text
Selma Meerbaum-Ei si nger Harvest of Blossoms: Poems from a Life Cut Short Ed. Irene Silverblatt and Helene Silverblatt Translations by Jerry Glenn and Florian Birkmayer, with Helene Silverblatt and Irene Silverblatt (Northwestern University Press, 2008)
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a cousin of poet Paul Celan, was born in 1924 in Czernowitz (formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, subsequently in Romania, now Chernivitsi, Ukraine). She attended Romanian and then Yiddish language schools, but her native language was German, and it was in German that she wrote poetry, beginning around age 15. After living in the Czernowitz ghetto in 1941, she was deported with her mother and stepfather from Czernowitz to Nazi camps in Transnistria, where she died in the camp Michailowka on December 16, 1942. A selection of her poetry that she had transcribed into an album and left with a friend before her deportation survived and was brought to Israel in the years after the Second World War. Although individual poems circulated among her friends, and her poem ("Poem") about the invasion of Czernowitz appeared in an East German anthology of Jewish and Holocaust poetry in 1968 (reportedly at Celan's insistence), the entire collection of her surviving works, 52 original poems in German, five translations from French, Yiddish, and Romanian into German and one from French into Yiddish, first appeared in Israel at the instigation of her former teacher at the Yiddish school in Czernowitz, Hersh Segal, in a private printing that he financed in 1976. It was first published in Germany in 1980, and the 2008 English translation is its first appearance in English in its entirety.
Published collections of Selma Meerbaum- Eisinger's poetry tend to emphasize the story of her life and the miraculous preservation of her work in their presentation of her poems. In particular they place Meerbaum- Eisinger in the context of her Czernowitz origin, either by virtue of the editor or translator's common origin in Czernowitz and personal connections with the poet and the Czernowitz Jewish literary scene, or by virtue of their very distance from it. Hersch Segal's personal connection to Meerbaum- Eisinger is clearly expressed in his afterword to her poems, which Adolf Rauchwerger's 1979 edition of the poems published by Tel Aviv University Press reproduced, and the...