Celan, the Jew

Prooftexts303 Celan, the Jew John Felstiner. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, xix + 344 pp. The three qualifiers in the title of this book are certainly of paramount importance to the study of Paul Celan, considered by some to be the central poet of the last half century. The young Jew from Czernowitz was "shoveling" (Celan's laconic account of his time in Rumanian labor camps during the Second World War) when his parents, who had been deported in 1942, were murdered by the Nazis. The experience of those years hangs over his poetry and over the rest of his life, which ended by suicide in 1970. John Felstiner's approach to his subject is tripartite, like his title: a blend of translation (he has rendered most or all of around sixty poems into English), criticism, and biography similar to that of his earlier book on the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.1 His work on Celan is impeccably researched, rich with insights into Celan's poems and their relation to his life, and comprises a detailed and often compelling case for the Jewishness of the poetry. Of the three qualifiers, Felstiner places most insistence on the "Jew." It is obligatory when discussing Celan to emphasize two facts: that he wrote in German, even after the Shoah, and even though his linguistic abilities included Rumanian, Russian, French, English, Yiddish, and Hebrew; and that he wrote a German like no one else's. Felstiner ardently champions the belief that Celan's Jewishness, bound up with the searing experience of the survivor, generates a deep ambivalence toward his mother tongue, and leads him to write what is in the deepest sense a Jewish poetry, written in a German that has been reinvented, subverted, made foreign to itselfand so hospitable to Jews. This argument, carried on largely through Felstiner's translations and commentary upon them, is the most interesting dimension of the book, and the most passionately felt. It is not an inevitable argument. What Celan experienced of Jewish tradition came at the goading of his father; Celan, his mother's pet, never liked the man. He resented having to spend three years in a Hebrew elementary school, and several years more taking private Hebrew lessons, on the orders of his Zionist father. And he felt coerced into a meaningless, perfunctory bar mitzvah, apparently most significant to him because family friends bought him a leatherbound edition of Goethe's Faust. Already he would seem to be typical of the many modern Jews for whom traditional involvement ends at the age of thirteen.2 Yet Celan's Jewish consciousness developed in other ways later on. One of the great strengths of Felstiner's book is the attention given to Celan's library, to his reading habits and annotations. It could be argued that, beginning in the 1950s, Celan's reading interests establish a kind of modernist Jewish canon, centering on writers such as Buber, Scholem, and Benjamin, and also including Karl Kraus, Else Lasker-Schüler, Hermann Cohen, Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, Gustav Landauer , Lev Shestov, Franz Rosenzweig, and Theodor Adorno, all of whom he read between 1954 and 1960, not to forget his sustained interest in Kafka and Freud. In this solitary way, Celan manages to construct a mode ofJewish self-understanding that could serve him, a Jew distant from any organized Jewish community, 304REVIEWS married to a non-Jew, writing in German, living in Europe, scarred by the Holocaust. In fact, Celan's reading list has, in one version or another, become the primary Jewish "tradition" for many an intellectual today. And in its current, "postmodern " form, Celan holds a sure place in this pantheon. Jean-François Lyotard, blithely theorizing about Jewish identity, has affirmed that its essence is to be found in the exilic grouping of "Freud, Benjamin, Adomo, Arendt, and Celan— these great non-German Germans, non-Jewish Jews."3 (Today, we would probably add Lévinas and Derrida, those great non-French Frenchmen, to the list.) Walter Benjamin's notion of a work composed entirely of quotations reaches an ironic Jewish apogee here, in a canon that teaches kabbalah through Scholem, Talmud...