Homer's Sun Still Shines: Ancient Greece in Essays, Poems, and Translations (review)

This most welcome and unexpected book restores a beloved and great teacher to the world. The volume contains a brief life, reminiscences of former students, and a number of Lachmann's poems and translations. An essay on Heraclitus frag. 27 Marcovich is first published here (70–73). Vera Lachmann was born in Berlin on June 23, 1904, related to the Warburgs on her mother's side. She studied there, more German than classics, doing a dissertation on Icelandic epic and planned a habilitation. Things changed. Forbidden to study after 1933, instead she founded and ran (1933–1938) a school in Berlin for some sixty-five Jewish children denied admission to city schools. Soon the Nazis closed it. Aided by the Weigand family, she escaped to New York City in November, 1939. She founded a famous summer camp for schoolboys in North Carolina and in the winter taught undergraduates at Brooklyn College (1948–1974) with occasional courses at Hunter College and New York University. She taught Greek, largely Homer, at no cost to selected students at her home privately on Saturday mornings. She died in New York on January 18, 1985. I met her occasionally for tea at Margarete Bieber's, a fellow refugee. She was a cousin of Wilamowitz's most famous female student, the Platonist, Eva Sachs. Her grateful students and many friends can only rejoice that Miller, himself a grateful student, undertook this task.

Vera Lachmann's great contribution was not to scholarship. She published three volumes of poetry. She had no doctoral students. She left nothing comparable to Adams' Republic, Fraenkel's Agamemnon, Jaeger's Paideia, or Pauly-Wissowa. But one may ask what makes such books valuable? Surely the intrinsic value of the texts they elucidate. Vera Lachmann chose to bequeath to the young the lessons of these texts. In the Aeschylean sense she had learned from suffering. She was at first a proud and patriotic German. Her brother Erich fell in Flanders for the Kaiser. She attended the greatest university of her day, Berlin, where she studied classics, under Jaeger and Wilamowitz, and German poetry. Like Paul Friedländer, she was torn between Stefan George and Wilamowitz. Suddenly there was January, 1933. She was no longer a German. She was a Jew. Denial, loss, but then a safe escape. Her sorrows made her great. In the U.S. she became almost a prophetess not of the Old Testament but of Hellenism. At her summer camp there were swimming and sports, but the telling of Greek tales and the reading of Homer, first in English, followed by a recital in Greek, were best remembered. Odysseus' reception by the Phaeacians, who received him, fed him, and asked no questions until the end, became her reception by New Yorkers. The Euphronios krater at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Thanatos and Hypnos rescue and bury the body of the fair youth Sarpedon, became the death and burial of her brother Erich. It was all so senseless, but paradoxically, it makes us better. She shared a dilemma with Pindar, who chose the cause of Athens against his own Thebes, which had sided with the Persians.

This book is one of the most powerful arguments I have read for why memory of Homer, tragedy, and the lyric poets must never be lost. I regret that a bibliography of her publications is not included. Each volume comes with a remarkable CD containing her readings from Homer, Sophocles, Pindar, Sappho, her own poems, and much else. Those who knew her have never forgotten her. She was like Socrates, a teacher not a writer. Charles A. Miller is her Plato. We can only thank him for his priceless gift.