Dec 17, 2009
Paul Celan (TSEHL-ahn) is considered among Europe’s most important post-World War II poets. He was born Paul Antschel (or Ancel) in 1920 in Czernowitz, the capital of Romania’s Bukovina region, to a German-Jewish family. A crossroads of languages and cultures, Bukovina had only recently belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In a letter to an aunt following his Bar Mitzvah, Celan remarked that “as for anti-Semitism” in the Romanian state school he was then attending, “I could write a 300-page opus about it.”
Celan’s formative years were marked not only by...
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