Black Flakes

Paul Celan

1943

Snow has fallen, with no light. A month
has gone by now or two, since autumn in its monkish cowl
brought tidings my way, a leaf from Ukrainian slopes:
“Remember it’s wintry here too, for the thousandth time now
in the land where the broadest torrent flows:
Ya‘akov’s heavenly blood, blessed by axes . . .
Oh ice of unearthly red—their Hetman wades…
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Holocaust and Post-Holocaust Fiction and Poetry

1939–1973

Jewish literature developed individual rather than collective voices, as postwar Jewish identity was transformed by the forces of modernism and assimilation.

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The Holocaust: Years of Catastrophe

1939–1945

Jewish writing in Nazi-occupied areas documented ghetto life, moral questions, and Jewish identity, while writers in free zones grappled with the unfolding tragedy.

Creator Bio

Paul Celan

1920–1970

A major twentieth-century poet and translator, Paul Celan (born Antschel; Celan is an anagram of his original name) was born in the multicultural city of Czernowitz, Bukovina, the son of German-speaking Jews. He studied medicine in Paris in 1938, and returned to Romania before the outbreak of World War II. His parents died in Nazi labor camps and Celan was interned for eighteen months. After the war, establishing himself as a poet, he lived in Bucharest. He moved to Paris in 1948 to study German philology and literature and in 1960 earned the Büchner Prize from the German Academy of Language and Literature. Celan took his own life, as did a number of other notable survivors of the Holocaust.

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