On the Genesis and Publication of the Biography

Israel (Lulziu) Chalfen was born in 1909 in Paltinossa (Păltinoasa), Bukovina (now part of Romania), about 100 kilometers south of Czernowitz, the erstwhile “Vienna of the East” and the birthplace of Celan (Hirsch and Spitzer 2010, xiii). In the brief biography included as part of the preview (“Vorschau”) put together by Insel Verlag, which first published his book on Celan, it is noted that Chalfen went to school in Vienna and Czernowitz, studied medicine in Prague and Paris, and immigrated to Palestine in 1946. It is also noted that he worked until the early 1970 s as a doctor and, at present (i. e., 1979), lives in Jerusalem.^[5] There is no mention of his wartime experiences and, in general, further biographical information is difficult to locate. In addition to some fragmentary details in the archive, snippets of his life can be found in Jean Ancel’s Toldot ha-Shoah: Romanyah, in Marianne Hirsch’s and Leo Spitzer’s Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, and in a post on the blog “Ha-achim ori.” We learn from these studies that Chalfen was a member of the labor Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair in Czernowitz, and that he was studying in Paris until shortly before the outbreak of World War II, when he was deported to Transnistria – the same place where Celan’s parents were killed. In the decades after the war, Chalfen worked as a dermatologist at various hospitals in Israel/Palestine. While Chalfen did not know Celan during his youth, he was close with several people who did, and he eventually met Celan in Paris in the early 1960 s. Chalfen began working on his biography as early as 1971, shortly after Celan’s death by suicide in 1970.

In a letter to the Romanian writer Petre Solomon, who knew Celan and later wrote a book about him (Solomon 1987; Solomon 2019), Chalfen reflects on the beginnings of his project: “Since 1971, I have been working on a biography of ‘Young Paul Celan,’ who was my former compatriot, but whom I only met in 1961 in Paris, when I was already in love with his poetry!” (“Depuis 1971 je travaille à une biographie du ‘Jeune Paul Celan’, qui a été mon ancien compatriote, mais que j’ai connu seulement en 1961 à Paris, quand j’étais déjà épris de sa poésie!”).^[6] In this letter, Chalfen further notes that he is reaching out to various individuals who knew “a young man Paul Antschel, the future poet Celan” (“un jeune homme Paul Antschel, le future poète Celan”). By focusing on Celan’s youth – his childhood, his wartime experience, and the initial postwar years – Chalfen focuses on what he shares with the poet (his “ancien compatriote”), even though he does not speak as someone who knew Celan well, and adumbrates the psychoanalytically-informed view that any understanding of “le future poète” requires us, his readers, to go back to the writer’s origins and childhood. While Chalfen frames his work primarily as a biography, not as a reading of Celan’s work per se, he also frequently makes reference to early and late poems that he excerpts and brings into conversation with biographical information. In the epigraph to the first chapter, as a kind of exemplum of this approach, he cites the following lines of a poem in Schneepart: “Darkened forth, once more, / comes your speech / to the shadow cast ahead / of the beech’s leaf-shoot” (“Hervorgedunkelt, noch einmal, / kommt deine Rede / zum vorgeschatteten Blatt-Trieb / der Buche”) (Chalfen 1991, 3; Chalfen 1979, 10). It is an excerpt from a poem that does not concern “a new inspiration” (“eine neue Inspiration”), but rather, as Christine Ivanovic has suggested in her own reading of it, “a memory of the past” (“eine Erinnerung an Früheres”) (Ivanovic 1996, 120). In turn, Chalfen firmly situates this past within Bukovina, a historical region, and a specific administrative division of the Habsburg Empire, which took its name from the beech tree (“die Buche” in German) – a region that, in Chalfen’s account, shaped and shadowed Celan’s life and work long after he left it and that he darkly remembered in the language and often encrypted references of his poetry.

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Paul Celan. Eine Biographie seiner Jugend was first released in book form by Insel Verlag in 1979, though at least one excerpt from it was published as early as 1973 (Chalfen 1973; Chalfen 1974). It is worth noting that the mid-1970s to mid-1980s was a turning point in the posthumous canonization of Celan’s work. It was during this time, for example, that Beda Allemann was working – however slowly, much to the chagrin of the editors at Suhrkamp and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, the poet’s widow – on a historical-critical edition of Celan’s poetry and prose, which was preceded by other editions of his writings, including the two-volume Gedichte and the five-volume Gesammelte Werke, also edited by Allemann (Celan 1975; Celan 1983).^[7] This editorial project was further linked with the complicated endeavor of making available Celan’s earliest poems, which, in manuscript form, were in the possession of his erstwhile girlfriend Ruth Kraft (Lackner), who also served as arguably the most important source for Chalfen as he worked on his biography.^[8] While the archival record is not entirely clear, it seems that the interest of major publishing houses, such as Insel Verlag, in Chalfen’s biography stemmed from this larger editorial and publishing effort that aimed to secure the afterlife of Celan’s work in the German-speaking world and beyond, with the latter attested, for example, by the publication of Michael Hamburger’s English-language translations of Celan’s poetry in 1980 (Celan 1980).^[9]

In other words, in conjunction with the increasing investment by publishers in Celan’s work, there was a growing (if not universally shared) interest in Celan’s biography, which was relatively obscure to most general and professional readers during Celan’s lifetime and during the 1970 s, as Celan rarely wrote in a recognizably autobiographical form and tended to refer to his youth and wartime experiences in highly elliptical terms. In this light, Chalfen’s biography served an important role in the larger effort to secure Celan’s postwar legacy by illuminating the aspects of his life that were least known, at least to readers in West Germany, Austria, and France. At the same time, Chalfen’s biography can be understood as contributing to the expansion, for these same readers, of the geographical (and linguistic) coordinates of Celan’s life, work, and reception, while also displacing the centrality of Western Europe as the main site of his writing’s address and, in so doing, spotlighting alternative networks and sites of literary production and reception.^[10] Not only does the biography focus on Europe – on interwar Bukovina, occupied Czernowitz / Cernăuți, and postwar Bucharest – it also foregrounds the intensive engagement with Celan’s life and work in Israel/Palestine, as reflected in the numerous interviews that Chalfen conducted with erstwhile residents of Czernowitz who had settled in cities such as Bnei-Zion, Haifa, Holon, Jerusalem, Ramat-Gan, Rehovot, and Tel Aviv, as well as Chicago, Columbus, Irvine, New York, and London. Furthermore, despite its focus on Celan’s youth, the research that went into the biography sheds light on Celan’s visit to the Middle East in 1969, when he re-encountered many individuals from his youth – many of whom Chalfen interviewed in the 1970 s. While this visit has continued to attract substantial artistic and scholarly attention, the significance of Chalfen’s book and archive for our understanding of it has arguably been underexplored, as have the ways in which his work set the stage more broadly for future biographical publications, including many that foreground and explore Celan’s Jewishness.^[11] In this regard, at the very least, Chalfen’s biography augured a consequential shift in the institutional investment in the transnational and translingual dimensions of Celan’s life and work, triangulated in this case between Eastern and Western Europe and the Middle East.

Chalfen himself repeatedly emphasizes the significance of place in both the biography itself and in correspondence with his German publishers, underscoring, in particular, the enduring influence of the landscape of Bukovina and the physical and symbolic distance between West Germany and Israel/Palestine. In February 1979, for example, in a letter to Ingrid Westerhoff, the secretary of one of his editors, Elisabeth Borchers, herself a prolific writer and translator, Chalfen notes that the proofs of his book had finally arrived, though they were sent two months earlier: “You see, the road to Jerusalem is difficult and long...” (“Sie sehen, der Weg nach Jerusalem ist beschwerlich und lang....”).^[12] In the same letter, he also notes his concern about ensuring that copies of the book are made available to Israel-Nachrichten and Die Stimme, German-language newspapers in Tel Aviv that had published numerous articles about Celan during his lifetime and after his death.^[13] He also remarks that “[i]t will probably interest you and the publisher that a selection of CELAN’S poems will be published in Hebrew almost simultaneously with my biography [...] Incidentally, I plan to work on getting my book translated into Hebrew as soon as it is published” (“[e]s wird Sie und den Verlag wohl interessieren, dass fast gleichzeitig mit meiner Biographie ein Auswahlband der Gedichte CELANS in hebräischer Sprache erscheinen wird. [...] Ich beabsichtige übrigens, sofort nach dem Erscheinen meines Buches an seine Uebertragung ins Hebräische heranzugehen”). While it seems that Chalfen’s biography was never translated into Hebrew, or at least that such a translation was never published, Manfred Winkler’s book-length translation of selected poems by Celan into Hebrew did appear in 1983 under the title Shoshanat ha-ayin (Celan 1983).^[14] Chalfen’s biography should be understood as both contributing to and reflecting these translational and transnational developments in Celan’s reception, which did not always succeed and crossed, as it were, “difficult and long” paths, raising complex questions about cultural belonging, memory, and the imprint of the Holocaust on different literary scenes and institutions.

Biography of a Cultural Milieu

One of the main aims and accomplishments of Chalfen’s biography is to provide a concrete and detailed, if also, of course, incomplete, portrait of Jewish culture and society in Czernowitz and Bukovina – a city and region that Celan frequently alluded to, albeit in ways that often emphasized its absence or unknownness. In his “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” for example, Celan addresses his largely German audience by noting that “[t]he region from which I come to you [...] will be unfamiliar to most of you” (“[...] die Landschaft, aus der ich zu Ihnen komme, dürfte den meisten von Ihnen unbekannt sein”). He then imparts further specificity to this region, if not much concrete detail, through a series of literary references and evocative metaphors:

Es ist die Landschaft, in der ein nicht unbeträchtlicher Teil jener chassidischen Geschichten zu Hause war, die Martin Buber uns allen auf Deutsch wiedererzählt hat. Es war, wenn ich diese topographische Skizze noch um einiges ergänzen darf, das mir, von sehr weit her, jetzt vor Augen tritt, – es war eine Gegend, in der Menschen und Bücher lebten. Dort, in dieser nun der Geschichtslosigkeit anheimgefallenen ehemaligen Provinz der Habsburgermonarchie [...] (Celan 1983, vol. 3, 185–86)

It is the home of many of the Hassidic stories which Martin Buber has retold in German. It was – if I may flesh out this topographical sketch with a few details which are coming back to me from a great distance – it was a landscape where both people and books lived. There, in this former province of the Habsburg monarchy, now dropped from history [...] (Celan 1986, 33)

In a speech that repeatedly emphasizes the “great distance” between Bremen and Czernowitz – an emphasis that anticipates Chalfen’s previously-mentioned marking of the distance between Frankfurt am Main, the location of his publisher, and Jerusalem – Celan adduces the power of literature to communicate and to establish connections across such distances. In his citation of Martin Buber’s translational retellings of Hasidic stories, Celan points, for example, to how these retellings, based on Yiddish- and Hebrew-language sources, were disseminated both within Germany and among German-speaking (predominantly Jewish) readers in Eastern Europe, linking, if only for a brief moment, the audience sitting before him in Bremen with the community in which he grew up, bringing them together as “uns allen” (“us all”) – an inconspicuous but highly-charged dative phrase that is, suggestively, left out of Rosmarie Waldrop’s careful translation. In the lines that follow, however, Celan avers that, even if literature can forge such connections, it does not have the capacity to make far-away locations – or even those that are nearby – reachable. In his typically indirect manner, he intimates the traumatic events that transformed the distance between Bremen and Czernowitz into an abyss, while speaking – merely thirteen years after the end of the war – at a time when the Cold War had made that distance impassable in new ways.

Speaking in Bremen, and as someone then living in Paris with French citizenship, Celan states that the region of his youth had “dropped from history” – that it had fallen victim to “Geschichtslosigkeit,” a deliberately “awkward” term that, as Marianne Hirsch has noted, “call[s] up history as absence” (Hirsch 2006, 1393). Hirsch further argues that, with this term, Celan sought to register, in the wake of the Holocaust, the loss of history as “a recognizable structure of memory and transmission” (Hirsch 2006, 1396). Indeed, Celan’s poetry can be partially understood as an investigation of how language had been shaped by and might be made responsive to such a loss. It is, however, a loss that Chalfen sought to rectify or at least contend with through the tools of biography and cultural history, as becomes clear in his book’s first chapter, titled “Die unbekannte Landschaft,” a direct reference to the Bremen speech. In a literalization of the “topographical sketch” that Celan had adumbrated via the relationship between “people and books,” Chalfen paints a detailed portrait of the Carpathian Mountains, the Prut River, and the vegetation of the region, followed by a wide-ranging discussion of the history of Habsburg occupation and its collapse after World War I, as well as of the cultural, socioeconomic, political, and religious dynamics of Jewish life in the region. Chalfen also provides detailed information about the layout of Czernowitz, its landmark buildings, and the modest apartments and neighborhoods in which Celan grew up – giving concrete form to a Jewish milieu that had been largely destroyed and delineating a background that provides, it is suggested, a key for understanding Celan’s poetry. In a characteristic move of the biography, Chalfen claims that “[t]he natural as well as the human landscape of [Celan’s] home was for the poet, throughout his life, the ‘land of wells,’ which nourished his life and his work” (“[...] die Landschaft der Heimat, die natürliche und die menschliche, war für den Dichter zeitlebens das Brunnenland, das in der Tiefe der Zeit die Voraussetzungen seines Lebens und Schaffens bereitet hat”) (Chalfen 1991, 34; Chalfen 1979, 35). However skeptical one is of such claims, it is important to note that Chalfen proposed such readings at a time when very few scholars or critics were interested in taking Celan’s lived experiences into account at all, so that the biography can be understood as an initial – and sometimes clumsy – attempt to think through the relationship between Celan’s life and his work. At the same time, in the pages of his biography, Chalfen argues that it was not only the “buried wells and their ashes” (“verschütteten Brunnen und ihrer Asche”) that informed Celan’s writing, “but also the dark row of ancestors [...] remained present in his spirit and his work” (“auch die dunkle Reihe der Ahnen wird immer gegenwärtig sein im Gedächtnis und im Werk”) (Chalfen 1991, 34; Chalfen 1979, 35). In this regard, while Chalfen’s book certainly falls into a positivist mode of reading that, at times, reduces Celan’s poetry to the elaboration of biographical details, it also makes more complex claims about the spectral influence of family history and of a landscape that should be understood in material, cultural, spiritual, and, as will be explored shortly, linguistic terms.

Chalfen’s biography thus elaborates the significance of the “landscape,” as Celan phrased it, “where both people and books lived.” In contrast to the speech of the latter, however, Chalfen provides a much more detailed and even granular “topographical sketch” that resists the fate of “historylessness” underscored by Celan; there is, perhaps, even an undercurrent of critique in the at-times hagiographic biography, which struggles with and against Celan’s apparent refusal to make the region of his youth better known to an unknowing audience, intimating that familiarity with the biographical context undergirding the poetry is necessary not only to understand specific allusions or references but also to grasp the ethical and historical stakes of that poetry.^[15] This may, in part, explain why Chalfen barely addresses Celan’s most famous poem, “Todesfuge,” even though the poem was composed and published (initially in Romanian translation) within the timespan upon which the biography focuses.^[16] It is as if to suggest that the enormous attention this poem received resulted in a relative disregard of other aspects of Celan’s early work and in a critical, scholarly, and popular reception that often (though not always) presupposed the ghetto or camp – and not Czernowitz and its environs or, later, Bucharest – as the essential context for an understanding of that early work. Chalfen seeks, that is, to recuperate other texts and contexts from under the shadow of what has been called a “kind of anthem around what had happened in the camps,” even though its author never directly experienced the death camps that have come to dominate the cultural imaginary (Rankine 2017). Chalfen prompts the reader to consider, instead, the particular social and cultural worlds that had been largely destroyed or displaced, that which had, as it were, fallen into “historylessness,” and only then to read (or re-read) “Todesfuge” with these in mind.^[17]

Oral Histories

In order to furnish this context and to return the region of Celan’s youth to “a recognizable structure of memory and transmission,” Chalfen conducted interviews with dozens of individuals who lived in Czernowitz at the same time Celan lived there, as well as with some who continued to live there long after the end of World War II. He often conducted these interviews in person, usually in Israel, taking detailed notes, though, as far as I can tell, he did not record these conversations or transcribe them verbatim (thus opening up more space for his own interpretative interventions).

Figure 1

Israel Chalfen’s notes from his interview with Edith Hubermann, Regina Rones, and Mina Brettschneider, conducted in the apartment of the Hubermann family in Tel Aviv on 31 December 1971. Source: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

Chalfen also conducted interviews via correspondence, especially with individuals living in Europe and the United States, and wrote a number of letters to follow up on his in-person interviews. Chalfen spoke or corresponded with people who knew Celan well, including family members, as well as with people who only briefly interacted with Celan, such as in school settings or social groups. In these conversations, which extended over several years, Chalfen frequently dwelled on the same topics, revealing a particular interest in Celan’s domestic life, including his uneven relationship with his parents (an intensely close relationship with his mother and a combative, fraught one with his father), the family’s religious observance, and the literal layout of their home; Celan’s education, including his Jewish and Hebrew-language learning; his romantic life and sexual anxieties; his reading habits and the genesis of his writing; his political views and engagement; and his wartime experience, including the events – somewhat blurred in the contradictions between different accounts – that led to the deportation and eventual death of his parents in Transnistria. In their ruminations on these topics, Chalfen’s interview partners also provided further details that helped Chalfen sketch the “landscape” recounted above, giving further depth to our understanding of what the poet Rose Ausländer once described as “the quadrilingual Czernowitz [...] an artistic city” (“[d]as viersprachige Czernowitz [...] eine musische Stadt”) (Ausländer 2001, 92).^[18] His research amounted, in effect, to an oral history project that, while focused on Celan and his family, shed light on the lived experience and memory of Jewish life in Czernowitz and its environs during the first half of the twentieth century.

Chalfen’s approach lent his book, as his publisher’s marketing team underscored, novelty and a kind of authority. The draft blurbs for the later Suhrkamp edition highlight the research that undergirds the book (“eine genaue Recherche”) and its author’s remarkable findings (his “Findeglück”), as well as the apparent “authenticity” of his reconstruction of Celan’s youth: “The book at hand offers,” according to Karl Krolow, “inexhaustible authenticity” (“Das vorliegende Buch bietet unerschöpfliche Authentizität”).^[19] His approach, as mentioned earlier, also elicited sharp criticism (Wiedemann 1985; Liska 1993). However, within the context of this article, I want to focus less on the overall import of Chalfen’s interviews, which should not be underestimated, than on how they both complicate and illuminate the variegated meanings of language use within, as Nelson Moe has phrased it, “historically determined formations of personal experience” (Moe 1992, 185). The interviews provide, that is, a highly differentiated and often idiosyncratic picture of language use within the “landscape” of Celan’s youth.

Celan’s ‘Mother Tongue’

In his introduction to the English-language translation of Chalfen’s biography, John Felstiner remarks, a few years before the publication of his own biography, that

there is good cause, and specific need, for bringing into focus the early life of this poet, even though in 1945, at the onset of his career, there was nothing left to him but the German mother tongue: only language, he said, only ‘this one thing remained in the midst of the losses.’ In fact, precisely because he lost family, culture, and the Bukovina homeland, that loss itself came to ground his writing (Chalfen 1991, xix).

Felstiner articulates here a compelling and widely shared view, informed both by Chalfen’s biography, which he is introducing, and by Celan’s own elliptical statements about his life in various speeches and poetological statements, including the Bremen speech analyzed in the previous section. In this view, Celan’s writing is grounded in absence and loss, but one thing remained: “the German mother tongue.” The force and tragedy of his writing can thus be understood as a struggle with a contaminated inheritance, with the fact that the Muttersprache had become a Mördersprache, as Theo Buck has provocatively phrased it (Buck 1993). While such an account is persuasive, it also obscures Celan’s knowledge and use of several other languages, so that this monolingual portrayal of the poet “stands in sharp contrast,” as Dirk Weissmann has argued, “to his translingual writing, his work as a translator, and the translational interaction in his work” (Weissmann 2013, 150). Like Chalfen and Felstiner, Weissmann further claims that this monolingual portrayal is an “official self-portrayal” (Weissmann 2013, 150). It is worth recalling, however, that Celan does not specify the language “that remained” in his Bremen speech. Instead, without any explicit emphasis on the “mother tongue,” he states: “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.” (“Erreichbar, nah und unverloren inmitten der Verluste blieb dies eine: die Sprache. Sie, die Sprache, blieb unverloren, ja, trotz allem.”) (Celan 1986, 34; Celan 1983, vol. 3, 185–86).^[20] In fact, in his metaliterary statements, Celan only rarely specifies that he writes in the German language, and not to the extent that subsequent biographers,scholars, and critics have done.^[21] Instead, he often insists on something like the particular incline or singularity of poetic language, or, as he once wrote: “Poetry is by necessity a unique instance of language” (“Dichtung – das ist schicksalhaft Einmaligkeit der Sprache”) (Celan 1986, 23; Celan 1983, vol. 3, 175).^[22] In this light, a more detailed analysis of Celan’s metaliterary statements and of the translingual threads in his poetry, prose, and translation work would be required in order to better understand what he endeavored to convey by this “unique instance of language” – an Einmaligkeit that should not be conflated with Einsprachigkeit. However, within the confines of this article, I want merely to outline how Chalfen’s biography may help us grasp the tensive openness of Celan’s language(s), even as his biography reifies certain categories, such as “native language” and “mother tongue,” that obscure as much as they reveal.

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In his account of Celan’s language(s), which, as noted above, has been quietly influential, Chalfen literalizes the notion of a “mother tongue.” He emphasizes, building on the claims of his interview partners, the shaping force of Celan’s mother, Fritzi Antschel (née Schrager), in the young poet’s linguistic and literary formation, in large part due to her passionate commitment to classical German literature and to the cultivation of the phantasm of a “pure” German. She “transferred to him,” Chalfen argues, “a devotion to the German language” (“vermittelten ihm [...] die Anhänglichkeit an die deutsche Sprache”) (Chalfen 1991, 34; Chalfen 1979, 35). In addition to this familial and even, it is intimated, psychosexual dimension of Celan’s linguistic maturation, Chalfen suggests that broader cultural dynamics may also be at play, though he is less direct about their effects on Celan and, at times, seems to write more broadly about himself and his generation and thus about many (if not all) of his interview partners, noting, for example – and, in so doing, marginalizing the large numbers of Yiddish speakers in the region – that “[t]he Jews of Bukovina remained loyal to the German mother tongue even under Romanian rule” (“[d]ie Juden der Bukowina blieben der deutschen Muttersprache auch unter rumänischer Herrschaft treu”) (Chalfen 1991, 11; Chalfen 1979, 18). While much more could be said about these familial and cultural factors, not least insofar as they relate to matters of power and political economy, I will restrict myself here to highlighting how, in his exemplification of what Yasemin Yildiz has called the “monolingual paradigm,” Chalfen repeatedly employs a vocabulary of attachment and fidelity (e. g., “Anhänglichkeit,” “treu”), suggesting not only the intimate connection of the “mother tongue” but also a kind of linguistic patriotism, bound up in the complex promises and pitfalls of an imperial language (and thus a language of cultural and economic aspiration) (Yildiz 2012).^[23] In this regard, Celan’s “German” can be understood not merely as something “natural,” inherited from and cultivated by his mother, but also as the sign of an active and ongoing commitment to a demarcated language that attains priority over his knowledge and use of other languages – a commitment that becomes, in the wake of the Holocaust, even more burdened and problematic, as Chalfen acknowledges more explicitly in a later article published in Hebrew.^[24] In the course of the biography, however, which is largely organized chronologically, Chalfen does not fundamentally revise his account of Celan’s monolingualism, but rather intimates that, in the dark light of traumatic experience, his commitment to the German language shifts from an active embrace to a no-less-active struggle.

In the biography, it is this complex web of familial and cultural factors that forms the backdrop of the oft-quoted line that “[o]nly in one’s mother tongue can one express one’s own truth, in a foreign language the poet lies” (“[n]ur in der Muttersprache kann man die eigene Wahrheit aussagen, in der Fremdsprache lügt der Dichter”) (Chalfen 1991, 184; Chalfen 1979, 148). This line, which originates (at least in print) from the biography, appears in the concluding section, which provides a brief overview of Celan’s time in Bucharest in the immediate postwar years – a time period that is elaborated at much greater length in Paul Celan: dimensiunea românească by Petre Solomon, who also served as an informant for Chalfen’s book, and who encouraged Celan to write in Romanian. Chalfen attributes this line, which is printed within quotation marks, to Celan, asserting that he used to say it to “everyone who reproached him for writing in the language of his parents’ murderers” (“[...] jedem, der ihm vorwarf, in der Sprache der Mörder seiner Eltern zu schreiben”) (Chalfen 1991, 184; Chalfen 1979, 148). In the endnotes to the book, Chalfen identifies the source for the quote as Ruth Kraft (Lackner), Celan’s erstwhile girlfriend, who certainly knew the young poet well and, as mentioned above, kept safe many of his early poems and served as probably the most important source of information for Chalfen’s book (Chalfen 1979, 175, n. 215). I think it is justified, however, to treat the line with a measured degree of skepticism, not just because it is “mediated,” as Dirk Weissmann has noted, but also because there are additional reasons to be wary of its veracity or at least of its precision, including its slogan-like quality – said, apparently, to “everyone” – and the fact that, even if Celan did say something like it repeatedly, he probably would have said it not only in German but, even more likely, in Romanian or French, so that it is a quote remembered decades later in translation. It is even more striking that, in Ruth Kraft’s correspondence with Celan, which is also preserved in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, she frequently undercuts the apparent fixity of the line – its insistent monolingualism – as it is presented in the biography. In 1952, for example, in a letter sent from Bucharest, Kraft asks Celan if he is now writing French poems. In 1958, in a letter sent from Haifa, she asks the same question: “And you, Paul, have surely become a true Frenchman. Do you also write French poems?” (“Und Du, Paul, bist bestimmt ein echter Franzose geworden. Schreibst Du auch französische Gedichte?”).^[25] While these seemingly simple questions can be understood merely as expressions of curiosity and interest by a close friend who now lives at a distance, they also belie the apparent conviction of Celan’s stance, as conveyed by her to Chalfen, that to write in a “foreign language” is to lie.

Just as Kraft’s own letters complicate the language ideology that is sourced to her, Chalfen repeatedly complicates his apparent embrace of a “monolingual paradigm” in the pages of his biography. In the interviews he conducted, Chalfen frequently asks about Celan’s knowledge of other languages and about his language learning, with an especial focus on French, Hebrew, Romanian, and Yiddish, and to a lesser degree English, Russian, and Ukrainian. He repeatedly inquires, for example, about Celan’s attendance of the Safah-Ivriah school, where the young poet began to learn Hebrew, as well as about the private tutoring he received in that language from a certain “Lehrer Rabinowitsch.”^[26] In the course of these linguistic queries, Chalfen not only uncovers knowledge about Celan’s language learning – and about everything that such learning might suggest about acculturation, nationalism, the role of Jewish cultural institutions, religious practice, and, it seems for the young poet, varying degrees of frustration and indifference with regard to these topics – but also lines of continuity between his early and later life, including his intensive engagement, in the 1960 s, with Hebrew-language writers, culminating in his visit to Israel in 1969 – a visit that included re-encounters with many individuals from his youth and with many of those who would later be interviewed by Chalfen.^[27]

Chalfen was likewise invested in learning more about Celan’s knowledge of and interest in Yiddish, which provides another window onto the translingual preoccupations of both the poet and his biographer, as well as onto the ideological and methodological torsions of the biography. He discusses, for example, Celan’s defense of Yiddish in response to an antisemitic comment by one of his teachers (Chalfen 1979, 52); his apparently middling interest in the Yiddish theater, where Ruth Kraft performed (Chalfen 1979, 98); and his (seemingly) more abiding interest in the Yiddish-language fables of Eliezer Shteynbarg, which, as many of his interview partners attest, Celan enjoyed reciting from memory (Chalfen 1979, 46, 101, 140). The latter is also a revealing instance of the contradictions that emerge between different informants insofar as, in a letter to Chalfen, the linguist and committed Yiddishist Chaim Ginninger – who read some of Celan’s early poetry and had serious discussions with the young poet about linguistics – disputes the notion that Celan had any interest in Yiddish culture: “I am not at all convinced,” Ginninger writes, “that he loved Steinbarg’s fables. [...] In addition, I never heard him utter a Yiddish word” (“Ich bin gar nicht überzeugt, daß er Steinbargs Fabeln geliebt hat. [...] Ich habe ihn übrigens nie ein jiddisches Wort äußern hören”) (Chalfen 1991, 105; Chalfen 1979, 88).^[28] Ginninger’s skepticism may be attributable, as Ohad Kohn has suggested, to the judgment of “an avid Yiddishist talking from the depths of his purist love [of] the language” (Kohn 2016, 20). But, in any case, the contradiction that emerges between Ginninger’s testimony and that of others, such as Kraft, who recalls Celan’s recitation of specific fables, points to a broader phenomenon that becomes apparent in the biography: namely, how different people – shaped by their own position within and experience of specific landscapes, languages, and social milieus – understand and assess questions of linguistic and cultural belonging in different and even contradictory ways at different periods of time.

Figure 2

Letter from Chaim Ginninger to Israel Chalfen, 6 December 1972. Source: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

Beyond the biography, these differences become even more apparent, as well as disorienting, in a later essay by the Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb, in which she suggests, however tendentiously, that Celan’s “decision” to write in German failed to “immunize” him against the pressurized conditions of postwar life; in this essay, she further makes the striking – and, to my knowledge, unsubstantiated – claim that “these two erudite young men, Celan and Ginninger, would spend long hours in passionate discussions about the Yiddish language and linguistic issues in general” (“ot di tsvey eruditn zoln farbrengen lange shoen mit heyse diskusyes vegn yidish un shprakh-inyonim biklal”) (Rosenfarb 2019, 111; Rosenfarb 1994, 62).^[29] And, less directly, one might also point to an essay by the American writer Jerome Rothenberg, who grew up speaking Yiddish, in which he claims that Celan reported to him during a meeting in Paris that he had learned Yiddish “during the war” (Rothenberg 1983, 112).^[30] In his later reflection on this meeting, Rothenberg suggests – in ways that interrogate, as in Rosenfarb’s essay, the transformation of the relation between language and identity after the Holocaust – that both writers “did in fact have a common (Jewish) language that we could speak, although we hadn’t tried to speak it” (Rothenberg 1983, 112). Unlike Rosenfarb’s claim about the “two erudite young men,” this conclusion, which, curiously, is not based on spoken language, does not contradict Ginninger’s views so much as exist in some tension with a sentence that he included in his letter to Chalfen, but which is quietly left out of the “direct quote” published in the biography: after noting that he had never heard the young Celan utter a Yiddish word, Ginninger adds that he also never heard him do so “later in Paris,” in their common circles, “where sometimes there were Yiddish-speaking people” (“[a]uch nicht später in Paris, wo manchmal jiddisch sprechende Menschen dabei waren”).^[31] In this regard, the biography demonstrates – both implicitly and, in certain moments, with refreshing candor – the difficulty of reconstructing the full breadth of a writer’s linguistic and cultural investments, especially when they were wavering or ambivalent, enmeshed within the messiness of the lived experiences that gave them shape, texture, and meaning. The reader (and biographer), confronted with the “opaque matter” of literature, to adopt Ginninger’s resonant phrasing, likewise brings their own investments to bear in the act of reading and interpretation (Chalfen 1979, 87). In this respect, even if one were to accept the conclusion of Ginninger, as attested in his letter to Chalfen, that Celan never expressed any serious interest in Yiddish culture, the anecdotal accounts of Rosenfarb and Rothenberg evince, in themselves, translingual forms of reading and reception, even if they also point up the limits of such accounts in providing reliable information about Celan’s actual linguistic knowledge. In other words, such anecdotal accounts, which echo the kind of information that can be found in the interviews and correspondence that inform Chalfen’s biography, reveal how the lives of writers and their work are often reimagined, reframed, and translated – or, curiously, wrenched into different linguistic contexts without translation or even without speech. Such accounts push against the presumed borders of Celan’s cultural and linguistic belonging, the fraught demarcation of “uns allen,” which, as noted above, falls away in English translation. In this light, for readers of the biography, I would suggest that such accounts are valuable not only because of the information, variously dubious and revelatory, that they provide, but also, in a “bio-graphical” sense, to adopt Moe’s vocabulary again, because they prompt us to consider how personal histories, embedded in diverse contexts or “landscapes,” ground the “linguistic experimentalism” of both Celan and his readers (Moe 1992, 186).

––

In conclusion, I want merely to highlight two passages in the biography, also revolving around Yiddish, in which Chalfen’s adherence to a “monolingual paradigm” again falters, even if his work adheres, in its overall framing, to such a paradigm. In the first, Chalfen seems to open up the borders of “German” when he reflects on its porousness – and also on his sense of its liveness and mentshlekhkayt – within the urban landscape of both his and Celan’s youth:

Man konnte das mit österreichischer Lässigkeit und slawischer Breite gesprochene, von jiddischen Redewendungen durchflochtene Bukowiner Deutsch überall in der Stadt hören. Hier gaben die jiddischen Lehnworte der deutschen Umgangssprache Farbe und Lebensnähe und ließen so etwas wie eine Mundart entstehen, wie sie sich im strengen Sinn sonst in der Bukowina niemals gebildet hat. Lebhaft und laut ging es zu, wo Ost- und Mitteleuropa einander begegneten (Chalfen 1979, 19).

Everywhere in the city one could hear their Bukovinian German, with its Austrian informality and Slavic breadth, and interwoven with Yiddish idioms. Here, the words borrowed from Yiddish gave their colloquial German color and warmth, and gave rise to a sort of dialect which had never, in the true sense of the word, been formed in the Bukovina. At this meeting point of Eastern and Central Europe, life was raucous and lively (Chalfen 1991, 13).

Here, Chalfen seems to celebrate such linguistic hybridity by grounding it in experience that is loud and lively. In the biography, however, he does not elaborate the relationship between “Bukovinian German,” Celan’s “German,” and, to wit, his mother’s “German,” though the consequent instability of these categories unsettles, at least to a certain degree, any fixed sense of the “mother tongue,” which Chalfen sometimes presents as if it were a stable object. While the implications of such porousness are largely unaddressed in the biography, in a later passage, Chalfen again troubles, at least to a certain degree, the distinction between German and Yiddish in his contextualization and abbreviated interpretation of the poem “Es steht gekrümmt ein Birkenstamm” (Chalfen 1979, 78–9).

In 1938, when the political situation in Europe had already deteriorated dramatically, Celan prepared for a trip that would take him to London, where some of his relatives were then living, and then to Tours, where he was studying. He planned to take a train that would lead across Germany, which, at the time, was still possible. In Chalfen’s account, Celan set out for this journey on the morning of November 9, 1938, mere hours before the outbreak of the November pogroms (Kristallnacht), the aftermath of which he would witness. In a typical move in the biography, a further instance of its much-maligned positivism, Chalfen asserts that the landscape invoked in “Es steht gekrümmt ein Birkenstamm” is the “moorland” (“Heidegebiet”) that he travelled through as he crossed the border from Poland into Germany (Chalfen 1991, 89–90; Chalfen 1979, 78–9). Such an assertion is, perhaps, not difficult to accept for a poem that was composed in the wake of the pogroms and that contains the line “Und Heide, Heide, Heide.” But I want to conclude with this poem because Chalfen’s engagement with it reflects something more complicated than a naïve positivism. He reads it, that is, as a strange echo of a Yiddish folksong, which begins, in the translation of Ludwig Strauß that Chalfen cites, “Mittenwegs steht ein Baum, / Der biegt sich in sich ein” (“Mid-way stands a tree / That bends into itself”) (Chalfen 1991, 89–90; Chalfen 1979, 78–9).^[32] It is a folksong that also thematizes a journey, albeit into the “Land of Israel” (“Jißraelsland”), where a Jewish émigré arrives with tears swelling in his eyes, eventually finding “great joy” (“große Freude”) (Chalfen 1991, 89–90; Chalfen 1979, 78–9). In his rumination on the connection between these poems, Chalfen argues that it is not merely the image of the bent-over tree that explains their resonance, but rather “the hope of that voyage to freedom” (“die Hoffnung auf eine Reise in jene Freiheit”) (Chalfen 1991, 89–90; Chalfen 1979, 78–9). For Chalfen, this is linked to the promises made by the Zionist movement, which, he speculates, would have resonated with Celan, as he came face-to-face with a resurgence of antisemitic violence, prompting him to reconsider his father’s Zionism, which he had earlier rejected, and to come to terms with his family’s failed efforts to emigrate out of Eastern Europe. While I am not fully convinced by this account of the connection between the folksong and poem – not least because it seems to collapse them into a single ideological framework, and because Celan’s own ideological commitments seem to have been much less fixed – I am struck, nevertheless, by the dynamic instability of the reading, which opens up just as much as it forecloses: a reading that emerges out of and that brings into view an affectively- and politically-charged movement between Europe and the Middle East and a meditation on multiple layers of time and memory. It is a reading that urges us, in turn, to consider what happens when people and texts move across space and across languages. In this tangled matrix, which recalls the biography’s own “difficult and long” road to publication, there is much to critique or resist, but there is also much to learn.^[33]

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Israel Chalfen’s notes from his interview with Edith Hubermann, Regina Rones, and Mina Brettschneider, conducted in the apartment of the Hubermann family in Tel Aviv, 31 December 1971. Source: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

Figure 2: Letter from Chaim Ginninger to Israel Chalfen, 6 December 1972. Source: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

Archival Materials

Letter from Ruth Kraft to Paul Celan, 3.1.1958. Papers of Paul Celan, D.90.1.1797. Deutsches Literaturarchiv [DLA] Marbach.

Letter from Ruth Kraft to Paul Celan, 22.1.1967. Papers of Paul Celan, D90.1.1797/22–23. DLA Marbach.

“Gespraech mit Fr. Edith Hubermann, Fr. Regina Rones und Fr. Mina Brettschneider, am 31. Dez. 1971 in der Wohnung der Familie Hubermann, Tel Aviv.” Papers of Israel Chalfen, 90.64.2. DLA Marbach.

“Gespräch mit den Damen Dr. Emma Lustig u. Klara Lindenfeld, am 19.4.72 in Haifa.” Papers of Israel Chalfen, 90.64.2. DLA Marbach.

“Gespräch mit Gideon Kraft über seinen Vater (Bruder Ruths).” Papers of Israel Chalfen, 90.64.2. DLA Marbach.

Letter from Chaim Ginninger to Israel Chalfen, 6.12.1972. Papers of Israel Chalfen, 90.64.11. DLA Marbach.

Letter from Israel Chalfen to Petre Solomon, 5.2.1976. Papers of Israel Chalfen, 90.64.4.DLA Marbach.

Letter from Ruth Kaswan to Israel Chalfen, 2.5.1977. Papers of Israel Chalfen, 90.64.17. DLA Marbach.

Letter from Israel Chalfen to Ingrid Westerhoff, 11.2.1979. Papers of Suhrkamp Verlag, SU.2010.0002. DLA Marbach.

Letter from Renate Laux to Israel Chalfen, 22.3.1983. Papers of Suhrkamp Verlag,

SU.2010.0002. DLA Marbach.

“Suhrkamp-Verlag <Frankfurt, Main> – Celan-Lestrange, Gisèle [Br. Wechsel], 1978–1982.” Papers of Suhrkamp Verlag, SU.2010.0002. DLA Marbach.

“Suhrkamp-Verlag <Frankfurt, Main> – Chalfen, Israel [Br. Wechsel], 1982–1999.” Papers of Suhrkamp Verlag, SU.2010.0002. DLA Marbach.