A 1101.0cAusr
,.0611.:CTIVE sT
4"Cn "W Aim --
1 0 NE OR
Between The Pages
from page 42
FICTION
Shalom Auslander raged against an
uncaring and ruthless" God in his
memoir, Foreskin's Lament. Out with his
first novel, Hope: A Tragedy (Riverhead
Books), he takes on history and, specifi-
cally, the Holocaust. Solomon Kugel buys
a cozy home with his wife and young son
in the hope that all the troubles of the real
world — his Holocaust-obsessed mother,
his struggling writer sister, his whole
Jewish past — will miraculously disap-
pear. But Solomon discovers Anne Frank
holed up in his attic, embittered, well over
80, and working on a new book.
((
In The Spinoza Problem (Basic
Books), psychiatrist and author Irvin
D. Yalom imagines the reasons behind
a Nazi's obsession with 17th-century
Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Using his skills as a psychiatrist, he
explores the inner lives of Spinoza,
the saintly secular philosopher, and of
Rosenberg, the godless mass murderer
who considers Spinoza his hero, explor-
ing the mindsets of two men separated
by 300 years.
HHhH, by Laurent Binet (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux), a first novel by a
39-year-old French professor, was
awarded France's distinguished
Goncourt Prize and became an interna-
tional bestseller. Now translated from
the French by Sam Taylor, the story —
blending history and fiction — features
a narrator obsessed with the assas-
sination of Reinhard Heydrich, known
as the Butcher of Prague, who was the
chief architect of the Final Solution and,
according to rumor, the brains behind
SS Commander Heinrich Himmler.
The title refers to the expression used
by SS officers, "Himmlers Hirn heist
Heydrich" ("Himmler's brain is called
Heydrich"). The narrator, who has read
every article about Heydrich and col-
lected masses of information about his
death, ponders how to tell the story of
a monster and the discreet heroes who
killed him.
Nathan Englander's new collection
of short stories, What We Talk About
When We Talk About Anne Frank
(Knopf), signals a return to the form
Elegy For Orten
Recalling a Holocaust-era poet.
Rachel Urist
Special to the Jewish News
Ann Arbor
I
n 1941 Prague, Czech poet Juni
Orten was hit by a speeding German
ambulance that dragged him for five
blocks before stopping. He might have
lived, but because he was Jewish, no hos-
pital would accept him. He died on his
22nd birthday. Two years earlier, he wrote
in his poem "A Small Elegy": "I will not
live long."
White Picture (Night Publishing), an
Orten anthology published last year, fea-
tures poems selected and translated by
poet-playwright Lyn Coffin. In the intro-
duction, Edward Hirsch, a giant among
American poets, calls Orten "one of the
greatest poets of the 20th century:'
Hirsch knows Orten's poems through
Coffin's translations, which were awarded
prizes by both the Academy of American
Poets and the International Poetry
Review. Orten's brother told Coffin: "I
can now die a happy man. These are the
poems Jiri would have written if he'd
written in English."
Coffin, 68, a University of Michigan
graduate who currently lives in Seattle,
will appear Sunday, April 22, in a dramatic
44
April 19 • 2012
and musical collaboration
with singer-songwriter
Laszlo Slomovits at the
Jewish Community Center
of Greater Ann Arbor.
Last November, Coffin
read Orten's poems at Ann Lyn Coffin
Arbor's Jewish Book Fair.
Slomovits — born in Hungary in 1949
and part of the Ann Arbor-based musical
duo Gemini with twin brother Sandor —
had set some of Orten's poems to music
and joined her onstage. Their collabora-
tion continues and has produced a CD.
Orten's poems feature an ongoing and
unabashed argument with God reminis-
cent of those carried on by the biblical
prophets.
"Orten's quarrel;' says Coffin, "is with
God alone, not with the Nazi butch-
ers or Aryan monsters, or Germans or
Christians — just God."
Orten asks not for revenge, but for
more time: to live one more day, write
one more rhyme, see one more spring.
Expelled from the conservatory where
he once studied, banned from publishing
his poetry, endlessly punished for the sin
of being Jewish, Orten writes:
"I am guilty for the vain longing for
my father ... for love that's lost to me:"
He yearns "to be without pain."
Laszlo Slomovits
Yet his words transcend the dark-
ness; they revel in the beauty of nature.
Flowers bloom, rivers flow, snow falls
and wild mustard fills the fields with
color — backdrops, all, to death and
destruction.
He prays, pleads and argues with God:
"Is there nowhere in your compassion a
place / where a wretched psalmist might
find rest?"
Although she is not Jewish, Coffin
gravitates toward Jewish writers when
she translates. Today, she practices
Buddhism but calls herself "pro-Semitic."
Over the years, she has celebrated many
Jewish holidays with close friends and
seriously considered converting to
Judaism.
Coffin first saw Orten's work more
than 40 years ago when her professor
handed her a stack of poems and said:
"You must translate these."
"But I don't speak Czech!" she
responded.
that put him on the map a decade ago.
The title story deals with two Jewish
couples, one secular and the other reli-
gious, debating which of their neighbors
they think would hide them in the event
of another Holocaust. In the often-hilar-
ious "Camp Sundown," Englander writes
about a group of Holocaust survivors at
a geriatric summer camp who insist that
a new camper, one Doley Falk, is a for-
mer Nazi. The Jewish campers conspire
to kill him, but not before they taunt
him with a funhouse of horrors.
Commenting on the moral quanda-
ries found throughout the new book,
Englander said: "I'm obsessed with this
idea that we live in the gray."
❑
Sandee Brawarsky contributed to this article.
"You will," he answered.
Laurence Goldstein, who has pub-
lished many of Coffin's poems and short
fiction in the Michigan Quarterly
Review, praises Coffin's "mastery of
metaphor." He marvels at her delight in
structure, and says, "Her wordsmithing is
something that cannot be learned."
Coffin has given poetry readings with
Nobel laureates Joseph Brodsky and
Czeslaw Milosz and Pulitzer Prize win-
ner and U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine.
She has translated Anna Akhmatova
(Russian), Dato Barbakadze (Georgian),
and Miloslava Holubova and Jaroslav
Seifert (Czech), among others. When
Seifert was awarded the Nobel Prize,
Coffin's translations were cited as a deci-
sive factor. 0
In commemoration of Holocaust
Memorial Day, the Jewish
Community Center of Greater
Ann Arbor presents "Poetry
and Music with Lynn Coffin and
Laz Slomovits," a dramatic and
musical collaboration based
on White Picture, Coffin's
translations of the poems of Jiri
Orten, at 4 p.m. Sunday, April 22,
at the Jewish Community Center
of Greater Ann Arbor, 2935 Birch
Hollow Dr. (734) 971-0990; www.
jccannarbor.org .