Kafka’s Sisters With thanks I was tubercular and dead by early summer nineteen twenty-four, long in the grave with my intensity before those three sisters rose to follow, Ellie and Ottla and Valli dragged through the cattle-car years down to forty-five. Ellie and Ottla and Valli I sing, deported to Poland, deported to Łódź or…
Tag: World War Two
Robert Oppenheimer (poem)
Robert Oppenheimer Now I come to write in light and firein a language of power we all know,beyond every letter and poetryand all the dithering of philosophy,all the prevarication of politics.The physicists have known sin, it’s true,but also the brilliance of a burden overcome in the ageless mountains,a foul display that was beyond awesome,beyond my…
Jean Guéhenno (Favorite Passages)
Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, by Jean Guéhenno Guéhenno bio A selection from one of the best documents of occupation during wartime, and one of my favorite diaries of a writer: [Guéhenno, on how he was a pacifist after WWI, but not after WWII started] I…