Author: Max Cavitch

Paul Celan, “Schwarze Flocken” (c. 1944) translated, with a prefatory note, by Max Cavitch   With Ukraine on the front page, I feel my shadowy Russian-Jewish forbears looking over my shoulder each day, as I read stories of Moscow’s mad and murderous grab for a neo-Soviet regime. In the early years of the previous century, in some shtetl along the Dnipro River north of Kyiv, my paternal great-uncle and namesake decided it was time to flee both his tyrannical father and the bloody late-imperial pogroms. Once in the U.S., he facilitated the emigration of other family members—among them, eventually,...

    Something about her car or the way she was driving must have caught my attention. I could see her plainly, behind the wheel: blond and pale-skinned, she was wearing a copper colored pea coat with the collar turned up. I was maybe fifty feet away, on the sidewalk, heading toward the intersection as she approached it from the opposite direction. Her light was turning red, and I watched her try to pull up into the narrow space between the curb and a larger blue sedan. The front corner of the sedan had edged just a foot or...