Paul Celan and Ukraine
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,...
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