Joshua Parker, who selected and translated into English this groundbreaking collection of Austrian refugee poetry, makes it clear in his preface that he feels a responsibility, if not a calling, to give (or return) to these poets their respective voices. One of his many goals is to deromanticize the state in which these authors found themselves after World War II. They were not exiles, he notes right away. There was no room for the nostalgia so frequently attached to the life of an exile. When fleeing Nazi extermination, when looking for a new homeland, when being forced to start from scratch, these poets did not have the luxury of choosing a new homeland or a new language. They had to go where they were accepted, often experiencing more trauma on their indirect and uncertain journeys.
One of the few things these poets could retain, Parker rightly points out, was their mother tongue. Frederick Ungar, an exiled Viennese publisher who settled in New York and founded the Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, puts it thus: “I think my mother tongue is the true home. … Language is homeland for me” (31). This sentiment might be the most important motif and through line uniting the thirty-five poets and seventy-nine poems in this volume. Men and women, young and old, of a wide variety of professions and backgrounds, these writers lived in, with, and through their words, retaining them as an umbilical cord of sorts, connecting them to a home that was no longer there. They also used their words as a type of periscope, helping them launch into the alien world of their new Manhattan home, extending them from their worlds of trauma and alienation. They sculpted these words into many vivid observations of the completely and startlingly un-Viennese terrain of mid-twentieth-century New York City.
Some of the poets Parker selected are not well known, and there is a sense of loss, a sense of what may have been as he introduces each poet with a date of birth, some important life events (usually including a very brief narrative of their flight from the Nazi regime), and their date of death. After reading this paragraph, and while reading the poems, the reader can't help but imagine the lives, careers, and influence these intellectuals could have had if totalitarianism had not cut their development so cruelly in half. Whether through the short biographies or references in the poems, the reader is also reminded of the many family members of these poets who ended up perishing in the Holocaust. As a result, another dominant motif of the collection is survivor's guilt. This sense of fragility is implied in the collection's title, Blossoms in Snow. Stemming from a verse in a Max Roden poem featured in the collection, this title conveys a sense of impending danger.
Some of the more well-known poets included here are Stefan Zweig, Rose Auslander (a close friend of Paul Celan who used Auslander's dominant image of “black milk” in his influential poem “Deathfugue”), and Maria Berl-Lee. A few of the lesser-known poets like Gertrude Urzidil and Alfred Gong were public intellectuals, moving in the same circles as Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud. A particularly memorable poem is Stefan Zweig's “The Lost Sky: The Home-Comers’ Elegy,” in which the narrator juxtaposes a sky that is “infinite,” “loving and blue” to another that is in “shards” and “darkened by factory smoke” (107). Both skies are those of Zweig's hometown, Vienna, separated by World War II and his absence. Even as the narrator returns to Vienna, he realizes there is no possibility of returning. The polluted, crowded, and claustrophobic city he finds is “killing” the very sky the narrator remembers from his earlier life.
Like several others in the collection, “The Lost Sky” demonstrates Parker's central theme that the Holocaust had eliminated any possibility of a return for these refugee poets. Even when they physically do return, they realize, like Zweig's narrator does, that “everything is scream here and no one to hear me in silence.” Zweig's narrator can “never quite sleep here” (109–11). That which they left no longer exists, and what remains is a vivid reminder of what once was. So, most of the poets in Parker's volume visit, observe, write, and mourn Vienna and Austria, and then they return to new home(s) that may be foreign, confusing, and alienating but are also the places that have helped save their lives. As Zweig puts it in “The Rhythm of New York,” “The beauty of American cities lies in their reality, in their violence and in the rhythm of their life. They are taunts, violations of nature; but they have the rhythm of the masses, the spirited breath of the people. … A wonderful life rhythm comes from them” (98). Vienna, to Zweig's narrator, is the city of the past and of death. New York is the city of a frightening yet vibrant life.
The poems in this volume are included in both the original German as well as in Parker's English translation, excepting those few originally written in English. The German and English versions appear on opposite pages, making it easy for a bilingual reader to refer between the two. The translations are excellent, demonstrating Parker's keen eye for nuance and awareness of cultural context. There are a few exceptions, where the translation seems disengaged from the original or is simply clunky. For instance, Maria Berl-Lee's “Grossstadt-Einsamkeit” is translated as “Metropolis Aloneness,” when a more subtle title, like “City Loneliness” or “The Loneliness of a Metropolis,” would have been preferable.
Elsewhere, Parker omits important commentary or contextualization. In Julius Buchwald's “I Travel through the World (from Emigrant Songs),” for example, the reader finds the following verses: “Factories puff past me / as hammers pound ore to paste. / Asians smile shyly, mischievous, / the African's sparkling teeth flash” (39). This kind of racial essentialization and stereotyping, while perhaps unproblematic (or less problematic) at the time of the poem's writing, has the potential to tear the contemporary reader, particularly the American one, out of the context of the poem, inhibiting other valuable message(s) or image(s) that the poem may have otherwise produced. A footnote acknowledging this issue, or perhaps a different editorial decision would have been preferred, especially because “I Travel through the World” is the very first poem of the volume, and one of only two included by Buchwald.
All in all, Blossoms in Snow is an important, fresh collection of poems (and poets) that fills a void in German-language literature in English translation. It allows for a multitude of voices to be heard in English for the first time—or for the second and third time in a different context. Parker recognizes the need for these voices, especially at a time when the topic of refugees and the refugee crisis is foremost in the mind again in Europe and North America. Perhaps Parker's project will be an inspiration to him or other scholars to collect the voices of the current refugees (those from Syria, Central and South America, and elsewhere) and bring them into what would certainly be an essential conversation on the status of home, language, and memory of those whose lives have been cut in half by no fault of their own.
