Blossoms in Snow: Austrian Refugee Poets in Manhattan ed. by Joshua Parker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blossoms in Snow: Austrian Refugee Poets in Manhattan ed. by Joshua Parker Monica Strauss Joshua Parker, ed. and trans., Blossoms in Snow: Austrian Refugee Poets in Manhattan. New Orleans: U of New Orleans P, 2020. 295 pp. For his selection and translation of seventy-five poems and prose pieces written in the United States by Austrian refugees after 1938, Joshua Parker chose the title Blossoms in Snow. It is an apt banner for the collection. The phrase comes from a poem by Max Roden (1881–1968), where it serves as a metaphor for dreams that disappear upon waking. As the title of the book, it points to the psychic split of a generation of writers in sudden exile. The subtitle, however—Austrian Refugee Poets in Manhattan—does not adequately describe the situation of several of the contributors who merely passed through the borough or did not live there at all. And, although the largest number of the verses confront the challenges of a city strikingly unlike Vienna, the issues explored by the writers cover a far wider range of reactions to radical cultural change. Parker's motivation for bringing together and translating these verses was to make a place for a "body of work with no homeland." Though shunted out of German-speaking Europe for less than a decade, the refugee writers created a rich, if momentary, linguistic detour amid their alien surroundings. Their responses to expulsion from Vienna, the flight to safety and the stresses of new lives, capture a unique historic moment. Once it passed, however, what was later termed "exile literature" remained accessible mainly to German readers. The writers in Parker's anthology vary widely in age. The oldest, in their fifties at the time of their departure, left established careers behind. Hence their contributions tend to look back rather than forward. The Dada poet Albert Ehrenstein (b. 1886) dwells on the violent arrival of the "braunen Wuthunde," while the theater and film director Berthold Viertel (b. 1885) laments the loss of home and language. He is the only one to dedicate a poem to the transports going east at the behest of the "Zoellnersohn." The novelist Hermann Broch (b. 1886) dwells on the absence of self—an existential crisis [End Page 172] brought on when language becomes a "blank page." The loss of others is the concern of the newspaper editor Max Roden (b. 1881), who asks, "Do I still shepherd a flock, which expresses itself in words?" The poems heat up as the younger writers describe in amazement the towering skyscrapers. the crowds that inhabit them, and the nonstop trains that never cease rumbling above and below Manhattan. Norbert Grossberg (b. 1903) writes hymns of wonder to his new experiences in a German laced with contemporary slang. In Central Park Hypertrophies, he writes: "Im Zoo, schuettelt ein sex-appealander Loewe, seine dauergewellte Maehne …" and concludes his verse by admitting that in the sweltering Manhattan heat, he cannot grasp all he sees. His poem Metropolis joins a series of wild impressions of the city into one pulsating run-on sentence. At the end, the poet recognizes that the "seelenloses Riesentier" will either destroy or expand his life. The ultimate reconciliation of a refugee to his new life is presented cabaret-style in A Man is Homesick by Greta Hartwig Manschinger (b. 1899). The narrator longs for Vienna, seeks the Danube instead of the Hudson, Herzmansky instead of Woolworth's, but once he saves enough to return to his fabled city, finds "alles war anderes, die Stadt und die Leute," Now it is New York that calls him—"g'wohntes Coca Cola, keinen Wein"—although he ends with a plaintive cry. "Ich kann diesen Wandel nicht verstehen, Wien, ach, warum liesest Du mich gehn." Mimi Grossberg (b. 1901) is one of the few writers with a lighter touch. In American Customs Control, she makes fun of an officer, who, pawing through her luggage, is unaware of her own long experience of crossing borders. Later she realizes his disturbingly thorough search was merely for "dope." Perhaps of even greater importance than Grossberg's poetry (and especially for Joshua Parker's project) was her dedication to her...