"I am not a part of this. I can laugh at it. But I know it.": A Conversation with Jeannette Lander

Abstract

When we met Jeannette Lander in November 1998 at her sister's home in Atlanta, she was open and eager to talk about her work and her life. At that time, she was in the midst of a reading tour to numerous American universities and Goethe Institutes, and seemed at home with herself and in the country where she had spent her childhood and youth. Lander was born in New York City in 1931 to Polish-Jewish immigrants and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where her parents had moved when she was three years old. Her father had a grocery store in an African American neighborhood and the family lived there during the era of legalized segregation. In 1949 she left Atlanta to pursue studies at sev eral colleges, including Brandeis and Bryn Mawr, and in 1957 she re ceived her B.A. from Southeastern Louisiana College. During this time she also became the mother of two children, Marcel and Tove. From 1950 to 1952 she lived in West Berlin and returned to Berlin in 1960, where she has lived ever since, except for a year in Sri Lanka in 1984-85. She currently resides in the Eastern Berlin district of Prenz lauer Berg. While living in the United States, Lander published Yiddish poetry as well as short stories and essays in English, for which she received several prizes. Her first German publications, however, were academic. In 1966 she received her doctorate from the Free University of Berlin with a dissertation on William Butler Yeats, and two years later she published a monograph on Ezra Pound, which appeared in English in 1971. Since then, although she is not a native speaker of German, she has written all of her literary works in German.