Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs (Paperback)

Born in Germany to an upper-middle class family, Nelly Sachs became interested in the arts early in life. As a child, she wrote poems and plays. Later, her work was published in magazines and, in the 1920s, she published a book of stories that reflected her readings in German Romanticism. In 1940, she fled Nazi Germany for Sweden, after 1909 Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlof convinced the Swedish Prince to arrange for a special exit visa for Nelly and her mother. The rest of her family perished in the concentration camps.||Sachs learned Swiss quickly and worked as translator, while continuing to write poems in German. In 1940, a collection was published whose title translates as IN THE HOUSES OF DEATH. Nelly Sachs is associated with Jewish writing and the Holocaust, and readers have remarked on her Biblical cadences, the sense of prophecy, and the influence of Jewish stories and legends, as well as the Zohaar, the book of Jewish mysticism. Her themes of suffering and death, and of exile, are said to refer both to the history of her people and to the condition of modern man. ||Nelly Sachs shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature with another writer of the Jewish experience, S. Y. Agnon. Her citation praised her for "her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel's destiny with touching strength."