Memories
Pierre Joris (1946-2025)
Pierre Joris, a poet and translator who tackled some of the 20th century’s most difficult verse, rendering into English the complex work of the German-Romanian poet Paul Celan, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 78.
His wife, Nicole Peyraffite, said the cause was complications of cancer.
Mr. Joris was the author of dozens of volumes of his own poetry and prose. But much of his life’s work was spent grappling with the poetry of Celan, whom many critics considered, in the words of one scholar, “arguably the greatest European poet in the postwar period.”
That greatness comes with a hitch for readers, though: the fiendish difficulty of a writer whose lyrics were formed and deformed by the crucible of the Holocaust — “that which happened,” as Celan termed it. Both his parents were murdered by the Nazis in what is now Romania. Less than 30 years later, Celan put an end to his own life in France, jumping into the Seine river in 1970 at the age of 49.
Norman Miller (1924-2024)
At 15, he escaped to England. At 20, he enlisted in the British Army and identified Arthur Seyss-Inquart (1892–1946) who, as the Reich commissioner of the German-occupied Netherlands, was responsible for deporting thousands of Dutch Jews to concentration camps.
Martin Greenfield (1928-2024)
Defying boundaries of taste and time, Martin Greenfield made suits for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the gangster Meyer Lansky, Leonardo DiCaprio and LeBron James. Men skilled in the arts of power projection — along with fashion writers and designers — considered him the nation’s greatest men’s tailor.
For years, none of them knew the origins of his expertise: a beating in Auschwitz.
As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards at the concentration camp. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a guard’s shirt. The man whipped Max in response, then hurled the garment back at the boy.
Amnon Weinstein (1939-2024)
Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli luthier who restored violins belonging to Jews during the Holocaust so that musicians around the world could play them in hopeful, melodic tributes to those silenced in Nazi death camps, died on March 4 in Tel Aviv. He was 84.
Josette Molland, Member of French Resistance, Holocaust Survivor and Artist (1923-2024)
Josette Molland was a member of the French Resistance during World War II. She was captured by German forces and imprisoned in Romainville, Ravensbrück and Holleischen.
The New York Times explains:
She survived, after witnessing and enduring repeated episodes of brutality. Later, after her return to France, she spoke to students about her experiences for years.
In the 1980s, however, worrying that her story wasn’t getting through to them, she concluded that telling the young of her camp life was not enough. She would have to show them. So she set about painting, from painful memory, scenes of the harsh incarceration that she and many other female inmates had suffered. She produced 15 paintings in all, in folk-art style. Here are five of them, with the text she wrote to accompany them.
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