Description
Poetry. Jewish Studies. "If a great poet, as Randall Jarrell once suggested, is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning a couple of times, then Israel Emiot is certainly one of the great poets of the 20th Century. For, no doubt, his best poems, such as 'A Prayer of a Man in Snow' [...] can stand in the company of such masterful works as Zbegnew Herbert's Mr. Cogito poems or Miklos Radnoti's moving war-time lyrics. That Emiot is not as well known as others is a shame. [...] I envy the readers who will encounter 'A Prayer of a Man in Snow' for the first time. It is spellbinding. It is hypnotic. It is a great poem saved for us from a barbarous century."—Ilya Kaminsky
Author Bio
Israel Emiot (1909-1978) was a Polish-born Yiddish poet who came to the United States before WWII. He published four books of poems in Poland in and in Russia where he went to escape the German Reich, and where he was confined to the Gulag for a time. After coming to America he settled in Rochester, New York, published several more books of poems, and served as poet in residence at the Jewish Community Center. He died in Rochester in 1978. His prison memoir, The Birobidzhan Affair, is a poignant, captivating chronicle of the persecution of Jews and Jewish culture in the last years of Stalin's Russia.
Author City: ROCHESTER, NY USA