News at Eleven: But perhaps what really drew the two

together was something else entirely. [Paul] Celan wrote his poems in the German that was his mother tongue, and also that of his mother's murderers. In his Bremen Prize speech, Celan famously said that after Auschwitz, "only one thing remained reachable, close and secure against all losses: language." [Ilana] Shmueli, also a Holocaust survivor who wrote in German, recognizes the limitations inherent to language, as when she writes to Celan that, having received his poems, she "can hardly write about it . . . can hardly say thank you. I would have to have another language for that." Language, then, is all that either one has, and at the same time, it falls short, for both.

from Forward: Love Is Talk

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