Selbstgefühl Alberto Manguel The woman who taught me my first languages (English and German) was not my mother but a refugee from Germany who had been engaged by my parents as my governess when I was only a few months old. Her name was Ellin Slonitz and she had escaped Nazi Germany with her parents, her sister and her brother, shortly after the Old Synagogue of Stuttgart had been set on fire during Kristallnacht. Her father was a Czech engineer who had migrated to Germany during World War I. Ellin was born on 22 November 1914 in Rotenburg an der Fulda, Hessen. She died in Florida on 8 March 1995, four months after her eightieth birthday.

I was born in Buenos Aires, but since my father had been appointed ambassador to Israel, when I was still a baby we moved to Tel-Aviv, to a recently built house on Trumpeldor Straße. Ellin and I were allotted the basement: a large room whose windows were four small rectangles close to the ceiling through which I could see the grass of the square garden ... read more

Fleur Adcock i.m. Jacqueline Simms, 1940–2021

Let’s go back in time, Jacky,
now that the present is not much fun,
to the menagerie you proposed,
entitled The Oxford Book of Creatures.

The range would be from whale to amoeba,
we agreed: Moby Dick to Cell DNA.
The whole of literature was eligible,
although with a limit on dogs and cats,

I was to find the poems, you the prose.
... read more

James Campbell March 23, 2001

Anyone nursing a rejection slip is likely to feel better after perusing the current issue of the Missouri Review. The latest in its ‘Found Text’ series is a feature on readers’ reports from the archives of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The list of rejectees is spectacular, and the comments are frank. In 1949, for example, a reader recommended turning down a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph, with the comment ‘they are utterly untranslatable, at least into anything that could be expected to sell more than 750 copies’. The reader himself found the stories ‘remarkable’, but thought they would appear to the general public as ‘$50-a-pound caviar’. El Aleph would not be translated for another twenty-one years.

Anaïs Nin was felt to be ‘a small, arbitrary, overpraised talent who has been able to hide her emptiness ... read more