Hugh Nissenson

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Hugh Nissenson (born March 10, 1933 in New York City , † December 13, 2013 there ) was an American writer .

Life

youth

Nissenson was founded in 1933 in Brooklyn as an only child Polish - Jewish born immigrants of first and second generation. The father came from Warsaw as a teenager in 1910 , the parents of the Brooklyn-born mother came from Lemberg . Like many Jewish immigrants, the father had worked in a sweat shop for a time. The family was not religious.

Nissenson graduated from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York and from Swarthmore College near Philadelphia in 1955 . During this time he developed his interest in mythology and religion, the Holocaust and the State of Israel - aspects that would shape his literature. After graduating, he became an office worker for the New York Times . But he discovered that journalism interested him less than literature. He gave up work and moved back to his parents' apartment to practice writing on the basis of short stories.

Beginnings as a writer

By chance he got an opportunity in 1957 to help write a film script in Israel. Work on Amud Ha'Esh , a film about the Palestinian War , dragged on for two years. Although Nissenson was dissatisfied with the end result, he used the time to work on his literary skills and, according to his own account, learned a lot. During his stay in Israel one of his short stories appeared for the first time under the title The Blessing in Harper's . In the following years he published other works in Commentary and Esquire . They later came out collectively in A Pile of Stones (1965).

In 1961, Nissenson reported on the Eichmann trial for Commentary from Israel . He regards the time as a turning point in his life when he lost faith in divine work. The following year Nissenson married. In 1965 he returned to Israel and lived for two more years in Kibbutz Ma'jan Baruch in the north of the country. He describes his experiences during the Six Day War of 1967 in the book Notes from the Frontier (1968).

Novelist

In 1972, In The Reign of Peace , another anthology of short stories, several of which deal with the Holocaust, was published. At this time, Nissenson had been writing his first novel My Own Ground (1976), a portrait of the difficult living conditions of Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side at the end of the 19th century, for some time .

For his next novel The Tree Life (1985), based at the Frontier of Ohio in the year 1812, he undertook studies for years on the spot, especially with regard to the regional history. The Tree of Life received very good reviews and was nominated for a National Book Award , but like most of Nissenson's books, it sold poorly.

Nissenson saw himself as a modernist who wanted to develop the novel with new forms. This was particularly evident in the novel Song of the Earth (2001), on which he worked for twelve years. In order to be able to illustrate the futuristic story about a genetically programmed artist from the middle of the 21st century with his own pictures, he learned to draw. His last novel The Days of Awe (2005), a processing of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 , was the first of his works to appear in a German-language edition in 2008.

Others

Over the years, Nissenson has taught literature and religion at universities, including Manhattanville College , Yale University , Wesleyan University, and Denison University (both in Ohio), as well as the University of Padua and the University of Milan .

Nissenson lived with his wife Marilyn Nissenson , who has published several non-fiction books and with whom he had two daughters, on the Upper West Side in New York. He died there in December 2013 at the age of 80.

Works

Fiction

Novels
Short stories
  • Pile of stones. Scriber, New York 1965.
  • In the Reign of Piece. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1972, ISBN 0-37417-657-4 .

Other prose

  • Notes from the Frontier. Dial Press, New York 1968.
  • The Elephant and My Jewish problem. Selected Stories and Journals, 1957-1987. Harper & Row, New York 1988, ISBN 0-06015-985-5 .

Movie

  • Amud Ha'Esh. Israel 1959. Director: Larry Frisch. Screenplay: Hugh Nissenson based on a story by him and Larry Frisch.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hugh Nissenson, Novelist, Dies at 80. In: The New York Times, December 16, 2013 (accessed December 17, 2013).
personal data
SURNAME Nissenson, Hugh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 2013
Place of death New York City