Michael C. Blumenthal

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Michael C. Blumenthal (born March 8, 1949 in New Jersey , USA) is an American writer and legal scholar .

Life

Michael C. Blumenthal graduated from Cornell University with a PhD (JD) in law in 1974 after completing an undergraduate degree in philosophy and economics from Binghamton University, New York State . After various activities, u. a. as an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, DC and a lecturer at Time Life Books , he became a lecturer in creative writing at Harvard University . From 1992 to 1996 he was a scholarship holder of the Fulbright Foundation as a university professor in Budapest , Hungary . Since then he has been an associate professor at various universities in the USA and abroad. a. 1999/2000 the Fulbright professorship at the Free University in Berlin , 2000 the professorship for American studies at the Université Jean Monet in Saint-Etienne and 2001/2002 the professorship for creative writing at the Université Sciences-Po in Paris . Since 2009 until today he has been teaching law as associate professor at the Copenhaver Distinguished Visiting Chair at West Virginia University .

plant

Michael C. Blumenthal has so far mainly published poetry, as well as novels and essays as well as a number of articles and magazine articles. He translates from German, French and Hungarian into American. His style is realistic and lyrical at the same time, he sees himself as an anti-romantic.

His work was received extensively and largely positively in the American press. a. in The Nation , The Washington Post , Publishers Weekly , Library Journal , The Jewish Daily Forward , Boston Globe , Poetry .

Michael C. Blumenthal has received many scholarships and prizes. a. Winner of the Harold U. Ribelow Prize for works of Jewish epic, the Scalg Poetry Prize for poems in German (2009), the National Endowment for the Arts (2005) and the Isabella Gardner Poetry Prize.

His reports of a research stay in South Africa, where he studied the behavior of orphaned ape cubs, were published in Natural History and in The Washington Post Magazine in 2008 .

childhood

Michael C. Blumenthal's biological parents were chicken farmers in New Jersey who, as Jewish Germans, fled to Palestine from the Nazis in the 1930s and went to the USA in the late 1940s. Out of gratitude for help with immigration and in their new home, they gave Michael C. Blumenthal a few days after his birth into the care of relatives who had remained childless, a Jewish fur trader from New York and his wife, who were also German Holocaust refugees. It was not until the age of ten, when his supposed mother died, that the boy discovered that he had grown up with completely wrong ideas about his origins and identity. The secrets, misunderstandings and catastrophes resulting from “giving away” the child have deeply influenced the author. He processed them in his 2002 HarperCollins memoirs "All My Mothers and Fathers" (German 2011). The memories were intensely noted in the USA by the public and the press and sealed Blumenthal's reputation as an epic, but also earned him reproaches for being too harsh and too realistic, almost ruthlessly, with his relatives and other people.

Quotes

  • from the author

“My goals as a poet have always been fairly straightforward and simple: to strive to be intelligent and understandable at the same time, not to address feelings that are lower than my own, to pay tribute to this life and its pain and glory. I proudly call myself a poet of everyday life, because everyday life is the area in which we live and breathe, celebrate and suffer. In some respects everyday life is our only eternity. "

  • to the author

"Michael Blumenthal's wonderful new book 'AND' is a high-spirited hymn of praise in Whitman style to the 'AND and so on' of the world. Ambitious, with a big heart, funny and pointed, 'AND' is a book to celebrate, a gem. ” Alan Shapiro

“One of the great poets of his generation.” Seamus Heaney , winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

  • Press reviews

“Blumenthal is funny, deep, erotic, playful, ironic, elegiac and, in its strongest moments, close to praise. His voice is like no other. His tone is gripping and completely new. ” The Nation

Works

Books

English
  • Sympathetic Magic , Poems, Huntington, NY: Walter Mark Press 1980
  • Days We Would Rather Know , Poems, New York, NY: Viking 1984
  • Laps , Poems, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press 1984
  • Against Romance , Poems, New York, NY: Viking 1987
  • The Wages of Goodness , Poems, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press 1992
  • Weinstock Among the Dying , Roman, Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books 1993
  • When History Enters the House. Essays from Central Europe , Essays, Bainbridge Island, Washington: Pleasure Boat Studio 1997
  • Dusty Angel , Poems, Rochester, NY: BOA Editions 1999
  • And yet. Selected Poems of Péter Kántor , translation, Budapest: Irodalom Publishers 2000
  • All My Mothers and Fathers , Memoirs, New York, NY: HarperCollins 2002
  • Correcting The World. Selected Poetry and Writings of Michael Blumenthal , Anthologie, University of West Virginia: Legal Studies Forum 2007
  • AND , Poems, Rochester, NY: BOA Editions 2009
  • Unknown Places. Poems by Péter Kántor , translation, New York, NY: Pleasure Boat Studios 2010
German

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Blumenthal, Michael C.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH New Jersey