Martha
Haftel was born in Vienna, 25 September 1922. Died, October 6, 1985, Jamestown,
NY. Singer, pianist and actress. Martha was the only daughter of Meier and Gisa
Braten Haftel, who were Orthodox Jews. Her father owned a kosher restaurant in
Vienna, where Martha spent her formative years before escaping Nazis in 1938.
She escaped through France to England, where her father became a butler and her
mother a cook. She attended a Jewish school in England.
Despite
being refugees, her parents were considered "enemy aliens" and so
were interned by the English government on the Isle of Man . Martha chose to
join her parents there. At the camp she met Engel Lund, a singer from Iceland,
who inspired her to become an international singer. He recommended her to good
music teachers, and after WWII, she studied with Ferdinand Rauter (piano) and
Emmy Heim (voice) in London. Schlamme came to the US in 1948, shortly after
marrying Hans Schlamme, which marriage ended in annulment in the 1960s.
She
began her concert career in the Catskills singing in Hebrew and Yiddish. She
continued vocal studies with Marinka Gurewich and Hans Heinz and later at Aspen
where she studied with Jennie Tourel, who introduced her to Olga Ryss who
became her coach. She began singing at good venues including college campuses,
concert halls and nightclubs, such as Town Hall and the Village Gate in NY and
Wilshire-Ebell Theater in LA.
She was able to perform on tv and radio. She was
so popular that by 1960, she had performed at over a thousand concerts in the
US. Shlamme was known as a supreme interpreter of folk song and concertized and
recorded in twelve languages, saying to The Christian Science Monitor in 1959
"The real test of a multilinguist is whether he can make his audience feel
a part of the country about which he is singing" and commenting again in
Musical America in 1963, "The meaning-yes, that's the most important
thing!"
Schlamme
enthusiastically sang Jewish songs throughout her career. On the Vanguard,
Folkways, Columbia and MGM labels she produced fifteen albums including
"Martha Schlamme Sings Israeli Folk Songs"(1953); "Martha
Schlamme Sings Folk Songs of Many Lands" (1958); "Martha Schlamme
Sings Jewish Folks Songs"(1957, and vol. 2 1959). She recorded "German
Folk Songs" on the Folkways label with Pete Seeger.
As an
early performer of Kurt Weill songs, her roles brought her considerable
attention and fame. She performed Weill's songs in Edinburgh at a venue called
the Howff. This show grew and eventually came to New York, playing for months.
For over twenty years she included Weill's music in her programs and produced
the recordings "The World of Kurt Weill in Song" (1962) and "A
Kurt Weill Cabaret" (1963). In 1965, she starred in a production of
Weill's "Mahoganny" at the Strafford Festival in Ontario and two
years later sang at Ravinia Music Festival in "A Kurt Weill Cabaret"
with Alvin Epstein. In 1985, she appeared with Epstein at the Israel Festival
in Jerusalem.
Schlamme
sang on Broadway, playing the role of Golde in "Fiddler on the Roof"
in 1968, and that same year appearing in "A Month of Sundays", and
"Solitaire, Double Solitaire." Later she had a one-woman show,
"A Woman Without a Man is..." Schlamme became a teacher of song and
acting at the the Circle in the Square Theater School in New York and H.B.
Studio. Schlamme was close to activists in leftist politics and later married
Mark Lane, a Democratic politician.
Despite
her early personal experiences, Ms. Schlamme wrote in a Music Journal article
in May, 1963, "I have always felt that people are very much alike all over
the world; by that I mean the human experience is very similar.... Languages
differ, customs differ, and the variations are fascinating but not
incomprehensible. And the same holds true for the music of different
peoples." Martha Schlamme suffered a stroke onstage at the Chautaugqua in
front of an audience of three thousand. She died at age sixty in nearby
Jamestown, NY. Today, her Yiddish and Weill recordings still circulate as
reformatted CDs.
Cummings described his father as a hero and a person who could accomplish anything that he wanted to. He was well skilled and was always working or repairing things. He and his son were close, and Edward was one of Cummings' most ardent supporters.
His mother, Rebecca, never partook in stereotypically "womanly" things, though she loved poetry and reading to her children. Raised in a well-educated family, Cummings was a very smart boy and his mother encouraged Estlin to write more and more poetry every day. His first poem came when he was only three: "Oh little birdie oh oh oh, With your toe toe toe." His sister, Elizabeth, was born when he was six years old.
In his youth, Estlin Cummings attended Cambridge Latin High School. Early stories and poems were published in the Cambridge Review, the school newspaper.
From 1911 to 1916, Cummings attended Harvard University, from which he received a B.A. degree in 1915 and a Master's degree for English and Classical Studies in 1916. While at Harvard, he befriended John Dos Passos, at one time rooming in Thayer Hall, named after the family of one of his Harvard acquaintances, Scofield Thayer, and not yet a freshman-only dormitory.
Several of Cummings's poems were published in the Harvard Monthly as early as 1912. Cummings himself labored on the school newspaper alongside fellow Harvard Aesthetes Dos Passos and S. Foster Damon. In 1915, his poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.
From an early age, Cummings studied Greek and Latin. His affinity for each manifests in his later works, such as XAIPE (Greek: "Rejoice!"; a 1950 collection of poetry), Anthropos (Greek: "mankind"; the title of one of his plays), and "Puella Mea" (Latin: "My Girl"; the title of his longest poem).
In his final year at Harvard, Cummings was influenced by writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He graduated magna cum laude in 1916, delivering a controversial commencement address entitled "The New Art". This speech gave him his first taste of notoriety, as he managed to give the false impression that the well-liked imagist poet, Amy Lowell, whom he himself admired, was "abnormal". For this, Cummings was chastised in the newspapers. Ostracized as a result of his intellect, he turned to poetry. In 1920, Cummings's first published poems appeared in a collection of poetry entitled Eight Harvard Poets.
In 1917 Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with his college friend John Dos Passos. Due to an administrative mix-up, Cummings was not assigned to an ambulance unit for five weeks, during which time he stayed in Paris. He became enamored of the city, to which he would return throughout his life.
On September 21, 1917, just five months after his belated assignment, he and a friend, William Slater Brown, were arrested on suspicion of espionage. The two openly expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans.
They were sent to a military detention camp, the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy, where they languished for 3½ months. Cummings's experiences in the camp were later related in his novel, The Enormous Room about which F. Scott Fitzgerald opined, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives- The Enormous Room by e e cummings....Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality."
He was released from the detention camp on December 19, 1917, after much intervention from his politically connected father. Cummings returned to the United States on New Year's Day 1918. Later in 1918 he was drafted into the army. He served in the 73rd Infantry Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918. Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and remained there for two years before returning to New York. During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s he returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, Pablo Picasso. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union and recounted his experiences in Eimi, published two years later.
In 1926, Cummings's father was killed in a car accident. Though severely injured, Cummings's mother survived. Cummings detailed the accident in the following passage from his i: six nonlectures series given at Harvard in 1952–1953:
... a locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing – dazed but erect – beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her hands (the younger added) kept feeling her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet.
These men took my sixty-six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father's body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.
His father's death had a profound impact on Cummings and his work, who entered a new period in his artistic life. Cummings began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He began this new period by paying homage to his father's memory in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love"
.Born into a Unitarian family, Cummings exhibited transcendental leanings his entire life. As he grew in maturity and age, Cummings moved more towards an "I, Thou" relationship with his God. His journals are replete with references to “le bon Dieu” as well as prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork (such as “Bon Dieu! may I some day do something truly great. amen.”). Cummings "also prayed for strength to be his essential self ('may I be I is the only prayer--not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong'), and for relief of spirit in times of depression ('almighty God! I thank thee for my soul; & may I never die spiritually into a mere mind through disease of loneliness')."
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes
Elaine Orr: Cummings's first marriage, to Elaine Orr, began as a love affair in 1918 while she was married to Scofield Thayer, one of Cummings's friends from Harvard. The affair produced a daughter, Nancy, born on December 20, 1919. Nancy was Cummings's only child. After obtaining a divorce from Thayer, Elaine married Cummings on March 19, 1924.
However, the marriage ended in divorce less than nine months later, when Elaine left Cummings for a wealthy Irish banker, moved to Ireland and took Nancy with her. Under the terms of the divorce Cummings was granted custody of Nancy for three months each year, but Elaine refused to abide by the agreement. Cummings did not see his daughter again until 1946.
Anne Minnerly Barton: Cummings married his second wife Anne Minnerly Barton on May 1, 1929. They separated three years later in 1932. That same year, Anne obtained a Mexican divorce that was not officially recognized in the United States until August 1934.
Marion Morehouse (March 9, 1906 in South Bend, Indiana – May 18, 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York City): In 1932, the same year Cummings and Anne separated, he met Marion Morehouse, a fashion model and photographer. Although it is not clear whether the two were ever legally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings until his death in 1962. Morehouse died May 18, 1969,[9] while living at 4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, New York City, where Cummings had resided since September 8, 1924.
Despite Cummings's consanguinity with avant-garde styles, much of his work is traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, and he occasionally made use of the blues form and acrostics. Cummings's poetry often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire.
While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the romantic tradition, Cummings's work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy of syntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.
As well as being influenced by notable modernists including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, Cummings's early work drew upon the imagist experiments of Amy Lowell. Later, his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and surrealism, which in turn permeated his work. Cummings also liked to incorporate imagery of nature and death into much of his poetry.
While some of his poetry is free verse (with no concern for rhyme or meter), many have a recognizable sonnet structure of 14 lines, with an intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically exuberant style, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols scattered across the page, often making little sense until read aloud, at which point the meaning and emotion become clear. Cummings, who was also a painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to "paint a picture" with some of his poems.
The seeds of Cummings's unconventional style appear well established even in his earliest work. At age six, he wrote to his father:
FATHER DEAR. BE, YOUR FATHER-GOOD AND GOOD, HE IS GOOD NOW, IT IS NOT GOOD TO SEE IT RAIN, FATHER DEAR IS, IT, DEAR, NO FATHER DEAR, LOVE, YOU DEAR, ESTLIN.
Following his novel The Enormous Room, Cummings's first published work was a collection of poems entitled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This work was the public's first encounter with his characteristic eccentric use of grammar and punctuation.
Some of Cummings's most famous poems do not involve much, if any, odd typography or punctuation, but still carry his unmistakable style. For example, the aptly titled "anyone lived in a pretty how town" begins:
anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn't he danced his did
Women and men(both little and small) cared for anyone not at all they sowed their isn't they reaped their same sun moon stars rain
"why must itself up every of a park" begins as follows:
why must itself up every of a park anus stick some quote statue unquote to prove that a hero equals any jerk who was afraid to dare to answer "no"?
Cummings's unusual style can be seen in his poem "Buffalo Bill's/ defunct" from the January 1920 issue of The Dial.
Readers sometimes experience a jarring, incomprehensible effect with Cummings's work, as the poems do not act in accordance with the conventional combinatorial rules that generate typical English sentences. (For example, "why must itself..." or "they sowed their isn't...").
His readings of Stein in the early part of the century probably served as a springboard to this aspect of his artistic development (in the same way that Robert Walser's work acted as a springboard for Franz Kafka). In some respects, Cummings's work is more stylistically continuous with Stein's than with any other poet or writer.
In addition, a number of Cummings's poems feature, in part or in whole, intentional misspellings, and several incorporate phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects. Cummings also made use of inventive formations of compound words, as in "in Just-", which features words such as "mud-luscious", "puddle-wonderful", and "eddieandbill." This poem is part of a sequence of poems entitled Chansons Innocentes; it has many references comparing the "balloonman" to Pan, the mythical creature that is half-goat and half-man.
Many of Cummings's poems are satirical and address social issues (see "why must itself up every of a park", above), but have an equal or even stronger bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex, and the season of rebirth (see "anyone lived in a pretty how town" in its entirety).
Cummings's talent extended to children's books, novels, and painting. A notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic stripKrazy Kat.Examples of Cummings's unorthodox typographical style can be seen in his poem "the sky was candy luminous...".
During his lifetime, Cummings published four plays: HIM (1927), Anthropos: or, the Future of ArtTom: A Ballet (1935), and Santa Claus: A Morality (1946). (1930),
HIM, a three-act play, was first produced in 1928 by the Provincetown Players in New York City. The production was directed by James Light. The play's main characters are "Him", a playwright, and "Me", his girlfriend. Cummings said of the unorthodox play:
Relax and give the play a chance to strut its stuff—relax, stop wondering what it is all 'about'—like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this play isn't 'about,' it simply is. . . . Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON'T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU."
Anthropos, or the Future of Art is a short, one-act play that Cummings contributed to the anthology Whither, Whither or After Sex, What? A Symposium to End Symposiums. The play consists of dialogue between Man, the main character, and three "infrahumans", or inferior beings. The word anthropos is the Greek word for "man", in the sense of "mankind".
Santa Claus: A Morality was probably Cummings's most successful play. It is an allegorical Christmas fantasy presented in one act of five scenes. The play was inspired by his daughter Nancy, with whom he was reunited in 1946. It was first published in the HarvardCollege magazine the Wake. The play's main characters are Santa Claus, his family (Woman and Child), Death, and Mob.
At the outset of the play, Santa Claus's family has disintegrated due to their lust for knowledge (Science). After a series of events, however, Santa Claus's faith in love and his rejection of the materialism and disappointment he associates with Science are reaffirmed, and he is reunited with Woman and Child.
In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1952 and 1955 were later collected as i: six nonlectures.
Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire.
He died on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 in North Conway, New Hampshire of a stroke. [13] His cremated remains were buried in Lot 748 Althaea Path, in Section 6, Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory in Boston. In 1969, his third wife, Marion Morehouse Cummings, died and was buried in an adjoining plot: Lot 748, Althaea Path, Section 6.
During his lifetime, Cummings received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including:
Helena
Kagan, a pioneer of pediatric medicine in pre-State Palestine, is known to this
day as the children’s doctor of Jerusalem, the city where she settled following
her aliyah in 1914. Kagan tended to generations of children—Jews, Muslims and
Christians—saving many of them from sickness and death. She devoted her life to
improving welfare services and living conditions. In her memoirs, she wrote:
“Throughout my career, I tried to uphold my two great loves: the love of
children and the love of Jerusalem. I sought to instill in the Arab residents
the sense that we—the Jews returning to our homeland—are sincerely interested
in peace and friendly relations with all
Kagan
was born on September 25, 1889 in Tashkent, capital of Turkestan (later
Uzbekistan) in Russia. Her family consisted of her mother Miriam, a native of
Riga; her father Moshe (d. 1912), from Latvia; and a brother, Noah (b.
1885). Kagan’s father, a descendant of the famed Vilna Gason,s tudied in
yeshiva in Warsaw and at the Institute of Technology in St. Petersburg. As a
chemical engineer, he was sent to establish and supervise the construction of
glass-manufacturing plants in Tashkent; there, Kagan was born, grew up, and
completed her studies. In early 1905, Noah left Russia to study medicine in
Breslau, Germany, while Kagan traveled to Switzerland to study piano at the
Bern Conservatory. At the same time, she commenced premedical studies as an
external student, but it was only two years later that she received permission
to be examined on the course material. Her success in the examinations paved
the way for her to enter the medical school as a regular student.
In
1910, she completed her basic medical studies, going on to specialize in
pediatrics. Upon completing her studies, Kagan accepted an offer to join the
research staff of the Medical Faculty’s Department of Physiology, but first she
traveled to Russia to see her family. Her father, who lay on his deathbed,
implored his children to go to Palestine, so that they might see with their own
eyes “the land the Jewish people lost but have never forgotten.”
Kagan
carried out her father’s dying wish, and on April 29, 1914, she and her mother
set foot “on the soil of the Holy Land.” After a brief stay in Tel Aviv, Kagan
moved to Jerusalem, where she was henceforth to live and work. She moved into a
stone house near the Meah She’arim neighborhood, set up a clinic and laboratory
in one of its rooms, and waited for patients. To her disappointment, they were
slow in coming: since she was only twenty-five, no one took seriously “this
young woman who claimed to be a doctor.”
In
the interim, World War I had broken out, and the Ottoman regime did not permit
her to work in her profession. In order to manage financially, she rented out
rooms in her home and from 1914 to 1916 worked as a nurse at the municipal
hospital. In addition, Kagan trained Arab and Jewish girls aged fifteen to
sixteen to serve as hospital nurses, and worked in tandem with two public
health nurses sent by Hadassah in America to institute a regional visiting
nurse program for mother and child care.
With
the outbreak of the war the two Hadassah nurses left Palestine and Kagan
continued to provide medical assistance from her home. To overcome the high
rate of infant mortality resulting from malnutrition, she purchased a cow and
preserved its milk in bottles placed in clay containers filled with water; this
milk would be given to sick children who visited her clinic. Slowly but surely,
Kagan’s work at the municipal hospital garnered respect, and she earned the
trust of the Jewish and Arab communities alike despite the fact that she was a
young, inexperienced female physician. The loving names bestowed on
her—“savior-doctor,” “angel of salvation” and “wonder doctor”—testify to the
deep admiration in which she was held.
In 1924 Kagan set up a children’s home in the Sha’arei Hessed
neighborhood of Jerusalem for orphaned and abandoned children and infants from
impoverished neighborhoods, where they could receive shelter and devoted care.
Kagan served as the institution’s medical director, guided by the belief that
it is the infancy and preschool years that determine the future physical and
emotional development of the child. In keeping with this approach, she began
working in 1925 at the Infants Home for Arab Children in the Old City of
Jerusalem, where she served as medical director until 1948, when Jews were
barred from that section of the city. Throughout she was an active member of
WIZO. In 1936 she established Bikur Holim Hospital’s pediatrics department,
which she headed until 1975. Kagan also established a special rheumatic fever
division, combining it with her pediatrics department. She later served as
chairwoman of the Israel Medical Association’s medical advisory committee on
rheumatic fever. In July 1965 she founded a residential facility for asthmatic
children in conjunction with the WIZO Baby Home in Jerusalem.
During
Israel’s War of Independence, when Jerusalem was under siege, Kagan was
appointed director of the medical department of the Jewish community of
Jerusalem, a position which she also filled on the Central Medical Council.
Assigned the task of running all medical and sanitary services in the city, her
work included tending to refugees from the Arab neighborhoods and people
confined to bomb shelters. But the bulk of her energy was devoted to rescuing
infants and she took babies from dangerous areas to stay at the WIZO Baby Home.
Kagan
was involved not only in medical activity but also in community work. In 1920
she was among the founders of the Histadrut Nashim Ivriot (Hebrew Women’s
Organization), which became the local chapter of WIZO. The organization’s
charter meeting was held in her home. She served as a member of World WIZO’s
board of directors from its inception and was a lifetime honorary member of
World WIZO. 1951 and in 1958. She also chaired the Health Ministry’s Advisory
Committee on Child Welfare from 1953 to 1956.
Kagan
became a legend in her own time, receiving numerous awards. In 1958 she was
granted the title of Honorary Citizen of Jerusalem in recognition of her unique
contribution to society and the community in the field of communal activity.
This was followed in 1963 by an award from the La Rabida Hospital for Rheumatic
Diseases of the University of Chicago for her contribution to research on
rheumatic fever and in 1967, at an historic ceremony on Mt. Scopus, by an
honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University, together with then-Chief of
General Staff Yitzhak Rabin and President of Israel Zalman Shazar. In 1975, in
honor of International Women’s Year, she was awarded the Israel Prize for her
service to the community.
In 1936 Kagan married Emil Hauser (1893–1978), a gifted
violinist who in 1933 founded the Palestine Conservatory of Music in Jerusalem,
which he directed for many years and of which Kagan herself served as honorary
secretary from 1938 to 1946. The couple’s home was a center of music and
culture, serving as a gathering place for concerts and meetings with local and
international Zionist leaders.
Helena
Kagan died childless on August 22, 1978, after a rich life filled with
accomplishments.
