Urbancic, Melitta. 2014
Frá hjara veraldar. Vom Rand der Welt. Edited by Gauti Kristmannsson. Translations of poetry by Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson.
Reykjavik: Stofnun Vigdísar Finnbogadóttur í erlendum tungumálum, Háskóli Íslands.
217 pages. ISBN: 978-9935-23-033-1.
On 8 June 1946, the Viennese newspaper
Zeitspiegel published an article that announced the reappearance of the Viennese author (and
sculptor) Melitta Urbancic, spelled Urbantschitsch at the time, whose survival during
the war was clearly a matter of some surprise in Vienna.
It is with great relief and delight that poetry readers have just found out that the
Viennese poet and sculptor Melitta Urbantschitsch survived the Nazi terror while spending
the war years in Reykjavík, Iceland, in that land of volcanoes, glaciers, and the
lonely isolation of a remote island. (“Vom Rand der Welt,” 13)
A note of almost disbelief creeps into this article since it contains the
information that Iceland had served as a place of refuge during the war for a Jewish
author from Vienna. The “Kingdom of Iceland,” as it was named between 1918 and 1944,
was at the time a constitutional monarchy
in personal union with Denmark, and was arguably the most remote place in Europe that
might serve as a safe haven for the European Jews who were attempting to escape annihilation
in the Holocaust. This name remained in effect during the years in which Denmark was
invaded and controlled by Nazi Germany (1940-1944) and while Iceland was occupied
by Great Britain in May 1940, replaced by United States troops in July 1941, five
months before the USA officially entered the war. The name “Kingdom of Iceland” only
ceased to exist on June 17, 1944, after a referendum in May 1944 overwhelmingly called
for the establishment of the independent Republic of Iceland.
For almost forty years during her life in Iceland, Melitta Urbancic wrote a large
amount of poetry in German, and while the manuscripts were not unknown in Iceland,
little attention was paid to them, no doubt because they were in German. However,
this changed in 2014 when she was “rediscovered” and a bilingual German-Icelandic
selection of her poetry, Frá hjara veraldar. Vom Rand der Welt, appeared in Reykjavík, which was edited and given an illuminating commentary by Icelandic
scholar Gauti Kristmannsson, from which much of the information in the short biography
that follows is drawn. Gauti Kristmannsson lends the reader a very helpful hand by
establishing a wider context for the poems, showing how they reflect the psychological
issues that must have challenged all refugees in foreign exile, while recognizing
the special case of exile in Iceland. Included in the edition are fine translations
into Icelandic by Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson of the fifty-one poems selected. It is the
first publication of any of Urbancic’s literary works in book form, and for potential
readers it remains the only in-print source of any of her poems, all of which were
written in German.
Melitta Urbancic (née Grünbaum) was born in 1902 to Jewish parents in Vienna and in
many ways the upcoming pattern of her life must have seemed preordained at the time
of her birth. Her father was a successful lawyer, and the family was reasonably well-off
and assimilated into the society of splendid fin-de-siècle Vienna. The Jewish population,
while still being subjected to the anti-Semitism of the drawing room, and governed
by the decidedly anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger, continued to hold down a position
of economic and cultural power that couldn’t be matched anywhere else in Europe. Viennese
cultural life was dominated by Jewish musicians, artists, scientists, and authors—Gustav
Mahler, Arthur Schoenberg, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Theodor Herzl, among others—many of whom had moved to the
Austrian capital from the provinces of the Habsburg Empire in order to be in the most
congenial place in Europe for them. But for a Jew born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
around the turn of the twentieth century, everything was going to turn out much differently
in the 1930s than anyone could have imagined around 1900. And this would be the fate
of Melitta Urbancic.
Despite the desperate crisis that enveloped Austria, and especially post-war Vienna,
in the wake of World War I and the total collapse of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy,
young Melitta was able to pursue a rather traditional academic route for a gifted,
enlightened, young, Jewish, bourgeois Viennese woman. It led through the University
of Vienna, where in 1924 she met her future husband, the Roman Catholic music student
from Vienna, Victor Urbancic, before she went on to study philosophy and literature
under Friedrich Gundolf and Karl Jaspers as well as theatre at Heidelberg University,
receiving her doctorate in 1927.
This was followed by several years of moderate success as a promising author and actress
in provincial German-language theatres. In 1930, during an engagement in the theatre
in Koblenz, she once again met up with Victor Urbancic, who was now music director
in the theatre in nearby Mainz. In the same year the two former student colleagues
from Vienna got married, and in the following year the first of their four children
was born. Under normal circumstances, by 1937, with two more children, they would
have been able to feel that they were reasonably well situated to contemplate a future
with family and promising careers in the music and theatre worlds of Central Europe.
But the times were anything but normal, thanks to the rise to power in Germany in
1933 of the radically anti-Semitic Nazis under Adolf Hitler. Sensing that Victor’s
position as a musician in Germany was becoming untenable because his wife was Jewish,
the Urbancics made their way back to Austria in 1933, where Victor continued to find
respectable positions in his field. But when Nazi Germany marched into Austria and
incorporated it into the Third Reich in the spring of 1938, Victor’s employment as
a musician also became impossible in Austria as Melitta was considered to be “Jewish”
by the Nazis despite having recently converted to Roman Catholicism. Desperate attempts
by her husband to find a position in Switzerland or North America proved futile and
the future for the family certainly must have looked bleak.
By one of those extraordinary quirks of fortune that determined fates in those years,
a colleague of Victor’s suggested to him that he contact the composer and conductor
Franz Mixa, an Austrian national who held down one of the leading positions for classical
musicians in Iceland. He had been hired, among other things, to organize the music
for the national millennial celebration of the establishment of the Icelandic parliament,
the Althing, and was well-respected in Iceland for his contribution to the music scene.
He thus possessed an Icelandic work permit, and Victor’s colleague had the feeling
that Mixa might be interested in an exchange with Victor that would allow Mixa to
return to Vienna and Victor to take over his position in Iceland, a place where Victor
had never been.
Mixa was in fact very much interested in this proposal and ultimately the exchange
took place in 1938. In August of that year, Victor travelled on his own to Reykjavík,
a city with only 38,000 residents at the time, to see if this was a reasonable place
of employment for a classical musician from Vienna. While it certainly wasn’t Vienna
as far as the classical musical scene was concerned, he found it acceptable and urged
his wife to follow him to Iceland with their three children before it was too late.
As irony would have it, during the same years when Victor Urbancic was desperately
trying to escape from the Nazis, Franz Mixa had already been a member of the then
illegal Austrian Nazi Party since 1932. He remained in Iceland until 1938, only returning
to Vienna when the Wehrmacht marched into Austria.
Victor replaced Mixa at that time in Reykjavík and settled down there. Melitta realized
that she had to take advantage of the fact that she could still legally get out of
Austria and join Victor in a place that was outside the Nazi sphere of influence.
By then, under terms of her husband’s work permit she could acquire documents that
very few people would receive—Icelandic visas for herself and her three children (she
had a fourth in Iceland)—which became available to her under the terms of her husband’s
work permit. In the fall of 1938, she took the Danish boat Drottningen (The Queen) from Copenhagen to Reykjavík. This was no doubt her last legal opportunity to escape
the Nazi terror in Vienna, and she abandoned her homeland and the only cultural and
linguistic world she had ever known with what must have been a mixture of great relief
mixed with great sadness. Her father had died shortly after the takeover of Austria
by Nazi Germany, and she had to leave her recently widowed mother behind when she
boarded the train to Copenhagen, as her mother had been denied an Icelandic visa and
was forced to remain in Vienna.
Victor Urbancic went on to become the music director of the Icelandic National Theatre
and is considered one of the key figures in the surprising rise of Iceland to its
contemporary position as a serious outpost of European classical music, with the spectacular
Harpa Concert Hall, that opened in 2011 on Reykjavík’s harbour. He remained in Iceland
for the rest of his life, dying unexpectedly in Reykjavík in 1958, when he was only
fifty-four.
Thus it was that Melitta Urbancic and her three children travelled to Iceland, a country
whose language she did not speak and whose history and culture she was not at all
familiar with. There is no doubt that Iceland, like virtually all European (and North
American) countries, made it very hard for threatened European Jews to get entry visas
as the European war began to take shape in the years before it swept into catastrophic
action. In reality it was almost impossible to get the proper documents that would
allow Jewish refugees to legally enter Iceland, or for that matter any Nordic country,
after 1938. Without such documents it was fruitless to try to cross the North Atlantic in an
attempt to reach the shores of Iceland and then hope for the best, a situation that
did not change when it became clear that any Jews still left in the Nazi-controlled
parts of Europe by the early 1940s were in mortal danger.
Melitta Urbancic had become one of only a handful of Jewish refugees from mainland
Europe who managed to not only gain entry into Iceland legally but also to settle
down there with growing success during and after the years when the German Reich controlled
most of Europe. Other German-language Jewish writers may have found themselves in
even more exotic locales than Reykjavík as havens of security in a precarious world
(Shanghai, various African countries, and the Dominican Republic come to mind), but
perhaps no refugee had found herself in such an unexpectedly alien landscape as did
Melitta in “Iceland, in that land of volcanoes, glaciers, and the lonely isolation
of a remote
island” to quote again the description in Zeitspiegel upon news that she had unexpectedly survived. As it turned out, she became one of
only a very small number of Jewish citizens of Iceland in 1949, and Iceland remained
her home for the rest of her life. (In recent years this handful included the great
Russian-born pianist and conductor Vladimir Azhkenazy, who became an Icelandic citizen
in 1972, and Brooklyn-born chess master Bobby Fischer, who gained Icelandic citizenship
in 2005 and died in Reykjavík in 2008.)
For all of these reasons, Iceland has not been one of the countries that is usually
included in a discussion of the Holocaust in Europe, as it was so remote that there
were very few Jewish refugees who even attempted to get there. Of those who did, almost
none actually succeeded in getting onto Icelandic soil between 1936 and 1945. Most
who even considered it were turned back in Copenhagen, where Danish customs officials
continued to vigorously control visa applications for Iceland, even after Denmark
was under the control of Nazi Germany.
But as the Icelandic author Sjón has written to this author:
I think it is important to hook Iceland into the narrative of the Shoah in the Nordic
countries. Even though the number of people is small—both who were allowed to stay
and the ones who were turned away—it is as we know a story where every individual
counts. Our rediscovery of Melitta Urbancic, her life and writings, is very important
as it adds to our understanding of the plight of the exiles who ended up in Iceland
and at the same time makes us face our shameful history.
So while Iceland was not really a major participant in the events that overwhelmed
civilized Europe between 1938 and 1945, the tragedy of the Holocaust also comes down
to individual stories, and each one of the very few refugees who made it into Iceland
during this period must have had a dramatic story to tell. This would certainly include
Victor and Melitta Urbancic and their children who settled down in Iceland and where
Melitta lived until her death in Reykjavík forty-six years later in 1984. Her mother,
however, abandoned to her fate in Vienna when Melitta and the children left for Iceland,
was murdered in 1943 in the collection and transport of Jews who were being sent by
cattle car to the Terezin concentration camp, many of whom subsequently ended in the
gas chambers of Auschwitz. The fate of her mother resonated bitterly with Melitta
for the rest of her life and is the focus of the poem that introduces her poetry in
Fra hjara veraldar. Vom Rand der Welt.
The poems selected for this book were written in her first years in Iceland and reflect
the brutal experiences of the Nazi rise to power and the first years of exile, which
was an unavoidable theme upon arrival for most exiled writers. In Melitta’s writing,
however, this gradually begins to give way more and more frequently to a growing appreciation
of the society that had saved her life, and those of her children, and her gradual
discovery of the new spectacular environment around her. It is hard to think of another
refugee from the Shoah who documented an equivalent reaction in the course of a lifetime
of writing.
Just how many poems she actually wrote in Iceland is impossible to calculate, but
when fifty-one of her poems appeared in this Icelandic book in 2014, no poems by Melitta
Urbancic were in print, although a few had appeared earlier in obscure post-war anthologies
of Austrian literature written in exile. And this is still the case. With regard to
the unpublished poems, Melitta’s third child, Sybil, who now lives in Vienna, has
written to this writer that the selection of Melitta’s poems in the book represents
only a small percentage of the great number of poems written by Melitta that she,
Sybil, possesses in manuscript form.
This selection in
Frá hjara veraldar. Vom Rand der Welt, which was assembled by Melitta but not published at the time, is made up of a dedication
poem, followed by fifty of her poems written in the first years of her stay in Iceland.
It is divided into the earliest ones lamenting the past, followed by slightly later
ones that begin to explore the possibilities of coming to terms with the reality of
her new existence in exile, even beginning to find the possibility of comfort in the
present and future in a new homeland. The dedication poem “Meiner Mutter” deals with
what must have been the most traumatic experience of her journey to Iceland,
the abandonment of her mother who was killed by the forces that the daughter had escaped.
Meiner Mutter
Komm aus deiner Finsternis und Ferne!
Bette meinem Herzen dich zunächst,
dass mit dir den Saft ich keltern lerne,
dessen Süsse erst am Bittern wächst.
Lerne ich doch das Leben erst geniessen,
seit ich ahne, welche Qual dich traf,
seit von diesen Tränen überfliessen
meine Wangen im durchträumten Schlaf.
Weil dein Blut in meinen Adern kreist,
Habe ich mehr als meinen Durst zu stillen -
weil es dir in Todesangst vereist,
hebt sich heisser noch mein Lebenswillen.
Komm ins Licht! Mit meinen heilen Augen
schau für dich den schönen Tag ich neu,
an ihm haftend, dich zurückzusaugen
aus der Nacht, dass er – in mir – dich freu.
Tilgend mit den unverdienten Gnaden
des Alltäglichen die dunkle Schuld,
darf ich meine Kraft für dich beladen,
meins für dein Herz üben im Geduld.
Aus dem Tale steigen schon die Schatten,
Reinste Linien hebt der Berg ins Licht,
das wir beide lang verloren hatten -
Wie es jetzt den Wolkenrand durchbricht,
lass mich nah dich wähnen, deren Ferne
Mir schon hier die Seele schmerzhaft weitet -
weil dein Dunkel sie schon überbreitet,
dass ihr Leuchten deine Nacht besterne!
(117–18)
To My Mother
Come from your distant darkness
Lie down and rest by my heart
Teach me to gather the nectar,
Whose sweetness grows from despair.
Let me relearn the glory of life
While imagining what pain ended yours,
My cheeks still soaked in sorrow
My dreams still drowned in tears.
As your blood flows in my veins
My thirst does not burn alone -
As your will to live froze in fear of death
Let mine return in flames.
Come in the light! Let my clear eyes
Return to you the splendour of day,
Lean on me. Let me draw you back
From the night, to bask in light again.
As the unearned mercy of routine
Slowly dissolves the dark guilt,
May I harness my power for you,
Let my heart beat truly for yours.
The shadows already rise from the valley,
The mountains take shape in the light,
that we both so long ago had lost –
as the light now breaks through the wall of clouds.
let me feel your nearness, whose distance
now painfully stretches my soul,
As the light spreads over the darkness
May its glow bestar your night.
With this poem, that looks backwards and hopes for mercy in the present, she sets
the stage for
Frá hjara veraldar. Vom Rand der Welt, the following fifty poems describing life at the edge. The first half is assembled
under the title
Zwischen Gestern und Morgen [
Between Yesterday and Today] and explores the pain and difficulty of finding a way through a completely alien
setting that had been forced on her for no comprehensible reason. It consists of apparently
simple rhymed poems probing deeply into the complexities of the traumatic experience
shared by many other refugees trying to come to grips with the fact that close friends
or relatives have been murdered while they, almost by chance, have not shared that
fate. One of them, “Vorwurf,” copied below, also asks probing questions about the
ability of language to even express
the essence of the Holocaust.
Vorwurf
Auch heute wollen wieder Lieder keimen
im Herzen, das - trotz allem - überlebt,
wie sich die Flut mit den Gezeiten hebt
und jeden Morgen neu die Kelche seimen.
Ein Laster fast, geübt nur im Geheimen,
seitdem der Geist vor Gram und Grauen bebt:
was soll ihm Wohllaut jetzt noch, wenn er strebt,
im Worte Sinn und Leben mitzureimen?
Wer heute schreibt, während die Brüder bluten,
wer jetzt noch dichten kann, indess die Knuten
der Teufelsknechte in den Tod sie treiben,
färbe die Feder sich mit anderm Saft:
Kräfte zu zeigen aus zerstörter Kraft,
darf sie mit Blut nur oder Samen schreiben!
(141)
Reproach
Let the songs spring to life
in those hearts that – despite all – carry on
May they soothe parched throats
like the rising tide cools the shore.
Like a weight borne only in secret,
since the spirit trembles before pure evil:
What good are beautiful words
When they try to rhyme sense with life?
If you write today, as your brothers bleed,
If you try to make sense of it as the
whips of the devil’s lackeys drive them to their death
colour your ink with a different liquid:
To display power drawn from destroyed strength,
write with blood alone or with semen.
This is a very disturbing presentation of the unfairness of fate and of the overwhelming
self-hatred for having abandoned her mother to a far-worse experience than her own.
The poem’s almost nihilistic comments on the futility of language to describe it come
five years before the presentation of precisely that theme in the much-discussed writings
of Theodor Adorno and others who argued that there should be no poetry after Auschwitz.
Here there is no suggestion that a new environment has in any way replaced the destroyed
world of her past, and Iceland is not even mentioned in what is essentially the exploration
of a dark interior space. The splendour of the Icelandic landscape makes no imprint
on the depiction of life in this new world order, and the city of Reykjavík plays
no real role.
But in the second half of the work, assembled under the rubric
Hier und Heut (
Here and Now), twenty-five poems are presented that show a dramatic shift away from the claustrophobic
interior space and the accompanying psychological withdrawal into depression that
dominates the poems of the often backward-looking earlier poems. In
Hier und Heut, the author begins to wander around and explore her new environment and takes her
own advice to confront the present and consign what happened previously to a desolate
past that must somehow be overcome. After a trip to the north coast of Iceland, songs
of praise to Akureyri and Dalvík appear as well as a lament that she must leave the
beauty of northern Iceland.
Abschied von Akureyri
Jetzt weht schon der Abschiedswind
durch Gras und Blätter,
Der wandelt auch geschwind
das gute Wetter.
Noch einmal will ich gehn
auf Gartenwegen,
die Hänge leuchten sehn
dem Meer entgegen –
Noch einmal, liebe Stadt,
Dir danken, du,
Die mich bezaubert hat
Im seligen Nu.
Wie war’n die Tage schön - !
Schnell wird mein Schritt.
Ich nehm den Glanz der Höh’n
Im Herzen mit!
(174)
Farewell to Akureyri
The farewell wind already blows
through grass and leaves.
It will soon drive away
the good weather
Once again I’ll take
the garden paths
to see the shining cliffs
leaning towards the sea
Once again, dear city,
I give my thanks to you
who took me in its spell
in the here and now.
How splendid were the days –
My stride quickens.
I take the brilliance of the heights
with me in my heart!
It is not only the geographical space that has altered dramatically but the psychological
one as well. As the landscape opens up, so too does her view of her potential home
as a world worth exploring. But anyone looking for breakthrough modernist works, or
even modernist tendencies in post-war poetry, will not find that in the poems of Melitta
Urbancic.
The complexities and the failures of language itself that drive the poetry of the
most famous of the poets attempting to describe the Holocaust, Paul Celan, do not
gradually enter into Melitta’s poetry. Celan employed a voice in the 1950s that produced
the most familiar and iconic poem about the fate of the European Jews in the war,
“Todesfuge,” a poem whose thundering words are crystal-clear on the question of right
and wrong
and whose unrelenting rhythm can have almost a martial feel to it. By the mid-1960s,
however, that voice was disappearing into something that at times suggests a near-silence
of fragmented words and potential sentences that end in silence. Linguistic signs,
sometimes almost without interpretable syntactic context, are given the assignment
of portraying a fractured universe that also was more and more applied to his own
life in Parisian exile. Celan, whose mother, like Melitta’s, was murdered in the Holocaust
while her child, Paul, survived, eventually found his post-war exile life in Paris
so unbearable that he committed suicide when he was only fifty. That world had become
a shattered and fragmented one by 1970 for Celan, and the poetry he wrote in the last
decade of his life reflected this shattered world through fragmented language, a stylistic
choice completely foreign to the poetry of Melitta Urbancic.
The poems in Frá hjara veraldar. Vom Rand der Welt, employ the almost folksy traditional style of rhymed verse. Although not every poem
is rhymed, these poems, like those of other authors living in exile at the time, deal
with the past with very simple poetic weapons rather than complex structures. This
was true of authors as different as Melitta Urbancic, Heinz Politzer, Theodor Kramer,
and even Georg Kreisler.
These four very different authors share some basic characteristics. They all write
in the same form about very complicated and life-altering issues. They were all born
in fin-de-siécle Austria, and they spent the war years in exile far from home, forced
to leave with very few possessions. If they had not escaped in time, they would probably
have shared the fate of many relatives in the Nazi gas chambers. Politzer went to
Palestine before moving on to an eminent academic career in the USA. Kramer was incarcerated
as an enemy alien behind barbwire fences on the Isle of Man and later lived in London.
Kreisler was in the United States, even serving as a US soldier, before he returned
to become a cabaret star in Vienna. And Melitta Urbancic was in Reykjavík. For all
of them it was a long and difficult way back to post-war Vienna, but in a physical
and psychological sense, Melitta may well have been the furthest away of them all.
Below are some opening stanzas of poetry by each of them that reflect on the consequences
of their suffering in the war.
Melitta Urbancic
Heimatrecht
Warum muss ich glauben ,
dass zuhaus ich bin
hier -- nach so viel tauben
Tagen ohne Sinn - ?
Schonungslosen Nächten
ohne Dunkelheit -
Dasein wie von Knechten
fremd und unbefreit -
(Urbancic 149)
Homeland Rights
Why must I believe
that this is now my home –
after so many silent
meaningless days –
pitiless nights
without darkness
Slavelike existence
foreign and schackled -
Heinz Politzer
Auf die deutsche Sprache im Jahre 1943
Oh Sprache, einst ein heilger Schrein,
Da Klang und Sinn sich streng verschränkt,
Gefäss, von Traum erfüllt und Wein,
Handharfe, in die Nacht verhängt,
(Politzer 74)
To the German Language in 1943
Oh language once a holy shrine
where sound and meaning interlocked
Vessel filled with dream and wine
Lyre played against the night
Theodor Kramer
Über den Stacheldraht
Wir standen hinterm Gittertor
—wie war der Abend blau und klar!—
scharf schob der Stacheldraht sich vor
und wehrte unsrer kleinen Schar;
erst summte wer für sich allein,
wir andern fielen lauter ein.
Wie war der Abend blau und klar!
(Kramer 68)
Beyond the Barbed Wire
We stood behind the wrought-iron gate
—how blue and clear the evening sky!—
the sharp barbed wire would be its fate
if to escape this small group should try
first humming solo, milling about,
then all of us joined in aloud.
How blue and clear the evening sky!
(Translation by Frederic Brainin and Jörg Thunecke, see Kramer 69)
Georg Kreisler
Nichtarische Arien - Ich fühl mich nicht zu Hause
Ich war bei meiner Schwester in Berlin.
Sie will ich soll auf immer zu ihr ziehn.
Ihr Mann ist jetzt gestorben, ein Schlemihl.
und hat ihr hinterlassen viel zu viel.
Sie hat a Wohnung, da ist alles drin.
Sie kennt die allerbesten Leut.
Doch ich sprach: Schwester wenn ich ehrlich bin,
mir macht das Leben hier ka Freud.
Ich fühl mich nicht zu Hause, zu Hause, zu Hause
(Kreisler 57)
Non-Aryan Arias - I’ll never feel at home here
I visited my sister in Berlin
She says that I should stay and move right in
Her husband’s kicked the bucket, a schlemiel,
and she got several million, what a deal
She has a villa – it is filled with stuff.
She hangs out with the upper crust.
But I said, “Sister, I’ve just had enough
This life just fills me with disgust.”
I’ll never feel at home here, at home here, at home here
What is striking about these poems is that they portray the complicated wartime experiences
of refugees—incarceration, loneliness, language loss—and employ simple rhymed verse
to do it, as if that would strip experiences to the bone. If you do this wrong, you
write doggerel about events that determined life and death. And much of that has in
fact been written. But this almost child-like poetic form is being used successfully,
even movingly, in works by the authors discussed here, to convey the very threatening
situations they had experienced. They all took great risks in escaping from central
European homelands and landing far from home. There was not only the loss of homeland
but also of the freedom they had known in their formative years, and there was the
potential survival of anti-Semitism despite everything, making it difficult for them
to feel at home anywhere. And in all of them, the simplicity of the rhyming scheme
seems to have been felt to be the most moving way to deal in literary form with the
disaster, while at the same time adding depth and accessibility to the complexity
of the issue.
All of Melitta’s poems are written like this, and when brought together in Frá hjara veraldar. Vom Rand der Welt, she creates in minimalistic form a large powerful version of the monumental story
of the destruction of the European Jews and of the difficulties that confronted those
who were lucky enough to escape as they tried to find a home elsewhere. Iceland may
play only a small role in the epic story, but it deserves to be remembered when focusing
on the big picture that dominates the stories of exile by Jewish refugees from Nazism
when they landed on foreign shores. Very few environments were as alien at first as
Iceland was for Melitta Urbancic. Her life as it moved from despair to acceptance
to great satisfaction in a new homeland and her forty-year recording of it in poetry
remained virtually unknown over all the decades. It is one that deserves a place in
the literary history of the Holocaust. And the role that Iceland played in it also
should find a modest place in the discussion.