Margalit Fox

Her death, at Montefiore Medical Center, was announced by her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. A spokeswoman said the cause was complications of pneumonia. Morrison lived in Grand View-on-Hudson, New York.

The first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Morrison was the author of 11 novels as well as children’s books and essay collections. Among them were celebrated works like “Song of Solomon,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and “Beloved,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Morrison was one of the rare American authors whose books were both critical and commercial successes. Her novels appeared regularly on The New York Times bestseller list, were featured multiple times on Oprah Winfrey’s television book club and were the subject of myriad critical studies. A longtime faculty member at Princeton University, Morrison lectured widely and was seen often on television.

In awarding her the Nobel, the Swedish Academy cited her “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

Morrison animated that reality in a style resembling that of no other writer in English. Her prose, often luminous and incantatory, rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act.

Her narratives mingle the voices of men, women, children and even ghosts in layered polyphony. Myth, magic and superstition are inextricably intertwined with everyday verities, a technique that caused Morrison’s novels to be likened often to those of Latin American magic realist writers like Gabriel García Márquez.

In “Sula,” a woman blithely lets a train run over her leg for the insurance money it will give her family. In “Song of Solomon,” a baby girl is named Pilate by her father, who “had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome.” In “Beloved,” the specter of a murdered child takes up residence in the house of her murderer.

Throughout Morrison’s work, elements like these coalesce around her abiding concern with slavery and its legacy. In her fiction, the past is often manifest in a harrowing present — a world of alcoholism, rape, incest and murder, recounted in unflinching detail.

It is a world, Morrison writes in “Beloved” (the novel is set in the 19th century but stands as a metaphor for the 20th), in which “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind.”

“Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you,” she goes on. “Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.”

But as Morrison’s writing also makes clear, the past is just as strongly manifest in the bonds of family, community and race — bonds that let culture, identity and a sense of belonging be transmitted from parents to children to grandchildren. These generational links, her work unfailingly suggests, form the only salutary chains in human experience.

“She is a friend of my mind,” a character in “Beloved,” a former slave, thinks about the woman he loves. “She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

A First Doomed Heroine

Morrison’s singular approach to narrative is evident in her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” written in stolen moments between her day job as a book editor and her life as the single mother of two young sons. Published in 1970, it is narrated by Claudia McTeer, a black girl in Ohio, who with her sister, Frieda, is the product of a strict but loving home.

The novel’s doomed heroine is their friend Pecola Breedlove, who at 11, growing up in an America inundated with images of Shirley Temple and Dick and Jane, believes she is ugly and prays for the one thing she is sure will save her: blue eyes.

In a drunken, savagely misguided attempt to show Pecola she is desirable, her father rapes her, leaving her pregnant. Now an outcast both in the community and within her own fractured family, Pecola descends into madness, believing herself possessed of blue eyes at last.

Reviewing the novel in The New York Times, John Leonard commended Morrison for telling the story “with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.”

The novel prefigures much of Morrison’s later work in its preoccupation with history — often painful — as seen through the lens of an individual life; with characters’ quests, tragic or successful, for their place in the world; with the redemptive power of community; and with the role women play in the survival of such communities.

Morrison explored these themes even more overtly in her second novel, “Sula” (1973), about the return of a young woman, now a scandalous temptress, to her Midwestern hometown and the ostracism she confronts there, and in her third, “Song of Solomon” (1977), the book that cemented her reputation.

That book, Morrison’s first to feature a male protagonist, centers on the journey, literal and spiritual, of a young Michigan man, Macon Dead III.

Macon is known familiarly as Milkman, a bitter nickname stemming from the widespread knowledge that his unhappy, neurasthenic mother, “the daughter of the richest Negro doctor in town,” breast-fed him long past babyhood. (In “Song of Solomon” as in “Sula,” Morrison depicts black bourgeois life as one of arid atomization.)

The novel chronicles Milkman’s journey through rural Pennsylvania, a trip nominally undertaken to recover a cache of gold said to have belonged to his family, but ultimately a voyage in pursuit of self.

“Song of Solomon” was chosen as a main selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black author to be so honored since Richard Wright’s “Native Son” in 1940.

‘Beloved’: Her Masterwork

Morrison published “Beloved,” widely considered her masterwork, in 1987. The first of her novels to have an overtly historical setting, the book — rooted in a real 19th-century tragedy — unfolds about a decade after the end of the Civil War.

Before the war, Sethe, a slave, had escaped from the Kentucky plantation on which she worked and crossed the Ohio River to Cincinnati. She also spirited out her baby daughter, not yet 2.

“Sethe had twenty-eight days — the travel of one whole moon — of unslaved life,” Morrison wrote. “From the pure clear stream of spit that the little girl dribbled into her face to her oily blood was twenty-eight days. Days of healing, ease and real- talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better. One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day.”

Then a slave catcher tracks Sethe down. Cornered, she cuts her daughter’s throat rather than see her returned to a life of degradation.

Eighteen years pass. Sethe has been saved from the gallows by white Abolitionists and is later freed from jail with their help. She has resumed her life in Cincinnati with her surviving daughter, Denver, with whom she was pregnant when she fled Kentucky.

One day, a strange, nearly silent young woman a little older than Denver materializes at their door. Known only as Beloved, she moves into the house and insinuates herself into every facet of their existence.

“Beloved, she my daughter,” Sethe realizes in a stream-of-consciousness monologue toward the end of the book. “She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be.”

Widely acclaimed by book critics, “Beloved” was made into a 1998 feature film directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Winfrey.

For mid-20th-century readers, one of the most striking things about Morrison’s work was that it delineates a world in which white people are largely absent, a relatively rare thing in fiction of the period.

What was more, the milieu of her books, typically small-town and Midwestern, “offers an escape from stereotyped black settings,” as she said in an interview in “Conversations With Toni Morrison” (1994; edited by Danielle Taylor-Guthrie), adding, “It is neither plantation nor ghetto.”

Ohio-Born

It was in just such a setting that Morrison herself was reared. The daughter of George Wofford and Ella Ramah (Willis) Wofford, she was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on Feb. 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, an integrated working-class community about 30 miles west of Cleveland.

George Wofford was a shipyard welder who took such pride in his work that, according to many accounts of Morrison’s life, when he finished a perfect seam he would write his initials on it, where they endured, unseen, in the skeleton of the ship.

Young Chloe grew up in a house suffused with narrative and superstition. She adored listening to ghost stories; her grandmother ritually consulted a book on dream interpretation, from which she divined the day’s selections when she played the numbers.

At 12, Chloe joined the Roman Catholic Church. She took the baptismal name Anthony, becoming known as Chloe Anthony Wofford.

That name would be the seed from which her nickname would spring a few years later, when she was an undergraduate at Howard University in Washington. She began calling herself Toni then, she said, because her classmates found the name Chloe bewildering.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Howard with a major in English and a minor in classics in 1953, she earned a master’s in English from Cornell in 1955. She taught English for two years at Texas Southern University, a historically black institution in Houston, before returning to Howard as a faculty member.

There, she joined a fiction workshop and began writing in earnest. Required to bring a sample to a workshop meeting, she began work on a story about a black girl who craves blue eyes — the kernel of her first novel.

In 1958, she married Harold Morrison, an architect from Jamaica; they were divorced in 1964. In interviews, Morrison rarely spoke of the marriage, though she intimated that her husband had wanted a traditional 1950s wife — and that, she could never be.

After her divorce, Morrison moved with her sons to Syracuse, New York, where she took a job as an editor with a textbook division of Random House. A stranger in the city, she found herself achingly lonely. In the interstices between work and motherhood, she began turning her short story into “The Bluest Eye.”

In the late 1960s, Morrison moved to New York City and took an editorial position with Random House’s trade-book division. Over the nearly two decades she held the post, her authors included Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and Muhammad Ali.

“I look very hard for black fiction because I want to participate in developing a canon of black work,” Morrison said in an interview quoted in The Dictionary of Literary Biography. “We’ve had the first rush of black entertainment, where blacks were writing for whites, and whites were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now we can get down to the craft of writing, where black people are talking to black people.”

One of the nonfiction projects on which she worked at Random House was “The Black Book,” published in 1974. Compiled by Morrison, the volume is a lavishly illustrated scrapbook spanning three centuries of African American history, reproducing newspaper clippings, photographs, advertisements, handbills and the like.

Researching the book, Morrison came across a 19th-century article about a fugitive slave named Margaret Garner who, on the point of recapture near Cincinnati, killed her infant daughter. More than a decade after “The Black Book” appeared, the story would become the armature of “Beloved.”

A Letter and a Prize

Critical response to “Beloved” was overwhelmingly positive, though not uniformly so. In a corrosive review in The New Republic, African American critic Stanley Crouch called it “a blackface holocaust novel,” adding: “The world exists in a purple haze of overstatement, of false voices, of strained homilies; nothing very subtle is ever really tried. ‘Beloved’ reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries.”

But the preponderance of opinion was on the other side. In January 1988, in the wake of the novel’s publication, The Times Book Review published an open letter signed by two dozen black writers, among them Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Arnold Rampersad and Alice Walker, lauding Morrison and protesting the fact that she had “yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize.”

“Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize that April. In 2006, after polling hundreds of writers, editors and critics, The Book Review named the novel the best American work of fiction of the previous quarter-century.

Morrison’s fourth novel, “Tar Baby” (1981), deals explicitly with issues of racial and class prejudice among black people. Set on a Caribbean island, it chronicles the love affair of a cosmopolitan, European-educated black woman with a rough-and-tumble local man.

Her other novels include “Jazz” (1992), set in 1920s New York; “A Mercy” (2008), which divorces the institution of slavery from ideas of race by setting the narrative in the 17th century, where servitude, black or white, was apt to be determined by class; and “Home” (2012), about a black Korean War veteran’s struggles on returning to the Jim Crow South.

Morrison’s volumes of nonfiction include “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992) and “What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction” (2008, edited by Carolyn C. Denard).

She wrote the libretto for “Margaret Garner,” an opera by Richard Danielpour that received its world premiere at the Detroit Opera House in 2005 with the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves in the title role.

Morrison is survived by her son Harold Ford Morrison and three grandchildren. Another son, Slade, with whom she collaborated on the texts of many books for children, died in 2010.

Her other laurels include the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented in 2012 by President Barack Obama. The Toni Morrison Society, devoted to the study of her life and work, was founded in 1993.

If there is a unifying thread running through Morrison’s writing, it is perhaps nowhere more vivid than in “Song of Solomon.” At novel’s end, after his odyssey through his ancestral past, Milkman has attained the knowledge that lets him situate himself within his family, the larger community and black America.

And with that, on the book’s final page, he leaps into the air, taking symbolic flight over a world in which he has found his place at last.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html" id="4e17fb8a-fecc-322f-ae2e-21fd0643c9ef">The New York Times</a>.

Toni Morrison, Towering Novelist of the Black Experience, Dies at 88

Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobel laureate in literature, whose acclaimed, best-selling work explored black identity in America and in particular the experience of black women, died Monday in New York City. She was 88.

His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for his publisher, Copper Canyon Press.

Merwin was one of the most highly decorated poets in the nation, and very likely the world. He was the U.S. poet laureate from 2010 to 2011; won two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award and a spate of other honors; and was lauded for his volumes of prose and translations of poetry from a Babel of languages.

He was also one of the most prolific poets of his generation, his work appearing often in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and elsewhere. After the release of his first collection, when he was in his mid-20s, he went on to publish nearly three dozen volumes of poetry, along with essays, short fiction, memoirs and translations of Dante, Pablo Neruda, Osip Mandelstam and other poets.

In later years Merwin was equally known for his work as a conservationist — in particular for his painstaking restoration of depleted flora, including hundreds of species of palm, on the remote former pineapple plantation in Hawaii where he made his home. He had lived there, in blissful near-solitude, since the 1970s, refusing to answer the telephone.

Merwin’s ardor for the natural world took frequent root in his poetry. But while for many poets nature begets odes, for him it was far more likely to inspire elegies. In “For a Coming Extinction,” part of his acclaimed 1967 verse collection, “The Lice,” he wrote:

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand

And I could say it

One must always pretend something

Among the dying

When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks

Empty of you

Tell him that we were made

On another day

Stylistically, Merwin’s mature work was known for metrical promiscuity; stark, sometimes epigrammatic language; and the frequent use of enjambment — the poetic device in which a phrase breaks over two consecutive lines, without intervening punctuation.

“It is as though the voice filters up to the reader like echoes from a very deep well, and yet it strikes his ear with a raw energy," poet and critic Laurence Lieberman wrote, discussing “The Lice,” a collection whose bitter contents were widely understood as a denunciation of the Vietnam War. He added:

“The poems must be read very slowly, since most of their uncanny power is hidden in overtones that must be listened for in silences between lines, and still stranger silences within lines.”

The themes that preoccupied Merwin most keenly were those that haunt nearly every poet: the earth, the sea and their myriad creatures; the cycle of the seasons; myth and spirituality (he was a practicing Buddhist); personal history and memory; and, above all, life and its damnable evanescence.

Yet there was about his work an intensity of purpose — heightened by a formal style not quite like anyone else’s — that, his champions maintained, gave it a fervor often described as oracular. A “post-Presbyterian Zen poet and channeler of ancient paradoxes,” The Los Angeles Times called him in 2007.

Some critics indicted Merwin’s later work for trafficking in a level of abstraction bordering on the obscure. It was rendered even less accessible, they complained, by the fact that by the late 1960s he had jettisoned punctuation almost entirely.

— Weight of Childhood

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on Sept. 30, 1927.

His mother had been orphaned very young. She later lost her brother and her first child, Merwin’s older brother, who died shortly after birth.

The weight of those losses, Merwin said long afterward, pervaded every aspect of the family culture.

Young William was reared in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his father, a Presbyterian minister, preached. Besotted with language from a very young age, he wrote his first verse, hymns for his father’s congregation, at 5.

To their son’s early dismay, his parents were possessed of incurious minds and unpoetic souls.

Worse still, the elder Merwin was capricious and cold.

“During my early childhood he had been distant, unpredictable and harsh,” Merwin wrote in his memoir “Summer Doorways” (2005).

Small wonder, perhaps, that the son grew up to become an explorer of absence and a repairer of dissolution and ruin — on his Hawaiian homestead; of a derelict stone farmhouse in southwest France, where he lived at midcentury with his second wife, Dido Milroy; and, to the extent that the medium affords such redress, in poetry.

At 16, Merwin entered Princeton on a scholarship. There he began to read and write poetry in earnest, studying with poet and critic R.P. Blackmur and his teaching assistant, a young poet named John Berryman.

At 17, during World War II, Merwin enlisted in the Navy but realized immediately that he had “made a terrible mistake,” as he told NPR in 2008. A pacifist, he declared himself a conscientious objector and was consigned for about a year to the psychiatric ward of a Boston naval hospital.

Returning to Princeton, he received his bachelor’s degree in 1948; married his first wife, Dorothy Jeanne Ferry; and stayed on to do graduate work in Romance languages.

Needing gainful employment, Merwin decamped with his wife for Europe, where he worked as a tutor to the children of the rich and famous.

He moved on to London, where he worked as a translator. After his marriage to Ferry ended in divorce, he wed Milroy, a ferocious, proprietary Englishwoman 15 years his senior, with whom he collaborated on a verse play.

Returning to the United States, he served as a poet in residence at the Poets’ Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and fell in with the cohort of Boston-area poets around Robert Lowell.

Merwin and his wife returned to Europe. He reprised their time there in “The Lost Upland” (1992), a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories.

By the late 1960s, the couple had separated — they would later divorce — and Merwin, now an established poet, had moved to New York. In his mature style, the diffuse mythic imagery of his earlier work is supplanted by harder-edged invocations of the here and now. The meter is faster and looser, and, stripped of punctuation and most capitalization, his lines hurtle with sheer oral abandon.

Merwin received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for his collection “The Carrier of Ladders.” The volume epitomized his concern with absence.

“Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine,” a poem from the collection, “Now It Is Clear,” begins:

no roots are mine

that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest

and the forest will know it

we will both know it.

Merwin publicly announced his intention to donate the thousand-dollar Pulitzer award to anti-war causes.

He married Paula Schwartz in 1983.

Merwin won a National Book Award in 2005 for “Migration: New and Selected Poems” and his second Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for “The Shadow of Sirius."

Merwin’s other laurels include the inaugural Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets; the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale; the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation; and the PEN Translation Prize.

Merwin’s wife died in 2017. He is survived by two stepsons, Matthew Carlos Schwartz and novelist John Burnham Schwartz; two grandchildren; and a sister, Ruth Moser.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/obituaries/w-s-merwin-dead-poet-laureate.html" id="16c7b40c-bf71-313d-afea-074a6efaa049">The New York Times</a>.

W.S. Merwin, Poet of Life's Evanescence, Dies at 91

W.S. Merwin, a formidable American poet who for more than 60 years labored under a formidable poetic yoke: the imperative of using language — an inescapably concrete presence on the printed page — to conjure absence, silence and nothingness, died Friday at his home near Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii. He was 91.

In “Leviathan,” from his 1956 collection, “Green With Beasts,” Merwin evokes the epic verse of old through his strategic use of alliteration, the central organizing principle of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse poetry:

The hulk of him is like hills heaving

Dark, yet as crags of drift-ice, crowns cracking in thunder,

Like land’s self by night black-looming, surf churning and trailing

Along his shores’ rushing, shoal-water boding

About the dark of his jaws; and who should moor at his edge

And fare on afoot would find gates of no gardens,

But the hill of dark underfoot diving,

Closing overhead, the cold deep, and drowning.

Some critics indicted Merwin’s later work for trafficking in a level of abstraction bordering on the obscure. It was rendered even less accessible, they complained, by the fact that by the late 1960s he had jettisoned punctuation almost entirely. (Merwin had his reasons, which spoke to the very heart of his lifelong poetic program.)

— Language Distilled

But most reviewers praised his relentless deployment of poetry as a talisman against the void; the emotional ferocity beneath the cool, polished surface of his lines; and his use of language so pure and immediate that it could attain translucence.

“The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper,” Peter Davison, the longtime poetry editor of The Atlantic, wrote there in 1997. “He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth and underground.”

Though the stylistic hallmarks of Merwin’s work changed appreciably over time, his abiding preoccupations — dissolution, absence, loss — remained nearly constant from the beginning.

This bewildered some early reviewers. Elegiac poetry, they argued, was no fit subject for a man not yet out of his 20s. What, after all, could the young Merwin have to be elegiac about?

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on Sept. 30, 1927. (He chose to be known by his initials at the start of his poetic career: It seemed to him to be, à la Auden and Eliot, what poets did.)

The weight of those losses, Merwin said long afterward, pervaded every aspect of the family culture. As he wrote, making a rare foray into rhyme, in “Testimony,” from his 1999 volume “The River Sound”:

those were her deaths before my day

by that time she could turn to hear

outside the voices on her way

a stillness only partly here

and whatever she would hold dear

giving herself up to its care

she looked beyond it without fear

toward what she felt was waiting there

Young William was reared in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his father, a Presbyterian minister, preached. Besotted with language from a very young age, he wrote his first verse, hymns for his father’s congregation, at 5. (“I was very disappointed that they weren’t used in church,” Merwin told The Paris Review in 1987.)

To their son’s early dismay, his parents were possessed of incurious minds and unpoetic souls. As Merwin wrote in “Native Trees”:

Neither my father nor my mother knew

the names of the trees

where I was born

what is that

I asked and my

father and mother did not

hear they did not look where I pointed

surfaces of furniture held

the attention of their fingers

and across the room they could watch

walls they had forgotten

where there were no questions

no voices and no shade

“During my early childhood he had been distant, unpredictable and harsh,” Merwin wrote in his memoir “Summer Doorways” (2005). “He had punished me fiercely for things I had not known were forbidden, when the list of known restrictions was already long and oppressive. I was told regularly that I loved him, as I was told that I loved God and Jesus, and I did not know at the time that the names for much of my feeling about him were really dread and anger.”

Needing gainful employment — a chronic occupational condition for poets — Merwin decamped with his wife for Europe, where he worked as a tutor to the children of the rich and famous, among them, in Majorca, the son of the poet Robert Graves.

He moved on to London, where he worked as a translator. After his marriage to Ferry ended in divorce, he wed Milroy, a ferocious, proprietary Englishwoman 15 years his senior, with whom he collaborated on a verse play. (“Dido’s ex-husband said she always wanted to own a poet,” Merwin told The New York Times in 1995.)

In 1952, Merwin’s first collection, “A Mask for Janus,” was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. A formative award in the field, the prize was judged in those years by W.H. Auden. The poems in the collection, displaying fairly conventional scansion and suffused with mythic references from Classical tradition, ancient sagas and oral verse, typify Merwin’s early style.

“Where I came by torchlight there is dawn-song,” one work, “Sestina,” begins. It continues:

Leaves remembering, sudden as a name

Recalled from nowhere, remembering morning,

Fresh wind in high grass, cricket on plowshare,

Whisper of stream in the green-shadowed place,

Thrush and tanager keeping season.

Merwin and his wife returned to Europe, eventually settling into the old farmhouse in the Dordogne region. He reprised their time there in “The Lost Upland” (1992), a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories.

— A Mature Poet

“Punctuation basically has to do with prose and the printed word,” he said in the Paris Review interview. “I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page. Since I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word, one step toward that was to do away with punctuation.”

Merwin publicly announced his intention to donate the thousand-dollar Pulitzer award to anti-war causes. That drew censure from Auden, who, in an open letter in The New York Review of Books, said that he considered the politicizing of the award unseemly.

“If I had behaved, in the circumstances, as though I thought that the only permissible response to the award was silence, there would have been real grounds for questioning my respect for those connected with the giving of it. Is it, after all, dishonoring the present distinction to use it to register once again an abhorrence at being swept along, as we are, and most of the time anonymously, in this evil?”

— Hawaii

In the mid-1970s, Merwin went to Hawaii to study with Zen master Robert Aitken. He remained there, purchasing some 19 acres on a remote part of Maui called Haiku — an apt place for a poet if ever there was one — where he set out to create a Walden in the Pacific.

When Merwin bought the property in the late ‘70s, it was distressed and barren. Decades earlier, it had been deforested, overgrazed and then “pinappled," as he described it, forging a verb as perhaps only a poet can — an act of agricultural imperialism that had denuded the land of its native foliage.

He married Paula Schwartz in 1983, and with her he tenderly husbanded the land, planting an effusion of flora. In particular, he planted palms — more than 2,700 trees, representing nearly 500 species, resulting in one of the largest palm collections in the world — their massed common names reading like found poetry.

For one thing, Zadek, who died Thursday at 101, was making her operatic debut: Though she had craved a singing career since she was a girl, working as a nurse and a shoe saleswoman to support her training, Zadek, at 29, had never performed on an opera stage.

For another, she was singing the title role in “Aida,” a part she had learned for the first time only the week before. For a third, Zadek, a German-born soprano, knew no Italian, the language of Verdi’s opera.

But there was an even more urgent reason that she was frightened on that February night in 1947: Zadek, a Jew who had fled Hitler’s Germany for Palestine, was about to step onto the stage of the Vienna State Opera.

Though the war had been over for more than year, the audience for whom she would sing, she later recalled, was an unreconstructed “nest of Nazis.” Peering from behind the curtain, she could see them massed in the opera house, armed with whistles, with which they planned to disrupt her performance.

“Dessa!” — “It is she!” — Radamès, the tenor, sang.

On cue, she began to sing. Her opening lines invoked a war between Ancient Egypt and Ethiopia, Aida’s homeland. But for Zadek, who had fled her own homeland at 16, they had a bitter, highly personal resonance:

Ohimè! Di guerra fremere

L’atroce grido io sento.

Per l’infelice patria,

Per me, per voi pavento.

“Alas! I hear the terrible cry of war,” she sang. “I fear for my country, for myself, for you.”

“At the end even they applauded and were my fans,” Zadek told The Associated Press in 2012. She would be a mainstay of the company for the next 25 years.

Throughout her career, Zadek was praised by critics for her dark-hued voice, dramatic intensity and fine musicality. Before retiring from the stage in 1971, she also sang at the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden and other major houses.

But her primary work was in Vienna. There, in the city she feared would revile her, she sang more than 700 performances in dozens of roles; taught for years at the Vienna Music Academy; presided over the International Hilde Zadek Voice Competition, a prestigious contest for young singers; and, to the end of her life, chose to make her home.

The daughter of Alex Zadek and former Elisabeth Freundlich, Hildegard Zadek was born on Dec. 15, 1917, in Bromberg, then in Prussia.

After World War I, Bromberg was assigned to Poland, where it became Bydgoszcz. In 1920 the family moved to Stettin, then still in the German Empire, where they operated a shoe store. (The city would become Szczecin, Poland, after World War II.)

In 1934, the year after Hitler became chancellor, Hilde happened to overhear a schoolmate remark, “Es stinkt nach Juden” — “It reeks of Jews.”

Sixteen-year-old Hilde knocked out the girl’s front teeth.

Expelled from school, she knew she would have to leave the city or risk arrest. She fled to Berlin, then to Munich and, in 1935, to Haifa, in what was then Palestine.

In Haifa, she took a job in an orphanage, sharing a room with 16 of its children. Moving to Jerusalem, she trained as a pediatric nurse in a hospital run by Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, while studying voice with distinguished soprano Rose Pauly, a Hungarian Jewish refugee.

Zadek’s family remained in Germany. Their store was destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938; Hilde’s father was imprisoned for a time in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used mainly for political prisoners. Zadek, she recalled long afterward, lost all desire to sing.

After her father’s release, the family managed to obtain visas for Palestine, emigrating there in 1939. In Jerusalem, Alex Zadek opened a small shoe store, and Hilda went to work for him.

Margalit Fox

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