Max Blecher and Michael Heim

Max Blecher, born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Romania, contracted tuberculosis of the spine at 19. Despite his illness, he wrote steadily and carried on an intense correspondence with many important intellectuals and philosophers of the time, including André Breton, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger. He died in 1937 at the age of 28, leaving a work of surreal beauty and force, in the vein of Kafka, Proust and Bruno Schulz. His condition, besides his literary genius, might have partially fueled his distinct inclination to minute, in depth observation of the passage of time, and the daily epiphanies of the physical body cocooned by the surrounding space in multiple layers of sensations and emotions. Blecher’s style is alchemical, bringing forth the enthralling quest for a synchronized method of perception of all levels of experience. Under the spell of his writing, objects are brought to life, reality as we know it disintegrates, while the unseen becomes palpable matter, and the reader reaches a deep mindful state of wonder.

Michael Henry Heim (1943-2012) is considered one of America’s greatest literary translators. Working with great Czech, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, French, Italian, German and Dutch authors, he won numerous awards, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and the PEN Translation Prize. He learned Romanian in order to translate Max Blecher and was himself ill while embarking on this process. The quality of the prose of the English translation testifies to a unique bond and rare encounter between two great minds, the writer and the translator.  

"When you read his books it's hard to believe your eyes. The author of this masterpiece was a twenty-five-year-old already weakened by disease, but Blecher's words don't merely describe the objects―they dig their talons into the things and hoist them high." -- Herta Müller

Readings from the heart of Europe: Central and Eastern European Reading Group

OUR MANIFESTO

WHAT?

Wedged by fate between empires, upwards of twenty distinct literary traditions have grown up in the geographic space that extends from the Adriatic to the Baltic and the Black Seas, from the Oder River to the Dnieper, and that is home today to some 190 million people.  Long overshadowed by dominant and domineering imperial neighbors, each tradition has grown out of a cultural, geographic and historical context distinctly its own, yet in fundamental ways similar to those of its Central European neighbors.

The texts featured in Readings from the Heart of Europe are drawn from the among the greatest 20^th and 21^st-century masterpieces of Austria, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine.  The region’s ethnic minorities sustain vital literatures, too, written in Friulian, German, Italian, Kashubian, Lusatian Sorbian, Romani, Russian, Ruthenian, Yiddish and other languages.    

Conceived of by a Seattle-based group of avid readers deeply convinced of the value that literature – storytelling – can bring to our lives, Readings from the Heart of Europe proposes to focus on texts of the highest quality, even if they are not (yet) widely recognized as such in our overwhelmingly Anglo-American-centered society.  Each month’s text will be available in a published English translation.

WHY?

In a world of ever-proliferating, ever-accelerating, artificially driven mass distraction, individuals are at heightened risk of losing their center. 

Reading from the Heart of Europe invites you to join other adventuresome readers in an ongoing series of monthly readings and discussions in which we propose to explore great works of imaginative literature whose unifying purpose is to strengthen that center.  As revitalizing as a strenuous workout, more outwardly directed than meditation, and as deeply satisfying as a reunion with a wise and benevolent old friend, encounters with these exceptional books can change and shape lives.

Reading that is worth the effort takes time.  Every work featured by S.H.E. was written not just to withstand intense scrutiny by inquisitive minds, but to challenge, engage and enrich them.  No summary or retelling of these books can reproduce the process of discovery, recognition and growth that the careful reader can retrace only by reading them.

These books and their writers present few illusions.  Throughout the 20^th century their societies endured the catastrophic consequences of ideologies of the right and the left, emanating from West and East – whether of ethnic and national tribalism or egalitarianism at gunpoint.  Now, in the 21^st century, new and resurgent economic and religious dogmas add new layers of rigidity and polarization for the uncertain to cling to.  What better guides to consult now than the testimonies of some of the world’s most exceptional writers, whose lived experience has given them immunity to ideologies of any stripe, and whose work explores the spectrum of human experience with striking immediacy.

"In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other." – Annie Dillard, "Teaching a Stone to Talk."

WHEN?

We meet on one Saturday late afternoon per month, at a designated location on the UW Seattle campus, to discuss that month’s designated book.  Why then?  We figure that the full day on Saturday gives people time to finish up that month’s book and participate all the more actively in our discussion.  Still, if you haven’t managed to finish that month’s book, don’t let that be an obstacle to attending.

Our inaugural meeting is scheduled for Saturday, May 18, beginning at 5:30pm in Odegaard Undergraduate Library, room 220, on the UW Seattle main campus.  The door to room 220 will open at 5:00.

Afterwards, you’ll still have time to head out for supper and a concert, a play or other event.  What better way to spend a Saturday?

WHO?

Anyone interested in great literature, in expanding their literary repertory, in exploring other cultures and, particularly, Central and Eastern European cultures through the printed word, and in sharing their impressions with similarly motivated readers.

We particularly hope that readers from the many Central and Eastern European-American communities represented in the Seattle area will take an interest in our group and join in, discovering the differences but, still more, commonalities that the literature of their heritage shares with the literatures of their Central and Eastern European neighbors.