Writing Problems: "Writers are all secret Jews"

Celan, Kumin, Arendt, Kunitz, Meyers, Grossman

Paul Celan:

There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Maxine Kumin:

Writers are all secret Jews.

Maxine Kumin’s 1975 statement “Writers are all secret Jews” may seem arch and idiosyncratic, but she was talking about something real. She was drawing our attention to a…