BOOKS
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what some have called a move toward "normalization," would have been
unthinkable.
To proclaim the beginning of a Jewish renaissance in Germany, as a
special issue of
Der Spiegel
did in 1992, is perhaps a bit overly optimistic.
The size of the Jewish population doubled between 1990 and 1996 (from
thirty thousand to approximately sixty thousand), and there are some esti–
mates that it will top one hundred thousand by the turn of the century.
According to Brenner, Germany is currently "the only European country
showing a steady increase in its Jewish population." The question of a true
" renaissance," however, is rather premature. It still remains unclear if and
when the Jewish community in today's Germany will be able to recognize
itself among the other "normal" communities of world Jewry.
And
yet,
what Brenner's meticulously researched and forcefully argued book makes
abundantly clear is that the future ofJewish life in Germany will not be a
"Germany without Jews."
NOAH ISENBERG
Fi tting Vision to the Dark
FLIGHT AMONG THE T OMBS . By Anthony Hecht. Alfred Knopf. $23.00
DESERT FATHERS,
U RANIUM
DAUGHTERS. By Debora Greger.
Penguin. $14.95
DESIRE. By Fr ank Bidart. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $20.00
Each of these poets fashions forms of extremity and forms of candor. The
forms are often hard-won; poets have to steal back for themselves even
what's given them by the world. Yet the work keeps the power of surprise.
One senses in these poems, so filled with the dead, "the quickened surface
of the page."
The title of Anthony Hecht's
Flight Among the Tombs
might herald a
book of elegies. Its second half does offer spare, eloquent poems of mourn–
ing for James Merrill and Joseph Brodsky. But the breathtaking sequence
that dominates the book, "The Presumptions of Death," has little typical–
ly elegiac about it. It is ferociously about life rather than death. It is about
the postures of death
in
life, voices of death that cannot be killed. The
scrupulous rage and inventiveness of Hecht's making display themselves in
all of their force here.
Death speaks in each poem from behind a mask. In the early poems of
the sequence, it assumes a style suited to a sly satirist of human vanity-
