Lisel Mueller came to America as a young girl after her family was forced to flee the Nazis. English was her second language; she managed to master it well enough to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1997. She died in her adopted city of Chicago yesterday at the age of 96.
"Lisel Mueller fled Germany at 15 and came to America, where she wrote in her poem “Curriculum Vitae”:
“In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually
I caught up with them.”
She caught up and more, using her “new language” to craft ravishing poems in English that would win her the Pulitzer Prize and many other literary awards.
“I think it is the poet’s job to find the unconscious spring that unites all people,” she once told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Ms. Mueller, who was living at the Admiral at the Lake retirement home, died Friday of aftereffects of pneumonia, according to her daughter Jenny. She was 96.
“She’s a classic American immigrant success story,” her daughter said, “and also the classic story not just of immigrant success but also of refugee contribution to this country’s culture.”"
Here is her 1992 autobiographical poem Curriculum Vitae in its entirety:
Lisel Mueller – 1924-20201) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea. 2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this. 3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws. 4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in. 5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth. 6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away. 7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes. 8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets. 9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence. 10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness. 11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them. 12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love. 13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. The daughter became a mother of daughters. 14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present. 15) Years and years of this. 16) The children no longer children. An old man's pain, an old man's loneliness. 17) And then my father too disappeared. 18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood, but it was closed to the public. 19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone's face was younger than mine. 20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.
