Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Renowned writer, Franz Kafka, speaking about his close friend, the blind author and journalist Oskar Baum stated that Baum's publications on the sightless show that "he is able to peer insightfully into the rays of their soul." The noted author Stefan Zweig believed that Baum's books represented "the most captivating documents in German of a life without light." Despite these accolades, almost nothing by Baum has been translated into English. It is this scarcity of translations which prompted me to start making Baum's work available to an English-reading public. It is my hope that the translation of "Riffraff," originally published in 1919, will be just a modest first step in the challenging task of bringing Baum' s writings to a wider audience.
 
   Oskar Baum was born on January 21, 1883 in Pilsen (today it is Plzen, a city in the Czech Republic). He was the sixth child in the family of a well-to-do draper, Jacob Baum. During his early years, he showed great promise as a student at Pilsen's German elementary school. However, his regular studies were interrupted prematurely at the age of eleven when he was attacked by a gang of Czech adolescents for being a German-speaking Jew: in this scuffle, pieces of broken glass got into Baum's eyes and deprived the already weak-sighted boy of eyesight completely. Baum was then sent to the Viennese Institute for the Blind, which was to be his residence for the next eight years.

   After successfully passing his piano and organ examinations, he left the institute and went to live in Prague. Here, in 1902, he obtained work as an organist at the Jubilee Synagogue on Jerusalem Street, which is still a functioning house of worship. In 1922 Baum was able to supplement his income, and gain even greater attention by obtaining the influential position of music critic for the leading German-language newspaper in Prague - The Prager Press. This was a job he kept until 1939 when German troops invaded Czechoslovakia, and the Nazi regime shut down all independent presses.

   As much as Baum enjoyed music, his love for literature, and particularly fiction, was just as great. He acted on this passion by making it a lifetime project to compose works about the blind. He also decided that the subjects in his novels and stories should be based on the sightless individuals whom he met when he first moved to Prague.

   Baum's writings on the blind were an immediate success with both readers and critics, but even more gratifying for the author was the continuing positive response that his work enjoyed over the next three decades. This sustained praise resulted in Baum being awarded the Czechoslovak State Prize for German Literature in 1932. In 1941 Baum, like almost all Jews in Prague, was scheduled to be deported to the Terezin concentration camp. However, he was spared this fate, owing to an unsuccessful stomach operation which led to his death on March 1, 1941.

   Baum's writings about the blind, including his story "Riffraff," were very much in the literary tradition of "realism" (a perspective which could claim such luminaries as Dostoevsky and Zola). Baum's goal was to give readers an insight into the life of the blind, based on the everyday problems encountered by the sightless individuals whom he knew. The object of his writings was not to have a clever plot, or to arouse pity in his readers' minds, but, rather, to make people think about and understand the meaning of events in the daily lives of Prague's sightless population. Baum accomplished this goal in works like "Riffraff' by describing actual incidents that were experienced by ordinary persons whose one great difference from other ordinary citizens of Prague was that they happened to be blind.

   "Riffraff' is a translation of the story "Gesindel." Baum originally wrote this piece in 1908, and it was published in the magazine Das freie woft (The Free Word) in 1919.