Remembering Samuel Menashe

The Villager says farewell to poet Samuel Menashe, who died last month in New York City:

For more than 50 years, Menashe lived in a small three-room railroad flat on the fifth floor of a Thompson St. walk-up with a bathtub in the kitchen.

“When we’d run into him in the street he’d often recite a poem — they were all short,” recalled Julie Salamon, a neighbor, who with her husband, Bill Abrams, had been friends of Samuel Menashe for 35 years.

Menashe, whose first published poem appeared in a 1956 issue of the Yale Review, received the Neglected Masters Award in 2004.

[Menashe] was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, where his father ran a laundry and dry-cleaning business. He graduated from Townsend Harris High School at 16, and enrolled in Queens College to study biochemistry. But he enlisted in the Army at age 18 in 1943. As an infantryman, he fought and slogged through France, Belgium and Germany.

In a 2003 article that Salamon wrote for The New York Times about Menashe, he recalled a day during the Battle of the Bulge when his company started the morning with 190 men and was left with only 29 by evening. The rest were dead, wounded or taken prisoner.

Menashe was 20 when the war ended. He returned to Queens College, but left without a degree and went to Europe, where he earned a degree from the Sorbonne in 1950. He started writing stories based on his Army experiences and his childhood. But, he recalled, “One night I woke up in the middle of the night and a poem started,” as he told a National Public Radio interviewer in 2006.

Find the full article here, an interview with Menashe here, and supplementary reading over here, here and here!