Fay Zwicky
Encyclopedia
Fay Zwicky is a contemporary Australian poet
, short-story writer, critic
and academic primarily known for her autobiographical poem Kaddish which deals with her identity as a Jewish writer.
in 1950, receiving her Bachelor of Arts
in 1954. Descended from European Jews, she described herself as an “outsider” (“I was ashamed of my foreign interloper status”) from an “Anglo-Saxon
dominated” Australian culture. She began publishing poetry as an undergraduate, thereafter working as a musician, extensively touring Europe, America and South-East Asia between 1955 and 1965.
She settled in Perth
with her Dutch husband Karl Zwicky (the two married in 1957) and two children (one son, one daughter) and returned to literature working primarily as a Senior Lecturer
in American and comparative literature
at the University of Western Australia
until her retirement in 1987. From 1978 till 1981 she also a was member of the literature board of the Australia Council
in Sydney
. Since her retirement she concentrated on her writing which won her international recognition.
In 1990 Zwicky married her second husband James Mackie who died some years later. She leads a very reclusive life in Perth: “I never expect anything. I always think I'm drifting along and nobody knows I'm here, and it's great.” In 2004 Fay Zwicky was declared a Western Australia
n “Living Treasure”, a term she calls “most repulsive”.
praised Zwicky as “one of Australia's most original and accomplished poets”. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English describes her style as "densely textured but elegant and direct".
Zwicky's first collection, Isaac Babel's Fiddle (1975) includes a number of poems about her Russian grandfather and his cultural displacement in Australia which nevertheless saved him from the Holocaust (“Summer Pogrom”, “Totem and Taboo”). Zwicky also writes of her own alienation, in spite of her being “whiter than Persil
”.
The title poem of her most-admired collection, Kaddish (1982), is an elegy
for father who drowned in the Tasman Sea
without the Kaddish
being recited for him. In her poem Zwicky uses the Aramaic phrases of the traditional prayer of mourning to frame her own memorial prayer detailing her complex relationship with her father. She draws on the Haggadah, the Passover Seder
night liturgy. Kaddish” also uses the Lord’s Prayer and invokes God in female form as a goddess. Ivor Indyk
describes Kaddish as “a mosaic of textual citations, of the Kaddish, the Passover Haggadah and numerous allusions to myth and nursery rhyme.”
Ask Me, Zwicky’s third book of poetry, contains poems on China, America, and a series of religious poems on the deities of the Hindu
pantheon
(“Ganesh”, “Vishnu”, “Siva”, and the goddess “Devi”). In Zwicky's subsequent books she develops a sparser style of poetry. In the title poem of The Gatekeeper’s Wife Zwicky, now a widow, writes of the devastating loss of her husband, and recalls the Jewish custom of lighting a memorial candle. In “Losing Track” the death of her husband is likened to the tragic Jewish loss of Zion
. The collection includes an elegy, “Banksia Blechifolia”, for Primo Levi
, and “Groundswell for Ginsberg”, an homage to Allen Ginsberg
.
Her most recent collection of poems, Picnic, published in 2006, gathers primarily poems about the nature of poetry and the poet's role in the world. Aside from her poetry Zwicky has published a collection of short stories, Hostages, in 1983, and a collection of essays on literature and survival, The Lyre in the Pawnshop, in 1986. In her essays Zwicky traces the ways in which the construction of an Australian literature has served to marginalize minority writers and women. She discusses the absence, until very recently, of any place for a Jewish writer in Australian literature: “Living and growing up in this country has been an exercise in repression”.
Reviews
Poems
Essays and Interviews
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, short-story writer, critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
and academic primarily known for her autobiographical poem Kaddish which deals with her identity as a Jewish writer.
Life
Born Julia Fay Rosefield, Fay Zwicky grew up in suburban Melbourne. Her family was fourth generation Australian, her father a doctor, her mother a musician. Fay Zwicky was an accomplished pianist by the age of six, and performed with her violinist and cellist sisters while still at school. After completing her schooling at Anglican institutions, she entered the University of MelbourneUniversity of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...
in 1950, receiving her Bachelor of Arts
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in 1954. Descended from European Jews, she described herself as an “outsider” (“I was ashamed of my foreign interloper status”) from an “Anglo-Saxon
Anglosphere
Anglosphere is a neologism which refers to those nations with English as the most common language. The term can be used more specifically to refer to those nations which share certain characteristics within their cultures based on a linguistic heritage, through being former British colonies...
dominated” Australian culture. She began publishing poetry as an undergraduate, thereafter working as a musician, extensively touring Europe, America and South-East Asia between 1955 and 1965.
She settled in Perth
Perth, Western Australia
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....
with her Dutch husband Karl Zwicky (the two married in 1957) and two children (one son, one daughter) and returned to literature working primarily as a Senior Lecturer
Senior lecturer
Senior lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a faculty position at a university or similar institution. Especially in research-intensive universities, lecturers lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...
in American and comparative literature
Comparative literature
Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
at the University of Western Australia
University of Western Australia
The University of Western Australia was established by an Act of the Western Australian Parliament in February 1911, and began teaching students for the first time in 1913. It is the oldest university in the state of Western Australia and the only university in the state to be a member of the...
until her retirement in 1987. From 1978 till 1981 she also a was member of the literature board of the Australia Council
Australia Council
The Australia Council, informally known as the Australia Council for the Arts, is the official arts council or arts funding body of the Government of Australia.-Function:...
in Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
. Since her retirement she concentrated on her writing which won her international recognition.
In 1990 Zwicky married her second husband James Mackie who died some years later. She leads a very reclusive life in Perth: “I never expect anything. I always think I'm drifting along and nobody knows I'm here, and it's great.” In 2004 Fay Zwicky was declared a Western Australia
Western Australia
Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...
n “Living Treasure”, a term she calls “most repulsive”.
Work
Recurrent themes of Zwicky's are the relation between art and the artist, the exploration of the author's Jewish heritage and autobiographical experiences. Her poetry collections have won several prestigious awards. The committee for the Patrick White AwardPatrick White Award
The Patrick White Award is an annual literary prize established by Patrick White. White used his 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature award to establish a trust for this prize....
praised Zwicky as “one of Australia's most original and accomplished poets”. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English describes her style as "densely textured but elegant and direct".
Zwicky's first collection, Isaac Babel's Fiddle (1975) includes a number of poems about her Russian grandfather and his cultural displacement in Australia which nevertheless saved him from the Holocaust (“Summer Pogrom”, “Totem and Taboo”). Zwicky also writes of her own alienation, in spite of her being “whiter than Persil
Persil
Persil is a brand of laundry detergent currently and originally made by Henkel & Cie; but which is now also licensed for manufacture, distribution, and marketing in several countries by the Unilever Corporation. Henkel and Unilever both manufacture their own formulations...
”.
The title poem of her most-admired collection, Kaddish (1982), is an elegy
Elegy
In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.-History:The Greek term elegeia originally referred to any verse written in elegiac couplets and covering a wide range of subject matter, including epitaphs for tombs...
for father who drowned in the Tasman Sea
Tasman Sea
The Tasman Sea is the large body of water between Australia and New Zealand, approximately across. It extends 2,800 km from north to south. It is a south-western segment of the South Pacific Ocean. The sea was named after the Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman, the first recorded European...
without the Kaddish
Kaddish
Kaddish is a prayer found in the Jewish prayer service. The central theme of the Kaddish is the magnification and sanctification of God's name. In the liturgy different versions of the Kaddish are used functionally as separators between sections of the service...
being recited for him. In her poem Zwicky uses the Aramaic phrases of the traditional prayer of mourning to frame her own memorial prayer detailing her complex relationship with her father. She draws on the Haggadah, the Passover Seder
Passover Seder
The Passover Seder is a Jewish ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. It is conducted on the evenings of the 14th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, and on the 15th by traditionally observant Jews living outside Israel. This corresponds to late March or April in...
night liturgy. Kaddish” also uses the Lord’s Prayer and invokes God in female form as a goddess. Ivor Indyk
Ivor Indyk
Ivor Indyk is an Australian literary academic, editor and publisher. He is a professor at the University of Western Sydney, and the founding editor and publisher of award-winning literary imprint Giramondo Publishing and HEAT magazine....
describes Kaddish as “a mosaic of textual citations, of the Kaddish, the Passover Haggadah and numerous allusions to myth and nursery rhyme.”
Ask Me, Zwicky’s third book of poetry, contains poems on China, America, and a series of religious poems on the deities of the Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
pantheon
Pantheon (gods)
A pantheon is a set of all the gods of a particular polytheistic religion or mythology.Max Weber's 1922 opus, Economy and Society discusses the link between a...
(“Ganesh”, “Vishnu”, “Siva”, and the goddess “Devi”). In Zwicky's subsequent books she develops a sparser style of poetry. In the title poem of The Gatekeeper’s Wife Zwicky, now a widow, writes of the devastating loss of her husband, and recalls the Jewish custom of lighting a memorial candle. In “Losing Track” the death of her husband is likened to the tragic Jewish loss of Zion
Zion
Zion is a place name often used as a synonym for Jerusalem. The word is first found in Samuel II, 5:7 dating to c.630-540 BCE...
. The collection includes an elegy, “Banksia Blechifolia”, for Primo Levi
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland...
, and “Groundswell for Ginsberg”, an homage to Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
.
Her most recent collection of poems, Picnic, published in 2006, gathers primarily poems about the nature of poetry and the poet's role in the world. Aside from her poetry Zwicky has published a collection of short stories, Hostages, in 1983, and a collection of essays on literature and survival, The Lyre in the Pawnshop, in 1986. In her essays Zwicky traces the ways in which the construction of an Australian literature has served to marginalize minority writers and women. She discusses the absence, until very recently, of any place for a Jewish writer in Australian literature: “Living and growing up in this country has been an exercise in repression”.
Awards and nominations
- 1982 - Kenneth Slessor Prize for PoetryKenneth Slessor Prize for PoetryThe Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is awarded annually as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for a book of collected poems or for a single poem of substantial length published in book form...
for Kaddish and Other Poems - 1987 - Western Australian Premier's Book AwardWestern Australian Premier's Book AwardsThe Western Australian Premier's Book Awards is an award for books, scripts, digital narrative and a People's Choice. Awards are provided by the Government of Western Australia, and the awards process is managed by the State Library of Western Australia...
for Non-fiction for The Lyre in the Pawnshop - 1991 - Western Australian Premier's Book Awards|Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry for Ask Me
- 1998 - Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry for The Gatekeeper's Wife
- 2005 - Patrick White Award
- 2006 - Christopher Brennan AwardChristopher Brennan AwardThe Christopher Brennan Award is an Australian award given for lifetime achievement in poetry. The award, established circa 1976, takes the form of a bronze plaque; it recognizes a poet who produces work of "sustained quality and distinction"...
of the Fellowship of Australian WritersFellowship of Australian WritersThe Fellowship of Australian Writers, also known as FAW, was established in Sydney in 1928. Its aim is to bring writers together and promote their interests... - 2007 - New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for Poetry for Picnic
External sources
Biography- Dominic Head (ed.): The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, 3rd edition. (Cambridge: University Press, 2006), p. 1240
- The Poetry Archive
Reviews
- Australian Poetry Review Review of Picnic
Poems
Essays and Interviews
- Between Two Worlds 2006 Judith Wright Lecture by Fay Zwicky
- Border Crossings An essay by Zwicky on Kaddish
- Fallen Idol Talk on William Butler YeatsWilliam Butler YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
and editorial justice