Pollak remembered
"Felix Pollak died on Nov. 19," Progressive editor Erwin Knoll begins in an Isthmus tribute. Born in 1909 in Austria, the renowned UW-Madison poet and rare-books curator "loved language and languages (among them his native German and the English he wrote with a felicity given to few natives).... He loved old things that were worth preserving as artifacts of human dignity and diligence and continuity - old books (including those he found and saved as curator of rare books for the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library), old violins (he was an accomplished musician).... He loved the old city of Vienna, where he was born, and he continued to love it after it forced him to flee for his life. The Holocaust made him a skeptic, though not a cynic, imparting a tragic sense of irony to all his work.... He was not a man to be pitied. When his eyesight failed, few of his friends were permitted to know how little he could see.... But when it came to the gross stupidities and monstrous injustices that afflict our time and place, he insisted that we face things head-on as they are."
