Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger - Song of the Yellow Asters
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger
Song of the Yellow Asters
Translated from German by
CARLIE HOFFMAN
$22.00
Bilingual Edition
176 pages
March 25, 2026
ISBN 978-1-954218-44-4
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
SELMA MEERBAUM-EISINGER (1924–1942) was a poet, translator, and librettist from Czernowitz (present-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine). The younger cousin of Paul Celan, she began writing as a teenager, composing original poems as well as translations from French, Yiddish, and Romanian into German. Despite her family’s modest means and the early loss of her father, she grew up amid Czernowitz’s vibrant polyglot culture, where poetry and language flourished. Between the ages of 15 and 17, she assembled her handwritten, handbound album Blütenlese, which includes 57 poems dedicated to her beloved Leiser Fichman. During World War II, the Meerbaum-Eisinger family was deported to the Mikhailovka forced-labor camp in Transnistria (now Transdniestria, a disputed enclave of Moldova). Selma died of typhus there on December 16, 1942, at the age of 18. Through the persistence of her friends and loved ones, her manuscript survived the war and remains a testament to her devotion to beauty, tenderness, and the lyric tradition.
CARLIE HOFFMAN is the author of three poetry collections: One More World Like This World, When There Was Light (winner of the National Jewish Book Award), and This Alaska (winner of the Northern California Publishers and Authors Gold Award in Poetry as well as a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award), all from Four Way Books. She contributed translations of Anneliese Hager’s poetry to the monograph, White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2025). Her translations of Rose Ausländer’s poems are forthcoming. A 2024 Convent Arts Fellow, her honors include a 92NY “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. Hoffman’s work has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other venues. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal.
PRESS
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger
Song of the Yellow Asters
Translated from German by
CARLIE HOFFMAN
The life of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a cousin of Paul Celan, was cut short in a Nazi labor camp, but her poems survived to bear witness with lyric tenderness, resilience, and enduring humanity.
Song of the Yellow Asters presents the first complete English translation of Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Blütenlese, her meticulously crafted handbound volume of poems—alongside translations from French, Yiddish, and Romanian—written between the ages of 15 and 17. This edition returns Meerbaum-Eisinger to her rightful place among twentieth-century Eastern European poets who offered a living song of remembrance to the horrors of their era. Drawing on a rich folkloric and literary lineage from Verlaine to Rilke to Tagore, these 57 poems explore love, nature, and the human spirit under occupation and amid the Holocaust.
“In the amber of her own alertness, Carlie Hoffman has caught Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s most striking gift—her ability to register the nearly invisible dramas and precarity of just about everything she encounters. From the opening “Song” to the closing “Tragedy,” Hoffman’s subtle melodic throughline holds the imagery of the precocious young poet’s inner and surrounding landscapes in resonant constellation. A remarkable body of rescued work.” —Peter Cole
“This beautiful new English translation grants the young poet Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger the full range of a lyrical voice that was tragically cut short in the camps of Transnistria in 1942. Love and longing, vulnerability and hope merge in these tender, intimate poems that yearn to affirm life and refuse despair.” —Marianne Hirsch
“Song of the Yellow Asters, Carlie Hoffman’s new translation of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s poems should make Meerbaum-Eisinger a significant figure in not only Holocaust literature, but poetry in general. Meerbaum-Eisinger is all about possibility and potential, cut-off by the abyss of fascism when she was only 18. Hoffman’s translation sounds contemporary: it’s muscular and textured. The speakers’ internal colors transform into weather, floral and vegetable settings, and an emotional core smoldering with intention. It’s poetry of a young person pulsing with dormant energy, surrounded by danger, but possessed with a chiseled clarity.” —Sean Singer
“I so love Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s buoyant spirit, her determination to sing a joyful song in the face of destruction, her own doom, the impending murder of the people she loved, and Carlie Hoffman has given us a literary gift by bringing these German-language poems into English with so much verve, sensitivity, learning, and dedication. It is agonizing to think of a life cut so painfully short, and yet these vibrant poems by a preternaturally talented teenager fill me with jubilation at the way that poetry can inspirit us, singing our lives and lifting our hearts.” —Edward Hirsch
“Despite the unimaginable suffering Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger endured, this young Jewish poet assembled a manuscript full of unforgettable and deeply-felt imagistic poems that bear witness, with a loving and intimate intelligence and sensibility, to a devastating period of history. Carlie Hoffman's translation is a tremendous gift, awakening readers to the profound amplitude of Meerbaum-Eisinger’s spirit.” —Yerra Sugarman
“This is poetry one reads with tears of excitement: so pure, so beautiful, so radiant, and yet so imperiled.” —Hilde Domin
BIOS
SELMA MEERBAUM-EISINGER (1924–1942) was a poet, translator, and librettist from Czernowitz (present-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine). The younger cousin of Paul Celan, she began writing as a teenager, composing original poems as well as translations from French, Yiddish, and Romanian into German. Despite her family’s modest means and the early loss of her father, she grew up amid Czernowitz’s vibrant polyglot culture, where poetry and language flourished. Between the ages of 15 and 17, she assembled her handwritten, handbound album Blütenlese, which includes 57 poems dedicated to her beloved Leiser Fichman. During World War II, the Meerbaum-Eisinger family was deported to the Mikhailovka forced-labor camp in Transnistria (now Transdniestria, a disputed enclave of Moldova). Selma died of typhus there on December 16, 1942, at the age of 18. Through the persistence of her friends and loved ones, her manuscript survived the war and remains a testament to her devotion to beauty, tenderness, and the lyric tradition.
CARLIE HOFFMAN is the author of three poetry collections: One More World Like This World, When There Was Light (winner of the National Jewish Book Award), and This Alaska (winner of the Northern California Publishers and Authors Gold Award in Poetry as well as a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award), all from Four Way Books. She contributed translations of Anneliese Hager’s poetry to the monograph, White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2025). Her translations of Rose Ausländer’s poems are forthcoming. A 2024 Convent Arts Fellow, her honors include a 92NY “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. Hoffman’s work has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other venues. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal.
PRESS
Bilingual Edition
176 pages
March 25, 2026
ISBN 978-1-954218-44-4
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
