Tiffany’s comment > Likes and Comments

Any examples you could point to? I've read through everything I can find of hers that's been published and I don't recall any racism.

Could you give examples? Given the era, it is quite possible but I never noticed and have read quite a lot of her work.

Sylvia definitely, when she lost control of herself, perhaps her most fruitful poetic moments (i.e., "Daddy") believed her mother to be a Jew (there were Gruenwalds, for instance, among those rescued by Schindler; it's a name with Jewish derivations. Also, her father was believed to keep quiet his sympathies for his homeland, but that's questionable, given the climate of the U.Sl government at the time. Plus, Sylvia was, I believe, 8 when her father died. She may have heard snippets of conversation, arguments, between her parents. The rise of National Socialism may have come up, Otto may have questioned whether his wife's antecedents were Jews, who knows? We'll never know. And of course, Sylvia passed so quickly, almost seamlessly, to the oppression she recalled as a child to that she perceived in her marriage. So, given the mental illness, her family situation, and the climate of her marriage, which has yet to be clarified, I don't wonder that within the culture of the 50's, 60's, and 70's, Sylvia said things that people today would find offensive. Too late to crucify her, so I say take her art and appreciate her and what she lived with, what she produced.