"The tale of the perfect schnorrer": Ezra Pound and Heinz Henghes

Join us for this talk with speaker Chloe Pinto, Montague Burton Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds.

The "tale of the perfect schnorrer," lies at the "melddt[ed] heart," of Ezra Pound's Canto XXXV. Composed between 1934-1936 this canto collages images of Mitteleuropa representing a supposedly Hebraised misuse of artwork in Pound's thought. Major concerns including the debasement of style, the fantasy of Jewish perversion and racial typology culminate in Canto XXXV's calculated caricature.

As an intense focus on an unnamed Jewish sculptor, the "perfect schnorrer," offers a highly concentrated insight into Pound's tanged perspectives on artwork, identity and difference. The "schnorrer," is famously tricky to identify as a subject, and such difficulty was a necessary component in the complicated logic of Pound's prejudice - the move from the specific to the general using processes of poeticisation, of telling tales.

This talk will tell the story of Pound's relationship with the sculptor Heinz Henghes, using material from archival resources and accounts of their time together in Rapallo from 1934-1936. Chloe Pinto argues that the fictionalised aspects of Canto XXXV's Jewish artist are as important as the verifiable specifics of the sculptor in question.

By reading Henghes back into Canto XXXV as the "perfect schnorrer," it becomes clear how Pound's antisemitism, while always deeply political, became personal too.

About the speaker

Chloe Yale Pinto is the Montague Burton Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds.

She holds a PhD in English (Criticism and Culture) from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge and was previously a Visiting Research Fellow in Antisemitism, Discrimination and Human Rights at the Woolf Institute and Assistant Professor in English, Creative and Academic Writing at Northeastern University London.

She was recently named an Emerging Writer in Poetry by the Genesis Foundation, in partnership with the Jewish Literary Foundation and will be an incoming Yotzer Fellow with Yetzirah, a hearth for Jewish Poetry. Her first book The Mosaic Negative: Ezra Pound, Artwork and Antisemitism is under contract with Rutgers University Press.

More information

This event is organised by the Postgraduate Researchers and Early Career Researchers Jewish Studies Network, recently formed under the auspices of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds.

Image

Photo of Chloe Yale Pinto.