The Book of Elaborations

Oscar Mandel was born in Antwerp in 1926 of German-speaking parents who had left Austro-Hungarian Poland after World War I to settle in Belgium. There Mandel joined his father and brothers in the diamond craft and trade. German was thus the author's first language. French and Flemish followed. The family escaped from the Nazis in 1940 and from that time lived in New York, where his father continued to deal in diamonds, and where Mandel was still young enough to make English his principal language. From high school in Forest Hills, Mandel went on to New York University, Columbia, and Ohio State University. His thesis at OSU, A Definition of Tragedy, published by the New York University Press in 1961, initiated a life-long career, much of it spent as professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. Mandel managed to divide his creative hours between off-the-beaten-path works of scholarship and a stream of widely applauded plays, poems, fables and essays. He has also translated a number of his works in French and published them in Paris. Drama has not been Oscar Mandel's only literary occupation. Like a musician who plays several instruments, he has "performed" in poetry, fiction, essays, memoirs, translations and (as professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology for over half a century) scholarship and literary criticism. It was as early as the year 1955 that a poem of his appeared in print, namely in the Georgia Review. In 1957 the South Atlantic Quarterly published his first essay. In 1961, the year The Massachusetts Review printed the tragedy called Island then and The Summoning of Philoctetes in the present Complete Theatre, Harper's Bazaar brought out an extract from Mandel's tale, Chi Po and the Sorcerer, which was to appear as a beautifully illustrated book three years later with the subtitle A Chinese Tale for Children and Philosophers. Altogether, almost 250 books, essays, articles and productions have seen life from these beginnings to the present time, and today, in his mid-nineties, Mandel remains fully active. Readers of the present volume will want to leaf through his Otherwise Fables (2014), Otherwise Poems (2015) and the miscellany of poetry, drama, story and essays he called Last Pages (2019) in a burst of unwarranted pessimism.