Holst-Warhaft, Gail 1941-

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HOLST-WARHAFT, Gail 1941-

PERSONAL: Born 1941, in Melbourne, Australia. Education: Earned undergraduate degree in English literature and art history in Australia; Cornell University, Ph.D. (comparative literature), 1990.

ADDRESSES: Home—113 East Upland Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850; fax: 607-254-8899. Office—Institute for European Studies, Cornell University, 120 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853. E-mail—glh3@cornell.edu.

CAREER: Educator, writer, translator, musician, and poet. Journalist and musician in Greece, 1970s; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, adjunct associate professor, acting director of Institute for European Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: Open Poetry Award, Poetry Greece, 2001.

WRITINGS:

Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek Sub-Culture: Songs of Love, Sorrow, and Hashish, D. Harvey (Athens, Greece), 1975, third edition, 1983.

Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music, Hakkert (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 1980.

Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature, Routledge (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor, with David R. McCann) The Classical Moment: Views from Seven Literatures, Rowman and Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 1999.

The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2000.

Contributor to books, including Greece in Modern Times: An Annotated Bibliography of Works Published in English in Twenty-two Disciplines from 1900-1995, Scarecrow Press, 2000, and to periodicals, including Journal of Modern Greek Studies Aegean Review, andJournal of the Hellenic Diaspora. Poetry published in journals, including Seneca Review and Forward, and in anthologies, including The Gospels in Our Image, and Ithaca Women's Anthology.

Translator of poetry and prose from modern and ancient Greek, including the collected poems of Nikos Kavadias, Achilles' Fiancée, by Alki Zei, Mauthausen, by Iakovos Kambanellis, The Suppliants, by Aeschylus, and the poems of Mikis Theodorakis.

ADAPTATIONS: Holst-Warhaft wrote the documentary film, Rembetika: The Blues of Greece, an adaptation of her book, Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek Sub-culture. The film was narrated by Anthony Quinn.

SIDELIGHTS: Gail Holst-Warhaft was born in Australia, where she completed her undergraduate work, and spent the 1970s in Greece, where she worked as a journalist and played harpsichord in the orchestras of notable Greek musicians, including Mikis Theodorakis, Dionysis Savvopoulos, and Mariza Koch. She earned her doctorate from Cornell University, and her dissertation was the basis for her book Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature.

The volume deals with laments from literature and from Greek oral tradition, some of which Holst-Warhaft recorded while living in that country. The voices of lamenting women are incendiary, she writes, because they focus on loss and mourning, rather than celebration, of the dead, therefore, minimizing the value of death in the name of community or state. This made it difficult for the ancient armies to recruit, inasmuch as the laments also laid the blame for the loss of life on those who were responsible and called for revenge. Because of this, women's laments were seen as threatening to the politics of Greece.

Sheila M. Colwell wrote for Bryn Mawr Classical Review online that Holst-Warhaft offers a selection of songs and laments about death composed over the last two centuries, demonstrating "that women's lamenting voices are indeed powerful and potentially dangerous. Much of the material comes from the Mani—an area of southern Greece famous for its blood feuds. The songs and stories concerning these feuds reveal a fierce mode of life in which murder resolves all too many disputes."

Holst-Warhaft draws on the Greek tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus in the fifth chapter, and in the last she "examines the modern Greek use of lament conventions in both narrative texts and poems written for typical lament situations," noted Colwell. "This material is rich, beautiful, and moving, and it is skillfully presented."

Warren S. Smith reviewed Dangerous Voices in the Journal of Anthropological Research, saying that it "gives solid evidence of the importance and permanence of women's laments in the Greek tradition. Above all, Holst-Warhaft brings out the ambivalence of mourning: the ability of women to share public grief gives them power and solidarity, yet the ensuing emotion and seeming lack of control has often been seen as threatening by the male establishment."

Holst-Warhaft's The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses was published less than one year before the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September of 2001. For many Americans the tragedy was a defining national moment, and a retaliatory strike was launched on Afghanistan. Books in Canada reviewer Patrick R. Burger said that this volume appears "with unnerving timeliness. … The tendency to allow one's reaction to 9-11, or any loss of life, to be controlled by the media and other established and unquestioned authorities, is arrested by this book."

The volume begins and ends with references to Hamlet and Electra and looks at mourning on a number of levels, from Celtic rituals to the AIDS quilt, to the Vietnam War Memorial. The author notes the government organization of grief, beginning after World War I, when millions of young men were celebrated as heroes through public displays, memorials, and ceremonies, which she feels effectively enabled the government to control the mourning process and left the grieving families obliged to participate as a duty. Holst-Warhaft includes an account of the grieving Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of Argentines who were tortured and killed or made to disappear by their government. This image is used for the book's cover, a photograph by Manuel Zambrana. "In the course of this discussion," said Burger, "Holst-Warhaft also makes illuminating use of the running theme of such age-old human reactions to grief being mirrored in literature."

"The surprising reversal affected by the Mothers underlines the optimistic tone and trajectory of Holst-Warhaft's book," continued Burger. "While private grief may be appropriated by governments and put to political uses, as with the heroic memorials erected to the slaughtered soldiers of the Great War, the trend has been to reclaim grief from the state. … With this book, Holst-Warhaft offers us a choice: will we be Electra, unwilling to have our grief sublimated and appropriated and thus ready to act against injustice, or will we be Hamlet, indecisive in our grief and ultimately self-destructive?"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Books in Canada, June, 2002, Patrick R. Burger, review of The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses, pp. 36-37.

Choice, October, 1993, M. R. Lefkowitz, review of Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature, p. 298; March, 2001, B. Weston, review of The Cue for Passion, p. 1308.

Journal of Anthropological Research, summer, 1996, Warren S. Smith, review of Dangerous Voices, p. 227.

Times Literary Supplement, December 27, 1991, Julietta Harvey, review of Achilles' Fiancée, p. 17.