Raymond Federman (1928-2009)
When I moved to New York, I thought nothing of trying to start a little magazine--in print. Little did I know that my only major distributor would go bankrupt. Little did I know that I wouldn’t make a very good editor. Nonetheless, in the three issues of Call: Review that I worked on, it was thrilling to see work go from sheets of paper to a bound journal, to know that a handful of people actually bought and read each issue. Raymond Federman, who died last week, had a poem [“list of what I do to my body everyday”] in that first issue of Call: Review. For me, Federman connected my contemporary existence with a time I would never see. A time in which Beckett and Stein walked down the street. I remember a conversation I had with Michel Deguy while I was in Switzerland—he wanted to know if I was friends with Raymond Federman or Kenneth Koch. These were the only two quote unquote American writers he brought up during that conversation. It’s easy to say that Federman never gained the American audience that he deserved. Next spring, Starcherone Books will publish a novelistic memoir by Federman, Shhh: A Story of Childhood, about his life prior to World War II.
