Word: kumin
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...When Kumin reached the end of high school, the admissions committee at her first-choice college, Wellesley, cared little about her personal relationship with Christ. At the time, Wellesley “had a very stringent Jewish quota,” Kumin recalled—and in Wellesley’s eyes, however fond she may have been of Jesus, Maxine Winokur was still a Jew. She was rejected...
...Kumin was born Maxine Winokur in 1925, the fourth child—and only daughter—of a South Philadelphia pawnbroker. The family lived in suburban Germantown; the hillside location of the Winokur family home was later immortalized in Kumin’s “Halfway,” the title poem of her 1961 anthology...
...Kumin’s parents were Reform Jews, but from kindergarten through second grade, they let their daughter attend the nearby convent instead of walking a mile each way to the local public school. When Kumin came home with a stolen rosary at the end of second grade, however, her parents pulled her out of classes at the convent, realizing that their daughter was rapidly embracing Catholic dogma. “I formed an unspoken bond with Jesus,” Kumin says. In “Halfway,” she writes...
...Radcliffe may have only been a second choice, but, aside from her one unfortunate encounter with a merciless member of the English faculty, Kumin speaks fondly of her years as a student here in Cambridge—one might even say she waxes poetically about her undergraduate experience. She was, as her ill-fated sonnet attests, “wide-eyed,” but not “lonely”; her fellow ’Cliffies joined her atop Cabot Hall at night to recite poetry. She swam competitively. And in 1945, she fell in love...
...second-semester junior when Victor M. Kumin ’43, an Army engineer on furlough from Los Alamos, took her on a blind date to the now-defunct Hotel Lafayette—then a swank destination for the college crowd on account of its dimly-lit bar. She would later learn that her soon-to-be-husband had been one of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “soldier scientists,” at work on the atomic bomb. The couple married...