Biographies:
Abba Kovner
Abba Kovner was born in Sevastopol in the year Nineteen- Eighteen (1918). He spent his childhood and adolescence in Vilna, where his Hebrew poem- writing career began. During Nineteen- Forty one, with the onslaught of German occupation, Kovner hid at a nearby convent. From shards of information he managed to gather, He was able to foresee the oncoming calamity, and was the first to write a manifest beseeching self-defense, called: "We must not go like lambs to the slaughter".
Kovner, who was a member of "Hashomer Hatza'ir" movement, participated in the organization of the Vilna- ghetto resistance, and after a while became its commander. When the ghetto was terminated he fled with the members of the resistance through the sewage system and to the woods, losing his notebook of poems on the way. In the forest he led a Jewish Partisan unit, as part of the Soviet Partisanyka. Women here played a major part in the organization as well as the actual fighting.
His mother, as well as most of his kin and town folk, perished in the Holocaust. As the war ended, Kovner arrived in his empty city and gathered the remainders of local Jewish writing, and began to act for the documentation of Vilna's historic life, and all that happened at the ghetto and in the forest. He became known as the leader of the survivors.
After the war Kovner wanted to act revenge upon the German people by mass- poisoning. When his plan was thwarted he came to Israel and made Kibbutz Ein Ha'horesh his home. During the Nineteen- Forty Eight war he became the army's information officer. Besides being a poet, he was active in Israel's communal life and acted for the immortalization of the Holocaust and the diaspora. During May 1961, Kovner testified in the Eichmann trial as a surviving warrior.
Although he won several awards, Kovner was pushed aside in the sense of his public status as poet, and was not part of the poetic hegemony of his time. His poetry was misunderstood and judged symbolic and underdeveloped.
Abba Kovner passed away in September 1987 in his Kibbutz. Avot Yeshurun attended the funeral and wrote a poem in memoriam.
Avot Yeshurun
Avot Yeshurun, formerly Yechi'el Perlmutter, was born in Ukraine at the end of Yom Kippur, on October the nineteenth, 1903, the descendant of flour mills owner on his father's side, Baruch, and a rabbinical dynasty on his mother's side, Ryckelle (Rachel). He was eleven when WW1 started, and knew the taste of uprooting and displacement at an early age.
He arrived in Palestine in 1925, when he was twenty- two years old. Yeshurun never left Israel since that time. One of his poems ("Ma Shenoge'a", or "About") ends with a question: "I haven't gone to mother shall I go elsewhere?" Indeed, the abandonment of home turned into a feeling of anguish and fracture in his poetry, and was a major factor in the shaping of his views towards the new land he arrived in.
After WW2, when he learned that his mother, father, brother and sister were murdered in the Holocaust, his world fell to pieces. Since then, so he said of himself, he "sentenced them to longing". It seems there is no other Hebrew poet whose biography is so plainly revealed in his poetry, such as Avot Yeshurun. He, who was born so close to Yom Kippur, relates between his time of birth and his need to atone time and again, unsuccessfully, for the abandonment of home.
Thus did Avot Yeshurun describe his guilty position and the way it was shaped into being: "A man roza one day, left his home, his kin, his language, his name – yes, he threw the name too – and went and made onto himself an other country, an other home, an other kin, an other language, an other name. All the letters, the pleas, the longing, the begging, all the regards that were sent after him to retrieve him from his deeds, and whose purpose was one – to turn back the wheel – fell on deafened ears and shattered upon a heart of stone. All this burdened the shoulders of one man."
Yeshurun is an anomaly in the history of Hebrew poetry. He published his first book in 1942, but most of his work was written and published during the sixties and onwards. From the time he himself turned sixty, he published eight volumes of poetry.
For many years Avot Yeshurun was considered insignificant, esoteric, even a curiosity. His broken dialect and political views accounted for that. Only in his latter days he was accepted and became an admired and influencing figure to a whole generation of poets. Avot Yeshurun died in Tel-Aviv in 1992.
The
names:
Avot Yeshurun:
Avot Yeshurun was born as Yechi'el Perlmutter and in 1950 he officially and finally changed his name to Avot Yeshurun. It is an odd and symbolic name, meaning in Hebrew "Fathers look", or "Fathers of Israel". He told that the choice of name related to a distant childhood memory. When his mother sang his young siblings to sleep, she fondly called them "Tatelech, tatelech" (fathers, fathers; Yiddish). Furthermore, Avot Yeshurun recounted that: "when my mother said 'fathers, fathers' she literally meant her ancestors who were rabbinic Patriarchs, and from that I have derived my first and foremost name [Tzurit, p. 141].
Abba Kovner:
The name "Abba" is a traditional name among eastern Europe Jewry. It means: Father. Although Kovner did not choose his name, he referred to it in his poetry and wrote a cycle called "Avot", meaning "Fathers", which mostly deals with his mother.
It is the same with both the poets' writing: on the surface a masculine, fatherly dominance is perceived, but beneath it the mother is the one who looks back.
Continue on to discussion of the mothers in Kovner and Yeshurun's poetry