Kovner/Yeshurun mothers

The mothers:

In both Kovner and Yeshurun's poetry, the concept of the Mother is perpetually, almost inherently tied to the notion of guilt. The mother appears explicitly in their poetry only after she is murdered (in fact, there's nothing known of Kovner's adolescent poetry which was written before his mother's death, and was lost while he escaped from the ghetto).Thus the mother must become a memory, a memory tied to guilt. Kovner senses guilt for not saving his mother who was sent from the ghetto to her death and he- he impotently stood by and didn't offer her any help. Yeshurun, on the other hand, senses immense guilt for abandoning his beloved mother in Poland. It both their poetries the biographic mother is intermixed with a poetic mother. And so, In Kovner's late poem "The Poem of Roza", a sensual memory in which the mother dresses the wounds in her legs (the same wounds that were caused by her son's birth), this sensual memory is intermixed with a childish-fictive memory which imagines his parents as king and queen. But in this fictive memory the mother dies of grief. This grief, which is sensed by the mother and causes her death, can be connected with the grief the son feels he brought on her. Yeshurun too builds a post-memory outlining a horrific scene in which his mother holds his photograph to her breastplate at the tume of her burning:

"For how yet long is yet there they could see you?

All her pleas were met with denial.

Burnt she held a photograph in her breast."

Although burning is a common element in the Holocaust's poetry lexicon, Yeshurun manages to recharge it by reanimating the routine idiom "bridges burning". But it is he himself who burns the home by abandoning it. He who leaves home- burns home.

About he who leaves home (and home shall lose self confidence)

He burns a home, it's true. But the bridge leading home he doesn't burn.

The bridge is necessary to return to the burned Time and again.

Rachel (Roza) Kovner:

Abba Kovner's mother, remembered as an assertive, wise and beautiful woman. Abba was her beloved middle son. After Abba's father passed away, Roza alone provided for her family. During WW2 both the mother and son are at the Vilna ghetto, but separately, and Kovner is of the leaders of the resistance. Kovner relates that when the Germans and Estonians broke into the ghetto "On the day I thought was the battle day", his mother came running to the warriors' hold, stretched out her hands and asked: "And what will become of me? What should I do? – And I had no answer to give her. This has troubled my sleep ever since then. Therefore my mother stays in my poems even now."

Roza Kovner was murdered in Ponar, 1943- This is the Ponar Kovner declared at the beginning of the war- Ponar is Death. Even during the sixties the critics took notice of the fact that Kovner draws the maternal figure[i] very humanly, individually, in a manner very unlike other Holocaust poetry of the time, in which almost every individual is the allegory of the plural. One township is all townships. (Hillel Barzel)

Kovner's address to the mother is the manufacture of an impossible dialogue and yet ongoing between the speaker, the son and his dead mother.

And so he tells her of the birth of his son, an event which takes place twenty years after her murder, and she asks what will be his name, so he tells her the boy is named after the poet's dead brother, the youngest son, Michael. [“Avot”] His last book of poems "The poem of Roza" is dedicated to her.

An important motive concerning the mother is the shedding of tears. The mother's tear, although dead, carries a power that is almost mythical, a destructive power to which both speaker and mother have to pray, to stop it from incinerating the world.

"And we both, my mother, shall pray as one\ so the world shall not burn in the tear you have left" ("the third tear") and because the mother is dead, the world may be already burned…

The carrying of the mother's bier (See "My Little Sister" ) is a symbolic act: a burden which the speaker must carry and cannot unload when no one can share the toil. The addressees cannot take an active role in the toil, but almost like a greek choir must repeat a phrase that sounds as if taken from an ancient lament: "Imi, Imi". In Hebrew there exists a distinguished phonetic semblance between the words "Am" (nation) and "Em" (mother). The address includes a nationwide call which joins the outcry of crisis. The word bed - "Myta" Phonetically sounds like - death- Mita, as in dying. Indeed the Hebrew word "Myta" includes the meaning of coffin or bier on which the deceased is carried to the grave. "Carriers of the bed" - carriers of the deceased's bier. Therefore his role is to carry, almost literally, his mother's corpse. There is a resemblance to Kepfitz poem "The Widow and Daughter”: “ And when the two crowded / into the kitchen at night / he would press himself between them / pushing, thrusting, forcing them to remember, /---- /he would press himself between them -- /hero and betrayer / legend and deserter --/ so when they sat down to eat/ they could taste his ashes.”[ii]

The presence of the dead parent evokes time and time again through life like a constant reminder.

Ryckelle (Rachel) Perlmutter:

Avot Yeshurun, Rachel's firstborn beloved son, never got over his leaving her. In the poem "On our mother Rachel" he writes:

Don`t call her by many names.

Call her Rachel.

A man is born as a child and dies as a child.

All this is dependent on the Mother.

The mother Ryckelle, who turned in his poems into "Rachel", has a founding stature in Avot Yeshurun's poetry. As said before, his chosen name "Avot" is related to the lullaby sung by his mother. It seems a kind of patriarchal "Fathers' right", but in Julia Kristeva's[iii] terms, there is a marking of the pre-symbolic element in the language that is used by the mother and her baby, before entering the father's order. "Tatelech, tatelech" The mother's voice, fractured, incoherent, incorrect, rises from fragments of citations, shreds of sentences in his poems, like a recurring disturbance of the order. Like that ancient lullaby that turned into a chosen name.

One of his last poems relates specifically to the mother and the Yom Kippur prayer, his day of birth: "Unlock for me and for my mother and I am born" ("Ptach Ne'ila" or "unlock", from "Ein li Ach'shav" or "I have not now"). Upon his death he asks to be reborn onto the mother.

In "Thirty p.” , Avot Yeshurun's third book (1964) there are thirty poems, as the thirty days of Jewish mourning. The poems serve as a late atonement, an attempt to reply too-late his dead family's letters. From the poems it seems that Yeshurun himself never replied to the letters of concern sent by his family from Poland. Despite that, Yeshurun did carry a regular correspondence with his family for twelve years.

The outcome impression, as if Yeshurun ignored the letters, Doubles the guilt that the poet feels. The first column pictures a severe future situation: "There will come a day when no one will read my mother's letters". Yeshurun tries to turn the letters into a worldly object that has a substantial presence that overcomes the verbal one. The letters are no longer an act of communication but a package, they exist autonomously and can bring him closer to the mother's body.

Continue to analysis of guilt in the poetry of Kovner and Yeshurun