On Avoth Yeshurun

January 18, 2006 [In 1981], Avoth Yeshurun was invited to read at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem on the occasion of the publication of a bilingual, Hebrew-English edition of The Syrian-African Rift, Yeshurun’s watershed collection of verse, written in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War [1973]. Yeshurun and his translator, the American-born Hebrew poet Harold Schimmel, read to a packed hall. Then in his mid-seventies, with a thick mane of white hair, the poet kicked back his chair and rose to read {id="3316" title="The Collection"}.

Yeshurun read slowly, almost falteringly, in a thick and weathered voice, the book of poems thrust just inches from his face, as if he were about to lie back and, covering his eyes with the book, take a snooze. And indeed, having read the first two stanzas, Yeshurun suddenly stopped reading and swayed. There was a hushed silence as he appeared to be struggling with himself. Again he swayed and Harold Schimmel, sitting to his right, slipped his arm around his waist and suggested he sit down until he regained his strength. Yeshurun, however, stubbornly refused and immediately returned to reading the poem, this time with renewed energy, to its last, triumphant line, “And I pick up/ everything I find.”

Now [in 1991], at the age of eighty-six and with the publication of his ninth collection of verse [Master of Rest], Yeshurun continues to refuse to sit down, even for a moment. What’s more, the verbal energy, range and sheer inventiveness of the present collection reaffirms and strengthens the claim that Yeshurun – octogenarian and grand-daddy of modern Hebrew letters – is Israel’s most seriously innovative poet to date.

The poet’s syntactic collisions and down to earth, homemade, “half-and-half” Hebrew (spiked with Yiddish, Arabic, Polish and freshly layered streetwise slang) are not, however, completely foreign to Hebrew poetry: pastiche and a burlesque style flourished during the Haskala period as well as in Renaissance Italy – the clearest example being the writing of macaronic verse – and medieval Spain. And as Harold Schimmel has wisely observed, after reading Yeshurun’s poetry one cannot dip into the Book of Psalms without noting Yeshurun-like lines, for example: “as for the light of mine eyes, it also is gone for me.” The grammatically awkward “it is also gone for me” rings at once archaic and strangely contemporary, like a sentence phrased with uncertainty by a new immigrant on the streets of Tel Aviv, a phrase, one might add, that Yeshurun wouldn’t hesitate to chalk mark for future use.

“How will I get up in the morning with one city in the heart/ and one city in the eyes. How will I be weaned/ from this partition?” writes Yeshurun in Master of Rest. This division, this bifocal vision – straddling the faultline running between Yeshurun’s native Poland and his adopted Tel Aviv – is what compels the poet to speak, to harangue his surroundings; it is also the underlying motive behind Yeshurun’s somewhat forceful manipulation of the Hebrew language.

For Yeshurun, who arrived in Palestine at the age of twenty-one and who would lose his family in the Holocaust, there is no process of weaning (note that the weaning is from the partition and not any one world); the poet cannot forget the past, yet the imagination is equally, even fiercely loyal to the present. This in itself, at a thematic level, is fairly common ground among contemporary Israeli poets. What poet, from Bialik to Yehuda Amichai, has not written of his or her “double vision”? Such has been the unique predicament of a generation displaced from one land to another. And fervently believing in the restorative powers of its new homeland, most contemporary Hebrew poets – and this is particularly true for the generation who started writing in the late forties – take comfort in the apparent wholeness, in the natural accents and “Sweet New Style” of the Hebrew tongue.

In Yeshurun’s case, however, loss and acculturation cannot be separated from the language in which such events are endured and voiced. A rift in memory becomes a rift in the structure of language. Modern Hebrew resembles a shattered vessel. “Language is in the hands of the artist,” writes Yeshurun. “He doesn’t feel it until he breaks it; and when he lets it slip and fall – he hears the voice of language, the language that is his.” Such a fractured aesthetics constitutes a radical departure from the norm, a departure, I should add, that was, perhaps inevitably, slow in coming. Yeshurun’s first book, On the Wisdom of Roads, appeared in 1942, his second, Oryx, in 1961.

The shards of experience, then, which Yeshurun reassembles and translates in the very graphemes of the Hebrew tongue, consist broadly of his childhood in Poland, of his early manhood roaming the countryside in Palestine, and of modern-day Tel Aviv, which the poet indefatigably explores as its most dedicated flaneur. Typically a Yeshurun poem restlessly shifts its attention from one facet of his life to another . . .

Yeshurun’s latest collection of poems, written when “life and death/ alternate like air,” attests to the fact that his appetite for life and its particulars has not diminished: “To feel words in the feet./ To feel poetry. In the feet, barefooted/ without shoes.”



Excerpted from Gabriel Levin’s review of Avoth Yeshurun’s Master of Rest in Modern Hebrew Literature 6 (Spring-Summer 1991).