Avoth Yeshurun

Avoth Yeshurun (1904 - 1992, b. the Ukraine) was raised in a Chassidic home and immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1925. His family was killed during the Holocaust.
Yeshurun spent a great deal of time in rural Jewish and Arab villages, intermittently dredging swamps, picking fruit and working as a watchman and a construction worker. In later years he became a regular contributor to the literary journal Siman Kriah. He was posthumously awarded the Israel Prize.
"Language," wrote Yeshurun, "is in the hands of the artist. 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." Hence Yeshurun`s mixed tenses, unusual syntax and the collapsing of tongues -- Yiddish, Arabic, Polish, American and Israeli slang -- in the creation of what has been described as "half-and-half Hebrew."
Called by translator and poet Gabriel Levin "Israel`s most innovative poet to date", Yeshurun frequently combines his idiosyncratic style with political themes and a tone ironically or elegiacally moralistic. A poetry of parts, Yeshurun`s work containst elements from all of his varied experiences, "and all of this," Levin goes on to say, "adds up, piece by piece, to a broad, complex vision of Eretz Israel: the poetry`s jagged surface reflecting not only the tears of the poet`s own life, but the life of the entire nation."

Books Published in Hebrew

On the Wisdom of Roads, Machbarot Lesifrut, 1942 [Al Hachmot Drachim]

Re`em, Dvir, 1960 [Re`em]

Thirty Pages of Avoth Yeshurun, Schocken, 1964 [Shloshim Amud Shel Avot Yeshurun]

This Is the Name of the Book, Schocken, 1970 [Ze Shem Ha-Sefer]

The Syrian-African Rift, Siman Kriah, 1974 [Ha-Shever Ha-Suri-Africani]

A Cappella Voices, Siman Kriah, 1977 [Kapella Kolot]

Entrance Gate, Exit Gate, Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah, 1981 [Sha`ar Knisah, Sha`ar Yetziah]

Homograph, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1985 [Homograph]

Master of Rest, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1990 [Adon Menuha]

I Have No Now, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1992 [Eyn Li Achshav]

Milvadata, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2009 [Milvadata]

Books in Translation

The Syrian-African Rift
English: Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1980
French: Paris, Actes Sud, 2006

Individual poems have been published in: Czech, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Last updated: 17.09.2009