Abba Kovner: A Poet’s Passing
by Dvora Waysman

Abba Kovner, the Israeli poet whose life was a symbol of our time, died on Rosh Hashana at the age of 69, leaving behind a rich legacy of poetry, renowned for its vision, its colloquial idiom, its irony and subtle humor.

Born in Sevestopol, Russia, in 1918, Kovner grew up in Vilna, Poland, where he attended a modern Hebrew gymnasium, continuing his studies at a Polish university. A talented sculptor as well as a poet, Kovner as a young man, was very active in the HaShomer HaZair (the Young Watchman) Zionist youth movement. The outbreak of World War II prevented him from immigrating to Israel so he remained in Vilna during the German occupation, at first, under the protection of nuns in a convent. In 1943, he took command of the partisans in the Vilna ghetto, helping to organize an armed revolt. When the ghetto fell, he continued to fight the Nazis as leader of Jewish partisan groups in the Vilna forests.

After the war, Kovner was among those responsible for bringing hundreds of thousands of Jews to Israel, through the Briha movement. En route to Europe, he was caught by the British secret police and imprisoned in Egypt. After his release, he returned to Israel and joined Kibbutz Ein Hachoresh. During the war of independence, he enlisted in the Givati Brigade, and once again took up arms.

His early poems grew out of his experiences as a partisan in Nazi-occupied Poland. “The Key Drowned,” which he wrote in 1951, gives symbolic expression to the tragedy of the ghetto fighters who knew that they - and all their people - were doomed:
 

“In the final account We were all defeated.
The Dead and the Living.”

Kovner was one of the few modern Israeli poets who wrote long narrative poems, characteristic of Bialik. Best known of these poems is his “My Little Sister,” a dramatic verse set in the convent where he hid for three months disguised as a nun before he returned to the ghetto. In it, Kovner asks:
 

“City
City
How mourn a city
whose people are dead,
whose dead are alive
in the heart?”

World Zionist Press Service