Mimeo

»I was glad that you had the courage and translated your poem into Hebrew. Indeed, the translation isn’t at all bad,«All translations from Hebrew are the author’s. wrote poet Leah Goldberg to Tuvia Rübner (1924–2019) in a letter dated 3 October 1949. Eight years earlier, the German-speaking, seventeen-year old Tobias Rübner from Bratislava had arrived in British Mandate Palestine with Ha-shomer Ha-tzair and settled in Kibbutz Merhavia. In his autobiography Long-Short Life, he would describe how in those early years most of his poems were created while he was outdoors working as a shepherd in the kibbutz environs: »There I conceived the poems by heart, and even if they were quite long, I remembered and wrote them down when I arrived back home.« A year or two after his immigration, Rübner met the German writer and scholar Werner Kraft and sent him »tons of texts« at the latter’s encouragement. Some of these Kraft showed to poet and translator Ludwig Strauss, who asked to meet the aspiring young writer. Rübner later confessed that he owed both of them his »spiritual and poetical existence.« He also recounted how he wrote to Kraft and Strauss, to his first wife Ada, and to God, and mainly »in order to find relief and in order to be a poet. Being a poet seemed to justify my existence […] and above all gave me an anchorage in a world in which all other anchorages had been lost to me.«

Twelve years after his immigration, Rübner moved from writing in German to also writing in Hebrew. The transition was not easy, as he noted in his autobiography:

»There is an essential difference between writing in an acquired language and a language in whose sounds the world had opened up to you. Each language and its beat, its attractions and rejections, its loves and landscapes, memories, and secrets. The rhythm of Hebrew is very different to that of German. Hebrew is a hard language, of coarse demeanor, lacking the softness of diminutives. Its sound prefers consonants to vowels. I wrote as someone who follows language. The words were examined. I wrote against the flow and not with it.«

A stencil kept at Gnazim Archive in Tel Aviv (dating to the late 1940s or early 1950s) includes nine poems and provides clear evidence of Rübner’s transition to writing in both languages. One poem, which bears no title but begins with the line »Ich bin nicht der der ich war,« typewritten in German and handwritten in Hebrew beside it, combines autobiographical, historical, and poetic aspects, and specifically reflects the craft and vocation of the poet. These aspects apply to each linguistic version in itself, but acquire a more pronounced meaning in the existence of both versions side by side. The poem is an expression of the death of the body and of language, a dying that is a walk between life and death, between becoming and demise. Rübner recalled that he wrote his first Hebrew poem, which begins with the words eineni ze sh-haiti אינני זה שהייתי after the immense personal tragedy that hit him in February 1950 when the bus he was riding on with his young family was hit by a truck and caught fire. His wife Ada died instantly, leaving behind their seven-month-old daughter. He himself was severely wounded and underwent a long rehabilitation process. While in hospital, Leah Goldberg visited him and read his poem, which she then sent to the newspaper Davar. As Giddon Ticotsky claims, beyond this personal tragedy, the poem reflects on the Shoah and the motif of the living dead in the poetry of the so-called tashaḥ generation, those Hebrew poets who fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and in particular the paradigmatic poem Here Lie our Bodies by Haim Gouri (1923–2018), a prize-winning poet, writer, and documentary film maker who fought during the 1948 War in the Negev Brigade and whose first poetry volume Flowers of Fire appeared following the war in 1949.

As a dedication or consecration poem, in the words of Ticotsky, Rübner’s text is a self-reflection on the source of authority of the poem and the poet, especially in the face of being »neither here nor there« and being burnt. I would argue that the poem engages with the »death of the poet,« for his lips and language are burnt, as are his words. In the stencil version, the reader is asked to forget the person who uttered these words – the poet. At the same time, death is not a finite event: Processes of self-negation take place on the diachronic and synchronic levels, the demise of the past and present self, resulting in a state of hanging between earth and sky, between air and water. Death is only partial, for the self lives on, even without space and time and despite a limited horizon: The self sees the sky from within an open sarcophagus. Does the poet dispense with himself, not in order to be reborn (this is too radical) but in order to continue living and writing? Does this prolonged life depend on creating in Hebrew alongside German, in the becoming of the Hebrew poet alongside the German one whose life and language were burnt and who begs to be forgotten?

From the stencil, an emerging Hebrew poet speaks to us who, after all, does not forget that he is a German poet too, and as such hangs between earth and heaven, between the holy and secular, between mother tongue and acquired language. Moreover, he draws on contemporary modernist Hebrew poetry and the classicist forms of his immigrant mentors: Strauss, Goldberg, and Kraft provided the young refugee Rübner with a European education deeply rooted in German literary tradition, while in parallel encouraging his writing in Hebrew. Rübner continued to be a prolific poet in both languages, alongside his scholarship, photography, and translation oeuvre. He published more than ten poetry volumes in German and more than twenty in Hebrew. In 1987, he became a corresponding member of the German Academy of Language and Poetry in Darmstadt and from the late 1950s onwards won many literary prizes in Israel and abroad, among them the prestigious Israel Prize (2008) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Prize (2012).

Lina Barouch  is affiliated as an art student at Minshar College of Art in Tel Aviv. As a freelance researcher she is conducting a translation of Gershom Scholem’s work »Alchemie und Kabbala« into Hebrew. Lina Barouch worked together with Yfaat Weiss between 2013 and 2018 in the international project »Traces and Treasures of German-Jewish History in Israel,« and was senior researcher at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while Yfaat Weiss was head of the Center. Lina Barouch edited the special focus »The Return to the Archive« in the Jahrbuch des Dubnow-Instituts/Dubnow Institute Yearbook 17 (2018) [2020]) | barouch.lina(at)gmail.com

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