The Halo of Refusal

18 januari 2006 Though his entire oeuvre consists of only eleven published poems, Avraham Ben Yitzhak is a legend in the history of Hebrew poetry and one of its most admired figures. Born Avraham Sonne, on September 13, 1883, in Przemyœl, he was raised in the home of his maternal grandparents, where he received a traditional religious education and was tutored privately in secular subjects. As a teenager, Ben Yitzhak took part in Zionist activities and Jewish public affairs, and began to read widely in Western European, especially German, modernism. Trakl, Rilke, and Hofmannsthal were particularly important to him, and by the age of fifteen he was writing his own Hebrew poems under their influence. An impressive career was predicted for the young poet. But Ben Yitzhak would come to frustrate many friends, acquaintances, and readers over the years; by age forty-five, he had stopped writing poems entirely.

If only for this master’s mysterious retreat from the written word, he would probably deserve a place in the history of modern Hebrew letters. In her memoir about him, Encounter with a Poet, published soon after his death, the poet Lea Goldberg certainly helped to cultivate the image of Ben Yitzhak as a reclusive but charismatic personality who wrote sparingly and with great reluctance, and over time began to turn his silence and solitude into the central principle of his life.
“ ‘Literature’ as such didn’t interest him,” she wrote, “poetry interested him, as the ground of reality, as the foundation of the world. In his great despair, with which he lived for many years of his life, he did not believe that many people were capable of listening to this ground of the real. And this was apparently one of the reasons for his silence. One of many—though this matter will never completely be understood.”

Ben Yitzhak was, though, far more than a reclusive eccentric, and the fascination and power of his slim body of work itself lingers on. While there are numerous and varied explanations for his extremely limited yield—as well as a range of opinions concerning his development as a poet and eventual descent into total silence—few question his essential contribution to the development of modern Hebrew writing. No less a figure than Haim Nahman Bialik, the foremost Hebrew poet of his time, credited Ben Yitzhak with having given him the first taste of the new wave of Hebrew poetry and hailed him as a pioneer. Poets and readers of his own generation expressed astonishment at the nobility of Ben Yitzhak’s poetry and viewed him as a guide to matters both literary and spiritual. Major poets of subsequent generations have continued to see in him a figure of exemplary purity, perhaps the harbinger of Hebrew modernism in verse, and — his aloofness and meager output notwithstanding — a pivotal figure in the renascence of modern Hebrew literature. As Lea Goldberg put it: “He was the first Hebrew poet whose watch-hands showed not only the specific Hebrew time, but the hour it was for world literature.”

Most of Ben Yitzhak’s poems were written before the start of World War I. His first published work, “Bright Winter” was written in 1903, when the poet was twenty, and appeared five years later in the important Odessa-based Hebrew journal HaShilo’ah. Over the course of the next four years, several other poems were printed in periodicals, and later—in 1918 and 1930—two more. That was all. Ben Yitzhak did not publish a book in his lifetime—though Bialik, among others, tried to convince him to collect his work, and in 1918 suggested that his own publishing house, Moriah, bring out a book of Ben Yitzhak’s poems, as well as a volume of his essays about Hebrew literature. For whatever reason, Ben Yitzhak declined, and several years later again rebuffed Bialik when the poet-editor served as a go-between for another publisher and attempted to have the younger poet’s work collected in book form. Indeed, as the interest in Ben Yitzhak’s poetry grew, so did his own resistance to public exposure. Years later, the editors of the leading Hebrew journal in Palestine, Turim, managed to circumvent Ben Yitzhak’s refusal to have his work published by printing thirty copies of a stenciled pamphlet, which included all twelve of his poems that had been previously published in journals (the eleven canonical poems plus “To The Sower”) and distributing it as a gift from the editors to the magazine’s contributors. In 1940, a further stencil “edition” of fifty copies was issued and given out by the Histadrut labor federation.

Only after his death in 1950 did a group of Ben Yitzhak’s friends manage to bring his work between the covers of a book: this edition included the eleven central poems, as well as the rejected twelfth and a collection of drafts and fragments—poems and pieces that were found among the poet’s papers after his death. Avraham Ben Yitzhak: Poems was published in a slender edition of four-hundred copies.

The most poetically fruitful years of the poet’s life belonged, then, to his youth and early manhood. When he was twenty-five, he took up residence in Vienna, where he studied and continued to write. Despite his later reputation as a recluse, Ben Yitzhak led during this time an extremely engaged public life and was involved in Zionist activities that were conducted in Przemyœl and around the world. Through all his political activity, however, Ben Yitzhak remained at heart a poet. At one point he tried his hand at writing in German, and in Vienna it seems that he even considered taking up a career as a bilingual poet. His notebooks from this period are a remarkable testimony to the several worlds in which he lived at once. A single page of his scribbling there might contain the draft of a Hebrew poem; German notes from a Zionist congress; a list of books to buy or read—everything from Hegel to Hans Christian Andersen to Dostoevsky in Hebrew; doodles of faces or buildings; and a quote from Kant, Rabbi Akiva, or Thucydides: “The concatenation of events by no means proceeds less stupidly than the thoughts of man.”

The language of his notebooks is primarily German, and German appears to have been the language in which he thought. But it was Hebrew that drew him most intimately and Hebrew that remained the language of his verse. Both the language and technique of his poetry are deeply rooted in Scripture: the poems make conspicuous use of biblical rhythms, particularly those of the Psalms, which serve as an alternative to fixed cadence and rhyme, and from Scripture, too, comes the stark clarity and resonance of Ben Yitzhak’s work. Biblical allusions, particularly to the language of the Prophets, are frequently employed.

Also biblical was the entire matrix of his Hebrew. Unlike his European Jewish contemporaries whose Hebrew verse relied on the “Ashkenazic” system of stress and pronunciation, Ben Yitzhak wrote according to the Sephardic system, which is used in modern-day Hebrew. In this respect he anticipated the mainstream development of Hebrew verse in Palestine, which in many instances continued to be written according to the Ashkenazic stress well into the twenties and beyond.

In 1913, Ben Yitzhak was invited to lecture at the Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary in Jerusalem. On the day he arrived in the city, the carriage taking him from the train station overturned, and he suffered a serious injury to his spine. After a lengthy hospital stay, he returned to Vienna in order to complete his recovery, and nearly a year after the accident, he returned to Jerusalem. Through the summer of 1914 he taught at the Teachers’ Seminary. During that year, he published three poems in a journal edited in Jaffa under the direction of the writer Joseph Haim Brenner. The cumulative effect of Ben Yitzhak’s poems began to make itself felt, and his reputation as a poet grew.

Meanwhile, during his stay in Jerusalem he witnessed the war of languages that was being conducted between proponents of German and Hebrew in educational institutions throughout the country. Ben Yitzhak kept to the sidelines of this battle. Because of the crisis, he managed to teach regularly for only a short period, and before the outbreak of World War I he returned to Vienna. Ben Yitzhak passed the period of the war in Vienna, far from the city of his birth. As he came to tell it, in the spring of 1915, during a battle in which Przemyœl fell to the Russians, he lost much of the work in Hebrew and German that he had left with his mother for safekeeping. This incident weighed on him heavily for many years, and he returned to it repeatedly, in particular when the question—and mystery—of his limited production and publication was raised.

Throughout his years in Vienna, Ben Yitzhak worked as a teacher and for a while as a principal at Vienna’s Hebrew Teachers’ Academy. At the beginning of the thirties he contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized for a while in a sanatorium. Although he ventured out rarely and, it appears, tried to keep his illness a secret, he did maintain ties with Hebrew writers and with a circle of friends that included some of the most prominent European men of letters of his time.

After the occupation of Vienna by the Nazis in March 1938, Ben Yitzhak was forced to flee Austria to Italy and Switzerland, and by August he had settled in Jerusalem. In the forties, Ben Yitzhak formed a profound and, for a while, intimate, friendship with the poet Lea Goldberg. In what she called her attempt to convey something of his spiritual character, she also describes him physically: “Tall, very thin, narrow, intelligent brow, and very light blue eyes, wise behind heavy glasses. There was something abstract about his face.” She writes of his charisma and, among other things, of his encyclopedic knowledge.

Ben Yitzhak’s tremendous intellectual curiosity, together with his extraordinary literary and cultural sensitivity, made the deepest possible impression on those who surrounded him. But the question of his poetry became taboo—and it was nearly impossible to get him to talk about it. And in fact when he chose not to discuss a given subject, his silences could be lethal.

While in Jerusalem, he fell on hard times financially, and his poor health made it necessary for him to be hospitalized from time to time. Still, throughout these years of relative poverty and decline, the power of Ben Yitzhak’s personality continued to hold sway over all who came into contact with him, and his friends persisted in seeing in him a great promise that would one day be fulfilled.

In the summer of 1948, ill and physically exhausted, Ben Yitzhak’s hoped to travel to Switzerland in order to convalesce. That didn’t happen, though, and by winter he was overcome by the tuberculosis he had fought so hard to conceal. He was hospitalized for a while in Jerusalem, and later moved to a rest home near Tel Aviv. On the morning of Monday, May the 29th [1950], he told the doctor he was going to die, left him a message of greetings for his friends and fell into a state of unconsciousness, from which he did not recover.

After his death, the enigma of his truncated career focused attention on the poems themselves: Perhaps they held hidden clues to explain his descent into muteness? The poem “A Few Say,” for instance, was read as a personal expression of the solitary artist who chooses the way of human silence in order to participate in the larger conversation of the cosmos. And his other masterpiece, the last poem he published, after twelve years of withdrawal—“Blessed Are They Who Sow and Do Not Reap …”—was seen as an unambiguous declaration of the poet’s desire to obtain true favor with eternity by forswearing poetry altogether. The legitimacy of such reductive, biographical readings of the poems is questionable, to say the least. More likely there were a number of factors at work here, most no doubt emotional and obscure to us, yet all of which led this most complex, gifted—and probably tormented—of personalities to retreat into silence.