The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner
440
The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner
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Overview
The Fall of a Sparrow is the only full biography in English of the partisan, poet, and patriot Abba Kovner (1918–1987). An unsung and largely unknown hero of the Second World War and Israel's War of Independence, Kovner was born in Vilna, "the Jerusalem of Lithuania." Long before the rest of the world suspected, he was the first person to state that Hitler was planning to kill the Jews of Europe. Kovner and other defenders of the Vilna ghetto, only hours before its destruction, escaped to the forest to join the partisans fighting the Nazis. Returning after the Liberation to find Vilna empty of Jews, he immigrated to Israel, where he devised a fruitless plot to take revenge on the Germans. He then joined the Israeli army and served as the Givati Brigade's Information Officer, writing "Battle Notes," newsletters that inspired the troops defending Tel Aviv. After the war, Kovner settled on a kibbutz and dedicated his life to working the land, writing poetry, and raising a family. He was also the moving force behind such projects as the Diaspora Museum and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. The Fall of a Sparrow is based on countless interviews with people who knew Kovner, and letters and archival material that have never been translated before.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804772525 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2009 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 440 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Fall of a Sparrow
The Life and Times of Abba KovnerBy Dina Porat
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2000 Yad Vashem and Am OvedAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6248-9
Chapter One
Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna"A sad-eyed child," March 1918-September 1939
Abba Kovner was born in Sevastopol, at the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula, on March 14, 1918. His parents were Israel and Rachel (Rosa) Taubman Kovner; Rachel was born in Warsaw. On his father's side Kovner was descended from a large, well-established family. His great-grandfather, Israel Kovner (born c. 1820), had at least two sons, one of whom was Michael, Kovner's grandfather (born c. 1860). Michael and his wife, Rachel, had seven children, including Israel (born 1882), Kovner's father. Kovner's cousins, Misha and Eliezer Kovner and Clara Bar, and his sister-in-law, Neuta Kovner, can name twenty-five cousins, including Abba Kovner and themselves. Another one of Israel Kovner's descendants was Meir Vilner, one of the leaders of the Israeli Communist Party, and although he was originally Berl Kovner, it was as Meir Vilner that he signed Israel's Declaration of Independence. Abba Kovner was the middle child, born between Gedalia (Genia), who was born in Feodosiya (a port and vacation site in the Crimea), and Michael, born in Oszmiana, near Vilna.
Apparently all the Kovners descended from the same line in Kovno, hencethe name. Haim Kovner, who today lives in Bnei Brak (an ultra-Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv), has a genealogical list given to him by his grandfather, traditionally written on the inside cover of a Bible, detailing the Kovner family tree. Semion (Simon) Kovner, a highly decorated Red Army soldier, immigrated to Israel and brought a similar family tree with him. The tree begins with the pogroms of 1648-1649 and continues through the generations until it reaches the most important rabbi in the dynasty, the Vilna Gaon (the highest title attributed to a rabbinical scholar), Rabbi Mordechai-Eliezer Kovner, who in the 1860s published innovative interpretations of certain portions of the Torah titled Ram's Horns. His grandson, Shlomo-Zalman, preserved the details of the dynasty on the book's inner cover, the pride of the family, and wrote a foreword detailing Mordechai-Eliezer's wealth, modesty, and generosity. Haim Kovner republished the book a hundred years later and presented it to Abba Kovner shortly before his death.
Most of the large family perished in the Holocaust. Those who left Lithuania before the war and those who survived or were born later form a microcosm of the Jewish people: a pre-1917 revolutionary and an Orthodox Jew, a physician and a literary critic, Red Army soldiers and rabbis, artists and lawyers, kibbutz members, scientists and ideologues. "All the Kovners are creative people," said Leon, an artist living in Haifa, "and attached to the family," continued Clara Bar, Kovner's first cousin.
Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, Abba's father, Israel, then in his 20s, settled in Sevastopol with his two brothers, Zalman and Shalom, and his sister, Rivka, Abba's uncles and aunt, because in Lithuania, which was then part of czarist Russia, only a limited number of Jews could study in the high schools and universities. The brothers and sister lived fairly close to each other and kept moderately traditional (but not Orthodox) Zionist households, which were always full of guests and financially comfortable (Shalom was an expert appraiser of antique jewelry, even the Crown's). They were close and celebrated the holidays and often dined together, husbands, wives, and their dozen or so children. Years later Kovner described the family in one of his poems, sitting together around the dinner table on a Saturday evening, his grandmother wearing an "immense pearl necklace" that had been handed down from generation to generation for 150 years (El, p. 48). The family was warm, educated, and affluent.
Kovner's cousins loved him and admired his eloquence, his sense of humor, and his pranks, and they valued his willingness, from an early age, to recite and read aloud for everyone's entertainment. To this day Kovner's cousins and sister-in-law recall the devoted care Kovner took of close family members, such as his older brother, Genia, and his sister-in-law, Neuta. They remember how modest and warm he was with them, even when he was famous and had been awarded many prizes.
Kovner's parents were already middle-aged when he was born. His father, Israel, married relatively late, in terms of the conventions of the time, and was almost 40 when he fathered Abba. Those who were well acquainted with Israel called him die zeideneh Late, "the silk patch," or sometimes Edelman, "the noble one," and described him as modest, honest and wise, fair of countenance, and always well dressed. Following the family tradition, Israel was always ready to help those in need. At least three of his nieces and nephews lived in his house for long periods of time, before and after his marriage, and were treated like sons and daughters.
Kovner resembled his father in character, whereas Genia took after their mother, who was a bustling, sharp-tongued, short-tempered woman, the ruler of her household. She was tall and beautiful-"Madame Kovner," according to Kovner's cousins-a talented woman and loving mother who admired her children, especially Abba. Her house was warm and open and a pleasure to visit, particularly at mealtimes. Kovner loved his mother deeply, especially "her hearty laugh, her black braids, her white-clothed table and the aromas of her cooking." He cherished the values she instilled in him: "My son, do evil to no man," she said when she saw him holding a weapon in the ghetto. He felt great pity for her suffering: "Her heart, her liver, the broken veins of her legs plagued her and filled the house with the smell of medicine, and sighs lingering in the air" for years (Scrolls of Testimony, pp. 55 and 144). From childhood the sight of her legs made him shudder. Her personality and her fate, more than any other's, was the central pivot of his poetry and his innermost pain.
When Kovner was 4 years old, his father was arrested by the Russian secret police. After the civil war (1918-1921) private commerce was forbidden in the Soviet Union and heavy fines were imposed on the "bourgeoisie." It is also possible, according to Kovner, that Zionism compounded the crime of commerce. His father's imprisonment was little Abba's first unpleasant experience in life, and he remembered it well, recalling it often in later years in his poetry. His mother and uncles collected a huge sum of money and managed to secure his father's release after a few months. In 1926, when it became obvious that not only could Jews not make a living in the Soviet Union but also that their lives as Jews, their religion and nationality, were being systematically destroyed, Israel and his brothers and their families returned to Lithuania, where they restored their wealth and continued their close family relations.
Toward the end of the 1930s the socioeconomic condition of Polish Jews worsened, Vilna's Jews included. When the generosity of Kovner's father became known, the needy turned to him and all received charity or security for their bills. He was especially generous with fees for students of the Hebrew Gymnasium, part of the famous Tarbut network, where he was on the board of directors. Thus the family fortunes gradually dwindled, and 13-year-old Kovner, who for the first time in his life heard his parents (usually a loving couple) quarreling, wept bitterly. His tears fell onto the pages of the book he was reading and were absorbed by the paper, and for the first time he asked the question that he was later to ask again and again in times of pain and remembrance: Where do tears disappear to, tears and voices and souls and desires, which are, if his question can be so phrased, realities, even though beyond the tangible and corporeal.
Kovner considered himself a citizen of Vilna: "I have a city," he used to say, even after having left, "which I draped in the poems of my youth." During the 1930s Vilna was a lovely place, with the wide Wilja River running through it, and a narrower river, the Wilejka, encircling it. Two high hills, many splendid churches, and much greenery added to its beauty. The city was founded in the tenth century and became the Lithuanian capital in the fourteenth; Jews began living there in the sixteenth century. Kovner absorbed the scenery and the uniqueness of the Jewish community, always, in his written and spoken communications, including tales and stories of its famous personalities and beggars, and never ceasing to yearn for it. "[Vilna is] a city that ... comes toward me" (On the Narrow Bridge, p. 132), and he kept seeing its beauty wherever he looked, all his life (Scrolls of Testimony, p. 157).
For Kovner, figures from Vilna's historical Jewish past were part of present community life, especially the Gaon Rabbi Eliahu (Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman), who in the eighteenth century shaped the image of the Litvak, the Lithuanian Jew known for his logic, critical mind, and independent thought, having no admiration for the exhilaration of the pious or the dances of the Hassidic Jews. "There was no Jewish home," wrote Kovner in a nostalgic essay, "in which Rabbi Eliahu was not present," hinting in his writings that he wished to follow in the Gaon's footsteps.
Writers, poets, and thinkers were active in Vilna. At the outbreak of World War II the Strashun Library, which opened in 1882 across from Rabbi Eliahu's synagogue, contained tens of thousands of books and was the most famous Jewish library in Europe. Every thinking young person in Vilna, Kovner included, found a seat at one of its long tables. During the 1920s and 1930s, when Vilna and the surrounding areas were under Polish rule, the Jewish community reached its cultural zenith, although materially it was quite poor. On the eve of World War II the Jewish population of Vilna numbered around 60,000 souls, about a third of the city's population. Thus, and for good reason, Vilna was called the Jerusalem of Lithuania. It accommodated a unique blend of religious and secular Jews, parties of every shade of the political spectrum, various educational systems (from kindergartens to teachers' seminaries and from heders [religious pre-elementary small schools] to yeshivas [Talmudic seminaries]), and a wide variety of newspapers and publications, both dailies and periodicals, in Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish-Vilna was a world center of Yiddish.
All Jewish natives of Vilna were and are proud of the intellectual richness of the community they grew up in and of the way history and Vilna's famous denizens influenced one another. Kovner viewed Jewish Vilna as the source of his own tendency to be a misnaged, that is, in constant opposition, like every other Litvak who was a spiritual descendant of the Vilna Gaon: "I was doubtless a rebel while still in my mother's womb," Kovner wrote (On the Narrow Bridge, p. 114). From a young age, Kovner was independent in thought, examining everything in his own way. He entered the Hebrew Gymnasium when he was 12, and although most of the other children had been studying together for five years, Kovner was immediately accepted into the class elite and became one of its most prominent members.
Miriam Zimnavoda, who during the 1930s taught at the Reali School in Haifa, sent the Tarbut Gymnasium in Vilna dried flowers accompanied by notes written by her students, even though she knew no one at the school. Kovner's teacher responded in kind by inspiring his students to correspond with hers. When Kovner was 15 and had already learned Hebrew, he sent a letter from "Vilna, Poland," to "our brothers in Eretz Israel"; the letter was dated Sivan 17, 1933, as Kovner made sure to use the Hebrew date. He wrote, "Our longings are immense, both for you and the ground you tread on. Every day we spend in exile, we wait impatiently and yearn for the day when we will be able to be in our beloved Land of Israel and to take part in building it." The letters that arrived from Eretz Israel were read and reread and then bound into albums.
The albums-and most of the youngsters who kept them-were destroyed in the Holocaust. However, toward the end of 1961, Zimnavoda, still in Haifa, contacted Kovner. She had kept the old letters and located him in Ein Hahoresh as soon as she heard him testify at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. His immediate written answer to her was nostalgic and sentimental because her letter, enclosed with an old one of his, brought back the days of his childhood and youth. Between those days and his adulthood, Kovner wrote to her, "there stood a terrible mountain of memory." After he received her letter, he went on writing, "I spent an entire day and night [imagining myself] going up and down the stairs at Number 4 Zavalne Street. I opened every door in the Tarbut Hebrew Gymnasium (they were all alive, all sitting in their seats in class!)." He then remembered himself being late for physics, leaving the old school building with his textbooks under his arm, and walking along the Wilejka and over the bridge and then back along the river; he thought about a bottle into which he had inserted a message when he was a boy and cast onto the water. Once again he was young and striding through his city, Vilna, and the world was still whole, intact, and had not yet shattered into fragments.
Kovner was 14 when his father, who was then in his early 50s, died in terrible pain from a serious case of tuberculosis. The burden of the house and children fell on his mother's shoulders. Their financial situation deteriorated, and she had no choice but to open a small restaurant, where her excellent cooking was praised. A large portrait of Kovner's father hung on the wall, reminding them of better days. His death was a terrible blow, and Kovner expressed his sorrow in poems. His father appeared often in his writings, and the years did nothing to dull the pain of his premature death, of the emptiness in the house, of the loss of a man he had both loved and respected, of whose talents and pleasant voice he was proud, and of everything he could have learned from him had he only lived longer.
In 1935, when he was 17, Kovner left the Hebrew Gymnasium, having decided, with the hubris of a young man, that his studies were contributing nothing to his development as an individual, that the teaching methods were outdated, and that he could learn what interested him by himself. His goals were pioneering in Eretz Israel and the proletarianization of the Jewish people, and he felt-as did many of his generation-that a future pioneer did not have to invest time and effort in diplomas and universities. Despite the financial situation at home, Kovner did not work after he left the Gymnasium, but he saved on tuition fees (which were quite high) and did in fact study on his own. When his friends came to visit, they found him poring over books on philosophy and psychology, but most of the time Kovner sat alone in the Strashun Library or spent days studying the Talmud with the old men in the yeshiva. Writing poetry, which he had begun two or three years previously, occupied more of his time, perhaps because of his father's death. Kovner wrote in Hebrew, which at that time was beginning to replace Yiddish as the spoken language among Zionist youth following great efforts to introduce it into the Hebrew Gymnasium. However, intensive reading and writing made way for a new occupation in which Kovner later invested all his time, effort, and thoughts: his membership in the Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard) Zionist-Socialist youth movement.
The Hashomer Hatzair branch in Vilna was one of the largest and oldest of this youth movement; it had been established in 1920, just a few years after the movement itself was founded in Poland. Kovner immersed himself in its vibrant activities and social life far more than he did in its ideological and political principles. It was a distinction he made early in his youth and that he continued when he came to Eretz Israel, where he was more of a member of the "educational movement," as Hashomer Hatzair was then called, and less a member of its political party, Mapam, or the Kibbutz Artzi, its kibbutzim movement. In his speeches and essays Kovner dealt infrequently with Hashomer Hatzair ideology, which drew its inspiration from a variety of different and sometimes opposing sources and whose uniqueness stemmed from their synthesis. Hashomer Hatzair guided its members toward personal fulfillment of the ideal of becoming a kibbutz member and toward ideological collectivism, the construction of a socialist society in Eretz Israel in the spirit of Marxist thought, and a search for a combination of Zionism, pioneering, and a realization of the Soviet idea of equality. That ideology was transmitted through an independent youth culture, with young members in turn leading and educating younger members. But Hashomer Hatzair's real gift was in creating its own style, different from the other youth movements. It formed cohesive groups that were emotionally close to a leader whose authority and personal example were decisive and who was at once a father figure and a teacher imparting knowledge and ideological values.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Fall of a Sparrow by Dina Porat Copyright © 2000 by Yad Vashem and Am Oved. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface....................xiiiAcknowledgments....................xxi
1. Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna: "A sad-eyed child," March 1918-September 1939....................3
2. In Independent Lithuania: "Vilna is the birthplace of everything," October 1939-June 1940....................15
3. Under Soviet Rule: "On the ruins of illusion," June 1940-June 1941....................28
4. Hiding in a Monastery: "A crimson life-line on the convent wall," June-December 1941....................41
5. The Manifesto of January 1, 1942: "The rebellion began with the manifesto," September 1941-January 1942....................57
6. The Establishment and Training of the Underground: "A man cannot be a hero at the expense of those he loves," January 1942-Spring 1943....................76
7. The Wittenberg Affair: "On the senseless night of July 16," March-September 1943....................106
8. The Last Days of the Ghetto: "And say with me / My mother / My mother," September 1-September 24, 1943....................132
9. In the Forest and with the Partisans: "Of ten fingers, only the one left knows how to shoot!" October 1943-July 1944....................150
10. From the Land of the Holocaust to the Land of Life: "Mammeh, may I cry now?" July-December 1944....................177
11. The Bricha (Escape from Europe) and the East European Survivors' Brigade: "A nightmarish ... an awful wandering," January-July 1945....................190
12. Nakam-The Blood of Israel Will Take Revenge: "To kill six million Germans," August 1945-December 1947....................210
13. Information Officer of theGivati Brigade During the War of Independence: "Everything depends on your courage in battle, face-to-face," December 1947-December 1949....................238
14. Serving the Party and at Odds with It: "Has the time come to forgive Germany?"....................261
15. The Holocaust and Jewish History: "A poem in stone"....................271
16. The Kibbutz Rebbe: "I am alone in the fields"....................295
17. Family and Friends: "And everything I have done should be corrected, / Except my life with you"....................312
18. Finis: "One should not summarize, for God's sake, not summarize!"....................324
Notes....................339
Writings of Abba Kovner....................385
Unpublished Sources....................389
Selected Bibliography....................395
Index....................399