The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner

By Dina Porat and Elizabeth Yuval

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9780804772525

Book preview

e9780804772525_cover.jpg

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

e9780804772525_i0001.jpg

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

English translation © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

The Fall of a Sparrow was originally published in Hebrew in 2000 under the title Me-’ever le-gishmi: Parashat hayav shel Aba Kovner

© 2000, Yad Vashem and Am Oved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Porat, Dina.

[Me-’ever le-gishmi. English]

The fall of a sparrow : the life and times of Abba Kovner / Dina Porat ; translated and edited by Elizabeth Yuval.

p. cm.

"Originally published in Hebrew in 2000 under the title

Me-’ever le-gishmi : parashat hayav shel Aba Kovner."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804772525

1. Kovner, Abba, 1918–1987. 2. Authors, Israeli—Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Lithuania—Vilnius. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Jewish resistance—Lithuania—Vilnius. 5. Holocaust survivors—Israel—Biography. I. Yuval, Elizabeth. II. Title.

PJ5054.K67513 2009

940.53’18092—dc22

[B]

2009015729

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

Dedicated to Vitka Kempner

A woman of courage and stature

Abba Kovner’s life companion

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Hamlet, act 5, scene 2

Table of Contents

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE - EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part One - Childhood and Youth (1918–1941)

One - Childhood in Sevastopol and Youth in Vilna

Two - In Independent Lithuania

Three - Under Soviet Rule

Part Two - Holocaust and War (1941–1944)

Four - Hiding in a Monastery

Five - The Manifesto of January 1, 1942

Six - The Establishment and Training of the Underground

Seven - The Wittenberg Affair

Eight - The Last Days of the Ghetto

Nine - In the Forest and with the Partisans

Part Three - Postwar Years in Europe and in Israel (1944–1949)

Ten - From the Land of the Holocaust to the Land of Life

Eleven - The Bricha (Escape from Europe) and the East European Survivors’ Brigade

Twelve - Nakam: The Blood of Israel Will Take Revenge

Thirteen - Information Officer of the Givati Brigade During the War of Independence

Part Four - A Life of Activity and Creativity (1949–1987)

Fourteen - Serving the Party and at Odds with It

Fifteen - The Holocaust and Jewish History

Sixteen - The Kibbutz Rebbe

Seventeen - Family and Friends

Eighteen - Finis

Reference Matter

Notes

Writings of Abba Kovner

Unpublished Sources

Selected Bibliography

Index

Preface

In March 1948 Abba Kovner celebrated his thirtieth birthday. Toward the end of May, two weeks after the establishment of the state of Israel was declared and two days before the Egyptian army invaded the Negev, its southern area, Kovner’s wife, Vitka Kempner, gave birth to Michael, their first child. Kovner wrote a poem about the fears of a man who has become a father after the Holocaust, calling it No, No, No. Kovner’s own sick father had died while he was still a youth and his mother had been murdered at Ponar, the killing site near Vilna, on the very day he left the ghetto for the forest with his comrades. His younger brother Michael, for whom the baby was named, joined the Soviet partisans and was killed on a mission. And now Kovner himself was a soldier, about to embark on yet another war for survival, although he was not at all certain that the previous war and the Holocaust had ended. The world kept turning while all over Europe Jews trying to return from the camps and forests to their former homes were being killed, and the criminals had yet to be punished. In the middle of the night, Kovner still awoke screaming from his nightmares.

In my mind’s eye I can still see my father dying

Behind my back I hear my mother’s voice as they kill her.

My brother fell dead in forty-three

On his birthday, in May, in May my brother fell.

Oh night, how wrong you are! A man like me is not

Hounded out of sorrow. These are not tears again

Fear terrifies me, fear of a meeting

With madness

And here my legs run, powerless run to see,

My God, is my son still breathing?

Of All Loves, p. 74

On the eve of the Jewish new year in 1949, Kovner, then information officer of the Givati Brigade, wrote festive orders of the day for his soldiers. He described his vision of the future after the gloomy present of the ongoing war: Beyond the shell-scarred walls there are white houses. Beyond the scorched hills, fields bursting into bloom; the plain, the mountain and desert are all populated, and the red trails have become the roads to redemption.¹ Neither compromise nor partition, no luxuries beyond the means of the surviving people and the newly born country, but rather a Jewish state, as large as possible, with the plain, the mountain, and the desert, populated by as many Jews as possible; the son breathes and his father, who walked down so many bloody paths, carrying his dead family and his dead people on his back, could finally sleep at night without the fear of coming face to face with madness.

Next to the Holocaust memorial column, which rises through all three stories of the Diaspora Museum located on the Tel Aviv University campus, there is a large open book titled Scrolls of Fire. Written by Kovner, it treats the sufferings of the Jewish people during their long history. It begins with a folktale about Jewish children in a shtetl (a small Jewish town) in the far north of Europe, its houses shrouded in snow, whose rabbi recounts the story of the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. The rabbi tells the children how the high priest climbed onto the burning roof and threw the key to the temple up to heaven. A hand was extended and took the key. The old man and the children were silent . . . and went their separate ways. . . . But that night one child, the child with sad eyes, saw the shining key fall from the sky and sink under the waters of the lake behind the village.² Thus Kovner introduces himself as the child with a mission, because only he had seen where the key sank and only he knew where to find it.

The tale connects Kovner to the poem Scroll of Fire by Haim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s poet laureate, which deeply laments the destruction of the Second Temple and describes the sad-eyed, white-winged angel whose prayer God answered, promising that even if the temple were destroyed, its last embers would never be extinguished. Since then the angel’s task had been to guard the hidden tear in the cup of silent sorrow. . . . The fire burned his lips and heart, scarred forever, because they had been touched by the holy fire.³ Kovner felt he had been burdened with a unique mission, burning like a holy fire, and it committed him always to be on his guard, to know in time what lay ahead and to warn of the Holocaust approaching Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, which would be destroyed, and of the key that would sink. It was up to him to light the flame of rebellion in the hearts of those caged in the ghetto and to lead them from there to fight in the forest and, afterward, to guide what remained of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, punishing on the way those responsible for the terrible tragedy, to renew the Temple in the Holy Land—the dwelling place that combined Jew and Israeli—and to forge the Zionism and Judaism of all generations into a new creation, providing a dwelling place that would be secure and populated, its houses white, its fields forever bursting into bloom, and to guard and preserve it, so that the embers might never be extinguished. That was how Kovner envisaged his mission.

Abba Kovner’s life can be divided into four periods. The first period is 1918–1941, covering his childhood and youth in Sevastopol and Vilna in the midst of a large, loving extended family; his studies at the Tarbut (culture) Hebrew Gymnasium and later at the Faculty for the Arts at the Vilna University; his activities as a young member, guide, and leader of Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard), a Zionist-Socialist youth movement, in Polish- and Russian-occupied Lithuania; and the beginnings of his literary work.

The second period, 1941–1944, took place during World War II and the Holocaust. When the Germans invaded Lithuania, Kovner hid in a convent near Vilna and from there returned to the ghetto to read his manifesto before the assembled members of the various youth movements still active at the time. In the manifesto Kovner asserted that Hitler was planning to kill all the Jews in Europe and hence self-defense was their only alternative. He participated in founding and training the ghetto underground and eventually became its commander. When the ghetto was liquidated, Kovner and his comrades fled to the forest, where he commanded a Jewish partisan unit, part of the Soviet partisan organization.

The third period, 1944–1949, includes the years between the liberation of Lithuania from the Nazi yoke and the end of Israel’s War of Independence. When Kovner and the partisans entered liberated Vilna, they searched for any Jews still alive and for whatever Jewish written material had survived the Holocaust, to bring them all to Eretz Israel (the Hebrew expression for prestate Israel) They also planned to unite the remnants of East European Jewry into one body and to wreak vengeance on the Germans. Kovner’s appearance before the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade in Italy was the climax of the meeting between representatives of Eretz Israel and the remaining European Jews, whereas his plans for revenge led him to British prisons in Egypt and Jerusalem.

After his release from prison Kovner joined Vitka Kempner, Ruzka Korczak, and other comrades at Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, located in the center of the country. During the 1948 War of Independence he was appointed information officer of the IDF’s (Israel Defense Forces) Givati Brigade and wrote its battle pages, among them the well-known page dealing with the fall of Kibbutz Nitzanim. Kovner’s first years in Israel were accompanied by an ongoing argument with the leadership of his movement, Hashomer Hatzair, and of his party, Mapam (the United Workers Party), with which the leftist kibbutzim, called together the Kibbutz Artzi, were affiliated. The argument began before he even reached Eretz Israel and continued until the death of Meir Ya’ari, his movement’s and party’s leader, in 1987, a few months before Kovner himself passed away.

The final period, from 1949–1987, covers Kovner’s life as a public figure and writer and revolves around his involvement in Israeli public life and, despite the ongoing argument, in his movement and in his party. This period also covers Kovner’s dozens of years as a member of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and his attempts to give kibbutz holidays and ceremonies a Jewish character. His efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and of the long history of the Jews were many. Kovner struggled for years for a memorial and a research center to preserve the history of Hashomer Hatzair during the Holocaust and founded the museum at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai and the Diaspora Museum at the University of Tel Aviv. He traveled abroad widely, wrote prolifically, and won many prizes, and his involvement in many varied public activities won him much public acclaim.

Abba Kovner’s stormy life was part of the history of the Jewish people in the twentieth century: the life of a thriving Jewish center in Europe between the two world wars, the Holocaust, Israel’s War of Independence, and the founding and building of the state of Israel. However, he did not stand on the sidelines and observe; he left his mark on each of the aforementioned periods of Jewish history. Some of his statements and actions are still debated to this day and were the source of accusations leveled against him both during his lifetime and after his death. His critics’ main claim was, and still is, that he let his followers down by failing to carry out plans and visions they believed in and followed him for—although it was far beyond his ability to change circumstances. He never answered any of them.

In addition to his literary output, Kovner wrote many articles and essays. Some of his speeches and lectures were transcribed, and he gave many interviews and recorded testimonies many a time. However, he left behind neither a diary nor any other continuous chronological testimony of the crucial events of his life, nothing to tell his side of the story, as did so many survivors, among them his own companions. He did not write his own biography because he often wavered between full appreciation of his role in history and fear of immodesty, of glorifying himself with an old man’s megalomania.⁴ Moreover, Kovner referred to his literary output as a kind of autobiography.⁵ In his great work on the Holocaust, The Scrolls of Testimony, for instance, a work that does in fact contain autobiographical elements, Kovner divides himself into two figures, Uri and Shaul. Uri is the intellectual who recognizes the limitations and flaws of decision making and action, meditates, and watches Shaul, who responds to the situation.⁶ This duality, the ability to objectively regard one’s own actions, had to find the proper vehicle for its expression. Kovner seemed to have decided that literature and poetry, with their symbols, metaphors, and images, could express the complexity and internal debate better than straightforward autobiographical prose.

And the third reason: Kovner himself was convinced that arguments about issues whose time, place, atmosphere, and norms were different and perhaps forgotten would be to no avail. The exact nature of the past would always escape and the efforts to restore it would only deepen the sorrow and lack of understanding⁷ and would cheapen the events of the past and their significance and perhaps even turn them into petty personal or political disputes.⁸

During the thirty years between 1956 and his death in 1987, Kovner testified no less than twenty-five times, usually with the participation of his wife, Vitka, and of Ruzka Korczak, and he gave dozens of interviews to various media. Some of his many speeches and public appearances were also attempts to bear witness. In 1982, in one rare, candid attempt to reach a definition of the processes of historical continuity, Kovner revealed how he felt about testifying. He made three main points:⁹

I am not sure if I have a conception . . . a clear idea about what happened during that period. If I had . . . I would have written the history of those times or described my experiences then.

I have different hours, different days, different times. . . . The event under discussion is so intense, its nature so dramatic, so unconventional, it would be an understatement to say its implications cannot be deciphered all at once. . . . In another hundred years it would trouble no less than today.

He spoke not only about the Holocaust but also about every testimony given by every Jew about every era: There are defense mechanisms. We defend our existence . . . our history . . . our deeds, the good years of our lives, etc. etc. The mechanism . . . represses failures. . . . First of all we are Jews. So we say we’d better be careful not to write anything that seems like a total Jewish failure. And rightly so. We’re Jews. As long as we are conscious of being Jews. As a Jew, you love your people. You can’t love and be objective at the same time.¹⁰

Kovner used those three main points to define the essence and goal of his testimonies and interviews. With complete clarity he objected to saying things which seem like a total Jewish failure, while defining himself as a son of a people whose failures are in greater abundance than its successes.¹¹ Thus Kovner made historians and readers face the unresolved tension between the duty to testify accurately and the goal he set for himself: to transmit the Jewish heritage, culture, and history from the Diaspora, every Diaspora, to Eretz Israel so the present generation could live in peace with itself and with its memories and so that coming generations could respect and venerate their ancestors and carry their torch. Even today, heritage and ideology are part of a continuum, Kovner said, and therefore a testimony is not a vehicle for precise historical events but a means of giving every Jew material with which to construct a picture of the past that could be lived with. The individuals who testify, and first of all Kovner himself, take a national mission upon themselves to preserve the past in the name of the future: Each one of us plays a role in Jewish history and is also its writer and its researcher, Kovner said, thus offering a clue to his—and others’—testimonies.¹²

Why then write the biography of a person who shied away from writing it and gave many reasons explaining why he deliberately avoided doing so? First, because Kovner’s is a fascinating stormy life story of an extraordinary personality, and his views on past and present issues were original, sometimes far ahead of his contemporaries. Second, because his views and the issues he raised are still relevant: the responsibility of a leader to his followers and the tension between reality and the principles he promised to adhere to; the power that the word, both written and oral—and Kovner was an orator who entranced his listeners—exerts in promoting a political or ideological position; punishment and revenge for wrongs inflicted by inhuman regimes, as a necessary means to restore order; achieving unity and continuity without enforcing uniformity; the role of every individual, not just the elite or the mavericks, in shaping the course of history; conduct in war, either when falling in captivity or when holding fast to one’s land, and being humane toward the enemy; foreseeing a looming national disaster and sending a warning on time. Those are still some of the themes of contemporary politics and tragedy.

Third, Kovner’s life story is thoroughly Jewish and Israeli, and there is no understanding of today’s Israeli and Jewish reactions without being acquainted with the notions he introduced or advocated, because they still are at the heart of debates such as like lambs to slaughter, death to the invaders, togetherness and differentness, and Judaism is a culture of a public. Although there is always a tension between the local and the universal, the details of the local always carry universal significance. A person who stays within his four walls is in the midst of an entire world, said the ancient Hebrew sages. Indeed, the underlying themes of Kovner’s story are beyond time and place—sacrifice, guilt, comradeship, first love, life companionship, illusion, and the weight of a mission that motivates human beings.

Were Kovner to rise from the dead and see his biography written, would he agree to the title, taken from Hamlet, The Fall of a Sparrow? He could have argued that he lived a full and rich life, soaring to heights of activity and creativity. But the Holocaust and its aftermath, no matter how well explained and presented, will always carry the bitter taste of human failure. And when Kovner passed away, as a sad-eyed old man, Israel and the Jewish people were again active and creative, and as the angel was promised, the embers were not extinguished, but Kovner could not feel that the heavy mission he undertook—to guard and preserve them and to shape them according to his vision—was completed.

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude is extended to Vitka Kempner, Kovner’s life companion, who allowed me access to all the materials in her home, including files containing sensitive subjects and letters sent to her by Abba at various times during their life together—all the materials, except, that is, for the handwritten notes written on the eve of his death, when he could no longer speak, which she has never shown to anyone. I particularly admire the way she spoke to me for hours and days without indulging in the currently popular trend of pouring her heart out about personal topics, but rather remaining reserved. She never boasted about her exploits as a partisan, despite the fact that they entitled her to the highest award a partisan could receive, but she always spoke candidly without avoiding embarrassing assessments. She never glossed over details about events, movements, or individuals, nor was she sparing in her criticism, sometimes even of Kovner himself. I cannot possibly thank her adequately for her help in finding materials that were not in her possession. She never asked to read the manuscript. This is not a formal or commissioned biography—no contract was signed—and our relations developed into trust and friendship.

It is a privilege for me to thank as well the many people whose help I was lucky enough to receive. First and foremost the eyewitnesses, who devoted many hours of their time to answer my questions. I owe special thanks to the members of the Vilna ghetto underground, the partisans, and the members of the bricha (escape) and nakam (revenge) groups, who were unselfish with their time and unstinting in their efforts to find written materials that had been stored in their homes for years, hosting me most cordially. Thanks are due to the Kovner children, his daughter Shlomit and his son Michael, and to Kovner’s relatives and many friends; to the members of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh; to those who were instrumental in building the Diaspora Museum, the Givat Haviva center, and the museum at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai; to the members of various kibbutzim and committees of Hashomer Hatzair; and to the fighters of the Givati Brigade. The list is too long—more than a hundred names—to acknowledge individuals here, but all the names appear in this book and all were my eyes; I was not fortunate enough to know Kovner, meeting him only once for one brief encounter.

In the more than 100 interviews recorded for this biography most of those interviewed described Kovner as a special and absolutely unique personality, respected to the point of awe, whether they fully agreed with or angrily objected to his statements and actions. The limitations of testimonies given decades after the events are well known; however, no piece of paper, no document could replace or do more than complement the colors, tastes, smells, scenes, quarrels, fears, loves, and hatred that rose from these memories. Warm thanks to all the witnesses.

I would also like to thank my friend Professor Dan Laor, who encouraged me from the very beginning; my teachers, Professors Yehuda Bauer and Israel Gutman, both intimate friends of Kovner, whose views had an impact on their academic work; and Shalom Lurie from Kibbutz Merhavia, Elisha Porat from Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, and Yosef Harmatz, Kovner’s close friend, who were all generous with their help; and Fania Yocheles-Barantzowska, a citizen of Vilna, who kindly spent several days leading me on a walking tour around the city, through the ghetto alleys, the convent grounds, and the forests where the partisans camped.

My thanks to Devorah Stavi, Genazim archivist; Ofra Kuzitz of the Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh archives; Yehudit Kleiman from Yad Vashem, for finding the material from Vilna and YIVO; Yossel Birstein and Yaron Sachish from the National Library; Dafna Olshanski of the Haganah archives; Hannah Shimoni from the Diaspora Museum; and the staff of Yad Ya’ari at Givat Haviva: Shlomo Bargil, Yehoshua Bichler, Yosepha Pecher, and especially Yonat Rotbein, Ruzka Korczak’s daughter. Special thanks to Mori Kantor of the Yad Tabenkin archives. All of them helped me willingly and took a deep interest in the work.

I would also like to thank my students: Dr. Liat Steir-Livni for her help; Rachel Hadaio for faithfully deciphering old cassette recordings; Dr. Haim Fireberg, who managed to find important material in the IDF archives; and Irena Catorovitch for being always there.

Thanks to those who read the chapters and gave me invaluable criticism (according to the order of chapters): Misha Kovner, Shalom Lurie, Yitzhak Ziv, Dr. Yitzhak Arad, Yosef Harmatz, Prof. Yehuda Wallach, Pnina Tzachor, Dr. Daniel Yam, Hanoch Bartov, Ehud Rabin, Dr. Yehoshua Bichler, Prof. Israel Gutman, Prof. Miriam Schlesinger, Dr. Geoffrey Wigoder, Adam Rand, and Cesia Rosenberg-Amit. I mourn all those who have passed away since the inception of this project.

Warm gratitude is extended to Elizabeth Yuval, who translated the Hebrew version, including citations from Kovner’s poetry and prose, most of which has not been translated before, and edited the manuscript. Her spirit and broad knowledge of Western literature made it a pleasure to work with her. I would like to thank Dr. Paul (Hershl) Glasser, senior research associate, and Dr. Susan A. Gitelson for naming me the Maria Salit-Gitelson Tell Memorial fellow at YIVO, New York, a place abundant with material concerning Vilna. My colleague Steve Zipperstein, the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, supported me with his good advice. Norris Pope, Director of Scholarly Publishing, and Sarah Crane Newman, Editorial Assistant for Humanities, both of Stanford University Press, were of great help. So were copyeditor Mimi Braverman and production editor Carolyn Brown. It is a pleasure to thank photographers Haim Goldgraber of Jerusalem and Mark Berghash of New York for their generous permission to use their work, and the Kovner family for readily allowing the use of photos from the family album and the citations from all of Kovner’s written works. William Lee Frost, president of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, a man of vision, generously supported the publication.

Warmest thanks go to my family: my best friend and husband, Yehuda; our sons and daughters-in-law, Iddo and Natalia and Avichai and Mirit, for their constant support; and Guy, who kept me from drowning in the Internet ocean.

I am fortunate to have them all as friends, students, and relatives.

This book was written in memory of my parents, Ruth Gold Kostrinski-Kitron, born in Ratzki, Lithuania, and Moshe Kostrinski-Kitron, born in Telechan near Pinsk, Byelorussia, later one of the leaders of Latin American Jewry; and my husband Yehuda Porat’s parents, both born in Cairo, Matilde Greenberg Forti and Marco Forti, descended from Jews expelled from Spain to Italy—who ingathered us from the exiles.

Part One

Childhood and Youth (1918–1941)

"Jerusalem without ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania,’

will it still be Jerusalem?"

Hours at Dawn

My best friends took their knapsacks

and went to the Tarbut school.

My best teachers took their knapsacks

and went to Ponar.

Observations, p. 163

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.¹ 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.²

Apparently all the Kovners descended from the same line in Kovno, hence the 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. ³ 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.⁴

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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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.⁷

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,⁸ 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.⁹

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.¹⁰

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.¹¹

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.¹²

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.¹³

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.

The groups engaged in scouting, trips, folk dancing, symbols, and flags and used them to foster strict, demanding norms of morality and behavior. In many of the branches Hebrew was spoken, and from afar the members lived the life of Eretz Israel, photographs of whose scenery and famous individuals were hung on every wall. ‘Otherness’ . . . in the face of our usual surroundings, was Kovner’s novel definition. The determination and single-mindedness with which the members lived group life was almost religious in nature, and in Vilna there was also the special nature of the community itself. Members of Hashomer Hatzair were convinced that a Vilna branch of the movement could not be divorced from the well-rooted ancient tree of Vilna Jewry that had been growing for generations or from the deep well of Jewish values from which those who were born there drew. Not only Hashomer Hatzair but also young members from all the youth movements represented the strength of the devotion, fidelity and willingness to sacrifice which Vilna Jewry had been amassing in surprising abundance.¹⁴

Between 1934 and 1938, from age 16 to 20, Kovner invested all his time and energy in the youth movement’s local chapter and became one of its central figures. At the same time, between 1936 and 1938, he studied for external matriculation examinations, which he took in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. He also studied at the Tarbut teachers’ seminary for Hebrew teachers, supporting himself by giving private lessons.¹⁵

Kovner was unmistakably born a leader. His name, Abba (father in Hebrew), suited the responsibility he took upon