TWO LINES ONLINE: Rachel Tzvia Back on Poet Tuvia Ruebner

Posted on June 02, 2011 by

(We've just published a poem by Tuvia Ruebner in Rachel Tzvia Back's translation in the June 2011 installment of TWO LINES Online. To help contextualize this work, today we have a post from Back.)

Tuvia Ruebner was born in Slovakia in 1924 to a German speaking Jewish family. The race-laws enacted in those years forced him to stop his studies in the ninth grade and he worked for a short while as an electrician. After an extended journey through Hungary, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, Ruebner arrived in mandate Palestine in 1941; his parents, sister and grandparents who had remained in Slovakia were killed in Auschwitz in 1942.

In Palestine, Ruebner worked on several kibbutzes, finally settling on Kibbutz Merhavia in the Jezereel Valley. He fought in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. After years as a high school literature teacher and kibbutz librarian, Ruebner was appointed a professor of comparative literature at Haifa University, where he continued his teaching and academic research until his retirement.

Ruebner published his first poetry collection in 1957 and has since published 11 more collections. Though his native tongue is German, he chose to write in Hebrew, as was the choice of his generation, in a rejection of the Old World and a declared commitment to the revived biblical tongue. His language is elegant and careful, even as it is conveyed in a direct, unflinching tenor. Already from the start of his poetic career, his poetry is marked by a rejection of formal verse and a bold experimentation with the potential embedded in the non-comforming line-break. His verse is always propelled by its musical force and an engagement with the many levels of meaning present in every word.

Ruebner's poetry is personal and political as one. His long life has afforded him a wide view of Jewish fate in the twentieth century, from the catastrophe of the Holocaust to the founding of the Jewish State to the ongoing disaster of the occupation. But Ruebner's poetry engages also universalistic themes of love, nature and loss. Indeed, his own life has been marked by abundant tragic losses, from the massacre of his family, to the death of his first wife in a car accident in the early 1950s, to the loss of his youngest son Moran, who disappeared in South America while traveling there in 1983 and was never found. Amidst these many losses, Ruebner's work maintains a grace and gentleness that are nothing short of extraordinary.

His poetry has received every major award in Israel, including the Prime Minister's Prize twice and the prestigious Israel Prize (in 2008). In Europe, his poetry and translations have been celebrated and extensively acknowledged with prizes including the D. Steinberg Prize (Zurich, 1981), the Christian Wagner Prize (Germany, 1994), the Jeanette Schocken Prize (Germany, 1999), and many more. Ruebner is also widely recognized as an accomplished photographer, and the strongly visual is present in his poetic work.