By Alyssa A. Lappen
ForPoetry.com | February 2003

Sloan Kettering first appeared in Hebrew in 1987 as a single poema, an extended verse on Abba Kovner’s terminal struggle against throat cancer. He died of it in Israel in 1987. But the poet’s other struggle bleeds through the skin of this work. This pentimento effect renders these 61 poems subtle, bold, and classic.

Throughout its history, Vilna’s rich cultural life made it known to Jewish residents as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. In June 1941, the city fell to the Nazis. Kovner hid in a nearby convent.

That fall, few believed the muffled rumors of Nazi horrors. But Abba Kovner, who had already suffered cruelly, was inclined to listen. In December 1941 he returned at great risk to learn from a 17-year-old girl of mass murders at Ponar and her survival beneath naked corpses in an open pit. As perhaps only a visionary leader could, he understood that this presaged Nazi extermination plans for the Jewish people of Europe. He knew their only hope for survival was to fight. Thus he led the Jewish partisans in Lithuania’s forests, along with his future wife Vitka Kempner and their friend Ruzka Korczak.

After the war, Kovner constructed an extensive Jewish underground to lead refugees from a criminally indifferent Europe into pre-Israel Palestine. Tens of thousands skirted Britain’s draconian immigration rules, which illegally denied entry into the Jewish National Homeland to all but a handful of Jews. Arrested by the British in December 1945, Kovner was imprisoned in Cairo and Jerusalem on unspecified charges until 1946. Continue reading “Review: Abba Kovner’s Sloan Kettering” →

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Transforming Literary Events into Pro-Arab Forums

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Big City Lit | February 2003

On Saturday, February 3, I had the supreme displeasure of attending a poetry event at the Poetry Project sponsored by Anne Waldman and Ammiel Alcalay, a professor of Hebrew Literature at Queens College.

Last fall, Professor Alcalay wrote to Campus-Watch.org to stand with radical colleagues who support violence against Israel. In a subsequent email correspondence with me, he denied supporting such people or acts. But his attitude was confirmed by his letter to the LA Times last year, his own words to me, and on Saturday. This man openly despises Israel.

I received his email invitation (with Ms. Anne Waldman, a fellow radical poet) to “Poetry is News: Operation Counter-Intelligence,” and sat in disbelief for four hours on Saturday afternoon as several speakers maligned Israel and (by extension) the Jewish people. Elias Khoury, for example, compared Israel’s siege of Ramallah to the Holocaust, and Israeli leaders to “tyrants and fascists.” (Alcalay said, “I cannot improve upon those remarks.”)

Elias Khoury is a far cry from the tolerant saint portrayed by Daniel Belasco in the Jewish Week last May, as a Lebanese novelist who, in Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish and English, “invoked the hallowed name of Al-Andalus.” All peace and good, except that this member of the Institute for Palestine Studies is not a liberal, not a moderate, and hates Israel. No doubt, he also seeks its destruction, as does the Palestinian Authority, according to its current PLO charter and Fateh Constitution. Continue reading “Poetry is News: Operation Counter-Intelligence” →

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.