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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