ABSTRACT
The Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun (born Yechiel Perlmuter, 1904-1992) contended for sixty years with a harrowing internal enigma, with the horrors of history, with the loss of his family in the Holocaust. His poetry attempted to convey all this, but in so cryptic and coded a manner that most readers utterly failed to understand it. Yeshurun’s Hebrew is fraught with “foreign”, non-Hebrew words drawn from Yiddish, Arabic and Aramaic. His language attempts to locate foreignness at the heart of Hebrew, problematizing its naturalness as a national colloquial language. Overwhelmed by the memory of Yiddish, his mother tongue, Yeshurun experiences his own Hebrew voice as uncannily foreign. In a 1970 text titled “Prelude to an Interview” he exhorts:
. . . You asked how someone comes to be Avot Yeshurun? The answer is: through shattering. I shattered my father and mother, I shattered their household. I shattered their quiet nights. I shattered their holidays, their Shabbats. I shattered their self-regard. I shattered their self-expression. I shattered their language. I scorned Yiddish, and their Holy Tongue [i.e. Hebrew] I made mundane. I made them scorn their own lives. I fled from being part of them. And when the time came, when there was no longer any escape for them – I abandoned them there in their escapelessness. And so I was here. In Israel. I started hearing a voice from within, alone in my shack, on my iron bed, a voice that called me by my household name, and that voice – it was a voice from myself, to myself. My own voice, emerging from the mind and spreading throughout the entire
body, and my flesh trembled, even afterwards, so I started looking for a way to escape, to exchange my name and my family name, and after a while I was able to suppress them. There was an aspect of defense to it. Because when the voice was there, I was stirred awake. And I was afraid to fall asleep again. (Yeshurun 1997, p.124)
Yeshurun’s writing is an attempt to decipher the “enigma of the otherness” inherent in his own voice (Caruth 1996, p.3). In “Prelude to an Interview” he gives succinct expression not only to his traumatic past but also to the way in which other voices inhabit his own speech.
