Tuvya Ruebner

Tuvya Ruebner was born on January 30, 1924, in Bratislava, then part of Czechoslovakia, into a semi-secular Jewish family.[1][6] Race laws enacted in Slovakia barred Jewish students from school, ending his formal education after the ninth grade.[1] He was also drawn to photography in his youth, using primitive cameras in Czechoslovakia before he began writing poetry.[7]

Ruebner's involvement in the Socialist-Zionist youth movement enabled him to leave Europe at seventeen. In 1941, he traveled with a small group of Jewish youths through Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon to reach Mandatory Palestine.[1][6] He later described his survival as a chain of apparently accidental events, including his membership in Hashomer Hatzair, his receipt of an expensive immigration certificate, and his avoidance of the fate of other vessels crossing the Black Sea.[4] At the Pressburg-Bratislava railway station, he said farewell to his family without knowing that he would never see them again.[1]

His parents, his younger sister Litzi, and his grandparents remained in Slovakia and were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Litzi was thirteen when she was killed in 1942.[8][6] Ruebner later dedicated the English-language collection In the Illuminated Dark to her.[8]

Ruebner lived at Kibbutz Merhavia in the Jezreel Valley from 1942 and remained associated with it for the rest of his life.[8] He initially worked as a shepherd and later took part in Israel's War of Independence.[2][6] After the traffic accident that killed his first wife and seriously injured him, he moved away from physical labor; over the course of his working life at Merhavia, he served as a librarian and teacher.[9][2]

Ruebner later connected his slow early reception in Israel to his kibbutz background, his distance from urban literary circles, and the literary climate of the period.[10] Merhavia nevertheless became both his permanent home and an important setting for his visual work.

For ten years beginning in the early 1950s, Ruebner photographed daily life at the kibbutz. His subjects included members' meetings, night-watchers' meals, produce packing, newspaper distribution, the kibbutz secretary's room, and weekly film screenings.[7] The archive presents photography as a sustained creative practice parallel to his poetry, while a later literary assessment also described him as both a poet and a photographic artist.[7][11]

Ruebner's first wife, Ada Klein, was also from Slovakia. Their daughter Miriam was born in 1949, but a few months later Ada was killed in a bus accident that left Ruebner critically injured.[9] He later recalled that doctors gave him twenty-four hours to live and that he survived while conscious of his responsibility to his infant daughter.[4]

Ruebner subsequently married Galila Yizre'eli, a trained pianist, and they had two sons, Idan and Moran.[9] Galila remained his partner for more than fifty years.[4] Another profound loss followed when Moran disappeared while traveling in South America in the early 1980s and was never found.[8][4]

Ruebner dedicated the poem "Or Orphai" to Moran after his traces were lost. The poem asks: "For what purpose. For what purpose all this? I do not know. The truth—what terrible chatter."[10] In Ruebner's later years, Miriam lived with her family in Iceland, while Idan lived in a Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu.[4]

Ruebner worked as a poet, translator, editor, teacher, scholar, and photographer. After serving as a teacher and librarian, he entered academic life and was appointed professor of comparative literature at the University of Haifa in 1974. He later held the title of Professor Emeritus.[1][2] His rise to a professorship was especially notable because his formal schooling had ended after the ninth grade.[1]

As a translator, Ruebner worked in both directions between Hebrew and German. He translated writings by S. Y. Agnon into German and rendered works by Goethe, Ludwig Strauss, and Friedrich Schlegel into Hebrew.[1][2] He also wrote a book about Leah Goldberg, translated and edited literary works, and edited A. L. Strauss's Be-Darkhei ha-Sifrut in 1959.[2] Goldberg's family later entrusted him with editing her literary estate.[6]

Ruebner was widely regarded as an important link between German and Hebrew culture, though he resisted reducing his life to the role of a symbolic bridge.[4] His archive contained thousands of documents and pages of correspondence with major figures in both cultural spheres.[4] He was affiliated by correspondence with institutions including the German Academy for Language and Poetry, the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, the Franz Kafka Society, the Hugo von Hofmannsthal Society, and the European Society for Culture.[6]

Ruebner's early literary work was in German, the language associated with his childhood, his lost family, and writers such as Kafka, Hölderlin, and Rilke.[1] He began composing poetry in Hebrew during the 1950s and published Hebrew poems from 1953, initially in Al ha-Mishmar and later in literary journals and supplements.[1][2]

His first Hebrew collection, Ha-Esh Ba-Even (The Fire in the Stone), appeared in 1957 and addressed catastrophe and the loss of family.[12] His subsequent books included Shirim Limtso Et (Poems to Find Time, 1961), Kol Od (As Long As, 1967), Ein Lehashiv (Unreturnable, 1971), Shemesh Hatzot (Midnight Sun, 1977), Pesel U-Masekha (A Graven and Molten Image, 1982), Ve-El Mekomo Shoef (And Hastens to His Place, 1990), and Shirim Meucharim (Late Poems, 2000).[2]

In late 2013, Ruebner published Last Ones, his fifteenth Hebrew poetry collection. Despite its title, it was not his last book: he continued writing and publishing into the summer of 2019, and the poems in his final three collections were written after his ninetieth birthday.[3] He also published German-language collections including Wuestenginster (1990), Granatapfel (1995), and Zypressenlicht (2000). His German autobiography, Ein kurzes langes Leben: Von Pressburg nach Merchavia, appeared in 2004.[2]

Ruebner's poetry addresses the Holocaust, family loss, exile, aging, love, nature, music, visual art, and the tension between past and present.[1][11] Pesel U-Masekha marked an important stage in his later work, particularly through poems responding to works of visual art.[13] His poetry also drew on photographs as objects of memory. In "Black-and-White Photograph, Summer 1939," for example, he recalls members of his Slovak youth movement before the destruction that awaited their generation.[11]

Dan Pagis described Ruebner's poetry as displaying an "obsession with time and with the need for retaining values in a world of crumbling security."[2] Hebrew Union College Press characterized the poems as transforming the "dark matter of personal loss and history" into "cosmologies of light and clarity."[1] Critic Eli Hirsch interpreted the work as an effort to give poetic form to the continuing presence of a destroyed past within the present.[13]

Ruebner's poetic language combines contemporary and classical Hebrew with vivid imagery, wordplay, and ironic turns.[2] Critics noted the flexibility of his rhythms, which move between conversational narrative and lyric expression, traditional poetic forms and contemporary speech.[13] His later poetry was marked by both unusual productivity and continued formal renewal.[11]

Ruebner's relationship with German and Hebrew remained central to his literary identity. German was the language of his childhood, his lost family, and the European writers he admired; Hebrew became the language of his adopted country and mature poetic career.[1] He described German as his "girsā de-yankutā," the language of childhood, and said it remained emotionally close to him even after decades of writing principally in Hebrew.[10]

Ruebner described himself as simultaneously uprooted and grounded: "My roots are planted in the air, in the air. ... I think that whoever is uprooted once remains in the air all his life. So in this respect, I am in the air, and at the same time, as you can see, also on the ground."[10] He connected that tension to his later poetry, which increasingly incorporated Israeli landscapes.

A history of Hebrew literature identifies this oscillation as a defining feature of his work. His poems move between Bratislava and the Israeli kibbutz, between European and Israeli landscapes, and between Hebrew and German, his mother's language.[12] This dual inheritance linked him to immigrant writers such as Ludwig Strauss, Werner Kraft, Leah Goldberg, and Dan Pagis.[1]

Leah Goldberg was one of the most important literary figures in Ruebner's life, serving as both mentor and close friend.[6][14] Their relationship began in the late 1940s and developed into a correspondence extending through 1969.

The National Library publicized approximately eighty previously unpublished letters from Goldberg to Ruebner. Written over roughly twenty years, they discuss literature, politics, S. Y. Agnon, Marc Chagall, Goldberg's own work, and personal and family matters.[14] The letters reveal a relationship combining intellectual exchange with unusual personal openness.

Goldberg's family later asked Ruebner to edit her literary estate.[6] He also wrote a book about her, extending a relationship that connected friendship, criticism, editing, and literary memory.[2]

Ruebner received the Israel Prize for Hebrew poetry in 2008.[5] The award followed the Prime Minister's Prize for Creative Work, named for Levi Eshkol, which he received in 2007.[6]

His European honors included the Swiss D. Steinberg Prize and Germany's Christian Wagner Prize.[2] Hebrew Union College Press notes that his poetry, translation, and scholarship received numerous awards and accolades in both Israel and Europe.[1]

Broad acclaim nevertheless came relatively late in his career.[8] Ruebner attributed his delayed reception in Israel partly to his kibbutz background, his distance from literary circles, and the conservative literary climate he encountered. He said that the Israel Prize prompted some readers to reconsider his earlier work.[10]

Ruebner died suddenly of a heart attack at age ninety-five at his home on Kibbutz Merhavia on July 29, 2019.[4] He died the night before archivists from the Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association were scheduled to arrive to receive his literary archive, which he had packed into boxes for transfer.[4]

He remained healthy and productive into his final months, writing almost daily; some poems were composed during the same month in which he died.[4] His late work continued to appear into the summer of 2019, extending a poetic career that had begun more than six decades earlier.[3]

In the Illuminated Dark, translated and introduced by Rachel Tzvia Back and published around Ruebner's ninetieth birthday, was the first English-language book of his poetry. The bilingual volume presented work from across his seven-decade poetic trajectory.[1] Hebrew Union College Press described him as a major Israeli poet and an important voice of modern Jewish experience.[1]

Ruebner was also remembered as a cultural link between Hebrew and German literature and as a poet whose work renewed itself late in life.[4][11] A Ynet literary essay associated him with a "late flowering," arguing that from Pesel U-Masekha onward he combined remarkable productivity with sustained artistic quality.[11]

His photography forms a parallel legacy. The images he made at Kibbutz Merhavia preserve a visual record of communal life in the early years of the state, while his poetry frequently used photographs as instruments of memory and confrontation with the past.[7][11]

In his final years, Ruebner said that he was learning joy and was grateful to have survived long enough to continue seeing, enjoying, and writing.[10] His poem "Olam Mufla" (Wonderful World) describes green stalks emerging from the earth and becoming bread shared by human beings "on the edge of a knife," joining wonder with the awareness of life's fragility.[10]

Ruebner resisted being categorized simply as a Holocaust poet, even though Nazi persecution, the murder of his family, and postwar catastrophe recur throughout his work. He told an interviewer, "There is no connection between poetry and the Holocaust," while acknowledging that poetry written after the war might bear witness "even if only through a kind of stuttering."[8]

Responding to Theodor Adorno's statement about the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz, Ruebner said that it was barbaric "in the way that it's barbaric that after a forest fire new trees grow." He added that poetry was so fundamental that "it bursts forth."[8] His position did not deny the Holocaust's presence in his work; rather, it resisted treating poetry as a direct documentary category.

Ruebner's reception in Israel also remains an interpretive question. He recalled that his early poems communicated through gestures, pauses, and silences and believed that German audiences initially understood them more readily than Israeli readers. He connected that experience to his kibbutz background and distance from literary networks.[10] These statements represent Ruebner's own explanation of his reception rather than an independently established critical consensus.