“How Was Spring Trimmed at the Apple Gardens”: Abba Kovner Sings the
Holocaust
Ofra Yeglin (December 5, 2008)
This presentation was part of the Seminar Series in Jewish Studies, 2008-09, presented by
the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, with support from the Labelle Birnbaum Tenenbaum
Enrichment Fund of TIJS, and the New Thinkers/New Leaders Fund of the Graduate School.
Cosponsors included the Departments of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and
Comparative Literature.
Ofra Yeglin
“Now this is Genius…”
by Amy Fisher, graduate student in Jewish Studies
Opening with a recording of the Hebrew version of a famous Yiddish song, it was clear that Ofra Yeglin’s talk,
“‘How Spring was Trimmed in the Apple Gardens’: The Poetry of Abba Kovner” would be an examination of poetry
in the fullest sense of the term. Rather than argue a single point, Yeglin chose to present both the early poems of
Kovner on the Holocaust as well as his final work the Scrolls of Testimony intertwined with his day to day
experiences. This gave the audience “a taste” of Kovner and his experiences. Having done so she posited the
question of how one might view his shift from inaccessible yet beautiful poetry of the Shoah to a coffee table book
(as he termed it) on this horrific event. Her presentation, brimming over with information, remained clear and lyric
throughout.
Abba Kovner’s varied life spanned sixty-nine years of destruction, tumult, and creation. Born in Sebastopol he spent
his youth in Vilna, where he took an active, prominent, and controversial part in the resistance movement. In 1945,
he was famously arrested by the British for attempting to leave Palestine for Germany with enough poison to kill 6
million Germans in an act of revenge. Kovner was also a witness at the Eichmann trial in 1961. With such an active
history of resilient resistance and attempted revenge, Kovner’s poetry might seem surprising.
Yet, it was through poetry, firmly entrenched in the Talmudic ideas in which he had been raised, that Kovner was
able to reflect and build on his experience with genocide. To examine this, Yeglin read the poem ‘Drowned’ in
Hebrew and then had a student read the English translation. In her rapid but lucid analysis of the poem’s motifs,
themes, and word choice (which could not always be duplicated in the translation), she drew out the multiple
references to the Mishnah and Torah layered into the poem. She then re-read the poem a third time through the lens
of his biography, specifically the events surrounding the death of his mother and brother, both of which are alluded
to in the poem. This final reading brought Kovner’s trope of the unlucky survivor to light: the skull in the river at
which he gazes in the poem turns out to be the poet himself.
While the individual haunted by memory was paramount in Kovner’s early poetry, by the end of his life he had lost
faith in memory and began to recreate the past through his writing. The dissemination of a collective memory of the
Holocaust became his paramount goal and led to the creation of the “coffee-table book” Scrolls of Testimony.
Visually influenced by the Talmud, it is divided into five scrolls, like the Torah. In the book Kovner records
individual and collective experiences of the Shoah, setting the stories in what are often jarring contexts and
explaining terms whose resonances he fears may be lost. This crystallization of experience is a far cry from the
layered and often opaque poetry Kovner first wrote and it is this point of disjuncture on which Yeglin invited the
audience to reflect at the conclusion of her talk.
The talk was followed by brief reflections from Emory’s Shalom Goldman (Middle East and South Asian Studies),
who as a young man knew Kovner when they lived on the same kibbutz. Intensifying the question with which Yeglin
ended, Goldman invited those present at the seminar to reflect on the problem of how a figure so passionately
committed to living life to his fullest could also, at an early point in his life, risked so much to carry out an act of
murderous vengeance.