Ruebner’s earlier collection in English, In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems (Hebrew Union College Press, 2014), also translated by Back, is a much more comprehensive volume that spans seven decades: from his first book The Fire in the Stone (1957) to Last Ones. In the Illuminated Dark is required reading for anyone interested in modern Hebrew poetry, for it contains a generous selection of Ruebner’s work along with an important biographical and literary introduction by the translator, extensive notes, and a chronology. These additional materials make it clear that Ruebner’s life was not only congruent with Israel’s history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but also marked by tragedy.
Born in modern-day Slovakia, Ruebner was seventeen when he emigrated to Palestine in 1941, leaving behind his parents and his twelve-year-old sister Alice (Litzi). Murdered in Auschwitz in 1942, the family, in particular Litzi, would always haunt his poetry. Ruebner later moved to Kibbutz Merchavia in the Jezreel Valley and married his first wife, Ada, with whom he had one daughter. In 1950, Tuvia and Ada were in a bus crash; Ada died and Tuvia was seriously burned. He recovered, remarried, and became a librarian and eventually a professor of literature. He and his second wife Galila had three children, but in 1983 their son Moran, who had served in the First Lebanon War, disappeared in South America after visiting his parents at Harvard, where Tuvia was on sabbatical. The lost son, like the lost sister, came to inhabit Ruebner’s work.
In Israel, Ruebner’s poetry is highly regarded, and has garnered every major literary award. Although he has also won awards in Germany and Austria, in the US he is not as well known as contemporaries such as Yehuda Amichai, Dan Pagis (one of his closest friends), and T. Carmi. This is unfortunate, for Ruebner is an extraordinary poet whose direct and expressive voice achieves both intimacy and public resonance. His works engage powerfully with the civic and political life of his nation; as Back tells us in the introduction to In the Illuminated Dark, he offers a poetry of prophetic testimony, a “virulent critique of late twentieth-century Israel [which] includes a fierce censure of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and, with this forty-six years of occupation, its oppression of two million Palestinians.” But Ruebner is more than a political poet: he also writes many poems about music and the visual arts, especially in relation to the high European traditions that accompanied him when he left Czechkoslovakia.
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“Haydn,” the first poem in Now at the Threshold and one of my favorites, meditates on the Austrian composer’s late string quartets and the aging of the artist. Here is the opening stanza:
Haydn, growing old
What did he know when he wrote the second movement
of the String Quartets, Opus 77, number 1?
Did he fear what he was sensing?
Did he sense what was soon to happen?
Something dark, something terrible not to be told
not in words and not in musical notes?
What did he have to fear? Safe in his home in Schönbrunn,
“The Creation” perfect, and he a favorite of the Kaiser.
Fear of the barbarians invading his Vienna, his Burgenland,
reign of the barbarians everywhere?
Reason subservient to abomination?
The slow second movement of the String Quartet Opus 77, no. 1 (1799) clearly presages the composer’s terrifying and inexpressible knowledge of death, though Ruebner also ironically asks “What did he have to fear?” “The Creation” refers to Haydn’s celebrated oratorio, yet I think Ruebner also implies that the elderly but still active artist who faces death ultimately perceives the created world around him as perfect. This may be why “the barbarians”—Napoleon and his troops, who invaded Vienna shortly before Haydn’s death— are to be feared. They represent reason (the claim of the French Revolution, which Napoleon was carrying throughout Europe), which the artist may consider “subservient to abomination” because it could be seen to oppose the imagination. Yet Ruebner may also have in mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which traces “enlightened” reason to the abominations of twentieth-century totalitarianism. The barbaric carnage of the Napoleonic wars, fought to spread ideals associated with the Enlightenment, presages the even greater violence of Nazism, which also made claims to “reason” and “science.”
Yet in the second stanza, Ruebner apparently becomes breezy and nonchalant, dismissing his speculations in the previous stanza and remarking that “One needs no flight of fancy / to invent imaginary possibilities regarding artists and art.” He continues:
The morning air is still cool
No memories.
The presto is stirring.
The jaybird tries to imitate it in its way
and the lark in its own way.
The world goes on, without crumbling
and on it, on this old planet spinning round on its delusional
indifferent axis,
with its killers and its clowns, its wise and its wicked,
with the plunderers of its poor, and with its innocent,
Haydn created the String Quartets.
Wondrous things happen. What a joy to be alive.
How are we to take this apparent change of direction? It appears that, tonally, we are suspended between an almost naïve expression of happiness, of joy in nature and human creativity, and an articulation of helplessness in the face of human evil and of the indifference it leads us to feel. As the poem ends, we are left in doubt, but I believe we must take Ruebner at his word: despite the wanton destruction of the innocent, “Wondrous things happen.”
This kind of tonal and philosophical vacillation, akin to the vision of Ecclesiastes, emerges throughout Now at the Threshold. The creative power of the imagination mediates between hope and despair, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, dark and light. Consider the brief “Angel Becoming”:
In the interim world
from within the darkest thoughts
a type of angel rises and floats,
I never saw its face but now I see it
line by line, note by note—
where?
On the white page
The angel’s redemptive power both inspires and inhabits the writing of the poem, as “the white page” is set in opposition to “the darkest thoughts.” Similarly, “In the Land of the Deer,” a poem about nightfall in the Jezreel Valley, ends as “the omnipotent darkness / slowly spreads and swallows all / but for the hidden light.” I do not think of Ruebner as mystical or even particularly religious. No poet writing in Hebrew can avoid references to biblical and other religious texts, but Ruebner’s earlier work has fewer such allusions. Here in this late poem, however, the Kabbalistic “hidden light” of the divine remains in the face of “the omnipotent darkness.”
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The seemingly endless darkness of state-sponsored political disaster that Ruebner’s earlier poetry so often addressed continues to impose itself in his late work. It is important to note that, according to Back’s introduction to In the Illuminated Dark, Ruebner “is critical of the very notion and reality of national identities and of statehood.” Ruebner is strongly connected to the landscapes of his youth in Czechoslovakia and his long adult life in Israel. Nevertheless, he insists, as he said in an interview, that “Poetry became my homeland.” Some of the political poems in Now at the Threshold reference recent events (the stabbings of the “Knife Intifada” of 2015–2016, the Gaza air strikes), but others are more generalized expressions of sorrow and anger that frequently make use of biblical allusions. To take just one example, a short poem called “Eikha / O How” (in Hebrew the title is simply “Eikha”) evokes the Book of Lamentations, which opens with the word eikha (how). Here are the opening lines of Ruebner’s poem:
Israel
The Promised Land
All hopes and prospects like an orchard of Palms
O how have you become
A land where truth turns its back on itself
Till what was, wasn’t?
Still your landscapes are glorious to the eye.
Still your sufferings blossom like the Judas tree.
Land of leave-takings
Still your heart beats
How long
Till when
As Back indicates, the Hebrew for “How long” (ad anah) also points to various biblical verses in such books as Job and Psalms, in which the speaker calls on God in the midst of suffering and despair. But the contemporaneity of the poem is also palpable, for Ruebner addresses the lies and corruption of Israeli politicians in the line “A land where truth turns back on itself.” Israel is also a “Land of leave-taking,” where parents say farewell to their children going to war, or perhaps to those who have simply had enough and emigrate, escaping the strife they have known all their lives.
In very old age, Ruebner’s imagination rarely flags. “My past returns to me again and again,” he declares in “Eyes,” a poem where he once more mourns family lost in the Shoah and another son lost to the trauma of war-torn Israeli experience. Speaking to them directly, he simply says that “If I join you, my lost ones, / you will no longer be my lost ones. / Not a single one.” What is truly remarkable, then, is how the present lives alongside the past in these poems, and how open Ruebner remains to this simultaneity. This is especially true in Ruebner’s love poems to his wife, as the passion that was kindled a lifetime ago is both recalled and renewed, however unlikely that may appear—even to the poet himself. “But how many nearing ninety still write / love poems?” he asks in “Since Then.” The poem “Wrinkles” offers a beautiful answer:
How beautiful are the wrinkles on your face!
With what exemplary order they lay down beside each other.
Filled with life in all its goodness and suffering,
how many memories that have never spoken,
the dawn of youth like a slender strip of light on the horizon,
loves that were, that are, disappointments, anguish,
how much joy stored, how much severity,
aspirations that were fulfilled and those that weren’t.
Your face is the fragmented orbit of stars
and my eyes caress.
Note Ruebner’s metaphors here, which contrast with his use of such generalized terms as “goodness,” “suffering, “disappointments,” “anguish, “joy” and “severity.” There are the wrinkles themselves, which “lay down beside each other,” perhaps like husband and wife. There is “the dawn of youth like a slender strip of light on the horizon.” Finally, there is the face of the beloved, beautiful and imperfect, a “fragmented orbit of stars.” Taken all together, these metaphors show us how their youthful love is not past but present.
Ruebner’s forthright sincerity here reminds me of American Objectivists such as Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, both of whom insist that sincerity is not merely an emotional but a linguistic quality, and that in poetry, as Oppen puts it, “the test of sincerity” is “the test of truth.” In rhetorical terms, this usually entails a stripped down, economical style with only the most precise and careful figures of speech. In his late poems, Ruebner passes this test again and again: “On the longest day of the year I want to say / again and again, life is beautiful. It’s beautiful to be alive.” Moved by this beauty, the poet tells us
. . . you can love, for real,
even if you’re mute as a mouse in hiding
and now the words are emerging from the blockage
and at age ninety-four you’re writing, it’s wild,
a new poem, song of a tufted titmouse
a song of praise.
It is as if Ruebner has surprised himself in the act of writing, discovering again the wildness of a poem rising from some previously blocked depth within him. It is a song of praise for the beauty of life, and for the power of poetry itself.
Ruebner’s constant faith in this power—and in the reciprocity of the poet’s relationship to poetry—is perhaps the most moving aspect of this final gathering. The poem enlivens the poet, just as the poet enlivens the poem. Charged with this wild power, Ruebner confronts the enormous tragedies and disappointments of his life as well as what lies beyond them, observing “What evades its name / what erases our image.” As Ruebner conceives of his task, the poet must acknowledge the unnamable but continually resist it; he must always pay heed to “The words that weren’t spoken” which “are knocking on the door / of the frightened heart.” Even at the threshold of oblivion, Ruebner opens the door to these words and speaks them.
