Descripción
In vowelized Hebrew. 118, [1] pages. 18 x 11 cm. Nathan Alterman (August 14, 1910 - March 28, 1970) was an Israeli poet, playwright, journalist, and translator. Though never holding any elected office, Alterman was highly influential in Socialist Zionist politics, both before and after the establishment of the State of Israel. He was born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). He moved to Tel Aviv with his family in 1925, when he was 15 years old, and continued his studies at the Herzliya Hebrew High School. When he was 19 years old, he traveled to Paris to study at the University of Paris (a.k.a. La Sorbonne), but a year later he decided to go to Nancy to study agronomy. Though maintaining close contacts with his family and friends in Tel Aviv and visiting them on vacations, Alterman spent three years in France and was influenced by his occasional meetings with French artists and writers. When he returned to Tel Aviv in 1932, he started working at the Mikveh Iisrael agricultural school, but soon left it to devote himself to journalism and poetry. Alterman is credited with bringing the seeds of the marmande tomato to Israel, where it was the main species cultivated in the country until the 1960s. Alterman's first published book of poetry was Kokhavim Bakhuts ("Stars Outside"), published in 1938. This volume, with its "neo-romantic themes, highly charged texture, and metrical virtuosity," as Israeli critic Benjamin Harshav puts it, established him as a major force in modern Hebrew literature. His next major book was "The Joy of the Poor", which many regard as his magnum opus. This is a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria consisting of 31 interconnected poems, all from the viewpoint of the ghost of a dead man obsessed with the living woman he loves, a reversal of the Orpheus and Eurydice story. The dead man wants to protect his living love from war and poverty, but more than anything he wants to drag her into his world. His plans are continually frustrated. The light from a humble candle is enough to drive him back. The story reads like a supernatural thriller, but the rhyme and the meters are regular and elegant. In 1942, when the first news about the Holocaust reached the Jewish community in British Mandate Palestine, Alterman wrote a poem, which can be described as a sarcastic paraphrase on the Jewish prayer, "Praised are You . . . who has chosen us out of all the nations". In this poem Alterman says, "At our children's cry, shadowed by scaffolds, we heard not the world's furor. For you have chosen us out of all nations, you loved and favored us. For you have chosen us of all nations, of Norwegians, Czechs and Britons. As they march toward scaffolds, Jewish children of reason, they know their blood shan't be reckoned among the rest, they just call to the mother 'turn away your face'." In 1943, Alterman wrote the maqama "The Swedish Tongue", in which he praised Sweden's willingness to welcome Jewish refugees from Denmark. In 1943, he also wrote a poem that was critical of Pope Pius XII, a poem that is featured at the Yad Vashem museum. During the 1945-1947 years of the Zionist movement's struggle against British rule, Alterman's weekly column in the Labor Movement "Davar" newspaper was highly influential, strongly denouncing the British army's oppressive measures and praising the illegal immigrant boats landing Jewish holocaust survivors on the country's shores, in defiance of British policy. The most well-known of these is the 1945 "In Praise of an Italian Captain." In the early stages of the Israeli War of Independence he wrote numerous patriotic poems, the most well-known of which is "The Silver Platter" ( magash ha-kesef). Having become a canonical text read on Israel's Remembrance Day, this poem was written in response to Chaim Weizmann's words in December 1947, after the adoption of the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, "No state is ever handed on a silver platter. . . N° de ref. del artículo 014890
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