The Poetry of Tuvia Ruebner

Offers a new reading of the poetry of Tuvia Ruebner, revealing the author’s thought-provoking shifts between German and Hebrew, and between text and music or visual arts.

Israeli poet Tuvia Ruebner (1924-2019), who emigrated from Slovakia to Mandatory Palestine in 1941, is widely celebrated as both a Hebrew-language and a German-language author. Less appreciated, however, is his lifelong writing across languages. Based on new archival materials and the latest comparative approaches, The Poetry of Tuvia Ruebner is the first monograph on Ruebner and sheds light on the transition between German and Hebrew at the core of his poetics.

Michal Ben-Horin’s study provides novel readings of Ruebner's poetry that call into question nation-based categories and source-translation binaries. It explores aspects of Ruebner's cross-cultural creation that interweaves diverse elements without erasing the differences between them, while combining the poetic with the ethical, the aesthetic with the political. Ben-Horin addresses Ruebner’s role as a mediator of German literature for Israeli readership; the poet’s processing of the traumatic loss of his family in the Holocaust by intertwining collective and private mourning and by crossing the lines between Europe, Africa and Asia; the connections of his poetry to music and the visual arts; and the compelling intertextual relations of his work to Franz Kafka.

Drawing inspiration from literary translation and memory theories, The Poetry of Tuvia Ruebner extends beyond the monolingualism of a German-Jewish tradition and contributes to the vibrant academic study of comparative Jewish literature.