Avraham Shlonsky

Avraham Shlonsky (March 6, 1900 – May 18, 1973; אברהם שלונסקי; Авраам Шлёнский) was an Israeli poet and editor born in the Russian Empire.

He was influential in the development of modern Hebrew and its literature in Israel through his many acclaimed translations of literary classics, particularly from Russian, as well as his own original Hebrew children's classics.

Known for his humor, Shlonsky earned the nickname "Lashonsky" from the wisecrackers of his generation (lashon means "tongue", i.e., "language") for his unusually clever and astute innovations in the newly evolving Hebrew language.

Avraham Shlonsky was born into a Hasidic family in Kryukovo (Poltava guberniya, now a part of Kremenchuk, Ukraine).

His father, Tuvia, was a Chabad Hasid, and his mother, Tzippora, was a Russian revolutionary.

When she was pregnant with her sixth child, she hid illegal posters on her body.

Five-year-old Avraham informed on his mother, leading to her arrest.

Four of his siblings were prodigies.

His younger sister was composer and pianist Verdina Shlonsky.

In 1913, when Shlonsky was 13, he was sent to Ottoman Palestine to study at the prestigious Herzliya Hebrew High School in Tel Aviv.

When the First World War broke out, he returned to Ukraine.

Shlonsky published his first poem in 1919 in the newspaper Ha-Shiloah.

He contributed to Jewish cultural life with songs for satirical stage productions, as well as the Purim holiday costume balls that were a tradition in early Tel Aviv.

Even at this early stage in his career as a poet, he showed a tendency for witty writing, incorporating linguistic innovations in the revived and developing Hebrew language.

During this period, he edited the literary columns of several newspapers.

Gradually, he became the representative of the "rebel" group that rebelled against the poetry of Bialik and his generation, expressing a particular aversion to what was seen as their characteristic clichés.

The new group tried to create a vibrant, youthful, lively poetry, and not perpetuate what they saw as being something second-hand from the literary establishment.

For years, perhaps as a result of this stance, Shlonsky's poetry was not taught in schools alongside the classic poems of Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, David Shimoni, and others.

In 1921, the whole family moved to Mandatory Palestine.

Tuvia Shlonsky worked as a warehouse manager and bookkeeper in the Shemen factory in Haifa.

Avraham was a manual laborer, paving roads and working in construction along with other members of the Third Aliyah.

He joined Gdud Ha'avoda and helped to establish Kibbutz Ein Harod in the Jezreel Valley.

In 1933 Shlonsky founded the literary weekly Turim, which was identified with the "Yachdav" society in which major poets Natan Alterman and Leah Goldberg were also members.

As an editor, Shlonsky gave aspiring poets an opportunity to publish their poems.

Dahlia Ravikovitch merited one such opportunity when her first poem was published in the literary quarterly Orlogin edited by Shlonsky.

Shlonsky was noted for his sensitive activism on behalf of Boris Gaponov.

Gaponov, as editor of the Communist Party daily in an auto plant in Soviet Georgia, translated the Georgian epic The Knight in the Panther's Skin by Shota Rustaveli into Hebrew.

Shlonsky orchestrated the publication of this translation in Israel, and was among those who worked to enable Gaponov to immigrate to Israel.

When Gaponov, who had learned Hebrew by listening to Israel Radio broadcasts, finally immigrated to Israel he was already very ill and close to death.

Israeli television viewers of the time remember the image of Shlonsky stroking Gaponov's head in a loving, fatherly manner, as the latter lay on his sickbed.

Despite his reputation for comic wit, Shlonsky did not shrink from the tragic situation around him, but rather expressed it in his works.

In the poem "Distress" he laments the fate of the victims of the First World War and of the Jews who suffered from pogroms in Ukraine during the Bolshevik revolution.

During the Holocaust, he published a collection of verse titled ממחשכים (From Concealing Shadows) in which he expressed his feelings from that darkest period in human history.

He particularly lamented the fate of the Jews in a diseased Europe.

His collection of verse Rough Stones exemplifies his work as a mature poet.

Poems from the Long Corridor is a collection of reflections on the nature of life and death.

Shlonsky is also considered among the finest Hebrew children's poets, for books such as Mickey Who? and Me and Tali in Lhama Country.

The play Utzli-Gutzli, about the dwarf Rumpelstiltskin of German legend, became a classic among Hebrew children's plays.

He married Lucia but conducted a secret affair with Mira Horowitz, the wife of a friend and colleague, with whom he had a child in 1936.

Avraham Shlonsky died in Tel Aviv in 1973.