‘I am a total paradox’

At 90, poet Tuvia Rubner, who will be honored at the Metulla Poetry festival, is still working on the balance between equilibrium and contrasts.

By BARRY DAVIS
Tuvia Rubner. ‘I enjoy life.’ (photo credit: Courtesy)
Tuvia Rubner. ‘I enjoy life.’
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The program of next week’s 17th annual Poetry Festival at Metulla, which this year goes by the theatrical title of “I Have A Stage in My Head,” includes a welldeserved tribute to poet Tuvia Rubner.
The 90-year-old Kibbutz Merhavya resident has been one of the country’s foremost poets for some years now. His efforts have been grandly and officially recognized across the world, and he received the 2006 Israel Prize for his field of art. But there is a lot more to Rubner than poetry. He has a strong sense of visual aesthetics, too.
“Photography is my real love; poetry is an obligation,” he declares with a twinkle in his eye. “Poetry is an obligation, because I have no choice about that, I simply have to write.”
Judging by his output over the last decade or so, the proof of the pudding is there in the reading. Between 1957 and 2000, he published 15 volumes of poetry, in Hebrew and German, after which the publication tempo increased appreciably: A dozen more Rubner books have come out since 2002. The most recent tome, released last year, bears the definitively terminal title of Ha’aharonim – The Last Ones – and is, Rubner claims, the last of his work that will be put into print during his lifetime.
“I have a whole book’s worth of poetry that I don’t want to publish. What can I possibly put out after The Last Ones?” he asks with a chuckle.
But while he may not intend to bother his publisher again, he certainly has not laid his pencil or his computer mouse to rest.
“Yes, I keep on writing,” he says. “Yesterday a poem was born, and today, before you arrived, I started writing a variation on it.”
Still, he is keenly and painfully aware that his chosen field does not have mass market appeal.
“There’s the Poetry Festival in Metulla, but not much more,” he notes. “There are small publishers who still put out poetry, and [Poetry Festival stalwart, poet and professor] Rafi Weichert still manages to keep going, but times are hard for poets and for poetry in general.”
The nonagenarian feels that contemporary society, as whole, is more achievement-oriented, aiming for bigger, better and faster.
“But there are always select groups of people who prefer the language of values to the language of numbers,” he says.
Indeed, he demonstrates a humaneness and accessibility; his poems are not replete with dense, difficult- to-fathom expressions.
“His work is accessible to anyone,” notes Uri Hollander, who has served as the Poetry Festival’s artistic director for the last two years. “He won’t talk in metaphors, like black milk. For him, like for everyone, milk is white.”
Rubner’s poems are eminently user-friendly. They exude an unmistakable feeling of pathos and warmth, and paint pictures that gradually emerge with the passing of his uncomplicated lines. One example is his poem “Sham Amarti” (There I Said), which appeared in his 1976 tome Shemesh Hatzot (Midnight Sun) and tells the tale of a father’s roots trip to Poland with his sons. He tries his utmost to convey to them something of the emotion that seeing his own childhood landscapes arouses, but the youngsters only want to know where they can grab a bite to eat. There is no sense of condescension by the wiser, older generation toward the more fickle and selfish children who are far more interested in instantaneous gratification than in their dad’s past. Rubner just tells it as it is.
THERE IS a lot of death in his work, too, but again, it is not a dark, foreboding reference. Of course, Rubner has plenty of grounds for writing more lamenttinged material. He was born to a German-speaking family in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, and came to Palestine in 1941 at the age of 17. His entire family perished in Auschwitz, and he says it was a miracle he survived.
“The [British Mandate immigration] certificates for me and eight of my friends arrived out of the blue,” he recalls. All nine of them made it to Palestine, via a protracted, circuitous route that took several months, and Rubner and the three other surviving members of the group still meet up every so often.
“Three of us live in Israel, and one lives in San Diego, and we met up a couple of weeks ago,” he says with a smile. “We were all members of the same swimming club, and we all went to Hashomer Hatza’ir together. We are all 90 years old now. We’re in a line now. We’ll see who goes next.”
His second major escape from death occurred in 1950, when a bus in which he was traveling with his first wife was involved in a serious traffic accident.
“The whole bus went up in flames,” he recalls. “I was dragged out, but my wife wasn’t.”
And it was touch and go whether he would live to tell the tale. “I was given 24 hours to live, but I told the doctors I had to pull through because I had a baby daughter at home to take care of.”
And survive he did. He puts that down to serendipity: “Until a year before the accident, antibiotics were only permitted for use in the army. I would not have survived without antibiotics.”
With this background, it would have been perfectly understandable if some pent-up sorrow had found its way into Rubner’s output, if he had used his craft as a cathartic vehicle for offloading some of the grim emotion he must have accrued. But that is not the case.
“I enjoy life,” he states simply.
He remarried in 1953, to concert pianist Galila Yizraeli, and they had two sons. One tragically disappeared over 30 years ago on a trip to Ecuador, and the other is a Buddhist monk who lives in Nepal.
Rubner’s daughter lives in Iceland, and the poet has three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren there. He has made several trips to the northern island and to Nepal, and his son spends two to three months in Israel every year.
Rather than lament that his children and grandchildren live so far away, he talks of the wondrous physical and human landscapes in Iceland and notes how much he has learned from his Buddhist son, displaying impressive knowledge about various Buddhist sects and forms of meditation. Seeing him in his living room clad in a white caftan, it is not hard to imagine Rubner employing spiritual methods from afar to reel in his poetry muses.
But his tranquil demeanor can be deceiving. He makes no bones about the blood, sweat and tears that go into producing a poem that satisfies his demands.
“I can get stuck on something, and I’ll take it to bed with me at night,” he says. “Writing a poem is very hard work. I am exhausted when I’ve finished one.”
ONE OF the more impressive facts about Rubner is his ability to create such works of tender passion in an adopted language.
“I wrote in German for the first 12 years here,” he says. “Here I met, by chance – if things happen by chance at all – [German Jewish writers] Werner Kraft and Ludwig Strauss [who came to Palestine in the mid- 1930s]. They told me I should write in the language I speak. I spoke Hebrew on a day-to-day basis, but it took me 12 years before I started writing in Hebrew.”
That development was a direct result of Rubner’s second marriage. “My second wife didn’t know German.
We got married in 1953, and my first book of Hebrew poetry came out in 1957.”
Meanwhile, his aliya spawned a radical stylistic shift.
“I started out as an abstract poet, but I changed to a realistic approach when I came here,” he says. “The landscape here is so different.”
Even so, his mother tongue remains an inseparable part of him, both as a person and as a writer.
“Today, still, German poetry is closer to my heart than Hebrew,” he declares. “There is an advantage and a disadvantage to writing in a language you have learned. The benefit is that you consider every word you write from every angle possible. The drawback is that the words don’t flow naturally. You have to work harder at it.”
His realistic approach also derives from his love of camera work.
“I think there is a visual side to my poetry. I use my eyes. My poems are not abstract. There is a strong movement back to realism now – like [British poet Sir] Geoffrey Hill, who writes realistic poetry – and it is the same with painting these days. You know, if you hang around long enough, you eventually come back into fashion. There is a saying that modernity is the endless repetition of the old.”
But there is something surreal about some of Rubner’s oxymoronic literary juxtapositions. His oeuvre includes such book titles as Short Long Life, Contradictory Poems and Illuminated Dark, the last being the name of a new English translation of works. The poet says he constantly walks a tightrope between contradictory elements.
“The meeting point between life and death, for example, is very fine,” he notes. “It is that tension that produces beauty. I have written a lot of poems about beauty, although I have no idea what that is. In the last poem I wrote, I say, ‘the beauty on the cusp of our comprehension.’ Beauty is the outermost point of life.
It really belongs to some other sphere – like poetry.”
Rubner says he lives in a world of inexplicable contrasts.
“I am a total paradox. All my poetry is a paradox.
Although in old age I discovered that there is equality in contrasts. There can be no contradiction without equilibrium. I have arrived at a stage where I emphasize more the equality that exists in contradiction.”
THERE WILL be no contradiction in the tribute to Rubner in Metulla next week. The event – which is running under the auspices of Jerusalem-based Confederation House – features a host of (naturally much younger) poets such as Miron Isaacson, Ronnie Someck and Yakir Ben-Moshe. Hollander will be the MC, and there will be musical entertainment by young students of the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv.
Among the other enticing items in the three-day program is a spot devoted to the work of Russian-born Hebrew and Yiddish poet David Fogel, who perished in Auschwitz in 1944. There is also the three-part “Midrashir,” which covers the poetry found in the Book of Job, the work of Iranian poet and film director Forugh Farrokhzad – who died in a car accident in 1967 at the age of 32 – and a session with 42-year-old poet Dory Manor, who will investigate the destructive side of creative inspiration. In addition, there will be shows by singer Nurit Galron and by singer-songwriter Shem- Tov Levy.
Meanwhile, the festival’s titular session will address the connection between poetry and theater. Someck and Hollander will examine some of the work of those who straddle both artistic disciplines, such as Hanoch Levin, Nissim Aloni and Yoram Levy Porat, and rock group Rony Voodoo will be on hand to push the energy ante up a notch or two.
Besides noting Rubner’s 90th birthday, the Revolution Music slot will mark the 55th anniversary of the publication of poet Nathan Zach’s game-changing paper, “Thoughts on Alterman’s Poetry.” The venerable panel of writers who will discuss how Zach’s article has impacted the evolution of Israeli poetry – as well as how music informs poetry and how writing in this country embraces radical about-faces – features poets Agi Mishol, Sharon Hass, Manor, and Benny Ziffer.
All events in the festival are free, except for the Galron and Levy shows.
For tickets and more information about the Poetry Festival: (04) 837-7777, www.barak-tickets.co.il or www.confederationhouse.org.