Oberlin College Press

Abba Kovner

MY LITTLE SISTER AND SELECTED POEMS (translated by Shirley Kaufman)

Cloth $19.95 (ISBN 0-932440-20-7)

The title sequence is justly famous as one of the major pieces of literature to come out of the Holocaust. It appears here with a new selection of Abba Kovner's work spanning his forty-plus years as one of Israel's leading poets. The noted American-Israeli poet Shirley Kaufman had the privilege of working directly with Kovner on these versions in the years before his death.

"One of the most memorable works to appear in recent years, this volume belongs in all collections of contemporary poetry. Shirley Kaufman's fine translation conveys the moral force and the linguistic innovations of the original."
--Choice

Shirley Kaufman is also the translator of Judith Herzberg's But What: Selected Poems.

ON THE WAY

Mother and father are beginning to die inside me.
Thirty years after their deaths in the storm
they withdraw quietly from my rooms,
from my moments of grace.

I'm sure about it. Voices and words have stopped,
they're free now. They no longer visit
my house, but not because they are angry.
A living man must be on his own.

Somewhere father is getting up early,
walking around in his sandals, pretending
as usual he doesn't see how mother cries
as she knits a warm sweater for her son,
camped on the way in the night.

--Abba Kovner
translated by Shirley Kaufman