Avraham Ben Yitzhak

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Avraham Ben Yitzhak ( Avraham Ben-Yishak, Abraham Sonne ) (born September 13, 1883 near Przemyśl , Austria-Hungary ; died March 29, 1950 in Ramatayim , Israel ) was a Hebrew poet , Austrian-Israeli literary critic, and scholar.

Life

Born in Galicia , Ben Yitzhak met Eliezer Lipshitz from Lemberg (Lwow) around 1900 , who encouraged him to publish his poems. He studied in Berlin and Vienna without a degree and published some poems in Hebrew , which are considered the first modern Hebrew poetry . In addition, some of his literary critical essays appeared anonymously. Martin Buber published one of his essays with attribution.

In 1913 he was offered a position as a lecturer in Hebrew literature and psychology at a teachers' college in Jerusalem , but on the way there he had a serious accident and had to return to Vienna to recover. In 1915 the works that had remained with Przemysl were destroyed in the chaos of the First World War, which plunged him into a severe depression. In the 1920s he taught at the Hebrew Pedagogical Institute in Vienna and fell ill with tuberculosis . Some wealthy friends supported him in the hope that he would resume his poetic and essayistic activities. He made friends and admirers, including James Joyce , Arnold Schönberg , Arthur Schnitzler , Elias Canetti and Hermann Broch .

Canetti, who met him in 1933, described him as "Dr. Sonne" in his memoir, Das Augenspiel . In this presentation, Ben Yitzhak appears as a scholar with a religious, philosophical, psychological and sociological education with astonishing social foresight. During this time, the sun had a great influence on Canetti.

When the Nazis invaded Vienna in 1938, Ben Yitzhak escaped to Jerusalem. There contemporaries, such as Leah Goldberg , described him as a silent poet. In 1950, Ben Yitzhak died of tuberculosis.

Works, editions

  • Poems , Tarshish Books, 1952 [Shirim, Hebrew]
  • Collected Poems , Hakibbutz Hameuchad / Siman Kriah, 1992 [Col Ha-Shirim, Hebrew]
  • Things went away. Poems and fragments , edited and translated from Hebrew by Efrat Gal-Ed and Christoph Meckel . Hanser Verlag 1994, ISBN 3-446-17876-7
  • Avraham Ben Yitzhak, "Poetry", (a cura di Anna Linda Callow e Cosimo Nicolini Coen), Portatori d'acqua, Pesaro 2018.

literature

  • Andrea Schatz: Sun, Abraham. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , p. 471f.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ben Yitzhak, Avraham
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ben-Yiṣḥāq, Avrāhām; Sun, Abraham
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hebrew poet, Austrian-Israeli literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH at Przemyśl
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1950
Place of death Ramatayim