Haim Gouri and “The Jewish People Who Have Been Severely Injured”

Abstract

The poet Haim Gouri is a central figure among the artists of the generation of the War of Independence and one of the first Israeli poets and novelists to express experience of the Holocaust. Gouri, who was bom in Tel Aviv in 1922, was sent to Europe in 1947 to smuggle Jewish Holocaust survivors into Palestine. Subsequently, he served in the Palmach and fought in the battles in the Negev in 1948. He attests that his encounter with the survivors of the Nazi camps changed his life, and that the experience became an obsessive theme throughout his work. This article focuses on two complementary subjects: (1) Gouri's perception of Jewish history and the effect of his encounter with Holocaust survivors in the formulation of his autobiography; (2) the concrete shaping of the experience of this encounter in his first three books of poetry, Pirhey esh, 'Ad 'alot ha-shahar, and Shirey hotam,1 and in his autobiographical novel Ha-haqira, sippuro shel Re 'u 'el?