La poésie d’Uri Zvi Greenberg et la Shoah

Abstract

The bilingual Hebrew/Yiddish poet, Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1983) was born into a distinguished and observant Hasidic family in East Galicia. He began to write in the two languages in 1912, and immediately displayed a tendency towards a sense of personal mission to impart a divine message. Having experienced the horrors of war at their most extreme, his poetry is imbued with the language of violence combined with a nostalgia for a distant and glorious past. After his emigration to Palestine in 1924, he continued along these lines, though, now as a Zionist nationalist, he wrote publicly and principally in Hebrew alone.For Uri Zvi Greenberg, the Holocaust did not constitute an unexpected departure in the annals of the Jews. From the outset, through the medium of both languages, Greenberg had peristently articulated the particular and tragic fate of his people. His work climaxed in the expression of the Holocaust, for him, an inevitable derivation of historical antisemitism. In this, he brought the lessons of the Expressionist verse technique, which he had cultivated uniquely, to bear on his rendering of the Jewish experience.