Reviewed by: Restless Shards: The Sources of Abba Kovner’s Poetics by Ofra Yeglin David R. Blumenthal Restless Shards: The Sources of Abba Kovner’s Poetics (Hebrew) Ofra Yeglin. Bnai Brak: Hakibbutz Hameuchad-Sifriat Poalim, 2015. ix + 134 pp. Ofra Yeglin has written a learned analysis of Abba Kovner’s poetic oeuvre. She begins by challenging the surrealist interpretation of Kovner’s poetry. Kovner specifically stated that he wanted to be coherent, partly because of his studies in sculpture and art in Vilna. This interest in being clear also led to his interest in museums as a medium and to his “long poems” in the mode of the narrative epic. Kovner, however, does write in “restless shards” and fragmentation because of his war experience and because, as he notes in the first chapter, he could not put a stone on his mother’s grave. A précis of this chapter in English is included at the end of the book. Kovner’s “long poems,” Yeglin maintains, are in the epic poem tradition, especially that of Russia, but they are not heroic tales. Rather, they skirt around the historical topic and wander as in a forest or, as Kovner puts it, as “poems with no narrative.” They are intended as an affective, not an historical, witness (there is one historical document embedded in Ad-lo-or, not for history or testimony but to create tension within the poem’s rhetoric). This is in contrast to Kovner’s late work, Megillat haedut, which is full of documentary evidence. As Yeglin puts it: The testimony in Ad-lo-or contains in its fragmentation the special coloring of the historical moment as a catastrophe without precedent, concretized in a paradoxical way in the refusal to tell the story. By contrast, the testimony of Megillat haedut is an effort to record and to document historically . . . The center of gravity has shifted from the universal-imaginary space of the forest to the territory of specific history in a despairing attempt to respond in a systematic, encyclopedic way to that which had been repressed and erased from memory, and from the poetry. It is the defeat of the time of public mourning and the descent into a world in which there is no more mourning (and no more singing). Of special interest is Yeglin’s detailed structural and associative analysis of the sonata, Tslilim mikarov, with its allusions to the Akeda and its wide-ranging references to other themes and motifs in Hebrew and secular literature. Yeglin is at her best in close reading of poetic texts. [End Page 190] So, too, Yeglin’s detailed analysis of “Hamal’akh hashahor” is of special interest. The poem is set in Paris and shows Kovner’s treatment of Sartre and the French resistance in comparison with the Lithuanian resistance, and his dealing with fundamental questions such as, “Was this the price of freedom?” “Is forgetting possible, necessary?” Yeglin also presents Kovner’s specifically geometrical poems. Throughout, Yeglin sets the oeuvre of Kovner into the context of midrash, medieval liturgical poems, modern Hebrew literary figures such as Avraham Mapu and Alterman, Russian and European authors, and post-Shoah authors like Celan, Primo Levi, and Sartre. Yeglin devotes separate chapters to the comparative poetics of Kovner and Bialik, Shlonsky, and Sutzkever. This is a book that raises the questions, What is an “epic poem”? What is “testimony,” especially in relation to the Shoah? and it answers them with great competence. To be sure, the more one is familiar with modern literature, especially modern Hebrew literature, the more one will learn from this book. David R. Blumenthal Emory University Copyright © 2015 Purdue University