The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe

(1896–1981), Hebrew and Yiddish poet, essayist and journalist. Uri Tsevi Grinberg (or Greenberg) was a trailblazer of radical modernism in both Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, one of the leaders of the Revisionist Zionist movement (from 1930), and a member of the first Israeli Knesset.

Grinberg was born in Biały Kamień, a village near the eastern border of Galicia. Through both parents he traced his lineage back to Hasidic dynasties. Grinberg’s family soon moved to Lwów, where his father, Ḥayim, led the life of a religious recluse. The family, experiencing penury and hardship, was led by the emotionally volatile, hot tempered and possessive mother, Basheva, who adored her beloved son and dominated him; she was to become the chief feminine figure in his emotional and imaginative world. Grinberg received a heder education, which was also informed by the intense Hasidic atmosphere at home.

The youthful Grinberg was encouraged by Shmuel Yankev Imber, a (minor) romantic lyrical poet but a meticulous craftsman, and Tsevi Bikeles-Shpitser, the Yiddish theater critic who edited the local Tagblat. Grinberg’s first Hebrew poems appealed to Gershom Shofman, who recommended them to Yosef Ḥayim Brenner, who lived in Palestine. In 1912, at the age of 16, Grinberg became a published bilingual poet, making his literary debuts in both Lwów and Jaffa at approximately the same time. Grinberg’s very early work in both languages consisted mainly of subdued, melancholy poems whose romantic landscapes are evoked by a dreamy, passive speaker. Thematically, they were conventional, naive, and nonspecific. In their prosody and structure, they were simple, unassuming, and often quite primitive.

Summarily drafted in 1915, Grinberg experienced the horrors of warfare in which many of his fellow soldiers died or were severely wounded. The fording of the Save River, in particular, etched itself in his memory, and was to reappear obsessively in poems he would write throughout his life. Exposed to enemy fire while crossing the river, Grinberg suddenly found himself alone and disoriented in a Serbian post on the other side of the river. All his fellow attackers were hanging lifeless, heads down and boots pointing up, on the electrified wire, while all the defenders were probably killed by a hand grenade. Then the moon shone from the clearing autumnal sky, casting its silvery light on the well-worn metal cleats of the upturned boots of the soldiers. The poet was mesmerized by the eerie effulgence, which he was never to forget. The image would later inspire the title of his first Hebrew book: Emah gedolah ve-yareaḥ (Great Terror and Moon; 1925). What he saw then—a heap of cadavers illuminated by moonlight—amounted to a horrendous negative epiphany: an indifferent God incorporated in dead and mutilated human flesh. This proved to be one of the sources of Grinberg’s modernistic vision. Still, when Bikeles-Shpitser published Grinberg’s first poetry collection, Ergets oyf felder (Somewhere in the Fields; 1915) he included in it, without violating the unified tonality of the slight booklet, both the war poems the poet had penned when still safe in his parents’ home and those he sent from the battlefield.

If a new element found expression in Grinberg’s early work it emerged in the lyrical prose of a war diary, which would form the first part of his second collection, In tsaytns roysh (In the Tumult of the Times; 1919). Here the radical use of impressionistic effects, which allowed for the presentation of images and impressions plucked from casual contexts, enabled the poet to convey some of the stunning and numbing impact of battle. This diary is the single piece written before 1920 in which the potential for literary greatness could be detected. Here too, however, what the poet was trying to do was not to fully externalize experience, but rather to soften its blows, to “domesticate” it and absorb it into his isolating melancholy, a defense mechanism he was still unable to give up.

Throughout the balance of the war Grinberg remained in Serbia, developing a positive, even loving attitude toward the Serbs in admiration of their warm humanity and unquenchable thirst for independence. In the winter of 1918, he deserted, fleeing to Lwów and hiding there until the armistice. He was treated brutally in the great pogrom (November 1918) with which Polish soldiers celebrated their victory over the Ukrainians. Grinberg and his family were waiting their turn to be shot when they were miraculously spared thanks to the sudden dispersal of the perpetrators. This experience left its imprint on his consciousness as much as, if not more than, his nightmarish experiences at the front. He became convinced that all Jews living in “the Kingdom of the Cross” would eventually face physical annihilation. As early as 1919, Grinberg sensed that Europe would kill its Jews, if not in the immediate future then some years later; if not through old fashioned slaughter, then through more modern means of execution such as poisonous gas clouds. The poet stated all this unhesitatingly in his prophetic poem “In malkhes fun tseylem” (In the Kingdom of the Cross; 1923), his last great Yiddish work before he emigrated to Palestine and channeled his burgeoning poetic energies into the writing of Hebrew poetry.

Before he became a Zionist and an almost exclusively monolingual Hebrew poet, Grinberg was yet to traverse a wide poetic and ideological terrain. Emerging from war and pogroms he collected his Yiddish poems in Farnakhtngold (Twilight’s Shimmer; 1921). More important, he opened himself to the new poetic voices and styles entering Yiddish literature from various directions: futurism from revolutionary Moscow; expressionism from Germany and Austria, where it had emerged before the war and was now the dominant style; the Skamander group of Polish modernists; and last but not least, inspiration from New York City, where Yiddish poetry was breaking new ground in innovative works.

Leaving Lwów for Warsaw, in 1921 Grinberg joined a group of radical Yiddish modernists that called itself Di Khalyastre (The Gang). Proclaiming its expressionistic poetics, the group also espoused a revolutionary and avowedly “rough,” loud, and contrarian self-image. The times called for an art that would eschew aesthetic harmony in its search for a direct and unadorned externalization of nightmarish experiences through explosive diction. Traditional poetic concepts and devices were replaced by formlessness, abrasive sound, free verse, and nonreferential, “exaggerated” figurative language. Grinberg soon became one of the leaders of the group, producing a grand scale poema, or a long sequence of poems, in which the weltanschauung of the new poetry was expressed in an intensely personal and yet universal philosophical manner. Titled Mefisto (1921), it was to remain his most important contribution to modernist Yiddish poetry. 

Unified by means of mood and repetitive patterns rather than through plot, Mefisto was nevertheless organized around a myth in which an inverted version of the Faust–Mephisto theme as developed by Goethe and the Nietzschean myth of God’s demise were conflated. The narrator experienced a reality in which God was absent, and the world was ruled by his eternal rival, Satan. All human passions and aspirations were reduced to sexual libido, and that too waxed vapid and vacuous as soon as man embraced it as the sole source of pleasure and drive that endowed life with significance. In Grinberg’s version there is no real struggle between man and the devil. Instead of being courted and deceived by the devil, the narrator went searching for him, offering him his services as spokesman and poet. Mephisto, however, constantly evaded this supplicant, led him astray, and left him to his loneliness, frustration and sense of worthlessness. At the end of the long sequel the narrator dimly discovered Mephisto as his own creation, a projection of his own vitiated interiority, a psychological rather than a metaphysical entity. Of course, the novelty of the poema manifested itself not only in its thematic content but also in its hard, skeletal diction, its nonreferential metaphors, its abrupt rhythms, its complex and loose structure based on repetition, variation, and sudden reversals.

The publication of Mefisto elevated Grinberg to the rank of a major modernist who could now establish a literary periodical, Albatros (recalling Baudelaire’s famous poem), which was essentially a one-man vehicle. Most of the three issues (1922–1923) were written by Grinberg himself under various pseudonyms. They included poems, articles, manifestos, plus the brilliant short story “Royte epl fun veybeymer” (Red Apples of Trees of Pain), which represents Grinberg’s first radical expressionist treatment of his experiences at the Serbian front. The poet’s main collaborators in Albatros were modernist Jewish artists whose expressionist typographic designs complemented the texts.

In 1923, Grinberg had to flee Poland because the Polish censor, scandalized by “Royte epl,” intended to charge him with blasphemous expressions against Christianity. He fled to Berlin where he mingled with German and Jewish modernist writers and artists and became friendly with the German Jewish expressionist poet Elsa Lasker-Schüller, whom Grinberg regarded as a Hebrew poet “in captivity,” a latter-day biblical Deborah. More important, the poet gradually abandoned the nihilistic mood of his Warsaw years. He became convinced that the fate of European Jewry was sealed. Zionism was therefore the only way open to Jews who were not ready for a collective suicide.

In the second half of 1923 Grinberg shifted his writing from Yiddish to Hebrew, took leave of his Yiddish readers in the last issue of Albatros, and arrived in Palestine in December of that year, a committed poet-pioneer. Even before his emigration to Palestine, however, the poet had found himself in the radical camp of Zionist opposition to the leadership of the World Zionist Organization. He feared that a Zionist leadership that did not openly and vigorously strive to establish a Jewish state in Palestine was bound to fail both politically and financially. It was clear to him that the leadership of the Zionist movement had to be summarily replaced by a group of young cadres whose sole objective would be to build an independent Jewish state.

Once in Palestine, Grinberg threw himself into three separate projects, each of which demanded his full attention. The chief one was the modernization of Hebrew culture in general and of Hebrew poetry in particular. He aspired to “transvaluate the values” of Hebrew poetry single-handedly and effect a cultural and poetic “changing of the guard.” Such a project was far more difficult than the equivalent Yiddish one had been, for while Yiddish poetry did not possess a strong and well entrenched romantic poetic establishment, Hebrew poetry was still under the influence of its great romantic and symbolist masters, Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, Sha’ul Tchernichowsky, and their disciples. Nevertheless, Grinberg was eager to engage in literary battle.

In 1925, his first Hebrew collection, Emah gedolah ve-yareaḥ, caused a huge critical furor. Consisting of a series of poemas of a kind unknown until then in Hebrew poetry, it opened with poems that delineated the universal condition of humanity after the fall of traditional Western civilization, achieving something of a negative climax in the grandiose prose-poem “Hakarat ha-yeshut” (The Consciousness of Being), in which the individual achieved an authentic existential recognition of the human condition without God and in the face of the sole certainty of impending mortality. From this utter despair, the tone turned in the opposite direction in the poems that followed. The narrator felt himself becoming more and more of a Jew, first by seeking a rapprochement with God (as well as with the poet’s “brother-Jew” Jesus), and then by penetrating into the very heart of the Zionist experience of renewal. In the great poem “Yerushalayim shel Matah” (Earthly Jerusalem), which represents the antipode of “Hakarat ha-yeshut,” Grinberg revealed the contours of his earthly Zionist messianism and explained why the latter was the only path open to the Jew who lived his Jewish life consciously and in a future-oriented mood. “Kefitsat ha-derekh” (The Short Cut), the poem with which the book concludes, lays bare the poet’s sense of the Jewish historical experience as an aggregate of scenes and events from the past that reenacted themselves simultaneously in his mental and emotional present, connecting him with the sum total of Jewish suffering as well as with the tradition of Jewish messianism, particularly that of Shabetai Tsevi.

Emah gedolah ve-yareaḥ was quickly followed by other grand Zionist expressionist poemas, such as “Tur Malka” (The King’s Mountain; 1925) and “Ha-Gavrut ha-‘olah” (Manhood on the Rise; 1926). In his conclusion to “Ha-Gavrut ha-‘olah” Grinberg defined expressive language per se as the only “refuge” from the terrors of the human condition and formulated the deeply pessimistic presupposition which made a certain optimism possible: “Beyond despair there is no more despair in the world, / And all the downward slopes in the mountains are also the upward ascents.” This formulation was to play an important role in the poems Grinberg was to write as an older man.

In a second project, Grinberg sought to lay the theoretical foundations of modernism in a series of articles that resulted in two major essays published under the title Klape tish‘im ve-tish‘ah (One against Ninety-Nine; 1928). In the first essay, he focused on the conceptual revolution—triggered by social, scientific, and technical changes—that formed the basis of the modernist project. These changes, he argued, fundamentally and irreversibly altered man’s self image and his stance toward nature. In the second, more extensive essay, the dimension of applied Zionism that Grinberg referred to as “the Hebrew Revolution” was added to the other dimensions of modernism, resulting in something akin to a prescriptive poetics for the new Hebrew literature: a poetics of radical expressionism, experimentalism, and strict commitment to the fiats of “the Hebrew Revolution.”

In the third project, Grinberg enthusiastically involved himself in the intense debates over issues faced by contemporary Labor Zionism with which he had at that point affiliated himself. Although he was concerned with matters of labor and social justice, his chief focus was on the enhancement of a national revolution, whose main goal was the achievement of political independence.

In the second half of the 1920s, Grinberg stopped writing poetry for a time, and totally immersed himself in hectic journalistic activity, vividly recording the general atmosphere of despair that engulfed the pioneering community in Palestine because of the financial crisis of the Zionist project in 1926–1927. Under such anguish, Grinberg emerged from this crisis as a somewhat different poet. On the one hand, during this period he wrote some of his best, emotionally balanced, lyrical poems which formed the cycle Anakre’on ‘al kotev ha-‘itsavon (Anacreon on the Pole of Sorrow; 1928). On the other hand, he turned to political poetry, evolving a new poetics of simple, direct political invective, diatribe, and visionary speeches, which gradually formed itself around a persona of the poet as a prophet.

For more than a decade Grinberg functioned as the Hebrew political poet par excellence. In the political sphere, he now turned his back on Labor Zionism and, in 1930, he joined Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists. During that decade, Grinberg was not only a political poet but also served as a political functionary; in fact, he was one of the leaders of the radical wing within Jabotinsky’s party, the editor of its important publications, and its vociferous journalistic representative. 

Grinberg’s poetry of the 1930s was collected in Sefer ha-kitrug veha-emunah (The Book of Condemnation and Faith; 1937). Disparaged by some as sheer propaganda, the book amounted to an extraordinary achievement, the best proof in the Hebrew language of the possibility of a successful conflation of poetry and politics. The coincidence of the book’s appearance with the “Arab Rebellion” of 1936–1939 vindicated the dire prophecies the poet had announced in 1930, thus buttressing the authority of his prophetic persona. He opened his book with a devastating diatribe aimed at the current Labor Zionist leadership in Palestine, which had neither understood nor prepared itself for the inevitable Jewish–Arab clash. As much as the book as a whole was political, it was also deeply personal, and in many ways could be read as a confessional autobiography. Representing a great poetic achievement, Grinberg’s book nevertheless accelerated his public marginalization in Palestine. Together with the Revisionist movement as a whole, he became a persona non grata in a society now almost completely controlled by Labor Zionism.

Grinberg himself spent most of the 1930s in Poland, the hub of Revisionist Zionist activities, where he joined Jabotinsky in advocating a massive emigration of Polish Jews to Palestine before the imminent new European or global war broke out. September 1939 found Grinberg in Warsaw. He made his way to the coast of the Black Sea and arrived in Palestine in November where he lived as a recluse until 1945. While this prolonged inactivity was officially explained as the result of a consuming fear for the survival of European Jewry (not one member of the family survived World War II), Grinberg’s poetic silence resulted from the fact that he could no longer reach his habitual readers who were mostly Labor Zionists. Marginalized and even ostracized, he lost the necessary poetic feedback to pursue his frenetic activity as a national poet and prophet, both of which roles required a large audience.

Grinberg eventually recaptured the attention of this audience. In the spring of 1945 he began publishing a series of dirges and elegies in the daily Ha-Arets, which soon were acknowledged as the most important response in Jewish literature to the horrific loss the Jewish people had sustained during World War II. The poet rejected the term holocaust, maintaining that it implied a natural catastrophe without intention, malice, or criminal perpetrators. What took place was better designated by the ancient Hebrew word ḥurban (destruction), which implied the existence of a destroyer, an intention to destroy, and an entity that was destroyed. On an almost weekly basis for about four years, Grinberg published his poems about the ḥurban, which eventually were collected in another magisterial tome, Reḥovot ha-nahar (The Streets of the River; 1951). The public accepted these poems as an authentic and visceral articulation of its collective grief and shock. In winter 1948, Grinberg was awarded the Bialik Prize for literature, then the most prestigious literary accolade to which a Hebrew writer could aspire. He was to become the recipient of this prize twice again—a triple recognition no other writer ever received.

In Reḥovot ha-nahar Grinberg explored the experience of national disaster on multiple levels. The most fundamental of these ran even deeper than that of sheer affect. Here, one’s consciousness entered the world of the dead and encountered familiar figures whose sudden disappearance had not yet been fully internalized. Here the rather peculiar title of the book was to be understood literally: the poet, walking in the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, regarded himself as well as the people who surrounded him as unwittingly walking on the rock bottom of rivers of tears and blood. Unbeknownst to themselves they had drowned, and their slow and heavy underwater gait was that of the half-dead. At any corner the familiar face of a dead relative—beautiful as it had used to be, idealized, or bloated and half-eaten—met their dreamy stares. The emotions that the poet experienced at that level were the sweetness of a reunion with a beloved person comingled with a consuming sense of guilt and worthlessness—the guilt and shame of the survivor who had left his dear ones to face extermination. Another level was that of grief and mourning, where loss and bereavement were fully acknowledged but experienced as unbearably painful. Yet another one was that of strong negative emotions of anger and wish for revenge often expressed in rather primitive fantasies, scenes of horrible retribution, excesses of vengeful glee.

The presence of these emotions in the book strengthened rather than weakened its impact and psychological authenticity. These were the inevitable imaginary figments emanating from a consciousness too deeply wounded to be morally appropriate, and their absence would have indicated a politically correct selectivity of doubtful moral import. The book also explores political, historiosophic, and metaphysical levels of significance. Here the poet, after a harsh critique of the people, who in spite of repeated warnings had exposed themselves to the mortal danger predicted by Zionist thinkers, gradually soared to a Job-like quarrel with God who allowed his chosen people to be exterminated and who still blessed the lands of their murderers (fattened with Jewish blood and ashes) with all but idyllic agricultural abundance. The ancient covenant announced by God from Mount Sinai, had been reneged on—this time by God himself and not by the people. Only a drastic change in the direction of Jewish history could restore the covenant and inform it with living contents. Jewish history, which had started with Abraham setting forth from the river Euphrates on his way to Canaan, should now reverse its course, taking the warriors of a victorious and proud Jewish kingdom back to the banks of the Euphrates, the biblical eastern boarder of the Davidic kingdom. At this level the title “Streets of the River” assumed a historical-eschatological significance.

Another level of significance in the multitiered volume, as important and as riveting as any other, was that of poetics and aesthetics. The decimation of European Jewry had destroyed poetic language because it deprived metaphor of its function as an intensified speech act. Nothing could be compared to what the Jewish people had experienced, and therefore metaphorical language was reduced to “shadows of shadows.” This undermined, to an extent, Grinberg’s own radical modernity, and necessitated reverting to traditional forms of liturgical poetry with its relative simplicity and monotony with which now Grinberg brilliantly experimented. Similarly, the death of the Jewish people undermined the persona of the prophet; for although the destruction had vindicated his repeated exhortations, what was the status of the prophet who had lost his people, and what was the worth of a truth proclaimed from the summit of a “Sinai of cadavers”? Thus Grinberg’s poetry was infused at this point with a new humility that informed some of the most poignant of the elegies and dirges collected in this jeremiad, which had no equal and parallel in modern Hebrew writing.

Grinberg was invited by the Herut party to represent it in the first Israeli Knesset (parliament) in 1948. He married the young poet Aliza Gurevitsh (pen name Ayin Tur-Malka) and had five children whom he named after his murdered parents and sisters. Again donning the prophetic mantle, he reassumed the position of a spokesman and a moral judge who celebrated the Israeli victory and castigated the leaders of the state for not realizing its full messianic potential and establishing the Jewish kingdom of his visions.

This rejuvenation, however, did not last. Grinberg was devastated by terrible personal loss. He dedicated the remaining twenty-five years of his literary activity chiefly to composing a series of lyrical poems that in essence formed chapters or sections of a mammoth personal-metaphysical poem that explored the significance of the poet’s life and mission. Between 1949 and 1960 seven major “tractates,” each of which reached book length, were published, and in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s two more followed.

This, as far as its poetic depth and the comprehensiveness of its vision are concerned, was the crowning jewel of Grinberg’s oeuvre. The complex mega-poem amounted to an attempt on a heroic scale to reintegrate—through lyrical meditation and far-reaching explorations of a dozen different poetic themes—the fractured life and mind of a poet who had experienced a lifetime of chaotic and disruptive events. It was not only that his life as an individual and as a Jew was broken in two by the annihilation of his family and of his society of origin; it was also his migration from the Poland of childhood to the harsh terrain of Palestine; his sudden switch as an artist from Yiddish to Hebrew; the deep cleavage that separated his lyrical individualism from the prophetic and political roles he had assumed; the gaping differences between his early and later poetry. Above all else, the poet was searching now for some equilibrium between his overwhelming sense of fully living in the here and now, and impending death, which loomed larger with old age.

All these as well as other discordant dichotomies had to be renegotiated. For one thing, Grinberg had to “invent” or reinvent death itself, since the annihilation of the Jewish people had eliminated “normal” death, the end result of the process of life itself, replacing it with “arbitrary” death, which was not in any manner linked with the life it terminated. For another thing, the poet had to reincarnate his childhood and the parental home. If he was to renegotiate his emotional and libidinal life he had to envisage his parents as young and vibrant, and not as victims and dead bodies. To re-leave his erotic attachment to his mother—the key to his love life as an adult—a huge effort of the poetic imagination was now needed. A similar effort was called for by the task of imagining the individualistic poems he would have written had he not committed himself to the role of the national bard. Grinberg endlessly focused now on such symbols as running rivers and the broken reflection of the person who looked into them searching for his essential self-image. He felt he had to collect these trembling and fractured reflections and unify them in the water of the Jordan or the Sea of Galilee. At the same time he was fully aware of the strong and unrelenting tide that swept all these reflections and the fragments of life they stood for toward the eternal sea of death.

As a poet Grinberg faced heroic tasks, which he approached with courage, integrity, and an upsurge of expressive diction of a symphonic richness that often overwhelmed the readers. He had to put together and unify at least five different elements that did not necessarily dovetail: personal memory; an ideological insight into the essence of his mission as a political persona; a mystical, essentially kabbalistic, view of nature and of the process of life as its core; a new metaphysics of death and dying; and a new poetics that had to find a synthesis between the poet’s early burgeoning modernism and his later neotraditionalism. All these issues had to be reexamined against the background of the assumption that beyond despair there was no despair and that the slopes in the mountains could also be regarded as ascents. Of this essentially optimistic principle the poet was not at all as confident at this stage as he had been in the past. Neither Jewish history nor his own life had truly vindicated it. As his poetic vision progressively became darker and more concerned with mortality than with the reintegration of the living personality, he was reduced once again (as he had been in the darkest moments of his existentialist youth) to the view that the sole value that could withstand the devastating impact of the angst inherent in the human condition was sheer expression, of language in general and poetic language in particular as “a last refuge.” He said, “Only the poem that sets the heart on fire is not a falsehood like all other achievements. Its truth is the only truth.”