Resumo de Remembering The Shoah: Excerpts From Abba Kovner`s Poem Little Sister

Abba Kovner was a man of many dimensions and gifts: artist, writer, orator and perhaps his most famous role was as resistance fighter. His reputation as a Lithuanian resistance fighter in the Vilna ghettos is legend. Kover, as poet, is examined here.

Abba Kovner was born in 1918 in the Crimean Black Sea City of Sebastopol, Lithuania while his parents were enroute to Palestine. The family moved from Vilna to Sebastopol but was unable to move on because of the onslaught of World War. At the end of the war, the Kovners returned to Vilna, which had been the home of their family for generations.
Abba attended a secondary Hebrew academy in Vilna and also a school for the arts. While in school, he became a member of the Zionist socialist youth movement of HaShomer HaTzair (The Young Guard). He had originally planned to become an artist. Kovner's style of sculpture was well-known.

Vilna, the capital of Lithuania was called the Jerusalem of Lithuania (Yerushalayim deLita), because of its rich Jewish heritage and culture. The city had many names: in Lithuanian it was called Vilna, in Polish, Wilno, in Russian, Vilnius and in Yiddish, Vilne. By the beginning of the 17th century, it had become a major center for rabbinical studies. Between the years of 1939 to 1941, Vilna became the center of Jewish organizations whose members had fled Poland during the Jewish genocide of German-occupied Poland. It also became the meeting place for the Jewish youth of Eastern Europe.

In mid-June of 1941, Hitler conducted a surprise attack along the eastern edge of the Soviet Republic states. He then marched into Vilna and chased the Red Army out. At this time, there were about 60,000 Jews living in Vilna. Hitler created two large ghettos and forced all the Jews inside. Kovner was able to escape Vilna during the Nazi occupation and find refuge in a Dominican convent. He later returned and organized a fierce resistance. It is his experience in the convent, however, that is described so poignantly in his poem Little Sister. Here is an excerpt:

The world that watched
withdrew.
Her beautiful doll,
father?s gift,
they crushed in the snow.

No mother, no brother,
hands crossed over her growing breasts,
they waved my sister
through the gate.

Hid her within the wall.
With sainted patience
the ladies wait.
They are flooded with mercy.
My fragile sister!
No harbor? betrayal
?no island.
Only a folded sail in a storm.

Far, far
a city lies. Body still warm.
Bells are ringing.

You have not seen a city thrust on its back
like a horse in its blood, jerking its hooves
unable to rise.
Bells are ringing.

City.
City.
How mourn a city
whose people are dead and whose dead are alive
in the heart...

this night, only snow.
Put your face
in the path of the dogs.
Put on the dress
our mother sewed for you,
the only one
left, in white folds.

We have no other dress.
We have no other prayer.
This sun,
no other.
Let us rise up, oh sister,
your time has come!

Behold you? behold
they.
So long as the night covers you like a canopy
let us go forth.
Say to them nicely
thank you.
Be grateful
for every hour
of refuge.
Perhaps they were not guilty?
there is always someone more guilty:
(the victim)
(the victim)
Perhaps they heard
only the voice of their hearts.

Go, they said.
Go.
My fragile sister!
You must
go.

Come, sister,
quiet.
Quiet.
We knew what the hazards were?
to cross the soft earth,
to pass by the glowing iron
and to say to a stranger
? a world was here.

It comes upon me from behind
? a choir of stones
here!
In the unrepenting street of the city
the shorn head of my sister
breaks out of a wall.

Kovner?s Little Sister is a masterpiece. Bittersweet and heartrending, it is an uncompromising depiction of suffering, the suffering of a city, a people and of a Little sister. That city, of course, is beautiful Vilna and the dead are the Jews of Vilna. His analogy of the devastation of Vilna as like the falling down of a horse onto its back, lying in its own blood and perishing, is stark and graphic.

Kovner also delivers judgment through the lines of the Dominican nuns or ladies, whom at first seem compassionate but later become cold and indifferent; it is an indictment to a world that was apathetic to the Jews? affliction. The thinness of the little sister?s dress, which is inadequate against the bitter cold, is an allegory to the emotional and physical fragility of the girl. Kovner applies a Biblical concept of a victim?s shame in the imagery of the sister?s glabrescent head and the hail of stones against them. The sibling?s departure from the convent is depressing; there is no rest, it seems, for the condemned. Finally, it is a loving and painful commemoration of a brother to a younger sister in a world that has been turned upside down.

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