Avoth Yeshurun, also Avot Yeshurun, was the pen name of Yehiel Perlmutter, an acclaimed modern Hebrew poet.
Biography
Avoth Yeshurun was born on Yom Kippur in 1904 in Niskhish. His father, Baruch, came from a family of flour millowners. His mother, Ryckelle was of rabbinic descent. Yeshurun grew up speaking Yiddish. When he was five, his parents moved to Krasnystaw in East Poland. He left for the British Mandate of Palestine in 1925, against the will of his parents who preferred that he remain in Poland. Initially he worked in construction, dredged swamps and picked fruit; later he worked in a brick factory and for a printer. In 1929, he joined the Haganah, the Jewish militia that later became the Israeli Defense Force. In 1934 he married Pesyah Justman. Their daughter Helit was born in 1942. Yeshurun's family, along with Krasnystaw's 2,000 Jews, were murdered in Belzec extermination camp in today's Poland.
Yeshurun's Poetry
His first book, Al khokhmot drakhim, was published under his birthname, Yehiel Perlmutter. He changed his name to Avoth Yeshurun in 1948, the night before he was inducted into the Israel Defense Forces. In 1952 Yeshurun published a highly controversial poem, "Pesach al Kochim", in which he compared the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees with that of the Jewish Holocaust. His subsequent books were Re'em, 1961, Shloshim Amud, 1965, Ze Shem HaSefer, 1971, HaShever HaSuri-Afrika'i, 1974, Kapella Kolot, 1977, Sha'ar Knisa Sha'ar Yetzia, 1981, Homograph, 1985, Adon Menucha, 1990, and Ein Li Achshav, 1992. Many of Yeshurun's poems allude to the guilt he felt for having left Europe before the Holocaust, leaving his home and family behind. His poetry is known for its broken phrasing, and combines Yiddish, biblical and modern Hebrew, and slang used by various cultural groups in Israel, including phrases in Arabic, which he often uses ironically in criticism of the marginalization of Arabs and Arabic in Israeli culture. Avoth Yeshurun died in 1992. In 2018, a documentary about Yeshurun called Yeshurun in 6 Chapters by Amichai Chasson premiered in Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival.
