Abba Kovner's My Little Sister, acclaimed as a major poem-sequence about the Holocaust, is published in a revised translation from the Hebrew, with a new selection from his other work since 1965. The poems in this book were chosen with the aim of collecting in English Kovner's most representative work, work that by the power and restraint of its personal response to the Holocaust proves poetry is possible after Auschwitz.
In a career that spanned more than 40 years, Abba Kovner published fiction, essays, and ten volumes of poetry that earned him international recognition and established him as one of Israel's finest poets. Leader of the Partisans in Vilna when the Nazis invaded Poland, he settled on a kibbutz in Israel after the war. His translator, Shirley Kaufman, is an American poet who has lived in Jerusalem since 1973, and had the privilege of working directly with Kovner on these versions in the years before his death.
