Sloan-Kettering: Poems (Hardcover)

by Abba Kovner (Author) "The door opened without a click pushing aside the shifting straw curtain his shadow entered followed by the man with his mane of dark hair..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker
Kovner, an Israeli writer and resistance fighter, led the famous Vilna ghetto uprising in Lithuania during the Second World War; in these plainspoken poems he writes about his hospitalization for cancer, which killed him in 1987. Weaving together memories of fighting in the Baltic forests and the chronicle of a rapidly weakening body (at a certain point his vocal cords are cut out), Kovner meditates on the possibility of heroism in the face of illness. "Remain what you were! / Remain what you were!" he writes, reminding himself, "Far worse / were the things you have already seen, / by God!" Kovner's physical muteness makes the book's imperative to witness all the more moving; in the face of his ultimate silence, he strenuously refuses self-pity, choosing instead to show us how "you could take explicit note / of the wail rising from the pine trees / from branches weighed down / with so much snow."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review
"[This] translation unfolds a multi-leveled composition of personal stormy biography, a strong sense of a national and humane mission, and above all-the simplicity reached by a person of stature, on the eve of his death . . . He now knows that life is an unending quest, soaring above principles and wars, that being Jewish entails a constant search for meaning, that the milk a Holocaust survivor drinks is always red, that most questions have no answers . . . Here is a work of art, masterfully presented."
--A.B. Yehoshua

"Abba Kovner was one of the greatest poet-fighters in the Jewish tradition. I grew up in his light, as did many of those of my generation. He was a hero to us all, and a splendid poet. To read, hear, experience the intimacy
of his last months-- that is something very powerful."
--Chaim Potok

"These are beautiful, stern, lacerating poems written by a genuine hero as he was dying of cancer. They detail his struggle to bear witness to the destruction of his body and the perseverance of his will and identity. It is a terrifying but superb legacy he has given us."
--Marge Piercy

"In this deeply moving collection, Kovner shows the same greatness of spirit in confronting cancer that he showed in confronting Nazis in the Vilna ghetto."
-- RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER, author of WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE

"Abba Kovner wrote about his impending death with a broken heart -- a heart laid open to longing, to memory, to love, to the ugly details of cancer treatment. The Sloan-Kettering Poems are unsentimentally, passionately, furiously alive."
--Anita Diamant (author of Saying Kaddish, The Red Tent, and Good Harbor) -- Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Schocken; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (August 27, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805241981
• ISBN-13: 978-0805241983
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,676,808 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars REAL HEROES ARE AFRAID BUT KEEP GOING., September 2, 2002

By A Customer

I'm not a big poetry fan, but this book is exceptional. I thought that a book about cancer would be depressing, but I found the opposite to be true. It's one of the most inspiring books I've ever read. And it is especially relevant now when there's so much talk about "heroes". The author was a true hero in the classic sense - a leader of the Jewish partisans against the Nazis, and he refers to that part of his life. But he - and many other people among us - are heroes in another sense: They are locked in a battle against cancer or other disease, and they fight it with all their might. The author is grateful for the magic of everyday comforts - his grandchildren's smiles, the rhythmic clicking of his wife knitting, the warm familiarity of his neighbors' voices. In spite of all his pain and fear, he has the guts to proclaim "death is not to be preferred". This book reminds us to cherish life.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond reproach, November 25, 2003

By	Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Sloan Kettering was first published in Hebrew in 1987 as an extended poema on Abba Kovner's terminal struggle against throat cancer. He died in Israel that year. Shadow themes and images subtly bleed through the skin of this work, in a pentimento effect that renders these 61 Eddie Levenston translations subtle, bold, and classic.

Kovner was a Jewish Holocaust and Israeli wartime hero, larger-than-life, and one of Israel's most important poets. But these works, in a voice intensely human despite the enormous events that shaped it, describe the loss of his voice to cancer.

Sloan Kettering nevertheless avoids self-pity or sturm und drang. Kovner regards his sons' photos and asks, "in their presence/ may one cry?" He speaks in understated irony. His grandchildren came for Hanukkah. "I didn't/ sing 'Ma'oz Tsur with them, you know why." He looses senses, without complaint, but will tell of it another time "if there is one." Of course, there won't be any more conversations. "Just as this one is no more/than the invention of a throat in ruins."

Kovner's past is his "burden of molten/ rocks." He wants this to "stay in the archives/ it is not for the operating table."

One poem instructing his heirs includes the first two words of the mourners' Kaddish -- Yitgadal veyitkadash (magnified and sanctified). Kovner next notes the greater suffering of others--and remembers God, reciting the prayer's third and fourth words--shemei rabba (is the Name).

He relives his fight for the survival of the Europe's Jews. He shudders here, like he did then, "challenged to stand up for his right/ to live." Expecting another time when the world would again oppose the Jewish people, Kovner presciently warns, "The worst of all comes back." He asks, "Will we ever/ get out of this terrible forest?"

In Sloan Kettering's silence echoes the great silence 65 years ago, when Jews had no idea where to turn and a Jewish prisoner was "cut off from his supervisor," lost and running from room to room....

One encounters again "a pathless wilderness/ between yellow arrows/ and blue signs." Reflecting his furtive life in Nazi-occupied Vilna, he calls the New York cancer center "a trans-life corridor."

The fingers of a black nurse mirror "the velvet pad where Mother/ kept her needles." Impossible circumstances forced Kovner to abandon her to save others. His mind and heart, however, never left her. His nights end by telling her of his fears, and about her grandchildren. "She should have a little joy/in Ponar."

He recalls Itzik Wittenburg, betrayed to the Nazis on July 16, 1943, who hoped that going along would save others. In his cell, he swallowed prussic acid. "The gate is still open." ... "a nation holding its breath."

Kovner 's metaphors also reflect the life that cancer patients struggle to keep, against hope and time. In a sense, they capture it too. Kovner describes a Thai man. His face looks like "Lost parchment/ in the heart of the desert."

Kovner understandably has no more "trust in the mercy of heaven," recalling "the day he lost patience waiting/ for the echo of his cry...to come back from empty space." Yet like all his work, these poems invoke Jewish prayers, themes and biblical proportions, some (though not all) detailed in the endnotes.

Readers may recognize Psalm 114 in Kovner's "mountains of Palmyra," where advanced radio-telescopes cause their planners to rejoice "like young goats."

They scan the universe's secrets, whose "ends flee and escape/...beyond space." This is Kovner's Jordan that fled backward. The cancer in his throat is like "An abyss fine as a pinhead/ in ambush," whose mysterious patience resembles "the galaxies of emptiness/beyond the black holes...."

These poems come as close as any to capturing absolute truth--that strangely elusive engine, invisible to most people most of the time, which poets spend their lives seeking to record. Kovner offers muted, simple humility. He writes so delicately of massacre and genocide--terms now bloodied by false invocation and overuse--that even readers unaware of his history, will find these poems pristine, awesome and beyond reproach.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The poetry of courage , December 2, 2004

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

Abba Kovner one of the great Jewish Resistance heroes of the Second World War wrote these poems as he was dying of throat cancer at Sloan- Kettering Institute. They are clear and deeply moving . They reflect upon his experience in the Resistance in his many years of life in a kibbutz in Israel and upon what he is witnessing and living through in the moments of his last struggle. Behind them is the voice of a man of tremendous courage who is once again being tested as he so often has been tested before. I think these poems can be of great interest to all those going through similar tests. And they should be of interest to anyone who wishes to know more of one great human being's experience and poetry.