STERN, NOAH

STERN, NOAH (1912–1960), Hebrew poet. Born in Jonava, Lithuania, he moved to the U.S. when he was 17. In 1935 he settled in Palestine where he worked as a news translator for *Davar and as a teacher in a Tel Aviv high school. During World War ii he served for four years in the Jewish Brigade. A growing mental depression, which was aggravated by the Holocaust, appears to have prevented him from striking roots in postwar Israel. His few poems, published in various periodicals, aroused little attention, though his translation of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (Ereẓ ha-Shemamah, 1940), was lauded by many critics. He served a prison term for attempted manslaughter, and in 1960 he committed suicide. His poems, Bein Arfillim ("In the Haze," Tel Aviv, 1966), a sheaf of prose sketches, and literary reviews were published posthumously. In his early verse, along with his attempts at more immediate and more intense expression, much is awkward, obsolescent, and graceless. In the poems written under the impact of his war experiences, sensitivity gives way to solemn rhetoric verging on the banal. The more personal imagery – recurring metaphors of decay and disease – sometimes appears as conventional trappings rather than a genuine expression of an immediate experience. But it would be unfair to measure Stern's poetry solely by the poem as a whole. The single phrase, the concise cluster of images that flare suddenly from the half-extinguished ashes are his most effective skills. It is here that the strange, unexpected epithet – at times, undoubtedly, a corollary of his unwieldy language – evokes a vital, highly suggestive presence. Perhaps his most impressive poems are those which, like Mikhtav Beinayim ("An Interim Letter," 1942), take to task the realities of Ereẓ Israel as they existed for the immigrant of the 1930s, with a keener awareness of conflict and contradiction and in a manner more outspoken and unadorned than that of many of his confreres who enjoyed wider popularity at the time. Here his poetic shortcomings are more than offset by the balance between the pungent statement and the resonant image. With the publication in 1966 of his collected work, interest in Stern greatly revived. A collection of poems, Egrof ha-Goral, appeared in 2002.

bibliography:

A. Broides, in: N. Stern, Bein Arfillim (1966), 5–16. add. bibliography: H. Schimmel, "Demut ha-Sofer ha-Ivri N. Stern," in: Moznayim 31 (1971), 358–62; B. Link, "Shirato shel N. Stern ve-Zikkatah le-Merkazei ha-Sifrut ha-Ivrit bi-Shenot ha-Sheloshim," in: Ha-Kongres ha-Olami le-Mada'ei ha-Yahadut, Yerushalayim 10, 2–3 (1990), 289–294.

[Natan Zach]