Avraham Shlonsky — poet, editor and translator with roots in the Russian Empire
Avraham Shlonsky was born on 6 March 1900 in Kryukov, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, now part of the city of Kremenchuk in Ukraine, into a Hasidic family. In 1913, at thirteen, he was sent to Ottoman Palestine to study at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium in Tel Aviv; in 1921 the whole family moved to Palestine.
There he worked as a labourer, paving roads and working in construction with other pioneers of the Third Aliyah, and published poetry from 1919. From the beginning his verse showed wit and linguistic invention in the still-developing modern Hebrew language. He became the literary editor of a series of periodicals, and in the 1920s and 1930s was the central figure of a group of modernist poets that broke with the Hebrew poetry of the preceding generation of Bialik; Britannica credits him with founding the Symbolist school in Israel and with bringing colloquial speech into Hebrew verse. His collections include Songs of Defeat and Conciliation (1938) and On Filling In (1947), and the collection Rough Stones is regarded as typical of his mature work.
Shlonsky was also among the most influential translators into Hebrew. He translated from Russian, his native literary language, works including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, as well as Gogol and Chekhov, and rendered Shakespeare, Brecht, Romain Rolland and George Bernard Shaw; he translated Shakespeare largely by way of Russian versions. In 1946 he received the Tchernichovsky Prize for exemplary translation for his Eugene Onegin and Hamlet. With Moshe Sharett he edited an anthology of Hebrew translations, and he arranged the publication in Israel of a Hebrew translation by the Soviet translator Boris Gaponov, who had learned Hebrew from Israeli radio, and worked to make Gaponov's emigration to Israel possible.
He was also among the finest Hebrew poets for children, and he coined many new Hebrew words; he also wrote plays. Much of his poetry concerns the experience of the pioneers and the emergence of the new country. In 1967 he received the Israel Prize for literature. He died in Tel Aviv on 18 May 1973, aged seventy-three; he had become an Israeli citizen in 1948.
"Sent at thirteen, in 1913, to study at the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv; settled in Palestine with his family in 1921."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kryukov, Poltava Governorate (now part of Kremenchuk, Ukraine)
Born in Kryukov, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, in 1900 into a Hasidic family, he grew up in the Ukrainian provinces of the Empire and settled in Palestine in 1921; many of his translations were from Russian.
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Kryukov, Poltava Governorate (now part of Kremenchuk, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.