Haim Lensky
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Haim_Lensky.jpg/250px-Haim_Lensky.jpg)
Haim Lensky (1905–1943), also Hayyim Lensky, was a Russian poet who wrote in Hebrew. He wrote the bulk of his verse while imprisoned in several Soviet labor camps from 1934 onward.[1]
Lensky was born in the Belarusian town of Slonim and lived in Dziarečyn, Leningrad, and elsewhere.[2] He was one of few Russian Jewish poets to write in Hebrew.[3] Lensky's poems reflect the realities of the camps in which he was imprisoned, the Russian landscape, and literature in a variety of languages and national traditions. He was able to receive books through friends while in the camps, and read poets such as Afanasy Fet and Fyodor Tyutchev.[4]
A few of Lensky's poems were published in Israel during his lifetime, and were first collected there under the title Beyond the River Lethe in 1960.[2]
References
[edit]- ^ Pinkus, Benjamin (1990). The Jews of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 112. ISBN 0-521-38926-7.
- ^ a b Lapidus, Rina (2003). Between Snow and Desert Heat: Russian Influences on Hebrew Literature, 1870–1970. Jonathan Chipman (trans.). Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press. p. 95. ISBN 0-87820-451-2.
- ^ Frankel, Jonathan (1994). Reshaping the Past: Jewish History and the Historians. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 370. ISBN 0-19-509355-0.
- ^ Lapidus, 96–97.