Join us to discuss the 2nd half of "
Her Life and Diary" by Hannah Senesh, and Yehuda Amichai's "
The Diameter of the Bomb"
Find it on pages 228-252 of The Soul of the Text: Anthology of Jewish Literature - Great Books Foundation.
We will also try to understand what is "
The Soul of the Text"?
Read the diary entries from July 17, 1939 (Hannah's 18th birthday) through to her poem:
Blessed is the Match:
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Born in Budapest on July 17, 1921, to a wealthy, distinguished, and assimilated Hungarian Jewish family, Hannah Szenes escaped the anti-Semitism she experienced in Hungary and joined a
kibbutz at Caesarea in Palestine. In 1943, she was approached by Jewish Agency officials to join a clandestine military project that offered aid to beleaguered European Jewry. She trained as a wireless operator and as a paratrooper in preparation for her mission.
Hannah Szenes was one of 37 Jews from Mandatory Palestine parachuted by the British Army into Yugoslavia during the Second World War to assist in the rescue of Hungarian Jews about to be deported to the German death camp at Auschwitz. Szenes was arrested at the Hungarian border, then imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal details of her mission. When she was brought face-to-face with her mother, whom she had not seen in five years, both women refused to give any information to their captors. Szenes was eventually tried and executed by firing squad November 7, 1944. After the war, her mother emigrated to Palestine and published her daughter’s diaries, poetry, and plays. Szenes is regarded as a national heroine in Israel, where her poetry is widely known and the headquarters of the Zionist youth movement Israel Hatzeira, a kibbutz, and several streets are named after her.
Yehuda Amichai was born in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1924 and emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1936. He later became a naturalized Israeli citizen. Although German was his native language, Amichai read Hebrew fluently by the time he moved to Palestine. He served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in World War II and fought with the Israeli defense forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Following the war, he attended Hebrew University to study Biblical texts and Hebrew literature, and then taught in secondary schools. Amichai has published eleven volumes of poetry in Hebrew, two novels, and a book of short stories. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages.
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimetersand the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,with four dead and eleven wounded.And around these, in a larger circleof pain and time, two hospitals are scatteredand one graveyard. But the young womanwho was buried in the city she came from,at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,enlarges the circle considerably,and the solitary man mourning her deathat the distant shores of a country far across the seaincludes the entire world in the circle.And I won’t even mention the crying of orphansthat reaches up to the throne of God andbeyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
