Benjamin (Binyamin) Harshav

Professor of Comparative Literature, J.& H. Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Benjamin HarshavBinyamin Harshav, prodigious scholar, critic, literary and cultural historian, translator, theorist, poet, prosodist, and Man of Letters—few on this faculty can have had a life that resembles yours. Born in Vilnius, your family fled during the Second World War to the Urals in the Soviet Union. In May 1946 you joined the Zionist-Socialist Movement in Poland and studied at its world seminary in Germany. In May 1948 you arrived in Israel as an illegal immigrant and joined the Palmach. After the War of Independence you studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where you received your B.A, and M.A. degrees in Hebrew Literature and Jewish History —later you came to Yale, where you studied Comparative literature with Rene Wellek from 1957-1960.

When you arrived at Yale for the second time in 1987 you had already retired from Tel Aviv University, where you founded and chaired the department of Poetics and Literature and the “Tel-Aviv School of Poetics” and were an influence on the intellectual zeitgeist of your adopted country. In 2005 the EMET Prize for the study of literature was awarded to you by the president of Israel for your unique position in shaping the study of literature in the previous forty-five years.

You are the author of more than 20 books—in Hebrew and in English—on a wide array of subjects, the titles of which alone reveal the breadth of your learning – for example, Marc Chagall and His Time; Language in Time of Revolution; The Meaning of Yiddish; Explorations in Poetics, and the Polyphony of Jewish Culture—the last a collection of essays covering the whole span of Jewish culture. You have translated ten volumes of poetry from several languages into Hebrew. You founded the journal Poetics Today, a key journal in what you define as “Historical poetics.” You and your wife Barbara have played a major role in awakening interest in and recognition of Yiddish as a literary language, and of the significant contribution of Yiddish writers to culture in America. This list of your achievements is far from complete—but it should be enough to demonstrate the breadth of your accomplishment. In 1997 a group of your students—all of whom said they came “out of the folds of [your] overcoat”—honored you by seeing to the publication of your collected works in Hebrew; a Festschrift in two volumes; a conference; and a special issue of Poetics Today devoted entirely to your work.
 
Nowhere perhaps is your learning as deep or your influence as wide as on Hebrew poetry. You are said to have “changed the way of studying and teaching it; contributed to the revision of the canon; reinstituted the prosodic elements of poetry as a distinguishing factor of the poetic text; translated Hebrew poetry into English; and brought texts from other languages, including Yiddish, into Hebrew.
 
Yale is lucky that you agreed to come here—a man who has been said to “sow ideas wherever he goes”—bringing with you your erudition, your devotion to literary culture and the arts—and, it must be said, your interest in developing a circle of friends who share your intellectual and cultural interests and enjoy good food, good wine and good conversation. As you retire now for the second time from a second great university, in a second country, your colleagues honor you for your many accomplishments and wish you Mazel und Brucha.

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans