Master of Unrest. The Terrible Power of Guilt and Remorse in Avot Yeshurun’s Poetry

The essay portrays and analysis the images of pre-war Krasnystaw in the poetry of the Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun. It concentrates on the idyllic images of his hometown in his late poetry, mostly in the volume Master of Rest, and confronts it with the images of Tel Aviv, the city in which he was living from 1925 till his death (1992). His illustration of Krasnystaw is strongly connected to his feelings of guilt and remorse for abandoning his family there, and for surviving while almost all his family was murdered in the Holocaust. A minor, imperfect atonement, a tombstone to those who do not have one, is restoring from oblivion by interweaving his mother’s Yiddish letters in his linguistically utterly unique Hebrew poetry.