Description:
AbstractAfter World War I, Avraham Ben Yitzhak had all but ceased to publish the modernist Hebrew poetry for which he is famous. He continued, however, to compose literary drafts in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish well into the mid-1920s. This essay interprets a selection of these unpublished writings in the context of his criticism of wartime technology and nationalist fervor. Ben Yitzhak’s early poetics of dissolution and decadence underwent further radicalization in the post-war years; experimenting anew with expressionist and cinematic styles, he cast apocalyptic images of a dying world abandoned by God and characterized above all by the mass statelessness of its denizens.