To God in Europe

A leading expressionist poet in both Yiddish and Hebrew, Uri Zvi Greenberg (also spelled Uri Tsevi Grinberg) was born in Biały Kamień, Galicia. The son of a Hasidic rabbi, he was raised in Lemberg (today L’viv) and fought on the Eastern front in the Austro-Hungarian army, an experience that shaped him deeply. A peripatetic poet thereafter, he moved from Warsaw to Berlin as the editor and publisher of Albatros, a Yiddish literary journal banned by the Polish censors. Certain that the Jewish people would be exterminated if they remained in Europe, he moved to Mandatory Palestine, where he joined the Revisionist Party in 1930. Emerging from his self-imposed silence during World War II, Greenberg published Streets of the River: The Book of Dirges and Power in 1951, a monumental work of personal lyric and national lamentation.