Elias Canetti, the German-language writer, born to a Bulgarian Sephardic family, who won the Nobel Prize in 1981, tells in his memoirs of his daily meetings in a Viennese café during the 1920s with a certain Dr. Sonne. A man of broad culture who radiated a quietly powerful sense of authority, Dr. Sonne was known by Canetti, somewhat to his perplexity, to be a Hebrew poet. (And he was a Hebrew poet who was on conversational terms with Broch, Schnitzler, Schoenberg, and Joyce.) In the course of their conversations, Sonne would sometimes recite by heart long passages of biblical poetry in Hebrew to an uncomprehending Canetti, who was mesmerized by the music of the ancient words. Sonne is familiar to Hebrew readers as Avraham Ben Yitzhak, the name with which he signed his poems. His was one of the most anomalous careers in modern literature. Whatever he may have consigned to the wastebasket, he published only eleven poems in his lifetime. You may think this hardly qualifies him to be thought of as a serious poet, but four or five of these poems are among the greatest Hebrew poems written in the twentieth century—verse of astonishing richness and imaginative complexity, modernist in its disjunctions and elisions while mobilizing multiple layers of biblical allusion.

People unfamiliar with modern Hebrew literature have some vague idea that it emerged after the Zionists established settlements in Palestine and began to revive Hebrew as a living language. In fact, a secular literature written in Hebrew long antedated the resuscitation of the spoken language. It originated in Germany during the Enlightenment, in the circle around Moses Mendelssohn. The new literature moved by stages eastward during the nineteenth century, from Berlin to Vienna and eventually to Lvov, Vilna, Warsaw, Odessa, and other centers in the Russian-Polish sphere. The first steps of this literary movement were understandably faltering, linguistically and artistically, and much of the writing was didactic or ideologically tendentious. But by the 1890s a major novelist had emerged in S.Y. Abramowitz, known as Mendele the Book Peddler, as well as two poets of the first order of originality, Hayim Nachman Bialik and Shaul Tchernikhovsky—all clustered around the Odessa center.