Tuvya Ruebner

Tuvya Ruebner was born in 1924 in Bratislava

Ruebner was born in 1924 in Bratislava to a German-speaking Jewish family. In 1939 Jewish pupils were barred from schools in Slovakia, and he left school. In 1941 he traveled to the Land of Israel with a group of youths, and his parents and sister, who stayed behind, were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942.

He settled in Kibbutz Merhavia, where he lived for the rest of his life. He married Ada in 1944, and she was killed in a road accident in 1950 in which he was badly hurt. He then worked as the kibbutz librarian and later married pianist Galila Yisraeli in 1953.

Encouraged by Leah Goldberg, he began writing in Hebrew, and his first Hebrew poetry book appeared in 1957. He translated Goethe into Hebrew and Agnon into German, and edited the poetry of Leah Goldberg. Much of his poetry deals with loss, including the disappearance of his son Moran in Ecuador in 1983.

From 1963 to 1966 he worked in Switzerland as an emissary. He then taught at Oranim College, Tel Aviv University and Haifa University, and became a professor of comparative literature in 1974. He retired in 1993 and died in 2019.