Avraham Ben-Yitzhak was the great poet of silence. Friend and contemporary of James Joyce and Elias Canetti, he published only twelve poems in his lifetime, all in Hebrew, and repudiated one on the basis of editorial changes introduced against his will. 'Happy are they that sow and will not reap,' he wrote in his last poem, published in 1930, 'They shall wander afar.'
At various times in his life, Ben-Yitzhak lived in Berlin, Vienna, Lvov, London, Copenhagen and Jerusalem. He himself certainly did wander afar, but was rarely happy. Born in 1883 in a small unpronounceable town in Galicia (Przemysl), his father died when he was very young, and he grew up with his maternal grandparents, where he received a traditional Orthodox Jewish education, supplemented with secular studies from private tutors. In his late teens, while still living in Przemysl, he met one Eliezer Lipshitz, an educator and researcher from Lvov, who acted for a while as his mentor and literary agent, sending his poetry to magazines on his behalf, and encouraging him to 'make a name for himself in his studies and his literary activity.'
Lipshitz seems to have been far more interested in Ben-Yitzhak than was reciprocated, and the tone of Lipshitz's correspondence with him becomes increasingly peevish. Lipshitz used to send him little nagging postcards such as the following gem from 1911: 'When will you go to Berlin for God's sake? It's obvious to me that your lack of ambition has also contributed to your health problems. In the nobility of your spiritual life you always scorn the wheels of the world - your work is not for this world and your writing not for other people, but for your own world and your own self. If only you would think...'
Lipshitz constantly insisted that he publish more poetry and finish his essays, such as the one on 'Criticism of Sentimentality in Judaism,' that he was supposed to have written for Yosef Klausner's prestigious magazine, 'HaShiloah'. From the publication of his first poems, Ben-Yitzhak was widely regarded in the Hebrew speaking world as a uniquely gifted writer, but that essay was one of many commissions on which he failed to deliver. He published infrequent articles throughout his career, mostly literary criticism, but only once did he consent to having his name printed by the piece. (The editor who talked him into it in that case was a certain Martin Buber, writer of 'I and Thou' and the great philosopher of dialogue.)
Berlin being a long way from Lvov, he eventually enrolled at the university there, but Lipshitz kept on nagging him: 'About your examinations - I see that you have despaired of them, but you must not, for there is a kind of moral law obliging us to seek civil standing in the paths marked out by society. [...] Turn again, my brother, it is required of you to work, and do not treat contemptuously the achievements of petit-bourgeois home-ownership.' Ben-Yitzhak subsequently seems to have spent the rest of his life working as little as possible and treating the achievements of petit-bourgeois home-ownership with a contempt bordering on the self-destructive, although this did not stop him from studying at the university of Vienna as well as Berlin without actually completing a degree at either institution.
A committed Zionist, in 1913 he was invited to teach Hebrew Literature and Psychology at the 'Hevrat Ezra' Teachers College in Jerusalem, and jumped at the chance. 'Each individual comes to Israel because their life outside it is impossible,' he wrote. 'The basis of their objection is the beginning of the decision to go and start a new life. Their internal life is bad; they come to build a better world...' However, the day he arrived in Jerusalem he was badly injured when the cart that was giving him a lift from the station overturned in the road, and after three months in hospital he returned to Vienna to complete his recovery. By the time he got back to Jerusalem, the job had fallen apart, and he was in Vienna again when the First World War broke out. 'They come to build a better world,' he had written, 'but at the first difficulty, they judge the conditions and people according to internal custom. Suddenly the world they have left seems attractive again...'
From Vienna, he wrote in 1914 to a friend in Jerusalem that 'it seems that no-one understands the meaning of the words 'European war' ... and there is no guessing how much of economic and cultural value it will consume and destroy.' He had left the vast bulk of his writings in storage at his mother's house, but when Przemysl fell to the Russians in 1915, it was all destroyed or lost in the confusion. This sent him into deep depression, from which he never really recovered, and while he continued to write, there is a distinct slowing down after 1915 in what was never a particularly prolific career. 'The Lonely Say', his penultimate poem, took him five years to finish, but he had dashed this off compared to 'Happy are they that sow...' which he began in 1916 but did not complete until 1928.
After a failed foray into Zionist politics, he began teaching at the Hebrew Pedagogical Institute in Vienna, an institution which he ended up running. This was not a particularly lucrative occupation, and after he fell ill with tuberculosis, he could no longer afford his cafe-dwelling hermit-like lifestyle. His failing health forced him to rely on a series of wealthy friends, all of whom desperately hoped that Ben-Yitzhak, the first modernist in Hebrew poetry, would start writing again. He never did.
Instead, he seems to have spent the bulk of his time in cafes with various artists and writers including James Joyce, Arnold Schoenberg, Arthur Schnitzler, Elias Canetti and Hermann Broch. In his memoirs of Vienna in the thirties, Canetti describes Ben-Yitzhak as a guru-like figure who cast a spell over writers and artists working in the city. To catch him, Canetti used to have to sit in the Cafe-Museum, and pretend to read. 'Only superficially did I bury myself in the paper', wrote Canetti, 'I peeked out constantly in the direction of the door. He always came, a tall figure, thin, with a rigid, awkward way of walking, almost arrogant, as if he did not want to meet anyone, and so kept these chattering creatures at a distance.'
After the Nazi occupation of Vienna in 1938, Ben-Yitzhak managed to escape to Jerusalem, where he continued both to be supported by wealthy admirers and to refuse to sanction any further publication of his poetry. His depression ebbed and flowed, but his silences deepened, and he remained a disconcertingly distant figure, who would speak rarely, and then only in the third person. The poet Leah Goldberg wrote of him that 'everyone who knew him remembers his long silences. They would come suddenly, and he was capable of silencing roomsful of even the most talkative people.'
In 1948, the year the State of Israel was founded, his tuberculosis began to worsen, and he died just over a year later. 'Happy are they,' he had written, 'that know their heart shall cry out in the desert / As silence sprouts on their lips. // Happy are they. They shall be taken into the heart of the world / Wrapped in the cloak of forgetfulness / Their eternal judgement shall be without saying.'