Alexander Penn - Biography

Alexander Penn (Александр Пэнн; 1906 – April 1972) was an Israeli poet.

Early years

Penn was born in Nizhne Kolymsk, Russia. As a youth, he was a boxer. He moved to Moscow in 1920, to study cinema, and published his first poems in Russian that year. In 1927, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. He worked as a boxing trainer in Tel Aviv, as well as a farm hand, a construction worker and a guard.

Career

Penn began writing poetry in Hebrew, which he learned only after settling in Palestine. He published these poems in the daily Hebrew newspaper Davar and a variety of literary magazines. Penn was a devout Marxist, and a member of the Israeli Communist Party. He edited the literary section of the party's paper Kol Ha'am.

Among many other works, Penn composed the poem "Vidui" (My Confession), a turbulent piece about love and death. The poem was set to music in the early 1970s and has been recorded since then by numerous Israeli singers and musicians, including Michal Tal who was the first to make a recording of it, Yehudit Ravitz, Gila Almagor, and most recently Marina Maximilian Blumin.

In 2005, Penn was voted the 171st-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.

Dalia Karpel wrote in a review published in the newspaper Haaretz, of Penn's life and work:

Penn was a contemporary of Israeli poets Avraham Shlonsky and Natan Alterman. He left romantic love poems, conformist and non-conformist patriotic poems, political poems and well-known songs.

But most of his fame seemed to derive from his Bohemian lifestyle. He contracted diabetes before the age of 30, but did not stop smoking and drinking large quantities of alcohol, and saw himself as someone who can overcome the weaknesses of the body in defiance of medical science. His cruel attitude toward women did not prevent many of them from falling in love with the talented and handsome poet. His romance with communism, on the other hand, led to his ostracism. To the end, he was upset that Alterman, who wrote "The Seventh Column," a weekly column of political verse in the now-defunct Labor Party newspaper Davar, was identified as the father of the genre in Hebrew poetry, while he, Penn, had had a similar column in Davar even before Alterman.

In 1989, Prof. Halperin published a first biography of Penn, "Shalekhet Kokhavim" (Shedding of the Stars: Alexander Penn. His Life and Work Until 1940, Hebrew). In the new biography she presents updated facts about his life. He was born Avraham Pepliker-Stern in 1905 - that is what is written on his card in the Political Red Cross archive, says Halperin. His father, Yosef Stern, ran a heder (a Hebrew school for young children) for a while, and afterward was a Hebrew teacher and wrote poems as well. He changed his family name to Pepliker in order to avoid military service. Penn shorted the name and took the "peh" from Pepliker and the final "nun" from Stern.

4. "Man of Many Parts" by Dalia Karpel, published in Haaretz, August 31, 2007.

External links

• Alexander Penn, Has It Ever Been?, translated into English by Yuval Marton