1875 - 1943

Hebrew poet, translator, and physician.

Saul Tchernichovsky (also Tsharnikhousky) was born in Mikhailovka, a village bordering on the Ukraine and Crimea. The most versatile of Hebrew poets, he was instrumental in the development, both in form and content, of Hebrew poetry. He published his first poem, Ba-Halomi (1892; In My Dream), at seventeen in the U.S. Hebrew paper Ha-Pisgah. His first book of poetry, Hezyonot U-Manginot (1898; Visions and Melodies), is romantic in style and deals with love and nature. From 1899 to 1906, he studied medicine in Heidelberg and Lausanne. During this period he wrote the first of his "Greek" poems - an indictment of Judaism's weakness vis-à-vis the vitality of Greek culture. The most powerful of these poems is Lenokhah Pesel Apollo (In the Presence of Apollo's Statue). In 1906 he returned to Russia, and until World War I, he held various positions as a doctor. The turbulent period in Russia following the war is described in his collection Sonnetot Krim (Crimean Sonnets). His Lashemesh (To the Sun), a series of sonnets written beginning in 1919, is in stark contrast to the surrounding darkness. In 1922 he left Russia but, failing to reach Palestine, he settled in Berlin where he translated such classical writers as Goethe, Molière, Shakespeare, and Homer. In 1929 he began to publish a ten-volume jubilee edition of his poetry, short stories, plays, and translations.

In 1931, at the invitation of Dr. A. M. Masie's family, Tchernichovsky arrived in Palestine to complete and edit a medical dictionary begun by the deceased doctor. The result was a trilingual work in Latin, English, and Hebrew, Sefer Ha-Munahim LiRefuah U-Lemadaei Ha-Tev'a (1934, A Book of Terminologies in Medicine and the Natural Sciences). Tchernichovsky first resided in Tel Aviv and then moved to Jerusalem, where he wrote his final works of poetry. In 1937 he published Kol Shirei Shaul Tchernichovsky The Poems of Saul Tchernichovsky). In 1942 the Tel Aviv municipality established a prize in his name for translations of classics and world classical literature with Tchernichovsky as its first recipient. Once in Palestine, his poems became strongly nationalistic, and in the resettlement of Eretz Yisrael, he saw the redemption and rejuvenation of pre-exilic Judaism. He expressed all these sentiments in ballad form, such as in Amma Dedhahaba (1943; The Golden People). Tchernichovsky died after a long illness and was buried in Tel Aviv's old cemetery.

— ANN KAHN

Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.