Nizza Thobi: Kleine Ruth

Kleine Ruth on the Album "Ein Koffer spricht" by David Records Munich

Kompostion: Nizza Thobi
Lyrics: Yehuda Amichai
Arrangement: Peter Wegele

Ruth Hanover, the daughter of rabbi Dr. Siegmund Hanover from Wurzburg, Amichai's early love, became his literary 'fixed star.' In his autobiographical novel "Not of This Time, Not of This Place" Amichai tries to avenge Ruth's death. At the age of eleven, Ruth Hanover suffered a road accident in which she lost a leg. Within the family, Ruth Hanover was called "Little Ruth," as her widowed father had married his sister-in-law Ernestine Katzmann, who also had a slightly older daughter named Ruth. While Rosi Hanover, the elder sister, and Ruth Katzmann Hanover, the stepsister succeeded in immigrating to Palestine, and Dr. Siegmund Hanover and Ernestine Katzmann Hanover fled to the US, Ruth Hanover was stuck in the Netherlands after the German assault. The historian Dr. Edith Raim says: "We don't know how Ruth Hanover spent the last years of her life in exile in the Netherlands. Perhaps she wrote a diary like Anne Frank, the girl born in 1929 who lived in hiding during the same period in a building in Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. Perhaps Ruth Hanover wrote poems, like Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a relative of Paul Celan born in 1924 in Czernowitz, who died at the end of 1942 in the labour camp Michailowska in the South of Ukraine and whose last quatrain, on 23.12.1941 was: 'I've had no time to write to an end.' Ruth Hanover also at that time had not even two more years to live. The transport, by which Ruth Hanover left on the transit camp Westerbork on the way to the Sobibor extermination camp on 18th May, 1943 included 2511 people. Not one of these deportees has survived. Ruth has not experienced her 20-th birthday."

Yehuda Amichai, one of the most important poets and authors of contemporary Israel, was born with the name Ludwig Pfeuffer in 1924, as the son of an Orthodox Jewish family in Wurzburg. After the Nazis came to power the family decided to leave Germany and immigrated to Eretz Israel, British-ruled Palestine, in 1936. At first the family lived for a short period in Petah Tikva, before they finally moved to Jerusalem. At the age of 18 he joined the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and fought against the Germans in Northern Africa. After 1945 he took part in the four Arab-Israeli wars. He renamed himself Yehuda Amichai. The name means 'My people lives.' After completing his studies in Biblical Science and Hebrew Literature, he worked first as a teacher and then as a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His work was translated into thirty-seven languages including Chinese, Estonian, and Albanian. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Israel Prize, his country's highest honour.

LITTLE RUTH Sometimes I remember you, Little Ruth, that we parted ways in a distant childhood, that you were incinerated in the camps. Had you lived now you would have been a sixty-five years old woman, a woman on the verge of old age. At twenty you were incinerated and I don't know what happened to you in your short life since we parted. What have you accomplished, what rank stripes you received on your shoulder, on your sleeve, on your courageous spirit. Which bright stars were you decorated with, which bravery honours, which love medals were hung on your neck what peace is upon you, you that have gone in peace. And whatever has happened to your unused years? Are they still packed together like beautiful parcels? Have they perhaps been added to my life? Have you turned me into your love bank? Like the Swiss banks in which the treasure is kept long after its owner has passed away? Will I leave them to my children whom you have never met?


You gave me your life, like a wine merchant who causes others to be drunk, yet he remains sober. You are sober in your death, clear in the kingdom of darkness, to someone inebriated by life, who rolls about in forgetfulness. Sometimes I remember you at times I didn't imagine and at places not meant to be remembered only meant to be transient and passing and not memorable like at the airport when the arriving travellers are standing tired next to the sliding turning carousel that brings their suitcases and packages and when they find theirs they give out a shout like at the resurrection of the dead, and they go on with their lives. And there is one suitcase that returns and then disappears, and then returns again, slowly, in the emptying terminal, and again and again it returns, that's how your silent image passes in front of me, that's the way I remember you,

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Nizza Thobi
• Ein Koffer spricht
• David Records
• Yehuda Amichai
• Kleine Ruth
• Ruth Hanover
• Sobibor
• Shoa

[NizzaThobi]

@utahna1967

Yes!

[utahna1967]

FOR THE VICTIMS OF SOBIBOR. LET EARTH NOT CONCEALE MY BLOOD..... FOR LEON......

[NizzaThobi]

Yes, rhe right place is Tel-Aviv!

Toda.

[rolligeswiesel]

Ich find es toll :)