David Twersky
WITH THE ISRAELI ARMY IN LEBANON
How Much Has Changed and How Much Hasn't
Through these pale cold days
What dark Jaces burn
Out oj three thousandyears,
A nd their wild eyes yearn,
While underneath their brows
Like waifs their spirits grope
For the pools oj Hebron again
For Lebanon 's summer slope.
They leave these blond still days
In dust behind their tread.
They see with living eyes
How long they have been dead.
Isaac Rosenberg wrote this poem in the trenches of France
a few days before his death. He mailed it to his patron, Edward
Marsh, first secretary to Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, whose
own regiment was soon sent to help ward off Von Ludendorf's major
German offensive. On April 1, under cover of darkness, having sus–
tained heavy casualties, they withdrew for a respite. The Germans
attacked, and a runner catching up with the regiment asked for vol–
unteers to return into the breach. Rosenberg volunteered and was
killed a few hours later in close combat.
The poem was written after a year of attempting, in vain, to
transfer to "the Judeans"-Vladimir Jabotinsky and Joseph
Trumpeldor's Jewish Brigade, based in Egypt and Palestine. After
two millenia, or "three thousand years," as the poet would have it,
of Jewish powerlessness, something within the poet stirred to the
notion of aJewish military and political power, based in the ancient
homeland. How prophetic his poem seems today! The Jewish spirit
groping for "the pools of Hebron again/ for Lebanon's summer
slope. "
Having just returned from a summer in Lebanon, I think of
these lines and of how much has changed, how much has not, since
Rosenberg's premature and tragic death.
Jabotinsky's disciple, Menachem Begin, is prime minister of
the Jewish state whose borders Rosenberg approached in his trou-
