Moshe Bassok — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Moshe Bassok (1907-1966)

Poet and editor. Born in Kovno, Lithuania, to a father who was ordained as a rabbi at the Volozhin Yeshiva and Bialik's partner in establishing a Zionist association of Volozhin students called "Netzach Israel." During World War I, the family was deported, and he lived apart from his parents for several years, an experience that probably left its mark on his inner world. After the war, the family moved from Minsk to Vilna. He studied there at the yeshiva until he was expelled (most likely at the age of sixteen) for reading "external" literature. This is where his path to socialist Zionism began, when he joined the "Young Pioneer" movement and played key roles in it, mainly as a lecturer and editor of newspapers in the "Pioneer" movement.

In 1934, he published his first book of poems in Poland, "In Stages", which surprised with its conversational tone and expressionist style that strives for direct exposure of the ugliness and depravity of social existence. In addition, he published a book of poems in Yiddish: "Brenendike Teg" (Burning Days, 1936) and edited an anthology of new Israeli poetry, in which he also translated some of the poems "Dos Buch fun der Nai-Eretz-Yisroeldiker Poezie: Anthology" (1936).

Upon his immigration to Israel in 1936, he settled in Kibbutz Ashdot Ya'akov in the Jordan Valley. His poetic world changed and he sought to design a kind of pastoral rurality (his books "In the Distance of the Flight", 1941; "Behind the Sower", 1949; "The Quiet Shore", 1957). However, the agricultural life in the oppressive heat was not suitable for the body and temperament of the refined intellectual, and he was invited by the Jewish Agency to engage in the compilation and editing of the "Book of the Pioneer" (1939), and with the establishment of the United Kibbutz Publishing House, he became a member of its editorial board.

During his years of work at the United Kibbutz Publishing House, his editing and compilation projects stand out: "The Book of the Young Pioneer" (1944); "The Book of the Immigrants" (1947) and "The Book of the Ghetto Wars" (with Yitzhak Zuckerman, 1947), alongside translation - first testimonies and memories of Holocaust survivors and ghetto fighters, and then a comprehensive anthology of Yiddish poetry ("A Selection of Yiddish Poetry", 1963).

As a poet, in his later years, he experienced a shift of return to modernism, which was expressed in open and free forms, in a pessimistic and skeptical tone, and in a more complex and sophisticated style ("Copper and Halleluyahs", 1961; "A Nice Day, Partly Cloudy", 1966). After his death, a selection of his poems "Selected Poems" (1968) and a book of articles he wrote dealing with literary and social criticism, "Landscapes of Literature" (1965), were published.

From: Edo Bassok, Lexicon of Connections