Zvi Arad
Zvi Arad (Rudnik), poet, writer and translator, was born on 17 December 1909 in Vilnius, Lithuania, to a traditional family, but already at the age of ten he began to distance himself from the world of tradition of his parents. He joined the Hashomer Hatzair movement and was active in Ken Vilna. He prepared himself for immigrating to Israel, studied accounting and worked as an accountant in a leather processing factory. In 1931 he came to Israel, joined Kibbutz Ein Shemer and was one of its founders. In the kibbutz he worked in the blacksmith shop and maintenance, and was a member of the kibbutz for almost thirty years. On the eve of World War II, he tried to convince his parents to immigrate to Israel, but they refused. At the end of the war, with the arrival of the first survivors from Vilna, he learned that the Nazis had murdered all the members of his family in Ponar, the great killing site close to Vilna. He gave expression to this in his poem "There is no turning back to where paths will lead."His first poems were printed in Hashomer Hatzair in Poland and Lithuania. His first book of poems, Badlok Hastau, was the first book of poetry published by Sefriyat Poalim (1939), containing poems of admiration from the encounter with the land and its landscape. His second book of poems, Diary in Ash (1946), lamenting poems about the destruction of the Jewish Vilna, was written after he heard the painful testimony of Ružka Korček-Marla, a partisan from the Vilna ghetto.At the time, he was attached to the group of poets and writers of MAPAM, the United Workers' Party, under the leadership of Avraham Shalonsky, and was one of the leading poets of the "progressive culture". His poems and stories, which were later compiled into books, were first printed in the Orlogin magazine edited by Shalonsky, starting with the first issue, which was published in December 1950.
His poetry shows an affinity to the language of the Mishna and the Talmud, and the use of linguistic idioms. More of his books: Adam's house: a novel (1951, 1984); On My Land: Poems (1954); Nissan Days: A Roman (1956); From Fall to No (1980); To be a dream (1982).
Upon leaving the kibbutz, he began translation work and until his death translated over 200 books. Zvi Arad has translated from several languages including Russian, Polish, German, Yiddish, English and more. From his translations: Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1958); The Mandarins for Simone de Beauvoir (1958); In the hands of a Macbeth of the Matsensk region to Nikolai Leskov (1967); The Myth of Sisyphus for Albert Camus (1978); Dostoyevsky's Sin and Punishment (1993) and many others. His last unfinished translation was "the hero of our time" by the writer Mikhail Lermontov.
In addition to the translation work, he was also the editor of the Hed HaHachan magazine. Zvi Arad won the Tschernihovsky Prize for translation. His daughter Thelma, is the widow of Chief of Staff David Elazar (Dado). Zvi Arad died in January 10, 1994.
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