At the Fresh Grave. Moshe Grinwald
Wrapped in deep mourning, the orphaned people stands today at the fresh grave of its great national poet and thinker and can find no comfort. It is hard to make peace with the cruel thought that the great Jewish heart has fallen silent forever, the heart that for years burned with the holy fire of love for its people and for years carried within it deep concern for their fate and future! Like a heavy, unbearable nightmare, the awareness of the great loss presses on us. So suddenly and unexpectedly has one of the few wholly Jewish personalities been torn from the front ranks, one of those who draw their nourishment from our spiritual primal sources and serve as a symbol of the Jewish renaissance. Gone forever is the tender singer of Jewish heartfelt folk life with its sorrows and joys, the mood-filled and colourful poet of nature and man, the great visionary who with his prophetic intuition sensed the rising sun of national liberation and embodied in eternally wondrous verses the sunset of past epochs in the rebellious spirit of "the last generation of bondage and the first of redemption"... And sharper still is the pain and greater the feeling of orphanhood, because to his last breath he was the majestic, powerful figure who worked in the midst of renewed life and radiated unceasingly so much faith and creative power from his brilliant personality! As a faithful companion of our birth pangs of creation, he descended from his poetic heights into the vale of tears of ideological lostness and fraternal hatred, encouraged with word and deed the weary and despairing, and grieved deeply that together with the historic hour there had not grown up a generation for whom national unity and responsibility for the common work serve as the highest commandment of its life. And what can now be said of the great departed that was not said in his lifetime? He had long since reached the highest level of recognition! Not only did he occupy the place of honour in our poetic temple, but he was also granted the highest measure of love and reverence that a people can feel for its living son. His works and name will remain immortal. Many generations will draw from his deep-flowing springs inspiration and love for all that is beautiful and free, but our generation will always remain unconsoled in its great mourning: it has suddenly lost not only the great man and poet, its teacher and leader, but also the highest moral authority of our national conscience! For this let the mourners mourn!