The Ambassadors of Death: The Sister Arts, Western Canon and the Silent Lines of a Hebrew Survivor

Tuvia Rübner, winner of the Israel Prize for Poetry (2008) and the 2012 recipient of the Konrad-Adenauer Prize for Literature, is a Hebrew poet who lost his family in the Holocaust. He turned his personal trauma into a broad world view that engages with Western culture - his poetry highlighting correspondences with paintings by Chagall, Breughel, Holbein, Turner, and Rembrandt. Death and loss are molding experiences in this poet's world. Paintings and sculpture masterpieces are signaled as masks, as 'Ambassadors of Death.' Rübner's poems enable us to examine the tradition of various forms of artistic representation, while addressing the experience of art in a century when God 'hid his face' from the fate of European Jewry. And as author Shahar Bram discovers and elaborates in this book, herein lies an exquisite example of the use of ekphrasis - Rübner using his poetic language medium to explain and process the meaning and messages inherent in a select group of paintings and sculptures of cultural significance. The Ambassadors of Death contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of word and image, and the history of the relationships between sister arts. This is not only a unique perspective of traditional Western art form as reflected in the eyes of a Hebrew survivor of 20th-century Holocaust atrocities, but, in the words of Ruskin, it is 'the expression of one soul [one artistic form] talking to another.' The result is a profound understanding of the central principles of word and image art forms.