How can a Russian prisoner write a song book in Hebrew?
There was a very special case, when I was still with my Rabbi: a man arrived from Russia. He has been in a labor camp, worked there very hard and spent a lot of time in jail. He did not know Hebrew and was very remote from Judaism, although he was Jewish. He arrived in Israel, around 1983-4. I was then printing my first book. He found me, arrived to me and gave me a book of songs that he wrote there in prison – in Hebrew; with no knowledge of the language at all. It is a wonder. I barely understood what was written there. They used to write in a very high level Hebrew. I brought the book to my Rabbi and he said that out of the suffering and out of the desire of man to understand what was happening to him, and why the world was treating him so harshly, he broke into the sensation of the world outside of himself. Outside of his sensation, out of feeling the upper world, he began to understand those symbols and wrote them down. And indeed they were amazingly beautiful songs. The words wer
