As a result, Kovner’s story—his work as a leader of the ghetto’s underground, his escape from Vilna to lead a Jewish partisan band in the forests, his role in organizing the postwar migration of refugees to Israel, and his part in the 1948 War of Independence—does not bring the kind of satisfaction or inspiration we turn to legends to find. If Kovner was a hero—and if he wasn’t, who is?—he is a new kind of hero, one we have to pity as well as admire. After all, we do not expect heroes to spend decades, as Kovner did, screaming in their sleep. “For thirty years I had a recurring nightmare, the same one every night,” he said in 1980, seven years before he died. “My feet were running through dark alleys, from one to another with no exit, the faces of the people chasing me were invisible and I could only hear them yelling, ‘Raus, raus,’ and they were almost on top of me…. Then I would wake up, dripping with sweat and terrified.”

The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner, by Dina Porat, is the first full biography of Kovner to appear in English. But the book was originally published in Hebrew, in 2000, and it presents a few obstacles to the American Jewish reader—of which the sometimes awkward translation is the least important. Porat is writing for a readership with a deeper knowledge of early Zionist ideologies and personalities, and of Israeli culture and history, than most Americans are likely to possess. Yet this Israeli perspective, for all its challenges, is especially useful when it comes to understanding Kovner. Not only did he spent his whole postwar life in Israel, living on the Ein Hahoresh kibbutz; the idea of Israel, and the often painful contrasts between the ideal and the reality, shaped Kovner’s whole life and personality, even before the Second World War. If it weren’t for his fervent Zionism, Kovner could never have assumed the terrible moral and practical burdens of leadership in occupied Vilna.

“Kovner was unmistakably a born leader,” Porat writes. Not only did his name mean “father,” but he was related to the Vilna Gaon, 19th-century Lithuania’s greatest rabbi and polymath. Yet one of the central ironies of Porat’s book is that, for Kovner and many Jews of his generation in Eastern Europe—he was born in 1918—commitment to Jewishness was expressed as a rejection of Judaism. As head of the Vilna chapter of Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist Zionist youth movement, Kovner was adamantly secular and revolutionary. (As Porat shows, he even exaggerated his family’s poverty in order to fit in better with the proletarian ideal.) Hashomer Hatzair provided the basic structure of Kovner’s world: it put him in touch with like minded young Jews across Europe and in Palestine, and it gave him an ideal of absolute commitment and self-sacrifice.

Both of these legacies were to prove crucial during the Nazi occupation, and it is no coincidence that both Kovner, the leader of the Vilna underground, and Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, were members of Hashomer Hatzair. As Porat shows, these two young men, along with hundreds of other Zionist activists, were briefly united in Vilna in 1939, when the independent state of Lithuania became a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland. It was even possible for some older Zionists to escape to Palestine; but Kovner, who was just 21 years old, decided to remain in Vilna, just as Anielewicz deliberately returned to Warsaw. At this crucial moment, Zionism was transformed for Kovner from a dream of Palestine to a doctrine of Jewish self-reliance. At an age when most young people are still in college, Kovner and his peers decided that they were “the only ones left ‘to stand guard over Jewish lives, now and in the future.’”

That resolve would be tested immediately, as Lithuania was first annexed by the Soviet Union, in 1940, and then conquered by Nazi Germany, in 1941. The sequence of events was triply disastrous for the Jews. The Soviets, who were idealized by the young socialists of Hashomer Hatzair, turned out to be as hostile to left-wing Zionism as they were to Orthodox Judaism. The movement had to go underground—in Porat’s words, “to continue admiring the regime while hiding from it.” But enough Jews welcomed the Soviets—either because they were committed Communists, or because they saw Stalin as their last defense against Hitler—that the Lithuanian population came to identify the Jews at large with the hated Russian occupiers. When the country fell to the Nazi onslaught in June 1941, its Jews were left to face an aggrieved, anti-Semitic population, whipped up by the Germans to a genocidal frenzy. As a result, the Holocaust in Lithuania was quicker and deadlier than anywhere in Europe. By December 1941, more than two-thirds of Vilna’s Jews had been murdered, mainly by shooting at a mass grave in Ponar, outside the city.

The survivors were imprisoned in the Vilna Ghetto, a tiny, impoverished, walled-in enclave. During the worst of the killing that fall, Kovner and some 20 other Jews were in hiding, protected by the mother superior of a Catholic convent who ran enormous risks to save them. (After the war, Kovner would call this heroic nun Ima, “mother.”) But in December he decided to emerge from hiding and slip into the ghetto, in order to provide the leadership he believed it desperately needed. For the next two years, as Porat shows in detail, Kovner helped to unite Vilna’s fractious Jewish political movements into a single underground, the Fareinikteh Partizaner Organizatzieh (United Partisan Organization), or FPO. At the constant risk of his own life—and worse, of incurring collective punishment on the ghetto—Kovner and the other FPO leaders organized cells, obtained weapons, wrote orders and manifestos, and planned to fight the Germans.

They knew, of course, that there was no way they could defeat the occupiers, or even inflict serious damage. The underground’s strategy was premised on the belief, which Kovner announced in a manifesto on January 1, 1942, that the Nazis intended to kill every single Jew in Europe—making Kovner perhaps the first Jew to publicly acknowledge the true nature of the Holocaust. Effectively, the Jews of the Vilna Ghetto were already dead. The only choice that remained to them was how they would die. “Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter!” Kovner wrote, in a terrible and famous phrase. “True, we are weak and helpless, but the only answer to the hater is resistance! Brothers! Better fall as free fighters than live at our murderers’ mercy!”

All the FPO’s planning, then, was devoted to a final, apocalyptic battle in the ghetto, in which the Jews would kill some of the enemy before their own inevitable deaths—like Samson pulling down the temple on the Philistines. This awful, hopeless revenge was the last possible form of self-determination, the last ember of the Zionist ideal. And even that was to be taken away; for Vilna, unlike Warsaw, never witnessed an uprising. The Jewish population, in whose name the FPO claimed to be fighting, adamantly opposed any attempt at resistance—encouraged in this by the ghetto’s Jewish ruler, Jacob Gens, who saw the underground as reckless youths who were endangering all their lives. When the ghetto was liquidated and the Germans captured a large fraction of the FPO’s fighters, the idea of resistance—which had sustained these young Jews during two years of hell—fell to pieces. “Suddenly we understood that after all our training and preparation we were still like all the other Jews, no different from them,” remembered Vitka Kempner, Kovner’s wife and fellow partisan. “It was the most awful and tragic helplessness. And that helplessness was the essence of the Holocaust.”

But Kovner found an alternative to helplessness. In September 1943, as the last Jews were rounded up for deportation, he led a group of 90 partisans out of the ghetto through a sewer pipe, making sure he was the last person to leave. After seven hours of crawling through three-foot wide pipes full of sewage, the group emerged in Vilna, then made its way to the Lithuanian forests. There Kovner assembled a Jewish partisan band, under the uneasy sponsorship of the USSR, and carried out sabotage and reprisal raids on the Germans and their collaborators. He managed to survive and to keep his group intact, despite strong anti-Semitic pressure from his Soviet commanders, until the Red Army liberated Vilna in July 1944. Porat reproduces a photo of the 25 year old Kovner, with Kempner and another female leader, Ruzka Korzcak, in the liberated ghetto. They are posing with rifles and smiling, but the streets behind them are empty.

Porat goes on to tell the equally dramatic story of Kovner’s role in leading survivors across Poland and Europe to Palestine; his terrible plan, thankfully never carried out, to inflict a genocidal revenge on the Germans, by poisoning the water supply of German cities; and the tense negotiations between Kovner and the survivors, on the one hand, and the government of the Yishuv in Palestine, on the other. Porat makes clear that, in a sense, Kovner never really belonged in Israel—even though his Zionism was all that sustained him through the Holocaust, and even though he became famous in the 1948 war for the powerful, angry bulletins he wrote as an information officer in the Givati Brigade.

For the rest of his life, as he wrote poetry, planned Holocaust memorials and museums, and worked on his kibbutz, Kovner belonged in some sense to the past—to the Vilna that was destroyed, to the partisan bands that were scattered and killed, to the Zionist idealism that existed before the founding of the actual state of Israel. He felt this difference above all in his poetry, Porat writes. Kovner “looked forward to the day when the kibbutz would also be the place his poetry belonged, natural and authentic like that of his fellow poets who had been born on the kibbutz; Kovner had been jealous of them for years. His first poem about the vineyard, whose grapes ran with blood instead of juice, asked the question, “‘How, my friend, is my poetry different from yours?/ The place of its birth, the date of life/ or the fact it tastes of ashes?’” What Kovner did cannot be separated from what he suffered; that is what makes his story so difficult to tell, and so necessary to remember.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

I’ve been thinking about that historical moment again in the wake of the death earlier this month of Marek Edelman. It was Edelman who, after the death of Mordechai Anielewicz, acceded as leader of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. He led the fight that some have said saved Jewish honor, though he would repudiate the sentiment. He understood that nearly all Jews dealt with certain death in myriad honorable ways that none can second-guess. Edelman survived and lived out his life in Poland, where he made his career as a physician. He hewed throughout his life to the Bund.

It happens that the first time I thought much about the Bund, I was living in Europe on assignment to cover the climactic years of the Cold War for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. I was having dinner with my wife at our home in Brussels, when the phone rang and an operator came on the line and asked me to hold for the deputy foreign minister of Israel. I didn’t know Benjamin Netanyahu well, but I’d been defending his policies. He was calling to ask whether he could mention my name to the new proprietors of the Jerusalem Post as a possible editor of the paper. I was touched, but had to tell him that I was planning to return to America to become editor of the Forward.

There was an awkward silence, and he finally said—in amazement—“the Bundist newspaper?”

I told him that it was a bit more complicated, that there’d been no more anti-communist paper in all of American history. Netanyahu was exceptionally gracious, under the circumstances, and we rang off. In fact, the Forward was never a Bundist paper, and, I learned in due course, the relationship between its editor, Abraham Cahan, and the Bund was decidedly rocky. But history has a way of playing tricks on all of us, and in my years at the Forward, I personally caused to be hung in its editorial rooms a portrait of the Bundist martyr Henryk Erhlich, who, with the outbreak of the war, had moved, with Victor Alter, east into the Soviet zone only to be murdered by Stalin.

Edelman was nearly 40 years younger than Erlich. He joined the Bund youth movement in the late 1930s, and ended up confined in the ghetto in Warsaw, where he helped organize the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or Jewish Combat Organization, which stunned the Nazis when the attack on the ghetto began. When Anielewicz was trapped, and committed suicide, Edelman became commander. After he and his comrades put up the fight that astonished the world, Edelman managed to escape through the sewers and, in 1944, to participate in the uprising against the Nazis by the Free Polish forces.

That was the battle that saw the betrayal of the Free Poles by the Red Army, which sat on its guns on the East side of the Vistula and exposed the communist camarilla in its full cynicism. After the war, Edelman stayed in Poland and in the Bund, though he opposed the Bund’s absorption into the Polish communist party. He emerged in harness with the Free Labor Movement when it began to organize in Poland, creating, in Solidarity, the institution that would crack Soviet rule and begin the end of the communist tyranny in the East bloc.

In the 1970s, the writer Hanna Krall had a long conversation with Edelman that was brought out as a book called Shielding the Flame. It included, at the end, a letter Krall wrote to the translators. In the season of the 40th anniversary of the uprising Edelman led, she had been with him in his home, where he was held under house arrest by General Jaruzelski’s communist regime. It had wanted him to participate in the official commemoration, but he’d refused. Solidarity promptly mounted its own commemoration and wanted—even needed—him in its ranks. So, Krall wrote, the Jewish path and the Polish path had merged again.

Not that Edelman was immune from mistakes. He’d issued earlier this decade a statement likening the Palestinian Arab “resistance” to the fight that he and his comrades had waged more than half a century ago, a statement that galled the Israelis. All the greater the irony of the bond that was established between Edelman and Moshe Arens, who, after Edelman’s death, wrote one of the loveliest tributes to him in Haaretz. Arens, a follower of Jabotinsky, had once gone to meet with Edelman and, apparently, formed an admiration for him, and he wrote that it was not only Edelman who was buried that day.

“The Bund, which commanded his loyalty to his dying days, was also laid to rest,” he wrote. He noted that Edelman’s coffin had been draped with the red banner of the Bund, with the words “Bund—Yidisher Sozialistisher Farband.” He called it “a farewell to a great movement, which had a massive following among Polish Jewry before the war, and had led all other Jewish parties in the last Polish municipal elections held before the war.” He noted that the Bund believed that “a Socialist Poland would be built” and “there the Jews of Poland, maintaining the Yiddish culture and the Yiddish language, would find their rightful place.”

Arens acknowledged that Zionism and emigration to Palestine were “anathema” to the Bund and that the Bund “reserved a special hatred” for Jabotinsky, who had called on the Jews to flee Poland. “The Bund’s lofty ideals took precedence over reality,” Arens wrote. “And cruel reality put an end to the Bund.” In the end, he wrote, “Zionism prevailed over the Bund.” But that, he added, “was not because most Polish Jews deemed its ideology superior, but because the human base of the Bund was exterminated, along with the rest of Polish Jewry, by the Germans during World War II.” Then Arens wrote: “Those very few who survived, like Edelman, remained fiercely loyal to the Bund, an organization that had ceased to exist, a loyalty that sustained them during the war years, and gave them the courage to heroically fight the Germans along with other Jewish fighters, outnumbered and outgunned, in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.”

* * *

What a concluding chapter that would make to the novel 1897—an aging Revisionist defense minister of Israel, weeping, if figuratively and from a distance, over the Bundist-bier of Marek Edelman. Let us ask what would prompt a hero like Arens to make this kind of bow to a hero at the other end of the ideological spectrum. We have come through a period marked by a vanishing Bund and an American Jewry in a crisis of intermarriage and assimilation. So it is a haunting question. No doubt Arens knows that we are in a time as dangerous for the Zionist enterprise—and so for all Jews—as any in history. We are in a period in which, if we are not careful, the dream of Herzl and the millions whose lives Zionism saved and inspired could be dealt a fate as cruel as that which was dealt to the socialists and to the Bund. It’s a moment when the example of a man like Marek Edelman towers over the generations.