AVINOAM (Grossman), REUVEN

AVINOAM (Grossman), REUVEN, (1905–1974), poet and translator. Avinoam, who was born in Chicago and educated in New York, received a thorough Hebrew education fostered by his father, a Hebrew writer. In 1929 he immigrated to Palestine and taught English language and literature at the Herzliyyah High School in Tel Aviv. In 1950 he was appointed supervisor of English studies at the Israel Ministry of Education   and Culture. On behalf of Israel's Ministry of Defense, he published the literary remains of the young men – including his own son, Noam – who had fallen in the Israeli War of Independence, under the title Gevilei Esh (3 vols., 1952–61). Excerpts were published in English under the title Such Were Our Fighters … (1965). Avinoam's literary contributions have appeared in many Hebrew periodicals. Several volumes of his poetry, a volume of stories on Jewish life in America, and translations from the work of Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, Israel Zangwill, and Ludwig Lewisohn were published in Israel. Avinoam also translated Tennyson's Enoch Arden, Thoreau's Walden, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Anthony and Cleopatra. He edited a Hebrew anthology of English verse. Avinoam and H. Sachs compiled a Hebrew–English dictionary which was revised and edited by M.H. Segal (Tel Aviv, 1938). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: R. Wallenrod, The Literature of Modern Israel (1956), 243–5. (Eliezer Schweid)