BONN, HANUŠ

BONN, HANUŠ (1913–1941), Czech poet whose lyrical poems have much common with the poetry of Jiří Orten\>\> . Bonn was born in Teplice and was active in the Czech-Jewish movement and as editor of the "Czech-Jewish Calendar" (Kalendář českožidovský) in 1937–39. In 1936, a collection of his poems, Tolik krajin ("So Many Landscapes"), appeared, followed in 1938 by an anthology of the poetry of primitive nations in his own translation, Daleký hlas ("A Distant Voice"). He also translated the stories of Kafka and the poetry of Rilke. In 1939 and 1940, he had to publish some of his poems under a pseudonym. At the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, he was active in the department of emigration of the Prague Jewish community, where he tried to help his Jewish compatriots. He was soon sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was tortured to death. After the war his collected works were published under the title Díla ("Works," 1947), with an introduction by Václav Černý, and in 1995 as Dozpěv ("A Final Song") with an epilogue by Zdeněk Urbánek but without Bonn's translations. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lexikon české literatury ("Dictionary of Czech Literature"), vol. 1 (1985); A. Mikulášek et al., Literatura s hvězdou Davidovou ("Literature with the Shield of David"), vol. 1; A. Dagan, The Jews of Czechoslovakia (1968). (Milos Pojar (2nd ed.)