{"id":84316,"date":"2021-03-23T17:05:28","date_gmt":"2021-03-23T15:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=84316"},"modified":"2021-03-17T08:20:59","modified_gmt":"2021-03-17T06:20:59","slug":"11-05-65","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=84316","title":{"rendered":"A Translator\u2019s Masterpiece"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>A Translator\u2019s Masterpiece<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

ADAM KIRSCH<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Hillel Halkin\u2019s lifetime of thinking about language, Zionism, and writing pays rich dividends in his \u2018indispensable\u2019 new collection of essays devoted to the writers who created modern Hebrew literature out of nothing<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

TABLET MAGAZINE<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

At the age of 81, the writer and translator Hillel Halkin has published his masterpiece\u2014a book that reflects a lifetime of thinking about Hebrew, Zionism, literature, and the relationship among them. The Lady of Hebrew and Her Lovers of Zion<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/a> is a collection of 11 essays, each devoted to a writer who helped to create modern Hebrew literature in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Each chapter surveys its subject\u2019s life and work, including generous quotations in Halkin\u2019s own translation. But Halkin has created something more than a gallery of individual portraits. The Lady of Hebrew<\/em> is really a book about how literary ideas can change the world, as well as a penetrating study of crucial period in modern Jewish history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Halkin is a leading translator of Israeli literature into English, having worked with Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua among many others. But Israeli literature is completely absent from The Lady of Hebrew<\/em>; the most recent work Halkin looks at, S.Y. Agnon\u2019s novel Only Yesterday<\/em>, was published in 1945, three years before the Jewish state was founded. The earliest, Joseph Perl\u2019s anti-Hasidic satire The Revealer of Secrets<\/em>, appeared in 1819, long before anyone dreamed that Hebrew could be revived as a spoken vernacular.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet as Halkin\u2019s title suggests, the story of modern Hebrew writing is inseparable from the story of Zionism. The writers he discusses\u2014including the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, the essayist Ahad Ha\u2019am, and the fiction writers Micha Yosef Berdichevsky and Yosef Chaim Brenner\u2014never lived in a Jewish state, but they can be compared to the generation of the Exodus: They didn\u2019t enter the Promised Land, but the journey couldn\u2019t have been accomplished without them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like the Israelites in the desert, too, these Hebrew writers were full of doubts, often wondering if they should turn back. \u201cAh, trusting soul to think that Hebrew has a future and not just a past\u2014a past that will be followed by nothing!\u201d lamented Yehuda Leib Gordon to a friend in 1879, after decades of writing Hebrew poetry. The idea that a modern, secular literature could be created in the Hebrew language was hardly less quixotic than the idea that a Jewish state could be created in Palestine. Both hopes seemed to fly in the face of 2,000 years of history.<\/span><\/p>\n

COURTESY HILLEL HALKIN<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

After all, Hebrew had ceased to be the main spoken language of the Jews by the first century CE, displaced by Aramaic and Greek. For the next 1,800 years, Hebrew was lashon hakodesh, the \u201choly tongue\u201d of Torah and prayer, rabbinic commentary and learned correspondence; but it was never the language of everyday life. All of the Eastern European writers Halkin discusses in The Lady of Hebrew grew up speaking Yiddish. Certainly Hebrew wasn\u2019t a language to write novels in; rabbinic Judaism scorned fiction as frivolous if not actively sinful.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the appearance of Abraham Mapu\u2019s The Love of Zion, in 1853, created such a sensation. Halkin argues that this wasn\u2019t actually the first Hebrew novel\u2014he gives that title to Perl\u2019s book, which appeared three decades earlier\u2014but it was certainly the first to have a sizable readership, and it effectively created modern Hebrew fiction. Today The Love of Zion appears unreadably stilted and artificial; as Halkin shows, practically every phrase is borrowed directly from the Bible, giving the effect of a pastiche. But Mapu\u2019s story of star-crossed lovers, set in Judah in the eighth century BCE, struck his first readers as thrilling. Halkin quotes from a contemporary memoir:<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cThe novel made its way everywhere, into the academies for rabbinical students, into the very synagogue. The young were amazed and entranced by its poetic flights. \u2026 Rabbinical students, playing truant, resorted [to the woods] to read Mapu\u2019s novel in secret. Luxuriously they lived the ancient days over again.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As this passage suggests, the audience for Hebrew fiction mainly consisted of freethinking young men with an advanced religious education. (Mapu himself was a yeshiva graduate and Hebrew teacher.) The Love of Zion dazzled such readers in several ways. Though written in the holy tongue, it was a story of human conflicts in which God played no role; it was passionately romantic; and it was full of descriptions of nature, converting \u201cthe biblical landscape from an abstraction into a reality,\u201d Halkin writes. All of this made a delightful contrast with the legal and religious texts that filled yeshiva students\u2019 days.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his letters, Mapu imagined the Hebrew language as a personified female figure, the \u201clady of Hebrew\u201d of Halkin\u2019s title, and addressed her in flowery terms: \u201cForsake thy domicile and come with me, leave the ancient Eden for the present habitations of thy people.\u201d To actually make Hebrew a part of living Jewish culture, however, it would have to give up the biblical purity of diction that Mapu cherished. Halkin gives a telling example from one of his later novels, The Painted Vulture, which was set in contemporary Eastern Europe. Mapu refers to a theater, almost incomprehensibly, as a \u201cvalley of vision,\u201d using a phrase from Isaiah. Halkin points out that he could have used the mishnaic Hebrew word \u201cteatron,\u201d but he shunned any vocabulary borrowed from Greek.<\/span><\/p>\n

Halkin\u2019s impatience with Mapu shows that he is writing as an engaged critic rather than a neutral historian. The purpose of modern Hebrew literature, Halkin insists throughout the book, was to help bring about a Hebrew-speaking Jewish state, and he judges each of his subjects by how well they understood and furthered this mission. By that standard, Mapu falls short\u2014linguistically, because he straitjacketed Hebrew rather than helping it progress, and politically, because he didn\u2019t arrive at full-fledged Zionism. \u201cWhat is actually in these novels \u2026 is Zionism\u2019s stopping short of emerging, like an idea that trembles on the cusp of consciousness and falls back,\u201d Halkin concludes.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Mapu had opened a door, and the next generation charged through it. Starting in the 1870s, secular Hebrew writers began to reach a small but elite readership thanks to journals like Ha-Shachar, edited by Peretz Smolenskin in Vienna, and Ha-Shiloach, edited by Ahad Ha\u2019am in Odessa. In their pages, poets and novelists experimented with making Hebrew a modern literary language, while polemicists argued about the Jewish future.<\/span><\/p>\n

Smolenskin and Ahad Ha\u2019am are among Halkin\u2019s subjects in The Lady of Hebrew, and their stories show how hard it was for even committed Hebraists to envision a hopeful future. Smolenskin proclaimed that the Hebrew language was the Jews\u2019 true homeland: \u201cIt puts words in our mouths with which to speak to one another to farthest isles and ends of the earth.\u201d Yet his fictional treatments of Jewish society were bitterly critical. His novel A Donkey\u2019s Burial shows how a spirited young man is crushed by a corrupt community, ending up as an apostate and a criminal. For maskilim, \u201cenlightened\u201d Jews like Smolenskin, Jewish life was in desperate need of rebirth\u2014but where was it to come from?<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 1880s, a new answer emerged in the form of the Hovevei Zion or \u201cLovers of Zion\u201d movement, which gives Halkin the second half of his title. After the assassination of Czar Alexander II led to a wave of pogroms throughout Eastern Europe, Jews began to think seriously about the idea of emigrating to Palestine. Only a small number actually took the plunge, creating the first modern Jewish settlements in the land of Israel. But the idea of Zionism quickly transformed Jewish political consciousness, especially after Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in 1897.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hebraists were a natural constituency for Zionism. They were already committed to creating a new Jewish culture that would be secular in content and national in form. One of Smolenskin\u2019s last stories, \u201cA Pact of Vengeance,\u201d is about a young man who converts to Zionism after his family is victimized by a pogrom: \u201cOur flag of vengeance is Jerusalem!\u201d he proclaims. But Halkin shows that there was also a natural tension between the Hebraists\u2019 high-minded cultural Zionism and the practical, political variety of Herzl, who scorned the idea that Hebrew could ever become the vernacular of a Jewish state. After all, he observed, who knew how to buy a railroad ticket in Hebrew?<\/span><\/p>\n

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To write modern literature in an ancient language, secular literature in a religious language, national literature for a nation that didn\u2019t yet exist\u2014these were challenges that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky didn\u2019t have to contend with.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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This conflict comes to the fore in Halkin\u2019s chapter on Asher Ginsberg, who under the nom de plume Ahad Ha\u2019am (\u201cone of the people\u201d) became the leading theorist of cultural Zionism. In 1902, Herzl published Old New Land, a speculative novel set in an imagined Jewish state. Reviewing it in Hebrew, Ahad Ha\u2019am attacked both the book and Herzl\u2019s vision of Zionism, which didn\u2019t seem to care if the Jewish state was actually Jewish. For one thing, the residents of Palestine in the novel speak German. \u201cAll is a monkey-like aping of others with no show of national distinctiveness,\u201d he complained.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

His own program for Zionism was very different. Rather than winning a Jewish state through a grand diplomatic coup, the way Herzl hoped, Ahad Ha\u2019am wanted to gradually build a spiritual and cultural center in Palestine. Most Jews, he believed, would always live in diaspora. The goal of Zionism was to create a Hebrew-speaking community to serve as an inspiration for Jews everywhere\u2014\u201ca miniature of the Jewish people as it should be,\u201d as he put it. Halkin, a Jewish culturist himself, is sympathetic to Ahad Ha\u2019am\u2019s vision, but points out that he was \u201cblind to the menace of anti-Semitism.\u201d The Jews of Europe didn\u2019t have generations to wait for a Jewish culture to be built in Palestine; they needed a refuge immediately.<\/span><\/p>\n

Both Herzl and Ahad Ha\u2019am knew Palestine only from a few fact-finding trips; neither man thought of moving there himself. It wasn\u2019t until around 1905 that settlement in Palestine became a live option for a new generation of Hebrew writers. The abortive Russian revolution of that year spurred a new round of emigration known as the Second Aliyah, which brought Labor Zionism to Palestine and created the kibbutz movement. A political path to a Jewish state remained unclear, since the Turkish government was adamantly opposed to the idea. Herzlian diplomatic maneuvering wouldn\u2019t achieve a real victory until 1917, when the British conquered Palestine and promised it as a Jewish national home in the Balfour Declaration.<\/span><\/p>\n

The pioneers of the Second Aliyah didn\u2019t minimize the obstacles, but they were driven by the kind of irrational faith that forces history to bend to its will. In The Lady of Hebrew, this cohort is represented by Yosef Chaim Brenner and A.D. Gordon, the first major Hebrew writers who actually made aliyah. They were diametrically opposed in temperament, yet shared a conviction that Jewish life needed to be completely transformed. Gordon settled in Palestine at the advanced age of 48, throwing himself into a life of agricultural work for which nothing in his earlier career had prepared him. His essays extolled labor and the land in terms that fused kabbalism and Tolstoyan socialism: The Jewish farmer, he wrote in \u201cMan and Nature,\u201d was \u201ca partner in the labor of Creation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Brenner, by contrast, was a Dostoevskyan figure, a tormented intellectual unable to believe in any creed. His first novel, In Winter, published in 1903-4, is narrated by a Brenner surrogate named Yirmiya Feierman, who goes through a crisis of faith and emerges a self-hating nihilist: \u201cIf I were to listen to the voice of inner reason, I \u2026 would not go on living for another minute.\u201d If Gordon\u2019s Zionism was an expression of religious faith, Brenner\u2019s was a revolt against despair. In Palestine he hoped to escape what he saw as the fatal deformation of the Jewish spirit in diaspora.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Halkin shows, the Yishuv he joined in 1909 was far from flourishing, and in his fiction he trained his unsparing gaze on its defects and illusions. In Brenner\u2019s last novel, From All Sides, he once again fictionalized himself as Oved Etsot, a young man who comes to Palestine, struggles, gets sick, and finally leaves. But Brenner himself stayed, in part because he was inspired by the faith of Gordon, who features in the novel under the name Aryeh Lapidot. \u201cThe man, in his quiet way, is a hero,\u201d Oved says about Aryeh. \u201cPrayer like that could make me get down on my knees and pray, too.\u201d Brenner spent the rest of his short life in Palestine; he was murdered by Arabs during a riot near Jaffa in 1921, when he was 39 years old.<\/span><\/p>\n

Brenner is perhaps the first writer in The Lady of Hebrew<\/em> who seems compelling on literary rather than historical grounds. (Two volumes by Brenner are in print in English, including Halkin\u2019s translation<\/a> of Breakdown and Bereavement<\/em>. Like The Lady of Hebrew<\/em>, they are published<\/a> by Toby Press.) But of all the Hebrew writers discussed in The Lady of Hebrew<\/em>, Chaim Nachman Bialik was the first to stake a claim to literary greatness. More accurately, greatness was thrust upon him whether he wanted it or not. By the early 20th century, Hebrew literature and Zionist consciousness had developed to the point where a national poet was demanded, and Bialik fit the bill. His long poem \u201cIn the City of Slaughter,\u201d a bitter response to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, made a Zionist case for Jewish self-reliance and self-defense. Certainly the poem\u2019s God wasn\u2019t about to rescue His people: \u201cMy heart goes out to you, my sons, it truly does.\/You died in vain, and neither you nor I\/Know what you perished for or why.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Halkin\u2019s chapter on Bialik is the longest and most critically ambivalent in the book. It is titled \u201cHe Who Could Have Set the World on Fire,\u201d quoting a damning description of Bialik by a woman named Ira Jan, who loved him and whose love he rejected. Like her, Halkin has a sense that Bialik didn\u2019t live up to his destiny as a national poet. His real genius was for sad, meditative lyrics; when he tried to write a symbolic national epic, \u201cThe Scroll of Fire,\u201d the result was a disappointment: \u201cThey\u2019ve taken our Bialik, the quintessential artist, and made a prophet of him!\u201d declared one reviewer. Bialik stopped writing verse in his late 30s, focusing instead on editorial work; by the time he moved to Tel Aviv in 1924, his poetic career was mostly over.<\/span><\/p>\n

Halkin pays intelligent, loving attention to Bialik\u2019s work, as he does with all of his subjects. His original translations show each writer to best advantage, while also serving as a running commentary on the evolution of modern Hebrew into a flexible literary instrument. Yet there\u2019s always at least a hint of impatience in Halkin\u2019s critical stance, a sense that none of these writers managed to solve the quandaries of modern Hebrew literature. Of course, that\u2019s because they were insoluble. To write modern literature in an ancient language, secular literature in a religious language, national literature for a nation that didn\u2019t yet exist\u2014these were challenges that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky didn\u2019t have to contend with. If they had, maybe they wouldn\u2019t have become Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Halkin, the destiny of modern Hebrew writers wasn\u2019t to produce masterpieces but to serve as a spiritual \u201cgovernment-in-exile\u201d for the Jewish people\u2014one that \u201cseemed unlikely, to say the least, ever to have a land or a people to rule.\u201d The emergence of a Hebrew-speaking Jewish community in Palestine isn\u2019t directly attributable to these Hebrew writers\u2014Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who did more than anyone to resurrect spoken Hebrew, appears in The Lady of Hebrew<\/em> but isn\u2019t one of Halkin\u2019s main subjects. But it certainly wouldn\u2019t have happened without them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now that a Hebrew-speaking society exists, do these writers still have anything to say to it? In his concluding chapter, Halkin writes about watching a group of teenagers windsurfing on the beach near Haifa, and realizing that they are totally oblivious to the literary and intellectual struggles that made their lives possible: \u201cThey weren\u2019t worried about the future of their country or troubled by Jewish history. They didn\u2019t care what anyone thought of the Hebrew they spoke. They didn\u2019t know about Ahad Ha\u2019am or Berdichevsky. They had never read a line by either of them and never would.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In a sense, this ability to live in the present is the fulfillment of the Zionist dream, which always hoped to give Jews a \u201cnormal\u201d existence in a country of their own. \u201cAll this soul-searching\u2014all this picking and picking at the Jewish soul\u2014who needs it?\u201d Halkin asks. But for better or worse, there will always be a few readers who can\u2019t leave the tormenting problems of Jewish identity alone; and for them, The Lady of Hebrew<\/em> is an indispensable book<\/span><\/p>\n

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Adam Kirsch<\/strong> is a poet and literary critic, whose books include The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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A Translator\u2019s Masterpiece ADAM KIRSCH Hillel Halkin\u2019s lifetime of thinking about language, Zionism, and writing pays rich dividends in his \u2018indispensable\u2019 new collection of essays devoted to the writers who created modern Hebrew literature out of nothing TABLET MAGAZINE At the age of 81, the writer and translator Hillel Halkin has published his masterpiece\u2014a book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84316"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84439,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84316\/revisions\/84439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}