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Hebrew Literature in the
Post-Imperial Age: The Future of Jewish Identity at the Millennium
My talk has two parts. In the first part, I will discuss a few things that are new in Hebrew literature in comparison with the recent past. In the second part, I will consider what I feel to be the cutting edge of Hebrew literature in a global perspective - the biblical prophets. Hebrew literature is the outstanding development in Jewish creativity over
the past century. It has faithfully reflected and in some cases actually
contributed to the greatest upheavals in modern Jewish history, and perhaps
in the history of any people. Hebrew was a witness to crisis in Tsarist
Russia, crisis which ultimately brought an end to this empire - where nearly
five million Jews lived, the largest Jewish community in the world at that
time. The rising militancy of young Jews and the emergence from powerlessness
is expressed in Bialik's poems of wrath, particularly In the City of
Slaughter - the most famous modern Hebrew poem, written after the Hebrew was witness and participant in this momentous change and the
demographic shift of nearly two million east European Jews, mostly to What is new in post-imperial Hebrew? It would be easier to ask: what is not new? The economist Milton Friedman once said that all characteristics associated with Jews in the past were reversed in the 20th century. This is true of Hebrew writers and literature. Hebrew writers a hundred years ago came mostly from religious homes in small towns. Their families were mostly working class and poor. Their native language was Yiddish. They had little formal secular education. Most of them did not even have a high school diploma. Their early education was mostly religious, and they were thoroughly learned in the sacred Jewish texts; for the rest, they were self-taught. They belonged to the rabbinic elite but, as Alan Mintz has shown in a brilliant and deeply moving critical study, they broke with the Judaism of their fathers and were banished at times literally from their father's table. Their writings represent a ceaseless dialectic with Judaism. They had much difficulty writing modern Hebrew - the language was still undeveloped. They were obsessed with the burden of Jewish existence, of being a defenceless minority among a hostile majority. Their writings reflect the transition from a patriarchal religious way of life to the modern secular world. In some ways, their writings anticipate the Holocaust. They wrote almost entirely for a Jewish readership. Theirs was the literature of the underdog. Elaborate descriptions of food and meals often appear in it, perhaps a reflection of the fact that many of the writers and their readers had known hunger. Bialik writes of poverty and hunger as a driving force in his poetry. Peretz's Yiddish and Hebrew story of Bontshe the Silent reflects east European life, not just Jewish life, at the turn of the 20th century. Bontshe's idea of heaven is a cup of coffee and a roll. The memory of child conscripts into the Tsar's army was still painful. Exploited children and women, including the white slave trade, figure in late-Tsarist Hebrew fiction, notably Mendele's novel Be-Emek ha-Bakha (in the Valley of Tear). The Jews had a lot going against them. Their cultural advantage - a profound religious and educational tradition - could often appear to be a disadvantage as it held them back from the secular education that could change their lives. Their main social advantage in retrospect was that they had little to gain by staying in eastern Europe and much to gain by emigrating. Despair has its uses. In contrast, most Israeli writers are native speakers from secular
middle-class backgrounds. For the first time in Hebrew, there are many women
writers. Hebrew writers work in an increasingly flexible language for the
largest Hebrew readership in history as well as for a large readership, both
Jews and non-Jews, who read them in translation. They represent a majority
culture in an independent liberal democracy in which literature is one of
many modes of expression. They are part of a consumer society in which the
importance of ideology has shrunk; and often they write unabashedly for the
market, including the market in translation. They are usually
university-educated and often teach at universities. I think few of them
would deny that they lack the profound Jewish scholarship of the classic
modern Hebrew writers such as Mendele, Bialik and Agnon. They tend to know
world literature better than the traditional Jewish texts. Few of them know
the Talmud in any depth. Symptomatic of the split between religious and
secular Jews in More Hebrew literature is published each year than ever before, but by and large does not represent a new, revolutionary departure. The revolution occurred a hundred years ago. Modern Hebrew literature has grown out of the writings of Brenner and Berdichevsky, Shoffman and Gnessin. It is interesting that the greatest Hebrew writers in the empire of the Tsars, Mendele and Bialik, represented an artistic dead end for most later Hebrew writers, precisely because they depicted faithfully the rich world of traditional east European Jews, and Zionism sought a new life detached from the old. In some ways, the pressure of diaspora existence, of being a religious
minority under an often-hostile dominant power, had a creative impact greater
than that of political independence. When this pressure was lifted, one
result after 1948 was a body of Hebrew literature that was in its very
absorption with narrow state interests, limited and timebound in comparison
with the extraordinary diversity and cosmopolitanism of the scattered
literature prior to 1948. It would be hard to find two Israeli writers more
different than Mendele and Gnessin at the turn of the century or Agnon and
Fogel in the 1920s and 1930s, though these writers wrote for a far smaller
readership. Also, the status of pre-1948 Hebrew literature was higher than
after 1948 as it was written for and by an elite and was perceived as an
essential part of the process of state-building. Once the state of It is ironic that Mendele, perhaps the most original modern Jewish writer, is largely unread today. For he is the most relevant, not to Jews but to large numbers of people in developing countries. His works, all set in Tsarist Russia, give insight into the conditions of poverty, malnutrition, disease and backwardness which no longer affect Jews but are found in much of the developing world today. Consider this passage in his allegorical novel The Mare which attacks the would-be reformers of the east European Jews. "You tell a poor creature: Get an education... what do eating and basic needs have to do with education? What right do you have to prevent someone from eating, from breathing freely, until he masters some trick or other? Every creature that is born is a living thing. Nature has provided it with all the senses, all the organs, for its own use, to get everything it needs to live. It has a mouth to eat with, a nose to breathe with, legs to walk with, not for dancing and prancing and capering. All that fancy rubbish was invented afterwards and given a name: Education." Insofar as the Jews are concerned this picture of hunger, backwardness and frustration is a thing of the past, and most Hebrew writers are naturally not in touch with it. But it is a reality in much of the world today. The current UNESCO report gives statistics on malnutrition and infant mortality rates mostly from starvation and curable sickness: the estimated statistics are that 30,000 children are dying every day. Yet what is the theme of this report? EDUCATION. Mendele's social conscience and activism owed much to 19th century Russian literature, which aimed to bring about social change. But the deepest sources of Mendele's passion for social justice are found in the prophets. In fact, I would like to suggest to you that the cutting edge of Hebrew literature in the global context today is in the biblical prophets. The prophets are our contemporaries in the sense that they address the
outstanding global problem which the world faces today: the champagne glass
phenomenon, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. It is estimated
that nearly half the world's wealth is concentrated in the hands of 225
individuals. Average annual income in The prophets envisaged an ideal world in which poverty and injustice would be wiped out. Some of their ideals can be realized. This was never the case before. When Isaiah calls for universal justice, for the poor to be fed, clothed and sheltered, he knows that on a global scale this is impossible. Until World War II and the economic and technological boom which followed, this remained true. Today, poverty, hunger and much illness are conquerable. Much has been done in the last two decades - notably the establishment of immunization programs in developing countries - but the problems have not been solved. Organized religions have the ideology to face these problems but not the will to solve them. Governments have the power but lack the mandate. Charities have the will but lack the power. According to a United Nations study published in 1998: "World agriculture produces enough food calories to meet the energy needs of all the nearly 6 billion people who are alive today. Increased production based on advances in seed, water, and environmental technologies especially in developing countries, have removed insufficient production as a cause of food shortage for the world as a whole" (p. 54). It is estimated by UNICEF that 12 million children die each year of hunger
or curable disease. In many countries infant mortality is twenty or thirty
times higher than in There is a serious moral dilemma here: Modern improvements in food
technology, medicine, transport, communications and the media, logistics, and
management have eliminated excuses. Children who died in the millions of
dysentery a hundred years ago in a remote part of Africa or .......... |
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© MCMXCIX Department of Jewish Studies of |
