A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry Poetics, Politics, Accent
Miryam Segal
A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry
Jewish Literature and Culture Series Editor, Alvin H. Rosenfeld
A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry Poetics, Politics, Accent Miryam Segal
Indiana University Press╇ /╇ Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders╇ 800-842-6796 Fax orders╇ 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail╇
[email protected] © 2010 by Miryam Segal All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Segal, Miryam. A new sound in Hebrew poetry : poetics, politics, accent / Miryam Segal. p. cm. — (Jewish literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-253-35243-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Hebrew language— Pronunciation—History—20th century.╇ 2. Hebrew poetry, Modern— 20th century—History and criticism.╇ 3. Hebrew language—Revival.╇ I. Title. PJ4579.S42 2010 492.4152—dc22 2008048272 1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10
For Devorah Aravah, with love and gratitude
For if a phonograph had existed in ancient times then there would of course be no room for doubt and indecision [with respect to the pronunciation of Hebrew]; since the phonograph is a modern invention, however, our scholars have not been able to make a definitive declaration, and the question remains unresolved. —Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Hebrew lexicographer, advocate of a “Sephardic” accent, 1903
The sefaradit way is the correct way. —Gene Simmons, lead singer of KISS, 2001
Contents
Prefaceâ•… xi Acknowledgmentsâ•… xix A Note on Transliterationâ•… xxi Introductionâ•… 1 1. “Make Your School a Nation-State” Pedagogy and the Rise of the New Accentâ•… 20 2. Representing a Nation in Sound Organic, Hybrid, and Synthetic Hebrewsâ•… 49 3. “Listening to Her Is Torture”: The Menace of a Male Voice in a Woman’s Bodyâ•… 74 4. The Runaway Train and the Yiddish Kid Shlonsky’s Double Inscriptionâ•… 100 Epilogue: The Conundrum of the National Poetâ•… 139 Appendix 1.â•… 151 Appendix 2.â•… 153 Notesâ•… 159 Bibliographyâ•… 191 Indexâ•… 199
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Preface
I
n December 2001, on a visit home to the United States, and having been deprived of easy access to American radio for over a year while living in Isrrael, I took advantage of the break from my research on Hebrew literature and accent to catch up on all things American. I tuned in to a program on a local New York satellite of National Public Radio to find no less a popular cultural icon than the former lead singer of KISS, Gene Simmons, correcting the intterviewer’s Hebrew:1 Gene Simmons: Oh, thank you so much [for the introduction] and since this is National Public Radio and it prides itself on accurate information— most of it sounded good—I stand guilty as charged and proud to say that I’m a mama’s boy. However, point one is you mispronounced my Hebrew name. It’s not ±ayim, which is the sort of sniveling please-don’t-beat-meup Ashkenazi European way╯.╯.╯. Leonard Lopate: Which is what I grew up in╯.╯.╯. Gene Simmons: Which is—hey, that’s why you get beaten up. I don’t. The sefaradit way is the correct way. It’s ±ayim, emphasis on the second vowel, like the Israelis do.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was a major figure in the language revival movement, and one of the early (Ashkenazic) promoters of the “sefaradit way.” To further his revivalist goals, he taught Hebrew in Jewish schools in Palestine and prommoted (relatively early on, in the late nineteenth century) the inculcation of a so-called Sephardic accent. His magnum opus was a comprehensive Hebrew dictionary, and he is known for having fashioned new words out of ancient roots to account for phenomena of modern life and for his practice of sending his son outside to declaim these neologisms and their definitions.2 It is harder to imagiine a less likely heir to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, professional (though self-appointed)
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neologist and mythical “Father of Modern Hebrew,” than the lead singer of KISS. Yet Simmons spends the opening moments of his interview rehearsing what are by now clichés of Modern Hebrew—a diatribe that no doubt reached more listeners in a few moments than a year’s worth of Ben-Yehuda’s public pronnouncements of new words or statements in favor of the Sephardic stress system. Simmons, a. k. a. Chaim Witz, waged one of the longest-lasting teenage rebelllions in American history, and made a career of rejecting the attitudes that his short-lived Jewish education in a Brooklyn yeshiva would have tried to inculcate in him. The rejection of what Leonard Lopate “grew up in” would have jibed precisely with an Israeli sense of a new Jewishness, one with which Simmons seems to identify. In matters of Hebrew diction he would have made BenÂ�Yehuda proud, for his passion if not for his expertise. As it happens, Lopate did pronounce Simmons’s Hebrew name as an Israeli would. In Hebrew, the word ¿ayim means “life,” and when used as an improper noun is pronounced with the stress on the final syllable. Names, however, are an exception to the rule—even the Israelis do not say them “like the Israelis do.” In other words, Israelis invariably pronounce Simmons’s Hebrew name with the stress on the penultimate syllable, in this case the first, as ±ayim, what he calls the “please-don’t-beat-me-up Ashkenazi European way.” (For Israelis, the use of this pronunciation is a gesture of intimacy that is associated with Yiddish and the memory of Jewish Eastern Europe. For this reason the penultimate stress is sometimes used even for those names most often pronounced with the stress on the final syllable.) As with all hypercorrections, Simmons’s compulsion with respect to the pronunciation of his name is a sign of the status and associations of a particullar mode of speech. Simmons was born in Haifa a year after the founding of the State of Israel. When he was eight years old he immigrated with his mother to the United States.3 Despite his ignorance of “the way Israelis do” and do not pronounce his Hebrew name, he is in tune with a cultural phennomenon that preceded the founding of the State and that was continually reinforced with the increasing institutionalization of Hebrew as the official national language of the pre-State Jewish settlement in Palestine and the State of Israel. The accent system he invokes is indeed associated with a mascculine, nationalist Jewish persona—especially when contrasted with what from an Israeli perspective is an outdated Ashkenazic Hebrew. The NPR of Israel—gale tsahal or IDF Radio—offers one of the few excepttions to the exception that is the rule for the pronunciation of names such as ±ayim. Formal Hebrew is reserved for broadcasting and official ceremony, and favors a terminal-stress pattern even more consistently than standard spoken Hebrew, applying the rules to proper names, for example. The radio announceers who read the hourly news digests that punctuate radio programming several times a day speak a rather stilted hypercorrect form of Israeli Hebrew and with
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an equanimity worthy of biblical text treat proper names no differently than any other noun. The late widow of Prime Minister Yits¿ak Rabin was commonly refferred to as Le’ah Rabin; by contrast, in the hourly national news one learned of the death of Le’ah Rabin. Israeli radio, and now NPR, is one of the only places where Gene Simmons would be likely to hear his Hebrew name uttered in the “sefaradit,” the “correct” or “Israeli” way. I came to Israel to research and write about the transition from the Ashkenazic to the so-called Land of Israel accent in Hebrew poetry. Like other foreigners doing research on Modern Hebrew texts, I welcomed the perquisites of working in a Hebrew-speaking environment, the possibilities of discussing common areas of interest with the natives, and working where my project would feel relevant. I did indeed discover dedicated scholars and a stimulating environment in which to familiarize myself with Hebrew and Israeli literature, but my experience both in Tel Aviv and on my brief trips back to the United States also offered me a diffferent perspective on working as something of a stranger in the homeland of Hebbrew culture. As neither native nor citizen nor complete alien, one views the idiosyncrasies of Israeli culture and education through a kind of de-familiarizing lens—a viewpoint that yields some benefit for the literary and cultural critic. A commonplace among Americans who take an interest in Hebrew culture is that poetry occupies a more central place in the Israeli consciousness than in our own culture. This phenomenon alone, however, does not quite acccount for the number of times that, after hearing me describe in one sentence or less the subject of my research, my Israeli interlocutor has responded in verse. To be precise, she has responded with a line or two from “To the Bird” “↜‘El ha-tsipor”), an early poem by the national poet ±ayim Na¿man Bialik:
, ִצ ּפ ָֹרה נֶ ְח ֶמ ֶדת,ׁ ָשלוֹ ם וָ ב ׁשו ֵּב ְך —ל־חלּ וֹ נִ י ַ ֵמ ַא ְרצוֹ ת ַהחׁם ֶא ַּ קוֹ לֵ ְך ִּכי ָע ֵרב ַמ-ֶאל ,נ ְפ ׁ ִשי כָ לָ ָתה-ה .ַ ּבח ֶֹרף ְ ּב ָעזְ ֵב ְך ְמעוֹ נִ י Sholom rov shuvekh, tsiporoh ne¿medes, Me-’artsos ha-¿om ’el ¿aloni— ’el kolekh ki ¿orev mah nafshi kholosoh, ba-¿oref bi-¿ozvekh me¿oni. Welcome upon your return, lovely bird, From the hot lands to my window— How my soul has yearned for your voice so sweet, In the winter when you leave my dwelling.4
My Israeli acquaintances responded, in short, with what may be the only Ashkenazic Hebrew text that is consistently preserved as such in the literature curriculum of Israeli schools. (Ashkenazic Hebrew has a stress pattern similar
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to that of Yiddish, with which it is often associated in contemporary Israeli culture. Other than this sympathetic outburst and the occasional Hebrew word that has returned to Modern Hebrew via the Yiddish—very often retainiing connotations as well as the stress pattern of the latter, such as the word “takhles”—I have rarely heard the Ashkenazic accent with its characteristic penultimate-word stress used by non-ultra-Orthodox Israelis.)5 By mentioning the transition to the accent of “the Land of Israel” I made speakers recall an artifact of an older Modern Hebrew—one of a very few reminders that Hebbrew speech in the territory of Israel in modern times was ever ruled by diffferent protocols for pronunciation than it is today. An Ashkenazic accent is more commonly heard among American Jews of Ashkenazic descent than it is among Israelis. Those communities or individuals identifying as “liberal” or “Zionist” or “modern Orthodox,” however, most often adopt an Israeli accent, sometimes very self-consciously, as an element of their religious-ethnic-political identity, and a variety of Hebrews with American intonnations exist in parallel.6 The “adopters” may use this Hebrew in ritual and educcational contexts, as well as in conversation with Israelis, but for some speakers each context may dictate its own level of compliance. Speakers from these commmunities may even exaggerate or increase the frequency of the terminal stress as a sign of their desire to sound Israeli, even as other elements—tone, consonnants, guttural sounds—remain heavily marked as issuing from the mouth of an American native English speaker who has been exposed to Ashkenazic pronnunciations of Hebrew. When Bialik composed “To the Bird” in 1891, however, the traditional Ashkkenazic accents were still predominant among Ashkenazic Jews in Europe and Palestine, and attempts to adopt some variation on a Sephardic accent and to teach Hebrew via the natural method in Palestine had only just begun. Bialik’s ear had been trained in an Ashkenazic accent and that is what he would have heard in his mind’s ear when he composed his poems. As early as 1894, Bialik expressed regret that his poems were written in this “distorted” Hebrew, but he seems to have been unable to ever make the switch.7 Thanks to the prosodic innovations of Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky, there were now poems in Hebrew with the same accentual-syllabic rhythms as in Europpean poetry (English, German, Russian, Yiddish) in which rhythm was geneerated by the regular recurrence of stressed syllables. Unfortunately, the stress system used in those poems was not the one that would become the standard for spoken Hebrew. From a pedagogic perspective this was regrettable beccause these were just the sorts of poems that would have otherwise been usefful in the schools as models of proper speech. “To the Bird” was not written for a juvenile audience, but it does have some elements in common with the genre of children’s poetry, which is so often populated by animals, especially birds. Hebrew primers for children from the late nineteenth century on, like
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their analogs in many modern languages, were filled with poems, stories, and rhymes in which talking animals served as models and companions for childdren on their journey to becoming literate speakers of the language. The sing-song rhymes of the primers could satisfy pedagogic needs only at the lowest grade-levels; beyond that point variety was called for. The rhythmically revolutionary poetry of the 1890s with its new (to Hebrew) accentual-syllabic musicality showed that the rhythms of poetry in other langguages could be generated in Hebrew verse too—at least in Ashkenazic Hebrew. Bialik and Tchernichovsky’s success in Ashkenazic Hebrew may have also nurttured an anxiety that the new-accent poetry—verse composed in a Sephardic stress system, with its predilection for placing the major stress on the final syllabble of a word—would be hopelessly monotonous. In 1892, Bialik’s poetic perssona could sing to the bird melodiously in an Ashkenazic Hebrew from the pages of the journal ha-Pardes (The Orchard). But in the second and third deccades of the twentieth century, when the new-accent bird opened her mouth, critics feared that a monotonous squawking would issue. The expert on birds and monotony in poetry is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe. He takes a particular interest in their respective properties in his “The Philosoophy of Composition” of 1846.8 In that essay Poe describes his method in composing his most famous poem, “The Raven.” (Perhaps because of its rhythmic charms, it was also one of the very first poems to be translated into new-accent Hebrew.) After deciding on a length of about one hundred lines as appropriate for his poem, choosing beauty as his province, a melancholic tone, and a refrain as the optimal “pivot” for his structure, Poe settled on the idea of a one-word refrain: “Nevermore.” But how was he to both maintain his refrain and avoid monotony? In observing the difficulty which I had at once found in inventing a sufficciently plausible reason for its continuous repetition, I did not fail to percceive that this difficulty arose solely from the presumption that the word was to be continuously or monotonously spoken by a human being—I did not fail to perceive, in short, that the difficulty lay in the reconciliation of monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating the word. Here, then, immediately arose the idea of a non-reasoning creatture capable of speech, and very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven as equally capabble of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone.
The word as repeatedly uttered by a human being threatens monotony; issuiing from the beak of the raven, however, it promises an ambiguity that is prodductive and even poetic. It was probably not much more than a half century after Poe revealed that he had first thought to write a poem about a parrot, that Vladimir Jabotinsky— journalist, political activist, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement and
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sometime poet and translator—first put pen to paper in order to translate Poe’s “The Raven” (“ha-‘Orev”).9
,נַ ְפ ׁ ִשי שָׂ ַח ְק ִּתי- ִ ּב ְמ ִרירוּת,עיִ ן בּ וֹ ִד ַ ּב ְּק ִּתי-ט ַ ֶמ ַ ּב : ֹ ו ִּב ְצחוֹ ק ָא ַמ ְר ִּתי לו,ּמ ְר ֵאהו-ן ַ ַֹעל ַ ּג ֲאוַ ת גְ או ,פ ַחד-ֹא ַ ל- ַא ְך נִ ָּכר ָ ּב ְך לֶ ב,“כ ְר ָ ּבלְ ָּת ְך ִמ ְק ַצת נִ ְק ַר ַחת ַּ !ֹה ׁ ַּש ַחת ָ ּב ּה ַהלֵ יל שָׂ ם ִמ ְמ ׁ ָשלו-יא ַ ִציר ׁ ָשחוֹ ר ִמ ֵ ּג ”ַמה ׁ ִּש ְמ ָך ִמ ְק ַצת נִ ְק ַר ַחת ”.לֹא- “לְ עוֹ לָ ם:וַ יִ ְק ָרא mebat-¿ayin bo dibakti, bi-mrirut-nafshi sa¿akti, ¿al ga’avat ge’on-mar’ehu, u-vi-ts¿ok ‘amarti lo: karbaltakh miktsat nikra¿at akh nikar bakh lev-lo¿-fa¿ad, tsir sha¿or mige’-ha-sha¿at bah ha-lel sam mimshalo! mah shimkha miktsat nikra¿at va-yikra’ “le-¿olam-lo’.” Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven. Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from nightly shore— Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
This translation was one of the earliest verse compositions in the new accent, and for several years to come the most successful: it is rhythmically captivating, recreates the mood of Poe’s poem, and has retained an unusually long shelf life for a translation. (It is still read and used in schools in Israel today, a century after its composition.) In short, the Hebrew succeeds at all that Poe set out to do, as stated in “The Philosophy of Composition”; it is as flamboyant an antidote to fears of the monotony of the new accent as a translation could possibly be. The publication history of this translation is a microcosm of the fate of the new accent in Hebrew language and poetry. Jabotinsky probably decided to compose his translations in the new accent at around the time Bialik would have first heard children speaking new-accent Hebrew in Palestine.10 Translattions, considered generically, are like children’s poetry in their tendency to adopt features from other linguistic and literary realms—in this case spoken Hebrew—at a quicker pace than high literature. “The Raven,” one of several of Jabotinsky’s translations, was first published in 1914 in the Zionist youth magazzine Moledet (Homeland), at a time when new-accent poetry was still primarily for children. In 1923, when poets were starting to publish their own new-accent compositions, the translation appeared again in book form, along with some of his other translations. Jabotinsky’s “The Raven” was first published for Hebrew-speaking youth—the same generation of Hebrew speakers that inspired the regret Bialik expressed,
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about fifteen years after his first poem was published, that his Hebrew had the sound of the “distorted” pronunciation so common to Ashkenazic Jews (Bialik 1937, 70). He had heard the future of Hebrew and it did not sound at all like the Hebrew of his poems. When children read his poems, they might even wonder at Bialik’s reputation: where was the beauty, the rhythm? It is perhaps this addittional context that makes sense of his poem’s current position as the paradigm of Ashkenazic poetic Hebrew. The bird comes from Palestine and the poet questions her throughout, asking after the inhabitants of Zion. Unlike Poe’s eternally squawking raven, however, Bialik’s bird is silent. But what would the bird sound like if she did respond to the speaker’s questtions? In the retrospect of Bialik’s visit to Palestine in 1907, and his realization that his own Hebrew pronunciation might very well be extinct in a few years, one is tempted to chide the poet: if only he had let her have her say, he might have learned a thing or two about Hebrew pronunciation. (It may be that the poet is in fact more interested in hearing himself speak. Three-quarters of the way through his monologue, the poet questions the bird yet again, only to continue as if the bird had already spoken in turn: “And I, what shall I reccount for you, lovely bird of mine,/What do you hope to hear from my lips?”) Even as Bialik’s Hebrew was replaced by a new pseudo-Sephardic dialect, his poetry retained pride of place in the national poetic canon. The bird-muse had in the meantime become the new citizen of the Hebrew-speaking nattion, listening to the babble of a hopelessly exilic Jew. What was upon publiccation an expression of the nationalism of the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe, of their longing for the land of their forefathers, now underscores the difference of the Diaspora even more, offering an impression of the exilic Jew from the bird’s-eye view of the nation. The unuttered accent of Bialik’s bird, her role as addressee and never as interllocutor, is more than a mere artifact of an Ashkenazic Hebrew. It is at the heart of Bialik’s poetics and the nationalist project of writing a modern literature in Hebrew. The bird visits the speaker on her annual migration from Palestine and stays for the duration of the poem, just long enough to spur a new cycle of longiing for the bird’s return and for the land itself. The bird’s silence represents the poet’s distance from the homeland and his unfulfilled nationalist desire; it memmorializes the desire for a Zion that is always just out of reach.
Acknowledgments
I
would like to acknowledge the Fulbright Foundation for funding my research and writing at Tel Aviv University during the 2000–2001 academic year. In subsequent years the National Foundation for Jewish Culture provvided support, as did the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women. I am also inddebted to the Indiana University College of Arts and Humanities Institute for funding my travel to archives in Israel, as well as to the Indiana University Jewish Studies Program for its support. The librarians and archivists at the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, at the Sourasky library at Tel Aviv University, especially at the Education Archives there, as well as at the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, all gave of their time generously. I am especially indebted to Michael Terry and Roberta Saltzman of the New York Public Library for their help. I would like to thank the Departments of Hebrew Literature and General Literature at Tel Aviv University where I was a visiting scholar for two years and where I conducted much of the research for this book. I benefited from the support of Shoshana Noy in the office of the Academic Secretariat, the guidance of Hannan Hever and Uzi Shavit, especially at the earliest stages of my research and writing, and the encouragement of Robert Alter and Celeste Langan at the University of California, Berkeley. I would also like to thank the students, faculty, and staff in the Department of Comparative Literature at Berkeley. I am grateful to Eliyahu Segal and Daniel Abrams for help of a more technnical nature; to the late Elsie Goldstein; to Harry Fox and Michelle Molina who read and commented on parts of the manuscript; and to Shmuel Weinbberger for his hospitality, advice, and humor over many years. I am especially grateful to Hamutal Tsamir for sharing her insights at all stages of this proje-
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ect; to Olga Litvak for her generosity in reading the penultimate version of the manuscript; and to Jennifer Lewin for lending her considerable talents over the course of very many weeks at a critical stage of editing. I must also thank Steven Meed for enabling me to start writing this book and Alison Levin and Adele Reising for enabling me to complete it. During the trying year in which I wrote the final sections of this book, the late Lana Schwebel sustained me with her visits, her good sense, and her inimitable wit. Finally, I am most indebted to my sister, to whom this book is dedicated. Cambridge, April 2008
A Note on Transliteration
T
his book uses the Library of Congress Hebrew Romanization Table for most Hebrew words and titles. Names of people and places are likewise Rommanized, but without the use of diacritical marks to represent the letters ¿ayin and ’alef. Exceptions are made for proper nouns that are widely accepted in other forms, such as Jerusalem, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and Chaim Witz (but ±ayim Na¿man Bialik); liberties are also taken in the interest of clarity. Titles of poems composed in an Ashkenazic accent are represented no differeently than the titles of other poems, articles, and books. The transliteration of these poems themselves, however, gives some indication of the accent used: in representing the kamats vowel, the o is preferred to the a. This marker as well as others of the standard Lithuanian accent are supplied with the understanding that this is one of a number of possibilities for articulating the text while presserving the rhythm. In some instances, the transliteration has been modified to more accurately represent the pronunciation as dictated by prosody.
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A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry
Introduction Is there a decent publishing house in Jaffa where I could find work€.€.€.€do you talk to each other solely in Hebrew— and in which accent? —Yosef ±ayim Brenner, in a letter to Mena¿em Gnessin, October 13, 1906
The Jewish Community in Palestine, 1880–1930 In 1906 Yosef ±ayim Brenner was a young man living in London and conss sidering a move to Palestine. He was already an accomplished Hebrew writer and editor and was single-handedly publishing a Hebrew journal. Despite his erudition, however, this devoted Hebraist chose to consult a wine-presser and amateur actor who was living in Rishon le-Tsiyon, Mena¿em Gnessin, in order to learn how speakers were pronouncing Hebrew in his future homels land. It was a necessary question. Of the many languages in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, Hebrew alone reverberated with both the diversity of established Jewish communities and the sound of stammering newcomers. Nationalism had imbued the language with ideological significance and the adoption of Hebrew as the language of everyday conversation was not a foregone concluss sion. Brenner was intrigued. Did the sound of Hebrew express the ambitions of the nationalist immigrants? In 1800 there were about 5,000 Jews in Palestine. Most were of Sephardic background and the vast majority lived in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. Ashkenazic immigrants in the late eighteenth century, mostly membs bers of Hasidic sects, had formed minorities within the Sephardic communits ties and received support from them.1 In the 1820s members of the Hasidic sect ±abad founded the first Ashkenazic settlement in Hebron. Even with this growth, however, Jews still constituted a small minority in the predomins nantly Muslim and Christian society. Jewish leaders and politicians in Westes ern Europe proposed an autonomous nation-state as early as the 1830s but nationalist movements only gained popular support in Palestine with the incs creased immigration of the 1880s.2 Throughout the nineteenth century, European Jewish philanthropists tried
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a new sound in hebrew poetry
to help Jews establish themselves as a self-sufficient community in Palestine.3 Some traditionalist Ashkenazic Jews opposed these projects because they regs garded them as an attempt to modernize and secularize the population. Yet Sephardic and more moderate Ashkenazic Jews took enough interest in these philanthropic efforts that in 1856 a modern trade school opened in Jerusalem (the Lemel School), and the Alliance Israélite Universelle founded an agricults tural school near Jaffa in 1870. The Alliance had been established in France a decade earlier with a mission to help Jews suffering from poverty and political oppression abroad and was distinctly non-nationalist. Its agricultural school nevertheless served nationalist purposes by encouraging modernization, and in 1878 Peta¿ Tikvah was founded as a Jewish agricultural settlement. Naftali Herts Imber composed a poem in honor of that settlement called “Tikvatenu,” “Our Hope.” A revised version, which partially suppresses the Ashkenazic accs cent of the original, was adopted as the Israeli national anthem at the founding of the State. In this same period the first Hebrew journals with nonreligious content were founded in Palestine; as in Eastern Europe, the advent of Hebrew journalism implied an openness to modernity.4 In the meantime, Jewish nationalism was growing in Europe. Signs of greater religious tolerance in Germany and Hungary in the 1860s encouraged Jewish movements that supported assimilation. Jewish nationalism was in part a reaction to these movements. In the 1870s, however, Jewish communits ties grew ambivalent toward Europe’s claims of increased tolerance and more accepting of the notion that they—much like the nations of Eastern Europe— had a distinct national identity. The founding of the influential ±ibat Tsiyon (Love of Zion) movement is usually understood to have been a direct outcome of the pogroms in Russia in 1881.5 Branches of ±ibat Tsiyon sprouted throughos out Russia in the years that followed. They supported emigration to Palestine and the creation of a self-sufficient Jewish society there: Jews would be farmes ers and workers instead of merchants and rabbis.6 These efforts met with some success despite the Turkish ban on immigration to Palestine issued in 1882 in response to a sharp increase in settlement. According to some estimates, by 1882 there were approximately 24,000 Jews in Palestine.7 The twenty years that followed were an important period in Zionist history both symbolically and practically. The wave of immigration that began in the 1880s is called the First Aliyah, the first “ascension” to the Land of Israel. The term marks the ideological difference between the new immigrants and the Jewish communities already in Palestine that were known collectively as the Old Yishuv or Settlement. The Jews of the Old Settlement were on the whole more religious, conservative, and established (though not infrequently impoves erished). The newcomers tended to be nationalist, socialist, irreligious, and influenced by revolutionary movements in Russia. They established several agricultural communities including Zikhron Yaakov, Rosh Pinah, Re¿ovot,
introduction
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±aderah, Metulah, and Har Tuv.8 If not always economic successes, these communities were nevertheless concrete expressions of the desire to settle the land by working it and to support themselves as farmers. The waves of emigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine from the 1880s through the 1920s have a mythic status in Zionist history.9 But immigration to Palestine accounted for just a small percentage of the Jewish population leavis ing Russia. Conditions in Palestine were poor enough that even this period of immigration was accompanied by the steady relocation of Jews to Europe and the United States.10 The forty years following the pogroms of 1881 were nevertheless a period of growth for the Jewish settlement in Palestine. The Jews of the New Yishuv made concrete if modest achievements in agriculture and, with the help of philanthropic organizations and individuals, some of the new settlements managed to subsist. Simultaneous with these developments, and in some ways more impressive, were the cultural achievements of the Yishuv. The East European immigrants saw themselves as the revivers of Jewish culture. In promoting the project of Jewish secular culture that had begun in Eastern Europe, they helped synthesize a modern national identity that could serve as an alternative to traditional religious identity. During this period of nation-building, Hebrew language and literature were undergoing a renaissance as well. The small nations of Eastern Europe, some of which were trying to retain their “local” languages, served as a model. An edis itorialist writing in 1918 for ha-Po¿el ha-tsa¿ir (The Young Worker) proposed that the Ruthenian revival serve as a model for the revival of Hebrew from the botts tom up—for the forceful integration of the language into daily communication. He also noted that the Hebrew revivalists whom he saw meeting in Jaffa did not speak Hebrew to each other, their fellow language activists, even as they hoped to influence the course of Hebrew history.11 Popular and scholarly accounts often portray Hebrew as a dead language that a few had suddenly revived.12 In fact, Hebrew’s domain expanded steadily in this period. The first Hebrew-language newspapers in Palestine appeared in the 1860s but were plagued by a variety of political and financial problems. Eliezer Ben-Â�Yehuda was responsible for a good portion of the journalism of the slightly more products tive period of the 1880s. It was also in this period that schools first attempted to adopt Hebrew as a language of instruction, thanks in part to the efforts of BenYehuda. Then, following the arrival of large groups of immigrants from Eastern Europe, several newspapers were established in Yiddish and Hebrew, including ha-Po¿el ha-tsa¿ir, which was founded as a weekly of the Young Workers’ movems ment in 1907. The Workers of Zion movement, Po¿ale Tsiyon, published its newsps paper in Yiddish until 1910 when it started publishing the Hebrew ha-A¿dut (Unity). Ha-±erut (Freedom), serving the Sephardic community in Jerusalem, was founded in 1909 as a biweekly and became a daily paper in 1912.13
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During their gradual adoption of Hebrew as the official language of the New Yishuv, the leaders of the revival movement faced practical difficulties in implems menting their plans and sometimes disagreed among themselves as to how to proceed. They revisited repeatedly the question of what Hebrew speech ought to sound like. The majority of nationalist Jews in the Yishuv came from Eastern Europe and their earliest experience (and for many their almost exclusive conts tact) with Hebrew was in an Ashkenazic accent (such as Galician or Lithuans nian). Yet the pedagogues came to a consensus early on that some kind of Sephardic Hebrew—considered more authentic than the Ashkenazic family of accents—was the appropriate choice for the national language. The nationalist leaders and pedagogues disagreed as to precisely what that Hebrew should sound like, but their repeated resolutions about the sound of Hebrew speech are as much an indication of the challenges they faced in implementing any variats tion on a Sephardic Hebrew as they are of their differences. Chief among the practical problems preventing the Yishuv from effectively adopting a Sephardic accent was the fact of an overwhelmingly Ashkenazic population. The evidence nevertheless indicates that when teachers began to adopt Hebrew as a language of instruction in the 1880s, they tried to implement a Sephardicized accent. As I will discuss in chapter 2, the teachers were to reject a truly Sephardic accent for underlying ideological reasons. Quite apart from but implicated in these issues was the role of poetry in prods ducing a national accent. The so-called language revival was not so much an attempt to bring a dead or lost language back to life as it was the adoption of an extant language to a wider range of uses, the reformation of Hebrew as an allencompassing language. Rather than serving merely as the language of prayer, poetry, and the occasional stilted conversation with Jews from foreign lands, Hebrew would be usable and useful in all arenas of life.14 The poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was composed in an Ashkenazic accs cent, but even the early attempts to implement a Sephardic accent in the schools seem to have been accompanied in both the pedagogic and poetic realms by the question of whether poetry ought to be written in a SeÂ�phardic accs cent. The discrepancy between poetic and the spoken Hebrew of the schools generated controversy in the second decade of the twentieth century. This book is a genealogy of the proto-Israeli accent as it functioned in the burgeoning Hebrew literature of Palestine. It explores the role of poetry in the formation of national identity and also contributes to the history of Hebs brew and its so-called revival in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lyric is the preferred genre here for a number of reasons. By the end of the ninets teenth century Hebrew poetry had become the pride of Hebrew literature. (In the last fifty years or so literary prose has become the more widely publs lished and read of the two genres.) This was in part because there were arguas
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ably even greater linguistic barriers to producing a viable Hebrew prose in the manner of the great nineteenth-century European novel than there were to writing poetry in that language.15 If one includes liturgical writings, the poes etic tradition in Hebrew runs uninterrupted from the ninth century through to the present day. Despite the challenges of writing modern poetry in this not-so-modern language, there was at least a rich tradition to draw on. Poetry was the genre most consistently interrogated and evaluated with ress spect to nationalist criteria in Russian Jewish culture. The contentious notion of a Jewish “national poet” that developed in the 1880s and 1890s reflects this generic bias that seems to have defined Russian literary criticism at the time.16 No such parallel title existed for other genres.17 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century several poets were crowned with the title of national poet: Yehudah Leyb Gordon, who wrote epic Jewish poems and, later in his career, more politically and socially motivated lyric; the medieval Hebrew poet Yehs hudah Halevi whose oeuvre was retrieved for modern pedagogic purposes and who could attest to the continuity of Jewish literary expression and nats tional longing for the Land of Israel; Simon Frug, who composed in Russian and was known among the non-Jewish readership as well; and Bialik, who ults timately retained the title.18 Hebrew lyric, like Hebrew speech, was a “nationos ometer”—both in the sense of an instrument sensitive to conflicting notions of proper nationalist politics and as a kind of dream of Hebrew sovereignty through literary art. The fundamental dependency of poetic effect on the way words are pronounced may have made this genre the overdetermined choice for nationalist expression. The aesthetic of the lyric inherited from the Te¿iyah generation of the late nineteenth century was very much intertwined with the rhythms of speech and was hegemonic. Accent in the sense of stress pattern was therefore critics cal to poetic composition. The very rhythm of an accentual-syllabic poem composed in Ashkenazic was endangered by the terminal-stress system of Sephardic accents. In the early years of new-accent production, editors somets times instructed readers to read a particular poem in the new accent.19 Poems that did not rely on the repetition of word stress at very regular intervals— such as those composed in free rhythm—were not as threatened by recitation in an accent or stress system other than the one in which they had been comps posed.20 Elisheva Bi¿ovski went so far as to worry aloud, or at least in print, that the problem of accent and poetry was encouraging poets to abandon accs centual-syllabic verse in favor of the (increasingly popular) free-verse composs sition that was very much foreign to Bi¿ovski’s own aesthetic.21 For these local reasons of reception in the 1920s, in what follows I will be focs cusing on accentual-syllabic poetry to the exclusion of free verse, although the latter constitutes its own chapter in the history of new-accent poetry.22 The polits tics of competing prosodic systems and the use of the new accent in lyric poetry
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that does not employ an accentual-syllabic meter are relevant to the question of the modes in which Hebrew literature adopted and integrated the New Hebrew. Free verse was an important alternative to accentual-syllabic meter in the 1920s, as distinct from the poetry of the thirties and forties as well as from the extant dominant poetry of the Bialik school (although Bialik himself did compose poetry that was not accentual-syllabic). From a prosodic perspective, the twenties are bracketed in Hebrew literary history. The moment of indecision, when Hebrew poetry stood between the recent Ashkenazic poetic tradition and the imperative of Hebrew language, may have been partially responsible for the temporary shift to free rhythm. The dominant poetries that preceded and followed this period favored accentual-syllabic verse but did so with diffs ferent accents.23 The relationship between speech and poetry meant that the Hebrew poem became a testing ground for national identity in a number of ways. The poetic corpus was charged with the task of configuring and interpellating the reader as a lyric national subject. National identity echoed in the prosodic realm as well; lyric was obliged to produce the sound that would represent the nation. What would the modern Hebrew sound be? How would it distinguish itself from prenational or pre-territorial pronunciations of Hebrew? These questions were �answered differently at various moments and were resolved by separate mechans nisms for the standardization of speech and for poetry. At the turn of the century, linguists and teachers debated the minutiae of Hebs brew speech. The future of the sound of Hebrew was uncertain and sensitive to competing conceptions of what the Hebrew nation would or should be. In these debates, compromises, and resolutions, one finds expressions of anxiety about the larger problem of creating a new national identity that would claim Jews as a nation of a particular land, language, and literature. The pedagogic and revivas alist institutions tried to design a sound for Hebrew in Palestine and decide whether poetic language ought to determine or be determined by the sound of Hebrew speech. The new accent that was adopted in Palestine became one of the more controversial issues in Hebrew language and a point of convergence for some of the major cultural and political forces of the time: the Labor movems ment, the Hebrew revival movement, modernist poetry, the synthesis of a stands dard spoken Hebrew, the canonization of Hebrew literature on a European model, the territorialization of Hebrew, the nascent school system, Europeanbred Zionism, and the forging of a neobiblical national identity.
A Brief History of the Hebrew Language Hebrew as a spoken language predates the written by several centuries and remained a spoken language until a few generations after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce.24 That is, Hebrew was still the mother tongue of
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a considerable segment of the population in the former Judean kingdom until the end of the second century. Biblical Hebrew was a continuously developing literary language until the Roman conquest. The mishnaic law code was the next incarnation of literary Hebrew. The language of the Mishnah may very well have been a written adapts tation of the spoken Hebrew that until then had coexisted with biblical Hebrew. The rabbis of the tannaitic period continued to use Hebrew for purposes other than prayer and writing although by then Greek and Aramaic were the more ests tablished languages outside of Judea.25 Foreign influences were weaker in Judea than in the Galilee but Hebrew persisted for longer in the Galilee: the Judeans were exiled there after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 135 ce and brought their lings guistic habits with them. Aramaic and the languages of a series of conquerors and host countries replaced vernacular Hebrew, as did the Judaized dialects of these languages in the various Jewish communities that formed in Europe, Afrs rica, Asia, and eventually the New World. Although Hebrew’s role was steadily reduced from the period following the destruction of the Temple by the Roms mans, Jews continued to use it in prayer and other ritual contexts, and as a spoks ken language under certain circumstances. They also continued to employ Hebrew in a wide variety of written genres—in books of religious law; in official communication regarding ritual, legal, and community matters; as well as in personal letters between people who did not share a mother tongue or, indeed, any other written language. Written Hebrew did not develop at a constant rate, but there were periodic literary renaissances in poetry and prose. The piyut, a liturgical poem, dates back at least to sixth-century Palestine and remained a basic ingredient of religious poetic composition through modern times. An especially noteworthy moment in the history of Hebrew saw Jewish writers in Andalusian Spain adopting Arabic genres in their religious and seculs lar poetry. The medieval poetic corpus was to have a profound influence on subsequent Hebrew poetry through the nineteenth century. The philosophic and legal works of the period also became important sources for Hebrew prose—the writings of Maimonides and Saadia Gaon, for example—which were read by European Jews in the Ibn-Tibbon translations of the Judeo-Arabic originals. Arabic also continued to be important for Hebrew in Western Eurs rope, mostly through the Spanish Jewish influence; German and French influes enced proto-Ashkenazic and Ashkenazic Hebrew. By the eleventh century a new mixed form of the language, sometimes called rabbinic Hebrew, appeared in Ashkenazic communities. It drew on mishnaic and biblical Hebrew as well as Aramaic and German sources. With Jewish immigration to Poland in the thirteenth century, rabbinic Hebrew started to incorporate Yiddish as well. The writings of Yehudah he-±asid that were disseminated a century or two later are an example of an influential Hebs brew work containing signs of German contribution. The commentaries of
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Rashi on the Talmud and the Bible that exhibit French, Andalusian, and other admixtures are an example of early rabbinic Hebrew.26 Old Yiddish both contributed to the Hebrew language and drew from it. Ashkenazic Hebs brew speech varied by region but in the fourteenth century came to be charas acterized by an accent system that was distinct from earlier ones, including that of the pointed Masoretic texts of the Bible and the Hebrew of their conts temporaries in other regions. Ashkenazic Jews, possibly by analogy with other languages to which they were exposed, tended to pronounce Hebrew words with a major stress on the penultimate syllable with the exception of monoss syllabic words and a few other categories of words.27 By contrast, earlier varietis ies of Hebrew contained a small minority of penultimately stressed words.28
Hebrew and the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany and Eastern Europe The major literary achievement in Hebrew of the early German Jewish Enls lightenment or Haskalah was Naftali Herts Wessely’s epic poem on the biblics cal Moses, Shire tif ’eret (Songs of Splendor), published in parts starting in 1789.29 Wessely remains an important figure in Hebrew prosodic history for introducing his own distinct set of rules.30 Medieval poets had adapted the Arabic distinction between long and short syllables, and it is possible that the genres in which they wrote were imitations of Arabic ones. The Italian and Andalusian poets used what would later be called a Sephardic accent, in which the stress more often falls on a word’s final syllable, generating a “mascs culine” rhyme, while Ashkenazic Hebrew was to favor the penultimate syllabs ble, which generates a “feminine” rhyme. Haskalah writers could not fully appreciate the prosody of their medieval predecessors, or at least not reprods duce it, because of their modern Ashkenazic accents. They may have adms mired Andalusian and Italian Hebrew poetry of the Middle Ages but adopted an entirely different prosodic system, one based on the number of syllables in a line rather than on the length of Â�syllables or their stress.31 Wessely wrote his epic poem in eleven- and thirteen-syllable lines that became a standard for the poetry of the Haskalah in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe.32 An oddity of Wesselian prosody that was to become a characteristic element of Haskalah poetry in general was its set of rules governing rhyme. Adopted from Italian Hebrew poetry, it required the poet to use feminine rhyme endis ings (a penultimate stress) for lines with an odd number of syllables, and mascs culine rhyme (a terminal stress) for those with an even number. A late but influential strain of Italian Hebrew poetry had favored feminine rhyme excluss sively. It is clear from the Haskalah poets’ selection of rhymed pairs that they composed in an Ashkenazic accent. Nevertheless, when it came to the obligats tory feminine rhymes, they insisted on limiting their choice for rhyme words to
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the relatively small set of words that would be penultimately stressed even in a Sephardic accent. Although some, such as Mikhah Yosef Lebensohn and Yehuds dah Leyb Gordon, allowed exceptions to this rule, it was in the main strictly apps plied.33 This meant that the vast majority of the words the poets knew to be penultimately stressed in their own Hebrew dialect were off-limits in the final two syllables of each line. In the realm of sound and stress, Ashkenazic Hebrew was treated as derivative and Sephardic Hebrew was considered more correct— a classical Hebrew like that of the biblical texts. Wesselian prosody was a concs crete sign of the hierarchy between Sephardic and Ashkenazic pronunciations of Hebrew in an Ashkenazic context. This compromise with the pronunciation of their predecessors meant that the poets of the Jewish Enlightenment created a very artificial poetic Hebrew with prosodic restrictions that bordered on the ridiculous. There is something comic in their predicament—a poet composing happily in his own Ashkens nazic accent until he approaches the end of the line and notices his Italian or Andalusian ghost-muse peering over his shoulder, waiting for a rhyme word that is penultimately stressed even in Sephardic pronunciations. But this compromise was also a serious attempt to satisfy the rules of the classical poets as well as of future poets who might share their aesthetic, regardless of how they pronounced Hebrew.
An Ashkenazic Prosodic Revolution The innovation of Shelomoh Zalman Luriya, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and Bialik was to write in accentual-syllabic meter, thereby ending the dominats tion of syllabic verse that had characterized Haskalah poetry.34 The foot reps placed the syllable as the metric unit, with each foot containing one stressed and one or more unstressed syllables. The late Haskalah poets had discussed the possibility of adopting the meters of European poetry, but prior to the Te¿iyah period in the late nineteenth century Hebrew poets had rarely comps posed in accentual-syllabic meter, certainly not on a grand scale.35 Luriya’s, Bialik’s, and Tchernichovsky’s use of accentual-syllabic meter came, then, at the heels of poets’ and critics’ recommendations and suggestions; what distings guishes them is not the idea of writing accentual-syllabic Hebrew verse as much as the execution. A number of historical factors no doubt underlie the hesitations of the Hasks kalah poets to compose in accentual-syllabic meters, despite the fact that some of them utilized that prosodic system in the poems they composed in other languages. As Uzi Shavit explains, this was one manifestation of a more general refusal on the part of Hebrew poets of the nineteenth century to shed the Wesselian prosodic prescription and to allow the “mouth and ear” to lead them, as the poet and critic Avraham Ber Gottlober had recommended they
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a new sound in hebrew poetry
do.36 Over the course of the nineteenth century there was more and more support for this idea and growing dissatisfaction with the sound of Wesselian poetry as compared to the sound of Russian and German poetry. Yet in an Ashkenazic Hebrew context the full-fledged adoption of the spoken form of Hebrew would have conflicted with the principle of language purity that reigned during the Haskalah. The Sephardic stress system was consistent with grammatical patterns and was associated with the Hebrew Bible, which was read, at least in ritual contexts, using a terminal-stress system; the Ashkens nazic system was considered corrupt. For the time being, there remained among this group of bilingual poets a dichotomy between Hebrew and other literatures—what was appropriate and necessary for Russian, German, or English did not necessarily conform to the internal system of the Hebrew language and was therefore not applicable to its poetry.37 Implicit in this explanation is the possibility that Hebrew poets would have gladly adopted the rules of poetry in other languages were it not for the sad fact that the closest thing they had to a vernacular was a corrupt form of Hebrew. Of course, that attitude is of a piece with not fully accepting the idea of a vernaculs lar national poetry. Robert Alter has described the ways in which Hebrew writes ers of the nineteenth century were able to imagine Hebrew as a vernacular even before there was one. Through various artifices, such as the use of direct transls lations of Yiddish expressions, they were able to generate a literary vernacular in imitation of European novelistic traditions.38 A parallel imaginative faculty, or lack thereof, partly accounts for the hesitation of one generation and the willis ingness of the next to compose accentual-syllabic poetry. Accentual-syllabic meter requires a poet to declare the accent or stress system she is using. The foot of accentual-syllabic poetry, unlike the syllabic unit of Wesselian poetry, depends on the regular appearance of the natural emphases of Hebrew speech. The location of these stressed syllables varies greatly bets tween Ashkenazic and Sephardic accents, so that what constitutes three feet in one accent may become an irregular arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in the other. One reason why it may have taken so long for poets to adopt the prosody that would have been so familiar to them from European lites erature was that they did not treat their own Hebrew accents as a vernacular; the Sephardic stress system represented not only high Hebrew but proper Hebs brew speech as well. By dispensing with the closest equivalent in Hebrew to a modern national lites erary tradition and acknowledging his use of the Ashkenazic Hebrew accent in his poetry, Bialik and a few of his contemporaries were able to create a poetic simulation of a vernacular. This use of Ashkenazic allowed them to write the kind of verse in Hebrew—trochaic, amphibrachic, iambic—that Europeans could write in their respective mother tongues. Whereas the prototypical Hasks kalah poet was trapped between his own penultimately stressed accent and the
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high Medieval Hebrew of the poets of Spain and Italy, Bialik used his Ashkens nazic Hebrew unabashedly. But even as Ashkenazic was coming to be accepted as the new vernacular for poetic Hebrew, the program to revive spoken Hebrew maintained a bias toward purity and a terminal-stress system. In the 1880s—before Bialik started publishing poetry—attempts to make Hebs brew an actual and not merely a literary vernacular among Jews of European descent in both Palestine and Europe had begun, as had debates about the proper way to pronounce Hebrew in both poetry and life, especially in the schools. The revivalists favored a Sephardic or terminal-stress system from the beginning. The audial dichotomy that was to develop between the recitation of a poem and Hebrew speech in almost every other context was the result of the application over the course of several decades of a common conception that the language ought to function like a European vernacular. The idea of composing accentual-syllabic poetry in Hebrew was very much inspired by Russs sian and German, and the movement to revive spoken Hebrew was influenced by the role of national languages in European nations, in their literatures, and in the political revival movements of the smaller nations.39 Poetic Hebrew evolved more quickly than spoken Hebrew. Poets applied the new rules of Â�accentual-syllabic poetry to what they legitimately saw as the default vernaculs lar—an Ashkenazic rather than a Sephardic Hebrew. They invested in the new technology of vernacular Hebrew early in the development of that idea. Not unlike advanced nations who are among the first to industrialize or modes ernize or computerize their infrastructure, these poets soon found themselves outdated, lagging behind those teachers and revivalists who had begun the procs cess of adopting Hebrew a bit later and therefore had access to more updated technology in the form of the new accent. It is only with the institution of the new accent in Hebrew poetry, their second attempt at integrating accentualsyllabic meter, that poets satisfied both the need for a national vernacular lites erature and the desire for a pure Hebrew.
The Appearance of the New Accent in Poetry The earliest accentual-syllabic poems employing a Sephardic stress pattern appeared simultaneously with those first composed for an Ashkenazic stress system in the 1880s and 1890s.40 One of the motivations for writing accentualsyllabic poems was to provide a model of proper Hebrew for the next generats tion of speakers, and much of the new-accent poetry in this period was written for children. Aharon Liboshitski published the first book of entirely new-accent poems in 1902, but his more popular work was the 1903 volume of children’s poems, Shir va-zemer (Song and Tune). A handful of others also published poems in new-accent Hebrew, but this practice became habitual only in the genre of children’s poetry. Shemuel Leyb Gordon translated Germs
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a new sound in hebrew poetry
man and French poems into new-accent Hebrew for the youth newspaper he edited, thereby ensuring that schoolchildren would have poems to read that correlated with the Hebrew they were being taught to speak.41 The teens were the period of highest friction between poetry and pedags gogy. There was already a generation of new-accent Hebrew speakers in Pales estine and it was becoming clear that their Hebrew might very well be the language of the New Yishuv. Both ha-Safah (The Language) and ha-Tekufah (The Epoch) published pieces on the question of accent, poetry, and pedags gogy. The publication of new-accent poems also began in the teens, albeit at a slow rate. The bimonthly Moledet (Homeland) published new-accent works including Jabotinsky’s skillful translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” discussed above.42 The Teachers’ Union published Moledet for young Hebrew readers in Palestine. This too indicates the pedagogic youth orientation of new-accent poetry. In addition to ha-Tekufah and Moledet, Hedim (Echoes), Davar (The Word), and ha-Shiloa¿ (The Siloam) also introduced their audies ences to new-accent poems relatively early in the twenties—often with a note that they be read in the “correct” accent. Ha-Tekufah came out in Odessa, haShiloa¿ in Berlin; the rest were published in Palestine. By the early 1920s some poets were publishing new-accent poetry, includis ing a group of women who only published and had only ever published verse using the terminal-stress system. This was the period of the rise of women’s poetry and the appearance of poems by Elisheva Bi¿ovski, writing under the name “Elisheva”; Ra¿el Bluvshtain, writing as “Ra¿el”; Ester Rab; Malkah Shekhtman, writing as “Bat-±amah”; and Yokheved Zelniak, also known as “Yokheved Bat-Miryam.”43 Of these, Bi¿ovski, Bluvshtain, and Shekhtman composed their accentual-syllabic poetry in the new accent. Bi¿ovski, in parts ticular, was known for her “pure” Hebrew for using a Sephardic stress system in her poetry and speaking new-accent Hebrew. Neither she nor Bluvshtain published any poems composed in an Ashkenazic accent. In the 1920s BatMiryam was composing in Ashkenazic, and Rab used the new accent but composed in free rhythm. That is, with the exception of Bat-Miryam, the popular female poets of the 1920s were composing almost exclusively in the new accent. Most of the male poets, however, were still writing in Ashkenazic in the early part of the decade. The women were also more likely to begin their Hebrew careers in the new accent; their male contemporaries, such as Uri Tsevi Greenberg and Avrahs ham Shlonsky, began in Ashkenazic and switched to the new accent in the mid- to late 1920s. There was some correlation between their choice of accent on the one hand and their Jewish education, the nature of their exposure to Hebrew and, to a lesser extent, their geographic location, on the other. Of the five most popular Hebrew “poetesses” of the early to mid-1920s, those in Â�Palestine—Rab and Bluvshtain—were composing in the new accent.44
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Â�Shekhtman and Bi¿ovski were writing new-accent poetry in Russia. BatMiryam was producing Ashkenazic poetry in Russia but switched some time after arriving in Palestine, thereby following a more typically masculine poes etic trajectory. Although Ashkenazic Hebrew was dominant in Jewish ritual life, the Hebrew classes in Russia were sometimes taught in their version of a Sephardic accent. This was the case in Bi¿ovski’s education. At the other end of the spectrum were poets who had begun their careers either late in the nineteenth or early in the twentieth century in an Ashkens nazic accent and switched in the 1920s. Among these were a number of younger poets, including Greenberg and Shlonsky, who began their careers in the 1910s or 1920s in Ashkenazic but switched early on.45 By the 1930s Ashks kenazic poetry was the exception rather than the rule. Still, some poets such as David Fogel, Yaakov Rabinovits, David Shimoni, and Yaakov Shtainberg continued to compose in the Ashkenazic accent well into the thirties and beys yond.46 Tchernichovsky, who had been a vocal opponent of the new accent, integrated it into his poetry in the 1930s.47 Bialik retained his own so-called biblical rhythm throughout his career, using it especially in later years when the Ashkenazic accent had become unacceptable.48 Yaakov Kahan and Avigds dor Hame’iri took the unusual step of rendering their old Ashkenazic poems into the new accent, with varying degrees of success.49 The appearance of folk songs in the new accent was a literary phenomenon similar to the publication of new-accent poems for children and poems by women. As was true of poems for children, the mizmor was a noncanonical genre sometimes written by canonical poets. These popular songs were explicis itly ideological and colloquial, and their use of the new accent did not require justification. Poets such as Shlonsky, discussed in chapter 4, used the folk song to prepare themselves and their readers for their canonical new-accent poetry. Each of these three poetic realms in very different ways (and at slightly different times) was seen as maintaining the kind of relationship with spoken Hebrew that could account for the writer’s use of the new accent. Defined by three diffs ferent parameters—readership, authorship, and genre—children’s poetry, womes en’s poetry, and the folk song were all able to perform this linguistic-cultural labor before canonical poetry had mastered it.
Authenticity and the Mother Tongue Like other European peoples, Jews attempted to create for themselves a new language and a new literature consistent with their nationalist aspirats tions. And like other nationalist movements, Zionism saw the distant past as a precursor to the modern nation and as the justification for its future.50 The Hebrew sound that was adopted in the New Yishuv and beyond was figured alternately as feminine, ancient and authentic, and as masculine and modes
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a new sound in hebrew poetry
ern. This book accounts for the timing of poetry’s adoption of the new accs cent, the lyric uses of that accent as a way of imagining the old-new Jewish nation, and the paradoxical association of women with a Hebrew sound that would come to symbolize a powerful masculine national identity. Even as the future leaders tried to build a modern nation, they propagated an idea of the people’s essential unchanging character that could be tapped in the present as it had been in prior moments of greatness. For these purps poses the authentic was that which remained untouched by modernity. Johs hann Gottfried Herder, the founder of a theory of cultural nationalism, conceived of language as a nation’s link to its authentic past and perhaps the most important artifact and symbol of national identity.51 For Herder, the “greatness” of a nation is to be found in its language—a kind of constant or soul of the nation—and is often associated in nationalist writing with that which is common and low. The upper classes are represented as corrupt, cosms mopolitan, exposed to and affiliated with foreign, international, and modern influences. The lower classes are conversely associated with the true national spirit. Hebrew literary and musical culture expressed these values. Wellknown poets of the period composed in low genres like the folk song, one manifestation of the importance of authentic (if simulated) cultural artifacts. These works were inspired by a variety of cultures—some were simply translats tions of Russian, Yiddish, and Arabic songs—and were sung in a variety of Hebrew accents, but prior to its appearance in the canonical genres, the new accent served poets and their public through the folk song, the genre consides ered most in tune with the national spirit. The relatively early appearance of new-accent poetry for children and the popular reception of poetry by women in the 1920s are both telling of the nats tionalist narrative that the new accent encapsulates. Seen as unself-conscious natural speakers, children and women frequently serve as symbols of authenticis ity in nationalist movements—of native culture unaffected by modernity.52 By the second decade of the twentieth century, the non-native-born adults were fascs cinated with their native-born offspring whose presumed mother tongue was Hebrew. A number of anecdotes from the period accentuate the supposedly non-Jewish or Zionist disrespect and crudeness of the Hebrew of children born in Palestine.53 The Hebrew of juvenile speakers was perceived as more colloqs quial and less textual. Commonness and the idiom of the folk served as Herders rian signs of national authenticity, so that this low register was a source of pride. The Hebrew pedagogic project in Palestine was motivated by, among other things, the goal of creating “natives,” and the demand for new-accent children’s poetry was an expression of the wish to create a completely authentic Hebrew speaker. The historical and literary reasons why women were responsible for so much of the new-accent poetry of the twenties are some of the same reasons that women’s poetry appeared in Hebrew at all in this period.
introduction
15
On the purely practical side, well into the twentieth century European Jewis ish men were more likely than women to have a high level of exposure to Ashks kenazic Hebrew and Aramaic intermingled with Yiddish as part of their religious education, while Ashkenazic women would have been taught in Yidds dish alone or, in certain educational contexts, in non-Jewish languages. (Inds deed, the Yiddish-Hebrew educational technique facilitated the Haskalah: in the paradigmatic biography of the maskil, the enlightened Jewish male taught himself German through Moses Mendelssohn’s translation of the Hebrew Bible.) If women did learn Hebrew, it was more than likely that they would have done so in a nationalist context, as speakers rather than as reciters of Yiddish and Hebrew. This in turn meant that Ashkenazic women in nineteenth-Â�century Eastern Europe would have more frequently encountered new-accent Hebrew earlier on in their Hebrew-language education than their male counterparts, since they were given a far smaller dose of Hebrew in religious contexts and in primary schools. The nationalist logic provides a complementary justification for the convergs gence of women’s and new-accent poetry in the 1920s. A class of East European Jewish woman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was more cosmopolis itan than her male counterpart. Jewish nationalism nevertheless adopted the sems miotics in which women were equated with the authentic, ancient, and unchanging aspects of the nation. A serendipitous moment of ideological nats tionalist poetry-writing marked the 1920s in Hebrew culture. This happy convs vergence, along with a symbolic equating of women with authenticity, among other factors, allowed for the rise of women’s poetry. Some women were able to take advantage of that symbolism and even of the history of the exclusion and absence of women from Hebrew poetry. If women were symbols of ancient auts thenticity they could also lend that cachet to the poetry they wrote even—or esps pecially—if they were never completely accepted as professional writers.
Scholarship on the New Accent There is a surprisingly small amount of scholarship on the new accent in poes etry.54 A major concern within this body of literature has been to account for the particular moment of the appearance of the lyric new accent as an exemplum of the larger phenomenon of the replacement of one center of Jewish cultural life in Eastern Europe with another in Palestine. A second focus is the search for a poetic source for this shift in the form of strong precursors who led by exas ample. There are three problematic tendencies apparent in this scholarship. All these biases are signs of the success of the nationalist revivalist project of the New Yishuv and the extent to which the ideas expressed by its leaders, the revivas alists, poets, and critics, have been integrated into scholarship. One problem in these histories is that the story of the new accent in poetry
16
a new sound in hebrew poetry
is presented as a master narrative, with the Hebrew poetic tradition serving as a field in which rebellious sons wage revolutions and eventually mature into the overbearing fathers of the next generation.55 A related problem is the tends dency to assume a necessary connection between the new accent and Palests tine, without acknowledging the genealogy of that association.56 The third problem is that scholars ignore questions of gender when analyzing the rise of new-accent poetry. The popular trope of the land as woman, the predomins nance of the figure of the laborer (and the Labor movement) in the New Â�Yishuv, and the myth of the pioneer who sheds his Diaspora identity are just some elements of a territorializing culture and politics in early-twentiethÂ�century Palestine in which the Jewish citizen is unequivocally and necessarily male.57 The gender bias also affects how women’s poetry has been repress sented in the history of the new accent. As I claim in chapter 3, it is not so much that women’s poetry of this period is excluded or ignored as that it is read in very different ways with respect to the new accent than the poetry of men is read. All three of these tendencies are also ways that scholarship has integrated the ideologies of writers, readers, and critics of the 1920s. Scholarship tells only portions of this story, and from the perspective of a reader who was in the New Yishuv. In his essay from 1920, “The Exile of Our Classic Poetry,” Tsevi Shats offers one such territorial perspective on Hebrew literature, comps plaining of the lack of poetry for the Hebrew speakers of Palestine.58 In his opinion, the poems of Bialik, Tchernichovsky, Zalman Shneur, and Shlonsky are useless for the Jewish masses of Palestine, the builders of the nation, whose Hebrew has a Sephardic stress system. He presents the new accent as appropriate for poetic use in Palestine, necessary for the proper development of Hebrew literature, and as expressive of the Jewish experience there. Shats speaks of new-accent poetry as a genre that will tell the story of the ingatheris ing of exiles and of Jewish laborers in Palestine, and will enact the national redemption from exile. It is a testament either to the success of the rhetoric of Shats and his fellow critics, or to their predictive powers, that new-accent poes etry did come to signify and allude to that narrative. Indeed Labor poetry— including the work of Bluvshtain and Shlonsky—took up Shats’s challenge to write the working Jewish body into literature in the new accent. Scholarship also seems to have absorbed Shats’s rhetoric, and takes for granted the territors rialization of Hebrew that was a necessary step in the rise of new-accent poes etry as the literature of the nation. The hybrid Hebrew that was synthesized at the turn of the century came to be seen as a natural, expressive, masculine, neobiblical national accent in the teens, twenties, and thirties. The minimizis ing of the political and pedagogic efforts responsible for the symbolic value that the new Hebrew accrued contributes in and of itself to the continued preservation of that status and significance.
introduction
17
Toward a New History of the New Accent in Poetry In offering an alternative genealogy of the new accent, I approach these linguistic-poetic phenomena as effects of the pedagogic and political instituts tions in Palestine. The rise of the new accent in Hebrew speech in Palestine, its subsequent adoption in Hebrew poetry, and the relationship between these two events are explicable as a part of the history of the Hebrew language from 1890 to 1930. I will claim in chapter 1 that these events are the result of newaccent Hebrew’s accumulation of value within the linguistic market throughos out this period. My analysis in that chapter is very much informed by sociological theories of language.59 Instead of accepting the assertion of Shats and others that the new accent is somehow inherently appropriate for Palests tine, I look to the school system as a site for the transformation of new-accent Hebrew into the proto-national language. In pursuing this line of inquiry, I show how the new accent’s rise in poetry paralleled its rise in the schools. Chapter 2 challenges the simplistic notion of a Hebrew that was native to Palestine by analyzing the approaches of revivalists to the unification of spoks ken Hebrew. What did the teachers hope to hear in their own Hebrew and in their classrooms? I identify three pronunciations in the early twentieth cents tury that would have been candidates for the Hebrew of the schools, compare the different notions of authenticity implicit in each one, and interpret each as a proposal for national unification through language. Throughout this first section of the book, I attend to the sometimes contrads dictory gendering of linguistic aspects of national identity. A national langs guage or culture commands authority and inspires pride through its ancient origins and signs of modernity; women alternately serve as figures for each. In their search for a suitable sound for Hebrew, revivalists were haunted by both the need for modernity and the need for an authentic accent. The imps portance of origins, for example, expressed itself through the valorization of woman as the pure embodiment of the unchanging soul of the nation. The gendering of the new accent precedes its adoption by poetry and complicates that literary history. I then turn to the poetry and criticism of the 1920s, where one can apprecias ate how the new accent accrued cultural meaning through its adoption by women’s poetry, Labor poetry, and the noncanonical folk song. The central poets and critics in chapter 3 are Bluvshtain, Bi¿ovski, Yehudah Karni, and Shats; chapter 4 focuses on Shlonsky. My interpretations show how these poets translated some of the associations that the new accent had already acqs quired into thematic, allusive, and linguistic elements in their poems; how they responded to anxieties about the new accent; and how they worked within the limits of contemporary expectations to integrate it into Hebrew culture. Poets and critics refashioned the new accent as a literary and political tool. I
18
a new sound in hebrew poetry
show how these poets wrote implicit (and sometimes fantastic) histories of Hebrew language and literature in their poems and how they inscribed the new accent as an element in the proto-national identity of the New Yishuv. This section also reconfigures new-accent history by tracing the naturalizats tion of the New Hebrew in poetry. By looking at the reception of these poets, I am able to reflect on the ways in which they shaped readers’ perceptions and accs count for the choices they made in presenting New Hebrew—how they formuls lated the new accent as the territorial, contemporary, authentic, and representative Hebrew, as the language of the laboring immigrant-native in Pales estine. I also imagine the context their poems invoke or might have invoked for their contemporary readers so as to nuance my own description of the Labor, New Yishuv, and gender politics of the new accent and new-accent poetry. The juxtaposition of a central canonical male poet and the most popular of the new breed of “women poets” of the twenties also necessarily brings their differences into high contrast—in particular the very different options availas able to men and women in writing a history of Hebrew poetry through their poems and personae. My recreation in chapter 3 of a Bluvshtainian interprets tation of Shlonsky’s new-accent method through the evidence of a critical essay by Bluvshtain more subtly dramatizes the different options and limitations imps posed on these poets. It is perhaps counterintuitive in a book that criticizes scholars for valorizing Shlonsky’s own presentation of himself as the new-accent poet that an entire chapter is devoted to his new-accent poetry and poetics. As much as I object to what I see as a distortion of Shlonsky’s role and his primacy, his sheer creativity and poetic-linguistic manipulation of the new accent is nothing short of breathts taking. Shlonsky was a poet-critic-translator extraordinaire, a grand homme of Hebrew letters who for a time defined and dominated Hebrew poetry and arguas ably influenced its course more than any other—this from the 1920s when he was seen as the rebellious son to Bialik’s father figure until the period of Natan Alterman’s dominance of Hebrew poetry. Although Shlonsky’s prosodic accomps plishments are rightly celebrated, in voting for his primacy critics have somets times inadvertently glossed over his actual accomplishments. I hope to correct what I see as a paradoxical underappreciation of the particular, subtle, refreshis ing, innovative, and seductive ways in which Shlonsky gave meaning to the new sound in Hebrew poetry. Bialik is the only poet working all but exclusively in Ashkenazic Hebrew to be the object of more than passing attention in this book. He initiated a fair share of innovations in the sound, prosody, and other features of Hebrew poesy, but his status and his influence are somehow more than the sum of their parts in the realm of accent. Over the years, Bialik’s influence has diminished far less than Shlonsky’s. In a book that takes the nationalist uses of literature and langs guage as phenomena of great interest, it seems a necessary pleasure to name
introduction
19
and to begin, at least, to account for the paradox of a national poet who never fully adopted the new-accent Hebrew that had already become the de facto nats tional language in the course of his career. He was an Ashkenazic-Hebrew poet more than Shlonsky was, more than his contemporary Tchernichovsky, and more than others of high stature. Yet it is Bialik who was crowned national poet. This paradox is the subject of the brief epilogue with which the book closes, an attempt to gather some of the threads of literary ambitions, achievements, and ideologies with linguistic ones. It is the literary, the linguistic, and the expresss sion of the one through the other that is the concern of this book.
Chapter One
“Make Your School a Nation-State” Pedagogy and the Rise of the New Accent .€.€.€and the Rothstein girl (Brokhoh, her mother called her— while her father the former Hebrew teacher called her Brakhah, with a kamats under the khaf—and the stress on the final syllable) quickly gathered her hair . . . —Devorah Baron, The Exiles A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. —Max Weinreich
D
evorah Baron’s fictional character Rothstein, father of Brakk khah, gives himself away as a former Hebrew teacher with his hypercorrect pronunciation of his daughter’s name. Baron was born in Lithuania and moved to Palestine as a young woman in 1907, and her stories and novellas draw on details of Jewish life in both locales. In this, her work was not unlike that of her contemporaries whose prose was punctuated by representations of the quotidian from both Eastern Europe (the shtetl, the big city) and Palestk tine (Jaffa, the agricultural settlement). In contrast to many of her contempork raries, however, Baron problematized the hierarchy of relations between Diaspora and Holy Land. In the novella cited above, first published in 1943, a group of East European Jews arrives in Palestine on the eve of World War I only to be exiled by the Ottoman authorities. Palestine is supposed to offer an antidote to exile; the Jews of Baron’s fiction become exiles only after they have arrived in the homeland. Brakhah’s father introduces this chapter for two reasons. First, in the context of a work that was eventually published under the title The Exiles (ha-Golim), these lines warn against easy equivalences between territory and identity. Scholak
20
“Make your school a nation-state”
21
arship that addresses the new accent most often interprets its rise in poetry as motivated by the Land of Israel itself. Scholars tend to assume a necessary relatk tionship between Palestine and the new accent without accounting for the complexity of interactions between Hebrew speech and literature or identifying a mechanism for poetry’s adoption of the new accent. With one demographic stroke, territory, or the Jewish presence in Palestine, is meant to resolve the question of the relationship between spoken and poetic Hebrew and between land and language. Baron does not rely on such assumptions to explain why Brakhah’s parents pronounce her name differently. The narrator simply states that Brakhah’s father was a former Hebrew teacher. And it is here with the figure of the teacher that I choose to begin; his profk fession is the second reason Rothstein introduces my narrative of the rise of new-accent poetry. Instead of looking to territory or even the compositions of a strong poet such as Avraham Shlonsky to explain the literary rise of the new accent, as many scholars do, I locate the motivation for the shift in the institk tutions of the nascent school system. It was the pedagogues who, over the course of about thirty years, presided over Hebrew’s successive integration into the classroom at all levels, from the primary school and the kindergarten to the college and university. With this integration into ever-higher levels of education from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, the status of the spoken Hebrew of the schools rose. This rise in status was responsible for poetry’s eventual adoption of the new accent. Baron’s narrator hints at the role of teachers, their classrooms, and the Hebrew schools more generally in the literary history of the new accent; my narrative of the rise of the new acck cent has a pedagogic subplot. The teachers inculcated in the minds of the Jews of the New Yishuv the notion that the sound of the new accent corresponded to the territory of Palek estine. Once scholarship adopted this notion, the implicit and central questk tion became a retrospective one: why did the integration of the new accent into poetry take so long, between twenty-five and thirty-five years after teachek ers first tried to adopt it in spoken Hebrew? The very first attempts to implemk ment a new accent in the Jewish settlement began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, simultaneous with the first large-scale waves of Jewik ish emigration from Eastern Europe, but poetry’s definitive switch to the new accent is usually dated thirty years later, in the late 1920s. For the most part, scholars resolve the so-called delay by pinpointing a momk ment when territory was somehow activated or by naming a figure able to activk vate the territory at a particular moment. The scholar Eliezer Kagan favors the hypothesis that poetry switched to the new accent as a direct result of the remk moval of the center of Hebrew literature from Russia to Palestine in the 1920s, as does Uzi Shavit, whose work I discuss below.1 In both these narratives Hebk brew literature “migrated” to Palestine along with the major literary figures of
22
a new sound in hebrew poetry
the period: Mordekhai Temkin who arrived in 1909 (and again in 1911), Yaakov Rabinovits (in 1910), Yaakov Fikhman (in 1912), Yehudah Karni (in 1921), Bialik (in 1924), and Tchernichovsky (in 1925 and again in 1931).2 In his study of Fikhman’s transition from the use of an Ashkenazic to the new accent, Kagan invokes the landscape first as a kind of muse, a necessary inspiration for poetry in general.3 He claims that problems arise when the writer deserts the maternal, nurturing landscape of his childhood for another, adopted landscape: This transition from one climate to another, from four seasons to two, from snow to rain alone, from a warm European sun to a blazing Israeli one, from low temperatures to high, from rich northern foliage to sparse subtropical vegetation, from one kind of clothing to another, from one manmade landscape to another—this transition was a crisis in the life of every artist emigrating to the Land [of Israel] from the European Diaspora. (Kagan 1976, 45)
Migration initiates a moment of crisis. Just as being thrown into exile can lead to national as well as personal trauma, the return trip, “the seminal experience of exchanging exile for redemption,” can lead to great suffering, including “pangs of withdrawal.” The artist must have time to recover (45). Like other scholars of Hebrew literature, Kagan sees the waves of immigration of the early twentieth century as the pivotal events in Jewish literary history.4 The several cultural centers of the Jewish European Diaspora are replaced by the single centralizing structure of the new settlement in Palestine. In both poetry and litek erary history, this focus on discontinuity encourages writers to project authentk ticity onto the territory of Palestine itself. Kagan translates these geographic themes into linguistic ones, presenting the accent differential between Palestk tine and Europe as a parallel trauma that may also produce “pangs of withdk drawal.” Just as the landscape, the climate, and the foliage affect and inspire the poet’s song, the environment determines the accent in which he composes: In the Land of Israel the Israeli accent [mivta’], called “Sephardic,” was acck cepted with a biblical terminal stress [hat¿amah], while the aforementioned poets composed their poetry in the Diaspora using the Ashkenazic penultk timate stress. (45)
The geographic return to the homeland becomes the retrieval of an older, nobler cultural heritage. In this fantasy, the Land of Israel activates the natk tion. There will be a delay as the poets recover and continue “for a time, out of inertia, to use the Ashkenazic intonation.” Just as the immigrants are powek erless to change the climate of their new environment, so too do they eventuak ally submit to “the natural demands of the current accent [mivta’].” (45) I am under no illusion that Kagan actually believes accent to be a natural phenomenon, like the climate. His presentation is nevertheless telling of a lack
“Make your school a nation-state”
23
cuna in his reasoning. Accent is a given, an accident of geography rather than a phenomenon that is activated by or at least implicated in aliyah—by the idea of immigration as ascendance and return to the ancient Jewish land. On the one hand Kagan’s history emphasizes how difficult it was for the East European poets to transplant themselves from one linguistic environment to another. On the other hand, he provides no explanation for why the poet must adjust his Hebk brew usage—aliyah itself is the only explanation. In his book on Shlonsky’s relationship to Bialik’s poetics, Avraham HagorniGreen tries to account for the seeming ease with which Shlonsky switched from Ashkenazic to new-accent composition.5 At first, Hagorni-Green seems to be trying to distance himself from scholars who portray the new accent as inherek ently masculine or Israeli, but then attributes Shlonsky’s relative success at integk grating it to the year he spent in a Hebrew high school in Tel Aviv. It is indeed plausible that Shlonsky’s yearlong exposure to the new accent at a young age made it somewhat easier for him than for others to abandon the Ashkenazic acck cent a decade later. But Hagorni-Green’s narrative does not help us understand why this particular period—a decade after the youthful exposure—would have been the moment at which Shlonsky made the switch. In fact, if one is moved to identify an important moment of Shlonsky’s linguistk tic development, the time he spent at En ±arod when he first arrived as an adult ought to be mentioned as well. The early settlements were populated by immigk grants who were among the most ideologically motivated to adopt Hebrew as a spoken language. If the schools enjoyed the advantage of a young and malleable population that dispersed daily to their families and for good when they entered the workforce and started their own families, the laboring settlements had their own advantages vis-à-vis language revival. These included ideological homogenk neity and relative isolation. Shlonsky’s accentual development, described in chapter 4, shows that the labor settlements served as a laboratory of Hebrew langk guage, albeit one far more limited in its audience and reach than the schools. The accent that Hagorni-Green prematurely refers to as the “Israeli” one was in poetry “perceived as the removal of the divide between everyday speech and litek erary language” (Hagorni-Green 3). Shlonsky rebelled against poetic precedent in general, and in particular against the expectation that poetic language and quotidian speech utilized different stress systems. He is the hero of the newÂ�accent revolution here as in much of contemporary scholarship. Like Kagan, Shavit invokes an explanation linking the rise of the new accent in the 1920s to the Land of Israel and emigration.6 He attends more precisely to the entire period of transition and organizes new-accent composition into two stages: the early phase of children’s poetry at the turn of the century that involved such figures as Shemuel Leyb Gordon, Aharon Liboshitski, and Yosef Halevi, and a second stage associated with the emigration of Hebrew poets from Russia and of the center of canonical Hebrew literature from Eastern Europe to Palestine.7
24
a new sound in hebrew poetry
The geographic explanations of Kagan, Hagorni-Green, and even of Shavk vit, however, are incomplete: the shift of the literary center from Eastern Eurk rope does not provide a mechanism for the adoption of the new accent by Hebrew poetry so soon after the arrival of the Russian poets in Palestine, nor does it explain why poetic accent must follow the vernacular. Furthermore, it fails to explain how the emigration of poets from Eastern Europe could have prompted the use of the new accent when most of the poets themselves contk tinued to write in Ashkenazic after their arrival. Rabinovits continued to write in Ashkenazic Hebrew throughout the 1920s; Fikhman throughout the 1930s; Karni “translated” his poems from Ashkenazic to the new accent in the mid1930s and 1940s.8 Karni’s Gates (She¿arim) of 1923 was still in Ashkenazic, and his At Your Gates, Homeland (bi-She¿arayikh moledet) was published in 1935 with poems in both accents.9 Temkin wrote free verse, in which rhythm is not as sensitive to stress placement, but he seems never to have abandoned compk pletely an internal default Ashkenazic rhythm. One can hear his accent even in his supposedly new-accent, free-rhythmic compositions. Avigdor Hame’iri is exceptional in that he translated poems he had originally composed in Ashkenazic into the new accent as early as 1925, with the publication of Motheer’s Milk (±alev ’em).10 Individual poets do conform to Kagan’s model in which the trauma of migration is followed by a period of adjustment, which is followed in turn by the adoption of the new accent—but almost none compk plete the process by 1930. By the mid-1930s, an Ashkenazic poet arriving in Palestine would have perceived the new accent as de rigueur for poetry in his new homeland. But this was the end of a long process of the integration of the new accent into Hebrew speech through the schools. The relationship between locale and accent in poetry cannot be explained by emigration alone. Poets did not switch the accent in which they composed immediately upon arrival in Palestine in the teens or twenties. Those in Palek estine felt the inevitability of a new-accent poetry as the status of Hebrew rose. By putting pressure on the language, pedagogic institutions indirectly motivated the shift in poetry. In the 1930s, geography is enough to explain a poet’s choice of the new acck cent. Poets who came to Palestine once the process of integrating Hebrew into the educational system in Palestine was complete would have felt pressure from poetic precedent itself. By then almost all the poetry published in Palestine was in the new accent, while the Ashkenazic accent was still prevalent abroad. At this later stage, the decision of individual poets to switch to the new accent may be attributed to emigration and the temporary falling out of favor of free rhythm. Kahan, for example, emigrated in 1934 and switched to the new accent in the same period. By contrast, Hillel Habavli, who wrote in the United States, only switched to the new accent after the founding of the State of Israel fifteen years later. In the 1920s, however, any compulsion to write in the new accent
“Make your school a nation-state”
25
would have come from the poets’ own ideological sympathies or as a result of the rising status of new-accent Hebrew speech. The successes of the pedagk gogues and the expansion of Hebrew’s domain were the source of pressure on the poets to adopt the new accent at this earlier stage. As Weinreich suggests in the epigraph to this chapter, one sign of the overwk whelming success of a dialect is its ceasing to be considered one. The ultimk mate predominance of the new accent obscures from view the question of how it came to be the standard. The underlying problem with these explanatk tions is that they take for granted the mode of territorialization that Hebrew underwent.11 They treat the new accent as if it were autochthonous, and take for granted that poetry must follow speech, but do not name actual sites of intk teraction between the two. They therefore beg several central questions: What mechanisms made one accent predominate over the others? How and why did the new accent become the standard for Hebrew speech in Palestine? What about the relationship between poetic and spoken Hebrew in Palestine determined that the former would mimic the latter? How was it that the tides seem to have turned toward new-accent poetry in Palestine precisely during the period of a great influx of Ashkenazic-accented talent?
Hebrew as the Language of Instruction, Hebrew as Universal Knowledge The synthesis of a national language and literature is not unique to Hebk brew. English literature, for example, did not exist as such before the eightk teenth century, when it began to replace the classics in the expanding educational system of the middle class.12 Unlike English language and literatk ture in the eighteenth century, however, Hebrew suffered from a severe lack of literary and linguistic ingredients (such as mother-tongue dialects to choose from), which partially accounts for the alacrity with which pedagk gogues and revivalists tried to synthesize a spoken Hebrew for the schools. The language revivalists were self-consciously creating and collecting the ingk gredients for a national language and literature. Yosef Azaryahu was one such language revivalist, dedicated to finding whatever materials the schools needed in order to institute Hebrew as the langk guage of instruction. He taught at the girls’ school in Jaffa, a center of Hebk brew revival in the New Yishuv, and co-authored a curriculum for the Hebrew schools in 1907.13 He was unabashedly excited about the expansion of the language and the establishment of the Hebrew school in the Yishuv. In 1929, Azaryahu published a history of the Hebrew school in the yearbook celek ebrating twenty-five years of the Teachers’ Association (histadrut ha-morim).14 Azaryahu’s history, “Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel” (±inukh ¿Ivri be-’Erets Yisra’el), is an informative account of Hebrew pedagogy in Palestine,
26
a new sound in hebrew poetry
full of dates, names, and mini-narratives of the institutions and events that shaped the Hebrew language and the school system in Palestine. But AzaÂ�rÂ�yahu is also an interested party in the events he narrates. He characterizes the Hebrew school as a new and distinct phenomenon. Like the “building of the Land” of Israel, it was inspired by a national drive and became, in turn, “a powerful motivating force” that strengthened and advanced the project of nation-building (Azaryahu 57). Two traits define the new Hebrew school: 1) the national language is the sole language of instruction; 2) “general studies” are inseparable from and an undivided part of the currk riculum of the school. (Azaryahu 57) Azaryahu apologizes for his trivial definition; he cannot imagine that the British or French school would ever be reduced to its language of instruction (Azaryahu 57). But of course the language of instruction is precisely what does define a national school system. The dialect that becomes the language of the schools does not do so independently, as part of the rise and fall of variok ous dialects, but is imposed. The Old Yishuv offers the closest parallel to a natural and pragmatic evolution of Hebrew dialects in modern times. Hebrew was being used as a spoken langk guage in Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem, and given the relative difficulty of travel in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one might even speak of the development of different dialects in these regions. There are, however, important differences between the European paradigm for the devk velopment of a national language and the situation of the Old Yishuv. When the Jews of Palestine spoke Hebrew prior to or outside the institutions and domk main of the revival, they were not speaking their mother tongues, and the Hebk brew encounters between Jews of different linguistic backgrounds would have been relatively frequent.15 In a non-nationalist scenario there is little motivatk tion to make one usage replace others even if the differences serve as a pretext for declaring one superior. In the Old Yishuv, the Asheknazic Jews continued to use their own various (Lithuanian, Galician, German) Hebrew pronunciatk tions in prayer and other rituals. When speaking with Sephardic Jews, they would not have adopted a Syrian accent, for example, but would have merely Sephardicized their own Hebrew, using a terminal-stress system and perhaps attk tempting to mimic other features of their interlocutor’s speech. The ingredients of this makeshift Hebrew would have varied with location. Hebrew as a lingua franca of the Old Yishuv was still not a standardized language. Like a hybridizatk tion of dialects that serves as a bridge between two communities, these makeshift Hebrews allowed people with different mother tongues as well as different Hebk brew accents to communicate minimally.
“Make your school a nation-state”
27
A dialect must be imposed over a linguistically diverse population before there can be anything like an official language that will be used in interÂ� actions between speakers of different dialects in place of a more naturally produced linguistic compromise. Azaryahu’s characterization of the new Hebk brew school is therefore far from trivial and quite precisely describes the school’s role in promoting Hebrew. Schools began the process of imposing a dialect and creating a national language when they adopted Hebrew as the primary language of instruction. By adopting Hebrew as the language of insk struction, schools also blurred the line between Jewish and general studies. In Azaryahu’s history, this loss of differentiation between particular and general knowledge is itself the second defining trait of the Hebrew school in Palestine: This innovation [of instituting Hebrew as the language of instruction] is what facilitated the change in instruction, particularly in the early school years, from the study of words to the study of issues, and is what made it more natural, substantial, and deep. This also prepared the ground for a natural blending of Jewish studies and “general” studies that constitutes the second principle of the Hebrew school, and to thereby make it a compplete and unified national educational institution in and of itself. (Azaryahu 57–58; emphasis in the original)
These two elements reinforce each other: Hebrew language tends to nationalik ize general cultural and scientific knowledge, transforming it into Hebrew knowledge; Hebrew is in turn transformed into a universal language inasmuch as it becomes the conduit of all knowledge. The language of instruction in a school system is not merely an invisible tool of pedagogy. It is what makes all of knowledge available. In French or German or Spanish schools, science and history are taught in those respective languages with the effect that the univk versal is nationalized. The process by which knowledge is relayed in a given language tends to equate that language with Culture itself. The Hebrew pedagogues understood that part of their job was to universalik ize Hebrew. Azaryahu writes about the insertion of general human issues into the framework of our national culture, and creak ating a wide and inclusive national education that has within it a full and unified weltanschauung, Hebrew and human as one.€.€.€.€Everything they are thinking about, learning, everything that impresses them—that is Hebk brew for them because they are Hebrew human beings. The Pythagorean Theorem, Archimedes’ Principle or biological phenomena in nature that they have come to know and recognize, are to them as Hebrew as Mendk dele’s creations are, as Bialik and Tchernichovsky by whom they have been influenced—inasmuch as they are the impressions of their Hebrew soul and their spiritual acquisition. (Azaryahu 58; emphasis added)
28
a new sound in hebrew poetry
Teaching history and science in Hebrew has the effect of presenting the universk sal as national and of linking knowledge, education, class, and status to proper Hebrew speech. Teaching Hebrew literature (or any particular national literatk ture) as Literature itself is likewise a way of universalizing that particular natk tional literary culture. This is one reason why the formation of a canon for the schools is dependent upon the standardization of a national language. One can teach about form, history, methods of literary interpretation, and what it means to be human in a Hebrew literature class, and that too is a presentation of the universal through the particular. A more immediate relationship, however, devk velops between literature as a subject in the schools and language than between other subjects and language, because literature serves as an imaginary model of proper speech. Hebrew literature becomes a necessary tool for standardizing the language, for making it a language in which speakers can take pride, a hope Ahad Ha’am preserved for Hebrew speakers. The language must also be capable of containing modern literary forms.16 This was all part of their projek ect to imagine the new universalized national Hebrew subject. The 1894 decision to teach Bible in Hebrew revealed a desire to naturalize and nationalize Hebrew. In hindsight it may seem perfectly logical and rather unremarkable, but it was, as one historian puts it, a “groundbreaking decisk sion.”17 Yiddish was the language of instruction in the heder—the traditional religious boys’ school in Europe and later in Palestine. Before Azaryahu and his colleagues implemented changes, the traditional mode of Bible study was predominant: students would recite the Hebrew original and its Yiddish translk lation phrase by phrase. Bible was now being integrated into general educatk tion in these schools simply by virtue of its being taught in Hebrew instead of Yiddish. When general subjects began to be taught in Hebrew a few years later, Bible as a subject was further departicularized, of a piece with Hebrew education in general. In 1907, a new curriculum recommended that geograpk phy lessons be based on the land of Israel.18 This was another one of many pedagogic habits—and one that seems to have been adopted widely—that enck couraged the universalizing of the particular. In this instance, the territorial content of the course of study echoed the territorial fiction implicit in the insk stitution of a standard language.19 The pedagogues were trying to demonsk strate a coincidence between geography and language even as they struggled to impose rules of pronunciation upon Hebrew speakers in Palestine. These innovations in pedagogy at the turn of the century contributed to Hebk brew’s rise in value, to making it the national language of this proto-nation. The schools were gradually effecting a situation in which Hebrew would beck come the obvious choice, where its particularity could be forgotten even beyk yond the school walls. Self-consciousness was necessary precisely because beyond those walls Hebrew was in an even weaker position than it was within them. The schools were faced with a bigger problem than simply selecting
“Make your school a nation-state”
29
and perfecting one dialect or mode of speech among many related dialects, namely the absence of native speakers of any kind of Hebrew. Pedagogues turned to new theories of second-language acquisition to solve this problem. They found they could teach Hebrew as if it already were the national langk guage by adopting the natural method.
“Make Your School a Nation-State” The natural method came into use in Europe in the late nineteenth century as an alternative to the grammar translation method that used the students’ mother tongue to teach a foreign language.20 The natural or direct method tried to mimic the way parents teach their children to speak and to rÂ�ecreate the environment in which first-language acquisition takes place. Language teachek ers were expected to focus more on the communicative aspects of language and to avoid as much as possible the use of languages other than the one being taught. Ideally, there was less reliance on grammar lessons and texts, and more reliance on other learning tools—objects, illustrations, and activities that would engage the students and encourage them to speak. The Hebrew language revivalists adopted the theories of the natural method almost immediately. Yits¿ak Epstein and Yehudah (Gur) Grazovski, teachers and leaders of the movement, both wrote about this method as appk plied to Hebrew, sometimes called “¿Ivrit be-¿Ivrit.”21 The natural method suited their practical and ideological needs and soon became an important part of the philosophy of the Hebrew revival movement. Grazovski’s essay on the natural method is written as a concise manual for teachers of Hebrew and is indebted to the work of an inspector general of elementary education in France who trained teachers of French for the Jewish population in North Africa. Epstein’s essay is less practical than Grazovski’s; it is more of a polk lemic in favor of the natural method and is therefore more revealing of the Romantic nationalist project. His recommendations for effective Hebrew pedagogy include a Romantic description of outdoor excursions where the children will be guided by the teachers’ speech and their own direct interactk tions with nature: When we teach introductory geography we will take the children outside, we will show them the four cardinal directions, we will take them to the top of a hill, and they shall see the forest, the boulders, the slope; we will bring them down to the valley€.€.€.€they shall feel the wind and ponder the clouds, thick ones and light ones, they shall touch the plants, wet their fingk gers in the dew drops; they shall open their eyes and gaze at the world and all it contains and then they shall comprehend our utterances. When we teach them introductory natural history we will present our pupils with a variety of living things, we will show them goat hooves and horns, cat claws
30
a new sound in hebrew poetry
and teeth.€.€.€.€We will place before them€.€.€.€skin, flesh, bones, veins, blood.€.€.€. We will present them with sand, clay, stones and different metak als. And even when we teach them history, we will place before the little learners good lifelike reproductions illustrating the heroes of the story and their deeds, and we shall breathe life into dead souls. (Epstein 385; emphasis added)
Epstein is not merely using the natural method to teach Hebrew. He is integk grating the natural method into the nationalist cause of language revival and breathing life into Jewish history and the Hebrew language.22 In this formulatk tion of language learning, nature is the teacher and there is a direct parallel between language and realia.23 This presentation is reminiscent of some of the strategies of the primers of the period in which Hebrew is depicted as the natural speech of the child, akin to the bird’s song and the cat’s meow.24 The natural method had been designed to teach a second language to speakek ers of a national language. It was assumed that pupils in the primary schools of Europe could speak the languages of their respective nations by the time they were old enough to go to school—that the language of instruction was in fact their mother tongue. The innovation of “¿Ivrit be-¿Ivrit” was to use the method not to facilitate the acquisition of a foreign language, but with the national langk guage itself as the target, so that Hebrew would in the course of a generation or two become a mother tongue. Epstein sees this method as a solution to the problk lem of the nation’s lack of a national language. He warns against both using other languages in the classroom and emphasizing reading and book-learning over speech and direct experience, in keeping with the philosophy of the naturk ral method. Before moving from the outdoors to the classroom, he compares the natural method to book-learning through agriculture, the favorite metapk phoric realm of the nationalist writers of the period. The farmer who knows how to care for his crops, Epstein reminds the reader, is in the end more useful than the agronomist who cannot plow a field: [Follow these prescriptions] but in an even more orderly manner, and the language the children are learning shall be like a mother tongue to them. Let not your pupils hear even one word of their language escape your lips, be in their eyes as people who cannot speak their [own] language. Make your school—during your lessons, at the very least—into a small nationstate in which only the language of instruction is spoken; the child shall understand that when he crosses the threshold of the school he is entering this nation-state. (Epstein 386; emphasis added)
The Hebrew classroom or the school does not merely teach the child to be a good citizen, as any school must do. Epstein’s classroom must serve as a subsk stitute home in teaching a new mother tongue, and as a substitute nation-state for a people that has neither territorial sovereignty nor, as yet, a national langk
“Make your school a nation-state”
31
guage. The school is a microcosm of a nonexistent nation-state.25 The classrk room replaces the family and the teacher replaces the mother—although the vast majority of teachers were male. The language of instruction within the schools is meant, in its European context, to mimic the use of a national langk guage within the nation-state. If German is the language of instruction in schools in Berlin that is because German is the language of the nation. That is, the power of the school to create a national subject is elided by its prior impk plementation. If Hebrew is the language of instruction in Jerusalem schools, however, that is so despite the lack of a Hebraic environment which, for the most part, exists only inside the school. The classroom itself serves as a model for a Hebrew nationality, and the school is the territory of that imaginary natk tionality. They mimic neither the immediate external environment nor any actual environment. At the same time, nature is also an integral part of Hebk brew education and of nationalist life whether the field trips are taking place in Europe or in Palestine. If on Epstein’s romantic field trips nature itself will inspire the children to speak, upon their return to the classroom the pupils will continue to learn in the miniature society that is the school. With the natural method, Epstein imagines the national home as a projection of the classroom, from what is supposed to be the merely cultural domain onto the political domain: “let the child know that when he crosses the threshold of the school he is entering this nation-state” (Epstein 386). For all his apparent minimizing of book learning, Epstein does address the role of books and literature, albeit with no small measure of ambivalence. No sooner has he introduced the natural method, emphasizing the importance of exposing children to nature and to spoken Hebrew, then he changes course entirely and addresses the central role of books in acquiring language: Behold, you simply wanted to learn to read books, but now [with the naturk ral method] you know how to speak, too, as well as to write—as much as it is possible to write and speak a dead language. You may have no use for speech but it is sufficient that it was the introduction that eased much of the burden of your journey. It never occurred to anyone to think that it is enough for us to speak a language in order to teach it. No. True knowledge of a language is acquired through the reading of the library’s greatest works, but only on the condition that you learn and read only that very language, without the aid of any other language. (Epstein 388; emphasis added)
Epstein’s justification for using the natural method is its ability to facilitate the same results as the translation method. (“You wanted to learn how to read—well, speaking helped you do that.”) But if you really want to learn how to speak, Epsk stein says, you must read! For all the teacher may instruct in grammar and vock cabulary and for all Epstein wants the pupils to learn the language “naturally,” in the end they must listen to the books, as it were, for only by hearing the sound of the language of the books can one learn to speak a fine Hebrew. Epstein is
32
a new sound in hebrew poetry
both making a claim for the importance of Hebrew speech—though he lacks the naturalizing presence of a national, bureaucratic Hebrew that would neck cessitate this kind of education—and at the same time trying to generate a sense of a high-Â�status Hebrew, again without the naturalizing presence of a national language. The introduction of the library is useful for both parts of his argument. At the moment when the success of Epstein’s Hebrew program seems most dependent on a community of Hebrew speakers—one that does not quite exist—he replaces the face-to-face contact of the natural method with the text of an imagined community. Hebrew books help readers to imagik ine a community of contemporary speakers as well as predecessors who gleaned the truths of their nation through these books. Epstein’s attempt to produce a high-status Hebrew can thus only be achieved through the introdk duction of a literary language. Epstein does not specify the contents of the library. Regardless, however, of the books he has in mind (which probably include the Bible and medieval poetry), the greatest works in the library, or even the simple certainty that they exist, facilitate the production of a high-status national language. These works are literature in the sense in which John Guillory writes, with respect to English literature, of “canonical genres of writing, whatever these genres happk pen to be in any particular time or place€.€.€.€genres of writing which become paradigmatic for a socially differentiated speech.”26 One role of literature is to classify forms of spoken language and set the value or status of each. Teachers acknowledge attributes of a literary work such as style, beauty, wisdom, and genius in order to account for its inclusion in the curriculum—its canonicity. But the most important attribute of the litek erary text in the nationalist pedagogic context (and in stark contrast to the ecck clesiastic context, for example) is the language in which it is written.27 Epstein’s library motivates his readers to acquire spoken Hebrew. The Hebk brew school can offer its own cultural capital and, unlike that which is offk fered by the French and, later, the German schools in Palestine, or non-Hebrew schools in Europe, this library has a Jewish national value that cannot be matched by the European languages. Although Epstein’s immediate subject is language pedagogy in the lower levels of the educational system, the uses of literature that he hints at seem to encompass the upper levels of education as well. The school standardizes language and assigns a status based on the educational level one has attk tained. This continues throughout the educational system. In the early years, literature is considered a tool for teaching proper speech. The higher a pupil rises in the system, the more she is exposed to literature as a means of Â�distributing a more abstract linguistic capital, such as a sense of style. Epsk stein’s talking library is useful at this stage of linguistic and cultural acquisitk tion as well.
“Make your school a nation-state”
33
Poets and Pedagogues at Odds But what of the poetry in Epstein’s talking library? If the volumes of the best Hebrew poetry of the time could speak, would Epstein really want his pupils to listen? Two articles and a letter from 1912 and an article from 1898 together tell a story of the growing divide between the Ashkenazic sounds of poetic language and the sound of the Hebrew of the schools. In 1898, on the pages of the Hebrew ha-Shiloa¿ published in Berlin, ±ayim Leyb ±azan demk manded of poets that they write for the new generation of children—that they compose poems for and with the new sound of Hebrew.28 In 1912 the Russian Hebrew-language ha-Safah published an emotionally charged exchange betk tween a poet and a Hebrew teacher.29 The tone of this correspondence indick cates just how central language and literature were to Â�Zionist nation-building and the extent to which the two were perceived as implicated in one another. These three documents react to the divide between the Ashkenazic sound of poetic language and the new accent of Hebrew speech. They also reveal a shifting balance of power between the school and the library; between pedagk gogic Hebrew and the poetic. To understand what is at stake in the rendering of accentual-syllabic Hebrew verse in a different stress system than the one in which it was composed, I reprodk duce here two transliterations of the first stanza of Bialik’s “To the Bird.” First in Ashkenazic: sholom rov shuvekh, tsiporoh ne¿medes, me- ’artsos ha-¿om ’el ¿aloni— ’el kolekh ki ¿orev mah nafshi kholosoh, ba-¿oref be-¿ozvekh me¿oni.
The foot or unit of rhythm is the amphibrach, composed of three syllables with the stress on the second syllable (È/È); the poem alternates between four and three feet per line (tetrameter and trimeter). The first syllable of the pattk tern is “missing,” but otherwise the pattern is complete: [È]/È È/È È/È È/È È/È È/È È/È È/È È/È È/È È/È È/È È/È È/È
But if the recital were to be rendered using a Sephardic stress system, the rhythm would be affected: shalom rav, shuvekh, tsiporah ne¿medet, me- ’artsot ha-¿om ’el ¿aloni— ’el kolekh ki ¿arev mah nafshi khalatah, ba-¿oref be-¿ozvekh me¿oni.
34
a new sound in hebrew poetry È/È È/È È/È /È ÈÈ/ È/È ÈÈ/ È/È È/È È/È /È È/È ÈÈ/ ÈÈ/
One can see that the pattern is disrupted when the poem is read using a SeÂ� phardic stress pattern. The stanza now sounds like a speech and has the rhythm of a lecture rather than the fluid rhythm Bialik intended. The rhythm in accentual-syllabic poems is generated by the stressed syllable of words as uttered in normal speech. If one’s pronunciation of words changed to such an extent that formerly unstressed syllables were stressed and vice versa, the pattk tern would be disrupted, the rhythm lost. ±azan opens his article by citing the first stanza of Bialik’s poem “Nation’s Blessing” (Birkat ¿am), marking the stressed and unstressed syllables to undersk score the accentual-syllabic meter.30 The poet cannot be ambivalent about the stress system he is employing when writing in accentual-syllabic meter because the prosody depends upon it. Since ±azan is writing in support of accentualsyllabic meter, contemporary readers may very well expect a paean to Bialik and Tchernichovsky to follow. It does not. ±azan sees even those few Hebrew poems that have appeared in the “modern meter” as self-defeating because they maintain the erroneous [i.e., the Ashkenazic] pronunciation of the masses that is destined to be forgotten as soon as the new teachers and instructors teach the youth a corrected version of our language based on the rules of grammar. That is the reason why one frequently hears the youngsters, [all of whom] know another language€.€.€.€saying that Hebrew poems are written without any meter or rhythm at all and that a poem writtk ten in Hebrew is nothing more than rhyming prose. And the high school students, who know that the poems they learn in ancient languages are read according to length of their vowels, innocently inquire when reading a Hebrew poem—“How are Hebrew poems to be read?” (±azan 573)
The high school students speak a Hebrew in which the major stress tends to fall on the final syllable of a word. This means that when they read the works of the two most renowned poets of their time, those works do not sound poek etic. This is a moment of crisis; the project of Hebrew pedagogy has been undk dermined. As Azaryahu correctly asserts, the nation is supposed to present universal knowledge through its own language as Hebrew knowledge, but the students of ±azan’s essay are left to wonder how Hebrew poems are to be read. Some may simply be convinced of the inferiority of the rhythms of their national literature. The exposure to other national literatures would have set expectations for how a poem can orchestrate sounds and Hebrew poetry is failing to live up to those expectations. When a single volume of accentual-syllabic poems talks, it tells us more
“Make your school a nation-state”
35
about the sound of Hebrew than does the essay, the short story, the scientific text, or the nineteenth-century syllabic poetry against which Bialik and TcherÂ� nichovsky reacted. ±azan encourages poets to continue to write in accentualsyllabic meter—but in the new accent—by pointing out its usefulness. Hebrew teachers will use such a rhythmic corpus to reinforce the sounds of the newaccent Hebrew they are trying to inculcate in their students, and this poetry might even help members of the older generation to shed their own accents and adopt the new accent in Hebrew. The pedagogues seem not to have experienced a true crisis vis-à-vis the availak ability of new-accent poetry—perhaps because this difficulty was lost in the more general problem of finding Hebrew-teaching aids of all kinds as well as in the other challenges of introducing and maintaining a proper and unified Hebk brew in the schools. Some of the poets, however, seem to have been subject to no small anxiety about the future status of their Ashkenazic works. Accent was controversial for them because it stood at the point of convergence between spoken and poetic language. The schools had the ability to crown literary works as canonical and they had clearly rejected the Ashkenazic accent. This threatek ened the very status of the works of these Ashkenazic poets as constituting Hebk brew culture and as the analogue to the Russian, French, or German poetry they read. I will recount a well-documented moment of one poet’s anxiety. Tchernichovsky published his first poem in 1892 and his first volume of poems in 1898. Along with Bialik he introduced the Hebrew-reading public to accentual-syllabic verse in an Ashkenazic accent. In 1912, Tchernichovsky wrote an article for the Russian Hebrew journal ha-Safah.31 By then he was a major figure in Jewish intellectual and literary circles and also had a considek erable popular following. His article, which is more like a letter to the editor, captures the temporary conflict between schools and poets, between the teachers who were instituting one kind of Hebrew in the schools and the Hebk brew poets who wrote in another. In the 1930s, after four decades of Ashkenk nazic writing, this poet would go on to produce a considerable corpus of poems in new-accent Hebrew. As early as the twenties, he had been introducik ing Bi¿ovski at her poetry readings and praising her “pure” Hebrew. He was to become, in short, an unequivocal supporter of the new accent. But in 1912 Tchernichovsky was still a staunch defender of Ashkenazic. When we had only those who perused books, or even those who read them, it was not such a great evil; but now that we are fortunate enough to have among us people reciting their own or others’ creative work in public, it is an entirely different matter. And it is still not a terrible thing in prose. But when you read poetry aloud, then you see the strangeness of the thing. The reciter doesn’t know—or if he does at that moment may not remember— that our poems, since the days of the artist Maneh, are [accentual-syllabic], and he forgets that the best of the poem is its ringing tone and that a poem
36
a new sound in hebrew poetry
is a musical utterance which has rhythm. And if one were to read a poem by Maneh, for example, according to grammatical rules [i.e., with the impk position of a terminal-stress pattern or a Sephardic accent], the meter would be lost, as if it had never been. (CD 165)
The poet has walked into Epstein’s talking library—and he does not like what he hears. Tchernichovsky is most concerned about the bookcase that houses the accentual-syllabic poetry—“our poems since Maneh’s time”— and that it continue to be included in the library.32 He fears that his poetry, like Maneh’s, will be deconstructed, rendered prosaic by the suppression of its meter. If students are taught to read his poems in their own new-accent Hebrew, his success in satisfying the European aesthetic demands will be forgotten; his integration of “European” meter into Hebrew poems unappreck ciated. A student looking for the kind of complex and well-designed rhythms he hears in other national literatures will find Hebrew wanting. For a Hebk brew poet as immersed and invested in European poetry as Tchernichovsky, this is a tragic turn of events. Even if his poems continue to be read and canok onized by the school, they will no longer be appreciated as successful metric compositions. A Hebrew teacher’s response to Tchernichovsky was published in the next issue of ha-Safah:33 I hereby confess my sins. In the early years of my teaching career I could not read those accentual-syllabic poems written in the Ashkenazic stress [hat¿amah] in the correct grammatical stress simply because, as TchernichovÂ� sky put it, my ears couldn’t stand the cacophony of such a recitation.€.€.€.€durik ing the Bible lesson as well as all the other lessons I would teach my students to read with the grammatical stress, and during the poetry readings we would read in a penultimate-stress pattern. But little time had passed befk fore I realized my error. The duality of the stress systems [hat¿amah] introdk duced confusion in the children’s minds, and they not only completely ceased to read properly [i.e., with a terminal-stress pattern], but their recitatk tion of poetry was also hybridized: at times they read with the grammatical stress pattern and at other times with the wrong one [i.e., the stress pattern that characterizes Ashkenazic Hebrew]. And so I did not accomplish the goal for which this sacrifice had been made, and everything I had done was contrary to the rules and demands of pedagogy—for I was destroying with one hand what I had built with the other. (CD 168–169)
The teacher is sympathetic to the poet’s complaint. He also appreciates that the disjunction between the stress system used in poetic language and the one used in spoken Hebrew is a problem for the schools as much as it is for TchernichovÂ�sky. If the poem is read in the school’s accent it is rendered “nonpk poetic.” The teachers cannot teach Hebrew poetry as Poetry, and the pedagk
“Make your school a nation-state”
37
gogic structure in which all knowledge is delivered through Hebrew breaks down.34 Yet our anonymous letter writer nevertheless refuses an explicit request to recite Tchernichovsky’s poetry as the poet himself sees fit. Instead, the teacher has chosen to respond to the problem that poses an immediate threat to the unification of Hebrew. He is willing to sacrifice poetic sound and his pupils’ appreciation of the rhythmic quality of the poems, if grudgingly, and to deny a “founding father” of Modern Hebrew literature a legacy in the classroom— all in order to increase the likelihood that Hebrew speech will be homogenk neous and unified. If the school is to imagine the nation through the vernacular, it must deck construct these Ashkenazic poems.35 The dissociation of print from spoken Hebrew implies that the text cannot in fact unite the nation. Hebrew was a language in a state of retrieval from the printed to the spoken word. If literatk ture in the national vernacular—newspapers, novels, volumes of poetry—reak assures readers of a shared nationality, however imaginary that shared existence might be, the recitation of a text in a manner distinct from the pronk nunciation used in spoken Hebrew would have been perceived as underminik ing the very idea of unification that the teachers were trying to institute.36 Poetry is meant to be read aloud in the schools as a model of spoken langk guage and provides the occasion for a shared auditory experience. The indivk vidual recitations of the poem must therefore adhere to some of the school’s rules for pronunciation even, or especially, if the prosody would indicate othek erwise. At this point, the threat to the unification of Hebrew posed by Ashkenk nazic poetry in the schools must be resolved at the expense of the prosodic success of that corpus because the inculcation of the new accent is of paramk mount importance. Perhaps the teacher who wrote the letter would continue to teach Tchernichovsky’s poems and hope that other poets would learn from this exchange that poetry must be composed in the new accent. By reciting Maneh’s poetry, Tchernichovsky’s poetry, biblical narrative and poetry, Andalk lusian poetry, and midrash in the new accent, the teacher would have dehistk toricized the Hebrew language, making of it a stable and shared heritage of the nation. Conversely, the teacher may have simply chosen to give up on this volume of poetry. The debate between pedagogue and poet on the pages of ha-Safah tells us about how poetry encountered spoken language in the schools. It is also one indication that the history of Hebrew’s adoption as the language of instructk tion in Palestine is essential for understanding the rise of the literary new acck cent. The teacher’s rejection of the poet’s request foreshadowed the German-Hebrew Language War that was to erupt the following year. In the years leading up to the Language War of 1913, the confidence of the pedagk gogues grew along with the number of Hebrew speakers in Palestine.
38
a new sound in hebrew poetry
The Hebrew School in Palestine Over the course of about thirty years—from the mid-1880s until World War I —Hebrew education in Palestine developed from a few isolated attempts at Hebk brew instruction to what could be called a unified, if modest, school system.37 That is, Hebrew as the language of instruction came to be the rule in Jewish Palek estine. The teachers’ organizations also increased their influence and power in this period as the teachers expanded the domain of Hebrew instruction and impk plemented standards that were voluntarily accepted even by schools that did not identify as nationalist.38 The first institutions of what was to become the Hebrew educational systk tem in Palestine were the primary schools, which started to adopt Hebrew as the language of instruction in the early 1880s. The first Hebrew kindergarten opened in 1898. As the population matured, pedagogues founded high schools and finally Hebrew institutions of higher education were established: the Hebrew University was founded in 1923 and classes were first held at the Technion at the end of 1924. Twenty years earlier, a school funded by Germk man Jewish philanthropy had not even seen the Hebrew language as a threat and had allowed it to be used as a language of instruction.39 The establishmk ment of postsecondary education in the 1920s indicates that Hebrew had acqk quired significant cultural capital in the intervening years. Hebrew was the language of Bezalel (founded in 1906 as a secondary school, the New Bezalel School opened as a college for fine arts in 1932), the Technion, and the new university in Jerusalem.40 By the 1920s, then, the most prestigious educational institutions in Palestine were Hebrew ones and the school system as a whole was very much based in the New Yishuv, independent of European control. The first school to use Hebrew as the language of instruction in the 1880s was, however, in Jerusalem, a center of the Old Yishuv. Moreover, it was a school run by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an organization whose attitk tude toward Jewish nationalism ranged from indifference to antagonism and that hoped to enlighten Jews by exposing them to French culture. Like the German Jewish Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, the Alliance took pride in its national culture and was oblivious to the power and popularity accruing to Jewish nationalism in Palestine. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda encouraged the Alliance school in Jerusalem to use Hebk brew and offered his services as a teacher but the context of the decision as well as the reasoning behind it were consistent with an Old Yishuv attitude toward Hebk brew. As Azaryahu explains, in the 1880s it was actually easier to implement Hebk brew as the language of instruction in Jerusalem than in almost any other city or settlement in Palestine (60). Hebrew speech was used in Jerusalem among Jews, especially among new immigrants who did not speak Arabic. There was also a very pragmatic reason for the decision to teach in Hebrew. The Alliance school
“Make your school a nation-state”
39
was small and composed mostly of Sephardic students. In order to increase enrollmk ment, they encouraged Ashkenazic students to attend, but the Ashkenazic populk lation could not be expected to send its children to a school in which Ladino, for example, was the language of instruction (Ladino is the Judeo-Spanish language of the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean). The school administration would no doubt have responded differently had it seen the implementation of Hebrew as an expression of nationalist sentiment, as a threat to the status of the French langk guage, or as weakening French influence in the Yishuv in general. Instead, Hebk brew was offered as a solution to a practical problem. In that sense, the linguistic situation was not essentially different from that of the Old Yishuv in which Ashkenk nazic Jews addressed Yemenite and SeÂ�phardic Jews in Hebrew. But while the school’s decision was based on practical concerns rather than a nationalist agenda, it was nonetheless a decision—as Â�opposed to an unexamined consensus, as in the Old Yishuv marketplace—Â�that reflected a belief that Hebrew was a common and therefore unifying language.41 This may be seen as a turning point, as contributik ing in some modest, practical, and symbolic way to the nationalization of the langk guage. At the very least, the school briefly served as a laboratory of language instruction for David Yellin and Yosef Meyu¿as, who replaced Ben-Yehuda. Ben-Yehuda, however, certainly did have an ideological motivation. Throughok out the 1870s, he had tried to persuade schools in Palestine to use Hebrew as the language of instruction. He favored the natural method of teaching “¿Ivrit be¿Ivrit,” the norm for revivalist teachers, and some version of the method eventuak ally became the standard for teaching Hebrew in all Alliance schools.42 The elements that scholars employ to define language revival were already extant in the 1880s and 1890s, although some consider the revival to have begun later. The most significant difference between Ben-Yehuda’s early career and the prodk ductive years of his junior colleagues was that in the latter period, standardizatk tion was implemented in many areas of Yishuv life, in part as a result of the mass migration of the Second Aliyah.43 In the late 1880s, the first rural-settlement schools began to teach certain genek eral subjects, such as arithmetic and history, in Hebrew.44 A relatively small langk guage war was fought in 1887–1889 between the lower-level administrators of Baron Rothschild’s settlements who favored French and the teachers who switched to Hebrew over the next two decades. Rothschild himself favored the use of Hebrew. In fact, the language of instruction at the Rishon le-Tsiyon school had been Yiddish until Rothschild requested that it be Hebrew. In contk trast to his employees, he saw little value in implementing French as the langk guage of the Jews in Palestine and, like many nationalists, regarded Yiddish as a low-status language. In 1893 he visited Zikhron Yaakov and asked that there, too, the language of instruction be Hebrew instead of Yiddish.45 Paradoxically, this was noncontroversial both because of Hebrew’s low status and its seeming inability to compete with French, and because of the even lower status of
40
a new sound in hebrew poetry
Â� Yiddish. Even the French representatives of Rothschild who did not support Jewish nationalism preferred Hebrew to Yiddish. The new accent was still very controversial in the rural settlements, howek ever, and in several schools in which Hebrew-language instruction was first implemented, it did not survive into the twentieth century.46 In Rosh Pinah and Rishon le-Tsiyon, for example, the schools returned to Yiddish and French, respectively, very soon after the first implementation of Hebrew-language insk struction, and the religious establishment in general objected strongly (and effectively) to the use of the “holy tongue” in the schools.47 In addition to tryik ing to influence the existing schools of Baron Rothschild and the Alliance, pedagogues tried to open new schools in which they would have the freedom to teach in Hebrew. In response to religious opposition to the use of the “holy tongue” as a quotidian language, New Yishuv settlers wanted to establish both a religious school and a secular school to replace the hybrid one in Re¿ovot.48 Sim¿ah ±ayim Vilkomits came to that town in 1897 and taught there briefly before moving to Rosh Pinah in the north. While Hebraists were doing their best to institute Hebrew as a subject and Â�especially as a language of instruction in the rural settlements, nationalist educk cators in Jaffa—the urban center of the New Yishuv—were trying to find alternatk tives to the Talmud Torah school and the heder that would be more appropriate for a secular nationalist population. In 1889 Yisrael Belkind opened a school whose curriculum included religious subjects as well as Hebrew language, histk tory, and math. Hebrew was the language of instruction from the outset in all subjects with the exception of math, which was at first taught in Yiddish (Â�ElboimDror 131–132; Azaryahu 65–66). The school survived for three years. The Alliak ance and ±oveve Tsiyon agreed to fund a boys’ school and a girls’ school in Jaffa that opened in 1893 and 1894, respectively. The schools were not as zealously Hebraist as Belkind’s had been—for example, several subjects were taught initk tially in French—but were nevertheless dedicated to cultivating Hebrew speakek ers and instituting Hebrew as the language of instruction. In 1902, when the disagreement between the nationalist ±oveve Tsiyon and the non-nationalist Alliance seemed irresolvable, they agreed to divide their common wealth. The Alliance took charge of the boys’ school and ±oveve Tsiyon the girls’ school. Over the next ten years, the Jaffa girls’ school became a center of Hebrew education and activism. Azaryahu writes of the New Yishuv as centered in the rural areas and of Hebrew education as erupting there spontaneously. This makes it seem as if agriculture and education were mutually reinforcing goals. In fact, the two areas competed for resources and Vilkomits, who spent his career in the north, was one of the only pedagogues who succeeded in intk tegrating agriculture into Hebrew education.49 The urban spirit of Hebrew education was considered a failure of the system.50 The first Hebrew kindergarten was founded in Rishon le-Tsiyon in 1898.
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±azan’s article in ha-Shiloa¿ appeared the same year, urging poets to write in the new accent.51 As if to indicate that these events were not unrelated, 1898 was also the year Shemuel Leyb Gordon started writing new-accent poetry for childk dren.52 The founding of a Hebrew kindergarten in Rishon le-Tsiyon was an entk tirely different enterprise than the introduction of Hebrew as a language of instruction in the Alliance school. The decision to open the kindergarten was not a pragmatic one, since most if not all of the inhabitants of this agricultural settlement were native Yiddish speakers. Rishon le-Tsiyon was an unadulterated First Aliyah product—it was founded in 1882 and its population grew thanks to subsequent waves of Zionist immigrants. The teachers and inhabitants of Rishon le-Tsiyon cultivated a reputation as the Hebrew-speaking settlement, and they made a very purposeful decision to open a Hebrew kindergarten.53 The primary schools demonstrated that Hebrew was sufficiently sophisticated to function as a “living language” by declaring it the language of instruction, thus initiating the rise of Hebrew in the educational system. In the process of adopting it as a language of instruction, the schools expanded Hebrew’s capabk bilities. Hebrew’s “immaturity” caused many pedagogic crises—the lack of teaching aids, an impoverished vocabulary, and the pedagogues’ own difficulty speaking and teaching in Hebrew. All the other educational institutions grew out of the primary school—the high schools directly, as the Hebrew-speaking pupils grew up, and the kindergartens as language-preparatory schools for the first grade.54 The first gymnasium to open, in 1905 in Jaffa, was at first populated by future high school students who were in the first through fourth grades at the time; it only lived up to its name when its pupils came of age a few years later (Azaryahu 83). These were the early stages of Hebrew’s rise, but one can already see how knowledge of New Hebrew could have accrued economic advantage for its pupils in the form of job opportunities: young graduates of the Hebrew high schools were hired as teachers in the growing school system (Azaryahu 63). In the first few years of the twentieth century Hebrew may have still been sometk thing of a specialty market. This advantage in finding work was based on the rising status of the language; schools were expanding but only a small segment of the population could speak Hebrew fluently. In the second decade of the century, most speakers would have either been the first or second generation of graduates of the school system. As the number of native Hebrew speakers grew, so did the number of available teachers. But as the language was institutionalik ized in other domains, such as the press and bureaucratic agencies like the Histadrut, speakers’ economic advantages increased further.55 The founding dates of the various schools and high schools indicate that the primary schools generated a momentum and a population that required and expected Hebrew education, culminating in a Hebrew victory in the socalled Language War of 1913. The teachers created a demand by educating a critical mass of students in Hebrew in their primary school years. Eventually,
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the supply of upper-level schools responded to the demand of �Hebrew-speakik ing students ready for high school, for college. By consolidating, the teachers were able to raise the cultural capital of the Hebrew language and set the stage for the Language War of 1913.
The Consolidation of the Hebrew Teachers Most histories of Hebrew pedagogy in Palestine prior to Elboim-Dror’s study, especially Azaryahu’s, emphasize the heroism of individual teachers.56 As mentioned above, Azaryahu also writes of the rural settlements, the moshavot, as centers for the promotion of Hebrew education in Palestine. By privileging the rural settlements in his pedagogic history, he not only gives agriculture a larger role than it had in Hebrew education in Palestine but also minimizes the efforts of pedagogues in Jaffa to “revive” Hebrew and make it a national language of the schools. The implication is that this process was somehow spontaneous, the heroism of the teachers notwithstanding. Azaryahk hu’s account of the teachers’ heroism is truer to the role they filled in creating an autonomous educational system in Palestine than his implicit claims of spontaneity. There may indeed have been more non-Hebrew schools in Jaffa than in the rural settlements, but that does not necessarily mean that the lattk ter were not influenced by the educated and educating class in Jaffa. The teachers were central motivators of Hebrew education in the rural settlemk ments, and they very often worked toward their goal of Hebrew as a language of instruction and a national language against the objections of community leaders and of the parents of their pupils. The Hebrew teachers are central to this story, though not as heroes carried on the shoulders of the masses and whose arrival in the various locales of the Jewik ish settlement was greeted with relief and celebration. They were rather purveyok ors of nationalism in the Yishuv, and even the spontaneous mobilization of the students and others in the Language War of 1913 was a by-product of the loyalty to Hebrew that they cultivated in the schools they controlled or influenced. In this sense, the accrual of support for the nationalist cause seems to resemble more closely the Central and East European paradigm (than that of Western Europe) in which businessmen and shopkeepers in the urban centers functioned as messengers of the national agenda.57 Inasmuch as disparate schools started to form some kind of system, the teachers were responsible; their associations consk stituted the only formal links between otherwise independent schools. Thus, teachers with similar stances and nationalist goals introduced Hebrew in the ±oveve Tsiyon schools and in unaffiliated schools that were not as well-disposed to Hebrew or to Jewish nationalism. The teachers accumulated power by uniting, and their consolidation also contk tributed to the cultural capital of Hebrew in Palestine. David Yudelovits and Yehk
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43
hudah Grazovski organized the Teachers’ Meeting (’asefat ha-morim) in Rishon le-Tsiyon on November 20, 1891. Mordekhai Lubman led the meeting at which a nineteen-member Teachers’ Association was founded.58 This was less than a decade after Ben-Yehuda, Yellin, and Meyu¿as first taught Hebrew using the natural method in the Alliance school in Jerusalem, and only a few years after general studies courses were first introduced in the settlement schools. The group had a total of ten meetings between 1891 and 1895, and throughout this short period the teachers debated and decided how Hebrew ought to be taught in their schools. It is clear from their repeated declarations that Hebrew would now be the language of instruction that teachers’ attempts to institute Hebk brew as such were not entirely successful in this period.59 Russian Zionist leader Mena¿em Usishkin’s efforts to unify the Yishuv, and the Yishuv’s increasing autonomy from Europe mark the next stage in the unification of the schools. Usishkin had been involved in ±oveve Tsiyon and the Zionist Congress. On his second trip to Palestine in the summer of 1903, he organized a general meeting followed by a teachers’ conference in Zikhron Yaakov. The conference of the Land of Israel Organization (histadrut ’Erets Yisra’el) took place in Palestine at the same time that the Sixth Zionist Congk gress convened in Basel. Usishkin was competing with the European-based organization and trying to make Hebrew education in Palestine a domestic affair (Elboim-Dror 209–210). Fifty-nine teachers attended the conference and the work of the Teachers’ Union began in earnest. The overarching goals of the Union were to improve Hebrew education in Palestine, to revive Hebrew and an “Israeli spirit” in the schools, to improve the situation of the teachers, and to promote unification of the schools and the teachers so as to achieve their other goals (Elboim-Dror 215). Usishkin’s reorganization of the teachers was incomparably more successfk ful than the efforts of the earlier Teachers’ Association had been. The union elected a steering committee; they agreed to prepare a curriculum and to promk mote it in as many schools as possible and that the Teachers’ Union would support all schools that used the curriculum. (Azaryahu and his colleagues at the Jaffa girls’ school designed the curriculum.) The steering committee also designed teacher-qualification exams and was soon accepted as overseer by nationalist and non-nationalist schools. This gave the union a certain statk tus—it was the pedagogic institution that superseded the ideology behind each individual school. The powerful Odessa branch of ±oveve Tsiyon also recognized the Teachers’ Union and gave it authority over their institutions in Palestine which they continued to finance. The Teachers’ Union also founded a language committee (va¿ad ha-lashon) that was to play a role in the expansion of the Hebrew language. In the years following Usishkin’s meeting, Hebrew secondary education beck came the focus of Hebrew pedagogic activism. The precursor to Hertseliyah,
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the Jaffa high school was founded in 1905 although, as mentioned, several years were to pass before its students reached high school age. A second high school opened three years later in Jerusalem, and in 1912 the Odessa branch of ±oveve Tsiyon opened a teachers’ seminary for women in Jaffa. Aside from the union and its steering committee, the other major force affecting Hebrew education and its politics in the period between the formation of the Teachers’ Union and World War I was the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden.
The Language War In 1904 Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden (also known as Ezra), a German Jewish philanthropic organization founded three years earlier, began to compk pete with the Alliance for influence over education in Palestine when it opened a teachers’ seminary in Jerusalem. In 1907 the first class of teachers graduated and the Hilfsverein opened a business high school. The schools taught Hebrew language despite the explicit non-nationalist stance of the Hilfsverein. The practical difference, then, in the attitudes of the Hilfsverein and the Alliance toward Hebrew was a function of the success of the revivalists and the status of the language in the Yishuv in the first decade of the century. By the time the Hilfsverein started to compete with the other schools—and did so quite successfk fully—Hebrew was far from a liability. On the contrary, it had become a means for attracting students away from the Alliance schools. One of the Hilfsverein’s most ambitious projects was to open a technical high school and college with the help of Russian and American supporters. The Hilfsverein project to create a European-style elite of scientists overlk lapped with the Zionist project of building a modern nation. There was a lot of popular support for the idea among the Jews of the New Yishuv, and the Hebrew teachers and Zionists in Palestine were especially supportive—if only up to a point. That point was reached the moment the explicit intent of the German Jews diverged from the goals of the nationalists. In the fall of 1913 when the school announced that German was to be the language of instructk tion, a large segment of the population mobilized almost immediately in protk test. The partial overlap in the goals of the groups may explain why there was such a dramatic reaction to the Hilfsverein’s announcement of the language of instruction. Technology was a sign of modernity for the Yishuv and had great symbolic importance for the language and its revivalists. Because of the special significance of technology, it was particularly exasperating to lose this institution to German loyalties and what was turning out to be an anti-Zionik ist organization. The students of a high school and a teachers’ college, both Hilfsverein insk stitutions in Jerusalem, sent a letter demanding that Hebrew be the language of instruction and went on strike soon after. The Teachers’ Union organized
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45
its members and held a public meeting as well, announcing plans to open a high school in Haifa to replace the Hilfsverein’s and requesting that all the teachers conduct classes in Hebrew. But this move was made only after it beck came clear that the masses were willing to fight this war (Elboim-Dror 316). As Elboim-Dror’s documentation demonstrates, the teachers’ organizations were relatively conservative, not wanting to upset the equilibrium nor alienak ate the powerful Hilfsverein that prior to World War I was in charge of insk structing almost half the students studying in modern schools.60 In other words, grassroots activism characterized the outbreak of the war. The protest against a single decision of the board of directors of the Technion soon beck came a general attack on foreign influence in the schools and on German infk fluence in particular. By February 1914 the Hilfsverein realized it had lost not only Jewish popular support in Palestine but the backing of its American and Russian philanthropists as well. The Hilfsverein was forced to allow Hebrew to be the language of instruction. The relationship between modernity and national language is the theme of the Hilfsverein story. The use of Hebrew was an expression of national authentk ticity, a symbolic link to the ancient and noble past of the nation in its homelk land. But in the pedagogic domain Hebrew was also meant to be a sign for what in nationalism is the yin of authenticity’s yang: modernity. Technology and sciek ence were, therefore, of particular national importance for the European pedagk gogues, administrators, and philanthropists who wanted to institute high-quality science teaching, as well as for the nationalists in Palestine who had wanted Hebk brew to prove itself as a modern and able purveyor of knowledge. The Germans, on the other hand, had their own nationalist agenda and wanted their own langk guage to be the medium of science teaching—an agenda the students no doubt understood.61 German nationalist sentiment and considerable resources propk pelled the technical college project, but its implementation coincided with risik ing popular Hebrew nationalist sentiment. In his book on Hebrew language revival, Jack Fellman, like Azaryahu, makes much of this language war and its repercussions for Hebrew revival and pedagogy. Fellman sees it as a point of no return: Although Hebrew was to undergo many changes in the following years, particularly in the realm of vocabulary, in all its essentials its status as a daily language of a nation living in its homeland was assured by the victory in the War of Languages of 1914. Ben-Yehuda’s dream of thirty-five years previous had finally been realized: Hebrew had been revived. (Fellman 1973, 111)
In this narrative, the language is equated with the homeland and must also be won by war. The Hebraists won their war with the German language as the Allied Forces began their own and actual military conflict with Germany.
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Despite Fellman’s claims of objectivity, his narrative follows Ben-Yehuda’s autk tobiography in describing his role in the revival of Hebrew and dramatizing Ben-Yehuda’s life as determined by his love for the Hebrew language.62 This was not just the conclusion of a victorious war, but the culmination of “BenYehuda’s dream.” Despite Fellman’s melodramatic language, there was no such culmination or victory, at least not in 1914. The Technion building was completed in February of that year, but neither the high school nor the technk nical college opened until after the war. The victory of the War of the Langk guages was—these thirty-five years after “Ben-Yehuda’s dream”—a symbolic victory first and foremost. It was a victory of great significance, however, because teachers and especk cially students fought this war as did others not directly affected by educatk tional policy. Widespread involvement in what could have just as well been perceived as a noncontroversial administrative decision indicated that there was strong popular nationalist and Hebraist sentiment. Disinterested parties were very willing to participate. The Hebrew pedagogic movement had clearly had a remarkable influence over its students and the population of the New Â�Yishuv in general, and its sphere of influence now lay far beyond the indk dividuals who had passed through the Hebrew classroom in their childhood. Hebrew had now accumulated enough value that it seemed worthy even of higher education. The Jewish population in Palestine could be collectively insulted by the idea of a German technical college only because Hebrew had, in a mere twenty years, become an all-encompassing language of which they could be proud. The symbolic victory had concrete repercussions. As Fellman points out, the decision to teach Technion courses in Hebrew was an important result of the public outcry. But there were other more immediate ramifications, as well. Odessa made a 20,000-franc donation and an even greater sum was collk lected in Palestine.63 More significant, perhaps, was the comparatively modek est donation of the Histadrut. This Zionist proto-governmental body in the Yishuv had pledged money to Hebrew education in Palestine before, but it was only after the Language War that the organization actually made an expk penditure—5,000 francs to buy books for high schools in Palestine. Public demonstration around the Technion controversy proved to the Histadrut and to the public itself that it was feasible for Hebrew to begin functioning as a national language. This led to the accrual of more value for the Hebrew langk guage in the form of official backing by the Histadrut. It was only at this point and in response to what was perceived as Hebrew’s victory that the Teachers’ Union invested its political power and financial backing. The public and stridk dent debate around Hebrew’s status in the technical high school and in the Technion was a turning point not so much because a particular battle had been decided in favor of Hebrew. If the Hilfsverein had had financial autonok
“Make your school a nation-state”
47
omy or presented a better image to the public, or negotiated more shrewdly for the role of Hebrew in the schools, it is not clear that the history of the natk tional language would have been drastically different. The Technion controvk versy was of central importance because it became a forum for public debate. It was only then that the Jews in Palestine and their leaders could see how far they had come in solidifying a national identity around the Hebrew language and how widespread the popular support for Hebrew as the official language was in the Jewish settlement. World War I delayed implementation of the Hebrew science curriculum, and the technical college itself did not hold classes until the end of 1924. Britain’s conquest of Palestine in 1918 meant the forced closure of the Hilfsverein schools whose students were then farmed out to the schools of the Education Committk tee that had formed after the Language War. The Education Committee reorgk ganized in fall 1918, and in 1920 the kindergartens and the Jewish Colonization Association schools were integrated into the newly formed Education Departmk ment.64 The Hebrew schools were more unified than they had been prior to the war and now constituted a proper educational system. Children entering kindk dergarten in 1925 could be assured that Hebrew would accompany them through their entire education in Palestine. The rise in the status of the Hebrew language paved the way for the rise of the new accent in Hebrew poetry. Although early attempts to encourage newaccent composition failed, it was ultimately a pedagogic initiative that was resk sponsible for its rise. Poets were increasingly obliged to either compose in the Hebrew of the schools or to switch to free rhythm.65 Instead of picturing sevek eral distinct attempts at creating a new-accent poetry—the early ones failing, the later successful thanks to the shifting geopolitics of Hebrew literature—a more useful model situates these moments as part of the larger phenomenon of the rise of spoken Hebrew and the schools’ increasing influence over poek etry. As the schools’ ability to improve the status of Hebrew grew throughout this period, and as the centralization of political and cultural life in the Secok ond Aliyah encouraged standardization, the implicit demands on poets to compose in the new accent grew stronger.66 At the same time, it became less necessary for schools to make blatant demands on Hebrew poetry, even ones as subdued as those in ±azan’s article of 1898. Once Hebrew gained importk tance in settlement life in general, and especially when it became clear that the language would be adopted at the highest educational institution, the university, the new accent no longer required advocates. The Hebrew langk guage demanded its own respect. At the end of the nineteenth century, and as late as the second decade of the twentieth, it was not yet obviously in the interests of the poets to write in the Hebrew of the schools. Poetry delayed until new-accent Hebrew was the
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language of choice in the highest reaches of the educational system. The protk tests against the Hilfsverein clarified for the Jewish philanthropists abroad as well as for the Yishuv population itself that Hebrew was now the national langk guage. If World War I disrupted settlement life and cultural activities, in the 1920s readers were rewarded with sharp increases in the publication of newaccent poetry and started consuming it in large quantities.
chapter two
Representing a Nation in Sound Organic, Hybrid, and Synthetic Hebrews And just as the farmer rejoiced over the first crop of his land, the fruit of his manual labor, the first flower that sprouted in the grove he planted with his own hands—so too should the happy one [Tsevi Shats] have rejoiced over the first four verses he was fortunate to have been able to compose in the New Hebrew that was alive in his mouth. —Elisheva Bi¿ovski
T
he school plays an important role in the transformation of particuu ular modes of speech and writing into a national language. The peculiarities of Jewish history and nationalism created an awkward linguistic-pedagogic situation at the end of the nineteenth century, in which the Hebrew language was not sufficiently exercised to be fit for use in the schools in Palestine. It was not simply a question of instituting an existent all-encompassing langu guage or a mother tongue in the schools, but of adapting Hebrew to an entu tirely new usage.1 Nationalist movements in general and language-planning institutions in partu ticular valorize authenticity. This does not mean that nations necessarily choose the most historically authentic dialect for their national language. Language planners proclaim the importance of authenticity even if that is in fact a subordu dinate factor in their decisions. In the case of Hebrew, the language planners reju jected the most historically authentic pronunciation that was available to them, and implicitly redefined authenticity in keeping with their assumption of a defu fault Ashkenazic national identity that needed to be corrected without being entirely replaced. Authenticity was not the only value. Modernity, unity, and authenticity were all mutable values that played a role in language planning. All three of these values are mutable. As Joshua Fishman has argued, the “natu
49
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tionalist tour de force is to combine authenticity and modernism; indeed, to find that there is no clash between them at all.”2 Authenticity may also clash with unity, and unification with modernism. In this chapter, I examine some of the ways that the Hebrew pedagogues perceived clashes between these different values and the ways they resolved these clashes. The moments when the plannu ners found that there was “no clash,” or resolved problems in ways not justified by their own stated reasons, are moments when one can see their underlying, unacknowledged assumptions about Jewish or Hebrew national identity. Teachers and revivalists hotly debated the Hebrew accent of the schools. This chapter analyzes the documents of the Teachers’ Association and the Langu guage Committee, focusing on the teachers’ meetings of 1895, 1903, 1904, and the Language Committee meeting of 1913.3 David Yellin’s update on the new accu cent was published in 1908 and the joint meeting of the language and teachers’ organizations, which was not about accent per se, took place in 1911.4 In my analyu ysis of these documents, I pay close attention to the ideological significance of the various sounds and the goals and values that pedagogues set for themselves in choosing an accent for the Hebrew of the schools. I also analyze the pedagu gogues’ perceptions of the three options from which they selected a Hebrew for the schools. Despite the failure of many of the initiatives described in these documents, they illustrate the various ways that the revivalists imagined the natu tion through the details of New Hebrew speech. Each accent design presupposes an image of the unified nation. The images of even those accent designs that the revivalists rejected were projected onto the Hebrew of the schools and informed the way writers integrated the new accent into their poetry. Alongside the relatively unself-conscious activities of the schools, the pedagu gogic organizations attempted to intervene directly in the development of the language. These efforts were to have success in a limited but significant realm of Hebrew speech. The notes from the teachers’ meetings of the early 1890s through the second decade of the twentieth century are especially telling of the discrepancy between their attempts and their success at controlling Hebrew speech in the schools. The teachers also tried to control proper speech through the Language Committee (va¿ad ha-lashon), resolving in 1903 to set up a commu mittee of linguists to create new words and expand Hebrew vocabulary to suit modern daily use. The 1904 teachers’ meeting revisited the issue and establu lished a separate committee to set standards for Hebrew speech and writing. The Language Committee was the precursor to the contemporary Academy of Hebrew Language that functions as other academies of language to protect the language from too great a foreign influence, and to provide alternatives to the vocabulary that such influence generates.5 At the time, the committee was expu pected to expand Hebrew vocabulary and make other suggestions for the unifu fied growth of the language. It struggled for several years, lacking the means to pay for its modest needs. In 1911, after Ahad Ha’am’s address to a joint meeting
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51
of three language and pedagogic organizations, the committee finally started to make progress—only to be interrupted again by war. The documents of the Hebrew pedagogic movement in Palestine reflect the three sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory values of unity, modernu nity, and authenticity. The documents also indicate that from the 1880s through the first decade or so of the twentieth century the school became the ideological guide and measure of the New Yishuv. Pedagogues and students fixed the langu guage of the school in their daily interactions whether or not their practice suited the theoretical demands of the language planners. And if the school was seen initially as merely one domain in the revival of Hebrew and Jewish national life along with the home and the workers’ settlements, it became more and more central to language revival until it was seen as a microcosm of the New Yishuv and as the key to the future of Jewish life in Palestine. One of the first problems the revivalists articulated was the lack of standu dardization among Hebrew speakers in Palestine. Revivalists and pedagogues were concerned about the variety in both vocabulary and accent. In 1886 in an article in ha-Tsevi (The Deer), Ben-Yehuda addressed the problem of variatu tion in vocabulary which he attributed to the lack of a consistent methodolou ogy for the adoption of new words. He likens contemporary Hebrew writers to the generation following the Tower of Babel who could not understand each other’s speech:6 We therefore see a generation of Babel among our writers.€.€.€.€Reuven uses a word adopted from Rashi’s commentary and Shimon uses another taken from the Metsudat David commentary and a third chooses as he pleases from whatever he finds, or the writer uses a foreign word€.€.€.€as if he were addressing foreigners [and therefore] we do not know his true intention. A confusion of tongues and the destruction of the language!
Ben-Yehuda uses the metaphor of the post-Babel generation to describe Hebrew writers culling a variety of written sources for the vocabulary they require. In general Ben-Yehuda encouraged the recycling of older Hebrews. In his most concrete contribution to Hebrew language—his dictionary—Ben-Yehuda takes on the role of archeologist, retrieving words from the many historical layers of Hebrew and putting them to new uses. In this passage, however, he worries that the lack of centralization will result in a babel of tongues rather than an Â�enriched Hebrew. The entire nationalist project depends on the success of lingu guistic unification. If the builders cannot communicate with each other the tower itself is condemned to fall. The allusion to the Tower of Babel also impu plies both that modernity is at fault in the lack of standardization—Jews retu turning from the exile speak a variety of languages—and that authenticity and unity are aligned: before the corrupting city of Babel people spoke a Â�single language.
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Ben-Yehuda’s metaphor is also implicitly gendered. Linguistic innovation is deemed exclusively the work of men by dint of their access to the Hebrew libu brary of traditional Jewish religious scholarship. The exclusion of women is unru remarkable—“Reuven” and “Shimon” are the John Does of the religious scholarly tradition, and the absence of Jane Doe is naturalized by the otherness of women in traditional Jewish scholarship (women are exemplified when the case involves “feminine” issues—marriage, divorce, menstrual impurity). In subsequent writing, women’s exclusion from traditional Jewish learning would motivate their valorization as authentic and would come to be seen as the origu gin of their exclusion from the hegemonic norms of Hebrew authorship. The problem of variation continued to plague the revival movement for years to come. Ahad Ha’am was a leader of the ±ibat Tsiyon movement and an influential writer who articulated a form of “spiritual” Zionism, in which Palestine is a symbolic cultural center rather than the possible site of a future Jewish State. In 1911 he visited Palestine and was the featured speaker at the joint meeting of the Teachers’ Association, the Society for the Expansion of the Language, and the Language Committee. In his address Ahad Ha’am notes the progress in “language production” and recycles the metaphor of the Tower of Babel, highlighting Babel’s status as the first city in the Bible.7 The schools are swarming with Hebrew speakers and are constantly “producing” language, but each school is issuing a somewhat different product. He seems to suggest that the unbounded desire for progress, the attempt to grow the Yishuv too quickly, may lead to disaster as the ancient biblical desire to build a tower to the heavens led to the dissolution of an entire society: In every school I now find a factory for the production and creation of words. Every teacher innovates at will and whim. One names a common concept with a particular term, and another assigns it an altogether differeu ent term, and even in a single school the vocabulary of the pupils varies accu cording to the various teachers. This [experience] may adversely affect these impressionable children—who will not understand one another—by making them feel ashamed of their language. In place of this chaos that reigns in the schools, we must create “a single and unified language.”€.€.€. Hence my request to the Teachers’ Federation to call a joint meeting so that perhaps together you will be able to find a way to arrange for the determu mination of a single terminology [such that] this will not be a free-for-all where everyone does as he pleases. (CD, 36–37)
Ahad Ha’am uses the biblical phrase “a single and unified language” (safah e¿at u-devarim a¿adim) from Genesis 11, which describes the linguistic unity of the people of Shinar before they built the Tower of Babel and God “confu founded” their language. Ahad Ha’am may be reminding his audience that some things are better left alone. But now that the people have intervened in their own fate it is necessary to improve this new status quo. The danger of
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variety for Ahad Ha’am has not so much to do with the proximate problem of children understanding each other (although that is an explicit concern as well) as with the fear that their incomprehension will make them “feel ashamed” of their language. In order for Hebrew to function as a language of the schools in all senses, it must be unified. Teachers and schools must use a common vocabulary for pragmu matic reasons—so that they can work together toward the formation of the New Hebrew speaker, the graduate of the Hebrew school system in Palestine. But the problem of unification is no longer merely pragmatic. There is a more abstract value to consistency as well which Ahad Ha’am invokes here and which refu flects both the greater ambition of making the language respectable and its ability to compete effectively with other languages of instruction used in Paleu estine such as German, French, and English. The school system distinguishes and classifies students based on their speech. If the Hebrew school does its job properly its graduates will be proud of their language. Ahad Ha’am is linking the unification and standardization of the school’s Hebrew to its position as an institution that grants status and inspires pride. Ahad Ha’am’s choice of an industrial over an agricultural metaphor may stem from his interest in standardization. A proper factory or complex of factories produces uniform goods; the farm’s produce is naturally varied. Despite metapu phorically identifying the factories with the schools, Ahad Ha’am has yet to find such a factory for the production of words. Instead he finds a cottage industry where each school, and even every teacher within a school, exercises the option to fashion a Hebrew vocabulary. If one were to extrapolate a utopian vision from Ahad Ha’am’s speech it would be of a school that produced a modern standardiu ized Hebrew on an industrial model of consistency and quality. The Hebrew speaker would have mastery over a unified and modern dialect and this mastery would mark him as both modern and well-educated.
The Teachers’ Meeting of 1895 and the Synthesis of the New Accent The first documented discussion of the new accent by the Hebrew pedagu gogues in Palestine took place at a meeting in 1895.8 It is clear from the documu ments that there was already an understanding that the Sephardic stress system would in theory be preferable: Mr. Lubman says that he would not object to the Sephardic pronunciation [havarah], were it not for the fact that the pupils will be exposed to another accent as well. For if in school it is a Sephardic pronunciation, in his fatu ther’s house it is a Polish or Lithuanian one, and at synagogue the Ashkenu nazic pronunciation is usually Lithuanian, so that he will be confused and will not know which to choose. (CD 159)
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Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a “Sephardic” way of speaking the language. Jews from Morocco used a different accent than Iraqi Jews who in turn articulated some consonants differently from Italian Sephardic Jews. Likewise, there was no single “Ashkenazic” Hebrew in this period, as much as there were Galician, Lithuanian, and German pronunciations (which did not necessarily coincide perfectly with territorial boundaries). A constant for each of the accent families is its stress system. Sephardic accents are all based on the grammatical placement of stress: the stress generally falls on the final syllable or what would be the final syllable in the base form of the word. Ashku kenazic accents tend to vary more than Sephardic accents in the iteration of vowels but Ashkenazic accents share a stress system that favors accenting the penultimate rather than the final syllable of a word. In later meetings, the Teachers’ Association wanted to control other aspects of accent as well. But their priority—and their primary characterization of accent—was the stress system. This particular feature of spoken Hebrew would eventually conform to the preferences of the pedagogic movement. Revivalists attributed authenticity to Sephardic accents for a number of reasu sons, including the association of Ashkenazic with exilic inauthenticity. There were also, however, justifications for associating Sephardic Hebrews with the ancient national literary treasure: the Sephardic stress system was consistent with the Masoretic pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible which Ashku kenazic communities followed in formal recitation, while the common Ashku kenazic pronunciation was at odds with that tradition. In 1895 the teachers hesitated to impose a single accent for two reasons: they saw the schools as having limited influence and they did not want to undu dermine unification. Lubman’s comment, which seems to resonate with the majority of his colleagues, shows that they are afraid of confusing the Ashkenu nazic student.9 The teachers see the school as one institution among many (the synagogue, the community, the family) that influence the child. They also seem to be worried that children from different schools would not undersu stand each other. They must therefore intervene to standardize the accent. The case of the Old Yishuv showed that Jews who had different mother tongues could make themselves understood by speaking Hebrew even if they spoke different dialects. The pedagogues’ insistence that people would not undu derstand each other indicates that unification was already laden with meaning.10 Despite the fact that the problem of accent is presented throughout the 1895 docuu ument as a practical one, their recommendation betrays a discomfort with lettu ting the language develop on its own.11 Even in this tentative decision, the teachers demonstrate that whatever the outcome it was important to actively unify, oversee, and direct the development of the Hebrew language, at least in the schools. They seem to have wanted to synthesize a new accent inasmuch as that would prevent the free-for-all that existed in the Old Yishuv in which Hebu
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brew was used as a lingua franca among Jews with different mother tongues.12 The drive to unification is already an ideal, not simply a goal motivated by pragmu matism; accentual and linguistic unifications seem to be standing in for national unification. Since they do not yet see themselves as a powerful body capable of imposing accents on a population, pedagogues must work around the linguistic chaos of the environment. The stance of the Hebrew teachers was in flux and it was only in 1903 that they started to design an accent with the intention of impu posing it on the schools, and by extension, on the New Yishuv in general.
The Place of the School in the New Yishuv The Teachers’ Association was not ready to impose an accent in 1895 and simply hoped to deal with what they described as a pragmatic problem: how to ensure that speakers would comprehend each other. Notice the limited role for the school as articulated by the 1895 document. The school is only one of many places where a child will hear Hebrew. This document is therefu fore continuous with both earlier and contemporaneous documents from outside the pedagogic realm that express anxiety about variation in accent and vocabulary. Hebrew was in a very different position in 1911 than it had been at the close of the nineteenth century, even in the opinion of one as skeptical as Ahad Ha’am was about the nationalist goals of his New Yishuv colleagues. The evidu dence from 1895 to 1911 demonstrates how quickly the schools came to be seen as the center of Hebrew production and standardization. Ahad Ha’am’s anxiety itself about linguistic variation in the schools attributes power to the pedagogic domain. In his address to the Teachers’ Union in 1904, Yellin both asserts the centrality of the schools and interpellates the schools as initiators of standardization and the teachers as agents of standardization: The best means at our disposal for disseminating [whichever] is accepted as the correct accent is, of course, the school, for only the school can establu lish it as the standard speech of our children [literally: can place it and set it in the mouths of our children], and only via the school will it be possible for the next generation to speak Hebrew in our land, the center of our natu tion’s revival, in a single accent that can serve as a model for our brethren in all the countries of their dispersion. (Yellin 1905 [1904], 3)
Yellin’s tone is entirely different than the tone of the Teachers’ Association meeting of 1895. Yellin sees a series of concentric circles where the diasporic communities are at the outermost ring and the Hebrew school is at the very center of Jewish revival. The confidence of the pedagogic institutions has increased significantly. This extended moment in pedagogic history from 1895 to 1911 indicates that
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the schools’ adoption of Hebrew and the increase in manpower in the Jewish settlement during the Second Aliyah, as well as increased confidence in the institutions of the New Yishuv, affected the status of the Hebrew language. These papers also indicate that calls for unification were never merely a resu sponse—or never a commensurate response—to the concern that speakers might not comprehend one another’s spoken Hebrew.
Organic, Hybrid, and Synthetic Hebrews In attempting to institute a standard unified accent, the pedagogues had a number of Hebrew options from which to choose. The imposition of a natu tional language on a state or territory is an inherently inauthentic act since it requires a mapping or a remapping of authentic dialects (those present in their areas due to patterns set by the economy and migration) in order to demonstrate an equivalence between nation and territory. Regional dialects may be the most authentic modes of speech but they undermine the idea of unification within a national framework, and their historical authenticity as well as their location on the periphery imply a backwardness, a lack of the urban modernity that is often a feature of nationalism at some stage of its devu velopment. Despite the competition between the values of authenticity, modu dernity, and unification, each one may, nevertheless, be integrated into an idea of the language as a representation of the nation. That which most fully embodies ideals of the modern, for example, may eventually be seen as an authentic form of speech. The discourse of Hebrew language-planning in the early twentieth century invoked the central metaphors of the period: the three options for Hebrew pronu nunciation reflected the ideals of farming, manual labor, or industrial productu tion. In the remainder of the chapter, I describe the options that were available to the schools, and analyze each accent design in relation to authenticity or natuu uralness, modernity and unity. In describing the options as permutations of natu tionalist values, each weighted toward one or another value, I demonstrate how each hypothetical national language organized the give-and-take between the three elements, and how these options were alternate ways of configuring a para� digm for national identity through spoken Hebrew.
Farming Hebrew in the Galilee The Galilean accent was the first and most historically authentic Hebrew that was available to the schools. It surfaced in the 1890s before the debates among the pedagogues regarding the accent of the schools had begun in earnest.13 Yits¿ak Epstein and Sim¿a ±ayim Vilkomits were its initiators and, as the name suggests, they taught in the northern Galilee region. Epstein developed a naturu
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ral method of his own and it is his version of “¿Ivrit be-¿Ivrit” that ultimately had the greatest impact on Hebrew pedagogy in Palestine—more so than the naturu ral methods of Bekhar, Ben-Yehuda, and Yellin who preceded him.14 This accent was thought to resemble the ancient Hebrew accent used in the Galilee (there is evidence that the Galileans had a distinct dialect in ancu cient times), but Epstein himself adopted the accent from contemporary Lebau anese and Syrian Jews. Like many of his contemporary pedagogues, Epstein felt that it was important for Hebrew speech to parallel Hebrew writing as much as possible so as to make it easier for children to learn to speak and write in Hebrew. This partially accounts for his adoption of that accent, since there is a greater distinction of letters than in other accents. The kof, tet, and the weak kaf (khaf) were distinct from the strong kaf, the strong taf, and the ¿et respectively, which is not the case in Ashkenazic accents. But that does not entirely explain Epstein’s choice. A salient feature of the Galilean accent was the lack of distinction between the strong and weak bet (in this it resembles Arabic), a distinction that did exist in Ashkenazic pronunciatu tions and that was to be preserved in the Teachers’ Association blueprint for Hebu brew. One possible explanation for this decision is that he preferred to leave the two forms of bet undistinguished because one could then distinguish easily betu tween a weak bet and a vav, which in Ashkenazic and some Sephardic pronuncu ciations is pronounced /v/, indistinguishable from the weak bet. But the vav is pronounced /w/ in other Sephardic pronunciations, as is the analogous letter in Arabic. He could therefore have resolved the problem of overlap between the vav and weak bet by pronouncing the vav as /w/, while maintaining the distinctu tion between the two versions of the bet. In fact the Teachers’ Association propu posed this solution and he eventually accepted it several years later. It would seem that from 1891 until he left Palestine in 1902, Epstein’s choice of a Hebrew accent was dictated primarily by the principle of authenticity— adopting whole an accent that was considered to be the historic Northern Hebrew of Palestine—and secondarily (and inasmuch as the available options permitted), by the desire for a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. I do not believe that he was primarily interested in resolving the problu lem of letters with overlapping sounds as much as in selecting an accent—an authentic mode of speech—that would also be suited to contemporary pedagu gogic and possibly national purposes.15 The pedagogic advantages may have encouraged him to adopt the Galilean accent, but his choice is still quite distu tinct from the mix-and-match Hebrew that Yellin and his committee were to design. The Galilean accent had pretensions to a historical authenticity refu flected in its name and it also had the advantage of being based on a dialect that people were already speaking. Epstein taught in Safed, Metulah, and, from 1899 to 1902, in Rosh Pinah. When he left for Switzerland, Vilkomits replaced him in Rosh Pinah (having
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already replaced him in Metulah in 1896) and until 1918 continued and expu panded upon Epstein’s project of disseminating the Galilean accent. Vilkomits was known for the model country school he founded in Rosh Pinah and seems to have used the location of the Galilee schools to the accent’s advantage. Accu cording to Bar-Adon, he encouraged pride in both the agricultural achievemu ments of their region as well as in their unique accent.16 Vilkomits had an appreciation for the power of local pride as well as for the power of the two most productive analogies of the New Yishuv. He linked the agricultural and linguistu tic characteristics of the region to each other as the markers of Galilean identity, much as Hebrew language revival and Hebrew labor were linked throughout the period. These two successes in this northern part of the New Yishuv were also seen as incarnations of ancient traditions. The Galilee was historically both an agricultural region and a region with its own idiom attested to in ancient sources, one whose distinct flavor was actualized by Epstein. This is typical of the Second Aliyah period which tended to proudly identify ancient agricultural Israel as its predecessor rather than more modern urban Jewish models of the Diaspora. Bar-Adon explains how the Galilean accent spread and thrived in such a short period of time and why the Galilee, removed from the cultural center of the Jewish community in Palestine by poor roads and negligible communu nication systems, was the first area to have communities of native Hebrew speakers. It was precisely because of their location at the periphery that places like Rosh Pinah were fertile areas for the cultivation of native Hebrew speech, and one of the reasons the teachers were able to create a distinct and relatu tively unified Hebrew accent. Many parents did not speak Hebrew; thus the children were exposed to one dialect. The towns’ distance from the immigratu tion centers meant that they had a more stable population than Jaffa or Jerusu salem, with the younger generation more uniformly educated in local Hebrew schools where the Galilean accent reigned. The revival of Hebrew was quicker and more successful in the Galilee at this stage than anywhere else in Palestine. It was the only area where a predu dominantly Ashkenazic community of Jews had completely adopted a SepharÂ� dic accent (either one based on a previously occurring accent or a synthesized accent with a terminal-stress system).17 By World War I there were adults and young parents, themselves educated in and speakers of Hebrew in the Galilu lean dialect, who heard their native children speaking Galilean Hebrew to each other. But despite the unmatched success of the Galilean accent in the New Yishuv, it seems never to have been seriously considered by the pedagogic committees that formulated an official Hebrew for the schools. According to Bar-Adon, the Galilean accent was mentioned at the 1903 meeting but only in unofficial contu texts, and more openly—but still mostly “in the corridors”—at the 1904 meeting
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in Gaderah. Many teachers apparently did not have a clear idea either of what the Galilean accent was, or how completely it had saturated its “native” region. The geographic isolation that allowed the dialect to be cultivated may have also contributed to its dismissal by the centralizing pedagogic movement.18 The strongest objections to the Galilean accent were to the dialect’s weak bet, which was indistinguishable from the strong bet, and pronounced /b/ rather than /v/. One participant, himself a Sephardic Hebrew speaker from Jerusalem, objected to the division between the central and northern regions of Palestine caused by the Galilean bet, and other participants objected for similar reasons. The greatest concession granted to the Galilean representative was to delay a final decision. In the meantime the participants were expected to review Yellin’s suggestions. His letter of 1908 and his speech of 1913, however, are practically identical to the 1904 document in their recommendations, such that the Galilu lean accent never acquired the support it would have needed to proliferate in schools throughout the Jewish settlement. It is noteworthy that the Galilean accent was never even formally presented as a viable option for the language of the school system. Even if there were teachers who did not know of the accent’s success or of its many advantages— that it was an authentic Sephardic accent, that it offered distinct sounds for almu most all the letters of the alphabet, that the Galilean schools had already proved that it could be quickly adopted—Yellin, Ben-Yehuda, and other pedagogic leaders surely had access to this information. Pedagogues’ underlying assumptu tions about the New Yishuv and national identity and about how various sounds would actualize that identity probably destined the Galilean accent to oblivion. The school system’s rejection of the Galilean accent was overdetermined desu spite the dialect’s obvious advantages. A nationalist movement may invoke autu thenticity while effectively placing itself at a remove from the source of authenticity. The Galilean brand of authenticity was idyllic, regional, and peru ripheral. Adopting this regionalism would have too strongly countered the centu tralizing, unifying, and modernizing urban force of Jaffa and its teachers who were trying so hard to make a system out of disparate schools. A nationalist movemu ment based in the cities may have benefited more from remembering an idyllic past than from trying to relive it. And inasmuch as a school system may serve centralization, centralization serves the system as well. Once one pictures the grammar school as responsible for reproducing itself, it seems nonsensical for a central and centralizing committee to institute a geographically peripheral dialu lect. Choosing a dialect that represents the centralization of the school system, however, would strengthen the system. It would both enact the centrality of the dialect of the schools and effectively distance the peripheral dialects even more. The greatest advantages the other two Hebrews had over the Galilean accu cent, then, may have been their lesser authenticity (or their redefining of that value) and their balancing of authenticity with the values of modernity and
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centralization-unification, both of which favored an urban “post-agricultural” flavor for Hebrew.
Hebrew Values and the Teachers’ Meeting of 1903 At the 1903 meeting referred to above, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and David Yellin spoke at the session devoted to Hebrew accent. In general the two had different approaches to language development and expansion—positions that might at first seem dissonant with their respective accent proposals. Thus Yellin was a purist who thought that biblical Hebrew forms and vocabulary should be the primary model and Ben-Yehuda, who was by far the single most productive innu novator in the realm of vocabulary, saw all the various layers of the language, including mishnaic and rabbinic Hebrew, as legitimate and valuable resources for modern speech. Although both favored a Sephardic stress system, by 1903 this stance was not noteworthy. The theoretical preference for a Sephardic accent was acku knowledged in the 1895 meeting of the Teachers’ Association, and there are other indications from the documents of the 1903 conference that a SepharÂ� dic accent, not unlike the one used by Ashkenazic Jews in the Old Yishuv, was already being implemented in the schools.19 Yellin’s Hebrew accent desu sign would turn out to be a synthesized patchwork of sounds as compared with Ben-Yehuda’s accent, which boasted a Sephardic stress system but presu served several Ashkenazic features. Their respective positions were coherent inasmuch as Yellin seemed to conceive of linguistic decisions as prescriptive and Ben-Yehuda took a more relaxed approach. Their positions also correspond to the different periods in the development of modern Hebrew that Lewis Glineu ert describes.20 Speakers of the late nineteenth century were “proud uninhibiu ited revivers” as opposed to those of the early twentieth century whom he characterizes as inhibited and insecure speakers of a “corrupt” native tongue that needed to be corrected (Glinert 1989, 5).
Ben-Yehuda’s Hybrid Hebrew and the Old Yishuv Ben-Yehuda begins his address of 1903 by describing two approaches to the problem of the Hebrew accent, the “scientific” and the “practical.” In his lectu ture these labels function less as categories of inquiry than as values that favor a Sephardic over an Ashkenazic accent. By “scientific aspect,” Ben-Yehuda means the historical accuracy or authenticity of each of the accents, and the “practical aspect” refers to the pedagogic advantages and disadvantages of a given accent. The assignment of a distinct sound to as many symbols as possibu ble is preferred, to make it easier to teach and learn spelling. The practical aspu pect of Hebrew pronunciation is therefore synonymous with selecting distinct
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sounds for as many letters and vowel signs as possible. The Sephardic accents distinguished more of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet because they had a greater number of consonantal sounds than the Ashkenazic. Beginning with the “scientific aspect” or historical authenticity, Ben-Â�Yehuda presents a brief historiography of Hebrew accent only to come to the conclusu sion that one cannot with any confidence answer the question of which accu cent is more accurate historically, the Sephardic or Ashkenazic.21 He then moves on to the first category of sounds, the vowels. Having just bracketed the question of historical accuracy, Ben-Yehuda brings it back into his discussu sion immediately, citing it as the reason for his preference for Sephardic pronu nunciations of the vowels kamats and ¿olam:22 The basic differences between the two systems are the pronunciation of the kamats gadol and the ¿olam. Mizra¿i Jews pronounce the kamats gadol as a pata¿ [ä] and the ¿olam as the kamats [o] of the Ashkenazic Jews [the “Westerners”]. And the Ashkenazic Jews pronounce the kamats gadol as the ¿olam [o] of the Mizra¿i Jews, and the ¿olam as they themselves pronu nounce the tsere with pursed lips. (Kim¿i 389, CD 160)
The Ashkenazic accent distinguishes between the pata¿ and kamats as well as between the kamats and the ¿olam. The Sephardic accent distinguishes betu tween the kamats and ¿olam but not between the kamats and pata¿. The explicit value here is the distinction of letters and vowels with respect to their vocalizatu tion (for pedagogic reasons), but authenticity is still in play. An Ashkenazic pronu nunciation offers a distinct sound for each of six vowels, where SepharÂ�dic offers four sounds for the lot. An oddity of Ben-Yehuda’s approach is that he chooses the Sephardic nondistinction for one set of vowels (kamats-pata¿) and the Ashku kenazic distinction for another (tsere-segol); that he mixes and matches when the Ashkenazic pair that he retains preserves a small difference (that of the vowel sound in late vs. let).23 If the members of the latter pair have a phonetically negligu gible difference, it would be the less pedagogically useful distinction of the two sets of vowels. The members of the former pair have quite an audible distinction (the aw or o of the Ashkenazic kamats versus the ä of the pata¿), one with pedagu gogic value. Even if he were to mix and match Ashkenazic and Sephardic vowel pairs, Ben-Yehuda ought to have reversed his selection. He explains his prefereu ence for the Ashkenazic tsere-segol distinction rather counterintuitively: The difference between the tsere and the segol in the two accents [havarot] is so small that there is barely a reason to reject the Sephardic pronunciatu tion in favor of the Ashkenazic, and we can pronounce the tsere as the Ashku kenazic Jews do. (Kim¿i 389, CD 160)
If pedagogic ease were truly his motive, the insignificance of the Ashkenazic distinction between tsere and segol should have been reason enough to reject
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the Ashkenazic option in this case, once he had already chosen the Sephardic option for the kamats-pata¿ pair which does not distinguish between the two. The key to understanding this oddity lies in Ben-Yehuda’s unacknowledged Ashkenazic bias. Although he is proposing that the Ashkenazic tsere-segol distu tinction be adopted, he is not trying to mix and match accents. From his persu spective, he is recommending a Sephardic accent and is merely tweaking it so that it provides slightly more vocal distinction without losing its “eastern” sound. This is an accurate characterization of his proposed Hebrew only if one adopts a very subjective definition of Sephardic: an accent that an Ashkenazic speaker would identify as “more Sephardic” than his own pronunciation. Sephardic is invoked through a number of tokens and Ashkenazic is likewise denied through particular markers. In the end a Sephardic accent is relational—its legitimacy depends on a minimal but measurable difference from Ashkenazic. The dispariu ity between paradigmatic Ashkenazic sounds defined through a Sephardic aestu thetic and Ben-Yehuda’s proposed sounds is often more important than the goal of achieving authentic Sephardic sound values. Ben-Yehuda’s rejection of the Ashkenazic kamats that would have distinguished it from the pata¿ vowel—desu spite his adoption of the Ashkenazic tsere-segol distinction—has more to do with his attitude toward Ashkenazic than with the nature of the tsere-segol distinctu tion. The sound of the Ashkenazic kamats was very closely identified with that family of accents. It was a metonymy for Ashkenazic and would be perceived that way even in an otherwise Sephardic accent. In nationalist Jewish discourse exile is usually defined through the experience of Ashkenazic Jews. The paradu digmatic sounds of their Hebrew are likewise associated with stereotypes of East European Jewish life and ritual uses of Hebrew.24 In the context of New Yishuv Palestine, the Ashkenazic kamats would have brought such stereotypes to mind. Ben-Yehuda can therefore reject that distinction unequivocally, as unfit for the Hebrew of the schools. Ben-Yehuda closes by noting that the Old Yishuv contributed to the resolutu tion of this problem by having Ashkenazic Jews speak in the Sephardic accent. It is entirely fitting for him to mention the Old Yishuv. His position is relatively noninterventionist and he proposes a Hebrew sound that one might labor to produce if one were a Yiddish speaker instructed to speak Hebrew with a SeÂ� phardic stress system. In other words, his accent design is based on the same principles as those which Ashkenazic Jews would have adopted to communicu cate with the Sephardic Jews in the Old Yishuv. Ben-Yehuda is proposing a SeÂ� phardic Hebrew but it is one that is based on an Ashkenazic perception. It is “Sephardic” only to the ears of its Ashkenazic speakers. The underlying principu ple of the accent is that it suppresses sounds that are seen as paradigms of Ashku kenazic and adopts some elements common to Sephardic pronunciations. The practical demands of the Old Yishuv, in which the Ashkenazic Jews were expu pected to meet the Sephardic Jews at least halfway, are converging with the
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values of the New Yishuv. In the New Yishuv the Sephardic accent symbolizes a rejection of an inauthentic because exilic Hebrew, where exile is defined as an Ashkenazic phenomenon. Ben-Yehuda is supporting a Hebrew that sounds SeÂ� phardic to him, that is Sephardic enough to be easily distinguished from LithuÂ� anian and Galician pronunciations of Hebrew. The hybrid of the Old Yishuv can stand in for Sephardic Hebrew in the predominantly Ashkenazic New Yishuv. This talismanic use of Sephardic elements continues to characterize BenYehuda’s approach to the New Hebrew throughout the formal pedagogic discu cussions, throughout Yellin’s revisions of his own design and consultations with Ben-Yehuda and others. While working within Yellin’s parameters of finding a distinct sound for each letter in the years following this address, Ben-Yehuda nevertheless continues to support “as little change as possible from the accepted pronunciation” (Yellin 1908). Ben-Yehuda’s position on the taf, the tsadi, and the vav in response to Yellin’s suggestions several year later is consistent with his approach in 1903. His resu spect for the need to provide as many unique sounds for the letters—Yellin’s ultimate value—is subordinate to his wish to change the so-called accepted pronunciation as little as possible. Taken together, his choices as recorded in Yellin’s 1908 document are best accounted for by invoking the hybrid accent of the Old Yishuv. He is proposing what he calls a Sephardic Hebrew that is actually merely an accent that would tend to sound Sephardic to an Ashkenu nazic speaker—and granting it the status of the default Sephardic Hebrew. Ben-Yehuda was one of many in these discussions, but as the supposed founder of Modern Hebrew and an icon of language revival, the public persu sona which he promoted is revealing of more than one immigrant’s story. In assessing the myth of Ben-Yehuda in Hebrew culture, Ron Kuzar describes him as a “Gramscian organic intellectual” who presented himself as a modeu ern biblical prophet who disseminates ideas to foster and strengthen a hegemonic discourse, working his way up, in our case, from a minority voice to hegemony. Ben-Yehuda’s symbolic use of family life (raising his children in Hebrew) and communu nity life (talking only Hebrew to the people), and the publicity that his symbu bolic acts received, constructed him in the Jewish discourse of those days as a prophet-intellectual who did not only appeal to the minds and hearts of his readers, but rather positioned himself as a role-model for his audieu ence. .€.€.€Ben-Yehuda became a living example of the possibility of reviviu ing the language. (111)
I read Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew design proposal of 1903 as shorthand for the mode of the modern biblical prophet who “moved to Palestine” and “devoted himself to the revival of Hebrew” (111). The passage from Eastern Europe to Palestine is audible in his Hebrew—that of an immigrant who is laboring to speak with a Sephardic accent. Vilkomits and Epstein invoked the Galilean link between
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agriculture and Hebrew language, and among pedagogues they came closest to cultivating crops and language in parallel. Ben-Yehuda’s hybrid cultivates Hebu brew in a very different sense: his Hebrew does not seem natural and does not grow fully formed. He describes not a historically authentic Hebrew but one that might be produced by the nationalist, authenticity-seeking immigrant trying to speak Hebrew with a Sephardic accent as if it were a totem, an autu thentic supplement. The accepted pronunciation from which Ben-Yehuda does not wish to deviate (and which Yellin would rather correct) is one that alru ready contains within it a history of adjustment in which the speaker adopts some elements of the New Hebrew but never abandons completely his prior linguistic habits (Yellin 1908). The speaker must work hard to cultivate a new accent without ever needing to sound fully Sephardic or Galilean. The nonSephardic aspects of the immigrant’s speech underscore the migration itself, the desire to be native and authentic, of having yearned for the “Land of Israel” and of coming to the New Yishuv in order to work hard. The authentic supplemu ment marks him as arriving at nativeness through acquisition and adoption rather than by accident of birth. Rather than representing natives, the speaker represents the figure of the immigrant who “goes native.”
Yellin’s Synthesis: 1903, 1904–1913 The 1904 meeting of the Teachers’ Union in Gaderah is marked by a new confidence in the centrality of the pedagogic movement to the revival of Hebu brew and by Yellin’s introduction of a method that would determine the accu cent design of the Teachers’ Union if not Hebrew speech in practice.25 After the meeting, Yellin solicited the opinions of several linguists and scholars of Hebrew to respond to his suggestions and to offer their opinions on some minor questions of accent and spelling that had not yet been resolved.26 He published a review of the responses and a very slightly updated accent design in 1908. His values for and theory of accent are stable from 1904 on but the give-and-take with his interlocutors reveals the ideological significance they heard echoing in the accents. Although Yellin’s approach reaches a new stage in 1904 it had precedents in the 1903 meeting. Yellin explicitly rejects the particulars of Ben-Yehuda’s historicu cal rationale and to a lesser extent his pragmatic ones but adopts Ben-Â�Yehuda’s dichotomy between historical and practical justifications for the accent. In debu bating Ben-Yehuda, Yellin dismisses a historical-authentic argument as well as Ben-Yehuda’s wish to establish the Sephardic accent internationally because the residents of Palestine are already used to it. “There is nothing wrong,” Yellin says, “with reviving the language with different pronunciations,” and introduces a new revivalist pragmatic value: “Those in the Diaspora will speak as is their habit, for that is the only way the language will spread quickly” (Kim¿i 390, CD
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161). Regardless of which accent is historically correct and which one is used abroad, the Sephardic accent will be used in Palestine if for no reason other than that “they prefer the sound of it, and here too, a committee will have to insu stitute standards to rid it of error” (Kim¿i 390, CD 161). Yellin’s tolerance for different accents might seem to run counter to the desu sire for unification implicit in much of the 1903 document and explicit in Vilkomits’s statement that “in Russia there are different accents in three regu gions, but through the schools the government tries to unify the accent” and that “we must do this too” (Kim¿i 390, CD 161). In fact Yellin’s tolerance for variety serves the goal of unification that is underlying the positions of each of the three speakers and exposes the inherently territorial nature of unificatu tion. Unification implies a distinction of the language from various “mere” dialects as much as it does the standardization of that particular dialect-cumlanguage. In both Anderson’s and Bourdieu’s models, the creation of a natu tional language involves the projection of a particular dialect onto territory. This selection and valorization of one dialect through the medium of newspu papers, the novel, or through its adoption as the bureaucratic language (Bourdieu’s langue officiel) adds social value and eventually economic value to the chosen dialect, ever after referred to as “the language.” Unification of the language means enforcing homogenization and centralization so that one dialect is the basis for official communication, and distinguishing this language from mere dialects that may continue to be used. In other words, unification territorializes the language. Yellin wants a unified accent for Paleu estine rather than a unified accent for Hebrew, and linguistic variety outside the borders of the settlement may actually contribute to the sense of unificatu tion within. Linguistic variety abroad could help define the particular homogu geneous Hebrew that the teachers are trying to produce as a national language consonant with a territory and as the standard within the New Yishuv as oppu posed to and distinct from Hebrew outside Palestine. Yellin’s acknowledged motivations for supporting the Sephardic accent in 1903 are first of all aesthetic: the Jews of Palestine apparently choose to speak with a Sephardic accent because it is more pleasing. Even though the Jews of Palestine prefer that accent, however, they do not quite succeed in producing it properly—hence the need for a committee to “institute standards” and rid their Hebrew of error (Kim¿i 390; CD 161). Underlying Yellin’s aesthetic prefeu erence is the understanding that the Sephardic accent (defined in almost any way) has status that Ashkenazic Hebrew, associated with Yiddish, lacks. The desu sire to correct the already partially corrected Hebrew implies a need to preserve and increase the linguistic capital that pupils gain in the schools. Yellin’s idea of national language is territorial and integrates the notion of correction that is so important to the distinction that schools bestow on speakers. Based on this model, the Hebrew of the schools would be distinct from the lesser SephardiÂ�Â�Â�cÂ�iÂ�
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zation of Ashkenazic Hebrew that took place in the Old Yishuv as well as from a Yiddish-influenced Hebrew. At the 1904 meeting of the Teachers’ Union in Gaderah, Yellin presented the new accent design that was to remain the official pedagogic ideal accent throughout the Second Aliyah period.27 His first and major principle is that “we must, as far as possible, match writing to speech and speech to writing. This is possible only if every sign, whether it is a letter or a vowel, has its own sound” (Yellin 1905 [1904], 5). His second and third principles, subordinate to the first, are to “do our best to find in our alphabet the sounds of all the foreign langu guages, since we have to borrow words from them anyway,” and “to look to the Semitic languages, especially Arabic” (Yellin 1905 [1904], 6). The assignment of a unique sound to each symbol, which was the organizing principle of his lecture, continued to be Yellin’s position and became the officu cial platform of the Teachers’ Union. In describing his method, Yellin seemed to be offering a belated reply to Ben-Yehuda’s proposal of 1903 that must have had popular appeal and that was probably also similar to other teachers’ expectu tations for what the new accent would sound like. Retaining Ben-Yehuda’s 1903 distinction between the scientific and the practical, Yellin rejects the former with its implicit and flawed idea of authenticity and essentially selects a practicu cal method. Ben-Yehuda claimed to prefer the Sephardic accent because it had a greater distinction of letters (Yellin uses the term to¿elet, purpose; Ben-Yehuda speaks of ha-be¿inah ha-to¿altit, the practical aspect). Once Yellin has dismissed authenticity outright, he has even greater freedom to multiply the advantage of the principle of symbolic distinction. That is, he can now maximize the distinctu tion of letters beyond the limits of any particular extant accent (which was a limitation on Ben-Yehuda’s accent design), and thereby create a modern accent with a novel combination of sounds.28 In 1903 Yellin expresses the desire for a distinct and territorialized Hebrew and rejects not only the particulars of Ben-Yehuda’s claim but also the possibu bility of declaring one accent historically authentic. By 1904 he has found a way of following Ben-Yehuda’s other principle of pragmatism to its logical conclusion. By privileging a form of pedagogic ease Yellin is able to synthesu size a territorial Hebrew that in theory does not invoke authenticity. The bulk of Yellin’s 1904 speech is dedicated to making recommendations for thirteen problematic letters whose sounds in some pronunciations overlap with the sounds of other letters: the alef, vav, ¿et, ¿ayin, weak kaf, tet, kof, and tsadi, as well as the weak bet, the two forms of gimel, the weak dalet, and the weak taf.29 For the most part, Yellin proposes sounds for undistinguished signs—and has some radical ideas on that score—but he wants to retain those signs for which he cannot find a unique sound. He even tries to find a way to save the normally undifferentiated dagesh forms of certain letters. Yellin’s most radical suggestion to change written Hebrew to match speech concerns
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the question of the alef which, he explains, once had a consonantal sound but is now a silent letter, at most a placeholder for diacritical marks. This means that one cannot predict based on the sound of a word whether it is spelled with an alef. Yellin does not propose a new sound for the letter; he suggests that one day spelling be modified to reflect this characteristic of spoku ken Hebrew.
Making the Alphabet Speak There are times when Yellin would seem to be preserving Ashkenazic categu gories and filling them with Eastern sounds in the manner of Ben-Yehuda, as with his decision regarding the taf. But even then he is true to his ideal of text-sound correspondence and in that rare instance acknowledges the Ashku kenazic bias, excusing it as demanded by practical necessity. For although his method should call for the consolidation of the two versions of taf into one letter, he does not do so because it would confuse the Ashkenazic majority. Yellin fears that Ashkenazic Jews will not understand books that print the strong taf without a dagesh: And we who get used to writing every taf without a dagesh will not undersu stand books with words such as [here Yellin lists two verbs with the dagesh incu cluded]. The excision of this dagesh does not at all resemble its excision from the gimel and dalet where its presence is foreign.€.€.€.€[We must] adopt the sound used by that [small] portion of Sephardic Jews that does distinguish between the taf with and without a dagesh and between the latter and the samekh.€.€.€.€If it is impossible to adjust the written word to speech, we must adjust [our] speech to the written word. This particular adjustment will requ quire no great effort, because the [th] sound is soft and€.€.€.€it is also European, being both an English and Greek sound. (Yellin 1929 [1913], 54–55)
Yellin reinvokes the founding principle of his accent—choosing a series of phonu nemes that will have a one-to-one correspondence with the letters of the Hebu brew alphabet. By privileging the written word as the organizing force of the New Hebrew, Yellin might at first seem to be allowing his design to absorb the history of the language, to be accounting for its layers and integrating them into a static design. In fact, his model is ahistorical. Yellin is sensitive to the possibiliu ity that Ashkenazic readers will be confused and makes gestures toward prevu venting that while maintaining a one-to-one correspondence as much as possible for the sake of future generations of Hebrew speakers and readers. He acknowledges the Ashkenazic advantage that he incorporates in recognition that the New Yishuv population is predominantly Ashkenazic but his accent desu sign nonetheless tries to account for the diversity of the Jewish people. Yellin’s archeological project is not to integrate an Ashkenazic or any other history into the language; he is sifting through the letters available to him
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through the textual remains of Hebrew culture. The accent of his design would produce the farthest things from a historically authentic accent but he nevertheless co-opts the value of authenticity in a curious way such that the value of authenticity of Ben-Yehuda and Vilkomits is replaced by a synthetic value. The theoretical advantage of Yellin’s accent offers a parallel to authentu ticity by appealing to the underlying origin of the twenty-nine letters (by his count) of Hebrew. If speakers of ancient Hebrew had different accents, and if accents are inherently unstable and susceptible to influence, it is impossible to speak of a single authentic accent even if one were to miraculously meet an ancient Hebrew speaker. But whatever the particular ancient pronunciatu tions of the tet and taf, the signs no doubt represented different sounds at the outset. If this were not the case, Yellin argues, they would never have found themselves in the same alphabet to begin with. By returning to the idea of the originary design of Hebrew and assuming that a letter must have justified its presence in the original alphabet by providing a distinct sound, Yellin maintains the coherence of the alphabet as a kind of replacement authenticiu ity, and can all but ignore the actual history of Hebrew pronunciation. Yellin has effectively rejected the authentic value in favor of the synthetic value, creating a modernized, unified, and democratic alphabet. It is modern inasmuch as it is dictated by logic rather than habit or tradition; it is unified and democratic inasmuch as it collects sounds from a variety of linguistic cultures that are meant to represent both the diverse Jewish populations Â�returning from the countries of exile and the cultural environment of the New Yishuv. It is the correspondence between sounds and letters that defines Yellin’s new accent and makes it an inherently synthetic Hebrew—an accent that must be learned by everyone, that is as yet native or natural to no one. This language is democratic and free of sentimental feeling about the autu thenticity or coherence of the SeÂ�phardic or Ashkenazic accent. Yellin wishes to move beyond the categories of Ashkenazic and Sephardic to an idea of Hebu brew as the Jewish national language that is compatible with both European (English, German, French) and Semitic (primarily Arabic) languages, and that represents the diversity of the Jewish people through fragments of more local accents. The union of writing with speech comes to represent and replace the unificu cation of Hebrew speakers. This is apparent in Yellin’s notes on the discussion over the weak form of the bet: Regarding the weak bet, all our members are also in agreement that one should pronounce it like a German w; except for our Mr. Etan who wants it to be pronounced in the Galilean fashion [so that the weak and strong forms of the bet would be indistinguishable] and to destroy any basis for a unified accent that we all—including him—want, as our member Mr. Meyu¿as has already emphasized, so that shall not be done. (Yellin 1929 [1913], 67)
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The introduction of an element from the Galilean accent cannot in and of itsu self be responsible for the charge of disunity since Yellin’s accent is itself entu tirely patchwork. Unification has come to refer to the relationship between letters and sounds, between text and speech, as much as to uniformity of pronu nunciation among the speakers of New Hebrew themselves.
Synthesis as an Inclusive Method If one considers the hybridity inherent in Ben-Yehuda’s accent, Yellin’s syntu thetic Hebrew might seem not all that novel. Ben-Yehuda’s accent is an Ashku kenazic version of a Sephardic Hebrew and includes elements from both accent families. Likewise, Yellin’s is a Hebrew that incorporates sounds from Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Arabic, English, and German. But the two contain their parts in very different manners. Ben-Yehuda’s accent reproduces a momu ment in what may or may not have been a continuing process of adaptation and adjustment of the Ashkenazic Hebrew accent in the mouths of individual speakers. Yellin’s accent is more static, a snapshot of the nation rather than the encapsulation of a process of “going native.” It conjoins elements from different accents and even different languages, introducing sounds that have never before met in Hebrew. The Ashkenazic tsadi—alias the German z—is placed side by side with the Iraqi kof; the English th sound and the Arabic ta share the weak taf; and the weak bet common to many but not all Hebrew accu cents is integrated into the same alphabet as the more exotic waw from Arabic and some Middle Eastern Hebrews. Yellin’s accent is a national one but in an entirely different way than Ben-Yehuda’s or the Galilean accent could claim to be. His Hebrew represents the Jewish nation as a consensus of diverse sounds—representing diversity of custom, affiliation, and ethnicity—that come together in one national language. As in the example above of the reju jection of the Galilean bet, it is as if the accent itself can do the work of unifyiu ing the nation. This accent has the sound and feel of a consensus. This “consensus” that was synthesized by one man demands that its constituents sacrifice a particular, coherent, local, and regional identity in exchange for a patchwork in which different pieces are more or less familiar to each of them. Yellin’s alphabet represents an ingathering of the exiles, a modern secular redu demption in which Jews recognize and reclaim their national identity within their historic territory. His Hebrew is as national as the other accent designs but is synthetic rather than authentic or natural, and is in no way native to the land prior to its projected adoption by speakers in Palestine. His accent reconsu structs speech through textuality, through a consideration of the letters of the alpu phabet as distinct sounds. That is the basis for the democratic or consensual aspect of his accent, however imaginary that consensus may be. The alphabet comes to represent the entire nation through its parts even if those parts are organu
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nized with respect to an Ashkenazic perception. This is in stark contrast to BenYehuda’s Hebrew that presents or represents the whole nation through one paradigmatic element—the male Ashkenazic immigrant—and to the Galilean accent that emphasizes the historical authenticity of a Jewish Hebrew presence in Palestine through a regional historical accent. The Galilean also hints at the miraculous element of spoken Hebrew—presenting itself as the revival of an ancu cient tongue rather than the adaptation for speech of a language preserved through texts. Inasmuch as Yellin’s Hebrew self-consciously integrates a diversity of sounds even as it valorizes the Ashkenazic or Yiddish ear, it is a compulsory consensus. It poses as a kind of imaginary parliament through its accumulation of metou onymic representations of the diverse Jewish population that the nationalists would like to see united.30 This kind of imagining of the nation is reminiscent of Anderson’s explanation for how what he calls the administrative units in the colonies of the New World came to be considered the Fatherland, through the journey or pilgrimage as a “meaning-creating experience.”31 Like Anderson’s pilgrims, the sound-letter combinations in Yellin’s Hebrew find themselves in the same alphabet simply by virtue of having been retrieved and recruited from the various communities of the exile, the languages of cultured peoples and the Arabic-speaking natives in Palestine, in order to be a part of the New Hebrew of Palestine. This kind of dehistoricization is unique to Yellin’s design; he is not merely excising the history of Hebrew between ancient and modern times (i.e., between the proto-nation and ancient sovereignty) as the Galilean accent did. He is uninterested in coherent extant Hebrews altogether. Yellin valorizes the present as well as the anticipated and ongoing ingathering of exiles. His dialect is meant to be owned by all; it is the common wealth of a Hebrew speech generau ated from the Hebrew alphabet itself through the diversity of sounds of Jewish speakers from around the world.
The Failure of Yellin’s Hebrew The schools did not reach the ideal that Yellin proposed for the one-to-one correspondence of sign to sound and the synthesis of European and Arabic or Semitic sounds into a new Hebrew. Instead the Hebrew of the schools was closer to Ben-Yehuda’s original suggestion of 1903. The Teachers’ Union did not succeed in imposing Yellin’s accent from above; a makeshift Sephardicu cized Ashkenazic took root more spontaneously. The hybrid Hebrew won neither through Ben-Yehuda’s own efforts nor by election. It was simply the closest to a default attempt by Ashkenazic speakers to sound more Sephardic. Standardization of the Hebrew accent was a continuing concern in the 1913 meeting but the focus was on the correction of Hebrew as currently spoken in the schools. The teachers were aware that the pedagogic Hebrew was not
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“Sephardic enough.” Aharon Mazya raised the possibility that Jews might no longer be capable of uttering these Eastern sounds properly, but that explanatu tion is dismissed by ± A. Zuta’s testimony that those who have come to the land of Israel and heard the Mizra¿i accent [ha-mivta’ ha-mizra¿i] are able to regain quite suddenly what had been lost for thousands of years, and they have returned to “prophesying” with the [distinctly Mizra¿i] ¿et and ¿ayin and tet and kof. (Yellin 1929 [1913], 67)
Pedagogic negligence is therefore to blame, rather than an inherent inability to utter these sounds. Yellin, paraphrasing Zuta, writes that the fault is not with the Mizra¿i accent [ba-mivta’ ha-mizra¿i] itself but with the fact that it is not being articulated, and if our teachers would only pronounce it properly our students would make no mistakes whatsoever. Its nonarticulation is the result not of a lack of ability but rather primarily of negligence. (Yellin 1929 [1913], 67) [emphasis in original]
The problem is that the teachers are not correcting their students, not following the principles of pedagogic necessity for teaching Hebrew, and neglecting to distinguish the ¿ayin from the ’alef. The Hebrew they spoke was perceived as distinct from Ashkenazic Hebrew but as not sufficiently Sephardicized. The schools succeeded in instituting a Sephardic stress system (common to all three of the Hebrews I have discussed—Yellin’s, Ben-Yehuda’s, and Epstein’s Galilean). But the Hebrew of the schools did not provide a larger number of distinct sounds than the Ashkenazic accents and significantly fewer than Sephardic accents. They did not succeed in making the accent Oriental enough to distingu guish it from Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew as Yellin had wanted. The claim of Yellin and Zuta that negligence on the part of the teachers “accounts for it not being used” seems naïve, and Yellin’s plan to institute a new synthetic accent attributes an immense amount of power to his will alone. Nevertheless, it is not enough to explain the failure of his accent desu sign by insisting that an accent cannot be imposed on a population. Under certain circumstances—such as the adoption of the Galilean accent—such attempts can be quite successful. Both the Galilean accent and Ben-Yehuda’s accent predate the 1903 debu bates. According to Asa Kasher, there is no evidence that Yellin’s accent was reproducible by an internal grammar. He addresses the issue of Yellin’s naiu iveté with regard to the teachers’ ability to influence the sound of Hebrew speech and the possibility for the absorption of an entirely new accent: There is no natural language that can function as a first language, as a child’s mother tongue, if [the children] cannot master the rules of that language.€.€.€.€The best possible proof that a given system may be internaliu ized is that there are people who realize that system in a language that
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Yellin’s accent may have been inherently flawed. But even if one does not take Kasher’s position, there are other reasons that this synthetic Hebrew would have been doomed from the start. Because it had not existed prior to the impu plementation of Hebrew in the schools, Yellin’s synthetic Hebrew was entirely nonintuitive for the teachers and spoken by none of them. The hybrid and Galilean Hebrews clearly had neither a problem of coherence nor one of exempu plification; they had already demonstrated they could be adopted by young speakers, and there were already speakers of these accents at the time when they were first implemented in the schools. Because accent was defined negatively in relation to Ashkenazic, a great variety of accents would have satisfied Ben-Yehuda’s demands. His hybrid accu cent was relaxed and benefited from the relative ease with which Ashkenazic speakers could approximate a Sephardic accent. The minimum requirement of excising features that were considered totems of Ashkenazic Hebrew coincu cided with the notion of authenticity as a process rather than a finished produu uct. Ashkenazic teachers attempting to Sephardicize their Hebrew would have all been speaking a hybrid with errors. It was as if the error was a part of the accent itself. In that sense Ben-Yehuda’s hybrid had more or less already begun to be implemented in the non-Galilean schools prior to the 1903 intervu vention and it benefited from centralization in becoming the de facto langu guage of the schools. In practice the competition for the role of national language was between Ben-Yehuda’s and the Galilean accents. Pedagogues continued to consider the New Hebrew of the schools as not quite correct and not quite Sephardic enough. As it gained ascendancy in other domains, however, the Hebrew of the schools came to represent the authenticity that would have more logically been attributed to the Galilean accent, and the story of the Ashkenazic immigrant to Palestine stood in for the native in Palestine. As it was integrated into the poetry of the 1920s, the Hebrew of the schools served as a symbolic link betu tween ancient sovereignty and the modern Jewish presence in Mandatory Paleu estine. As the new-accent poetry featured in the next two chapters will exemplify, it was precisely this accent that revealed the rites of passage of the paradigmatic figures of contemporary Jewish life which came to be represu sented as the authentic organic Hebrew of the land itself.
chapter three
“Listening to Her Is Torture” The Menace of a Male Voice in a Woman’s Body Bat-Miryam reads with an Ashkenazic accent (and speaks too) and listening to her—is torture. —Ra¿el Bluvshtain, in a letter to Sarah Milshtain, 1929
I
n 1929, Rah· el Bluvshtain would have had many opportunities to hear immiÂ�grants speak in an Ashkenazic accent, and to read other poets’ recent compositions in Ashkenazic. Why then does Yokheved Bat-Miryam’s accent irritate her so much? It is difficult to imagine Bluvshtain confiding to Milshtain that listening to Bialik or Tchernichovsky—or even Uri Tsevi Greenberg and Avraham Shlonsky only a few years earlier—was torture. Bat-Miryam was certainly not an early adopter of the new accent, but why does that make her Ashkenazic accent so offensive? The 1920s saw the rise of both new-accent poetry and women’s poetry, and in fact the history of the two overlap to a remarkable degree. Bat-Miryam wrote in Ashkenazic Hebrew in Russia before moving to Palestine, but most of the small number of women writing poetry in this period began their careers—in the late teens or early twenties—as new-accent poets. Elisheva Bi¿ovski (writing first in Russia, then in Palestine under the pen name of “Elisheva”), Bluvshtain (writiing in Palestine under the pen name “Ra¿el”), Andah Amir, and Ester Rab all inaugurated their careers in new-accent Hebrew.1 Malkah Shekhtman (writing under the pen name of “Bat-±amah”) composed most of her poems using a Sephardic stress system although she was less consistent than either Bluvshtain or Bi¿ovski.2 Yits¿ak Lamdan, Greenberg, and Shlonsky, three of the most inffluential and popular labor poets, did not make a complete switch until the late 1920s (ca. 1928). Given the density of this very literary decade, a gap of four to eight years is significant. Even as the men maintained their Ashkenazic habit, hestitating to make the transition, these women were already publishing excclusively new-accent poems.
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Yet their reception was markedly different from that of the men; critics for the most part naturalized women’s early contribution to the literary new accent. The crowning of Shlonsky and Bi¿ovski as the two new-accent poets is telling of that bifurcated reception. Both the response each garnered on account of new-accent usage and the quality of Bi¿ovski’s work compared to that of other women working in the new accent are indicative of the implicit limits within which women’s poetry could be read. Bi¿ovski’s poetry was formally conservattive and she was praised most of all for the purity of her speech rather than for the quality of her poetry. Rab and Bluvshtain should have been the candidates for the role of new-accent poetess although since Rab composed free rhythmic poems her use of the new accent would have been less apparent to her contempporary readers—and less dramatic. Among the male writers of the era, then, it was Shlonsky, thought to be the most rhythmically skillful and innovative, who was credited with composing in final-stress Hebrew—and who in the course of his career earned a reputation as a symbol of New Hebrew literature and the rebel-heir to Bialik’s poetics with its distinctly Ashkenazic rhythm. Among the women, it was the poet most associated with the miracle of the revival of Hebbrew speech and the one whose biography was that of the ultimate Modern Hebbrew speaker whose use of the new accent garnered the most attention, rather than the poet who was most able to do things with words or rhythm. The new accent signified differently for male and female poets. As I will demonstrate, this difference was consistent with the reception of women’s poetry and with the gendering of authenticity itself. The gendered politics of new-accent poetry that still play a role in contemporrary scholarship derive in part from a number of prior assumptions about feminninity and language. In Hebrew culture the new accent was a metonymy for contemporary spoken Hebrew and was associated with women who, in the criticcism of the period, were most often perceived as verbally rather than textually expressive. Nationalist culture also associated women with the natural or motheer’s method of learning Hebrew—although the majority of Hebrew schoolteacheers in this period were men—whereas traditional Jewish textual learning was a male arena.3 In the orientalizing logic of nationalist culture women’s spoken Hebrew was more natural. This assumption encouraged critics to read the poems by women as songs they spoke or sang and discouraged them from seeiing what was daring and new in their writing. Both Bi¿ovski and Bluvshtain were received more as speakers, as signs of some stage of national development, than as artists carefully crafting their work. Women’s new-accent poetic compossition was both symbolically important, the sign of great progress toward a modeern and authentic national identity, and regarded as natural, as nothing more than what was to be expected. At the same time, these linguistic and literary assumptions about women, which limited sharply their reception as poets, may have also facilitated the rise
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of female authorship in the 1920s. Women as a group would have benefited more than their male colleagues from the risk they took of writing in the new accent. The logic of Bi¿ovski’s, Bluvshtain’s, and Shekhtman’s adoption of the new accent just prior to their male colleagues is not a logic based on claims that women were inherently more able, or better suited to making the change, or that they had been educated precisely for this literary-linguistic adjustment. The key is to look at concepts more basic to Hebrew culture than the different expectations for men’s poetry and women’s poetry—concepts that may in fact explain such prejudices. Given the difficulty that Bluvshtain quite possibly faced in trying to avoid the Ashkenazic sound in her poetry, a difficulty ackknowledged by Bi¿ovski, the relevant questions to ask here concern the symbbolic potential of women’s poetry and of the new accent: By what logic of Hebrew culture did women’s poetry introduce a new accent before men’s poeetry? What did the possibility of women’s poetry share with the poetic potenttial of the new accent? How did women and men writing poetry perceive their incentives vis-à-vis the new accent? What was at stake for Bluvshtain in BatMiryam’s use of Ashkenazic? To make sense of the reception of the new accent in women’s poetry, one must return to the hybrid design of Ben-Yehuda and the Galilean accent adoopted by Epstein and Vilkomits. These were two viable options for the nattional language that encapsulate masculine and feminine notions of authenticity. The Galilean accent was more historically authentic than either Ben-Yehuda’s or Yellin’s design. Galilean speakers came closest to mimicking an actual Sephardic accent and to purifying their Hebrew of Ashkenazic sounds. Epstein’s and Vilkomits’s success in inculcating their accent was also unmatched by any other revivalist attempt in the first two decades of the twentieeth century, yet the Galilean option was never seriously considered. It was in some sense too authentic—both provincial and peripheral—to serve as the langguage of a modern nation. Ben-Yehuda’s cultivated hybrid accent design was by contrast inherently inaauthentic—composed of sounds from a variety of linguistic sources. Neverttheless, it was seen as an authentic pronunciation of Hebrew and appropriate for adoption as the national language. The authenticity of the hybrid pronuncciation was not to be found in its loyalty to any particular Sephardic accent. Nor could it claim an authenticity born of a purging of all Ashkenazic sounds in favor of a mix of Sephardic and Yemenite pronunciations. Rather, the hybbrid Hebrew claimed authenticity by virtue of its partial abandonment of Ashkenazic sounds. If Galilean seemed deracinated, Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew was the sonic portrait of an East European Jew in the process of “going nattive” and laboring to become more authentic. The speaker of hybrid Hebrew articulated his Ashkenazic roots, as well as his desire to become more authenttic, with every phrase he uttered. Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew redefined authenticity
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through the narrative arc of the biography of the nationalist Jewish immigrant. Yellin’s synthetic Hebrew told a slightly different national story of the ingatheering of the exiles. His alphabet was meant to represent a plethora of langguages and to create combinations of sound that had never before existed in spoken Hebrew. It was a snapshot of the nation at a moment when unity was triumphing over diversity. Galilean Hebrew told no such stories of nationalist longing or national reddemption—another possible reason it was disqualified as a candidate for standdard Hebrew—and in this it resembled the simultaneous valorization and dismissal of the Hebrew poetess. Galilean Hebrew was always already authenttic. At least in theory, it neither retained a trace of the native languages of immiggrants from all over the world as Yellin’s accent did, nor represented the increasing authenticity of the Jewish immigrant in Palestine as the hybrid Hebbrew of Ben-Yehuda did. More than anything, Galilean Hebrew encapsulated the feminine role in the nationalist symbolic which was perceived as inherently authentic and as almost mystically connected to the ancient roots of Judaism. The twenties marked the last moment of insecurity for the new accent in poeetry and this linguistic uncertainty proved to be an opportunity for women. Nattionalism attributed to women qualities such as authenticity, which were also projected onto the new accent, and which were essential ingredients of national identity. The very idea of a national literature in Palestine was predicated on an idealization of the ancient past and its incarnation in the present, and on a causal relationship between place and authenticity. The symbolic potential of the new accent, as both ancient and modern, and the symbolic potential of women’s poetry were each seen in relation to authenticity and the re-incarnation of an ancient past. In this moment of tension and insecurity women were uniquely positioned to fill an important if naturalized role as speakers or singers of a Hebrew that was regarded as both new and derived from the ancient past. Female authorship was desirable precisely because it was seen as distinct from male authorship and because it implied direct access to an ancient past that was a marker of unadulterated national identity. Women could take advantage of the association of authenticity with both femininity and the new accent to creaate feminine poetic personae that satisfied a nationalist desire for a national autthentic old-new identity. Bi¿ovski came to be seen as the paradigmatic new-accent poetess because she embodied the natural Galilean mode of authenticity. In an autobiographiical essay that appeared in the journal Ketuvim (Writings) in 1926, Bi¿ovski portrays herself as a partisan of the new accent in poetry: As a Hebrew poet I can declare for my creation just one purpose: to serve as much as possible the development of Hebrew poetry in the New Hebrew language that we speak in the Sephardic stress [havarah] every day.€.€.€.€I myself treasure not the “spirit” or “Zionism” in my poetry, nor the “Slavic”
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nor the “woman’s spirit” that I brought into Hebrew poetry, but the few lines in which I succeeded, in my opinion, in discovering some small part of these possibilities.4
It is tempting to read these words as if they describe her experience and vision of her work throughout her career. But I do not believe that the recognition of Bi¿ovski as the new-accent poetess derived from her attempts to convince poets to write in new accent, nor that she even necessarily saw this as the “purpose” of her literary creation when she first started writing. Bi¿ovski was born to an Irish mother and Russian father. Because she was not Jewish she had a much higher ratio of new-accent to Ashkenazic Hebrew exposure than the other East European Jewish poets at the time: she had not grown up hearing Yiddish and Ashkenazic Hebrew at home or in her commmunity, and when she studied Hebrew as an adult it was in the new accent. The fact that she first learned Hebrew with a teacher who, as she puts it, used a “Land of Israel” accent no doubt helped to determine the non-Ashkenazic sound of her poetry.5 But it was the story of her acquisition of Hebrew as a Russian outsider that resonated with readers and critics in Eastern Europe and Palestine, and made her an ideal candidate for the role of new-accent poeetess. This much is apparent from the appreciations of her that appeared in Elisheva: A Collection of Essays on the Poet Elisheva (hereafter Elisheva), first published in 1927. The essays return again and again to a limited number of themes: Bi¿ovski as the first national (as opposed to religious) convert, as a universal rather than national Jew, and as a native Hebrew woman. Her foreeignness and femininity constitute her authenticity, her identity as a Zionist symbol and as the ultimate national subject. Bi¿ovski’s non-Jewish identity made her the quintessential Jewish female. Her familiarity with traditional Jewish text and learning was far less even than that of a poorly educated East European Jewish woman whose religious education took place in Yiddish. In that sense her foreignness reinforced her femininity by detaching her completely from the traditional Jewish learning and textuality that were associated with the Diaspora. Four of the essays in Elisheva compare her to the biblical figure of Ruth, the Moabite who folllowed Naomi back to Judea and was the ancestor of David the King.6 The critics think that Bi¿ovski’s new-accent Hebrew is beautiful because they see her as free from all that is undesirable in exilic Jewishness. The figure of Ruth incorporates the paradox of her simultaneous freedom from Judaism and her representation of the Jewish nation.7 Readers and critics project a Galilean-style authenticity onto this poet. Bi¿ovski’s pronunciation may not have been the least bit Galilean but “Elisheva” the cultural symbol represented a similar authenticity. Critical writing on Hebbrew culture in the 1920s also offered an analogue to the accent design of BenYehuda in the realm of arts and literature. Three essays in particular—by Tsevi
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Shats, Yehudah Karni, and Ra¿el Bluvshtain—provide a model for male authentticity in Hebrew language and literature. Shats’s “The Exile of Our Classical Poetry” (“Galut shiratenu ha-klasit”) was first published in 1919 and deals explicitly with the paucity of new-accent poeetry.8 Neither Karni’s “Artists in the Homeland” (“ha-’Omanim ba-moledet”) of 1922 nor Bluvshtain’s “On the Sign of the Time” (“¿Al ’ot ha-zeman”) of 1927 adddresses the question of accent directly, but the commentaries and prescriptions of each have ramifications for the use of the new accent and the perceived need for a poetry that would integrate it.9 The essays of both Shats and Karni tell the story of a literary-linguistic process that parallels the metamorphosis of the sterreotypically weak diasporan Jew into a strong, physically productive worker. The earlier two essays were written in an extended moment of expectancy vis-àvis the new accent, and both are concerned with listening and with absorbing from the environment as acts constitutive of a native national literature. Â�Bluvshtain’s essay appeared after the initial reception of women’s poetry when the new accent was well on its way to being established as the poetic norm. It describes artistic inspiration as far less environmental than the other two essays do. But Bluvshtain also describes a male model of authenticity and seems to appprove implicitly of Shlonsky’s accentual hybridity. She embodies a tension bettween theorizing poetry for men and practicing poetry as a woman, a tension that is nicely illustrated by the different personae she adopted. Her review essay is signed R. Sela, a genderless first initial and a “masculine” last name—the Hebraized version of their patronym Bluvshtain that her brother Yaakov adoopted. She signed her poems simply “Ra¿el” or “Ra¿el the Poet,” and in them one sees a very different practice than Shlonsky’s. In her poetic and personal statements about Bat-Miryam, Bluvshtain alternated between enforcing feminninity in her colleague and envisioning herself in the male role vis-à-vis BatMiryam’s feminine persona.
The Exile of Our Classical Poetry In “The Exile of Our Classical Poetry,” Shats describes a mythic-historic exile of Hebrew poetry that is parallel to the history of Jewish exile—and suppplies an antidote to this literary loss. “Classical poetry” is defined by Shats in linguistic and pastoral terms that make its so-called exile of a piece with the historical loss of Jewish sovereignty or the perception of it in the 1920s: classiccal poetry is written in the language of working men. But unlike William Wordsworth’s attempts to refine an idea of poetic language as the language of the common man in English literature, Shats is neither evasive nor abstract.10 He writes of the division of Hebrew language by Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Yemenite accents, and characterizes his own era as suffering from a divide between poetry and speech in which the language of poetry, Ashkenazic Heb-
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brew, is rent from the language of the people, or Sephardic Hebrew. Shats invvokes two moments in literary history, one stemming from the classical, the other from the biblical milieu which boasted a coherent literary language. He claims for each of these moments a union of speech and literary art and a convergence of the respective languages of working men and men of letters. Homer appears at the beginning of the essay in the role of wandering poet of his people before there was any “division between the language of the people and the language of the book” (106). Near the end of his essay Shats invokes the Hebrew Bible, the “classical” tradition of the Jews. He does not, however, choose to cite the biblical heroes or prophets of the Land of Israel, but “our anccestors,” a far more homely collective who tell part of their story in Psalm 137. These ancient Israelites experienced the Babylonian exile but lived to see Zion again with the rise of the Persian Empire. They are therefore figures in whom Shats would have seen a correspondence with his own generation who immiggrated to the Land of Israel: “How shall we sing the song of God on foreign soil?” they ask (Psalms 137:4). In Shats’s fanciful history, subsequent exiled geneerations were unable to keep that implicit vow of silence. Feeling an urgent need to express their sorrows and “longings for the homeland” but no longer fammiliar with “the strings of the ancient harp” after years of exile, the descendants of the speakers in Psalm 137—who were to experience perhaps more painful and certainly longer-lasting exiles—adopted the artistic media and styles of the various states and empires in which they lived. Thus poetry was sent into exile. Contemporary poets must reverse course, Shats writes, and undo the poetic and musical exile (112). Shats is describing a mode of authenticity that is gendered male. Unlike the always already brand of authenticity that was projected onto women, this is a process, a formula for becoming a native. For Shats, the salvation of literature is to be found in labor, which will strengthen the literary muscle of the nation. The workers’ limbs have grown strong since returning to their homeland and to manual labor so that they may now “once again stretch and reinforce the harp strings as in the days of yore” (112). But Shats goes even further, putting labor at the center of literary achievement: “The only language in which the true classic poetry can be sung is the language of the working people” (106). Poetry continues to bear the mark of exile because it is composed in Ashkenazic Hebrew instead of the Hebrew of Jewish workers in Palestine who adopt a SeÂ�phardic stress systtem upon their arrival. Poetry may redeem itself by absorbing that language of labor. In other words, the choice to be a laborer and the choice to speak new-accent Hebrew are equally expressive of a Labor Zionist ideology. Shats invokes labor and language as the twin signs of authenticity. And his excursion into classical Jewish literature seems to make the workers’ choice of Sephardic Hebrew consonant with ancient poetic language, while he speaks of Ashkenazic Hebrew as the “foreign accent” of contemporary poets. As in anc-
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cient times, contemporary foreign influence now prevents poetry from adopting and absorbing the old-new Hebrew. “With all its beauty,” writes Shats, [Ashkenazic Hebrew] does not strike our hearts, for it is not carved from the rough sods of our life, nor from the tones of our difficult or joyful existtence, which vibrates on our lips daily. Its value is that of anything written in a foreign language. (107)
Yet Shats does not leave the poets in utter submission to the language of labor. The process of language formation is not yet complete, not only beccause the poets have yet to produce a poetry that favors a Sephardic sound, but because their doing so will in turn effect changes in the spoken language. The divide between poetic language and the worker’s language, a divide Shats describes solely in terms of accent, is one that has yet to be closed. He wants the poets to close the divide not merely by adopting the worker’s acccent, but by building a Hebrew with a Sephardic base that also draws on Ashkkenazic and Yemenite Hebrews. The Hebrew Shats envisions, one that allows for Ashkenazic sounds, is in fact a variation on Ben-Yehuda’s design. And the give-and-take between poets and workers provides a formula for the relationsship between literature and the Labor movement that is just shy of A. D. Gorddon’s formula in which literature at its best and truest may be nothing more than the transcribed words of the worker.11 Shats provides a fairly convincing historical explanation, before the fact, for the integration of the new accent into high poetry through Labor literature just after—or in the case of BluvÂ� shtain’s Labor poetry, simultaneous with the advent of—women’s poetry. He tells a story that Labor poets, and not only Bluvshtain, could retell in their poeetry and one that could justify and even valorize their departure from the poeetic norm of Hebrew sound up to that point. But above all, “The Exile of Our Classical Poetry” is a call to poets to end the exile of Hebrew poetry just as they have begun to put an end to the exile of the Jewish people. What then is the first step in this process? What is the solution to the probllem of the “exile of our classical poetry”? How does one assure its “return” to the homeland? Shats’s answer is simply to listen. He sees Jabotinsky’s translattion of “The Raven” into new-accent Hebrew as the “first swallow.” This omen, however, has yet to be followed by other birds. It is almost as if poems exist not as texts but as sentient sound waves whose murmur will clarify and strengthen if people are listening. Tchernichovsky expressed anxiety about the future of Hebrew poetry, but that, Shats writes, is only one part of the tragedy. The other and greater part of this tragedy strikes the readers themsselves, those who long to hear and whose careful listening for the poetry of the homeland will not bring them fame. But Shats is hopeful that one day the sounds of a reinvigorated national literature will reward their listening. This self-same listening is also a stage in the creative cycle: the artist’s “holy
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need to receive” inspires his poetry (109). When the great poets come to “the Land” they will adjust to their new surroundings, but it will not be necessary to start from scratch as others suggest (110). The temporary silence in the momment it takes to listen will, on the contrary, inspire a new classical literature as writers work toward creating a native literature and help poetry rejoin its people in the homeland.
Artists in the Homeland The subject of Karni’s “Artists in the Homeland” is the creation of Hebrew art, as opposed to merely art in Hebrew. The enemy of this new kind of artistic expression is Europe—its sounds, colors, and forms—although the poetics Karni describes here is itself of European provenance. In an essay entitled “The Singer Nation” (“ha-¿Am ha-zamar”), published in the following issue of Hedim, Karni develops the converse idea—the authenticity of the noncosmopolitan working Arab and his song.12 The two are companion essays and the one of greater concern to us here is the first, in part because it directs the reader on how to meet the challenge posited in the second essay, namely the need to know the song that the Arab sings. In “The Singer Nation,” Jews are instructed to learn from the authentic native who is in touch with the land and sings of his beloved and his crops. Karni identifies authentic Jewishness with the Arab worker, seeing in the face of one old man the image of “Abraham our forefatther”; he has yet to see even a spark of that image of Abraham in any of the Jewiish faces in Palestine (Karni 1923, 46). If “The Singer Nation” praises the authenticity of Arab song, “Artists in the Homeland” provides a set of instructions for achieving something approaching that authenticity. Although he is speaking to artists working in a variety of media, Karni’s metaphors and images indicate a special concern with theater and literature. In keeping with the cluster of ideological code words of the perriod, his first directive for the artist invested in the homeland—the artist who wishes not merely to create artistic objects but to contribute to a homegrown art—is to sacrifice: And this is your sacrifice, artist: Do not hurry to the stage, and do not rush to teach us the art of the old school. You must be silent for a time and, while sillent, try to free yourself from all those impressions and sounds in which you were drowning in the exile. (Karni 1922, 37; emphasis in the original)
First, the artist must cease to perform or write. He must remain silent for a time and listen to the sounds of his new environment: to Sephardic and even Yemenite Jews; to the “wild cry” one hears at an Arab wedding rather than to the proper “European melody.” After a period of silence the artist will have freed himself of European sounds and absorbed the sounds of his new home.
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Then he will feel the need to express, to let out a great cry. And that cry, Karni asserts, will be the new poetry of the homeland.13
The Sign of the Time “The Sign of the Time” is a review of three books of poetry that were publlished in 1927: Shlonsky’s To Papa-Mama (le-’Aba-’ima), Temkin’s Drops (Nettafim), and Bas’s Man (’Adam).14 But in some ways it is more poetic manifesto than review—Bluvshtain only writes two sentences on Drops, for example—in which she is interested in promoting her criteria for the evaluation of books of poetry. In this essay, expression, or releasing the cry that is within the artiist, is constitutive of literature. Bluvshtain praises Shlonsky’s book at the exppense of the others, and in elaborating her praise and criticism she presents a model for contemporary poetry. Temkin was the last of the three to adopt the new accent; the poems in Drops are composed in Ashkenazic Hebrew. Bas was the first of the three poets to publlish new-accent poems, and in 1927 had published more of them than most of his contemporaries.15 Shlonsky’s new-accent productivity fell somewhere bettween that of his two colleagues. Had Bluvshtain evaluated these works based on each poet’s adherence to the new accent, Temkin would have fared worst, Shlonsky would have received middling praise (five out of the fourteen poems are in the new accent), and Bas the highest praise. In fact the essay is most critical of Bas and most admiring of Shlonsky. Bluvshtain’s evaluation of these books, then, cannot be directly correlated to the frequency of the new accent in each. Her explicit criterion for evaluation is “the sign of the time,” which she defines as “simplicity of expression”: Simple expression, that is: an expression of the first flutterings of lyric emottion—immediate expression, before it has managed to cover its nakedness with festive silk attire and gold ornaments; expression free of literariness, that touches the heart with its human truth, that satisfies the soul with its freshness; which has in its power to be engraved in one’s memory, to escort us in our daily lives and to suddenly sing from within us. (201)
The “sign of the time” does not refer (or does not refer only) to poetic subject matter but to a mode of expression—one that is direct, unmediated, and emottive. It relates to “our daily lives” inasmuch as it may “accompany us€.€.€.€and suddenly sing within us” (201). The source for this song seems to be internal, a genealogy of poetry that concords with those of her poems that are most expliciitly ars poetica. But how does the song enter the artist to begin with? Bluvshtain supports her claim that simplicity is the sign of the time with examples from foreign literatures: this kind of expression marks “the majority of the poetic creaations of our times,” including the poetry of Aleksander Blok, Anna Akhmatova,
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and Sergei Yesenin as well as the French poet Francis Jammes, whom she cites in a poem and whom she both wrote about and whose work she translated for Hedim (201).16 If this sort of expression is truly a sign of their epoch there must also be some influence from without. At the very least, the freedom that allows one to express oneself so directly is made possible by the current literary environment. Bluvshtain portrays Shlonsky’s To Papa-Mama as the embodiment in Hebbrew poetry of this kind of simplicity of expression. In the 1920s and 1930s, Shlonsky was indeed a very important figure in Hebrew literary politics, but his poetic persona was as an innovator and a rebel. He was credited with inttroducing new European schools to Hebrew poetry, with showing poets how they could write in Hebrew as they did in Russian, and with replacing Bialik and his school. His poetry was not known for its simplicity, at least not in the sense that Bluvshtain portrayed her own poetic language as simple.17 Bluvshtain suspects that some readers might find her representation of Shlonssky counterintuitive. She all but apologizes for his seeming lack of simplicity, advising her readers, “it is proper to ‘forgive’ Shlonsky his illusions, because of his ability to be so much a man of his time” (201). But the question remains: How can she attribute simplicity of expression to poems replete with metaphor? For metaphors can, indeed, be€.€.€.€an unmediated effect of a poetic view of the world, that is to say: the eye is set in this way and no other, and emotion peeps out of the womb in this attire, like a privileged child born fully clothed. (201–202)
Simple expression is something that grows naturally, as a fetus in the womb. At the same time, the fetus is not au naturel. Having already utilized festive silk atttire and gold ornaments to represent unnaturalness or literariness in poetry, Bluvshtain’s answer—that the emotions expressed in Shlonsky’s poems are born dressed—may seem somewhat forced, a hyperextension of the metaphor. She tries to naturalize his adornments by claiming that metaphor is actually the natuural and immediate mode of expression for this particular poet. In her own poetry Bluvshtain tended more toward the natural, internal, sponttaneous side of simplicity rather than toward the rhetoric of a dressed newborn. The essay ends with an allusion to the biblical Jacob’s surprise upon awaking from his dream-prophecy by God’s presence in the place he had stopped for the night. “The realization of its rightness comes to us unmediated, with a cry of surprise like that of Jacob our forefather: ‘For there is a new glory of expression in this place and I did not know it!’” (202).18 Jacob’s realization of a divine exppression itself arrives in a direct, seemingly unmediated way. He did not know it; the revelation came as a surprise. Bluvshtain may have a similar reason for admiring the poetry of Francis Jammes in her poem “I” (“’Ani”).19 The speaker both is simple and likes simplicity in others, and these two qualities are identif-
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fied with one another. The speaker in “I” was once more of a Romantic, becomiing one with the eagles’ cries; now she is quiet like the waters of a lake. She is consistent with her environment as well as with her feelings. The book under consideration, Shlonsky’s To Papa-Mama, is a bridge in two senses: it closes the divide in his own work between Ashkenazic and the new acccent; it treats themes of immigrants in the Holy Land only recently arrived and still in the midst of a great transition. Shlonsky’s idiosyncratic use of accent to express the themes of his book sheds light on Bluvshtain’s praise of the poet’s simplicity and the multiple sources for simplicity, internal and environmental.
How to Read To Papa-Mama In 1927 Shlonsky published two books of poetry. To Papa-Mama appeared in the spring and In the Cycle (ba-Galgal) in the summer. In the Cycle is a collecttion of his previously published lyric works, including the poems from Distress (Devai) and To Papa-Mama. To Papa-Mama and In the Cycle are the first of his books that contain new-accent poems; To Papa-Mama’s table of contents indiccates with asterisks which five of the volume’s fourteen poems were composed for the new accent. And although all the poems in To Papa-Mama also appear in In the Cycle, Shlonsky created a very different sort of book in the smaller volume. Each volume is a résumé of Shlonsky’s career. To Papa-Mama is the result of a thoughtful selection of a small number of poems, and In the Cycle collects virtuaally all of Shlonsky’s poetry published in Hebrew. But despite its size and inclussiveness, In the Cycle is not simply a bibliography. The larger collection opens with “Revelation” (“Hitgalut”), in which the speaker adopts the persona of a young Samuel, the biblical prophet who did not at first comprehend that he was being called by God. “Revelation” is ars poetica that builds on a tradition of the poet-as-prophet, a neo-Romantic trope used most prominently by Bialik.20 Â�Shlonsky is the new poet who supersedes his predecessor, just as the biblical Samuel famously superseded Eli the Priest, replacing Eli’s unworthy sons. The poem tells the story of Shlonsky’s initiation as a poet-leader; what follows will demonstrate his authority.21 Shlonsky chooses “Tishre,” buried in the back of the relatively long In the Cycle, as the opening poem of To Papa-Mama. With “Tishre” Shlonsky sets up a very different agenda. The speaker is a wanderer or poet who longs for—but does not return to—his Romantic roots, “to the lullaby, papa-mama” (line 4). The third stanza is most explicitly about the poet’s supposed evolution:
, נַ ְפ ׁ ִשי ַה ׁ ּ ַשכּ וּלָ ה.ִמיִ זְ ְר ֶעל ֶאל דְּ וָ י .ֵּאי ָאנָ ה לֶ כֶ ת עוֹ ד ִמ ּ ְס ָתם ַעד הוֹ נוֹ לוּלו ֲאדֹנָ י! לֹא לִ י ַה ִהילּ וּלָ ה,שָׂ ֵאנִ י .ּא ְתנָ ן יָ חוּלו-ּד ֶ ֵעת לִ ילִ יוֹ ת ָס ִביב ִר ּקו
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מ ּ ִלים ְ ּב ִצ ְקלוֹ נִ י ַהדַּ ל-י ִ ֵאין ַּת ְמרו ֵּק .לָ סו ְּך ַמנְ ִ ּגינוֹ ַתי– ְּכמוֹ ְב ַה ְרמוֹ ן ּ ִפלֶ גֶ ׁש , ִּכי ֲע ַמלְ כֶ ם לְ ַאל,נַ ּ ְפצ ּו ַה ֲחלִ ילִ ים !וָ ֶרגֶ ׁש-פזְ מוֹ ן-י ִ ּ ֵ רוֹ כְ ל,זְ ָמר ֲעלו ִּבים- ְּכלֵ י,ָה ּה : ִּכי כָ ל זָ ב יָ ִריר לָ צוֹ ן ָעלַ י,יָ ַד ְע ִּתי ”! ַע ָּתה– ָענִ י ַ ּב ּ ֶפ ַתח, ָהיָ ה ׁ ִש ְמ ׁשוֹ ן:ְּ“ראו ָה ָעט ְ ּב ַאלְ לַ י,ַהבּ וּז לְ כָ ל ָּכזָ ב .שְׂ ָפ ַתיִ ם ַעל ָּכל נֵ ַתח-ְּככֶ לֶ ב ּ ְפ ׁ ּשוק From Jezreel to Distress [devai]. My bereaved soul, Where else to go between Vagueness [setam] and Honolulu. Lift me, God! The feast is not for me When Liliths [or: nocturnes] round a harlot’s dance they dance. There are no word ointments in my meager sack To anoint my melodies—as in a harem of concubines. The flutes have shattered because your toil is for nought, Ah, wretched musical instruments, peddlers of sentimental ditty! I know that every oozer will drool ridicule on me: “See: He was Samson, now—a beggar at the door!” Down with all lies that weep with woe-is-me Like an open-mouthed dog on every piece of meat. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The speaker’s journeys between place and state of mind—Jezreel and distress; vagueness (setam) and Honolulu—also refer to Shlonsky’s arrival at the various milestones of his poetic career. Jezreel (Yizr¿e’el) and Whatever (Setam) are the tittles of two of his poem cycles from the twenties, “Honolulu” is the title of a long poem, and Distress is the title of his 1924 book of long poems. Both In the Cycle and To Papa-Mama narrate Shlonsky’s career, but the smaller volume uses “Tishre” to introduce its themes. The wandering poet rejects the feasting and dancing that he may have once participated in and in the fourth stanza rejects the useless poetry of his past. He was once a Samson, but now “the flutes have shattered” (line 15). The picaro-like speaker who inhabits much of this volume focuses on that which is quotidian (¿ulin), on “bread, lamb, and goat.” The poet of this volume prefers that his words not wear perfume and claims to favor the quotidian, contemporary speech of the Jews in Palestine. The new accent reinforces Shlonsky’s presentation in “Tishre” of his own poetics, and plays a subtle but important role both in that poetics and in Bluvshtain’s positive reception of To Papa-Mama. Reading Bluvshtain’s essay through To Papa-Mama clarifies that the new accent symbolizes her conception of poetic language: speech that is immediately expressive; lyric speech that is culled from the envirronment but also seems to emanate from within one’s own body. The new acc-
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cent represents conversational, contemporary, territorial, expressive, and direct language. One speaks the new-accent Hebrew here and now; it is the language of everyday conversation. The Ashkenazic accent emanates from the pages of Bialik or from the mouths of “foreigners,” whereas the new accent, like simple expression, issues from one’s mouth and body.22 For Bluvshtain, the new accent is only one of many ways to demonstrate natuuralness. The Shemuel Bas who writes in the new accent is also a poet who favvors the sonnet, a paradigm for all that is not immediate, spoken, expressive, or emanating from within the poet’s body. The sonnet is sometimes perceived as an overly refined, European, mechanical, even oppressive, genre—one that puts excessive limits on expression. Instead of expressing what is “inside,” Bas imposes the restrictive dress of the sonnet from the outside. Bluvshtain may disaapprove of Bas precisely because he composes for the new accent while failing to integrate its essence into his larger poetic project in a meaningful way. Likewise, Bluvshtain knows better than to merely count the number of asteriisks in To Papa-Mama’s table of contents that indicate new-accent composittions.23 What is more important than the number of poems is how the new accent signifies. The selection of poems Shlonsky included in the volume is more faithful to the new accent than the numbers would indicate. Some of the poems in Ashkenazic Hebrew were composed in a free rhythm and so may be read in the new accent with minimal damage to prosody: “Dress Me” (“Halbbishini”), the sixth and final poem of the eponymous cycle; the first part of “Revelation”; and “Go forth” (“Lekh lekha”). “To the Anonymous One” (“la’Almoni”) is an accentual-syllabic poem composed in an Ashkenazic accent whose rhythm is lost in a new-accent reading. But the rhyme scheme (abab) inddicates an accentual ambivalence: only when read in the new accent does the rhyme alternate in an orderly way between feminine and masculine rhyme.24 Moreover, even those poems composed in the Ashkenazic accent jibe with Bluvshtain’s implied poetics of accent. Although they must be read with a penuultimate stress in order to maintain their rhythm, these Ashkenazic poems justtify that handicap thematically. The final poem in Shlonsky’s volume, “Up to This Point” (“¿Ad halom”), describes the speaker’s memories of his father and of the eternal letter that is on his own forehead. The letter is an alef with the vowel kamats and hints at the Ashkenazic accent with its characteristic aw or o sound. Other poems in this volume that were composed for an Ashkenazic stress systtem suggest the spoken Hebrew or Yiddish of an older generation, consistent with the title of the collection.25 “Papa-Mama” is itself an import into Hebrew of the Yiddish term for one’s parents, “tate-mame.” The themes of the individual poems, the implicit identity of the speaker as a Jew in transition, and the stage of hybridity implicit in the title and concept of To Papa-Mama all account for Ashkenazic Hebrew when it does appear in the volume. Like Yellin’s tolerance for Ashkenazic outside the New Yishuv, Shlonsky territorializes the new acc-
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cent by inviting the Ashkenazic sound into this volume when the Diaspora is invoked. To Papa-Mama is Shlonsky’s attempt to present his poetry as relatively colloqquial and as rooted in the lullaby rather than the prophetic tradition such that Bluvshtain’s praise may very well be genuine. Through accent the book signals the personal as well as a more global cultural and national transition that is its major theme. It is therefore compatible with Bluvshtain’s poetics as she presents them in her review. He uses and integrates the new accent when appropriate to the themes of the poem themselves. That “The Sign of the Time” sees something worth complimenting in Temkin’s poetry is also consistent with a reading of the essay that takes accent into consideration. Temkin does not use the new accent but some of his poems come close to Bluvshtain’s prescription for immediate expression, such as “I Was Not Gifted” (“Lo’ ne¿anti”), in which the speaker, implicitly identiffied as a poet, ends by expressing the land’s pain.
: ִּכי אֹזֶ ן לִ י ַק ׁשו ָּבה,ַא ְך לֹא יֵ ַדע ִא ׁיש ְּכסוּס נֶ ֱא ָמן פ ְר ָסאוֹ ת ֶא ְצנוֹ ף-י ַ ִמ ְ ּב ַעד ֶמ ְר ֲח ֵּק ְ ּב ִה ָּת ַקע מוֹ טוֹ ת ְמגֻ ָּונִ ים :ַעל ֲא ָד ָמה עוֹ ְט ָ ּיה וַ ֲעצו ָּבה .ְ ּבבוֹ ָא ּה ִ ּב ְב ִרית מוֹ לָ ֶדת But nobody knows that my ear is cocked: Like a loyal horse From a distance of parasangs I neigh As the colorful poles are pounded Into the earth, mournful and sad: As she enters into a covenant of the homeland. (Temkin 1927, 25)
If a Jewish male enters the covenant through circumcision, the land (feminnine in Hebrew) enters the covenant of the homeland through the pain of poles being pounded into her, and through the many violent acts that are reqquired to build the homeland. The pain does not emanate from the poet’s body but the speaker empathizes with the land as if she were a sentient being. In an act of loyal sympathy and ventriloquism, the speaker neighs like a horse with each pounding of a pole into the earth. He expresses the land’s experieence as an animal’s cry—the sound of sincere uncultivated expression.
Channeling Authenticity Karni and Shats instruct artists to be silent in order to reach the respective goals described in their essays: becoming a Hebrew writer and not merely one
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who writes in Hebrew, and redeeming classical poetry. The spontaneous side of simplicity (more than the rhetoric of the newborn), as well as the silences that Karni and Shats recommend, leave their mark on Bluvshtain’s poetry. In many of her poems, Bluvshtain forges a link between the present and the disttant past at the expense of a problematic middle that for the most part is not represented in her poems. In the poem “Rachel,” for example, the biblical matriarch Rachel inhabits the poem’s speaker.
ָר ֵחל ,ֵהן דָּ ָמ ּה ְ ּב ָד ִמי זוֹ ֵרם –ֵהן קוֹ לָ ּה ִ ּבי ָרן ,ָר ֵחל ָהרוֹ ָעה צאֹן לָ ָבן .ל–אם ָה ֵאם ֵ ָר ֵח וְ ַעל ֵּכן ַה ַ ּביִ ת לִ י ַצר ,וְ ָה ִעיר–זָ ָרה ִּכי ָהיָ ה ִמ ְתנוֹ ֵפף סו ָּד ָר ּה ;לְ רוּחוֹ ת ַה ִּמ ְד ָ ּבר וְ ַעל ֵּכן ֶאת דַּ ְר ִּכי א ַֹחז ,ְ ּב ִב ְט ָחה ָּכזׂאת ִּכי ׁ ְשמו ִּרים ְ ּב ַרגְ לַ י זִ כְ רוֹ נוֹ ת ! ִּמנִ י ָאז,ִמ ִּני ָאז Rachel Behold her blood flows in my blood, Behold her voice within me sings— Rachel the herder of Laban’s sheep, Rachel—mother of mother. And so the house constrains me and the city—is alien, For her cloak would flutter In the desert winds; And so I shall stick to my path With that same confidence, For memories are preserved in my legs From then, from then! (Bluvshtain 1927, 36)
Bluvshtain does not invoke a folk or literary intertext to link herself to the mattriarch. The poem both alludes to biblical intertexts and at the same time seems to devalue literary allusion. Physical traces replace intertexts. Memorries or traces of experience of ancient figures are to be found in the legs of the
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speaker; the matriarch’s blood flows within her. If the matriarch once stood in the desert, her cloak blowing freely in the wind, the speaker has inherited some of that experience so that she feels constrained and alienated by city life. The two Rachels share an ontology and have shared sensory experience as if they were conjoined twins born in different millennia.26 Despite the poeem’s efforts to create an entirely physical and even mystical connection, the key that unlocks the meaning in the poem is that the poet and the matriarch have the same name. The title’s referent is therefore ambiguous: it may refer to the matriarch, the poetess, or the being who is both one and the other— who lives in Mandatory Palestine and contains within her the spirit, voice, and blood of the ancient matriarch. In her poem “Aftergrowth” (“Safia¿”), which I have analyzed at greater length elsewhere, Bluvshtain similarly connects ancient and present in a way that is physical and linguistic.27 The speaker tells us that even though she has not worked the land, grain has spontaneously arisen. Furthermore, it is not a paltry aftergrowth, but a “sun-blessed” grain:
, גַ ם לֹא זָ ַר ְע ִּתי,ֵהן לֹא ָח ַר ׁ ְש ִּתי .לֹא ִה ְת ּ ַפ ַּללְ ִּתי ַעל ַה ָּמ ָטר ְר ֵאה נָ א! שְׂ דוֹ ַתי ִה ְצ ִמיח ּו,ו ֶּפ ַתע .דָּ גָ ן ְ ּברו ְּך ׁ ֶש ֶמ ׁש ִ ּב ְמקוֹ ם דַּ ְר ָדר ַ ַה ִאם הוּא ְס ִפ ,יח ְּתנוּבוֹ ת ִמ ֶּק ֶדם ? ְקצו ִּרים ֵמ ָאז,ִח ּ ֵטי ֶח ְדוָ ה ֵהם ,ימי ָהעֹנִ י ֵ ֲא ׁ ֶשר ּ ְפ ָקדוּנִ י ִב .ָ ּב ְקע ּו ָעל ּו ִבי ְ ּבא ַֹרח ָרז Behold I have not plowed nor have I planted, I have not prayed for the rain. And suddenly, see! my fields have grown Sun-blessed grain instead of thistle. Is it the aftergrowth of ancient produce, Grains of joy, cut then? That have remembered me in hard times, Burst forth rose up in me in a mysterious way.28
Something extraordinary has happened. Seeds that ought to have been planted millennia ago—dropped from the grain harvested by the hands of ancient Israelites—have suddenly sprouted in the Labor Zionist setting of twentieth-century Palestine. The speaker is identified through the poem as both a female laborer and as the land herself, feminine in the Hebrew, so that the address to the field in the final stanza may be understood to be words the laborer knows and that the land herself remembers having heard once upon a time:
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, ׁ ַש ְדמוֹ ת ַה ּ ֶפלֶ א, שְׂ גֶ ינָ ה,שַׂ גְ שֵׂ גְ נָ ה ! שְׂ גֶ ינָ ה וּגְ מֹלְ נָ ה ִח ׁיש,שַׂ גְ שֵׂ גְ נָ ה :ֲאנִ י זוֹ כֶ ֶרת דִּ ְב ֵרי ַהנ ַֹחם .יח וְ ַאף ָס ִח ׁיש ַ ּתֹאכְ ל ּו ָס ִפ Flourish, grow, fields of wonder, Flourish, grow and ripen quick! I remember the words of comfort: Eat safia¿ and even sa¿ish.
The claim for orality is most distinct in the final stanza with its address to the wondrous fields and the recollection of an ancient past that, with its reworkiing of Isaiah’s prophecy, cannot be read as a simple citation of the biblical text. The poem “Rachel” asks to be read as ars poetica inasmuch as it is named for the poet herself. (The allusion is starker if one keeps in mind that the poet was, and still is, commonly referred to by her first name only and almmost never by her last.) “Aftergrowth” has a similar distinction since it is the title poem in Bluvshtain’s first collection as well as the poem that opens that volume. There is the additional inducement of Bluvshtain’s historical context and that of her colleagues and readers, a generation for whom the revival of Hebrew and of Jewish labor was part of a single national project. As in Shats’s fanciful literary history, the dormant ancient Hebrew culture has come back to life and in the process Bluvshtain has quite purposefully skipped over a rich cultural middle. Or, to use Shats’s and Karni’s image, that cultural and historical in-between has been quieted to allow for an ancient-modern exppression. The silenced middle includes rabbinic culture and Jewish law, reccent Jewish life in the Diaspora of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language, and, of course, Ashkenazic Hebrew.29 That has all been cleared away to make space for the reappearance of ancient Hebrew culture and even ancient lifeforces and spirits—seeds dropped on ancient soil that sprout in the 1920s, or the voice of an ancient Israelite woman speaking through the body of a conttemporary woman. Ancient artifacts of a matriarch and of agriculture have surfaced in modern times, and Bluvshtain’s poetry, with its biblical vocabullary, has appeared so many years after the speakers of Psalm 137 first silenced themselves in order to preserve their song from the taint of the Diaspora. Finnally, authenticity has surfaced in Bluvshtain’s poetic language. The Ashkennazic and the Yiddish and the Russian have fallen away and the sound of ancient authentic Hebrew can now be heard. For all its purity of vocabulary, however, Bluvshtain’s language is hardly bibliccal. The most that can be said for the historical authenticity of her Hebrew is that the poem’s meter, certainly not a prosodic organization familiar to the anccient Israelites, does control for the terminal-stress pattern common to both bibllical (Masoretic) and Sephardic pronunciations of Hebrew. The narrative of
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Hebrew revival that I have extrapolated from her poems tells the story of an abrupt linguistic and cultural blossoming and diverges sharply both from the formulation of revival implicit in Ben-Yehuda’s accent design and from Shats’s instructions for absorbing the new accent. Her ancient authentic artifacts apppear suddenly and effortlessly; ancients speak through her. Her poems promote an idea of contemporary Hebrew in Palestine as an authentic and pure sound, the all-but-unmediated expression of the land or the ancients. In the moment that she composes the poems, however, Bluvshtain is integrating the Hebrew of the schools rather than critiquing it, all the while maintaining the pretense of a perfectly realized authentic Hebrew. Bluvshtain’s language is the Hebrew of Ben-Yehuda, the flawed speech of Ashkenazic Jews that must be corrected and perfected, but she treats that hybrid new-accent Hebrew as if it were pure and wholly authentic. She herself experienced something like the process of becomiing a Hebrew poet that Shats and Karni describe—arriving in Palestine and learning Hebrew as an adult. But her poems disguise the hybridity of the immiggrant behind the mask of a native and portray the linguistic and edible products of the New Yishuv as finally determined by higher forces. However underappreciated Bluvshtain was as an accent pioneer, she was a successful new-accent poet in two senses. She created a new-accent sound in her poetry, and through her poetry provided an ideologically useful account of Hebrew in Palestine. She inscribed a history of Hebrew language and poetry that made sense of and naturalized the appearance of a new and Hebrew sound in poetry in the Land of Israel. Bluvshtain’s poetry is associated with orality twice over. Critics received her as one of the group of women writing poetry in Palestine but she was also a labor poet. Labor poets toyed with the fiction that poems were on a continuum with the unliterary scrawls of a laborer describing the life of labor just as women’s poeetry was associated with speech. This relationship to orality helps explain how and why labor poetry was the first canonical poetry to finally adopt the new acccent. The ideological demands on labor poetry, the expectation of the Labor movement that high poetry must speak for the workers or as workers, and the imaginative linking of classical and contemporary Jewish life through agricultture provided an overdetermined poetic justification for the new accent. I have interpreted her essay as incorporating her thoughts on the new accent for men; her poetry may tell us more about her thoughts on how women’s poetry ought to integrate the new accent. For Bluvshtain as well as for Karni and Shats, silence and attention to one’s environment help shape the true Hebrew artist of his time. Men must listen and integrate, move through a hybrid stage of poetic language. Shlonsky’s expression of his environment, or its effect on his own speaking, singing, poetry-writing self is indeed the sign of the time. In the fiction of her poems though not in her life, silence is important less for the fact that it alllows her to hear the surrounding native sounds than for allowing her to embody
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and speak some old-new sound. The speaker need not learn Hebrew, nor correct it, nor strive for authenticity just as she need not labor to make the crop grow— she must simply serve as the conduit for an ancient voice. Bluvshtain enacts autthenticity in her writing as immediate and fully formed. Her reception of Bat-Miryam—as a charming new immigrant and muse, on the one hand, and as a cacophonous poet on the other—indicates that she expects other women to do the same in their own poetry.
Bat-Miryam: The Cacophony of the Exilic Jew in the Guise of a Hebrew Woman Bluvshtain seems to have quite shrewdly read the possibilities and expectations for women’s poetry within Hebrew culture—as well as the limitations on female authorship. One therefore ought to take seriously the contrast between her praise of Shlonsky’s hybrid volume of Ashkenazic and new-accent poems and her ambbivalence toward Bat-Miryam as a colleague in the unofficial group of poetesses. Bat-Miryam came to Palestine in 1928, almost twenty years after Bluvshtain’s emigration, already recognized as a Hebrew poet. The line that appears as the epigraph to this chapter is part of a letter in which Bluvshtain writes of her first encounter with Bat-Miryam: You no doubt know from [the daily Hebrew newspaper] Davar of the arrival in Palestine of Bat-Miryam. She is black and beautiful as the tents of Kedar. I threw a “party” in her honor at our Yaakov’s house. Elisheva [Bi¿ovski] was there and Andah [Amir] in addition to about twenty other writers and poets. Professor Shor played, the poets [feminine, meshorerot], all four, read from their poetry. Bat-Miryam reads with an Ashkenazic accent (and speaks too) and listening to her—is torture.30
Bat-Miryam is now part of the same small group of women writing Hebrew poeetry in which Bluvshtain places herself. “All four” of the women read from their poetry while we hear nothing of the other twenty or so other writers and poets who attended. Bat-Miryam impresses Bluvshtain with an exotic beauty; her pronnunciation of Hebrew makes a more negative impression. The word Bluvshtain uses to describe the effect of Bat-Miryam’s reading and speaking, translated above as “torture,” is sevel, literally “suffering.” Sevel also means burden or load. It should be noted that Bluvshtain dismissed the common notion that the immiggrants of the wave arriving in 1904–1914 had suffered greatly.31 And even for those who subscribed to such a notion, the word sevel did not necessarily carry those heroic connotations of suffering implicit in the twenties’ vocabulary of ¿amal, hard labor, or korban, sacrifice. In fact sevel, as opposed to ¿amal, would seem to connote suffering that is less likely to be indigenous to the homeland and more likely to be a burden or load that one had brought from abroad.32 In the incident
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described in the letter, Bluvshtain hosted a soiree in honor of the newly arrived poet. Even if Bat-Miryam did carry an Ashkenazic burden or poem with her from the Diaspora, that alone does not explain Bluvshtain’s irritation especially in light of her praise of Shlonsky in print not long before this incident. The recception and affiliation of each of the three poets involved, however, explains more. Shlonsky did not belong to the group of four or five women with which Bluvshtain was affiliated, whereas Bat-Miryam, whose persona was at odds with Bluvshtain’s vision for women’s poetry, is now part of that group. Bluvshtain wants to maintain an association between Hebrew dialect and women’s writing. Bat-Miryam’s accent undoes that association and threatens an idea of women’s poetry to which Bluvshtain adheres, and which she may see as constitutive of her persona among her readers. Bat-Miryam upsets Bluvshtain’s paradigm for womeen’s poetry as authentic and territorial. Just before her unkind remark about the homeliness of Bat-Miryam’s accent, Bluvshtain describes the poet’s physical beauty. She compares Bat-Miryam to the “tents of Kedar” of the Song of Songs, utilizing biblically inscribed beauty as a kind of literary antidote to all exilic sounds and personae.33 Bluvshtain’s irritation with her colleague’s Hebrew was not aired publicly, as far as I can tell. But her imppression of Bat-Miryam as an exotic beauty and her association of the poet with the Song of Songs did receive public expression about six years later in the poem “Hebrew Woman” (“¿Ivriyah”).34 The poem has both a dedication “to Y. BatMiryam” and an epigraph from the Song of Songs (1:5), “I am black and beautifful,” so that it opens by associating Bat-Miryam with the female speaker in that biblical work.35 Once the poem begins, however, Bat-Miryam or her image vaccates the speaking position. The beautiful Hebrew woman is the subject and adddressee rather than the speaker in this poem that is marked by nineteenth-century European notions of authenticity and femininity—while the speaker plays a typiccally male role. Bluvshtain has transformed Bat-Miryam from a poet into a muse.
ִע ְב ִריָ ה מרים- בת.לי )ׁ ְשחוֹ ָרה ֲאנִ י וְ נָ אוָ ה (שיר השירים
,ֲאנִ י ַמ ֶ ּב ֶטת ָ ּב ּה נִ ְפ ֶע ֶמת נִ ְד ֶמה ִה ֵּנה זֶ ה ַא ְך ִ ּב ְשחוֹ ר וְ לַ ַהט,ְ ּב ֵחן ְקדו ִּמים ְ ַָעלְ ָתה ִמן ַה ַּתנ .”ך וְ גֶ ׁ ֶשר ּ ָפז נִ ְתלָ ה ִמ ֶּמ ָּנ ּה ,ֶאל ֶא ֶרץ ָה ִע ְב ִרים וְ זִ כְ רוֹ נוֹ ת יְ ֵמי ַה ֶח ֶסד .ַ ּבנֶ ֶפ ׁש ִמ ַּת ְמ ִרים
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,ְ ּבנוֹ ף נֵ כָ ר ָהלוֹ ְך וָ נו ַּע )?(דְּ ָרכִ ים בּ וֹ ִמי יִ ְס ּפֹר ֲאנִ י ֵה ַמ ְר ִּתי ׁ ְשחוֹ ר וְ לַ ַהט .ְ ּב ְתכֵ לֶ ת ו ִּבנְ הוֹ ר ,ַא ְך ִאם ָמ ַעלְ ִּתי—לֹא לָ נֶ ַצח .ִּכ ַח ׁ ְש ִּתי—לֹא ַעד ּתֹם וְ ׁ ַש ְב ִּתי ׁ ּשוּב ְּכ ׁשוּב ַה ֵהלֶ ְך .ֶֹאל ְּכ ַפר מוֹ לַ ְד ּתו
Hebrew Woman
כּ ֹה ֶא ֱעמֹד לְ ָפנַ יִ ְך , ֲאחוֹ ִתי,נִ ְפ ֶע ֶמת ִ ּב ׁ ְשחוֹ ר וְ לַ ַהט,ְ ּב ֵחן ְקדו ִּמים .ָאזִ ין ֵעינֵ י ְתכֶ לְ ִּתי
For Y. Bat-Miryam “I am black and beautiful” (Song of Songs 1:5)
I look at her struck It seems: this very moment With the charm of ancient times, with black and blazing She has risen from the Bible. And a golden bridge suspended from her leads To the land of the Hebrews, And memories of the days of grace Rise up in the soul. Wandering in a foreign vista (Who can count the paths?) I traded the black and blazing For the blue and for the light. But if I have been faithless—not forever, If I have deceived—then not completely. For I will return again as the wanderer returns To the village where he was born. Thus will I stand before you Struck, my sister, By the charm of ancient times, by the black and blazing Upon which my bluish eyes will feed.
This poem departs from the poet’s usual methods. Bluvshtain regularly invvokes biblical figures as elements of an authentic, national past in order to make a claim of authenticity for contemporary Jewish life in Palestine, and sometimes adapts the trope of the woman as land, or embeds her speaker with traces of anc-
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cient authenticity. In “Hebrew Woman” the addressee rather than the speaker or the land is the vehicle for authenticity and the poem situates her in metonymic rather than metaphoric relation to the land. The speaker gazes at her, stunned by a beauty that brings to mind an ancient Israelite woman. The second stanza remains focused on her appearance and person: the woman looks as if she might have stepped out of the pages of the Bible and indeed a bridge suspended from this beautiful woman leads to the land of the Hebrews. By her very appearance the Hebrew woman sends the speaker on a journey to ancient Israel.36 In the third stanza the speaker seems to turn away from the spectacle of the Hebrew woman to consider her own biography. The maleness of the speaker (or the masculine associations of her biography) becomes more expplicit in the third and fourth stanzas when she invokes the trope of the wandderer, or perhaps the prodigal son, returning to the national homeland.
,ְ ּבנוֹ ף נֵ כָ ר ָהלוֹ ְך וָ נו ַּע )?(דְּ ָרכִ ים בּ וֹ ִמי יִ ְס ּפֹר ֲאנִ י ֵה ַמ ְר ִּתי ׁ ְשחוֹ ר וְ לַ ַהט .ְ ּב ְתכֵ לֶ ת ו ִּבנְ הוֹ ר ,ַא ְך ִאם ָמ ַעלְ ִּתי—לֹא לָ נֶ ַצח .ִּכ ַח ׁ ְש ִּתי—לֹא ַעד ּתֹם וְ ׁ ַש ְב ִּתי ׁ ּשוּב ְּכ ׁשוּב ַה ֵהלֶ ְך .ֶֹאל ְּכ ַפר מוֹ לַ ְד ּתו Wandering in a foreign vista (Who can count the paths?) I traded the black and blazing For the blue and for the light. But if I have been faithless—not forever, If I have deceived—then not completely. For I will return again as the wanderer returns To the village where he was born.
Unlike the addressee, imagined as untainted by modernity and foreignness, the speaker has wandered outside the village that represents the homeland. The biblical epigraph has already set up a rural-urban divide. The blackness of the beautiful woman in the Song of Songs signals her rural environment— the sun does not darken the women of the city. The speaker-wanderer is more cosmopolitan than the addressee and has also circulated and been exposed to foreign influence. She has compromised the purity she once had and that the addressee retains. Bluvshtain’s speaker has traded the “black and blazing”— words that have already been used to describe the beautiful woman—for “the blue and for the light” (lines 11–12). The poem’s vocabulary hints at a deep offfense the wanderer has committed. The word I have translated as “I traded,”
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hemarti, has in addition to its commercial connotation the sense of an offfense to God, violations of the rules of the Temple cult. The root of the word translated as “I have been faithless,” ma¿alti, refers in its biblical context to the illegal use or acquisition of property belonging to the Israelite Temple. Through the vocabulary of the Temple cult, these elements betray a very nineteenth-century European sensibility—the association of purity with femiininity and authenticity, of tainting with monetary circulation and the wandderer. This tainting was perhaps inevitable but it is no less offensive for that. (These words of biblical provenance also have rabbinic resonances. BluvÂ� shtain alludes to biblical text frequently in her poetry; rabbinic references are rare. Her poems habitually leap over the middle of Jewish history—East Eurropean shtetl life as well as rabbinic Judaism—but here, conversely, she may be invoking that middle as a contrast to the Hebrew woman and as another sign of the tainted status of the wandering Jew.) The Hebrew woman’s beauty signifies the authenticity of the nation itself, and the possibility of reviving that pre-exilic state. By comparing the speaker’s wanddering to the circulation of money and wares, the poem invokes another related nineteenth-century European association of sexual purity in women with isolattion from the masses. The Jews have wandered and they have also circulated, just as the speaker’s own blackness has been traded for the light. Bluvshtain’s speaker fills the male role by representing a nation whose identity has been comppromised through circulation in the Diaspora. The Hebrew woman has not circculated, and her unfaded beauty and blackness preserve an authentic national identity. Bat-Miryam’s persona in the poem expresses a typically nationalist idea of the feminine as that which maintains and secures the authentic identity of the nation and facilitates others’ access to or retrieval of that identity. Whether one understands the speaker of “Hebrew Woman” to be the male citizen inhabiting the female speaker or a fallen woman, a devolved national identity, the poem’s valorizing of both the Hebrew woman’s femininity and her authenticity betrays a gendering of national identity. Men may long for a return to the authentic ancient homeland but that authenticity is already present in the ideal woman. Men may or may not engage in a process; women represent an undisturbed and pure authenticity that cannot be obtained through effort, convversion, and adaptation. The wanderer of Bluvshtain’s poem wants to retrieve something, wants to return home, and regrets her loss of the blazing black. In short, she would do well to read the essays of Shats, and especially Karni in order to learn how one is to retrieve one’s nativeness after a long journey in the Diaspora. The hybridity that is tolerated—and even expected and encouraged—as part of the masculine Jewish biography seems not to be so easily integrated into a female poetic persona. The artists whom Karni addresses in his essay achieve authenticity through very different means than women do. For BluvÂ�
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shtain as a critic of men’s poetry, the new accent is a sign of having followed Karni’s advice and listened to the land. The new accent signifies something else entirely in women’s poetry, however, because for Bluvshtain the female poet emerges from the trope of the muse. Bat-Miryam’s severe Ashkenazic acccent undermines or deconstructs that distinction between the muse who sometimes sings her own poems and the “artists in the homeland” who, after listening for a time, begin to relearn the language of that land. Bat-Miryam’s exotic appearance makes the fact of her wholly inauthentic speech stand out starkly. The man may commune with, learn from, and address the land; the woman must enact authenticity. The man may learn how to become more authentic but the woman must always Â�already be so. It is this internal contradiction, rather than Bat-Miryam’s enunciation of Ashkenazic sounds per se, that engenders suffering. The exotic woman has articulated a masculine hybridity instead of taking this opportunity to speak in a feminine voice—either as the land or simply as an authentic speaker. When a man fails to adopt the new accent he speaks Ashkenazic, but when the muse-like woman recites her poems in Ashkenazic it is cacophony. In “Hebrew Woman,” Bluvshtain transforms the speaker of the Song of Songs into the mute addressee of the poem who is both a muse and a metonymy for the land. The letter describing her encounter with Bat-Miryam tells us that Bluvshtain believes that the way to be a poetess is to be a kind of muse. If a muse in the Land of Israel were ever to compose her own song, she would certainly sing it in new-accent Hebrew. Bluvshtain’s reaction to Bat-Miryam’s accent hints at her notions of feminine poetic personae but is also revealing of the expectations of her larger cultural context. The symbolic importance for women within Hebrew culture in Palesttine of being authentic over and against becoming authentic is reflected in the reception of Bi¿ovski. Perhaps more than that of any other Hebrew poet, her carreer was predicated on the possibility of becoming, but her persona was as autthentic as the Hebrew woman of Bluvshtain’s poem.
Bih·â†œæ¸€å±®â†œovski and Bluvshtain as Always Already Authentic The address that the literary critic Yosef Klausner gave at one of Bi¿ovski’s poetry readings contains the three ingredients that appear so often in the disccourse on “Elisheva”: her femininity, her accent, and her foreignness. Klausner reverses Isaiah’s prophecy to make Bi¿ovski a light unto the Jews, one who revvealed a light in Judaism that Jews themselves did not see. In praising Bi¿ovski’s use of the Sephardic stress system, Klausner compares her favorably to TcherniÂ� chovsky who is still, he says, rebelling against the new accent (Elisheva 11). Bi¿ovski’s lack of Ashkenazic accent does not signify a more authentic genetic or personal connection to Hebrew text and older layers of Jewish culture; she is
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not a Jew of Spanish origin, for example. But for Klausner and others Bi¿ovski was more authentically Jewish than Ashkenazic Jews. This idea that the non-Jewish woman can be more authentically connected to Jewish identity is reminiscent of Karni’s essay “The Singer Nation,” in which the Arab worker has more in him of the patriarch Abraham than the Jews of Tel Aviv do. Klausner crowns Bi¿ovski poetess extraordinaire, the one who expresses the essence of the Jewish soul, and says that she is in a sense the only female poet. Bi¿ovski is authentic both because she is not Jewish and because she is femmale. She is therefore doubly free of Ashkenazic Diaspora identity. In addition to their alacrity in adopting the new accent, both Bi¿ovski and Bluvshtain deviated from the male poetic biography in another significant and related way: they seem to have entirely skipped the Ashkenazic stage of composition of their male contemporaries and with it the question of how to stage their switch, and whether to transpose their early poetry after switching to the new accent. Yet it is unlikely that either poet found it entirely natural at first to write in the new accent. Bi¿ovski admits to feeling haunted by the sound of Bialik’s Ashkenazic poetry, saying that her initial instinct was to write in Ashkenazic because that was the sound of Hebrew poetry she knew. In the late twenties she writes: In 1920 I tried, for the first time, to compose original poetry in Hebrew. I wrote my first poems in the Ashkenazic accent [havarah] despite the fact that from the beginning of my studies the Sephardic accent was the only one I knew and used (by chance my Hebrew teacher in the Hebrew language classes sponsored by ±oveve Tsiyon was from the Land of Israel). But the inffluence of my reading in the Hebrew language—which was until then only in the Ashkenazic accent—was so great, that at the beginning I could not imagine a Hebrew poem being written in another mode. My first attempt did not satisfy me. The second attempt to create original Hebrew poetry in that same accent that I was used to [i.e., in the new accent] was a success and led me to the writing of Hebrew poems in general. (Elisheva 5)
Thanks to her unusual biography Bi¿ovski was freer of Ashkenazic Hebrew than any other Russian Hebrew poet of her generation. Yet even she was not immmune to the influence of Bialik’s poetry. Bluvshtain does not draw attention to the challenge of writing in the new accent in the early twenties, but she too had to contend at the start of her brief career with a paucity of models for new-Â�accent composition, and was no doubt haunted by the Ashkenazic sound of canonical Hebrew poetry at the time. Critics and writers saw the poetic corpus and the Hebrew language as engaged in a parallel process of renewal, but poetry by women was excluded from that model. An assumption of naturalness for womeen’s spoken Hebrew, as well as an expectation that women’s poetic composition was closer to speech, meant that these poets had no literary history to overcome. They were writers without precedent.
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The independent-minded Ezra Zusman was one of the few critics of the perriod to treat Bluvshtain’s work as art rather than as a phenomenon of unmediated national expression. He was also unusual in seeing that the shift in accent was a challenge that would have affected women as well as men, and in acknowledgiing Bluvshtain’s use of the new accent as making her one of the “pioneers of the correct accent, among the wounded pioneers of this transition” from the Ashkennazic to the new accent.37 He writes of her as a poet who has to find a new way of writing in Hebrew within a strong Ashkenazic poetic tradition instead of merely as a woman who, ignorant of Hebrew tradition, speaks rather than writes her poeetry and therefore does not have to contend with shifting literary conventions. Bluvshtain never published poems composed in an Ashkenazic Hebrew. The fact that neither Bi¿ovski nor Bluvshtain dramatized a struggle with the new acccent in their poems or made a semi-official switch from one accent to another does not mean that they did not experience their own adoption and adaptation of new-accent Hebrew as a challenge. They also had to overcome anxieties of inffluence, but the gender politics of Hebrew poetry obscured those anxieties from view. Even though Bi¿ovski made no claim to a genetically Jewish or Israelite identity, her lack of connection to the devalued Ashkenazic Jewish identity rendders her authentic. Shlonsky, Bluvshtain, Bialik, Karni, Shats, Temkin, and Bi¿ovski were all listening to the Hebrew being spoken in Palestine. Men were able to dramatize that listening and that evolution in their poetry. The model for the male new-accent poet was a Hebrew that required correction and was deffined less by arrival than by a continual asymptotic striving toward an authenticiity they would never quite reach. The women, even as they may have struggled to overcome the influence of Ashkenazic poetic language, were expected to drammatize personae that were always already authentic.
chapter four
The Runaway Train and the Yiddish Kid Shlonsky’s Double Inscription Shlonsky’s train made a bigger impression than the [Jezreel] Valley Railroad. —Mordekhai Sabar, paraphrasing the “jokesters” of the era
Toward a New History of Shlonsky’s New-Accent Poetry Whether or not his new-accent poem “Train” made a bigger impression on Hebrew speakers than the actual Jezreel Valley train that first rode into Palestine in 1904, Avraham Shlonsky continues to be the focus of scholarship on the literaary new accent. He performed perfectly the role of innovator, inscribing the proto-Israeli accent in contradictory service to national identity: as both new and old, integrative and revolutionary. Ironically, the scholarship tends to reduce or simplify Shlonsky’s contribution even as it valorizes him as the new-accent poet. The literary history as written by contemporary critics locates the 1920s as the decade in which Hebrew poets in Palestine discontinued the Ashkenazic accent and chose instead to write in what was known as the Sephardic or corrrect accent. In fact, the switch from one accent to the other is most often identtified as a phenomenon that occurred ca. 1927. But this consensus is linked to and at least in part determined by another consensus: that Shlonsky was criticcal to—if not the motivating force behind—the literary accent shift. This scholarly perception of Shlonsky as the one responsible for revolutionizing Hebrew poetry by introducing the new accent may have roots in the percepttions of readers in the twenties and thirties, such as the one expressed in the epigraph above, and the poet’s own self-portrayal as a rebel and innovator.1 This account of the rise of the new accent in Hebrew poetry and of Shlonsky’s contribution to it has several problems. It is not clear why Shlonsky is credited with this revolution when among his generation of poets he was far from the first to compose in the new accent. By the time his new-accent poetry appeared in print, many other well-known poets had already published their own volu-
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umes of new-accent poetry. At this point Shlonsky was still publishing poems in Ashkenazic as well. Imprecise claims of Avraham Shlonsky’s primacy in new-accent poetry obfusccate the nature of his considerable contribution. Shlonsky’s reputation in this realm is in part an extension of his general reception as an innovator and as a rebel, and his persona as the leader of a generation of Hebrew poets. Thanks to this reputation, critics tended to see him as the newest addition to a genealogy of great Hebrew writers. But these perceptions are also an expression of Shlonsky’s actual and substantial contribution to new-accent poetry that have been either displaced or distorted. Shlonsky was a great innovator capable of breathtaking literary-linguistic feats: he integrated the new accent into his poetry while ressponding to the demands of contemporary conceptions of literary history. This chapter focuses on Shlonsky’s innovative integration of the new accent into both the Hebrew poetic corpus and his own poetic persona. Shlonsky used his canonical and noncanonical poetry explicitly to allay fears associated with the introduction of the new accent into canonical Hebrew poetry. He resolved questions about the possibility and viability of new-accent poetry, questions that were untouchable by women’s poetry because of the terms of its reception. Shlonsky’s first new-accent compositions in the early to mid-twenties were in subcanonical genres—folk songs, translations, and occasional verse. He did not begin to publish new-accent poems in any genre until 1926 when “Train” (“Rakevet”) appeared in Davar.2 He had composed “Train” a few years earlier and first performed it at his work settlement in the spring of 1923. As with BluvÂ� shtain, Shlonsky’s brief stint as a laborer (briefer, even, than Bluvshtain’s) conttinued to be a major inspiration for his poetry for several years.3 Some scholars attribute Shlonsky’s switch to the new accent in the 1920s to the year he spent in Palestine as a teenager, but his participation in a labor settlement may very well have been the more significant factor in his adoption of the new accent.4 The first extant new-accent composition by Shlonsky is dated winter 1922 (January– March), and was written during his four-month stay at En ±arod, a settlement that pitched its tents in the Jezreel Valley in 1920. Shlonsky wrote “A Panorama of En ±arod” for a celebration that he and his fellow laborers staged there. The occasional poem was set to music.5 The first new-accent poem Shlonsky is known to have written, it contains between fourteen and twenty-four lines, depending on the version, and was clearly inttended for insiders. Each stanza mocks a different member of the group, so it is unlikely that “A Panorama of En ±arod” would have circulated beyond Â�Shlonsky’s colleagues, family, and friends. Five years would pass before ShlonÂ� sky published a book containing any new-accent poems (To Papa-Mama [le’Aba-’ima], in 1927) and another few years before he published a book entirely in the new accent (In These Days [be-’Eleh ha-yamim], 1929–1930), at which point the accent revolution was, by most definitions, over.6
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The work settlements were relatively small, isolated, and ideologically mottivated and were therefore a friendly environment for the cultivation of a new accent, as the schools in the Galilee had been. The small audience consisted of people with whom Shlonsky worked and who communicated in new-Â�accent Hebrew as best they could (and when they managed not to speak Russian or Yiddish). It is possible that Shlonsky decided to compose “A Panorama of En ±arod” in the new accent because the workers of En ±arod favored it or simpply because of the nonliterary context in which the song was performed. Like the settlements themselves, the low genres had explicit ideological motivattions. Hebrew lacked folk songs and work songs. Writers would compose verse in these genres (which would often be disseminated without attribution), and would translate Russian and Yiddish verse into Hebrew. The nationalist need for folk literature as well as the intense ideological sentiment and idealism that characterized the work settlement, where work songs would have been in high demand, together explain why the folk song became the literary entry point of the new accent. Despite its necessarily limited impact, “A Panorama of En ±arod” is impportant because in it one can already see some of the strategies Shlonsky was to develop in his precious few published new-accent folk songs. A few of the lines are composed in Ashkenazic although this limited usage is thematized or otherwise accounted for by its context and so does not render the work a hybrid composition in the usual sense. His use of Russian and Yiddish rhymes no doubt mimicked his fellow immigrants’ reliance on their mother tongues, but is also a technique that he adopts in “Doesn’t Matter” (“Lo ’ikhpat”), albbeit in a more refined form. “Doesn’t Matter” is a chastushka, a folk rhyme in Russian and Ukrainian. Shlonsky’s use of this form and of Ukrainian sounds in the refrain is also significant because the chastushka refuses narrative devvelopment and can therefore be seen as a distinct alternative to the Yiddish and Hebrew poems of the period.7 Several new-accent poems in a similar vein followed—“In the Tent” and “Doesn’t Matter” were written as folk songs and described the life of pioneers in an agricultural setting; “Train” took a more urban laboring lifestyle as its backddrop.8 All of these disseminated beyond the point of their initial performances and some were put to music, becoming part of the culture of the new settlement. The first of Shlonsky’s lyric new-accent poems to appear in print was “Tishre,” in September 1926 in the journal Ketuvim (Writings).9 “Tishre” is the opening poem of To Papa-Mama and appears in the collection In the Cycle as well as in all subsequent collections of Shlonsky’s poetry. One approach to writing a histtory of new-accent poetry would be to begin with “Tishre” because it was a cannonical poem composed by an authoritative poet who defined a generation of Hebrew literature. Scholarship attends to Shlonsky’s new-accent poetry in large part because it was canonical—as opposed to poetry for children, folk songs, occ-
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casional poetry, and even poetry by women. Shlonsky encouraged such a readiing of his poetry as the continuation—however eccentric and individualist—of a national narrative.10 But this authoritative poet began his own new-accent composition in a low genre and this was to help effect his particular reception as a new-accent poet.11 Poetry by women held a different, more ambiguous position than children’s poetry and may have challenged Hebrew poetry in general to adopt the new acccent. The works of Rab and Bluvshtain may have also prepared poets and the reading public for the more complete adoption of the new accent by the Hebbrew poetry that followed. Folk songs, however, played a more obvious role in the adoption of the new accent by canonical poets in the 1920s. In Shlonsky’s own oeuvre, folk songs provided him with a laboratory in which to experimment with new-accent rhythms and prepare himself for writing in those genres as well.12 His folk songs paved the way for the introduction of the new accent into all parts of his oeuvre and resolved anxieties about its debut in lyric poetry. Despite the generic divide between lyric poetry and folk song, the latter facilitated the standardization of the new accent in the higher genres and not only in the more colloquial ones. The challenge at this moment in new-accent history was to write poems that could be integrated into the brief but lofty and by now very well respected Modeern Hebrew poetic tradition. Shlonsky was in a good position to meet this challlenge. Critics and readers already perceived him as the central poetic figure of the new generation, as the inheritor of Bialik’s role if not of his precise poetics.13 In part because of this perception of him as engaged in an oedipal struggle with Bialik, Shlonsky was able to break with the tradition on the question of accent while maintaining continuity with it in other ways. His position as dominant poet and as rebel made it possible for him to enact a shift to the new accent in a way that other, less central poets could not have done. Shlonsky operates in two modes in his poetry. At times he is a welder, makiing the new accent continuous with Hebrew literary history; at other times he uses the new accent to make a clean break with the old sound and to define a culture of the Land of Israel that is distinct from East European Jewish cultture. Through these two modes Shlonsky is able to resolve the problem of preserving the young tradition of national poetry that had already become so important to national identity and, with the help of his prosodic technique, to resolve the prejudice against the new-accent sound. From the 1890s to the 1920s, pedagogues, revivalists, and even poets called on writers to compose new-accent verse so as to close the infamous gap bettween spoken and poetic uses of Hebrew. Poets as authoritative as Bialik and Tchernichovsky felt anxious about this gap, aware that the new accent threateened the continued popularity and relevance of their poetry. ±ayim Leyb ±azan’s 1898 article spoke on behalf of the teachers, asking poets to “lighten
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the heavy workload of the teachers” by writing new-accent verse, instead of providing them with poems in Ashkenazic which lost their rhythm “in the mouths of the little students” (±azan 576). A quarter of a century later writers and residents of Palestine were still pleading with poets.14 In 1922 an anonymmous letter writer complained that poets were abusing poetic license by conttinuing to write in Ashkenazic. He entertained the possibility that accentual-syllabic poetry was not suitable for new-accent Hebrew and looked forward to the arrival of a great poet who would “import a new form into Hebbrew poetry suitable for our language and the modern sensibility.”15 In 1923 Elisheva Bi¿ovski was still trying to encourage her fellow poets to compose in the new accent, and lamenting the dichotomy between the poetic Ashkennazic and the new accent of spoken Hebrew.16 In this article, Bi¿ovski is conccerned because poets both continue to write in Ashkenazic and choose to write in free rhythm as a way of avoiding the problem of accent altogether (Bi¿ovski 1923, 171–172). She leaves it up to the poets to decide how best to ressolve the problem, but there is a sense of inevitability absent from earlier writiing on accent. She accepts that there are factors preventing poets from adopting the new accent immediately and wholeheartedly, but she conceives of these factors as concrete problems that are resolvable, without actually expplaining what those problems are.17 In 1927 Hedim published an essay by Moshe Kalvari, “Rhythm in Poetry” (“ha-Mishkal ba-shirah”), which did in fact explicate some of those problems, especially that of monotony in the Sephardic stress system.18 Kalvari’s essay is relatively unbiased: he is writing at a moment when many poets are composing in the new accent and is trying to account for the technical difficulties inherent in writing accentual-syllabic poetry in the new accent. The fact that his essay deals with practical difficulties indicates that Hebrew poetry has indeed passed into a new phase in which poets now have the impetus to tackle the very real problems of continuing to write and doing so in a new accent. The essay is more or less contemporary with—and appeared in a periodical that was also the forum for—the very poetic oeuvres he excerpts, the works in which poets grappled with and found solutions to those problems he so accurately describes.19 Kalvari makes an aesthetic claim about accentual-syllabic poetry: Italian, German, English, and Russian poetry all distinguish between the end of a word and the end of a foot such that the two are in tension, “and this switching game is what makes for a beautiful rhythm [mishkal]” (Kalvari 97). A poem is monotonnous when it fails to create tension between its verbal and prosodic units, when the stress system of its accent and the prosodic pattern are too similar. In theory, poetry in either accent may generate monotony when the stress system and the metric pattern coincide too frequently. According to Kalvari, the iambic line, in which every second syllable is stressed, is often monotonous in verse composed for a Sephardic pronunciat-
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tion. The bisyllabic word as pronounced in the new accent is most often an iamb itself—one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. (A simillar problem arises with the anapest, whose foot is composed of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable.) Kalvari cites three lines of poetry to illustrate. The first is a line from Bi¿ovski in iambic tetrameter; the second and third are iambic hexameter taken from Shlonsky:
. . .ַה ׁ ִּשיר ָּכלוּא ְ ּבתוֹ ְך ַה ּ ֵלב . . . לָ כֵ ן ָּכל ַּכ ְך ָעצוּב,ָאכֵ ן ֲאנִ י ּ ַפ ְ ּי ָטן . . .ַה ֵ ּבן ָהלַ ְך (לְ ָאן?) ַה ֵ ּבן רוֹ ֶצה לָ ׁשוּב ha-shir kalu’ be-tokh ha-lev ‘akhen ‘ani paytan lakhen kol kakh ¿atsuv ha-ben halakh (le-’an?) ha-ben rotseh la-shuv The poem is locked inside the heart . . . For I am but a poet, and therefore very sad . . . The son has gone (where?), the son wants to return . . .
Each word (or in one case a phrase composed of two monosyllabic words) is composed of exactly one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. The inevitable coincidence of each iambic foot with exactly one bisyllabic word or two monosyllabic words makes for monotony.20 My translation of Bi¿ovski’s line above echoes her meter: “The poem is locked inside the heart.” This coinciddence is sometimes tolerated and even desirable. Children’s verse is often singssong, such as Dr. Seuss’s iambic tetrameter, “I do not like green eggs and ham.”21 Ashkenazic suffers from the converse problem, if to a lesser extent. An accenttual-syllabic line of poetry that ends with an unstressed syllable threatens monnotony in an Ashkenazic pronunciation whose words also end with an unstressed syllable. The trochee, a foot consisting of one stressed followed by one unstressed syllable, is the Ashkenazic analog to the new accent–iambic combination. (The line “Mirror mirror on the wall” begins with two trochees.) One way to mitigate this monotony is to vary the distribution of words across the metric feet by selecting words with a varying number of syllables. (Consider line 4 of Shakespeare’s “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,” in which the stress of one of the bisyllabic words has a penultimate stress: Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.)22 The difficulties that the respecttive accents encounter, however, are not entirely symmetrical because the Ashkkenazic stress system has enough words that are pronounced with the stress on the final syllable to allow for variety.23 The poet writing in the SeÂ�phardic stress will find it harder to inject his verse with penultimate variation.24 Shlonsky’s “Doesn’t Matter,” whose first stanza and refrain Kalvari quotes, serves as an example of a poet’s success in overcoming this problem.25 Shlonsky uses a variety of methods—penultimately stressed words of two or four syllables,
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monosyllabic words, trisyllabic words in which the stress falls on the third syllabble, penultimately stressed bisyllabic words with a prefix (such as the definite artticle and the conjunction “and,” both monosyllabic prefixes), and placing three- or four-syllable, penultimately stressed words at the end of every second line—in order to prevent a neat and constant coincidence of the end of the foot with the end of a word. In his brief review of these few lines by Shlonsky, Kalvvari does not do justice to Shlonsky’s talent for integrating unconventional sounds into his poetry. In this mostly trochaic poem, Shlonsky manages to gather an impressive variety of words—including segholates (’orez), assonancebased noun paradigms (kada¿at), conjugated verbs with archaic endings (’alinnah), declined nouns (artsenu), and loan words (nafka minah)—that carry their stress on the penultimate syllable even in the new accent.
ֵּתה וְ א ֶֹרז יֵ ׁש ְ ּב ִסין .ֶא ֶרץ ַה ִּנדַּ ַחת ו ְּב ַא ְר ֵצנ ּו יֵ ׁש ַח ְמ ִסין .ָּכל ִמינֵ י ַקדַּ ַחת !לֹא ִאכְ ּ ַפת! לֹא ִאכְ ּ ַפת !ַ ּב ְּכ ָפ ִרים ָאלִ ינָ ה Â�Â� ֵאין לִ י ּ ַפת,יֵ ׁש לִ י ּ ַפת ?לְ ִמי נָ ְפ ָקא ִמ ַּינ ּה teh ve-’orez yesh be-sin ’erets ha-nida¿at, u-ve-’artsenu yesh ¿amsin kol mine kada¿at. lo ’ikhpat! lo ’ikhpat! ba-kefarim ’alinah! yesh li pat, ’en li pat le-mi naf ka minah. China has its tea and rice, Remotest of all lands And our land has sirocco Malaria of all kinds. Doesn’t matter! Doesn’t matter! In villages I’ll lay me down! I have some bread, I have no bread— Who could give a darn?
This subcanonical faux folk song, which became a popular song in the Yisshuv and remained popular into the statehood years, demonstrates Shlonsky’s unique facility and creativity with Hebrew sounds. He created a new sound
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in Hebrew poetry whose echoes can be heard in the work of many subsequent poets including, most famously, in the poetry of his so-called student Natan Alterman.26 Inertia is a powerful prosodic force, and even Shlonsky was subject to its efffects. The problem of abandoning the Ashkenazic sound was not merely techniccal, though the lack of words with a stress on the penultimate syllable did pose a challenge to the literary new accent. The success of the recent Ashkenazic Hebbrew literary tradition also encouraged resistance to the new accent in poetry in a number of ways. The Te¿iyah poets of the late nineteenth century had set a precedent. It was difficult to imagine one’s poetry departing so radically from this revered corpus. But imagining such a departure may have fostered another anxiety within Hebrew culture. Poets may have feared the loss of the recent traddition that served as a literary precedent. If they abandoned the Ashkenazic acccent (along with their own Ashkenazic oeuvres), the achievements of the Te¿iyah generation would be lost to them. Shlonsky contributed greatly to the literary new accent by finding ways to deal with both problems of technique and the weight of tradition.
Shlonsky’s Folk Songs Shlonsky’s earliest new-accent poems were folk songs, but he did not begin publishing them until a few years after their composition, at which point he was already writing lyric new-accent poetry. The new-accent folk composittion served a number of roles in the evolution of Shlonsky’s new-accent poeetry. It allowed him to experiment with new-accent composition, it “prepared” the Hebrew-speaking audience for lyric composition in the new accent, and it served as a forum in which Shlonsky could characterize the new accent as enacting a sharp break with the past. This dramatic characterization of the New Hebrew in poetry was distinct from the story Shlonsky told in his high new-accent lyric. The content, tone, and use of Hebrew in these folk songs were very current. As ±agit Halperin and others have noted, this small subcorpus of Shlonsky’s poetry from the twenties is a large part of what made Shlonsky the poet of the Third Aliyah (Halperin 20). The poems describe an anguished existence and moments of celebration, extremes that are present only in a far more abstract way in his canonical poetry: Shlonsky imprinted this [tragic Blokhian outlook] on a number of his songs [pizmonim], and he describes the pioneer of the Land of Israel in [this] perriod as someone whose joy and happiness with his world, whose wildness and rebelliousness, are mixed with the pain of separation from the parental home and with existential angst. (Halperin 18–19)
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As mentioned, his most successful folk song, “Doesn’t Matter,” was composed as a chastushka with disconnected stanzas valorizing sound over sense. ShlonÂ� sky’s version of this genre represented formally the unbridgeable emotional divide typical of the pioneer’s experience. It resonated so completely with contemporary notions of the figure of the pioneer that it was almost immediaately absorbed by popular culture as an anonymous folk song.27 I shall elaborate these characteristics of Shlonsky’s folk songs because they help to account for the contrast between their own accentual history and that of his canonical lyric poetry, and give us a sense of the openness of the folk song in general to new-accent innovation in Hebrew culture. All three folk songs that Shlonksy composed in the early twenties and published in the mid-twenties—inccluding “Train,” which does not resemble a chastushka—presume or enact a sharp break that is dramatized by their formal qualities. Shlonsky uses the nonnarrattive and antinarrative forms to express existential divides. There is a gap between the expressions of hope and an internal anguish, and a divide between the hereand-now of the pioneer-immigrant experience and the elsewhere of the living “parents of orphans.”28 Both divides were typical of the pioneer-immigrant experrience of the Third Aliyah, or at least of that generation’s self-image which they saw reflected in literature. Scholars have already noted Shlonsky’s attempt to creaate a different, new-accent folk song for life in Palestine.29 I would like to extend and elaborate these claims. On a metapoetic level these songs reflect themes of alienation, and this too is relevant to Shlonsky’s particular use of the new accent. The poems seem to refuse the option of continuing or contributing to the Jewish East European folk-song tradition; that in and of itself constitutes a particular method for absorbing the new accent into Hebrew culture and identity.
“In the Tent” Shlonsky wrote “In the Tent” (“ba-’Ohel”) in 1922 and it quickly became a popular song among the new settlements of Palestine. He apparently wrote it to replace a Yiddish folk song that was popular among the pioneers or, as he put it, “to displace the feet of the Yiddish song by giving people another expression of their sadness.”30 Shlonsky drew from a rich tradition of Yiddish folk songs, inccluding the Yiddish lullaby “The Roof Is Sleeping on the Attic” (“Afn boydm shloft der dakh”). In this poem, however, he draws on the tradition in a very diffferent sense, replacing the impoverished Jewish household of Eastern Europe that is the subject of the folk song with the pioneer’s lonely tent and supplanting Yiddish with new-accent Hebrew. He refers to the tradition only inasmuch as he proposes an alternative to that tradition. Of all his noncanonical works in the new accent, this song relates most directly to tropes of Yiddish folk culture, and this may be one reason why it is the only poem of a noncanonical genre to be included in To Papa-Mama. Nevertheless, the most severe break in “In the
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Tent” may well be metapoetic rather than thematic. By composing a newÂ�accent substitute for a Yiddish song, Shlonsky was also marking a divide bettween the Hebrew folk song in Palestine and the Yiddish folk song in Europe:
ָ ּבא ֶׂהל .וָ ֶדלֶ ף€.ו ְּס ָתו€.א ֶׂהל ׁ ַשח .ּאוּ‑הוּ‑הו€:שם€ ָ ְּיֵ ְבך€זֶ ה€ִמי ?כלֶ ב€ֶּ ֹאו€אח€ָ ?רו ַּח€ ֹאו€ַּתן ּ ֶ נֵ ֶט€וְ כָ ל .הוּא€ף—ד ַמע .סוֹ ף€בלִ י€ּ ְ יף‑טיף‑טוֹ ף—וְ כָ ְך ִ ִט !ו ְּדלׂף€דְּ לׂף€ה ֶ ּדלֶ ף€ְ ַ ְ ּדלֹף ,ס ָתו‑מוֹ לֶ ֶדת€ ְ רק€ַ יֵ ְב ְּך€ָּככָ ה ,י‑אב ָ ִן‑בל ּ ְ ב€ּ ֶ רק€ַ יֵ ְב ְּך€ָּככָ ה רו ֶׁע ֶדת€ביָ ד€ּ ְ ברֹם€ּ ָ ֵעת .נֵ רוׁת‑זָ ָהב€ּיְ כֻ בּ ו ...יף‑טיף‑טוׁף ִ ִט ,ה ּ ַלילָ ה€ַ נֵ ר€לִ י€א ְדלִ יק€ַ לֹא .ה ּיוׁם€ַ מכְ ָּתב€ִ אכְ ּתֹב€ֶ לׂא ,לָ ּה€אלְ לַ י€ַ ,לִ י€אם€ֵ י‑שם ָ ׁ ֵא .יָ תוֹ ם€וְ ה ּוא€בן€ּ ֵ לָ ּה€יֵ ש ...יף‑טיף ִ ִט ה ּתֹה ּו€ַ אל€ֶ .אהל ֶ ב€ּ ָ ַקר ְ :לַ ׁ ּ ָשוְ א€ ּיֵ ְבך€,כלֶ ב€ֶּ ֹלו€יֵ ְב ְּך :ּכמוֹ הו€ָּ עוֹ ד€יוֹ ֵד ַע€ִמי .וָ ָאב€אם€ּ ֵ יָ בֹאו€לֹא .ִטיף In the Tent A bent tent. And Autumn. And dripping. Who is crying: boo-hoo-hoo. Jackal or wind? Brother or dog? And every drop—is a tear. Drip, drip, drop—it does not stop. Drip the drop, drip and drop! Only the motherland’s autumn cries like this, Only a fatherless son cries like this, While above with trembling hand The golden candles are extinguished.
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a new sound in hebrew poetry Drip, drip, drop . . . I will not light a candle for myself tonight, I will not write a letter today. Somewhere I have a mother, woe-di-doe is she, She has a son and he’s an orphan. Drip, drip . . . It is cold in the tent. A dog cries To the chaos, cries for naught: Who knows others like him: Mother and father will never come. Drip. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The trochaic singsong, the lack of a narrative that would link the stanzas in a necessary chronology, the simple words, the rhyme, and the use of onommatopoeia typical of children’s poems (“oo-hoo-hoo,” “tif-tif-tof,” “delof hadelef, delof u-delof!”) misprepare one for the gloomy description of pioneer life that is the subject of the poem. The sound “oo-hoo-hoo” (translated here as “boo-hoo-hoo”) represents a cry. It is an eerie sound because it is not clear who is crying: a jackal, the wind, a person, or a dog. Is this the sound of dangger or of a familiar, familial, and innocuous creature in pain? A central motif of each of the next three stanzas is the absence of parents.31 The third stanza’s paradoxical articulation is the most poignant: “somewhere I have a mother€.€.€.€She has a son and he’s an orphan” (ll. 14–15). Shlonsky conjures up a figure whose loneliness exceeds that of the orphan, one whose parents are alive but are elsewhere, unreachable. “In the Tent” expresses the detachment and lonelliness of the mythical parentless young men and women who left Eastern Europe to work in Palestine, and enacts a parallel metapoetic move by creating a new, local, Hebrew folk-poetic expression that will replace the Yiddish folk songs and lullabies these pioneers grew up on in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. Shlonsky enllists the new accent to create a distinctly new sound that one can hear in both “Doesn’t Matter” and “In the Tent.” The new accent is a basic ingredient in his attempt to craft a truly contemporary and territorialized Hebrew folk-poetics. Despite differences in tone, “In the Tent” and “Doesn’t Matter” make simillar use of the new accent. The latter more than earns its mention in Kalvari’s article. In “Doesn’t Matter,” Shlonsky miraculously retrieves and invents a plethora of penultimately stressed words for new-accent Hebrew, and that makes the poem a kind of prosodic brag that would have no place in high lyric poetry. “In the Tent” is more restrained. Both poems expose the dichotoomy between the high and low emotional states of the pioneer’s life, although Shlonsky’s use of the trope of the pioneer’s lonely and unpleasant existence
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tends to be more playful and mocking in “Doesn’t Matter,” which avoids the deep unrelieved melancholy of “In the Tent.”
“Train” as a New-Accent Manifesto In “Train” (“Rakevet”), Shlonsky retains all the innovative elements of his other new-accent poems and proceeds one step further by evoking Italian futuriism. The concern with the present in “In the Tent” and “Doesn’t Matter” beccomes in “Train” the creation of a new timeline that begins with the poem’s first word and reaches aggressively and unsentimentally toward the future. The old sound is replaced by a distinctly new one. This new sound expresses the Jewish cultural present in Palestine and its journey into the future, rendering the Ashkenazic poetic texture a relic, a representation of East European Jewiish culture that in “Train” is part of the devalued past. In this futurist or perhhaps mock-futurist poem, the past is condemned in the sense that a building is condemned—forcibly abandoned, uninhabited, and eventually forgotten.32 “Train” both picks up on the theme of the pioneer as irretrievably divided from the past (the orphan whose parents are alive and elsewhere), and presents a new sound of the working, pioneering present, thereby underscoring the start of a new epoch that breaks with the past. The new beginning is in fact predicated on a violent detachment from the past and has an analogue in the poem’s prosody: Shlonsky seems intent here on proving that the new accent can produce poetic sound as musical, flexible, textured, and as rhythmically varied as the old, a sound that invokes the more global cultural and historical break with the past.
ַר ֶּכ ֶבת !דַּ י ִ ֵאי ה ּ ַפ ּ ִסים€ַ גַ ֵ ּבי€על€ַ ע ַקד€ָ מיÂ�.הכּ ׁל€ַ ֶאת ר ִּכים€ַ ּארים ִ ַָצו ְמ ֻר ְט ּ ָפ ׁ ִשים .ה ּ ַפ ּ ִסים€ַ ַעל ,פֹה€ּ חוֹ ֵרז€ִמי :פֹה€ּ כּ וֹ ֵרז€ִמי .ׁ ְשכוֹ ל ,ב ְרזֶ ל-Â� ּ ַ ְרכ ּוב,יח ַ ִאג€ָ ִה ֵּנה ,ֲא ַפ ְרזֵ ל ,ֶא ְדלֹק ֲ ו ְּב ַמ ּ ַסע א ְמלֹק€ֶ ,א ֱערֹף€ֶ חזִ יז-Â� .הכּ ֹל€ַ ֶאת
a new sound in hebrew poetry
€ס ָתם ָ ּ€ב ָאיִ ן, ִּכי€טוֹ ב€לִ י€נו ַּע ְ €ש ִמי€ה ּוא ַ€קיִ ן, נוּ€ו ָּמה ִ€אם ְ ִמי€יְ ַפ ְר ֵּכס ּ€פֹה ַ€חי ֲ€ע ַדיִ ן�—Â� ֲא ָמ ֵע ְך! י—�Â�Âה ִ ּצ ָידה! �-Âב ְרזֶ ל ֲ€אנִ ַ ְרכ ּוב ַ ּ ם�—Â�Âה ִ ּג ָידה! ַ €פה ָ€אב€וָ ֵא ִמי ּ ֹ ּ ֵפן ַ€א ׁ ְש ִמ ָידה. ַא ֲא ִב ָידה. ֵהי ַ€ה ִצ ָדה! וְ ַא ַחר: ע ּוף ָ€עיַ ְפ ִּתי. €שן חוֹ ֶר ֶקת וְ ׁשוֹ ֶק ֶקת: ַא ְך€נוֹ ֶש ֶפת ָ€ה ַר ֶּכ ֶבתֵ ׁ , €ש ֶקט! €ש ֶקט! ָהלְ ָאה ֶ ָהלְ ָאה ֶ �-Âתא! �Âתא ָּו ְּמ ׁ ַש ְק ֶש ֶקת€ָּ :תא ָּ את! אט ָ €ט ֵ וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים ּ ַ€פ ִסיםֻ : וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים ּ ַ€פ ִסים€ִּ :ת ְע ַּת ְע ָּת! וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים ּ ַ€פ ִסים€:לְ ַמ ּ ָטה, ַרק€לְ ַמ ּ ָטה, ַא ְּת€ַ ,א ָּתה! ָה ֶאתמוֹ ל ּ ֶ€פה ָ€קמוּץ. ַה ָּמ ָחר ּ ֶ€פה ּ ָ€פתוּח וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים ַ ּ€גלְ ַ ּגלִ ים ִ€עם ּ ַ€פ ּ ִסים€וְ ִעם€רו ַּח: ֵאין ַּ€ת ֲחנוֹ ת€ֵ ,אין ַּ€ת ֲחנוֹ ת. ַה ַּת ֲחנוֹ ת ֵ€ה ָּנה ַ€רק ֲ€הכָ נוֹ ת. ַרק ֲ€הכָ נוֹ ת. ָמה?! ית? ָמהָ :ט ִע ָ ְּתעוֹ ת ָּ€ת ִע ָּ ית: יטא. דֶּ ֶר ְך€רו ְּסיָ ה€ּ ,פוֹ לִ ין ,לִ ָ €טעוּ. €ט ִעיְ . €ט ֵעהְ . ָּתאְ . וְ ַע ָּתה? יטה: וְ ַע ָּתה ּ ָ€פנַ י ָ€אלִ ָ יטה, הוֹ ָ€מ ָחר ַ€אל ִ ּ€בי ַּ€ת ִ ּב ָ יטה, ֵּתן ָ€אנו ַּח€ֵּ ,תן ַ€א ׁ ְש ִק ָ �—Â�Âא ַּכת ַ€ע ָּתה! וְ ִאם ֻ€הכּ ֹת ֻ
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€שן€חוֹ ֶר ֶקת וְ שוֹ ֶק ֶקת: ַא ְך נוֹ ׁ ֶש ֶפת ָ€ה ַר ֶּכ ֶבתֵ ׁ , €ש ֶקט! €ש ֶקט! ָהלְ ָאה ֶ ָהלְ ָאה ֶ ו ְּמ ׁ ַש ְק ׁ ֶש ֶקת: ַאל ִּ€ת ַטע! ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע!€לֹא ֵ€עת ַ€ע ָּתה. €טע! ִּ€כי ֵ€עת ַ€ע ָּתה. €טע! ַ ַטע! ַ ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע! €טע!€ €טע! ַ ַטע! ַ ַטע! ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע—�Â�Âוַ ֲאנִ י ָ €ט ַר ְפ ִּתי! ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע—�Â�Âוַ ֲאנִ י ָ€ע ַר ְפ ִּתי! ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע—�Â�Âוַ ֲאנִ י ָ€עיַ ְפ ִּתי! €ט ַע! €טע! ַ €טע! ַ וְ ַהלֵ ב ִ ּ€ביַ : ַאך€צוֹ לֵ ַע ְּ€תמוֹ לִ י ַ€ה ִ ּג ֵ ּבןַ ,ה ָקרו ַּח: עוֹ ד ְ€מא ּום€לֹא€נָ ַת ָּת€,וְ לָ ָּמה ָּ€תנו ַּח? וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים€גַ לְ גַ לִ ים ִ€עם ּ ַ€פ ּ ִסים€וְ ִעם€רו ַּח: ִמא ּום€לֹא ַּ€ת ִּתי לֹא€נָ ַת ָּת לֹא€נָ ַתנּ ּו לֹא נָ ַת ְּת את אט ָּ €ט ֵ ְס ָתם ֻ ְס ָתם ִּ€ת ְע ַּת ְע ָּת ְס ָתם€לְ ַמ ּ ָטה ַרק€לְ ַמ ּ ָטה כּ ֹל€גָ ַמ ְע ִּתי ַמ ִּתי ַ€מ ָּת ּ€מ ֶּתם ַמ ְתנו ַ ֵמת ּו 33 ָמת. Train !Enough Hey who bound all Onto the rails. Soft necks Tromped On the tracks. Who here is rhyming, Who here is declaring: Grief.
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a new sound in hebrew poetry Lo, I shall sally forth, an iron-rider, I shall strike, I shall track down And in a flash shall slash the neck Of one and all. For I like to wander in the nether, And so—what if my name is Cain? Anyone here twitching, still alive— I’ll pulverize. Iron-rider am I—step aside! Who here is a mother or father?—do tell me! Lest I quell thee. Homicide. Hey—step aside! And afterwards: I’m weary-bleary. But the train is blowing-breathing, The cowcatcher—grinding-grunting, hustle-bustle: Yonder silence! Yonder silence! And rumbling-grumbling: Cabin-car-car-car! And rails are nagging: You were swept away! And rails are nagging: You led astray! And rails are nagging: Down below, Always below, You—you too! The yesterday—a pursèd mouth. The tomorrow—an open mouth And the wheels nag with the rails and the wind: There are no stations, there are no stations. These stations are only preparations. Only preparations. What?! What: did you err? You strayed there: Through Russia, Poland, Lithuania. Cabin-car. Err. Err. Err.* Now where?
*In the original, “err” appears here in three different forms of the imperative: masculline, femine, and plural.
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And now my face I shall conceal: Oh, tomorrow, do not gaze at me, Let me rest, let me be still, And if I’m struck, let it be forthwith! But the train—is blowing-breathing, The cowcatcher—grinding-grunting, hustle-bustle: Yonder silence! Yonder silence! Rumbling-grumbling: Do not plant! Do not plant! The time t’isn’t now. Plant! Plant! Plant! For the time is now. Do not plant! Plant! Plant! Plant! Plant! Do not plant—and I devoured! Do not plant—and I beheaded! Do not plant—and I am drooping, fagged and flagging! Heart is thumping: Plant! Plant! Plant! But hunchbacked and bald, my yesterday lumbers: You have yet to contribute, why do you slumber? And wheels nag with the rails and the wind: I gave not a thing You did not give We did not give You did not give You were simply swept up You simply deceived Simply below Always below I swallowed all I died you died We died you all died They died He died. (Shlonsky 1965, 226–228)
One of the many things Shlonsky’s train represents is futurist motion à la Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the writer and artist who gave the movement its name. He outlined an Italian futurist aesthetic that revered technology, speed (and the convergence of the two in the form of modern vehicles—the automobbile, the train, and the airplane), the valorization of sound over sense, an antibourgeois amorality, and a rejection of the contemporary aesthetic. Marinetti’s imprint is apparent in some of Shlonsky’s manifestos, as well as in “Train.” In
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one essay Shlonsky advocates “free love” for words of different registers and sources in Hebrew, which is reminiscent of Marinetti’s discourse of “free words.”34 The “sssssssiii ssiissii ssiisssssiiii” of Marinetti’s “Zang Tumb Tumb” of 1912 is a precursor to Shlonsky’s train. Marinetti’s “ssii” sounds in a description of a train ride in Sicily and is both an onomatopoeia for the whistling train and a vote of confidence for his futurist aesthetic (si is “yes” in Italian). Marinetti despises both the tired, outdated, irrelevant art and the attitude towward art represented by the museum and its contents. The constant motion of Shlonsky’s train, among other characteristics, keeps it and the poem from beccoming a stagnant museum of the dead. Although meaning and syntax in “Train” do not disintegrate to the extent that Marinetti encourages, this poem has often been treated as if it did, as if it were a collection of audial tricks lackiing any deeper meaning.35 The Hebrew language is harnessed to the poem’s train such that public performances of the poem (which preceded its publicattion by about three years) were seen as celebrations of the possibilities opened up by new-accent Hebrew, much as the appearance of the train that arrived in Palestine in 1904 was supposed to pull the Ottoman Empire into the twentieth century.36 Jews in Palestine also interpreted the construction of the railroad as their ticket to the modern world and in retrospect the railroad may be seen as a kind of symbol for the linguistic goals of the revivalists of the Second Aliyah.37 The poem’s new-accent credentials are impeccable. Shlonsky’s project here forms an unexpected parallel to the more artificial challenge that Jewish Â�Enlightenment poets had set for themselves only a few decades earlier. In fact Shlonsky’s position resembles both that of the Haskalah poets—the quest for words that have a penultimate stress even according to the rules of the Sephardic stress system—and that of Bialik—composing unabashedly in the accent of spokken, as opposed to literary, Hebrew. But whereas Wesselian verse was mocked for its repetition of the same old rhyme words that satisfied its rather odd requiremments, Shlonsky’s quest was far more fruitful and “Train” is less dependent on foreign words than his homespun “En ±arod” is. Words like ’ayin, ¿ayin, kayin, ¿adayin, ha-tsidah, hagidah, ’ashmidah, ’a’avidah, ¿ayafti, shokeket, sheket, lematah, patua¿, rua¿, ta¿ita, Lita’, tabitah, ’ashkitah, ’anua¿, and karua¿, which appear in the poem, all carry their major stress on the penultimate syllable in all pronunciations of Hebrew. The oft-repeated ta sound also indicates that Shlonssky has surrendered his Ashkenazic accent. The consonantal sound is sometimes generated by the letter tet, sometimes by the strong taf, and sometimes by the weak taf, which would be pronounced as /s/ (like samekh or sin) rather than as /t/ (like tet or the strong taf) in Ashkenazic Hebrew. By rhyming a weak taf with a tet instead of with one of the sibilant letters, Shlonsky marks the poem as newÂ�accent and instructs the reader or listener in this New Hebrew. For all his flexing of new-accent muscle, Shlonsky has a rather different motive than the Haskalah poets. He wishes to demonstrate that accentual-
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syllabic new-accent poetry can be flexible and rhythmic and that New Hebbrew is the appropriate medium for Jewish modernity and literary modernism. Shlonsky is replacing Bialik and his revolution inasmuch as he is proclaiming the rise of a new poetic sound based on a prosaic, colloquial, quotidian Hebbrew. Bialik and his contemporaries had accomplished as much in the late nineteenth century for Ashkenazic Hebrew. But in the meantime, with the rise of spoken Hebrew in the schools, Bialik’s spoken Hebrew had been renddered a literary language, and Ashkenazic Hebrew was now being conddemned to the museum of the Hebrew language. The futurist mode of violence functions here as well at the same time that the poem valorizes sound over sense as low genres such as children’s poetry do.
mi’um lo’ tati lo’ natata lo’ natanu lo’ natat stam tu’te’ta stam ti¿ta¿ta stam le-matah rak le-matah kol gama¿ti mati mata matnu matem metu mat. I gave not a thing You did not give We did not give You did not give You were simply swept up
ת ִּתי€ַּ לֹא€ִמא ּום נָ ַת ָּת€לֹא נָ ַתנּ ּו€לֹא לֹא נָ ַת ְּת את ָּ אט ֵ ט€ ֻ ְס ָתם ת ְע ַּת ְע ָּת€ִּ ְס ָתם לְ ַמ ּ ָטה€ְס ָתם לְ ַמ ּ ָטה€ַרק גָ ַמ ְע ִּתי€כּ ֹל מ ָּת€ַ ַמ ִּתי מ ֶּתם€ּ ַ ַמ ְתנו ֵמת ּו .ָמת
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a new sound in hebrew poetry You simply deceived Simply below Always below I swallowed all I died you died We died you all died They died He died. (Shlonsky 1965, 228)
When the poem conjugates “to die,” an irregular verb in Hebrew, it seems both childish—as if it were written to be integrated into a Hebrew primer—and absollutely inappropriate for juvenile consumption.38 (It also reinforces a new-accent lesson: since the final letter of the alphabet is always pronounced as a tet, /t/, and never /s/ like the samekh, a lesson provided by the ta repetitions as well, and identiffies conjugated verbs as a rich source of penultimately stressed words, “mati mata / matnu matem / metu / mat.”) Shlonsky is undoing the ties that bind the new acccent to children’s literature and inscribing a new link in Hebrew poetry between the culture of the Land of Israel and the new accent. This morbid pedagogic drill also introduces a future for new-accent poetry as it enacts the death of the old sound. I will return below to one example of the poem’s enactment of the moment when Hebrew poetry in the Land of Israel switched from one accent to the other. The “iron-rider” (rekhuv-barzel)—whether the runaway train itself or a condductor or passenger who speaks the poem—maps out time along the train tracks and onto the surface of the land so that the recent chronology of (Ashkenazic) Jewish experience has a geographic analogue in the poem. The future would at first seem to be just ahead of the train, but then the poem identifies the past in Eastern Europe as a detour (“via Russia, Poland, Lithuania”) rather than the first stop on the train’s route, and the stations as “only preparations,” indicating that the motion of the train or the train itself in motion represents the future. In the poem’s mapping of time onto space, the past is underfoot and the train is etching its path onto that surface, replacing as it destroys. The “iron-rider” identtifies with Cain, Adam and Eve’s violent son. In the following lines of the poem, he warns pedestrians to get out of his way:
!—ה ִ ּצ ָידהÂ�Â� ַ אנִ י€ֲ ב ְרזֶ ל-Â� ּ ַ ְרכ ּוב !—ה ִ ּג ָידהÂ�Â�ם ַ וָ ֵא€אב€ָ פה€ ֹ ּ ִמי .א ׁ ְש ִמ ָידה€ַ ּ ֵפן .ַא ֲא ִב ָידה Iron-rider am I—step aside! Who-here is a mother or father?—do tell me! Lest I quell thee— Homicide! (Shlonsky 1965, 226)
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The parents and the past are so irrelevant to the high-speed present that the dangerous and threatening iron-rider can afford to warn them to move aside. Despite the poem’s sharp rejection of the recent past, the speaker’s viollent aggression seems directed less at the actual figures of the other generattion than at specters of the past that haunt the present. The biblical Cain, with whom the speaker shares a name (“so what if my name is Cain”), was a fratricide, not a patricide. The older generation itself is not held responsible for the stagnation of society, art, and language; Cain’s conservative tightlipped contemporaries who hold on to the outdated past are responsible. The human victims of the first eighteen lines of the poem seem to be the speaker’s contemporaries rather than the irrelevant and harmless parents who may have even once been the futurists of their own generation.39 Although the effort of inscribing the future has exhausted the speaker, the noise and motion of the train continue. In the next stanza the train seems to be breathing noisily and its tooth, referring to the train’s cowcatcher, both recalls Cain’s violent potential and links the stanza to the next part of the poem, which describes the past and future as mouths, the one closed, the other open:
.קמוּץ€ָ פה€ֶ ּ ָה ֶאתמוֹ ל .פתו ַּח€ָ ּ פה€ֶ ּ ַה ָּמ ָחר :רו ַּח€וְ ִעם€פ ּ ִסים€ַ ּ עם€ִ גלְ ַ ּגלִ ים€ּ ַ וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים .ת ֲחנוֹ ת€ַּ אין€ֵ ,ת ֲחנוֹ ת€ַּ ֵאין .הכָ נוֹ ת€ֲ רק€ַ ה ָּנה€ֵ ַה ַּת ֲחנוֹ ת .הכָ נוֹ ת€ֲ ַרק !?ָמה The yesterday—a pursèd mouth. The tomorrow—an open mouth And the wheels nag with the rails and the wind: There are no stations, there are no stations. These stations are only preparations. Only preparations. What?! (Shlonsky 1965, 226–228)
Patua¿ is the obvious word choice for “open,” but for “closed” Shlonsky prefers the rare kamuts to the more prosaic sagur. Kamuts connotes a pursed or clenched mouth rather than one that is merely and incidentally closed. The distinction here between an open mouth and a pursed or clenched one is not unlike the distinction in French between la gueule and la bouche. La gueule, a loose or wide-open mouth, has both masculine and lower-class associations; la bouche is a pinched mouth, and is associated with femininity, proper behavior, and midddle- or upper-class speech.40 Indeed, the very articulation of the word kamuts purses the lips, and the word patua¿ begins and ends with open syllables. This
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classification of open and pursed mouths, whether through the French or anoother source, functions in Shlonsky’s idiolect, and the metaphoric language of this poem recalls Shlonsky’s 1922 essay “Eternal Hunchback” (“±atoteret ¿olam”) in which he proposes that culture rises up from the bottom ranks of socciety.41 The articulated and open mouth in the poem is the speaking mouth “of the morrow,” as are the masses and the culture that rise to the top in his essay. The pursed, proper mouth produces subtle, roundabout, and quiet speech—if it is able to articulate at all—and is redundant and outdated. The choice of kamuts for the pursed mouth of the past also invokes the new prosodic stage in Shlonsky’s career that this poem inaugurates. The associations of the open mouth with the masses and the morrow are transposed onto the new accent. The pursed mouth, associated with the rarefied, outdated, and redunddant, represents the impeded Ashkenazic accent (as well as the speech and cultture of Jewish Eastern Europe more generally) that is itself symbolic of an enervated culture whose Hebrew is mute and bound to texts. The secondary meaning of kamuts, after “clenched,” is “vocalized with the kamats vowel”; in adddition to “open,” patua¿ means “vocalized with the pata¿ vowel.” One major difference between the vowel systems of the two competing groups of accents during the period of Hebrew revival was the relationship between the kamats and pata¿ vowels in each. Ashkenazic pronunciations tended to make a distincttion between the two while the new accent (in keeping with most Sephardic pronnunciations) assigned the more open /ä/ sound of the pata¿ to both vowels.42 The more pursed sound of the Ashkenazic kamats (o or aw) was considered representtative of that accent, a metonymy for the Ashkenazic pronunciation. The violent futurism haunting the poem suggests that precisely because the shut Ashkennazic mouth or accent is a thing of the past it is undesirable, to be pushed aside or destroyed. An open mouth or the new accent belongs to the future, and the mouth of the train progressing through space clears a path for Hebbrew literary culture entering an age when poems may actually open their mouths and speak freely. The train is giving voice to Hebrew poetry, presenting it as vocal rather than (merely) textual. The poem associates the language of the masses with the new accent, and the nation collects artifacts of popular or low culture in order to produce a national literary culture. One meta-poetic ramification of this interpretation is that the new accent is upwardly mobile. The generic and self-congratulattory implication is that something of this open-mouthed popular song—its new-accent aesthetic, its rhythm—will be integrated into the higher genres so that they too will speak. I have already mentioned some of the clever ways in which the poem uses the sounds of syllables and words as a certificate of its new-accent credentials, but that does not begin to account for the poem’s breathtaking onomatopoeia and sonic originality. The novel combinations of sound account for the poem’s
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popularity at readings in the early 1920s (a recital of “Train” would have been more of a performance than a reading) and it remains one of the more mesmmerizing and audially captivating poems in Hebrew. “Train” appropriately serves as a star example of onomatopoeia in Benjamin Harshav’s classic article on sound and meaning in poetry.43 Harshav writes of the three groups of sounds in Shlonsky’s poem: The F of exhalation, the K + Š of rustling, and then a string of ta-ta-ta. Later on in the poem the poet raises in a most virtuosic (but exaggerated and perhaps childish) way every linguistic possibility that allows for a repettition of the sound ta-ta-ta. (Harshav 1968, 413)
In addition to reminding the reader of the connection between onomatopoeia and children’s poetry, Harshav reads the sounds of the poem as the sounds of a train. But “Train” is merely one of many paradigms in his article, and he is not interested in the poem as a complex of sound and meaning nor in its prosodic history, so that one of the most innovative and subtle uses of onomatopoeia to be found in this poem is left unattended. The most impressive of Shlonsky’s auddial achievements in the poem is what I call an onomatopoeia of rhythm. It is generated by a shift between words with a stress on the final syllable and words with a penultimate stress within a trochaic meter (one in which each metric unit is composed of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable). The rhythmic onomatopoeia of the train also describes the shift from an Ashkenazic to a Sephardic stress within the history of Hebrew poetry. Shlonsky uses newaccent Hebrew to represent both the new and Ashkenazic accents and can therefore enact the shift from one to the other rather than merely representing the appearance of the new accent. Efrayim Lisitski’s “To the Caboose” (’El ha-katar) and Yaakov Lerner’s “SootSoot” (Pia¿-pia¿) were two Hebrew poems about trains that preceded Shlonssky’s.44 Aleksandr Neverov’s novel Tashkent: City of Bread was a more immediate precedent; Shlonsky was to publish his own translation of the novel into Hebrew in 1932.45 In one scene, the protagonist Mishka settles into his seat on a train desspite others’ best attempts to stop him. As he falls asleep, the sounds of the train mingle with his thoughts of recent events, and shards of phrases intertwine with the rhythm of the moving wheels and merge with the sounds of the train:
הנה יפרוץ וירוץ. בעלותו במעלות יקרא בקולי קולות.זוחל הקטר עקלקלות הגלגלים- ולמשק. וגלגליו ישתקשקו. והנה יתנדנד לעתו,ארך כמה פרסות :נים בלבו של משקה המתחפש-לא-המתון יתקשרו ויתפרדו הרהורי נים !חת-—סע–נסעת ! מטה—תרי,—מטה !תא-תא-תא! תא-תא-—תא !—איש אתה! איש אתה
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!—הנה באת! הנה באת ! חת, חת,—חת ! אל תחת, אל תחת,—אל תחת !חטה-חטה! פוד-—פוד !פוד-פוד-—פוד The locomotive crawls crookedly. It cries loudly as it climbs hills. It races a few parasangs, it rocks slowly, wheels rumbling. And halfsleeping thoughts in the heart of the disguised Mishka mingle and divide themselves from the restrained sound of the wheels. —go—you’re gone—one —down, down—two —Tchoo-tchoo-tchoo! Tchoo-tchoo-tchoo! —A man you are! A man you are! —You have come! You have come! —one, one, one! —do not fear, do not fear, do not fear! —corns and ears! Corns and ears! —ears-ears-ears!46 (Neverov, 76–77)
Shlonsky’s Hebrew translation of this passage is reminiscent of his own liteerary train, retaining the “ta-ta-ta” of his poem (translated above as “Tchootchoo-tchoo” to preserve the rhyme). His poem gives us a sense of the great noise of a steam engine heaving its way across the countryside and announciing its impending arrival. The phrase “Yonder, silence” or “Away, silence” concretizes the metaphor. What would have merely been the noise of the train “chasing” the quiet away is literalized now that the train has words to express itself. By virtue of speaking at all, and huffing and creaking, the train is already chasing the silence away. In order to illustrate how the rhythmic onomatopoeia functions, imagine a figure like the character in Neverov’s novel, sitting on a train that is the poem and listening a bit more intently than the “iron-rider” could. ‘akh noshefet ha-rakevet, shen ¿oreket ve-shokeket halah sheket! halah sheket u-mshaksheket ‘al tita¿ ‘al tita¿! lo’ ¿et ¿atah. ta¿! ta¿! ta¿! ki ¿et ¿atah. ‘al tita¿! ta¿! ta¿! ta¿! ta¿!47
These lines mimic the series of sounds a train makes when in motion or, more precisely, they recreate the shifting rhythms of an accelerating train.
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The first three lines above contain many words whose stress falls on the penuultimate syllable. Those in the first line are present-tense singular verbs geneerated by the feminine subject, the train (rakevet). The fourth line introduces the first of many “ta”s in the stanza, and is composed of words that carry their major stress on the final syllable. The repeating “ta” acts as a marker of the rhythm. Although there are no words in this segment of the stanza that have a penultimate stress, the variation in number of syllables between one “ta” and another creates the effect of a switch between one stress and the other. This switch (which I have marked with an asterisk in my example below) capttures the experience of the passenger lulled by the sound the wheels of the train make as they pick up speed and move out of the station. One sound marks the beginning of a cycle of sounds. A second, less pronounced sound occurs many more times and fills the gaps between one marker and the next (think of the major and minor heartbeats). Suppose the more noticeable sound, the marker, sounded something like “dum” and the quieter filler like “da.” A passenger who had just settled into her seat as the train started to pull out of the station might hear something like this: da da dum da da dum da da dum da da dum
But as the train picks up speed, the rhythm changes even as the passenger continues to hear the same da da dum da da dum .€.€. da da / dum da da* dum da da dum . . .
The passenger hears the same number of sounds in the same order and with the same frequency. All that changes is the point at which the listener marks the beginning of a rhythmic unit, or whether she hears the marker, the beat, at the beginning of the phrase or the end. The stanza from “Train” is more complicated but follows this same basic pattern if the sixth and eighth lines are read more slowly than the fifth and seventh. A switch takes place between the fifth line (al tita¿! lo’ ¿et ¿atah) and the sixth (ta¿! ta¿! ta¿! ki ¿et ¿atah). The major “ta” sound stays in place but the minor sounds mutate to wonderful effect. Whereas the train was forbidding the addressee of the poem to plant (“now is not the time”), it now orders the addressee to plant (“for now is the time”), perhaps invoking memories of the pioneers’ confused and miserable attempts to work the land. In the first stanza containing the ta-ta-ta onomatopoeia, Shlonsky rhymes— or fails to rhyme—le-matah and ’atah (down and you). The rhyme is impoveri-
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ished by the difference in the stress of each word, as he pairs feminine with masculine endings. Le-matah, a word that has a penultimate stress universally (i.e., in the new accent as well), comes to represent the Ashkenazic accent in contrast to the ’atah that is attempting to rhyme with it. However the reader articulates ’atah—correctly, with the stress on the final syllable (’atah), or so as to create a proper rhyme with le-matah (’atah), or by maintaining a tension between these two options—one gets a sense of disjunction, of the shifting beat of the train as it picks up speed, or of a larger cultural poetic transformattion from the Ashkenazic to the new. Shlonsky is addressing a particular concern about the new accent and the possibility of new-accent poetry. While poets and critics may have appreciated the need for children’s poetry in new-accent Hebrew and even acknowledged the existence of some very good new-accent poems for children, they claimed that rhythmically interesting poetry could not be written in such a monotonous dialect. This poem calls the Ashkenazic bluff. With his runaway Hebrew train Shlonsky seemed to demonstrate that rhythmically, new-accent Hebrew could do everything Ashkenazic Hebrew could do. The dramatization of the new-accent shift in this poem has two ramifications that partially resolve the larger historiographic and genealogical questions. Inaasmuch as “Train” is one of Shlonsky’s early new-accent compositions and the very first new-accent poem he published (and one that received a lot of attenttion thanks to its sonic innovations), this poem inaugurates the poet’s own adopttion of the new accent in poetry. Shlonsky followed his publication of “Train” with folk songs and lyric poems in the new accent. The poem itself also alludes to the futurist notion that the populace and low culture are the sources of literaary and artistic creativity in general. Shlonsky’s publication history following “Train” and the metapoetic implications of the poem itself both serve to portray “Train” as Shlonsky’s inaugural new-accent poem in all genres, high and low. The poem enacts Shlonsky’s own shift in his choice of poetic dialect, and the rhythmic switches such as the one illustrated above enact the historic shift within Hebrew language and literature from Ashkenazic to the new acccent, linking that literary-linguistic shift to the technological progress and growth of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. By enacting, or reenacting, the shift in poetic accent in Hebrew poetry in his own inaugural new-accent poem, Shlonsky is himself writing the history of new-accent poetry as if it paralleled or were identical to the development of his own poetic language. “Train” confuses Shlonsky’s own poetic development with the history of Hebbrew poetry and his own official and dramatized switch from one accent to another with that of the proto-national literature.48 In a similar way, Shlonsky plants the new accent in the territory that the poem identifies with the future, the new Jewish settlement in Palestine:
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?ית ָ ָט ִע:ָמה :ית ָּ ת ִע€ָּ ְּתעוֹ ת .יטא ָ ִ ל,פוֹ לִ ין€ּ ,רו ְּסיָ ה€דֶּ ֶר ְך .ּטעו€ ְ .ט ִעי€ ְ .ט ֵעה€ ְ .ָּתא ?וְ ַע ָּתה What: Did you err? You strayed there: Through Russia, Poland, Lithuania. Cabin-car. Err. Err. Err. Now where?
There is no explicit destination, but the implication is that the train is the futture or is headed for the territory upon which the future is mapped and that the stations as well as the East European Ashkenazic exile are peripheral and outdated. The open-mouthed future starts today, in the now of the poem, and these other places are remnants of the past. In spatial terms they are detours and delays, territories exiled from the future of the new Hebrew nation. In dramatizing and pinpointing his shift from an Ashkenazic to a new acccent in a poem that clarifies the distance between Palestine—the destination of the Jezreel Valley railway—and Europe and puts Poland and Russia at the periphery, Shlonsky is also enacting this switch for the Palestinian Hebrew corpus as a whole. He makes Palestine the home of the new-accent poetics of the future. This is in keeping with his other popular poems in the new accent that in various ways replace, reject, or break with the popular and folk Yidddish genres of Eastern Europe rather than conversing with that corpus or even attacking it oedipally. Shlonsky had many roles in new Hebrew culture. He is probably second only to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the number of Hebrew neologisms he coined; he integrated modernist poetic revolutions into Hebrew poetry and encouraaged and influenced a generation or two of modernist Hebrew poets to follow suit; he revised his own aesthetic and poetic persona a number of times and, as Leah Goldberg said of him, taught his fellow Russian immigrants how to write poetry in Hebrew.49 It is therefore overdetermined that he should have come to represent Hebrew poetry, that his biography should be identified with the Hebrew literary history of the early twentieth century, and that the shift to the new accent should be attributed to him. With “Train,” Shlonsky takes advantage of his status, equating his own oeuvre with Hebrew poetry and inscribing himself as the inventor of the new-accent poem for Hebrew culture in Palestine. Shlonsky’s self-presentation in this poem is one of the sources of his reputation as the new-accent poet.
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Shlonsky’s Canonical New-Accent Poetry and the Yiddish Folk Tradition Shlonsky’s train is a Cain figure who renders the parents and the past irrelevvant, and reserves his brute force for contemporary manifestations of the outddated. But that attitude itself betrays an underlying oedipal struggle even if the parents are old and worn and no match for the threatening speaker. ShlonÂ�sky is preoccupied with representing the present and the immediate future of the new settlement as effectively replacing and erasing the recent past. This is one of the ways that he inscribes a new Hebrew poetry as territorial, as belonging to the Yisshuv, but he seems to limit this method to the noncanonical genres in which he composed in the early 1920s. Both “Train” and “Doesn’t Matter” present themsselves as discontinuous with the East European Jewish past and present. “In the Tent,” more than “Train” or “Doesn’t Matter,” refers to the Yiddish folk tradition even as it tries to replace elements of that tradition with the stuff of the pioneeriing myth in the Land of Israel. The poem treats the break as a traumatic one to be mourned. That makes it more of a piece with the collection To Papa-Mama and distinguishes it in sensibility if not genre from “Train” and “Doesn’t Matter.” As “Train” in some sense introduces the publication of his new-accent poetry across genres, the poem’s dramatized break with Eastern Europe and its reinfforcement of the connection between new-accent poetry and Palestine become associated with Shlonsky’s entire new-accent corpus.50 But within the lyric poems themselves there is quite a different relationship to the past and the Diaaspora that is in keeping with the avant-garde labor poetry of the period. In his canonical new-accent poems Shlonsky remains in contact with the milieu and culture of Jewish Eastern Europe and is very much in dialogue with Jewish folk songs, especially from the Yiddish tradition. These poems are distinct from but linked to that tradition; there is a distance that nevertheless allows for nostalgia and longing.
The Yiddish Kid To Papa-Mama contains five new-accent poems, all published separately in periodicals several months prior to the book’s appearance.51 With the exception of the folk song “In the Tent,” these early new-accent poems refer to the Yiddish folk tradition as a way of locating their speakers in or headed for Palestine, drawiing upon the rich Yiddish poetic tradition as upon a predecessor. When the speakers in these four poems do reflect on the irreducible divide between the pioneering life in Palestine and the tropes of their Jewish childhood, they do so without introducing the discontinuities of “Train” or “In the Tent”; they integgrate that tradition and acknowledge the loss of some valuable aspects of Jewish life associated with the Yiddish folk song.
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All four poems (“Tishre,” “Oh Boy Boy” [“Hah yeled yeled”], “Return” [“Shivvah”], “Up to This Point” [“¿Ad halom”]) refer to the speaker as a poet—with the title paytan, which evokes the medieval liturgical poets, or by reference to one of Shlonsky’s earlier works (Devai, Gilboa¿)—in a moment of crisis or transition. These early canonical new-accent poems attempt to integrate the New Hebrew and the pioneer experience in general into a preexisting context, into East Eurropean “pre-history.” I will be reading these poems both as individual works and also in the context of their appearance in To Papa-Mama, a book that opens with “Tishre” and that contains both Ashkenazic and new-accent poems. I do this not only because it facilitates my analysis of several simultaneous newÂ�accent events (the appearance of each individual poem and of the collection), nor simply because it is plausible given the denseness of the dates of publication (all within half a year). I believe that the appearance of To Papa-Mama encomppasses a series of phenomena beginning with the integration of the new and the old within individual poems and peaking with the appearance of a book that is not so much Shlonsky’s first new-accent book as it is his first book to contain and account for the appearance of new-accent poems. The design and structure of To Papa-Mama supports my hypothesis that ShlonÂ�sky inscribed the new accent in his lyric poetry in a way that was distinct from his integration of the new accent into his popular songs. The book is organnized around a model of integration rather than the model of interruption and suppression that characterized “Train” and “Doesn’t Matter.” The collection reiinforces attitudes to the Yiddish tradition and the Old World beyond the strictly linguistic realm that are expressed in the individual poems.52 Shlonsky does this through his selection and ordering of the poems. One of the predominant tropes of popular Yiddish poetry is the baby goat of the lullaby who is a metonymy for the child in the song’s narrative.53 In the paraddigm, the animal stands under the cradle and stands in for the boy, and the song is composed as if sung by a mother to her baby boy. She sings of his growiing up and going out into the world or of the kid’s forays to the market for raissins. In both the Yiddish and Hebrew uses of this trope the kid or the boy’s imagined trips to the market are symbolic of his pious future. Shlonsky is not unique among Hebrew poets in utilizing these themes and tropes from the Yidddish lullaby, but the range and density of his applications are remarkable.54 The kid symbolizes the impossibility of truly disposing of one’s heritage. The preddominance of Yiddish folk elements in Shlonsky’s poems only makes the abssence of these tropes from his noncanonical poetry more noteworthy. In my reading of “Tishre” in the previous chapter, I underscored the poem’s antiromantic elements and its explicit parting of ways with Bialikian poetics. But in the context of Shlonsky’s Hebrew version of the Yiddish tate-mame (namely his collection To Papa-Mama), this poem must also be read as a melanccholic yearning, a nostalgia for tropes of Yiddish poetry that overlap with rom-
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manticism in Hebrew poetry and other literatures. The Yiddish kid has followed tate-mame to this volume of Hebrew poems, appearing in “Tishre” as well as in several others including “Oh Boy Boy” and “Up to This Point.” The son of the Yiddish lullaby, like his alter ego and sometime companion the kid, is destined to wander away from home. And so he does in the openiing stanza of “Tishre”:
לָ כֵ ן ָּכל ַּכ ְך ָעצוּב. ֲאנִ י ּ ַפיְ ָטן,ָאכֵ ן .ימה ָ ן–כ ִמיָ ִמים יָ ִמ ְּ ֹׁ ִש ִירי ָה ַא ֲחרו ַה ֵ ּבן רוֹ ֶצה לָ ׁשוּב,)?ַה ֵ ּבן ָהלַ ך (לְ ָאן .א ָּמא-א ִ ַא ָ ּב,ֶׂאל ׁ ִשיר ָה ֶע ֶרש Indeed I am a poet [paytan]. And so my final poem Is so very sad—as in years gone by. The son has gone (where?), the son wants to return To the lullaby, papa-mama. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
Time passes in the course of the poem and by its end “Tishre,” the first month of autumn and the beginning of the year, is also drawing to a close as the secoond autumn month approaches.
ַה ֵ ּבן ְּכ ָבר לֹא יָ ׁשוּב.ְּכ ָבר ִמ ְת ַ ּד ּ ֵפק ֶח ׁ ְשוָ ן !א ָּמא-א ִ ַא ָ ּב,לִ י-ּלו-לִ י-ֶאל ַאי לָ כֵ ן ָּכל ַּכ ְך ָעצוּב. ֲאנִ י ּ ַפיְ ָטן,ָאכֵ ן .ימה ָ ן–כמוֹ ִמיָ ִמים יָ ִמ ְּ ֹׁ ִש ִירי ָה ַא ֲחרו ±eshvan’s already knocking. The son will not return To aye-li-lu-li, papa-mama! And so I am a poet. And so my final poem It is so very sad—just as in years gone by. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The son will not return home to his parents after all. Neither will he return to the lullaby and the way things were in his childhood. Still, he longs for home. This is quite a different pretense than forgetting one’s past or condemning it as irrelevant, or valorizing the present as altogether new and inherently better. Each of the three lyric new-accent compositions that complete the voluume—“Oh Boy Boy,” “Return,” and “Up to This Point”—bring together elemments from the pioneering life in Palestine and from the Old World. And in each, one can see the two domains in relation to each other and in relation to the speaker-immigrant. “Oh Boy Boy” is structured as a conversation between an unidentified “us” and a somewhat alienated poet:
–ַהכּ ֹל ָ ּברוּר ָּכל ַּכ ְך ֲעלֵ י ֵת ֵבל ַר ָ ּבה !?ִמי עוֹ ד יְ ַקו ַה ּיוֹ ם לְ ֶפלֶ א ,ּפֹה ׁ ְש ַּתיִ ם ּ ַפ ַעם ׁ ְש ַּתיִ ם ְ ּב ִד ּיוּק ַא ְר ַ ּבע .ּת–א ֶּולֶ ת ִ וְ כָ ל ִה ׁ ְש ּתוֹ ְממו
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, ּ ַפיְ ָטן,ֵהן ְּכ ָבר הוֹ כִ יח ּו לְ ָך ;ל–רק ַא ְתמוֹ ְס ֵפ ָירה ַ ִֹּכי זֶ ה ַה ְּתכו –,ָה ֲא ָד ָמה ַּכדוּר ָק ָטן .וְ ָה ָא ָדם ֵאינֶ נּ ּו ּ ֶפ ֶרא רב-י ָ ב-ר ּ ֵ ֶא ְצלֵ נ ּו פֹה ָּכל ַ ּב ...ק ֶֹהלֶ ת ְמלֹא ָח ְפנַ יִ ם-אוֹ ֵסף ָחכְ ַמת Everything is so very clear in the wide world— Who today could still hope for a miracle?! Here two times two is four precisely, And all astonishment—is folly. They have already proved to you, paytan, That this blue—is just the atmosphere; The earth is a small sphere,— And man is not wild. Here, chez nous, every schoolboy Collects a handful of Ecclesiastes wisdom. . . . (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The poet is a stranger to this rational, scientific, cynical, and enlightened world in which he finds himself.
יתי ֵבין ֻּכלָ ם ִ ְִּכמוֹ ִמכּ וֹ כָ ב ַא ֵחר ָהי . ְּכ ַעיִ ר ּ ֶפ ֶרא,מ ְד ָ ּבר-ֹאו ִ ִּכ ְת ,עוֹ לָ ם- סו ֵּסי,ִמי ִה ְד ִה ְירכֶ ם ? ֶה ָרה, ֶה ָרה,ֲעלוֹ ת ַרק ֶה ָרה I was like the man from another planet among them— Like a desert buffalo, like a wild ass. Who rode you, horses of the world, Ascending only the mountains, mountains, mountains? (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
But if the horses of the world are constantly climbing in this foreign place, the poet finds a familiar creature in the valley, as confused as he is.
– ֶמה ו ָּמה: ַה ְ ּג ִדי ּפוֹ ֶעה עוֹ ד, ַ ּב ַ ּגיא,וְ ׁ ָשם .ְּולֹא ִאיכְ ּ ַפת ִאם ְּת ַצ ֵחקו ,ֲאנִ י עוֹ ד ַמ ֲא ִמין ֶ ּב ֱאמוּנָ ה ׁ ְשלֵ ָמה .ּם–תיקו ֵּ ִִּכי ׁ ְש ַּתיִ ם ּ ַפ ֲע ַמי And there, in the ravine, the kid still bleats: what and what—[meh u-mah] It does not matter if you laugh. I still believe with perfect faith, That two times two—it is a draw. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
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The speaker has caught sight of the kid of his childhood and hears its confussion (“what and what?”), words that mimic the sound of bleating (meh u-mah). The poet’s arrival in the rational scientific world is now identified with his exoodus from the insular and familiar realm of religious knowledge and superstittion, where a draw is merely a victory postponed until semi-divine intercession at the end of days.55 The poet in the New World has managed to hold on to remnants of his now romanticized childhood. That same boy who was once addressed by his mother’s lullaby, the boy with his childish-pious notions of the Old World, still survives within the confused and alienated man, as the goat in the valley.56 “Return” collects a variety of linguistic and literary forms, inverting and confflating the tropes of the lullaby and labor poetry. The first stanza has much in common with other Yiddish and Hebrew poems from this period: it is written in epistolary form and refers to the piety of that prior life.57 But in addressing his “dear mother,” the speaker, identified later in the poem as the author of Distress (Devai, the title of Shlonsky’s first book of poetry), who has embarked on a mythical journey, inverts the lullaby even as he tries to comfort both of them. In the third of four addresses to the mother, the speaker says:
! ִא ָּמא יְ ָק ָרה,ָה ּה –,ְ ּבכִ י ָ ּבכוֹ לַ ֶ ּילֶ ד .ִה ְתעוּה ּו לִ ְבלִ י ׁשוּב דְּ ָרכָ יו ַהנְ לוֹ זוֹ ת Oh, dear mother! Do cry indeed for the boy,— His crooked paths led him astray, and there is no way back. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The figure of the mother is itself complex and brings together the East Europpean past with the labor ideology and daily pressures of the pioneering present.
,ִא ָּמא יְ ָק ָרה .ַּרק ִצ ּ ָפ ִרים לָ עוּף יַ גְ ִ ּביהו : ֹאוּלַ י גַ ם ַס ָ ּבא זַ ”ל ְ ּב ַפלְ לו —ֶא ָח ָ– ָ–ד Dear Mother, Only flying birds rise high Perhaps grandfather too, of blessed memory while praying: Ooone— (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
In this opening stanza he recalls his grandfather reciting a prayer. The grandfatther’s piety is evoked in part through a careful and prolonged utterance, as dicttated by custom and ritual law, of the Hebrew word for one (e¿od or e¿awd in
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Ashkenazic) in the phrase “God is one.” Shlonsky represents the second prollonged syllable by placing two kamats vowels after the first and necessary one that accompanies the ¿et. Not unlike the clever inclusion in “Train” of the sounds of both the new and Ashkenazic accents within a new-accent prosody, this poem manages with its typographical stutter to signal an Ashkenazic readiing within an otherwise new-accent poem. Although throughout new-accent poems the Â�kamats is presumably pronounced as the pata¿ vowel, the repeated kamats vowel in this poem is meant to communicate what has become the Old World sound of a Jew reciting the prayer “Hear, O Israel.” The grandfather’s Hebbrew is the holy tongue, and by uttering this prayer proclaiming the unity of God the mythical grandfather rises to the heavens like a bird. In contrast to the pious Old-World grandfather, the poet is required by his new environment to think only of his most basic physical and unholy needs.
.ם–ת ִפילָ ה ַעל ּ ַפת ְּ ַֹ ּביו ימ ָּנה ֶ ה–ת ִה ְּ ַָ ּב ּ ַליְ ל . ְּכ ִר ֲבבוֹ ת ַּתנִ ים,סוּפוֹ ת מוֹ לֶ ֶדת ּפֹה By day—a prayer for bread. At night—the storms Of homeland rage here, like multitudes of jackals.58 (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
But this stanza also implicitly compares the earlier pious utterance of the grandfather with a very different use of Hebrew that draws the holy tongue even farther from the recitation of the “Hear, O Israel” than the “prayer for bread” does:
:ֲאנִ י ׁשוֹ ֵמ ַע קוֹ ל קוֹ ֵרא ֵאלַ י !ֹּבא ֵה ָּנה !ַא ָּתה ַה ָּׁשר ַעל ְדוָ י !ּ ַפיְ ָטן ֵ ּבין ּ ַפיְ ָטנִ ים I hear a voice calling to me: Come here! You who sing about misery! Poet among poets! (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The poet in Palestine can only speak of hunger and misery; misery or “Distress” is also the title of Shlonsky’s long poem published in 1923. The Hebrew of the Diaspora was sanctified, and the poet seems to long for that very holiness bellonging to the home and mother he has sacrificed in order to come to the Holy Land. Shlonsky’s early books of poetry published in Palestine were Ashkenazic compositions. New-accent Hebrew is nevertheless implicitly associated with Paleestine inasmuch as its adoption is part of a longer process of acclimating to life
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in the Yishuv. By using this language to express the misery of life in the settlemment, rather than uttering Hebrew as the holy tongue of religious devotion, the speaker further acclimates himself to the New Hebrew. In the course of the poem the figure of the mother acquires quite a differeent denotation than she had in the opening address. By the end she bears a strong resemblance to the motherland of Bluvshtain’s poems.59
,ִא ָּמא יְ ָק ָרה —!ה–אנִ י יוֹ ֵד ַע ֲ ַָא ְּת ֲענִ י .יָ ֵד ְך ַח ָּמה- וְ כַ ף,ַא ְך זֶ ה ִק ֵּנ ְך ָּת ִמים , ׁ ְשחוֹ ַח וְ יָ גֵ ַע,ֲאנִ י ָאבֹא ֵאלַ יִ ְך .לִ ְטבּ וֹ ל ְ ּב ִד ְמ ָע ֵתך ֶאת ּ ַפת ַה ֶּנ ָח ָמה Mother dear, You are poor—I know!— But your nest is safe and sound, and your hand is warm. I will come to you, worn and weary, To dip the bread of comfort in your tears. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The pioneer’s destination and the “return” of the title are ambiguous. The motherÂ� land is described in harsh and unhomey terms and the speaker as one who has lost his way. In the second-to-last stanza the speaker addresses the land explicitly and says he will go to her. But he also addresses his mother and speaks of paths leading back to her, the source of comfort, as if she were the faraway destination. Amid this confusion, Shlonsky seems to be translating and transposing two diffferent languages. When uttered from the discomfort of Palestine, the language of yearning that is a trope of the Old World becomes a yearning for home and mother instead of the homeland and motherland. But the last three stanzas of the poem, in which the speaker intersperses his addresses to “mother dear” with one to the “homeland,” also allow for the possibility that the speaker is maintainiing the Old World trope of desire for the Homeland precisely by losing his way. This allows him to continue his search for the (true) Homeland, to recapture some of the unjaded desire for the Land of Israel that is now muted by hunger. “Up to This Point” also introduces elements from both the motherland and the mother’s land, but juxtaposes them and their respective linguistic and musical associations. Invoking Jewish mystical legend, Shlonsky finds anoother way of underscoring the significance of the signifier and the holy tongue, using it as a symbol of the divide between the speaker’s experience in Palestine and that of his parents and his past in Europe.
ְ אתי ַעד ֲהלוֹ ם–וְ ֵא ?נָ ַעל-יך ַא ִּתיר שְׂ רוֹ ְך ִ ָ ּב —?ֵאיך ֶאנְ ַער ֵמ ֶרגֶ ל זְ ַהב ַה ִּמ ׁ ְשעוֹ לִ ים ֶּכ ֶבד ַמ ָּזלוֹ ת יָ ַרד ָעלַ י ִמ ַּמ ַעל .ֶאל ִֹהים גְ דוֹ לִ ים
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I have come all the way here—and how can I untie my shoelace? How can I shake the gold dust of the paths from my foot?— The weight of the stars descended upon me from above Great God. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The poem begins with a declaration that the poet has gotten all the way to the promised land and is overwhelmed by the holiness of his journey as much it seems as by his actual sojourn in Palestine. The stanzas that follow make clear that his new environment and life parallel and perhaps replace his prior experience in the Diaspora and—through musical and mystical allusions— emphasize verbal expression over experience. Each stanza invokes a word, a song, or a letter that encapsulates the beauty and holiness of the Land of Israel or nostalgia for the Old World. The poem itself plays the same melody, working in tandem with the theme of absorbing the new while treasuring the old. Most of the poem is composed in trochaic hexameter (which the translation echoes). With a stress on the first of its two syllables, the trochee pushes against the new accent with its terminal stress. This poem adopts the new accent even as it alludes aurally to the Ashkenazic sound of his parents’ speech, Sabbath songs, and Yiddish folk songs.
– הוּא כָ ל ַּכ ְך ָ ּגב ַֹּה:לְ ָפנִ ים ָא ַמ ְר ִּתי ְ ֵא ?יך ַּתשִׂ יג יָ ִדי לִ ְקטֹף כּ וֹ כָ ב ַמ ְב ׁ ִשיל ! גִ לְ בּ ַֹע:ְּכ ׁ ֵשם ַה ְּמפ ָֹר ׁש ֶאלְ ַח ׁש ַע ָּתה .וְ ִאילַ ן ַה ּ ַליִ ל ּ ֵפרוֹ ָתיו יַ ׁ ִּשיל –,ט ַען-ּק ַ ְּכגָ ָמל ּ ְפרו, ֵאלִ י,ַה ְב ִריכֵ נִ י ָ ּפֹה לְ ַמ ְרגְ לוֹ ֶת .יך ֶאנָ ֵפ ׁש ְמ ָעט ” “יָ ִפים לֵ ילוֹ ת ְּכנָ ַען:ׁ ִשיר ּו לִ י ַה ׁ ּ ִשיר .ש ָ ּבת-ת ַ ׁ ִֹּכזְ ִמירו : ֲאנִ י ֶאכְ ּתֹב לְ ִא ָּמא.ׁ ִשיר ּו לִ י ַה ׁ ּ ִשיר . טוֹ ב לִ ְבנֵ ְך ַה ָּמ ְך.ַאל ִּת ְב ִּכי ַ ּבלָ יְ לָ ה ימה ָ ֵעת ַע ְרשׂ וֹ ִהנְ ִע,טוֹ ב לוֹ ְּכמוֹ ָאז .ִא ָמא’לֶ ה ַה ִּׁשיר ַעל ְ ּג ִדי לָ ָבן וָ ַצח ָ ֵעת ַא ָ ּבא ִה ְק ִר,טוֹ ב לוֹ ְּכמוֹ ָאז יאה ּו .א-ף ָ ֶ ָק ַמץ ָאל:ְ ּבנָ ׁשקוֹ ַעל ֵמ ַצח !ּ–אוּי! ּ ְפרו ָּטה זָ ְרק ּו לִ י!—זֶ ה ּו ֵאלִ יָ הו .וְ קוֹ ְרנָ ה ִמ ַּנ ַחת ִא ָּמא’לֶ ה יָ ָפה Once upon a time I said: He is so high— How to reach my hand and pick a ripened star? As the tetragrammaton I’ll whisper now: Gilboa! And the tree of the night will shed its fruit.
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a new sound in hebrew poetry Bow me down like an unloaded camel, my God— Right here at your feet I will revive a bit. Sing me the song: “The Canaan Nights Are Beautiful” Like Songs of the Sabbath. Sing me the song. I will write to mother: Do not cry at night. Your lowly son is well. He is well as he was then, when his cradle mama Sweetened with the song of the white and pure kid. He is well as he was then, when papa read to him When he kissed his forehead: kamats alef-aw Oh! They threw me a coin!—It must be Eliyahu! And beautiful mama beams with contentment. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The speaker invokes a popular Hebrew folk song of the period, “The Canaan Nights Are Beautiful,” which he juxtaposes both to the Sabbath songs and to the distinctly diasporic music of the lullaby about the white kid.60 Shlonsky’s clever use of the title of that folk song in the third stanza generates a double enttendre so that the popular folk song is compared to Sabbath songs, and the Â�Canaan nights are said to be as beautiful as Sabbath songs—the nights themsselves are compared to a song. (Like several of Shlonsky’s poems from this perriod, including “Return,” this last part is contained in a letter home that the speaker writes in Palestine.) In the second stanza the unreachable height that was defined by God is replaced by a mountain, by the Land of Israel itself. But just as the poet alludes to other characters and environments (Canaan, life in the Diaspora, his childhood and mother) through a musical association, his utteraances displace both sites mentioned in the second stanza. Gilboa is a divine name, a place-name, and the title of a cycle of poems by Shlonsky. The speaker will whisper this word that—with all the legendary power that accompanies it— has mystical-religious uses. He whispers “Gilboa” as an incantation of sorts. The final two stanzas focus on the father and his replacement in the new land. As in “Return,” the Old World is invoked through the sacralized Hebrew of a father figure. The projected letter to his mother continues, at times speakiing of the son in the third person:
יאה ּו ָ ֵעת ַא ָ ּבא ִה ְק ִר,טוֹ ב לוֹ ְּכמוֹ ָאז .א-ף ָ ֶ ָק ַמץ ָאל:ְ ּבנָ ׁשקוֹ ַעל ֵמ ַצח !ּ–אוּי! ּ ְפרו ָּטה זָ ְרק ּו לִ י!—זֶ ה ּו ֵאלִ יָ הו .וְ קוֹ ְרנָ ה ִמ ַּנ ַחת ִא ָּמא’לֶ ה יָ ָפה גַ ם ַהיוֹ ם ְּכמוֹ ָאז ָא ִבי ׁ ֶש ַ ּב ּׁ ָש ַּמיִ ם .ב— וְ יִ ׁ ּ ַשק ִמ ְצ ִחיּ ָ ַא:יְ ַא ּ ְל ֵפנִ י עינַ יִ ם-יר ֵ ְ ּבנֵ ְך יִ ְהיֶ ה ָּת ִמיד ְּכיֶ לֶ ד ְ ּב ִה .אלֶ ף ַה ִּנ ְצ ִחי-ץ ָ ִעם ַה ָּק ַמ
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He is well as he was then, when papa read to him When he kissed his forehead: kamats alef-aw Oh! They threw me a coin!—It must be Eliyahu! And beautiful mama beams with contentment. Today too, as then, my father in the heavens Teaches me: pa-pa—and kisses my forehead. Your son will always be like a clear-eyed boy With the eternal alef-with-a-kamats. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
The speaker remembers his childhood, the early lessons with his father, and perhaps even mystical experiences with the Creator. He remembers learning the alphabet that Hebrew and Yiddish share and evokes the distinctly homey assocations of these early exposures to Yiddish and Ashkenazic Hebrew sounds.61 Alef is the name of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet but is also a verb meaning “to train”; the word I have translated as “teaches me” can also be read as “alefs me.” As a boy the speaker is taught to read the first two letters of the alphabet, pointed to sound like the word for “father,” ’aba (translated above as “pa-pa”). The sounds of the word also evoke the primers from which boys learned to read Hebrew. His father or God, the “father in the heavens,” teaches him how to address his father and teaches him how to read. Throughoout his life the letters have remained constant—whether they are the letters of Yiddish, of the holy tongue, or of his life in Modern Hebrew. In closing, the speaker promises that with all the changes in the meaning of his langguage, in his life and circumstances,
עינַ יִ ם-יר ֵ ְ ּבנֵ ְך יִ ְהיֶ ה ָּת ִמיד ְּכיֶ לֶ ד ְ ּב ִה .אלֶ ף ַה ִּנ ְצ ִחי-ץ ָ ִעם ַה ָּק ַמ Your son will always be like a clear-eyed boy With the eternal alef-with-a-kamats. (Shlonsky, To Papa-Mama, 1927)
Whether partially cynical, ambivalent, or naïve, there is an attempt to have these two worlds communicate through the figure of a boy, in a language whose referents have changed even as the boy continues to use it in the dislocated world in which he now lives as a man. He uses these Hebrew letters but he uses them to write neither in Yiddish nor in the pious (Ashkenazic) Hebrew of his childhood. All that is left is the signifier, the letters themselves. The eternal alef on the boy’s forehead also invokes the legend of the golem that, in a more radical way than the other verbal musical allusions (the lullaby, the “Canaan” folk song, whispering the divine name, and “Gilboa”), engages the uniqueness of the Hebrew language and the power of the naked signifier. The golem is in some versions of the legend mute and susceptible to the power of lett-
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ters and language. He is created via the inscription or recitation of combinations of letters and is destroyed by a recitation in reverse or an erasure of letters. His forehead contains the three letters that spell ’emet, truth. The first letter, alef, keeps the golem alive. Its erasure would leave the letters mem and taf that toggether spell met, or dead.62 The golem is a paradigm for the power of language. The alef marked on the boy’s forehead indicates that although he is for the time being protected, he is susceptible to language, and perhaps endangered by it. He is an artificial man-made creation. In this sense he is orphaned, alone, and detached from his parents in the old country. At the same time, the refereences to Ashkenazic Hebrew are homey and nostalgic, so that his present alienaation would seem to be a question of location rather than origin, deriving from his perch in Palestine, where the Divine Name has been replaced by Mount Gilboa. He speaks in Palestine, but his family back in Europe cannot hear him. Despite his formulaic assurances in the letter to his mother asserting that all is well, the poem also displays a kind of new-accent longing for the comforting Ashkenazic sound. His is an orphaned Hebrew, not entirely confident it can communicate across the divide with his former life—a Hebrew, perhaps, that can only really function locally. Yearning, ever a flexible trope in early-twentieth-century Hebrew poetry, perssists throughout the poem. And the shift in desires is not unlike the shift in “Retturn.” The desire that brought the speaker and his poetic voice toward God-the-father and the motherland has been replaced by a parallel and intermmingling nostalgic desire for his flesh-and-blood father and mother and for what was once his home rather than his homeland. Shlonsky’s references to Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and to Yiddish necessarily recall and even emphasize the rift created when the pioneers left their families and their culttural context. But his allusions to the Yiddish folk song and its motifs also underÂ� score a poetic continuity despite that social and cultural rift. And by preserving some of the yearning that in Ashkenazic culture may have been focused on the Land of Israel or divinity or piety as an inverted desire, a backward yearning for the exile, Shlonsky demonstrates the utility of these diasporic elements that ought to have been rendered useless by the Jews’ arrival in Palestine.
Shlonsky’s Double Inscription Shlonsky inscribed the new accent in his poetry in two distinct modes that served complementary purposes in his new-accent performance, and offered two visions of the relationship between new-accent poetry and the past. With “Train,” in particular, Shlonsky demonstrated that the new accent could comppete with the old rhythms, that Hebrew poetry after the new sound need not be monotonous. But underlying the fear that new-accent poetry would suffer from monotony, Hebrew culture was plagued by another anxiety: the concern that by
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turning to the new accent, Hebrew culture would lose the admired, even valorrized, recent tradition of poetry in Ashkenazic Hebrew. Would all the literary gains of the past thirty years be lost? Would poets have to start from scratch to create a respectable poetic corpus? In one mode, in poems such as “Doesn’t Matter” and “Train,” Shlonsky reprresents new-accent poetry as a definitive break with the past. He marks the new accent as an ingredient of a Hebrew poetry native to Palestine and distinct from the Diaspora, which admits of no precedent and is composed solely of native realia—the ascetic pioneer, manual labor, the diseases of settlement life, and other hardships suffered by Jews in Palestine of the 1920s. With his introduction of the new accent into his poetry Shlonsky made a claim for a Hebrew literature of and for the Land of Israel that would be independent of the Hebrew literary tradition that was born in Eastern Europe. This mode of inscription resembles Yellin’s synthetic accent design inasmuch as it is territorialized and divorced from any continuous tradition. Shlonsky also uses this territorializing mode to create a niche for himself within the Hebrew poetic tradition. He is the poet of the new generation that is maturing self-consciously as residents of the Land of Israel, the generation of the immigrant-pioneer. But Shlonsky’s poems also go a long way to resolving anxiety about the lack of continuity in Hebrew poetry and the potential loss that that implies. In his secoond mode of operation, employed in To Papa-Mama, Shlonsky formulates newaccent poetry as continuous with the recent past. The new poetry is destined to depart from some accepted norms but will not disrupt the accumulation of layeers of meaning and of a national literary corpus. In his lyric poems, Shlonsky maps a journey for the speaker in which he simply veers onto new branches of a path he has been on all along, a path that emerges from the recent past of folk and lyric composition—and of life in Eastern Europe. This mode parallels the hybrid accent design of Ben-Yehuda which incorporates the diasporan past into the New Hebrew. Shlonsky’s immigrant speaker is slowly acclimating; the New World is in dialogue with the old. For the most part Shlonsky employed the second mode in his lyric poetry (and in “In the Tent”). Yet even in “Train,” Shlonsky utilized the fact that he was one of those poets caught between two dialects in order to proclaim that the literary tradition would survive this change. In both modes he had his Ashkenazic past working for him. In contrast to the always already authenticity of Bluvshtain’s new-accent usage, “Train” represented a transition, however abrupt and violent that transition might have seemed. Bluvshtain and Bi¿ovski had no Ashkenazic corpus; their entire poetic output was linguistically current. Shlonsky on the other hand had an Ashkenazic past and a new-accent future. He could contain the history of Hebrew prosody in his own oeuvre, and enact a powerful analogy between his own career and the entirety of the post-Haskalah Modern Hebrew poetic corpus precisely because he had begun his poetic journey in Ashkenazic.
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He could mark himself as having traveled the journey that the (Ashkenazic) nattion as a whole needed to take—integrating the new accent into their poems, their conversation, their songs—and thereby make of himself the paradigm of the Hebrew poet and the New Jew. Within the time of “Train,” Shlonsky also makes an analogy between his own accent shift and the larger shift in literary acccent so that when seen from the outside, as an entry in Shlonsky’s extensive biblioography, “Train” is making a claim about Hebrew poetry itself. If “Train” demonstrated that Shlonsky could play all his tricks in new-accent Hebrew as well as he did in Ashkenazic, that he could survive the sudden leap into the preseent of Hebrew speech and the future of Hebrew poetry, and that he could do so while maintaining connections in his canonical poems to the great literary past—then it was also by analogy making that claim for the rest of Hebrew poeetry as well. Shlonsky was far from the first poet to commit to the new accent in print, but his belatedness did not damage his reputation as an avant-garde. Instead, Shlonssky’s dramatized switch from one accent to another reinforced his symbolic identity as the Hebrew Poet and identified his own oeuvre with Modern Hebbrew Poetry itself. His lyric new-accent poetry, with its integrative model for the role of East European culture in New Hebrew culture, and his first new-accent book, with a majority of poems in Ashkenazic, served as the calling card of the laboring Jew in Palestine. The Jewish immigrant was undergoing a traumatic displacement at the same time as Hebrew culture itself was struggling to plant roots in Palestine. Shlonsky’s various modes for identifying his oeuvre with the larger tradition and, paradoxically, his tardiness in publishing his new-accent poetry were part of what made him an essential enabler of this literary accent shift and made him seem so ahead of his time.
Epilogue The Conundrum of the National Poet
A
t the beginning of this book, I observed that a common reaction of contemporary Israelis to the subject of my research—the rise of a new, proto-Israeli accent in Hebrew poetry—was to recite a line or two of Bialik’s poem “To the Bird” in an Ashkenazic accent. What does this reaction signnify? There are a number of possibilities. One might hear it as an astute ressponse demonstrating an awareness that the contemporary near-perfect convergence of Hebrew poetry with both Israeli poetry and Israeli Hebrew is not to be taken for granted. If contemporary Israeli poetry assumes a “proper” pronunciation for Hebrew, this was not always the case for literary Hebrew even—or especially—for the canonical poetry of Bialik. Or one could hear in this response a simple reflex reaction and a sign of how thoroughly Ashkennazic Hebrew has been purged from the national culture: all but a few memmorials to the sound have been discarded. Or one might hear in it something far more essential to Bialik’s oeuvre than the Ashkenazic sound of his poems, the sound of longing. The unfulfilled desire that is so central to Bialik’s poetiics and his impatience with his own outdated accent appear now in inverted form as nostalgia. Whatever one’s perception of this reaction, however, its frequency indicates the success of the canonization of Bialik’s poetry and its ubiquity and constancy in the school curriculum. Hebrew speakers remember these lines because they are taught the poem in school—or a fragment of it, or a version of it set to music. And the schools teach Bialik because he is the national poet. His collected works sit on a prominent shelf in the great national bookcase. But why is Bialik the national poet? A tumult of theories could be brought to bear on the question of Bialik’s reign as national poet—aesthetic, ideological, and historical explanations. My essay into questions of poetics and politics and accent guides this inquiry along a narrrower path. Bialik was not the first to be honored as national poet but he was the first upon whom the appellation stuck. Scholars have already pointed to Bialik’s
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national themes and to Tchernichovsky’s “Hellenic” spirit to explain the critical preference for Bialik (Bar-El 215–216). But Bialik’s failure to adopt the new acccent is motivation enough to briefly revisit the question of his status as national poet and ask how it is that he retained the role after his accentual-syllabic poems lost their rhythm.1 What does it mean for our understanding of the relattionship between language, national identity, and literature that Bialik, anointed national poet with the publication of his first collection, continued to hold that position even after the great accent shift in poetry, even after the nattional literary language parted ways with his poems once and for all? How is it that a writer who in some sense failed to compose in the national language rettained the title of national poet even as others of his generation, like TcherniÂ� chovsky, adopted the new accent? When Bialik and Tchernichovsky began to write, Ashkenazic Hebrew was not a literary language; it was their writing that made a poetic language of the disresspected, common Ashkenazic pronunciation. For a time the careers of these two great figures in Hebrew literature developed in parallel. Bialik was the first to publish accentual-syllabic poems, beginning with “To the Bird.” Tchernichovsky composed several accentual-syllabic poems soon after (in 1893), although the first poem of his to appear in print was not in accentual-syllabic meter. The recoognition of the two as major Hebrew poets reached a new level with the publicattion of each one’s first book of poems at the turn of the century.2 Despite their almost simultaneous adoption of a prosody that was new to Hebrew—one that implicated each of them in the Ashkenazic accent in which they composed— they related to the new accent differently from the beginning. Bialik’s attitude toward the new accent could be described as theoretical acceptance and benign neglect, Tchernichovsky’s as initial animosity and eventual adoption. Each poet quickly came to fear with good reason that the oeuvre upon which his reputation rested was vulnerable to the upset of what had been the default accent of Ashkenazic Jews and of literary Hebrew. In a letter from 1894 Bialik criticizes his own poetic practice of using the “disttorted reading common among us, the Ashkenazic Jews, who always read with a penultimate stress.” Only a few years after launching his career, Bialik is utterly deprecating of the literary Hebrew he has helped to establish and that he continues to use. In the same letter, he goes so far as to prophesy an early death for this Hebrew sound: “And I believe that in the years to come, when we speak the language purely and correctly, these poems will pierce our ears like an awl and make us gnash our teeth” (Bialik 1937, 70). Compared to Bialik, Tchernichovsky was positively outspoken in defense of Ashkenazic Hebrew—at least for a time. As recounted in chapter 1, in 1912 Tchernichovsky still saw the new-accent pedagogues as the enemies of his poetry and was anxious to preserve a space in the school for an Ashkenazic recitation of his and others’ poetry that would express its audial glory.3 In
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practice Bialik was the less cooperative of the two. In the course of his career he composed only a small number of accentual-syllabic new-accent poems, a neglect of the new accent perhaps attributable to the difficulty of retraining his ear to its rhythm.4 Bialik nevertheless continually reinvented himself prossodically. After having been one of the first poets (and the most influential among them) to compose accentual-syllabic verse in Hebrew in the 1890s, Biaalik moved on to his own version of free verse. He first began composing in his biblical free rhythm in 1904 and continued to work in this mode alongside others for the rest of his career.5 This rhythm was based on stress patterns but without a strict adherence to the foot as a unit. Biblical free rhythm was forgiving and allowed him to write poeetry that was, accentually speaking, up-to-date—or at least not obviously outddated—without having to perfect his new accent the way one would in a strictly metered poetry of the kind he first innovated in Hebrew.6 For all his prosodic variation, Bialik never truly adopted the new accent. By contrast and despite his initial outspoken opposition, Tchernichovsky began using the new accent in accentual-syllabic poetry in 1933 and about 20 percent of his collected lyric poems are identifiably new-accent.7 The fact that Tchernichovsky cooperated with new-accent demands underscores Bialik’s failure to do so and the inconggruity between this neglect of the new sound of the national language and his status as the national poet. The wide circulation of the written word can facilitate some form of standardiization so that one dialect is anointed a language that supersedes other (mere) diaalects. It can also encourage readers in the belief that the sound of their speech is represented by the text, effecting a sense that other far-flung citizens speak the same way they do—that all readers share a common tongue.8 In the case of turnof-the-century Hebrew literature, poetry actually offered the possibility of a more direct intervention in speech than either the newspaper or the novel, two genres often associated with vernaculars and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieeth centuries. Bialik took advantage of that possibility and was able to interpelllate a nation through poetry. The themes he chose and the personae he projected through his writing were two factors. A third was his early use of accentual-sylllabic meter with an Ashkenazic accent. I would like to propose a way of understanding the apparent contradiction between Bialik’s role as the national poet and the history of his literary langguage by looking very briefly at his first published poem.9 Many before me have written fine studies of “To the Bird.”10 Here I wish simply to illustrate a telling parallel between Bialik’s failure to adopt the new accent and the themmatic structure that characterizes his oeuvre. “To the Bird” creates a sense of national simultaneity and unity through the title figure who arrives at the speaker’s window during the annual migration and serves as a substitute for the absent land.11 The entirety of the sixteen-stanza poem addresses a bird
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but even though she is present throughout, the bird is in some ways as distant from Bialik as Palestine is from Russia. The speaker urges her to share news of the “warm and beautiful land,” then poses a series of questions about the land itself, its flora and fauna, and its (Jewish) inhabitants, which constitute the bulk of the poem. Although he asks for news of the Holy Land repeatedly and in the final lines urges her to take up her own song, the bird does not resspond—or does not respond during the recorded time of the poem. If she never sings a note, the bird’s infrequent but regular appearances neverÂ�theless mark the passage of time, and are a reminder that as the speaker lives his life in the Diaspora his Jewish brethren are in the meantime buildiing a new life in the Land of Israel.
, ִצ ּפוֹ רי יְ ָק ָרה, ַס ּ ֵפ ִרי,זַ ְמ ִרי ,ֵמ ֶא ֶרץ ַמ ְר ֲח ִּקים נִ ְפלָ אוֹ ת , ַה ָ ּי ָפה,ֲהגַ ם ׁ ָשם ָ ּב ָא ֶרץ ַה ַח ָּמה ; ַה ְּתלָ אוֹ ת,ִּת ְר ֶ ּבינָ ה ָה ָרעוֹ ת ,ש ִאי לִ י ׁ ָשלוֹ ם ֵמ ַא ַחי ְ ּב ִציוֹ ן ׂ ְ ֲה ִת ?ֵמ ַא ַחי ָה ְרחוֹ ִקים ַה ְּקרוֹ ִבים הוֹ י ְמ ֻא ׁ ָש ִרים! ֲהיֵ ְדע ּו יָ דוֹ ַע ? הוֹ י ֶא ְסבּ ֹל ַמכְ אוֹ ִבים,ִּכי ֶא ְסבּ וֹ ל ,ַהיֵ ְדע ּו יָ דוֹ ַע ָמה ַרבּ ּו פֹה שׂ וֹ ְטנַ י ? הוֹ י ַר ִ ּבים לִ י ָק ִמים,ָמה ַר ִ ּבים , נִ ְפלָ אוֹ ת ֵמ ֶא ֶרץ, ִצ ּפוֹ ִרי,זַ ְּמ ִרי .ָה ָא ִביב ָ ּב ּה יִ נְ וֶ ה עוֹ לָ ִמים ,ֲה ִתשְׂ ִאי לִ י ׁ ָשלוֹ ם ִמ ִּז ְמ ַרת ָה ָא ֶרץ ? ֵמרֹאש ָה ִרים, ֵמגַ יְ א,ֵמ ֶע ֶמק ,ציוֹ ן-ת ִ יָ ֶא-ְ ֲהנִ ַחם י,ֲה ִר ַחם ?אוֹ עוֹ ָד ּה ֲעזו ָּבה לַ ְּק ָב ִרים Sing and recount, dear bird of mine, From a faraway land of wonders, There too, in that warm and beautiful land, Do the troubles, the evil, increase? Do you bring greetings from my brothers in Zion, From my close brothers so far away? O fortunate ones! Do they truly know? That I suffer, o suffer, great pains? Do they know indeed how my foes have increased, How many, so many, attack me? Sing, bird of mine, the wonders of a land, Where springtime resides everlasting.
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Do you bring me greetings of the song of the land, From valley, from dale, from mountaintops? Has God had mercy, has he comforted Zion, Or is she still abandoned to graveyards? (stanzas 2–5; lines 5–20)
By questioning the bird repeatedly, appealing to her for news of the land and its inhabitants, the speaker establishes the bird as a conduit of information between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel. The bird is a witness who may carry a messsage from the speaker’s “brothers in Zion” (l. 9); or from the land itself: “Do you bring me greetings of the song of the land, / From valley, from dale, from mounttaintops?” (ll. 17–18). And she may deliver or have already delivered news of the Diaspora to Zion: “Do [my brothers in Zion] know indeed how my foes have inccreased€.€.€.€Sing, bird of mine, the wonders of a land, / Where springtime Â�resides everÂ�lasting” (ll. 13–16). If the medium is not terribly forthcoming or communicattive within the body of the poem, she is nevertheless—or perhaps precisely for that reason—the figure of parallelism; through her the speaker establishes the simmultaneity of diasporan Jews with each other and with their brothers in Zion. The speaker’s continual apostrophe, the repeated and almost desperate questioniing of his addressee, locates the speaker and his brethren in something akin to the spaces of two parallel universes. They are living simultaneous and divided lives bridged only by the regular but infrequent medium of the bird. The epistemmology of the poem is relevant: Do they know I am suffering here, in the Diasppora, while they go about their lives in Zion?12 The speaker draws attention to the gap between him and his brothers. The fact that little or no information is exchanged implies a parallel set of lives on the other side of a divide. I use the metaphor of parallel universes advisedly, for theirs are not a series of worlds endlessly breaking off at every fork in the proverbial road. There are only two sites of interest: the Diaspora that the speaker inhabits, and the land never mentioned by name, the land where his ancestors lived and died.
—וְ ֵע ֶמק ַה ּ ָשרוֹ ן וְ גִ ְב ַעת ַה ּ ְלבוֹ נָ ה ? ֶאת נִ ְר ָדם,מ ָֹרם-ֲהיִ ְּתנ ּו ֶאת ,ַה ֵה ִקיץ ִמ ּׁ ְשנָ תוֹ ַה ּ ָׂשב ַ ּביְ ָע ִרים ? ַה ִּנ ְר ָדם,ַה ּ ְל ָבנוֹ ן ַהיָ ׁ ֵשן ,ר ֶח ְרמוֹ ן-ֲהיֵ ֵרד ִּכ ְפנִ ינִ ים ַה ּ ַטל ַעל ה ?ִאם יֵ ֵרד וְ יִ ּפֹל ִּכ ְד ָמעוֹ ת ?ּימיו יִ נְ ָהרו ָ שלוֹ ם ַה ַ ּי ְרדֵּ ן ׁ ֶש ֵמ-ה ְ ּׁ ו ַּמ ..?חמאוֹ ת ָ ן—ש ָחלְ ק ּו ַמ ֶ ׁ ְּכ ׁ ֶש ֶמ ,ִאם ָעב ֶה ָענָ ן ַעל ַה ְר ֵרי ִציוֹ ן —? ַצלְ ָמוֵ ת,עוֹ ד לֹא ִת ְפרֹשׂ ֲעלָ ָטה ֵמ ֶא ֶרץ ָ ּב ּה ָמ ְצא ּו, ִצ ּפוֹ ִרי,ַס ּ ְפ ִרי . ַה ָּמוֶ ת,ֲאבוֹ ַתי ַה ַחיִ ים
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נָ ְבל ּו ַה ּ ְפ ָר ִחים ׁ ָש ַתלְ ִּתי-ַה ִאם לֹא ?ַּכ ֲא ׁ ֶשר נָ ַבלְ ִּתי ָאנֹכִ י ,ֶאזְ ְּכ ָרה יָ ִמים ָּכ ֵהם ּ ָפ ַר ְח ִּתי . ָסר כּ ִֹחי,ַא ְך ַע ָּתה זָ ַקנְ ִּתי And the valley of Sharon, the Ascent of Levonah— Do they yield their myrrh and their spikenard? Has the old man in the woods woken The slumbering, sleeping Lebanon? Does dew drop like pearls on the Mountain of Hermon, Does it drop, does it fall as tears do? And how is the Jordan with its streaming waters? Like oil flowing so smoothly? Does a thick cloud remain on the hills of Zion, Has it yet to unfurl a dark gloom? Tell, bird of mine, of a land where my fathers Found their life and also their death. Have the flowers I planted not yet withered As I have withered myself? I recall those days when I blossomed as they did, But now I’ve grown old, am exhausted. (stanzas 6–9; lines 21–36)
The speaker cannot reach the land or its inhabitants, nor see or hear them. But moving back and forth between descriptions of his own situation and queries to the bird about theirs, he yokes the two narratives together and creaates a sense of simultaneity—of time passing in the one as in the other. Talk of his ancestors’ life and death in “the land” reminds him of his own inevitabble decay in the Diaspora. His alternation between the use of the imperfect— will they or do they “yield their myrrh” (l. 22) and will it or does the dew “drop like pearls?” (l. 25)—and the present descriptive, “Does a thick cloud remain on the hills of Zion?” (l. 29), when inquiring about the Land of Israel also contributes to the sense of simultaneity. Bialik’s poem projects a sense of national identity through the figure of the poet-speaker in exile. Structured around its apostrophe, the poem defines the Diaspora as a position in which one may feel a strong national longing, and through that a sense of belonging. National unity is based on the yearning for the homeland that all Jews share, and the simultaneity of Diaspora and homelland. The poem constructs national unity based on this simultaneity. The bird functions as a (not-very-informative) newspaper, circulating among the Jews of the Diaspora, serving as tangible evidence of the Land of Israel, the object of national desire that is beyond reach for the likes of Bialik. In contemporary scholarship, one important role for the newspaper in the formation of national
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identity is to inspire a sense of belonging by unifying strangers through a shared moment of reading and a common language.13 Yet the newspaper holds out merely the pretense of a shared tongue; it is never more than a silent text that alllows a reader to assume that he speaks the same language as others. Accentualsyllabic verse, on the other hand, is like sheet music—with some notes rubbed out perhaps—a partial set of instructions for how to sing the lyrics. In the conttext of turn-of-the-century Jewish nationalism and its project of reviving Hebrew as a vernacular and as a mother tongue, poetry circulating in journals had the ability to serve unification in a far more proactive and concrete way than the prose of the newspaper. The rhythmic revolution of the late nineteenth century in which the rhythm of the spoken word was woven into a metric pattern was in some ways similar to the accent shift of the twenties. One value of accent design was the unification of Hebrew speakers in Palestine; another was the alignment of speech and writing. Bialik and Tchernichovsky would acknowledge their error—or their bad luck—in having shackled their respective oeuvres to one accent just as the children, the teachers, and the inhabitants of the Jewish setttlement in Palestine replaced it with another. But for a while their poems uniffied their readers through Hebrew writing in a new way. “To the Bird” was not unique for being composed by a poet who thought and even spoke Hebrew with an Ashkenazic accent. Such was the case for almost all of Bialik’s and Tchernichovsky’s immediate predecessors. The poem was unuusual for flaunting rather than hiding its author’s “ungrammatical” pronunciattion. Each foot is composed of three syllables with the major stress on the second of the three and alternates between three and four feet per line. ha-gam shom bo-’orets ha-¿amoh, ha-yofoh, tirbenah ho-ro¿os, ha-tlo’os?
Pausal forms appear several times in the poem (kholsoh becomes kholosoh in line 3, for example), helping to set the reader’s ear to a “penultimate” rhythm.14 A number of lines begin with words that universally carry a penultimmate stress (e.g., lines 6, 7, 8). Poems of this kind retain a partial memory of their composers’ accent; the prosodic organization in toto pushes the latenineteenth-century reader to realize the Ashkenazic stress fully—and perhaps even to exaggerate it. Once they did so readers would have been rewarded by the regularity of the poem’s rhythm. For the first time writers were acknowledging the pronunciations of Ashkenazic Jews and a vernacular Hebrew literature was born in the Diaspora. Hebrew readers could now do something new: generate a perfectly regular accentual-syllabic rhythm in their own Ashkenazic accents. The accentual-syllabic poems in Ashkenazic were the first to facilitate simultanneity in Hebrew, providing the proto-nation with poems that Ashkenazic Jews could read together in rhythmic parallel in their minds’ ear.
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Through accentual-syllabic meter and a default accent similar to the acccents of many of his readers, Bialik achieved a kind of transparency of text that David Yellin, several years later, hoped to achieve by designing his own version of new-accent Hebrew with a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds, and that Yits¿ak Epstein’s talking books evoked.15 Bialik’s poems actualized the desire to unify, to imagine a nation through a “talking text” that was the motivation for Yellin’s synthetic accent even as those poems failed to valorize an appropriate Hebrew authenticated by the schools. Once she is in the Diaspora, the bird is not only a messenger. She also reprresents the Land of Israel itself, a songless bird exported to the Diaspora.
ַּ קוֹ לֵ ְך ִּכי ָע ֵרב ֵמ-ֶאל ,נ ְפ ׁ ִשי כָ לָ ָתה-ה .ַ ּבח ֶֹרףְ ְ ּב ֵעת ֲעזָ ְב ִּתינִ י How my soul has yearned for your voice so sweet, In the winter when you leave me. (stanza 1; lines 3–4)
Constitutionally and intertextually the bird exists in metaphoric relation to the poet but she is in this expectant moment, in her silence, an equally perffect metonymy for the Land of Israel that itself remains out of reach. The bird is here but only very temporarily in the moment of the poem’s utterance. The speaker is very conscious of this, both recalling past moments and envisioniing future moments of wintertime longing. This bird’s arrival is expected, part of a predictable cycle, but from the perspective of the time of the poem, the speaker misses the bird even before she is gone. His yearning is a semipermanent state—even the bird’s arrival is a reminder of her absence, and fuels his longing for the land. Again, the speaker’s desire is built on an asssumption of simultaneity, on the continued existence of the Land of Israel just out of reach. The whole sixty-four-line poem becomes a kind of delay of the pleasure of actually hearing the bird’s voice, an endless deferral.
, ֲא ַס ּ ֵפר ִצ ּפוֹ ִרי,וַ ֲאנִ י ָמה לָ ְך ?ת ַקוִ ּי לִ ְשמ ַֹע-ה ְ ִמ ּ ִפי ַמ ,לֹא זְ ִמירוֹ ת ִּת ְש ָמ ִעי ִמ ְּכנַ ף ֶא ֶרץ ָק ָרה . ַרק ֶהגֶ ה וָ נ ַֹּה,ַרק ִקינִ ים And what shall I recount for you, lovely bird of mine, What do you hope to hear from my lips? You will not hear songs from this corner of cold land, Just dirges, muttering and sighs. (stanza 12; lines 45–48)
In an earlier, longer version of the poem the speaker answers his own questtion by telling the story of his life in some detail. In the published version, the
epilogue
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request is rhetorical and folds in on itself. The speaker has said enough, and sends the bird on her way:
! ִמ ְד ָ ּב ֵר ְך,ה ֵר ְך-ל ָ ֶא, ִצ ּפוֹ ִרי,נו ִּדי ;א ֳהלִ י-ת ָ ִּכי ָעזַ ְב ְּת ֶא,ֻא ׁ ּ ַש ְר ְּת , ְּכנַ ְף ְרנָ נִ ים,א ְּת-ם ַ ַל ּו ִע ִּמי ׁ ָשכַ נְ ְּת ג . ַמר ָ ּבכִ ית לְ גוֹ ָרלִ י,ָ ּבכִ ית Away, my bird, to your mountain, your desert! Happy for having left my tent; If you had stayed with me, winged song, You’d have sobbed, sobbed bitterly at my fate. (stanza 14)
The bird must depart. If she were to stay she would only suffer in sympathy with him. The bird’s departure is also necessary in order to renew the cycle. She will eventually return to the poet’s window. But in the meantime the speaker will return to his usual state of missing her, of yearning for the land through the figuure of the absent bird. The speaker in “To the Bird” was the first in a series of semi-autobiographical figures in Bialik’s poetry. He is the miserable Jew stuck in exile who yearns for the Land of Israel and a new Jewish identity. It is telling that true to its name this poem apostrophizes the visitor who has flown in from Palestine but never adddresses the reader. The reader is interpellated as the diasporan Jew who yearns for the land just as the speaker does. Bialik’s readers are interpellated as members of a nation that longs for its homeland and that, like the speaker in his poem, awaits the sound of the national poetry that emanates from the Land of Israel, which is itself both a continuation of and a response to the Hebrew poetry of Eastern Europe.
, ִצ ּפוֹ ִרי יְ ָק ָרה,—שלןם ָרב ׁשו ֵּבך ָׁ ְ !אַת קולֵ ך וָ רׁנִ י ְּ ַצ ֲהלִ י A very peaceful return, my dear bird, Exult with your voice and sing!16 (stanza 16; lines 63–64)
Bialik’s trope of unfulfilled desire finally helps make sense of the paradox of a national poet whose early poetry is heavily marked by a sound that the nation was to reject. The figure of Bialik is up the road, at the beginning of a journey that is literary and linguistic but also inevitably political. By looking back over its shoulder at the national poet, the nation is able to take measure of how much progress it has made. Tchernichovsky represents the fulfillment of a dream of Jewish identity that is European and Classical. He completes the journey to the homeland and to the national language. Bialik died in 1934 with only a few
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a new sound in hebrew poetry
new-accent poems to his name a year after Tchernichovsky started over in the new accent. Would Bialik have adopted the new accent too, had he lived a few years longer?17 Given his long-standing theoretical openness to the new accent, it seems unlikely that his practice would have ever changed radically. The nattional poet reminds the nation of the desire that is never quite fulfilled. His failuure to adopt the new accent was in part the result of historical accident, but that failure resonates with Bialik’s insistence on a poetic persona that preserves a memory of exile. The national poet did not cover the distance between exile and homeland so much as dedicate himself to that distance. The proto-Israeli accent, the Hebrew of Ben-Yehuda’s design, even the Hebrew that the poets spoke in Palestine in the 1920s was a Hebrew-in-the-making, one that required correction and left something to be desired. It was a language that demonsstrated the speaker’s dedication through its imperfections. “To the Bird” enacts a stage that is the beginning of that process: the longing to hear, to listen, and to arrive on the other side of the world and start to go native imperfectly. In describing the composition of “The Raven,” Poe wrote that “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world,” and that he chose the raven because it was emblematic of “mournful and never-ending remembrance.”18 Poe’s raven is an appropriate interlocutor for Bialik’s speaker because the only word he utters, over and over—nevermore— communicates to the bereaved lover that he will never attain his desired object. Even in “the distant Aidenn” he will never “clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore.”19 Bialik’s “To the Bird” relates to the Land of Israel as to the absent, desired object, and the Hebrew sound he inscribed in the mouth of his speaker would come to represent the almost unbridgeable distance between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel. Just as Poe set himself the challenge of crafting contexts and questions that would make sense of the raven’s eerie oneword declamation, poets after Bialik would search for and find news ways to recreate the lack that allows for longing and desire.
Appendix 1. Interview with Gene Simmons by leonard lopate*
Leonard Lopate: In seven-inch boots, armor, and adorned in kabuki-style make-up, Gene Simmons epitomized the rock and roll demon in the pioneering glam-metal band KISS. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that the fire-breathing, blood-spitting rock-god was born Chaim Witz in Israel and once studied to be a rabbi in Brooklyn. In his autoÂ� biography KISS and Make-Up from Crown, Mr. Simmons confirms all of the wild adventures that one might expect of a member of the hottest band in the land: wild parties, celebrity romances, hotel room trashiings, bang-up cars, and getting busy with the groupies. However, you might be surprised to know that the man who wants to rock and roll all night and party every day is an unabashed mama’s boy. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Gene Simmons today. Gene Simmons: Oh, thank you so much and since this is National Public Radio and it prides itself on accurate information—most of it sounded good—I stand guilty as charged and proud to say that I’m a mama’s boy. However, point one is you mispronounced my Hebrew name. It’s not ±ayim, which is the sort of sniveling please-don’t-beat-me-up Ashkennazi European way . . . Lopate: Which is what I grew up in . . . Simmons: Which is—hey, that’s why you get beaten up. I don’t. The sefaradit way is the correct way. It’s ±ayim, emphasis on the second vowel, like the Israelis do.
*Leonard Lopate, New York and Company, WNYC Radio, December 12, 2001
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*]Appendix 2. “rakevet” [train
דָּ י! ֵאיÂ�ִ -מי ָ€ע ַקד ַ€על ַ ּ€ג ֵ ּבי ַ€ה ּ ַפ ּ ִסים — ֶאת ַ€הכּ ֹל. ּארים ַ€ר ִּכיםְ ,מ ֻר ְט ָפ ׁ ִשים ַצוָ ִ ַעל ַ€ה ּ ַפ ּ ִסים — — ִמי€חוֹ ֵרז ּ€פֹה, ִמי€כּ וֹ ֵרז ּ€פֹה: “שכוֹ ל!” ְׁ יח — ְרכוּב ַ ּ ִה ֵּנה ָ€אגִ ַ �-Âב ְרזֶ ל — ֲא ַפ ְרזֵ ל ֶא ְדלֹק ו ְּב ַמ ּ ַסע�-Âקו ְּריָ ר ֶ€א ֱערֹף, ֶא ְמלֹק — ֶאת ַ€הכּ ֹל. €ס ָתם ָ ּ€ב ָאיִ ן. ִּכי€טוֹ ב€לִ י€נו ַּע ְ €ש ִמי€הוּא€ַ :קיִ ן. נ ּו€,ו ַּמה ִ€אם ׁ ְ ִמי€יְ ַפ ְר ֵּכס ּ€פֹה ַ€חי ֲ€ע ַדיִ ן — ֲא ָמ ֵע ְך! ְרכ ּוב ַ ּ�Âב ְרזֶ ל ֲ€אנִ י — ַה ִ ּצ ָ ּ ידה! €פה ָ€אב€וָ ֵאם — ַה ִ ּג ָידה! ִמי ּ ֹ ּ ֶפן ַ€א ׁ ְש ִמ ָידה ַא ֲא ִב ָידה ֵהי€ַ ,ה ִ ּצדָּ ה! וְ ַא ַחר — ּף—עיַ ְפ ִּתי: עו ָ ּף—עיַ ְפ ִּתי. ע ּוו ָ עוּף — —
*Published in the literary suplement to Davar 1, no. 15, January 8, 1926
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appendix 2
€שן חוֹ ֶר ֶקת וְ ׁשוֹ ֶק ֶקת: ַא ְך€נוֹ ׁ ֶש ֶפת ָ€ה ַר ֶּכ ֶבתֵ ׁ , €ש ֶקט! €ש ֶקט! ָהלְ ָאה ׁ ֶ ָהלְ ָאה ׁ ֶ …•âו ְּמ ׁ ַש ְק ֶש ֶקת: ָּתא! ָּתא! ָּתא! את. אט ָ €ט ֵ וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים ּ ַ€פ ּ ִסיםֻ : וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים ּ ַ€פ ּ ִסים€ִּ :ת ְע ַּת ְע ָּת. וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים ּ ַ€פ ּ ִסים€:לְ ַמ ּ ָטה ַרק€לְ ַמ ּ ָטה — ַא ְּת€ַ ,א ָּתה — ר—פה ּ ָ€פתו ַּח. ָה ֶאתמוֹ ל — ּ ֶ€פה ָ€קמוּץַ .ה ָּמ ָח ּ ֶ וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים ַ ּ€גלְ ַ ּגלִ ים ִ€עם ּ ַ€פ ּ ִסים€וְ ִעם€רו ַּח: ֵאין ַּ€ת ֲחנוֹ ת — ֵאין ַּ€ת ֲחנוֹ ת — ַה ַּת ֲחנוֹ ת ֵ€ה ָּנה ַ€רק ֲ€הכָ נוֹ ת. ַרק ֲ€הכָ נוֹ ת — ָ…•âמה? ית? €ט ִע ָ ית? ְטעוֹ ת ָ ָמהָּ ,ת ִע ָ יטא — דֶּ ֶר ְך€רו ְּסיָ ה€ּ ,פוֹ לִ ין ,לִ ָ ה-ת ִע ְ א-ט ֵע ְּ ָּת ְ י-טע ּו — …•âוְ ַע ָּתה? יטה: ה—פנַ י ָ€אלִ ָ וְ ַע ָּת ּ ָ יטה! ֵהי€ָ ,מ ָחר€ַ ,אל ִ ּ€בי ַ€ת ִ ּב ָ יטה! ֵּתן ָ€אנו ַּח€ֵּ ,תן ַ€א ׁ ְש ִק ָ וְ ִאם ֻ€הכּ ֹת — ֻ…•âא ַּכת ַ€ע ָּתה! €שן€חוֹ ֶר ֶקת ו ְּמ ׁ ַש ְק ׁ ֶש ֶקת: ַא ְך נוֹ ׁ ֶש ֶפת ָ€ה ַר ֶּכ ֶבתֵ ׁ , €ש ֶקט! €ש ֶקט! ָהלְ ָאה ֶ ָהלְ ָאה ֶ ו ְּמ ׁ ַש ְק ׁ ֶש ֶקת: ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע! ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע! —€לֹא ֵ€עת ַ€ע ָּתה! €טע! — ִּ€כי ֵ€עת ַ€ע ָּתה! €טע! ַ ַטע! ַ ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע! ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע! €טע! ַטע! ַ
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appendix 2
153
€ט ַר ְפ ִּתי ! ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע—.וַ ֲאנִ י ָ ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע—.וַ ֲאנִ י ָ€ע ַר ְפ ִּתי ! ַאל ִּ€ת ּ ַטע—.וַ ֲאנִ י ָ€עיַ ְפ ִּתי ! …•âוְ ַהלֵ ב ִ ּ€בי: €טע! €טע! ַ ַטע! ַ ַאך€צוֹ לֵ ַע ְּ€תמוֹ לִ י ַ€ה ִ ּג ֵ ּבןַ ,ה ָקרו ַּח: עוֹ ד ְ€מא ּום€לֹא€נָ ַת ָּת—וְ לָ ָּמה ָ€תנו ַּח? וְ טוֹ ְר ִדים ַ ּ€גלְ ַ ּג ּ ִלים ִ€עם ּ ַ€פ ּ ִסים€וְ ִעם€רו ַּח: ְמאוּם לֹא ַ€ת ִּתי לֹא€נָ ַת ָּת לֹא€נָ ַתנ ּו לֹא נָ ַת ְּת ְס ָתם את אט ָ ֻט ֵ ְס ָתם ִּת ְע ַּת ְע ָּת ְס ָתם לְ ַמ ּ ָטה ַרק€לְ ַמ ּ ָטה כּ ֹל€גָ ַמ ְע ָּת ַמ ִּתי — ַ€מ ָּת ַמ ְתנוַּ Â�Â�€מ ֶּתם ֵמת ּו — ַמ ְּת. ֵאין ַּ€ת ֲחנוֹ ת — ֵ€אין ַּ€ת ֲחנוֹ ת — €ה ָּנ ה ַ€ר ק ֲ €ה כָ נ וֹ ת — ַה ַּת ֲח נ וֹ ת ֵ ַרק ֲ€הכָ נוֹ ת ָ…•âמה? ע ּוו ָ ּף—עיַ ְפ ִּתי — — —
154
appendix 2 Enough! Hey who bound all— Onto the rails. Soft necks tromped On the tracks—— Who here is rhyming, Who here is declaring: “Grief!” Lo, I shall sally forth—an iron-rider— I shall strike I shall track down And in a flash shall slash, The neck— Of one and all. For I like to wander in the nether. And so what if my name is: Cain. Anyone here twitching, still alive— I’ll pulverize! Iron-Rider am I—step aside! Who here is a mother or father—do tell me! Lest I quell thee. Homicide. Hey, step aside! And afterwards— I’m weary—bleary: Weeary—bleary. Weary—— But the train is blowing-breathing, the cowcatcher grinding-grunting, â•… hustle-bustle: Yonder silence! Yonder silence! And rumbling-grumbling: Cabin-car! Car! Car! And rails are nagging: You were swept away. And rails are nagging: You led astray. And rails are nagging: Down below Always below— You, you too—
appendix 2
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The yesterday—a pursèd mouth. The tomorrow—an open mouth. And the wheels nag with the rails and the wind: There are no stations— There are no stations— These stations are only preparations. Only preparations— What? What, did you err? Did you stray there? Through Russia, Poland, Lithuania— Cabin-car-err-err-err— Now where? And now—my face I shall conceal: Oh, tomorrow, do not gaze at me! Let me rest, let me be still! And if I’m struck— Let it be forthwith! But the train is blowing-breathing, the cowcatcher—grinding-grunting, â•… hustle-bustle: Yonder silence! Yonder silence! Rumbling-grumbling: Do not plant! Do not plant!—The time t’isn’t now! Plant! Plant! Plant! For the time is now! Do not plant! Do not plant! Plant! Plant! Plant! Do not plant and I—devoured! Do not plant and I—beheaded! Do not plant and I am—drooping, fagged and flagging! Heart is thumping: Plant! Plant! Plant! But hunchbacked and bald, my yesterday lumbers: You have yet to contribute, why do you slumber? And wheels nag with the rails and the wind: I gave Not a thing You did not give We did not give You did not give You were simply
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appendix 2 Swept up You simply Deceived Simply Below Always below I swallowed all I died—you died We died—you all died They died— He died. There are no stations— there are no stations— These stations are only preparations— Only preparations What? Weeary— Bleary———
Notes
Preface 1. New York and Company, WNYC, December 12, 2001. For a longer excerpt, see Appendix 1. 2. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Milon ha-lashon ha-¿Ivrit ha-yeshanah ve-ha-¿adashah [Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew] (Jerusalem and Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1908–1959). 3. Gene Simmons, KISS and Make-up (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001), 6, 23–24. 4. ±ayim Na¿man Bialik, Shirim 659–694 [Poems 1899–1934], ed. Dan Miron, Zivah Shamir et al. (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1990), 129. This version is the one appearing in the 1933 edition and most subsequent editions of Bialik’s poems. Translations from the Hebrew here and throughout are my own. 5. In biblical Hebrew takhlit means end or completeness. The Yiddish takhles means “result” or “practical purpose.” In Modern Hebrew, when the stress falls on the final syllable of takhlit the word is defined as “purpose,” in keeping with the meaning the Hebrew word accrued in the medieval period. When used in modern Israeli Hebrew but with the stress on the penultimate (i.e., first) syllable and with the final letter pronounced /s/ (characteristic of Yiddish and of Ashkenazic Hebrews), it means “in practice.” The word retains meanings it had in older Hebrews, but when uttered in an Ashkenazic accent it has the texture of slang and invokes a sense inspired by the Yiddish. 6. Conversely, I have seen instances of Israeli native Hebrew speakers attempting to adopt an Ashkenazic accent for ritual uses of Hebrew. 7. ’Igrot ±ayim Na¿man Biyalik [Letters of ±ayim Na¿man Bialik], ed. Yeru¿am Fishel La¿over (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1937–1939), 70. 8. Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition (Philadelphia: G. R. Graham, 1846). 9. Jabotinsky even used a trochaic meter as Poe did. The trochaic foot consists of two syllables with the stress falling on the first—a nonintuitive choice for someone self-consciously employing the new accent. Most bisyllabic words would form a trochee in an Ashkenazic pronunciation, but an iamb (a bisyllabic foot where the stress falls on the second syllable) in Sephardic and new-accent pronunciations. In the updated version of his translation of Poe’s “The Raven,” Jabotinsky notes that he changed the refrain, his
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notes to pages xvi–3
translation of “nevermore,” from le-¿olam lo’ to the ’el-¿ad-’en-dor so as to include the sound or which Poe had described in The Philosophy of Composition as both “sonorous and susceptible to protracted emphasis” and therefore suited to the overall poetic effect he was trying to produce. See Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven and Other Poems (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845). The stanza of the Jabotinsky translation quoted here is from the 1914 version published in Moledet 6 (1914): 305–308 and appears on page 306. The revised version was published in 1923 in a collection of Jabotinsky’s translations of French and English poems. See Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Tirgumim [Translations] (Berlin: ha-Sefer, 1923), 12, for the note on “The Raven.” 10. The next mark Jabotinsky made on the history of Hebrew accent was at its subsequent stage of development, in 1930, with the publication of ha-Mivta’ ha-¿Ivri [The Hebrew Accent] (Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at ha-Sefer).
Introduction The epigraph is from ’Igrot Y[osef] ±[ayim] Brener [The Letters of Y(osef) ±(ayim) Brenner] (Tel Aviv: Davar, 1941), 261. Mena¿em Gnessin was in the first Hebrew production of Karl Gutzkow’s play Uriel Acosta. It was staged by the Lovers of Dramatic Art in Jaffa in 1904. See Mendel Kohansky, The Hebrew Theatre in its First Fifty Years (New York: Ketav, 1969), 13. 1. Martin Sicker, Reshaping Palestine: From Muhammad Ali to the British Mandate, 1831–1922 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999), 5–6. 2. In 1839 Moses Montefiore began negotiations with Egyptian leaders. This failed attempt was followed by others initiated by Western European parties, especially Britain. See Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 42–46 and Sicker, 15–16. 3. These included Moses Montefiore and members of the Rothschild family. 4. Ha-Levanon was founded in 1863; ±avatselet in 1870 after a short run in 1863. Several more papers followed in the mid- to late 1870s. See Galyah Yardeni, ha-¿Itonut ha-¿Ivrit be-’Erets Yisra’el ba-shanim 1863–1904 [The Hebrew Press in the Land of Israel in the Years 1863 to 1904] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Meu¿ad, 1969), 17–81, 420. 5. Laqueur 74–83. 6. In 1884 these groups were centralized (Laqueur 76–77). 7. “Zionism,” Encyclopedia Judaica 16 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), 1039. Population statistics in Palestine are, however, highly contested. According to a demographic study of Palestine by Justin McCarthy who returns to Ottoman sources, the Jewish population was far smaller. He reports that in 1880 there were 7,000 Jews representing 3 percent of the almost 240,000 people living in Palestine. By this tally, in 1912 23,000 Jews constituted 6.5 percent of the total population (The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990]). 8. Laqueur 76. 9. The word aliyah is used to describe these later waves of immigration as well. Contemporary scholarship adopts the term unself-consciously. 10. Raphael Patai, “Immigration to Palestine and Israel,” Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel (New York: Herzl Press and McGraw-Hill), vol. 1, 535, 538. McCarthy estimates that of the 44,000 Jewish immigrants to Palestine between 1895 and 1914, approximately 33,000 remained (McCarthy 23). 11. “The Ruthenian people in Galicia did not start with legions or universities or
notes to pages 3–5
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any other such fancy things. The Ruthenian nation held onto its land and did not neglect its language. (I was an eye-witness to a not very well-established Ruthenian [offering to] increase the bill he received from the storekeeper by a number of krones on the condition that [the bill be composed] in Ruthenian.)” “’Im sefatenu ’itanu (si¿ah),” ha-Po¿el ha-tsa¿ir (November 22, 1918): 24. 12. The grossest exaggerations seem to be connected to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s role in the language revival. See Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1930); William Chomsky, Hebrew: The Eternal Language (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1978); and Jack Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). For a critique of this scholarship, see Ron Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001). 13. “Cultural Life (State of Israel),” Encyclopedia Judaica 9 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), 1015. On Ben-Yehuda’s early journalistic activity in Palestine, see Galyah Yardeni, ha-¿Itonut ha-¿Ivrit be-’Erets Yisra’el ba-shanim 1863–1904 [The Hebrew Press in the Land of Israel in the Years 1863–1904] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Meu¿ad, 1969), 107–119. 14. Uzi Ornan’s phrase “all-encompassing language” allows one to speak of the stages of Modern Hebrew’s development without the teleological implications of the term revival. See my chapter 1 and his “Hebrew in Palestine before and after 1822,” The Journal of Semitic Studies 29, no. 2 (Autumn 1984): 225–254. 15. See Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose, especially chapter 3, “Realism without Vernacular” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988). Alter shows how literary prose was particularly handicapped by the absence of a vernacular Hebrew. The aesthetic of the modern novel demanded a language flexible enough to record fictional conversations. Writers faced a greater challenge in trying to create a colloquial illusion in Hebrew than in Yiddish, Russian, or other European vernaculars, since Hebrew did not exist as a mother tongue. Speakers’ own actual conversations often sounded stilted and awkward. 16. Judith Bar-El, “The National Poet in Hebrew Literary Criticism (1885–1905),” Prooftexts 6, no. 3 (1986): 205–220. 17. Despite the increasing centrality of prose fiction this asymmetry persists. There is no ambiguity as to Bialik’s status as the national poet. Shemuel Yosef Agnon, whose productive period overlapped with Bialik’s and whose stature is unmatched among writers of Hebrew prose fiction, is never referred to as the “national novelist,” although it is hard to think of another who could bear the weight of that title. 18. Bar-El, 208–211, 215–216. 19. This was the case intermittently in Hedim, Davar, and ha-Tekufah. For example, Avraham Shlonsky’s “Rakevet” and Elisheva Bi¿ovski’s early poetry were thus marked. 20. See Shaul Tchernichovsky, “bi-Devar ha-mishkal he-¿aluv” [On the Matter of the Wretched Meter], in Hed Lita’ 2, no. 1 (26): 11–14; no. 2 (27): 11–12; no. 3 (28): 13–14 (1924–1925); and his “li-She’elat ha-mivta’ ve-ha-neginah” [On the Question of Accent and Rhythm], in ha-Safah 1, no. 1 (1912): 27–29, reprinted in Leket te¿udot: le-Â� toledot va¿ad ha-lashon ve-ha-’akademiyah la-lashon ha-¿Ivrit, 5650–5730 [Collected Documents: Toward a History of the Language Committee and the Hebrew Language Academy, 1890–1970] (Jerusalem: The Hebrew Language Academy, 1970), 164–166. 21. Elisheva Bi¿ovski, “li-She’elat ha-havarah ba-shirah ha-¿Ivrit” [On the Question of Accent in Hebrew Poetry], ¿En ha-kore’ 1 (Winter 1923): 170–172.
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22. Both Ester Rab and Avraham Ben-Yits¿ak wrote in free verse. In his correspondence with Ben-Yits¿ak, Eliezer Lifshits encourages the poet to improve his Hebrew and his Hebrew accent. See his letter of November 18, 1902, in which he suggests that the poet tutor his student in the “Sephardic accent and Hebrew speech.” He goes on to instruct Ben-Yits¿ak to try to “disseminate knowledge of the language. This is the most important national labor. A language that is not spoken is not a language, and a nation that has no language is not a nation” (The Zionist Archive A165/26, first page). 23. See Uzi Shavit, “ha-Shir ha-parua¿â†œ” [The Wild Poem], Me¿karim be-sifrut ¿Ivrit [Studies in Hebrew Literature] (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1986). 24. Linguists date the birth of Hebrew to around 2000 bce with the arrival of Abraham in Canaan and the subsequent fusion of his Mesopotamian with the local Canaan dialect of Common Semitic. See Jack Fellman, “A Sociolinguistic Perspective on the History of Hebrew,” Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua Fishman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 27–34 (especially 27); and Chaim Rabin, A Short History of the Hebrew Language (Jerusalem: The Jewish Agency, 1974), cited there. For analyses of ancient Hebrew see Aba Bendavid, Leshon mikra’ u-leshon ¿akhamim [Biblical Language and Rabbinic Language] (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1967–1971); and Alexander Sperber, A Historical Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966). 25. Bernard Spolsky, “Jewish Multilingualism in the First Century: An Essay in Historical Sociolinguistics,” Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua Fishman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 35–50. 26. See Yehudah Ben Shemuel he-±asid, Sefer ha-±asidim (Jerusalem: Makhon Â�Rishonim, 1992); and the annotated edition of Rashi’s commentary on the Bible, Perushe Rashi ¿al ha-Torah (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1983). 27. Segholate nouns are one subset of words penultimately stressed in their base form in all pronuncations (except, perhaps, in the hypercorrect Israeli Hebrew of foreigners). Verbs are a more complex case. Suffixes tend not to affect the placement of stress; the conjugated verb is often penultimately stressed even in non-Ashkenazic Hebrew (e.g., halakh hu, “he went” in biblical Hebrew, but halakhti ani, “I went,” and halakhnu anu, “we went”). It should be noted that Ashkenazic Jews employed a variety of accent systems depending on the occasion. Even the choice of accent for religious purposes varied with the ritual. Cantor and congregant would have favored a penultimate stress for the Hebrew of prayer, but in ritual readings of the Bible a terminal-stress system would have been preferred. No such variety of stress systems exists for most contemporary Israeli Hebrew speakers. 28. See Benjamin Harshav [then Hrushovski], “Prosody, Hebrew,” Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 13 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), 1195–1239; and his briefer “Note on the Systems of Hebrew Versification,” The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, edited and translated by T. Carmi (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 57–72. 29. Naftali Herts Wessely (Weisel), Shire tif ’eret [Songs of Splendor] (Berlin: ±evrat ±inukh Ne¿arim, 1789–1802). 30. Harshav 1971, 1225–1226. 31. Harshav writes that the “19th-century Haskalah poets were strongly influenced by late Italian Hebrew poetry, but having a different pronunciation (Ashkenazi as opposed to Italian ‘Sephardi’), they could not feel this underlying iambic meter╯.╯.╯.╯they interpreted this [medieval tonal syllabic] verse as purely syllabic” (Harshav 1971, 1223–1224). 32. Uzi Shavit, ba-¿Alot ha-sha¿ar: shirat ha-Haskalah: mifgash ¿im moderniyut [At Dawn: The Poetry of the Haskalah: A Meeting with Modernity] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Meu¿ad, 1996), 43 and Harshav 1971, 1225. 33. Harshav writes that even in Gordon’s later less restrictive poetry, “a group of
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words constituting 8% of the normal language continuum was used in 90% of his rhymes” (Harshav 1971, 1226). 34. For histories of Bialik’s prosodic development, see Yits¿ak Bakon, ha-Prozodiyah shel shirat Biyalik [The Prosody of Bialik’s Poetry] (Be’er Sheva: Ben Gurion University, 1983); and Uzi Shavit, ±evele nigun [Rhythmic Bonds] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Meu¿ad, Makhon Kats, 1988). On the prosodic “revolution” initiated by Bialik’s Ashkenazic accentual-syllabic poetry, see Uzi Shavit, ha-Mahapekhah ha-ritmit [The Rhythmic Revolution] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts a-Meu¿ad, 1982–1983). Luriya was a minor poet who composed only thirteen poems in accentual-syllabic meter—the earliest of these in the late 1870s. (See Shavit 1982–1983, 57–60.) Both Bialik and Tchernichovsky started composing in Â�accentual-syllabic meter in the 1890s, although Bialik used it more consistently at first. 35. Avraham Ber Gottlober raised the possibility as early as 1865 (Shavit 1982–1983, 18). Shavit writes that “[t]he same dichotomy or discrepancy between theoretical knowledge on the one hand and poetic practice on the other that is so apparent in Gottlober is to a certain extent characteristic of other poets of the Haskalah period as well, who were very familiar with the principles of the accentual-syllabic method practiced in the various European literatures, but did not make any attempt to adapt them for Hebrew” (22). Te¿iyah poetry refers to that which began to be published in the 1890s—most prominently the work of Bialik and Tchernichovsky—and that broke with Haskalah poetry, instituting new generic, stylistic, and thematic norms. 36. Avraham Ber Gottlober, “’Igeret bikoret: peles u-ma’ozne mishkal ha-shirah ha¿Ivrit be-artsot ha-Germanim ve-ha-Slavim” [Critical Epistle: Scales and Measures of Hebrew Poetry in German and Slavic Lands], published in ha-Kokhavim 1 (Vilna, 1865), 11–50, especially p. 27; quoted in Shavit 1982–1983, 18–20. 37. Uzi Shavit 1982–1983, 28. 38. Alter, chapter 3. 39. See note 11 to this chapter. There is a logic to choosing Russian as a literary influence and Ruthenian as a model for language revival: the Hebrew revivalists of the late nineteenth century looked forward to the development of a great national literature in Hebrew such as existed in German, Russian, French, and English, and at the same time saw themselves in a dramatic struggle to invigorate and modernize their national language similar to that of the smaller nations. 40. In fact there were experiments in this vein in the Haskalah period as well. See Mordekhai Hak, “Nitsane ha-mishkal ha-toni ba-shirah ha-¿Ivrit” [The Budding of Accentual-Syllabic Meter in Hebrew Poetry], Tarbits 11, no. 1 (1940): 91–109. 41. Shavit 1988, 73–78. 42. See the Preface and note 9 there. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, better known for his Labor Revisionist politics, published his translations separately in 1923; he composed them in 1908. See Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Tirgumim, which included translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven.” 43. See the title essay in Dan Miron, ’Imahot meyasdot, a¿ayot ¿orgot [Founding Mothers, Stepsisters] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts a-Meu¿ad, 1991). 44. Although “poetess” is a derogatory term in English, the Hebrew equivalent, meshoreret, is the standard term for women who write poetry. The women mentioned here were almost immediately perceived as a distinct group. I will sometimes use the term “poetesses” to capture this aspect of their reception and to invoke the sense of women’s poetry in the 1920s as a distinct cultural phenomenon. The Hebrew rendering of this phrase is redundant, since meshorerot already indicates a feminine plural noun; Dan Miron uses the redundant “meshorerot nashim” as a way of invoking this critical discourse. 45. See Benjamin Harshav, Ritmus ha-ra¿avut: halakhah u-ma¿ase be-shirato ha-
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’ekspresyonistit shel Uri Tsevi Grinberg [The Wide Rhythm: Theory and Practice in the Expressionist Poetry of Uri Tsevi Greenberg] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Meu¿ad, 1978). On the issue of switching from one accent to another, see the introductions to individual poets in Harshav 2000; and Eliezer Kagan, “¿Al ha-saf (¿iyun be-ma¿avar mi-mivta’ le-mivta’)” [On the Threshold (An Investigation of the Transition from One Accent to Another)], ¿Arugot: kovets le-zikhro shel Yaakov Fikhman [Garden Beds: A Collection in Memory of Yaakov Fikhman], ed. Nurit Govrin (Tel Aviv: The World Council of Bessarabian Jews, 1976). 46. Fogel eventually composed two poems in the new accent and recomposed some of his Ashkenazic poems in the new accent. See David Fogel, Kol ha-shirim [Collected Poems], ed. Aharon Komem (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Meu¿ad, 1998). Rabinovits emigrated to Palestine in 1910 and eventually became the editor of Hedim, which published Shlonsky, Lamdan, Bluvshtain, and others who were composing in the new accent in the twenties. Shimoni taught Bible and Hebrew literature at Hertseliah high school in Tel Aviv. Despite his pedagogic context, he favored the Ashkenazic accent in his own poetry; with a few possible exceptions, he continued to compose in Ashkenazic throughout his career. See Benjamin Harshav, Shirat ha-Te¿iyah ha-¿Ivrit: antologiyah historit-bikortit [The Poetry of the Hebrew Revival: A Historical-Critical Anthology] (Jerusalem: Mosad Biyalik, 2000), 229. Shtainberg moved to Palestine in his late twenties. “Although he settled in Palestine during the period of the revival of spoken Hebrew and the blossoming of Hebrew literature there, Shtainberg preserved the Ashkenazic accent in his poetry all those years. In this sense he was the only poet in Palestine who did not betray the musical basis of Hebrew poetry of the Te¿iya period, as his contemporaries tried to do: Shaul Tchernichovsky, Yaakov Kahan, Yaakov Fikhman, Yehudah Karni, Shimon Halkin, and others” (Harshav 2000, 362). 47. Tchernichovsky nevertheless continued to compose poems in Ashkenazic even after switching to the new accent. 48. Shavit 1988, 72–73. 49. Harshav 2000, vol. 1, 547, 569; vol. 2, 457. Harshav notes that this tactic worked best when the poet transformed his Ashkenazic metered poetry into less strictly metered or free-rhythmic verse. 50. Theories of nationalism that treat the formation of national identity as an attempt to create a modern analogue to ancient kinship bonds and/or religious identity inform this study. See Joshua A. Fishman, Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1972); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991); and the introduction to Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present: A Reader, ed. Stuart Woolf (London: Routledge, 1996). 51. Johann Gottfried Herder, On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 52. Women, like the folk, typically serve as a nationalist symbol of authenticity as opposed to the leaders of nationalist movements who are often the least “authentic” segment of the population. These symbolic values are unstable, the constant being the role of women as symbols of national pride whether that takes the form of ancient authenticity or the successful industrialization and modernization of the state. See Hamutal Tsamir’s doctoral dissertation, “Israeli Statehood Generation and Women’s Poetry in the Fifties and Sixties: Poetry, Gender, and the Nation State” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union and University of California, Berkeley, 2000), 115–116; and
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Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 376–391. 53. This applies to the first two of the following three examples in which the native boys are portrayed as rascals; both reveal a perverse pleasure in children’s rudeness or use of naughty words, which is taken as evidence of the naturalness of their Hebrew. The third features young girls. A large part of the fascination with Hebrew-speaking children in all three is that children born of Yiddish-speaking parents seem native to Palestine. The first two anecdotes appear in Itamar Even-Zohar, “ha-Tsemi¿ah ve-ha-hitgabshut shel tarbut ¿Ivrit mekomit vi-yelidit be-’Erets Yisra’el, 1882–1948” [The Growth and Solidification of Local and Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948], Cathedra 16 (July 1980): 165–189. See also his shorter English version, “The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948,” Studies in Zionism 4 (Autumn 1981): 167–184. 1. Tel aviv. Hertsl Street. Boys and girls poured out of the Hertselia high school after class. At that very moment, two of the most well-known Yiddishists who had come to see Palestine arrived. The older of the two said to his friend: “The Zionists brag that Hebrew has become second nature for the children of the Land of Israel. Now you will see how they lie and deceive. I will shriek in a boy’s ear and I can assure you that he won’t cry ‘ima!’ in Hebrew but ‘mame!’ in Yiddish.” He did as he said. He approached a boy from behind and screamed in his ear. The boy spun around and cried: “±amor!╯.╯.╯.” [ass] The famous Yiddishist replied to his friend: “It would seem that they were indeed right.”
(Alter Druyanov, Sefer ha-bedi¿ah ve-ha-¿idud [The Book of Jokes and Wit] (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1963), vol. 3, Item no. 2636, translation mine; also quoted in Even-Zohar 1980, 183 and Even-Zohar 1981, 179): 2. One of the bunch complained that the Tel Aviv kids are bad╯.╯.╯.╯wild—and that they grow up without any manners, fear of God or good Jewish values.╯.╯.╯.╯All his life, he says, he would comfort himself with the dream that our children in the Land of Israel would greet every passerby with a shalom,╯.╯.╯.╯and in the end, he says, we hear from them a different blessing: “Ass!”╯.╯.╯.╯Now, he says, he himself has a story to tell: This morning he walked innocently down a city street and without intending to he kicked some stones, which little schoolchildren had arranged for a game on the sidewalk. One of them, an orphan who couldn’t have been even five years old, yelled bloody murder: “May your name be wiped out, Mister!”—and was shaking all over╯.╯.╯.╯ â•… The second one responded: “And your mind is still not at peace?” â•… “On the contrary,” he says, “let’s be grateful that they speak Hebrew so naturally! Did you ever in your life expect,” he says, “when you were there in the Diaspora—did you ever even dream that a young child of five would ‘bless’ you to your face with such an acrid and juicy mother-tongue Hebrew: ‘may your name be wiped out, Mister?’” (From Yits¿ak Dov Berkovits, Mena¿em-Mendl be-’erets yisra’el (Mena¿em Mendl in the Land of Israel), Tel Aviv: Devir, 1936, 156–157; quoted in Even-Zohar 1980, 183) 3. They (fem.) speak Hebrew, they sing Hebrew. In the evening, in the evening
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notes to pages 15–17 I see them walking and strolling and I hear them speaking and singing Hebrew. One is about five and the other about four╯.╯.╯.╯and I shorten my steps and follow them both. “One two,” the older one says; “wa too,” replies the younger one, and the big girl walks along counting her steps and the little one follows her and I follow them both . . . “Where did you learn such a nice song, my pretty girl?” I ask the great poetess. And in such a sweet voice, a voice that pulls at the heart strings, she answers: “in nursery school.” “Sing me a song,” I ask her, and in the pleasantness of her ringing voice she starts to sing: “The hand takes, the hand gives, the hand, the hand, the hand.” “What is my hand doing?” I ask her, holding out an apple. “Your hand is giving,” she answers. “And your hand?” I continue to question her. “Taking,” she answers, snatching the apple and running away.
And from time to time, when I pass by the kindergarten and Hebrew chit-chat reaches my ears, Hebrew songs ring in my ears, I see small Hebrew boys and girls walking in the garden and singing Hebrew songs together with the birds.
(Y. Kantrovits, “¿Ivrim ve-¿Ivriyot,” Hashkafah 7 (1904); quoted in Grintsvaig 1997, 411) This is no doubt a variation on the song Leah Mazyah taught in her kindergarten in 1901. See David Shapira and Shimon Rubenshtain, “ha-±ipus a¿ar milim ¿Ivriyot ¿adashot ¿avur gan ha-yeladim ha-¿Ivri ha-rishon be-Yafo” [The Search for New Hebrew Words for the First Hebrew Kindergarten in Jaffa], Kivunim 38 (1990): 67–73. 54. Eliezer Kagan, “¿Iyun ba-fonetikah shel Shlonski” [An Analysis of Shlonsky’s Phonetics], Avraham Shlonski: miv¿ar ma’amare bikoret ¿al yetsirato [Avraham Shlonsky: A Selection of Critical Essays on His Work], ed. Aviezer Vais (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975); Uzi Shavit 1986; Uzi Shavit 1988; Avraham Hagorni-Green, Shlonski ba-¿avotot Byalik [Shlonsky in the Bonds of Bialik] (Israel: Or Am, 1985); Harshav 1978, 28–29; and Harshav 2000. 55. The demand for unambiguous heroes in the history of the New Yishuv is not limited to belles lettres. Ben-Yehuda’s fathering of a Modern Hebrew is a dramatic example of this sort of mythmaking. See Kuzar, 84–136. 56. See Kagan 1976, 45. 57. For a theory of why it was precisely this cultural milieu in which women’s poetry appeared, see Hamutal Tsamir, “ha-Korban ha-¿alutsi: ha-’arets ha-kedoshah vehofa¿atah shel shirat ha-nashim bi-shenot ha-¿esrim” [The Pioneer’s Sacrifice: The Holy Land and the Appearance of Women’s Poetry in the Nineteen-Twenties] in Rega¿ shel huledet: me¿karim be-sifrut ¿Ivrit u-ve-sifrut Yidish li-khevod Dan Miron [Moment of Birth: Studies in Hebrew Literature and Yiddish Literature in Honor of Dan Miron], ed. Hannan Hever (Jerusalem: Mosad Biyalik, 2007). 58. Tsevi Shats, “Galut shiratenu ha-klasit” [The Exile of Our Classical Poetry], ¿Al gevul ha-demamah: ketavim [On the Edge of Silence: Writings] (Tel Aviv: Davar, 1929). The article was written in 1919 and appeared the following year in ’Ohel. 59. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), and John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
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1. “Make Your School a Nation-State” The first epigraph is from Devorah Baron, ha-Golim [The Exiles] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1920), 11. The second epigraph is from Max Weinreich, “Der Yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt” [YIVO and the Problems of Our Time], Yivo-bleter 25, no. 1 (Jan.– Feb. 1945): 13. 1. Chaim Rabin, “The National Idea and the Revival of Hebrew,” Studies in Zionism 7 (Spring 1983): 31–48; Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948,” Studies in Zionism 4 (1981): 167–184; Uzi Shavit, “ha-Shir haparua¿â†œ” [The Wild Poem], in Me¿karim be-sifrut ¿Ivrit [Studies in Hebrew Literature] (Tel Aviv: University Presses, 1986), and his ±evele nigun [Evolution and Revolution in Bialik’s Prosody] (Tel Aviv: Makhon Kats, Tel Aviv University, 1988); Eliezer Kagan, “¿Al ha-saf (¿iyun bi-ma¿avar mi-mivta’ le-mivta’)” [On the Threshold (An Analysis of the Transition from One Accent to Another)], ’Arugot: kovets le-zikhro shel Ya¿akov Fikhman [Garden Beds: A Collection in Memory of Yaakov Fikhman], 4 Iyar, 5736 (1976), ed. Nurit Govrin (Tel Aviv: Eked). 2. Zohar Shavit, ha-¿ayim ha-sifrutiyim be-’Erets Yisra’el: 1910–1933 [Literary Life in the Land of Israel: 1910–1933] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Meu¿ad, 1983), 434–436. 3. “Yaakov Fikhman belongs to that generation of Hebrew writers whose early literary creations were born into the East European world and whose subsequent work was in the Land of Israel. The transition from one landscape to another is a tragic one. The world of visions that is nourished by life experience in childhood and youth—this world which is the personal property of the artist—loses its value, and the poet must acquire new foundational visions appropriate to the landscape and to the personal experience of the new reader” (Kagan 1976, 45). 4. See, for example, The Great Transition: The Recovery of the Lost Centers of Modern Hebrew Literature, ed. Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), especially the chapters by David Patterson, Zohar Shavit, Yaakov Shavit, and Nurit Govrin. 5. Hagorni-Green, 3. 6. Shavit 1986, 165–166, and 1988, 72–73, 184. 7. In introducing the genre of children’s poetry to his analysis of Bialik’s prosody, Shavit makes an important contribution to scholarship on the new accent. See Uzi Shavit 1988, 72–78, 182–192; and Uzi Shavit 1986, 170. He also ties the history of new-accent poetry to the fate of one poet, Avraham Shlonsky, and the history of that poet’s personal transition from one accent to the other. I will return to the topic of Shlonsky’s transition in chapter 4. 8. See Harshav’s notes on individual poets’ prosodic and accent histories, in Shirat ha-te¿iyah ha-¿Ivrit: antologiyah historit-bikortit [The Poetry of the Hebrew Revival: A Historical-Critical Anthology] (Jerusalem: Mosad Biyalik, 2000). 9. Yehudah Karni, She¿arim [Gates] (Jerusalem and Berlin: Devir, 1923); and biShe¿arayikh moledet [At Your Gates, Homeland] (Tel Aviv: A¿i¿ever, 1935). 10. Avigdor Hame’iri, mi-Shire Avigdor Foyershtain [Selected Poems of Avigdor Foyershtain] (Budapest: Histadrut ha-Tsiyonim bi-Hungariyah, 1912) and ±alev ’em: kitve ’Avigdor ha-Me’iri [The Writings of Avigdor Hame’iri], vol. 1 (Jerusalem: ha-Ketav, 1925). 11. On issues of language and nationalism, see Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991) and Fishman 1972; on Hebrew language and Jewish nationalism, see Chaim Rabin, “The Role of Language in Forging a Nation: The Case of Hebrew,” The Incorporated Linguist 9, no. 1 (January 1970); and especially Ron Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001). 12. See John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Canon Formation (Chi-
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notes to pages 25–28
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chapter 2, especially 87–97. Guillory’s analysis of the category of English literature first made me aware of the relevance of Bourdieu’s sociology of language to the history of Hebrew language and literature. 13. Ra¿el Elboim-Dror, ha-±inukh ha-¿Ivri be-’Erets Yisrael [Hebrew Education in Palestine] (Jerusalem: Yad Yits¿ak Ben-Tsevi, 1986), vol. 1, 219. This is the authoritative contemporary work of scholarship on Hebrew education and one of the few books on Hebrew education that is not based on Azaryahu. 14. Yosef Azaryahu, “ha-±inukh ha-¿Ivri be-’Erets-Yisra’el” [Hebrew Education in the Land of Israel], in Sefer ha-yovel shel histadrut ha-morim, 5763–5788 [The Jubilee of the Teachers’ Organization, 1903–1928], ed. Dov Kim¿i (Jerusalem: Merkaz histadrut ha-morim bi-Yerushalayim, 1929), 57–112. On Hebrew education in Palestine, also see Aharon Berman, Toledot ha-¿inukh be-Yisra’el u-va-¿amim [The History of Education in Israel and among the Nations] (Tel Aviv: Yehoshua Tchechik, 1960), 139–153; A. Arnon, “Shishim shenot bet ha-sefer ha-¿Ivri ba-’Arets” [Sixty Years of the Hebrew School in Palestine], Hed ha-¿inukh 9 (Fall 1947): 8–40; Jack Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1973); and “±inukh u-me¿kar: toledot ha-¿inukh ha-’Ivri he-¿adash” [Education and Research: The History of the New Hebrew Education], in ha-’Entsiklopediyah ha-¿Ivrit [The Hebrew Encyclopedia] 6 (Jerusalem: ±evrah le-Hotsa’at ’Entsiklopediyot, 1956– 57), 983–996, all of which to some extent rely on Azaryahu as well. 15. Jews of different ethnicities lived in close proximity in the Old Yishuv. Even though the Sephardic communities were more established, Ashkenazic Jews did not abandon their own pronunciations of Hebrew. Bourdieu’s account of the intermingling of dialects in a nonnationalist context describes aptly the Hebrew language dynamic in the Old Yishuv in which there is “no question of making one usage the norm for another (despite the fact that the differences perceived may well serve as pretexts for declaring one superior to the other)” (Bourdieu 46). Also see Bourdieu, chapters 1 and 2. 16. Recall the “impossibility” of writing accentual-syllabic poetry in Hebrew until Bialik and Tchernichovsky started doing just that. There were also challenges that were more strictly linguistic, such as the creation of a literary vernacular in which to write modern prose genres. See Alter, especially chapter 2. 17. Arnon, 16. 18. “Hatsa¿ah le-tokhnit ha-limudim shel bate-ha-sefer ha-¿amamiyim be-’Erets Yisra’el” [Proposal for a Curriculum for the Primary Schools in the Land of Israel], cited in Azaryahu (73). 19. In Bourdieu’s model, the map of dialects is never entirely superimposable [on the territory in an absolute way] and only ever corresponds to religious or administrative boundaries through rare coincidence.╯.╯.╯.╯Only by transposing the representation of the national language is one led to think that regional dialects exist, themselves divided into subdialects—an idea flatly contradicted by the study of dialectics.╯.╯.╯.╯A nd it is no accident that nationalism almost always succumbs to this illusion since, once it triumphs, it inevitably reproduces the process of unification whose effects it denounced. (258)
As I will show in the next chapter, the language revivalists whittled down the choices and excluded the Galilean accent from consideration although its implementation had been one of the most successful experiments of the language revivalists in turnof-the-century Palestine.
notes to pages 29–31
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20 See Arnon 1947, 10; and “Language Teaching” in the Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 21. See Yehudah Grazovski’s “ha-Shitah ha-tiv¿it be-limud sefatenu ’o ¿Ivrit be-¿Ivrit” [The Natural Method in our Language or Hebrew in Hebrew], published in ha-Tsevi in 1885 and reprinted in 1896, and Yits¿ak Epstein’s “¿Ivrit be-¿Ivrit: ha-shitah ha-tiv¿it bereshit limud sefat ¿Ever” [Hebrew in Hebrew: The Natural Method in the First Years of Hebrew Language Acquisition], ha-Shiloa¿ 4, no. 5 (1898): 385–396. See also the introduction to David Yellin, le-Fi ha-taf [The Mouth of the Children] (Warsaw: Tushiyah, 1903). 22. The use of an ancient heritage that has been forgotten or lost is typical of nationalist movements in their early stages (Anderson 1991, chapters 2 and 3). In just such a vein, Hebrew was often described as a dead language that needed to be brought back to life. See above, note 14 to the Introduction, on Ornan, who has an alternative periodization based on his concept of an “all-encompassing” language. For other approaches to the problematic term revival see Ornan, Rabin, and Kuzar. See also Shelomoh Morag, “ha-¿Ivrit ha¿adashah be-hitgabshutah: lashon be-’aspaklariya’ shel ¿evrah” [The New Hebrew in Its Formation: Language in the Mirror of Society], Cathedra 56 (June 1990): 70–92. 23. Note that this excursion takes place when “we teach the early writings of the land” (Epstein 385). The relationship between language and writing is developed further below (see my discussion of Epstein). 24. See the poems in Ze’ev Yavits, Tal yaldut [Childhood Dew] (Jerusalem, 1891; Vilna, 1898). See also the onomatopoeic play and the parallels between animals’ sounds and children’s Hebrew speech in Yehudah Grazovski and Shemuel Leyb Gordon, ha-Keri’ah ve-ha-ketivah [Reading and Writing] (Warsaw: Tushiyah, 1907). The many human characters in the book bear names that are also animals in Hebrew, and the Hebrew sounds of children are constantly compared to the “natural” sounds of animals and even sounds associated with inanimate objects. See p. 93 in which the girls are pretty like the animals who vocalize and are also poets who can imitate the sound of a bell. Poetry is most often presented in the book as a character’s speech (pp. 100, 101, 108, 132). The lesson of many of the stories in this book seems to be that the Hebrew-speaking child is yet another species of animal. The child is not identical to any other animal—and he should certainly not bark—but his Hebrew verbal instincts are as natural to him as the bark is to the dog. Yehudah Grazovski’s Bet sefer ¿Ivri [Hebrew School] (Jerusalem: Hatsevi, 1895) presents a much more belligerent habitat where animals constantly play tricks, steal, or kill one another. They live by their wits and pose a danger to human beings (see, for example, pp. 15–16, 21, 28–29, 39, 54–56, and 58–59). The theme of this reader published in Palestine is the home and protecting it from danger (see especially pp. 63–64 which narrates a mini-history of the home from ancient times to the present). Many of the stories, about children and animals alike, involve building, finding, or returning to one’s home (pp. 31, 32, 34 [poem]). Many passages taken from Jewish history are about the national home in some sense, including stories on the return to Israel from Babylon and on Jewish struggles against the Greek and Roman Empires (pp. 35, 37, 49–50, 53, 58–59, 60–63). According to Eliyahu Hacohen’s Matayim shenot ha-mikra’ah ha-¿Ivrit [Two Hundred Years of the Hebrew Reader] (Tel Aviv: Mikhlelet Levinski, 1988), this popular primer “almost certainly [remains to this day] the most widespread book in Hebrew in the world, aside from Scripture.” 25. This trope is repeated in the Hebrew primers. See for example, Yehudah Grazovski and Shemuel Leyb Gordon, ’Otsar ha-limud ha-¿Ivri [The Treasure of Hebrew Learning] (Warsaw, 1904), 124. The poem there describes the “small free land” of the school that will be a miniature “Land of Israel,” a true Hebrew Garden of Eden.
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26. Guillory, 69. 27. In an ecclesiastic context language is never the most important of the text’s attributes; scriptural language is perceived as a uniquely holy and true language rather than as the heart and soul of a nation: “while the vernacular canon as pseudo-scripture takes its place in the emergence of national ‘traditions,’ the ends of nationalism were served not simply by the establishment of vernacular classics but even more crucially by the use of these texts in the schools as a means of standardizing the vernacular language” (Guillory 77). 28. ±ayim Leyb ±azan, “Midat ha-te¿amim la-shirah ha-¿Ivrit” [The Rule of Rhythm in Hebrew Poetry], ha-Shiloa¿ 3, no. 6 (June 1898): 572–576. 29. “li-She’elat ha-mivta’ ve-ha-neginah” [On the Question of Accent and Stress], in Leket te¿udot: le-toledot va¿ad ha-lashon ve-ha-akademiyah la-lashon ha-¿Ivrit, 5650– 5730 [Collected Documents: Toward a History of the Language Committee and the Hebrew Language Academy, 1890–1970] (Jerusalem: The Hebrew Language Academy, 1970), 160–166; the collection is hereafter referred to as CD. 30. ±ayim Na¿man Biyalik: Shirim [±ayim Na¿man Bialik: Poems], vol. 1, ed. Dan Miron (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1983), 239–240. 31. See “li-She’elat ha-mivta’ ve-ha-neginah” in CD, 164–166. 32. Tchernichovsky speaks explicitly of Mordekhai Tsevi Maneh’s poetry but the subtext is that all accentual-syllabic poetry including his own would be mutilated as well. Maneh was at the time seen, at least by Tchernichovsky, as the poet who had begun the process of integrating an accentual-syllabic prosody into Hebrew poetry and, by extension, the poet who first wrote poetry that could not be cleansed of its Ashkenazic origins. See Uzi Shavit 1983, 48. 33. “li-She’elat ha-mivta’ vi-ha-neginah (he-¿arat moreh)” [On the Question of Accent and Stress (A Teacher’s Comment)], CD 167–169. 34. On this structure, see Kim¿i 1929, 260–262. 35. On print culture and national identity, see Anderson; on the role of the newspaper, see especially pp. 32–36. 36. The problem of a divided language was to some extent mitigated in the 1920s by the possibility of composing free-rhythmic verse. In the 1930s the new accent was quite explicitly the poetic norm for new writers (and even, effectively, for veteran Ashkenazic versifiers), and was also a period of return to accentual-syllabic meter, a trend that, significantly, was to continue until the 1950s. 37. On Hebrew education in Palestine, in addition to Azaryahu, see above in this chapter note 14. Azaryahu’s history was published in 1929 in the yearbook celebrating twenty-five years of the Teachers’ Association in Palestine. He writes that in “1920 there were forty-two kindergartens (with a total of 2,764 students), forty-seven primary schools (6,684 students) and four high schools (802 students) under the auspices of the Education Department of the Histadrut” (Azaryahu 104). See also Shimon Reshef and Yuval Dror, ha-±inukh ha-¿Ivri bi-yeme ha-bayit ha-leumi, 1919–1948 [Hebrew Education in the Period of the National Home, 1919–1948] (Jerusalem: Mosad Biyalik, 1999) which, as its title suggests, focuses on a later period than is of interest here. 38. This includes that of the Jewish Colonization Association which was founded in 1891 by Baron Hirsch Moritz. The primary concern of the association was the emigration of Jews from Europe; it also supported Jewish settlements in Palestine. 39. Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, the Relief Organization of the German Jews, was also known as Ezra in Palestine. 40. See Yosef Klausner, ha-Universitah ha-¿Ivrit bi-Yerushalayim [The Hebrew University in Jerusalem] (Jerusalem: Tarbut, 1925), 8–9, where he writes of how the univer-
notes to pages 39–43
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sity could not be successfully established until after the Jaffa high school had produced “Hebrew” graduates. 41. It is difficult to know exactly what kind of sociolinguistic environment existed in the school as a result of this decision. See Berman, 140. Ben-Yehuda was not obsessed with errors as the later revivalists were. Such precision was afforded by the standardization implemented during the Second Aliyah (Kuzar 132). 42. Berman, 140. 43. Kuzar, 130–136. 44. As Fellman writes, “The first teaching of arithmetic in Hebrew took place in 1887, and in 1888, all general subjects, including history, geography and nature-study were taught in Hebrew [by David Yudelovits and his colleagues in Rishon le-Tsiyon]” (Fellman 97). The principal Mordekhai Lubman, as well as Ben-Yehuda, Yudelovits, and other teachers wrote the Hebrew textbooks themselves. 45. Elboim-Dror, 156. 46. See Elboim-Dror, 156–157 on the exclusion of Ashkenazic schoolboys who were taught to speak with a “Sephardic” accent from reading the Bible aloud in ritual contexts. 47. That is, their idea of sacred language was in some sense premodern. Hebrew was seen as distinct from other languages much as the biblical period was perceived as discontinuous with historical time. See Anderson, 69–73. 48. Elboim-Dror, 165. 49. See Elboim Dror, 134 on the competition between the two in the ±oveve Â�Tsiyon budget. 50. Reshef and Dror, 4–8. 51. That year ha-Shiloa¿ also published Epstein’s essay on the natural method in which he wrote that Hebrew pedagogy required a literature that could serve as a model for proper speech (see my discussion above in this chapter). 52. The first collection of new-accent poems to be published was also for children— Liboshitski’s Dimyonot ve-’agadot: shirim ¿adashim [Fantasies and Fables: New Poems] (Warsaw: Tushiyah, 1902). Page 4 in its entirety reads: “kol shire ha-kovets ha-zeh ketuvim ba-neginah ha-’amitit u-ve-ketsev ’Erope’i.” [All the poems of this collection are written in the proper rhythm (i.e., a Sephardic stress system) and in a European meter.] 53. Although the settlement showed patience in allowing itself to slowly adopt Hebrew as the official language, it was quite zealous in protecting this reputation. See Yosef Lang, “Te¿iyat ha-lashon ha-¿Ivrit be-Rishon le-Tsiyon, 1882–1914” [The Revival of the Hebrew Language in Rishon le-Tsiyon, 1882–1914], Cathedra 103 (2002): 85–131. 54. The first Hebrew preparatory preschool opened in Rishon le-Tsiyon in the 1880s (see Azaryahu 67 and his note there). 55. See Zohar Shavit, “Hitmasdut ha-merkaz ha-tarbuti be-’Erets Yisra’el” [The Establishment of the Cultural Center in Palestine], in Toledot ha-yishuv ha-Yehudi be’Erets Yisra’el [The History of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine], ed. Moshe Liski (Jerusalem: Mosad Biyalik, 1998), vol. 1, 123–262 and her ha-±ayim ha-sifrutiyim be-’Erets Yisra’el: 1910–1933 [Literary Life in the Land of Israel: 1910–1933] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Meu¿ad, 1983). 56. “From the history of Hebrew education in Palestine we know that the Hebrew school is the fruit of the labor and spirit of the Hebrew teacher╯.╯.╯.╯alone. He founded and tended and fortified it until it was a perfect and inseparable part of the national life in Palestine . . .” (Azaryahu 58). 57. Woolf, 23–24. 58. On the meetings of the various incarnations of the Teachers’ Association, see
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notes to pages 43–50
Shelomoh Karmi, Telamim rishonim ba-¿inukh ha-¿Ivri: asefat ha-morim ha-¿Ivrim be’erets Yisra’el u-mekomah be-toledot ha-¿inukh, 5652–5656 [First Furrows in Hebrew Education: The Hebrew Teachers’ Association in Palestine and Its Place in the History of Education 1891–1896] (Jerusalem: Reuven Mas, 1986); CD; and Kim¿i 1929. 59. See the brief discussions on the “Sephardic” accents in the minutes of the seventh and eighth meetings of the teachers [’asefat ha-morim] (Karmi 112–120); and selections from the minutes of the founding of the histadrut ha-morim in 1903 (CD 160–161). 60. See Elboim-Dror 1, 312. They ran schools in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Safed, and supported schools in Rehovot and Gaderah as well as Talmud Torah schools in Jerusalem and Hebron. 61. In a work of historical fiction the Hilfsverein representative goes so far as to say to the workers at the site of the future college that they were “treading on German soil.” See Noa¿ Tamir, Seminaristim be-ma’avak ¿am [Teachers’ College Students in a National Struggle] (Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 1963), 67–68; quoted in Elboim-Dror 1, 315. 62. Kuzar devotes two chapters to Ben-Yehuda, in which he critiques the scholarship and demonstrates the self-mythification in Ben-Yehuda’s own writings. One trend in Ben-Yehuda’s writing is to narrate his life story such that his love of the Hebrew language is a constant throughout his political, religious, and intellectual experimentation, although the evidence shows that Hebrew was not a central concern in his early thought. See especially 42–67. 63. “±inukh u-me¿kar: toledot ha-¿inukh ha-¿Ivri he-¿adash” [Education and Research: The History of the New Hebrew Education], in ha-’Entsiklopediya ha-¿Ivrit [The Hebrew Encyclopedia] 6 (Jerusalem: ±evrah le-hotsa’at ’Entsiklopediyot, 1956– 1957), 983–996. 64. Reshef and Dror, 6. 65. See the introduction to Harshav, Shirat ha-te¿iyah, 2000. 66. Some poets published new-accent poems for children even as they continued to compose canonical poetry in Ashkenazic (Uzi Shavit 1988, 72–82). In the meantime the schools continued to teach Bialik, Tchernichovsky, and Lebensohn for lack of new-accent poetry (Kim¿i 1929, 260–261).
2. Representing a Nation in Sound The epigraph is taken from Elisheva Bi¿ovski, “ha-Me’ushar: le-zekher Tsevi Shats” [The Happy One: In Memory of Tsevi Shats], Ketuvim (August 13, 1926): 2; emphasis in the original. 1. This project had an analogue and partner in Europe. See Shimon Frost, Schooling as a Socio-Political Expression (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1998), 15–51. 2. Joshua A. Fishman, Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1972), 72. 3. See CD, 159 for a transcript of the 1895 meeting and Kim¿i, 383–398, excerpted in CD, 160–161, for the 1903 meeeting. For the 1904 gathering, see David Yellin, haMivta’ ve-ha-ketiv be-¿Ivrit: hartsa’ah ba-’asefah ha-kelalit ha-sheniyah le-’agudat hamorim be-’Erets Yisra’el [Accent and Spelling in Hebrew: A Lecture at the Second General Assembly of the Teachers’ Union in Palestine] (Jerusalem: Lintz, 1905), excerpted in CD, and for the Language Committee meeting of 1913, consult “ha-Mivta’ ve-ha-ketiv” [Accent and Spelling], in Zikhronot va¿ad ha-lashon [Memoirs of the Language Committee] (Jerusalem: Vaad Halashon, 1929), 47–68.
notes to pages 50–54
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4. For the updates, consult Mikhtav-¿ozer, ’Agudat ha-Morim [Newsletter of the Teachers’ Union], 1908, no. 6–7, 97/75 in the Archives for Jewish Education, Tel Aviv University. For a record of the 1911 meeting, see CD, 36–37 5. The first committee of its kind was actually founded in 1890 by Ben-Yehuda as part of the Clear Language Society but lasted only six months. 6. Ben-Yehuda, ha-Tsevi, February 12, 1886, no. 19: 1. See also Pin¿as Shifman, “A¿dut ha-lashon” [The Unity of the Language], in ha-Shiloa¿ 35 (1918): 251–256, and Epstein 1898 for some ideas that are echoed by Ahad Ha’am in his lecture of 1911. 7. From the early twentieth century through the 1920s and beyond, writers described Hebrew as the product of the Yishuv or fruits of labor in Palestine. Hebrew language was often compared to Hebrew labor—building roads, agricultural work, and other manual labor. Ahad Ha’am participates in that rhetoric despite his reservations regarding the nationalist territorial project. See Mikhael Grintsvaig’s “Ma¿amadah shel ha-¿Ivrit bi-yeme ha-¿aliyah ha-sheniyah” [The Status of Hebrew in the Days of the Second Wave of Immigration] in ¿ldan: ha-¿aliyah ha-sheniyah, 1903–1914 [Idan: The Second Aliyah, 1903– 1914], and his “ha-Lashon ha-¿Ivrit bi-tekufat ha-¿aliyah ha-sheniyah” [The Hebrew Language in the Period of the Second Wave of Immigration], in ha-¿aliyah ha-sheniyah: me¿karim [The Second Wave of Immigration: Studies], vol. 1, ed. Yisrael Bartal (Jerusalem: Yad Yits¿ak Ben-Tsevi, 1997), 406–418. See also Shifman. 8. This was the “Eighth Meeting of Teachers Involved in the Education of the Hebrew Children in Palestine on the Tenth of Tevet in the 1,826th Year of Our Exile [Sunday, January 6, 1895] in Rishon le-Tsiyon,” according to the protocols of the meeting published in CD. This group met between 1891 and 1895 and was the precursor to histadrut ha-morim [Teachers’ Association], whose first official meeting was in 1903 (and was initially called ’agudat ha-morim; Teachers’ Union). Present at this 1895 assembly were Mordekhai Lubman, Shraga Feivel Rosen, and David Yudelovits (YodehLev-Ish) of Rishon le-Tsiyon; Yits¿ak Cohen (Kahana) and Yehudah Grazovski (Gur) of Jaffa; Aryeh Leyb Gordon of Peta¿ Tikvah; and Aryeh Leyb Horvits of Ekron. They, like Ben-Yehuda, preferred to use an eccentric Hebrew calendar dated to the Jews’ loss of sovereignty during the Roman conquest rather than the traditional Jewish calendar based on a rabbinic calculation of the biblical creation of the world. 9. Even those who do not see the family unit as secondary to the schools seem to think there is no room for two different Hebrews in the life of one child: “Mr. Grazovski responded [to Lubman’s point]: ‘On the contrary, that is fine. They will speak to their fathers in their own pronunciation. The children will not understand the mistakes of their fathers, who speak without regard for diacritical marks.╯.╯.╯. The boy will speak with a proper Sephardic accent, will become accustomed to it, and no damage will have been done if he does not comprehend his father’s speech.’ Mr. Gordon objected, saying: ‘For if the children read in the Sephardic pronunciation they won’t understand anything in the synagogue, and one must [be able to] pray with the congregation’” (CD, 159). 10. In an article on Yellin and the speech of 1904, Asa Kasher writes: “It is hard to prove that the existence of two systems of primary pronunciation, or, truth be told, two different families of pronunciation systems, was a practical barrier to the use of Hebrew in everyday speech by Jews in Palestine. On the contrary, there is much evidence of natural, simple and successful contact between speakers of different accents. The need to choose one accent over another came from an ideology that saw linguistic unification as a goal worth striving for, just as it was worthwhile establishing absolute unity in other central realms of Hebrew culture and national life in the Land of Israel” (Kasher 65). This is reminiscent of Bourdieu’s description of the national language disrupting the natural habits of speakers of different dialects who when left to their
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notes to pages 54–59
own devices will develop an in-between or compromise language to make themselves understood. Asa Kasher, “Temimim ve-so¿arim: se¿if be-toledot ha-lashon ha-¿Ivrit” [Innocent and Tempestuous Ones: A Chapter in the History of the Hebrew Language] in Kevatsim le-¿eker toledot ha-¿inukh ha-Yehudi be-Yisrael u-va-tefutsot [Studies in the History of Jewish Education in Israel and the Diaspora] (Tel Aviv: Ramot, 1982), 52–114. 11. Kasher dates the decision to teach for two years in one accent family before introducing the other to 1885, and writes that “This proposal did not last long, but one may suppose that the speakers of one accent for the most part understood what was said to them in another accent” (Kasher 65). The earliest documentation I found is from 1895. 12. Despite the consensus among these teachers that a Sephardic accent was to be preferred, the 1895 decision effectively showed a privileging of an Ashkenazic accent at least when compared to the status of the various accents in the Old Yishuv. If Ashkenazic Jews were in theory expected to make concessions to the Sephardic speakers of the Old Yishuv, the 1895 decision required Sephardic children to be as proficient in Ashkenazic pronunciation as the Ashkenazic children were in a Sephardic accent. 13. The major work on the Galilean accent is Aaron Bar-Adon’s The Rise and Decline of a Galilean Dialect: A Study in the Revival of Modern Hebrew (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). See also his “ha-Niv ha-gelili u-mivta’o—perek be-toledot te¿iyat ha¿Ivrit be-’Erets Yisra’el” [The “Galilean Idiom” and Its Accent—A Chapter in the Revival of Hebrew in Palestine], Cathedra 24 (July 1982): 115–138. 14. Bar-Adon 1982, 126. 15. Bar-Adon writes: “My investigations in the area among people who were closely connected with both Epstein and Wilkomitz (including the former’s son and the latter’s daughter) indicate the pronunciation of the indigenous Sephardim, i.e. the Sephardim of Zefat and Upper Galilee, probably also of places like Hasbáya, etc., in neighboring Southern Lebanon and Syria, was the immediate decisive factor and the direct influence on these teachers, not Arabic as we shall see below, although the original influence on the Sephardim themselves probably came from Arabic” (BarAdon 1975, 24–25). Epstein valorized authenticity while Yellin and the Teachers’ Association attempted to maximize the distinction of letters. As I will discuss in greater detail below, the proposed accent of the pedagogic movement was never actualized in the schools. The Galilean accent, on the other hand, was quite successful in its locale for the brief period in which it was allowed to flourish. 16. Bar-Adon writes that Vilkomits demanded that his students speak Hebrew with a Galilean accent; these demands were accepted “not only because of the great respect they had for him, or because of his authority as an overseer [of the schools in the region], or thanks to his preaching, but, it would seem, on account of another socio-linguistic reason. He gave the youngsters in the first settlements in the Upper Galilee—Rosh Pinah, Metula, Yesod Hama¿ala, Mishmar ha-Yarden and others . . . a source for a unique personal pride: a pride in their exceptional school and excellent education (and, as mentioned, it was excellent compared to all the others), in their involvement with real agricultural work in the remote Galilee, and pride in their particular idiom, that actualizes the distinct flavor of the ancient Galilean idiom” (Bar-Adon 1982, 132). 17. Bar-Adon 1975, 43–44. 18. See Bar-Adon 1975, chapters 12, 13, and 14, for more on how the Galilean accent fared at the language meetings of the Teachers’ Union. 19. In one session of the 1903 conference, a teacher from Zikhron Yaakov asked “Which accent shall we choose? The Sephardic or the Ashkenazic? And if [we use] the Sephardic, as we’ve done until now, which is more suitable—the Sephardic accent itself
notes to pages 59–66
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or the Yemenite [one] which is also considered a Sephardic accent?” (Kim¿i 387). The fact that a Yemenite accent is in this context “also considered” Sephardic is an additional indication that stress pattern is the feature that for their purposes organized the divide between Sephardic and Ashkenazic. 20. Lewis Glinert, The Grammar of Modern Hebrew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), quoted in Kuzar, 133. See also Kuzar, 136 on “the difference between the early revival and second aliyah that fortified political and organizational power” and that contributed to the standardization of the language. 21. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, ha-Mivta’ ba-lashon ha-¿Ivri [Accent in the Hebrew Language] (New York: Histadrut ha-¿Ivrit be-’Amerikah, 1917). 22. “In the two aforementioned vowels there are those who favor the Sephardic pronunciation for a variety of reasons: 1) the Hebrew names that appear in Greek and Latin translations are written in the Sephardic pronunciation: Adam, Babel, Abraham rather than Odom, Bobel, Abrohom, etc. 2) The spelling of names in the antiquities of the ruins of Gezer that were discovered in these our times, also demonstrate that the Sephardic pronunciation is more accurate. 3) In many places in the Talmud as well, it is evident that we write the sound O with a ¿olam and the letter vav like our contemporary Sephardic pronunciation, as in ‘pedagog,’ ‘apotropos’ etc.” (CD, 160). Ben-Yehuda claims to leave the academic scientific question unresolved but in practice he atÂ�tributes authenticity to the Sephardic accent. 23. The kamats katan (the “small” or infrequent kamats, as opposed to the more common kamats gadol) is a distinctly Sephardic variation on the kamats in which it is pronounced as a ¿olam under certain circumstances (when it appears in an unaccented syllable after an open syllable); the kamats gadol is far more common. The same symbol is generally used for the two versions of the kamats. Ashkenazic speakers would have to learn the special rules of kamats katan to determine when the kamats should be pronounced as a ¿olam in Sephardic Hebrew. The Ashkenazic accents, in which the kamats symbol has a stable value (but varies by region), preserve the relationship of one symbol per sound in this case. The kamats katan should therefore constitute another mark against adopting the Sephardic kamats since the vocal distinction of the kamats katan is not accompanied by a written distinction. 24. There is an interesting suppression here of the Sephardic identity of such classic Jewish expressions of yearning for the homeland as Yehudah Halevi’s “My heart is in the East and I am at the westernmost [edge of the world].” 25. “The best means at our disposal for spreading [whichever] is accepted as the correct accent is, of course, the school, for only the school can╯.╯.╯.╯establish it and only via the school will it be possible for the next generation to speak Hebrew in our land, the center of our nation’s revival, in a single accent that can serve as a model for our brethren in all the countries of their dispersion. Therefore I think that this, the meeting of the teachers of the Land of Israel, is the place best suited for determining the details of the accent and for coming to a final agreement immediately or in the near future” (Yellin 1905 [1904], 3). 26. He did not pose open-ended questions. Rather, he provided two options for each undecided trait which conformed to the principles of his accent design—spelling conformed to speech in one and speech conformed to spelling in the other. 27. In the same session at which he discussed the new accent, Yellin also lectured on the standardization of spelling. His formal remarks on accent were from this point on always accompanied by separate statements on spelling. 28. In contrast to Yellin in 1904, Ben-Yehuda values authenticity, at least in theory, and conceives of the new national language (in 1903) as an existing and more or less
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“historically authentic” accent. Ben-Yehuda is willing to include some Ashkenazic sounds, provided they are not dramatically different—not too Ashkenazic. 29. The strong bet is universally pronounced /b/. But the weak bet is pronounced /v/ in Ashkenazic Hebrews and, for the most part, either /b/ or /v/ in Sephardic accents. The vav is pronounced /v/ in Ashkenazic and /v/ or /w/ in Sephardic accents. Yellin recommends that the weak bet be pronounced /v/ and that the vav be pronounced /w/. The latter selection—in addition to allowing the distinction between the vav symbol and the weak bet symbol even if the weak bet is distinguished from the strong bet—offers two advantages. It incorporates into Hebrew a sound that is both “Semitic” (the Arabic waw) and European (the English “w”; the French “oi”). Yellin is fairly consistent, basing his decisions on the three principles (although most of his choices do not actualize all three principles, as the bet-vav resolution does). There are a number of cases where he offers two options to resolve the problem of sound that is not represented in writing. In the case of the gimel with and without the dagesh he suggests the sound of the letter j for the former and the hard g for the latter, unless they decide to do away with the dagesh form for this letter in both speech and writing. He offers a similar option for the dalet—of conforming written to spoken Hebrew or instituting a difference in pronunciation between two signs (the letter with a dagesh and without) and thereby preserving an orthographic distinction. In the case of the two forms of the letter taf, Yellin offers two options as well—of reducing the written sign or expanding the pronunciation—but says that “it would be more difficult in this case [to do away with the distinction between hard and soft altogether] than with the previous two letters, since we have already gotten used to writing it in both forms” (Yellin 1904, 11). He rejects the Ashkenazic option for this distinction that, like the distinct kamats, was seen as a paradigm for Ashkenazic speech. His justification for this choice is that the Ashkenazic weak taf is a redundant sound and so does not promote the major goal of distinguishing letters. At the same time, he very much wants to maintain the difference itself and proposes the th sound (as in thin) for the weak taf. This would have the double advantage of incorporating into Hebrew a sound found in both Arabic and English, thereby actualizing all three principles of his accent design. In his response article of 1908 Yellin collects reactions to his 1904 speech which had been sent to Hebrew scholars. In this document he reinforces his decisions regarding the weak bet, the vav, the tsadi, the ¿et, the tet, the ¿ayin, and the kaf. With regard to the two forms of the taf, he receives support for his idea of instituting the th for the weak taf and resolves in favor of that option. On the other hand, regarding the two options for the gimel and for the dalet, he decides, again with quite a bit of support, to do away with the written distinction and pronounce the gimel as /g/ and the dalet as /d/. In his 1904 speech, Yellin had unequivocally recommended the Ashkenazic sound for the tsadi, to avoid the overlap with the sin and samekh common in Sephardic pronunciations as well as to include the German z in the Hebrew alphabet. In the 1908 document he partially undoes this decision. Most of his respondents had apparently favored the more “authentic” /s/ for this letter, the Sephardic sadi—also the Arabic sound for the analogous letter in that language. He no doubt still favored the Ashkenazic/German option but perhaps because of the experts’ responses, he preferred to leave the question officially unresolved. By the time of his 1913 speech he had resolved in favor of the Ashkenazic/German tsadi. Aside from that adjustment, his phonemes remained stable from 1908 to 1913. 30. For a similar reading of the portrayal of the literary canon in the context of the American canon debates, see chapter 2 of Guillory.
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31. “It is not simply that in the minds of Christians, Muslims or Hindus the cities of Rome, Mecca, or Benares were the centres of sacred geographies, but that their centrality was experienced and realized by the constant flow of pilgrims towards them from remote and otherwise unrelated localities.╯.╯.╯.╯The Berber encountering the Malay before the Kaaba must, as it were, ask himself: ‘why is this man doing what I am doing, uttering the same words that I am uttering, even though we cannot talk to one another?’ There is only one answer, once one has learnt it: ‘Because we╯.╯.╯.╯are Muslims.’” (Anderson 53–54; emphasis in the original.)
3. “Listening to Her Is Torture” The epigraph is from Ra¿el: shirim mikhtavim, korot ¿ayeha [Rachel: Poems, Letters, Writings, Life Story], ed. Uri Milshtain (Tel Aviv: Zemorah Bitan, 1985), 90. 1. Bluvshtain published her first Hebrew poem in 1920 in ha-Shiloa¿; Bi¿ovski in 1921 in ha-Tekufah; Rab in 1922 in Hedim; Bat-Miryam in 1922 in ha-Tekufah. Rab was born in Palestine; Bluvshtain, Bi¿ovski, and Bat-Miryam were all born in Russia and emigrated in 1909, 1925, and 1928, respectively. 2. A prosodic analysis of Shekhtman’s poems indicates some crossover to an Ashkenazic accent. While the majority of her poems clearly are composed in the new accent, at least one, “±om ha-tamuz . . .” [The Heat of (the month of) Tamuz] is an imperfect trochaic tetrameter in Ashkenazic and an irregular iambic tetrameter when read according to a Sephardic stress system. “Ba-Ra¿av” [In the Famine] is the only poem that demands a reading in an Ashkenazic accent. Some of the earliest poems by women, however, were composed in Ashkenazic. See Zinah Rabinovits’s poems which appeared first in ha-¿Am (Shirim, Poems) no. 8 (15), 1917; her “¿Im dimdume-voker” [With the Early-Morning Light] is composed in Ashkenazic amphibrach dimeter. For Malkah Shekhtman’s poems, see Bat-±amah, “¿Arba¿ah shirim” [Four Poems], in Hedim 3, no. 2 (1924): 58–62; Yehoshua Gilboa, ed., Ge¿alim lo¿ashot: yalkut mi-sifrut ¿Ivrit u-mi-sifrut Yidish bi-Verit ha-Mo¿atsot [Hissing Embers: An Anthology of Hebrew Literature and Yiddish Poetry in the Soviet Union] (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at M. Neumann, 1954), 127–132. Shekhtman’s “±avah” [Eve], which appeared in ha-Shiloa¿ in 1918, was composed in Ashkenazic trochaic tetrameter. 3. See chapter 1 on the “natural” or “mother’s” method of language instruction. The Clear Speech Society chose to recruit women to teach spoken Hebrew to girls— the mothers of the next generation. 4. Elisheva, “Toledotai” [My Personal History], Ketuvim, August 27, 1926: 1. 5. See ’Elisheva¿: kovets ma’amarim ’odot ha-meshoreret ’Elisheva¿ [Elisheva: A Collection of Essays on Elisheva the Poet] (Tel Aviv: Tomer, 1930), 5. 6. “Rut ¿al gedot ha-Volgah” [Ruth on the Banks of the Volga] (12–15), “’Elisheva¿” (18–22), “’Elisheva¿” (23–25), and “ha-Giyoret ha-leumit ha-rishonah” [The First National Convert] (26–32), in Elisheva. 7. This is reminiscent of Karni’s “¿Am ha-zamar” [The Singer Nation] which sees in the face of an Arab a trace of the face of Abraham the patriarch. See below in this chapter. 8. Tsevi Shats, “Galut shiratenu ha-klasit” [The Exile of Our Classical Poetry], in ¿Al gevul ha-demamah: ketavim [On the Edge of Silence: Writings] (Tel Aviv: Davar, 1929). 9. Yehudah Karni, “ha-’Omanim ba-moledet” [Artists in the Homeland], Hedim 1 (1922): 36–38; Ra¿el Bluvshtain, “¿Al ’ot ha-zeman” [On the Sign of the Time], Davar (literary supplement) 2, no. 29 (April 8, 1927), reprinted in Shirat Ra¿el [Rachel’s Â�Poetry] (Tel Aviv: Davar, 1939), 201–202.
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10. See William Wordsworth’s prefaces in Lyrical Ballads: The Text of the 1789 Edition with the Additional 1800 Poems and the Prefaces (London: Routledge, 1988). 11. See A. D. Gordon’s speech of 1918, “ha-Soferim ve-ha-¿ovedim” [The Writers and the Workers], Kitve A[haron] D[avid] Gordon [The Writings of A. D. Gordon] (Tel Aviv: ha-Po¿el ha-Tsa¿ir, 1922), vol. 1, especially pp. 317–318; and Berel Katzenelson, “’El ha-shotekim” [To the Silent Ones], Davar (September 17, 1925): 5. 12. Yehudah Karni, “ha-¿Am ha-zamar” [The Singer Nation], Hedim 2 (Spring 1923): 44–47. 13. Karni at least seems to have followed his own advice. He published She¿arim [Gates], a book of poems ruled by the Ashkenazic stress system, in 1923, two years after his arrival in Palestine. Twelve years passed between the appearance of Gates and his next book, which introduced his new new-accent poems. 14. Avraham Shlonsky, le-’Aba-’ima [To Papa-Mama] (Jerusalem: Ketuvim, 1927); Mordekhai Temkin, Netafim [Drops] (Jerusalem: Ketuvim, 1927); Shemuel Bas, Adam [Man] (Tel Aviv: Hedim, 1927). 15. See his poems published in Hedim between 1922 and 1928: vol. 1, no. 4; vol. 2, nos. 8, 9; vol. 3, nos. 1, 2; vol. 4, nos. 1, 3; vol. 6, no. 3. Uzi Shavit writes that “about half of the poems [in Bas’s book] are in the ‘Land of Israel’ [’Erets-Yisra’eli] accent . . .” (Shavit 1988, 186). 16. See “Tefilah” [Prayer], in Hedim 1 (1922): 34, and her essay on Francis Jammes on the following page. 17. Shlonsky was certainly perceived as integrating colloquial Hebrew into poetry, but in a way that diverged sharply from Bluvstein’s poetic practice. Almost twenty years later Leah Goldberg spoke of the influence of Shlonsky’s colloquialism: “[Those] of us who were educated, if you will, on the knees of Shlonsky’s poetry remember all that— that complete integration of technical and prosaic terminology—already from the end of the twenties and from the mid-thirties, from the start of Shlonsky’s composition, and that is what gave such rise to the possibility of expressing our time in Hebrew” (Leah Goldberg, ha-’Omets la-¿ulin [The Courage for the Quotidian] (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po¿alim, 1976), 160). 18. The verse alluded to is: “And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said: For God is present in this place and I did not know it” (Gen. 28:16). 19. See her poem “’Ani” [I] (Bluvshtain 1927), her essay on Francis Jammes (Hedim 1 [1922]: 35; reprinted in Bluvshtain 1939, 213), and her translations of his poetry (in Hedim 1 [1922]: 34 reprinted, along with two other poems of his, in Bluvshtain 1939, 181–185). 20. On the trope of the poet as prophet in Bialik’s poetry, see Dan Miron, H. N. Bialik and the Prophetic Mode in Modern Hebrew Poetry (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006). 21. “Revelation” appears in To Papa-Mama but is presented differently. In In the Cycle, the poem does not receive pride of place and is part of a cycle of two poems, the second of which develops the theme of human communication with God but with a greater distance and ambivalence. This second poem (which does not accompany “Revelation” in To Papa-Mama) is iambic and is also composed in Ashkenazic but the rhyme is more consistent when read in new-accent Hebrew. 22. Inasmuch as some people continue to speak Hebrew with an Ashkenazic accent once the new accent has come to be associated with Palestine, they reveal that they are not natives and that they were not educated in the New Hebrew of Palestine. The new accent becomes the immediate direct expression of the territory of the Land of Israel whether the speaker learned that Hebrew in Palestine or, as Bi¿ovski did, in Russia.
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23. He uses the term havarah sefaradit here. 24. This is not as trivial as it might seem. Shlonsky often used alternating masculine and feminine rhyme in his penultimately accented poetry. One of the ways he identified himself as a new-accent poet was precisely by demonstrating his ability to do that in new-accent poetry as well. In penultimately accented poetry, monosyllabic words served as the masculine rhyme words. Conversely, in new-accent poetry the challenge was to find feminine rhyme words. 25. See, for example, “la-’Almoni” [To the Anonymous One], the “To Papa-Mama” cycle, and “Shabat” [Sabbath] in To Papa-Mama. “Shivah” [Return] is an interesting hybrid for this volume inasmuch as it refers to memories and pieces of family history that read as “Ashkenazic” (a memory of the grandfather saying a prayer and elongating the final word of the verse as is customary), although it is composed in the new accent. See below, chapter 4. 26. The word tsar, translated above as “constrains,” also means “troubles” and is the root of the word for co-wife. The biblical Rachel lived in a home troubled by strained relations with her sister and co-wife Leah; the speaker likewise finds herself in a house that is “too small” for her. Bluvshtain’s allusions are often based on exact renderings but in this chapter the word house or household [bayit] in the same line may provide a context for this reading. This is one way the poem seems to suppress or weaken exact textual allusion while still relying on one’s knowledge of the biblical story of Rachel. There is a fiction of nonallusiveness, of resorting to other means for connecting to the past that is more elaborate in her poem “Aftergrowth”—a pretense of replacing the textual with an oral or physical and mystical transmission. 27. Miryam Segal, “Ra¿el Bluvshtain’s ‘Aftergrowth’ Poetics,” Prooftexts 25, no. 3 (2005 [2006]): 319–361. 28. Blusvshtain 1927, 3. The first stanza reads:
hen lo’ ¿arashti, gam lo’ zar¿ati, lo’ hitpalalti ¿al ha-matar u-feta¿ r’eh na’ sdotai hitsmi¿u dagan brukh shemesh bimkom dardar.
29. Not all of Jewish history before ancient and modern times is excised. In most scenarios the Jewish culture of medieval Spain is neither silenced nor dismissed. For a reading of the exclusion of the middle of Jewish history in Israeli culture, see Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 30. Bluvshtain 1985, 90. 31. On Bluvshtain’s ambivalence toward the notion that the generation of the Second Aliyah had sacrificed itself, see “Korbanot?” [Sacrifices?], in Bluvshtain 1985, 328–329. See also her poem “be-Vet ¿olim 1” [In the Hospital 1], Bluvshtain 1927, 15. 32. Shlonsky’s poem “Halbishini ’ima’ kesherah” [Dress Me, Good Mother] uses both ¿amal for hard labor and sevel for suffering or burden. As Hever has pointed out, this poem moves toward a normalization of the experience of the pioneers—most of whom arrived alone—by placing this pioneer in the bosom of his nuclear family. The father is in Palestine too, like his son. But if the poem focuses on the son going off to work in the morning and uses ¿amal to describe his working day, the father is the focus only as the poem moves into the evening when “Father returns from his burdens [sivlotav, from sevel].” Father comes home from his suffering or his burdens. The word is perhaps a reminder of the burden that he has brought with him from the Diaspora and the fact that he is less native to the land than his son is.
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33. “I am black and beautiful, daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the pavilions of Solomon” (Song of Songs 1:5). 34. Ra¿el Bluvshtain, “¿Ivriyah” [Hebrew Woman], published in the posthumous Nevo [Nebo] (1932); reprinted in S¿irat Ra¿el, 138. 35. The speaker in the biblical text looks different from the women of the city who are not blackened by the sun as she is. A better translation of the verse from which the epigram is taken might be “I am black but beautiful.” The ambiguity of the Hebrew works well, for the woman’s blackness is what signifies her authenticity and is therefore part of what makes her beautiful in the context of the poem. 36. This is a common trope with which Bluvshtain would have been familiar from a number of sources. See for example Charles Baudelaire’s “Invitation au voyage.” “Hebrew Woman” employs these tropes of wandering rather heavy-handedly, however, and is one of Bluvshtain’s weaker poems. 37. Ezra Zusman’s “Sefer shirat Ra¿el” [Rachel’s Book of Poetry], in Ra¿el ve-shiratah [Rachel and Her Poetry], ed. Mordekhai Kushnir (Tel Aviv: Davar, 1946), 119.
4. The Runaway Train and the Yiddish Kid The epigraph is from “mi-Yamim rishonim” [From the Early Days] in ¿Al ha-mishmar (June 15, 1973): 6. 1. See Avraham Hagorni-Green, Shlonski ba-¿avotot Biyalik [Shlonsky in the Bonds of Bialik] (Tel Aviv: Or-Am, 1985). Hagorni-Green uses an oedipal paradigm to interpret Shlonsky’s poetic development in relation to Bialik and his poetry. See also Uzi Shavit, “ha-Shir ha-parua¿” [The Wild Poem] in Me¿karim be-sifrut ¿Ivrit [Research in Hebrew Literature] (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1986) and ±evele nigun [Evolution and Revolution in Bialik’s Prosody] (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1988). Varied as these three brief treatments are of Shlonsky and the rise of the new accent in Hebrew poetry, they seem to share a rhetorical goal. They write a history in which Shlonsky stands in for contemporary Hebrew poetry, or at least poetry in Palestine, and in which the literary new-accent arrival coincides with Shlonsky’s own shift in accent. In his book on Bialik’s prosody, Shavit sees the year 1927 as the first moment of the dominance of the new accent that has reigned ever since. This was the year in which Bluvshtain’s Aftergrowth and Lamdan’s Masadah appeared, both entirely in the new accent; the year in which Moledet published new-accent poetry by Fikhman, Asher Barash, Yosef Likhtenboim, and Bi¿ovski. This was also the year that saw the publication of Shlonsky’s To Papa-mama and In the Cycle in which, Shavit writes, “most of the poems are in the Ashkenazic accent, but more than ten percent of the poems are in the Land of Israel accent” (Shavit 1988, 186). By mentioning Shlonsky’s rather paltry 1927 statistics (90 percent of his poems are in Ashkenazic) alongside others’ more impressive statistics, he implies that Shlonsky was essential to the rise of the new accent, as if his 10 percent were somehow a greater proportion than that. Shavit’s classic article “The Wild Poem,” on the dramatic changes Hebrew poetry underwent between 1922 and 1928, presents the statistics in a different way. The year 1927 and Shlonsky are still important elements but the critical moment for Â�Shlonsky and the new accent is extended over the years 1926 to 1928: â•… In the second half of the decade the wheel turns and the leaders of the pack, Shlonsky and Greenberg, join the pioneers of the new accent [hamivta’ he-¿adash] in the poetry of the Land of Israel—Lamdan, Yehudah Karni, Ra¿el, Elisheva, Shemuel Bas, Avigdor Hameiri, and others. Early in
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1926 Davar publishes “Train” (Tevet 22, 5686), Shlonsky’s first poem in the accent of the Land of Israel, and more poems in this accent follow in its footsteps in Ketuvim, and in ha-Po¿el ha-tsa¿ir╯.╯.╯.╯while from the publication of In the Cycle in the summer of 5687 [1927], Shlonsky writes all his poems solely in this accent. This is also the case with U[ri] Ts[evi] Greenberg whose transition in poetry from one accent to the other apparently takes place in 1928. (Shavit 1986, 170)
Shlonsky does n0t stand out in sharp contrast to the others in Shavit’s article as he does in the book, in part because Shavit links Shlonsky to Greenberg who published his first new-accent book at the end of 1928 (this may also explain why he speaks in his book of the years 1927–1928), and partly because he does not place Shlonsky on the same plane as the “pioneers” (he and Greenberg are the “leaders of the pack”; literally, “the lions among them”; 170). Shavit lists the pioneers but dismisses them in favor of describing in detail the rise of new-accent poetry within Shlonsky’s corpus. The question of why 1927 is the critical year is answered by referring to Shlonsky, whose most important new-Â� accent moment spanned the years 1926, 1927, and 1928. The passages from Shavit demonstrate that the years 1926–1928 are indeed an important period of change and development for Shlonsky’s own use of the new accent in his poetry and to a lesser extent in Hebrew poetry as a whole, which in these years passed a point of no return. What is not clear is why Shlonsky’s transition is treated as a paradigm. Avraham Hagorni-Green’s literary biography of Shlonsky is less concerned with an exact dating of the accent “revolution” and more inclined to take it for granted that Shlonsky was responsible for that revolution. In a section on Shlonsky’s teenage years, most of which were spent in Russia, Hagorni-Green writes that Shlonsky’s yearlong stay in Palestine in 1913 when he was thirteen years old and studied at the Hebrewspeaking Hertseliyah high school introduced him to its scenery and to the Hebrew language as spoken by the people of the land. In the Sephardic accent [havarah], of course—thanks to the war waged by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his colleagues. This would later make it easier for him to stage the great revolution in our poetry: the transition [ma¿avar] from the Ashkenazic pronunciation [havarah] to the correct pronunciation, as it was called then—i.e., the Sephardic or Israeli one. (Hagorni-Green 18)
Although he does not say it in so many words, Hagorni-Green is dealing with a peculiarity of literary history—that a poet from Russia should have been the one to stage a revolution that to a great extent was seen as a victory of the Hebrew culture of Palestine over the dominance that Russian poets had maintained in the realm of Hebrew poetry in the first two decades of the century. Shlonsky’s year spent in Palestine appears as an implicit response to a question which the author does not actually articulate: How is it possible that a Russian could have been a more successful poet of Hebrew and advocate for the language as spoken in Palestine than the poets who had been exposed in their formative years, some from birth, to the “scenery [of Palestine] and the Hebrew language”? (18). Also implicit in this account is an idea that was expressed by many in the 1920s— that some poets whose first extended exposure to Hebrew had been “Ashkenazic” were simply unable to switch to a new accent midway through their careers. (Such is the manner in which Bialik’s “silence” is sometimes understood, for example. See David Shimonovits, “Kavim” in Moznayim 2 (1934): 466, quoted in Shavit 1988, 72.) The implication
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is that this switch was easier for Shlonsky than for others because he had been exposed to Hebrew in Palestine (if only for one year) at a formative age. That may be so. But HagorniGreen betrays a teleological approach to new-accent poetry by neglecting to explain why—if Shlonsky’s trip to Palestine in 1913 accounts for his ability to stage an accent revolution no less than thirteen years later—the poet waited quite so long. In this sense, Hagorni-Green seems to be telling a story a little too similar to Shlonsky’s denial much later in his career that he had ever written anything other than new-accent poetry. (See Benjamin Harshav’s anecdote on the topic in Language in Time of Revolution [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 102.) In addition, Hagorni-Green seems to be adopting an ideology of “nativeness” with regard to one’s ability to write a national literature that, if it has some linguistic justification by the 1950s, is less convincing in the 1920s. He also effectively if inadvertently reduces the significance of Shlonsky’s talent: had there been a high school that accepted Jewish students that was not a religious school, in or near his hometown of Yekaterinoslav, Shlonsky would not have gone to Palestine to study at Hertseliyah and might never have waged the rebellion he did. (See Hagorni-Green 17 on his mother’s wish that he study in a gymnasium.) At one point, Hagorni-Green refers prematurely to the “Israeli” accent rather than the accent of the “Land of Israel,” and evokes all the respective stereotypes of the Ashkenazic and new accents (17). Ashkenazic Hebrew is diasporic, outdated, and literary; Sephardic Hebrew is masculine, alive, vernacular, new and—paradoxically—European (39). Hagorni-Green’s comment that at “a time of polemics among the veteran poets for and against the ‘correct accent,’ the poets saw in Shlonsky a ‘masculine’ poet, who inserted into our poetry the sound of a living, European language” implies that Shlonsky was the pioneer of the new accent in poetry (Hagorni-Green 39). One pictures the young and brave Shlonsky taking charge while the veteran Hebrew poets stand at the periphery in fear and possibly awe. By comparing him to the older poets and describing him in virile terms, Hagorni-Green gives the impression that Shlonsky was the first to dare to use the new accent in Hebrew poetry, an impression compounded by the fact that no other new-accent poets are mentioned. By both claiming that Shlonsky staged the revolution in accent and showing how “Train”—the first newaccent poem by Shlonsky to be published—benefited from the transition to the new accent, Hagorni-Green seems to have made a paradox of Shlonsky—he is both the chicken and the egg of the literary new accent. If these accounts tend to conflate Shlonsky with Hebrew poetry, Shlonsky’s own self-portrayal is partly responsible for that. The problem with relying on received wisdom is that Shlonsky’s actual and concrete contributions are obscured. Eliezer Kagan’s article on Shlonsky’s phonetics provides a refreshing departure from accounts that tend to conflate Shlonsky with Hebrew poetry (“¿Iyun ba-fonetikah shel Shlonski” [An Analysis of Shlonsky’s Phonetics] in Avraham Shlonski: mivhar ma’amarim al yetsirato [Avraham Â�Shlonsky: A Selection of Critical Essays on His Work], ed. Aviezer Vais [Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975], 130–149). Kagan provides a basis for comparison and a context in which to appreciate some of Shlonsky’s contributions by presenting him with other poets in the same awkward prosodic position—Jews from Poland, Ukraine, and Russia whose Hebrew careers were marked by the transition from one accent to another. (He is also, however, prone to taking Shlonsky at face value. For example, he relies on Shlonsky’s own edition of his collected works of 1958 to determine the chronology of the poems’ compositions. See Kagan 1975, 131, note 5; Kagan 1975, 139.) Kagan observes that over the course of several years of new-accent composition, Shlonsky seems to have come to conclusions about the contexts in which, for example, the problematic mobile sheva should be pronounced as a full syllable and when it
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should be treated as a quiescent sheva. His own decisions coincide with the norms that developed for spoken Hebrew. He was either influential or in touch with the tendencies and preferences of a Hebrew-speaking public in the process of accepting a standard. Kagan’s findings are intriguing and may even contribute by way of analogy to our understanding of Bialik’s role in prosodic adjustments earlier in the century. At the very least, the results of his research motivate one to consider how the reception of Hebrew poems may have been determined by their audial success more so than contemporary poetry in other languages precisely because a Modern Hebrew and later Israeli sound were developing simultaneously with the poetry. Nevertheless, this is only part of the story of Shlonsky and the new accent. The process Kagan describes—Shlonsky revising his prosodic rules in response to contemporary Hebrew speech—was only solidified in the 1930s. But the tendency to perceive Shlonsky as the new-accent poet precedes this; Hagorni-Green’s version of events, however reductive it may be, reminds us that the perception of a poet’s innovation can be a function of his overall reception. 2. “Train” was published in the literary supplement to Davar 1, no. 15 (January 8, 1926): 1. 3. This was a phase in each of their lives that provided a disproportionately large amount of images for their respective poems. As ±agit Halperin points out in her book me-¿Agvaniyah ¿ad simfoniyah [From Tomato to Symphony] (Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv, 1997), Shlonsky’s poetry speaks of the laborer—the road-paver, the agricultural worker—but he was a garbage collector. He also worked as a Hebrew teacher for the “real” workers (31). 4. Hagorni-Green, 18. 5. Halperin, 35. 6. Avraham Shlonsky, le-’Aba-’ima [To Papa-Mama] (Tel Aviv: Ketuvim, 1927); be’Eleh ha-yamim [In These the Days] (Tel Aviv: Ketuvim, 1930). 7. As Halperin points out, the stanzas may be reordered without drastically changing the song (35). Such is the case for “Doesn’t Matter” and “In the Tent.” “Train” refuses narrative development in a more subtle way. 8. See Shlonsky, “Lo ’ikhpat” [Doesn’t Matter], first published in Ketuvim 2, no. 9: 1; see also “Setav ba-’ohel” [Autumn in the Tent], in Mo¿adim: ¿overet le-sifrut ve’omanut [Festivals: A Pamphlet of Literature and Art], published in Tel Aviv in Autumn 1927 in honor of the Feast of Tabernacles. 9. “Tishre” was published on September 8, 1926 in Ketuvim 1 (no. 7): 2. 10. I do not mean to imply that this combination of his acceptance as a central poet and strategic differentiation from prior and contemporary poets is counterintuitive. Indeed, Shlonsky’s eccentricity and his poetic signature are part of what made him such an important writer in the emerging canon of Hebrew literature. 11. See Hever 1994, 234–248 on a similar use of the “light” genres in the late 1920s as an early site of political poetry prior to the publication of political poetry in the canonical genres. 12. Halperin, 11–28. 13. See Leah Goldberg’s examples of his influence and dominance as early as the 1920s, in her speech given in 1956 in honor of the Shlonsky Prize ceremony, reprinted in ha-’Omets la-¿ulin [Courage for the Quotidian] (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po¿alim, 1976), 159–162. 14. See Tchernichovsky’s articles in Hed Lita’ in 1924–25, and the subsequent articles in Hed Lita’ voicing strong opposition: Y. Y. Galas, “ha-Mishkal he-¿aluv” [The Wretched Rhythm], no. 12 (June 18, 1924); no. 13 (July 2, 1924): 14–15; N. Lidesky, “bi-Devar ha-
182
notes to pages 104–105
mishkal he-¿aluv” [On the Matter of the Wretched Rhythm], no. 16 (August 13, 1924): 12– 13; vol. 2, no. 5(30) (March 11, 1925): 15; and vol. 2, no. 6(31) (March 29, 1925): 23–24; Y. L. Barukh, “Mishkal pagum u-mishkal metukan” [Defective Rhythm and Proper Rhythm], vol. 2, no. 7(32) (April 29, 1925): 9–10; vol. 2, no. 8(33) (May 20, 1925): 8–9. 15. See the letter to the editor, entitled “¿Al ha-shirah ve-ha-mishkal” [On Poetry and Rhythm], ha-±ayim 1, no. 1 (April 9, 1922): 12. 16. See “li-She’elat ha-havarah ba-shirah ha-¿Ivrit” [On Poetry and Rhythm in Hebrew Poetry], ¿En ha-kore’ 1 (Winter 1923): 170–172. 17. By 1923 Bi¿ovski had already published her own new-accent poems. See haTekufah 13 (Fall 1921: 396–401). Other poets had addressed the problem publicly, including TcheÂ�rnichovsky who was at first very resistant to the idea of new-accent poetry. See Tchernichovsky, “li-She’elat ha-mivta’ ve-ha-neginah” [On the Question of Accent and Rhythm] ha-Safah 1, no. 1 (1912): 27–29, excerpted in CD (164–166), discussed above in chapter 1, in which he expresses dismay that his poems are being read in the new accent. Twelve years later, in a series of articles appearing in Hed Lita’, Tchernichovsky is still far from enthusiastic but his position has necessarily shifted and acquired more nuance. See “bi-Devar ha-mishkal he-¿aluv” [On the Matter of the Wretched Rhythm] published in three parts in Hed Lita’ 2, nos. 1(26): 11–14; 2(27), 11– 12; 3(28), 13–14; (1924–1925). In the 1930s, he began to write poems in the new accent. 18. Moshe Kalvari, “ha-Mishkal ve-ha-shirah” [Meter and Verse], Hedim 4, no. 5–6 (1927): 96–104. 19. See the section on Hedim in Zohar Shavit, ha-±ayim ha-sifrutiyim be-’Erets Yisrael 1910–1933 [Literary Life in the Land of Israel, 1910–1933] (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibbuts ha-Meu¿ad, 1983), and especially 76–77, where Shavit describes the literary journal as the mouthpiece of Hebrew modernism in Palestine. Kalvari quotes a line from Bi¿ovski’s poem “’Omerim li╯.╯.╯.” [“They tell me╯.╯.╯.”], that also appeared in Hedim in 1927 (vol. 5, no. 2: 250), not long after Kalvari’s article. Kalvari’s use of the work of selected poets to exemplify various prosodic phenomena provides evidence for poets’ contemporary reception. The mere selection of certain oeuvres to illustrate methods for dealing with the problem of monotony gives one an indication of who were considered new-accent players and hints at the gendered reception of new-accent poetry in the twenties. He brings one example each from Shemuel Bas (“Tsefat” [Safed]; see Bas 1927, 112), Yits¿ak Lamdan, and from Jabotinsky’s translation of Dante. The bulk of his examples are from Shlonsky. He quotes from three different Bialik poems composed in Ashkenazic Hebrew, but the third excerpt is quoted twice—transcribed as it is recited “in most of our schools” and transcribed again as it was composed with a penultimately stressed accent system (Kalvari 103). Bialik is cited as the main source of Ashkenazic poetry (and Tchernichovsky is discussed in this context as well, although his poetry is not quoted). The Shlonsky-Bi¿ovski dyad appears as well: Shlonsky is the primary source of new-accent poetry for the article with Bi¿ovski a far second. His inclusion of a translation by Jabotinsky and a folk song by Shlonsky also reflects the meandering path new-accent poetry took and the tendency of some linguistic innovations to enter high genres in Hebrew poetry through the low. The sample of poets reveals not so much who was writing new-accent or even accentual-syllabic new-accent poetry as much as which poets were associated with this kind of composition. Although Bas was writing new-accent poetry in this period, the line of Bas that Kalvari quotes as an example of new-accent composition is from a poem composed in Ashkenazic. 20. For Kalvari’s purposes this category of iambic words includes the word-pairs composed of a monosyllabic Hebrew word—such as on (¿al), if (’im), so that (kede), or the direct object definite marker ’et—and the following word with which it is linked.
notes to pages 105–113
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21. Theodore S. Geisel, Green Eggs and Ham (New York: Random House, 1960), 12. 22. William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 6–7. 23. See also Tchernichovsky’s remarks on the variation of stress in Ashkenazic words in the first installment of his article “bi-Devar ha-miskal he-¿aluv” [On the Matter of the Wretched Rhythm], in Hed Lita’ 2, no. 1(26) (1924): 11–14. He writes: [In] our “corrupted” accent [there are words] that carry the stress on the third-to-last syllable (for example, na¿arah) that are dactylic, and words that have a penultimate stress (bayit) and [words] that have a stress on the final syllable (¿asah). In other words, the placement of the stress is not predetermined and these serve as a basis for [the Ashkenazic] use of the rich and variegated combinations of the accentual-syllabic rhythm. (12)
24. Kalvari complicates his position yet again when he claims that the Sephardic stress system is not entirely compatible with the trochee either, because of the challenge of finding words to begin the line. This would mitigate the “handedness” of the problem, making the challenge to the Sephardic stress system all but parallel to the problem that composers of Ashkenazic verse face when trying to reconcile their stress system with iambic feet (99–100). 25. Kalvari’s quotation of lines from Jabotinsky’s translation of Dante introduces segholates, a category of nouns that carries the stress on the first of its two syllables in all stress systems. Kalvari takes his first example of a non-monotonous new-accent iambic line from Shlonsky’s “Tishre,” which includes conjugated verbs and a verb with an archaic ending that pushes the stress back to the word’s penultimate syllable. 26. See Shelomoh Tsema¿’s “¿Al ha-hashva’ah” [On the Comparison], Masah uvikoret [Essay and Criticism] (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1954), 140–144, which criticizes both Alterman’s and Shlonsky’s metaphoric style. 27. Halperin, 17. 28. See “In the Tent,” cited below, in the next section of this chapter. 29. See Halperin’s Introduction. 30. Halperin, 46–49. 31. Even the motherland in the second stanza is associated with parentlessness by the comparison of her autumn with the orphan: “Only the motherland’s autumn cries like this, / Only a fatherless son cries like this” (lines 7–8). 32. Trains have their own particular history of representation within the Jewish literature of Eastern Europe in this period—most prominently in the stories of S. Y. Abramovits and Sholom Alekhem. Inasmuch as Shlonsky’s train relates to their works, I believe his is meant to replace the other trains not unlike the way “In the Tent” was meant to replace the Yiddish folk song. This futurist, violent train is at best an alternative to depictions of the train in those Yiddish and Hebrew stories in which the interiors are sealed-off microcosms of the shtetl and their occupants are immune to the thrills of speed. The train may very well have represented progress and technology in the Jewish literature that preceded Shlonsky’s poem, but the train itself, with its sounds, body, and motion, seems almost irrelevant to these stories. The trains of Hebrew prose provide stories with a suspended moment; the journey is a narrative frame in which the characters have never really left home. Shlonsky rewrites the microcosmic train of East European literature as Hebrew poetry and prosody itself and as the modernist poetics of a new Jewish territorial consciousness. 33. The version published in Davar is slightly longer, repeating the second half of
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notes to pages 116–121
what is here the sixth stanza and the second line of the fifth stanza. See Appendix 2. I have reproduced here the version from his Collected Poems (Shirim [Tel Aviv: ha-Po¿el Mizra¿i, 1954], 226–228), in which he made relatively minor revisions including several changes in punctuation. 34. See Shlonsky’s “ha-Melitsah” [Phraseology], in Hedim 2 (Spring 1923): 189–190, and Marinetti’s “Destruction of Syntax—Untrammeled Imagination—Words-in-Freedom,” in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 120–131. 35. See Hagorni-Green, 39, cited in note 1 of this chapter, and my discussion of Harshav below (pp. 121–122 and note 43 to this chapter). Shlonsky himself spoke of the poem as a laboratory for the new accent, although he also claimed that the poem was about his own wanderings and those of the Jewish people (quoted in Halperin 59). 36. On Shlonsky’s performance of the poem, see Halperin, 61. 37. See Pin¿as Pik, “Maizner pe¿ah: ¿aluts ha-rakavot be-’Erets Yisra’el u-vi-Â� shekhenoteha” [Meisner Pasha: Railroad Pioneer in the Land of Israel and Its Environs], in Cathedra, no. 10 (1979): 102–128. “Zionist onlookers followed Meisner’s activities in the Land of Israel with special interest, for in their eyes the work of this German engineer had not only pragmatic but symbolic importance: the building of railroad tracks meant progress, and the integration of the neglected holy land into the development of the modern world” (105). The semiotics of the railroad in the New Yishuv are strikingly parallel to the cultural symbolism that inaugurated the language war with the Hilfsverein. The railroad was a product of German technology and engineering but Eastern labor. The language revivalists wanted to construct a Hebrew that was literally as technologically advanced as the German language—a Hebrew in which one could conduct courses at a technology institute—but was native and “Eastern” as well. The difference between the warm reception of the Jezreel Valley Railway and the grassroots rebellion in response to the Hilfsverein’s announcement eight years later that German would be the language of the new technical college measures the change in the Yishuv’s sense of itself vis-à-vis European (and Jewish) culture. By the end of the Second Aliyah the New Yishuv saw its own skills and resources as sufficient to replace European philanthropy. They were no longer grateful for the kind of foreign intervention that had provided economic relief and a sense of hope as recently as the begining of the Second Aliyah. 38. This conjugation of death hints that language development is a serious matter and not merely the domain of the schoolmaster and children. The root kof, tet, lamed (K-T-L), which means “to kill,” is a regular verb in all tenses and forms and is used as a paradigm of verb formation in biblical Hebrew pedagogy. 39. Similarly, the true target of Shlonsky’s supposed rebellion against Bialik may be the younger poets who maintain Bialikian poetics. 40. For the sociolinguistic ramifications of this distinction, see Bourdieu, 86–87. 41. Compare, for example, the limping, hunchbacked [giben], and bald yesterday of the poem with the opening line of Shlonsky’s essay which speaks of “the yesterday” as a hump [¿atoteret] “on our back” that cannot be fixed (Hedim 1, no. 4 [1922]). 42. Among the many different Sephardic pronunciations, only one distinguishes between the two—and in a different manner than the Ashkenazic ones do. 43. Benjamin Harshav [Binyamin Hrushovski], “ha-’Im yesh la-tselil mashma¿ut? li-ve-¿ayat ha-’ekspresiviyut shel tavniyot ha-tselil ba-shirah” [Do Sounds Have Meaning? The Problem of the Expressiveness of Sound Patterns in Poetry], in ha-Sifrut 1 (1968–69): 410–420. In a slightly updated version of the essay, Harshav adds that the ta-ta-ta corre-
notes to pages 121–126
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sponds to the rattle of the wheels, and elaborates on the type of onomatopoeia in Shlonsky’s poem: “The chugging of the train is heard throughout the text╯.╯.╯.╯the sounds of the words are not directly mimicking the sounds of the train, but the ta-ta-ta is an accepted way of indicating the sound of a train, that is, a mimicking of an onomatopeia. By inducting a plethora of words╯.╯.╯.╯the poet brings us beyond the train to the perversities of the modern world” (’Omanut ha-shirah [The Art of Poetry], vol. 2 [Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Carmel and Tel Aviv University, 2000], 66). 44. I am indebted to Uzi Shavit for bringing Lerner’s poem to my attention. See Yaakov Lerner, “Pia¿-pia¿” [Soot-Soot], ha-Tekufah 1 (1918): 443–452; see also Dan Miron, “ha-Masa¿ ’el ha-¿oshekh: he¿arot le-‘Pia¿-pia¿’ me’et Ya¿akov Lerner” [Journey to the Darkness: A Note on Yaakov Lerner’s “Soot-Soot”], in Gazit 17, nos. 7–12 (December 1959–March 1960): 104–107. 45. See Aleksandr Sergeevich Neverov, Tashkent: gorod khlebnyi: povest’ (Moscow: Gudok, 1923); the translation of the novel into Yiddish, Ezra Fininberg, tr., Tashkent: di Broyt Shtat (Moscow: Shul un Buch, 1924); and Shlonsky’s translation, Tashkent: ¿ir ha-le¿em [Tashkent: City of Bread] (Tel Aviv: Mitspeh, 1932). 46. This is my very loose translation of Shlonsky’s Hebrew translation from the Russian. 47. “But the train—is blowing-breathing, / The cowcatcher—grinding-grunting, hustle-bustle: / Yonder silence! Yonder silence! / Rumbling-grumbling: / Do not plant! / Do not plant! The time t’isn’t now. / Plant! Plant! Plant! For the time is now. / Do not plant! / Plant! Plant! Plant! / Plant!” 48. One critic writes of Shlonsky’s “confusion” of his biography and twentieth-century Hebrew literary history: “In his poetry, Shlonsky himself attributes a symbolic, fateful importance to the fact that he was born in 1900. His life begins at the start of the twentieth century and he is the poet of the twentieth century. At least in the early stages of his poetry he passionately curses this fact . . .” (Yisrael Levine, Ben gedi vasa¿ar: ¿iyunim be-shirat Shlonski [Between a Goat and a Gale: Reflections on Shlonsky’s Poetry] (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po¿alim, 1960), 15. 49. For Shlonsky’s neologisms, see Yaakov Kenaani’s Milon ¿idushe Shlonski [Dictionary of Shlonsky’s Neologisms] (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po¿alim, 1989). Poet Leah Goldberg, speaking in 1956 on Shlonsky’s influence on her generation in the 1920s and 1930s and his continued influence on contemporary poets, said: [The] very young poet today╯.╯.╯.╯has, of course, the feeling that he is innovating entirely, that nobody has done this prior to him, and that one must read the American cummings or a contemporary British poet to find these prosaisms, [while] those of us who were educated, if you will, on the knees of Shlonsky’s poetry remember all that—that the complete integration of technical and prosaic terminology—already from the end of the twenties and from the mid-thirties, from the start of Shlonsky’s composition, and that is what gave such rise to the possibility of expressing our time in Hebrew. (Leah Goldberg, ha-’Omets la-¿ulin [The Courage for the Quotidian] [Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po¿alim], 160)
50. The publication of “Train” in Davar was followed by the publication of “Tishre” in Ketuvim, also published as the first poem in To Papa-Mama, Shlonsky’s first book to include new-accent poems. 51. “Tishre” appeared in Ketuvim 1, no. 7 (September 8, 1926): 2; “Hah yeled yeled” [Oh Boy Boy] appeared in Davar’s literary supplement, vol. 2, no. 4 (1927): 1; “Shivah” [Return] appeared in Ketuvim, no. 27 (1927): 1; “¿Ad halom” [Up to This Point] appeared in Moledet 9, no. 2 (1927). The book To Papa-Mama was published in spring 1927.
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notes to pages 127–140
52. Even the appearance in the collection of “In the Tent” is presented in such a way as to minimize the power of its disruptive poetics. The book’s integrative structure is maintained inasmuch as the poem appears as a kind of artifact. 53. See Menasheh Gefen, mi-Ta¿at la-¿arisah ¿omedet gediyah [Under the Cradle Stands a Kid] (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po¿alim, 1986). 54. “Among the Hebrew poets, there is no one who devoted such a large place in his poetry to the motifs of our lullaby and who exhausted the possibilities for all its elements╯.╯.╯.╯as Shlonsky did. It would seem that he does not even have competitors within Yiddish poetry” (Geffen 61). 55. The “draw” is my translation of teku, a talmudic acronym for “[Elijah the] Tishbite will resolve queries and conundra.” It implies that the authority and legal reasoning of each side of a debate is sound and asserts that the question cannot be resolved definitively until the arrival of Elijah in the eschatological future. 56. The meh both represents the baby goat’s natural expression and, in the context of the boy’s confusion, takes on another meaning—the boy’s alienation in his new context. In both “Up to This Point” and “Return” the retrieval of the past is similarly linked up to the memory of an utterance or the inscription of a familiar and personally meaningful Hebrew phoneme. Attention is paid to the utterance that still echoes or the letters that are still visible in his mind’s eye. 57. See Yehudit Tsevik, Toledot ha-’igronim ha-¿Ivriyim [The Hebrew Brievensteller] (Tel Aviv: Papyrus, 1990). 58. The rabbinic-sounding phrase “tefilah ¿al pat,” “a prayer for bread,” is ambiguous. It may refer to the prayers a pious Jew says before and/or after eating bread, or may refer to a hungry man’s prayer or wish for something to eat. These connotations underscore in another way the terrible divide between the grandfather’s prayer and life—and his own. 59. See, for example, Bluvshtain’s “’El artsi” [To My Land] (Bluvshtain 1927, 42). 60. Also called “Mah yafim ha-lelot bi-Khena¿an” [How Beautiful Are the Nights in Canaan], composed in 1925 by Yits¿ak Katzenelson, based on an Arabic song. Recorded in The Nights in Canaan: First Songs (1882–1946) [ha-Lelot bi-Khena¿an: shire rishonim (1882–1946)], ed. Yaakov Mazur, vol. 13 of the Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1999). 61. Parents or teachers would encourage study by dropping coins or sweets on the open book and telling the child it was a gift from Elijah the Prophet. The poem is replete with biblical phrases and alludes to a story in the Talmud in which God floods the world in the time of Noah by pulling stars from the heavens. See Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Bera¿ot, 58b–59a. 62. The source of the golem legend is the ancient Book of Creation [Sefer yetsirah], which deals with the magical creative power of the Hebrew letters and language. See Itamar Gruenvald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition of Sefer Yetsirah,” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): 132–177 and Sefer yetsirah ha-meyu¿as le-Avraham avinu ¿alav ha-shalom [The Book of Creation Attributed to Our Patriarch Abraham, Peace Upon Him] (Jerusalem: ha-±ayim ve-ha-shalom, 1990).
Epilogue 1. It was not a foregone conclusion that Bialik would be the national poet. In 1899, the critic Shimon Bernfeld wrote in praise of Bialik, but with some ambivalence: “Recently, a new star has risen in [lyric poetry], namely the poet ±. N. Bialik, who has all
notes to pages 140–145
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the gifts.╯.╯.╯.╯His feelings and thoughts are as one, which is the ultimate sign of a true lyric poet.╯.╯.╯.╯Mr. Shapira of Petersburg is also a lyric poet, and his poems have the advantage of being national in the full sense of the word.” Shimon Bernfeld, ±eshbonah shel sifrutenu: has¿kafah ¿al devar hitpat¿ut sefatenu ve-sifrutenu [The Measure of Our Literature: A Perspective on the Development of Our Language and Our Literature] (Warsaw: A¿i’asaf, 1899), 22. 2. ±ayim Na¿man Bialik, Shirim [Poems] (Warsaw: Tushiyah, 1901; Shaul Tchernichovsky, ±ezyonot u-manginot: shirim [Visions and Melodies: Poems] (Warsaw: Tushiyah, 1898–1901). 3. See my discussion of Tchernichovsky’s letter of 1912 above, chapter 1, in the section on “Poets and Pedagogues at Odds,” pp. 33–37. 4. On Bialik’s silence and accent see Shimonovits, 466, and Shavit 1988, 72. 5. See Uzi Shavit’s book on Bialik’s prosody and his prosodic renovations (Shavit 1988). Shavit sees this as evidence that as early as 1903–1904, Bialik was trying to deal with the problem of the probable or inevitable rendering of Ashkenazic Hebrew. 6. It also imposed constraints that Bialik was not always able to overcome. As its name implies, biblical rhythm relied in large part on symmetric phrasing to achieve structural coherence. At times, these poems were weighed down by repetition and reiteration. 7. This estimate does not take into account his long poems [po’emot] and idylls for which he was well known, and very few of which were composed in new-accent Hebrew. Only two poems, one from the ¿Ama di-dahava [Nation of Gold] cycle, appear in his collected works with instructions that they be read with the “Sephardic” stress. See the two-volume Kitve Sha’ul Tsherni¿ovski [The Writings of Shaul Tchernichovsky] (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1966). 8. See Anderson chapters 2–3, especially pp. 34–36, 41–46. 9. Ahad Ha’am suggested that Bialik reduce the length of the poem and send it to Yehoshua Ravnitsky. Bialik eliminated a long section in which the speaker tells of his hard life and enumerates the tragedies he has suffered, including his wife’s death in childbirth. Ravnitsky was enthusiastic about “To the Bird” and, with some minor changes, he published the poem in spring 1892. For the complicated history of the composition and publication of the poem, see Bialik 1990, vol. 1, 135–136. 10. In an essay of this length, I cannot begin to account for the poem’s complex of intertextual allusion to both biblical text and lyric poetry. The bird as a trope for poetry and/or the poet would have been familiar to Bialik from a wealth of sources, as would the golden peacock of Yiddish folk culture. See David Yosef Bornstein, “li-Mekorot ’el hatsipor” [On the Sources of “To the Bird”], in Biyalik: yetsirato le-sugeha bi-re’i ha-bikoret [Bialik: Critical Essays on His Works], ed. Gershon Shaked (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1974), 85–106; Moshe Ungerfeld, “’Or ¿adash ¿al reshit yetsirato shel ±[ayim] N[a¿man] Bialik: shemonim shanah le-’el ha-tsipor” [A New Light on the Early Work of ±. N. Bialik: Eighty Years after “To the Bird”], in ha-Sifrut 2 (1969–1971): 842–855. 11. Anderson sees the potential for national imagining in the simultaneity generated by the shifting focus of a novel or the adjacent articles in a newspaper that share nothing other than their currency. Bialik enlivens this potential in the lyric. 12. See stanzas 3–4. 13. See Anderson, chapter 2, esp. pp. 34–36. 14. The pausal form, common in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, tends to shift the grammatical stress back one syllable, so that words that would ordinarily bear the major stress on the final syllable in non-Ashkenazic accents become penultimately stressed words (even in non-Ashkenazic accents) when appearing at the end of a sentence or phrase. See also “lo¿oshu” in line 38 and “tishmo¿i’” in line 47.
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notes to pages 146–148
15. For both David Yellin’s synthetic Hebrew alphabet and Yits¿ak Epstein on the roles of text and speech in Hebrew pedagogy, see chapter 2. 16. Taken from the 1908 version. 17. One of Bialik’s few new-accent compositions was a poem for children, “Mekhonit” [Automobile], which foregrounded sound and was published in three periodicals between 1932 and 1933. It was the only poem to be collected in his canonical works as well as in his volume for children, both published in 1933. See Shirim u-fizmonot li-yeladim [Poems and Songs for Children] (Tel Aviv-Devir, 1933), 400. 18. Poe 1846. 19. Poe 1845, stanza 16.
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INDEX
Abramovits, Shalom Yaakov (Mendele), 27, 183n32 accent debates, 6, 11; in print, 33, 35–37, 103–104; at the teachers’ meetings, 43, 50, 60, 61, 63, 64, 71, 173n19 accent revolution in nineteenth-century Hebrew poetry, xiv, xv, 9, 117, 140, 141, 145 accent shift in poetry (to new accent), xiv, 13, 21–25, 47, 73, 82, 99, 100, 101, 103; absence of, in oeuvres of Bluvshtain and Bi¿ovski, 98–99; dramatization of, in Shlonsky’s “Rakevet,” 118, 121, 122–24, 125, 137–38 accent shift in spoken Hebrew, 11, 21, 145 accentual-syllabic poetry, 5, 6, 35, 104, 105, 116–17, 140, 141; adoption in Hebrew, xiv–xv, 9–13; in Ashkenazic, xiv, 5, 9, 11, 12, 33–34, 35–36, 86, 140; and nationalism, 6, 145; rendered in another accent, 33–37, 104, 140; as training ear to vernacular Hebrew, xiv–xv, 11–12, 34–35, 145 “Afn boydm shloft der dakh” [The Roof Is Sleeping on the Attic], 108. See also Yiddish folk song, lullabies Ahad Ha’am, 28, 50, 51–53, 55, 171n8, 187n9 aliyah, concept of, 2, 23 Alliance Israélite Universelle: attitude toward Zionist goals, 2, 38, 44; schools of, 2, 38, 39–40, 41, 43, 44 Alter, Robert, 10, 159n15 Alterman, Natan, 18, 107 Anderson, Benedict, 65, 70, 175n31
Arab, as sign of authenticity, 81, 98 Arabic, 38; folk songs, 14, 81, 186n60; and Hebrew pronunciation, 57, 69–70, 174n29; influence on Hebrew, 7, 15, 66, 68, 172n15; Judeo-, 7; poetry, 7, 8 Aramaic, 7, 15 Ashkenazic accent, xi, xiii, 4, 8, 10, 22, 23, 24, 54; association with exile or Diaspora, xii, xiv, 22–24, 62–63, 79, 86–87, 90, 111, 125, 133, 134–36; Bat-Miryam, 75, 92; Bialik and, 18–19, 33, 74, 98, 139, 145; Bi¿ovski, 98; as exceptional, xiv, 13, 19, 24, 139; fear of extinction of, xvii, 35–37; and gender, 12–13, 14, 15, 73–75, 77, 92–93, 97, 98; history of, 7–8, 61; influences upon, 7, 8; negative associations with, xi, xii, xvii, 8–9, 34, 36, 73, 80, 92–93, 97, 117, 120, 140; poetry in, xiii, xvii, 4, 8, 9–11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 24, 33–37, 75, 79, 105, 132, 139, 141; poetry in, and “translation” into new accent, 2, 13, 24, 162nn46,49; poets writing in, xiv, xv, 11–13, 22, 25, 73, 104; positive associations with, xv, 80, 136, 145; representation of, in new-accent poetry, 111, 120, 124, 131, 133–36; rise of, in poetry, 8, 10–11; Shlonsky, 92, 101; Temkin, 82; tradition of poetry in, 6, 98–99, 117, 124, 136 Ashkenazic community in Palestine, 1, 2, 39, 58; and students, 39; and women, 15, 98 Ashkenazic immigrant-pioneer, figure of, and writings of: Ben-Yehuda, 63–64, 70,
199
200 72, 75–76; Bluvshtain, 96–97; Shats, 79; Shlonsky, 107–10, 111, 123 Ashkenazic Jewry, 7; adopting Sephardic accent, 26, 58, 60, 67, 70–72 authenticity, 14, 49–50, 51, 56; and Ben-Yehuda’s accent design, 61, 64, 72, 75; feminine and masculine notions of, 13–14, 15, 52, 75, 76, 77–78, 79, 91–92, 93–98; and Galilean, 56, 57–59, 72, 75, 76, 77; labor as sign of, 79, 81; and Yellin’s synthetic accent design, 69 Azaryahu, Yosef, 25, 28, 43, 45; curriculum, 25, 43; ±inukh ¿Ivri be-’Erets Yisra’el, 25–27, 34, 38, 40, 42 Bar-Adon, Aharon, 58 Baron, Devorah, 20–21; The Exiles, 20–21 Bas, Shemuel, 82, 86, 182n19 Bat-±amah. See Shekhtman, Malkah (Bat-±amah) Bat-Miryam, Yokheved (Yokheved Zelniak): as muse, 92, 97; reception by Bluvshtain, 73, 75, 78, 92–94, 96, 97; using Ashkenazic accent, 12–13, 73, 75 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer: and address to the Teachers’ Association in 1903, 60–64; on Galilean accent, 59; and Hebrew revival, xi, 39, 45–46; as journalist, 3, 51; and the natural method, 3, 38, 39, 43, 57; as neologist, xi–xii, 125; as promoter of Sephardic stress system, xi, 38, 60, 61, 63; as teacher, xi, 38, 39, 43; on unification of language, 51–52 Ben-Yehuda’s hybrid Hebrew accent design, 60–64, 91, 148; and authenticity, 75; and Bluvshtain’s poetry, 91; and Galilean accent, 59, 71–72; as language of labor, 80; as portrait of the immigrant, 63–64; and women’s poetry, 75, 91; and Yellin, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69–70 Ben-Yits¿ak, Avraham, 160n22 Bialik, ±ayim Na¿man, 16, 18, 22, 27, 73, 86; and accentual-syllabic poetry, xiv, 6, 9, 10–11, 34–35, 146; and Ashkenazic accent, xiv, xv, xvii, 10–11, 13, 18, 19, 140, 182n19; “Birkat ¿Am” [Nation’s Blessing], 34; “’El ha-tsipor” [To the Bird], xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, 33–34, 139, 140, 141–48, 187n9; as national poet, xiii, 5, 19, 139–40, 141, 144, 147–48, 151n17, 186n1; relation to new accent, xvi, xvii, 19, 103, 140, 141, 148, 179; in relation to Yellin’s talking library, 146
index Bible, Hebrew, 15, 28; as classical literature of the Jews, 32, 79; and national identity, 5, 16; pedagogy, 28, 36, 37 biblical Hebrew, 60; history of, 7; pronunciation of, and terminal stress system, 8, 10, 22, 54, 90, 157n59 Bi¿ovski, Elisheva, 12–13, 17, 49, 75, 92, 99, 105; biography, 77, 98; as newaccent poet, 12–13, 73, 74, 75, 76–78, 98, 137, 182n19; as promoter of accentual-syllabic and new-accent poetry, 5, 76–77, 104; in relation to Bialik, 98; as symbol of authenticity, 74, 76–77, 97–98, 99 Bluvshtain, Ra¿el, 12, 17, 18, 73, 74, 75; absence of Ashkenazic composition, 12, 98, 137; and Ashkenazic accent, 75, 92–93, 96–97, 98; compared to Bi¿ovski, 98; and Labor poetry, 80, 91; on Mordekhai Temkin, 87; on orality and poetry, 85–86, 90–92, 93; as pioneer of new accent, 12, 16, 73, 74, 75, 91, 98, 99; poems of, in relation to Ben-Yehuda’s hybrid Hebrew, 91; pseudonyms of, 12, 78; reception of, 74–75, 99, 137; in relation to Bat-Miryam, 73, 75, 92–94, 96, 97; in relation to Bialik, 73, 86, 98; in relation to Shlonsky, 18, 73, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85–87, 91; on Shemuel Bas, 86; writings— ”¿Al ’ot ha-zeman” [On the Sign of the Time], 18, 78, 82–87, 91; “’Ani” [I], 83–84; “¿Ivriyah” [Hebrew Woman], 93–96, 97; “Ra¿el” [Rachel], 88–89, 177n26; “Safia¿” [Aftergrowth], 89–90 Bourdieu, Pierre, 65, 116n15 children, as Hebrew speakers and readers: as authentic, 14, 167n24; and BenYehuda, 63; in Galilean accent, 58; of new accent, xvii, 12, 13, 34, 35, 36, 145; as novelty, xvi, 41, 163n3; primers for (see Hebrew primers); in school, 29–31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 41, 47, 52–53, 54, 55, 57 children’s poetry, 13, 105, 121, 188n17; demand for, xv, 12, 14, 33, 34, 35–36, 103–104; as early new-accent poetry, xvi, 11–12, 13, 14, 23, 41, 102–103, 165n7; in new accent, 13, 14; resemblance to, xiv, xvi, 110, 117–18, 124, 127 Eastern Europe, Jewish communities in, 2, 20
index Elboim-Dror, Ra¿el, 42, 45 Elisheva. See Bi¿ovski, Elisheva En ±arod, 23, 101, 102; Shlonsky’s poem about, 101, 102, 116 Epstein, Yits¿ak, 29; as disseminator of Galilean accent, 56–58, 63–64, 75; “¿Ivrit be-¿Ivrit” [Hebrew in Hebrew], 29–32; and talking library, 32, 33, 36, 146 The Exiles, 20–21 Fellman, Jack, 45–46 Fikhman, Yaakov, 22, 24 Fogel, David, 13, 162n46 folk songs, 14, 101, 106–107, 134; chastushka, 102, 108; or folk culture invoked in Hebrew poetry, 88, 126–27, 133–34, 135; Hebrew, compared to Yiddish folk songs, 109; and national identity, 14, 102; in the new accent, 17, 101, 102, 107–109, 124; role in rise of new-accent poetry, 13, 103, 107, 120; by Shlonsky, 102, 106, 107–10; vs. canonical poetry, 13, 101, 102; Yiddish, 14. See also Yiddish folk song, lullabies; Yiddish folk song, uses of, in Hebrew poetry free rhythm: in Ashkenazic, 24, 86; Bialik’s use of, 141; Ester Rab’s use of in new accent, 12, 74, 160n22; and timing of accent shift, 5–6, 24, 168n36; as a way of avoiding new-accent composition, 47, 104, 141 French, 38, 119–20; influence on history of Hebrew, 7, 8, 29; as language of instruction in Palestine, 32, 39–40; literature and Hebrew, 12, 83, 158n9, 178n36; French sounds in Hebrew, 68, 174n29. See also Alliance Israélite Universelle Frug, Simon, 5 Galilean accent, 56–60, 72, 102, 172nn15,16; and agriculture, 58, 60, 63–64, 172n16; and ancient Hebrew, 7, 57, 70; compared to Yellin’s synthetic accent design, 57, 59–60, 69–70, 75–76; and distinctive bet, 57, 59, 68, 69; and parallels to women in nationalist symbolism, 76–78; rejection of, 58–60, 68–69, 71–72, 75; and women’s poetry, 75, 76 Geisel, Theodore (Dr. Suess): Green Eggs and Ham, 105 German: German-Hebrew Language War
201 (see Language War, of 1913); German influence (see Haskalah); German Jewish philanthropy (see Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden); German sounds in Hebrew pronunciations, 68, 69, 70, 174n29; influence on history of Hebrew, 7, 15; as language of instruction in Palestine, 32, 44, 45, 53; literature as influence on Hebrew, xiv, 10, 11, 12, 35, 104; technology and revival, 184n37 Glinert, Lewis, 60 Gnessin, Mena¿em, 1, 158n Goldberg, Leah, 125, 185n49 Gordon, Aharon David, 80 Gordon, Shemuel Leyb, 11–12, 23, 41, 167n24 Gordon, Yehudah Leyb, 5, 9 Gottlober, Avraham Ber, 9, 161n35 Grazovski, Yehudah, 29, 43, 167n24, 171nn8,9 Greenberg, Uri Tsevi, 12, 13, 73, 178n1 Habavli, Hillel, 24 Hagorni-Green, Avraham, 23, 24, 178n1 Halevi, Yehudah, 5, 173n24 Halevi, Yosef, 23 Halperin, ±agit, 107 Hame’iri, Avigdor, 13, 24; ±alev ’em [Mother’s Milk], 24 ha-Pardes, xv ha-Po¿el ha-Tsa¿ir, 3 Harshav, Benjamin, 121, 161n45, 180 ha-Safah, 12, 33, 35–36, 37 ha-Shiloa¿, 12, 33, 41, 169n51, 175n1 Haskalah, 8–9; and language pedagogy, 15; and maskil, 15; poetry of the, 8, 9, 10, 116, 161n35 ha-Tekufah, 12, 159n19, 175n1 “ha-Tikvah” (Israeli national anthem), 2 ±azan, ±ayim Leyb: “The Rule of Rhythm in Hebrew Poetry,” 33, 34–35, 41, 47, 103–104 Hebrew: as an all-encompassing language, 4, 46, 49, 159n14; and concept of modernity, 2, 13, 14, 17, 44–45, 49–50, 51, 59, 68, 75, 117; history of, 6–8, 9–11, 17, 18, 44–48; history of (mythical), 18, 78–79, 90–91, 124; as holy tongue, 40, 131, 132, 134, 168n27; Israeli, xii; as language of instruction, 3, 4, 25, 26, 27–28, 30–31, 33, 36, 37–38, 39–42, 44–45, 49–53, 54, 55–56 (see also ¿Ivrit
202 be-¿Ivrit [natural method]); as language of prayer, 4, 6, 26, 130–31; as national language, xii, 4, 27, 42–48; as official language of Yishuv, 4; pronunciation of (see pronunciation of Hebrew); prosody, history of, 121, 140–41; as spoken language, 1, 6, 10–11, 14, 26; status of, 21, 39–40, 41, 44, 46, 47, 65; territorialization of, 6, 16, 18, 21–25, 28, 59; unification of, 37, 42–43, 49, 145; value of, 16, 17, 41, 46; vowels (see kamats) Hebrew, biblical. See biblical Hebrew Hebrew language planning, 4, 49–52, 53–56, 57, 58 Hebrew literature: of Andalusian Spain, 7, 11, 37; canonical, 23; as cultural capital, 32, 42; formation of, compared to English, 25; as model for spoken Hebrew, 28, 31, 32, 33–37; Modern, xii, xiii, 6; and nationalism, xvii, 3, 18; poetry vs. prose, 4–5; renaissance of, 3 Hebrew liturgy, 5, 7 Hebrew primers, xiv, xv, 30, 135, 167n24 Hebrew speakers. See children, as Hebrew speakers and readers Hebrew spelling, 60, 64, 67, 173n27 Hebrew teacher: and correct Hebrew, 70–71; and creation of school system in Palestine, 42–48; in Eastern Europe, 77, 98; female, 175n2; figure of, 20–21, 31, 42; vs. poet, 33, 35, 36–37, 47, 103–104; as purveyor of nationalism and national identity, 4, 31, 41, 42, 44, 59. See also Hebrew language planning; teachers’ organizations heder, 28, 40 Hedim, 12, 104, 159n19, 162n46, 175n1, 182n19 he-±asid, Yehudah, 7 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 14 Hibat Tsiyon (Love of Zion), 2, 52 Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, 38; and the Language War, 44–48 homeland: personification of, 87, 89, 131–32; as woman or female creature, 16, 94–95, 97, 148 homeland, trope of desire for, xvii, 5, 79, 96, 144, 146, 147, 148; in Ben-Yehuda’s hybrid Hebrew, 64, 75–76; and reversal of trope, 132, 136 ±oveve Tsiyon, 43; Odessa branch, 43, 44, 46; schools, 40, 42, 44, 98
index Imber, Naftali Herts: “Tikvatenu,” 2 immigrants, Jewish: representation of, 101–102, 148. See also Ashkenazic immigrant-pioneer, figure of, and writings of ¿Ivrit be-¿Ivrit (natural method), 29–32, 39, 43, 57. See also Hebrew, as language of instruction Jabotinsky, Vladimir (Ze’ev), xv; ha-Mivta’ ha-¿Ivri [The Hebrew Accent], 158n10, 161n42; and monotony in poetry, xv; and the new accent, xvi; and translation of “The Raven” [ha-¿Orev], xvi, 12, 80, 157n9 Jammes, Francis, 83 Kagan, Eliezer, 21, 22–23, 24; on the rise of the new accent, 180–81 Kahan, Yaakov, 13, 24 Kalvari, Moshe: “ha-Mishkal ba-shirah” [Rhythm in Poetry], 104–106, 110, 182n19, 183n24 kamats: in poetry, 120, 131, 134–35; pronunciation of, 61–62, 173n23, 174n29; as sign of Ashkenazic Hebrew, 20, 62, 86, 120, 130–31 Karni, Yehudah, 17, 22, 24, 176n13; “Artists in the Homeland,” 78, 81, 87–88, 90, 91, 96–97, 99; “The Singer Nation,” 81–82, 98 Labor, 18, 90 labor movement, 6, 16, 80; labor poetry, 16, 17, 73, 80, 91, 126, 130; labor settlements and rise of new accent, 23, 101, 102; new accent as language of, 18, 49, 56, 58, 63–64, 78–80, 90–92, 137, 171n7 laborer, figure of, 16, 78, 79, 89, 101, 138, 181n3 Ladino, 39 Lamdan, Yits¿ak, 73, 162n46, 178n1 Language Committee (va¿ad ha-lashon), 43, 50, 52 Language War, 39; of 1913, 37, 41, 42, 44–48, 184n37; and status of Hebrew, 46–47 Lerner, Yaakov: “Pia¿-Pia¿” [Soot-Soot], 121 Liboshitski, Aharon, 11, 23; Dimyonot ve-’agadot [Fantasies and Fables], 169n52; Shir va-zemer [Song and Tune], 11
index Lisitski, Efrayim: “’El ha-katar” [To the Caboose], 121 lullaby, 84, 87, 127–28, 130, 134; “Afn boydm shloft der dakh” [The Roof Is Sleeping on the Attic], 108, 127 Luriya, Shelomoh Zalman, 9 Maneh, Mordekhai Tsevi, 35–36, 37 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 115–16 Mendele. See Abramovits, Shalom Yaakov (Mendele) Mendelssohn, Moses, 15 Meyu¿as, Yosef, 39, 43, 68 migration: from Palestine, xvii; to Palestine, 2, 3, 20, 21–24; to Poland, 7; of poets, 21–24; role in appearance of new-accent poetry, 22–24; and standardization of Hebrew, 39, 41 Miron, Dan, 161n44 monotony: anxiety about, in new accent, xv, xvi, 124, 136; in poetry, xv, 104–105 Montefiore, Moses, 158n2 national identity, 3, 6, 14, 49–50, 86, 96; as Ashkenazic, 49; and gender, 13–14, 17, 74, 76–77, 96, 98, 99; and language, 16, 17, 18, 47, 144–45; and the newspaper, 141, 144–45; and poetry, 4, 5, 6, 103, 144, 147; as represented by Hebrew accent, xiv, 14, 59, 69–70, 75–76, 100, 140; and simultaneity, 141–44; and territory, 20. See also authenticity national poet, 5, 19. See also under Bialik, ±ayim Na¿man nationalism, Jewish, xvii, 1, 2, 6, 11, 13, 49; cultural, 14; in Eastern Europe, 2, 3; and language, 14, 18, 40, 50, 141 Neverov, Aleksandr: Tashkent: City of Bread, 121–22 new-accent Hebrew: adoption in Palestine, 6, 12, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 102; characterizations of, 13, 17, 23, 86, 91; and gender, 13, 14–15, 16, 17; scholarship on, 21–24, 100–101, 178n1; and schools, 17, 21, 33–37, 47, 70–72, 102; territorialization of, 21–24, 65, 66, 86–87, 118, 124–26, 131, 137, 176n22 new-accent Hebrew as language of labor. See under labor movement new-accent poetry, xv, xvi, 5; anxiety about, xv, 17, 80, 103; appearance of, 11–14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 24–25, 47–48, 80,
203 100–101; and children’s poetry, xvi, 11–12, 14, 23, 41; and fear of monotony, 104, 124, 136; and gender, 12–13, 14–15, 18, 73–74, 97; and geography, 12–13, 15, 16, 21–24, 73; pronunciation of, 12; reasons for rise of, 25; scholarship on, 15–16, 74; and women’s poetry, 12–13, 14, 16, 17, 73–74 Palestine: Ashkenazic Jews of, 1, 2; as exile, 20; as homeland, 22; Jewish community of, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 1–6, 46; Jewish population of, 2, 158n7; Sephardic Jews of, 1, 2, 3, 38 penultimate stress pattern: in Ashkenazic, xiii–xiv, 8, 9, 10, 11, 22, 36, 54, 86, 140, 145; in non-Ashkenazic accents (see terminal-stress pattern, penultimately stressed words in) pioneer. See Ashkenazic immigrant pioneer, figure of, and writings of piyut, 7 Poe, Edgar Allan, xv, 12; “The Philosophy of Composition,” xv, xvi, 148, 157n9; “The Raven,” xv–xvi, xvii, 12, 80, 148, 157n9 poetry in Hebrew: of the Haskalah, 8–9; in Israeli culture, xiii; and nationalism, 5; in nineteenth century, 4, 9–10; relation to spoken Hebrew, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 23, 25, 33–37, 47, 78, 80, 103, 104, 117, 140, 145; of the Te¿iyah, 9–11; tradition of, 5; in the United States, 24 pronunciation of Hebrew, xi–xii, xvii, 1, 4, 10, 20; among Ashkenazic Jews, xiv, 8, 20, 160n27, 171n9; consonants, 57, 59, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 116; debates over, 4, 6, 33; formal, xii–xiii; names, xi–xiii; and national identity, xvii, 4, 6, 14, 16, 17, 18, 49–50, 51, 52–53, 53–55, 56–72; and need for correction, 70–71, 91; in the Old Yishuv, 62, 65–66, 166n15, 171n10, 172n12; of vowels, 61, 67 pronunciation of new-accent poems, instructions for, 12, 159n19, 169n52, 187n7 prosody: history of Hebrew, 6, 8; politics of Hebrew, 5; Wesselian, 8–10, 116 Rab, Ester, 12, 73, 74, 103, 175n1; and free rhythm, 74, 160n22 Rabinovits, Yaakov, 13, 22, 24, 162n46
204 Rabinovits, Zinah, 175n2 Ra¿el. See Bluvshtain, Ra¿el Rashi (R. Shelomoh Yits¿aki), 7–8, 51 revival: of Hebrew, xi, 3–4, 6, 11, 17, 23, 25–28, 29–30, 31, 32, 37, 39, 40–41, 44, 45, 47, 50–52, 53–58, 63, 64, 70, 74, 75, 90, 91, 103, 116, 120; of Ruthenian, 3, 11, 159n11, 161n39 rhyme, 110, 116; of Haskalah poetry, 8–9, 116, 160n33; masculine and feminine, 8, 86, 123–24, 177n24; of medieval Hebrew poetry, 8; in relation to accent, 8–9, 86, 124, 176n21 rhythm in poetry, xiv–xv, xvi, 37; free, 5–6, 12, 74, 86; free, and accent shift, 24, 47, 104, 141; of spoken Hebrew, 5; syllabic, 8, 9, 35. See also accentual-syllabic poetry Romanticism: and Hebrew pedagogy, 29–31; tropes of, in Hebrew poetry, 84, 85, 127, 130 Rothschild, Baron Edmond James de, 39–40 school system, 6, 38, 41; formation of, 41 schools in Palestine, 2, 42; adoption of Hebrew in, 3, 21, 25; agricultural, 2; Bezalel, 38; compared to work settlements, 23; and the creation of a national language, 27, 41–42, 49–51, 54; curricula, xii, 25, 28, 32, 40, 43, 47, 139; in Galilee, 102; heder, 28; Hertseliyah high school, 23, 41, 43–44; high school, 38, 41–42, 43–44; history of, 25–29, 38–48; of the JCA, 47; kindergarten, 38, 40, 41, 47; post-secondary, 38, 42, 44; primary school, 38, 41; as providing mechanism for adoption of new accent in poetry, 21, 24, 36–37; in Rishon le-Tsiyon, 39, 40, 41; school for girls in Jaffa (±oveve Tsiyon), 25, 40, 42, 43; as site of standardization of Hebrew, 17, 21, 35, 41, 47; Talmud Torah, 40; teaching history in, 30; Technion, 38, 46–47; in Zikhron Yaakov, 39 Sephardic accents, 53–54; as correct, xi–xii, 9, 10, 72; in Old Yishuv, 26, 39, 62; in relation to ancient language, 22, 54, 59, 61, 64, 79, 90 Sephardic Jews, 1, 2, 3, 26, 39; as students, 38 Shakespeare, William, 105
index Shats, Tsevi, 16, 17; and Ben-Yehuda’s accent design, 80; “Galut shiratenu ha-klassit” [The Exile of Our Classical Poetry], 16, 17, 78–81, 87–88, 90, 91, 96, 99; as poet, 49 Shavit, Uzi: on Haskalah poetry, 9–10, 161n35; on the rise of poetry in the new accent, 21–22, 23–24, 165n7, 178n1 Shekhtman, Malkah (Bat-±amah), 12–13, 73, 75, 175n2 Shimoni, David (Shimonovits), 13, 162n46 Shlonsky, Avraham, 16, 17, 18, 21; and abandonment of Ashkenazic accent, 23, 107; and accent shift, 12, 13, 23, 73, 180; early new-accent composition, 107–108, 124; in En ±arod, 23, 101; evaluation of vis à vis Bluvshtain, 82, 83, 84–87; and exposure to new accent, 23; as innovator, 100–101; interpretation of, 111–25; as laborer, 101, 102; as neologist, 109, 125; as the new-accent poet, 74, 100–101, 125, 137–38; organization of his writings, 84–87, 126–28, 137; in his poetry, 100, 101, 102–103; poetry of, identified with Hebrew poetry, 124–26; poetry of, in Ashkenazic, 131; reasons for, 23; in relation to Bialik, 18–19, 23, 74, 83, 84, 103, 116, 117, 127; in relation to Bluvshtain, 18, 73; as representing acculturation to Palestine, 137; scholarship on, 100–101; as symbol of New Hebrew literature, 74; as teenager, 101; use of folk song as preparation for canonical new-accent poetry, 103, 105–107, 120, 184n35; writings—“¿Ad halom” [Up to This Point], 86, 127, 128, 132–36; ba-Galgal [In the Cycle], 84, 85, 102; “ba-’Ohel” [In the Tent], 102, 108–11, 126, 137; be-’Eleh ha-yamim [In These Days], 101; Devai [Distress], 84, 85, 127, 130, 131; Gilboa¿, 127; “Hah yeled yeled” [Oh Boy Boy], 127, 128–30; “Halbishini” [Dress Me], 86, 177n32; “ha-Melitsah” [Phraseology], 116; “Hitgalut” [Revelation], 84, 86, 176n21; “la-’Almoni” [To the Anonymous One], 86; le-’Aba-’ima [To Papa-Mama], 101, 102, 108, 126; “Lekh lekha” [Go Forth], 86; “Lo ’ikhpat” [Doesn’t Matter], 102, 105–106, 108, 110–11, 126, 137; “Panorama of En ±arod,” 101, 102, 116; “Rakevet” [Train], 100, 101, 102, 108,
index 126, 130, 136, 137–38; “Shivah” [Return], 127, 128, 130–32, 134, 136, 177n25; “Tishre,” 84–85, 102, 105, 127–28 Shneour, Zalman, 16 Shtainberg, Yaakov, 13, 162n46 Simmons, Gene (Chaim Witz): and Hebrew pronunciation, xi–xii, xiii; and Jewish identity, xi Tchernichovsky, Shaul, 16, 22, 27, 34, 37, 73; adoption of new accent, 13, 140, 141, 147–48, 162n47; and anxiety about new-accent poetry, xv, 35–36, 80, 103; attitude toward new accent, 13, 97, 140, 182n17; and Bi¿ovski, 35, 97; compared to Bialik, 19, 140–41, 145, 147–48; as defender of Ashkenazic Hebrew, 35–37, 140; and prosodic innovation, xiv, 9, 35, 140, 141, 145, 168n32; publication of first poem, 35; published exchange with teacher, 33, 35–36, 140; reception as “Classical” poet, 140, 147 teacher. See under Hebrew teacher Teachers’ Association, 25, 50, 52; founding of, 43 Teachers’ Meeting, 43, 50 teachers’ organizations, 38, 43, 45, 50; meetings—of 1895, 53, 54, 55; of 1903, 55, 58, 60–64; of 1904, 58–59; and Yellin, 64–67 Teacher’s Union, 12, 43, 44, 45, 46, 64 Te¿iyah poetry, 5, 9, 107, 161n35, 162n46 Temkin, Mordekhai, 22, 24, 99; “Lo’ ne¿anti” [I Was Not Gifted], 87; Netafim [Drops], 82, 87 terminal-stress pattern, xii, xv, 5, 10, 11, 12, 16, 22, 23, 26, 33–34, 36, 74, 79, 90, 104, 105; adoption by workers, 23, 79, 102; penultimately stressed words in, xii, xiii, 9, 105–106, 110, 116, 118, 124, 160n27, 187n14. See also Sephardic accents Unification (and unity of Hebrew), 17, 35, 37, 39, 49–55, 56, 145; and tolerance for variety, 64–65, 68 Usishkin, Mena¿em, 43 va¿ad ha-lashon. See Language Committee (va¿ad ha-lashon) Vilkomits, Sim¿ah ±ayim, 40; and
205 Galilean accent, 56, 57–58, 63–64, 68, 75, 172nn15,16 Weinreich, Max, 20, 25 Wessely (Weisel), Naftali Herts, 8; Shire tif ’eret, 8. See also prosody, Wesselian women, 52, 148; as Hebrew speakers, 74, 76, 175n3; poetry by (see women’s poetry); as symbols of authenticity, 14–15, 17, 76, 79, 90, 92, 93, 94–96, 97, 98, 99, 162n52; as symbols of national identity, 17, 76–78, 90, 96, 98 women’s poetry, 17, 18, 73–78, 80, 83–84, 88–89, 92–93, 101, 103; and accent, 12–13, 14–15, 16, 17, 73, 75, 97, 98–99, 175n2; association of, with speech, 74, 76, 91–92, 93, 98–99; history of, 16; in relation to Bialik, 73, 98, 99; and lack of Ashkenazic transition, 98, 137; and meter, 175n2; as new-accent poetry, 73–75, 80, 93, 98–99; reception of, 16, 18, 74–75, 76–77, 78, 91, 98–99, 101, 103 Yellin, David: on accent, 50, 59, 60, 63, 64; and correspondence of letters and sounds, 63, 66, 67, 68–69, 70; as Hebrew teacher, 39, 43; on language revival in the schools, 55, 59, 70–71; and the natural method, 57 Yellin’s synthetic accent design, 57, 60, 64–70, 86, 146, 174n29; and authenticity, 66, 68, 75; compared with BenYehuda’s and the Galilean accent, 69–70, 75; and Epstein’s talking library, 146; failure of, 70–72; as ingathering of exiles, 68, 69–70, 76; and Shlonsky’s poetic break with the past, 137 Yemenite: pronunciations of Hebrew, 75, 78, 80, 173n19; Jews in Palestine, 39, 81 Yiddish, 10, 15, 86, 90; association with Ashkenazic Hebrew accent, xii, xiv, 65–66, 86, 90, 135; in Hebrew poetry, 86, 90, 102, 130, 135, 136, 183n32, 187n10; influences on Hebrew language, xiv, 7, 8, 10; as language of instruction, 28, 39–40, 77; newspapers, 3; Old, 8; pronunciation of, xiv, 158nn5,10; speakers in Palestine, 41, 62, 102, 163n3. See also Yiddish folk song; Yiddish poetry Yiddish folk song, 14, 102, 133, 136;
206 lullabies, 108, 110, 127–30; trope of the kid, 126, 127, 134; uses of, in Hebrew poetry, 108–109, 110, 126, 127, 133, 136 Yiddish poetry, 127, 130 Yudelovits, David, 42, 169n44, 171n8
index Zelniak, Yokheved. See Bat-Miryam, Yokheved (Yokheved Zelniak) Zionism, 6, 13, 52, 76. See also nationalism, Jewish Zionist Congress, 43
MIRYAM SEGAL is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures at Queens College, The City University of New York.
