Band

Hebrew Literature and the Zionist Narrative

Arnold J. Band

The happy timing of my lecture has facilitated the choice of my topic, “Hebrew Literature and the Zionist Narrative.” We are now in the midst of a yearlong commemoration of the Establishment of the State of Israel which was, of course, the fruition of Zionist dreams and efforts. It is most fitting that we use this opportunity to consider some aspects of this momentous feat in Jewish history, a feat fraught with broad opportunities and daunting challenges since it involves nothing less than the “return of the Jewish people to history.” One of the great cultural achievements of this half-century of Jewish national sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland has been the amazing expansion of the Hebrew language and the veritable explosion of significant creativity in Hebrew literature. This creativity would not have been possible without the existence of a viable Hebrew-speaking society in Israel. That aspect of the history is well-documented and fairly easy to understand.[1] What is not well known and much more difficult to comprehend is how Hebrew literature contributed to the shaping of the more profound cultural aspects of Zionism, how it helped shape “the Zionist reconstruction of Jewish history.” It is to the latter historical phenomenon that I wish to address my remarks today.

In Recovered Roots,[2] her insightful study of “collective memory and the Israeli national tradition,” Yael Zerubavel demonstrates how three historical events, the Battle of Tel Hai, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, and the Fall of Masada, have been reshaped and used as commemorative events within the formation of “the Zionist narrative.”[3] Increasingly, over the past decades, we have become aware of the fact that modern national movements have recreated, imagined, or reconstructed “narratives” of their past history in order to buttress their present nationalist claims and aspirations. This is a well-attested and normal phenomenon which I shall treat here without any specific valorization. It is a fact in the life of many peoples, including the Jews. In this sense, then, the “Zionist” narrative is the system of narratives, symbols, and attitudes that the Zionist movement has generated, wittingly or unwittingly, in its attempt to mobilize the Jewish population in both the Yishuv and the Diaspora for actions leading to the creation of a sovereign Jewish state in the ancestral homeland, Eretz Yisrael.

In her book, Zerubavel demonstrates how modern Hebrew figured as a major feature in “the Zionist reconstruction of the past,” a phrase which needs some elaboration here. All authoritative historians of Zionism agree that modern Zionism, a product of a variety of social and political forces in Europe in the middle and end of the nineteenth century, involved a reshaping of Jewish history as it was then known and formulated, for instance, in such a great historiographical work as Graetz’s History of the Jews.[4] In that great study, one finds the history of the Jews treated with great sympathy, even passion, period after period from earliest biblical times to the threshold of the modern era. All periods of Jewish history were given roughly equal valorization, both those lived in Eretz Yisrael and those in the Diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple.[5] The Zionist version of history, needing to stress the bond between the people and the land of Israel, assigned greater importance to the biblical period when most of the Jews did live in Eretz Yisrael, and slighted the centuries of Diasporan experience which was regarded as exilic, as Galut. By the beginning of this century, in such books as Joseph Klausner’s early “History,”[6] we find a fairly well-formulated history which, charted on a graph, looks like two peaks with a large, dark valley in the middle. The two peaks are life in Eretz Yisrael in antiquity and life in Eretz Yisrael after 1881, while the depression in the middle was the ‘valley of the shadow of death,’ i.e. the period of the Galut. That is how Jewish history is viewed by most secular Israelis even today.

To this reconstruction of history we should add at least one more feature of the Zionist narrative: the drive to create a new Jew often called a “new Hebrew” to distinguish him from Galut Jews. These new Jews would speak Hebrew rather than Yiddish; would be capable of defending themselves and tilling the soil; and would embody many of the enlightenment ideals such as a love of beauty, of life, of moral virtues; and would be imbued with a devotion to a vague national ideal. The new Hebrews will settle the land in the third period, i.e. post-1881, of the Zionist reconstruction of Jewish history described above.

Yael Zerubavel deftly presents this historical reconstruction as the foundation of the Zionist narrative which she describes and analyzes. While she refers to individual literary works here and there and states that Hebrew literature played a major role in the formation of the Zionist narrative, she really treats literature only tangentially. She is, after all, an anthropologist, not a literary historian. I would like to build on her work and supply some interesting examples of literary works which, I will argue, contributed significantly to the construction and texturing of the Zionist narrative as we understand it today. I shall not attempt to be exhaustive for to do so would require my offering a yearlong course on the history of modern Hebrew literature. I will not restrict myself to works written in Israel since long before the actual establishment of the State in 1948, perhaps as early as 1920, the Zionist narrative had crystallized. I will concentrate upon three focal examples, but in doing so I shall mention several other works, if only in passing. In each of these three cases, the book examined has been extremely popular, hence arguably a fitting example of a work that shaped the imagination of many readers.

The logical point to begin our considerations is not 1948, the establishment of the State of Israel, or even 1897, the First Zionist Congress convened by Theodor Herzl, but 1853, the publication in Vilna of the first Hebrew novel, ’Ahavat Tzion, by Avraham Mapu (1808-67).[7] While few readers today could possibly enjoy the novel with its melodramatic turns and contrasts, its shallow characterization, and its biblicizing style, throughout the nineteenth century it was hailed as a major cultural event and was reissued many times. While we would not agree with the exaggerated claims of some critics that this novel was instrumental in creating the Zionist movement, it is helpful to ponder why one might reach that conclusion. The novel set in Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE in the days of the prophet Isaiah and the king Hezekiah, is actually a love story which tries to merge the romantic notions of the melodramatic novel of the early nineteenth century with the biblical setting. The implied genre linkage is obviously the biblical Song of Songs understood not as an allegory of divine love, but as it was originally written, a love story between an ideal young couple. Suspense is generated by the deeds of several villainous individuals and the turns of fate, but in the end, love wins out and peace reigns in a pastoral Jerusalem.

For our concerns here, the novel itself is less important than its reception. It thrilled its audience with its portrayal of young love, of normal, joyous people, and of scenes of Zion which are metonyms for the vitality and passion of the characters. For all its failings, it was still a full-blown novel, a genre which its readers had never before experienced in Hebrew; it was a world of fiction designed both to entertain the reader and inculcate enlightenment ideals such as the potentiality of human experience, beauty, nature, and the romanticized scenery of Jerusalem. Note that the title, ’Ahavat Tzion, means literally, “love of Zion,” but by extension could be understood as “a love in Zion.”

The average reader had to be a fairly learned Jew with a traditional education and religious upbringing—as was the novel’s author. Otherwise, he could not possibly have understood the text. It was clear that the locus of resplendent romantic ideals was biblical Zion, implicitly opposed to the depressing, impoverished world of the European shtetl where most of the readers lived, the epitome of Galut (Exile) with all its emotional and ideational ramifications. Mapu’s sources of inspiration have been well charted, but are essentially irrelevant, for none of the works he emulated fused all the elements that made ’Ahavat Tzion so captivating to generations of readers. Some twenty editions have been published and the novel was required reading in Hebrew High Schools both in Israel and the Diaspora until the 1950’s. An examination of the biographies of the many cultural figures in pre-Herzlean Zionism would clearly indicate that one of the foundation texts of their intellectual world was Mapu’s ’Ahavat Tzion.

It is no surprise that the book had difficulties with the government censor who, inspired by pious Jews who did not want to see it printed, delayed its publication for several years. The same is true for Mapu’s second novel, ‘Ayit Tzavu‘a (The Hypocrite), published in the 1860’s, and his third novel, Hoze Hezyonot, (The Fantasist)—on Shabbatai Zvi—of which only a small portion survived the censor’s office in the same decade. Most of it was lost or destroyed there. I cite these publishing facts as the social background to the triumph of ’Ahavat Tzion: the novel was launched in very hostile seas. The second novel, ‘Ayit Tzavu‘a, serves as a foil to ’Ahavat Tzion in that it portrays the corruption of contemporary Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement and the clash of generations in which hope for the future is squelched by the dead hand of the past which lives on in the present. The readers of these two novels learn to construct two opposing realms of imagined existence: the decadent Jewish present and the glorious biblical past. Since both novels are suffused with enlightenment didacticism that purports to lead the reader to a better future, the reader is lead subliminally to the rough outline of the Zionist reconstruction of Jewish history mentioned above in which the past and the future are seen as two resplendent mountain peaks while the present is a shadowy, barren valley. Most fiction written in both Hebrew and Yiddish fiction during the next two generations portrays Jewish life in the Galut as decadent, depressing, and even depraved. Even when the portrayal is somewhat humorous as in Mendele or Shalom Aleichem, the inescapable impression the reader received from these books is that the Galut is a place devoid of joy, potential for life, or hope for the future. Contemporary Hebrew poetry did offer a more positive note, but this was often connected with a vague yearning for Zion.

The significance of the publication of this novel in 1853 increases measurably when we realize that in the 1850’s the expressive capacity of Hebrew prose increased dramatically. ’Ahavat Tzion was one of the three major works of Hebrew prose that appeared in that decade. Shortly before it publication, Leopold Zunz published in 1851 Nachman Krochmal’s A Guide for the Perplexed of our Times,[8] a weighty study of the periods and concepts of Jewish history, the first major study of Jewish historiography written in Hebrew, a book whose intellectual rigor earned the respects of the erudite reader and demonstrated that modern, philosophical subjects could be discussed in Hebrew. In 1859, Kalman Shulman began to publish his highly popular translations/adaptations of Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris,[9] thus introducing the Hebrew reader to one of the great popular adventure stories of contemporary French literature. These three works of the 1850’s formed the basis of what might be called “the invention of Hebrew prose.”[10]

The Zion-Galut antinomy is further complicated and anchored in history in the second focal work I wish to examine. In the mid 1890’s, perhaps in 1893, Avraham Shalom Friedberg (1838-1902) published a long story called “HaMa’akhelet” (“The Slaughterer’s Knife”) that was republished many times—as recently as 1958.[11] Friedberg, almost entirely forgotten today, was, in many senses, the paradigmatic “maskil” (person devoted to the ideals of the Haskalah, the Enlightenment). A writer of boundless energy, keen sensitivity to the trends of Jewish life, and some talent, he worked as translator, editor, journalist, and commentator for forty years in many of the centers of Eastern European Hebrew culture.[12] As a young man in the Pale, he fell under the spell of Mapu’s historical novels and corresponded with him intensively in the 1850’s and 1860’s. As early as 1876 he reworked into Hebrew—apparently from the original German—Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars (1850),[13] the famous idealized portrait of Marrano life. After the pogroms of 1881-82, the historic watershed after which enlightenment ideals were considered untenable, he divided his time among three projects: articles espousing the ideals of Hibbat Tzion (the proto-Zionist “Love of Zion” movement) and commenting upon the contemporary situation of Jews; translations from significant works about the Jewish Middle Ages; and his multivolume collection of stories on focal episodes in Jewish history, Zikhronot levet David (1893-), based on stories in German by Hermann Reckendorff. Friedberg’s versions of these exciting stories educated several generations of Hebrew readers about Jewish history; in a sense, he was one of the foremost creators of the modern Jewish historical consciousness, specifically dealing with the Middle Ages.[14]

Read today as a literary artifact, Friedberg’s “HaMa’akhelet” is fairly dismal: its biblicized style is stilted; its plotting and dialogue are predictably melodramatic; and its ideological tendencies are patently and simplistically those of the pre-Herzlean Hibbat Tzion movement. But as a historical document it is fascinating. This 80-page story, half straightforward history of the Jewish Middle Ages, purports to be a “te‘udah,” a document or even an ethical will, written in 1130 by one Abraham ben Elyakim, for his son Shelomo to inform him of the tribulations of the Jews which, he asserts, exceeded by far the persecutions in the time of Antiochus and Hadrian. The family descended from the Chazar nobility which settled in Cordova, but, after the Berber invasions, moved to Christian Spain, then to the Rhineland. The plot of the story actually begins after 12 pages of historical background which seems to interest Friedberg more than the story itself.

In 1096, at a pastoral Pesah Seder scene in the home of the rabbi of Worms, we learn of the slaughter of the Jews of Metz from a seven year old girl who had escaped from there. The Jews of Worms are next attacked by the Crusaders and the rabbi encourages all his congregation to commit suicide rather than agree to conversion. As the rabbi is about to slaughter his five year old son, he (the rabbi) faints. The son tries to commit suicide by jumping out the window, but he was caught by a wealthy Christian who converts him and brings him up as his son.

Note that Friedberg actually subverts the martyrological theme here since he uses two conventional melodramatic devices—the opportune faint and the surprising safe landing of the jump from a window or precipice—to avoid the violent, irreversible slaughter of the son by the father or the father’s own suicide which one expects in a martyrological document. These acts, intended to prevent the forced conversion to Christianity, were the passion of the Jewish Crusades chronicles. To subvert them as did Friedberg and later, Tchernichowski was truly daring.

Twenty years pass during which we learn—in a lengthy historical digression—that Jerusalem had been conquered and the Muslims had amassed formidable armies to drive the Crusaders out.[15] In a mighty battle somewhere to the northeast of Jerusalem, the carnage is horrendous. At this point the second plot is introduced: a rabbi Elyakim of the neighboring city of Helbon, walks with his daughter, Sarah, through the field after the battle and finds a young Christian knight still alive, though severely wounded. They take him home, tend to his wounds, and discover that he was once a Jew. After a series of pastoral family scenes—a Shabbat meal where they sing a zemira of 20 stanzas written in typical Hibbat Tzion style and read a poem of Shlomo Ibn Gabirol—we discover that Rabbi Elyakim was the former rabbi of Worms who had escaped and fled to the Muslim Middle East and the young Christian knight was—no surprise—his son who had jumped out the window in Worms in the first plot.

The son is restored to Judaism and given a new name, Avraham, since his old name had been given to the rabbi’s son from his second wife. It is this newly discovered son who writes the document that comprises the story called “HaMa’akhelet.” The author of this document, now called Avraham ben Elyakim (shortened as “Abrabanel”) ends the document with instructions to preserve and cherish this te‘udah and the ma’akhelet which he retrieved in some unexplained way from the bishop of Worms.

“HaMa’akhelet” frequently republished and anthologized, embodies a fictive world of recognizable didactic situations and attitudes: the matrix, the melodramatic plots with the “surprising” discoveries is characteristic of popular Hebrew fiction of the 1890’s; the matrical plots are embedded in a meaningful and authenticated historical setting; the Hibbat Tzion ideology emphasizing Zion and the perennial hatred of Christians for Jews is concretized in the Crusade milieu, its perfect ideological fit; the knight who turns out to be a Jew is an adumbration of the machismo of the new Jew soon to be extolled by Berdiczewski and Tchernichowski; traditional Jewish life is portrayed in sentimental genre scenes such as the Passover Seder, the Shabbat meal, the learned father discussing Torah lessons with his sons —all demonstrably sentimental and pastoral as are the idylls of Tchernichowski dealing with Jewish home life. One senses in them as in the pastoral, a nostalgic yearning, perhaps unconscious, for a form of life rapidly disappearing. Above all, one cannot neglect the daring subversion of martyrology.

Of the many ideologically animated features of this story, two stand out. First, though the story takes place in the 12th century, the reader is fully aware that Jewish life in the Galut in general is portrayed as perilous, actually untenable as many Jews in Russia began to believe in the 1880’s and 1890’s. The solution to this problem is not to be found in the world of faith, of martyrdom, but rather in individual action, in flight from Europe and migration to Eretz Yisrael. Second, the young Jew in the second part of the story is one of the first examples in Hebrew literature of a Jew as a heroic warrior. This new Jew, dimly imagined in Mapu’s biblical novel, is more familiar to the readers of Friedberg’s story since the religious behavior of both the young man and his father are those of rabbinically-oriented European Jews. We thus already find here intimations of the firm Zionist belief that the Hebrew national revival will produce a new type of Jew, more a Hebrew (he actually was brought up as a Christian) than a Jew, one capable of defending himself and living a productive life on the soil. This character type is what develops into the halutz, the pioneer, in the literature of the Second and Third Aliyot (1906-14; 1919-25) and, subsequent to that, the “sabra” in the Hebrew literature of the 1940’s and the early years of the state, in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

The new Jew, or rather, the new Hebrew, is an integral part of the Zionist narrative as demonstrated clearly in Yael Zerubavel’s book. Just as this new figure is molded and singled out for emulation in the three commemorative events she discusses in her book (Tel Hai, Masada, and the Bar-Kokhba rebellion), he is featured at the center of many stories of the period. The classic example is Moshe Shamir’s Hu’ halakh basadot (He Walked in the Fields) of 1948, whose main hero, Uri, became the emblematic sabra of fiction copied and subverted by later writers. Precisely because the sabra figure was so dominant and had to be toppled by writers of the 1960’s, it would be interesting to see how this was done in a central novel of the period. By choosing a prime example of this literary process, the final rejection of the sabra hero, we can see how this figure was so dominant in the Zionist narrative.

To do so we shall focus on Aharon Megged’s HaHay ‘al HaMet (The Living on the Dead)[16] not because it is the best novel of the period—it is far from that—but because it captures the generational transition more clearly (in fact, too clearly) than any other book of the period. Though now relegated to a deserved secondary position among the books of the sixties, it was, upon its publication, hugely successful and influential. It purports to be the story told by a young writer, Jonas, of his inability to write a contracted book about a hero of the previous generation, the typical hero of Labor Zionist fiction from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. The hero, one Abrasha Davidov, though born in Russia, embodies all the characteristics of the sabra hero. Jonas’ own lawyer finally claims that Jonas could not write the book because of “a mental crisis” in his life. To disprove this claim, Evrat, the prosecuting lawyer, reads Jonas’ statement that Davidov, in his heroic righteousness, was a tyrant and “If we want to live, it is our sacred duty to wipe out his memory for ever and ever!” The breach of contract was therefore deliberate. I cite this passage because it captures so vividly the matrix of the turbulent attitudes animating so much of Israeli fiction of the 1960’s, fiction which so eerily adumbrates the so-called identity crisis of Israeli society discussed by social scientists in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

In the process of telling how his life has disintegrated after he signed the contract, Jonas actually records the story of this hero as background to his present problems. His narration is set in three different situations: his interviews with friends and relatives of the deceased hero; the court scenes; and his dissolute carousing with artist friends mostly in a Tel Aviv night club. The stories he records in his notebook are typical hagiographic tales of devoted hard labor and prodigious heroism characteristic of the literature of the Third Aliyah and the school textbooks, so characteristic in fact that they border on parody.

We learn, of course, as the story progresses, that Davidov was far from an ideal family man: he was rarely home, often sought out other women, was excessively demanding of his son, and frequently beat his daughter. But precisely because Jonas was contracted to tell a hagiographic tale of the Zionist hero, he could not write it. The Oedipal relationship is obvious: the saintly reputation of the dead Davidov repressed Jonas. Jonas, on his part, portrays his own life as the antithesis of Davidov’s; a writer who could not write, he is often drunk, and after divorcing his caring wife, he pursues several different women. So while he claims he must wipe out Davidov’s memory, he cannot do it, and has nothing to replace it.

We must deduce that part of the failure of the founders’ generation lies in their failure to rear worthy sons and daughters. The bleakness of the picture that Megged paints here has nothing to do with the Holocaust, or with the Arab problem, or with the exploitation of Oriental Jews by Ashkenazic Jews. The heroes here are not defined by these three crucial moments in Israeli history, but rather by the internal dynamic of Zionist efforts at state building and social engineering. While other motifs adhere to this matrix and complicate it, I would submit that without a clear understanding of this matrix, no reliable reading of much of Israeli literature is possible.

Megged’s novel is particularly poignant since it was written not by a member of the generation that appeared on the scene in the 1960’s, but by a veteran writer, a long-time member of a kibbutz who earned his reputation in the early, more “heroic” years of the state. When he wrote The Living on the Dead, Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua were already rising stars in the literary pantheon. The problematics of Meged’s novel provides an interesting and illuminating backdrop for Oz’ first novel, My Michael, that appeared three years later in 1968, or Yehoshua’s novels such as HaMe’ahev (The Lover)[17] or Mar Mani (Mr. Mani)[18]—all significant works of fiction that embody the artists’ vision of life in the State of Israel and shape the imagination of the Hebrew reader.

We have followed a grand trajectory of over a century, from 1853 to 1965, from Mapu’s ’Ahavat Tzion, the first Hebrew novel, to Meged’s HaHay ‘al HaMet, a crucial phase in the disintegration of the Zionist narrative. It is clear to any close observer of either Israeli politics or culture, that the Zionist narrative as we have known it, has undergone radical modification over the past two decades. We now longer naively accept as truth many of the aspects of the Zionist narrative we were brought up on. This is not to deny for a moment the recognition of the great accomplishment of Zionism. Even in the cultural arena, for instance, the evidence is obvious. When, for instance, we compare the style of Mapu’s ’Ahavat Tsion with that of Megged’s HaHay ‘al HaMet or, even more so, with Yehoshua’s Mar Mani, we cannot escape the shock of recognition, the thrill in the presence of human expressive achievement that this progress implies. This literature not only reflects the cultural achievement, but has contributed significantly to it.