From the Kheyder to the Ḥeder : A Transformation of the Room

When Dvora Baron sought, in the absence of a Hebrew-speaking culture, to create a vernacular literature, how did her associations and choices differ from those of her male colleagues? How do those differences nuance our understanding of the continuities and discontinuities with traditional Hebrew and religious texts presented by a modern vernacular literature in the making? In her stories Genizah (Holy burial, 1921) and 'Agunah (Abandoned wife, 1920), Dvora Baron's depiction of sermons sheds light both on the stylistic development of a vernacular Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century and on the social implications of the burgeoning vernacular consciousness during that period. Learning traditional Jewish texts orally and aurally, Baron was better equipped than her literary peers to recognize the importance of representing the juncture of voice and text in modern Hebrew literature. In her texts, she posed a number of crucial social questions about Jewish literacy as well as about vernacular literatures. Who is speaking and who is listening in traditional as well as in modern Jewish literary culture? Who chooses to read and who chooses to hear? Who must hear because they cannot read, and what do they lose, or gain, in the process? Baron achieves a fine balance, in her representation of the relationship between textually erudite orators and illiterate auditors, between the oral voice and the literary text.

Reviewed by: Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution by Karen Grumberg Maya Barzilai Karen Grumberg. Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 328 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000295 The title of Karen Grumberg's 2019 book, Hebrew Gothic, states what is not obvious: modern Hebrew literature has not been often associated with the [End Page 473] European Gothic and its ghosts, supernatural phenomena, haunted castles, crypts, and labyrinths. Grumberg herself contends that the Gothic mode might appear at first "incompatible with the aesthetic and the setting of Israel/Palestine" (3). Over the course of this lucidly written volume, however, she makes a compelling case for considering Hebrew writers' engagement with the European and American Gothic. Through comparative readings of Hebrew fiction alongside popular Gothic works by Horace Walpole and Edgar Alan Poe, Grumberg shows that scholarship of Hebrew literature stands to gain from a reassessment of this corpus outside the conventional frameworks of Hebrew literary history and more classical European literature. The twentieth-century writers Grumberg discusses did not adopt the Gothic wholesale, but rather appropriated Gothic themes and conventions to offer a critical examination of the Jewish past; they also drew on the Gothic tradition in order to address the ambivalence inherent to Jewish nationalism, reopening wounds such as the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The European Gothic has allowed Jewish writers to call into question the narration of past events, to engage both history and historiography. In Hebrew Gothic, Grumberg constellates European and American works with Hebrew literature spanning the early twentieth-century writers S. Y. Agnon, Dvora Baron, and Yaakov Shteinberg, through Leah Goldberg's mid-twentieth-century theatrical writing, to novels by Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. She productively pairs Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Israeli writer Almog Behar's short story "Ana min al-yahoud" (I'm one of the Jews), and concludes the book with parody and black humor in twenty-first-century Gothic-inspired Israeli film and television. At the outset, Grumberg points out that "it is not only what gothic texts do but also how they do it that makes them gothic" (6). In other words, the transgression of established social, cultural, and national boundaries in Gothic works unleashes a state of anxiety, an atmosphere of terror. The Gothic trades in instability, Grumberg explains, and this instability stems from the return of repressed narratives in Gothic literature. One of the central questions Hebrew Gothic poses concerns how twentieth-century Hebrew writers engaged historical events in order to comment on the Jewish and Zionist present and future. In many of Grumberg's case studies, supernatural motifs and gothic scenes allow writers to interrupt linear narratives of national conquest and triumph, as well as to call into question gender norms and expectations. Divided into two parts, "A Spectralized Past" and "Haunted Nation," Hebrew Gothic balances works that contend with the Jewish European past with post-1948 Hebrew literature. Reading Agnon's macabre Polish stories, Grumberg shows how the author appropriated stereotypes of the Wandering Jew and the bloodthirsty Jew in order to "recalibrate the dynamics of victims and oppressors," assigning antisemitic tropes to Christian figures. The issue of victimization returns in the chapter on maternal figures in stories by Baron and Shteinberg. In contrast to the passive and repressed Gothic heroine, Grumberg reads the "gothic agunah" as both "excessively present" and "defiant" or resistant through her affect (85). Grumberg previously explored Space and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (2012) and her current book likewise focuses on the spatiotemporal dimensions of the Hebrew Gothic. She focuses, for instance, on the [End Page 474] cuckoo clock in Leah Goldberg's "Lady of the Castle," interpreting it as a foreboding Gothic motif that also invites a spatial reading, as it leads to a secret passageway and room where Lena, a Holocaust survivor, remained locked away even after the war's conclusion. Grumberg's comparative analysis, drawing on the work of Poe, suggests that Goldberg narrated the castle as a spiritual sanctuary in response to the demand placed on her to produce ideologically enlisted literature. The notion of a "conflicted Zionism," becomes relevant also for Oz and Yehoshua...

When Dvora Baron sought, in the absence of a Hebrew-speaking culture, to create a vernacular literature, how did her associations and choices differ from those of her male colleagues? How do those differences nuance our understanding of the continuities and discontinuities with traditional Hebrew and religious texts presented by a modern vernacular literature in the making? In her stories "Genizah" (Holy burial, 1921) and "'Agunah" (Abandoned wife, 1920), Dvora Baron's depiction of sermons sheds light both on the stylistic development of a vernacular Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century and on the social implications of the burgeoning vernacular consciousness during that period. Learning traditional Jewish texts orally and aurally, Baron was better equipped than her literary peers to recognize the importance of representing the juncture of voice and text in modern Hebrew literature. In her texts, she posed a number of crucial social questions about Jewish literacy as well as about vernacular literatures. Who is speaking and who is listening in traditional as well as in modern Jewish literary culture? Who chooses to read and who chooses to hear? Who must hear because they cannot read, and what do they lose, or gain, in the process? Baron achieves a fine balance, in her representation of the relationship between textually erudite orators and illiterate auditors, between the oral voice and the literary text.

Reviewed by: The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by Neta Stahl Chen Mandel-Edrei Neta Stahl. The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature. London: Routledge, 2020. 212 pp. Neta Stahl's The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature provides us with fresh terminology with which to consider modern Hebrew literary historiographies and constitutes a call for new scholarly frameworks within the field of modern Hebrew literature. Stahl argues that despite challenges to the established critical narrative of secularization in modern Hebrew letters, the binary categories of religion and secularization still dominate. Stahl claims that this binary system is ineffective for reading the various and complex forms by which divinity appears in modern texts and seeks to go beyond and against this limited framework. As was illuminated by Gershom Scholem, Hannan Hever, Shachar Pinsker, and others, the divine is embedded in the Hebrew language despite attempts to repress or secularize it, a condition that in the Zionist context might be culturally destructive. Acknowledging this, Stahl works to illuminate a broader spectrum [End Page 447] of representations of the divine while extending our understanding of their literary and cultural functions. Fundamental to this literature, Stahl writes, are three religious-philosophical tensions that challenge the act of representing divinity. The first is the biblical prohibition against representing God, which, developed by Maimonides, allows a merely rhetorical representation of a transcendent and bodyless entity whose intentions are concealed. The second is kabbalist perceptions according to which divinity resides in language itself, posing representational problems. The third is a historical tension that questions the assumption that modern Hebrew writers worked to depart from tradition. Here, Stahl adopts Shraga Bar-On's suggestion to understand modern literary projects through the concept of quest in which God is present and absent simultaneously. In the first chapter, which is dedicated to pantheism, Stahl reads canonic works from the turn of the twentieth century (by Aḥad Ha-ʿam, S. Y. Abramovitsh, Ḥ. N. Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and M. Y. Berdyczewski) and validates the well-established claim that these writers did not seek to secularize Judaism but to extract God from the limited halakhic world to a national sphere, which is natural and universal. The second chapter focuses on the relation between images of man and God as described by Y. H. Brenner and Avraham Shlonsky. Here, "theomorphism" and its nuances (mainly anthropomorphism) are the center of discussion. Stahl shows that in Brenner's writing, the world-without-God forces man to embrace godly powers for redeeming humanity, a move that fails and leaves man in what Aharon Appelfeld has called "distress of religiosity" (43). In Shlonsky's late poems, God provides utopian dimensions to the national labor of the pioneer, who then becomes "a divine creature whose own hands re-create God's world" (52). The third chapter is dedicated to Uri Ẓvi Greenberg and presents a complicated image of his transition from a world filled with "the God of mother-father" to a broken world (seemingly) devoid of God. Stahl shows how Greenberg's response to World War I was to split God into two entities; while rejecting the universal God of the arts that his contemporaries embraced, Greenberg elevates the local God whose divinity is realized through the open wound of the poet. Greenberg's response to World War II in Reḥovot ha-nahar (1951) is read by Stahl through the notion of hester panim and the dynamics of theodicy that help illuminate the poet's justification for violence. Focusing on S. Y. Agnon, the fourth chapter examines providence and punishment. Discussing various works, Stahl claims that Agnon depicts divine order through negative theology and criticizes it using what she calls "theo-narration" (103). The fifth chapter deals with Dahlia Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai's antiwar poetry. Stahl points out that in Amichai's poems, humans are presented as victims of violence that results from a distanced divinity; a structure that is incompatible with the secular world and that overlooks human accountability. She explains that this antitheodicy rhetoric allows Amichai to remain loyal to the victims by graphically depicting the results of violence without "tainting" them with politics. Juxtaposing Ravikovitch with Amichai, Stahl shows that Ravikovitch emphasizes what...

Studies in Modern Hebrew Literature: Abraham Mapu; Studies in Modern Hebrew Literature: Saul Tschernichowsky; Studies in Modern Hebrew Literature: Isaac LamdanPattersonDavidPattersonDavid <i>Studies in Modern Hebrew Literature: Abraham Mapu</i> East and West LibraryLondonCornell University PressIthaca, 1964, 184, £1.75PattersonDavidSilberschlagEisig <i>Studies in Modern Hebrew Literature: Saul Tschernichowsky</i> East and West LibraryLondonCornell University PressIthaca, 1968, 210, £2.10PattersonDavidYudkinLeon <i>Studies in Modern Hebrew Literature: Isaac Lamdan</i>

In Search of Identity: Jewish Aspects in Israeli CultureIt is a pleasure to recommend In Search of Identity to readers of Shofar. Dan Urian and Efraim Karsh have assembled a collection of thought-provoking essays by leading academics on issue of how and in what way Israel is Jewish. editors introduce themes of this book by sketching cultural history of State of Israel. Their concern with history is echoed by some of authors of consequent chapters who are careful to spell out distinct outlooks of different generations of Israelis. Another connecting thread is openness with which authors disclose their own opinions and hopes concerning Israel's Jewish identity. Noting increased salience of subcultures in Israeli society in aftermath of Six-Day War, editors diagnose current cultural landscape as postmodern, a situation in which one can turn to neither tradition nor ideology for guidance (p. 4). Other authors also share their assessment of Israeli society, and thus as I span arc of fifteen chapters in this volume I am introduced to a variety of provocative opinions alongside sound analysis.In Search of Identity is divided into three parts, Cultural Tension, The Jewishness of Israeli Identity, and Artistic Representations of Jewish contributors to first part, Cultural Tension, describe a culture war between and orthodox Jews. Eliezer Shweid opens discussion by exploring wide gulf that separates two warring camps. He concludes his essay, titled in Israeli Culture, by expressing his hope that despite drive to follow Western fashion, Israeli society may seek protection against an assimilating world culture by preserving its Jewish national and cultural identity (p. 28).In Secular Judaism and Its Prospects, Charles Liebman is critical of tendency to allow religious elite to define Judaism. Writing from a social scientist's perspective and drawing in part on reports from Guttman and Carmel Institutes, he explores secular Judaism, or culture of the vast majority of Israeli Jews (p. 34). He opines that in absence of research on how Israelis celebrate rites of passage, very little can be said about salience of Jewish heritage in Israeli society.In Between Hegemony and Dormant Kulturkampf in Israel, Baruch Kimmerling provides a fascinating analysis of place of religious symbols in Zionist hegemony. Several upheavals, including rise of Likud Party to power in 1977 and 1982 Lebanon War, quickened emergence of countercultures that challenged Zionist hegemony. Kimmerling identifies three Jewish countercultures: religious, secular, and traditionalist, as well as an Israeli-Arab counterculture.In Shall We Find Sufficient Strength? On Behalf of Israeli Secularism, Gershon Shaked argues that best works of Hebrew literature were produced in an environment where there was much tension between ghetto culture and pressures of assimilation. He notes that many religious holidays were transformed to become part of Israeli culture, a trend that is, in part, informed by a rejection of both ghetto and Western culture. He concludes by asserting that Israeli secularism is legitimate and has a right to blossom.Dan Miron's Between Rabbi Shach and Modern Hebrew Literature is fifth and last of chapters that make up first part of this book. Miron takes a hard look at Rabbi Shach's profound dislike of kibbutzim. Rabbi hates kibbutzim because they pretend to perpetuate Judaism while at same time abandoning God and transferring core of matter...to land [of Israel] and its control (p. 92). Had other authors taken Miron's tone and approach, this first part of book should not have been titled Cultural Tension, but rather, Culture War and Enmity.The second part of book is titled The Jewishness of Israeli Identity. …

38 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 A HUMOROUS VIEW OF JEWISH AND ARAB LIFE IN PALESTINE: YA'AKOV HURGIN'S STORIES by Hamutal Bar-Yosef Hamutal Bar-Yosef is Assistant Professor and Chairman of the Department ofHebrew Language and Literature at BenGurion University, Beer-Sheva. Her publications include the three books (in Hebrew): U. N. Gnessin's Figurative Language (1987); On tbe Poetry ofZelda (1988); and The Genre of "Notes" as a Mediator Between Realism and Symbolism in Hebrew Literature (1989); as well as many articles on the influence of European (especially Russian) decadence and symbolism on modern Hebrew literature. She has also published five books of poetry and has translated poems and short stories into Hebrew from English, French, and Russian. 1. Hebrew literature, from biblical times to our day, is not overflowing with humor. Moving from one geographical center to another, Hebrew writing was, until the end of the eighteenth century, either religious in nature or literature written on secular themes by religious authors. There are many sparks of humor in the miniature tales ofthe Midrash, in the Maqama and in Hebrew poetry and drama written in Italy of the Renaissance and baroque. But these examples of humorous literature are exceptional. Modern Hebrew literature was born in Europe as social didactic satire, expressing the fight for progress and Enlightenment against the religious establishment. It was Mendele Moicher Sfoirim who introduced humor into modern Hebrew literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mendele, who began as a Yiddish writer, adopted Gogol's Ya'akov Hurgin's Stories 39 techniques of humor, as did Sholem Aleikhem, the "classic" humorist of Yiddish literature. Humor in Hebrew literature at the turn of the century was pan of the effon to create "national" literature, a concept which included (according to romantic poetics) a humorous tone as a pan offoUdoristic atmosphere. This is the main function of humor in the poetry of Bialik, the Hebrew National Poet, and in the idylls of Shaul Tchernichovsky. In the stories of Uri Nissan Gnessin a very interesting mixture of impressionism, modernism , and humor-sometimes grotesque-is to be found. It will be difficult, however, to name a "classic" Hebrew humorist in the period of Hatkbia who could be compared with Moliere in French or with Gogol in Russian, or even with Sholem Aleikhem in Yiddish. After the First World War the center of Hebrew literature moved to Palestine. literature which was written in Bretz Yisrael in the years 1920-1950 reflects the highly ideological atmosphere in which new Hebrew life was being created. Also characteristic of this period was the strong sense that, in this unique historical opponunity, victory or failure would be of a critical imponance. Agnon's subtle irony made his writing close to Israeli prose writers Avrahm B. Jehoshua, Amos Oz, and Aharon Appelfeld. Bitter irony and grotesque, not "pure," humor, are the main forms of the comic also in works ofIsraeli poetry writers. "Black humor" is the domain ofthe dramas and stories of Hanoch Levin. Still, humor without bitter criticism is very rare in Israeli "canonical" literature. 2. Against this background I would like to present a writer whose best works ,were published in Palestine from the 1920s into the 1940s. He was almost unknown until about ten years ago, but recently he was "discovered " by critics and researchers. Of all the haloes with which he has been crowned, he is most wonhy of the halo of Humor. Ya'akov Hurgin was born in Jaffa in 1898 and died in 1990. This fact is already of note, because most Hebrew writers in the Palestine period were born and educated in Europe. As a child Hurgin had Arab friends, from whom he learned the Arabic language. Hurgin began writing poetry at the age of eleven, and it was Brenner, who y.ras a neighbor of the Hurgins and an object of general admiration, who was his first literary judge. Hurgin's first published poem was written under the influence of Arab pogroms of 1921, during which Brenner was 40 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 murdered. Throughout his whole life, Hurgin has remained skeptical of the socialist Zionist dream...

Writing Biography as a Relationship Amia Lieblich (bio) Writing a biography is usually considered a combination of historical scholarship and literary art. The biographer needs to investigate the life of her protagonist in the context of her or his time and culture. From fractions of information that form a mass, the biographer forges a story, an image, a picture. The vivacity of the person emerging from the pages is a criterion of the biographer's writing talent, the coherence and breadth of the story a measure of her knowledge. These two elements are said to distinguish good biographical works from bad ones. In this short essay, I will describe how I learned that this conceptualization is severely insufficient, and how my understanding of the subject developed from my first biography, about Dvora Baron (Conversations with Dvora, 1997), to my second, about Lea Goldberg (Learning about Lea, 2003).1 In the late 1980s, like many feminist scholars, I became aware of the scarcity or near-absence—not only in Hebrew, but everywhere—of biographies about women, by women writers.2 I was motivated to enter the field and write about women in Hebrew literature. My initial approach was to accept the dual nature of biography as a cross between history and literature. Thus, when I began to study the life and work of Dvora Baron (1887-1956), considered the first modern Hebrew woman writer, I bravely planned to write a biography of this kind.3 I considered my academic background in psychology as a possible third resource, since, after all, telling a life is not only about facts but also about understanding the inner world and life of the woman—her personality, her traits and motives, her strengths and weaknesses, her pathology and her resilience. Having collected the many materials I would need, I sat quietly in my study at the Hebrew University during the summer of 1990 and felt completely stuck. Despite my experience as a writer and scholar, all my beginnings and plans seemed to lead me, over and over, to a dead end. I could not find my voice in telling Baron's story. Specifically, I saw many possible versions of this [End Page 206] life and could not make up my mind which of them was the "truth"—better, more accurate, more convincing. The biographers I had studied as models, most of them male, seemed so confident and sure of themselves when they said this or that about their heroes. Didn't they experience doubts and confusion? Is it possible to keep a variety of narratives in one biography, and how can this be realized artistically? In frustration, I stayed at my desk one afternoon until dusk came over Jerusalem. I turned my eyes to the open space around me and invited Dvora Baron to come and help me then and there. To my great amazement, she did. I could suddenly see her very clearly, leaning on the embroidered couch in her old apartment in Tel Aviv. When I asked her a question, she answered, as if we were having a real conversation. Our voices, hers to me and mine to her, came through loud and clear. Mind you, I hadn't lost my sanity. The year was 1990; Dvora Baron died in 1956, and I had never met her. It was absolutely clear to me that all this—the vision, the voices, the dialogue—was happening in fantasy. But isn't fantasy what writing is always about? One doesn't merely put marks on a blank piece of paper or strike a computer keyboard randomly. My sudden encounter with Dvora Baron was a blessing, and it unstuck my "writer's block." I found a way to write her biography, while discovering at first hand that writing a biography is a relational project. I can provide more details about what I view as my epiphany. That morning, I had been studying some of Baron's most important stories, those that depict the little girl Chana witnessing the slow demise of her father, the rabbi, from tuberculosis, and sharing the tragedy with her mother and siblings. In the stories, these things happened to a girl about 11 years...

Writing Biography as a Relationship Amia Lieblich (bio) Writing a biography is usually considered a combination of historical scholarship and literary art. The biographer needs to investigate the life of her protagonist in the context of her or his time and culture. From fractions of information that form a mass, the biographer forges a story, an image, a picture. The vivacity of the person emerging from the pages is a criterion of the biographer's writing talent, the coherence and breadth of the story a measure of her knowledge. These two elements are said to distinguish good biographical works from bad ones. In this short essay, I will describe how I learned that this conceptualization is severely insufficient, and how my understanding of the subject developed from my first biography, about Dvora Baron (Conversations with Dvora, 1997), to my second, about Lea Goldberg (Learning about Lea, 2003).1 In the late 1980s, like many feminist scholars, I became aware of the scarcity or near-absence—not only in Hebrew, but everywhere—of biographies about women, by women writers.2 I was motivated to enter the field and write about women in Hebrew literature. My initial approach was to accept the dual nature of biography as a cross between history and literature. Thus, when I began to study the life and work of Dvora Baron (1887-1956), considered the first modern Hebrew woman writer, I bravely planned to write a biography of this kind.3 I considered my academic background in psychology as a possible third resource, since, after all, telling a life is not only about facts but also about understanding the inner world and life of the woman—her personality, her traits and motives, her strengths and weaknesses, her pathology and her resilience. Having collected the many materials I would need, I sat quietly in my study at the Hebrew University during the summer of 1990 and felt completely stuck. Despite my experience as a writer and scholar, all my beginnings and plans seemed to lead me, over and over, to a dead end. I could not find my voice in telling Baron's story. Specifically, I saw many possible versions of this [End Page 206] life and could not make up my mind which of them was the "truth"—better, more accurate, more convincing. The biographers I had studied as models, most of them male, seemed so confident and sure of themselves when they said this or that about their heroes. Didn't they experience doubts and confusion? Is it possible to keep a variety of narratives in one biography, and how can this be realized artistically? In frustration, I stayed at my desk one afternoon until dusk came over Jerusalem. I turned my eyes to the open space around me and invited Dvora Baron to come and help me then and there. To my great amazement, she did. I could suddenly see her very clearly, leaning on the embroidered couch in her old apartment in Tel Aviv. When I asked her a question, she answered, as if we were having a real conversation. Our voices, hers to me and mine to her, came through loud and clear. Mind you, I hadn't lost my sanity. The year was 1990; Dvora Baron died in 1956, and I had never met her. It was absolutely clear to me that all this—the vision, the voices, the dialogue—was happening in fantasy. But isn't fantasy what writing is always about? One doesn't merely put marks on a blank piece of paper or strike a computer keyboard randomly. My sudden encounter with Dvora Baron was a blessing, and it unstuck my "writer's block." I found a way to write her biography, while discovering at first hand that writing a biography is a relational project. I can provide more details about what I view as my epiphany. That morning, I had been studying some of Baron's most important stories, those that depict the little girl Chana witnessing the slow demise of her father, the rabbi, from tuberculosis, and sharing the tragedy with her mother and siblings. In the stories, these things happened to a girl about 11 years...

RlNA LAPIDUS. Between Snow and Desert Heat: Russian Influences on Hebrew Literature, 1870-1970. Translated by Jonathan Chipman. !Monographs of Hebrew Union College 27. Detroit: Wayne State University Press [for] Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 225.REUVEN SHOHAM. Poetry and Prophecy: The Image of the Poet as a Prophet, a Hero and an Artist in Modern Hebrew Poetry. Brill's Series in .Jewish Studies 31. Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2003. Pp. xii + 357.The revival of the Hebrew language and the emergence of a range of genres of literature written in that language remain, along with the establishment of the state of Israel, among the great wonders of modern Jewish history. Modern Hebrew literature, like all bodies of literature, drew extensively on previously existing literary models. For modern Hebrew literature there were, essentially, two categories of models: the internal models found in the Bible and in postbiblical classical Jewish texts (which were mostly written in Hebrew) and the external models found in a 'whole range of Western literary texts. Kach of the monographs under review, written by Israeli scholars and recently published in English, focuses on one of those categories. Between Snow and DeJert Heat, by Rina Lapidus of Bar Ilan University, focuses on the ways that Russian literature provided a variety of models on which Hebrew writers drew in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth centu ry, while Poetry and Prophecy, by Reuven Shoham of University of Haifa and Oranim Academic College of Education of the Kibbutz !Movement, deals primarily with the ways that three major Hebrew poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries modeled themselves on the prophets of ancient Israel, and in a related manner on heroic images found in a variety of cultures throughout the history of humanity.Between Snow and DeJert Heat was ably translated by Jonathan Chipman; no translator is credited for Poetry and Prophecy. The latter work, unfortunately, suffers from a number of instances of awkward, grammatically incorrect phrasing that could have easily been corrected if the manuscript had been submitted to more careful copy editing. The publishers of these volumes, Hebrew Union College Press and Brill respectively, are to be commended for making available for English readers without knowledge of Hebrew otherwise inaccessible criticism on modern Hebrew literature by Israeli scholars.After a brief overview of the approaches of such well-known literary critics as Roland Barthes, Harold Bloom, Julia Kristeva, and others to the questions of how literary texts relate to those that have preceded them, Lapidus presents a series of nine largely self-contained chapterlong studies of the relationship of individual Hebrew writers to Russian culture and literature: Y. H. Brenner (1881-1921), Isaiah Bershadsky (1871-1908), Mendele Mokher Seforim (1835-1917), Y. D. Berkowitz (1885-1967), Hayyim Lensky (1905-42/43), Hayyim Hazaz (1898-1971, to 'whom she devotes two chapters), Saul Tchernichowsky (1875-1943), and Alexander Penn (1906-68).In most of the chapters, Lapidus undertakes a textual comparison of writings of a Hebrew writer and those of a Russian writer who, she argues, influenced the Hebrew writer. The majority of these chapters involve comparisons of works of fiction: two novels by Ivan Turgenev and Bershadsky's novel Ai.mleJj; satiric narrative works by Nikolai Gogol and those by A'lendele; Leo Tolstoy's trilogy Chishood, Boyhood, and Youth and Berkowitz 's autobiographical novel Chapters of Chishood: My Father'j HuMe; Tolstoy's War and Peace and Hazaz's Shmuel Frankfurter. The book also includes two chapters that explore the influence of a Russian poet on a Hebrew poet - that of JVlikhail Lermontov on the younger Tchernichowsky, and that of Sergei Ksenin on Penn. In each chapter, Lapidus makes clear that the works of these Hebrew writers were far from slavish imitations of the writing of the Russian authors who influenced them. …

Modern Hebrew literature emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in European centers of Jewish life, such as Berlin, Vilna, and Warsaw. Often considered as part of the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment), its various themes and genres were acutely attuned to historical change and may be understood in relation to the modernization of large segments of eastern and central Europe’s Jewish population. Early typical themes of the techiya (revival or renaissance) treated the evolving structure and tenor of traditional Jewish societies as they experienced the physical and psychological pressures of secularization. Hebrew writing often expressly addressed the tension between the individual and the community and the ethical bond between writer and nation while depicting the social and geographic upheavals in traditional Jewish life and the encounter of small-town values with the chaos and opportunity of cosmopolitan urban centers. These transformations were reflected in a new range of attitudes toward the body and the natural landscape as well as the worlds of secular learning and aesthetics. Though historically influential, this newly revived audience of Hebrew writers and readers was a minority, an educated elite constituting a literary republic that by the early 20th century stretched from London to New York to Jerusalem. Modern Hebrew belles lettres maintained a close if tense relation to the ancient Hebrew sources, including biblical texts and the two thousand–year gamut of legal and aphoristic writing in Hebrew. The presence of intertextual allusions to sacred texts in ostensibly “profane” genres, such as the lyric and prose fiction, made modern Hebrew literature a paradoxical amalgam both of the familiar and the new, pointing simultaneously toward an ancient, illustrious past, the uncertainties of the present, and the possibilities of the future. At the same time, Hebrew literature was also intensely shaped by aesthetic trends, such as romanticism, modernism, and the avant-garde. While always produced in relation to the languages of the surrounding host cultures, including Slavic tongues, German, Arabic, Ladino, and English, Hebrew has had a special relationship with Yiddish, which shares its orthography and many of its thematic and ideological preoccupations. With the advent of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine in the early 20th century, Hebrew became a spoken vernacular, a condition that influenced its literary production. The existence of normative literary groupings or generations, such as the moderna (modernism), Palmach, and state generation—all coexisting during a period of just several decades—indicates the tremendous velocity with which Hebrew literature has evolved since its early modern origins. In contemporary Israel, Hebrew writing is an increasingly multicultural endeavor, one that often reflects the cultural, political, and psychological tensions inhering in territorial sovereignty.

The complex relationship between space and modern Hebrew literature proceeds from key spatial paradigms of the Hebrew Bible: Egypt, the desert, and Zion. Over centuries, Jews dispersed around the globe used Hebrew to express different modes of spatial engagement: rabbis considered the places and placelessness of God; medieval Andalusian poets longed for Zion; communist Jews in Baghdad and Jewish polyglots in Odessa used Hebrew to narrate their relationship to places their families inhabited for generations; Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians, in an era when Hebrew is no longer the sole purview of Jews, share Hebrew to reflect on homeland and diaspora in poetry and prose. Though “space” is by no means a novel phenomenon, the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences offered scholars of Hebrew culture conceptual and theoretical tools for addressing the diverse spatial configurations they encountered. The theorization of space and place in literature emphasized their active role in social relations and called for new conceptualizations of the construction and subversion of identities. Works by Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Edward Said, Edward Soja, and Yi-Fu Tuan, among others, have undergirded investigations of space and place in modern Hebrew literature. Because most of the critical work on space in Hebrew literature addresses Hebrew texts from the twentieth century, this entry focuses on this period, though it also provides citations of scholarship analyzing biblical, rabbinic, Andalusian, and Haskalah texts. The citations mostly refer to literary texts but also include spatial analyses in cultural studies and history contexts. While many of the texts cited address the nation and territory or, alternatively, spatial paradigms that coalesce in resistance to the national, others investigate spatial paradigms in Hebrew that circumvent the national to consider fluid spatialities such as diaspora, migration, transnationalism, and travel, as well as historical spatial configurations that exist as memories, dreams, or specters. The preponderance of concrete investigations of specific places such as the city, the desert, and the kibbutz indicates the materiality of much of Hebrew literary spatiality. As the final section on modernity demonstrates, the spatial has opened fruitful avenues of inquiry within the existing historical discourse on Hebrew culture. There is, inevitably, some overlap in these categories: entries under The City, for example, might feel at home under Modernism and Place, while the line demarcating Borders and Beyond is appropriately penetrable, bleeding into Spatialities of Center and Margins. Finally, this entry should by no means be taken to represent all the scholarship on space in modern Hebrew literature, but rather to provide a sense of significant contributions and recent research.

The Phonetic Representation of Spoken Language in Modern Hebrew Literature – Written language normatively transmits the full graphic pattern of a word without deviating from the spelling rules of a particular language. However, when graphic signs are intended to represent the spoken language used in natural conversation, the question of the phonetic imitation of spoken language in written texts arises. The present article deals with the position of spoken language in Hebrew narrative fiction and drama, and the modes of its representation from 1948 on, including both original Hebrew works and those translated from English into Hebrew. This issue is discussed against the background of such relevant broader issues as: the special situation of Hebrew, which had long been used as a written language only, devoid of the varied functions of spoken language; linguistic-stylistic norms in Hebrew literature from 1948 on and the changes they underwent; Hebrew writers' and translators' awareness of the principles of spoken language in general, and those of the Hebrew vernacular in particular; differences in dialogue formation between various literary sub-systems: drama as distinct from narrative fiction and original literature as distinct from translated literature, including some cross-sections of both. The issues are discussed from both the synchronic and diachronic points of view.

Reviewed by: Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance Esther Fuchs Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance, by Sheila E. Jelen. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. 240 pp. $24.95. [End Page 213] Dvora Baron may not have been the first Hebrew woman prose fiction writer, as critics often present her, but as the only woman author of the Techiya—or Hebrew Renaissance—to have attained canonic stature she invites and deserves a serious critical examination of her life and poetic art. Though she has recently become the focus of critical attention, and though much of her work has recently been made available to English readers, Dvora Baron's oeuvre and life have hardly been explored in detail. This is what Sheila E. Jelen sets out to do in the present volume. She seeks to go beyond the biographical and literary readings by, among others, Nurit Govrin, Amia Lieblich, Orly Lubin, and Naomi Seidman, in an effort to create a synthesis between the two—a literary biography as it were—and to elucidate, with sufficient attention to historical context, Baron's artistic accomplishment and cultural contribution to Hebrew letters. Jelen succeeds, in my mind, in reversing the critique of Baron's puzzling literary as well as life choices in such a way as to highlight them as expressions of a creative genius. Despite her canonic status, Baron remained by and large a puzzle—due to her gender, her life style, and the literary genres she adopted. The emergence of a woman write r from the segregated Jewish educational context of both traditional and Haskalah contexts was an anomaly, and some of Baron's writing has been considered as simple biographical and ethnographic transcriptions. Sheila Jelen's reading of Baron's work and biography reverses the critical reservations, and suggests that rather than manifestations of narrowness and limitations, Baron's "intimations of difference" reflect artistic genius and originality. For the most part, I find her presentation of Baron as both insider and outsider in her literary generation convincing, coherent, and impressive. Baron's difference from other Techiya authors, as a rabbi's daughter in the company of rabbis' sons, as a writer of the European shtetl among writers of the new Yishuv, as an isolate amid the tumultuous life of the Zionist community of Palestine in the 1930s–1950s, is conceptualized here as a challenge, a triumph, and a sophisticated and intentional manipulation by the author who insisted on her artistic independence, thus offering a critique of the conventions, imperatives, and prescriptions of her literary generation. Thus, according to Jelen, Baron both accepted and rejected the "autobiographical imperative": by planting autobiographical references throughout her work and fictionalizing both personal events and relatives, she seems to adhere to this Renaissance convention, but at the same time, she departs sharply from the collective autobiography of the male Yeshiva student struggling to become secular and modern and in the process becoming a talush—socially uprooted and alienated from both cultures. Instead of creating a female tlushah, Baron preferred to deal with the theme of tlishut or alienation by constructing a gallery of uprooted female narrators, like the Rabbi's daughter, or the displaced [End Page 214] European women of the new Yishuv. Jelen argues that these narrators are both characters in the story and the controllers of the narrative, they are both unwilling to leave the shtetl entirely behind, yet seem unable to return. Baron both accepted and subverted the "mimetic imperative" or realism, but combined her narrator's voice with a photographic idiom. By introducing the photographic medium she draws the readers' attention to the mediated nature of literary perception. Baron subverted the "vernacular imperative"—the required creation of a dialogical, "spoken" Hebrew—by adopting the language of men, or using biblical and rabbinic texts to describe the struggles of simple illiterate women. While she uses a biblical idiom in some of her work, in others she challenges the "intertextual imperative"—or the convention that required authors' Hebrew allusions to classic texts—by alluding instead to women's traditional texts, as the Tkhines, devotional prayers in Yiddish, or the Tsenerene, Yiddish retellings of biblical stories. Jelen...

Reviewed by: A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity by Yitzhak Lewis Alexandra Mandelbaum Kupeev Yitzhak Lewis. A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 242 pp. Many studies have been conducted on Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav (1772–1810), and the stories he told. The book before us is significant for clarifying an important perspective on R. Naḥman, which has not yet been explored in scholarship and research: R. Naḥman as part of modern Hebrew literature. In this book, Yitzhak Lewis discusses modern Hebrew literature in detail, including its various definitions and characterizations, as well as the notion of modernity in general, which at times implies a historical awareness of renewal and at other times indicates a rupture from the Old World. Yet the most important task of the book is to establish the correct place of R. Naḥman in his time, a crucial task that recognizes that a person does not only interpret his reality but is also an inherent part of it. Although R. Naḥman was critical of the cultural processes taking place in eastern Europe in his time, Lewis shows that R. Naḥman played an integral role in these changes as well, in his own way. Departure is a recurring theme throughout the book. Modernity as a movement of departure is both an ideological and aesthetic decision, according to the author. Like many others, R. Naḥman participated actively in shaping the rift of modernity as an act of departure. It is important to consider that modern Hebrew literature was influenced not only by Enlightenment ideas from the West, but also by local national movements. While it is difficult to argue that R. Naḥman was well versed in all of these, this was the prevailing mindset of his time. According to Lewis, it is incorrect to regard R. Naḥman’s thought as a “tradition.” In fact, R. Naḥman himself took a central part in modernity, even when observing it from the outside. Lewis argues that R. Naḥman created a theology of “in between,” or alternatively, a theology of “the edge.” He stresses that R. Naḥman is not an “example” of modernity or revival, and treads carefully between the desire to position R. Naḥman in a modern framework and the danger of framing him anachronistically or romantically. What I find the most interesting aspect of A Permanent Beginning is how Lewis accurately describes the crisis of modernity not only specifically as a content issue but also as a crisis of language. It is the means of representation that change, and the person remains in the existential condition of being detached. This crisis is not only an ideological crisis; it is primarily an aesthetic crisis. It is thus impossible to address the question of R. Naḥman and modernity without referring to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. This is why a dichotomy between Hebrew and Yiddish may overlook the ways in which both the revival of Hebrew and the Yiddishist movement are important players in the board game of modernity. Lewis is careful not to place R. Naḥman at the beginning of Hebrew literature (as some scholars do) but he also does not rush into declaring R. Naḥman a Yiddish author. Even in the matter of language, R. Naḥman remains stranded. It is interesting to consider R. Naḥman’s request that a book of sipurei maʿasiyot (fairy tales) be printed in both Hebrew and Yiddish. This request was not motivated by one decision or the other, but rather stemmed from the complex and rich nature of his situation between the two worlds. [End Page 222] Here, I believe it would have been appropriate to extend this discussion on R. Naḥman’s stories to two additional topics: visions and dreams (they are included in Zvi Mark’s book All the Stories of R. Nachman of Breslav), and a consideration of his teachings. The latter appear in different contexts, such as the important discussion regarding the word beḥinah that Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav often uses in...