Zionism and Melancholy

The Short Life of Israel Zarchi

Nitzan Lebovic

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253041838
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Nitzan Lebovic claims that political melancholy is the defining trait of a generation of Israelis born between the 1960s and 1990s. This cohort came of age during wars, occupation and intifada, cultural conflict, and the failure of the Oslo Accords. The atmosphere of militarism and conservative state politics left little room for democratic opposition or dissent. Lebovic and others depict the failure to respond not only as a result of institutional pressure but as the effect of a long-lasting "left-wing melancholy." In order to understand its grip on Israeli society, Lebovic turns to the novels and short stories of Israel Zarchi. For him, Zarchi aptly describes the gap between the utopian hope present in Zionism since its early days and the melancholic reality of the present. Through personal engagement with Zarchi, Lebovic develops a philosophy of melancholy and shows how it pervades Israeli society.

1

THE HISTORY OF A FAILURE

1. Background

Writing about the forgotten requires justification of either a long-lost history or of my own work in the present. Hebrew culture forgot Israel Zarchi and erased his name from its pages. The reason for this neglect was that his historical novels did not fit with “our customary mode of thought” and developed a “conception of history that avoids any complicity with the concept of history” to which later generations adhered.¹ Zarchi is mentioned very little in Hebrew literature, as revealed by a search from the early narratives of Avraham Shaanan, Shalom Kremer, Baruch Kurzweil, Dov Sadan, and Gershon Shaked through the corpus of Dan Miron’s analyses and up to the essays of Avner Holtzman, Mikhal Dekel, Dan Laor, Nurit Govrin, Benjamin Harshav, Eric Zakim, and, most recently, Shai Ginsburg and Shachar Pinsker. Govrin is the only one who has discussed him in any way systematically, but even her short encyclopedic review presents Zarchi more as a representative of a certain cultural stance than as the creator of a significant body of work.² The root of the forgetfulness is embedded in the late 1940s context, and, beyond it, in the crystallization of a new discourse during the 1960s. Two landmark events in those decades—the war of independence (1948) and the Six Days War (1967)—shaped a narrative of redemption whose dark side swallowed Israel Zarchi.

Zarchi was lost in these historical narratives despite a relatively fertile body of work—six novels, a few collections of short stories, and three key translations (including a canonical rendering of Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas)—and close relationships with the best-known intellectuals of his generation: Shai Agnon, H. N. Bialik, Dov Sadan, Shin Shalom, Yaakov Fichman, Aaron Abraham Kabak, Yaakov Orland, Joseph Klausner, Asher Barash, and others. Yet his name is not mentioned in the social and intellectual histories of the yishuv written by Anita Shapira, Hillel Weiss, Shlomo Avineri, and Derek Penslar—to give just a few examples. He is not even mentioned in the counterhistories of Hannan Hever, Idith Zertal, Hamutal Tsamir, Yehouda Shenhav, and Michael Gluzman. Zarchi’s name disappeared from the pages of history even though Unsown Land, his most celebrated novel, was a finalist for the Ussishkin Prize and won the prestigious Jerusalem Prize in 1947, the year of his death. The oblivion surrounding his name makes it difficult to analyze his appeal as a writer, yet it also opens up a new way of reading his works, of seeing them as examples of what I call here a Zionist melancholy of the left.

Zarchi was forgotten because his later writing, although better in literary terms, did not fit with the yishuv’s idealist self-image nor with how the Israeli state would in due course want to remember the yishuv. The earlier writing, though, exhibited a style that was much closer to the language of the time in which it appeared. Before his immigration to Palestine, Zarchi wrote short stories that were dedicated to the Zionist dream, their tone passionate, idealistic, and explicitly messianic. In one story titled “The Leader of Israel,” which Zarchi presented to a childhood friend named Yishayahu Graizer, he tells of young students at an Orthodox religious school who break away to join a group of secular students dreaming of a return to Zion and the revival of Hebrew, the ancient language of the Torah. Uniting students from different backgrounds is their shared hope for a messianic redemption in Palestine, led by the vision of Theodor Herzl—“our great leader,” as the early Zionist activist is described in this story. From an Orthodox tract about abandoning the old messiah, the story shifts to the coming of the new messiah: “His name is Theodor Herzl, and he lives in Vienna. . . . We must also become worthy of our leader. We must revive the language of our forefathers.”³ The boys embark on a utopian mission: “Ideas had united them in an indissoluble chain. And so the boys began to study Hebrew, reading books about Zion. . . . They remained uniformly and unflinchingly faithful to their idea.” The mission ends with the death of the great leader and the transformation of the messianic creed into a national, secularized promise: “Though our leader has died, our ideal remains eternal, and we will serve it. . . . Yes, we will serve our idea as long as we have strength.” Such short stories did not amount to much in literary terms, and Zarchi never published them. Indeed, the published work drives the process of transformation in the exact opposite direction to this authoritative Zionist rhetoric. Yet a certain messianic thread survived in the later published work, in spite of its turnabout.

In Palestine, Zarchi took a job paving roads for the Zionist construction company Solel Boneh, then worked as a laborer in different settlements and at Kibbutz Giv’at HaShlosha. Paging through his diaries, one finds dried flowers he gathered alongside quotations from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Gottfried Keller, Rainer Maria Rilke, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad. He spoke a new language, one that undoubtedly drove his writing from a high European style to something far more modern. The change seems to have been carefully considered: Hebrew, as his early diaries show, felt like the language of the future; Arabic was ignored as if irrelevant, and it is only later, during the early 1940s, that an ancient and more traditional Hebraic formulation seeps into his writing. Reviving an old register of Yemenite traditional Hebrew questioned, in turn, the fundamental assumptions of Zarchi’s early writing or the explicit Zionist tone of his texts. If the Zionist notion of “revival” required a movement from an ideal to realization, language to nation, Zarchi’s end point questioned the very conditions of possibility required for the process; an old, Yemenite, traditionalist, mythical, allegorical Hebrew negated the secularist telos of Zionist claims and what Benjamin Harshav called “a revival not only of the Hebrew language but also of Hebrew culture and a Hebrew society.”⁴

The shift in tone was not the only change reflected in the diaries. Early entries, like the story quoted above, describe a man constructing a world around the idea of a secularized and subjective redemption—the redemption of the land through work, the redemption of the soul through love, the redemption of mankind via a new anthropology. The “new men,” the Zionist pioneers, reshaped their language to better describe their territory and a national collectivity while embracing a new subjectivity; they combined “knowledge of the land, a hatred of the Diaspora, a native sense of supremacy, a fierce Zionist idealism, and Hebrew as their mother language.”⁵ As Shai Ginsburg wrote recently, in a reflection on the modern and idealist style that Bialik—the national poet—introduced into Hebrew, “At the core of Bialik’s [linguistic] transpositions lies a new aesthetics that aims to produce a new bodily experience and, more than that, a new subjectivity.”⁶ Zarchi’s early novels built on Bialik’s linguistic reforms, citing him and the other reformers of the Hebrew language while ignoring the telos of it all. Language and personality, text and character were the same for him; when Zarchi wanted to understand a person, he would sit at her side and question her without looking beyond her shoulder. When he wanted to write about a person, he considered himself his mouth and mind. Writing was a direct and unmediated act of sharing with his reader his own empathic impressions and those of his fictional creations, whom he often constructed from traits and linguistic formulations he heard around him and memorized or documented in his diaries. For example, his last novel, Shiloh Village, concerned the Yemenite emigration to Palestine, and his research for the novel included a series of interviews with the elders of this first aliyah; their voices and turns of phrase, recorded by Zarchi, emerge, often verbatim, from the lips of the book’s fictional figures and contrast directly with the Zionist and secular story of national redemption or the “new man.”⁷

Zarchi’s strange fit with Zionist ideals and their realization can be seen in his relationship between labor and writing. Ironically, farming and other manual labor broke Zarchi’s body.⁸ Literature, as he reported, revived his body and soul even when it did not find an audience and even when the spiritual search ended in utter exhaustion and mental crisis. Long periods of asceticism appear in his journals, love and sex vanish from his life (at one point, for two years), and he pays little attention to what most consider necessities or the facts of life. His close friends described a man who was warm but difficult, and his correspondents complained time and again about his “absence,” “distance,” or “foggy look.” The man, some of his lovers complained, was simply “not there.”⁹

Zarchi’s melancholic literature did not fit with the conventions of the time. As Mikhal Dekel showed, the literary conventions of the early yishuv were often those of tragedy rather than melancholy. The tragic mode fit the Zionist ideology of the time, lending it an identity both modern and premodern and ensuring that volunteerism remained ambiguous.¹⁰ But Dekel’s thesis—accurate in the context of the yishuv literature—applies poorly to Zarchi’s melancholy. Although an avid reader of the tragic mode, Zarchi chose a noncathartic tone of ambivalence in his narratives, political affiliations, and personal life. After his immigration to Palestine, Zarchi never endorsed a political movement, party, or leader. In contrast to his friends—the poet Yaakov Orland comes to mind—or his teachers, such as Yosef Haim Brenner and Bialik, he was not looking for a way to integrate into the political or cultural elite, and his melancholy was not balanced by public action. In contrast to other writers, Zarchi did not endow his characters with tragic flaws, such as hubris. His characters do not rise and fall; they simply fall—from the very first sentence. Finally, also in contrast to Agnon, he made no effort to find a midpoint between the old and the new yishuv, sticking with the presettlement period, before the yishuv achieved its more established form.¹¹

2. The Idealist-Revolutionary Ethos

Zarchi identified with the ideological rhetoric of members of the second and third aliyah—the waves of immigration to Palestine that took place between 1904 and 1914 and between 1919 and 1924. Those immigrants arrived from eastern Europe with the idea of occupying the Holy Land, realizing the socialist ethos, and bringing about the revival of Hebrew. The idealist mission, as historians and linguists have shown, is tied inherently to the revolutionary German-Russian philosophy that the pioneers imported and integrated into revivalist literature and history.¹²

The arrivals from Europe reflected a cultural and a political transformation. As historian Anita Shapira wrote, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a change occurred; it was brought about by a new generation of young Zionist activists who reacted to the persecution of Jews in the Diaspora:

This [Zionist] leadership was not blessed with religious erudition, or economic status, or ties to the authorities, [but it possessed] remarkable language skills, saw itself as responsible for the fate of the nation, and produced a new ideology of change. It belonged to the lower middle class, a moderately educated group that maintained an affinity with traditional Jewish culture but added a worldview and mindset derived from nineteenth-century European thought. Such is a portrait of the leadership of the Hibat Zion movement. . . . To this was added a sense of injustice and the need to overcome it, which came naturally to those settlers. . . . Aspiring toward an exemplary society, based on the morals of the prophets and the leading European humanistic cultural values, was a dominant feature of the Zionist movement from its outset.¹³

The young Zi...