Sanctuary in the Wilderness

A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry

Alan Mintz

• Editorial: Stanford University Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780804779104
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Jüdische Literaturkritik

The effort to create a serious Hebrew literature in the United States in the years around World War I is one of the best kept secrets of American Jewish history. Hebrew had been revived as a modern literary language in nineteenth-century Russia and then taken to Palestine as part of the Zionist revolution. But the overwhelming majority of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe settled in America, and a passionate kernel among them believed that Hebrew provided the vehicle for modernizing the Jewish people while maintaining their connection to Zion. These American Hebraists created schools, journals, newspapers, and, most of all, a high literary culture focused on producing poetry. Sanctuary in the Wilderness is a critical introduction to American Hebrew poetry, focusing on a dozen key poets. This secular poetry began with a preoccupation with the situation of the individual in a disenchanted world and then moved outward to engage American vistas and Jewish fate and hope in midcentury. American Hebrew poets hoped to be read in both Palestine and America, but were disappointed on both scores. Several moved to Israel and connected with the vital literary scene there, but most stayed and persisted in the cause of American Hebraism.

Part I

The Hebraist World

One	Hebrew Knights in a New Land

I present two brief collective portraits of the American Hebraists from two different periods to introduce the subject of this study.

The first comes from the pen of Zalman Shazar, a historian and man of letters who became Israel’s third president. On his first visit to America in the early 1930s, he made a surprising discovery: a band of Hebrew poets about whose existence he had known nothing.

They were not exactly a group because they were not joined together but rather a scattering of proud and lonely individual writers who seemed to be prophesizing to themselves. In their isolated nobility, they attached themselves only to the intangible and absolute in the national spirit. They had complete mastery over the Hebrew language in all its depth and vitality as if they lived in the Land of Israel, and they were utterly unreconciled and even oblivious to the surroundings in which they actually lived. In their loneliness, there was the sadness of being the chosen few, and in their sadness there was a marked but unexpressed pride. Just as they were alienated from their surroundings, so were they also separated from each other “like the fixed stars in the firmament.” Most of them were scattered among various cities, a few here and a few there, as if no single Jewish community in America could handle them as a group. They appeared like a phalanx of knights loyal to the Hebrew language whose pride forbad them both from admitting the least hint of their difficulties to a Jew from Palestine and from paying the least heed to the seductions of English. [. . .] In this conscious renunciation of popular attention there was something of the self-gratification that proud artists allow themselves, something of the feeling of superiority enjoyed by monks offering obeisance to a Hebrew Princess and serving her with no expectation of reward either in this world or in the world to come, either in the Diaspora or in the Land of Israel.¹

Shazar describes the American Hebrew poets with the rapt fascination of an ethnologist who has discovered a hitherto unknown tribe. The very fact that their existence was a surprise to a man like Shazar, the editor of the Histadrut’s newspaper Davar and the editor-in-chief of Am Oved, is itself a revealing instantiation of the double marginalization of the American Hebrew poets. It is understandable they would go unacknowledged at home by a Jewry rushing to Americanize and leaving Jewish languages behind. But that their existence should have been hidden to the intelligentsia of the Yishuv (the organized Zionist settlement in Palestine) and its Hebrew literary establishment is less accountable and, for the poets themselves at the time, more dispiriting. Shazar perceptively suggests that their broad streak of pride was a reaction formation to the pain induced by this deep isolation. To a representative of the Yishuv, they would never have let on how they suffered, no more than they would to the boorish representatives of American Jewry among whom they worked and lived. They saw them-selves—again Shazar’s eye proves true—as members of a secret society who served a higher authority, and their confidence in their high calling was enough to shield them from the ignominy of being ignored.

I take the second introductory picture, with the reader’s indulgence, from the realm of my own experience some thirty years later. I was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, and given a supplemental Jewish education in the Hebrew school of Congregation Beth Israel. In the elementary grades, the curriculum for our studies was prescribed by a central bureau of Jewish education in Boston. During four years of high school, we were directly enrolled in the Prozdor division of the Boston Hebrew Teachers College (now called the Hebrew College); we were taught the course materials by our teachers in Worcester—five two-hour sessions per week—and then examined at the end of the year by tests sent from Boston. My recollection from this experience was less of the texts we studied than of the personalities of our instructors. By far the most distinguished personage in Boston, where we students from Worcester visited occasionally, was the College’s president, the remote and aristocratic Eisig Silberschlag. Handsome and dapper despite his age, Silberschlag was known to us as a disciple of the rebellious poet Saul Tchernichovsky and as the eminent translator of Aristophanes’ comedies into Hebrew. We had little idea at the time that he was a remarkable lyric Hebrew poet with a broad erotic streak and a jaundiced eye for social satire. Of the teachers with whom we had everyday contact, some were scholars who published learned articles in Hebrew, and others were simply dedicated pedagogues.

What was common to all was a passionate and steadfast devotion to the Hebrew language. This was not merely a principled commitment but something on the order of a fierce and burning idée fixe that made Hebrew into the cornerstone of national and personal existence. These Hebraist teachers seemed old to us, and few were American; and although their monomania had the force to inspire awe, they often seemed to us alien and obsessed. We were American students in the 1960s, and the changes that were roiling our world seemed unrelated to the one thing that was all-consuming for our teachers, who, in turn, must have viewed us as distracted and unserious. The sovereignty of Hebrew had the curious effect of reordering other priorities. To our teachers, whether you were a believer and observed the commandments was far less important than the depth of your Hebrew literacy. About Israel and the imperative to make aliyah, there was much confusion and unspoken ambivalence. It goes without saying that the American Hebraists were enthralled by the creation of the state of Israel; the map of the new state, as well as all the crooked alleyways of Jerusalem, was etched in their brains, even if they had visited only briefly or had never been there at all. Yet, to them, Israel was only a manifestation of the great national Hebrew ideal; this was an ideal that remained larger than the state and enfolded within it the “pioneering” educational work (in the nationalist sense, ḥalutsiyyut) that they themselves were carrying out.

In our eyes, the fine madness of our teachers seemed curious, eccentric, and out of touch. When it came to Hebrew, everything that seemed vital and attractive to us at the time came from Israel: the latest songs, the folk dances, slang and the ring of real speech, and even the new poetry, which eschewed florid classical diction for the lilt of a conversational register. So it was not surprising that when we moved on in life and looked back at this chapter in our education, though grateful for a firm grounding in Hebrew, we viewed our Hebraist teachers under the aspect of a benign dottiness and thought little more about them. In my case, that changed only many years later when, after a tortuous educational path, I found myself teaching Hebrew language and literature in a number of American universities. Experiencing the exhilaration and frustration of my job, I began to ask myself fundamental questions about what it means to teach Hebrew in America, to speak Hebrew in America, and generally to be involved with Hebrew as an American in relation to Israeli colleagues both here and in Israel. I was exercised by the deficient state of Hebrew knowledge not only among my students but also among supposedly literate Jewish professionals and by the general sense in the community that all essential Jewish knowledge can be conveyed in English.

In seeking answers to these questions, I sought out writers and thinkers from the earlier decades of the twentieth century who had also struggled with the mission of teaching Hebrew in an indifferent American environment. Even though I had known something about the manifold expressions of the tarbut ‘ivrit [Hebrew culture] idea in America, I had filed away this knowledge together with the memories of the quaint fanatics who had taught me in high school. Yet, suddenly there unrolled before my eyes a vast and vigorous drama of many dozens of poets and writers and educational revolutionaries who had attempted to foment an ambitious Hebrew cultural program for American Jewry. I quickly realized that the aging eccentrics I met in the 1960s looked quite different thirty years earlier, when they had indeed resembled the romantic knights serving the Hebrew Princess whom Shazar had observed on his visit to America. I and my fellow students had had no idea that the tattered tail we had experienced belonged to a once vigorous beast. To corral and describe that beast is the goal of this study.

Any discussion of Hebrew in America must begin by locating itself in reference to Christian Hebraism, which was responsible for the knowledge of Hebrew becoming a necessary attainment for the elite of Protestant clergy in the colonial period. The fact that Hebrew was the original language of the Bible counted for a great deal in a post-Reformation world in which that sacred text was regarded as the sole source of God’s word. Moreover, as the language of Creation and as the tongue from which all others must therefore have been derived, Hebrew was accorded the power to explain the origins of peoples; it even led to a proposed linkage between the Jews and Native Americans, which, as will be observed later on, was a connection fertile to Hebrew poets in the twentieth century. The young men of Harvard College through its first century were required to learn Hebrew along with Greek and Latin. In the first half of the eighteenth century, they were instructed by one Judah Monis, who was born in 1683 in Italy into a family of Portuguese conversos and eventually became the first full-time instructor of Hebrew in 1722. Monis was the author of the first Hebrew textbook in the Americas, A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue (1735). The price of his appointment to the Harvard faculty was his conversion to Christianity, and this requirement illustrates the fact that there was no connection between the prestige of Hebrew and sympathy for the Jews as Jews. “Some Christian Humanists,” writes Shalom Goldman, “though they demonstrated the ‘Christian Truth’ through their study of Hebrew, were most vocal and active in their anti-Judaism.”² Thus, quite apart from being a language employed by living Jews, Hebrew has been taught in Christian seminaries from the earliest European settlement until today. It forms a separate branch of Hebrew in America that Arnold Band has aptly called Divinity School Hebrew.³

As for the Jews themselves, there were no more than fifteen hundred of them in the thirteen colonies, and their use of Hebrew was reserved for the synagogue and home rituals. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Jews arriving from German-speaking lands were accompanied by rabbis trained in Reform seminaries. Later in that century, with the beginnings of mass immigration from Eastern Europe, a trickle of maskilim began to arrive in America. These were writers and men of letters who identified with the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement that had begun in Berlin in the eighteenth century and then moved eastward into Russia. As part of a broad program for the modernization of Jewish life, the maskilim took Hebrew from being a medium of religious scholarship and made it into a modern literary language for use in belles lettres (lyric, epic, and dramatic genres, and the novel), as well as in social criticism and satire. Just like the masses of non-literary immigrants, the maskilim came in hopes of a better life, and this they most assuredly did not find. Hebrew journals, which were their natural medium, were slow to take root in America, and the maskilim were accorded no honor by their fellow immigrants, who were absorbed in the struggle for economic survival and remained indifferent to Hebrew culture. Some of these writers were far from being unknown commodities when they came to America. Naftali Herz Imber (1856–1909), whose poem “Hatikvah” became the anthem of the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel, came to the United States in 1887 after living for extensive periods in Palestine and London and publishing several collections of poetry. He floundered in America, and despite writing for the Yiddish press, he remained sunk in poverty and alcoholism. He died in New York, known principally at the end of his life for his love of the bottle and his embittered, scabrous witticisms. When he arrived in America in 1892, Menachem Mendel Dolitsky (1856–1931) was perhaps the best known poet of Hibbat Zion, the romantic proto-Zionist movement that arose following the pogroms of 1881 in Russia. (His lyric “Tsiyyon tamati, tsiyyon ḥemdati” is still sung today.) He too was resentful and abject over the absence of recognition and income; he was forced to resort to what these proud Hebrew maskilim regarded as a form of prostitution: writing serialized sensationalist novels [shund] in Yiddish. Living much longer than Imber, he spent forty years of wandering and unhappiness in America before dying and being buried in Los Angeles. This was also the fate of Yitzhak Rabinowitz, a Haskalah poet who was born in Kovno in 1846 and arrived in America in 1893. This disciple of Avraham Mapu and friend of Y. L. Gordon, who come to America with several published volumes of Hebrew verse to his credit, was unrecognized when he died seven years after his immigration.

There is one figure among this company who seems not to have been miserable—Gershon Rosenzweig (1861–1914). He was singular in a number of other ways as well. He came to America somewhat earlier (1888); he began his literary work only after leaving Europe; he supported himself through various shops and businesses; and, most importantly, he had a sense of humor. He was a poet, among other things, and his Shirim, meshalim umikhtamim [Poems, fables, and epigrams] appeared in 1898. But his genius lay in satire and parody, genres with a rich tradition in Haskalah literature. He conceived a series of talmudic parodies, complete with mishnah and gemara, on different aspects of immigrant Jewish life, under the general title ‘Amireiqa. At first glance, ‘Amireiqa simply looks like a variant spelling of America; but when pronounced carefully, the title turns out to be two words run together: ‘ami [my people] and reiqa [empty, boorish]. Rosenzweig was the kind of parodist whose humor is prankish and bemused rather than saturnine and caustic. As in the case of many satirists, his depiction of human foibles implied the existence of an ideal against which imperfections were judged, and this basic optimism underlies his work. His talmudic satires were collected in Talmud yanqi [Yankee Talmud] (1898). The same year he published a pamphlet containing his Hebrew translations of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Rosenzweig can truly be said to be an American original, and his work deserves to be better known.⁴

Maskilic Hebraist activity continued into the first decade of the new century. There were dozens of periodicals in which poetry, essays, and learned discourses were published. (The maskilim also published in Hebrew in the Yiddish press.) Many were one-man operations with irregular publication schedules and content of very uneven quality. The two most important and most sustained efforts were Ha‘ivri, which was edited by Rosenzweig, and Zeev Schor’s Hapisgah.⁵ Other avenues of maskilic engagement that emerged at this time were associations and committees to advance the knowledge of Hebrew and disseminate its literature. A New York group, founded in 1903, was called Mefitsei Sefat Ever (Sefat Ever is a classical locution for the Hebrew language). Around this time, there were approximately twenty Hebrew clubs and societies not only in New York but also in Chicago, Montreal, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, as well as in Kansas City, Missouri, Bayonne, New Jersey, and San Antonio, Texas.⁶

In the decade before World War I, this scene was transformed by the arrival in America of young people who brought with them very different notions about what Hebrew literature should be. They were part of a second wave of mass i...