AMOSOZ
17
of the day you could see - until a few years ago - the John Donne of
Hebrew poetry and the Lord Byron of Hebrew poetry, and the Walt
Whitman and the T.S. Eliot sitting together by the same table with
the local Allen Ginsberg, all of them alive (and kicking hard), all of
them on speaking terms or rather on screaming terms with each
other. It is a result of the fact that literary developments which
occurred in English and in other European literary traditions over
centuries took place within decades in Hebrew.
Modern Hebrew has several things in common with Elizabethan
English: our language is still like melting lava, an erupting volcano;
it's bubbling still with steam and with fumes and with fury . A poet or
a writer of modern Hebrew is still in a position to "legislate" within
the language to force or to seduce the language into "having it his
way." I dare say that, by comparison, modern English is a
respectable elderly lady with whom you do not dare to take liberties
so easily (admittedly Faulkner and Joyce and some other mad
Irishmen did just that to English , and did it all the way) .
But Hebrew nevertheless seems to encourage such practices.
She still is a lady of easy virtue.
Incidentally, by comparing modern Hebrew to Elizabethan
English I'm not suggesting, of course, that each and every contem–
porary Hebrew writer is a William Shakespeare (of those we only
have about half a dozen) .
But I'm making the wrong point altogether-the easier one.
Because the truth is that despite some striking similarities, and
despite strong influences from East and West European literatures,
the basic context of Hebrew literature has always been Hebrew, and
Jewish, and recently , Zionist. Which makes my task much harder
than it could have been if I thought that the context is basically
European. As I said, modern Hebrew literature happens to be in my
view much more than just an extension, a replica, or a "province" of
other literatures with which one may be more familiar.
Perhaps I could start with the madmen; talk about the
desperados - those Hebrew poets and writers who emerged from the
ghettos of Eastern Europe at the turn of the century: Mendele and
Berdichevsky, Bialik and Brenner and Gnessin - figures of "The
Great Generation ." I refer to them as madmen and desperados
because they were writing in Hebrew for a hardly existing audience,
with hardly any hopes for future generations of readers . For many
years they wrote in Hebrew to be read mainly by their fellow
Hebrew writers and by very few others . Some of them died without
