18
PARTISAN REVIEW
ever dreaming that their works would be taught in schools, that
streets and kibbutzim would be named after them, and that they
would even get as far as having their names remembered .
In fact, at least some of them felt that they were the very end of
Hebrew. They regarded themselves - at least some of them did - as
authors of a tragic epilogue for an ancient drama which opened
millennia earlier and was now, as they saw it, dying in the gutters.
So why didn't they simply quit? They were, after all, excellent
writers . All of them could easily write in Yiddish, which at the time
was still the language of millions and which, incidentally, was the
native tongue of them all. Some of them could have gone very far in
this world by switching to Russian, or German, with which they
were at home. Who, at the turn of the century, really cared to read
Hebrew? Whom did they have in mind?
I have to admit that to me it is still a mystery .
Actually, rather than solve it, I'm going to further complicate it.
Bialik and Brenner and Berdichevsky and the others knew only too
well that there are millions of Jews in the world who could read
Hebrew but would only read it in their holy books and not - Heaven
forbid, perish the thought-in secular books . While at the same time
there were already more and more Jews ready and eager to read
stories and poems, but who would rather read them in Russian or
German or Polish. So for whom did those members of the Great
Generation write their Hebrew, whom did they have in mind?
All this is extremely relevant to our subject, as I happen to
believe that at least a touch of the very same madness and of the very
same despair is still there in every significant contemporary Hebrew
work. Just as it is still secretly feeding the true Zionism (not the
distorted one, though : I refer to despair and madness as opposed to
insanity and fanaticism).
So we begin with Smolenskin perhaps, or with Mendele, who
struggled to compose mimetic Hebrew prose
a
la
Charles Dickens or
a
la
Balzac and Victor Hugo, many years before any man in the
world had ever said to a woman "I love you" in Hebrew? (By the
way, our problems in writing mimetic Hebrew prose nowadays are
not as far from theirs as one might have thought.)
Or do I start with Bialik, who loved and who hated and demol–
ished and who at the same time preserved and reconstructed
in his
Hebrew verse
a Jewish world which in his days was still alive (in
Yiddish) and still creative and vivacious (in Yiddish) and still blos–
soming (in Yiddish) with its last pulses of vigor? Why did Bialik, and
