AMOSOZ
19
how could he, along with all the others, try to preserve this Yiddish
world in Hebrew? Oh, those sons and lovers and killers and under–
takers and monument builders and museum-keepers of the great
shadow-state of the Jews in Eastern Europe - why and how did they
do all this in Hebrew rather than in Yiddish? Or, for that matter, in
Russian or German or Polish? After all , those writers, as well as
their heroes, used to laugh and weep and talk and dream and make
love in languages other than Hebrew, which at the time was almost
as dead as ancient Greek or Latin . Still, they made their Yiddish or
Russian-speaking characters talk and curse and weep and even
make love in Hebrew. Why on earth did they do it?
I have my guess: there must have been some deep sense of
despair beyond all this. And a terrible sense of doom . Maybe they
sensed somehow that all was lost anyway, that soon there would be
no more Jews, no more Yiddish or Hebrew; maybe something in
them wanted to close the circle with a biblical passion and anger for
which the Yiddish language was just too soft and cozy, whereas
Russian or German - improper. Like the homecoming of a dying
man. At least of Bialik, Berdichevsky, and Brenner I daresay that
sometimes they wrote not for the living, not for any future
generation, but precisely for the ancient dead. Or was there, after
all, some secret hope beyond hope? I do not know. All I know is that
all of us write or talk to the dead in moments of despair.
Maybe the story begins right in Number 48, Mile End Road,
Whitechapel, London, in the year 1906, with twenty-six-year-old
Yossef Hayim Brenner who lived there, a wretched Jewish refugee
from Russia, and was putting together no less than a fresh and
modern Hebrew literary magazine . Which he printed with his own
hands and bound and carried in a sack on his back to the post office
to be mailed to his 212 subscribers , scattered in eight or nine
countries (hardly half a dozen of them in London itself), just a
bunch of lunatics who had not abandoned Hebrew .
Not that Brenner had much faith in what he was doing. On the
contrary; just like his wistful characters, Brenner felt that it was all
over and doomed : Zionism and Hebrew, as well as the world of
Jewish Eastern Europe . Many of his characters, Tolstoyans who
stepped right out of a Dostoyevsky novel, were desperate people who
maintained that the Jewish people were dying of an incurable,
malignant, inherited disease . Nevertheless something ought to be
done in the way of trying to survive and even recover , no matter how
pathetic and useless this "something" may be.
