ANITA SHAPIRA
From the Palmach Generation to the Candle
Children: Changing Patterns in Israeli Identity
G
vile Esh (Parchments of Fire),
a memorial volume of posthu–
mous literary texts penned by soldiers who fell in Israel's War
of Independence, opens with a passage by Zvi Guber:
How poor, how wretched you are, 0 homeland...there is nothing
in you of that splendor sublime, of majesty that stirs the heart. Why
then did our souls so cling
to
your love? ...From your dust were
we molded, from your soil we sprouted, your children....To us
you were both mother and father, our nursemaid and teacher! We
are your harvest...we are with you, true
to
the last.
Behold: we poured forth the best of our young blood to drench
your dust. Upon the altar of your freedom we laid the cream of our
youth, a sacrifice to liberty.
Find favor in the youthful vigor of our offering, 0 motherland!
If
we disregard the ornate style, untypical of the first Sabra generation
eager to break free from the confining literary Hebrew of their parents
and find a more forthright and simple language, we have here a text that
bespeaks the ideological tenor and temperament of the generation of
young women and men for which the poet Natan Alterman coined the
epithet the "silver platter": the first generation of native sons and daugh–
ters, bred in Palestine, a group inseparably linked with the figure of
Yitzhak Rabin. The homeland they cherished was a land of open
expanses, parched wadis, of baked clods of earth that crumbled beneath
the naked foot under the scorching summer sun. There were no cities,
asphalt roads, factories, or dense concentrations of population.
It
was a
homeland of fields in the Jezreel Valley redolent with " the scent of
manure, the aroma of new-mown hay" (as in a popular song of the day).
Zvi Guber's cohort was part of a generation issued forth at the end
of the
I930S
whose identity was shaped in the decade that followed.
The sabra or prickly pear cactus was a plant unfamiliar to the founding
