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PARTISAN REVIEW
Jerusalem, and was involved with the Zionist orthodox community. My
father, Pinchas Govrin, his brothers, and his nephew, were secular
"Poalei Zion" (the workers of Zion), pioneers, members of the "regi–
ment of work"
(gdud avodah )
involved in the founding of kibbutzim, of
drying the swamps in the Valley of Jesree1. In spite of their different
lifestyles, the four generations kept mutual respect and dialogue, united
by a common dream. Inhabited with a deep sense of history, both my
grandfather and father felt a responsibility to write their memoirs. My
grandfather, whom I never met, started to write on his sixtieth birthday,
in 1934: "Today is my birthday. I am sixty years old. Ten years ago,
when
I
was fifty years old, I arrived in Palestine." And then immediately,
he moves into mythic language, saying: "I came down from the ship that
carried me to Zion on my fiftieth birthday. And, as it is written 'in the
year of this Jubilee, ye shall return every man unto his possession' so I,
too, came back to my possession, on my fiftieth birthday, my Jubilee
year." Private biography is intimately lived through mythical terms. The
personal and the collective persona are mingled in what he believed is
the true, ancient biography. "These memoirs are a commemoration of
our shtetl and the whole district of Wohlyn in the Ukraine, where Jew–
ish life abounded." He later gives a wonderful account of this life in the
second half of the nineteenth century. "During these years the great
move of immigration started. Most of our brethren went to the Goldene
Medina IAmerical where there is no difference between a Jew and a
Gentile, where there are only citizens, and one can live a private life. A
small group chose to follow the promise of the prophets, and to go to
Palestine. I will tell their story."
Forty years later, in Tel Aviv, my father wrote his memoirs and was
also interviewed at length for the Labor Movement's archives. At the
conclusion of his interview he says:
"If
I had the choice to live my life
again, I would live it in the same way, but with even greater intensity.
We were all carried, leaders and simpletons, by the same great feeling of
building a home for the Jewish nation. This has been the greatest cre–
ation of my whole life." Once again, the private life, with its sorrows
and joys, with the richness of details and events is lived as the fulfillment
of a passionately expected culmination of the Jewish Biography.
Today, the Zionist chapter of the Jewish Biography could, certainly,
gain from self-criticism and re-articulation, worthy of the Jewish tradi–
tion of multiple writing. Yet, the Zionist case also poignantly reminds
us of how thin the line is between plot and slander, how much Biogra–
phies can arouse fascination and threat, jealousy, projection, and rejec–
tion. The perverted re-reading of Zionism by its opponents-labeling it
