Leivick in Israel 1957, Part 6
Accounting of the Soul of the Young Writers of Israel: Impressions from my Israel Trip
Part 5 can be found here. The series begins here.
Accounting of the Soul of the Young Writers of Israel: Impressions from my Israel Trip
Following the Hebrew press in the State of Israel during the time I spent in Jerusalem, I was strongly affected by the energetic zeal with which the great number of writers take up the critical cultural and education problems which stand before the current generation of Jewish youth in Israel. Problems which touch upon not only their day to day, but also, and even more so, their entire Jewish existence. Their approach to Jewish history, both to the old and the new, to all of Jewish culture, which is contained in the frame of thousands of years. — More concretely: Their approach to the two thousand years of diaspora, to the literature, in all its forms, which Jews have created over the span of these long generations. And more concretely still: Their approach to the very nearest — cut off before our eyes — time, to all its movements and and creations.
True, the push towards all passionate considerations and debates came, as I showed in my previous article, from Ben Gurion’s provocative idea about leaping over exile, and moving immediately forward into a biblical climate. Ben Gurion’s idea was certainly a push in this. The arguments themselves, though, had long fermented within themselves and awaited upon this push.
Of course — just as Ben Gurion’s idea arrived from his present attitude toward official Zionism, the argument of those who polemicise it, mostly to defend the entire Zionist era of the last couple of generations and to prove that Zionism, in its original, classical, essence, must also be the main foundation of the Israeli youth’s upbringing today. This is, though, only on the face. In truth, the words of those who polemicise Ben Gurion go further and deeper. They touch upon things which also stimulate the thought and mood of the unofficial Zionist, and even the non-Zionist. They touch upon questions which don’t only have to do with the upbringing of new Jewish generations in Israel, but also with the entire attitude and orientation of every Jew, wherever they may be.
As examples of the argument, which even has something of an accounting of the soul in it, I would like to present here a few condensed extracts from articles which two important literary representatives of the current young generation in Israel, Moshe Shamir1 and Hanoch Bartov,2 published in Al Ha-Mishmar and La-Merhav.
I read the articles while I was in Jerusalem, in something of a state of self-reflection, and therefore, perhaps, they made a particular impression upon me. I have often sought in the Israel press a word reassessing words — not merely of routine polemic, but of true, inner stirring of the spirit.
Both of these articles are reactions to the more than once mentioned exchange of letters between Ben Gurion and N. Rotenstreich.3 And both take Ben Gurion’s position to heart and thereby display the state of their own disposition.
Moshe Shamir, one of the important current young belle-lettrists in Israel, the author of King of Flesh and Blood, won my heart with another article of his in connection to his revisionist attitude toward Stalinist, today called Khrushchevist, Soviet Russia. He, the member of Mapam, could not bear the poured in, repellant, manner of swallowing down or half-choking, half-swallowing the anti-Jewish or, more simply said, antisemitic, attitudes from Moscow with regarding Israel, regarding Jews as a people, regarding the entirety of Jewish culture. Attitudes and annihilation, shootings and liquidations. He, Shamir, could bear it no longer and came out against the custom of remaining silent. He saw the Moscow tablets in their full brokenness and inundation with blood. Educated, I suppose, in the ideology of extreme repudiation of exile as well as in estrangement from — at best, indifference to Yiddish and to all living Jewish words created in exile, to see in them dead words — he, when the artist in him emerged, was not able to satisfy himself any longer with repudiation and indifference. He started to make an accounting of himself. And deeply feared the idea of dead words.
Answering Ben Gurion in his idea to turn back intellectually to the state of a biblical people, M. Shamir, amongst others, writes that, for example, the Talmud, as a collective intellectual creation, is closer to us in spirit than the Tanakh, because it was created by a people who lived, as the same time, in the land and in diasporic lands. —— And later Shamir says, amongst others things, that when we enter into the abyss of our recent generations, we draw near to such a Jewish life and to such an image of redemption that we need, at one and the same time, to both question and accept them. —— We must teach (educate that new generation, that is to say) classical Zionist literature as we teach beautiful literature, Chassidish literature…If we do not hide our eyes from the literature which Jews wrote in other languages, and most essentially, in Yiddish, if we learn from Jewish worker’s literature in the diaspora, and from the figures of this new history of ours, which have found their continuation in the figures of the pioneers of the last generation, of the ghetto fighters, of the rebel martyred on the threshold of our state’s emergence ——— if we see all this bound together with our great generation in the land, which has given its blood and life — if we see it like this, we will then understand how far all these matters are from being dead words…
Another who argues with Ben Gurion, Hanoch Bartov, employee of the Mapai newspaper La-Merhav, approaches the matter with a still more openly and concretely. In an successful article (La-Merhav, 30 August) written like M. Shamir’s, with power and with profound arguments, Bartov presents a few extracts from Ben Gurion’s statements and he comments upon them. Ben Gurion, Bartov quotes, said: ‘For my children, who were raised in Israel, Plonsk (Ben Gurion’s place of birth — H.L.) has no meaning. ———With the establishment of the Jewish state, we have started a new chapter, a new beginning, which unites itself, of itself, in its being, with our distant past — with the past of Joshua Ben Nun, David, Uzziah, the first Hasmoneans. Our youth see our a Jewish people now through the lens of the state of the Tanakh.’ And furthermore, Bartov writes, Ben Gurion argues that ‘to recognise and love their own land is very important to the youth of Israel, but this won’t be found in the books of Pinsker and Herzl only in the Tanakh. — A bit in Mapu’s Love of Zion.’4 Bartov remonstrates: ‘Is it then indeed possible that Ben Gurion should believe that Israeli people could create their national identity from Mapu’s Love of Zion? Can that naive, romantic book give the solution to all the difficult questions which exhaust our generation, day by day, hour by hour? And is it indeed possible that our book of books can answer all questions?’
Bartov turns again to Ben Gurion’s statement about Plonsk, and about this, that the young people of Israel have no connection with the ‘distant, forgotten states of Galitzia, Rumania, in Poland,’ and he says: ‘Let us try to enter into the depths of Ben Gurion’s idea. The youth of Israel is entirely separate from the thousands of years of exile. The Jewish youth in America — they, too, are separate from exile. Now, when Ben Gurion says ‘What does our Israeli youth have to do with the distant, forgotten states of Galitzia, Rumania, in Poland?’ we can, in the same manner, ask: What does the Jewish youth of America have to do with the distant, forgotten places of Israel? ——— What sort of connection do they have with the Israeli youth? And what sort of connection do the Israeli youth have with Jewish youth in America? — Where is ‘that historical connection between Israel and the diaspora’? It still isn’t enough, Bartov, born in Israel, says further: — ‘It still isn’t enough that we have set up a state. We must know for whom the state has been created. —— Moshe Shamir, in his article, proves the fullness of words of Jewish creativity in all eras.——— I agree with him. But not the question which books we need to give our youth, occupy our present, but with a different question: Who are we? Of what does our greatest worth, on which we pride ourselves, consist? — We are born in Israel. — The credit for that isn’t due to us, but our parents. But we, ourselves — who are we?’ ———
As we see, difficult questions which seek their answers in the present Jewish times, in the present truthful, intimate relationships between the Jew in Israel and the Jew spread out over the world, in the full intellectual, moral, not only technical, partnership of Jews everywhere, in the feeling of the equality of every Jew, in the full falling with lips to every link of the Jewish golden chain of generations. Every leaping over is as though a break.
It makes no difference if Shamir and Bartov arrive at their experiences by one approach or ideology or another, through this or that Zionist attitude. The creative unease which they bring in through their words, which has seldom to this day been heard in Israel, is important. Words which indeed have in them the breath of self-reflection. Words which therefore lead the people of Israel to listen to them.
These are certainly colourful blossoms in the cultural and literary garden in Israel today. Both those who stimulate to the accounting of the soul and the expressions of those who undergo the accounting of the soul — the belong to this beautiful garden.
I am of the opinion, therefore — it will not be out of order to present here more particular manifestations of beautiful writerly and self-reflective expression.
The reader will forgive me that I must, because of the interpolation of matters which had a connection to the writer of these lines personally, though the matters had, at the time time, carried a societal character and reflected a newly productive relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish in Israel. (Indeed, in connection with this, my ears stung with their own thorny-prickling, but about them — later. Separately.)
I spare myself the need to recount. I present, a bit shortened, a report printed in Letste Nayes, about an intimate encounter which the Hebrew writing family in Haifa arranged in honour of the writer of these lines after his leaving hospital in Jerusalem. — The reception took place on the terrace of ‘Lev HaCarmel.’ Amongst those in attendance — S. Shalom, Gershom Shafman, Borla, Erland, Bar-Yosef, Shimshon Meltzer, A. Kariv, Yerushalami, Rosenhack, M. Singer, and the Yiddish writers A. Sutzkever, M. Tsanin, Y. Eichenrand and L. Kenig from Mount Carmel.
The report describes: ‘The pure air of Mount Carmel had as if symbolised the atmosphere, which is remarkable in the altered attitude of Hebrew and Yiddish creation and the creators in both languages. —— There ruled the ambiance of a family which had, after long and difficult conflicts, saw around themselves that there is nothing so close as blood and common fate. It lacked the proper authoritative stimulus which might date this reprint; without any doubt, that stimulus was the arrival of our guest and his appearances in Israel. At the reception on Mount Carmel, you felt this listening to the speech of the writer Erland, who knew no Yiddish, who was raised in the atmosphere of denial of Jewish creation in exile, and is now studying Yiddish. —— Perhaps bolder still were the words of the pedagogue Rosenhack, the former leader of the Tarbut5 schools in Poland, who led the evening. Once one of the harshest opponents of Yiddish and of culture in Yiddish — his words were laden with a strange nostalgia for an abandoned wholeness. And the same came to be expressed even by the speakers who didn’t touch upon this theme — Yerushalami, Meltzer, Bar-Yosef, S. Shalom. ———Striking against this theme was M. Tsanin, who proved that the war of unjustified hatred, which was perhaps historically unavoidable, should it continue now, threatens national dangers. ——— A. Sutzkever and Y. Eichenrand spoke in the same creative spirit. Their words were also in the tone of the whole of the wonderful evening. ——— That evening on Mount Carmel will surely be distinguished as a way-marker on the road of better understanding, of becoming closer.’ ——
It is pleasant for me to recount that such a productive, festive, family atmosphere also ruled at the Yiddish literature Friday evening which our Baruch Zuckerman6 and his wife held at their house in Jerusalem. At the evenings, a great crowd of the intelligentsia of Jerusalem came together. It was carried out reading from works of Yiddish literature and conversations occurred around them.
Now — however strongly I should wish to avoid writing about the nettles in the beautiful cultural garden in Israel, I cannot avoid it. I will, therefore, attempt to do it.
H. Leivick, Tog, 14 December, 1957
Onward to Part 7
Leivick was supposedly kicked out of yeshiva over Mapu’s Love of Zion, so it certainly looms large in his personal legend.