Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s 9780804797184

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S u d d e n l y , t h e S i g h t o f Wa r

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture ed i ted by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Suddenly, the Sight of War Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s Hannan Hever translated by Lisa Katz

stan f ord u n iversit y press stanf o rd, calif o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation ©2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s was originally published in Hebrew in 2000 under the title

‫ לאומיות ואלימות בשירה העברית בשנות הארבעים‬:‫פתאום מראה המלחמה‬

(Pit’om mar’eh ha-milḥamah: le’umiyut va-alimut ­ba-shirah ha-ivrit bi-shenot ­ha-arba‘im) ©2000, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, ­Tel-Aviv. Portions of Chapters 12–23 were first published in “The Critique of National Reading: Historical Analogy and National Allegory in Nathan Alterman’s Poetry During the Holocaust,” Iyunim BeTkumat Israel 8 (1998): 449–97. Reprinted by permission. Portions of Chapter 25 were first published in “Poems to the Ghetto: The Poetry of Yocheved Bat-Miriam in the 1940s,” in Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel, ed. Galit Hasan-Rokem, Ruth Kark, and Margalit Shilo (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2008), 268–77. Reprinted by permission. Portions of Chapter 34 were first published in “Gender, Body, and the National Subject: Israeli Women’s Poetry in the War of Independence,” in The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society, ed. Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 225–60. Reprinted by permission. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hever, Hannan, author. Title: Suddenly, the sight of war : violence and nationalism in Hebrew poetry in the 1940s / Hannan Hever ; [translated by] Lisa Katz. Other titles: Pit’om mar’eh ha-milḥtamah. English | Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | ©2016 | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | “Originally published in Hebrew in 2000 under the title Pit’om mar’eh ha-milḥamah.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037623 | ISBN 9780804784108 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Israeli poetry--20th century--History and criticism. | Violence in literature. | Nationalism in literature. | Symbolism in literature. | War in literature. Classification: LCC PJ5024 .H48413 2016 | DDC 892.41/609--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037623 ISBN 9780804797184 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

Part I  Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II 1. “The Real Has Become a Symbol”

11

2. The Dispute over War Poetry

17

3. Criticism of Nationalist Violence

22

4. Reading Nationalist Poetry Critically

26

5. Nationalism Anthologized

32

6. The Living-Dead in Joy of the Poor

37

7. Revenge on a Nationalist Scale

44

8. Leah Goldberg Writes War Poetry

48

9. The Duality of the Symbolist Woman Poet

54

10. The Living-Dead and the Female Body

58

11. Amir Gilboa: Boy Poet

62

Part II  Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust 12. A Surprising Moral Judgment

75

13. The Uncommon Stance of a Major Poet

78

vi

Contents

14. Critical Reception

81

15. A Postnationalist Reading

86

16. A Symbol, Not an Allegory

92

17. Allegory in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt Versus Symbolism in Joy of the Poor

97

18. Allegory as a Nonhegemonic Stance

103

19. Alterman and the Memory of the Holocaust

110

20. The Father-Son Strategy

114

21. Blind Vengeance

119

22. Breaking the Cycle of Crime and Punishment

123

23. History of the Defeated

134

24. A Summer Quarrel

138

25. Ghetto Poems in the Streets of Tel-Aviv

146

Part III Symbols of Death in the National War for Independence 26. Return of the Hegemonic Symbol

163

27. The Living-Dead in the Independence War

175

28. Amir Gilboa and the Subversion of the Symbol

178

29. Gilboa Versus the Metaphor of the Living-Dead

188

30. Poets as Reporters

193

31. Sorrow Petrified into Symbols

200

32. Hegemonic Strategies

207

33. From Reportage to Lyric

215

34. Women Write of Fallen Soldiers as Flesh and Blood

222

35. In the Service of National Subjectivity

225

36. Women and the Metaphor of the Living-Dead

229

Contents

37. Criticism of the Living-Dead Metaphor

236

38. The Authority and Power of Women

243

39. Popular Versus Canonical Mourning

251

40. The Secrets and Power of Women

253

Conclusion

259

Index

261

vii

Acknowledgments

Some of the research for this book was supported by the Wolf Foundation administered by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. I would like to thank the late Dr. Pinhas Ginossar for his help with the portion of the book originally published in Hebrew in the journal Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society (Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism) 8 (1998): 449–97. Special thanks to Lea Snir, the editor of the Hebrew edition of the book, and to the Amos Fund for Scholars and Writers of the Office of the President of Israel. I’d like to thank the research foundation of the Faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University for their support of the translation. At Stanford University Press, my gratitude goes first and foremost to Steve Zipperstein, who welcomed me to the Press and supported me and this project throughout this journey. I would also like to thank Friederike Sundaram and Mariana Raykov for their careful handling of the transition from manuscript to book, and a special thanks to Eric Brandt for his commitment and help. Special thanks go to Andrew Frisardi for his outstanding editorial skills, which made this book more precise and its language more coherent. Finally, many thanks to Yael Tamir and Roni Masel for their help in preparing the manuscript for publication. new haven, june 2015

S u d d e n l y , t h e S i g h t o f Wa r

Introduction At the end of the first night watch, between hills and shore, suddenly we saw the sight of war like gypsy life, joined with a rope and a stake, the freedom and urgency of the journey, vessels and law, all naked. Nathan Alterman, “Overnight” (“Leil hanaya,” 1957)

Until the 1920s, modern Hebrew poetry included little representation of war. Of course, we find the Song of Deborah in the Bible, and a prominent figure of medieval times was Shmuel Hanagid (Samuel ibn Naghrillah, 993–1056), a military leader and commander, poet and Talmudic scholar, who would send his poems of war to his sons from the battlefield as he stood at the head of the army of Granada. War can be found also in the poetry of Judah Leib Gordon (1830–92), the leading poet of the Hebrew Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) period of the nineteenth century, who described the fall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem to Titus’s Roman legions in his grand poem “Between the Lion’s Teeth” (“Bein shiney arayot”). Hebrew literature, which usually dealt with the lives of the Jews and the dilemmas preoccupying them, made little mention of wars. Jewish life during two thousand years of exile, which distanced Jews from full participation in the political life—and in the wars—of the nations they lived in, did not give rise to war poetry. Even when Jews did join the army, as in czarist Russia, it did not amount to participating in Jewish wars and therefore was hardly represented in the Hebrew poetry. Indeed, when Shmuel Hanagid wrote war poems it was from the perspective of a leading statesman of the kingdom of Granada; and when J. L. Gordon wrote about Jewish warriors it was from the political perspective of the Haskalah, critical of the weakness of the exilic Jew, who would rather study Torah than strengthen his body in preparation for enlisting in the national struggle of the Jews during their sovereign existence in the Second Temple period. The Chibbat Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) poetry that developed in eastern Europe in the 1880s began to show interest in the violence of war

2

Introduction

only when it became territorial poetry, that is, poetry written in EretzIsrael (“The Land of Israel,” the name given to the land of Palestine/ Zion prior to the establishment of the State of Israel). The poet ­Naftali Herz Imber (1856–1909), who wrote “The Hope” (“Hatikvah”), the poem adopted as the anthem of the Zionist movement and then as the State of Israel’s national anthem, arrived in P ­ alestine/Eretz-Israel in 1882, during the wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine which Zionist historiography calls the First Aliyah (1881–1904). In “The Guard of the Jordan” (“Mishmar ha-yarden”), Imber wrote the lines, “A sword hath the Lord and our country / by the Jordan there lies our citadel,”1 arousing among his readers a fear of the reaction by the Ottoman authorities, who were liable to see this as the expression of a Jewish aspiration to conquer the country by force. In eastern Europe Chibbat Zion poetry was followed by the “Revival” poetry led by H. N. Bialik (1873–1934), which also generally avoided the theme of war. An exception from this period was the poem “Song of the Hooligans” (“Shir ha-bir-yonim”), by Yaakov Kahan (1881–1960), which, again, commemorated the heroism of the zealots who fought against the Romans in the battle to defend Jerusalem of the Second Temple. From the beginning of the twentieth century, during the “Second Aliyah” period (1904–14), a center of Hebrew literature started to burgeon in Palestine, then still under Ottoman rule. Central figures in this stream were Yosef Haim Brenner (1881–1921) and eventual Nobel laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1887–1970). In this new center, poetry took second place to prose, which spread in the form of works that remain staples of the Hebrew literary canon to this day. Modernism was a relatively minor influence in the poetry of the Second Aliyah, finding expression mainly in impressionistic poetics and in the idylls of David Shimonovitz-Shimoni (1891–1956). At this early stage of this poetry, the subject matter of war was almost entirely absent, with the exception of, for example, Shimoni’s idyll “The War of Judah and the Galilee” (“Milchemet yehuda ve-hagalil”), which includes a light and comic parody on the theme of war. On the other hand, prominent in prose 1.  Naftali Hertz Imber, Sefer barkai (Jerusalem: n.p., 1884), 12. Other than English versions cited in these notes, all translations of quotations are done by the translator of this volume.

Introduction

and nonfiction writing was the theme of the Hebrew guardsmen who had fallen in the line of duty while defending the small Jewish community in Palestine/Eretz-Israel (the “Yishuv”) from the local Arabs, who, seeing the Jews as foreign invaders, had attacked them violently. All of this changed beyond recognition as modernism blossomed in Hebrew literature. Together with the intensification of the Zionist territorialization process in Palestine and the development of the Jewish ­Yishuv under British Mandate rule from 1917, the violence of war became a legitimate topic in Hebrew poetry. Among the immigrants during the “Third Aliyah” period (1918–23) were also poets immersed in the European avant-garde. Central among them were such figures as Avraham Shlonsky (1900–1973), Yitzhak Lamdan (1897–1954), ­Avigdor Hameiri (1890–1970), and Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981). By their expressive poetics, these poets developed the foundations of “labor poetry,” which focused on the hardship of the pioneers who cultivated the Land of Israel. At first, World War I gave rise in its wake to the Hebrew version of the wave of modernist writing, in poetry and prose, about the horrors of the war that had overtaken Europe. At the center of this movement stood the personal experience of the soldier-author himself, relating his horrific experience at the deadly battlefront. Prominent in Hebrew poetry are two poets who had personal experience as soldiers: Avigdor Hameiri and Uri Zvi Greenberg. Hameiri, who wrote The Great Madness (1929), the major Hebrew war novel, expressed in his poetry as well the terrors of war during his days as an officer of the Austro-Hungarian army. Uri Zvi Greenberg, who had fought in the service of the Austro-Hungarian army on the Serbian front, also published his impressions of the war, first in Yiddish and then in Hebrew. Both writers place at the forefront the subject himself, who is recording his personal experiences and drawing his authority from the very fact that he had “been there” in the thick of the fighting. Already during the “Fourth Aliyah” period (1924–31), Uri Zvi Greenberg, in his book Anakreon on the Pole of Sadness (Anakreon al kotev ha-izavon; 1928), included the poem “Remembering Souls,” in which he describes the awful spectacle, from the battle on the Sava River, of dead soldiers hanging upside-down from iron nets, their legs appearing to him as if kicking at the sky. The lyricism in this modernist poetry has been perceived as the immediate, authentic expression of the horrors of war. In both of these poets

3

4

Introduction

it developed in association with the expressionist movement in European literature, which offered new tools of representation that could contend with the inconceivably intense chaos and mayhem of modern war. In 1927, also during the Fourth Aliyah period, Yitzhak Lamdan published the long poem Masada, which presented the Hebrew pioneers settling in twentieth-century Palestine as both a continuation of the struggle and an opposition to its suicidal solution that was taken by the Jewish warriors at Masada in the year 70 C.E. These ancient Jews had fought against the Romans, and when their struggle for national liberty was defeated, they preferred to take their own lives rather than fall into Roman captivity. The poem’s modern point of departure is the pogroms against the Jews launched in 1919 by Petliura in the Ukraine, which disgorged many of the Jews; its resolution is redemption in Eretz-Israel, despite the many hardships faced by the Hebrew pioneers who had come there from eastern Europe. The most dramatic war-related event that took place in Palestine in the 1920s was the series of riots at the end of August 1929, when Jews were attacked by the Arabs on an unprecedented scale, leaving 133 Jews dead. This event, which some see as having forged the unity of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine against its Arab enemies, generated in its wake a widespread poetic response. Prominent within this response is Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Zone of Defense and Address of the Son-of-Blood (Ezor magen u-neum ben ha-dam; 1930), which was a distinctive expression of the Revisionist right that was not devoid of explicit racism toward Arabs. Uri Zvi Greenberg developed a one-poet school in Eretz-Israeli Hebrew poetry, in which he gave expression to his fascist views and aggressive activism. In 1937 he published The Book of Denunciation and Faith (Sefer ha-kitrug ve-haemuna), in which, among other things, he attacked the Marxist Zionist left and, primarily, what he saw as a demonstration of Jewish weakness toward the Arab Revolt of 1936. After World War II, Greenberg published Streets of the River (Rehovot ha-­ nahar; 1951), which is the greatest lamentation in Hebrew poetry over the victims of the Holocaust; still, in this book as well, the belligerence and racism that characterized his poetry of the 1930s are plainly evident. In an entirely opposed manner to Uri Zvi Greenberg, Avraham Shlonsky published his anthology Thou Shalt Not Kill (Lo tirtzach;

Introduction

1932), in which he included translations of European pacifist poetry written in the wake of World War I, thereby distancing his testimony from the events of the local war in Eretz-Israel. But even before this, in response to the riots of 1929, Shlonsky published the poem “Facing the Wilderness,” in which the military battle against the Arabs is represented as a mythological struggle with the wilderness that is attempting to destroy the Zionist settlement in Eretz-Israel. In the 1930s and 1940s, the time of the Yishuv (the mode of organization of Jewish life in Palestine prior to the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948), the use of symbolism dominated Hebrew poetry in theory and in practice. Avraham Shlonsky’s poetry collection In These Days (Be-ele ha-yamim; 1930) marked the point at which Hebrew poetry turned in this direction, developing in Shlonsky’s work and that of his contemporaries, until reaching a peak toward the end of the decade. Over these years, the group of writers, mostly poets, that gathered around Shlonsky turned into a literary school whose activities centered on the Hebrew weekly journal Ketuvim and continued in the journal Turim, founded by members of the Yahdav group (the Hebrew young writers who established themselves in Tel-Aviv in contrast to the followers of the national poet H. N. Bialik), led by Shlonsky, and in the books Yahdav published.2 Shlonsky’s poetry book Stones of Chaos (Avnei bohu; 1933), in which he refined his symbolism to a noticeable degree, became a sort of handbook for the literary school that had grown around him. Poets Nathan Alterman (1910–70), Yocheved Bat-Miriam (1901–80), Yaakov Orland (1914–2002), Ezra Zussman (1900–1973), Eliahu Tesler (1901– 65), Leah Goldberg (1911–70), A. D. Shapir (1911–74), Rephael Eliaz (1905–74), Alexander Penn (1906–72), Yonatan Ratosh (1908–81), and others adopted, each in his or her own way, the identifying features of the poetic school: musicality, assonance, suggestive imagery, strict adherence to form, and, most importantly, universal themes focusing on European landscapes, Paris in particular, and urban dwellers, marked by their isolation and conducting an intense, constant dialogue with death. 2.  See Uzi Shavit, “Hashir haparua--shira eretzisraelit bishnot haesrim,” Teuda, vol. 5 (TelAviv: Tel-Aviv University, 1986), 170.

5

6

Introduction

By about 1938, the year that saw the publication of books by the school’s premier practitioners—Alterman’s Stars Outside (Kochavim bahutz) and Shlonsky’s Poems of Catastrophe and Reconciliation (Shirey hamapolet vehapeeyous)—Shlonsky’s school dominated Hebrew modernism. Rich musical tones, protagonist-speakers wandering over European expanses and struggling with universal questions of love, the dreariness of existence, and the fatalism of life: all of this permeated contemporary Hebrew poetry, leaving behind the earlier decade’s poetry of labor and nationalism. There is no doubt that all this might have continued for a very long time. The fact that by the middle of the 1930s it was clear that European Jews would suffer persecution and worse, and that the Jewish population in Palestine was already involved in a bloody struggle with the Arab population—a conflict whose height was reached in the Arab Revolt against the British Mandate of 1936, which entailed a multitude of injuries among the Jewish population, and did not diminish until 1938—none of this significantly changed the high road taken by the Shlonsky poetic school, and almost none of it was perceptible on the surface of this poetry. On September 1, 1939, however, when the German invasion of Poland set off World War II, dilemmas and collective fears began to receive open expression. The general anxiety about the fate of Polish and other European Jews, and the realization that the result of these violent developments would surpass the worst that had happened before, found sharp expression in the Jewish literature of the Shlonsky school in Palestine. At the same time, the Yahdav group disbanded, some members following Shlonsky to Hashomer Hatzair (the political and settlement Jewish organization of the Zionist-socialist radical left in Palestine) circles on the left, and others going to the group led by Alterman around editor and literary critic Israel Zmora’s (1889–1983) Hebrew literary journal, Mahbarot Lesifrut. There is a clear logic to the way they responded in their poetry, and a decisive transformation of the structure of Hebrew poetry took place in the 1940s. Its primary subject, adopted with great force, is violence that usually leads to death. The question of the representation of violence—that of the perpetrators as well as that of the persecuted—­ became the hub of the Hebrew poetic discourse.

Introduction

This book concentrates on the dynamics of symbolist Hebrew poetry, written in light of and as Hebrew culture’s response to the series of catastrophes that the Jews underwent as a national entity. An examination of Hebrew poetics in the 1940s in the Yishuv, and of the cultural power relations within which it developed, leads to a recognition of three stages in the further evolution of symbolism in its second decade in Hebrew poetry. The first stage was a response to the events of World War II. Symbolism followed a nationalist path, creating an imagined national community that was to stand up to the violence committed against it.3 Due to symbolism’s compelling hold on writers, those who wanted to rebel and make their own path could do so only indirectly, as Leah Goldberg did by feminizing representations of nationalist images in her poetry. The second stage began when understanding of the war went beyond the terrible nexus of persecution and killing, redefining events as systematic genocide: the Holocaust. From the end of 1942 and during 1943, Hebrew writers absorbed the fact that the Holocaust of European Jewry was a new, pervasive, and horrific phenomenon. At this stage Alterman underwent a dramatic, unprecedented change, emerging as the leading poet of the period. In 1944, he published The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt (Shirey makot Mitzraim), which expresses a profound awareness of the crushing defeat of the Jewish people in Europe. For Alterman, this defeat meant the total destruction of the Jewish nation’s self-image as powerful. As the most prominent representative of the symbolist wing, which until now had nurtured Zionist cultural hegemony, Alterman did his part to construct an alternative national image, one that openly recognized the absence of Jewish sovereignty and was, therefore, unable to promise collective Zionist redemption. In this way Alterman violated the standards of the contemporary Eretz-Israeli neosymbolist literary canon, and shifted his poetry to a resonant and radical allegorical mode that diverged from the dominant framework of national culture. Alterman was joined in this move by other poets who worked less methodically than he did. Yonatan Ratosh, for example, held fast to his symbolist position during the Holocaust, as part of his anti-Zionist, Canaanite stance (“Canaanite” being those whose 3.  See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006).

7

8

Introduction

nativism severed them from Judaism, and who consequently glorified their ancient Hebraic ancestry), which placed him on the margins of Hebrew culture. Alterman did not have many followers in this revolutionary process, although the Holocaust poems of Yocheved Bat-Miriam, the most prominent Hebrew woman poet of the period and of the symbolist movement, developed on a similar track. At the end of the 1940s, ­Alterman returned to the dominant nationalist approach, to Hebrew symbolism’s third stage, in which a generation of poets who had followed in Shlonsky’s and Alterman’s footsteps harnessed their work to the goal of national independence. Each labored to return the literary symbol to center stage. The return of nationalism as a dominant literary force brought about the search for alternative channels of poetic expression, the most prominent among them being women’s writing on the struggle for national independence and the Israel-Arab 1948 war. Women’s writing joined other critical trends, such as that evinced in the poetical work of Amir Gilboa (1917–84). But what happened at the end of the Israeli Independence War and immediately afterward? A very unique move of women poets renewed literary symbolism and undermined the controlling forces in Hebrew poetry. They were moving in the direction of the innovative and antimythical trend of the Hebrew poetry that was to take place later in the first years of what is called “the statehood generation” of Hebrew writers such as Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) and A. B. Yehoshua (1936–), and under the leadership of the poet ­Nathan Zach (1930–).

C h a p t e r 1   “The Real Has Become a Symbol”

Nathan Alterman’s poetry was nurtured by a large variety of modernist schools, among which the influence of French and Russian symbolist poetics—with its stress on sound and its abstract imagery, artifice, and lack of human presence—is prominent in both his theory and practice.1 Although Hebrew symbolism followed in the footsteps of European symbolism, it paved its unique way by applying what will be presented as a nationalized symbolism. In its early stages Alterman’s poetry distanced itself from political reality. One expression of this may be seen in his energetic defense of the poetics of ambiguity. In an essay entitled “On the Incomprehensible in Poetry” (“Al habilti muvan bashira”; 1933), Alterman denied the existence of unintelligible poems, claiming that literature does not “depict life . . . but rather relives it,” and that “lyric is a willed forgery of emotion.” In addition, Alterman wrote, “The poet of ambiguity must not be concerned with a lack of response by the reader. A genuine response, one that is not dependent on current events and daily life, will always exist, and only such a response may be counted upon. All authentic literature, whether seemingly clear or ambiguous, [however], will be genuinely felt only by the few and only rarely.”2 The intensity with which Alterman wrote these lines in 1933 is absent from his programmatic essay “The Secret of Quotation Marks” (“Sod hamerchaot hakfulut”), published only five years later. In this 1.  See Ziva Shamir, Od hozer hanigun: Shirey Natan Alterman baraee hamodernism (TelAviv: Papyrus, 1989). 2.  Nathan Alterman, “Al habilti muvan bashira,” in Ba-ma’agal, 2nd ed. (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1975), 16. See also Uzi Shavit,”Hashir haparua--shira eretzisraelit bishnot haesrim,” Teuda, vol. 5 (Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University, 1986).

12

Suddenly, the Sight of War

piece, too, Alterman examines poetry from a symbolist perspective. In contrast with the ahistorical aesthetic discussion in the earlier article, here he deals with the fate of poetic language at a time when Zionism was becoming a reality in Palestine. He sees the actualization of Zionism in Palestine as a dramatic turning point in Jewish history. “This nation,” Alterman writes, “which is sometimes seen, perhaps not wholly without reason, as a decadent, separatist, and skeptical pathogen, is now the sick man who loves life more than anyone else . . . and despite his hard labor and his devotion to making symbols a reality—the real has become a symbol.”3 In this essay, Alterman argues that the Jewish people were then suddenly faced with a deeply embedded fault at the core of the symbolist interpretation of the Zionist upheaval. Jews “had never tasted such a sharp mixture of stark reality and inspiration, of abstraction and materiality.”4 The tension between reality and an ideal situation disrupted the way the nation experienced that reality. It was “assailed by moments of great giddiness: not weakness, but rather a dream—a mixture of realms rather than ideas.”5 The fact that “the Hebrew poem was being read on Hebrew soil” and could “call everything by name, call everything dear by its sacred name,”6 placed great demands on symbolist poetry. Those for whom these names “are things as they are and not signs, the voice of things and not just what they are called,”7 Alterman wrote, will have difficulty representing the new national reality from now on. A sensual, musical approach to words was, in effect, the source of the linguistic and poetic crisis in Hebrew poetry that Alterman identified; it was extremely difficult in wartime “to play genuine, profound, and living melodies . . . [at] a time of change and innovation, a time when words bore an enormous weight.”8 He characterizes the common skepticism about using big words, those “which moved nations and made history,”9 as a symbolist reservation, since symbolism stresses musical suggestiveness and the obscurity of the meaning 3.  Nathan Alterman, “Sod hamerchaot hakfulut,” in Ba-ma’agal, 29. 4.  Ibid. 5.  Ibid. 6.  Ibid 7.  Ibid. 8.  Ibid. 9.  Ibid., 28.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

of the word that is supposed “to speak a tune from mouth to ear.”10 Poetry, Alterman argues in this essay, is the first to have reservations about big words enclosed in quotation marks; the role of these punctuation marks is to solve this representational problem that was created by these reservations, and he characterizes them in symbolist terms as “notes between marked pauses that set the tone.”11 Alterman’s candid symbolist interpretation of historical reality in Palestine reveals his stance with regard to political messianism, whether he intended to or not. In the context of the 1930s, it was very hard to interpret nationalist tension between the real and the ideal in any other way. The discussion of poetic principles in symbolist language, which examined the gap between symbol and reality, inserted a political/current-events dimension into the poetic discourse of the time, which Alterman, like other members of the symbolist school, had sought to resist. What Hebrew poetic language gained in return, Alterman says explicitly in his essay, was messianic feeling. “The language [of the nation],” he writes, “in which it prays and sings to [Shabtai Zvi, a self-proclaimed seventeenth-century Jewish messiah, H.H.] is called upon now to sing and weep on the necks of cows in the fields of Sharon [a large area of Jewish settling in the center of Eretz-Israel].”12 Alterman interprets Hebrew poetry’s caution about calling the details of real life by name as prudence about playing an uncritical role in the idea of national redemption that now burdened poetic language. “There is not a giving up, but there is a fervid expectation. The explicit language about what is seen and done here remains within quotation marks from the world of speculation, abstraction, and the symbol.”13 In general in all texts, including poetry, quotation marks are a sign of a discourse that is defined as foreign or other. And so a radical act like Alterman’s, which is not satisfied with the distance established by quotation marks, but instead demands and welcomes the complete expulsion of this other discourse from poetry, is in effect a highly tense dialogue: the distancing of one of the participants stems not from in10.  Ibid., 27. 11.  Ibid., 28. 12.  Ibid., 29. 13.  Ibid., 30–31.

13

14

Suddenly, the Sight of War

difference but from intensity. Alterman views the lack of visible names, not as a sign of weakness, but as an invitation to action: the creation of a flurry of meanings that are impediments to poetry and constitute a source of muddy waters “from which only magicians may draw fish.”14 In other words, Nathan Alterman uses his symbolist conception of poetry to criticize and attack those who spread illusions about redemption; in contrast, he holds that there is nothing like a poem “that knows that everything painful and human feeds anger. . . . And so it is afraid of provoking sharp words . . . poetry hates generalization and concealment.”15 In this way, Alterman marks those he attacks in the nationalist arena with literary terminology that is very close to a description of the fascist-messianic-expressionist poetry and philosophy of one of his contemporaries, Uri Zvi Greenberg. In contrast to the raging political anger of Greenberg’s Book of Denunciation and Faith (1937), Alterman—who at that time positioned himself at the political center—published his most lyrical, universal, and influential book, Stars Outside, at nearly the same time.16 It seems that it would be hard to locate a wider gulf between poets and their work than that between Greenberg and Alterman. It also seems that even a reader who burrows deep into Stars will not find any exceptions to Alterman’s unmistakable lyricism, a characteristic that was to reverberate throughout several generations of Hebrew poetry. At the same time, however, Alterman included a poem in this book that is concerned with the messianic potential of his own poetry. In “Beyond the Melody” (“Meever lamangina”),17 pain and sorrow (“stones like tears on the world’s lashes”) face the inability of the art of the poem to express them: “How can I protest with a silk handkerchief? / Silence hovers like an eagle / over the last poem trembling.” After this, the poem examines two options of human existence within the limits of the relationship between life and art: the first copes with difficult reality (signified by night and stones) with the smiling acceptance that is part of a stoic and silent examination of the inner self. 14.  Ibid., 30. 15.  Ibid. 16.  Uri Zvi Greenberg, Sefer hakitrug vehamena (1937; Tel-Aviv: Sadan, 1991); Nathan Alterman, Kochavim bahutz (Tel-Aviv: Yahdav, 1938). 17.  Nathan Alterman, Shirim me-sheh-kvar (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hamuechad, 1972), 35–36.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

The second possibility is realized in a dynamic context, the external landscape of paths characterized by their music and speech. What these roads say, uttered while the travelers walk them (expressed metonymically in the movement of the roads) distinguishes between the area of a single, small, paralyzing ache (characterized metonymically in silence) and the region of noisy collectivity. What appears at first as a purely universal lyrical experience, however, “our small shameful pain” that “resides in each like its older brothers / the end, the heart, the autumn,” is a critical, political response about the diametrically opposed alternative. The small, silent hurt is defined as clashing with political, messianic noise and its regal affectations: They walk and speak about the well that’s full and the forest burning in a royal cloak, but the grove is silent and alone like our small and shameful pain. For it has neither messiah nor flags, and stillness dressed in mourning guards its countenance.18

In effect, the poem concentrates on the effort to isolate oneself in a small, private, and human corner in the midst of the national, public expanse. The seventh and last stanza of the poem completes this process and defines the situation of the private hurt in a public context. It accomplishes this with the aid of a paradoxical attempt to fulfill the first existential option of static, conciliatory self-examination that appears at the beginning of the poem (with highly similar terminology). The title “Beyond the Melody” points to the inner struggle of the private pain that tries to escape the external pressure of the collective—observed in the movement along the roads that will “straighten up with tune and cloud, / walk tall, walk with tender strength, / drive us forth in their embrace.”19 The tune being played here, alongside collective messianism and regal grandeur, is placed in opposition to the silence of the individual. In this particular historical context, abstract 18.  Ibid. 19.  Ibid, 35.

15

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symbolism, which exemplifies the aesthetic formula of “art for art’s sake,” encounters a thicket of considerations which are, in the final analysis, political. When we read Alterman in light of Walter Benjamin’s remarks on the movement away from symbolism, which had championed art for art’s sake, toward fascist culture, which aestheticized the political,20 symbolism’s concealed political dimension is obvious. Its primary emphasis on musicality reveals, in this particular political and cultural context, the political dangers involved in such aestheticizing of social reality. The links to musical themes and structures in Stars Outside are evident from the opening poem, “The Tune You Abandoned in Vain Returns” (“Od hozer hanigun shezanchta lashave”),21 as is its social and political significance. In this book of refined lyricism, in which musicality is nearly the top priority, Alterman exposes his concealed engagement with the national and political reality that produced him. Alterman was responding to the cultural and political context in which he wrote and published his poetry; he traced the fine line that separated his work from the mystical musicality that nurtured political messianism at that time, and whose most prominent representative in poetry was Uri Zvi Greenberg.

20.  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 241–42. 21.  Alterman, Shirim me-sheh-kvar, 7.

C h a p t e r 2   The Dispute over War Poetry

In explicating his stand on Hebrew poetry in Palestine at the end of the 1930s, Alterman exposed symbolism’s bifurcated nature: its remoteness from current events on the one hand, and its aesthetic distance from emotion on the other. And so it is not surprising that when World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, it immediately confounded the symbolist school of poetry in Palestine and plunged it into disarray. At this point in time, symbolism dominated Hebrew nationalist culture, but its hegemony depended to a large extent on universal aesthetic codes. According to beliefs prevalent among members of the school, poetic expression was both universal and eternal. Because it was not directly answerable to “the real world,” it did not have to adapt to the events of war. The symbolists’ pacifism, particularly in response to the atrocities of World War I, is pronounced, as mentioned above, in the Hebrew antiwar anthology Thou Shalt Not Kill, translated and edited by Avraham Shlonsky and published in 1932, and later in Alterman’s well-known pacifist poem “Don’t Give Them Guns” (“Al titnu lahem rovim”).22 The symbolists in Palestine held that poets owed loyalty first and foremost to eternal human values. And so they expressed their antiwar sentiments immediately as World War II broke out. Leah Goldberg published an article during the first week of World War II in the weekly Hashomer Hatzair (published by the Hakibbutz Haartzi, one of the kibbutz movements; its literary supplement was edited by Shlonsky), under the heading, “On This Matter,” in which she declared that she 22.  Nathan Alterman, Mahbarot Alterman (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1979), 2: 136–38.

18

Suddenly, the Sight of War

would not write war poems, even now as the new and justified antiNazi war began. Her decision at such a difficult moment was in agreement with the symbolist school’s traditional stance, as well as with her own protest against using violence to fight evil. She argued that the poet was forbidden “to forget the genuine values of life. It is not only permitted for the poet to write love poems during wartime, but a necessity, since in wartime, too, love is of greater value than murder.”23 Goldberg ends her article with a declaration about the role she has assumed for herself: “As the person who jumps in head-first, it is for me to declare that I, in September 1939, see it as my duty to write literature with lines like this: ‘On a morning in Elul / the sea in our country is limpid and cold.’”24 Goldberg’s article aroused a controversy in the pages of the weekly. Some people unreservedly supported her loyalty to the dictates of lyric poetry. Other writers, including some close to the symbolists, condemned what they saw as a shirking of the war effort and demanded a more nuanced stance, especially with regard to the European Jews who could be expected to be among the war’s first victims. The Yiddish poet and the Yiddish and Hebrew playwright Moshe Lipshitz (1894–1940), the poet Rephael Eliaz, and others offered positions that, despite differences among them, agreed in rejecting symbolism’s apolitical and universal nature.25 There is no doubt that the symbolist commitment to lyric and universal aesthetics was now, at the outbreak of a world war, on the wane. Proof of the upheaval in the apolitical universalism of the symbolist school may be seen in the fact that the weekly Hashomer Hatzair became the main outlet for the symbolists’ writings on this topic. Both Hakibbutz Haartzi and its youth branch Hashomer Hatzair were so committed to their radical Zionist-socialist cause that they had failed to become part of the centrist Mapai organization (of the Zionist labor movement and a precursor of the Labor Party) when it was founded in 1930, and instead turned into the main opposition bloc in the Jewish labor movement in Palestine. In 1936, a companion Socialist League 23.  See Leah Goldberg, “Al oto nose atsmo,” Hashomer Hatzair, September 8, 1939. 24.  Ibid 25.  See Moshe Lipshitz, “Al ‘Karka ha-metsiut’ veh-‘ha-emet ha-moofshetet,’” Hashomer Hatzair, September 22, 1939.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

was established to organize workers in urban areas, and in 1946 they united to form the Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party. Political pressure on members of the symbolist school is also evident in the active involvement in the literary controversy over war poetry by members of the socialist Hashomer Hatzair movement, such as that of the journalist Yaakov Amit (1904–?) and literary critic Azriel Schwartz (Uhmani) (1907–78).26 Within a very short time the symbolists split into two groups. One established itself at the end of 1939 within Hashomer Hatzair, becoming clearly identified with a leftist political approach; the second found its place, from January 1940 onward, in the journal Mahbarot Lesifrut, edited by Israel Zmora, who gathered poets, fiction writers, and critics under Alterman’s leadership. In its quest to differentiate itself from Hashomer Hatzair’s leftist identity and attempt to conscript literature in the service of political action, Mahbarot Lesifrut published work by people who held very different political views, including Yonatan Ratosh, who took a Caananite (nativist and anti-Zionist) approach. Avraham Shlonksy and Nathan Alterman, the two central figures in Hebrew symbolism, were prominent authors of polemical writings that in effect expressed symbolism’s last stand in Palestine before its radical transformation. Both said they agreed with Goldberg and her declaration about the eternal and universal nature of poetry, in this way reaffirming her place in the Hebrew symbolist canon. At the same time they raised several points in an openly patronizing tone, and instructed her on how to correct what they saw as her errors. Alterman was incensed by the manner in which Goldberg responded to her critics.27 He argued that she should have viewed critical comments as gloating over her puristic stance by petit bourgeois figures who sought further proof that “there is no need for poetry.” Instead, he noted, Goldberg chose to limit the debate to the specific theme of war. That is, she interpreted her critics as saying that death (as a result of war) doesn’t “need” poetry. Alterman wrote that Goldberg had pinned her response on the single instance of war poetry, while she should have answered in universal terms and examined the 26.  Ibid. 27.  See Nathan Alterman, “Mihtav al oto nose,” Hashomer Hatzair, September 22, 1939.

19

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place of ­poetry in culture in general. Alterman also accused her of a more serious offense, rejecting war poetry on a moral basis, as she had previously, for example, rejected biblical poetry praising a military victory (the “Song of Deborah” in the book of Judges). Goldberg should have, Alterman wrote, adhered to universal and aesthetic standards of judgment that distinguish between good and bad poetry, since “a poem calling for war could be ‘pure literary gold.’” Shlonsky’s criticism of Goldberg also exhibited anxiety about poetry’s universality. He, like Alterman, reaffirmed its eternal and timeless nature, and joined Goldberg in her reservations about enlisting poetry in the cause of war. At the same time, Shlonsky was concerned about Goldberg’s reasoning, which he thought was not universal enough: “I understand the spirit of L. Goldberg when she says, ‘I will not!’” But Shlonsky had doubts: “Perhaps . . . instead of this, I’d say, ‘Poetry.’”28 Shlonsky asked why she used the first person, the language of the self, when she said that she could not speak the language of war; why didn’t she speak in general, universal terms, that is, about poetry in general? In effect, Shlonsky argued, she should replace the language of the self with a universal approach. Alterman, for his part, asked Goldberg why the reason for her refusal to write war poetry was to be found in her private moral standards; didn’t she see that that ethics in general did not have anything to do with poetry, and that the issue was instead an aesthetic and universal matter? There is no doubt that Shlonsky and Alterman had identified exactly the point where Goldberg strayed from universality, the lifeblood of symbolism. It is nearly certain that both recognized a subversive trend beneath her declarations of symbolist hegemony; she placed herself at the heart of the Hebrew symbolist canon in Palestine, but at the same time, she remained separate and distinct. Shlonsky and Alterman, who meant to correct Goldberg and put her back on the symbolist high road, did so by using the category of language of the self. They both pointed out that Goldberg’s refusal to write war poetry was not based on beliefs about poetry but on an individual declaration that she, a specific person, the poet Leah Goldberg, would not write war poetry because her own personal ethics stood 28.  See Avraham Shlonsky, “Pikuah nefesh,” Hashomer Hatzair, October 27, 1939.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

in her way. They both recognized that her opposition to war poetry was part of a universalist, symbolist stance; but they also saw, exactly because of the way she emphasized her personal viewpoint, that Goldberg’s language constituted a threat to the universalist arguments that justified the symbolist position.

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C h a p t e r 3   Criticism of Nationalist Violence

In light of the wrenching historical developments facing Hebrew writers in Palestine, the debate within the symbolist group, and between its members and the opposing camp, in effect constituted a last stand for universalist aesthetics. Reservations about writing directly about war did not last long; members of the school were quickly mobilized and were among the major Hebrew poets to write about the war and the Holocaust. In 1941, less than two years after the war had begun, six symbolist poets, led by Avraham Shlonsky and Nathan Alterman, along with four others—Yocheved Bat-Miriam, Leah Goldberg, Alexander Penn, and Rephael Eliaz—contributed to a collection called Six Chapters of P ­ oetry (Shisha pirkey shira), which included Alterman’s sequence “Song of Four Brothers” (“Shir arba’a ahim”), Bat-Miriam’s “At the Edge of Days” (“Beshuley hayamim”), Goldberg’s “On the Flowering” (“Al hapricha”), Alexander Penn’s “The Seventh Sky” (“Harakia hashvee”), and Shlonsky’s “The Bread and the Water Poems” (“Shirey halechem vehamaym”). The book attracted interpretation and controversy that reflected the changes taking place in symbolist literary discourse. This discussion also responded to the duality of the poetry shaped by Shlonsky’s school: on the one hand, committed to the universalist aesthetics best exemplified by European symbolism, and on the other, a particularistic loyalty to the nationalist framework of Zionist culture. These two commitments repeatedly reacted to the intense violence that surrounded them. Despite their differences, nearly all the poems in the collection exhibit this duality. “That death would rise up in his win-

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

dows,” G ­ oldberg wrote in “On the Flowering,” “we knew: his even gaze / clear and cold as a grapeskin.”29 Goldberg dedicates this series of poems to her close friend and lover, the first modernist Hebrew poet Avraham Ben-Yitzhak (1883– 1950), and strives to express a general picture that is distant from her historical and national context. But the conflict between the horrors of the period and an individual as a universal outlook—depicted in imagery of light rich with symbolic meaning—is the main theme of the eighth poem in the series: How can we bring our dying heart at dawn to the new day? For then wine sparkles in the glass, and the firmament straps on its bow, then morning quickens in the hay and dusk’s cheek caresses the river’s brow. And only we, fear-struck, dream-bereft, witness[es to] the blaze, carry our blossoming land like a mourning wreath toward the grave.30

The figuration of light (in the sky) in the phrase “the firmament straps on its bow” connects it from the start with the light radiated by violence—“the blaze”—that “we” are witness to. Violence, when it directly strikes a living thing and also when it is fatal, is always mediated and represented in some form, and representation of the body is never pure but always shaped by discourse.31 Poetic discourse about violence toward people and their bodies is too mixed here with other types of discourse. The main semantic field for Hebrew poetry in the 1940s was Zionist and nationalist, and so the violence of World War II is portrayed as aimed, directly or indirectly, at members of this community. When Goldberg identifies the collective speaker of these poems, published in 1940, as “witnesses to the blaze,” it is hard to read the 29.  Leah Goldberg, “On the Flowering,” in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama, trans. Rachel Tzvia Back (London: Toby Press, 2005), 62; in Hebrew: “Al ha-priha,” in Shisha pirkey shira, ed. Avraham Shlonsky (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1940), 24. 30.  Ibid., “On the Flowering,” 67. 31.  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1–43.

23

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signifiers without reference to the horrors of the war. Nonetheless, the poem takes pains to distance itself from the representation of current events. The suppression of real-world violence blends in a strained and problematic way with the direct expression of violence. On the one hand, the sky arms itself at dawn (“the firmament straps on its bow”), while the poem uses a series of devices that keep alive and unresolved the conflict between engagement and distance. In Alterman’s “The Cabin” (“Habikta”), the second poem in his sequence “Song of Four Brothers,” the oldest brother turns to his siblings who have gathered at an inn and will die one by one, in the manner of a folk tale. They do not know when the sentences of this collective peril will be carried out; an individual fate awaits each of “my mother’s sons,” who “will fall on his back, / will die and lie prostrate.”32 In this heavily fraught atmosphere, the elder brother presents the others with the principles of poetry as an acute conflict between the individual and the collective, between individual freedom and collective supervision and control, and between individual deaths and the universal specter of death common to all humankind, which appears in the poem in the image of “the light of brotherhood”—“the angel’s light / that sees us with a thousand eyes”—that is, the angel of death: And this is the way of poetry: while still young it can bear both heat and ice. It will or will not set its heart free until it grows to the size of a half-moon. You will manage it wisely from small details to matters of importance patiently surrounded by falsehood and if it breaks through—with a cattle prod, get down, put it down! No remorse no forgiveness. For the poem is not a slave and it’s good for it to disobey orders and advice like a bridle and a bit. But its freedom is the freedom of lightning, slave to the laws of electricity. You must want the lively words like veins running through the thicket of bad poetry. 32.  Nathan Alterman, “Shir arba’a ahim,” in Shisha pirkey shira, ed. Shlonsky, 291.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

Without tiring, chase words to the edges of Hebrew, pull on their braids all the way home. Choose every line like a maiden in captivity and seek the most beautiful one in the region. Crush a rhyme for her, whole like a vow or halved and juicy like a slice of fruit. And that is compensation for the testimony of the poem that set out friendless on its way. And that is the salary for its hard work, blurring the borders of play and toil. And the crescent is drawn out directly to our garden, and the rooster still listens to another. And I talked too much about the poem as those wielding the rod tend to do. The only thing I want: to light your darkened heart tonight. The light of brotherhood, the angel’s light that sees us with a thousand eyes.33

33.  Ibid., 23–25.

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C h a p t e r 4   Reading Nationalist Poetry Critically

The representations of violence in Hebrew poetry in the preceding chapter were published and read within the framework of the “imagined national community” of the Jewish population in Palestine by the different members of the Jewish community who produced them.34 During the war, they generally perceived themselves as belonging to one homogeneous entity then in the process of establishing a continuous narrative that would in turn establish a national identity for the Jewish people. Most symbolist imagery in Hebrew poetry was based on the unwavering, ethnocentric assumption that violence was aimed only at the Jewish nation, which had now arrived at a historically decisive stage of Zionism. The symbolists’ image of themselves as universalists, therefore, meant that a large number of other stories were suppressed or even erased by the Jewish national narrative. One conspicuous aspect of this poetry is that members of other nations are excluded: non-Jews in Europe and Arabs in Palestine. In Yocheved Bat-Miriam’s “My People and Them” (“Ami vahem”), the Jews are represented by the second person “you,” in opposition to “them,” the Other: They will return to their silent thought interwoven with the odors of earth and horse and a caravan of cranes that shows how to fly in their wake. They will walk in the gardens, clearheaded from the whiteness of madonnas hovering over the pedestal, 34.  The phrase “imagined national community” draws on Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006).

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

blessing their whispers, their beloved vows, pure and glad their uprightness. They will sketch a picture, study a book. Amid the noise of the suburban market they wear ribbons, tap their feet, mixed odors of their dappled future.35

In ambiguous, sensual, symbolist language, Bat-Miriam depicts “them”—the non-Jews—as calm and quiet in the presence of the upheaval that signifies the fate of her people. Universalist symbolism helps her position the “you” of Jewish nationalism in opposition to “them”: Only you, only you who are amused and dizzy, undone by the sights and the noise, only you, only you, loaded with storms and journeys, what will you do, my people?36

The fragility of the nation’s existence is presented in an ironic light as a kind of lightheadedness. In contrast to the frivolity of “them,” who dance in the noisy marketplace and adorn themselves with ribbons, the giddiness of the Jews is cut off from their real situation and its sounds, and turns out to be the lightheadedness of wanderers who do have a goal; “loaded with storms and journeys.” In contrast to the deeply rooted and secure future of “them,” there is a question about the fate of the Jews at the end of the poem. Aside from raising a doubt about the future of the suffering nation, neither the poem nor its hypothetical readers ever question the identity of this nation. The fate under discussion clearly belongs to a definitive subject with a fixed nationality. The establishment of the tormented sufferer as the national subject, as well as those who look on—“you,” according to Bat-Miriam, and “witnesses to the blaze,” according to Leah Goldberg—is based on an unassailable ethnocentric assumption that these are Jewish subjects. In addition to an assumption about the persistence of Jewish identity, the text contains a premise about the Jewish collective’s awareness 35.  Yocheved Bat-Miriam, “Ami veh-hem,” in Shirim, 2nd ed. (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, Hotzaat Hakibbutz Haartzi veh-Hashomer Hatzair, 1972), 214. 36.  Ibid.

27

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of its own power. A nationalist reading of a nationalist text directs itself, usually consciously though sometimes not, to a collective point of view, aware of its sovereign power, with an unmistakable, unified center of identity and action. A reading of the violence that the sovereign national collective operates against its enemies always involves the assumption that the nation’s actions depend on mobilizing all the forces at its disposal. This mobilization exists in the present and is to bear fruit in the shared future of the collective, with regard to both the violence bearing on it from outside and the violence directed inward by the nation’s current afflictions. The national situation at the present time is always represented in light of the narrative of national redemption, which is just on the horizon. The question of the speaker in Bat-Miriam’s poem—“what will you do, my people?”—assumes a shared future for the nation. And so, the possibility of an alternative reading, one that does not comply with the Zionist dichotomy between national sovereignty and its absence, is removed by Hebrew poetry readers and critics from the realm of legitimate possibilities. Anything which could not be read as the representation of a collective with a unified identity and historic continuity in the midst of a struggle for sovereign existence did not win a legitimate place in Zionist nationalist reading culture. Nonetheless, a critical, alternative reading of nationalist commentary on the representation of violence—a reading that does not accept the basic assumptions of Zionist nationalism from the start but questions them instead—will not necessarily reflect the sovereign/­ nonsovereign polarity upon which nationalist commentary is based. This type of reading may be conducted from a heterogeneous point of view, one that does not posit the continuous historical narrative of a unified collective. Instead of positioning the Jews as a given entity, it questions them. In place of the history—or historicity—of Jewish existence, it allows us to speak of the “genealogy” of the past, in Nietzsche and Foucault’s terms:37 a concept which does not represent the past as 37.  See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

a decisive teleological narrative of a collective with a fixed identity and an unbroken existence. Unlike the historian, the genealogist is concerned with the breakdown of coherent narratives of development that lead from the past to the present and thereby confirm their own necessity. In contrast with the historian, who weaves a continuous thread connecting past and present, the genealogist cuts it in two: defamiliarizing the past, seeing it not as a stage on a continuum with the present, but as “other,” necessarily disconnected from it. In this way the genealogist refrains from using the past to justify and legitimize the present. Paradoxically, because the genealogist emphasizes the foreignness of the past, she avoids turning it into a support and makes it a relative factor, one which does not have the power to legitimize the present. A genealogical study of the past is conducted in such a way that the past’s foreignness, its lack of belonging to the present, undermines the apparently structural and rational nature of events from the past so that they may not be taken for granted just because they have clear roots and origins. Historical studies produce narratives of continuously existing identity, in which the power and the desire to affirm such an identity contribute to the creation of the speaker’s identity. In contrast, the genealogist narrates history without committing himself from the start to using it to build his own continuous, homogeneous identity as its speaker. The genealogist casts doubt on the teleological narrative; he concentrates on the uniqueness of events and foregrounds alternative stories, the exceptions and gaps that undermine the authority of the dominant narrative. The genealogist’s starting point is that the beginning, the origin of a string of events, is the result of an arbitrary decision and was never the only one that could have been made. And so, a genealogical reading of the founding narrative of an “imagined national community” does not assume that it will be continuous and consistent. Instead, it grants legitimacy to a hybrid, discontinuous narrative filled with gaps and contradictions.38 This enables it to read poetic figures separately, as elements in different stories that are not necessarily sequential, and as reactions and developments in response 38.  Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routlege, 1994), 157–60.

29

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to the fluctuating violence and structural changes caused by the war, and not only as part of the narrative of national redemption. A critical reading of the traditional discourse in the poetry of Shlonsky’s school and related groups, including its opponents, constitutes a critical reading of the Zionist interpretive framework from which it arose. Genealogical reading undermines the Zionist point of view of the interpreter as holding an obligatory perspective, representing it as one possibility of many and not a binding one. Its first step is to shift the interpretive framework out of exclusively Zionist boundaries and begin a rereading process for texts that belong to the cultural history of Hebrew writing. Such a critical reading assumes, first of all, that acts of reading and interpretation are themselves historical phenomena, and institutionalized features of culture that contain, in particular historical situations, a selection of canonical readings of canonical texts and a preferred selection of reading strategies, and different preferred strategies in other situations. This type of reading is often characterized as post-Zionist; its “postness” is twofold: first of all, chronologically, as a reading that comes after the intensively nationalistic period that produced the texts and in which they were read as part of a process of rebirth and national struggle. While this reading is distant in time from the immediate context in which Zionist texts were written and read, it is also, secondly, distant conceptually from the Zionist norms of reading traditionally and apparently naturally linked to Hebrew literary texts. Despite this assumed natural identification, it is also possible to develop a critical reading that moves the Hebrew text out of this Jewish nationalist interpretive framework. Such a reading was made possible in the 1940s and 1950s by Yonatan Ratosh’s Canaanite point of view. Ratosh questioned the continuity of the Jewish nation with the Hebrew nation and its creation of a native Hebrew culture in Palestine. He argued for a distinction between Hebrew literature and “literature in Hebrew,”39 thus undermining the way that Hebrew literary criticism attached literature written in Hebrew yet still immersed in the experience of Jews in the Diaspora, to Hebrew literature that expressed the national-native experience. 39.  Yonatan Ratosh, Sifrut yehudit balashon haivrit (1950; Tel-Aviv: Hadar, 1982), 1: 37–41.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

Such a critical reading is also possible today as a result of processes that are taking place in Hebrew-language Israeli literature. Characteristics that had been taken for granted and perceived as natural in Hebrew literary discourse have been undermined. For example, as Hebrew literature turned into Israeli literature in the State of Israel, and Palestinian Israeli writers of Hebrew such as Anton Shammas (1950–), Salman Masalha (1953–), and Naim Areidi (1950–) entered the Hebrew literary canon, the ethnic element of Hebrew writers’ identities has been problematized and can no longer be taken for granted. The ethnic identity factor in Hebrew literature, which had always existed but was concealed, has emerged and is now clearly in sight. The complete overlap of Hebrew text and Jewish author no longer exists, and in its wake the identification of Hebrew literature as nationalist Zionist writing has been undermined. A postnationalist reading of Hebrew literature disturbs the exclusive position of the Zionist interpretive framework and pushes it back to the starting line, where it can be poked and prodded, studied and clarified. Instead of speaking about Hebrew literature as an institutionalized collection of works with an objective, natural existence, the accumulation of authentic creative powers, it may be seen as the product of invention, a metaphorical rubric that brings together a group of texts written in the Hebrew language. This principle of the Hebrew language, an organizing rather than a natural principle, which has been part of Hebrew literature over all its generations, is also nothing but an invention: that is, a principle of linguistic identification that conceals additional organizing norms such as shared national territory, shared history, and a shared ethnic Jewish identity. The exposure of the ethnocentric norm hidden behind the metaphorical heading of “Hebrew literature” makes a large contribution to clarifying the position of such literature as a site of critical and literary discourse which at all times functions to destroy and exclude, classify and brand everything that is worthy or unworthy of passing through the gates of Hebrew literature.40

40.  See Hannan Hever, “Lehakot ba-ekvo shel akiles,” Alpayim 1 (June 1989).

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C h a p t e r 5   Nationalism Anthologized

The literary anthology is one of the most significant arenas that shapes the norms of national literary discourse. It is a useful tool that not only disseminates a coherent image of “Hebrew poetry” and accentuates collective poetics norms but in fact determines and institutionalizes them by force of representation. In World War II and after, during the struggle to establish a Jewish state and the 1948 Independence War, Hebrew poetry anthologies were markedly nationalist enterprises. The anthology Six Chapters of Poetry, published by the symbolist Shlonsky school in 1940, constituted a foundation for the literary construction of the “imagined national community” of Jews in Palestine. It portrayed the overall nationalist scene combined with the local one so that symbolism’s universalist ethics were linked with the local situation of the Jews in Palestine. During the 1940s, anthologies of poetry on the armed conflict with the Arabs and the 1948 war clearly strengthened the nationalist framework, and reinforced Palestine as the natural setting for nationalist Hebrew poetry. At the same time, however, the lyric poem—purportedly determined by aesthetics alone—is the characteristic mode. Such universalist rhetoric conceals a fundamental and particularist commitment to nationalist Zionist values, even in earlier works. For example, from the moment when it appeared in 1938, the anthology A Selection of the New Hebrew Poetry (Mivhar hashira haivrit hachadasha) seized center stage. This anthology contains a selection of work from two hundred years of lyric Hebrew poetry, from the Hebrew Italian poet, playwright, and philosopher Moshe Haim Luzzato (1707–46) in the eighteenth century to contemporary poets. Edited by the respected author and editor Asher Barash (1889–1952) and pub-

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

lished by the prestigious publishing house Schocken Books in 1938, it was more popular than any other Hebrew poetry anthology published during the pre-state period and even after. Barash’s book was considered genuinely representative, as it was not the product of any one literary camp or particular political tendency, but an inclusive work of the whole spectrum of poetry. At this point in time, the end of the 1930s, when modernism and the avant-garde were well established in Palestine, Barash offered a purportedly general perspective, in which differing trends were to find their place in harmonious coexistence.41 The poems in this apparently inclusive book, therefore, bear a generic status; each poem constitutes an example of the whole, becomes representative, and acquires authority. Barash, close to the generation of H. N. Bialik (1873–1934), considered the national poet, constructed the anthology from a Zionist-nationalist perspective, that is, as a conservative arena that duplicated the common-denominator norms of the dominant field of high, nationalist culture. It cancels out or swallows up differences and conflicts based on politics, gender, religion, class, ethnicity, or race; in their place it constructs a shared representation that is purported to be general and universal. Barash’s controlling hand is evident in the removal of conflicts and exclusion of those works that threatened to create them or make it otherwise difficult to arrive at a resolution within the framework of a common nationality. And so the political poet Alexander Penn, a Marxist, is not represented by a political poem but a lyric one, “Without Knowing—Why?” (“Bli daat— lama?”),42 and the voice of Leah Goldberg, a woman who had already published a book of poems in 1935, Smoke Rings (Tabaot ashan), was completely excluded. Barash’s anthology declares its commitment to the Hebrew language, but this statement serves to mask the boundaries of what was actually included in the book. Behind the norm of Hebrew language lie criteria of ethnic origin, class, gender, and religion that grant legitimacy to the texts in the anthology, even if they are not openly expressed. The universal human image produced by this book of ­Hebrew 41.  See Hannan Hever, “Our Poetry Is Like an Orange Grove,” in The Anthology in Jewish Literature, ed. David Stern (Oxford: Oxford University, 2004), 281–303. 42.  Asher Barash, ed., Mivhar hashira haivrit hachadasha (Tel-Aviv: Schocken Books, 1938), 484.

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poetry, which apparently could represent any modern national entity faithfully, is in fact the product of particularism. It does not exceed the boundaries of a shared national image, created by poems written in Hebrew, but whose writers are all Jews, mostly men who identify as secular (a minority are religiously observant), all of whom are of European background (except for the poet and Orientalist Yosef Halevi [1827–1917], born in Adrianopolis in the Ottoman Empire). It completely ignores contemporary Hebrew poetry written by Yemenite and North African Jews.43 In order to establish its authority, the anthology does not focus on one specific poem or historical or political event. The editor’s organizing principle is rather the figure of the poet: each is presented to the reader (in a short biography) as an individual whose work is valued according to universal standards of quality as the aesthetic product of a creative personality. And it is only to be expected that the lyric form is the cultural category with the most important role in the development of such dominant figures in poetry. In this context, a lyric poem obeys criteria of beauty, aesthetics, naturalness, and authentic, unmediated individual expression that cancel out the contradictions, conflicts, and incoherencies of the cultural community. The power of the lyric increased as the Hebrew cultural community in Palestine developed as a national group; it became a term that papered over the contradictions and clashes within the imagined national community with its narrative of linear progress from the present toward a shared future. After World War II broke out, more specific anthologies focusing on national struggle and suffering replaced the comprehensive lyrical view promoted by Barash. But the Shlonsky school’s 1940 anthology did not distance itself from universalism; on the contrary, it represented the lofty, harmonious lyric as a trove of collective resources with which to counter violence. Another anthology appearing at the same time emphasized a different preference of the symbolists: poetry in translation from other lan43.  On poetry by Yemenite Jews, see Yehuda Razhabi, ed., Shirat teyman ha-ivrit (TelAviv: Am Oved, 1989). On poetry by North African Jews, see Ephraim Hazan, Hashira haivrit ba-tsfon afrika (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1995).

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

guages. Entitled Russian Poetry (Shirat Russia), this was an anthology of Russian verse translated into Hebrew, coedited by Shlonsky with Leah Goldberg and published in 1942, at the height of World War II. The book’s universalist, humanistic spirit is expressed by virtue of its publication by the socialist Hakibbutz Haartzi movement and its Hashomer Hatzair wing, identified (like the editors) with the Soviet Union’s war against Nazism under the leadership of Stalin. Like Barash’s anthology, this book too claims to speak in the name of universality; its aesthetic-ideological basis is pure universalism, presented as the underpinning of historical events. Current events and political tendencies did not distract Shlonsky from his commitment to deriving authority from such universalism. While in Barash’s anthology, aesthetic ideals nourished the spirit of Zionist nationalism, Russian Poetry went so far as to position the lyric as the source of the morality uniting all humankind, including the Jewish nation, in the struggle against the common enemy at a difficult historic moment. Coeditor Goldberg writes: [A Digest of World Poetry] is the overall title we gave [this series of] six collections of recent world poetry from different nations and languages—mostly lyric—and it was not at all for formal reasons that we began with Russia. We do not intend to say that certain poems are the best or certain poets especially gifted—our goal is to give the portrait of a generation, its moral biography, which in every nation and language appears at its height in poetry, which, while it is the expression of a particular age, paradoxically speaks to all ages. The private conversation of an individual generation with the heart of the nation, and the nation with its soul is, in the end, one chorus of all the nations of the world. After all, each generation shapes its personal image in its poetry (the larger picture of the ensemble and not necessarily the individual play of uniquely gifted poets). All honest poetry is rooted in the actual; it grows from its place, is nursed by its times. Our intention from the start was to express the essence of humankind that in any case breaches the banks of time and place, and rises toward the international and intergenerational bridge of the human spirit. It is fitting that the poetry gathered here opens our series of collective confessions—of the thoughts of a generation, its high and low tides, hates and loves. Isn’t this book the chronicle of a generation about whom it

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will surely be said that it transgressed, but also sought atonement and redemption?44

Restrained fury coursing under the universal-national narrative of collective redemption may be seen clearly in a small anthology that appeared in 1943, Plucked Leaves: Poems of Nations at War (Aley teref: mishirey amim bamilchama), edited by Azriel Schwartz (Uchmani), also published by Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair. Schwartz included poems from contemporary periodicals, “whose value is not their uniqueness, but in the way they belong to the poetic chronicle of our times, a tragic chronicle that began twenty-nine years ago at the fateful crossroads between two ‘histories’—one of egoism and blood, and the other that creates the life of nations and their souls.”45 Hebrew poetry constitutes only one section, the last, in Schwartz’s book, which features poetry in translation from Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, England, Greece, Serbia, and the Soviet Union), as well as poetry translated from Yiddish. But this purportedly universalist gaze is quickly revealed as enlisted in a clearly political agenda that views the Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany as the struggle of the entire socialist camp. The universalist humanism the editor finds in Jewish Holocaust poetry he explains away in a sharply political manner: “It is no accident that precisely the Jewish poet makes the plea [to protect his tribe]. . . . Destiny? Of course. It is a tragic destiny, but there is splendor at its margins. These days it has no name but socialism.”46 And the historical narrative which is Schwartz’s organizing principle for the book presents World War II according to the socialist interpretation: the roots of the war are to be found in World War I, perceived as the arena of struggle between nationalism and capitalism and humanism and socialism.

44.  Leah Goldberg and Avraham Shlonsky, eds., Shirat Russia (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1942), 7. 45.  Azriel Schwartz, ed., Aley teref: mishirey amim bamilchama (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1943), 5. 46.  Ibid., 6.

C h a p t e r 6   The Living-Dead in Joy of the Poor

The Hebrew poetry anthology took shape close to the events of World War II; the Shlonsky group’s dominance was expressed in the many volumes of verse it produced during this period. When the war ended, Shlonsky edited Poetry of Days (Shirey hayamim), discussed in Chapter 26, constructing the anthology around his own poem “Signs” and organizing it into chapters according to the original languages of the selections. The book is clearly focused, like its predecessors, on the fate of the war’s victims. Starting from the earliest stages of the war, members of the school and their followers adhered to a symbolist representation of death. Physical death is the result of violence against the body. But death and collective suffering are mediated and therefore softened in symbolist representation; they blend together and are consumed by the transcendental framework of poetry whose ascendency is expressed in music, melody, and song. The grayness of daily life is contrasted with eternity in such work; music signifies the missing element toward which one never ceases to aspire. In the first section of Alterman’s “Song of Four Brothers,” called “Opening” (“Pticha”) (and indeed, it is the opening poem of the anthology Six Chapters), he presents the creation of poetry as an existential alternative while living under the shadow of death: The sun is large and low and rests at the end of the street. Perhaps we won’t see it tomorrow for many are to die before dawn. But until we are white as chalk we will sleep bitter death,

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and the song of ten brothers will live before us.47

Death is portrayed with a characteristic symbolist formula of erotic attraction in work by Yaakov Orland, a minor voice in the Hebrew symbolist school, in his series, “Leaves from the Autumn Garden” (“Alim migan hastav”), first published in 1942 in a book of the same name, and later collected in On the Hawk and the Dove (Al ayit veyona) (1946). Collective death is the starting point of symbolist sublimation; a woman who arouses the male speaker is a metaphor for the Land of Israel, emphasizing the contradiction between the grayness of masculine existence and the feminine transcendence to which the speaker is drawn. According to symbolist logic, death is the object of desire; through the art of music, it becomes melodious poetry. Like Alterman’s poem about brothers, filled with the anticipation of death, Orland’s poem shows that the end of life is in effect the material of song: 1. I sing because my life is windblown by autumn and the leaves have not yet fallen. Let me rinse the clods like the first rain. Pray let me fall on you like a stone falls in the field— gray, anonymous, but before I leave I will sing my whole life to you, because David’s harp sways over the abyss of my life and the ears of my generation are insensate to song. Open your windows, my country, before [the song], because it is sad from start to finish.

2. I live in great times, my life lesser than dust. Immortality breathes around me and spreads its wisdom as wide as its wings, while I the fool die moment by moment, hour by hour. I have uttered all wisdom and whispered all secrets, everything I’ve called eternal—is swallowed by eternity.

47.  Nathan Alterman, “Shir arba’a ahim,” in Shisha pirkey shira, ed. Shlonsky, 19.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

Where is the new melody to sing that which has not yet been sung, that is not second, [but] first— forever.48

The linguistic sharpness of “not second, [but] first” (alsheni, ehad), which combines a tautology (not second, therefore first) with an ordinary phrase, merges a sign of individuality with one of universality. This merger depends on the paradoxical way the act of poetry positions itself with regard to its readers. In this poem Orland says that the poetry that may substitute for life is personal and universal, but the current generation is not listening. In Alterman’s “Opening,” poetry is presented as a solution for the life that is merely an anticipation of death. Alterman then instructs the reader in a type of reading that is to distinguish between the artistic-aesthetic poem and real life: And you, reader, look at what’s written, if you’re tired—just a moment, listen to autumn batter the shutters and set out on a walk in the evening breeze.49

The symbolization of violent death reaches its height in Alterman’s book-length poem Joy of the Poor (Simhat annieem), published in 1941, when his work was already securely part of the canon of Hebrew poetry written in Palestine. He became the leading Hebrew poet in Palestine due to this book and his previous volume Stars Outside (1938), along with the poems that appeared in his Haaretz newspaper column “Moments” (“Regaim”), and later, in his regular “The Seventh Column” feature in the Histradrut, Eretz-Israel workers’ labor union’s newspaper Davar, the chief organ of the Jewish population in the Yishuv. Alterman followed current events in these platforms, and formulated the positions of the labor movement, in particular of Mapai, then the dominant party in Jewish politics in Palestine. In the “The Seventh Column,” Alterman gave special attention to international policy toward the Jews in Palestine and world Jewry, and many of the columns

48.  See Yaakov Orland, Meevhar ktavim (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1997), 1: 125. 49.  Nathan Alterman, Simhat annieem (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1972), 20.

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were semiofficial expressions of the opinion of Jews in Palestine on the other nations of the world. They also devoted attention to the Holocaust and responses to it. The book-length poem Joy of the Poor, more than any other work of his, made the biggest contribution to Alterman’s status as national spokesman of Hebrew poetry during the war. Both during the war and after, it represented the collective-nationalist world of values at the time when the collective was under threat.50 Although it was published in 1941 and therefore does not directly discuss the Holocaust, it was nonetheless read as part of the struggle against fascism and as a “pre-Holocaust response”:51 it was perceived as an expression of the period of terror and persecution in the 1930s that preceded the Holocaust. It also expressed the collective anxiety that permeated the Jewish community in Palestine at the beginning of World War II, as the German army advanced and might well have invaded and murdered the Jews there.52 The figure of a dead husband returned from the grave—envious of his living wife and observing his daughter—is at the center of the poem. Living in the midst of death is revealed as granting existence significance and value: Life on the edge, full and strong. In the open! Everything! You’ve torn all your webs! My daughter, on the edge of a knife we will never get old! Your youth shines like knives!53

The readiness of the individual to sacrifice his life for the general good is praised for a series of collective values such as loyalty, hope, and vengeance; within this culture of death, he is willing to die in their name. Also praised is the cult of losing one’s threatened life— “life on the edge, full and strong”—for the collective. The justification of violence also appears, for example, in the section “The City 50.  For representations of this national consciousness in Alterman’s poetry by Hebrew literary criticism see, for example: David Cnaani, “Al kav ha-ketz,” in Beynam l’vein zmanam (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1955), 245–49; Rachel Katzenelson, “Shirey zmanenu,” Dvar Hapoelet, July 13, 1944, 177–81. 51.  Cnaani, “Al kav ha-ketz,” 239–41. 52.  Boaz Arpali, Avotot shel hoshek (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1984), 146–51. 53.  Alterman, Simhat annieem, 173.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

Falls,” in which a fatal rebellion is the source of joy and of the hope for redemption: Rise and sing, oh night turns toward the joy of loss at dawn. For night has ended, oh ancient joy. Brothers! Once in a thousand years perhaps our death has a reason. ... A terrified father! A city burning like a candle! A city alight, entrapped courtyard by courtyard! The end, my daughter! The end is here! And the life of joy and misery, long live your pure happy life, expelled as if leprous, long live all those who close their eyes, because between the straits is not the happiness of the besiegers, but that of the besieged!54

The father admits to his daughter the enormous force of collective disaster. But death and suffering in a collective context make death meaningful, and turn it into a source of redemption. Such redemption and misery were read in their pronounced nationalist context. Their double nature—based in current events as well as seemingly ahistorical abstractions—strengthened the poem’s symbolist effects. The pacifist symbols of the 1930s, in particular the dead returned to life, were now being read in an openly nationalist context. The figure of the living-dead is ambivalent, meant to resolve the contradiction between the obligation to individual life and to the nation, the collective. The metaphor seems to solve this by blurring the boundaries between the world of the dead and the world of the living. The alive/dead man is an oxymoron: the individual dead victim who is granted significance within the life span of a national collective. The oxymoron is based on a clearly masculine tradition, whose main cultural sources are the biblical stories of Isaac, who is saved from sacrifice, and Jesus, who is crucified and resurrected. This is a sacrificial tradition in which the end of life is transcended, and which exchanges an absence of significance in an individual’s bodily death for an alternative significance, either a religious or an exalted national one. In the end the victim is 54.  Ibid., 220–21.

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rescued from death and undergoes a metamorphosis. After death he returns to life in a process with divine, metaphysical, religious, or nationalist significance. Religion or nationalism legitimizes death and those killed in wars. A particular individual death is a signifier of national/ collective meaning, granting private death a metahistorical dimension. The concrete live/dead person is a signifier of the national whole. The nation too is a dead body that has been resurrected. It suffers but is not extinguished; it is an entity of which death is part but not the entirety.55 The figure of the live/dead person is an ideological mechanism that blurs the differences between the realm of the living and that of the dead by operating in both. On the one hand, it grants life to the dead, although this is a spiritual, collective-national life and not a physical, individual one. On the other hand, as Sigmund Freud’s analysis of two Shakespeare plays, and several folk tales and myths shows, death is a part of life;56 inserting choice into the equation gives people the illusion that they have beaten death. In the third act of the Merchant of Venice, Freud notes, suitors of the heiress Portia must choose among three caskets—gold, silver, and lead—in order to win the right to marry her. In King Lear, a similar choice of three must be made: Lear will divide his kingdom among his three daughters according to the amount of love they show for him. But in the case of Lear the choice is negative and the result inverted; Lear disinherits his youngest daughter, Cordelia, with disastrous consequences for everyone. Common to the plays as well as the story of Cinderella and the myth of the judgment of Paris, according to Freud, is that in these cases, to choose the most desirable of three women is also to choose death: Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In this way man overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually. No greater triumph of wish-fulfilment is conceivable. A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of women. . . . Lear carries Cordelia’s dead body onto the stage. Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess who, like the Valkyrie in German mythol55.  Hannan Hever, “Hi ha-hi oo-met ha-met,” Siman Kria 19 (March 1986): 188–90. 56.  Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” trans. James Strachey, in Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 109–21.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

ogy, carries away the dead hero from the battlefield. Eternal wisdom, clothed in the primeval myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying.57

The tendency of Hebrew poets of the 1940s to represent the livingdead in their work may be seen, therefore, as a mechanism with which to defend themselves from the fear of death; but their metaphor of the living-dead creates a culture of death.

57.  Ibid., 119, 120.

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C h a p t e r 7   Revenge on a Nationalist Scale

The figure of the living-dead served as a cornerstone of Hebrew culture in Palestine, which, confronting death, found that this image worked powerfully in its name and favor. The dead person who returns to observe the living and exists beyond the specific and private constraints of daily life gathered such great force that this image became the appropriate proxy for the entire collective. The community’s violent response to the evil it faces is set in motion by such a figure; it is violence directed toward a goal, with the clear purpose of revenge. Contemporary Hebrew poetry in the 1940s repeatedly suggests revenge as the collective solution to persecution and suffering; revenge is nearly always represented as a stage on the way to national redemption. Evil is portrayed as part of the collective narrative having a beginning and an end, and so coping with and responding to it are included in this teleological story. A prominent example of revenge carried out by a living-dead figure may be found in Alterman’s Joy of the Poor, in the poem “Prayer for Revenge” (“Tfilat nakam”): And the whip spoke night and day, here it is written on my back as if on a book. And the dead man died, felled by a whip, but blessed is the one who returns like locusts and ashes. One can’t die of mourning and clubs. Driven away with sticks he returns like a dog. They beat him and cursed and say he’s dead. And they will make him the object of laughter and scorn. And he will hurry at the touch of fear, and be lit with the flicker of a match,

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

his gait like straw walking and his voice like paper tearing.                

And he went and said: Rise and fight my fight. Rise and fight my fight, because my destroyer laughed. Don’t abandon the day, don’t say lie down, my son, lie down. Rise and see your slave insulted by his enemies. Don’t forget what was done to him. Don’t forget that for one, a hundred were annihilated. Accept the rage of a few. Blessed is the god of the dead.

Because my mouth is filled with ashes and the one who cursed me laughs because suddenly I’m old as the days of heaven, give me gray hatred like a sack too heavy for a pair of people to bear. To the winters of life I will walk not-alive and shine like the moon in the middle of the month my pursuer tracks me over forest and valley, and I will pursue them in valley and forest. And the woodchoppers will see as the woodcutter rises, and from the woods the animal will see, and indeed you did not wish the death of the dead, but his return as locust and beast. Rise up, one who fights my fight! From ashes, from crypts. The spilled blood of your slaves cries out: Arise father! Arise and attack! For this you are a father! There is an end to the insult of your slaves from their oppressors! What does your slave seek, great father? Send your hand to his neck. What does the slave want from their possessions? Only their eyes your slave will ask. For his sorrow is heavy and his heart bitter. Because his oppressors struck the earth’s clay, and they will spit on him, and he will say there is revenge. And they will think he is mute,

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and he will be silent until pay day. And celebrate revenge a day and a month, and with one eye see the Holy. He brightened in his happiness too great to count, don’t say: have mercy! don’t call to him: repent! Don’t forget, don’t forget what was done to him. Don’t forget that a hundred may finish one off, accept the anger of a few. Blessed is the god of the dead.58

The transcendent authority that is supposed to ensure the validity and significance of revenge is usually god, whom Alterman calls here “the god of the dead.” It is in fact difficult to find a representation of revenge in any poetry of this period that is not based on a direct address to god; these poems use prayer as a generic framework. Such a use of the prayer structure is also prominent in more popular types of writing, such as the poem written in December 1942, by Menachem Bergman, a student at the Kadoorie Agricultural High School; he died three years later as a soldier in the Palmach, the fighting force of the Jewish underground in Palestine under the British Mandate. The following lines quote a mother who sends her sons to fight in World War  II. She parts from them before their enlistment in the British army, speaks of those who have already fallen, and prays to god to take revenge for the Jewish people: “I sacrificed my eldest son without a complaint on my lips, my youngest son I lost today – how can I stop my tears? “But a quiet prayer I shall lift to the Master of the Universe: take revenge for the suffocated Diaspora, take revenge for rivers of blood! “Take revenge for violated women, take revenge for infants and old men, take revenge on the wicked now for the blood of the nursling, the babe, the child! 58.  Alterman, Simhat annieem, 198–200.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

“Look up as one, swear, brothers, this oath: in blood and fire the Diaspora fell— in blood and fire the Diaspora will rise!”59

59.  Menachem Bergman, Ben haaretz: Pirkey yoman, mihtavim veh-shirim (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1947), 269.

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C h a p t e r 8   Leah Goldberg Writes War Poetry

National revenge and the symbol of the living-dead share center stage in the discourse of Hebrew poetry at this time. The figure of the living-dead was considered a normative representation, a recurring metaphor for the general situation of a people living in the constant presence of collective death. Poets repeated this formula, which harnessed blatant violence to the nationalist narrative. But not everyone embraced the figure of the living-dead that Alterman had placed at the forefront of poetry. Other paths were taken by writers who refused to accept the authority of one hegemonic national symbol, and who followed other trends. Leah Goldberg openly refused the call to write war poetry, but at the same time she nonetheless found a way to make the figure of the living-dead her own. Her proclamations against war poetry established her as a member of the symbolist canon, and at the same time as a rather singular poet. This dual nature was apparent in the many poems she wrote during the rise of violence in Europe at the close of the 1930s, in the turbulent days before the outbreak of World War II and at its beginnings, when the controversy about war poetry arose. During this time her second volume of poetry, The Green-Eyed Stalk (­Shibolet yerukat ha-ayn), was published, as well as poems that were later collected in her Songs in the Villages (Shir bah-kfarim) and From My Old Home (Me-beiti ha-yashan).60 Goldberg’s poems and pronouncements appear to obey the univer60.  Leah Goldberg, Shibolet yerukat ha-ayn (Tel-Aviv: Hanakdan, 1940); Shir bah-kfarim (Tel-Aviv: Hanakdan, 1942); Me-beiti ha-yashan (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1944).

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

salism of the Shlonsky school, keeping their distance from writing directly about war and murder. Goldberg wrote: It is not only the right of poets in horrendous times to create poems about nature, flowering trees, and children who know how to laugh, but an obligation, the obligation to remind human beings that they are still human, and that the same simple, eternal values that make life dear still exist in the world, and make death more perfect—death, not murder. It cannot be that the only way to defeat evil is to massacre human beings. This indolent thought always brings us to one wellworn path paved by the bones of millions of people. I deeply believe that the poet is forbidden to do this during wartime.61

In her poetry as in this pronouncement, Goldberg represents death as an eternal human phenomenon, while suppressing the fact of murder and collective violence. It is for this reason that she makes a sharp distinction between death and murder. Goldberg portrays death with euphemisms, often using transitional moments in the time cycle of a day as a metaphor for death, as in this well-known poem from The Green-Eyed Stalk: The world is heavy on our eyelids. Our heads are bent. Our weeping stilled. The light at the edge of the sea is sealed. The song is done. Clouds pass by. The convoy is marching in vaulted and shining silence. We will be calm. We will be very calm. The day fades. Our eyes are closed.62

The process of relaxation begins with eyelids weighed down by the world and ends in an almost meditative posture. The poem depicts a metaphoric middle state between life and death, produced as a result of the human suffering in the world that weighs us down. The violence of war is merely hinted at in the presence of a “convoy” and the use of the first-person plural. It is represented as having a symbolic, transcen61.  Leah Goldberg, “Al oto nose atzmo,” Hashomer Hatzair, September 8, 1939. 62.  Leah Goldberg, “The world is heavy on our eyelids,” in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama, 47; “Kaved al afafeynu haolam,” Shibolet yerukat ha-ayn.

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dental existence that blurs the borders between death and life, and is softened with cosmic consolation. For Leah Goldberg, too, the symbolist process of epiphany begins with music. The symbolist norm of transformation from the concrete to the universally symbolic often portrays this change as a result of the combination of the human voice with music. Rich, intensive sound—raised to the point where music and instruments become a theme in themselves—grants poetry a symbolic position and authoritative stance. The symbolist poem is involved with mediation between the natural and artificial, while the transformation from concrete to symbolic is the result of a semantic process that melds the physical human voice with musical notes, symbolic and sounded at a distance. Music elevated to theme is a necessary part of the symbolization process. That Goldberg’s poetry accedes to this norm is undisputed; it is evident in remarks made at the appearance of her first book in 1940 by Israel Zmora, who functioned as a semiofficial critic of the EretzIsraeli symbolist school: “Anything foreign to a poem’s rhythm, anything likely to lower its melodic heights, is banished without regret; the ease of this step, one of the virtues of Leah Goldberg’s verse, becomes one of her graces in The Green-Eyed Stalk. . . . [There is] much light and music for those who turn to this fragile material, those with good taste, will know how to appreciate and consider.”63 Another characteristic and even more influential example of a typical symbolist formula appeared in the introduction to Goldberg and Shlonsky’s anthology Russian Poetry in 1942: “There is no poetry that is not a supreme symbol of what is happening, the music of the times and a hint of what is to come.”64 In Leah Goldberg’s work, however, there is nearly always some complication in the characteristic symbolist transformation in the form of a delay or other disturbance. Such a process takes place in “The world is heavy on our eyelids,” but is clearly not completed. Instead of the perfect blending of a human voice with music, the music stops: 63.  Israel Zmora, “Shibolet yerukat ha-ayn, by Leah Goldberg,” Mahbarot Lesifrut 1 (January 1940): 84 64.  Leah Goldberg and Avraham Shlonsky, eds., Shirat Russia (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1942), 11–12.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

“The song is done” and “Our weeping stilled.” The silencing of music occurs at the same time that crying stops, and both are interfering with the cosmic solace.65 In her January 1940 poem “Yekitza” the populations of cities victimized by war are compared to slain birds in the rising dawn. The sounds heard above the city towers are drumbeats, but the continuity of music in the symbolization process is interrupted. In the poem “In the Evenings” (“Balaylot”),66 published near the end of the war, a grotesque connection between the human voices of the dead and music produces an unpleasant sound: “My father’s voice jests. Thunderous laughter— / the dead city laughs at night in the valley / to the melody of the Days of Awe.” Such a symbolist effort may also lead to a kind of transcendence when the musical instrument is represented as a physical continuation of the body. But when Goldberg depicts her return to the country of her childhood, now destroyed by war, she foregrounds the obvious conflict between music and the sound of children crying: Like a cruel and pointless mockery, foolish and maddening, sometimes their crying is accompanied by the choppy waltz of a music box.

In the end, music fails to overcome death and loss. And so, in the fourth section of “Ending” (“Siyum”),67 despite the fact that “Into this quiet the voice / of lost worlds will burst,” and “The angel cries on my rooftop, / his tears drip down my window,” there will be no mending or redemption, for “my dead never rose.” There is “no escape from the weeping of angels,” and the conclusion is that “No ram’s horn [calls] out in the silence.”68 The music of the ram’s horn, or shofar, a musical and Jewish religious instrument, is an explicit expression of the lack of a transcendental solution to violence. Instead, music becomes an ironic tool with which to bypass and subvert the symbolist representation of war 65.  Leah Goldberg, Shirim (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1986), 3: 166. 66.  Ibid., 2: 72, 79. 67.  Ibid., 247. 68.  Leah Goldberg, “Ending,” in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama, 48–50.

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v­ ictims. Only in the poem “Recently,”69 the last moment before loss, in the dark or redemptive moment of fleeting revelation, does she speak of weeping and music as belonging to one figurative continuum: Somewhere a harmonica weeps over the passing hours. Only one moment of eternal time remains in the cow’s eyes.

Artificial sound produced with an instrument may represent human feeling and serve as an extension of the human body. But behind the universal musical synthesis that distances and softens violence, war is nonetheless present in Leah Goldberg’s poetry. The private voice nearly always retains a trace that is not swept along by the poem’s transcendental process. The symbolist encounter with the violence of war is often complicated by a failure or interruption of the musical process and the synthesis of the two voices: the drum is sealed, the singing ends, the waltz is choppy, or the nightingales are silent. Patent evidence of irony appears as well in the poems Goldberg wrote in the first years of World War II. She adopted a folk-ballad style for these poems, which were collected in Songs in the Villages. The framework was reworked into the presence of a foreign, “other” voice and presented as folk literature; this enabled her to lean on melody as a complete and artificial musical process of formulaic violence undergoing symbolization and elevation. And so, for example, there is the Slavic-style “Melody” (“Nigun”),70 in which the speaker describes an elder brother who sets out to take revenge; and “Three Sons” (“Shlosha banim”), based on a Lithuanian folk song, which tells of three brothers who seek revenge on a battlefield and in the end include a guest in their fight: Three sons to our aged father, oh, my flute, our aged father, we were raised in an inn on a great road: welcome he who enters!

69.  Goldberg, Me-beiti ha-yashan, 133. 70.  Goldberg, “Shlosha banim,” Shirim, 2: 212–13.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

The guest wonders on the doorstep: one is in the inn, are two missing? Three large young men as one, the young one remained alone with his father.   Sing, my flute, please sing! One said: I will tell you a song, oh, my flute, I will sing you a song, about two brothers who went out to harvest to the green meadow, to the gather the hay. The meadow is wet from blood not dew, oh, my flute—not a shower and not dew, my brother was felled like a pine, his scythe in his hand, our brother fallen. Then the second brother arose and went out to battle, to take his revenge on the destroyed field, to take his revenge on the falling tree, the revenge of the scythe in the hand of the dead.   Sing, my flute, please sing! Days and months without a letter, oh, my flute, no news, no letter, our brother is gone, went out and did not return, our aged father cries over the wine. The mourning father sits in the inn, his long moustache dips into his cup . . . a guest hears the song’s melody, sets out on his way with the youngest brother.   Sing, my flute, please sing!71

71.  Ibid., 204–7.

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C h a p t e r 9  The Duality of the

Symbolist Woman Poet

Goldberg situates herself as a generic poet within the dominant symbolist canon and at the same time as a particular woman poet in a private space. With this duality, Goldberg disturbs the symbolist process of transcendence and includes women in the discourse of war, despite the fact that western culture systematically excludes them from it. Like all western cultures, Hebrew culture grasps war as a masculine enterprise. The experience of waging war is dominated almost completely by men, who dominate the representation of war as well. A sharp distinction between the battlefront (center) and the home front (periphery) has been constructed, enabling male hegemony to maintain control. One prominent expression of this control is the decisive weight accorded to eyewitness testimony and to direct participation in war as the basis of a writer’s authority. A nationalist culture mobilized for battle will not accept the legitimacy of a woman as an unmediated eyewitness from the front. In English poetry of World War I, actual participation in battle loomed large in the identity of the male poet.72 The discussion of the relationship between battlefront and home front and their weight in war poetry shows not only the authority granted those who served “there”—the male fighters (whose authority was inherited by editors and critics of World War II poetry anthologies)—but it also shows efforts to expunge “the active presence of women as subjects . . . in the discourse of war,” according to Susan Schweik.73 72.  Simon Featherstone, ed., War Poetry: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 14–18. 73.  Susan Schweik, A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 4.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

Instead of joining this discourse by taking the male high road, identifying with the speech of those who experienced violence on the battlefield as male warriors, Leah Goldberg creates an alternative stance for women. From her position, she takes part in the hegemonic and canonic literary discourse of the symbolist school, but at the same she situates herself there as a woman. Though lower in status, her presence in the dominant discourse prevents her erasure from the legitimate representation of war and violence. As early as 1934, when Avraham Shlonsky published Stones of Chaos, a prominent example of Hebrew symbolist poetry written in Palestine, Goldberg wrote a poem in response, “On Reading Stones of Chaos” (“Lemikra Avney bohu”), in which she offered a cautious challenge from the point of view of a woman: “How strange, why would another write about my past, / drawing out my soul from a rivulet of silence? . . . My hands freeze, but facing me  / the sad flame of these poems burns.”74 The poet’s stance opposite the alien voice elevates into a conflict. But this voice of “another” that belongs to Shlonsky, the authoritative poet, is represented as a masculine voice, so that the conflict between fire and ice is a gendered one. The same kind of opposition can be found in “And will days ever come,” published during the Holocaust: And will they ever come, days of forgiveness and grace, when you’ll walk in the fields, simple wanderer, and your bare soles will be caressed by the clover, or the wheat-stubble . . . sting your feet, and its sting will be sweet? Or the rainfall will catch you, its downpour pounding on your shoulders, your breast, your neck, your head. And you’ll walk in the wet fields, quiet widening within like light on the cloud’s rim. And you’ll breathe in the scent of the furrow, full and calm, and you’ll see the sun in the rain-pool’s golden mirror, and all things are simple and alive, you may touch them, and you are allowed, you are allowed to love. You’ll walk in the field. Alone, unscorched by the blaze of the fires, along roads stiffened with blood and terror. 74.  Goldberg, “Lemikra Avney bohu,” Shirim, 1: 82.

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And true to your heart you’ll be again humbled and softened, as one of the grass, as one of humankind.75

The contrast between the hypothetical, bright future and the gloomy present crammed full of physical symbols is represented as a contrast between the universal longing to be like everyone else (“one of humankind”) and women’s actual lives. The rhetorical device of a litotes is used to express the utopian future in terms of the bitter present: “You’ll walk in the field. Alone, unscorched by the blaze / of the fires, along roads stiffened with blood and terror.” But the process of representation develops in the direction of universalism—“one of humankind”—and is revealed as the polar opposite of the private existence of a woman walking in the fields. Goldberg repeatedly situates a woman opposite violence, whose prayer is for death: “a death poor and simple—like a sister / to the stalk, the tree, the stone.”76 In a poem from 1940 (“Broad and golden the field in front of me” / “Zahov verahav hasade lefithee”), Goldberg appropriates the masculine language of a common Jewish prayer—the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4–9 and 11:13–21), which commands Jews to obey God and his commandments—in order to foreground the language of women. The Shema commands Jews to serve God “with all your heart and all your soul,” “when you lie down and when you get up.” In “I imagined my soul when I lay down and when I arose,” Goldberg identifies the voice of the worshipper as a woman, the mother of a weaned child: Broad and golden the field in front of me in the light of a flowering tree. The morning looks green to you, my brother, green, deep, and shining. I imagined my soul as I lay down and when I rose in dew, in the scent of the hay. Like a weaned child with its mother, the day is with me. And it is good for us, good for us together.77

75.  Leah Goldberg, “And will they ever come,” in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama, 76; in Hebrew: Davar, February 19, 1943, and Goldberg, Shirim, 2: 77. 76.  Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama, 42; in Hebrew: Goldberg, Shirim, 1: 115. 77.  Goldberg, Shirim, 1: 129.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

In the same year, Goldberg wrote “To a City” (“Leahat hearim”), a series of poems about Kovno, Lithuania, where she was born. Here too she seems to return to the symbolist pattern in which “the song of a whip moans and is understood, / and my throat laughs under the bridge.”78 But all this occurs at a sharp remove; there is a clear and irreparable division between the gloominess of the city and the speaker’s childhood, the “small steps” of which “will never return.”79 Only when this separation is recognized can the picture be completed, blending human voices with foreign ones, enabling Goldberg to write, “How our city cries and sings,” and to write about the delicate pallor of the seamstress on hearing “the song from the music box!”80 At the end of the poem, Goldberg returns to the dire present in the Kovno ghetto, when the human voice has become hoarse, disrupted, and uncommunicative, that of sick girls, victims of Nazi violence: Later they sit and sing together in lonely, indifferent voices— to the coming evening, to darkness, to fear they sing a children’s song.81

This particular place, which is not reworked into a process of musical transcendence and even disrupts it, is a markedly gendered location. Writing from the location of women turns Goldberg’s refusal to write war poetry into a refusal to write it from a male point of view. Her refusal prevents her from becoming completely attached to the symbolist process that could make her lose her legitimate place in the discourse about war, controlled as it is by masculine writing.

78.  “Leahat hearim,” ibid., 233. 79.  Ibid. 80.  Ibid., 234. 81.  Ibid., 236.

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C h a p t e r 10  The Living-Dead and the

Female Body

The symbolist representation of violence and murder, in its move toward transcendence, blurs the immediacy and concreteness of death and grants it a spiritual dimension in the figure of the living-dead, whose physicality is annulled. The impressive career of this figure in Hebrew symbolist poetry written in Palestine reached its apex in Alterman’s book-length poem Joy of the Poor (1941), in which women are many times portrayed at the moment of their exclusion from the sphere of nationalist culture. In this long poem, which may be considered the most influential attempt of the Hebrew symbolists to deal with collective death during war, women are solely a means for the production of the living-dead. The figure of the living-dead is also a metaphor for the submission of the individual body to the symbolist process that is meant to produce a world of universal values; in Joy of the Poor, a dead woman is the necessary condition for the creation of these transcendent beings. A woman jumps into a grave in order to save a dead man; in order to rescue him she herself must pass into the kingdom of death. In Hebrew grammar, which is gendered, “joy” (simha) is feminine word; reading the opening of the poem in English from a gendered perspective— through the use of feminine pronouns—shows how the living-dead is rescued from his enemies by a woman’s physical death: The joy of the poor knocked at the door. The man was waiting for her. And the joy of the poor will take up her stringed instruments, and the poor-dead man be gladdened.    And will say how fine it is, how good,    that I heard the joy of the poor.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

... And joy will say: No, for your destroyer is here, no, your last day is here. Though I didn’t visit your house or trample your wine press, I am walking with the coffin bearers.    And he’ll say: From my enemy and my abode,    how will you return, joy of the poor? And she’ll say: I will go down into the pit with you, coffin-man, I am in your debt as though you were alive. You did not see my face until your last day; no foe shall see me and live.82

The woman who accompanies the figure of the living-dead in Joy of the Poor is the source of his strength and grants him life after death. She, “the joy of the poor,” can help the “poor-dead man” only after he has died. Only there, in the grave, will he and she be shielded from the goading stare of the enemy. Her behavior is dictated by the collective stand against the enemy. In the name of collective necessity, the individual is supposed to relinquish satisfaction of individual need; in this case, need is so great that even after his death, the woman will still be in debt to the figure of the living-dead. These needs will be met, but in order that this not be carried out under dangerous enemy eyes, the individual woman must pay with her own death. The renunciation of individual life is the means by which collective life is realized; women are mobilized to sacrifice themselves for men in the name of the collective: “I will go down into the pit with you, coffin-man.” In contrast with Alterman’s symbolist transcendentalism, in which the woman is subordinated in order to save the man, to concede to the demands and rules of the collective in times of danger, Leah Goldberg’s symbolism foregrounds the woman’s individual situation. ­Goldberg disrupts the process of symbolization with the physical presence of a woman who does not become enslaved to a symbol and does not erase herself in its presence. Signs indicating the body are never markers of physical facts but are always mixed with representations and formulations of the body in dis82.  Alterman, Simhat annieem, 149–50.

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course. Goldberg’s poetry offers an alternative to renunciation of the symbolist link between the individual/physical life and the collective through singing and music: instead, she suggests instead a link between the embodied individual and gender. Gender is what enables her poetry to engage with the collective violence of war. The first-person plural speaker, the collective self that constructs the figure of the living-dead, suppresses gender—at which point the music and singing stop. The poem “The world is heavy on our eyelids” paints a symbolist portrait of death-in-life in a series of metaphors that blur the borders between these two states. At the stage when “our weeping [is] stilled,” the song ends as well, truncating the symbolization process of the living-dead. It becomes clear that gender is the factor responsible for this interference. The physicality and gender of the collective symbol was part of an open debate on war poetry. In her first essay on the topic in 1939, Goldberg wrote, “I believe that the warm, living body bearing within the potential for love and suffering in all its forms, the body of a living person, is more important than all the corpses of the fallen (even if they were heroes) on the killing field.”83 Later on, Goldberg returned to the idea of the physical element in the act of poetry and argued that in effect universal poetry is an earthly phenomenon like the joy in lovemaking between a man and a woman: The existence of poetry and the existence of love and the existence of music lie, for some reason, in the realm of necessities, [yet] for some other, important reason, [this fact is] hidden from view, and hardly ever expressed in writing or speech. There is no literary theory or [psychological] one, and no political movement that can explain and completely clarify where I get the confidence [to say] that under all conditions of life we must preserve, preserve wholeheartedly, the possibility for the existence of poetry. Perhaps—or so it seems to me at times—art and everything connected with it and everything that results from it, strive for the unlimited, and nonetheless remain limited within our earthly domain, the most human embodiment of humankind.84

Goldberg said the same thing in her poems, for example, by means of the marked physicality of the woman walking in the fields, in 83.  Leah Goldberg, “Al oto nose atsmo,” Hashomer Hatzair, September 8, 1939. 84.  Leah Goldberg, “Yoman lesifrut,” Hashomer Hatzair, October 21, 1939.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

“And will they ever come, days of forgiveness and grace.” She is “unscorched” by the fires taking place now; she will be caressed in the future: the soles of her feet by grass, and her breast by the rain. The poem “On Reading Stones of Chaos” is situated in opposition to the flames of sorrow in Shlonsky’s volume of that name, in the physicality of the speaker’s frozen hands; in “To a City,” the girls in the ghetto are represented physically by their shaved heads, “shining almost blue.” The transition from the individual situation to a universal one is not portrayed in Goldberg’s poetry as a natural process that can be taken for granted. The identifying marks of women’s bodies are not consumed by symbolism; on the contrary, their presence exaggerates and foregrounds the conscious act of mediation between the individual and the symbolic. The female body that disturbs the continuity of the symbolization process also cuts off the process of mediation between the human voice and music. Resistance to the violence of war provides the interference; instead of music as a symbolic continuation of the human voice emerging from a human body, Goldberg’s poems foreground the female body as an obstacle that delays symbolization. The voice of the girls in the ghetto is a female voice erupting from female bodies and undermining the naturalness of the symbol. By refusing to participate in war poetry, Leah Goldberg joined the symbolist hegemony, but beyond this she paved her own way and found her own space. She does not sing of war, since that way she will lose her individuality, will be forced to relinquish her individuality as a woman as well as the ethics of someone who looks toward the center from the margins as an embodied individual. Goldberg created a subversive current in the only channel available to her: the role of women in the culture of war poetry. From a place of exclusion, she discovers the location of the individual—where she can exist autonomously, differently, and as a woman. In this way, Goldberg opened possibilities for other women artists, especially in the poetry of the Independence War, to sing a song of war in Hebrew culture from their particular point of view as women.

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C h a p t e r 11   Amir Gilboa: Boy Poet

Amir Gilboa wrote his first poems at the beginning of the 1940s and became a prominent figure in the Yalkut Hareim literary group. The young writers featured in the group’s four small volumes published from 1942 to 1946 include Shlomo Tanee (1919–2000), Moshe Shamir (1921–2004), Ozer Rabin (1921–99), Binyamin Galai (1925–91), ­Nathan Shaham (1925–), Ayin Hillel (1926–90), and others who had been raised on the poetry of Avraham Shlonsky, who now personally aided these new poets. Gilboa faced two polar stylistic options: that of Shlonsky and his followers, including Nathan Alterman, who represented the symbolist direction of Hebrew modernism in Palestine; or the radical right-wing political camp of Uri Zvi Greenberg, as exemplified in his Book of Denunciation and Faith (1937), in which Greenberg provided a rhetoric for politically fascist mobilized poetry. Greenberg’s earlier raw expressionism turned prophetic and mystical in this book; its fiery ideology placed political messianism on center stage, characterizing the poet as the warrior at the gate. Gilboa was committed to the Shlonsky school, in particular the measured distance its members drew between their work and their political obligations, in one way or another identified with the Jewish labor movement in Palestine. Shlonsky published Gilboa’s first poem, “For Then I Will Cry Out” (“Veaz etzak”), in the leftist Hashomer Hatzair journal; Gilboa’s inclusion in the Yalkut Hareim collections was part of his affinity, poetically and politically, with the literary and cultural circles around Shlonsky. But at the same time Gilboa was an expressionist,85 85.  Haya Shaham, Hedim shel nigun (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1997), 205–25.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

whose greatest stylistic exemplar in Hebrew poetry was Uri Zvi Greenberg. And so, while taking his first steps as a poet, Gilboa wrote “The Boy Poet,” an ars poetica work about a poet just starting out: 1. The gem of the firmament burning with a deep and cold light. The dream’s veil scratched by the silvered rod, the tall boy longed for a line that would not let him down. He was called to a poetry feast. He’d expected it for a long time. He didn’t know how to get drunk, drank just a little. His wine was wreathed in the yellow heart of a daffodil. He brought the brass goblet to his mouth. Since burned by the fire, he beats tablets of sound from the iron stocks.

2. Points of sapphires stretch to the lips of a new day. The shepherd’s flute clothes the day in a scarf and a crescent necklace. Wine bubbles, rises and storms within the sleeping boy. His fire will soon brighten with a poem’s silken gleam. He opened his eyes wide to the vision. His ears rose to the sound. A blue-voiced organ at the top of the tower put him to sleep. The story of a lamb, the mother made the bed. Ever since he’s been harnessed to the task. He runs with the storm—winged, is silenced.86

Up to this point it appears that Gilboa maintains his commitment to symbolism. The poem’s closing lines recall Shlonsky’s “Young Goat from a Lullaby,”87 from his Poems of Catastrophe and Reconciliation, whose symbolic existence enables the lyric speaker to create a defensive shield against the horrors of the period. In this poem Shlonsky wrote, when “days have already been laid to waste / the calendar on the wall insinuates: ‘you will be murdered’ [the meaning of the Hebrew letters that spell out the year 1938 on the Hebrew calendar],” and “now a beast lurks under the children’s cradle.” 86.  Section 1, line 1, trans. Warren Bargad, To Write on the Lips of Sleepers: The Poetry of Amir Gilboa (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1994), 46; Amir Gilboa, “Ha-na’ar hameshorrer,” Gilionot 13, no. 2 (1949): 20.­ 87.  Avraham Shlonsky, “Ha-gdi sheh-hazar,” Shirey hamapolet vehapeeyous (Tel-Aviv: ­Yahdav, 1938), in 1971 edition Shirim, vol. 3 (Tel-Aviv Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim), 256–59.

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The speaker in Shlonsky’s poem, like the son identifying with the slaughtered goat in Gilboa’s verse, faces the cruel reality of Europe at the end of the 1930s as an innocent; all suffer “for a sin not ours.” In the end, Shlonsky’s speaker seizes upon the consolation promised in the symbol of the goat that takes the son’s place in the sacrifice: The scapegoat. The calf beheaded. The son bound to the altar. But like me you returned: to the beautiful mother. Grown— Weary—And forgiving.88

In addition to this symbolist image, Gilboa’s poem also features the prosaic rhythms and logical composition of the symbolist school. In the second stanza of “The Boy Poet,” the young poet is represented in a way that clearly connects him to the symbolist worldview. The new day is characterized mystically: dawn rises like “points of sapphires stretch[ing].” Nature is revealed as an artificial aesthetic process of adornment with filmy scarves and a crescent necklace adorning the flute player. But what is the point of view of the boy-poet? He has now matured within the world of poetry; “his wine bubbles, rises and storms,” and he is to become part of the world of aestheticism, in which “His fire will soon brighten with a poem’s silken gleam.” Up to this point it seems that the young Gilboa makes his confident way into the poetry world by relying on the fundamentals of the dominant contemporary school of Hebrew poetry. In contrast to Shlonsky and his followers, however, Gilboa grants new political meaning to the symbol. The symbolist representation of reality insinuates itself into the settled and closed world where the symbol once separated the speaker from the world outside. While the poem includes characteristics that clearly depart from the school’s main precepts, Gilboa depicts the young poet taking his first steps in the world of poetry and emphasizes his commitment to the autonomous world of aesthetics far removed and protected from the reality outside literature and art. At the same time, however, he develops the traditional formula of the poet’s dedication to prophecy: “He brought the brass goblet to his 88.  Ibid., 258–59.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

mouth, since burned by the fire, / he beats tablets of sound from the iron stocks.” In the next stanza, which depicts the poet’s maturation, there is an explicit statement that the poet observes reality but hopes to see a vision: “He opened his eyes wide to the vision. His ears rose to the sound.” The symbolist divide between poetry and reality is severely tested by the expectation of a vision of the (real) future. In the end, symbolism takes the upper hand, and overcomes the young poet’s desire for the real world; aestheticism offers him “A blue-voiced organ at the top of the tower.” Yet the poem’s development is based on a conflict between inner and outer worlds, stressing the opposition between the utopian point of view and the historical, intensely nationalist one that arouses and suppresses hope at the same time, at the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. The belief in a constructivist utopia that locates the Zionist present in a long-term perspective requiring patience is a standard characteristic of the culture of the Jewish labor movement in Palestine. But it also contains a messianic vision, in the radical right-wing style of Greenberg’s Book of Denunciation and Faith, which locates an apocalyptic solution to concrete hardships in the present historical moment. At bottom, these are two contradictory timetables: a controlled, patiently awaited utopia versus mystical messianic fervor that acts now. Through them, each political camp presents its opinion about the desired pace for realizing the Zionist vision, and mechanisms to cope with difficulties and despair.89 While Gilboa operates within the tradition of the Shlonsky school, he also works within the lines drawn by Uri Zvi Greenberg. “On [the Jewish holiday of] Simhat Torah,” Gilboa wrote in a letter to Shlomo Tanee during his service in the Jewish Brigade: I recalled “rabbi” Nathan Alterman, and if God isn’t his enemy [because of Alterman’s column in the Davar newspaper associated with the centrist labor movement], He will rejoice in his vigilance and will inquire about his well-being in my name. And when his work appears in [the] Al ha-Mishmar [newspaper, associated with the radical Zionist left] give my regards to [Avraham Shlonsky]. . . . For a long time I’ve wanted to 89.  See Hannan Hever, Be-shevi ha-utopia (Sade Boker: Hamercaz le-moreshet Ben-­Gurion, 1995).

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ask about Uri Zvi [Greenberg]. I don’t know, but that’s how it is. If you see him, tell him that Gilboa, if he still remembers me, remembers him in any case. And how is Alexander Penn? He is one of those to whom I feel a kind of relation but I don’t understand why. Or perhaps I do.90

Gilboa turns symbol into reality by standing in the middle between Alterman and Greenberg, and in his challenge to Alterman’s doubts about reality as expressed in “The Secret of Quotation Marks.” On the affinity of the editors of the “Yalkut Hareim” series of books to symbolism, Moshe Shamir would write, quoting Alterman at the end: “Yalkut Hareim writers were mesmerized, and sensed that that the quotidian life of the streets of their cities and the fields of their country­side lurked under [the symbolists’] romantic robes; they sought to remove the nebulous distance, the ever-present darkness that reigned in Alterman’s world, and to open their eyes to the light of day, the light of contemporary Palestine. They wanted to say ‘my land’ without feeling they had stepped on a snake.”91 And so, for example, in Gilboa’s “The Sign to Come,” the poet places symbolist light with its inner-directed aims side-by-side with a practical striving toward utopia: “And with your garments you guarded the secret of the glow within you. / And from a distance you strove with courage toward what enchants you. / And the sign has come.”92 For Gilboa, symbolist lyricism becomes a national matter: “again the hymn in which my days are played, in hope of what’s to come.”93 Similarly, Greenberg asks, in a programmatic poem in his Book of Denunciation and Faith, how, in a world of kingdoms, will the independent nation be praised, and he answers by counting two “miraculous powers”: that of a “beautiful poem,” and that of the nation’s “army in the field.”94 He goes on to ask the Messiah if it is his voice that he hears calling him “with murmurs, trumpets, lowing, and thunder.”95 And in Greenberg’s poem “I’ll Speak into the Ears of a Child” 90.  Shlomo Tanee and Moshe Shamir, eds., Sefer yalkut ha-reim (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1992), 318. 91.  Ibid., 17–18. 92.  Amir Gilboa, “Levo ha-ot,” in La-ot (Tel-Aviv: Orha, 1946), 36. 93.  Ibid., 15. 94.  Greenberg, “Hashir vehasayef,” Sefer hakitrug, 181. 95.  Ibid., “Zion / Be-sode Hanemerim,” 81.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

(“Beozney yeled asaper”), he depicts the Messiah entering the body of the poet and creating mystical, lyrical communication as the poet, who feeds him “live flesh and blood,” also plays the laments, remorses, and prayers of his ancestors on the cello.”96 Gilboa writes in an epigraph to “Evening Breeze”: Clappers hit the sides of the bell. Uncountable times the crowd cheers the violin—yearns. For here light will anchor. And its string is raised: And the light of a nation next to the mountain.

At the end of this poem, the symbol linking the playing of music with enactment of a miracle is achieved by the actualization of the musical metaphor: “and heartfelt prayers quietly proclaim / virginal psalms that await their player, / he wields his wand and the wonder of creation is revealed.”97 Another poem in Gilboa’s first book places the two image systems in confrontation with each other. One is clever, playful, and illuminated by symbolism: I knew: I will remain in my penury; my signs like those of a river bed will flow toward the sea—my heart, in autumn. And the candle lit for a moment will die out. And the fire went out, for I arrived at my last letter.98

In contrast to this symbolist representation of light is the expressionism below, in which Gilboa borrows directly from the position taken in Greenberg’s A Great Fear and the Moon (Eima gedola veyareach; 1925): The morning sun, like a copper pan of myrrh, will drip lavender over my bed— and along with the white night I will feel the terror of the creeping of the moon, 96.  Ibid., 45. 97.  Bargad, To Write on the Lips, 36; Gilboa, La-ot, in Amir Gilboa, Kol ha-shirim (Collected Poems), vol. 1 (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 18. 98.  Ibid., untitled poem, 11.

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trembling like the rings of fire in the pupils of a prophet conjuring among spirits, at night, in the midst of a forest.99

This opposition between symbolist and expressionist representation returns in Gilboa’s poetry at the beginning of the 1940s. In “To the Primeval” (“El kadmon”), one in the series “Random Poems” (“Shirim bodedim”) in the first edition of Yalkut Hareim that appeared in 1943, the speaker approaches the years of his life with the request that they break through the barrier separating him from reality, using typical symbolist visual terminology: Converged rays scattered in the wind, gather in splendid slivers of light a mound. Pull the sun here to shine. It will repair itself, the flawed song.100

The reasoning about the symbolic light rays is noticeably expressionist: in order for the tune to play it must thematize the creative aspect of song: “The universe rose to a revelation that was planned / by the all-seeing God from the ancient forever, the song and its flaw.” This opposition often becomes the central narrative in a Gilboa poem, although the symbol is nearly always victorious, and shines the light of its utopian hope for harmonious improvement to take place in the future. While the process is taking place, however, the poem points to the price involved in concretizing the redemptive tune. For example, “Memory of the Good” (“Zikaron hatov”), one of Gilboa’s first poems to appear in Yalkut Hareim, opens like this: You will arise again and your face shine with the gold of memories flowing from your dream. And the voice of its splendor in the red distance calls your name from the depths of its notes.101

But the contents of this vision of the future in “Memory of the Good” turns out to be filled with violence and suffering: And your joy will blossom in a world of smiles, song drawn out from a well of memories. 99.  Lines 4–6, trans. Bargad, To Write on the Lips, 41; Gilboa, La-ot. 100.  Amir Gilboa, “Shirim bodedim,” in Yalkut Hareim 1 (March–April 1943): 87–88. 101.  “Zikaron hatov,” in ibid., 86.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

Strong streams will spray high and distant, yesterday’s rage will be calmed and extinguished, that sank in its own sharp saliva and rose over its banks, leprous and polluted. Someone afraid has become a simpleton— and another who escaped, escaped only because there was no refuge for the sinner.102

Yesterday, as shocking as it is, was intended from the beginning to merge with the harmonious plan for the future of the “vanquished step”: He waited yesterday, for the vanquished step that swallows seas, distance and mountains, that comes from all sides. And the gates will call each other and rise before him.103

Only after the completion of the cycle of the terrible past—the poem’s present time, of course—and the future creates an appeasement, is the poem’s composition complete: two stanzas portray a bitter battle between a glance at the redemptive future, “until resurrection,” and scenes of suffering and death. This takes place only after an unsettling explosion and the disintegration of polished and organized stanzas in light of the coming chaos of a scream and the collapse of the human voice portrayed in the poem. Only then does the poem return to its form and in the end promise the universal, humanistic purity of the speaker, whose “threads of light” illuminate him in harmonious symbolic light: Then you rose among the multitude of heads and the host of piercing eyes until the resurrection. Through the ashes of life, in whispering mounds, through the compassionate valley of blood— Your nights wandered frozen and mute, eye pupils are tied to the flagration of the scream, the scab of strength still cried on the edge of horror— but when your voice burst out    the step was conquered. ... 102.  Ibid. 103.  Ibid.

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You will arise again and your face shine with the gold of memories flowing from your dream. And the voice of its splendor in the red distance calls your name from the depths of its notes approaches purified, its gown embroidered with the light of memories that flooded over you. They covered cave entrances and filled every hole with the glory of human sacrifice.104

By pairing the symbolist view and its conflict with concrete or expressionist representations of blood and horror, Gilboa once again copes with the central question posed by Nathan Alterman in “The Secret of Quotation Marks,” in 1938: the political implications of the nationalist timetable (when we will arrive in messianic-utopian time) suggested by the symbolist sign. The major political debate in symbolist language, which examines the gap between symbol and reality, led Alterman to a political call for a change in Hebrew poetic language as a change in its messianic sensitivities: from the language of a people “who declaimed prayers and poems for the false Messiah of Izmir, [Shabtai Zvi,] [they are] now invited to cry and sing on the necks of cows in the fields of Sharon.”105 Alterman’s argument for authentic representation, “lest words not be spoken in their own voice, lest they be disguised,”106 is presented as a principled one. He offers circumvention, refraining from calling things by name, as a temporary solution: poetic language “only does this because the name [in Hebrew, hashem, also a term for God] still distinguishes poetry from its prey. This is not a concession but a passionate expectation.”107 His operative assumption is that when political vision is achieved in national reality, it will be expressed in a change in patterns of poetic expression. The day when the Hebrew liturgical poet sings about Zionism, for example, and sees himself as capable of naming it and eligible to do so—­Zionism—­explicitly and without quotation marks, will be a day of victory for Hebrew poetry.108 104.  Section 2, line 3, trans. Bargad, To Write on the Lips, 52; Gilboa, La-ot, 87. 105.  Gilboa, La-ot, 29. 106.  Nathan Alterman, “Sod hamerchaot hakfulut,” in Ba-ma’agal, 30. 107.  Ibid. 108.  Ibid., 31.

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

Alterman believed that this shift in the timetable of the development of the literary representation of the nationalist experience was politically dangerous. The music of the symbolist sign contains utopian potential, but utopias may develop in different time periods. Time may be perceived as constructivist and restrained, the time of “another house and another goat,” the slogan of the Zionist labor movement marking a gradual process of realization of non-messianic Zionism, or it could be destructively messianic. Similarly, Alterman presents vague musical symbolist representation as a necessity not a choice, as a battle against the exact sign of an actual object and not as a way of ignoring it. Alterman demonstrates the limitations of the symbolist school and also hints at the opposite pole, represented by Uri Zvi Greenberg, who made messianic-fascist use of poetry by placing the immediate establishment of Jewish sovereignty above all else. In contrast to Alterman, Gilboa, in the poem “Time’s Revenge” (“Nakam hashaot”; 1943), which opens the “Random Poems” series, writes about the tension between physical violence and the symbolic representation of the Messiah as a realistic possibility, likely to shed its symbolic-verbal covering and suggest a fusion between the word and what is being represented: The hours blocked the pitiable words. Its raised hands will strike when the time arrives. Letters blossom in the blood that stained them. They lean heavily over the roads in flowers of memory. But their dimming echo still pursues each bolt sealing the power of man and idiom. And in each door stands the Messiah on his way to pray for them.109

Ticking time, the hours, are signified in the poem by clock hands whose movement underscores the violence expected in the near future. Violence, and the revenge that will follow, are represented as the opposite of verbal expression. The poem’s metonymic density places these opposites in conflict until the letters spotted with blood bloom and spread as a flowery reminder of violence. And again, out of exaggerated loyalty to symbolist aesthetics, the speaker investigates the 109.  Gilboa, “Shirim bodedim,” 85.

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echo, the divine voice of words, the secondary sounds that remain after the verbal expression of the violence in the previous stanza is complete. The “dimming echo” of these words may pursue and take control of any final fusion of words and human reality, and break them down, since in any such closure, “the Messiah stands before each open door,” offering revelation instead of poetry. What Alterman described in 1938 as the poetic word’s craving to become real, the desire for a solution to the tension between representation and what is being represented, appears in Gilboa in 1942 as a direct vote for the messianic option. Fusion with reality, which appears in Alterman as a possibility in the future, is realized by Gilboa. At the same time, Gilboa’s literary symbol includes an objection and reappears in the possibility of authoritative and controlling representation. And so, when he included “Time’s Revenge” in his first book, For the Sign (Laot) (1942), Gilboa modified, thus softening, the title to “Words’ Revenge.” Throughout 1942 the Shlonsky school’s literary symbol continued to be used to represent violent current events. Its authority, however, did not last long, and within approximately a year cracks began to appear, widening into chasms until its aesthetic position as an authorized literary symbol representative of the school’s poetry was undermined.

C h a p t e r 12   A Surprising Moral Judgment

Nathan Alterman published The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt at the end of February 1944, when there was a general awareness in the Jewish community of Palestine about the tragic fate of European Jewry in the Holocaust. Almost a year after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and its horrific aftermath, news was flooding in about concentration camps, the fast pace of deportations, exterminations, and mass executions. A ­ lterman’s title refers to a story in the biblical book of Exodus in which ten plagues were inflicted on the Egyptians in order to convince the ruling pharaoh to let the Israelites leave. Alterman’s stance in the book was quite surprising. Its main subject was the question of revenge. A father and son, ancient Egyptian citizens of the city called No-Amon, discuss their suffering in light of the plagues inflicted by God upon Egypt on behalf of the Israelites. In a series of ten dialogues, each parallel to one of the plagues, the poems give voice to the private cry of two Egyptians who are afflicted although they themselves are innocent; they have not sinned against the Jewish people. No-Amon is the Hebraization of an ancient name for Luxor, the capital of Egypt during its heyday, named after the god Amon, also later known as Thebes and called Diospolis by the Greeks: the city of god. The name No-Amon appears in the Bible in Nahum 3:8, while Jeremiah 46:52 refers to Amon of No. On ancient steles the god is represented in human form with a crown made of two large feathers, or as a man with the head of a deer, the animal sacred to Amon. The plagues cast upon Egypt are portrayed in the Bible as a violent means to induce the pharaoh to allow the Israelites to leave Egypt, although, as their effects accumulate, they change from being an instru-

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ment and proof of God’s omnipotence to an instrument of vengeance. The main function of the plagues may be found in Exodus: “When Pharaoh does not heed you, I will lay My hand upon Egypt and deliver my ranks. My people the Israelites, from the land of Egypt with extraordinary chastisements. And the Egyptians shall know that I am the lord when I stretch out My hand over Egypt and bring out the Israelites from their midst.”1 Pharaoh hardens his heart on his own initiative for the first five plagues. After that, beginning with the plague of boils, God is the active agent: “But the lord had stiffened the heart of Pharaoh.”2 In the transition from the pharaoh’s hardening his own heart to its being stiffened by God, the plagues change from being a tool for the glorification of God’s name by saving the Israelites from Egypt, to being vengeful retaliation for the harm done them by the Egyptians and their pharaoh. From the sixth plague on, God is the one who brings about the hardening, and he is the cause of the transition to vengeance. In addition, the pharaoh’s repeated promises that he will allow the Israelites to leave, and his breaking of these promises time and again, are not interpreted as mistakes or misunderstandings that may be corrected by teaching a lesson. In Exodus, both the biblical narrator and the pharaoh describe his actions as a sin: “I stand guilty before the lord your God and before you.”3 In Midrash (traditional Jewish biblical exegesis) and liturgical poetry, the matter of retaliation is viewed as so central that each plague is justified as the response to a particular crime committed by the Egyptians.4 Hebrew poetry’s preoccupation with this theme at the height of the Holocaust obviously raises the topic of Jewish revenge against the Nazis. The historical analogy between the biblical past and World War II was accepted almost automatically, just as the story of the Exodus from Egypt had been accepted over many generations as an analogy for the suffering of Jews in history. For Jews in the Middle Ages and again in 1.  Ex. 7:4–5 (Jewish Publication Society [JPS]). 2.  Ex. 11:9 (JPS). See Nechama Leibowitz, Eyunim hadashim besefer shemot (Jerusalem: Hahistadrut Hazionit Haolamit, 1970), 110–11. 3.  Ibid. 4.  Dov Sadan, “Makot Mitzraim,” Mahanaim 5 (1957): 36–38; Leibowitz, Eyunim hadashim besefer shemot, 125–26.

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modern times, contemporary suffering was compared to the tribulations and redemption of the Israelites coming out of Egypt.5 In light of what might be expected of literature written while the Holocaust was taking place, Alterman’s position was highly surprising. The aspect of vengeance at the heart of his cycle of poems is, of course, retaliation against an enemy. However, the main thrust of the work is not about the destruction and death wreaked upon the Egyptians, but the demonstration of sensitivity to the suffering and pain inflicted upon innocent people: those who belong to the predatory enemy nation but who have not been directly responsible for harm done to the Jews. Although the messenger of God is righteous— there is always bleeding in his past, he leaves behind, like the taste of salt, the tear of the innocent.6

Even if there were no guarantee that Alterman would support unlimited or unconditional vengeance, and even if were possible to foresee that the question of revenge would be portrayed in terms emphasizing its complexity, nonetheless, a poem that focuses on the suffering of enemies even if they have no personal responsibility for the misery of the Jews is highly unexpected from the point of view of Jewish moral judgment in response to the Germans who, as a nation, were responsible for the Holocaust. The fact that the poem focuses on the injury to and human suffering of innocent members of a hostile nation—the citizens of No-Amon, the capital of Egypt—deviates from expectations of a literary work written in Hebrew at the time.

5.  Leibowitz, Eyunim hadashim besefer shemot, 132. 6.  Nathan Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim (1944; Tel-Aviv: Mahbarot Lesifrut, 1972), 231.

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C h a p t e r 13  The Uncommon Stance

of a Major Poet

The exceptional nature of Nathan Alterman’s point of view in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt is especially noteworthy in light of the fact that Alterman at that time held a prestigious position in Hebrew culture in Palestine. Due to his book Stars Outside (1938), and even more so, Joy of the Poor (1941), Alterman’s poetry had come to form the core of the Hebrew canon there. In addition, his verse-responses to current events in newspaper columns (first in the daily Haaretz and afterward in the daily Davar) contributed to the centrality of his place in the culture. In these columns Alterman formulated the political positions of the Jewish labor movement, in particular of the Mapai Party, the dominant force in Hebrew politics in Palestine. In the series of poems that appeared in Alterman’s “Seventh Column” during the 1940s, he gave sharp expression to Jewish suffering, using his work as a national voice that decried the disaster that befell the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Several of the poems that appeared in his newspaper column became well-known expressions of protest. For example, “Of All Nations” (“Mikol heamim”), which deplored the murder of Jews and the world’s silence, in particular that of the Vatican, was published in Haaretz on November 27, 1942. The poem “Archimedes’ Principle” (“Nekudat archimedes”), in which Alterman presented the destruction of the European Jews as the crux of the Nazi plan to take over the world, appeared in his “Seventh Column” (“Hatur hashvee”) in Davar on February 5, 1943. More than any other factor contributing to Alterman’s position as a national spokesman for Hebrew poetry during the war, however, was his book-length poem Joy of the Poor. For years after its first appearance, Joy of the Poor was perceived as a nationalist text about the resurrection

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

of sovereign Jewish existence. In an essay by A. D. Shapir, a close friend of Alterman’s and one of the staff of the journal Mahbarot Lesifrut, written in the 1940s but unpublished at the time, Shapir remarks: From the start and in the main, Alterman means no one else but the Jew here, even if he doesn’t say so explicitly. The Jew at this time. The tragedy of Judaism in the world . . . we view it from afar and our thoughts neither rest nor sleep, not only because we feel the horror, but because all our vital forces awaken when we are downtrodden. The truth is that Alterman is talking about vital Judaism, sketching its nature and singing its song. Judaism bound inseparably to life; it demands and does not forgive, remembers and recalls everything; it is not a withered but an active Judaism.7

In a broad-ranging analysis in the Israeli journal Alpayim, the critic Mordechai Shalev (1926–2014) portrays Joy of the Poor’s nationalistic call as an especially complex Zionist tale of redemption. The images of suffering and struggle in the face of threats against the Jewish population in Palestine in the 1940s are woven from two threads, according to Shalev: the Zionist battle against Jewish tradition and the reverse—the struggle of Jewish tradition against Zionism, its horror at the loss of Judaism as a result of a Zionist victory. But in the end these two battles undergo a synthesis that turns the poem into a story of Zionist redemption; in the modern version of this story dialectic overcomes internal contradictions. Disaster is combined with redemption in the pangs of suffering before the coming of the Messiah, which grants the expected catastrophe a higher significance than a merely heroic battle. And the obviously messianic semantics of the poem reinforce the narrative of the transformation of the living-dead from pursued to pursuer and from defeated to victor. The conflict at the poem’s core, between the Zionist desire to destroy the Jewish past and the desire to preserve this past, becomes the return of the living-dead—a return which reconciles the poles of the conflict. Reconciliation is embodied in the figure of the son (of the dead man and his wife), a symbol of national hope, who lays the foundation for the story of national redemption as a family narrative.8 7.  A. D. Shapir, “Al simhat annieem, l’Natan Alterman,” Maariv, October 11, 1974. 8.  Mordechai Shalev, “Me mefahed me simhat annieem?” Alpayim 5 (1992): 161–67; 245, 251–52.

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In 1944, it was a great surprise, then, when Alterman portrayed the diametrically opposed picture in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt. In contrast to the emphasis in Joy of the Poor on collective values derived from the suffering of individuals who belong to a persecuted people, in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt Alterman focuses on the suffering of individuals in spite of the fact that they belong to a non-Jewish collective. The fact that, at the height of the Holocaust, a major poet like Nathan Alterman would choose to write about it, from such an unexpected perspective, obviously aroused confusion. First of all there was embarrassment at the analogy between the biblical past and the present-day disaster. This analogy, according to which the ten biblical plagues are translated into current events, reversed the relationship between the besieged and the besieger, the opposite of what might have been expected at the time the horrors of the Holocaust were taking place. Instead of an analogy that emphasizes generations-old Jewish suffering over the suffering of others, the poet reveals sensitivity to the distress of members of the nation of persecutors, even if they do not bear personal responsibility for their nation’s crimes. When the plagues befall them one by one, they are devastated despite their individual innocence. In this way, despite the almost natural expectation that the analogy would emphasize the resemblance between Jewish suffering in the twentieth century to that of the biblical past, the biblical misery in focus is that of the Egyptians, which, by analogy, is the misery of the Germans during the Holocaust.

C h a p t e r 14   Critical Reception

Hebrew literary critics used a number of interpretive strategies in order to deal with the discomfort caused by Alterman’s identification with Egyptians rather than the Jews in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt. At one end of the continuum were those who completely ruled out the use of an analogy between the biblical text and modern history, thus attempting to rid themselves of the conflict from the start. That is, if the analogy did not exist, there would be no way to link biblical Egyptians with Nazi-era Germans, and thus no Jewish empathy for Germans would be expressed. The opposing strategy did not deny the existence of an analogy in Alterman’s work, but sought to ignore the correlation of the biblical story with real-world events, blurring the significance of the author’s Jewish identity. This approach suggests that the Jewish poet is not writing about the biblical plagues on Egypt in order to depict the travails of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, but rather to make an analogy whose general, universal applications are distant from World War II. For example, the poem’s protagonists are depicted by Hillel Barzel (1925–) as representing “the family of man.”9 This attitude has been expressed in a series of similar critical statements that have lasted nearly to the present, so that, for example, the Israeli poet-critic Nathan Zach (1930–) gave a public lecture in 1994 explicating the current-events analogy in a exaggerated and ironic manner.10 There is also a particularly revealing piece from the universalist point of view that reads the poem as minimizing Egyp9.  Hillel Barzel, “Shirey makot Mitzraim l’Natan Alterman,” Hataney Pras Yisrael, Shira (Tel-Aviv: Yahdav, 1971), 83. 10.  Nili Carmel-Flumin, “Amud hashahar kam,” Moznaiim 68, no. 6 (March 1994): 3–8.

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tian crimes against the Jews: “The moral lesson of No-Amon is also a sign that this work is our self-portrait. The crimes of the ministers of No-Amon are not found in their coldness toward the foreigner, their betrayal of the Jews, but in the fact that they brought the ten plagues upon their own people.”11 In an influential essay first published at the beginning of the 1960s, the literary critic and scholar Dan Miron (1934–) argued that Alterman’s identification with the Egyptian father and son—“representatives of a sinful and doomed society”—means that, in contrast with the Bible, the book is anti-eschatological. That is, the poem’s analogy is unconnected to any teleological mission: “What was is over and what is now is what will be. The eternal cycle of sin and punishment is driven by the force of ethical causality, but has no eschatological purpose; in effect it has no goal whatsoever. Its historical content rotates endlessly but does not change.”12 Miron disassociates the biblical analogy from any specific historical situation, thereby disconnecting it from the goals of any particular historic group, including the Jewish people. In this way Miron contributes to the neutralization of the poem’s strange and surprising identification with the Egyptians; as soon as it is not seen as having anything to do with the Jews, there is of course no problem in the poem’s solidarity with the innocent Egyptians in the Bible. In other words, the solution Miron offers to the embarrassment raised by the poem is to view this problem as artificial. Paradoxically, even the critics who emphasized the historical aspect of the plague analogy did so in order to reduce the range of topics to which it might be applied; they too, in effect, argued that the analogy supplied a perspective far removed from current events.13 This claim led to praise for the values of universal justice housed in an aesthetic structure somehow detached from the specific historical context of the 11.  D. Nahalati, “Meshirey makot Mitzraim ad Ir hayona,” Davar, July 3, 1959. 12.  Dan Miron, “Bin yom ktanot la-aharit hayamim,” Arba panim basifrut ha-ivrit bat zmaneinu (1962; Jerusalem: Schocken Books, 1975), 100. 13.  Yehiel Halperin, Hamapeha hayehudit (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1961), 583–85; Barzel, “Shirey makot Mitzraim l’Natan Alterman,” 77, 85; Avraham Blatt, “Makot Mitzraim l’Natan Alterman,” Hatsofe, March 3, 1972; Ida Tzurit, “Shirey makot Mitzraim l’Natan Alterman.” Masah, July 3, 1953, 115–16; Ziva Shamir, Od hozer hanigun: Shirey Natan Alterman baraee hamodernism (Tel-Aviv: Papyrus, 1989), 294–97.

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Holocaust, although it was linked to the world war: “There is also a different, a very different current running through The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt: that of the world accounting for itself at the end of World War II. The restrained and ascetic language of Joy of the Poor is no more; descriptions of the horrors of crime and punishment are detailed and bold. The construction of the poem is unified and whole, as if it had been sculpted and then painted by a powerful brush.”14 Scholar Uzi Shavit (1936–) methodically analyzes this interpretative method, and makes a parallel between “the formal unity of the poem with regard to meter, stanza organization, and rhyme . . . the character of the rhymes”; and the semantics of “the aesthetic unity of the opposites” of beauty and destruction. Shavit suggests that formal unity provides a solution to the poem’s ethical dilemma that “‘the tears of the innocent’ [pose] for ‘the law,’ which does not differentiate between ‘guilty and saintly and innocent.’ As soon as the ethical point of view ceases to dominate—a more complex vision develops that combines ethics, vitality, and aesthetics, and then the half-rhymes disappear, and the harmony based on the unity of opposites is embodied in perfect, euphonic rhymes.”15 That Alterman’s disturbing analogy allowed for a link between the Egyptians and the Germans led to Alterman’s being portrayed as the creator of a “tragic figure by ignoring tradition and historic decisions and thus minimizing the fact that a guilty party stands before us.”16 In addition, the book sparked surprise at Alterman’s courage in making a selective analogy between the present-day Holocaust and the biblical plagues in Egypt that excluded other current events, which might be interpreted as problematic: We must note a degree of particular daring on Alterman’s part in placing the plague story at the center of this poem and exhausting it with14.  Rachel Katzenelson-Shazar, “Im kria mehudeshet bisfarav,” Dvar Hapoelet, September 1960, 233. 15.  Uzi Shavit, Haruz umashmaut: Eeunim bapoetika hahistorit shel hashira haivrit (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1993), 169. In 2003 Shavit published a book entitled Poetry and Totalitarianism; Alterman’s Song of the Ten Plagues (Haifa University Press and Zmora Bitan), in which he reproduces the evasion of the interpretive confusion by severing the poem from the historical context of the Holocaust, the context of the time of its writing and publication (pp. 46–52). 16.  Rivka Gurfein, “Semel atik,” Al Hamishmar, April 11, 1960.

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out mentioning what comes before it—slavery—and without the story that follows—redemption. This daring becomes an act of bravery, as is the poem’s obvious ability to withstand the double-edged tension. One point of tension is between what is far and what is near—the poem was born out of the Holocaust in our time, which has made its mark upon it, but is expressed in a way that is faithful to the ancient Holocaust, with the mark of the Bible upon it.17

Readers and critics repeatedly encountered the interpretive difficulty raised by Alterman’s surprising historical analogy, and they continually adopted various interpretive strategies to cope with this difficulty. Some critics praised the poem’s boundless universal humanism.18 Ziva Shamir (1946–) underscored the regular cycles of ruin and rebuilding in which this paradoxical ethical sensitivity was clarified,19 and there were even those who reprimanded the poet for including, as the critic David Cnaani (1912–82) wrote, “a moral accounting of sinful Egypt— the archetype of all humanity—and this during World War II . . . in a clear and harmonic framework.”20 At other times critics struggled with this difficulty by bypassing or ignoring it. Or they interpreted the poem’s stance as cynical and ­ironic.21 A representative and influential example of such an approach may be found in an essay written, close to the time the poem was first published in 1944, by the literary critic and women workers’ leader ­Rachel Katzenelson-Shazar (1885–1975): “The war years make their voice heard here: horror flows over the sinful world from the days of Egypt to the present time.” But when Katzenelson-Shazar writes that “a sentence of death is passed on cities and nations,” she raises the dilemma of justified punishment inflicted on the collective body versus injury done to the innocent, and hastens to soften the blow. With language about the satisfaction gained “in revenge and the sorrow in it,” she attempts to overcome the conflict between the expectation of revenge against enemies and Alterman’s surprising sensitivity to the fate 17.  Dov Sadan, “Makot Mitzraim,” 4. 18.  Eliezer Shweid, “Hemunah hagenuza,” Molad 20, no. 166–67 (May–June 1962): 209–14. 19.  Shamir, Od hozer hanigun, 293–94. 20.  David Cnaani, “Al kav ha-ketz,” Beynam l’vein zmanam (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1955), 250. 21.  Shamir, Od hozer hanigun, 293.

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of the innocent people among them.22 In a typical critical move, then, Katzenelson-Shazar avoids dealing with the conflict between these two stances and attempts to embrace them both. Eliezer Shweid (1929–) takes a similar path, raising the moral dilemma of revenge to a universal plane that blurs the issue until it loses its moral dimension because “the individual does not judge himself by his deeds”: For [Nathan Alterman] there is no simplistic distinction between the saint and the evil person. Man—each man—can be saintly and evil, deserving of punishment and not deserving of it at one and the same time, and thus the law is just and unjust at one and the same time. Man is sinful by nature and corrupted by sin, but until you catch him acting despicably—he is revealed in all his glory. Man is a living being who treasures life, which is sacrosanct beyond good and evil. The individual does not judge himself by his deeds, but by the fact that he is a living being; there is only one standard by which an individual judges himself—and that is love.23

22.  Rachel Katzenelson-Shazar, “Shirey zmanenu,” Dvar Hapoelet, July 13, 1944, 168. 23.  Eliezer Shweid, “Shirey makot Mitzraim,” Niv Hakvutza 4, no. 2 (March 1955): 383.

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C h a p t e r 15   A Postnationalist Reading

The analogy between Jewish past and present in Nathan Alterman’s Poems of the Plagues of Egypt caused discomfort and led to many different interpretative efforts to smooth over this embarrassment. But most attempts to soften or even remove interpretive confusion used one common underlying principle: all of them, including those which exaggerated the poem’s universality, read it as an expression of modern Jewish national solidarity, of Zionism. All of them integrate Alterman’s text as a stage in the realization of Zionism as the legitimate modern embodiment of the struggle for Jewish existence. In formulating their responses, critics demonstrate their loyalty to a Zionist reading of the poem, as Eliezer Shweid does here: The first association a Jew has when hearing of the plagues inflicted on Egypt is of retaliation against the nation that enslaved the exiled Jews: [the book of Exodus is] a story of the liberation of the Jewish people from exile. And if a Jew is asked to connect this symbol to the reality of his own day, he connects it, as a matter of course, to the Zionist attempt to enact a new exodus from Egypt. In [Alterman’s depiction of] No-Amon there is more than enough justification for the judgment against the Egyptians; Jews are unable to view it as the symbol of a disaster for all humankind to which they do not honestly feel included.24

Whether or not the analogy between events narrated in the Bible and those taking place in the 1940s was rejected or accepted, whether the reading was nationalist or universal, critics repeatedly limited the range of interpretation to a modern, Zionist one, a framework in which the Hebrew literary text could be read in one of two mutually exclusive 24.  Ibid.

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ways: it either suited the Zionist nationalist structure or was irrelevant to it. Either way, the narrative of the Zionist struggle—the modern Jewish story of the aspiration for sovereignty—was to be the necessary framework for reading a Hebrew literary text. “The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt,” Shweid wrote, “is a work laden with [our] heritage. Outwardly, [Nathan Alterman] uses biblical Hebrew imagery, although he does not offer the accepted Jewish interpretation. No-Amon is not a symbol of the vengeance of [the Jewish] nation liberated from slavery, but a symbol of [Jewish] humanity deliberating between benevolence and justice.”25 In other words, if what Alterman wrote is not a Zionist poem, the implicit syllogism concludes that it is not Jewish. At the same time, and similar to the nationalist reading by K ­ atzenelsonShazar, there was a noticeable critical effort to reduce and blur the importance of the moral conflict in the poem. To this end, instead of approaching the historical analogy between the biblical story and the Holocaust as of clear binary significance and with a clear moral message, critics preferred to avoid the embarrassment of such a message. Both the acceptance of a moral code and its rejection remained within the confines of a presumption of one eternal identity for the Jewish people, whose fate is portrayed with a historical analogy between the biblical past and the World War II present. “A Hebrew poet who dedicates his poetry to a biblical subject,” wrote Israel Zmora about The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, “will not achieve glorious results unless he understands that he must do the opposite: to interpret the legend that encases our historical narratives, to turn the legend into prose, to remake history, to gradually bring it to our time, to make it seem current.”26 The “imagined national community” within which Hebrew literary critics practiced their profession was a homogeneous one with a uniform, continuous collective narrative that established the fixed identity of the Jewish people. Both acceptance and rejection of the analogical reading were based on one unchanging assumption that Zionism was the decisive stage in the nation’s history. “There is no need to say this,” the critic and the scholar Dov Sadan (1902–89) wrote, “because the poet lives in these terms [and] every generation sees itself this way. In 25.  Ibid., 389. 26.  Israel Zmora, “Shirey makot Mitzraim,” Davar, May 30, 1953.

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the language of imagery, which serves as a system of thought, a poet of our generation has made an exodus from Egypt and he too, of course, leaves an opening for the passing thought that even if this is not the experience of those who knew the full horrors of the Pharaoh,” it is a decisive one.27 To the premise about the continuity of Jewish identity from the Bible to our day was added another all-encompassing premise about the nature of Jewish collective’s awareness of its power. A Zionist reading of Alterman’s poem interprets the approach to the Egyptians in the Bible, as well as to the Germans during the Holocaust, from the point of view of a collective that sees itself as a sovereign power with a clear and uniform center of identity and activity, and most important, as a collective which envisions a common future. The violence exerted by the collective against its enemies always involves the enlistment of all the forces at its disposal. And so it was deemed unreasonable and even embarrassing to discover how, at the height of a life-and-death struggle, the speaker for the collective presented the enemy in a favorable light, thereby hampering the effort to muster all possible strength against it. In contrast to the nationalist norm of an effort that erases the border between individual and collective existence, the poem differentiates them, speaking in a language that threatens the strength of the Zionist collective. Critics simply took off the table the possibility of an alternative that would distinguish between collective existence in the past and present, disregarding the perspective that sees Zionist sovereign nationality as the only possible existence of Jewish nationalism. Interpretation that tries to create an analogy between ancient Israel and a contemporary powerless and non-Zionist nationalism would be illegitimate. In contrast, a critical reading that questions Zionist nationalism does not exhibit the polarity on which the nationalist interpretation is based. Criticizing the nationalist reading requires a heterogeneous point of view, one that does not assume the existence of a continuous historical narrative. This reading is genealogical, granting legitimacy to discontinuous, truncated hybridity that is filled with contradictions.28 27.  Dov Sadan, “Makot Mitzraim,” 14. 28.  Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 157–60.

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A genealogical reading views the historical analogy of the exodus from Egypt as one between groups that are not continuous. That is, modern Jews are not the direct descendants of the biblical Israelites and the analogy is only partial. A comparison is made between similar entities; a nonsovereign modern collective is partially analogous to biblical Jewish collective existence. As a partial analogy between two disjointed entities that do not participate in a continuous, uniform story, it does not necessarily signify national redemption. Nationalist critics attempted to fit the poem into their interpretive framework, which included the unquestioned Zionist nationalist narrative as the starting point for discussion. Their repeated and strained efforts to solve the problem of the discomfort caused by the poem’s apparent sympathy with the Egyptians is proof of the profound need to include the work in the Hebrew literary canon: a normative system of appropriate texts obeying a series of constraints that allow them to be legitimately included among the texts that will form Hebrew literature as a Zionist national literature. Such interpretive solutions were proposed in the hope of mitigating or even eradicating the problem, but adherence to a Zionist reading in fact prevented this from happening, succeeding only in temporarily repressing or bypassing the issue. The Zionist reading actually aroused an appreciation of the biblical Egyptians that was then extended to current-day Germans. And since this reading failed to meet its goal, a radical step had to be taken; a new point of view was needed that questioned the hegemonic Zionist framework as the natural and appropriate one for a discussion of the poem. The critical reading offered here of the interpretative tradition around Alterman’s Poems of the Plagues of Egypt at the same time constitutes a critical reading of the Zionist interpretive framework in which that tradition developed. A genealogical reading undermines the assumption of Zionist critics that the hegemonic viewpoint is obligatory and presents it as just one possibility among others. The first act of genealogical criticism is to move the discussion out of the exclusive Zionist framework and begin the process of rereading texts in the history of Hebrew culture. A critical reading that disturbs the identification of a Hebrew text as a Jewish nationalist text was undertaken by the Canaanite Yonatan

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Ratosh, who distinguished between “Hebrew literature” and “literature written in Hebrew”: that is, between literature that was written in Hebrew but remained immersed in the experience of Jewish exile, and that which was written in Hebrew but expressed the national/ native experience of those born in the Jewish community in Palestine or the State of Israel.29 Ratosh needed to make use of the Exodus story and its modern role in the establishment of Jewish nationalism to criticize “the traditional Jewish trap of identifying Hebrews-Jews-Israel [as one] (the ‘Jewish people’). I did not have the ability or the tools to deal with Jewish brainwashing,” he wrote. “As long as I remember myself, I have known the story of Jacob and his sons going down to Egypt and ‘the Exodus,’ and I accepted it literally, of course, including the identification of those who made the exodus from Egypt with the Jews, although this isn’t mentioned at all in the Bible.”30 Ratosh’s position lacked a significant presence in Hebrew literature and made no waves in the discussion around The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt. Ratosh criticized Alterman but in fact duplicated the Zionist discourse he opposed. In his reading of Alterman’s “Summer Quarrel,” a polemical poem criticizing the Canaanite movement, Ratosh views the poem through the dichotomy he had constructed: as an example of purportedly foreign poetry written by an immigrant looking at the landscape, as opposed to an authentic representation written by a native. Ratosh attacked Alterman’s inability to liberate himself from his Jewish origins in the Diaspora; for Ratosh, Jewish and Hebrew culture were two mutually exclusive options, and he called for the separation of Hebrew and Jewish representation. In this way, he repeats and authorizes the concept of the continuity of Jewish culture in the categorizing of identity in Zionist discourse. Ratosh portrays The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt in opposition to Joy of the Poor by drawing a sharp dichotomy between Jewish national hopes and nonnationalistic universalism. In The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, Ratosh writes, “Alterman attempts to respond to the terrors of war in terms of all humanity. In Joy of the Poor he tries to present the Jewish problem in poetry, in light of the Holocaust on the one hand and . . . hope on the other, with an 29.  Yonatan Ratosh, Sifrut yehudit balashon haivrit (1950; Tel-Aviv: Hadar, 1982), 1: 37–41. 30.  Yonatan Ratosh, Reshit hayamim (Tel-Aviv: Hadar, 1982), 10.

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emphasis on identity and a combination of the individual Jewish soul with the collective Jewish one.”31 Like Zionist critics of the book, the Canaanite Ratosh fails to see the possibility of a different position in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, one that is not necessarily the dominant stance. Criticism that rejects the norm of nationalist interpretation as natural and a matter of course leads to an alternative reading of the poem. The fact that the origin of the interpretive conflict lies in Alterman’s apparent solidarity with a national enemy hints that removal of the problem outside the context of national sovereignty may solve what seems strange and disturbing in a Zionist framework. And so, despite the surprising identification with Egyptians which the poem suggests to Zionist critics who emphasized the conflict between national identities, a post-Zionist reading supplies a rationale for the anomalous and surprising solidarity with the injured parties among the enemy. A discussion of the historical analogy in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt that questions the continuity of its elements allows for the rejection of a sovereign Jewish nation in the present day that sees its direct source in a shared past with biblical Israelites.

31.  Ratosh, Sifrut yehudit balashon haivrit, 75–76.

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C h a p t e r 16   A Symbol, Not an Allegory

The primary critical tool used to avoid reading clear and perhaps disquieting moral messages into Alterman’s Poems of the Plagues of Egypt was the symbol. Hebrew critics interpreted the plagues inflicted on Egypt with a figurative device whose meaning is traditionally considered amorphous, rather than as an allegory, whose meanings, while also ambiguous, are expected to lie within a particular conceptual framework. And so, for example, while Israel Zmora came to the conclusion that the poem bore the message “crime will be punished,” he immediately added the claim that “the poet made the title ‘makot Mitzraim’ [the plagues visited upon Egypt] or . . . ‘makot Amon’ [the plagues visited upon the city of Amon] into a symbol.”32 For Zmora and other critics, the symbol mitigates the poem’s problematic historical analogy. The use of No-Amon, “the capital of Egypt at its cultural height during the New Kingdom period, whose ruins are mute witness to the profound culture that developed there and that has disappeared from the world,” is interpreted by the scholar Nurit Govrin (1936–) as an appropriate “symbol of an eternal universal catastrophe that is renewed time and again.”33 This reading curtailed or even blocked the use of a direct analogy to current events that would raise the specter of the innocence of the Egyptian (and thus also German) father and son. Symbols are often considered different from allegories. Both represent meaning that is not immediately available in a concrete presence, but is present none32.  Zmora, “Shirey makot Mitzraim”; Ida Tzurit, Hakorban ve-habrit (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1953), 11. 33.  Nurit Govrin, “Mitzraim ba-sifrut haivrit ba-dorot ha-ahronim,” Dapim Ba-mehkar Ba-sifrut 2 (1985): 271.

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theless. For example, a Star of David carries nationalist significance beyond its physical form as a six-pointed star. At the same time, symbol and allegory are distinct in a complex manner that has undergone many transformations in the history of aesthetic philosophy. The frequent use of this distinction in modern Hebrew criticism is anchored for the most part in the aesthetic tradition of romanticism and its nationalist inheritors. In allegory, according to this tradition, abstract qualities are represented by arbitrary, concrete signifiers. The general, abstract idea is embodied by a particular image. Common examples are Aesop’s Fables and those of Jean de la Fontaine, in which foxes and ravens speak and act, embodying general human qualities including slyness and stupidity. The allegory arbitrarily links the signifier and the signified while both remain in their separate realms. That is, the connection between a fox and slyness in Aesop’s fable exists only in a theoretical framework in which the fox signifies slyness, but he remains an animal, while slyness remains an abstract concept. In contrast to the unambiguous and arbitrary elements of allegory, the symbol is considered a richly ambiguous linguistic figure in which the relation between signifier and signified is more complex. With symbols, the movement is from the particular to the general. The symbol exists in both of these worlds at the same time: the concrete signifier along with its diffuse meanings. Unlike its role in allegory, the signifier of the symbol is not only an intermediate “vehicle” that illustrates meaning, but is also present in the text as a concrete object; it is a part signifying the whole (synecdoche) and also itself. The symbol is at one and the same time a concrete, immediate, and sensual element, and offers additional levels of meaning. The meaning of a symbol is never completely exhausted, but repeatedly proves its supremacy in the precise representation of complex experience.34 An allegory sometimes rests on a metaphysical basis that views the physical world as an illusion and the product of deceit, and for this reason refuses to recognize the validity of direct observation of the 34.  Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983), 187–208; H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975), 63.

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world. The reader of allegory is meant to find knowledge on a spiritual and abstract level beyond—and sometimes also in opposition to—the evidence of the senses. Unlike an allegorical reading, which negates information obtained through the senses, the basis for a symbolic reading is found in the assumption that the sensual world is a proven, solid reflection of the truth. The symbol is a representative and an agent of reality. As such, the link between the linguistic signifier and the reality on which it is based is not perceived as arbitrary but rather as an organic, metaphysical, and unchallenged connection between what is visible and concrete and what is invisible and abstract. Unlike the symbol, the allegory is perceived as a conventional, mechanical, and artificial connection between language and reality, and as such it includes concrete images for abstract entities such as truth, love, heroism, and justice. Under the influence of the romantic concept of genius, and the emphasis on the importance of subjective experience and expression in the framework of romantic aesthetics, a value judgment was pronounced about the difference between allegory and symbol, with allegory viewed as inferior. The starting point for this judgment lies in the perception of allegory as artificial and reductive, in contrast with the richly faceted symbol. The allegory is an arbitrary sign of an abstract quality via a concrete signifier that purportedly produces sharp and clear meaning, while the symbol is a complex, ambiguous sign. The symbol is often depicted, as Goethe put it, as the fruit of an effort to blur the boundary between experience and its representation in words.35 In order to depict the blurring between signifier and signified as preferable, Goethe, like other aestheticians, must emphasize but also repress the very existence of signification as mediation between the viewer or reader and the object on display. To do so, Goethe makes use of paradox. On the one hand he points to the unavoidability of mediation but at the same time attempts to remove it as a factor. In his criticism of the preference for symbol over allegory in the romantic and postromantic eras, Paul de Man objects to the “rhetoric of presence” that eliminates intervention between the symbol and the reality 35.  De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Über die Gegenstande der bildenden Kunst,” Schriften zur Kunst (1797; Zurich: Artemis, 1954), 122–25.

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it signifies:36 the same rhetoric praises the symbol for its ability to call attention, apparently unaided, to the living and purportedly authentic world of significance. The argument favoring symbolic rather than allegorical representation is the romantic argument about unmediated representation, based on the belief that one may tell a story without telling another that mediates between meaning and its representation. In contrast, the identification of a particular text as allegorical recognizes it as a representation that does not grant visible, physical presence to the signified, a sign that emphasizes the act of representation and the mediator, that is, the mechanics of representation. By making its mechanism prominent, the allegory underscores mediation between meaning and representation. And so, in opposition to the symbol, which draws attention to the full and rich existence of the thing being represented, allegory reduces its presence. Instead of reality, it foregrounds absence and lack. The allegorical signifier does not call attention to something that is wholly present, but is a sign of something partial, conditional, and temporary. The allegorical sign, therefore, remains secondary, partial and neglected. The romantic conception that prefers symbol to allegory was and is still prevalent in mainstream Hebrew nationalist literary criticism, and is expressed in the approach to Alterman’s poetry.37 In the spirit of romanticism, Hebrew literary critics attempted to blur the inconsistencies in the historic analogy in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt by interpreting it symbolically rather than allegorically. According to the critic Rivka Gurfein (1908–83), “We are faced with a tremendous poetical symbol, the most beautiful of all times—and it is entirely ours.”38 At the same time, Hebrew critics attempted to solve the problem they faced in allegorical approaches to the poem. Eliezer Shweid, for example, argued that symbolic and allegorical elements existed in separate and irreconcilable realms of organization: the former opaque and the latter clear and explicit. When he examines the way the poem steers the biblical story from national to universal significance, and the nature of the myth of the sacrifice of innocent people “in the context 36.  De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” 37.  Miron,“Bin yom ktanot la-aharit hayamim,” 135–38. 38.  Rivka Gurfein, “Semel atik,” Al Hamishmar, April 11, 1960, 235.

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of current events,” his conclusion is that “here we enter the realm of darkness.”39 In other words, everything that is clear and mediates for the Zionist reader is an allegory; what arouses doubts and cannot be clarified belongs to the realm of the ambiguous symbol. In this way Shweid attempts to translate the poem’s appreciation of the enemy into a murky statement that blurs what cannot be reconciled.

39.  Shweid, “Hemunah hagenuza,” 210.

C h a p t e r 17  Allegory in The Poems of the

Plagues of Egypt Versus Symbolism in Joy of the Poor

Viewing The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt as a symbolic work allowed readers and critics to view it as a continuation of Alterman’s Joy of the Poor, published three years earlier. Both works were characterized as “striving to reveal the core values in the world at a time when life is lived ‘on the edge,’”40 as Ziva Shamir remarked. But in this way they were also presented as part of a continuum with one nationalist function. “Death is fierce,” David Cnaani wrote, “a powerful enemy with an often ineffable name positioned opposite life; they are of almost equal strength. . . . The war between them is the subject of Joy of the Poor and The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt. . . . It runs throughout their pages. Salvation appears only at the end; the chord of victory is sounded. . . . And so it is no wonder that the young generation [in Palestine], who paid for the existence of the country with endless struggle, were the first to respond to Alterman’s poetry.”41 The symbol is indeed the dominant figure in Joy of the Poor, and has been perceived as such over the years. Dan Miron notes about the book that “collective experience is completely swallowed up by the symbol that is lacking in the world of personal-universal poetry. It glows from within but only indirectly or from beyond a screen, like a bulb sealed within a colorful glass lampshade. While the light projects the colors our way, they do not emanate from the bulb. The unique force and tension in Joy of the Poor stems from its combination of the passion of collective experience with the searing quality of the most intimate and darkest aspects of an individual’s [innermost being].”42 40.  Shamir, Od hozer hanigun, 292. 41.  Cnaani, “Al kav ha-ketz,” 237. 42.  Dan Miron, “Darko shel Natan Alterman el hashira haleumit,” Me prat el ikar (TelAviv: Sifriat Poalim, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1981), 226.

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Dan Miron characterizes the symbolism of Joy of the Poor in suggestive language that reveals the internal power relations between the symbol and its constituent elements. By harnessing discrete elements of the collective, symbolism grants them space and meaning within the authoritative whole. The symbol is often perceived as the most appropriate form of representation for the nationalist collective.43 But the subordination of individual to the collective by the symbol also involves repression of the individual’s independent presence. In order to blend the individual into collective representation, he must be subjugated within the structure of collective meaning: that is, within the narrative timeline that tells the story of the inclusion of the individual in the national collective whole. This narrative structure is the basis for the central symbol in Joy of the Poor, the mythical figure of the victim, the living-dead, whose web of relations with his wife serves to glorify the collective situation of life lived dangerously on the edge. In order to grant meaning to individual death, the individual is depicted as subordinated to the needs of collective existence, and in return he is granted collective life. In this way the life of the individual is appropriated for the good of the shared, dominant values of the collective, and the individual’s independent presence disappears. This position is expressed prominently and strongly in the poem that opens Joy of the Poor. The manner in which the poem unfolds the story of the living-dead extols the power derived, paradoxically, from death. The dialogue between “the man” and the figure of the “joy of the poor” that knocks at his door at first fills the man with hope. But joy hastens to correct his mistake and emphasizes that it has not come to support him while he is alive, but only after his death, when “I’ll walk with the coffin bearers.” The absence of “the joy of the poor” was apparently the individual’s advantage over his enemies. But death, the absence of everything, is even more vital and powerful. Its power, however, can only be produced under conditions of steadfast struggle against the enemy. Ambivalence about the strength achieved through death strengthens the poem’s symbolic effect. The living-dead man, at one and the 43.  David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 59–87.

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same time a concrete figure and an abstraction, may be interpreted as a symbol with an unmediated and elusive meaning that is difficult to break down. Hebrew criticism took this view of the poem for a long time. The critic Ida Tzurit (1926–) emphasized the nearly inscrutable paradoxicality of the figure of the living-dead,44 while many years later Mordechai Shalev, offering a different interpretation of the opening poem of Joy of the Poor, pointed to the paradoxical nature of its depiction of the destroyer of the Jewish nation as a redeemer.45 Many critics also tried to map this elusiveness in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, so further foregrounding the book’s relationship to Joy of the Poor, blurring the books’ differences and enveloping them within one homogeneous narrative structure. The function of the repeated use of the symbol as the interpretive key to both books was to emphasize their continuity. A genealogical approach, however, which is not under obligation to a symbolic, teleological, nationalist reading, recognizes that the symbol is not the end of the story, not yet another proof of the inevitability of the teleological nationalist story of which it is an example. Instead, it views this reading as an effect, the result of a process. Such a reading must be seen as the product of the construction of a continuous narrative representing a collective with a continuous identity. This construction is meant to include the poem within the framework of properly nationalist texts. The pharaoh is seen as the same pharaoh, and the Jewish nation the same Jewish nation in symbolic readings of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt as of Joy of the Poor; such readings enable the national story to be combined with that of the individual, and the story of the Jewish past with that of the present. In contrast to the relative ease with which Joy of the Poor was suited for a symbolic reading, it was much harder to make the same case for The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, which despite efforts to make it fit such a framework, continued to challenge the nationalist framework. When it became clear that the analogy involved a conflict—the embarrassing implications of the analogy of the biblical exodus to contemporary conditions—requests were made by critics to correct and reduce their dimensions. But these reductions, removing the embar44.  Tzurit, Hakorban ve-habrit, 96–109. 45.  Shalev, “Me mefahed me simhat annieem?” 205.

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rassing conflict out of the range of current Jewish interests and posing it as an all-embracing humanist statement, make it difficult to read the analogy as an organic whole, therefore as a symbolic reading. The reductionists, with their cautious, partial reading, emphasized the artificial didacticism of the universalist, humanist analogy, and removed the Jewish issue of the day, meaning the Holocaust. In this way the critics undermined the validity of the symbol that was to combine individual and collective interests; instead, almost against their will, they read it as an allegory. In contrast to the way, in Joy of the Poor, the symbol integrates and blurs the boundaries between the world of the dead and that of the living, The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt makes a sharp distinction between them. Instead of uniting these polarized worlds with a transcendent mythical image that contains them both, The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt offers an antimythic representation that delays the concrete process—though not the metaphorical one—in which the living turn into the dead. While symbolic representation in Joy of the Poor unites life and death, The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt offers the physical process of death; rather than symbol, it gives an allegory—an allegorical impersonation of a symbol. As an imitation, allegory thematizes the process in which a person moves from the land of the living to the land of the dead, thus emphasizing the distinction between the two categories. The mythical authority that blurs the distinction between these realms is asserted again in the picture of the dead standing near walls of the homes in No-Amon. These dead are explicitly depicted as unreal, “a vaporous dream”46—not as a myth that looks real but as reality seen in a dream. In this way, Alterman follows in the wake of midrashic depictions of the plagues inflicted on Egypt in the Sefer Hayashar, a medieval text relating the history of the Israelites: “The image of Egyptian firstborn engraved on the walls of their homes effaced and fallen to the ground.”47 And the book’s distinction between the innocent and the guilty may also be found in the Midrash’s emphasis on the innocence of Batya, the pharaoh’s firstborn daughter, who raised Moses in her home and was therefore promised to be spared. 46.  Ibid., 232. 47.  Joseph Dan, Sefer hayashar (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1986), 315.

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In another Alterman poem published the same year as The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, “So Said the Sword of the Besieged,” the livingdead oxymoron is even more enthusiastically deconstructed: And blood covered my eye in vain, and the hand of death grasped us in advance, and like you I saw that in battle we exceeded all hope, but your friends will know, sir, that we behaved as man and sword.48

The collective knowledge of friends that the national ethos of “man and sword” has been preserved is presented as the product of an illusion. Extremely dangerous conditions do not elevate death, but rather make it to be in vain. The fact that death will get us in advance prevents it from turning it into life. It prevents it from being represented by the usual oxymoron, which absorbs it as a value, and makes the individual death as a stage, an element, in the narrative of collective redemption. Alterman’s formulation in this poem actually makes this particular physical death, signified by a bloody eye, as occurring in vain. The mythic effect of death is presented as an illusion meant to reconcile the collective of “friends” to the idea of it. The fact that the symbolic appearance of the living-dead is taken from the dead people in this poem, as in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, is also indicative of the type of reader for whom these verses were written. The victims, the living-dead of Joy of the Poor, serve members of a real community, a shared focal point for identification with suffering, while in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt the victims become the objects of an abstract, moral solidarity that is no longer connected to one group or another. The allegorical, unintegrated nature of the historical analogy in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt is what allows it to be read outside a collective framework, located in the world of universal, abstract values. The major contribution of this universal reading is in its blurring of the predictable binary quality of the Jewish past and present in the poem’s historical analogy. The absence of this polarity undermines 48.  Nathan Alterman, “Amra herev hanetzurim,” Ir hayona (1944; Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978), 182–83.

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the continuity and stability that lie in stretching ethnic and national identity over centuries, from slaves in Egypt in the past to the persecuted Jews during the Holocaust. Reading the poem as a heterogeneous analogy allows one to read it without a commitment to a clear connection between the biblical past and the Jewish present. And it is only a small step from this position to blurring the strict analogy between biblical Egyptians and contemporary Germans. This lack of clarity grants a degree of legitimacy to the ethical sensitivity over the fate of innocent people among the enemy. The flimsier the analogy, the more abstract the poem’s world of values. The weight of particular Jewish interests becomes more flexible (they are not necessarily sovereign national interests), and as a result the moral conflict is diminished between the distress of the vanquished nation and feelings about the fate of innocent people among the enemy.

C h a p t e r 18   Allegory as a Nonhegemonic Stance

In order to suppress the moral dilemma that The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt created for them, critics imposed the structure of historical analogy on the book. In an attempt to reduce the heterogeneity of the analogy and limit it to a binary model, they transformed the disparaged allegorical mode into a symbol that could legitimately combine the poles of past and present. An allegorical reading of the poem, however, encourages a rejection of this symbol. It emphasizes instead the mechanical nature of representation and how far it is from being an organic, all-embracing structure; it forfeits the subordination of each element into a clear and total picture. In this nonbinary, noncomprehensive allegorical framework, innocent people among the enemy are represented as deserving of moral sympathy in and of themselves and not as exceptions to sweeping, obligatory moral considerations. Such moral sensitivities do not constitute errors or deviations in need of correction; rather they belong to a critical reading of Alterman’s text, one that accentuates its subversion of an integrated, uniform reading of the historical analogy between biblical periods and the twentieth century. The lack of integration reveals the surprisingly allegorical nature of the historical analogy, since the attempt to hide this failure simply exposes it. Despite the numerous efforts of critics to unite the horns of the dilemma—the implications of the analogy between the Nazis and the Egyptians—with a symbol, the conflict between justification of the plagues imposed on Egypt as collective punishment and the preclusion of such a general punishment for innocent individuals continues to arise. By insisting that the poem was symbolic, critics dug themselves and their interpretation into a hole.

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The symbolic reading made clear the innocence of individuals within the collective, while, in contrast, an allegorical reading allowed for the coexistence of contradictions. Hebrew literary interpretation here encounters the limits of ideological criticism within a particular nationalist framework. What Hebrew critics repressed was the possibility of a legitimate interpretation of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt that deviated from the symbolic line of Joy of the Poor and offered a historical analogy with a nonhegemonic nationalist stance. The boundaries of its purported impartiality and the limitations that such a framework imposes upon itself led it nonetheless toward discomforting conclusions. The time that elapsed between the publication of the two books— between 1941 and 1944—seems relatively brief. But it was exactly the stretch of time during which the Jewish community in Palestine changed its view of the Holocaust from another in a series of disastrous events—as a stage in Jewish martyrology—to its realization of the unprecedented dimensions of the genocide of the Jews. This sharp transition occurred in the Palestinian Jewish community at the end of 1942 and throughout 1943. Before the spring of 1943, the time of the failure of the Bermuda Conference (April 19–29, 1943), which dealt with saving Jewish refugees, and after the failure of the Trans­ nistria Rescue Plan (1942), Palestinian Jewish institutions understood that there was no chance for large-scale rescue efforts to save millions or even hundreds of thousands of Jews.49 On November 23, 1942, the Jewish Agency, the central organ of the Zionist movement, had published an official announcement of the systematic murder of European Jewry. Four days later, on November 27, Alterman published a poem called “Of All Nations” (“Mikol heamim”) in his Haaretz newspaper column. In this poem he mocks the idea of the Jews as a chosen people as the basis of the teleological structure of national Jewish history. Cynically, even sarcastically, he dismantles the idea of a national collective and its shared hopes, and situates isolated children in the midst of this process: As our children cried in the shadow of the gallows we did not hear the world’s fury, 49.  Dina Porat, Hanhaga bamilkud (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1986), 1–32, 264–346; Yechiam Weitz, Mudaut veh-hoser onim (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Publishing, 1994), 27–68.

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for You chose us out of all the nations, You loved and favored us.50

An awareness of the preposterousness of such a divine choice brings each child to his mother with an unexpected command: “They call out to mother: Turn away!” In this way the poem abandons the national collective as a shared framework where suffering can be corrected and rescue is possible. The child does not expect anything, even from the only place where a child may have expectations—a mother. This transition from a hopeful to a hopeless perspective with regard to national redemption expresses the sharp transformation that Alterman’s poetry underwent in its approach to Jewish suffering, and his transition from a symbolic to an allegorical mode. The symbol and principle of Joy of the Poor is the representation of a concrete element that is integral and organic to a narrative of completion and redemption that reaches its height in the transcendent existence of the collective. Beyond, and in effect in contradiction to the death of the individual, Alterman moves toward an allegory written from the point of view of desperation and loss. Allegory makes no promises, and rather than a coherent, organic story, it offers fragments, a torn picture that emphasizes what is artificial and uncommunicative. The bulk of the transformation that occurred during the three years separating Joy of the Poor from The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt lies in the figurative concept underlying the books, and which represents as well a transformation in the types of force exerted by figurative language. Walter Benjamin writes about the difference between symbol and allegory with regard to power in his book on the Baroque tragedy: Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica [the dying man’s face] of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head. And although such a thing lacks all “symbolic” freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity—nevertheless, this is 50.  Nathan Alterman, “Mikol heamim,” Haaretz, November 27, 1942.

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the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular expression of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline.51

In contrast to the power exerted by symbol, which may, due to its freedom of expression, purify nature and idealize it, the position of allegory, which creates crumbling images of destruction, death, and loss, is noticeably weak. Allegory in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt also creates a realistic picture of the chaotic and ruined world. This representation of the world means as well that there is no longer a point in playing the symbolic game that creates integrated identities. The position of weakness from which The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt was written is testimony, too, to the forfeiture of a normative Zionist utopia which does not stop approaching the national collective as a powerful, integrated entity providing hope for the future, despite the persecution and murder of the Jews in the Holocaust. Hebrew critical response suppressing the book’s allegorical nature also distanced itself from the fact that Alterman presented the collective as weak, persecuted, and hopeless. Recognizing this would mean admitting that Alterman had abandoned a central feature of the hegemonic nationalist stance which viewed the collective’s inferior position as a temporary situation that could be overcome, and which saw the establishment of a Jewish state as the proper solution to and expression of overcoming the Holocaust. The Alterman of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt abandoned the idea of a hegemonic national utopia, exchanging it for the desperate awareness and profound internalization of the weakness of the Jewish collective during the Holocaust. This weakness was also expressed by Alterman in even sharper allegories that sometimes took the form of traditional fables. For example, one of his 1943 newspaper columns, called “Archimedes’ Principle” (“Nekudat Archimedes”),52 compared the Nazi’s incitement against 51.  Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 166. 52.  Nathan Alterman, “Nekudat Archimedes,” Hatur hashvee: Sefer rishon (1943; Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1972), 29.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

the Jews in order to take control of the world to Archimedes’ scientific claim that he could lift the earth off its foundations if he had one solid point to stand on. And in his column “The Lamb from the Haggadah” (“Hagdi meen haagada”), written close to the composition of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, he linked the biblical exodus from Egypt to the European Holocaust with a skeptical and ironic statement about the promise of redemption made by the allegorical figure of the Passover Haggadah.53 Alterman’s stance was an obvious exception to the norm. At the same time, there are glimmers of allegory in the work of some symbolist poets of the period, such as Rephael Eliaz, who wrote a poem titled “Allegory” (“Alegoria”), which opens: When the distances set out to meet their brothers who did not return from battle the wine set out after the pulp and the son was lost after the father.54

Hebrew criticism, which persisted in reading The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt from the hegemonic perspective of the symbol, perceived the difficulty of the task but attempted to keep it from view. Critics returned to the category of the symbol in order to create and rehabilitate a strong central authority, which they presented as a given. The authority of the symbol derives its power from its authenticity as figurative language that blurs the border between genuine experience and the representation of that experience. The symbol creates the effect of an immediate, unmediated transparence of an entire, inexhaustible reality which exists beyond complete human understanding. Critics portrayed the book’s universalism with this hegemonic perspective, as proof, for example, of a deviation from nationalism, or a response to interests foreign to the Jews.55 There were, on the other hand, those who coped with the conflict by removing it completely from any Jewish national context; Dan Miron, for example, who saw it 53.  Nathan Alterman, “Ha-gdi min ha-hagadah,” Hatur hashvee, 393–94. 54.  Rephael Eliaz, Ahava ba-midbar: Shirim (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1946), 65. 55.  Blatt, “Makot Mitzraim le-Natan Alterman”; Eliezer Shweid, “Haemunah hagenuzah,” Molad 20, nos. 166–67 (May–June 1962): 19–22.

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as testimony to a total existential despair that lacked any human solution in the frameworks of nature and society. This complete severance from the nationalist context freed critics from the reservations of those who found it difficult to justify the presence of innocents among the enemy, since, outside this context, the Egyptians were not enemies and the Hebrews were not allies. But rejection of the nationalist reading also meant abandoning the possibility of a non-Zionist nationalist interpretation, so that the universalist approach was boxed inside hegemonic Zionist discourse. What unites all these readings is the uncritical acceptance of the rules and categories of a hegemonic Zionist reading that is expressed in adherence to a number of basic assumptions that do not allow for exceptions. Whether the poem is interpreted as a response to interests foreign to the Jewish people, or portrayed as indifferent to or cut off from the Jews, it is still being examined on the basis of a Zionist nationalist criterion. The first criterion remains the poem’s connection to the history of the Jewish people; it continues to be taken for granted, and continues to delegitimize the possibility that while the fate of the collective is a Jewish fate, it might not be one of collective redemption. And so Dan Miron characterizes The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt as depicting the cycle of sin and punishment as without “eschatological purpose.”56 He concludes that “in effect it has no goal whatsoever,” and that the poem’s cyclical nature embodies “a complete lack of hope for human rehabilitation within the framework of indifferent government and social bodies.”57 Miron also downplays the historical comparison between the Holocaust and biblical times, reducing it to an analogy between the past and present of one integrated collective that may or may not be able to take effective action. In this way Miron limits the range of the dilemma he finds in the poem between participation or nonparticipation in government and society. This stance holds that goals and meaning may or may not exist within integrated collective frameworks with clear centers of power and identity. The possibility of action by the 56.  Miron, “Bin yom ktanot la-aharit hayamim,” 100. 57.  Ibid., 100–102.

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weak, which cannot be considered representative of the national collective and which lacks an eschatological purpose, may, during times of ruin, have a different goal. Its social nature is different from that of the sovereign national collective, and Miron removes it from the realm of legitimate possibility from the start.

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C h a p t e r 19  Alterman and the

Memory of the Holocaust

The limits of the nationalist-Zionist discourse did not allow critic Dan Miron to raise mere national existence as a legitimate interpretive possibility, despite the fact that, devoid of any hope for collective redemption in a Jewish state, it was nonetheless a nationalist mode. This limitation also barred the way to an analytical link between The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt and other stances which Alterman had taken about the nationalist implications of the Holocaust. For example, reading the book outside the Zionist paradigm shows that internalization of weakness and its legitimization are in line with Alterman’s other declared positions about the ethical judgment of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust. Alterman had expressed a highly anomalous opinion; he came out against the popular assumption that the underground fighters were the only ones to maintain the Jewish tradition of courage, and defended members of the Judenrat, forced to collaborate with the Nazis, who were resented as betrayers of their nation. On Israeli Holocaust Memorial Day in 1954, Alterman published the poem “Memorial Day and the Rebels” (“Yom hazikaron vehamordim”),58 in which he attacked the critics of Judenrat (the Jewish councils appointed by the Nazis to run Jewish life on their behalf) members for having a narrow, Palestinocentrist Zionist point of view and ignoring the special circumstances of the Holocaust. He argued that resistance fighters were not the only ones who might be elevated to the status of symbols of national bravery, and criticized members of the resistance, writing, “The people granted bravery and honor / also to the Jewish forefathers who said, ‘The underground 58.  Nathan Alterman, “Yom hazikaron vehamordim,” Hatur hashvee, 407.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

will bring a Holocaust upon us.’” An even stronger formulation appeared in his diary: “The fighters who carried out the uprisings were the main ones to survive. The people, upon whom the uprising was imposed, were completely destroyed.”59 After the poem was published, poet and partisan Abba Kovner (1918–87) and his wife the partisan Vitka Kempner (1920–2012) met with Alterman, and told him that the partisans’ obligations to the Jewish community had severely limited their activism. Following their encounter, Alterman retracted his statement.60 Later he was to express himself further on the subject in poems and newspaper pieces written about the Kastner affair;61 Rudolf Kastner (1906–1957), a Hungarian Jew who helped sixteen hundred Jews flee the Holocaust, was accused after the war of collaborating with the Nazis and then assassinated in the street in front of his home in Tel-Aviv. Alterman’s poem and his position on two different types of courageous Jewish behavior during the Holocaust sparked many negative responses. There were critics who argued that Alterman was denying the need to distinguish between the behavior of partisans and that of the Judenrat, as well as the need to praise heroic activism in the service of a national symbol; in this way, they said, he cut himself off from the long tradition of Hebrew poetry and its symbols of national courage.62 Alterman responded to critic David Cnaani and the partisan Tuvia Bogikovsky (1914–59) in an article titled “The Face of the Uprising and Its Times” (“Pney hamered uzmano”),63 in which he devoted special attention to the creation of national symbols. About Cnaani he wrote in his diary : “He argues that ‘if we seek symbols of wartime’ in order to bequeath them to future generations, only one sign [that of uprising] deserves to become a symbol. He does not, of course, insist that the making of this sign into a unique and separate symbol of the 59.  Nathan Alterman, Al shtey drahim: Dapim min hapinkas, ed. Dan Laor (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1989), 18. 60.  Ibid., 63. 61.  Alterman, Hatur hashvee, 2: 421–40. 62.  David Cnaani, “Ke-or yahel,” Al Hamishmar, May 14, 1954; Tuvia Bogikovsky, “Hamordim, haparnasim veh hameshorer,” Masa, May 27, 1954; Avraham Tarshish, “Galed oh lekah histori?” Al Hamishmar, June 4, 1954; Matti Megged, “Al ha-emet hahistoria veh-hasmlim hahaim,” Davar, August 12, 1955. 63.  lterman, “Pney ha-mered veh-zmano,” Hatur hashvee, 2: 409–20.

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story will change the entire picture and reduce all its light and courage to one point and leave the rest in darkness and degeneracy.”64 In “Memorial Day and the Rebels,” Alterman points out that the fighting in Palestine was that of a nation on its own land and could not be equated with the conditions of the Holocaust. In 1947, however, three years after The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt was published, Alterman openly expressed the main difference he perceived between his approach in that book and his stance in Joy of the Poor. Alterman told Abba Kovner, “If I had been in the ghetto, I would have been in the Judenrat.” When Kovner responded with surprise, “But Nathan, I have read Joy of the Poor; how can you say that?” Alterman said, “That [book takes place] here, it’s here, after all!”65 This sharp distinction between Jewish nationalist activity in Palestine and that in the diaspora had appeared in Alterman’s work even earlier, in 1945, in his famous poem opening with the line, “Now the days and nights of battle are over.” The poem retells the biblical story of the defeat of King Saul by the Philistines on Mount Gilboa; it is explicit about the nationalist hope raised by the sacrifice of life, and offers a sharp contrast between death in one’s homeland and death in the Diaspora:66 And so he said to the youth: blood will cover the feet of the mothers, but if it is defeated in its own land, the nation will rise seven times. The verdict befell the king. An inheritor will rise because he placed the sword on which he died on his own land.67

A more concentrated and abstract expression of the internalization of weakness and loss appears in Alterman’s newspaper-column poetry of the same period. “Passover of Exiles” (“Pesach shel galuiot”) appeared in the Davar newspaper on April 19, 1943, even before news of the 64.  Alterman, Al shtey drahim, 62. 65.  Abba Kovner, Al hagesher ha-tzar (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1989), 111. 66.  Boaz Arpaly, “Dvarim kalim al inyanim kvedim,” Davar, July 31, 1987. 67.  Nathan Alterman, “Hineh tamo yom krav ve-arbo,” Ten shin dalet, shnaton davar (1945; Tel-Aviv: Davar, 1978), 184–85.

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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had arrived on the Passover holiday eve.68 A year earlier, before The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt was published, Alterman had used the historical analogy of the biblical exodus from Egypt. Here too, in opposition to what might be expected in light of the uprising, Alterman used language that presented the Jewish people as weak, a nation “of smoke and sword / beaten into dust with a threshing board,” to which he added a sarcastic description of a nation so pure that it is like “refined gold.” The protest of the weak appears at the poem’s end. Its main point is that if, in the future when it rises from mourning, some of its strength remains, it will be made possible by the memory of “that night, that Passover sacrifice, / you won’t forget, world! You won’t be able to forget!”—that is, a memory that is empowering only on the universal level.

68.  Nathan Alterman. “Pesach shel galuiot,” Hatur hashvee, 1: 18–19.

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C h a p t e r 2 0   The Father-Son Strategy

The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt provides a sharp antithesis to the political and ethical strategies in Joy of the Poor. The desire for national redemption, the basis of the symbol of the living-dead in Joy of the Poor, is expressed in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt from a nonhegemonic perspective. The later book turns the symbolism of the earlier one into an allegory that in effect provides an alternative nationalist answer to the Holocaust, as an allegorical reading rejects integration into a whole and complete control of reality. The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt develops a dynamics of struggle against extreme evil and searing loss from a position of weakness. Facing a world that lacks a clear system of rules, whose time frame is represented by an oxymoron, these poems suggest struggling against evil with a strategy that creates disorder and fragmentation. Such a strategy is based on the realization that for the weak—those who have been ejected from the arena of power and have ceased to hope to participate in the struggle between competing collective entities—what remains is a diversion of efforts from the lost cause and the dismantling and undermining of the very existence of the arena of symbolic representation. The heterogeneous historical analogy in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt does not establish symbolic representation and does not speak for the dominant collective. Alterman’s analogy works in the opposite direction. Instead of offering a unified position, it emphasizes discontinuity; instead of creating coherent and stable entities, it is, on the contrary, occupied with disturbing the symbolic order. In its place, it offers an allegorical, mechanical, fragmentary, and heterogeneous historical analogy between the biblical past and the Holocaust.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

Most of the effort to undermine symbolic order falls on the figure of the Egyptian father. In his dialogues with his innocent son, the father is revealed as repeatedly preventing him from attributing a generalized, collective, transcendent symbolic meaning to the plagues imposed upon Egypt. And so, for example, in the poem on the second plague (that of frogs), when the son depicts the violence as official as “a king in all his glory,” the father hurries to correct him and explain that such violence is individual, rather than institutional. It is not a predictable and natural expression of generalized royal authority but rather, “You, my eldest, will recognize the dagger in his hand.”69 That is, the son will identify the source of the violence, not according to its official, cultural, and legal connection, as that of “a king in all his glory,” but only when a particular king comes to him with a particular dagger in order to harm this particular son. The first version of this poem was written before the war, an expression of universal anxiety at the growing violence in Europe. In the original poem, published September 1, 1939, the day war broke out, there is no contradiction between a specific enemy and a transcendental one. Only later, during the Holocaust, when Alterman rewrote the poem in order to include it in his 1944 book, did he make this change. Alterman added two stanzas to the later version that emphasized the unique destructiveness of the frog: Frog, show yourself! A kingdom awaits you! Slick frog! Monster and queen! Leap like a horseman! Drooling, rejected by man! Frog, you will inherit nations and scepters! And rising at a gallop, [the frog] swells like rye. It is only one and [yet] also too many too count. And the Nile rises from clouds, and night on its waves . . . Father, calls the son, my eldest, he answers.70

These pronouncements about the nature of the frog serve as the background and basis upon which the poem creates a sharp and clear contradiction between a transcendent enemy responsible for general destruction and the exact fall of No-Amon at the concrete moment when 69.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 236. 70.  Ibid., 235.

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the king appears with “the dagger in his hand.” Alterman ended the earlier version of the frog section with these lines: “Beautiful, my eldest son, beautiful is No-Amon / its death, my father, appears like a king in all his glory . . .  / you, my eldest, will know the dagger in his hand.”71 In the later version, the distinction between the two instances of revenge—two kinds of violence, individual and general—questions the seemingly natural way the national symbol binds the individual to the collective. A nationalist symbol enlists the individual for the general good by portraying him as an integral element in the larger whole. By distinguishing between individual and collective violence, Alterman inserts a barrier that impedes the transcendence that is to lead to symbolization. The intermediary, which Goethe’s theory of symbol tried so hard to remove, rises to the surface of the text here; the one who suffers the most damage from mediation is the symbolic figure of the victim. The coherence of the fixed structure of the victim narrative, in which the dead person as an individual victim of violence is merged with the dead person as a collective victim, is disrupted, undermining the symbolic principle’s exclusive control over the arena of nationalist rhetoric. The purportedly smooth and natural transition between the individual and the collective encounters interference and barriers that distinguish between the individual dead person and the collective victim. In this way the ambivalent symbol that blurs boundaries is broken down into parts and the unnatural allegory is emphasized in its place, connecting individual fate to the Holocaust and the general horror through the abstraction of the arbitrary sign and not organically. And so the abused individual cannot be harnessed to serve the nationalist narrative. Unlike symbol, allegory permits a discussion of the enemy’s suffering separately from that of the Jews. In contrast to fixed and focalized symbolism, The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt offers a reduced allegorical perspective in the third poem in the opening series, where the speaker explicitly declares that he will take on the father’s suffering: The small-eyed poem glances at you as a mouse from the darkness of his hole. He hears fire and water in you and the cries of a father over the body of his firstborn. 71.  Nathan Alterman, “Meshirey makot Mitzraim,” Hashomer Hatzair, September 1, 1939.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

No-Amon is covered by the shadow of death, I will take the cries of the father like the immortal flowers from your hands.72

Instead of offering an abundance of details granted significance within the total picture, here the perspective is narrow, like that of the mouse “from the darkness of his hole.” The allegorical reading rejects integration and complete control of reality. These ars poetica verses immediately follow the second poem in the introductory series depicting chaos, and the absence of a coherent picture of the world that would have allowed for the development of language uniting the parts into a symbolic whole—in the language of the poem, “signs” bearing conventional significance: And in striking their heads like stones, the signs that looked like mirth, and on fire in everyone’s sight, like hay, truth that seemed like law —your night also rises, forgotten and times torn like a seal and your ash blends in the wind with the ashes of the capitals of each generation.73

This chaotic world cannot be expressed in symbols: “signs . . . that seemed like law.” The possibility of symbolic representation is smashed into pieces, and with it the figurative ability to appropriate and organize reality. Alterman gives up in the face of the chaotic evil of the Holocaust and in essence suggests the allegorical gaze as fragmented. Against the massive violence of the war of extermination, The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt positions “the endless fragmentation of allegory as frozen portrait of horror, as enactment of an ultimate difference which displays a world of ruins and materially represents the dead and suffering body.”74 Allegorical fragmentation is evident in the sharp transition between the first version of the poem, at an earlier stage of writing, during 72.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 231. 73.  Ibid., 230. 74.  Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Thousand Oaks, 1994), 69.

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the period before the war and its first years, and the final version, published in 1944. The rhetorical and stirring language of the earlier version of the third section (about the plague of lice) is specific and antitranscendental: My eldest, my eldest son, vengeance is not over. An eye for an eye, my eldest son, is not enough. One small detail for another. Drops in a sea. For hate will [return] seven times. Will rise seven times.75

The expression “Will rise seven times” has its source in a biblical phrase (Proverbs 24:16) used to identify a righteous person, “For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again,” and which emphasizes the cyclical nature of disaster and redemption. What is missing here is the complete cycle of catastrophe and redemption. In the 1944 version, the father explains to his son that the need for revenge is not satisfied in taking one life for another, individual by individual, but now the revenge dismantles their presence as whole physical entities and is translated into a vengeance that attacks one organ after another: My eldest, my eldest son, there is no retribution for a soul. A soul for a soul, my eldest, is not enough. Skin for skin. An eye for an eye. Each finger collected. Each tooth, every hair.76

The link between the individual figures of father and son and the collective fate of the residents of No-Amon is that which makes the individual an allegory for general human suffering. But the transition from the individual to the universal significance of suffering returns in the concentration of bodily details. As the object absorbing the violence of revenge, the human body is reduced to its parts. But the dismantling continues, the body dissolves as an object of revenge, and attention is turned toward the allegorical connection between the individual and general suffering, to its unnatural and artificial character.

75.  Alterman, “Meshirey makot Mitzraim.” 76.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 237–38.

C h a p t e r 2 1   Blind Vengeance

There is a major difference between the representation of vengeance in Joy of the Poor and the representation of it in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt. In the former, vengeance is that of the collective, which is expected to launch a violent response toward a precise, specific target; such a reprisal is an integral element in the collective story of redemption and derives its authority from the power of God: And he said: Rise, the one who fights my fight. Rise, the one who fights my fight, for my destroyer laughed. Don’t abandon me today, don’t say lie down, son, lie down. Rise and see how your servant suffers from his sorrows. Don’t forget, don’t forget what was done to him. Don’t forget the one for whom a hundred will be annihilated. Accept the rage of a few Blessed is the Lord of the dead. Because my mouth is in ashes and my destroyer is laughing because suddenly I aged like days of heaven, give me hatred gray as a sack too heavy for even two people to carry.77

In contrast to the collective retaliation portrayed in Joy of the Poor, The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt break down the avenger’s position. Nowhere does the latter book grant general significance—the result of broad and authoritative planning—to acts of violence or the suffering of the injured. This is the reason for the dissolution of the symbolic

77.  Nathan Alterman, Simhat annieem (1941; Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1972), 198–99.

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representation of the object of violence; he is not an intended, chosen victim, but rather an innocent, accidental one. In the poem “Blood” from The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, for example, the son emits heartrending cries and a plea for help, while the father, in response to the son, points out that the violence is not aimed specifically at them, and that they are, in a sense, accidental victims. The son calls out because of his thirst for the water that is now undrinkable, because it has been turned into blood. He hopes that his father can explain this and also help him, while the father gradually makes clear to him that they are essentially blind targets. Tracking the distance that Alterman traveled between the 1939 version of the poem and that of the 1944 book, released at the height of the horrors of the Holocaust, demonstrates the transformation of his representation of evil into something lacking any apparent intention. The first version of “Blood,” published on the first day of the war in September 1939, ends in the following stanza: My father, there is no end, no end to thirst. Beautiful, my eldest son, beautiful is No-Amon. Its water, merciful father, like dawn in a jug . . . Its blood, eldest son, like a vengeful lion.78

Hearing his son’s pleading, the father tries to distract him with praise of the beauty of No-Amon. But even after the father has explained, in the previous stanza, that “My eldest, my eldest son, the blood was [once] water” and “The depths of the well darkened, the eyes of the inflamed [lion] are reddened,” the parched son insists that the city water is as pure “as dawn in a jug.” In contrast with the well that has blackened, the son uses an image of morning and compares the city water to the dawn reflected by or dwelling in a water jug. In this way he compares the spoiled water to that in drinking jugs, which he wishes/ assumes has remained pure. The father ignores his son’s claim, and supporting demagoguery with rhyme, he exchanges the son’s “its water” (memeyah) with “its blood” (dameyah), and cites the inflamed blood of a vengeful lion. He approaches his son as someone who has lost touch with reality and does not understand vengeance. In the father’s words 78.  Alterman, “Meshirey makot Mitzraim.”

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in this earlier version of the poem, Alterman establishes the analogy between current events and biblical plagues imposed on Egypt as a simple, one-dimensional binary parallel: revenge is taken against enemies in both cases. But this position undergoes a far-reaching transformation in the final version of the poem: My father, there is no end, my father, no end to thirst. The foreign star, my eldest son, shines on the city of Amon its water, father, rising like fire in their vessels. Its blood, son, is blind, and we are in its hands.79

The main concern of the later version is the undirected nature of this vengeance. Instead of distracting his son with praise of the city, now the father accentuates the presence of a foreign element, the “foreign star,” which signifies the Hebrews. In this way he makes the identity of the avenger clear to his son, rephrasing the words of the poem’s main speaker at the beginning of this section in the final version: “The path of a foreign star. Its light like fire on the surface of lakes and wells.” He includes a dramatic re-creation of the attack, during which “a radiant crimson struck the faces of those asleep and awake.” But the miserable son ignores his father’s words, and his response fails to connect his suffering with its cause. Instead, the son chooses to respond only to what the father terms the radiance of the foreign star. He uses this characteristic in order to depict his reflection in the blood as water “rising like fire in their vessels.” But the father’s response returns the son to the avengers, the source of suffering, and in doing so stresses the arbitrariness of their victimhood; after all, the city’s blood “is blind, and we are in its hands.” Alterman reworked “Lice” from The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt in a similar fashion. In the 1939 version, the poem opens with this stanza: You are hated, No-Amon, not without reason. You are hated. The lice will create a wasteland. No sword is hired against you. Slowly and without pity loathing will strike. You are loathed, great city.80

79.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 234. 80.  Alterman, “Meshirey makot Mitzraim.”

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The address to No-Amon as a hated human entity remains in the later version. In both versions, the collective enemy is approached aggressively. But while the 1939 poem emphasizes that this hatred is not baseless—it exists “not without reason”—the 1944 version erases the cause. Instead, it characterizes hatred with a tautology (“in the way of hatred, you are loathed”). The lice do not exercise intentions; they plague NoAmon blindly: You are hated, No-Amon, not without reason. You are hated. The lice will strike you into desolation. No sword will touch you. But slowly without mercy hatred will strike you. You are hated, mother and city.81

81.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 237.

C h a p t e r 2 2  Breaking the Cycle

of Crime and Punishment

In the poem “Boils” from The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt the son tells his father that the moon is looking directly at him (“laughing on my eyelashes”). His father maintains that the moon’s glance is allembracing and sees all young men from a distance, and he underscores their defeat in the face of the blows rained down upon them. At the same time he attempts to give his son some hope, however limited, that it may be possible to escape the cycle of violence in which both sides are immersed. He does so by undermining the dominant view of the collective victim of violence as one especially chosen for victimhood: as the object of intentional violence that grants him collective standing as a chosen person. The dead person represents the collective and not himself. By subverting this image, the poem breaks down the cyclical narrative of crime and punishment contained within the biblical story of the plagues on Egypt. Alterman recognizes that the representative victim acquires authority and significance exactly because he is part of the narrative cycle of crime and punishment. Furthermore, the individual sufferer who represents the collective justifies a continuation of the cycle of violence; the crime committed against him leads to retaliation by the collective and so on and so forth. The cycle preserves the arena of conflict between the hawkish camps while maintaining the victim’s stance as a representative of collective suffering. In the poem’s opening stanzas, which examine No-Amon as a model of the crime-and-punishment formula, Alterman attempts to deconstruct the image of the victim. The stanzas are formed as a series of appeals to the city of No-Amon, the select, eternal witness to

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the uninterruptedly cyclical nature of crime and punishment. Blame is increasingly focused on representatives of society—from preachers to government ministers and the king: The county rabble have gathered and the collar of guilt with them, to hang on ministers and king to remove it from their own.82

In this way crime and the punishment that follows it are portrayed as phenomena that represent the collective. But representative cyclicality undergoes a methodical process of deconstruction in the poem. No-Amon’s model character repeatedly appears as an example of a “show of retaliation.” According to Eliezer Shweid, “There is something hypocritical . . . in this cruel ‘show of retaliation.’”83 The lesson produced by the ancient example of No-Amon is the forced and ludicrous doing of seers who strike out against sin in order to “add the punishment of a moral lesson / to the plagues on Egypt.”84 When Alterman reworked the first version of the book’s opening poem,85 he added a stanza that accentuated the disturbance of moral order and exposed vengeance wreaked by the powerful as unwarranted trickery: And in striking their heads like stones, the signs that looked like mirth, and on fire in everyone’s sight, like hay, truth that seemed like law.86

The father and son are also portrayed as deviating from the cyclicality of crime and punishment. And so, for example, in the section “Hail,” the son summarizes the phenomenon as a disclosure of chaos: My father, my father, the sky charged like a beast. My father, the sky like a bird of prey will take me.

82.  Ibid., 229. 83.  Eliezer Shweid, “Shirey makot Mitzraim,” Niv Hakvutza 4, no. 2 (March 1955): 383. 84.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 226. 85.  Nathan Alterman, “Petiha l’shirey makot Mitzraim,” Tav shin gimmel, shnaton davar (1941; Tel-Aviv: Davar, 1945), 21. 86.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 230.

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I have abandoned their gods! Crush my skull! My father, chaos is coming! Why wait in vain!87

The father responds that the situation is one of iron laws rather than chaos, but the nature of these laws is revealed immediately following: the legality of violence destroys everything else. This violence is not simply that committed by the enemies of No-Amon, but No-Amon’s own violence toward its enemies. The father rejects his son’s definition of chaos. But the iron laws he mentions completely disturb the distinction between an avenger and the objects of vengeance. What is revealed when the smoke over the ruins of No-Amon dissipates is not a situation in which the attackers may be distinguished from the victims but a symmetry that disrupts this distinction: My firstborn, my firstborn son, this is not chaos: Here too there are iron laws. We do not legislate chaos. After the king falls from the throne to the cradles they appear when the smoke recedes over the ruins. My father, your blood drips on me, red, red. Iron laws, my son, watch over No-Amon. The smallest of its sparrows, father, fell wounded in the chest. The greatest of its enemies, son, wept that night.88

This is the reason that the stanza about chaos includes an appeal by the son to the father that he, the father, attack him—his own son. In this way it also dissolves the distinction between aggressive enemies and “us”—those harmed by the plagues imposed upon Egypt. And so, the son says, because “chaos is coming,” the father may not wait but must throw his son into the sky that will bear him away like a predatory bird crushing his skull. The height of the deconstructive process occurs in the poem dealing with the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn child. The father prepares his son for death in an openly ritualistic manner recalling the binding of Isaac in Genesis. The entire poem is a series of preparations leading up to the creation of the mythic victim—the son bound on the altar—the living-dead who will in the end be saved from slaughter. 87.  Ibid., 245. 88.  Ibid., 245–46.

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The central speaker of the poem, as well as father and son, prepare for the binding. The speaker renews his call to the heroes of the plagues, the agents of vengeance, to take part in the act: Come back, foreign star. Cloak No-Amon in crimson. Frog, daughter of kings, place yourself on the walls. Dust of earth, rise and look as if you were alive. Wild vermin, stand up. You are being called now!89

By reiterating the plagues before the execution of the tenth blow in the presence of “a large audience,” the speaker grants them a dramatic theatrical aspect.90 The mounting of the son on the sacrificial altar is announced by the father in the lines, “My firstborn, my firstborn, son. Dust, star and a cry / gave us a universe of happiness stronger than a cry.” And “Dust, star, and a cry are the coat of many colors” indicates that the victim is a chosen one like the biblical Joseph. It would seem that we have before us the symbol of a universal innocent victim, whether the Jewish victim of the binding of Isaac or Jesus, the Christian victim whose suffering will redeem all humanity.91 But the symbolic nature of this figure is undermined in what follows, when the drama of the binding is suddenly interrupted. The expectation that the authoritative violence of the plagues on Egypt will yield a revelation and turn the individual death of a son into a collective symbol, a chosen victim, is exposed as a vain hope. Once partners in dialogue, the father and son now turn silent. Their dialogue, which gave significance to the plagues until now, ends sharply. God’s righteous violence disappears along with this dialogue and a private family drama takes its place, in which a father strikes his son. This aggression is private and not that of a father as a moral representative of the collective. Alterman here undermines the idea of an individual fulfilling a collective order, a structure that justifies the killing of the son by the father as the symbolic expression of the collective principle of biblical punishment, which imposes the sins of the fathers upon the sons. Allegorical violence remains arbitrary and is not translated into an act with moral significance for the collective. 89.  Ibid., 251. 90.  Cnaani, “Al kav ha-ketz,” 222–54; Shamir, Od hozer hanigun, 33–48. 91.  Shweid, “Shirey makot Mitzraim,” 386; Tzurit, Hakorban ve-habrit, 116.

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This presentation of violence as individual and random supplies the key to the poem’s ethical paradox. The appropriate response of the defeated is not located in acts of vengeance against those who have injured them and which is justifiable retaliation but rather, by creating random, unjustifiable suffering. The possibility that both sides will internalize the arbitrary nature of violence undermines any attempt to morally legitimize the cycle of violence, breaks down the justification of the cyclical narrative of crime and punishment, and sabotages the process that turns random violence into an proper and justifiable moral act: No-Amon immersed in gloom, I will take from your hands the cry of the destitute father one of the immortal flowers. And the dry old flower will shine, not fade. For many eulogizing the dead in the dark illuminate it with the blood of their eyes. Because the righteous one whose fate is a dagger, always, in his bleeding past, leaves behind, like the taste of salt, the tears of the innocent.92

The demonstration of eternal hope with the allegory of a flower as an eternal light is supported with a paradoxical moral argument: hope is maintained precisely because the dagger also strikes at the innocent. The use of the explicit connector “because” shows that for the weak, the only possibility of action is to destroy the victim’s stance as a representative of the collective. The nonbinary, allegorical historical analogy reveals and also criticizes the one-sided structure of crime and punishment as a mechanism that produces, in both hawkish camps, representative, chosen victims—dead people who have undergone transcendence into a collective existence. Vengeance and retribution are not independent acts of violence, but responses; that is, they are mediated by violence carried out by others. René Girard, in his work on the cultural dynamics of the victim, posits 92.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 231.

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that the desire for and will to violence are always responses to violence, imitations of the violence committed by others. “Mimetism [sic] is a source of continual conflict. By making one man’s desire into a replica of another man’s desire, it invariably leads to rivalry; and rivalry in turn transforms desire into violence.”93 Furthermore, Girard writes: The imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons, in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder . . . it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles.94

In its loyalty to the principle of violence as an imitation of prior violence, the community duplicates the moral principle of the cyclical causality of crime and punishment. Society deals with this cycle by sacrificing a victim. This sacrifice by the collective is not an independent act, but is also an imitation and a response to collective violence; the suffering of the individual is supposed to purify the collective of blame. Violence aimed at the individual focuses the blame on him; by attaching the blame on an external factor the collective is redeemed for its transgressions and granted the image of a renewed and ethical community. In order to do so, it must transfer all the guilt to the victim so as not to share any of it. And for precisely this reason, blame must be placed upon a wholly innocent victim, such as Isaac, bound to the altar, or Jesus, nailed to the cross.95 According to this cultural logic at work in the heterogeneous historical analogy of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, the war against such cyclical violence cannot be waged with an aggressive response 93.  René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 169. 94.  René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), 12; emphasis in the original. 95.  René Girard, “The Plague in Literature and Myth,” To Double Business Bound (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 136–54.

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that merely contributes to the cycle. The opposite is the case; the image of the pure victim must be undone. As spokesman for the weak, Alterman breaks down the logic that supports the cycles of violence between camps and between groups; a random or aimless attack is the solution. The representational status of the avenger is in this way destroyed, as is that of the victim. The distinction between the selected, victimized dead and the random dead is removed, and transcendental potential of death is neutralized. Death is no longer something of the “selected,” and it loses its power as a symbolic tool of the collective. The democratization of death shows that even the person chosen for death is, first of all, part of the general population of the dead. He is returned to the community of mortals in the universal sense of the word, and loses the status attributed to him as representative of anything beyond flesh and blood. The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt recommends fighting the enemy in this manner, thus disturbing the worldview in which a dead individual is meant to fulfill a defined nationalist or religious collective role; this kind of attack is not the direct expression of an act of intentional vengeance that imitates the violence of the other. It is precisely the lack of intentionality that gives hope to the weak that they may break the cycle of violence. In this way the Alterman of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt offers a brilliant critical rereading of his earlier position in Joy of the Poor. In the latter book’s “A Prayer for Revenge,” the figure of the living dead is presented as the ultimate avenger: Because my mouth is in ashes and my destroyer is laughing because suddenly I aged like days of heaven, give me hatred gray as a sack too heavy for even two people to carry.96

The act of vengeance, that is, violence mimicking prior violence, is represented in Joy of the Poor as always inclusive of a collective in whose name it acts, since, as the poem says, it is “graver when you are two.” Most important, this vengeance includes a transcendental authority, that is, God, a vital element that grants significance to blatant violence. 96.  Nathan Alterman, Simhat annieem, 199.

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In contrast, the violence of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt is cut off from the collective story that might grant it significance. The heterogeneous historic analogy of the book to the biblical exodus from Egypt exceeds the bounds of Zionist cultural hegemony. As an exception to the dominant nationalist framework, the poem points to that fact that it is precisely the position of weakness, when one has or is left with nothing, that one may drive a spoke into the spinning wheel of violence. The proper method of struggle against collective violence waged by the representative victim is, therefore, not to link up with the representative, hegemonic nationalist violence that creates new victims, but to end the cycle of violence committed in the name of the collective. According to this idea, “the cry of the destitute father / one of the immortal flowers,” is an aimless cry that belongs to eternity and is not the product of any particular historical collective. The aimlessness of the cry is what undermines its collective significance and represents the universal hope of the immortal flowers, the hope of those who step out of collective cycles and the cyclical nature of violent conflict. The destitute father’s cry and other elements in the poem grant it the status of an allegory, one that represents the chance nature of suffering unconnected to any symbolic system drawing significance from its location within a nation or other collective. Alterman offers a sympathetic presentation of the way Egyptian father and son characterize violence. We have seen how, in the poem “Blood,” the father gradually steers the son from away the concept of purposeful aggression to that of chance violence. At first he argues that the water he would like to drink has turned to blood. He then hints that the Israelites are responsible for this, since a foreign star shines over the city. Only at the end of the poem does the father admit to his son that the blood causes them harm by chance, without the presence of a responsible party: I am dizzy, my father, and not from dancing. I am parched, my father, as dry as sand. Hold me as on the day of a robbery. Support me until I faint. Support me, my father, with water dripping from a jug. My firstborn, my firstborn son, the blood was once water, the pure blood, my firstborn, was once spilled as water.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

The depths of the well darkened, the inflamed eyes reddened, there was blood in the city and the city did not fear. My father, there is no end my father, no end to thirst. The foreign star, my eldest son, shines on the city of Amon. its water, father, rising like fire in their vessels. Its blood, son, is blind, and we are in its hands.97

Biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz (1905–72) has examined three traditional Jewish commentaries on the plagues in the book of Exodus. Only one, Shemot Rabba 9:8, perceives them as an educational tool with which to teach the greatness of God. The others—Mishnat Rabbi Eliezer, Parasha 19 and Lekach Tov, Shemot, Vaeira 9, 13, et al.)—view the plagues as retribution in the spirit of “an eye for an eye.” Leibowitz cites Alterman’s Poems of the Plagues of Egypt in this context as supportive of the position in Lekach Tov. She compares the lines, “Support me, my father, with water dripping from a jug. / My firstborn, my firstborn son, the blood was once water, / the pure blood, my firstborn, was once spilled as water,” to the explication in Lekach Tov to Exodus 7:17: “As they spilled the blood of Israel like water, ‘He turned their rivers into blood; / He made their waters undrinkable’” (Ps. 78:44).98 A close examination of the context of these lines in Alterman’s poem, however, leads to the opposite conclusion. The second half of the stanza tells the story of the city’s behavior while the Israelites’ blood was shed: “there was blood in the city and the city did not fear.” And in the following stanza when the son cries out with thirst, his father emphasizes the cruelty of the foreigners—the Israelites, the “others” for the Egyptians, those whose star “shines on the city of Amon”—as those responsible for the son’s suffering. But this structure, which hints at the vengefulness of the Israelites against the father and son, breaks down nonetheless in the final two lines of this section of the poem: the city’s “water, father, ris[es] like fire in their jars. / Its blood, son, is blind, and we are in its hands.” The series of images of blood implying revenge is shown here to be only a stage in the education of the son by the father. The claim that 97.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 233–34. 98.  Nechama Leibowitz, Eyunim hadashim besefer shemot (Jerusalem: Hahistadrut Hatzionit Haolamit, 1970), 126; Ps. 78:44 (JPS).

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the city was indifferent to the spilled blood of the Israelites is now seen as distinct from the plea about the private fate of father and son. The blood of No-Amon is “blind”; the injury to father and son is random. The father and son are distinguished from the sinful city in which they dwell. What happens to them is appropriate and even hopeful, as it contributes to breaking the cycle of violence. With this allegory Alterman enters the rich tradition of plague literature that begins with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, in which the plague cast on the Greek city of Thebes (a name also used for the Egyptian city of No-Amon) affects all citizens though only Oedipus has sinned. “The plague is universally presented as a process of differentiation,” René Girard notes, “but the similarities may well be more intriguing than the individual variations.” In fact, he writes, “The plague makes all accumulated knowledge and all categories of judgment invalid. . . . The distinctiveness of the plague is that it ultimately destroys all forms of distinctiveness. . . . Between the plague and social disorder there is a reciprocal affinity.”99 The plague which affects everyone usually appears, however, as an excuse to sacrifice a victim as an act of purification. The plague marks a moment of crisis for intentional, mimetic violence; a sacrificial victim solves the crisis by atoning for the sin that caused the plague. Girard sees the tragic conflict in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which he views as the search for a scapegoat whose death will atone for the sins of the entire society, “even more common in myth and ritual than in literature. In Exodus, for instance, we find the ‘ten plagues’ of Egypt together with the incident of Moses stricken with leprosy and cured by Yahweh himself. The ‘ten plagues’ are a worsening social breakdown. . . . ­Finally we have a strong sacrificial theme in the death of the firstborn and the establishment of the Passover ritual.”100 Girard notes, however, that “the process just described implies that the random victim must be perceived as a ‘real culprit,’ missing before and now identified and punished. This random victim, in other words, will never be perceived as random; the ‘cure’ will not be operative if its beneficiaries realized convinced the randomness of the victim’s 99.  Girard, “The Plague in Literature and Myth,” 136–37. 100.  Ibid., 144–45.

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selection.”101 Punishment for Oedipus, who bears the responsibility for the entire community, turns him into a scapegoat in the full sense of the word, “because he is never designated as such.”102 Alterman uses the connection between victim and plague to exactly the opposite effect. Instead of having a purifying and uniting function, the victim is identified and emphasized as random, undermining the idea of retribution. The allegory of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt is not one of vengeance but, rather, it is about breaking the cycle of crime and punishment. The redemption sketched in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt provides salvation for the defeated. Not a linear story of the powerful and rosy future of the collective, it is instead the story of those who seek to plant hope of an existence for both individuals and a collective with limited and modest aspirations.

101.  Ibid., 146. 102.  Ibid.; emphasis in the original.

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C h a p t e r 2 3   History of the Defeated

“Doe,” the closing section of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, offers the image of morning light as a symbol of hope and redemption: The pillar of dawn rises. The doe glows again. And like a young bird, she rises. She will shine at daybreak, insolent and scared. But the elders of all generations, out of wisdom or stupidity, kiss her small, pure sandal.103

This stanza rests on the Talmudic story of two ancient Eretz-Israeli sages, the rabbis Hiyyah Hagadol and Shimon Ben-Halafta: “They were walking in the valley of Arbel as dawn rose and they sought the doe of dawn and her light emerged. Rabbi Hiyyah Hagadol said to Rabbi Shimon, ‘So shall be the redemption of Israel, slow in the beginning and then shining and then fruitful and multiplying and then wet and gone.’”104 The slow rise of dawn is compared to the gradual process of redemption. But in Alterman’s poem, the hope that rises with the morning light is merely a possibility. In other words, the elders of all generations are depicted allegorically and not symbolically as those who kiss dawn’s small sandal whether they are wise or stupid—for there is no guarantee that hope will come in its wake: “For in the shining world of silver and sword / the hope of generations blows like wind in the leaves.”105 In a belligerent world, hope merely ruffles the leaves like wind; it is the last resort of the weak. In this desperate situation, there is one per103.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 253. 104.  Shir hashirim rabbah, Parasha 6, 10, chapter 1:3; Yerushalmi, Berahot 2:73. 105.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 254.

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son who remembers the presence of hope in order to face the enemy with a degree of force: Above the eternal ash of love and pain [hope is] born on a night of pain. Yet as long as one heart remembers its covenant and rhythm its enemies will sit as if on coals.106

The existence of hope is portrayed as puzzling, for it is not the result of a general historic process. On the one hand, it results from a nonlinear mechanism with anti-eschatological aims.107 On the other hand, it is not a secular process of historical nationalism with a shared collective goal. Hope is present, in essence, in one heart that recalls “covenant and rhythm,” and as such it contains the cracks, gaps, truncations, and unfathomed discontinuity of the national historic narrative. The ray of dawn that lifts hopes is portrayed as observed “through potsherds” by the elders of an entire generation, while in the previous section of the poem, the eyes of the son bound on the altar are blindfolded: You are light, light, lighter than a bird you are. And the young woman is like you, her eyelashes fluttering. The firstborn of each generation, doe, in a calm row, look at you through potsherds. And the wonder of a butterfly born from a worm is like the wonder of an unplanned, glowing smile.108

The father and the young woman are portrayed as allegorical figures; the chance nature of hope, the last resort of the weak, causes them to smile. Avoidance of collective processes gives hope, especially to the father, whose ethical responsibility for the collective sin is undermined. The smile of the firstborn daughters is in light of the random nature of hope and its status as a last resort for the weak; as such it remains a puzzle unsolved by cyclical history: The history of nations passes like a robbery in daylight between sin, judgment and sin—just foolishness and adultery 106.  Ibid. 107.  Miron, “Bin yom ktanot la-aharit hayamim,” 100. 108.  Alterman, Shirey makot Mitzraim, 253.

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and the blindness of the prophets and the rest of Egypt’s plagues left the smile as a mystery. And it is the mystery of endless power, and the mystery of an artist without end. A boy will solve it, and yet in vain the heads of fools will break again.109

History, the “history of nations,” is the realm of the powerful who participate in the cycle of crime and punishment, crime and retribution, the cyclicality that produces an individual victim with collective significance. Alterman’s historical analogy between the Holocaust and the biblical story of the plagues praises, in contrast, the hope of the weak. For this reason, hope is portrayed as allegorical, the hope of the weak that disturbs the cyclical order of history. In a world where power is unchecked and belief unending, hope is a riddle to be solved only by the weak (“a boy will solve it”), and not by those who do not sense the subversive potential power of the weak that enables allegory: “in vain / the heads of fools will break again.” The allegorical light of the ray of hope does not, therefore, stem from divine violence and does not shine from the collective victim, whose individual death allows the collective to survive. Paradoxically, the opposite is the case: “And on the night of the firstborn—between the flashes of a weapon / the small, shining sandal flickers.”110 That is, it is one flicker among many, neither special nor divine, and therefore is not required to bear the symbolic function of a concrete expression of an abstract, general significance. The last stanza repeats the emphasis on allegorical hope as that of the weak: Doe of the night of Amon, how high you fly! And you star-bird, how shiny and great! You are the last mercy, sprawling, unshaken and the grace of first laughter for those left vacant. They smile to you with worm and bug, and the father and the young woman in braids of blood.111

109.  Ibid., 254. 110.  Ibid., 255. 111.  Ibid.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

This hope is connected to the concrete world by an allegorical sign which explicitly defines itself as nonsymbolic, “the final good for those left out who do not tremble.” It is not a benevolence that grants mythical transcendence to dead individuals in the survival of a collective soul—“the grace of first laughter for those left vacant”—that is, a good that connects one to emptiness, to nothingness.

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C h a p t e r 2 4   A Summer Quarrel

In July 1945, a year after The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt appeared, Alterman published “Summer Quarrel” (“Merivat kaitz”), a series of seven poems depicting a new creation myth, in the journal Mahbarot Lesifrut. Following the yearly cycle of continuous and connected seasons from winter to summer, suddenly, as in the biblical creation story, earth and sky are separated. The connection between them is broken and as a result summer is detached from the other seasons and appears in the form of a threatening opponent, a war hero. Facing this image of summer is a young Jewish woman with roots in Cordova, Mainz, and Prague, who enters the basalt-filled Palestinian landscape generations later: This grace made up of shifting times that foreign generations gave you little by little, burns the bridge to Astarte’s statue, denies intimacy with the noses of the Hittites. A young Jewish woman engaged to the sword, a young woman from Cordova, Mainz, and Prague. A thousand years have ended and here you are again at dusk, rebellious and new as a poppy field. Happy is the one who saw how you entered the basalt landscape, the scorpion’s circle surrounded by flames, with a practiced daily step imitating your ancestors’ gait unknowingly.112

112.  Nathan Alterman, “Merivat kaitz,” Ir hayona (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978), 204–5.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

The conflict between the young Jewish woman and summer serves as the starting point for a sharp attack on those who deny the continuity of the Israelite people with the Jewish nation, as did the Canaanite movement led by Yonatan Ratosh. The Canaanites took an anti-­Zionist stance in the beginning of the 1930s that called for the separation of Hebrew identity from the Jewish nation, and the development of a shared identity with the inhabitants of Palestine, that is, Jews and Arabs together, who will be redefined together as Hebrews. Separated from Jewish national continuity and as an alternative to historical continuity in time, the Canaanites had instead to keep a grip on the Palestinian territory as the basis of a modern, Hebrew national identity. Alterman depicts the construction of an Israelite nation in Palestine as the story of a struggle in which the designs of the nation take on power and matter, in this region they will meet while reclining, and when they rise to battle with shield and sword the foundations will rock for many more years.113

The construction of a nation involves a struggle between various positions; in the poem it is depicted as a contradiction between the Zionist-Jewish stance embodied in the figure of the young woman and the native figure of summer that denies Jewish continuity. Five years later, in January 1950, Ratosh published an attack on Alter­ man’s poetry in general, and this poem specifically, in the Canaanite journal Alef. His main argument was that nature in Israel as depicted in Alterman’s verses includes “something strange. Something foreign. . . . Summer as described in the poem is indeed extreme, our summer, but as though seen through foreign eyes. The eyes of a newcomer.”114 Furthermore, Ratosh wrote, “the young woman, who is Alterman’s symbol of everything new in Israel, stands in opposition to and at war with nature.”115 This foreignness arises because of the acceptance of the Jewish past as a legitimate and even vital element in the nationalist encounter with the land; it is what gets Alterman to avoid a clear spiritual definition of the encounter, and hence of the national identity 113.  Ibid. 114.  Ratosh, Sifrut yehudit balashon haivrit, 77. 115.  Ibid.

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of the one who encounters with the land. Instead, Ratosh writes, Alterman escapes “toward reality, experience . . . and daily problems . . . only to avoid the biggest problem taking place, defining the basics of Hebrew culture as it makes its way, and . . . every change in values that involves.”116 Ratosh seems to be exposing Alterman’s foreignness in his representation of the Eretz-Israeli landscape in, for example, Alterman’s claim that all summer months are the same, or viewing the thistle as summer’s only identifying mark. Ratosh appears, in the name of EretzIsraeli realism, to undermine Alterman’s representation of details. But Alterman’s foreignness is not at all a hidden phenomenon or a stylistic symptom that Ratosh the critic must reveal to us. In fact, the opposite is the case. As Ziva Shamir has noted, “Ratosh pretended that he and his method were not controversial, and wrote a seemingly positive analysis of the poem ‘Summer Quarrel,’ in which he appears to undermine Alterman’s credibility in mimetic terms—[that is,] whether or not there is a correspondence to Eretz-Israeli reality.”117 Ratosh purposefully ignored the fact that both foreignness and unreconciled contradictions are made explicit in the poem. Alterman depicts the encounter with the Eretz-Israeli landscape as one with conflict and other­ness. And so it is not only, as Ratosh writes, that the young woman symbolizing what is new in Palestine is at war with nature, but that A ­ lterman himself is the one describing the landscape in terms of conflict and an encounter with the foreign. Ratosh exposes what has already been exposed from the start. What Ratosh sees as a totalizing, symbolic representation, which Alterman seems to offer as the essence of national existence in Palestine, is actually presented by Alterman as a problematic, inconsistent allegory and therefore free of any clear symbolic significance. Unlike Ratosh, who demands a narrative of a pure, homogeneous national identity, harnessed to the establishment of a Hebrew nation, Alterman offers a demonstrably problematic national identity: ambiguous, ambivalent, and unstable. 116.  Ibid., 81. 117.  Ziva Shamir, Lehatheel me-alef; shirat Ratosh (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993), 174.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

An unconcealed conflict between two national narratives underlies “Summer Quarrel.” On the one hand, there is the story of nationalist awakening in Palestine, within which the young woman symbolizes the Jewish nation returning to its land according to the Zionist formula: the realization of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. On the other hand, and not at all synchronized with the standard nationalist story, Alterman here unfolds a narrative of weakness and destruction, and especially, one that lacks a clear ending. From the outset in this series of poems, it is clear that the image of the creation of the world is used as an organizing metaphor. The Holocaust is attached to the mythological picture, and in its wake there is a profound realization that the nationalist story can no longer ignore what has been missing; the weakness and failure evidenced in the Jewish catastrophe etched the need for political sovereignty into the Zionist project for the solution of the Jewish problem. Alterman opens the poem this way: A large paw and beak, part lion, part eagle the image of an etched sun. They won’t tarnish, won’t become gloomy. From one summer to another we passed over the flickering and thundering bridge of winter months.118

The verse depicts icons—the British lion and the Nazi German eagle— positioned opposite each other as the hawkish forces of the history of World War II. The publication of the poem in July 1945, two months after the surrender of Nazi Germany, left no room for doubt that Alter­ man developed the “summer quarrel” from the point of view of the various possibilities for Jewish national existence after the war, when suddenly, “as though by sword, the connection was severed / ­between heaven and earth.” Following a mythological situation in which the heavens like giants pursue women, once again the skies are cut off from the land and a new era of Jewish national history begins. Alterman’s had a year earlier criticized the Canaanite movement in response to a position paper on Hebrew nationalism written by Ratosh.119 ­Ratosh had attacked the Palestinian Jews’ attachment to the Diaspora during 118.  Alterman, “Merivat kaitz.” 119.  Yehoshua Porat, Shelah ve-et beyaddo (Tel-Aviv: Mahbarot Lesifrut, 1989), 200.

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the Holocaust, warned against Jews disguised as the new Hebrews, and argued for distance from the heroism of the ghetto uprisings, which he called “the heroism of rabbits” who fight when there is no longer any hope of escape.120 Ratosh’s demonstration of Jewish passivity and weakness is one-­ dimensional. In contrast, Alterman tells the precarious story of the inner resources of a young woman who is engaged to the sword, in this way linking the story of those who came out of the inferno weak and broken, and whose smooth integration into the Jewish homeland could not be guaranteed, to the realistic one of the nation-building process. The poem offers a series of allegorical models for dealing with the conflict that emerges from these representations. While they are attempts at a cover-up, on the other hand they, in the way of allegories, cannot erase the conflict entirely. In this sense the story of the woman is a conventional and traditional solution to the representational crisis of the national narrative. The woman in Alterman’s poem is the one who, at one and the same time, is shackled by an ancient summer month, but who also, as in the Song of Songs, imprisons the summer month with the water troughs. So the poem methodically depicts the image of Jewish national power in combination with metaphors of liberation and enslavement, power and weakness. The disadvantage of the summer months, Alterman writes, is that of all their charms, “they took on only the thistle’s last shine,  / a sign better suited to the slave.”121 That is, the concentration of the summer or Canaanite months in a homogeneous symbolic representation removes the subjugation, weakness, and subordination to which Alterman would like to grant a legitimate place in his heterogeneous national image. A height of nationalist ambivalence in this erotic story occurs when the woman exhibits contempt for the memory of the biblical daughters of Zelophehad, and raises an internal conflict in w ­ omen’s nationalist traditions (Num. 27:36). The young woman who today is engaged to the sword attacks the assertiveness of the daughters of Zelophehad in their successful fight against laws that granted inheritance rights only to men. In the end the ambivalence of this allegory is expressed in 120.  Ratosh, Sifrut yehudit balashon haivrit, 174. 121.  Alterman, “Merivat kaitz.”

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the new human product of the nationalist undertaking, with an allusion to the Song of Songs: “Tomorrow’s Shulamite dresses in her room / and you may not look through the keyhole.” When the new and daring beauty to be formed from the struggle between summer and the young woman is created “as if from a rib,” it is an act of a woman’s creation from a human rib (Gen. 2:21–22), and not the result of the coupling of a man and a woman. This erotic narrative provides the most noticeable metonymic transformation in the poem, which is meant to overcome the conflict between the realistic nationalist story and the weak and hazy one. The story of the summer facing the fall and winter months provides an overlapping metonymy. The nationalist tale is told in an orientalist mode: the West (the young woman from Cordova, Mainz, and Prague) comes to the East, which rejects her. On the other hand, the young woman from Yemen, who apparently represents Mizrahi Jews (Jews who immigrated to Palestine and Israel from Arab countries), joins forces with the western girl and welcomes her arrival. The overlap between the story of the women and that of western civilization redeeming and cultivating the hostile East is meant to mediate between the poles of the conflict. The standard nationalist story of the collective that seeks territorial sovereignty is situated opposite the suffering, torn collective with its variegated past, which must now cope with a battle whose outcome is unclear. All of these transformations preserve the borders of the Jewish ethnic experience. Unlike Ratosh, who defines a nation according to its territory, Alterman maintains that identity is based on blood ties, which can serve a variety of structures for collective Jewish life, and not only that of Zionist-­ sovereign-national existence. Although the struggle that Alterman depicts is heterogeneous and lacks commitment to one clear line of development, it is still an internal Jewish one. What he discards—but which is nonetheless visible under a series of stories of white men who redeem the East and the erotic story of the woman—is the conflict of Zionism with the inhabitants of Palestine; the violent conflict between the Jewish nationalist movement and its Other: Palestinian Arabs. The struggle with the environment and the violence of summer, is, therefore, a metaphorical and euphemistic way to depict the conflict with them.

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There is no doubt that Ratosh understood Alterman’s mechanism for conflict, and that he turned this foreignness and the distance between the desire for territory and its attainment into an appropriate subject of attack. Ratosh also viewed the conquering of Palestine as a bloody and violent process, but its success always appears in his work as a given. The Palestinians did not constitute a problem for the realization of Canaanite ideology; as far back as the 1930s, Ratosh had rejected their identity as a separate nation. He aspired to establish an alliance with ancient peoples who would form a front with Europe against the desert Arabs.122 And so the Altermanic national process of conquering Palestine—conflicted, heterogeneous, and foreign—is presented by Ratosh as limited and ambiguous. Ratosh focused his criticism on the young woman as an unassimilated immigrant. In contrast to Alterman, who uses the allegorical mechanism of the girl in order to emphasis conflict and contradiction, Ratosh demands that she behave like a symbol with a single, clear meaning: “a symbol of all that is new in the land.”123 In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the symbolist Ratosh read Alterman’s allegory as a failed symbol that should have functioned according to Ratosh’s homogeneous and totalitarian principles for national identity, which placed territory at the center. Alterman perceived historical continuity as an element in Jewish ethnic continuity whose normative nationalist identity was to be examined in all its variations and vicissitudes. In contrast, Ratosh saw it as putty to be shaped, and believed that nationalist ideology could remove whatever did not suit the norms of national territory. He also allowed himself to choose only those periods of time that suited his utopian definition of modern Hebrew national identity. Alterman presented the heterogeneous immigrant girl as someone who existed in the past and also in the present, where she imitates—she mimics but does not identify with—her “ancestors’ gait.” In contrast, Ratosh demanded an essentialist spiritual definition of Hebrew culture that would cancel out the Jewish past and not evade a vision of the future, but instead, define it precisely as a Hebrew future based solely on pure, native Hebrew culture. 122.  Porat, Shelah ve-et beyaddo, 75. 123.  Ratosh, Sifrut yehudit balashon haivrit, 77.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

This controversy is not, as Ratosh described it, between two political positions embodied by two unambiguous images of the Jew and the Hebrew. Ratosh interpreted Alterman as if his imagery indicated a preference for Jewishness and national Jewish continuity and the removal of Hebrew and Canaanite elements from emerging nationalism. But Alterman offers a completely different picture. He does not cast Canaanism out and does not turn it into a new Other, whose absence marks borders. Instead, he includes Canaanism and depicts the new nationalism as formed by Jewish continuity and by the new local Hebrew identity, even if they are in conflict, but absorbing both. In this way Alterman does not remove Canaanism from the establishment of nationalism, but rather the Arabs, who thus become the Other for both the Zionists and the Canaanites. This reading of the poets’ dispute breaks down Ratosh’s claim that Canaanism is the ultimate way to exclude the Other from the new nationalism. It is precisely such a reading of this dispute that allows us to identify Alterman’s position as that of someone who, in light of the Holocaust, developed, in The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt and after, a nationalist stance that cannot be reduced to sovereign Zionist nationalism based on territoriality that destroys the possibility of Jewish national existence in the Diaspora. In his position on Jewish rebellion and his opposition to total condemnation of Jewish local councils, and in his view of Rudolf Kastner, Alterman chose a nationalist stance whose independent images of power are far more complex than those on the Canaanite side of the argument. The debate he conducted with Ratosh refutes the often-repeated claim by the Canaanites, their interpreters, and critics that Canaanite Hebrew identity was methodically rejected by the new nationalist establishment. Alterman’s part in the controversy was an attempt to include the Canaanites as part of the internal struggle of Jewish nationalism; it was another stage in preparing to face its concrete Other: the Palestinian Arab.

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C h a p t e r 2 5   Ghetto Poems in the Streets of Tel-Aviv

A small book by Yocheved Bat-Miriam made a quiet appearance in 1946: a thin volume whose gray cover bore letters which spelled out the book’s title in the yellow color of the star-shaped patch forced on the Jews by the Nazis. In this book, 1943—Ghetto Poems (1943—Shirim laghetto), Bat-Miriam’s sixth volume of poetry, she wrote about the terrors of the Holocaust. The poet here continued in the rich tradition of Hebrew symbolist poetry she had been a central part of in Russia at the beginning of the 1920s. By the second half of the 1930s, Bat-Miriam had helped make symbolist expression the dominant mode of Hebrew poetry in Palestine. In the intense symbolist context peopled by Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky, Yonatan Ratosh, Leah Goldberg, and others, this trend reached its zenith in Bat-Miriam’s writing.124 Her extensive use of symbolist poetics is characterized by a particularly high sensitivity to the myriad possible meanings of the poetic word and to its continuous figurative chains. She paid great attention to the musical suggestiveness of poetic text, using a high register that projects the upper realms of human experience to the point of seeming mystical, and a transformation of images of time into images of space and distance.125 What is also notable about Bat-Miriam’s symbolism is the use of narratives that combine real, concrete elements into a broader story that develops into a harmonious whole; her poetry blends concrete details into metaphysical spiritual significance that grants each of them a role 124.  Dan Miron, “Kanfot ha-aretz,” Gazit 16, nos. 7–8 (October–November, 1958): 14–17; Ruth Kartun-Blum, Ba-merhak hane’alam (Ramat Gan: Masada, 1977), 33–38, 47–70. 125.  Kartun-Blum, Ba-merhak hane’alam, 45.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

and significance in the shared collective story. It is no wonder, then, that in Jewish nationalist culture in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, Bat-Miriam’s symbolist poetry served, no less and perhaps even more than that of other writers, as a channel for the nationalist narrative. The thematic scope of her poetry, according to Dan Miron, does not deviate from the fixed range “through which great Jewish pathos percolates”; Miron includes in this “the poet’s crisis of attachment to the landscape, the entire experience of which was imbibed in a distant environment (in this case the Ukrainian countryside), at a time when the poet stands before a new landscape, the ambiguous one of Palestine.”126 This nationalist narrative, continually advancing and gathering force before it is realized in an imagined national community, shares territorial and other elements; symbolism grants these concrete elements, in particular individuals, a shared universal and general context in which they may acquire significance and value. In an essay pointing to the unifying power of Bat-Miriam’s work, Nathan Alterman wrote: “The question of the difference between poetry of the individual and that of the collective never arises. This can never happen because of the poetry’s extremely strong power of attraction that unites the various elements into one overpowering melody.”127 And so, for example, in her book Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel), published in 1937, Bat-Miriam utilizes symbolism in the service of nationalism by telling the story of Zionist redemption as a mystical narrative of national continuity and religious unification in the Palestinian homeland. In contrast, in the collection Russian Poetry (Shirat Russia), published during the war in 1942, she grants the Russian people’s national struggle a rich and sweeping symbolist musical representation. In Bat-Miriam’s book, the symbolist starting point develops into a sweeping solidarity with Mother Russia, the ultimate homeland for which death and bereavement in wartime are presented as noble ideals. A nationalist death in Bat-Miriam’s symbolist poem is perceived as a choice as well as an ideal: For your beauty and fiery zeal your poets chose to die young. 126.  Miron, “Kanfot ha-aretz,” 14. 127.  Nathan Alterman, Ba-ma’agal, 2nd ed. (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1975), 85.

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And the melody still plays above your murmuring and life demands embodiment in a poem.128

This exaggerated inflation of symbolic Russia portrays death as a lofty event, “bereavement’s joy,” which softens and in effect erases the horrors of war, perceived here as sublime and even admirable in a nationalist context. All of this appears in the poems via a ceaseless harmonizing of everything that might be viewed as suffering or a burden. Undoubtedly, at their best these poems universalize Russia, and imply that Jewish Palestine is Mother Russia’s twin. The Jewish nationalist viewpoint, including the Zionist homeland, is integrated within celebratory universalism: “And you are young, reflected in [Russia’s] eyes, / like my country in the eyes of my prophets, torn. / Illuminated and unnamed, barefoot and unknown.”129 Symbolist universalism held sway until the end of 1942. Until that time, representations of death and bereavement could blend into stirring musicality, which granted them power and turned them into sources of collective hope. But at the end of 1942, when more concrete news of what was taking place in Europe reached Palestine, and the murders, persecutions, and torture were perceived as genocide against the Jewish people—a Holocaust—Bat-Miriam’s poetry, and the entire symbolist school in Palestine, faced a new cultural reality. At the core of the school’s widening split lay the inability of the literary symbol to absorb two incompatible narratives at the same time. On the one hand, there was the story of a beginning and related progress that overlapped with the modernist tale of building a new Zionist nationality, as Bat-Miriam phrased it in Land of Israel, or with the stirring symbolism of Mother Russia in Russian Poetry. But, like the change that occurred in Alterman’s poetry, Bat-Miriam’s work, too, came to base itself on the other narrative, in which loss and destruction took the place of redemption, and death was no longer seen, as it was in Poems of Russia, as “bereavement’s joy,” and “grief’s melody.” It was no longer possible to “to sing out of bereavement and hope / that we curse, and [then] die in its name.”130 That is, death no longer served 128.  Yocheved Bat-Miriam, Mi-shirey Russia (1942; Merhavia: Doron Sifiat Palim, 1972), 228. 129.  Ibid., 229. 130.  Ibid.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

nationalism and was not sanctified by it—the opposite was the case. Death marked absence, destruction, and loss, from which it was no longer possible to inspire national power or hope. The national significance of the literary symbol faced a sharp contradiction. The writing of a symbolist poem, which as usual is committed to universalism, musicality, and, primarily, to a narrative of salvation, was pushed in the context of the Holocaust to portray death, which is represented as an unredemptive loss, from a position of desperation and helplessness. Bat-Miriam here faced a profound dilemma, solved by adopting one of the solutions offered at the time, which constituted one of the most dramatic changes ever to take place in symbolist poetry: the process led by Alterman, in which he made a sharp turn from the redemptive symbolism of Joy of the Poor in 1941 to the allegorical fragments, lacking in national hope, of The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt in 1944. Bat-Miriam expressed the dilemma at the outset of Ghetto Poems in “David’s Verse” (“Psuko shel David”), which portrays the Holocaust, superficially at least, as occurring within the framework of a story of national redemption. The star-shaped yellow badge forced upon the Jews first appears in the phrase “the yellowness of the badge,”131 accentuating the star’s symbolic value. This would seem to be preparation for a symbolist narrative of salvation, in which the woman speaker will tell the story of the ladder “situated in the heavens [ . . . on which one] rises toward death forever / my ghetto in the yellowness of the badge.”132 But in fact, instead of pointing to the vitality and redemptive nature of death, the poem points to its finality. “David’s Verse” is based on the biblical lines in which King David responds to the loss of his child with Batsheva, another man’s wife; the death of the child is God’s punishment for David’s adulterous relationship (2 Sam. 12:14–23). David fasts and weeps after God afflicts the child with a fatal illness, but when the child dies, he ends his fast and period of mourning. In this way, however, David acknowledges his profound understanding that the child is dead and there is no way to bring him back to life: “When the child was still alive I fasted and wept because I thought: ‘Who knows? The Lord may have pity on me and the child may live.’ 131.  Yocheved Bat-Miriam, 1943—Shirim laghetto (1946; Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1972), 249. 132.  Ibid.

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But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will never come back to me.”133 By basing itself on this biblical story, the poem offers a symbolic picture that includes both hope and the continuing victory over the yellow patch as well as a bitter recognition of the finality of the destruction, the dead that cannot be returned to life. In this way Bat-Miriam’s symbolic text offers an encounter, in effect a clash, between the progressive Zionist narrative, expressed in characteristic symbolist language, and the alternative narrative of destruction and despair. Paradoxically, the poetic language that Bat-Miriam uses to represent loss and death during the Holocaust is the same as that used to portray nationalism: the language of modernism and progress in expectation of the national community’s shared future. Similar to other heterogeneous, postcolonial cultural situations in which a hybrid model of economic and cultural repression exists even after political liberation is achieved, nationalist discourse about the Holocaust maintains the conflict between, on the one hand, the language of power and the nationalist future and, on the other hand, the language of despair and weakness. One obvious feature of hybridity is the appropriation of the hegemonic-nationalist-Zionist discourse by those who identify with the weakness and oppression of the Holocaust’s murdered victims. Zionist culture during the Holocaust may be viewed in light of a characteristic of the postcolonial situation noted by Indian theorist Partha ­Chatterjee: “Non-European colonial countries have no historical alternative but to try to approximate the given attributes of modernity when that very process of approximation means their continued subjection under a world order which only sets their tasks for them and over which they have no control.”134 Paradoxical, conflicted Zionist discourse about the oppressed victims of the Holocaust is conducted in modern, nationalist language about the future, and contains the symbolist language of progress that Bat-Miriam uses to portray the Holocaust and destruction. Bat-Miriam’s portrayal of the main contradiction in Hebrew cultural discourse in the 1940s—also the most glaring contradiction in symbol133.  2 Sam. 12:22–23 (JPS). 134.  Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed Books, 1986), 10.

Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust

ist discourse in the paradoxical nationalist situation—appeared, as in Alterman’s work, in the representation of nationalist-collective time. Time is portrayed as simultaneously progressive and static, two modes that are opposed to each other. These two irreconcilable images of time are the means by which Walter Benjamin defines the principle difference between allegory and symbol. On the one hand, the organic symbol contains the concrete nature of the signifier, which therefore offers hope and continuity. On the other hand, allegory is mechanical and abstract; it cannot transcend its existence as the representation of lifeless ideas. Symbolic time ensures continuous progress toward the future, in contrast with allegory, which is disrupted, inanimate, and lacking in any clear hope. In light of this profound split between two representations of time, nationalist progress versus the static observation of destruction in symbolic versus allegorical time, the symbolist Bat-Miriam utilized a rather particular mechanism. In order to deal with this basic contradiction, she shaped her symbolist representation of collective death, the ghettos and concentration camps, by means of drastic displacement or the transformation of time into space. The mechanism of spatial representation, so prominent in Bat-Miriam’s poetry,135 becomes a central tool for the containment of time during the Holocaust. She used spatial categories to represent horror. In a discussion of Bat-Miriam’s transformative images, Dan Miron notes, “The most legitimate . . . is that of the wing, an obvious expression of sublimation as well as flight. . . . A close examination of Bat-­ Miriam’s poetry reveals that the image of the wing serves as a primary tool with which to grasp the experience of landscape.”136 About Ghetto Poems he writes that those poems, too, contain “the same fixed stance of distance between ‘I’ and ‘you,’ but now the self is ‘my generation,’ or more precisely the Jewish ghetto. . . . Once again we have before us a poem about a pathway, of walking and pursuit.”137 While noting the blurred border between (historical) time and (geographic) space, Miron holds that the space through which the road passes is not geo135.  Karton-Blum, Ba-merhak hane’alam, 45. 136.  Miron, “Kanfot ha-aretz,” 15–16. 137.  Ibid., 16.

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graphic but historical (“a strong vision passes overhead and streams into the blue sail of generations”),138 subordinating space to historical time while emphasizing Bat-Miriam’s nationalist commitment, and absorbing the nationalist subversion and unruliness that permits the reverse process of the transformation of the representation of time into representation of space. Nearly every section of Ghetto Poems starts from a symbolist point of view, focusing on the temporal continuity of the phenomenon being represented; very quickly, however, this continuity is exposed as false. Just as quickly, a spatial solution is offered in symbolist language to resolve the conflict of irreconcilable times. “Your name,” Bat-Miriam says, that is, the ghetto’s name, is too big for slogans and resistance like a fiction that became real, I dared write of in my notebook, and innocence and purity do not rule.139

This symbolist credo includes the ghetto in a verbal continuum that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction, the signifier and the signified, the fixed symbolist formula and what is always unutterable, unusable. From her loyalty to symbolism, Bat-Miriam moves toward the reverse, alternative system of representation. It is a method that characterizes her poetry not as harmonious but as spatially divided. The “vision of horror and flames” is frozen in the glance of the generation that she depicts as an entity existing in space, personified as someone looking at her, “like a guest / who will sit at the table.”140 In a similar manner, Bat-Miriam divides her poetic voice among different locations in space. One way she does this is by creating an utterance located in a different place from the voice it expresses. Instead of the unified, border-blurring symbolist voice, the poem is sharply distinctive; Bat-Miriam distinguishes between the “I” of the speaker and its voice. The “I” is the voice of lofty spiritual and transcendental freedom. At the same time, however, it is a voice that imposes external, physical chains which limit freedom: “Freedom’s voice. The voice of its 138.  Ibid., 15–16. 139.  Bat-Miriam, 1943—Shirim laghetto, 249. 140.  Ibid., 250.

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bonds.”141 The voice is divided between power as longing and power as limitation; between its expression of longing for a world of higher values and its action as a spatial, physical limitation on the achievement of such values. This division takes place in different locations in space rather than in time. These divisions of the self in Bat-Miriam’s poetry constitute a basic, intensive poetic practice realized in a series of locations of the self in space. The speaker is clarifying to herself the significance of her voice and her poetry by spreading the various elements over an expanse. Locating her voice as physically outside herself, she can express the horrors of the period “in the look of those who are torn, facing the sublime.”142 By harnessing harmonious symbolist expression to contradiction-­ ridden hybrids, Bat-Miriam locates the object of this problematic image, the vision of horror and flames, as an external entity that places the speaker—who seeks to speak for the collective—as an intermediary between the representative and the represented: You will go before us like vapor, and put us like an arrow between a noun and its name. The things we love in the world so much our lips will bear and not know how to say.143

In this way she continues, on the one hand, to use the collective’s symbolist language and to preserve the symbol; on the other hand, she creates a certain amount of flexibility in the speaker’s movement, which can now approach and distance itself from the threatening object. This flexibility allows the national framework of the symbol to be preserved, but also allows the poet to locate herself in a national framework yet in a marginal place. Using spatial, contradictory symbolic language, Bat-Miriam manages to shape an alternative space which does not perceive territory as solely national. In her poems, the territory of the ghetto and concentration camps, and of the “city” (Tel-Aviv), are located in one common expanse which is completely different from a national territory. While national territory includes symbolic space with defined contours bear141.  Ibid. 142.  Ibid., 259. 143.  Ibid., 250.

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ing historic significance, in Bat-Miriam’s ghetto poems, separate spaces with different and contradictory histories are included one within the other. Just as her poetic voice is spatially divided between hope and despair, here too the shared space contains the national hopes of Palestine as well as destruction in the Diaspora. It was in this spirit that Alterman wrote of Bat-Miriam’s work that Palestine arises from this book like “a chariot of fire among the world’s mountains, but despite the unequaled power she achieves here, and despite its raging fire, it does not close itself off [from that world]. The book also bears the lamentations, songs, chains, and flags of Russian poetry.”144 Alterman noted that Bat-Miriam’s longings for Palestine and Russia were not contradictory and did not cancel each other out. Similarly, the scholar Ilana Pardes has commented that in Bat-Miriam’s 1940 poem “Miriam,” Palestine and Egypt are not placed in opposition, and that such a combination offers a different type of nationalism that neither matches nor contradicts routine Zionist categories.145 And so the expanse that Bat-Miriam creates in her poetry is not subject to the standard Zionist-nationalist dichotomy between Palestine and the Diaspora in which Palestine absorbs and appropriates the ghetto and becomes its successor. The heroism of the ghetto uprisings is portrayed in terms of a pioneering act in Palestine, as Yitzhak ­Tabenkin (1888–1971), leader of the Hakibbutz Hameuchad movement, part of the Zionist left wing of the labor movement in EretzIsrael, wrote about the historic continuity between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943 and the revolt of the Jews against Roman rule in 70 c.e.: The Jewish nation, the Jewish refugee, where do they seek a homeland? The homeland is here! The Warsaw Ghetto fighters—what gives them the strength to fight? The strength of this homeland, their homeland, the strength of the memory of the war of the Jews against Rome, the strength of this nation persecuted for thousands of years that continues to remember the homeland it won with blood and sweat, in wars, created in this land—it lives in its homeland not only 144.  Alterman, Ba-ma’agal, 83. 145.  Ilana Pardes, “Yocheved Bat-Miriam: The Poetic Strength of a Matronym,” in Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, ed. Naomi Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), 57.

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in the memory of the Jews, but also in the memory of the civilized nations of Europe and America—the Land of Israel.146

Bat-Miriam’s unique stance as a woman poet and the woman speakers in her poetry made a dramatic contribution to the place of women and gender in nationalist discourse. Her particular approach to space made her a subversive force that undermined the exclusion of women from that discourse. The fact that her place as a woman was established via an alternative marking of territory grants subversive power to the spaces she creates. Instead of presenting territory as a national symbol, perceived in categories that subordinate women as Mother Earth, Mother Russia, and the feminine gender of Palestine (in Hebrew, eretz—land—is feminine), in which territory is always land, the foundation on which the symbolic construction of the nation is built and to which it is subordinate, Bat-Miriam suggests territory as part of the expanse of connections and markings that do not fall under hegemonic national classification. It is possible to catalog the European ghetto and Tel-Aviv as part of a shared space that the speaker freely and flexibly navigates; it does not have to be perceived according to the DiasporaPalestine hierarchy and division whose fixity is meant to establish its symbolic function in national discourse. And in her approach to the nation, Bat-Miriam characterizes it as something whose existence is dual, which exists both within borders and outside them. You murmur and disturb. Your lands look over the expanse. Keeping their borders, as a guest You pass over the edge.147

Territorial existence that grants equal weight to Palestine and the Diaspora is thus presented in a way that accentuates its deviation from the dominant order of things in the expanse of national existence. And so it is no wonder that in the wake of this disturbance of the accepted order, national time is not presented in the poems as overlapping and matching the borders of one clear national expanse. It too, like space, divides and distances itself from hegemonic order. It too offers direc146.  Yitzhak Tabenkin, “Beyom mifkad,” Mebefnim 9, no. 2 (June 1943): 227–28. 147.  Bat-Miriam, 1943—Shirim laghetto, 263.

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tions and elements that do not match the standard nationalist story uniting the territory of Palestine with historical progress within one shared national collective. This is the reason that these poems treat the image of national memory in a way that creates a divided memory separating time from space. With the aid of spatial figures, the poems turn national memory into a container, a collection tool for national time. The representation of time as contained, as well as located in spatial proximity within memory, allows Bat-Miriam to accentuate noncorrespondence—the gap between time and space. National memory is a memory that “curves time,” while the relationship between memory and forgetting is depicted as a spatial one between two stages of time, between green rust and the copper upon which it grows. In this fashion Bat-Miriam shifts the focus from temporal existence to spatial, territorial existence; the role the speaker takes on herself is presented as one of confusion and hesitancy, a movement in space that does not require a choice between a national vision progressing and developing in time, and the representation of a separate expanse in which the human presence does not overlap with national time. This ambivalent and undefined space becomes the only place where the poet can mourn the fate of her people. Out of devotion to them she looks toward the hills; there, in the distance, she mourns, and there she sees, indistinguishable alongside each other, a green Palestinian grove and the plots of land of non-Jews.148 This contradictory space, which enables Bat-Miriam to establish a place for women in the national discourse, may also be seen in the representation of “the daughter of my people” as a woman with whom the speaker identifies. On the one hand, this figure hews to the symbolic norm of the narrative of national history; on the other hand, she is a feminine figure who is presented in the poem as existing only in space and not in time. On the one hand, there are those who tell her Kingdoms you conquered with words, precious stones with proverbs, you turned your body into a symbol your excited language was hewn.149 148.  Ibid., 264–65. 149.  Ibid., 265.

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On the other hand, like the figure of the Shulamite in the Song of Songs, she wanders in the Palestinian expanse of vineyards and her voice wishes for “hope outside of time.”150 In other words, this is a hope to be realized, not over time, but in space. It is a hope that develops, the speaker says, in the presence of horror, when “the arrogant laughter of slander will pursue me. / Death and loss will strike me.”151 The location of gender reaches it height within the expanse of national memory in the fourteenth and final section of the poem, when the speaker presents herself as someone who, in contrast with “the daughter of my people,” will not forget the horrors of the Holocaust. She, the speaker, will carry with her “forever, heart-beating, step by step, / Majdanek and Treblinka, the furious ghetto.”152 Preservation of the loss at Majdanek and Treblinka (as these Nazi concentration camps were named) is carried out in a different channel from that of the official national memory—the memory that will be forgotten in the end, and of which “the daughter of my people” has charge. But here, in contrast to the symbolic character of the daughter, there is an intensive, dynamic shift in the woman speaker’s location, so radical and unprecedented that it undermines her place and breaks through gender boundaries. After gender location is established it is divided: one position is that of the “daughter of my people,” the official national memory that will be forgotten, and which represents the Holocaust with precise numbers that close off the imagination and define horror in concrete concepts like “sword and wall.”153 On the other hand, from the same self-creating stance, the speaker depicts her poetry as “a sheet of fire in a rock,”154 something undefined and boundary-breaking as the impossible, unstable existence of fire. The fire does not arise from the rock; it cannot take hold of it or consume it. This is an expression that depicts an expanse that has been breached, one of undefined borders within whose context the memory of the history of civilizations from Egypt, Assyria, Babel, and Canaan to Spain and Portugal and to Nazi Germany is represented as dust, as the outer coating 150.  Ibid., 267. 151.  Ibid. 152.  Ibid., 270. 153.  Ibid., 271. 154.  Ibid.

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on rock and stone face, on the grave, the solid, concrete route and earth. This is memory as an open space where “a lone God watches, reflected in an image, / transgresses his borders / his blue borders.”155 In the division between “I” and the daughter of my people, BatMiriam asserts the double nature of the location of the “I” facing the daughter. On the one hand the self is devoted to her, connected to her, and all it wishes is to present her with a gift—for her, for motherhood, the ultimate, total femininity (that includes the prostitute) which symbolizes nationalism; all the precious stones and ivory and all the basalt I have gathered over the years I want to give to you, because you are a woman and a child, the gift is for you. The jewel, the bride price—and the prostitute’s pay.156

On the other hand, this is a divided expanse where memory cannot be represented. It is impossible to connect it to territory, stone, rocks, a fixed reality. That the speaker is torn between these two forces and locations, between national loyalty and the inability to anchor herself in a spatial territory, brings her to the breaking point. She erects a ladder that the yellow star can mount and defeat, the ladder of appearances, hues, and abundance of shapes and styles, which the “daughter of my people” represents as follows: “You are one and many, with clear style and color / with set shores in song and sorrow.”157 This ladder divides rather than bridges, bisects the way and creates a conflicting situation, a sort of oxymoron: in order to be seen, she closes her eyes, while the acute contradiction between light and darkness creates a paradoxical situation in which “the command glows sevenfold / like an oath, I go wandering to remember.”158 This line marks a revolutionary and dramatic turn. Not only is space cut in two, and not only is the act of memory translated into a physical movement in space by one who declares, “I go wandering to remem155.  Ibid., 272. 156.  Ibid., 273. 157.  Ibid., 272. 158.  Ibid., 273.

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ber.” It is not only that a woman’s wandering and shifting dynamism accelerates in the presence of the national symbol; but that in the end the split is so great that it subverts women’s place. Without any advance warning, suddenly, the speaker uses the masculine gender for the verb to go, expressed in the original Hebrew in the masculine form, holekh. In a mirror image of the process a few stanzas back, in which Majdanek, Treblinka, and the angry ghetto were feminized in the second person plural, now, at the end of this process, the floating woman who represents the horrors of the Holocaust while moving in the space of that horror and murder extracts the most she can from the process of representation until she abandons or empties her feminine position and begins to speak as a man, ending the poem in a release from national territory and the dialog with a mention of “the daughter of my people,” whose “desired estate is like a closed cage around you.”159 The new self that emerges at the end of the poem notes that its size extends as far as the cosmos; its cosmic boundaries are signs from heaven; its footprints have the weight of time and earth—all of this blending into an omniscient picture of the world in which, “my graves within you are a valley, an abyss and water. / Strong is your rising sound,— / the breaking of waves is the verdict—terror.”160 This self is an “I” separate from the body. The body whose gender is indistinct is now “lighter than a robe,”161 enabling the poem to end with a declaration of degendering, with the promise that its battle with the “daughter of my people,” the nationalist icon, will continue to be waged forever, unsettled. This complex process is one in which, after the establishment of the location of gender and the completion of the act of gendering, gender is dismissed. By these means a new alternative space that is not subject to national territorial needs is created. What we finally get is a space that makes room for the territory of the Holocaust. After the internal gender conflict between the woman who symbolizes nationalism (the daughter of my people) and the individual woman who offers an alternative in which femininity exists in a different expanse and does not serve as a symbol, the time has come to create a new location. By 159.  Ibid., 274. 160.  Ibid. 161.  Ibid.

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shifting to masculine grammatical gender, the final two stanzas blur the characteristics of gender; the necessity for struggle between the two forms of national establishment disappears. The new, neutral location is the outcome of a feminine alternative, whose emergence means rejecting the exclusivity of the masculine national alternative. This is what enables the containment of the different expanses of the ghetto and Palestine, one next to the other, without this containment being a source of conflict or even a source of polarity. Unity that does not exclude the feminine is achieved, although not before expressing the feminine dual split, the return of the male, and in the end as a strategy against masculine hegemony, the final removal of the gender conflict without necessarily bringing along the totalizing of one element.162 Nationalism is not the most important thing in place of gender, and neither do exile and the ghetto become the agents of place instead of gender. The new expanse is other, different, and does not correspond to any of these factors; it therefore is not contaminated by identity and remains undefined, unfixed, and unnamed. Only now, from this deconstructed place, is it obvious that the national symbol was fractured from the outset of “David’s Verse,” based on the biblical story of King David and Batsheva. Rereading the opening section allows us to see the how Bat-Miriam seeks to break down exclusionary, masculine nationalism by using a verse from 2 Samuel. Praise of the way that David copes with their son’s death exposes the only way that a woman can be absorbed into the national narrative: only within the framework of power relations and gendered repression, and only as an intermediary, in this case as the mother of King Solomon, David’s second son with Batsheva—that is, as a national symbol. And Bat-Miriam literally leaned the image of the ladder on the verse, that is, she based the poetic process of representing the Holocaust on one biblical verse that excludes Batsheva from the national story. In order to break down the nationalist representation of the Holocaust, the poem breaks down the nationalist-biblical source that excludes women; it deconstructs gender itself. 162.  Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), 185–202.

C h a p t e r 2 6   Return of the Hegemonic Symbol

During World War II and directly after it, some members of the symbolist school, led by Avraham Shlonsky, attempted to return to what had been the dominant nationalist symbolism. In contrast to the undermining of nationalist culture in poetry written and published during the war, and the radical deviations of Nathan Alterman in Plagues Poems, these writers and other artists under the influence of labormovement culture produced images of national sovereignty during the war and in its wake. Even Alterman himself, in “Last Kindness” (“Hesed acharon”), a poem published in his regular newspaper feature “Seventh Column” on April 27, 1945, expressed the wish that victims would take revenge against the Germans.1 In the poem entitled “Mother, May We Cry Now?” (“Ima, kvar mutar livkot?”), which appeared in his column on October 19, 1945, he merged the fate of a girl survivor with national, historical salvation in Palestine: You walk in the path of heroes your dress in tatters but the history of the nation is written now! ... Young men as hard as fists will bear you in their arms to the shore . . . will stand dazzled to see how in the blink of an eye you flash your first smile.2

1.  Nathan Alterman, Hatur hashvee, vol. 1 (1943; Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1972), 21–22. 2.  Ibid., 25.

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This smile is the same as that of “those who remain alone” at the end of Plagues Poems; now, at the end of 1945, it heralds renewed nationalist hopes. In another newspaper poem by Alterman, “The Boy Avram” (“Hayeled avram”), a child survivor sleeps on the front steps of his home in Poland at the end of the war, “for fear of lying in his bed,” and begins a dialogue with his living-dead brother and mother who were murdered in the Holocaust and are now revealed as national symbols. The end of the poem is based on an analogy with Abraham, the biblical father of the Jewish nation, and God’s national covenant with him, pointing out the redemptive path to Palestine: “For I shall make thee mighty. / Go forth through the night of dagger and blood / Unto the Land I shall show thee.”3 The awareness that the Jewish population in Palestine would be subject to a nationalist war increased during this period. Before long, Hebrew poetry shone its spotlight on Palestine and the national conflict with the Arabs. Collective consciousness continued to develop, and in its wake came a perception of war as the height of struggle for a nation, clearly phrased in terms of life and death. As in other cultural fields, poets too viewed themselves, in one way or another, as committed to participating in the literary discourse of war in order to take part in the general effort to create “an imagined national community.”4 In Louis Althusser’s terms, a process of “interpellation” turns subjects— individuals, private human beings—into Subjects who internalize collective roles and values: people who are subject to and constructed by a particular field of discourse.5 Following this logic, it may be argued that in times of war the national Subject is in constant danger of being undermined, because the process is especially likely to fail at such a time; some people will concede their nationalism. War puts the level of national integration to the test, and sharply emphasizes the contradiction between the basic, universal commitment to private life and the demand for self-sacrifice in the name of collective national values. It 3.  “The Boy Avram,” trans. Vivian London, in Profane Scriptures: Reflections on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry, by Ruth Kartun-Blum (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1999), 29; “Al hayeled avram,” in Hatur hashvee, 1: 13–17. 4.  See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006). 5.  See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127–86.

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threatens the integrity of the individual subject, and is likely to undermine her integration into the collective that in effect grants meaning to her ideological world. Working to reinforce the Jewish national Subject in Palestine at that time was the prevalent institution of the literary anthology. Several such anthologies of what were considered appropriate texts had been published in the 1930s and at the beginning of World War II. One example of a text enlisted in the service of a particular topic is Illegal Immigration: A Popular Reader (Maapilim: Mikraa lanoar vehlaam), edited by Zvi Zohar (1898–1975) and published in 1940. It opens with an introduction by Berl Katzenelson (1887–1944), one of the most prominent leaders of the Eretz-Israel labor movement, taken from an address to the Twenty-first Zionist Congress that linked contemporary illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine to the continuum of immigration over the years as an expression of “shared Jewish fate.”6 The anthology included different kinds of texts: essays, fiction, journalistic prose, parts of plays, and poetry, organized in chronological order and unfolding the story of immigration to Eretz-Israel from the poet and philosopher Yehuda Halevi in the Middle Ages to survivors from Europe during the Holocaust. One result of the propaganda function of these texts is the mix of genres selected for their direct and obvious connection to the goal. The poet-editor Zrubavel Gilad (1912–88) edited a special edition of the journal Maarachot: A Political, Economic, and Military Issues Monthly (Maarachot: Yarhon leshelot mediniyot, kalkaliot vezvaiyot), published at the beginning of 1944 under the title Heroic Chapters from the Literature of Israel, which included a wide span of material, from the biblical story of Abraham and his victorious war against the king of Sodom to a contemporary poem by the poet and Kibbutz Eyn Harod member Moshe Tabenkin (1917–79), “A Voice at Night” (“Kol balyla”).7 The editor also chose exactly the same section of Alterman’s Joy of the Poor, the poem “Prayer for Revenge” (“Tfilat nakam”),8 as did Azriel Schwartz (Uchmani) for his anthology Fallen Leaves (Aley 6.  Berl Katzenelson, “Bimkom hakdma,” in Maapilim: Mikraa lanoar vehlaam, ed. Zvi Zohar (Jerusalem: Hakeren Hakayemet Le-Yisrael Veh-Keren Hayesod, 1940), 8. 7.  Ibid., 263. 8.  Ibid., 263–64.

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taraf), which appeared a year earlier. In Gilad’s introduction to his collection he explains its practical function as well as outlining the Jewish tradition of heroism. When he gets to the Holocaust he ignores the Jews who did not take up arms: This collection was created by the needs of the hour: many of our friends are scattered around the country in their army units at great distances carrying out their tasks—they need it. We have received more than one request from the recruits: bring us material related to our lives for use at parties, on holidays, and at public readings. They don’t always have access to books and they travel light. This anthology is meant to supply this need. The readings: Most of the texts here may be read at parties on army posts, at campfires, off duty in a tent or while on a journey. These stories of bravery will accompany those who stand up against the [enemies] who pursue us in every generation, and deepen the feeling of Jewish pride, courage, and daring. The wars of the [ancient] Hebrews with the Philistines, the Babylonians and the Romans, the terrible and tragic days of Jewish uprisings in Warsaw and other Polish ghettos, the Jewish war against evil on all fronts [form] one continuum of war for the existence of a nation, its honor and independence; a war to preserve national and human values, for the acquisition of the right to shape our lives as we wish. Each generation finds its heroes in this war for the honor of Israel. Their memories and stories are preserved both in the memory of the nation and in this book. Jewish self-defense will resound through the generations as the vision of the heroism of the few who opposed enemies; those who extended their necks in powerful exultation of the martyrs and as the mighty and passionate defenders bearing arms—a source of pride and a fortified wall against the evildoers. Until this very day.9

In remarks added to the introduction by the scholar and critic Dov Shtock (Sadan) (1902–89), Shtock develops the idea of Jewish martyrdom while completely nationalizing it: “The vision [of Israeli heroism] was different. The homeland of free men was not pictured as the walled 9.  Zrubavel Gilad, introduction to Pirkey gevura misifrut Yisrael, ed. Zrubavel Gilad (Jerusalem: Kiryat Hasefer, 1944), 5. See also Hannan Hever, “Our Poetry Is Like an Orange Grove,” in The Anthology in Jewish Literature, ed. David Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 197.

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ghetto of a rejected nation living in exile. It was envisioned differently, the stand of David against Goliath resulting in an obvious victory, or Bar Kochba’s war against the Romans, ending in a hidden victory. It was always a war of the few against the many, and the victory of the few over the many was won by the power of the last true faith, by force.”10 The second, expanded version of the anthology, appearing under the title The Legacy of Heroism: Chapters from Israeli Literature (­Moreshet gevura: Prakim misifrut Yisrael),11 included popular poems and songs alongside canonical poems, stories, essays, and excerpts from memoirs, arranged in the chronological order of the history of the Jewish national struggle from biblical times to the Holocaust and the fight against the British. The declared intention was to shape a continuous story of Jewish heroism that united martyrdom in exile under one roof with the fight for an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Coping with the horrific outcome of the war quickly transformed into a Zionist approach. Sovereign nationalization of an abstract symbol became the symbolist school of poetry’s high road. One prominent expression of this attempt to restore precedence to the nationalist symbol may be seen in the collection edited by Avraham Shlonsky at the end of the war, A Chronicle of Poems: An Anthology of World Poetry on the World War (Shirey hayamim: Yalkut mishirat haolam al milchemet haolam), which also lay bare the aspiration to universalism. In effect, Shlonsky declare his intention to write universal history with this poetry: A chronicle of poems—like [the biblical book of] Chronicles. A sort of autobiography of a generation written in verse and in a collective fashion. A collection of poetic testimony of feelings about and events in World War II, what preceded it and caused it, about it, its structure, how it reached an end, its crimes and punishments . . . and so on, from nation to nation, and topic to topic. A sort of montage of poems intended to give expression to the big and small events of the period. If not to all of them, then to most, to the extent that they are part of the larger picture, to the narrative of time, and in a way, so that they 10.  Dov Schtock (Sadan), “Bimevoay hayalkut,” in Gilad, ed., Pirkey gevura misifrut ­Yisrael, 6. 11.  Zrubavel Gilad, ed., Moreshet gevura: Prakim misifrut Yisrael, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1948).

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will not be read the way poems in an anthology usually are, that is, scattered, but continuously, one after another, so that the book will be read with one thread connecting . . . what’s most important: an emotional attentiveness [linked] to rage and the lament of cities and countries, all of which were cast into an abyss of blood—not by surprise and not by mere accident, but on purpose.12

The conflict between the commitment to universalism on the one hand and the horrors of the actual events perpetrated against the Jewish people on the other led Shlonsky, faithful to his universalist precepts, to situate the destruction of the Jews as part of the worldwide disaster—even if it was the most horrifying element in it—rather than in stark contrast to other national cultures: “Because no matter how particular our destruction, the result of our special historical position, is it not the result, the consequence of the general fate of the human family? This link between our individual-national fate to the general ethical fate of the world, provides the irrefutable proof . . . of these chronicles.”13 Shlonsky combined the national fate of the Jews with universal destiny by interweaving his own poetry with translated poems, in particular the opening poem, “Signs,” which he wrote for the anthology; each stanza provides an epigraph for a section of the book. And so, for example, he placed the following verse at the head of the “Signs” section that commemorates the historic events heralding the coming of war in Europe, such as the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism in Germany, and which includes poems by, among others, the Flemish poet Emil Verhaeren (1855–1916), the American poet and writer Langston Hughes (1902–67), the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904–73), the Yiddish poet H. Leyvik (1888–1962), and Shlonsky himself: The storm struck them with a few lightning bolts, an acronym of fire—signs, signs, signs! and the flame seized the forest’s wing— and they were blinded, they failed to see!14

12.  Avraham Shlonsky, ed. and trans., Shirey hayamim: Yalkut mishirat haolam al milchemet haolam (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1945), 5. 13.  Ibid., 6. 14.  Ibid., 7.

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The poem’s various narratives involving light imagery end with an optimistic biblical allusion, imparting a universal, lyrical aspect to current events: “You, You again, will command again: Let there be light!” In a footnote, Shlonsky touches on the subject of permission to use the anthology in public readings, instructive of the way the book was mobilized in the service of nationalism, as well as how it blurred traditional boundaries between poetry meant to be read to oneself and poetry that was to be declaimed in public. The overt suggestion to use the poems at public readings comes in addition to their declared and clearly defined collective themes, in headings such as “War,” “Heroism,” and “Immigration,” as well as “Settlement”—official and public positions outside the realm of poetry. The mobilization of poetry anthologies for the nationalist cause reached its height during the Israeli Independence War. One example is To the Defender (Lamagen), edited by the writer Yehudit Hendel (1921–2014) and published by the Histadrut Worker’s Union in 1948. This book’s didactic intentions are underscored in a glossary of terms at the end, and also by the fact that the anthology does not distinguish between high and low culture, translations and originals, or lyric poetry and poetic prose. It includes chapters from the Bible, Yiddish poetry, popular songs, and canonical lyric poetry by Alterman, the major Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichovski (1875–1943), and others. Such heterogeneous arrangements appear as well in collections of literature and reportage that were published during the war, and whose goal was to offer immediate reflection on what was taking place, for example, In the Footsteps of Soldiers: A Selection of Work by Army Reporters and Chronicles of Settlements at War (Beikvot lohamim: Mivhar reportazim met sofrey zva-hagana vereshimot medivrey yemey yeshuvim bamaaracha).15 In 1949, The Writer’s Bow: A Literary Collection by Soldier-Writers (Keshet sofrim: Yalkut ledivrey sifrut shel sofrim hayalim), edited by the writer Moshe Shamir and published by the Israeli army’s cultural department, included poetry, stories, and essays. Although it was purportedly the work of “soldier-writers,” it was weighted toward certain 15.  Beikvot lohamim: Mivhar reportazim met sofrey zva-hagana vereshimot medivrey yemey yeshuvim bamaaracha (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1949).

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writers of what is known as the Palmach generation (named for a fighting force of the Jewish underground in Palestine under the British Mandate), and toward the followers of Shlonsky in the 1940s, such as Ayin Hillel, Binyamin Galai, and Haim Gouri (1923–). In his introduction, Shamir defined the common denominator of the work as the historical context of 1948, and its common function as abstract melody in the spirit of symbolism: What did they write about? It doesn’t matter. It clearly doesn’t matter. The subject, the story— these are only external matters. The main thing, what matters, is how things are said, how they are related, a tune, a grimace, the tone, overtones. In this way unity is achieved. This group of artists, whose work appears in the book open before us—is not united only by their uniforms, but by melody. It is their common denominator and makes its mark on their creations—today as well as tomorrow.16

Unlike the general anthology that represents the imagined national community indirectly and attempts to transcend contradictions lyrically, this anthology becomes a direct tool of propaganda at the height of struggle for independence; it even guides its readers on how to use it in public. Shamir, who describes this function so precisely, makes use of a fundamental category of the dominant symbolist school: melody. In the context of the mobilization of war literature in anthologies that established itself in the 1940s and became particularly strong at the end of the decade, he expresses the way the symbolist school’s concept of abstract melody was recruited in the name of concrete nationalist struggle. Shamir had given expression to this process earlier, in 1946, in the manifesto “With My Generation” (“Im bney dori”), published in the third volume of the journal Yalkut Hareim. In this piece Shamir makes an argument that blurs the boundaries between art and other fields of discourse: The test of a literary generation is not only whether it creates something revolutionary, but whether it hews closely to the revolution that is actually occurring in its own society. An extremely important revolution took place in Hebrew literature, but it did not stand up to 16. Moshe Shamir, ed., Keshet sofrim: Yalkut ledivrey sifrut shel sofrim hayalim (n.p.: Ho­tzaat Sherut Hatarbut Shel Tzva Hahagana Le-Yisrael, 1949), 3.

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the test of life because it did not find a way to revolutionize Hebrew reality. The literary revolution articulated despair, crisis, helplessness, and fear. Perhaps our generation will not make a revolution in literature. It has been a generation of realistic literature, bare and revealing without, perhaps, breaking literary rules, but it has clung to, must cling to, drastic changes in reality.17

Shamir suggests a process of transition from modernism to the avantgarde in which literature moves away from autonomy toward reality.18 He turns Yalkut Hareim, a literary repository for the followers of Shlonsky, into a call for the concretization of abstract literary language. This movement was, for the poets of the 1940s, the students of Shlonsky and Alterman, a linear development from the basic premise of the symbolist school, which held that sound and melody were the abstract, symbolic essence of human existence and everything beyond. The poets Binyamin Galai, Shlomo Tanee, Yaakov Orland, Rephael Eliaz, Nathan Yonatan (1923–2004), Yechiel Mar (1921–69), and others had remained on the symbolist path. But a sharper change in the imagery of power underscored and strengthened by Shamir’s manifesto led them from autonomous modernism to the avant-garde, a process that focused on the concretization of the poetic symbol. Most of them integrated representations of reality into the symbolist school’s weave of elusive hints. In this way they removed some of the ambiguous and dreamy qualities of symbolism and gave an explicit, realistic context to abstract melody. Such a process may be seen, for example, in work by Binyamin Galai, who during the war wrote to Moshe Shamir, “Is there nothing in the Jezreel Valley [the symbol of Zionist settlement)] of interest to history? [Mount] Tabor, the city of Jezreel [Afula], Beit-Hashita [a kibbutz], Beit Shean [city in the north of Israel], don’t you sense anything of the souls of Saul, Joshua, in every corner of the valley and the Galilee?”19 The title “Polka,” which Galai gave to one of his first 17.  Shlomo Tanee and Moshe Shamir, eds., Sefer yalkut ha-reim 3 (Fall 1946; Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1992): 215. 18.  See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. M. Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984). 19.  Shlomo Tanee and Moshe Shamir, eds., Sefer yalkut ha-reim (Jerusalem: Mossad ­Bialik, 1992), 320.

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poems, later included in his first book,20 attributes the physicality of this popular dance form to the abstract nature of music. A place— “somewhere”—is added to the music’s effects and attributes geographic significance to the feeling the music is supposed to arouse: But once—oh, have my ears misled me? Here I heard happy chords, of a harmonica, as in our nights of Canaan simple, strong . . . There was a Greek who wondered: Today is scattered to the winds, comrade . . . here he started thinking of distant Palestine, the parting!21

The blurring of borders between musical structures and themes is repeated in order to blur the strangeness of the poetic text present in other fields of discourse. Poetic speech-acts and what is being said in a poem blend together into one statement. No distinction is made between the speech-act and other events—for example, political ones. A clear formulation of this process may be found in Yaakov Orland’s ars poetica work “The Writer Said,” which opens his book Poems of the Hawk and the Dove,22 in which the poet-speaker declares his commitment to poetry because of the moral lesson it includes: For if it weren’t for the poem’s wit tasty as an olive, the author would not hurry to put it down and close with a flowery phrase.23

After the poet announces that the poem has an ethical-social dimension, he claims that his role is to explain its disadvantages. The writer is not despondent over the possibility that things may happen in a seemingly magical manner—for example, the way singing imposes words on the author. Singing appears here as an abstract and independent category, and as in Alterman’s poetry, it isn’t merely an accompaniment 20.  Ibid., 91–92; Benyamin Galai, Im haruah (1946; Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1985), 10–11. 21.  Galai, Im haruah, 11. 22.  Yaakov Orland, Shirim al ayt vehal yonah (Jerusalem: Ahiasaf, 1946). 23.  Ibid., 9.

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but rather, the factor that dictates and establishes action. Two things occur here at once: poetry is portrayed as an ethical and social tool outside the literary world; and the world outside poetry is portrayed as aesthetic and musical. The result of this dual sense is that Orland’s argument is also double-edged. On the one hand, there is the claim that the poem will act upon the readers: If he cries out in pain and sorrow he will move the walls around your hearts, so don’t let him go around your heart, but allow him to enter.24

On the other hand, due to the fact that song is the abstract essence of things, it is possible to portray the development of poetic expression as something that is really taking place, in the end, only in the arena of poetic expression: When the time comes, no later, your walls will have fallen down, then don’t say, my brother, that the writer is to blame, just say: this is poetry and its misgivings.25

The result is the collapse of the speaker’s responsibility and its transfer to the arenas of poetry and aesthetics. Rephael Eliaz ends his poem “Harvest in the Valley,” written in rhyming quatrains, with the speaker-wanderer, whose contact with reality is through music, which is ephemeral, lasting only while it is being played: Feel: the blessing of stillness and bread in the breeze like a song when the Sabbath stars shine above hill and valley.26

Music is the main metaphoric vehicle for depicting the agricultural and rural landscape of the Jezreel Valley. Composed according to the weekly cycle of days, the poem portrays a settled musical existence in a time of fulfillment—complete, calm, and concrete. 24.  Ibid. 25.  Ibid. 26.  Rephael Eliaz, Ahava ba-midbar: Shirim (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1946), 107.

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This concrete transformation of the symbol found expression in the work of poets who served in Britain’s Jewish Brigade during World War II; they were drawn into the genre of soldiers’ poetry while stationed in the desert. The most typical example of this was a poetry of wanderers who wrote during their time on the road. Not surprisingly, these poets used the 1930s Altermanesque model of itinerant poetry, to which they added significant current events. In “What Is the Number of Years” (“Ma mispar lashanim”), Dov Homsky (1913–76), who had taken his first steps as a writer during army service, sketched life in the boundless, open desert while translating it into universal, ahistorical, ambiguous time: How many years are suspended above you? Tall days? Erect nights? Your existence, the desert, comes from you and to you this paleness after torments.27

In another poem, Homsky combines the desert landscape with its musical aspects: Your roads, desert, so meager, their spotted look [will be] lush and green. Water a melody of birds and lyre from the trembling heart, on the barren stillness.28

The encounter between a human being and the landscape is a musical one. The agricultural metaphor (“Water a melody”) unites with the musical metaphor, and the personification of the landscape is carried out through music. Similarly, his poem “Opposites” portrays the encounter between man and desert as a symbolic one, and so concludes: I brought another world with me, desert, I breathe life [into it] in a moment. Your time is dark, a broken flute, without me you are vast and dead.29

27.  Dov Homsky, Meshirey hamidbar, 1942–1944 (Jerusalem: Ahiasaf, 1947), 7. 28.  Ibid., 18. 29.  Ibid., 9.

C h a p t e r 2 7  The Living-Dead in the

Independence War

Hebrew poetry composed during the Independence War undergoes another transition; the dead are once again brought back to life, with the war landscape providing the background. The use of this model from the 1940s occurred at a time when Hebrew poetry’s focus on the nationalist war in Palestine was intensifying. In the widening context of the war for national independence, the mythical image of the livingdead increasingly served to justify the willingness to sacrifice victims. Individual existence was subordinated to the collective, and the death of the individual was authorized and justified by contributing to national life and significance. Many poems were written during the 1948 war around the central figure of the living-dead, the fighter whose material existence is lost but whose imagined national presence is thereby strengthened. These poems include Nathan Alterman’s famous “Silver Platter”(“Magash hakesef ”),30 Ayin Hillel’s “The Speech of the Gray Soldiers” (“Dvar hayalim haaforim”),31 and many more constructed around this model, whose source is the symbolist tradition in Hebrew poetry, in particular Alterman’s Joy of the Poor.32 The central mechanism in these poems is the portrayal of a dead person who returns to life in the context of national collective memory, or whose individual death in battle remains ambiguous. In “Silver Platter” it is said of a young man and woman—who together constitute the symbolic silver platter upon which the State of Israel is served to its citizens—“There is no sign whether they are alive or dead.” In 30.  Nathan Alterman, “Magash hakesef,” Hatur hashvee, 154–55. 31.  Ayin Hillel, “Dvar hayalim haaforim,” Eretz hatzohoraim (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1950), 55–57. 32.  See Hannan Hever, “Hai hahi vemet hamet,” Siman Kria 19 (March 1986): 188–92.

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Haim Gouri’s well-known poem “Here Lie Our Bodies” (“Hine mutalot gufoteynu”), the fallen soldiers known as the Convoy of Thirtyfive, who were killed on their way to the besieged Gush Etzion, ask: “Have we really been buried now?” They are depicted as located between life and death: “We rose again, burst forth and came back to life.” Later in the poem they promise, “We will return, meet, return as red flowers”;33 here Gouri uses the motif of the World War I poem “In Flanders Fields” by Canadian poet John McCrae (1872–1918), which predicts the luxuriant growth of poppies on the battleground after the bloodshed ends. And in Ayin Hillel’s “The Speech of the Gray Soldiers,” the dead soldiers say, “We will reach the doorway at the end of all the blood. / We will arrive with or without our bodies.”34 A similar cultural mechanism is at work in the differentiation of army grave sites from civilian ones, making them part of a ritual that legitimates the death of the individual soldier by justifying it at the national level. In this way the representation of the death of an individual is transformed in favor of his status as a representative of the collective. Following Hegel, it may be argued that the participation of the individual in war and his willingness to be sacrificed in it is not validated merely by the need to defend one’s life and one’s own private interests. “Property and life, not to speak of opinions and the ordinary routine of existence, they must sacrifice, if necessary, in order to preserve the substantive individuality, independence and sovereignty of the state.”35 The image of an individual dead person is exchanged for an image of collective life; those who fall in battle are raised to a transcendent level of national experience.36 It may be said that as the identity of the individual object of remembrance becomes less distinct, collective national identity gains in force. The most extreme version of this process appears when the dead individual is absent completely. As Benedict Anderson has noted, nationalism’s most effective use of dead soldiers is, paradoxically, epitomized in the empty tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The creation of an imagined 33.  Haim Gouri, Pirhey esh (1949; Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1976), 66. 34.  Hillel, Eretz hatzohoraim, 56. 35.  Georg H. W. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Hyde (New York: Cosimo, 2008), 192. 36.  See George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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national existence is based, Anderson says, on the simultaneous existence of those whom we do not know personally, and it is precisely this lack of specificity and the emptiness of the tomb that inspires the community’s imagination and serves as a focus of national solidarity.37 A radical formulation for keeping a grip on nationalist values beyond the point of death sometimes reached poetic expression in a sort of “advance death,” a sense of superhuman death-in-life that served as a defense, numbing feeling before the horrors of imminent death. The close circumstantial connection between acceptance of death and its transformation into an organic element of life, and the realization of ideals beyond it, is evident in Ayin Hillel’s poem “Fighters’ Friendship” (“Reut halohamim”). Hillel pays special attention to the renewed use of the clichéd Hebrew drinking toast “L’chaim” (To life), which marks the friends’ celebration of the life of the living and the life of the dead even as the poet acknowledges that none of the dead, killed by bullets which could have been meant for those who are still alive, will return. Nevertheless, they drink to the life of both living and dead, for the spirit of life breathes in us! Death will not crush the spirit of friendship!38

Hillel’s poem “Life’s Command” (“Pekudat haeem”) depicts deathin-the-midst-of-life, “a death worse than any other.”39 Poet Moshe ­Tabenkin, after his release from a British jail in Atlit, calls on his readers in “The Voice of the Campfire” (“Kol hamedura”) to join the fighters, and addresses himself to the soldier who are “fallen and drawn near, / whose blood is the lead of sorrow, / and his glance extinguished before the darkness of the horizon.”40

37.  Ibid.; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9–12. 38.  Hillel, Eretz hatzohoraim, 52. 39.  Ibid., 57. 40.  Moshe Tabenkin, “Kol hamedura,” Sefer shirim (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1954), 208–10.

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C h a p t e r 2 8  Amir Gilboa and the

Subversion of the Symbol

In contrast to the linear development of the poets discussed in the previous chapter, who added the significance of concrete current events to existing abstract symbolist imagery, Amir Gilboa took a different path, working at the level of poetic structure of the poem and transforming the poetic paradigm of the poem itself. In Seven Domains (Sheva rashuyot), published in 1949 and containing most of his war poetry, Gilboa brought to its height the process he had begun in his earlier work, combining Avraham Shlonsky’s purportedly apolitical symbolism with the highly political nationalist expressionism of Uri Zvi Greenberg. The resulting poetry was rife with conflict in themes and forms. These two poetics could exist side by side: refined prosody and intense figuration on the one hand, and expressionism, ecstasy, and pathos on the other. But the gap between them caused cracks in each structure of the poems. Most of Gilboa’s effort is invested in exposing the mechanism of poetics. Instead of making lyricism primary, music, song, and melody are thematized. That is, musical patterns are not merely used; they are under scrutiny and constantly struggle to maintain their prominence. The situation is similar with regard to figurative language. Instead of using or rejecting a symbol, Gilboa does both. In contrast to the mainly linear approach of concretizing the symbol, characteristic of most poets of his generation, Gilboa’s approach is two-dimensional: he turns the real into symbols and concretizes the symbol. Gilboa’s work was not always appreciated by readers loyal to what was considered politically “progressive culture,” which included Shlonsky’s poetry, and Gilboa was criticized for distancing himself from this culture. “How decadent, worn and empty are the symbols in ‘Battle’s

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End’ compared to those in Shlonsky’s ‘Signs’ [‘Otot’], so filled with burning pain, or in ‘Stalingrad,’ where the decisive battle between the Nazis and the Red Army took place, with its firm grip on the heart of the matter!”41 A particularly intensive symbolic arena may be found in Gilboa’s poem “The Book of the Perpetual Day” (“Sefer yom hatamid”), with its emphasis on sacrificial offerings. The day lasts forever, in that the fire perpetually burns on the Temple altar (Lev. 6:6). But “perpetual” (tamid) is also a term used for the “regular” offerings sacrificed daily in the Temple (Exod. 29:38, Lev. 6:13, Dan. 11:31). Gilboa reverses the accepted biblical meaning of a daily offering, focusing instead on the day itself. In this act of thematization, Gilboa focuses attention on the unending nature of sacrifice. Such an act connects the perpetual victim with the symbol of perpetual fire, foregrounding the act of representation. In the poem “Begetters of Light” (“Molidey haor”), Gilboa again exploits the mechanism used in “The Book of the Perpetual Day.”42 This six-part poem, first published in the 1949 Writer’s Bow anthology, tells the story of light as a symbol in the context of human existence. Reality as illuminated by symbolic light includes Kabbalistic semantics and redemptive-messianic potential.43 Symbolic, metaphysical light is meant to fill cracks and reconcile contradictions: Prevailing light— accompanies us on all roads, hangs on to the hills. Then it continues. Like a naughty boy running it will return to the ridge. It will smile. And will also be filled with light. Light. On all roads. In forgotten pits. Light that is revealed. Light of praise. The light of life. Light of every luxuriant tree. The continuing light. The seed. A small cloud. The light of blood that enlivens the stone. The supreme light, the father of each hue and color. 41.  Dan (sic), “Le-orer oh lehardim?” Ba-sha’ar, May 6, 1950. 42.  Amir Gilboa, Sheva rashuyot (1949; Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/ Hashomer Hatzair, 1987), 184–89. 43.  Ida Tzurit, Hahaim, haatzilut (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988), 193.

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The light of joy. Smiles are his sons. The light that destroys hatred and vanity. The light of ancestors. Scrolls. Walls. The light in the hyssop. In the dome. In the painting. The light of legends and poems. The light of faith. Hills of light. Layers upon layers. The light while we walk. The light of our strong will. The light of death on trail and cliff. The light of our eyes shines always while weaving the dreams of youth. The light of consciousness. This and no other. Like choosing water—here the fountain, there the well. Like the sound of our song. Like our pure speech. Like the great hope—and then darkness is gone. Like striking the rock and the fire—it will burst and the devil’s thistles will be defrosted. Our prayer in the light. To the light. From the light. Our fallen soldier rises to create it.44

The last line of this first section accentuates the rejuvenating role of light in raising the dead. But more than this, the ambiguous line also portrays light as the creation of the fallen. The victim is one who, as the title says, “begets” light. The beginning of the second section makes this duality explicit by presenting the fallen as the source of redemptive light that enables death to be vanquished: Our prayer in the light. To the light. From the light. And great as our fallen on earth while dying. And the light comes from him and greatness from him and without him it cannot come Into our world— And from that comes the glory of the lament. And from this lightning in the eyes of maidens. And from this the eternal cycle of existence that cannot stand still.45

44.  Gilboa, “Molidey haor,” Sheva rashuyot, 184–85. 45.  Ibid., 185.

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But the light that resolves the crisis and pain of death by combining them into an eternal cycle of “light going round and round— / [that] lives forever,”46 is later revealed as limited. While the speaker argues that we cried while gathering “the frozen flowers of light,” the tears become: Silent. Fragmented and liberating. Clear like widening ripples. Calm like the plucking of a string beating the ripples gently.47

But then the light achieves its conciliatory, calming goal: And then Hee and hah! Voices went wild suddenly like youth bursting out from their dark and hidden place to continue their game seen on the ground tall and peaceful like light and shade never went by— because in their blood— the Messiah.48

In contrast to the reconciliation enabled by metaphysical, symbolic light, these voices are not peacemaking but disturbing. They are about, not liberation and tears, but blood. The musical, metaphysical, and symbolical is confronted with dark, hidden, redemptive blood. Symbolic redemption, Shlonsky-style, confronts Greenberg’s expressionist redemption and the result is that they represent each other, creating a paradoxical structure of redemption whose source is the sacrifice. But the existence of this redemption is only potential, and necessarily unrealized: Like winds sweeping the fields and fallow land. Like a call receiving an answer from the past.

46.  Ibid., 186. 47.  Ibid., 187. 48.  Ibid.

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Like shame that forgot to pale when standing in public. Like a grave empty of the buried dead. Like all things that may still happen. Because we have already seen them. And they are certain. And they are truly correct. Waiting for us to take them secretly because they are filled with light. No way without them.49

In the next stanza Gilboa returns to the paradox of this abundant light in which, on one hand, things are filled with necessary light (“No way without them”), but: on the other hand: Everything flutters. Everything is fleeting— but they cannot be raised! ... because they are filled with light. No way without them! And the sadness in their eyes like the evening in the mountains.50

This faulty image disrupts the possibility of a symbolic correlation between death (in the service of the collective) and poetic imagery. The redemptive significance of the victim is contained in a fragmented allegory that attaches symbolism and expressionism to each other but cannot combine them into one nationalist statement. This is why the reader gets a messianic message that limits its redemptive power. And so the poem ends this way: Glittering light— blood set the beads in the crowns of youth and clappers [ring] in golden bells with the news of the birth in the hills and disturb the silence lodged in the hills with stormy voices.51

On the one hand the poem neutralizes the messianic dimension and on the other it allows it to remain, albeit under control. The paradoxical structures of the poetic mechanism allow for a representation of the victim that does not exceed permissible boundaries. That is, 49.  Ibid., 188. 50.  Ibid. 51.  Ibid., 189.

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utopian-messianic tension may be aroused, as long as it does not lead to destruction. “Night of the Nation,” the poem preceding “Begetters of Light,” is also based on the tension between these two poles: The night is full and scented. Somewhere a prayer curves the clouds and thickens the night and we will storm the roads and tears will mix with rain. Oh, night of the nation! The open heart filled with consolation and the storm in the heart whispers the great news. How wide is our heart stopped at its borders— not to burst, not to burst and to die. Because it was a little. Because it was a lot. And old men in the corners began to prophesy.52

The paradoxical construction meant to contain the basic conflict between the desire for collective eternal life and the destruction of individual life is the foundation for the representation of the victim. Gilboa thus portrays the conflict as an intense polarity between a symbolistuniversalist representation of the victim and a reduction of the victim’s bodily existence. Gilboa closes “Night of the Nation” this way: Long live abundance and long live the crowd   in the night of a nation. The blade of their eyes burns the blackness of night   in the night of a nation. We were amazed by so many miracles   in the night of a nation. The wind from the East passed over the nation and searching voices brought the blood back:   Your lives from the blood!   Your lives from the blood!53

The primeval quality of blood is revealed as the basis of the universal “Night of the Nation,” as in “Begetters of Light,” where the symbolic glittering light . . . set the beads in the crowns of youth and clappers [ringing] in golden bells 52.  Ibid., 182. 53.  Ibid., 183.

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with the news of the birth in the hills and disturbed the silence lodged in the hills with stormy voices.

The voices that disrupt this symbolic utterance illuminated by the “Begetters of Light,” are those that burst through “their redemptive blood.” The combination of Shlonsky’s universal light with Greenberg’s body and blood ends in a dual process: on the one hand, the concretization of the symbol in the reduction of the symbol to a body, and on the other hand, the symbolization of the individual body as a national-collective entity, as we find in “Night of a Nation.” In the preface to a book of his short stories, The Lazy Gods, which also appeared in 1949, Nathan Shaham, one of the contributors to Yalkut Hareim, made similar remarks about the link between the symbol and the body: The land [of Israel] is no longer a landscape; it is now in the world of symbols (not because it is distant but precisely because of its nearness). And this is quite a lot—the symbol—because also myself, my body, are nothing but symbols of my existence on earth. . . . My friend says there is a sign that clashes [between Arabs and Jews] will break out, and if a cavalryman arrives with a flower in his hand—it is a sign that there will be clashes. And I would think it was the red color that the cavalry man desired from the flower.54

This dual sense was also felt by Gilboa’s readers, in particular those of his generation. Seven Domains, wrote Moshe Shamir, “is a book of current events poetry in the best and most desirable sense of the words. . . . Its currency makes for] excellent, aesthetic and genuine poetry,” which Shamir extolls along with Gilboa’s post–World War II poetry; “more mature and weightier than war poetry which the frenzy of time and place makes breathless in tone and rhythm.”55 The poet Shlomo Tanee said that Gilboa’s poetics created an effect that was both referential and imaginary, with its “hidden signs,” a “code” with “signs of actual events suggesting particular ones that took place at particular times. There are elements in Seven Do54.  Nathan Shaham, Ha-elim atzalim (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/ Hashomer Hatzair, 1949), 12–13. 55.  Moshe Shamir, “Shoshanim noshmot,” Ba-sha’ar, November 3, 1949.

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mains that I have not yet deciphered.”56 In ordering the poems in the “Book of the Forever Day” section, Gilboa placed “Begetters of Light” at the center, on the main stage where the role and national implications of the symbols of light are weighed. Toward the end of this section he situated poems that bring into focus his tense and paradoxical stance. The section finally ends with “Return of the Brother,” about the lost brother who is an object of hope, whom one day we may see again: Reeds as far as the eye can see. We will trudge in the green pond watching the waves. Watching until the wind disturbs the surface of the water. Perhaps we’ll see your eyes in it, brother. Perhaps we’ll see you [coming] out of the wave.57

Here too is depicted a wounded world which anticipates a redemption that will not be the result of a simple process. The image of the victim contains the potential for redemption, presented as uncertain. The lack of certainty in the coming redemption is located in the human gaze—a glance turned toward the brother who is supposed to return—to be returned to life, that is. But the certainty of this redemption is limited to different voices in the poem hoping for the very hope itself: The most powerful. Until the sun arrives. The highest sound, nothing higher. The freest laughter of all. The laughter that set out to sow. The most powerful will be the law.58

The solution is, therefore, to gaze at the one who gazes. When a look is returned, if ever, then the brother will return: not as a body or after being brave in the battlefield, but as some kind of presence, sign, reminder, which will mark his existence in memory. This is precisely how Gilboa ends the untitled poem that precedes “Return of 56.  Shlomo Tanee, “Al shirat Amir Gilboa,” Ba-sha’ar, November 17, 1949. 57.  Gilboa, Sheva rashuyot, 191. 58.  Ibid.

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the Brother” in the sequence. This poem depicts mourners after the period of bereavement: The windows will be crying still and the sun won’t touch the stains upon the wall. And all the coals that are already embers will remember the fire’s cloudy eye and no mouth will revive them.59

From where will renewal and redemption come? The poem’s answer is that this is an individual resurrection, not a collective one, the resurrection of an orphan whose existence as an orphan implies his loneliness because the death of his parents. And the resurrection he heralds is also that of the dead arising now. Gilboa transfers this potential to the world of things. The light attached to things will always contain the potential for redemption; potential only, which is not naturally and regularly connected to a story of redemption: Until someone’s spirit arises, an orphan’s, threatened by an abyss on this morning proudly orders the lights to lodge in everything and on every threshold, lights [facing] forever. And every shut eye will peek and tear, and the blinded will see.60

The messianic possibility of producing a saving light, present in everything, even in inanimate things, is represented in the poem as the reverse of the biblical significance of the perpetual light as that of sacrificial offerings. It happens by returning of the tamid (perpetual) to its original literal Hebrew meaning: eternal and persisting forever. The closed eye will peek, form tears, and glance blindly at the eternal light that shines from things. The physical eye and the symbolic light come together in one moment of revelation which combines cyclical, uni-

59.  Ibid., 190. 60.  Ibid.

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versal, symbolic time (Shlonsky’s) with physical-messianic, linear time (Greenberg’s). In this closely intertwined interpretation, “forever” appears in its biblical meaning of sacrifice, as the eternal, persistent potential of salvation. Gilboa uses the sacred potential in the material world, like that of Hasidic mysticism, to create a controlled, moderate, mystic-expressionist version of the living-dead, where redemption is uncertain. The gaze of the individual is the mechanism that points to the fact that redemption may not be realized.

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C h a p t e r 2 9  Gilboa Versus the

Metaphor of the Living-Dead

Amir Gilboa’s emergence as a major poet of the generation of the struggle for independence and the first days of the state may be viewed in terms of a crisis in the representation of death in Israeli literature. In Seven Domains, Gilboa opposes the fundamental poetic conventions of Israeli Independence War poetry. He examines and exposes their stratagems, and attempts to update his methods of representation to suit the new literary and cultural situation after the war. As the war neared its end, and in the period immediately following, G ­ ilboa forcefully sharpened the criticism he had developed regarding the image of the living-dead. Gilboa, who had gone farther than any other member of his generation in developing a dense world of interconnected symbols, is also the poet who developed profound and direct social satire, for example, in the poem “A Let’s Settle an Accounting Poem,” in which he criticized the Israeli government’s willingness to come to an agreement with Germany about reparations for the Holocaust.61 Immediately after the publication of Seven Domains in 1949, in a series of poems that had appeared after the war and were later collected in the 1953 volume Early Morning Poems (Shirim ba-boker ba-boker), Gilboa clarified his criticism of the living-dead metaphor. The first issue of the journal Orlogen, which appeared in December 1950, edited by Avraham Shlonsky, featured Gilboa’s now famous poem about the silent brother: My brother came back from the field dressed in gray. And I was afraid that 61.  Amir Gilboa, Shirim ba-boker ba-boker (1953; Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 132–33.

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my dream would prove false, so at once I began to count his wounds. And my brother said nothing. Then I rummaged in the pockets of the trench-coat and found a field-dressing, stained and dry. And on a frayed postcard, her name beneath a field of poppies. And my brother said nothing. Then I did unpack and took out his belongings, memory by memory. Hurrah, my brother, my brother, the hero, now I’ve found your decorations! Hurrah, my brother, my brother, the hero, I shall proudly hymn your name! And my brother said nothing. And my brother said nothing. And his blood was crying out from the ground.62

The poem is a monologue about a brother who returns seemingly mute from the war. The brother’s silence turns out to be a euphemism for his death; his silence both alludes to and parodies the metaphor of the living-dead. It undermines the mythic dimension of the image, thus underscoring its limitations and subverting it from within. Gilboa’s position, taken by other poets as well, accentuates the obvious: it impossible to resuscitate the dead via metaphor, and in fact any such attempt is a manipulative, ideological fiction of nationalist culture. The very fact that at the end of the poem, the speaker-younger brother uses a version of a biblical phrase, God’s words to Cain after he has murdered his brother (Gen. 4:10), accentuates the sense of guilt of one whose life is in a sense aggrandized due to the death of a brother. “Hurrah, my brother, my brother, the hero,” the surviving brother says, I am the one who “shall proudly hymn your name!” The use of the worn metaphor of “blood crying out from the ground” would seem to reduce the injury, but the synecdoche of spilled blood removes the basic ambiguity—dead or alive?—of the status of the 62.  Amir Gilboa, “And My Brother Said Nothing,” in Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, ed. and trans. T. Carmi (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 559; Gilboa, Shirim ba-boker ba-boker, 212.

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fallen soldier. This metaphor is the compositional high point of the poem, which begins to acknowledge the deceit involved in a myth that seeks to blur the sharp difference between the silence and immortality of the dead.63 The broader context of the series “Ancient War” (“Milhama atika”),64 in which this is the final poem, underscores the effort Gilboa made to expose the ruse involved in the image of the livingdead, a basic tool in the poetry of the struggle for independence. In this series of poems, in both the treatment of the Holocaust and the 1948 Independence War, the experience of death is portrayed as fundamental and universal, preceding its particularistic mythical function as represented in Hebrew poetry. “Seeds of Lead,” the opening poem of the cycle, which offers a child’s point of view on death as opposed to that of the adult, mythically represents a water well as a womb gathering lead seeds (a death which is also a birth). And “End of Days” (“Ketz hayamim”), the fourth poem in the cycle, develops by reversing the mythical significance of the living-dead. The grotesque situation of a military commander returning to his normal duties after falling in battle, a euphemism marking death, also serves as a parodic response to the living-dead. “End of Days” develops within a structure completely opposed to the norms of 1948 Independence War poems, which usually end with the mythicizing and optimistically ambiguous death of soldiers. Such finales—for example, in Nathan Yonatan’s “Two Poems for One Person” (“Shney shirim al adam ehad”)65—dull our pain and grant the dead another life, preserving the world of values for which we sacrifice life. In contrast, Gilboa developed a narrative which disturbs the existing order of values: an upside-down world where soldiers command their officers, and in which death provides an optimistic beginning for a new and better life. Gilboa’s exposure of the living-dead oxymoron and his compositional solutions found complex expression in the figure of the speaker in his poems. One particularly characteristic example is the speaker who combines the point of view of a child with that of an adult. Such a speaker dominates the “Ancient War” cycle 63.  Hever, “Hai hahi vemet hamet”; Dan Miron, Mul ha-ah ha-shotek (Jerusalem and TelAviv: Keter and Hauniversita Hapatuha, 1992), 329–35. 64.  Gilboa, “Milhama atika,” Shirim ba-boker ba-boker, 207–12. 65.  Nathan Yonatan, “Shney shirim al adam ehad,” Ba-sha’ar, December 14, 1950.

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of poems, enabling the reader to attribute the results of the mythic viewpoint to a child: for example, the child who observes the reversal of military order in the fourth poem, and the child who views the well as an open womb gathering seeds of lead. In contrast with the mythic and authoritative speakers in Nathan Alterman’s Independence War poetry, Gilboa’s are granted a measure of realism that detracts from their absolute authority. Gilboa’s poem “Isaac” (“Yitzhak”), for instance, retells the biblical story of the binding of Isaac in a way that divides the role of sacrificial victim between Isaac and his father. And in Gilboa’s eulogy for General Sadeh (1890–1952), “A Prayer for Isaac” (“Siah le-Yitzhak”),66 the speaker emphasizes the gap between the real-life death of a famous fighter and leader—or, to be more precise, his absence after he was rejected from the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) for political reasons—and his transformation into a legend. The consolation inherent in the myth is explicitly rejected, and the speaker-poet underscores the fact that Yitzhak Sadeh (who was also the subject of Gilboa’s poem “Isaac”), the founder of the Palmach and its first commander, was always “alive among the living / and was never [alive] among the dead.”67 This phenomenon of a speaker in a poem portrayed as a poet, or someone involved in the world of words and books, contributes greatly to the undermining of the illusion of reality in a mythic situation. It is a literary way of rejecting the myth of the living-dead, or at least treating it in a sober and skeptical fashion. Indeed, in “On Style” (“Al signon”), one of Gilboa’s more well-known ars poetica works, he wrote directly about this matter. We always knew: There’s no end to it. But what is it that returns again and again and yet without making a sign the voice whispering: the living are living and the dead are dead whether one shouts or is silent.68

66.  Gilboa, Shirim ba-boker ba-boker, 312–13. 67.  Amir Gilboa, “A Prayer for Isaac” (“Siah le-Yitzhak”), in To Write the Lips of Sleepers, trans. Warren Bargad (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1994), 189–91. 68.  Gilboa, Shirim ba-boker ba-boker, 72.

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Gilboa’s “Kingdom of Silence” (“Malchut hadmama”) opens with a description of the quiet after battle: “Scrolls / among smoking pages / will extoll the kingdom of silence.”69 This poem, which sharply distinguishes between the reality portrayed in books and the reality of life, ends declaring that there is “no longer a voice / bequeathed by the dead. Just one who goes on.”70 The section of the poem portraying the calmness of ordinary life after a battle has ended enables us to understand Gilboa’s attempts at demythologizing, his concerted effort to redirect the ideological role of Hebrew poetry after the war. The living-dead mythic oxymoron is dismantled at the end of the poem in a dramatic connection between the battle and routine civilian existence. In effect, Gilboa is responding to the narrative potential of myth by developing a new narrative chapter. In doing so, he alludes to the famous motif of the eyes of the living-dead peeking from the ashes in Alterman’s Joy of the Poor, contained now in a new narrative synthesis, in which everything is bound up and rest in the books without an immortality of the soul.71 Gilboa portrays death in war in its immediate political context to the point of subordinating the lyric poem to the aesthetic demands of publicists. Having become a major figure in representative Israeli poetry, he is the writer who integrated into his poetry the most important results of the literary laboratory in which Independence War poets worked in their search for a new and alternative voice in the nationalist representation of that war.

69.  Amir Gilboa, “The Kingdom of Silence” (“Malchut hadmama”), trans. Shirley Kaufman with Shlomith Rimmon, in The Light of Lost Suns, ed. Shirley Kaufman (New York: Persea Books, 1979), 36–37; Gilboa, Shirim ba-boker ba-boker, 317. 70.  Gilboa, “The Kingdom of Silence,” 37. 71.  Ibid.

C h a p t e r 30   Poets as Reporters

The newer, more restrained version of the myth of the sacrificial victim that developed in Hebrew poetry at the end of the 1940s also made its presence felt in other fields, including journalism, generally considered an activity on the margins of canonical literature. Reportage was a prominent genre of Hebrew writing during the Independence War and immediately after.72 A large part of it was written by authors who had already made their literary reputations, and who, at the outbreak of the war, turned to journalistic or documentary-style writing, collected in such publications as In the Footsteps of Soldiers.73 The contributions of poets were prominent: Shlomo Tanee, Haim Gouri, Nathan Alterman, Zrubavel Gilad (1912–88), Abba Kovner, and others wrote for news­papers and pamphlets, each in his own way describing the atmosphere of the time, the end of the war, and openly offering propaganda as well, in the service of raising morale among the soldiers and the public. During the struggle for independence, what could have been more natural and predictable than the mobilization of the talents of Hebrew poets in the service of nationalism? These writers did not lose their identity as poets when they assumed the temporary role of reporter, dictated by the circumstances of war. They retained their hybrid character, using their authority and prestige as poets to lend clout to the new genre. The transformation of poets into prose writers both lent their prestige to the new genre and added to their established reputations— 72.  See Nurit Gertz, Shvuia bahaloma (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1995). 73.  See Beikvot lohamim (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1949).

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a result that they and others noted. It also added to the growing series of hybrid identities, such as “soldier-poets” or “mortar-shell poets,”74 a term used to describe Nathan Alterman.75 The bifurcated identity of poet-reporters or poet-cultural officers in the military, created by the war situation in 1948, was perceived as an effective writing formula. The phenomenon of fiction writers incorporating reportage into their work or publishing it separately was a common one that did not go unnoticed by critics.76 “At the beginning of our Independence War most of the prose that was written by young writers was, due to its nature, reportage,” wrote the literary critic A. B. Yaffe (1914– 2008).77 The phenomenon of mixed genres stood out because it was unusual and innovative. Its twofold quality was particularly notable among poets who combined their wartime prose together with ­poetry in a single volume, as did Haim Gouri in Until Dawn (Ad alot hashahar),78 Shlomo Tanee in Three Arrows (Shlosha hitzim),79and Zrubavel Gilad in Flowering Pines (Prihat ha-oranim).80 Abba Kovner incorporated a combat missive entry written as a cultural officer in the Givati brigade into his long poem Farewell to the South (Preda min hadarom).81 Prose journalists, too, added poetry to their work. A young reporter named Uri Avnery (1923–), later the editor of the militant weekly Haolam Hazeh (This World) and a Knesset member, whose personal diary as a combatant was published in a newspaper, added poetry he wrote during the conflict and afterward the material was issued in a book, 1948, A Soldier’s Tale: The Bloody Road to Jerusalem (Bisdot pleshet 1948).82 What is responsible for the wartime phenomenon of the mixed genre of reportage combined with poetry? Why did journalism written 74.  See Moshe Shamir, ed., Keshet sofrim (Tel-Aviv: Sherut Hatarbut Shel Tzva Hahagana Le-Yisrael, 1949). 75.  See Menachem Talmi, “Veh ha-sa’ar paratz,” Bamahane, October 28, 1948. 76.  See Moshe Shamir, Ad eilat (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1950). 77. ̃A. B. Yaffe, Shira vemetziut (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1951), 112. 78.  Haim Gouri, Ad alot hashahar (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1950). 79.  Shlomo Tanee, Shlosha hitzim (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/ Hashomer Hatzair, 1950). 80.  Zrubavel Gilad, Prihat ha-oranim (Ein Harod: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1950). 81.  Abba Kovner, Preda min hadarom (1949; Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim and Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1991). 82.  Uri Avnery, Bisdot pleshet 1948 (1949; Tel-Aviv: Hotza’a Meuchedet, 1975).

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by poets appear in this dual genre, which willingly situates itself in the no-man’s-land between poetry and reporting? What was the nature of media at the time that led it to encourage a mix of documentary material with poetry? In contrast with poetry, reportage has a short life span. It is obvious that attaching a respected and highbrow genre like lyric poetry to journalistic efforts is likely to increase both the popularity of poetry and the prestige of reporting. But the real question is why such a popular genre was joined to poetry. How can an aspect of high culture intended for select readers with an appropriate educational background be connected to a popular genre intended for broad if not mass distribution among those who are not traditionally numbered among readers of canonical literature? The first part of the answer may be found in the particular literary structure of the type of reportage that combines poetry with propaganda. The poetic framework creates effects that complicate the literal meaning of the material. In other words, the more the genre sticks to concrete and passing current events, the further it distances them from their specific historical and social contexts. Episodes are not connected to a logical, cause-and-effect narrative, and are not anchored in a social context belonging to a particular time and place. The basic narrative framework that re-creates the events of a journey to the Sinai front or the breaking of the siege of Jerusalem during the 1948 war constitutes, in many cases, the starting point of a highly convoluted figurative text. Beyond documenting history as it is being made, reportage also serves as propaganda. Paradoxically, a reduction in fidelity to the historical representation of the events of war heightens its persuasiveness. Manifested linguistically and thematically, the move toward figurative and fictional regions so characteristic of war reportage strengthens its role as propaganda. The naturalism of these reportages is not used to increase their historicity. Unlike what Nurit Gertz (1940–) has demonstrated,83 the poetics of these reportages was very different from the realistic narrative norms of dynamism and causality common to the fiction of the Palmach generation. In many cases the reportage was designed as romantic or balladic poetic narratives. One 83.  Gertz, Shvuia bahaloma, 52–55.

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example may be found in Haim Gouri’s poetic account “The Journey to God’s Mountain” (“Hamasa lehar haeloim”), in his book Until Dawn (1950): Winter. Rain fell ceaselessly. Water slaked the earth. And Be’er Sheva, too, at the entrance to the arid zone, heard the clapping of thunder bearing downpours. The convoys made their way south then. The cars rolled through the Negev and sank, consumed by the so-called relief road, the path of suffering. They were carrying equipment, screens, bridges, land mines, tents, ammunition, food. Above the cloudy skies, in the expanse of the heavens where fate is sealed, judgment was handed down. It pierced the human soul and the consciousness of the military command, splitting into thousands of particles of rumor and whispered talk. Great tension filled the air. Day and night blended together in an endless mix of preparations bearing within the judgment’s terrible secret. The soldiers felt it—a storm was brewing, coming.84

What are the implications of the decision to use the hybrid reportage model, clearly a propaganda tool whose main function is to represent current events in order to mitigate contradictions, in the particular historic context of Israeli literature and culture during the 1948 war? Its definitively naturalistic mode may be seen in the way it removes events from their contexts and situates them within broadly historical processes. A naturalistic writer, focusing on a specific, visible event, in this way bypasses critical understanding based on the exposure of causal connections to the principal laws of nature, anchored in historical time and place. A stance emphasizing the inferiority of naturalistic reportage in relation to realistic fiction was prevalent at the time among critics in the Zionist leftist Marxist camp, relying primarily upon the influential writings of the Marxist literary scholar Georg Lukács.85 In a naturalistic framework, war is not perceived as a specific historical event in the concrete history of a nation, but an intensive, violent occurrence that could take place nearly any place at any time. As such it eludes critical judgment tied to particular conditions of time and 84.  Gouri, Ad alot hashahar, 49. 85.  See Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” in Lukács, Writer and Critic, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (1936; London: Merlin Press, 1970), 110–48; Shlomo Nitzan, “Beyn sipur lare­ portaga,” Ba-sha’ar, June 30, 1949; Yaffe, Shira vemetziut, 106–10.

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place, and may relatively easily blend, in nearly modular fashion, into other systems of representation operating in propaganda texts. For example, Zrubavel Gilad’s poetic reportage on the battle at Malkia, an Arab village in northern Israel, develops a lyrical process that in effect breaks narrative continuity into fragments representing the events of the battle while blurring their connection to each other: Until night fell. And the people from Kibbutz Maoz Haim retreated from the hill. Silence descended suddenly, empty and foreign. The rocks blackened and the earth panted. The mandrake began spreading its fragrance among the silent bodies of soldiers and stars sailed on high. ... Forty-eight hours! Worlds, worlds of life and horror and friendship and pain. Daring and initiative and action and heroism. And helplessness and cowardice and flight . . . And brotherhood and a smile on the lips of a lost comrade and splendid loyalty—the bleeding youth who knows his fate and whispers to a friend facing the approaching enemy: “Are you the last? Leave me and flee!” And the company commander kicking the enemy’s grenade that fell near his stand—saving his men and wounding himself.86

Hiram Campaign, named after a military campaign in the north of Israel at the end of the 1948 war, written by the writer Shlomo Nitzan (1921–2006) and published as a booklet by the Pocket Library for the Hebrew Soldier (most of whose publications were written by established authors), raises literary war writing to the level of abstract symbolism: “Have you noticed? The contact of merchants with each other is stealthy; of writers—quizzical; musicians—generous with reservations; politicians—accompanied by professional smiles. Have you noticed how commanders communicate? A few words, only if truly necessary, at an attentive distance. It seems that here the word is restored to its primeval origins. Once again it is no longer a goal in itself, but a sign, a hint, a symbol, a means of expressing act and thought.”87 86.  Zrubavel Gilad, “49 shaot shel malkia,” in Tav shin tet, shnaton davar, ed. Zalman Rubashov and Nathan Alterman (1949–50; Tel-Aviv: Davar, 1971), 120–21. 87.  Shlomo Nitzan, Mivtza hiram (Tel-Aviv: Sherut Hatarbut Shel Tzva Hahagana LeYisrael, 1949), 12–13.

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What is the connection between the naturalistic poetics of reportage and its persuasive function, and the hybrid genre of poetic reportage? In addition to the unified figure of the poet who is also a journalist, there is also a thematic and structural link between this type of reportage written by poets during the 1948 war and their poetry; both are often included in the same book. And so, for example, Gouri’s poetic account “The Journey to God’s Mountain,” discussed in the previous chapter, and his poem of the same name, both appear in the book Until Dawn. Shlomo Tanee’s poem “People” precedes his reportage “Operation Yoav or the Ten Plagues.”88 Despite the inclusion of both genres in these cases, however, there is still a clear difference between them. The poem, which generously mythicizes the reality of war, is nonetheless distinct from reportage which, despite the lengths it travels to reach poetic and mythical shores, maintains eye contact with its starting point in the reality of the 1948 war. If the journey to God’s mountain in Haim Gouri’s poem is grasped in its larger mythical context, in the accompanying reportage it is presented within the historical context of Operation Yoav for the occupation of the Negev in the south of the country. In this way, reportage offers a simplified and popular alternative to abstract poetic representations. In order to achieve this persuasive and popular effect, poetic reportage uses poetic models while simplifying them. Such a relationship may be seen in Zrubavel Gilad’s poem “Horev,” and his essay “The Way to Horev.”89 Both portray the breakthrough of advancing forces in Operation Horev in the Sinai Peninsula where Mount Horev is located. The poem describes the conflict between man and the primeval landscape as a cruel struggle whose outcome is still undecided: Storming, panting in anger, a swift iron horse. Hundreds and thousands of hearts, beating out the melody of freedom with small hammers in his wake— Hallucinating, lost, between storm and sky, cruelly dazzled, mountain of God. 88.  Tanee, Shlosha hitzim, 16–34. 89.  Gilad, Prihat ha-oranim, 62–63; ibid., 146.

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Ancient stones blooming suddenly by the power of God at the touch of familiar footprints— Oh, the troubled Hebrew tribe! The stones gather together, wild dunes stand still the charming seashells are joyous, rushing in innocent happiness . . . Hallucinating, cruel, waving at its sky until there is no mercy, mountain of God.

The reportage, like the poem, repeats the ahistorical element of the old-new story of Jewish presence in the desert. In the poem, the story of the breakthrough remains cast in symbolist doubt, while in the essay it is presented as the result of a collective effort of “youthful daring and the pioneering soul and a thousand arms in brotherhood,” an effort crowned a total success due to “an unquiet and courageous pioneer spirit.” In contrast to the symbolism of the poem, the poetic reportage uses concrete images, while preserving prominent poetic characteristics. This series of parallels and the blurring of borders between genres emphasize the fact that poetic reportage is an alternative and heterogeneous version of the symbolist templates of Independence War poetry, as well of the poetry of the struggle that preceded the war. In this way it fulfills the function of reinvigorating customary patterns through which poetry portrayed the period, and in particular the figure of the Hebrew soldier. It is possible to view poetic reportage as a literary response to the argument that the central stratagems of the generation of poets of the struggle for independence were wearing thin.90

90.  Moshe Shamir, “Homer lemahshava.” Ba-sha’ar, September 23, 1949.

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C h a p t e r 31  Sorrow Petrified into Symbols

The dominant symbolist mode of imagery did not suit the new cultural situation that emerged at the end of the Independence War, though it was obvious that poets of the period were still profoundly committed to the basic premises of the Shlonsky-Alterman school: allegiance to intellectual poetry and the supremacy of linguistic stratagems and poetic wit, with little weight given to human emotion.91 They viewed reality as no more than a starting point from which to depart for universal, spiritual regions, a pathway to mystical revelation. Yet symbolist language centering on the metaphor of the living-dead, found in the stylized poetry of Haim Gouri and others,92 in a world similar to that of romantic ballads whose heroes set out on quests, was now considered anachronistic. A mechanism to overcome the limitations of symbolist poetics in coping with the needs of its new audience was expressed in a programmatic essay by David Hanegbi, a senior editor and cultural activist at the Sifriat Poalim, the settlement movement’s Kibbutz Haartzi publishing house: “In order for a poet to continue to belong, for example, to the Palmach generation [of war poets], he must accompany what they feel after the Palmach army was disbanded, accompany the development of opposing feelings—of life—to the very bottom, to the taproot of their worldview. If not, he will be a poet of consummate, 91.  Dan Miron, “Darko shel Natan Alterman el hashira haleumit,” in Me-prat el ikar (TelAviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Sifriat Poalim, 1981), 9–14; see Ziva Shamir, Od hozer hanigun (Tel-Aviv: Papyrus, 1989). 92.  Reuven Shoham, “Besiman ketonet hapassim, eyun badiukano shel hadover be Pirhey esh u-ba Ad alot hashahar shel Haim Gouri,” Mehkaray yerushalim besifrut ivrit 11 (1990): 277–304.

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unspecified sorrow, sorrow that has petrified into symbols that lack a human form.”93 In his search for a “worldview,” Hanegbi expresses a demand for the politicization of the position of the Palamach-generation poets (the 1948 generation in Hebrew literature). But in effect he casts doubt on the effectiveness of an ideology that intends, in this new situation, to create symbols of sadness detached from social contingency. In a similar spirit, challenging anachronistic devotion to the cultish representations of fighters as victims who transcend their sacrifice, the poet Didi Menousi (1928–2013) wrote “I Don’t Want to Cry Any More,” which parodies the work of Alterman and of Gouri, to whom it is dedicated: I—who have passed through battles from which one arises covered in a stream of blood, I—who breathed long nights under torchlight. I waited forever for this terrible nightmare to end. I don’t want to cry any more— And you, your poems sacrifice to Moloch on the altar, You—in pictures and colors you thunder out mourning songs, until the heart too melts in battle like rock salt— until it sheds a salt tear into emptiness and for nothing. —I knew that autumn was wild like a colt swallowing fallen leaves, the street shakes and hums and breathes deeply: it’s good that time moves on, it cannot be stopped from going on! I, I don’t want to cry any more.94

An attempt by one of the most prominent young critics of the period, Matti Megged (1923–2003), to characterize the literary atmosphere, illuminates other contemporary changes in subjectivity. In his essay “Man at War” (“Adam bemilhama”), Megged argued that from the moment one changes from being pursued by the enemy to being his pursuer, self-awareness undergoes a complete change. In other words, Megged holds that a shift in the perception of power brings about a change in the way we interpret our cultural field. He dates the change to a very particular point, the ten days of fighting between 93.  David Hanegbi, “Uvdot vemegamot basifruteinu hatzeira,” Ba-sha’ar, January 12, 1950. 94.  Didi Menousi, “Ani aini hafetz od livkot,” Ba-sha’ar, January 5, 1950.

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the two temporary truces, which began on July 9, 1948, when the war began to go in Israel’s favor, and says this is when the literary audience underwent a transformation, too. The target audience—until then considered an organic collective—had become, he said, a public that would have to be approached in a new way. The change in the addressee of the literary text demanded, according to Megged, a change in approach. The effect of mythicizing of the dead, which was meant to soften the pain over those lost in battle, weakened as the individual dead were raised to the national-collective level, where they remained memorialized despite their death as individuals. The shift in the nature of the audience and its expectations eroded the ideological effectiveness of the symbol of the living-dead; the expectation of a political rather than symbolist formulation, about which Megged wrote, was added to a new orientation toward the individual. Such a formulation may be found in Haim Gouri’s “Meeting at a Curve in the Road” (“Hapegisha beekul haderech”): “The war was over. The ceasefire lines had been set, and the hour of great relief had come. Sometimes we would meet, a group of us, near a spring or junction in the road, passing a few hours sharing memories, and then go on our way. Most of the time we spoke about the same things: telling war stories, raising the memory of dead friends, guessing and wondering what tomorrow would bring us under the sun. . . . It was an in-between time. There had been a moment of increasing noise that turned into drums pounding and smoke signals. Since silence had descended, I found myself sitting in the shade and watching the shadows.”95 The speaker meets with his friend Shamgar and the two of them take a walk at night, during which they sum up the period of battles in the Negev: “Those were the best years of our lives!” and “Our company was good; . . . the company was terrific—Shamgar agreed.”96 In the end each goes his separate way home. This small tale offers readers a method of coping with the changes of the period, which sent a generation of fighters back to the realm of personal life. In effect the anecdote offers a simplified, concrete version of the transcendent, 95.  Gouri, “Hapegisha beekul haderech,” in Ad alot hashahar, 122. 96.  Ibid., 127.

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mythic process of separation from that period of time, a process that is also portrayed in the poem “Betrothal” (“Klulot”), included in the same book. In this poem, a figure walks with a friend in the Negev at night, looking at the landscape where battles have taken place but which is now quiet. He interprets his and his friend’s presence as an erotic betrothal to and sexual possession of the Negev. Now, the poem says, after we spent the war together: Here we whispered her name breathless. Here we spent a day in a metal tank, we possessed storm and power. We possessed it until it was ours, with sword and grief.

Now the walker returns alone like someone who, “it seems, will walk silently, silently walking, / for fear has no friends and sorrow no sisters,” as someone who participated in the “wedding night . . . the canopy of sky trembled above us, / a star for a candle above the granite candlestick.”97 There appears to be much resemblance between Gouri’s poem and his reportage. In contrast to the poem, however, which still addresses the traditional audience for Jewish symbolism in Palestine, poetic reportage displays sensitivity to the new audience. While the poem portrays the return from the collective domain to the private one in the usual mythical terms, the reportage sketches a narrative in which the individual is cut off from the collective via a personal incident. Most of the difference is rooted in changes in the potential audience for Israeli literature and, more importantly, in the way writers viewed this audience. During the war, especially toward its end, the elite image of the fighting forces that symbolized Jewish culture in Palestine and reached its height in the 1940s was confronted with a new reality. A new public moved further and further away from the social and cultural traditions of the Zionist-socialist labor movement of the prewar Jewish population in Palestine. The very variety of the population consisting of new immigrants, as well as members of the extreme nationalist Etzel and Lehi fighting groups from the right side of the political map, and the overseas volunteers in Gahal, Jewish war volunteers from 97.  “Klulot,” in ibid., 131–32.

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abroad who were recruited to take part in the unprecedented historical effort, created strong tensions that destabilized the dominant image of the Hebrew fighter. Against this background it is possible to portray the growth of the heterogeneous genre of poetic reportage as a result of two main factors: erosion of poetic patterns of representation that no longer suited the continuing reality of the war, and change in audience profile, which encouraged a popularization of the collective image of the fighter, which in turn led to an aspiration to widen the circle of potential readers, or at least an attempt to meet the expectation that it would do so. The combination of a popular genre with a formal one such as lyric poetry is symptomatic of a culture that strives to maintain its dominance even during times of a revolutionary process that shakes its foundations and threatens its hegemony. At the height of the Independence War, the culture of the Jewish population in Palestine also underwent drastic changes. It had coalesced during the struggle for independence, and shaped normative behavior in most areas of life, from the forms of canonical poetry preferred by the symbolist Shlonsky school and its followers, aimed at a select group of readers, to popular culture as it emerged in the fields of education, entertainment, and journalism. Combining poetry with more common channels of communication, could, for example, help official culture control and absorb the products of popular culture. The first artist to work in this format, who had a great influence on the incorporation of poetry into journalism, was Nathan Alterman. Even before the struggle for independence, Alterman founded and persistently used the formative, current events–­responsive institution of his “Seventh Column” in Davar, the Histadrut labor-organization daily, which considered itself, in comparison with the sensationalist evening papers, an ideological, educational tool.98 But along with other changes taking place, poetic reportage turned into an independent field. The genre’s transformation was symptomatic of a general cultural shift that included changes in the portrait of the normative reader, called upon to display solidarity and fill an active role in the develop98.  See Nathan Alterman, “Haezor hamutkaf,” Davar, March 5, 1948.

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ment of literary texts at a particular moment in history. A new reality, with all its tensions and contradictions, would no longer allow for the seemingly natural and conventional use of, for example, the collective image of the soldier-pioneer. Uri Avnery, in his popular book of reportage 1948: A Soldier’s Tale: The Bloody Road to Jerusalem, wrote, It was not only a people’s army forming in our camps. It was a youth movement in the fullest sense of the word, a genuine revolutionary movement. Within a few days, new ways of life were born, a new style of leadership, in speech and dress. . . . For the first time I felt that a great awakening like an earthquake had shaken Hebrew youth but had not entered the hearts of intellectuals. Writers and poets who the public had gotten used to thinking of as “young” continued to remain hidden at home, as if nothing had happened. They didn’t set out to join us on our difficult path, which was filled with rich experience.99

The new situation brought along with it a need for new channels of communication that were flexible enough to adapt to the new context yet preserve the continued hegemony of the labor movement. At the beginning of 1948, the Mapam Party, the United Workers Party founded in January 1948, already existed as an amalgam of several radical Zionist left-wing parties, including Ahdut Ha-avoda-Poalay Tzion and Hashomer Hatzair. The motivation for the formation of Mapam was to answer the needs that emerged at the beginning of the new historic era of the establishment of the state and its defense. In order to maintain their stance as parties and settlement movements (Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Hakibbutz Haartzi) within the framework of labor, alongside and as an alternative to the more moderate left-wing Mapai Party, they joined forces.100 At that time, Mapam aimed its hegemonic approach at the broader public, and it naturally viewed popular culture as a positive channel through which to achieve its goals. It is no accident that a large portion of reportage was first printed by Ba-mahane (In the Army Camp), the Israeli army newspaper edited by Moshe Shamir, a writer and member of Mapam with a strong left-wing political identity, and by Ba-sha’ar (At the Gate), the publication of 99.  Avnery, Bisdot pleshet 1948, 22, 31. 100.  David Zeit, “Ihud ha-smol ha-tzioni-socialisti,” in Ha-smol ha-meuchad, ed. Elkanah Margalit (Givat Haviva: Yad Yaari, 1991), 48–66.

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Mapam’s youth wing, whose members enlisted during the Independence War and which added to its masthead the subtitle “publication of the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces.”101 Such reportage, written for the most part by left-wing poets and authors associated with Mapam, marked an attempt to prevent the party’s loss of its leading position, in particular in the military arena, in comparison with the increasing strength of the entrenched Mapai Party. This struggle was clearly expressed in the Writers Union conference of 1949, when a group of these writers sought to form a socialist faction in order to fight for dominance in the union.102

101.  Eli Tzur, “Bin ihud le-pilug,” in Ha-smol ha-meuchad, ed. Margalit, 80. 102.  Moshe Shamir, “Im vaidat ha sofrim,” Ba-sha’ar, December 22, 1949.

C h a p t e r 32   Hegemonic Strategies

Hegemonic practice excels at a cautious approach to gradual change based on new needs, combined with a constant effort to remain in touch with old norms. In this spirit Israel Galili (1911–86), a prominent leader of the left-wing Mapam Party, turned to new readers in his introduction to a book by poet Zrubavel Gilad, Palmach Chapters (­Pirkey Palmach),103 published a short time after the Independence War had ended. Galili’s introduction, which marked the book politically and identified it with his own authority, gives voice to the collective consciousness of the time and appeals to its validity despite recent upsets. He turns now to the new audience, “even if [its nature is] not completely clear,”104 in order to instruct it on how to interpret the new situation in a way that maintains coherence even though it has undergone change and its prestige has been questioned. ­Galili’s remarks highlight certain attitudes. Socialist Mapam (connected with the ­Palmach brigades, the pre-state fighting forces of the Jewish community in Palestine which were disbanded by Ben-Gurion) and Mapai (who supported the Israeli Statism and opposed Mapam’s radical socialism) took a negative view of the official Israeli army that was formed by the new government from the various fighting forces led by different Zionist movements after the establishment of the state, and the dismantling of the Palmach which was affiliated to the leftist party Mapam. Galili also disapproved of the organic connection between Jewish settlement and the army in the era of the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, 103.  Zrubavel Gilad, Pirkey Palmach, 2nd ed. (1951; Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1971). 104.  Israel Galili, introduction to ibid., 8.

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whose Mapai Party opposed Mapam’s radicalism and the increased control of the state: What do the readers of Palmach Chapters feel upon finishing it? Beyond awe for the people it portrays, and being touched anew by their inner strength, they are gripped with a brash love for these young men and women, soldiers and officers, who are reflected in the book and captivate us. This is love for the character of the Palmach soldierpioneers, whose army service raised them to a high level of humanity and who were bound by strong ties between battlefield and the land, its flora, a movement and an ideal. They set out for battle as if setting out for work, loathing all artificial mannerisms associated with the military: characters destined for greatness, marching confidently on the ground of their homeland and making their nation’s history with only a modicum of pride. . . . This is what the book tells readers, if they wish to hear it: about the kibbutz home and farm that has always accompanied them in battle; the pioneer youth movement that educated them, training immigrants and enlisting them in the army; the ­Haganah defense forces; the military organization of the Yishuv organized under the auspices of the Eretz-Israel General Workers Union, which gave them their first real taste of rebellion and power; the Palmach—the daring brigade that prepared itself to meet the goal and to pass the most cruel and profound test of our generation.105

Antonio Gramsci characterizes the power amassed by rulers as obtained with the agreement of their subjects, who willingly accept the power relations in their society as natural and a matter of course, and accept as well the received interpretation of collective symbols and the patterns of control realized through these means. A national culture may be harnessed to the reinforcement of ruling power with close, seemingly organic relations between the broader public and —intellectuals, including writers.106 However, since hegemony is a historical phenomenon that undergoes change, in order to maintain a ruler’s standing in the dominant culture, it must adapt itself to cultural change with a dynamic balancing act. Literature, especially the popular kind, makes use of prominent elements of hegemonic cultural practice in order to 105.  Ibid., 8–9. 106.  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5–23, 418–19.

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maintain the ascendency of ruling forces. The ability of popular literature to create acceptable characters and neutralize contradictions and conflicts enables it to contribute to the maintenance of control by the ruling group; it serves as a broker between hegemonic positions and the positions of those echelons of society which are likely to endanger popular literature’s influence and control.107 In order to continue to preserve the privileged position of the collective subject of the arms-bearing laborer (etched, for example, in the iconography combining a sheaf of wheat with a sword as the symbol of the Palmach fighting forces), writers had to include new material in their work; they initiated changes in their strategies and in the institutions that hosted them, attempting to subordinate them to the ideological symbolizing mechanism of the ruling culture. At this stage the importance of popular works as the expression of individuals was primary. And so, for example, the narrator of poetic reportage was often the fighter who took part in the heroic action he reports. “I am sitting in my tiny bivouac writing these words in the light of a borrowed kerosene lamp on a new writing tablet—part of the gifts I received as a soldier,” Uri Avnery wrote.108 “I am writing about things I myself lived through and saw with my own eyes as a soldier in the second infantry unit,” wrote Haim Gouri.109 At times the writer appears as a commander at the nightly meeting at headquarters before an action is to take place. These writers and others like them base their narrative authority on their unmediated contact with specific, local aspects of the war experience. In contrast with poetry, which remains on an abstract and general level of representation, poetic reportage answered the need of hegemonic culture for the representation of current events. At the same time the poetic nature of direct contact with actual events that was to serve the new needs of the hegemonic order was revealed. Again and again it became clear that the characteristic effort of reportage to simplify utterance and anchor it in the concrete and actual was always connected to the opposite trend: universalization, heightening 107.  Roger Broomly, “Natural Boundaries: The Social Function of Popular Fiction,” in The Study of Popular Fiction, ed. Bob Ashley (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989), 147–55. 108.  Avnery, Bisdot pleshet 1948, 69. 109.  Gouri, Ad alot hashahar, 7.

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the register, a generous use of war imagery, and an attempt to give that imagery fictional qualities. The heterogeneous structure of these books, equating poetry with reporting, as well as the heterogeneous nature of the reportage itself, grant a ritualistic dimension to current events. The mythical, ahistorical effect this creates is essentially based on a mechanism that represses the sharp contradictions of a difficult historical ­reality. Newspaper reportage also used such mechanisms and contributed to the suppression and blurring of contradictions. Nurit Gertz notes that, “At a time when the State of Israel stood alone against the invading armies of five Arab countries without any guarantee of aid from the West, the war was depicted in newspapers as a united front of European nations against a weakened, isolated East. In a war in which six thousand people fell—one percent of the entire Jewish population and twenty percent of its youth—the reports hardly mentioned those who were killed or mentioned death.”110 The attempt to bridge tensions and contradictions during the difficult days of war therefore involves modification—developed within the framework of hegemonic discourse seeking to preserve its own power—of representations of this reality. In order to remain relevant it had to include, for example, an edited version of heterogeneous materials, a generous use of realistic details such as the names of commanding officers (usually affectionate nicknames), and of campaigns, places, and battle sites, all effective means in creating a sense of relevance and realism. No less than this, they also serve the fictionalizing needs of reportage. It is precisely real nicknames of such of Israeli commanders as Yiska (Issachar Shadmi [1922–]), Sergei (Nahum Sarig [1914–99]), Bren (Avraham Adan [1925–2012]), or Kidony (Haim Bar-Lev [1924– 94]),111 that enable readers to more easily establish the communication that literary invention helps create between themselves and writers. It is precisely the limited presence of specific, real details in reportage that contributes to the suspension of the reader’s disbelief or doubt in the level of truth in the text. The mechanism of fictionalization, based on the suspension of disbelief, is heightened and attracts the reader to participate in the fictional drama offered to him. An effect is created, 110.  Gertz, Shvuia bahaloma, 66. 111.  Gouri, Ad alot hashahar, 49–121.

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therefore, of relevance and currency, according to the rules of literary invention. In the case of poetic reportage, such regularity is realized by the poet-reporters’ use of the main literary models of Independence War poetry. Matti Megged’s remarks on the shifts in images of power that took place in Israeli cultural awareness during the war allow us to see poetic reportage as part of a cultural practice meant to rehabilitate the position of the normative subject during the period of struggle for independence. Changing historical conditions forced writers to create new solutions in narrative and genre. As pressure grew to create competing representations of reality, tensions and contradictions in normative representations were exposed. The fact that the appearance of reality in poetic reportage was nothing but a cover for a fictional, sometimes even fantastic world of imagery, was also exposed. Poets found a tool with which to adapt their poetry to new needs. The solution they offered used themes taken from current events to fill a vital rhetorical role and create the authority of the soldier-writer, whose reports were based on direct, unbiased personal experience. But from here on the work is subject to abstract rhetorical rules that highlight the lyric presence at the heart of the journalistic report. One example appears in the second section of Gouri’s Until Dawn, which includes a selection of his poems written during that period, among them “Facing God’s Mountain” (“Mul har haeloim”), which opens this way: The stars blossom in a halo now above our heads, and we are abandoned in the sands, sprawled on the rocks no flute sounds. Our ears hear a great silence. Lights wander the slopes and return to us. Sinai. Midnight approached from God’s mountain.112

The image of stars blossoming is directly parallel to one of the most difficult passages the reportage, “The Journey to God’s Mountain,” which tells the story of the conquest of the Sinai Desert and the Gaza Strip in the Horev Campaign. Gouri describes the bitterness of French volunteers who fought there and ends his report this way: “That night 112.  Ibid., 154.

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everything that had been pent up burst out and there were those who welcomed this. After they calmed down the best of them sat in the darkness and listened. Outside the stars blossomed.”113 Gouri’s lines represent a frank response to feelings and distress that exceed the boundaries of the standard image of the Jewish pioneer soldier. Closing the scene with the metaphor of blossoming stars underscores the last point of the report, the effort to restore balance and harmony despite the sharp contradictions that erupted during the war. Earlier too, when Gouri described the enemy the soldiers faced, it was represented in contradictory terms. On the one hand, they “invaded your country, tore broad swaths of land from you. They said they would raid your cities, with their companion—destruction. They raped your sisters and abused your mother. Your-home-your-castle will be stables for their horses. These Egyptian dogs, heat struck and syphilitic, descended on you and all that is yours.” On the other hand, you “leap at night on people you have never seen: simple people, poor people, fathers and sons, a straying flock, misled.” And again, on one hand the Arab is portrayed as a contemptuous enemy, and on the other as a human being to be pitied.114 But here too poetic reportage seeks to resolve contradictions; the narrator holds that “we don’t hate the man but the enemy,” and even expresses a wish to explain to him face to face, “Man, we don’t seek ill for you. I am the neighbor whose borders you breached.” What follows is an acknowledgment of the narrator’s inability to realize his humanist desire; this is why Gouri tries to soften the contradiction by quoting the formulation of the violent conflict to come at night as it was given in the measured, almost neutral language of Bren, the commanding officer. This is the case with Gouri, writing from the heart of the cultural establishment, as well as Uri Avnery, whose distance from the emotional and political world of the Palmach (formerly he was a member of the Eztel, the right-wing underground group) did not stop him from using his reportage in the service of nationalism. Avnery, who touched on negative phenomena—looting,115 as well as the shirking 113.  Ibid., 78. 114.  Ibid., 25–35; Gertz, Shvuia bahaloma, 60–62. 115.  Avnery, Bisdot pleshet 1948, 58.

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of responsibility116—as legitimate material for his reporting, did not refrain from patriotic admiration for the declaration of statehood by David Ben-Gurion,117 or an exchange of feelings with a new immigrant who has adapted to his situation, who was once discriminated against and is now happy.118 The figure of the new fighter is usually portrayed as absorbed by the normative human landscape of the Jewish labor movement in Palestine, or raised to an ahistorical and metaphysical plane. In the end, it is precisely reportage that adapted literary discourse in order to respond to new literary needs dictated by the necessity to fulfill the cultural demands of a new audience; in the end it is the reportage that changed the characteristic profile of the fighter and inserted it into hegemonic culture. In this way reportage imposed the new image of the fighter as the authoritative representation of hegemonic culture. But by this act of imposing and assimilating the figure of the Israeli fighter in the hegemonic culture the reportage also prevented the figure of the fighter from having its own independent location where it could be examined not only in relation to older norms and might have maintained something of its individuality. Israel Galili created a rhetorical continuum that unites in one sweeping statement both the “climate that bred the soldier and commander,” and “the atmosphere of absorption of volunteers from Palestine and abroad.”119 By suppressing the huge gap between them, Galili uses a strategy that seeks to maintain hegemony not by opposing reality but by broadening and bending principles to create a way to accommodate change. Gouri functioned in a similar fashion in his reportage, aided by poetic language in order to raise current events to a higher plane that is neutral with regard to political debate. Such flexible discourse creates an effect of relevance to current events, often appropriated by broader contexts that neutralize contradictions. The subversion of borders between genres and their realignment are prominent signs of a process that was to lead to a restabilization of hegemony. What could not be accomplished within the poetic conven116.  Ibid., 27. 117.  Ibid., 84–85. 118.  Ibid., 99–102. 119.  Galili, introduction to Gilad, Pirkey Palmach, 9.

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tions of canonical poetry of the period was carried out via increased popularization and the hybrid genre of poetry-and-reportage: poetry absorbed the conventions of reportage. In the wake of the “Black Saturday” on June 29, 1946, when a raid was conducted by British authorities searching for Jewish arms, Moshe Tabenkin wrote a poem about the event that was printed on the third anniversary of the event under the heading “Dumbfounded: Poems of June 29” (“Demama nidhama: Mishirey ha-29 beuni”).120 Although the context of the poem’s publication left no doubt that it marked a particular event, the abstract poetics that ruled the school of Shlonsky and Alterman, to which Tabenkin belonged, prevented him from using a lexicon that included clear historical references. In contrast, during the last days of the Independence War, popular songs made a contribution to the field of poetry, its most prominent practitioner being Haim (Feiner) Hefer (1925–2012), whose work was collected in Light Ammunition (Tahmoshet kala).121 Hefer called them pizmorim, a portmanteau of the words pizmonim (popular ditties) and zmarim (songs). The popular song’s intermediate position between canonic and mass culture is also evident in Uri Avnery’s report of the efforts of soldiers to build a repertoire of fighting songs, for the most part translated from other languages.122

120.  Moshe Tabenkin, “Demama nidhama, mi-shirey ha-29 be-yuni,” Ba-sha’ar, June 30, 1949; Tabenkin, Sefer shirim, 201. 121.  Haim Hefer, Tahmoshet kala (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1949). 122.  Avnery, Bisdot pleshet 1948, 33.

C h a p t e r 33   From Reportage to Lyric

How did different permutations of genre affect canonical lyric poetry? One place in which it is easy to locate interactions between genres is the interim space between popular songs and what is formally recognized as poetry. For example, there is Nathan Yonatan’s well-known “Our Convoy” (“Shayara shelanu”), which functioned simultaneously as lyric poem and popular song.123 The poem depicts convoys on their way to besieged Jerusalem with imagery of the transformations of a song and its fate. Loyalty to the musical metonymy upon which the Shlonsky school’s universalist poetics is based turns the poem’s narrative into a sublime, symbolic distillation of human existence. In this case, events that took place in the Independence War are depicted symbolically; a song fashions its material abstractly and stereotypically,124 qualities also due to the generous use the poem makes of common idiomatic phrases: The song sets out on its way again, where our days go and cry. Convoy, where are you heading? Convoy, sad is the way. ... Metal is blind to death, but the journey’s stars are clear, the roads know where to go, return, convoy, to the roads. you’ll carry hard metal on them, 123.  Ziva Ben Porat, Lyrika veh-lahit (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1989), 292–319; Miron, Mul ha-ah ha-shotek, 257. 124.  Miron, Mul ha-ah ha-shotek, 240, 260.

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stubbornness, steel, and routine. My convoy, if you fall, my song will fall far away with you.125

The only place name inserted into this abstract world is “Bab el-Wad” (Gate of the Wadi), the Arabic name of a location on the Tel Aviv–­ Jerusalem road known as Sha’ar Hagay in Hebrew, the single marker anchoring it in a specific historical place and time. In this way the abstract lyric continuum is interrupted, emphasizing the poem’s symbolic framework as a kind of reportage about the fate of the convoy to Jerusalem during the siege of the city: The song is with you, besieged convoy, will fight, will never abandon you, until it plucks the cyclamen with you on the hills in front of Bab el-Wad.126

What appears to be a contained historical reference in Yonatan’s poem, which undermines the uniform, ahistorical representation of battles, becomes in Haim Gouri’s work an outright breach of the high register that had previously dominated the poetry of their generation. Low register first appeared in Gouri’s work in his cooperative efforts with lyricist Haim Hefer, and then in his own poetry as well, and such heterogeneity is prominent in Until Dawn. “The Sudanese Outpost” (“Mishlat hasudanim”), for example, contains a sublime description of a battle, ending in a section written from an autobiographical viewpoint: the completion of a mythical cycle of a king’s son who successfully carries out his mission, and now, topped with a “crown of bandages,” reports to his mother: You did not see me, distant mother. On the night of redemption in fear and the dark. You did not see me in the strong gale, my hair mussed, in my crown of bandages, in the reddening spot under my temple, in the tear running down my cheek, from happiness.127 125.  Nathan Yonatan, “Shayara shelanu,” in Shviley affar (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, Hotzaat Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1951), 16–17. 126.  Ibid., 17. 127.  Gouri, Ad alot hashahar, 135.

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While the poem attempts to fill all the narrative requirements of myth, it is precisely the freer tone and diction that create a heterogeneous continuum, combining high register with characteristic military terms for explosive materials such as TNT, common military acronyms, and the use of euphemistic but bold language to describe the killing of a soldier: “A tall Sudanese passes over to the dead.” In a book of reportage appearing at the war’s end, Gouri’s poem “The Flag Shot Through with Holes” (“Hadegel nekuv hakadurim”), was included. In this poem he sought to grant literary expression to a “simple soldier”: The simple soldier whose number is tied to an amulet, the simple soldier from an anonymous company or regiment, the simple soldier who falls on his face and hears how death passes over his head and brandishes knives. ... Seeing his life end, he turned his face to the ground never knowing how to ask for compassion . . . in Hebrew.128

In contrast to the normative depiction of the admired fallen soldier as a magnificent character, the living-dead, instead “he is beaten, [yet] fights back, bites his lips—[says] no to death!” And in contrast to poems depicting legendary figures portrayed in a high register, most of the poems in Haim Gouri’s Flowers of Fire (Pirhey esh) and other similar books depict new immigrant soldiers who do not yet have a good command of Hebrew. The rest of the poem evinces an effort to simplify poetic expression by including a few words of low register in a conversational rhythm. But this is only a temporary stage. In the final stanza the lyric poem integrates the “simple soldier” into the nation’s symbolist drama: The wind blows. Ruddy dawn rises. More battles, more fire on our borders, and sorrow at the gates! Dawn rises ruddy and strong, the entire nation endangered, and the flag moves on, the flag shot through with holes!129

128.  Hativat hanegev bamaraha (Tel-Aviv: Tzva Hahagana Le-Yisrael, Hotzaat Maarahot, 1950), 152–53. 129.  Ibid., 153.

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On the other side of the reportage continuum tending toward heterogeneity, soldier-reporter Uri Avnery wrote a popular song about the battle waged by the Givati division on Hill 69 as though it were a newspaper account. The song opens with a faithful description of the landscape (“Three towers stand / on Hill 69”), but ends with a variant on the living-dead metaphor, drawn directly from formal lyric: On Hill 69 the battle took place and ended. On the grave of the immortal soldier a wild flower grew and grew silent.130

Abba Kovner made an exaggerated use of this mix of documentary and fiction in his book-length poem Farewell to the South.131 The title speaks to the poem’s perspective on the experience of the war that has just taken place. While Kovner includes reportage in poetic language characteristic of Gouri, he also assimilates reportage into the poem. It is dedicated to “the [army] division—its name Givati,” in which Kovner served as an information officer, and contains lyrical passages about the soldier’s beloved, given the stereotypical name Shlomit, as well as more obviously documentary sections, for example, about the battle in Kharatiya: “This is Hirbet Fatatah! / Who set the fire in Kharatiya and Hata? / A fire was set in Kharatiya and Hata.”132 The figure of Dambam, a fighter who falls in the battle, is represented, as was customary in that period, with a monologue by the living-dead addressing his lover.133 Dambam’s name creates a suggestive link, in the spirit of symbolist poetics so characteristic of Kovner, to his prototype—Debambam, the nickname of Gershon Dubenbaum, who was shot on Dahariya Bridge on October 26, 1948.134 Kovner admitted this in a footnote: “I did not know the man, but I heard his name during those nights, from a distance, and it resonated within me, strange and stirring. Then he died. I am left with only the rhythm of the name: 130.  Avnery, Bisdot pleshet 1948, 123–24. 131.  Kovner, Preda min hadarom. 132.  Abba Kovner, A Canopy in the Desert, trans. Shirley Kaufman (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 87; Kovner, Preda min hadarom, 181. 133.  Kovner, A Canopy in the Desert, 89; Kovner, Preda min hadarom, 183–86. 134.  Benyamin Hrushovski, “Abba Kovner veh hapoema haivrit hahadisha,” in Abba Kovner, ed. Shalom Luria (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988), 81.

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Dambam.”135 The most decisive incidence of the assimilation of reportage into the poem is in the inclusion of an official army missive. Next to a poem with the same title as the dispatch, “Combat Page,” Kovner used an authentic section of a real document he had written for propaganda purposes.136 “In the battle of Ibdis,” Uri Avnery wrote, “the combat page was born in its final incarnation at division headquarters. It was like the flick of a whip spurring us on to a greater effort; it explained the place of our modest, personal efforts within the larger front. It united the regiments and companies into one unit with one soul, heart, and pulse—the Givati division.”137 Such materials now became part of the heterogeneous materials included in the modernist long poem, face to face with lyric elements. The poetic nature of the original material is obvious in biblical allusions such as “Ephes-dammim [a place name meaning literally ‘no-blood’] between Socoh and Azekah,”138 where the Philistines assembled to fight Saul. At the same time the combat page tells of the division’s achievements in the attempt to take control of Mount Hebron on the night between October 22 and 23, including explicit mention of battle sites.139 Despite a few minor emendations that increase the amount of military terminology used on official combat pages, the page used here has been transferred nearly intact to the poem. At a certain point the combat page moves from a report of achievements in battle to a protest about the urgency of a ceasefire. In this way Kovner responds to the orders from headquarters to retreat, the crux of a political dispute between Ben-Gurion and the radical Zionist left and its representatives in the army, such as General Yigal Alon (1918–80) and Colonel Shimon Avidan (1911–94). Reportage is obviously being used to maintain the power of the dominant group by papering over the political conflict in favor of the creation of an agreedupon national front. Where the poem moves from the combat page’s report of achievements on the battlefield to an expression of the political protest, the citation of the original official document is interrupted. 135.  Kovner, Preda min hadarom, 353. 136.  Ibid., 189 137.  Avnery, Bisdot pleshet 1948, 157. 138.  1 Sam. 17:1 (JPS). 139.  Avraham Ayalon, Hativat givati mul hapolesh hamitzri (Tel-Aviv: Maarahot, 1963), 550–51.

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Poetic reportage was offered, therefore, as a genre-based solution to new needs in the cultural field. Poets and reporters tested their strengths in it, and it was awarded wide circulation and popularity. But very quickly it became clear that it was only a temporary, limited, and problematic solution. On the one hand there was an awareness of reportage’s potential to maintain the dominance of the powers that be. A dialectic approach to this process reveals that the other side of this awareness—and along with it the acknowledgment that the preservation of hegemony warrants changes in patterns of literary representation—was the knowledge that from now on the weakening of the collective symbols of pioneering, defense, settlement, and socialism demanded, in contrast to hegemony, the development of protest literature. This literature would involve an oppositional stance by the new culture developing in the State of Israel against the cultural and political establishment. So Moshe Shamir wrote in “The End of Reportage: Long Live Criticism!” (“Haketz lareportaga: Tehi habikoret!”), in which he noted, “For many more years our literature will nurture the image of the generation that fought and fell in battle. It is a loyal and important lynchpin in all branches of our cultural work.” And he added, “Until now we have accompanied the state, its army and its war, with the literature of reportage. This is all well and good.” Nonetheless, he warns, exaggerated use of the genre of reportage now opposes the politically critical role of literature aimed at the new Israeli society: “We are not allowed to release ourselves from the role of fighting within [the Israeli society] for these and other values, and so to prepare the background for a major upheaval that will turn us over time into a socialist country.”140 In the new constellation of power relations in the Israeli cultural field, the transitory power of reportage became its weakness. Shamir raises the possibility that at a later stage reportage may serve opposing political goals from those supported by writers associated with the establishment. From being a tool operated by the Mapam Party to reinforce the hegemony of labor-movement culture, it was now grasped as a participant in the new and little-admired political and cultural situation; it functioned as a fig leaf. The shifting fate of reportage during 140.  Moshe Shamir, “Haketz lareportaga: Tehi habikoret!” Ba-sha’ar, February 3, 1949.

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the Independence War demonstrated the erosion of the radical Zionist left as a leading force in culture and in the army. As it appeared in the poetry written by Amir Gilboa at the time, it also marked a turning point and the distancing of Israeli literature from the struggle for independence.

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C h a p t e r 34  Women Write of Fallen Soldiers

as Flesh and Blood

An additional approach in the search for an alternative national representation of fallen soldiers developed in poetry written by women during the 1948 war and afterward. One of the high points of Anda Amir-Pinkerfeld’s (1902–81) long epic poem about the war, One (Ahat; grammatically a female one),141 depicts the soldiers of the Convoy of Thirty-five who set out on January 14, 1948, to bring supplies to Jews in the besieged Gush Etzion area and were killed before they could arrive. Amir depicts the remains of their bodies returned from the battle: The thirty-five were brought by truck, dismembered. A merciful hand covered their defilement with a blood-soaked rag. Their remains were washed and honored, even marked, laid row upon row. And a paralyzing fear went through the grim hall that held them. Their silence filled it like a cry of rebuke.142

The harsh description of the cruelly slain soldiers focuses on their physicality; Amir’s heroic national epic centers on their dismembered body parts covered with blood. In this way the representation of the Israeli national hero is reduced to its most basic physical elements. The physical aspects of national bravery dominate Hebrew poetry written by women during the Independence War, including Yaffa Krinkin’s (1917–87) “My Country,” in which the woman speaker addresses her homeland, personified as a woman:

141.  Anda Amir-Pinkerfeld, Ahat, Poema (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1952). 142.  Ibid., 182.

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You are one like truth, you—the motherland. Your thorns—are flowers before my eyes and my blood. Within you all my parched fields become moist with dew Within you a storm rages for me—my blood. Your clods call out to me from time immemorial, For mine is their burning thirst, For your sake you have implanted eyes and living creatures within me So that I might echo you. I am the echo of your longing nights, The echo of your falling stars, The echo of your strength is led In the flesh. In blood. In the heart.143

The above poem, describing conventional love of country, ends with images of flesh and blood, as does Haya Vered’s (1921–97) “Blood in the Valleys” (“Dam bageayot”), in which a woman praises a male fighter, focusing on one of his limbs and his spilled blood: In the landscapes which writhe like a scream, like a blaze (Your corpse was a fortress to them, and the nights an obstacle), In the sudden valleys, in the fissures of the crucible of stumbling A jet of blood flows, digs a path. And on the shoulders of nights they carried your youth An astonished glance broke its way through to the blue dawn. And my poems were afraid to follow in your footsteps, To kiss the traces of your blood in the sand.144

Similar descriptions appear in the work of such prominent poets as Fania Bergstein (1908–50) and Esther Raab (1894–1981), as well as that of Ella Amitan-Wilensky (1893–95) (who joined the British army during World War II), Batsheva Altshuler (1928–48) (who was killed in the bat143.  Yaffa Krinkin, “My Country,” in Hannan Hever, “Gender, Body and the National Subject,” trans. Louise Bethlehem, in The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society, ed. Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 226; Yaffa Krinkin, “Moledet sheli,” Bamahane, August 19, 1948. 144.  Haya Vered, “Blood in the Valleys” (“Dam bageayot”), trans. Louise Bethlehem, in Hever, “Gender, Body, and the National Subject,” 226; Haya Vered, Shirim al herev ve-meitar (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1966), 11.

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tle for Lod on July 10, 1948), Erella Or (1923–67), Zafrira (­Gerber) Gar (1926–) (who fought in the Independence War in Jerusalem), ­Miriam Yalan-Shteklis (1900–1984), and Edna Cornfeld. In one way or another, these poets attempted to write about the war in unmediated fashion, without symbolism, directly about flesh and blood and the physical aspects of suffering during wartime. Russian Poetry (Shirat Russia), the influential 1942 anthology edited by Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg, included translations of war poems by three Russian women poets. “July 1914” (“Yulee 1914”), by Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), and “Prayer” (“Tefila”), by Maria Shkapskaya (1891–1952), were written about World War I; “Russia Mourns Its Sons” (“Rus mevaka et baneya”), by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), was about the Russian civil war. The speakers in all three poems use flesh-and-blood imagery to depict the war dead. In “July 1914,” Akhmatova writes of the grief of a woman who has lost her soldier-lover and now denounces God. Her challenge is formulated in highly physical language evocative of Jesus, and draws an analogy between Christ and the soldier, a “sacred body” over which people will disagree.

C h a p t e r 35  In the Service of National Subjectivity

Women poets played a prominent role in Hebrew war poetry during the Jewish struggle for national independence in Palestine. Their work appeared in literary magazines, in other respected, more general venues, in the Israeli army journal Ba-mahane (In the Army Camp), and in ­poetry books published immediately at the war’s end. Nonetheless, their standing as women poets did not change much and they remained, in effect, on the margins of the literary canon. And so, for example, in the 1948 anthology, For the Defender, published by the information service of the Histadrut labor union and edited by writer Yehudit Hendel, only the work of Yocheved Bat-Miriam and the parachuter and poet Hana Senesh (1921–44) is included.145 In the 1958 anthology Poetry of War and Bravery in Israel (Shirat milhama vegvura be-Yisrael), edited by Reuven Avinoam (1905–74) and Shlomo Shpan (1898–1962), the only poems by women in the book are those of Anda Amir-Pinkerfeld and Haya Vered.146 Clearly, women poets were being shunted toward women’s publications, such as Dvar Hapoelet, which during the war became a central tool in the development of nationalist consciousness among women. Most of the women poets who appeared in its pages vanished from the literary scene after the war or were marginalized; some of them turned to writing for children (AmirPinkerfeld, Bergstein, Erella Or, Zafrira Gar) and some became translators (Amitan-Wilensky, Cornfeld, Or, Gar). During the war, most women poets expressed a heightened con145.  Yehudit Hendel, ed., Lamagen—pirkey shira (Tel-Aviv: Histradrut, 1948) 146.  Reuven Avinoam and Shlomo Shpan, eds., Shirat milhama vegvura be-Yisrael (TelAviv: Hotzaat Sherut Hatarbut Shel Tzva Ha-Hagana Le-Yisrael, 1958).

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sciousness about the critical historical situation of national struggle. The war was grasped and represented as the climax of preparations for a state, expressed in no uncertain terms as a life-and-death struggle. As in other cultural fields at that time, women poets saw themselves, in one way or another, as committed to taking part in the literary discourse of war in order to participate in the broader effort for the creation and reinforcement of the “imagined national community.” They too contributed to the integration of the national subject into literature, and took part in coping with the contradiction between the fundamental and universal obligation to the life of the individual, and the call to self-sacrifice in the name of collective, national values then at their height. In order to exist within a canonical literary framework at such a critical moment, these poets had to develop and preserve national awareness and to place their talent at its service. During this process, they all, in effect, had to write for the cause, even those who clearly expressed their reservations about it. Leah Goldberg, too, who had declared at the end of the 1930s that literature had to maintain its obligation to aesthetics even during war, published an essay in the army journal during the first temporary truce (June 11–July 9, 1948). In this article she praised neutral classical literature as providing spiritual nourishment to soldiers at the front. Despite all her reservations, as we have seen, Goldberg emphasized the importance of literature during wartime, and even went so far as to say that women should supply their soldierboyfriends with books.147 Despite their desire to take part in the national effort, women poets could never be full participants since, as with other western cultures, Israeli culture perceived war as a masculine concern. The cultural construction of war was controlled by men; the depiction of the war experience was based on the dichotomy between the (central battle) front and the (peripheral) home front, an opposition that facilitated masculine hegemony. One means of control was the decisive cultural weight given to eyewitness accounts from the front; direct participation in the war granted a writer the authority of a primary source. For this reason, in a culture mobilized in the service of nationalism, women would 147.  Leah Goldberg [Ada Grant], “Sihot Ktanot,” Bamahane, June 12, 1948.

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never be seen as entirely legitimate witnesses, a position understood by the poet Ella Amitan-Wilensky, who had, in fact, served in the British army in World War II. In her poem “In the Army” (“Batzava”) she included women in the war experience as toiling female soldiers. But in order to do so, she distanced women from the biblical tradition of the woman combatant: A whistle in the evening. The damp storeroom opens its mouth again, and we will march together exhausted by heat and the long day: women soldiers laboring. Why do you talk about biblical characters, a chapter of poetry and the heroism of Yael and Deborah . . . fatigued again at evening we will march together, women soldiers laboring.148

In contrast, a man who had not served at the front could still be accepted as a legitimate war writer, as for example, the American Stephen Crane (1871–1900), who based his Civil War novel, Red Badge of Courage, on contemporary accounts. In Israel, Rami Ditzani (1950–2012) wrote strong protest poems about the first Lebanon war without having actually participated in it.149 The same is true of the Israeli Independence War, in which the distinction between battle and home fronts was not always clear, as battles also took place in residential areas where civilians lived. In this war, too, there was a clear sense of a national center that controlled imagery in journalism and literature and other sites of representation—a constructed, imagined center that was the war front. Prominent battle sites around which narratives were woven contributed greatly to this phenomenon. Representational categories of war were subordinate to nationalist terminology, and sites where events of the war had taken place were marked as nationalist spaces. The distinction between the masculine battle front and the feminine home front was replicated, strengthening male hegemony of national culture.

148.  Ella Amitan-Wilensky, Lach veh-lecha (Tel-Aviv: Masada, 1949), 5. 149.  Rami Ditzani, Meshirey mador nehut ruah (Jerusalem: Domino, 1984).

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The heroic image of fighting women in the line of fire—a practice that in fact ended after only the first month of the Independence War— was of no use in this context. The widely believed myth about women serving as combatants in Jewish defense forces and later in the Israeli army could not disguise the fact that women’s “natural” place was felt to be at home or in auxiliary forces.150 The mobilization of women as fighters in the Palmach, the underground army of Jewish settlements in Palestine during the time of the British Mandate, was an important contribution to the realization of equality between the sexes, and a prominent element in the declared ideology of the Jewish labor movement in Palestine. But this commitment, inspired by the presence of Soviet women in the Red Army, was not united with the marginalization of women that in fact took place and underscored the lack of equality.151 In practice, it was only in 1981, eight years after the Yom Kippur War caused a great division in Israeli society in relation to its mythologizing and chauvinist military discourse, that the writer Netiva Ben Yehuda (1928–2011)—nicknamed the “yellow devil” during the Independence War because she was a blonde—could write a memoir about her past as a combatant in the Palmach.152

150.  Emmanuel Sivan, Dor Tashah (Tel-Aviv: Tzahal, Misrad Habitahon, 1991), 35–39. 151.  Deborah Bernstein, Isha be-eretz Yisrael (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987), 118–24; Alon Kadish, Lameshek ve-laneshek (Tel-Aviv: Tag, 1995), 234–41. 152.  Netiva Ben Yehuda, 1948—Bein hasefirot (Jerusalem: Keter, 1981).

C h a p t e r 36  Women and the Metaphor of

the Living-Dead

The marginalization of women in national discourse was particularly evident in their configuration as bereaved mothers and the official mourners of the war dead. This distinct position was based on the dualism of those who are asked, on the one hand, to situate themselves at the center of the national experience, but who are, on the other hand, excluded from it. Women were enlisted in the collective national project while maintaining their individual identity as mothers, a role that in fact distanced them from the centers of power. The worker leader and member of the Israeli parliament Dvorah Netzer (1897–1989) writes about such duality in “Women on the Home Front”: And we ask—How should we live in the regime of mourning? What does the public owe the bereaved mother? How can society support her? And who should break the bitter news to the parents? In my neighborhood, I saw how a young girl, in the grip of fear and deep emotion, was called upon to fulfill this duty—to tell parents of their tragedy. I took this young girl and accompanied her. Should not such a task be imposed on close family friends? And who will bring the bereaved mothers out of their loneliness? The tragedy doubtless strikes the fathers, too. But work outside the home and the company of other people eases his situation. And in this country, in the presence of a consoling and concerned larger family circle is mostly lacking. It therefore becomes necessary to make female family friends take on their role in this case. When our sons were sent to the army, they set off into the distance not knowing the conditions under which they would be living. Now they are in our midst. The mothers feel responsible for the conditions of their life, but no mother can afford to worry about her own son alone.

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Also we lack state resources. And in every meeting or conversation with mothers, the question arises: What should the standard of living behind the lines on the home front be, as opposed to that of the front line? The question that saws at the heart: Why only our sons and not we ourselves? During the [World War II] years, did not older women enlist in the auxiliary services where they were often more effective than younger volunteers?153

Though they were excluded from cardinal space of war imagery, women Independence War poets chose to join the literary discourse of the war via the high road of Hebrew literature at the time with the mythicizing metaphor of the living-dead, or prosopopeia, speaking for another person who is absent, imagined, or dead. The metaphor of the living-dead operates primarily within the preserve of masculine power. Choosing this metaphor did not solve the duality of women’s position; it enabled women to enter the canonical literary space of the period, but could not save them from marginality on the home front, far from the line of fire. Nonetheless, women poets developed a strategy of turning being distant from the front from a weakness into a strength. Such a duality structures Edna Cornfeld’s book Eyes at Night (Eenayim baleylot). Her poem “Our Dead Knew No Hatred” (“Aval meteynu lo yadu sinaa”) uses humanistic language to depict the moral high ground of fallen Israeli soldiers: “The day will come. Loathing all around us. / But our dead knew no hatred.”154 The biblical Abel is resurrected and becomes an allegorical figure for a weak nation fighting for its freedom. The metaphor of the living-dead assumes its appropriate place at the end of the poem: Abel rises, truly alone, and he marches over the ashes of dreams. And stands with sword in hand, sorrow sanctifying his steps.155 153.  Dvorah Netzer, in Hannan Hever, “Gender, Body, and the National Subject,” trans. Bethlehem, 231–32; Dvorah Netzer, “Haimahot be oref,” in Im pa’amay hador, ed. Rachel Katz­enelson-Shazar (1948; Tel-Aviv: Histadrut, 1964), 1: 194–96. 154.  Edna Cornfeld, Eenayim baleylot (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1954), 41. 155.  Ibid.

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On the thematic level, however, a companion poem to “Our Dead” somewhat undermines this picture of a pure victim in an evil, hatefilled environment who must do battle against it. In the poem “Eve Mourns Her Sons” (“Chava mevaka et banea”),156 the speaker is Eve herself, the definitive biblical mother, who might be expected to be totally invested in the imperiled, weaker nation represented by her son Abel. In this poem, however, Eve’s pedagogical role as the mother of her murderous son Cain is emphasized. In contrast to the expected allegorical pairing of mother and nation, here the mother is situated above the national conflict. She awaits both children and elicits an admission of murder from Cain: And the silences stood tense as knives. The mother stood, awaiting her children, Eve stood at the side of the road And her eldest son approached her and spoke. And Eve said: Where is brother? And he said: I killed him.157

How do women poets cope with this kind of duality? What methods do they employ in order to participate in canonical nationalism on the one hand, while being marginalized and distant from it on the other? Ultimately, they offer their own ambivalent position. In order to understand their strategy, it is necessary to reexamine the metaphor of the living-dead from this point of view. A gendered reading of the metaphor reveals that its exclusion of women is not merely twofold, but tripartite. The first way that women are excluded from war poetry may be found in the fact that they cannot portray themselves with the metaphor of the living-dead soldier; they may not speak for this figure, not having been present at the battle front as fighters. There is an unbridgeable gap between the writers/speakers of the poems and the voice of the living-dead. The authoritative stance is reserved for the male combatant, the comrade at the front or some other man permitted to represent the war as if he had been there. If a woman does appear in such a narrative, she is marginalized in a second way. As she cannot be the figure of the living-dead himself, she 156.  “Chava mevaka et banea,” in ibid., 11–13. 157.  Edna Cornfeld, in Hever, “Gender, Body, and the National Subject,” trans. Bethlehem, 235; Cornfeld, Eenayim baleylot, 13.

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takes a subordinate role as wife, lover, or daughter. In Nathan Alterman’s Joy of the Poor, the love and devotion of the living-dead for the wife he married in his youth (called “my daughter” in the poem) receives sustenance from the fact that he is physically dead, which somehow increases his power and his desire for her. Their shared suffering and his death grant him the authority of a victim. His individual, physical death grants power and spiritual significance, by virtue of which he can reject the claim that “all is vanity” and establish that life does have value: Not all is vanity, my daughter, not all is vanity of vanities. I did break my covenant for money as well, I did waste my days in in vain. I followed you my daughter, as the neck follows the rope. ... And illness struck, my daughter, and poverty covered our face. And I called illness my home, and poverty our son. We were poorer than dogs, my daughter, and they ran away from us. And then the iron rose, my daughter, and struck my head from over you. And nothing is left, but my dust pursuing your shoes. Because the iron will break, my daughter, and my thirst for you will not. Power has no end, my daughter, only the body breaks like a shard. Happiness did not visit my home and earth already cradles me. But the day that my home rejoices my eyes will rejoice out of the land. A happy day will come, my daughter, we will have a share in it.

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And when you will fall prostrate on the land of my covenant they will lower you down to me with a rope. Not all is vanity, my daughter, not all is vanity of vanities.158

The couple’s shared joy will begin when the wife is lowered into her grave. As early as 1944, critic and labor activist Rachel KatzenelsonShazar pointed out the derivative role that Alterman granted to the wife, who is pushed to the edge of the nationalist arena in a symbolic process “in which fable and moral intertwine.” In a situation in which the personal love of a father is collectivized, the woman is integrated into the nation without being granted equal value: This father is not only the private father of an individual; he is the father of the collective, a kind of immortal father whose love will always exist. His image is automatically connected to the image of the mother, the wife he married in his youth, who embraces . . . the son who has escaped destruction. Is this any comfort for a persecuted and exterminated people—just a father’s love and a rescued cub. Is there any other hope in these poems?159

Women are distanced from the figure of the living-dead in a third way, when the physical function of birth is appropriated by men. The imagined national community returns the dead individual to life by absorbing him into the developmental process of the future nation. Individual death is canceled out by inclusion in national resurrection. Like religion, Benedict Anderson notes, nationalism is preoccupied with the connections between the dead and those who are not yet born, and with the mystery of rebirth: Who experiences their child’s conception and birth without dimly apprehending a combined connectedness, fortuity, and fatality in a language of “continuity”? . . . What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be “new” and “historical,” the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into 158.  Nathan Alterman, Simhat anieem (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1972), 151–52. 159.  Rachel Katzenelson-Shazar, “Shirey zmanenu,” Dvar Hapoelet, July 13, 1944.

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a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into necessity.160

Anderson shows that the nationalist narrative is a homogeneous, linear advancement through synchronic situations. The homogeneity and synchronicity of the nationalist narrative of time is, however, according to Homi Bhabha, a cover for the conflicted, heterogeneous narrative of diverse periods that do not coalesce.161 From this point of view, what Anderson defines as the homogeneous national narrative may be seen as suppressing alternative stories of ethnicity, class, and gender. In this way, the homogeneous national narrative of Hebrew literature uses the living-dead formula to suppress women’s stories about the nation that discuss it in terms of the power of motherhood. The nationalist story of rebirth, with its mythical warrior returned to life, is a hegemonic and masculine one which expropriates the power of birth from women and appropriates it by the homogeneous nationalist story. The representation of the nation in a story of the rebirth of a soldier who dies in combat attributes the power to grant life to the male body. The transition from a dead individual to a living national entity is limited to the male body. When representation is dominated by men, motherhood and direct participation in war are mutually exclusive options. “Girls,” Nancy Huston writes, “are taught . . . that only motherhood can make women of them; boys are taught . . . that only war can make men of them.”162 It is impossible to be and do both. If a woman becomes a combatant, like Joan of Arc, she must remain a virgin, or like the Amazons, abandon her children. The figure of the living-dead is supposed to mitigate the contradiction between the commitment to individual lives and the obligation to the collective, the nation. It does so by using an oxymoron to blur the borders between the world of the living and that of the dead. The living-dead metaphor rests on a decidedly masculine tradition in Judeo-Christian sources that includes the biblical Isaac, who is saved 160.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11–12. 161.  Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 157–61. 162.  Nancy Huston, “The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 132.

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from sacrifice at the last moment, and Jesus, who is crucified and resurrected. These male victims of sacrifice undergo a process of transcendence that removes the sting of physical, individual death and replaces it with lofty significance. A man is saved from death and undergoes a metamorphosis. He returns to life after death through a divine, metaphysical process, justified by religion or nationalism, in which one or the other of them grants legitimacy to death and sacrifice in war. The particular individual’s death has a metahistorical dimension; the concrete figure of the living-dead signifies the national collective. The poets of the 1948 Independence War who portrayed death-inlife in their work were using a mechanism of survival and redemption in which death is considered a matter of choice and the dead are resurrected. From the point of view of gender, the choice of redemption through death suits the nationalist-masculine need to cope with the fact of death. Netiva Ben Yehuda made note of this phenomenon in the ironically worded dedication to her book about the Independence War: “In honor of the people who ‘felt the need’ and ‘felt obliged,’ and ‘they who are with us’ and ‘they who will always be with us’ (those who were killed and are dead), and in honor of friends who ‘gave their all’ (those who were killed and remain alive), and to the glory of the state of Israel.”163 From her gendered position, Ben Yehuda exposed the ideological mechanism of the myth of the living-dead that metaphorically expropriates birth from women.

163.  Netiva Ben Yehuda, 1948—Bein hasefirot (Jerusalem: Keter, 1981), 37.

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C h a p t e r 37  Criticism of the Living-Dead

Metaphor

How did women poets position themselves in relation to the metaphor of the living-dead during this period, against the background of a culture of death, and in the face of the marginalization of women in war poetry? Writing about the Independence War, they took a bifurcated approach. On the one hand they were active in the canonical literary enterprise and portrayed the figure of the living-dead combatant in their work. On the other hand they criticized this figure and changed it, demanding what had been taken from them: birth. To this end they took a series of steps critical of hegemonic poetry, announcing and in effect joining a more general undermining of the authority of the metaphor of the living-dead.164 Women poets were not the only ones criticizing this myth, but their criticism was profoundly different from that of male poets. Men poets might use parody, concretizing the image, exposing it as only a metaphor, undermining its authority and pointing to the heavy emotional price involved in actualizing a metaphor or myth. This tactic also revealed the limits of metaphor when examined diachronically; the representation of the living-dead is not valid for the dead soldier since his story in fact ends when he dies. The soldier is really dead; there is no continuation in an alternative transcendental existence, as Gilboa showed in his poem “And My Brother Said Nothing.”165 Another example may be found in Yehuda Amichai’s well-known poem “Rain on the Battlefield”: Rain falls on the faces of my comrades; On the faces of my living comrades, who 164.  Hever, “Hai hahi vehmet ha met.” 165.  Amir Gilboa, “And My Brother Said Nothing,” trans. T. Carmi, in Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, 559; Gilboa, Shirim ba-boker ba-boker, 212.

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Cover their heads with a blanket— And on the faces of my dead comrades, who No longer cover.166

The poem, written close to the time of the Independence War, is dedicated to a friend of Amichai’s, identified only by a nickname, Dicky, who fell in battle. The memory is portrayed in the distinction between the living, who cover their heads against the rain, and the dead comrades, who can no longer do so. Amichai distinguishes between two axes of time: that of the living, which continues, and that of the dead, which is over. In this way the poem undermines the metaphor of the living-dead from within its own image system, and shows that it has lost its transcendent position. The transcendence of time is prominent in war poetry, and parodied in antimythic works that nonetheless do not exceed the rules of the masculine world in which women have no active role. In the poem in which Gilboa examines the relationship of life and death with regard to two brothers, the name of the dead brother’s lover, missing from the poem, is said to be written only on a postcard featuring a picture of poppies; these poppies allude to the red flowers in Haim Gouri’s “Here Lie Our Bodies,” and the Canadian John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields.” In Amichai’s poem the memory of the fallen is viewed in terms of the speaker’s relationship with his male friend. Even in poems written by men that are critical of the living-dead metaphor, the authority of the male combatant and his central place in poetry are not questioned. In contrast, women poets used a completely different strategy. While male poets were satisfied with protesting the purported temporal continuity between life and death, women poets moved from the axis of time to that of space, in particular the space of the body. In many cases it seemed that they were subverting not only both axes of time—that of the living soldier and that of the dead one— as well as the relations between them, but also the idea of the dead soldier as an intact physical entity. They did not accept this image but redrew it, breaking down the seemingly monolithic body into its constituent parts, with which they have an intimate relationship. 166.  Yehuda Amichai, “Rain on the Battlefield” (“Geshem bisde krav”), trans. Esther Raizen, in No Rattling of Sabers (Austin: University of Texas, 1995), 38; Amichai, Shirim, 1948–1962 (Jerusalem: Schocken Books, 1972), 21.

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The representation of war in women’s poetry of the Independence War is based on a two-part process: the first step is the familiar representation of the living-dead on the level of the national metaphor that is a part of hegemonic discourse, as in Esther Raab’s “Funeral”: All our dear dead: The living and the dead— Follow us in procession! And the echoes of their footsteps Are woven in the sound of our quivering paces.167

But the speaker in this poem protests her own marginalization in this arena. Her tense position as a woman writing in the language of the canon, yet at a distance from the center—a woman testifying about the events of the war but prevented from being considered a legitimate witness—leads her to a very special sort of poetics, to suggest an alternative representation of the living-dead in which the metaphor becomes a metonym. As a metaphor, the image of the living-dead links meanings that are distant from each other (as far as the living from the dead); Raab breaks the lofty metaphor down into familiar bodily parts. In the same poem she writes, A wizened hand sent— Like a sign hung above: And one vein, thin, red Like a startled chameleon Suddenly turned gray And slowly crawled into warm hiding-places—168

From the opening metaphor of the living-dead marching at a funeral, Raab moves toward the metonymy of human flesh itself. The movement toward flesh and the body contradicts the immortality of the living-dead in hegemonic verse. In Raab’s poem, she depicts the procession of the dead as heading, not toward a transcendental and sublime plane, but toward an existence as disassembled body parts. One hand, later reduced to one vein, changes suddenly from red to gray as

167.  Esther Raab, “Funeral” (“Levaya”), in Hever, “Gender, Body, and the National Subject,” trans. Bethlehem, 243; Raab, Kol hashirim (Tel-Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 1988), 99. 168.  Ibid.

Symbols of Death in the National War for Independence

a metonymic sign of the passage from life to death. And a similar process may be seen in Erella Or’s “Loss”: And a voice speaks From the dwellings of the past, And he sits, his whole being still alive, As in times past. The same hand, the same voice, The same light in his eyes. The same desire to love forever, And still to hear violins In their spilling forth like water.169

The hegemonic role of the metaphor, to strengthen the national subject by subordinating individual deaths to the spirit of nationalism, is confirmed. Yet at the same time, the uniqueness of the individual is portrayed in discrete human fragments: hand, voice, and eyes. In this way women poets produced normative war poetry and at the same time created a corner of their own, despite its location within the maledominant culture of war. Poet Batsheva Altshuler, who fell in battle, also situates herself within this dualistic space in her poem “He Was a Tank Soldier” (“Hu haya tankist”), dedicated “to the battle at Yehudiya, in memory of M.Z.”: Just one more remained Lying in the tunnel. This is a body fashioned in flesh. Someone among the blackened survivors had also bothered To remove his shoes, The blackened body, spotted with blood. Surrounding the speechless, no adornment of color Where is the gold of ears of corn? Where is the fire-gold of the fighters? From the tunnel,   He is the burnt offering, A bloody moan of grief.

169.  Erella Or, “Loss,” in Hever, “Gender, Body, and the National Subject,” 243; Erella Or, “Ba-ovdan,” in Min he-afer (Tel-Aviv: Mahbarot Lesifrut, 1975), 29.

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He fell there among the fallen And he was a tank soldier.170

In her 1948 poem “My City Jerusalem” (“Yerushalaym iri”), Miriam Yalan-Shteklis attributes the metonymic representation of the fallen and wounded soldiers to the city of Jerusalem itself, wounded as well, and dripping blood: I heard your voice in the dead of night— wounded lioness roaring to avenge the death of her cubs.171

In place of injured soldiers, the city itself is wounded. Those who fall in war are described euphemistically as “cubs.” And Jerusalem, in addition to being portrayed in the metaphor of a wounded, roaring lioness, is also “queen of the desert wallowing in blood.” But just when the narrative of the poem seems to be distancing itself from the original metaphor, the city’s/lion’s roar is said to respond, and a metaphorical dialogue develops between the roar via metonymy. The fighters who answer the city’s metaphorical roar are represented as “a multitude of mouths of steel”—part body, part weapon. This metonymy reduces the killed or wounded soldiers to one particular body part— mouths—while enfolding them within the metaphorical process and the norms of nationalist war poetry, appropriating them for the good of the metaphorical Jerusalem. A particularly instructive example of such dualism may be found in Haya Vered’s “Zero Hour” (“Shat haefes”), a parody of Nathan Alterman’s “Silver Platter” (“Magash hakesef”). Vered’s poem is structured as a nationalist anthem, like the famous “Silver Platter,” but nonetheless succeeds in upsetting its mythic validity. Vered criticizes the myth of the living-dead by scornfully concretizing and actualizing the metaphor: You, blood stain of land on the map, tired you, immersed in soot and ashes, forever a small piece of land. 170.  Batsheva Altshuler, “He Served in the Tank Division,” in Hever, “Gender, Body, and the National Subject,” 244–45; Altshuler, “Hu haya tankist,” Yom yarok (Tel-Aviv: Mahbarot Lesifrut, 1949), 35. 171.  Miriam Yalan-Shteklis, Haim u-milim (Jerusalem: Kiryat Hasefer, 1978), 189.

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And the monuments are witnesses at every junction and at the roadsides, and far, far from the roads. ... The living diligently eat and drink, taking wives and making babies. Time runs out of hands through greedy fingers, and they won’t want to know that a heartbeat must be dug out of the ground counting time in split seconds, and remember, remember the zero hour. The dead. Why did you die? Why didn’t you die alone, you, only you?172

This concretization does not stop at the borders of the individual subject, but continues and dismantles people into physical parts. The living-dead and the symbol of the silver platter undergo a process of fragmentation: The love on whose dead fingertips the silver platter is borne, the people’s silver platter: An open gate to our own blue sea. And brothers tens of thousands like a raging sea: Yemenite ear locks, the graceful modesty of those from the Indian shore, the fiery eyes of the Jews of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, the fiery brand on the arm of the Jews of Lithuanian, Holland and Poland, tens of thousands! A whole map of the world!173 172.  Haya Vered, “The Zero Hour” (“Shat haefes”), trans. Lisa Katz, in The Defiant Muse, ed. Shirley Kaufman, Gali Hasan-Rokem, and Tamar S. Hess (New York: Feminist Press / CUNY, 1999), 124–25. 173.  Ibid., 126–27.

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Two processes are combined: the living-dead is reduced to a cripple, and symbolic silver is transformed into real-world purchasing power: The silver platter: hearts like harp strings, warm feet caressing stone, cliff and thorny path. Youth generous, giving, wasting themselves ... Amputees stalk the streets, their eyes threaten clerks, the blind are awarded a dog. Seeing eyes see only silver, fingers dig only for silver, and on the silver platter: onions and garlic and pots of meat, and on the silver platter: Frigidaires, luxuries, decay and the corpse of conscience. And you, wounded five-year-old child, cry for a soul and a wind hits the sails.174

174.  Ibid., 127–29.

C h a p t e r 38  The Authority and Power

of Women

The dualistic nature of women’s writing about war is also evident in works by bereaved mothers who lost their sons, a popular rather than professional-literary genre that was widespread in the years following the Independence War. One noticeable element in this mode of writing is an intimate, unmediated connection between the mother and the body of her son, recalling the physical connection of the mother to the child in her womb. Artist Menachem Shemi’s Friends Talk About Jimmy (Haverim mesaprim al Jimmy), a memorial book for his son Aharon (Jimmy), is one of the most famous of such volumes in Israel’s well-developed culture of bereavement. In it, Jimmy’s mother Rivka writes: We were among those rare parents who were actually able to see their dead son in battle and accompany him on his final journey. The brigade sent for us. For Jimmy’s sake. . . . I came to [the nearby friendly Arab village of] Abu Ghosh. I removed the blanket from his pale, marble face. It was as beautiful and proud as that of a young eagle. As if he were proud of the death that he died. . . . But his half-open eyes had a frozen look under their long lashes, glancing inward at a terrible abyss . . . that was etched deeply into my memory; it accompanied and still accompanies me everywhere I go. The impression his face made upon me in Abu Ghosh displaced my memory of him for a long time, the image of him alive. I could not envision him whole. He appeared in my imagination limb by limb, in truncated movements, but not whole. His eyes and the smile on his lips floated in a murky space, disconnected from everything. Slowly time returned his living image to my memory, and sometimes I could sense him, the heat of his body when he sat next to me on the sofa, breathing near my hair;

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I was afraid to move and destroy the illusion; or he followed me in the street.175

After describing her son’s fragmented body, the mother returns to the metaphor; in order to demand renewed control over the representation of her fallen son’s body, she must recount the story of the living-dead. She, like male poets, transforms the dead individual into a living, national figure. But unlike those who are part of masculine hegemony, she tells the story in order to re-appropriate the dead individual for herself as a woman and a mother. She does so by reducing him to discrete physical elements, and only afterward reconstructing him. That is, she gives birth to him for a second time, symbolically, beyond the control of male power, as a living-dead individual, in a way that enables her to connect to the hegemonic image, but this time under her control: There are those who say, amputees say, that they sometimes feel their missing limb, a hand or leg, as if it were still there. The nerves that operated the missing limbs, and that still exist, create this illusion. Several nerve endings and fine capillaries are connected and link the mother to the son who is gone. When he is gone they are roused into action in order to resuscitate him, to give birth to him for a second time. And if it turns out that his death is final, he will only really cease to be when the mother dies. Only then will death come to both of them.176

Male writers seeking to undermine the metaphor of the living-dead and reformulate it may do so by concretizing it, without losing the masculine advantage of one who served at the front (or could have). Because of this actual, unmediated connection with death, a male writer may also cancel out the image’s mythological dimension, as Yehuda Amichai did in “Rain on the Battlefield.” The woman writer is faced with a different situation. As wife and mother, she cannot speak directly as an eyewitness, and her concretization of the representation of the living-dead cannot trace its authority to this source. She did not see the battle or the moment of death. But she can speak about the dead son as he looked when she identified him after his death, or as 175.  Haverim mesaprim al Jimmy (n.p.: n.p., 1952), 228–29. 176.  Ibid., 299.

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the publicist and a labor party leader Devorah Dayan (1890–1956) did, say how she guided the emissaries she sent in her place to look at the body of her son Zohar, nicknamed Zurik, who was also the brother of the Israeli politician and the Israeli army chief of staff Moshe Dayan: When they went to identify the body, I told them: “It isn’t hard to find identifying marks on [Zohar’s] body, scars . . . he has a big scar on his face as well.” He received them because he was daring and mischievous. Once he was badly injured in [an athletic] competition. I was very angry with him and said in rebuke, “Since you saw you could not clear the iron bar, why didn’t you step aside?” And the way he said with childish seriousness, “I couldn’t, I didn’t want to withdraw” was repeated many times in his short life, even when he knew he would not have the upper hand. “I couldn’t withdraw”—this is how he was until his final hour on Ramat Yochanan.177

Devorah Dayan becomes a kind of indirect eyewitness, through emissaries. She validates the male myth by directly quoting her son’s unwillingness to retreat. On the other hand, the mediation of others is what enables her to struggle with this myth and even overcome it. Her cultural connection with him takes place within the shared space of nationalist war, and her power is drawn—not from an impersonation of the male combatant but rather through her contact with him in the reconstruction of physical markings. In a memorial book for her son, Rafi Maletz, who died in the battle at Nebi Samuel on April 23, 1948, Yehudit Maletz (1901–72), the wife of the kibbutz writer David Maletz (1889–1981), takes a similar position: “My son fell at a distance and my hands did not succeed in touching him [while he was still alive]. But nonetheless I was awarded the right to touch the dead body of my son before his burial, to bend over it, to rinse it with tears.”178 Raya Golani, whose son Itamar Golani (1928–48) was killed in a parachuting accident, re-creates his death without having witnessed it. She retells the shocking incident by anchoring it in the biblical story of the binding of Isaac, alluding to the verse in Genesis of “the ram 177.  Devorah Dayan, Asaper (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1952), 256. 178.  Yehudit Maletz, “La-ben,” in Rafi Maletz, Beykod (n.p.: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1951), 191.

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caught in the thicket” who takes Isaac place as a sacrifice. But in doing so, she subordinates it to a representation of her son’s physical being: Hundreds and thousands witnessed the event. The parachute collided with an airplane. Those who saw it with their own eyes saw the efforts of the body hanging in air, thrown from side to side, trying to grab the edge of the plane. Twenty long minutes passed and my son fluttered from the tangled ropes between heaven and earth. What did he think about? Did he know it would be his end? Did the faces of those close and dear to him pass before his eyes? They were always raised to the skies. And how he loved the rebellious and stormy sea! And here the plane flew in space, my son caught in the thicket, struggling, with an abyss below. I fashioned this picture in my soul, sealed it within my heart.179

Golani ends her piece by emphasizing the act of representation. In this way she authorizes her control over the image of her son’s death, which she—who was not a witness to it and never saw her son’s body which was lost in the sea—creates for herself. Golani, Dayan, and Maletz do not merely look or desire to look at the dead son, but create its representation, emphasizing physical contact with his body. They dismantle his existence as soldier-subject, and produce the necessary elements for his reconstruction. The return to the stage before birth is a return to the place where the hegemony of men—lacking wombs— cannot appropriate the son for themselves. A woman’s path to the authority of the eyewitness is via the body of the fallen soldier. She cannot be present on the battlefield, so she draws her authority from his prior presence in the space of her body. In her poem, “In the Desert” (“Bamidbar”), Ella Amitan-Wilensky reconstructs the death of a soldier with poetic language that neutralizes the language of the battlefield and transforms it into a description of a body sinking into the desert sand: An anonymous soldier in a remote desert region. There raging winds blew: the desert closed off passage to the world, and the soldier lost all strength. 179.  Itamar Golani, Nefesh veh-tehom (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Kibbutz Afikim, 1950), 156.

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One more grope—he recovers, will fight a sea of sand— until the soldier falls—and does not rise. Only a monument in the desert will tell how he strove in the primeval sands, how he fought, simply a soldier.180

Amitan-Wilensky offers the metonymic experience of the fragmented body—in particular the fetal experience, enclosed in “primeval sands”—as a way to connect with the dead soldier and as a substitute for the experience of war. In “Prayer,” written in 1915 about World War I, and which appeared in a Hebrew anthology, Russian Poetry, published in Palestine in 1942, the Russian poet and journalist Maria Shkapskaya sharply dichotomizes the difference between a mother’s blood during childbirth and the blood of a son dying in the war, demanding that God put her out of her misery; the poet invokes the memory of the mother of Jesus and calls on God to preserve other mothers from her suffering or quickly take the lives of those who have lost their sons now stained with “a different blood.”181 Women’s war poetry replaced the cultural structure of the national war with the cultural structure of the human body. The mode of the body’s representation was at the earlier stage before the body’s entry into the national war discourse. Both men’s and women’s poetry allude to the bodies of dead soldiers, but one speaks from the national battlefield and the other from the domain of the body, returning it for a time to its birth. After the death of her son Zuzik (Nahum Hazaz, 1928–48), poet Yocheved Bat-Miriam wrote about this shift with great precision. Then the most senior woman poet writing in Hebrew in Palestine, she grappled with the conflict between her literary status and her role as a mother: Zuzik, If I could only burn everything I’ve ever written! If I could only erase my name from literature! . . . 180.  Amitan-Wilensky, Lach veh-lecha, 11. 181.  “Tefila,” in Leah Goldberg and Avraham Shlonsky, eds., Shirat Russia (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Haartzi/Hashomer Hatzair, 1942), 103.

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... Literature. The literature of ornaments on display, decorative words, flowery phrases, like make-up on an aging face, haggling among merchants—to whom are they selling it? Good lord, good lord. One offense brings on another—this writing too—is sinful, but since I cannot uproot my name I continue to write, to write to my son, my Zuzik—about Zuzik my son Zuzik, there is nothing greater than him, no truth without his truth, his justice and honesty— Zuzik He found on my desk a letter from the Writers Union asking me if I want to visit a soldier’s base—he read the letter and said: if you can go, go, because it’s very important, those fools send all kinds of lightweights to soldiers and don’t understand that the soldiers actually want the best. I told him: Zuzik, I am no longer Bat-Miriam, I am merely Zuzik’s mother.182

She included her poem: The flash of a dense flame, the smell of water and sand The smell of a human body become continent, The heavens, heavens covered with smoke like a plain, fatigued from trying to prevent being dried out. ... You will be a temple and its midnight prayers The destitute man waiting at its doors. The melody hidden in the secret-places of mirrors Suddenly appears like a face from the mirror. Until you are bent to dust, from loneliness and silence Like a fountain in the mountains of ice Pouring forth to bruise the earth The absence of your footsteps crosses the road.183

Immediately afterward she interprets the poem this way: The touching of his face: Even now the touch is like touching a chilled stone on the roadside. Piercing and mute is [the mother’s] 182.  Yocheved Bat-Miriam, in Nichtav be-Tashach, ed. A. B. Yaffe (Tel-Aviv: Reshafim, 1989), 28. 183.  In Hever, “Gender, Body, and the National Subject,” trans. Bethlehem, 250–51; BatMiriam, in Nichtav be-Tashach, ed. Yaffe, 30.

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scream from within, as if she were suspended on the edge of an abyss. Here, here, she [the mother or the stone] is about to slip and plunge—above her as if leaning over is the face of her son, Zuzik—his mouth open and his eyes screwed up, watching, seeing something from a distance—here is the smile—“So what was it you said?—a kind of seal to his thoughts. His voice—my son, my son—I tear out my eyes. This tearing out of eyes, as if trying to comprehend, to assimilate the fact that Zuzik is no more!—I am torn from my foothold as rock and I plunge into the abyss—my son— . . . My son, my son, Zuzik—this call goes unanswered—“Y-e-s”—This voice inside which is heard in its voicelessness—his face floats before my shut eyes until—until my voice becomes the voice of a woman in labor—I am wrenched in an agony of pain and grief—here, this is the stake-like focus of my pain. Death—in every breath of your breaths—the emptiness of oblivion and you woman get up, comb your hair, look in the mirror—far, far back there, behind the body of your son—your face floats. Bread and water in the mouth like the taste of ashes from his grave. Grave? Zuzik’s grave? And I, I am the grave, my son is entombed in me, and that is why I walk so, so slowly and moderately—like a mourner accompanying my own body in a funeral procession to the grave. You are my son Zuzik to the fullest extent of your being with me here, your face which first appeared at 4 a.m. in a Paris nursing home—you are Zuzik, Zuzik, my Zuzik to the fullest extent of silence and terror and sorrow—And my voice will not touch your head raised to throw the grenade—raised and fallen, eyes will not open to see your extinguished face, will not caress nor wipe away the blood, the blood of the wound—my son, my son: your night which you compressed for me in a letter, “The work is hard and tiring, food is insufficient and the night is cold.” My son! The sin, the transgression in this very cry, in my love for you which lay far away, impotent and blind— Cursed am I on the threshold of that night, I shall remain standing until darkness gathers me in. Mothers of the world, mothers, though your honesty and truth be diminished, may your sons magnify this hint, this intimation, seventysevenfold, seventy-sevenfold, until sparkling and radiant it dawns before you, hidden and secreted away until the end of time, the source of the legend, the root of all that is wonderful, of hope.

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Mothers, mothers of the world, be like a wall to shield and guard your children, for without them there is nothing—without them death stalks your cold and silent bodies.184

The vague symbolism of the poem is now revealed, in light of BatMiriam’s exegesis, as a code for direct representation, and the unmediated contact of the mother with the body of her dead son. Touch is represented as a substitute for the unbridgeable distance between the mother and the death of her son on the battlefront. Bat-Miriam’s interpretation is an attempt to control the meanings that will be attributed to the poem she wrote about her son; at its center lies a story linking his death with his birth.

184.  Ibid., 251–52; 30–32; emphasis in the original.

C h a p t e r 39  Popular Versus Canonical Mourning

Writings by bereaved mothers in memorial books for fallen sons became an established fixture in popular Hebrew culture in Israel. Their publication during the Independence War and soon after makes them a close relative of the poetry by women that appeared in high-culture venues at that time. In general it would seem that the more popular the genre, and the farther it strayed from the nationalist literary canon, the more politically subversive it became. In contrast, the more canonical the text, the closer it is to the collective representation of death that blurs the borders between life and death. Birth, which appears openly in popular texts by women, is treated figuratively in canonical works, where a collective death may be depicted as a collective birth. Zafrira Gar’s (Gerber) poem “Death” (“Mavet”) provides an example: Death is great and grave, death descends from the hills grant us a small quiet corner let us rest and breathe. Death descends from the hills we’ll sit on gray stubble let us dream of field and forest and we’ll gallop on horses. Great death descends from above our lives saturate the soil tools and streams in its embrace great death over the hills. Let us all die together and not hunched in a ditch

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we will die fearless because for us this is just the beginning. Death is great—we are small call us aloud—we will answer.185

The popular genre of memorial literature by mothers reveals the public side of bereavement, while canonical literature represents it as a sequestered experience. The bereaved mother brings private and intimate moments into the public domain, thereby turning her private mourning into an experience rife with contradictions: private and public; internal and external; the individual mobilized in the service of the nation. Bereaved mothers navigated among these diametrically opposed regions, sometimes constructing an entirely public space that nonetheless contained the sheltered intimacy of the womb. In the popular memorial books, women re-appropriated birth within a larger obligation to the public aspect of the process. Devorah Dayan writes with the authority of a mother who has been intimately familiar with the body of her combatant son since his infancy. But when it comes to the image of the living-dead, just as in Alterman’s popular and theatrical “Silver Platter,” the bereaved mother makes the small, intimate situation public. In this way the marginal authority of a mother in fact becomes a position of power. The public exposure of private matters leads to a kind of imagery in which the writer’s control over her work is emphasized. She not only provides imagery but also publically announces her creative role in the development of this imagery. In this sense, Devorah Dayan’s writing, which undermines the hegemonic image of the living-dead, is like that of Rivka Shemi, Jimmy’s mother, who accepts it. The dead son does not appear as a natural metaphor to be taken for granted, but as an invented strategy, clearly their own creation and handiwork. The metaphor of the living-dead is an artificial product established and controlled by the mother, who determines its borders, and so, as Jimmy’s mother writes, “he will only really cease to be when the mother dies.”

185.  Zafrira Gar, “Mavet,” in Nichtav be-Tashach, ed. Yaffe, 351–52.

C h a p t e r 4 0  The Secrets and Power of Women

The differences between popular and canonical women’s writing express the internal contradictions of women’s discourse during war. In popular works, the writer draws her strength from the public domain. In contrast, in canonical poetry, in which strength is derived from the re-appropriation of the birth process, the writer adheres to a more private figurative language, and the development of power is hidden. In this poetry, the metaphor of the living-dead is also revealed as a function of the mother’s action. She creates it and its existence will end with hers. And she accumulates power as well by the revelation of what has been hidden. Mourning, however, gathers force behind an intense curtain of language. In Fania Bergstein’s “My Sister,” published at the height of the Independence War, a secret becomes a linguistic symbol: 1. My good sister, you walk toward the light, my beloved sister, your steps are a psalm. You strike sparks from black mourning, and unfettered face the day. My only sister, how good to walk with you, sheltered in your shade.

2. Farewell my sister! I hear your voice. You spoke and your greetings arrive. And I won’t ask if you knew that I listened to your voice with all my might.

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For with every letter you pronounced, you answered without even being asked. It’s a secret, my sister, between us two, a very hidden secret between us. And if you can’t guess, it’s enough for me to know.186

The secret of women is the power shared by the sisters in the poem, and by all women. It is the location where they are powerful despite the fact that they are not present on battlefields and may merely mourn, and this power in effect grants them a degree of freedom. The process women undergo in accumulating power in the private arena of mourning and which is later brought to light and becomes a public matter may be found in Anda Amir-Pinkerfeld’s long poem One. The mother Ada laments the loss of her daughter Rachel, who fell in the battle for Jerusalem. The fact that Rachel was as a combatant does not affect her inferior position as a woman in the masculine discourse of war. At the end of the poem, the mother and daughter come to embody the heroic Zionist epic of resurrection in general, and of the Independence War in particular—an epic of heroic women whose strength stems from the way they cope with mourning over the fallen, and from the shared secret that unites them. The mother’s grief over her daughter’s death is depicted as intensely private as well as rare: She didn’t cry.     Hardened, locked in her desolate room. Only sometimes her voice is heard: “My girl, what have you done? What have you done to me, my daughter?” And it seems that sometimes she bangs her head against the wall.   Even Sarah Did not dare to tear apart the borders of her grief, to break the restrictions of her confinement. The grief of all griefs, there is no grief like Ada’s. She is extinct together with Rachel, uprooted, lost in her loss.

186.  Fania Bergstein, “Ahoti,” Dvar Hapoelet 14, no. 6 (July 12, 1948).

Symbols of Death in the National War for Independence

She doesn’t hear her loved ones, and consolers leave empty-handed. No compassionate glance penetrates the barrier of silence.187

But the bereaved mother’s seclusion from the world is revealed as a reentry point to the public space of the military commanded by men. Mourning is transferred to the public arena: When her “sons”—fighters of the outpost—returned to her as if to a mother; Standing broad, long-haired and with mustaches, she saw them. ... And one of them in his bear’s voice Said, “We have come to call you: Come home, many are awaiting you. The post is cold without you, come—Mother—to your sons” ... Then and only then did the weeping of horror burst and spill from within her And all wept in response, they did not stop their tears, they tore the silence, And cried thus for a long time until tears subsided and were stilled. And Ada, calmer now, said, “I will return in a mere matter of days.”188

Coping with mourning is a stage in the establishment of a national symbol that combines mother, daughter, and all women. Their shared public existence is what allows them to organically integrate the very earth of Israel into the national symbol of unity, of the titular “One.” At the end of the poem the mother returns to her daughter’s writings and in this way brings her back to life. Rachel is turned into a female image of the living-dead by her mother, who fulfills, along with the men, the nationalist role of rebirth: For it has surely not been in vain. In every corner of the land, The lives of Rachel and Gad and of the other young women and men are blooming and bearing fruit And the mother will pace out her steps, collecting Rachel from pathways, 187.  Adapted from Hever, “Gender, Body, and the National Subject,” trans. Bethlehem, 255; Amir-Pinkerfeld, Ahat, 201. 188.  Ibid., 255–56; 201–2.

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Glorifying her life, enriching the paths with life. And you must understand No more Rachels will be snuffed out For this land, the mother and the daughter are One.189

The joint presence of the two women is the source of power. But this power is hidden because it is likely to be the power of someone who is not present on the battlefield, and because mourning is a force that is usually concealed in private spaces. The woman who loses from the start in the battle over language—the living-dead as metaphor—is victorious when it comes to language of the body, in her contact with the bodily subject and the network of physical signs woven around it. By means of physical contact, which is almost nonexistent for the male fighter-subject, she creates an authority stemming from contact with the flesh, unique to the mother. In contrast with the nature of women’s contact with the flesh of their children, a secret and private power, men create war. By this contact with death, with the taking of life, the male poet creates the image of the male fighter and the dead person who is reborn as a substitute for the female life-giving contact of womb with fetus. The second and essential stage in women accumulating power, however, is making the secret public. After the death of an individual soldier, who in some sense remains fetal in relation to the mother, the body is displayed in public: rows and rows of the fallen on display, as at the beginning of Amir-Pinkerfeld’s poem. And so it happens that the location and role apportioned to a woman’s body by masculine culture—as a powerless object—is overturned. Now the mother is the one who gazes and has the power in her hands. She is the one who arranges the rows of bodies, in public in front of everyone, in the public expanse; she makes the most private and ineffable thing public: her direct contact with the flesh that once lay within her. In this way she accomplishes what is usually forbidden to her; she rebuilds what culture has disassembled—the private (in both meanings: her uniqueness, her physical insides) with its public representation: now that the son or daughter is dead, it is permissible to represent them. This is the source of her power and the secret shared by her with the mothers of 189.  Ibid., 256; 204.

Symbols of Death in the National War for Independence

other soldiers. This is the source of her power to create an image that the man who has been on the battlefield cannot: she makes public the contact with flesh at the heart of a mother’s existence. In the end, this is all that remains in the nationalist discourse in Hebrew literature in Palestine to guarantee the participation of women. The representation of women’s experience in the Independence War was written within the framework of a highly developed and sophisticated Jewish nationalist discourse. The way women moved away from the language of the battlefield toward that of the body put them on a subversive track that enabled them to make their voices heard. But at the same time it also left intact other identities, such as ethnicity, which the Hebrew canon scrupulously avoided. Feminizing death, addressing the body, and marking the obvious physical presence of the body and of death: all of these constitute part of a rich strategy of subversion of masculine nationalist hegemony. At the same time they represent universal values and do no injury to the idea of the sacredness of war. On the contrary, they bring about a nationalization of femininity and teach women to come to terms with sacrifice, and in doing so fulfill their role in the masculine, nationalist arena during a time of emergency.

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Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s has aimed to create a genealogy of Hebrew poetry written in Eretz-Israel between the beginning of World War II in 1939 and the War of Independence in 1948. The main focus of the book is the struggle of the poets of the Hebrew symbolist school in Eretz-Israel to represent the violence perpetrated by and against Jews in the wars. The prevailing aesthetic and ideological approaches of Hebrew symbolism transform during the war into a national poetical commitment, favoring the national symbol of the living-dead as a discursive tool. Violence thus dealt has been dealt through its sublimation and transcendence. The very act of perpetrating violence is always in need of some justification. In the case of the 1940s, the justification was produced as a response to the urgent Jewish national need, which reached its peak with the publication of Nathan Alterman’s Joy of the Poor, in 1941. Suddenly, the Sight of War presents an analysis of poems about the Holocaust written by women symbolists such as Leah Goldberg and Yocheved Bat-Miriam, and reveals their subversive, gendered perspective, which undermined the national narrative constructed by the Hebrew symbolist school male poets. Toward the end of the book the response of Hebrew women poets to the 1948 war is discussed. Their complex critical stance put in the focus of their poetry the perished human body as an alternative to the abstract transcendent concept of the fallen soldier. An important theme of the book is the surprising manner in which Nathan Alterman, then the leading poet in Hebrew poetry, dealt with the Holocaust in his book The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt (1944). The fact that Alterman fully internalized the annihilation of the Jew-

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ish people made him dramatically change the national function of his poetry and thus its patterns of poetic representation: the hegemonic national symbol of collective redemption was transformed into an allegorical mode that expressed ruin, destruction, and a lack of national hope, which enabled Alterman to portray the Egyptians in his book as victims. Immediately after World War II, Alterman returned to the nationalist mode of hopefulness and belief in redemption, as his poems expressed the national struggle leading to the War of Independence, and the war itself. The poetry of the next generation of poets, Haim Gouri’s for example, followed in Alterman’s footsteps and returned to the national symbolic figure of the living-dead while sublimating war and violence. Nevertheless, countering mainstream poetics, another prominent poet, Amir Gilboa, undermined this living-dead symbolic figure by avoiding its consoling transcendentalism. This was Hebrew poetry’s long, tough journey during the horrible days the Jewish people went through during the 1940s in Europe and Palestine. But what is absolutely clear is that along this journey Hebrew poetry revealed profound sensitivity to the complex response of the literary form to its brutal historical contexts.

Index

Abel, 189, 230, 231 Abraham, 164, 165 Adan, Avraham “Bren,” 210 Aesop’s Fables, 93 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef, 2 Ahdut Ha-avoda-Poalay Tzion, 205 Akhmatova, Anna: “July 1914” (“Yulee 1914”), 224 Al ha-Mishmar, 65 allegory: in Alterman’s Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, 97–102, 105–6, 121, 126, 130, 132, 133, 136–37, 149; in Alterman’s “Summer Quarrel,” 140, 142–43; vs. symbol, 92–96, 93–102, 103–4, 105–7, 114, 119–20, 126, 130, 134, 136, 140, 144, 151; and time, 151 Alon, Yigal, 219 Alpayim, 79 Alterman, Nathan, 65, 169, 174, 201; allegory in works of, 92–93, 97–102, 105–6, 121, 126, 130, 132, 133, 136–37, 140, 142–43, 144, 149; “Archimedes’ Principle” (“Nekudat Archimedes”), 78, 106–7; on BatMiriam, 147, 154; vs. Bat-Miriam, 148, 149, 151; “Beyond the Melody” (“Meever lamangina”), 14–16; “The Boy Avram” (“Hayeled avram”), 164; “The Cabin” (“Habikta”), 24–25; “Don’t Give Them Guns” (“Al titnu lahem rovim”), 17; “The

Face of the Uprising and Its Times” (“Pney hamered uzmano”), 111; and figure of the living-dead, 40–43, 48, 58–59, 79, 98–99, 100–101, 114, 125, 129–30, 175, 192, 232–33; vs. Gilboa, 66, 70, 71, 72, 191, 192; on Goldberg, 19–21; vs. Greenberg, 14, 16, 71; and the Holocaust, 7, 75–77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 87, 88, 90–91, 100, 102, 106, 108–9, 110–11, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 141, 145, 164, 259–60; and Jewish identity, 139–40; on Jews as chosen people, 104–5; on Judenrat, 110–11, 112, 145; “The Lamb from the Haggadah” (“Hagdi meen haagada”), 107; “Last Kindness” (“Hesed acharon”), 163; and ­Mahbarot Lesifrut, 19; “Memorial Day and the Rebels” (“Yom hazikaron vehamordim”), 110–11, 112; and messianic feeling, 13, 14–15, 16, 70, 71, 79; “Moments” (“Regaim”), 39; “Mother, May We Cry Now?” (“Ima, kvar mutar livkot?”), 163–64; and musicality, 15, 16, 71, 172–73; and nationalism, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 40–42, 70–71, 78–79, 88–90, 91, 97, 99, 104–5, 106, 107–9, 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, 130, 139–43, 144–45, 163– 64, 233, 259–60; “Of All Nations” (“Mikol heamim”), 78, 104–5; “On

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Index the Incomprehensible in Poetry” (“Al habilti muvan bashira”), 11; “Opening” (“Pticha”), 37–38, 39; “Overnight” (“Leil hanaya”), 1; “Passover of Exiles” (“Pesach shel galuiot”), 112–13; on poetics of ambiguity, 11; on revenge, 44–46, 75–77, 115–16, 118, 119–20, 121, 124, 126, 129–30, 163–64; “The Secret of Quotation Marks” (“Sod hamerchaot hakfulut”), 11–14, 66, 70; “Seventh Column” (“Hatur hashvee”) in Davar, 39–40, 78, 163, 204; “Silver Platter” (“Magash hakesef”), 175, 240, 252; “Song of Four Brothers” (“Shir arba’a ahim”), 22, 24, 37–38; “So Said the Sword of the Besieged,” 101; Stars Outside (Kochavim bahutz), 6, 14–16, 39, 78; “Summer Quarrel” (“Merivat kaitz”), 90, 138–45; symbolism of, 5, 7, 8, 11–14, 16, 17, 19–21, 58, 59, 62, 66, 70, 71, 92–93, 95–96, 97–102, 103, 105, 114, 146, 149, 164, 171, 200, 214; “The Tune You Abandoned in Vain Returns” (“Od hozer hanigun shezanchta lashave”), 16; on victimhood, 123–24, 128–29, 260; on war poetry, 19–20; as war reporter, 193, 194; and women, 58–59; and Zionism, 7, 12, 70, 86–91, 106, 108, 130, 139, 145, 164 Alterman’s Joy of the Poor (Simhat annieem), 39, 83, 90, 112, 259; “The City Falls,” 40–41; figure of the living dead in, 40–43, 58–59, 98–99, 100–101, 114, 175, 192, 232–33; “Prayer for Revenge” (“Tfilat nakam”), 44–46, 78–80, 129, 165– 66; revenge in, 119, 121; symbolism in, 97–101, 104, 105, 149 Alterman’s Poems of the Plagues of Egypt (Shirey makot Mitzraim), 7,

80, 110, 112, 114–18, 145, 163, 164; allegory in, 92–93, 97–102, 105–6, 121, 126, 130, 132, 133, 136–37, 149; “Blood,” 120–21, 130–32; “Boils,” 123; chaos vs. iron laws in, 124–25; and cycle of crime and punishment, 123–33, 136; death of the firstborn child in, 125–26; “Doe,” 134–37; first vs final version, 115–16, 117–18, 120–22, 124; “Hail,” 124–25; hope and redemption in, 133, 134–37; “Lice,” 121–22; literary critics on, 81–85, 86–91, 92, 95–96, 97, 99–100, 103–4, 106, 107–8, 124; revenge in, 75–77, 115–16, 118, 119–20, 124, 126; vs. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, 132–33 Althusser, Louis: on interpellation, 164 Altshuler, Batsheva, 223–24; “He Was a Tank Soldier” (“Hu haya tankist”), 239–40 Amichai, Yehuda, 8; “Rain on the Battlefield” (“Geshem bisde krav”), 236–37, 244 Amir-Pinkerfeld, Anda, 225; “In the Army” (“Batzava”), 226; One (Ahat), 222, 254–56 Amit, Yaakov, 19 Amitan-Wilensky, Ella, 223, 225; “In the Desert” (“Bamidbar”), 246–47 Anderson, Benedict: on dead soldiers and nationalism, 176–77; Imagined Communities, 26n; on nationalist narrative as homogeneous, 233–34 Arab Revolt of 1936, 4, 6 Areidi, Naim, 31 avant-garde, the, 3, 33, 171 Avidan, Shimon, 219 Avinoam, Reuven, 225 Avnery, Uri: 1948, A Soldier’s Tale (Bisdot pleshet 1948), 194, 205; and nationalism, 212–13; as war reporter, 194, 205, 209, 212–13, 214, 218, 219

Index Ba-mahane (In the Army Camp), 205, 225 Barash, Asher, 32–34, 35 Bar Kochba, Simon, 167 Bar-Lev, Haim “Kidony,” 210 Barzel, Hillel, 81 Ba-sha’ar (At the Gate), 205–6 Bat-Miriam, Yocheved, 225; vs. Alterman, 148, 149, 151; Alterman on, 147, 154; “David’s Verse” (“Psuko shel David”)/Ghetto Poems, 149–50, 160; “At the Edge of Days” (“Beshuley hayamim”), 22; Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel), 147, 148; and gender, 155–60; and the Holocaust, 8, 146, 148, 149–50, 151, 157, 159, 160, 259; “Miriam,” 154; and music, 146, 147; “My People and Them” (“Ami vahem”), 26–27, 28; and nationalism, 26–27, 147–49, 150–51, 152, 154, 155–56, 158, 159–60; 1943—Ghetto Poems (1943—Shirim laghetto), 146, 149–50, 151–54, 155–60; and Russian Poetry (Shirat Russia), 147–48; and space, 151–54, 155, 156–59; symbolism of, 5, 146–54, 155, 156–57; and time, 151–52, 155–56, 157; and Zionism, 147, 148, 150; on Zuzik (son), 247–50 Batya, 100 Ben-Gurion, David, 207, 208–9, 213, 219 Ben-Halafta, Shimon, 134 Benjamin, Walter: on allegory, 105–6, 151; on symbolism, 16, 105–6, 151; on time, 151 Ben Yehuda, Netiva, 228, 235 Ben-Yitzhak, Avraham, 23 Bergman, Menachem, 46–47 Bergstein, Fania, 223, 225; “My Sister,” 253–54 Bermuda Conference, 104 Bhabha, Homi, 234 Bialik, H. N., 2, 5, 33

“Black Saturday” (June 29, 1946), 214 Bogikovsky, Tuvia, 111 Brenner, Yosef Haim, 2 British Mandate, 3, 6, 46, 167, 170, 213, 228 Cain, 189, 231 Chatterjee, Partha, 150 Chibbat Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) poetry, 1–2 A Chronicle of Poems (Shirey hayamim), 167–69 Cnaani, David, 84, 97, 111–12 Convoy of Thirty-five, 176, 222 Cornfeld, Edna, 224, 225; “Eve Mourns Her Sons” (“Chava mevaka et banea”), 231; “Our Dead Knew No Hatred” (“Aval meteynu lo yadu sinaa”), 230–31 Crane, Stephen: Red Badge of C ­ ourage, 227 Daniel 11:31, 179 Davar, 39, 65, 78, 112, 163, 204 David: and Batsheva, 149–50, 160; and Goliath, 167 Dayan, Devorah, 245, 246, 252 Dayan, Moshe, 245 death: figure of the living-dead, 40–43, 44–46, 48, 58–61, 79, 98–99, 100– 101, 114, 125, 129–30, 175–77, 188–92, 200, 202, 217, 218, 230–35, 236–42, 244, 252, 253, 259, 260; Freud on choice and death, 42–43; Goldberg on, 22–23, 49, 56; vs. murder, 49; self-sacrifice, 40–42, 59, 164–65, 176–77, 226, 234–35; and symbolism, 5, 37–40, 147–49; as universal, 5, 24–25, 129, 190; violence leading to death, 6, 19, 23, 37, 39; war dead as flesh and blood, 222–24 de Man, Paul, 94–95 Deuteronomy: 6:4–-9, 56; 11:13–-21, 56

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Index Diaspora, 30, 46, 47, 90, 112, 141–42, 145, 154–55 Ditzani, Rami, 227 Dubenbaum, Gershon “Debambam,” 218 Dvar Hapoelet, 225 Eliaz, Rephael, 5, 18, 22, 171; “Allegory” (“Alegoria”), 107; “Harvest in the Valley,” 173 Eretz-Israel (“The Land of Israel”), 2, 3, 4, 7, 13, 140, 154–55, 259 Eve, 228 Exodus, book of, 75–77, 86, 90, 100, 123, 130, 131; 29:38, 179. See also Alterman’s Poems of the Plagues of Egypt (Shirey makot Mitzraim) expressionism: of Gilboa, 62–63, 67–68, 70, 178, 182; of Greenberg, 3–4, 178, 181 Eztel group, 203, 212 Fallen Leaves (Aley taraf ), 165–67 fascism, 4, 14, 16, 62, 71 First Aliyah, 2 For the Defender, 225 Foucault, Michel, 28 Fourth Aliyah (1924–31), 3, 4 French symbolism, 11 Freud, Sigmund: on death and choice, 42–43; on King Lear, 42–43; on Merchant of Venice, 42 Galai, Binyamin, 62, 170; on Jezreel Valley, 171; “Polka,” 171–72 Galili, Israel, 207–8, 213 Gar, Zafrira (Gerber), 224, 225; “Death” (“Mavet”), 251–52 gender: and Bat-Miriam, 155–60; battlefront vs. home front regarding, 54, 226–28, 229–30, 244–45; male hegemony, 54, 160, 227, 244, 246, 257; and metaphor of the liv-

ing dead, 230–35, 236–42, 244–45; motherhood, 46–47, 56, 105, 158, 229–30, 231, 233, 234, 235, 236, 243–46, 247–48, 252, 253, 254–57; and nationalism, 54, 155–60, 225–28, 231–35, 233, 234, 255–56, 257; secrets and power of women, 253–57 genealogy vs. history, 28–30, 88–89 Genesis: 2:21–-22, 143; 4:10, 189 Gertz, Nurit, 195, 210 Gilad, Zrubavel: Flowering Pines (­Prihat ha-oranim), 194; “Horev,” 198; on Jewish heroism, 165–66; Palmach Chapters (Pirkey Palmach), 207–8; as war reporter, 193, 194, 197, 198; “The Way to Horev,” 198 Gilboa, Amir, 8, 62–72, 221; vs. Alterman, 66, 70, 71, 72, 191, 192; “­Ancient War” (“Milhama atika”) cycle of poems, 190–91; “And My Brother Said Nothing,” 188–90, 236; “Battle’s End,” 178–79; “Begetters of Light” (“Molidey haor”), 179–85, 186; “The Book of the Perpetual Day” (“Sefer yom hatamid”), 179; “The Boy Poet,” 63, 64–65; Early Morning Poems (Shirim ba-boker ba-boker), 188–90, 236; “End of Days” (“Ketz hayamim”), 190, 191; “Evening Breeze,” 67; expressionism of, 62–63, 67–68, 70, 178, 182; and figure of the living-dead, 188–92, 236, 260; “For Then I Will Cry Out” (“Veaz etzak”), 62; For the Sign (Laot), 72; vs. Greenberg, 62–63, 65, 66–68, 178, 181, 184, 187; “Isaac” (“Yitzhak”), 191; “Kingdom of Silence” (“Malchut hadmama”), 192; “A Let’s Settle an Accounting Poem,” 188; “Memory of the Good” (“Zikaron hatov”), 68–70; and messianic feeling, 71–72; and music, 67; and nationalism, 65,

Index 66–67; “Night of the Nation,” 183, 184; “On Style” (“Al signon”), 191; “On [the Jewish holiday of] Simhat Torah,” 65–66; “A Prayer for Isaac” (“Siah le-Yitzhak”), 191; on redemption, 179–80, 181–82, 184, 185, 186, 187; “Return of the Brother,” 185–86; “Seeds of Lead,” 190; Seven Domains (Sheva rashuyot), 178, 179–86, 188; vs. Shlonsky, 62–64, 65, 178–79, 181, 184, 187; “The Sign to Come,” 66; symbolism of, 63, 64–65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71–72, 178, 179–85; “Time’s Revenge” (“Nakam hashaot”), 71–72; “To the Primeval” (“El kadmon”), 68; on victimhood, 179–85, 191; and violence, 71–72 Girard, René, 127–28, 132–33 Givati division, 218, 219 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 94, 116 Golani, Itamar, 245 Golani, Raya, 245–46 Goldberg, Leah: “And will days ever come,” 55–56, 61; “Broad and golden the field in front of me” (“Zahov verahav hasade lefithee”), 56–57; on death, 22–23, 49, 56; “Ending” (“Siyum”), 51; and figure of the living-dead, 48, 60; From My Old Home (Me-beiti ha-yashan), 48; The Green-Eyed Stalk (Shibolet yerukat ha-ayn), 48, 49–50; “In the Evenings” (“Balaylot”), 51; on love and poetry, 60; “Melody” (“Nigun”), 52; and music, 50–53, 60, 61; “On Reading Stones of Chaos” (“Lemikra Avney bohu”), 55, 61; “On the Flowering” (“Al hapricha”), 22–24, 27; “On the Matter,” 17–18, 19–21; “Recently,” 52; relationships with Ben-Yitzak, 23; and Russian Poetry (Shirat Russia), 35–36, 224; Smoke Rings (Tabaot

ashan), 33; Songs in the Villages (Shir bah-kfarim), 48, 52–53; symbolism of, 5, 7, 17–18, 19, 20, 22–24, 48–51, 54, 55, 57, 59–60, 61, 146, 259; “Three Sons” (“­Shlosha banim”), 52–53; “To a City” (“Leahat hearim”), 57, 61; on war poetry, 17–18, 19–21, 48, 57, 60, 61, 225; as woman poet, 54–57, 58–61; “The world is heavy on our eyelids,” 49–51, 60; “Yekitza,” 51 Gordon, Judah Leib: “Between the Lion’s Teeth” (“Bein shiney arayot”), 1 Gouri, Haim, 201; “Betrothal” (“­Klulot”), 203; “Facing God’s Mountain” (“Mul har haeloim”), 211; and figure of the living dead, 200; “The Flag Shot Through with Holes” (“Hadegel nekuv hakadurim”), 217; Flowers of Fire (Pirhey esh), 217; “Here Lie Our Bodies” (“Hine mutalot gufoteynu”), 176, 237; “The Journey to God’s Mountain” (“Hamasa lehar haeloim”), 196, 198, 211–12; “Meeting at a Curve in the Road” (“­Hapegisha beekul haderech”), 202–3; “The Sudanese Outpost” (“Mishlat hasudanim”), 216–17; symbolism of, 170, 200, 217–18, 260; Until Dawn (Ad alot ­hashahar), 194, 196, 198, 211–12, 216–17; as war reporter, 193, 194, 203, 209, 211–12, 213, 217 Govrin, Nurit, 92 Gramsci, Antonio, 208 Greenberg, Uri Zvi: vs. Alterman, 14, 16, 71; Anakreon on the Pole of Sadness (Anakreon al kotev ha-izavon), 3; Book of Denunciation and Faith (Sefer ha-kitrug ve-haemuna), 4, 14, 62, 65, 66; expressionism of, 3–4, 178, 181; and fascism, 4, 14, 16, 62,

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Index 71; vs. Gilboa, 62–63, 65, 66–68, 178, 181, 184, 187; A Great Fear and the Moon (Eima gedola veyareach), 67; and Holocaust, 4; “I’ll Speak into the Ears of a Child” (“Beozney yeled asaper”), 66–67; as immigrant, 3; as modernist, 3–4; political messianism of, 16, 65, 66–67, 71; “Remembering Souls,” 3; as soldier, 3; Streets of the River (Rehovot ­ha-nahar), 4; Zone of Defense and Address of the Son-of-Blood (Ezor magen u-neum ben ha-dam), 4 Gurfein, Rivka, 95 Gush Etzion, 176, 222 Haaretz, 39, 78, 104 Hakibbutz Haartzi, 17, 18–19, 35, 36, 205 Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 154, 205 Halevi, Yehuda, 165 Halevi, Yosef, 34 Hameiri, Avigdor: The Great Madness, 3; as modernist, 3–4; as soldier, 3 Hanagid, Shmuel (Samuel ibn Naghrillah), 1 Hanegbi, David, 200–201 Haolam Hazeh (This World), 194 Hashomer Hatzair, 6, 18–19, 35, 36, 205 Hashomer Hatzair, 17–18, 62 Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party, 19 Hazaz, Nahum “Zuzik,” 247–50 Hebrew Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) period, 1 Hebrew language, 30–31, 33–34 Hefer, Haim (Feiner), 216; “Light Ammunition” (“Tahmoshet kala”), 214 Hegel, G. W. F., 176 Hendel, Yehudit, 169, 225 Heroic Chapters from the Literature of Israel, 165 Hillel, Ayin, 62, 170; “Fighters’ Friendship” (“Reut halohamim”), 177; “Life’s Command” (“Pekudat

haeem”), 177; “The Speech of the Gray Soldiers” (“Dvar hayalim ­haaforim”), 175, 176 Histadrut Worker’s Union, 39, 169, 204, 225 Hiyyah Hagadol, 134 Holocaust, the, 22, 36, 55, 104, 166, 167, 188, 190; and Alterman, 7, 75–77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 87, 88, 90–91, 100, 102, 106, 108–9, 110–11, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 141, 145, 164, 259–60; awareness of, 75; and BatMiriam, 8, 146, 148, 149–50, 151, 157, 159, 160, 259; and Greenberg, 4; and Ratosh, 7–8 Homsky, Dov: “Opposites,” 174; “What Is the Number of Years” (“Ma mispar lashanim”), 174 Hughes, Langston, 168 Huston, Nancy, 234 Illegal Immigration: A Popular Reader (Maapilim: Mikraa lanoar vehlaam), 165 imagined national community, 7, 26, 29, 32, 34, 87, 147, 164, 226 Imber, Naftali Herz: “The Guard of the Jordan” (“Mishmar ­ha-yarden”), 2; “The Hope” (“­Hatikvah”), 2 individual vs. collective life, 24, 118, 126–27, 136, 137, 147, 175–77, 182, 202, 203; self-sacrifice for the collective, 40–42, 59, 164–65, 176–77, 226, 234–35; in symbolism, 60, 98, 101, 105, 116, 129, 183–84 In the Footsteps of Soldiers (Beikvot ­lohamim), 169, 193 Isaac, 41, 125, 126, 128, 191, 234–35, 245–46 Israeli Independence War: battle at Malkia, 197; battle at Nebi Samuel, 245; battlefront vs. home front

Index during, 226–28, 229–30; Convoy of Thirty-Five, 176, 222; end of, 202–4, 207; Hill 69, 218; Operation Horev, 198–99, 211; Operation Yoav, 198; poetic response to, 8, 61, 169, 169–70, 175–77, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193–99, 202–3, 209–14, 215–19, 222–24, 225–28, 230–35, 247–48; popular songs during, 214; popular vs. canonical mourning during, 251– 52, 253, 254–56; siege of Jerusalem, 195, 215–16; war reportage during, 169, 193–99, 203–6, 209–14, 218–21; women poets during, 8, 61, 222–24, 225–28, 230–35, 236–42, 247–50, 251–52, 253–56, 259 Israeli national anthem, 2 Israeli pioneers, 3, 4 Jeremiah 46:52, 75 Jerusalem: Second Temple, 1, 2; siege of, 195, 215–16 Jesus, 41, 128, 224, 235, 247 Jewish Agency, 104 Jewish-Arab conflict, 3, 4, 5, 6, 32, 143, 145, 164, 212. See also Israeli Independence War Jewish Brigade, 174 Jewish heroism, 165–67 Jewish identity, 26–31, 32, 87–89, 101–2; and Alterman, 139–40; Ratosh on, 90–91, 139–40, 143, 144–45 Jezreel Valley, 171, 173 Judenrat, 110–11, 112, 145 Kahan, Yaakov: “Song of the Hooligans” (“Shir ha-bir-yonim”), 2 Kastner, Rudolf, 111, 145 Katzenelson, Berl, 165 Katzenelson-Shazar, Rachel, 84–85, 87, 233 Kempner, Vitka, 111 Ketuvim, 5

Kibbutz Haartzi, 200 Kovner, Abba, 111, 112; “Combat Page,” 219; Farewell to the South (Preda min hadarom), 194, 218–19; symbolism of, 218; as war reporter, 193, 194, 218–19 Kovno ghetto, 57 Krinkin, Yaffa: “My Country,” 222–23 Labor Party, 18 La Fontaine, Jean de, 93 Lamdan, Yitzhak, 3; Masada, 4 The Legacy of Heroism, 167 Lehi group, 203 Leibowitz, Nechama, 131 Lekach Tov, Shemot, Vaeira 9, 13, et al., 131 Leviticus: 6:6, 179; 6:13, 179 Leyvik, H., 168 Lipshitz, Moshe, 18 literary anthologies, 32–36, 37, 50, 165–70, 224, 225 literary critics: on Alterman’s Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, 81–85, 86–91, 92, 95–96, 97, 99–100, 103–4, 106, 107–8, 124 Lukács, Georg, 196 Luzzato, Moshe Haim, 32 lyricism, 14, 16, 32, 33, 34, 37–39 Maarachot, 165 Mahbarot Lesifrut, 6, 19, 79, 138 Majdanek, 157, 159 Maletz, David, 245 Maletz, Rafi, 245 Maletz, Yehudit, 245, 246 Mapai Party, 18, 39, 78, 205, 206, 207–8 Mapam Party/United Workers Party, 205–6, 207–8, 220 Mar, Yechiel, 171 Marxism, 196 Masada, 4 Masalha, Salman, 31

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Index McCrae, John: “In Flanders Fields,” 176, 237 Megged, Matti, 211; “Man at War” (“Adam bemilhama”), 201–2 Menousi, Didi, “I Don’t Want to Cry Any More,” 201 messianism: and Alterman, 13, 14–15, 16, 70, 71, 79; and Gilboa, 71–72; and Greenberg, 16, 65, 66–67, 71 Mishnat Rabbi Eliezer, Parasha 19, 131 Midrash, 76, 100 Miron, Dan, 82, 97–98, 107–9, 110; on Bat-Miriam, 147, 151–52 Mizrahi Jews, 143 modernism, 2, 3–4, 6, 11, 33, 62, 150, 171

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28 Nitzan, Shlomo: Hiram Campaign, 197 North African Jews, 34 Numbers 27:36, 142

Nahum 3:8, 75 nationalism, 23, 26–31, 33, 35, 93, 192; and Alterman, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 40– 42, 70–71, 78–79, 88–90, 91, 97, 99, 104–5, 106, 107–9, 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, 130, 139–43, 144–45, 163–64, 233, 259–60; Anderson on, 26n, 176– 77, 233–34; and Avnery, 212–13; and Bat-Miriam, 26–27, 147–49, 150–51, 152, 154, 155–56, 158, 159–60; and gender, 54, 155–60, 225–28, 231–35, 233, 234, 255–56, 257; and Gilboa, 65, 66–67; and imagined national community, 7, 26, 26n, 29, 32, 34, 87, 147, 164, 226; and literary anthologies, 32–36, 169; relationship to symbolism, 7, 11, 22, 23, 26–28, 32, 98, 99, 147, 148–49, 163, 167, 170, 259; and self-sacrifice, 40–42, 164–65, 226, 234–35; and time, 151; and violence, 28, 44–47, 48, 130; and war reportage, 193; and women poets, 225–28, 231, 239. See also Zionism Neruda, Pablo, 168 Netzer, Dvorah: “Women on the Home Front,” 229–30

pacifism, 4–5, 17–18, 41 Palmach, 46, 191, 207–8, 209, 212, 228 Palmach generation, 170, 195, 200–201 Pardes, Ilana, 154 Penn, Alexander, 5, 66; as Marxist, 33; “The Seventh Sky” (“Harakia ­hashvee”), 22; “Without Knowing—Why?” (“Bli daat—lama?”), 33 Petliura, Symon, 4 plague literature, 132 Plucked Leaves: Poems of Nations at War (Aley teref: mishirey amim bamilchama), 36 poetry anthologies, 32–36, 37, 50, 165–70, 224, 225 Poetry of Days (Shirey hayamim), 37 Poetry of War and Bravery in ­Israel (Shirat milhama vegvura ­be-Yisrael), 225 popular literature, 208–9 popular songs, 214, 215–16, 218 prayer structure, 44–47 propaganda, 193, 195–97 prose vs. poetry, 2–3 protest literature, 220 Proverbs 24:16, 118

On the Hawk and the Dove (Al ayit veyona), 38 Or, Erella, 224, 225; “Loss,” 239 Orland, Yaakov, 5, 171; “Leaves from the Autumn Garden” (“Alim migan hastav”), 38–39; “The Writer Said,” in Poems of the Hawk and the Dove, 172–73 Orlogen, 188 Ottoman Empire, 2, 34

Index Psalm 78:44, 131 Raab, Esther, 223; and figure of the living dead, 238–39; “Funeral,” 238–39 Rabin, Ozer, 62 Ratosh, Yonatan: on Alterman, 89–91; as Canaanite, 7–8, 19, 30, 89–90, 139–40, 141–42, 143, 144–45; on Hebrew literature vs. literature written in Hebrew, 90; and the Holocaust, 7–8; on Jewish identity, 90–91, 139–40, 143, 144–45; on Palestinians, 144; symbolism of, 5, 7–8, 146 redemption, 14, 41, 69, 107, 119, 164, 235; in Alterman’s Poems of the Plagues of Egypt, 133, 134–37; Gilboa on, 179–80, 181–82, 184, 185, 186, 187; as national/collective, 4, 7, 13, 28, 30, 36, 44, 79, 89, 101, 105, 108, 110, 114, 147, 149, 260 revenge, 48, 52–53, 71, 84–85; Alterman on, 44–46, 75–77, 115–16, 118, 119– 20, 121, 124, 126, 129–30, 163–64; as violence, 44–47, 127–28 Revisionist right, 4 “Revival” poetry, 2 riots of August 1929, 4, 5 romanticism, 93–95 Russian Poetry (Shirat Russia), 35–36, 50, 147–48, 224, 247 Russian symbolism, 11 sacrificial victims, 41–42, 126, 132–33, 191, 193, 201 Sadan, Dov, 87–88 Sadeh, Yitzhak, 191 2 Samuel 12:14–-23, 149–50, 160 Sarig, Nahum “Sergei,” 210 Saul, King, 112 Schwartz, Azriel, 19; and Plucked Leaves: Poems of Nations at

War (Aley teref: mishirey amim b­amilchama), 36; on socialism, 36 Schwartz (Uchmani), Azriel, 165–66 Schweik, Susan, 54 Second Aliyah (1904–14), 2 Sefer Hayashar, 100 Selection of the New Hebrew ­Poetry, A (Mivhar hashira haivrit h­ achadasha), 32–34, 35 Senesh, Hana, 225 Shadmi, Issachar “Yiska,” 210 Shaham, Nathan, 62; The Lazy Gods, 184 Shalev, Mordechai, 99; on Alterman, 79 Shamir, Moshe, 62, 66, 169–71; “The End of Reportage: Long Live Criticism!” (“Haketz lareportaga: Tehi habikoret!”), 220; on Gilboa, 184; “With My Generation” (“Im bney dori”), 170–71 Shamir, Ziva, 84, 98, 140 Shammas, Anton, 31 Shapir, A. D., 5; on Alterman, 79 Shavit, Uzi, 83 Shema, 56 Shemi, Menachem: Friends Talk About Jimmy (Haverim mesaprim al Jimmy), 243–44 Shemi, Rivka, 243–44, 252 Shemot Rabba 9:8, 131 Shimonovitz-Shimoni, David: “The War of Judah and Galilee” (“Milchemet yehuda ve-hagalil”), 2 Shkapskaya, Maria: “Prayer” (“Tefila”), 224, 247 Shlonsky, Avraham: “The Bread and the Water Poems” (“Shirey halechem vehamaym”), 22; and A Chronicle of Poems (Shirey hayamim), 167–69; “Facing the Wilderness,” 5; vs. Gilboa, 62–64, 65, 178–79, 181, 184, 187; on Gold-

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Index berg, 19, 20–21; as immigrant, 3; In These Days (­Be-ele ha-yamim), 5; and ­Orlogen, 188; Poems of Catastrophe and Reconciliation (Shirey hamapolet vehapeeyous), 6, 63–64; poetic school, 5–6, 8, 22, 30, 32, 34, 37, 49, 62, 64, 65, 72, 163, 170, 171, 200, 204, 214, 215; and Poetry of Days (Shirey hayamim), 37; and Russian Poetry (Shirat Russia), 35, 50, 224; “Signs,” 37, 168–69, 179; “Stalingrad,” 179; Stones of Chaos (Avnei bohu), 5, 55, 61; symbolism of, 5, 8, 19, 20–21, 55, 62, 72, 146, 163, 167–68, 171, 178, 181, 187, 200, 204, 214, 215; Thou Shalt Not Kill (Lo tirtzach), 4–5, 17; “Young Ghost from a Lullaby,” 63–64 Shpan, Shlomo, 225 Shtock (Sadan), Dov, 166–67 Shweid, Eliezer, 85, 86, 87, 95–96, 124 Sifriat Poalim, 200 Six Chapters of Poetry (Shisha pirkey shira), 22–25, 32 socialism, 6, 18–19, 35, 36, 220 Socialist League, 18–19 Song of Deborah, 1, 20 Song of Songs, 142, 143, 157 Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, 132–33 Soviet Union, 35, 36, 228 space, 237; and Bat-Miriam, 151–54, 155, 156–59; and symbolism, 151–54, 155 Star of David, 93 statehood generation, 8 symbolism, 111–12, 197, 199; vs. allegory, 92–96, 93–102, 103–4, 105–7, 114, 119–20, 126, 130, 134, 136, 140, 144, 151; of Alterman, 5, 7, 8, 11–14, 16, 17, 19–21, 58, 59, 62, 66, 70, 71, 92–93, 95–96, 97–102, 103, 105, 114, 146, 149, 164, 171, 200, 214; of Bat-Miriam, 5, 146–54, 155, 156–57; Benjamin on, 16, 105–6, 151; and

death, 5, 37–40, 147–49; figure of the ­living-dead, 40–43, 44–46, 48, 58–61, 79, 98–99, 100–101, 114, 125, 129–30, 175–77, 188–92, 200, 202, 217, 218, 230–35, 236–42, 244, 252, 253, 259, 260; of Goldberg, 5, 7, 17–18, 19, 20, 22–24, 48–51, 54, 55, 57, 59–60, 61, 146, 259; of Gouri, 170, 200, 217–18, 260; individual vs. collective life in, 60, 98, 101, 105, 116, 129, 183–84; musicality in, 5, 6, 12–13, 15, 16, 37, 38–39, 50–53, 60, 61, 67, 71, 146, 147, 149, 170, 171–73, 174, 178, 215; of ­Ratosh, 5, 7–8, 146; relationship to nationalism, 7, 11, 22–23, 26–28, 32, 98, 99, 147, 148–49, 163, 167, 170, 259; relationship to the body, 184; and salvation, 149; and space, 151–54, 155; and time, 151–52, 186–87; universalist aesthetics of, 5, 6, 17, 19–21, 22, 26, 27, 32, 34, 35–36, 48–49, 50, 56, 58, 148, 149, 167–68, 186–87, 200, 215; and World War II, 7, 17–19 Tabenkin, Moshe: “A Voice at Night” (“Kol balyla”), 165; “Dumbfounded: Poems of June 29” (“Demama nidhama: Mishirey ha-29 beuni”), 214; “The Voice of the Campfire” (“Kol hamedura”), 177 Tabenkin, Yitzhak, 154–55 Talmud, 134 Tanee, Shlomo, 62, 65, 171; on Gilboa, 184–85; “Operation Yoav or the Ten Plagues,” 198; “People,” 198; Three Arrows (Shlosha hitzim), 194; as war reporter, 193, 194 Tchernichovski, Shaul, 169 Tel-Aviv, 5 Tesler, Eliahu, 5 Third Aliyah (1918–23), 3 time: and allegory, 151; Amichai on, 237;

Index and Bat-Miriam, 151–52, 155–56, 157; Benjamin on, 151; and Gilboa, 71–72; and nationalism, 151; and symbolism, 151–52, 186–87 Torah study, 1 To the Defender (Lamagen), 169 Transnistria Rescue Plan, 104 Treblinka, 157, 159 Tsvetaeva, Marina: “Russia Mourns Its Sons” (“Rus mevaka et baneya”), 224 Turim, 5 Tzurit, Ida, 99 Ukraine: pogroms of 1919, 4 Vatican, 78 Vered, Haya, 225; “Blood in the ­Valleys” (“Dam bageayot”), 223; and figure of the living dead, 240– 42; “Zero Hour” (“Shat haefes”), 240–42 Verhaeren, Emil, 168 victimhood: Alterman on, 123–24, 128–29, 260; Gilboa on, 179–85, 191; sacrificial victims, 41–42, 126, 132–33, 191, 193, 201 violence, 23–24, 49–50, 51–52, 68–69, 71–72, 115–16, 118, 125, 126–30; as cyclical, 132–33, 136; imitative character of, 127–29; justification of, 40–41, 259; as leading to death, 6, 19, 23, 37, 39; and nationalism, 22, 28, 44–47, 48, 130; as revenge, 44–47, 127–28 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 75, 113, 154–55 World War I, 3–4, 17, 36, 54, 224, 247 World War II: Judenrat during, 110–11, 112, 145; poetic response to, 6, 7, 17–19, 22, 35, 37, 54, 112–13; Soviet

Union during, 35, 36; and symbolism, 7, 17–19. See also the Holocaust The Writer’s Bow (Keshet sofrim), 169–70, 179 Writers Union, 206 Yaffe, A. B., 194 Yahdav group, 5, 6 Yalan-Shteklis, Miriam, 224; “My City Jerusalem” (“Yerushalaym iri”), 240 Yalkut Hareim, 170, 171, 184; “Random Poems” (“Shirim bodedim”) series, 68, 71 Yalkut Hareim literary group, 62, 66 Yehoshua, A. B., 8 Yemenite Jews, 34 Yishuv, 3, 4, 5, 7, 39–40 Yom Kippur War, 228 Yonatan, Nathan, 171; “Our Convoy” (“Shayara shelanu”), 215–16; “Two Poems for One Person” (“Shney shirim al adam ehad”), 190 Zach, Nathan, 8, 81 Zelophehad, 142 Zionism: and Alterman, 7, 12, 70, 86–91, 106, 108, 130, 139, 145, 164; and Bat-Miriam, 147, 148, 150; cultural hegemony of, 7, 130; “The Hope” (“Hatikvah”), 2; and Jewish sovereignty, 7, 26–27, 28, 71, 78–79, 87, 88, 91, 141, 143, 145, 167; and territory, 3, 143, 144, 145; Twenty-first Zionist Congress, 165; Zionist interpretation, 30, 31, 86–91, 96, 108–9, 110; Zionist labor movement, 18, 39, 62, 65, 71, 78, 165, 203, 213, 220–21, 228. See also nationalism Zmora, Israel, 6, 19, 50, 87, 92 Zohar, Zvi, 165 Zussman, Ezra, 5

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