The Magazine

Come to Life

The Hebrew revival in modern literature.

May 18, 2009, Vol. 14, No. 33 • By BENJAMIN BALINT
Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts

Hebrew Writers on Writing

Edited by Peter Cole

Trinity University, 320 pp., $45

The contemporary Israeli novelist Amos Oz likes to say that, as a boy in Jerusalem, he noticed that everyone over 45 spoke in another language, and so he feared that when he would grow up and turn 45, he himself would start speaking Yiddish just as surely as his hair would go gray.

Before the year 1900 or so, no modern Jewish community spoke Hebrew; the language slept in hibernation. The Bible itself had to be translated into languages that Jews spoke: Aramaic (the Targum), Greek (the Septuagint), and Yiddish.

Modern Hebrew writers, then, had to refashion a 3,000-year-old sacred language--a language without a vernacular--into a lithe idiom. They had to stretch a traditional language until it became supple enough to seize a world that had moved beyond tradition. These writers sought, as the critic
Robert Alter has said,

to achieve in Hebrew what Gogol and Turgenev had achieved in Russian, Balzac in French, Scott and Dickens in English; and how was one to do this in a language nobody spoke .  .  . in which there was no word for 'potato'?

The dreamers who wrought this miracle were ex-yeshiva students who left the confines of the shtetl for vibrant cultural centers like Odessa, Warsaw, Vilna, Königsberg, and Berlin, and then for Palestine. Bonded by a fierce (and quixotic) commitment to Hebrew as the language of national renewal, they succeeded in coaxing this ancient language to act as the vehicle by which the Jewish past was brought to bear on the present. And they gave it a vitality the likes of which had not been seen since the poets of the Hebrew Renaissance in medieval Spain.

To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber

We're Sorry,

the rest of this article is available only to subscribers.

You have two options:

Subscribing today will provide you with immediate, complete access to the current issue, as well as to all back issues on the site. Each week you will be able to read articles from the newest issue even before print copies are mailed!

Privacy Policy