6. The Hebrew Language
While the connection between the flowering of the new living
language and the growth of Zionism and the Jewish community
in Eretz Yisrael is too well known to need recounting
here, any survey of Zionist and Israeli culture must mention
the centrality of Hebrew in the development of a new kind
of Jewish life. Its revival came from two different directions.
Initiated by the pedantic ideological considerations of
a few ‘fanatics’, and perpetuated by a multitude
of linguists and academics, it ultimately developed beyond
these limitations. It indeed became a living language,
nurtured by the people who used it in their daily lives.
It is a commonplace to speak of Hebrew as a dead language
that was in need of revival. It seems, however, that an
important meaning of this metaphor is often missed. In
order for the language to become a vehicle of everyday
communication, a constant evolution of vocabulary and
speech patterns was necessary. The language had to become
more ‘everyday’ – more flexible and
natural – allowing for the influence of real life.
It would be impossible for a society to develop, speaking
only with the grandeur and formality of the great classical
texts, however rich they may be. It is in this sense that
the ‘dead’ language had to be revived.
It is fascinating to see this process evolving in the development
of the literary texts of the modern period. This is exemplified
most clearly in poetry. The great poets of the Haskalah
and the early Zionist period produced some outstanding
poetry. Bialik, Tchernikovsky and Fichman, for example,
created powerful and dramatic texts. Despite their greatness
as text, however, they sound rather stilted and formal
to a modern ear. Although the esthetic experience can
be extraordinary, to read these writers the modern Israeli
ear has to travel a distance similar to that which an
English ear has to travel to read Shakespeare. At first
glance, a comparison between the language of Shakespeare
and the language of Bialik may seem surprising: Shakespeare
lived nearly five hundred years ago while Bialik died
only in 1934. Nonetheless, it is apt because the Hebrew
language has undergone such revolutionary changes since
the period of Bialik’s formative years as a poet,
as it has evolved into a truly living language, stripped
of its stiffness and formality.
Zionist and Israeli poetry has produced a number of generations,
each of which has tended to use the language in a different
way. The generation after Bialik – the generation
of Natan Alterman, Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg –
produced a much more flexible mode of poetic language,
tending often towards the playful and the humorous. The
‘third generation’ was that of Amihai, Natan
Zach and T. Carmi. Their language continued the trend
towards naturalism – a far cry from the rhetoric
of the ‘first generation.’ Amihai, in particular,
used many everyday expressions in his poetry, sometimes
creating a surrealistic air through his use of unusual
contemporary speech patterns and images. The tone of the
poetry of these writers also changed, emphasizing personal
rather than the collective experience, and moving away
from the subject of the nation. This tendency will be
discussed later in Section 13. Although some of this generation
is still writing, younger poets have emerged in the last
decades who have taken these tendencies further still.
The Hebrew language of much of contemporary poetry is
almost unrecognizable as the same language in which poets
such as Bialik and Tchernikovsky wrote. Nevertheless,
it is, indeed, the same language.
The same tendencies are noticeable in prose. This essay
will not note the different ‘generations,’
but rather will focus on a few of the top contemporary
Israeli prose writers. There are some excellent authors
today whose work has been embraced by the international
literary world and the general public. Foremost among
these are Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, whose works have
been in print in many different languages for decades:
their style is modern, their language rich and allusive.
In contrast, new writers such as Orly Castel Bloom and
Etgar Keret use a very different prose whose everyday
character and apparent ‘flatness’ of tone
produce a strangely surrealistic effect that is at odds
with the richer narrative prose of their predecessors.
To a large extent, they come very close to writing in
contemporary speech patterns. This significant development
is very modern in tone. It remains to be seen whether
this type of work will stand the test of time and the
fickle tastes of the current generation of readers.