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"SACRED TONGUE" OR "FOREIGN LANGUAGE"?
THE AMERICAN JEWISH STUDENT
AND CONTEMPORARY HEBREW LITERATURE 1
Yael S. Feldman
Yael Feldman is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature at New York University. Among her many publications are: Ben HaKe- tavim LeKav HaMashveh (1987) and Modernism and Cultural Transfer (1985). She also serves as the literary editor of Hadoar.
In the competition between the two separate institutions of education, the general and the Hebrew, the former had the upper hand. Why? Because of its naturalness, the product of social and existential realities, and be- cause of its apparent usefulness in the struggle for survival. -"As youngsters we had understood"-my son told me many years later-"that our general education was of great importance, both socially and economically, so we were serious about it, while Hebrew had only limited relevance for our life." For those young intellectuals, general literature seemed of much higher value than Hebrew. For us, the generation trained in the old world, He- brew was the center of our life and our mental world; ~ut for the young generation, their place of residence became their center. The speaker is Zvi Scharfstein, a well-known Hebrew educator in New York between the wars, and the father of Professor Ben-Ami Scharfstein of Tel Aviv University, the "son" whose retort is quoted here. This was Scharf- stein senior's attempt to rationalize the changes that had taken place already in the forties in the attitude toward Hebrew language and literature: the gap between his own generation, who had emigrated from Europe during the first world war, and their children, the first American-born generation.
IAn earlier Hebrew version of this paper was presented as a forum lecture in Jerusalem on August 15, 1989, under the auspices of the International Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, and was published in the periodical i1m vaSefer (Brit Ivrit Olamit, Jerusalem: 1991), pp. 85-96.
2Zvi Scharfstein, i1rba'im Shanah bai1merica (Massada, 1956), p. 287. (My translation- Y. E)
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Writing in the fifties, in his memoirs Forty Years in America (published in Is- rael in Hebrew, of course!), he still did not have a convincing explanation for the difference between the European diaspora and the American one: why was Hebrew relegated to the margins in the life of young American Jews? Was it only because of its uselessness "in the struggle for survival"? Its "un- naturalness"? Its "lower value" in relation to general literature? -So why hadn't the older generation felt all of that in their own youth in Europe? A partial answer to this question was given a couple of years ago, in Robert Alter's study The Invention of Hebrew Prose: [B]ut as anyone can attest who has had the opportunity to know the emi- gre Hebraists in New York as recently as the 19505, these writers, dis- placed from their multilingual setting, were doomed to declaim sonorous Hebrew cadences in a historical vacuum. In an essentially monolingual country that offered relatively open access to people of talent, those with literary gifts in the younger generation [... ] would of course be drawn to the dominant language. The older Hebraists, then, were 1eft brandishing a literary torch with no one to whom they could pass it on.. Professor Alter's thesis is best demonstrated by his own book: who would have thought it possible, in the not too distant past, to publish such a meticulous analysis of Hebrew style in English? Today, however, Alter's book is not an exception.^4 These days, more than ever before, it is language profi- ciency (rather than mere interest) that is a rare commodity. This can be readily "proven" by the growing translation industry and the relatively wi<ie exposure given to Israeli books on the pages of the New York Times: close to 30 Israeli novels were published in English in the span of two or three years, and at least half of them were reviewed by major American papers. So we witness a growing interest in Hebrew cultural products simultaneously with a waning ability to satisfy this interest in the original language. But can we ac- cept the monolingual nature of American culture as the sole cause for the loss of Hebrew vitality? Didn't the canonization of Hebrew as the official language of the State of Israel detract from the romantic halo that had for- merly surrounded its diaspora loyalists? Indeed, this is precisely the view put forward by Arnold Band, in his acceptance speech for the 1989 Friedman Prize awarded him by the Histadrut Ivrit of America:
Hebrew was the most cherished asset ... to which Jews have held in their encounters with the cultures surrounding them. In fact, for both [Isaac] Silberschlag and [Nahum] Glatzer Hebrew was not just another language
3Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modem Fiction and the Invention of Realism (University of Washington Press, 1988), p. 73. (Emphasis mine- Y. F.)
4See on this point my review of his book, Modem Fiction Studies (Purdue Uni- versity Press, Winter 1991).
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in sheer surprise, both here and in Israel: "Do you really teach Hebrew liter- ature in Hebrew? To whom?" Just as surprised were my colleagues from the Midwest, for instance, when I used to tell them that at Columbia there was no real interest in courses in translation. Courses of Hebrew literature in Hebrew, by contrast, could draw up to 25 students in the lower-level classes, and about a dozen in the higher-level classes. What I am suggesting, then, is that we have two different groups of stu- dents and two diverging kinds of motivation: on one hand, there is the all- American campus, in which the study of Hebrew-among other lan- guages-is in decline, often aggravated by the elimination of foreign-lan- guage requirements; in such campuses the only way for the Jewish (or the non-Jewish) student to get to our subject matter is via courses in translation. On the other hand, there is the population graduating from Hebrew day schools and Yeshivot, who are fully equipped for the perusal of Hebrew texts, ancient as well as modern, and whom we meet mostly on the East Coast. Since it is the latter group that I know best, I would like to devote most of this presentation to the specific problems they raise, and only hint at some overlapping with other campus populations. Typical Yeshiva graduates are mainly concerned to retain their Hebrew language proficiency; some of them are also interested in extending their fa- miliarity with Hebrew literature. In principle, this group could have pro- duced candidates for graduate studies in Hebrew literature-they are gener- ally well suited for such an undertaking both linguistically and culturally. But this rarely happens. As a rule, the Jewish education system does not encour- age serious engagement in belles lettres. In all my years at Columbia, and more recently at New York University, I have not met more than a handful of students with interest in literary matters. Still, it would be unfair to put the whole blame on Jewish education alone. Ironically, its attitude to literature is unexpectedly backed by the all-American university, specifically by what Tzvetan Todorov has called its "Crimes Against Humanities." 7 According to Professor Todorov's findings, the last two decades saw a decrease of 33 percent in the number of college students graduating in the humanities; 88 percent of all college graduates have never taken a course in "Western Civilization," "American History," or "Foreign Language." So why should we malign our Jewish students? The majority of these students opt for a degree in medicine, law, busi- ness administration, or at least computers. An academic career is definitely
7Tzvetan Todorov, "Crimes Against Humanities," The New Republic (July 3, 1989), pp. 26-30. This essay is just a tip of the iceberg-one aspect of the raging de- bate over the canon and the curriculum in the American university that is focused on the humanities.
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beyond their scope, not to mention a career in the humanities. In contrast to the youngsters in Scharfstein's times, they do not think about any "litera- ture," either Hebrew or general. What makes them come to us is something totally different. Hebrew literature attracts them, not "literature." For some of them it is Israeli literature, without all its historical dowry; for others, just the reverse: they are sharply critical of our "young" literature (from the sixties on), the likes of which, they claim, "we can also read in American literature." Put differently: with some exceptions, our typical students bring to class their problems of ethnic identity. Both their identification and objection stem from this source. Generally speaking, they lack any readiness for a criti- cal-objective inquiry. Moreover, very often they transfer to the modern text an attitude of reverence and awe that they have acquired at the Yeshiva or Hebrew school, and since the literary text does not properly "respond," they react with indignation and alienation. It is this problem, then, that challenges us as teachers and scholars: how is the teacher-who is often an Israeli and generally a product of one of the "isms" of the last half-century (Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism, Post-Modernism)-to get through to the American student who generally comes to us for emotional rather than intellectual reasons? How should the teacher cope with the student's usual "innocence," his total oblivion to the hard questions recently raised about language and liter- ature in general, along with herlhis naive expectations of Hebrew literature in particular? Questions of this sort arouse heated debates, debates that keep surfacing in almost every professional meeting and every panel devoted to the teaching of Hebrew literature. Often enough a debate of this kind would revolve around methodological arguments; my feeling is, however, that such argu- ments tend to miss the main issue. Rather, what I would like to propose is that the major problem is not means and methods but aims and positions. At the center of our difficulty, as I see it, is a fundamental conflict, both emotional and cognitive, between the position of the average teacher and the position of the average student. For the typical student of the group I am discussing, Hebrew still functions as a "sacred tongue," if not technically then emotionally. Hebrew literature is the object of expectations that are qualitatively different from the expectations he/she has of any other literature; it is expected to reflect some ideal reality that corresponds to the readers' perceptions of their own self-identity. It is therefore not amenable to any comparison, it cannot be studied in a rela- tivistic framework; like the "chosen people," it is sui generis. Rules of any ~science of literature" cannot apply to it. It is a natural continuity of an in- ternal tradition of thousands of years, and not a member in the international club of belles lettres, criticism, and theory of literature. As such, it is
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Twenties" in a course on "Israeli Myth: The Dream and Its Aftermath" (!). I suppose the speaker never asked herself why she called a course by this title; or, more fundamentally, whether this topic could be taught from the perspective implied by her statement. And finally, has she really chosen Sobol's play for its esthetic merit? I sincerely doubt this. lO Indeed, what we face here is almost a contradiction in terms. And this is by no means the only case. The heated exchange that followed the presenta- tion of that paper attests, in my opinion, to an unconscious conflict between the desirable-according to certain academic standards-and the avail- able-the ideological matrix not only of our students' expectations but also of sizable portions of our cultural inheritance. This is not the place to rehash the ramifications of this conflict and its expressions in contemporary Hebrew literature and criticism. I would only like to emphasize that although a few years ago it still seemed possible to establish an edifice of objective-esthetic research that would function as a defense against the pressures of the outside world, and that HaSiftut (Literature)-the Israeli journal best representing this approach-was going to be revived, today it is clear that such hopes have no basis in reality. That literary journal has not revived, while Israeli literature at large is bending under the weight of current events. 11 Literary scholarship itself now seems to "betray" scientific-esthetic ideals and adopt new "cultural" (rather than purely literary) research avenues. 12 In this it echoes several post-structuralist premises and methodologies (e.g., "critique of the canon" or "critique of ideology"), that seem to me appropriate in addressing some of the difficulties we grapple with in teaching Hebrew literature in the American university. It should come as no surprise that several of the didactic solutions pro- posed in the panel discussion following the paper referred to above (see note
- did point in similar directions. It was suggested, for example, that the interweaving of non-canonic sources (films, popular or documentary
9Edna Amir-Coffin, "Theatre in a Course on Literature and Cinema," a paper given at the Annual Methodology Meeting of NAPH, Chicago, May 1989.
lOOn the ideological aspects of Sobol's play see my "Zionism-Neurosis or Cure?- The 'Historical' Drama of J. Sobol." Prooftexts 7:2 (May 1987), pp. 145-162. 111 have developed this point in a series of articles; see especially "Poetics and Politics: Israeli Literary Criticism Between East and West," PMJR 52 (1985), pp. 9-35; "Back to Vienna: Zionism on the Literary Couch," Vision Confronts Reality, eds. Ruth Kozodoy et aL (New York, 1989), pp. 310-335.
12 See , for example, Dan Miron, '1m Lo Tlhye Yerushalayim [If There is No Jerusalem] (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987); Shaked, No Other Place; and collections of essays by writers Zach, Yehoshua, Oz, and scholars Gertz and Calderon, among others.
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literature) might soften (or balance) the extreme self-criticism of the canonic literature. These very sources may also help clarify how thin boundaries may at times be between literary imagination and historical reality. A film documenting the dialogue of some old-time pioneers may demonstrate how life and art overlap in ideological rhetoric. From here it is but a short step to theories of New Historicism and their claim that the narrative and tropological dimensions of historiogra~hy question the traditional polarization between literature and history. I Last, but not least, was the suggestion to call students' attention to other literatures that were written under conditions and in a socio-historical context similar to those of the Hebrew literature under scrutiny. In some sense, Israeli literature, despite its declared westernization, still adheres to the Russian tra- dition of a literature engaged in the socio-political discourse. But we would be mistaken to limit ourselves to this line of historical continuity. For even a most superficial look should suffice to convince us that this tradition is not exclusively Russian, or even East-European. And even though our students may be mostly familiar with contemporary American literature, it is important to direct them to earlier literature of the American pioneering period. Just as valuable is the literature inspired by the two world wars or Vietnam, as well as the literatures of Central Europe or South America that reflect similar realities of a society under internal or external pressures. Thus, for example, the fictional autobiography, a genre believed to be the most westernly individualistic, turns out to be quite different, not only in Hebrew but also amonĀ„ western women writers or other non-mainstream groups in the West. 4 In other words, contemporary Hebrew literature calls for literary frames of reference other than the ones automatically used by the average American student. The common denominator underlying the various didactic suggestions enumerated here is the comparative method. In my experience, there is no better way to neutralize positions of defense and resistance than by directing students to a comparative reading. My personal solution for the problems raised above is to plan each of the courses I teach, even when taught in Hebrew, as if it were a course in comparative literature. And if limitations of time do not allow for the inclusion of primary reading from other literatures in class discussion, they are given at least as background reading, to help in
13 See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978).
14See my "Ideology and Self-Representation: The Case of Israeli Women Writers," in Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction, eds. Janice Morgan and Colette Hall (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 281-301.
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this we have reached what is for me still an unresolved issue in the teaching of Hebrew literature in America. Why "unresolved"? Technically, the answer is quite apparent: How can one plan a serious comprehensive course when so many core texts are still unavailable in English? I say "still," because the situation has much im- proved in the last couple of years, when major portions of Israeli literature, mainly pro.se and drama, have been and are being translated. In poetry there are several translated collections, and chief among them T. Carmi's The Pen- guin Book of Hebrew Verse (1981) and the new edition, by Harvard University Press, of The Modem Hebrew Poem 1tself(1989). This is all very helpful, but not enough. What is being translated is mostly contemporary literature. In any of the "generic" courses that I try to structure I still miss a central link: here Agnon, there Brenner, or Yizhar, and beyond them, works by women writers. Is it conceivable to teach in to- day's America an introductory course of any kind without exploring the question of gender difference (or non-difference)? And I don't even want to dwell on the number of students we "lose" by not being able to give courses on "Women's Literature in Israel," simply because the works are not trans- lated. But this is, I would like to reiterate, only the technical aspect of the issue; The principal problem is, naturally, the fear-the fear lurking between the lines of Shaked's chapter on "Alexandria of America" (see note 5): If today teachers read the original while students use a translation, what will happen in the next generation? Already now "commentaries are written on trans- lated texts" (Shaked, p. 143), "and everyone scrutinizes them as if they were the originals ... " Aren't we risking even more the unpromising future of He- brew in America (and in other diasporas)? Aren't we assisting the dangerous process described by Band as the transition from "sacred tongue" to "foreign language"? Don't we offer our students the way of least resistance instead of encouraging them to cope with original texts? I assume that it was this kind of reasoning that directed the actioqs of the first generation of Hebraists who established the "Hebrew in Hebrew" programs in the American universities. In the name of this reasoning they have also objected to the transition from Hebraica to "Jewish Studies." The fear was that the transfer of emphasis to social and contemporary stud- ies-fields that do not require knowledge of the classical sources-would be at the expense of the investment needed for the mastery of the language and the ancient texts required in the study of Judaica. I do not know if this fear was unfounded. But at the same time, I am not sure that the perception of cause and effect underlying this fear is accurate. In the final analysis, we have to regretfully acknowledge the fact that, without soine revolutionary changes in the academic language-level teaching, we
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cannot expect college students who begin Hebrew with the basics to reach a level of mastery that will enable them to study literature qua literature. Moreover, I suspect this is not a new phenomenon; I do not think the academy has ever supplied its own advanced students in Hebrew and Judaica. Acknowledging this fact should help us (and me) realize that classes of translated literature have another function altogether. They are geared to a different audience and should not constitute a "threat" for th~ Yeshivot graduates who can read the material in the original. What is this distinct function of classes using translated texts, then? First and foremost, to accompany the lower-level language classes. Had it been in my power, I would have made them a formal requirement, the way it exists in some European universities (Cambridge, for instance). But since this option is not available to us in the democracy of the American academy, all we have left is the way of "seduction." What I mean by this is a conscious response to the cultural and literary codes that the American student absorbs in other areas of herlhis academic studies. It should come as no surprise that popular topics (such as "the Holocaust," "the other," "gender and culture") draw also students who have no specific interest in Judaica, Israel, or He- brew. This means, naturally, that we should expect a class different not only in its language but in its didactic and social dynamics as well. My experience with courses of this kind (mostly on the graduate level, though) has been very gratifying, and in ways I had not originally foreseen. Attracting students with a variety of specialties and ethno-cultural back- grounds, these "mixed" classes have often turned into a fascinating exercise in self reflection. The interaction with "others" usually drives both students and teacher into an overall examination of generally unquestioned presuppo- sitions (us/them; male/female; objective/subjective; self/other). As such, these classes offer a healthy counterbalance to the enclosed, parochial atmosphere that sometimes marks our Hebrew courses. At the same time, they also reach out to those who "would otherwise never have known about this literature," as a newly "converted" enthusiast has recently told me. This may not be a major breakthrough for Hebrew studies per se; but reaching out, shaking up some rigid perceptions and boundaries, are hu- manistic gains not to be underrated in this day and age. And if Hebrew texts can perform this feat-^ if only in^ translation-let^ this be^ our^ consolation.
