There was never a good time for Hebrew in America. You could say the same of most languages, of course. The mere notion that Hebrew may have fared better stems from its exceptional status in American history. Hebrew, for example, is interwoven with the origin of the Republic. A required course at Harvard when its graduates helped to decide the nation’s fate, Hebrew was studied by some of the Founding Fathers, driven by their interest in the Old Testament as a template for democratic government. In what will turn out to be a recurring pattern, however, this prestige didn’t translate into a substantial role for Hebrew. Among Colonial and early American Jewry, it hardly factored. “Not a single Hebrew book was published till mid-nineteenth century,” American Hebrew poet Eisig Silberschlag has observed. “Not a single contribution to the traditional branches of Jewish learning was made.”
According to the literary critic Robert Alter, that dearth had turned to abundance by the interwar years, the high-water mark of American Hebrew letters. But while exemplary writers like Shimon Halkin, Abraham Regelson, and Israel Efros crafted sophisticated fiction, poetry, and essays in the language, the audience for Hebrew literature on American shores dwindled. For Hebrew periodical editor Reuven Brainin, the successes could not outweigh the losses. In 1923, he lamented that “there is, among American Jews, no Hebrew movement, not even a trace of one.” And indeed, at length, the great American Hebrew writers died, disappeared, or emigrated. Despite the immense effort they put into creating a Hebrew educational system—whose legacy persists until today—no homegrown generation of Hebrew writers followed them.
No, there never was a good time for Hebrew in America, achievements notwithstanding. There was, however, a golden age of Hebrew literature in translation. Between the Holocaust and the smartphone era, more than two thousand works of Hebrew-language literature were translated into English. Ranking behind only the major European languages, Israeli literature has had an outsized impact on American readers, a fair portion of them Jewish. It is through translated poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction that many American Jews have come to their most important insights and beliefs about the other major center of world Jewry. That translation mediated their encounters is a crucial part of the American Jewish–Israeli connection.
That the golden of age of modern Hebrew literature in translation requires the absence of a real Hebrew movement seems obvious. If there are no Hebrew readers, then translation is a necessity. In the case of Hebrew in America, the relationship between language poverty and translation is more complicated than a first glance would suggest.
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The necessity (and danger) of translation between Jewish Americans and Israelis is the focus of Omri Asscher’s Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation Between Jews (Stanford, 2019). The first half of the book is a meticulous analysis of the translations and book reviews, as well as broader cultural debates, which mediated ideas and images of Israel to Americans, in the main Jews. The second half flips perspectives and analyzes the same kind of materials in the mediation of American Jewry to Israeli readers—a topic which few scholars in English have explored and none, as far as I know, at book length.
Both halves of Asscher’s book are bound to surprise those familiar with the larger cultural and ideological narratives. Americans are chary of reading in translation, translated books famously assessed as just 3% of the US book market in 2007, while the classical Zionist tenet of negation of the diaspora would seem to limit interest in the creative output of American Jews. However, the long history of translation between Jews, from the appearance of the Septuagint to the circulation of Judeo-Arabic and German Jewish philosophy, indicates that such narratives are not determining. Harking back to this history, Asscher shows, Israeli and Jewish American readers, writers, critics, and publishers avidly explored each other’s literature.
Such exploration didn’t arise from mere interest or mutual admiration, Asscher says. Indebted to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Asscher sees culture as a “field of struggle” between agents trying to lay claim to its representation. Americans and Israelis each want to position themselves at the center of the Jewish world, as the voice of collective Jewry. Their translations—and how each readership receives them—reflect that struggle.
In this view, writers moderately critical of the conflict, like Amos Oz, are feted because they bolster American Jews’ sense that the legacy of Jewish morality resides in the Diaspora; S. Yizhar, on the other hand, was for a long time suppressed, his portrayals of the conflict deemed so damning as to sully American Jews by extension. On the other side, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud are praised for their depiction of fiercely intelligent and creative yet neurotic Jews, harassed and alienated in non-Jewish America, proof certain that Israel is the only place that Jews, as Jews, can flourish. That said, they are faulted for writing in any language but Hebrew, the sole means of linguistic access to the spiritual and cultural inheritance of Jewish history. Rather than careful study, Asscher argues that the source of these blunt approbations and criticisms was deep-seated anxiety and ideological conviction about cultural status and authority.
Much of Reading Israel, Reading America is thoroughly convincing. This is because most of the book is based on Asscher’s readings of translations which have been tampered with in fascinating and often telling ways. An extraordinary example is the recasting of Abie Driesel— an obvious and vicious caricature of Elie Wiesel—in David Shahar’s novel His Majesty’s Agent as Jules Levi. The name change was accompanied by the excision of whole passages depicting Wiesel-Driesel as a pompous, lecherous egomaniac. None of the changes seem to have been made by the translator, but rather occurred during the editorial process. That these suppressions veiled Shahar’s critique of an icon among Jewish Americans, and hence of aspects of Jewish American life writ large, can hardly be doubted. Less dramatic examples include the alteration of many passages in fiction writing about the War of Independence, the interpolation of Zionist motifs in Jewish American literature, and the Hebraization of American Jewish names (see Sha’ul Bellow). While you can quibble with Asscher’s readings, the extent of textual manipulation is undeniable.
So who do we have to thank for the translations, tampered with or otherwise, that permitted the conflicts and encounters described above to take place? You won’t find an answer in Reading Israel, Reading America. That is to say, you will find names of translators (mostly the American ones) and even claims based on interviews and correspondence with them; but their general profile, their individual aims and approaches—these hardly feature. There is much discussion of mediation, but much less of the “mediators.” As with any analysis from the perspective of structures of power, the risk is of losing sight of the agents who actually do things in the world. This risk is in fact twofold. As sociologist Margaret Archer contends (contra Bourdieu), without considering how people think reflexively about themselves and the structures they are part of, you also lose sight of how these structures really work.
Nonetheless, one set of agents does stand out. In chapter after chapter American Hebrew writers, American Hebraists, and their descendants appear. Hillel Halkin, Shimon Halkin, Eisig Silberschlag, and Alan Mintz all feature as subjects or interlocutors. Between the four, we have the preeminent American translator of modern Hebrew literature; arguably the greatest American Hebrew writer, later a chair of Modern Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University; the dean and president of Hebrew College in Boston, once the premier Hebraist institution in America; and the most prominent scholar of American Hebraism and a leading critic on modern Hebrew literature. And yet their shared connection to the program, ideals, and legacy of Tarbut Ivrit never warrants mention.
Above all, the profile of these Hebraists goes some way to explaining the basis for the whole enterprise of translation between American and Israeli Jews. Certainly, the dimension of cultural gamesmanship matters. Segments of each center of world Jewry were eager to appropriate the successes of the other for their own purposes and to establish a claim to speak as the center. But in the end, someone had to do the translating. Someone had to know Hebrew and English well enough to make the gamesmanship possible. Many people had to. And people like that tended to love both languages, both cultures. Not each and every one was a Hebraist, but those who weren’t Hebraists usually resembled them. Because beneath the gamesmanship, beyond the politics of translation, one finds, time and again, lovers of Hebrew, men and women whose lives were animated by the language.
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The success of Hebrew literature in translation, then, which marks an end of Hebraist aspirations in America, is in no small part due to American Hebrew writers and their intellectual heirs. The absence of a large-scale Hebrew movement may have been necessary for the golden age of Hebrew-language translation in America; but it’s hard to imagine that golden age without the cadre of poets, essayists, reviewers, publishers, and translators who made Hebrew their mission. More literatures than not fail to get anything like the foothold of Israeli literature in the US book market, even those from other closely allied nations. Success spelled their doom; but the Hebraists and American Hebrew writers contributed to a flourishing that secured for modern Hebrew literature a permanent place in American cultural history.
There is today another such cadre of Hebrew-language writers. I refer to Israeli and Israeli American writers who have made the United States their home and write out of their connections to the country, yet in a language vanishingly few of their fellow Americans understand. Ruby Namdar and Maya Arad are the best known. They are joined by younger writers like Nadav Linial, Ari Lieberman, and Dea Hadar. They inherit and perpetuate a legacy of Hebrew letters in America to which they have no, so to speak, genetic connection.
Much separates yesterday’s American Hebrew writers from the current crop. The latter grew up in a place where Hebrew literature forms part of the national culture; the former lived much of their lives before the State of Israel existed. After Namdar won the prestigious Sapir Prize in 2015, the eligibility criteria were changed to limit winners to writers living in Israel. This was taken by some as a sign of disconnect between the Israeli establishment and diasporic world of Hebrew letters, while others interpreted the change as a sign of charged connection—the center evidently threatened by the appearance of a new edge in the cultural landscape. In the past, American Hebrew writers were lucky to be reviewed in the Yishuv or in Israel, let alone win a prize—then to see the rules for that prize changed to prevent them from winning again!
Still, the parallels are instructive. Through the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, American Hebrew writers were, by and large, transplants from Galicia and the Russian Empire; since the late twentieth century, they have been Israelis. American Hebrew literature remains therefore an immigrant literature. And while the internet eases communication and creates virtual community, writing in a foreign tongue, now and then, is a lonely business. Some level of consolation must come from the pleasure of the language itself. The secret of the American Hebrew poets, according to Alan Mintz, what kept them going despite the neglect of their efforts, was the “linguistic jouissance” they experienced in “kneading the language, reshaping it, and being enriched by it in return.” The Israeli and Israeli American writers I mentioned are hardly neglected; but they do evince a willfulness, rooted in libidinal attachment to Hebrew, which makes them kindred spirits to the American Hebrew poets.
Maya Arad’s novella The Hebrew Teacher opens with the line, printed in English, “It wasn’t a very good time for Hebrew.” As the narrative progresses, this line becomes a refrain, an articulation of all the main character’s personal defeats. Ultimately, she gives up Hebrew as a language of written expression, convinced that to connect with her American-born family she must use English. Surely this is the most rational way of looking at things. There really was never a good time for Hebrew in America, and any clinging to Hebrew must be doomed. Doomed it may be, but finality and exceptionality are not without their pleasures. And pleasure, not to mention love, has a way of drawing us on, for better or worse.
Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation Between Jews, by Omri Asscher. Stanford University Press, 2019, pp. 256.