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

Part I

Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II

Chapter 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 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 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 indifference 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. 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 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.

Notes

1. See Ziva Shamir, Od hozer hanigun: Shirey Natan Alterman baraee hamodernism (Tel-Aviv: 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).

3. Nathan Alterman, Sod hamerchaot hakfulut, in Ba-ma’agal, 29.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 28.

10. Ibid., 27.

11. Ibid., 28.

12. Ibid., 29.

13. Ibid., 30–31.

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.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid, 35.

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.

Chapter 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 would not write war poems, even now as the new and justified anti-Nazi 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 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 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 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.

Notes

22. Nathan Alterman, Mahbarot Alterman (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1979), 2: 136–38.

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.

26. Ibid.

27. See Nathan Alterman, Mihtav al oto nose, Hashomer Hatzair, September 22, 1939.

28. See Avraham Shlonsky, Pikuah nefesh, Hashomer Hatzair, October 27, 1939.

Chapter 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 Poetry (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 windows, Goldberg 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 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.

Without tiring, chase words to the edges of Hebrew,

pull