HADRIAN AND HEBREW
Ozick, Cynthia
HADRIAN AND HEBREW I. Seven Propositions: Cynthia Ozick /.Agnon asks Saul Bellow, "And have you been translated into Hebrew?" "Yes," says Bellow. "Good," says Agnon. "Then you are...
...they are outside the reality, the con-creteness, of history...
...1 mean, she is sometimes too "aristocratic," too "high...
...5. The language a writer writes in is synonymous with what he will write...
...Yiddish lasted a thousand years...
...The holy tongue is vertical: to be read, in the language of perpetuation, from generation to generation...
...a powerful gasp...
...only the exhortation toward the Commandments...
...the whole statue was recovered, says the Times, and is "being cleaned and prepared for exhibition" in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem...
...But for me, the sand is not only landscape, not only childhood — it's these too, of course, and sensually these—but also history...
...and while Hadrian's workers hung, "as a special annoyance to the Jews" (the phrase is from Graetz), a stone carving of a pig's head at Bethlehem's south gate, oak leaves hummed in the primeval forests of New York—out of which, two thousand years after, Morton Leventhal comes to scratch Hadrian's head out of the sand with his pocket-knife...
...Though Yiddish is rich in Hebrew, and cannot, in fact, be fully understood without Hebrew, its metaphysical foundation is exile...
...You are incessantly aware of her antiquity, even when writing the most ordinary words, like boker, tsohara-yim, erev (all have very rich biblical and cabbalistic connotations), and at the same time these ordinary words are all yesterday-born in this fresh air, issuing from those who came from Hungary and Algiers...
...from a letter by Aharon Megged, Tel Aviv, June 16, 1975) II lb Cynthia: Aharon Megged Safed, Israel June 21, 1974 Shoshana hay'karah, I've packed and left Tel Aviv to come to Safed and spend ten days in Kna'an among the beasts of the field and the spirits of the past...
...A strange thing happened to me here, in this resort place on Mount Kna'an: walking on the lawn, thinking about what you wrote, I met, sitting in a deck chair, pen and paper in hand, an elderly man, who introduced himself to me as a poet who had come from Russia a year ago...
...It is as if they come out for the first time, not "used" enough, not polished by usage...
...Aharon HI...
...To put it otherwise: in the long run Yiddish could not survive exile...
...I close the gap with this feeling...
...A major German publishing company has undertaken a definitive edition of the Collected Works of Heinrich Heine, calling the venture a "monument...
...How strange: Hebrew is my mother tongue— I think and dream in Hebrew — still, when I utter the sentences, by mouth or by pen, they don't feel quite "natural" to me...
...Yes," he said, "there, the trees were mine...
...mythological impulse, like every artful sculpture...
...It is the blessed-and-cursed nature of the language, which we inherited from books and not from grandma tales...
...You are tense...
...I wish I could write to you in Hebrew, in that lingua franca of Jews, by which they used to communicate for generations, from Babylon to Toledo, from Tours to Frankfurt, from Amsterdam to Safed, the town of the Cabbalists, and of beautiful Sabbath eve sunsets...
...My pen is heavy in English, and hesitating...
...You feel awkward beside her at fancy parties, and at home — at home you have to train her to do the cleaning, the washing, all the housework, even the work in the kitchen-garden...
...Hebrew is a 'small' language, but God loves it, as his Benjamin...
...A very rare piece," the curator notes, "extraordinary and beautiful...
...It's not my tree...
...Hebrew did...
...Monument...
...I think it will take three, four generations to change...
...He was a Yiddish poet (a "po...
...1 came to this country when I was five and a half and lived in a small village, sunk in sand, hot sand at noontime, cool in the evenings, and my first sensation of the country was the feel of sand between my bare toes...
...Your letter is like that useful shirt...
...Of all the statues celebrating Hadrian, only one other has been found...
...It's ambivalent...
...The Germans burned his books...
...No one knows his burial place," we are told of Moses...
...Popular agitation recently prevented a new German university from taking the name "Heinrich Heine University...
...By putting them down in simple, fluent, realistic prose—well, you make believe, you create, in a way, unrealistic, imaginary "simplicity" which doesn't exist...
...I never, never think of it when I write...
...She is very ancient and very new at the same time...
...It shocked me...
...Yiddish was murdered...
...A Jew from New York dug it up with a Boy Scout knife, wrapped it in his T-shirt, and lugged it on his bicycle to a nearby kibbutz, where it was displayed in the dining hall...
...A Jew writing in a diaspora language is by definition an "as-similationist...
...Moses leaves no mythic trace...
...6. There is no permanent Jewish language other than the holy tongue...
...This week — you must be reading about it in Tel Aviv while 1 am reading about it in New York — Hadrian's head rose out of the ground near Beit Shean in Israel...
...You'll think it's snobbery, a kind of Israeli arrogance, if I say I never think of it...
...To be more precise: you never feel relaxed with words...
...How can I think of it when the whole of my life is Jewish...
...It's not easy...
...ornament...
...Die Lorelei having been popularly mistaken for a folk song, it could not be extirpated, and continued to appear in Nazi school readers with the ascription "Anonymous...
...Next, about sand...
...Yiddish in Europe died not of attrition — like, perhaps, that other Jewish language, Aramaic, or like Yiddish in America — but by calculation, at the hands of those who plotted the Final Solution...
...Monuments and gods and Definitive Collected Editions are ornaments...
...No, it's not as simple as that...
...To Aharon: Cynthia Ozick New York August 5, 1975 Dear Aharon, Or: perhaps history becomes mythology only when we un-link ourselves from it...
...Morton Leventhal carries Hadrian's head in his shirt...
...and when I asked him how he felt in this country, he said: "So-so — but you see this lawn, this grass...
...Shaw, thinking to propose the reform of English spelling, proposed instead the expunging of history: change "beauty" to "byooti," and you have blotted out the Norman invasion...
...Hadrian, ferocious persecutor, designer of a second-century Final Solution, who banned the study of Torah and every Jewish practice: Rome is gone into air, the language of Rome dissipated into the Romance tongues, the religion of Rome transmogrified in Roman Catholic statuary...
...Counting from Sinai, a brevity...
...First, on writing in Hebrew...
...But more than merely the head survives...
...It may be that for us the struggle is to resist becoming mythology...
...What, to us, is Hadrian now...
...Jerusalem is important to Christianity not as the birthplace of a faith, but as the deathplace of a god: hence the cen-trality of those monuments-in-little, the crucifix and the cross...
...How, when I write on and from the life in this country...
...And there...
...In his lifetime and beyond...
...When you tell about the effort to put Hebrew to quotidian use again — didn't King David's mechanics pass tools to one another in Hebrew all the while King David was singing the Psalms?—you guarantee resistance to mythology, you fulfill the concrete -ness of history...
...There is a picture of the head in the Times, with fine Roman curls over the forehead, every hair of the noble beard lifelike in valuable bronze...
...How, when I write in Hebrew...
...The winds of two millennia have blown away since Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem under the name of Aelia Capitolina, and erected a column in his own honor on the Temple Mount...
...See this tree...
...Alas, this false question has been solved not by us, especially after the last war here, when the illusion — indulged in by some—that we in Israel are unlinking ourselves from Jewish history does not hold any more...
...I write in a perishable language — my pen makes futile tracks on Hadrian's head — and 1 envy you...
...It isn't my grass...
...Die Lorelei became a German poem...
...Who would have believed that Yiddish— a language regarded as Jewish beyond any historic, social, temperamental, or linguistic dispute — would perish...
...Did Heine Aharon Megged's most recent novel, THE BAT, will be published this fall in Israel...
...Then you are safe.'' 2.Horizontal and vertical: A diaspora tongue is horizontal: to be read, in a perishable language, in the writer's own generation...
...How many Hebrew poets came from Russia in the first aliyot, and sang my Kinneret, my Galil, my Yerushalayim...
...4. A language is the history of a people...
...A monument marks death...
...Her essay, "The Riddle of the Ordinary," appeared in our pages last month...
...You wrote about your sand being ""golus sand...
...Very good for poetry, or for translating Shakespeare or Milt'on (even Whitman), much less so for down-to-earth prose...
...J.Heinrich Heine: In an essay on Shakespeare, he writes: "The Jews are a chaste, abstemious, so to speak an abstract people, and in purity of morals approach the German nations...
...7."A writer grows in his own language...
...The con-creteness of history is not preserved in bronze...
...Cynthia Ozick is the author of several works of fiction including BLOODSHED AND THREE NOVELLAS to be published next spring by Knopf...
...Writing "Jewish...
...It makes up for what I lost, for what others have and I don't—the continuity, the knowledge that your father and grandfather and forefathers lived in the same place...
...Ornaments are perishable...
...The same fate pursues us (with the great difference that we can, here, defend ourselves) until history for us becomes mythology...
...In my heavy, clumsy English I shall try to say something about things you touched on...
...I asked...
...I tread on history, I feel history in it...
...become — speaking "vertically" — a German poet...
...Shoshana...
...I feel all this is not mine — and for a poet it is very bad...
...Wherever there is a monument, history is replaced by mythology, Heine returns as smoke bound in leather, the teacher turns into a god...
...Being an Israeli and being a Jew...
...But this is the truth...
...I think sometimes that to be wed to Hebrew is to be wed to a princess (and I am plebeian, an ordinary man, after all...
Vol. 1 • September 1975 • No. 3
