·.

,--oDERN
. EBREW
·poEM
ITSELF
A New and Updated Edition

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS DETROIT

 · · · APPENDIX D
MODERN HEBREW POETRY
1960-1990
T he Hebrew poems which have been
selected for Book II of this anthology
were composed between 1960 and 1990 and
represent one of the more impressive periods
in the history of Hebrew literature. Unfortu-
nately the achievements of contemporary
Hebrew poetry, even more so than those of
Hebrew prose, have been on the whole
unavailable to the non-Hebrew reader. Only a
scant minority of non-Israeli readers are
aware of the remarkable attainments of con-
temporary Hebrew poetry: a poetry written
for a very small audience and yet so complex,
varied and daring. During the long and
distinguished history of post-biblical Hebrew
poetry, Hebrew served as the literary but not
the spoken language of its authors. Only in
this century was Hebrew revived as a living
language by the Zionist revolution and is now
the spoken idiom of the State of Israel. For
the first time after thousands of years, a direct
link was reforged between speech and the
literary language. What has been self-under-
stood about verse composed for example
in English or French literature ever since
the Middle Ages has only recently become
a fact in Hebrew literature. This development
marks an upheaval within the history of
Hebrew culture whose impact cannot yet be
fully grasped.
The great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
has distinguished between l,angue (language),
and parol,e (speech). Langue, he contended,
consists of the supertemporal totality of the
laws, form and phenomena of a language as
it evolved throughout its history. Parol,e is the
temporal form of language, limited to a seg-
ment of time within a long historical process.
Parol,e is the praxis of language and as such
• 337 •
,·,_,
embodies only a partial', and transitory aspect
of it, and co_ntains concrete (and limited)
linguistic representations and situations.
Hebrew during the last two millennia until
its revival as a spoken language was charac-
terized by its severance from the spokeE>
word. Even the greatest poets and thinkers
who wrote Hebrew. did not speak it. The
language thus preserved its uniquely static
position as the repository of an ever growing
pile of texts whose inter-relationship had
remained relatively unaltered: the Bible,
the Talmud and other legal works, Midrash,
prayer, early paytanic (religious) poetry and
medieval Hebrew poetry. These works formed
in Jewish consciousness a colossal pyramid
constituting both a corpus of valid knowledge
as well as a stock-pile which defined the
language and its stylistic models, and
determined the hierarchical status of its
various levels. The Bible, being the most
archaic text, was viewed as the most sacred
and sublime source.
The written language, therefore, had a
fixed vocabulary. The Hebrew of Maimonides
was also the idiom of Bialik and Tcherni-
chovsky almost seven hundred years later,
with only minor changes. The identity which
exists in Hebrew between language, religion
and nationality was preserved in an ideal
condition unequaled in the normal dynamics
of most cultures. Jews who spoke the various
languages of lands in which they resided
preserved Hebrew as their ·literary language.
In this situation, its archaic elements were
never consigned to the limbo of the past.
"The holy tongue" which Hebrew authors
used was l,angue in the de Saussarian sense
and existed outside of time or geography.
It united different eras and the communities
of the wide-spread diaspora. Even Bialik
(1873-1934), the greatest poet of the period
of national revival, did not speak Hebrew in
his daily life. The Hebrew in his poetry, for
all its rich musical quality, was also
pronounced in the Yiddish accent which
East European Jews were using at the close of
the 19th century and not in the rhythms of
contemporary Hebrew. Three generations
had to pass since the age of Bialik before the
sounds of the concrete and practical speech
of Hebrew speakers with its special resonance
and the new meanings given to ancient
Hebrew words and phrases were heard in its
literature and poetry. Yet until the close of
the 1940s, even this renewed language was
perceived as an additional link in the mighty
body of a language which had existed for
thousands of years. Shlonsky, Alterman,
Greenberg and Goldberg, the more promi-
nent poets whose main works appeared
before the 1950s, were influenced by spoken
Hebrew principally toward the end of the
creative period of their lives. The Hebrew
which they spoke, and even more so the
Hebrew of their verse, was an ideal language,
quite distant from spoken Hebrew whose
presence in literature really would first
become felt in the 1930s and 1940s. They
understood the meaning of its words, in the
first instance, as they were derived from the
history of the Hebrew language, rather than
as signified in daily speech. They heard the
l,angue before they heard the paro'le. Since the
1950s, Hebrew was no longer considered by
most of its poets to be primarily linked to an
ancient literature. The paro'le now assumed its
rightful position. Hebrew as l,angue was
learned later and was perceived as something
distant. But the radical change in the
relationship of Hebrew poetry to the Hebrew
language did not simply happen because
poets had suddenly become native speakers
of Hebrew. It was also a result of a sharp shift
which occurred in the Hebrew poetry of the
1950s. At first, this shift was simply viewed as
ansmg from a generational conflict, osten-
sibly as a result of the rebellion of Nathan
Zach against the dominant role of Natan
Alterman, an older colleague who had been
one of the leading arbiters of literary taste
during the period preceding the establish-
ment of Israel and the early years of its
existence (1930-55). Zach's revolt soon
proved to be that of an entire generation
against its predecessors. In the perspective of
time, we can now understand that it signaled
the beginning of an all-embracing cultural
process which would reach its climax in the
1970s. Not only were the principles of the
older poetics challenged but the entire gamut
of the Zionist ideologies that dominated the
cultural milieu during and immediately after
the establishment of the Jewish State.
The new questioning of the meaning of
poetry by the preceding generation was not
merely a matter of poetics. It was a political,
and even a meta-political act involving the
meaning of man and the self perception of
one's nation and society as they operated
within a specific area and within history. The
personal revolt in the field of poetry in effect
turned out to be a symptom of a profound
cultural crisis. Zach was not the first to
inaugurate this poetic turnabout. Amir
Gilboa, Yehudah Amichai, David Avidan-
each in his own way-had done so before.
Zach, however, was the first to formulate the
new ideology in a series of critical essays.
None of these younger poets exactly followed
the particular path which Zach had taken.
Avidan, for example, did not present himself
as rebelling against Alterman's prosody. He
even continued to develop artistic modes
which were clearly Alterman's. Amichai,
likewise, did not declare himself to be a
rebel. His poetry was indeed different from
Alterman's but was totally unrelated to Zach's
as well. Nevertheless, Zach defined the break
which was taking place in critical terms. On
the poetic level, he criticized Alterman's
figurative language as being artificial and
forced to the point that it became a verbal
and mannerist posing. His main attack was
directed against Alterman's prosody: his
measured and allegedly monotonous meter,
his symmetrical lines, and his stanzas which
often closed with strident and extravagant
rimes and adhered to strictly mechanical
feminine and masculine patterns. Zach
proposed a poetry in which the relationship
between form and content should no longer
be architectonic and in which line, stanza and
rhythm should be in consonance with what is
said within the poem. Poetry, he argued, is a
metaphoric, dynamic phenomenon which
flows as an indissoluble unit, combining
rhythm, idea and emotion. Retroactively this
may be viewed as one of the recurrent literary
revolutions in which the pendulum swings
between classicism and romanticism.
Zach's literary views were in no way
superior to Alterman's. Driven by his own
needs, Zach was off target when he
disparaged Alterman's achievement and
disdained his poetics (which, by the way,
was very far from an achromatic, neoclassical
mannerism). And yet his revolt was profound
and relevant. He met the needs of the
succeeding generation of poets. His criticism
was also directed at Alterman's public role as
a secular "prophet"-a role which tradition
had assigned to Hebrew poets even before
Bialik's day. Like Bialik (if to a lesser degree)
Alterman too had enjoyed the status as the
uncrowned poet laureate of the Jewish
community of Palestine during its struggle
against Great Britain. In contrast to Uri Zvi
Greenberg, who assumed the mantle of a
scorned prophetic figure and preached a
message decidedly messianic and eschatolo-
gical, Alterman identified himself with the
mainstream socialist-Zionist ideologies of the
pre-state community.
Zach was one of the first critics who tore
away the bonds which linked Hebrew poetry
to the Zionist endeavor. As he turned his
back on Alterman's poetics and ideology,
Zach sought out literary resources that
espoused poetical views more akin to his
• 339 •
own. He rediscovered the works of David
Vogel (1891-1944?), a poet and novelist who
had lived in Austria following World War I.
Vogel's modernist verse expressed the
existentialist angst which prevailed in the
µismantled Hapsburg EII_lpire. His was the
voice of a lonely, disillusioned individual
detached. from any commitment to history or
to redemptive ideologies, detached to the
point of nihilism, depr~ssion and even
madness. Vogel's poetry was almost forgotten
during Zionism's heroic period and was
generally ignored by his contemporaries. He
was rediscovered in the 1960s and is today
considered to be one of the innovative poets
of the 20th century. Zach's Different Poems
(1962) became the identity card of an entire
generation. These poems do not contain a
single political idea, and not even a clearly
formulated ethical message. They are "Dif-
ferent Poems"-a collection oL variegated
experiments in verse which differed in form
and content from those written by t:h.e poets
of Alterman's generation. Their impact
penetrated the very core of the new Israeli
society which emerged following indepen-
dence. But even if we can understand the
dimensions of the crisis, the change of
direction it precipitated, and its full political
significance, we still would find it difficult
to discern all its effects upon almost two
generations of Israeli poets. The crisis was
as radical and as important as that which
occurred at the time of the revival of Hebrew
lyricism in the 1890s by Bialik and
Tchemichovsky. It involved the process by
which Hebrew poetry drew closer and closer
to Hebrew speech until both were fused.
It introduced a new speaker, who was
individual and singular and who did not
address the reader from a pedestal, but spoke
to him/her in an idiom which often had a
pre-literary vocabulary, converting what had
been a high and declamatory diction into a
more natural one. A new relationship was
established between the speaker of the poem
and the new Hebrew reader. The new poetry
rejected the "blurring" of the line between
"I" and "we." The old collectivist stance had
enabled poets like Alterman and Gouri to
compose the great eulogies of their genera-
tion which expressed the deep sense of
mourning shared by the pre-State community
during the War of Independence in poems
like "Silver Platter" (Alterman 1944) and
"Here Lay our Bodies" (Gouri 1949).
(1) See, our bodies are cast in a wng wng line.
(2) Our faces have changed. Death shines from
our eyes. We are not breathing. (3) The last glows
are extinguished and the evening falls upon the
hilL (4) See, we will not rise to walk awng paths
to the light of a distant sunset. (5) We will not
/,ove, will not set strings trembling in gentl,e and
quiet tones, (6) We will not roar in the gardens
when the wind passes through the forest.
Gouri's poem with its very high diction
implied a collective "we," the "we" of the
soldiers who gave their lives for the future
state. It is written in classical anapests and
adheres to a regular rime scheme, although
one can begin to hear the cadences and
breath-stops of spoken Hebrew. The world
of the fallen is portrayed via European
images somewhat remote from the authentic
Israeli milieu.
The 1950s marked a turning point on an
additional plane. Until the mid-century,
Hebrew poetry was almost exclusively influ-
enced by Eastern European models princi-
pally drawn from Russian romanticism and
symbolism. In the 1920s and 1930s, Hebrew
modernist poets like Shlonsky and Alterman
took their cues from the Russian symbolist
poets. True, some poets, like Abraham Ben
Yitzhak and Vogel who lived in the Austrian-
Hungarian cultural sphere, were influenced
by German expressionism (Rilke, George),
but they functioned on the periphery of
Hebrew poetry. Now most of the poets
executed an abrupt shift away from these
Eastern European influences towards Western
European, German and especially Anglo-
American poetry. T.S. Eliot became the
dominant poetic model in Zach's criticism.
• 340.
A sizeable portion of his Different Poems
might be read as a collection of Eliot-like
experiments in Hebrew verse.
Eliot served Zach as a kind of cultural
Archimedean point from which he was able
to attack Alterman's poetry. However, Zach's
colleagues did not completely share his
dependency upon Eliot. Also the lure of
Eliot's poetry was hardly as profound and
instrumental as Russian poetry had been
during the first half of this century.
The essential element in this shift was not
the transferring of the literary sphere of
influence from Eastern Europe to the West,
but rather the profound change in Hebrew
poetry's self-image and in its relationship to
European culture. While the poets of the
first modernistic period (the generation of
Shlonsky and Alterman) constructed an
abstract and unified poetics which accorded
with the Russian model and confined most of
its poets within an almost single conception
of the nature of poetry, the stance of its
speaker and the formal rules to which the
poets should adhere, the poets of the 1950s
rejected any possibility of maintaining a
consensus regarding any doctrine, or at
least avoided stressing any doctrine which
might serve as common ground for a school
of poets.
Consequently, it was no longer possible
to point to a single or even a principal source
of influence. Every poet considered himself
to be free to determine his own intellectual
line of descent. Henceforward, Hebrew
poetry ceased viewing itself as being on the
periphery of a center which stood outside
itself. The revolt against Alterman and his
generation now fixed that center within
Hebrew poetry.
With the collapse of this earlier conception
of the essence of a poem, Hebrew poetry
became fragmented into a multitude of
different poetic approaches which afforded
the poetry-reading public fascinating and, at
times, avant-garde experiments that were
often barely understood. The questions as to
what constituted a poem, who is a poet, and
who is a reader remained open.
The intensity of the making of poetry and
its development during the 1950s and
particularly in the 1960s left both the Hebrew
public and critics almost .helpless. Criticism
lagged behind these new developments for
years. Some of the more important poets
of the period were almost not read or
understood in their "true time." Pagis was
a blatant example of tl;i.is neglect. And yet
this great episode of Hebrew poetry was far
from being merely a large and amorphous
collection of modernist verse. Even through
the limited perspective of our times, one can
perceive the traces of a certain consistency
in the dynamics of contemporary Hebrew
poetry. The most apt analogue for what
stands at the core of this polysystem is
the human personality. We might view the
"role" of the various poets as Melanie Klein
viewed the various characters in Aeschylus'
Orestia. To her, they represented the different
components which made up the structure
of a single personality in the very throes
of its development from a state of infancy
to maturity.
Orestes represents the "ego" while the rest
of the characters of the drama represent the
various elements operating within the
environment of the "ego": father, mother,
primal forces, judgment, public opinion, etc.
However, defining historical phenomena by
such a comparison is fraught with danger.
A drama is a closed, organic, functional and
meaningful unit while an historical period,
even after it is long past, is not a closed
system. Moreover, the problem whether it is
functional or not is a metaphysical problem.
The modernistic phase of the 1950s projected
a new type of "ego" in Hebrew poetry, which
had hitherto been concealed or relegated
to the sidelines and now moved to the
foreground. The arrival of this new, totally
unique and individual "ego" may be
compared to a birth. A new Hebrew "voice"
was born. The establishment of the Jewish
State and the crisis it engendered, namely the
conflict between the generation of its
founders and their "sons," was fraught with
all the usual psychological problems such a
conflict entails. The revolt against Alterman
was an open rebellion against a literary
figure, but it actually disguised another
rebellion against a much more "threatening"
father-figure: David Ben Gurion and the
policies he advocated. Ben Gurion repre-
sented the ethos which strove. to concentrate
the entire · national enterprise within the
domain of the State. This rebellion had even
greater implications. Hebrew was the "lan-
guage of the fathers," the "sacred language,"
the ''language of God.'' In many ways, this
open rebellion against the generation of the
still living literary "fathers"-Alterman and
Shlonsky-strove to remove the barriers
which had been erected to separate the sons
from their ancient fathers. A more Jdirect and
living connection was re-established with the
archaic sources of pre-exilic biblical times.
From another point of view, Ben Gurion; the
"immediate" father, was "removed" .because
he was too Israeli. He was the wrong father.
The various communities of the diaspora, the
European Holocaust, and the fate of Jewry
and Judaism could no longer be compre-
hended only through an Israel-centered and
overly Zionist prism. The figures of father
and mother whose different faces were strewn
over Jewish history demanded the realization
of a relationship to them.
Nathan Zach was the Orestes of this drama.
Without necessarily accepting all the details
of Aeschylus' drama, it is palpably clear that
Zach formulated the existence of a new
"ego," its dominant role in poetic speech,
and the implications of its presence. Placing
Zach at the center of this drama might lead
to a misconception because the profound
elements which underlay this period were
products of a system, or rather a poly-system,
whose many components were vital "char-
acters" who were inter-related but not
organized about a single lodestar. In applying
the model proposed by Melanie Klein, the
"ego," Orestes (Zach), is not the focal point
dominating all those about him but is rather
the point at which all forces converge. He
represents a state of consciousness, and the
ability to formulate that state in his critical
writings. Zach became a kind of geometric
point in the space in which his contempor-
aries operated even if he did not confront all
the challenges generated by the cultural rift
he had defined.
Contemporary Hebrew poetry might be
divided into these major groupings: 1) Poets
who have striven to renew the contact with
the traditions of Hebrew language, religion
and history; 2) those who have plumbed the
"ego" and its inner psychological processes;
and 3) those who have established the new
Hebrew "ego." Avidan's first volume of verse,
Faucets Without Lips, 1952, is a brilliant
collection of parodies of Alterman's poetry.
Avidan was able to adapt a great deal of
Alterman's poetics and at the same time to
depart from it gradually. Using this device, he
developed the meta-linguistic thinking of the
new Hebrew poetic idiom. His poetry, for a
period of more than thirty years, marked out
an encyclopedic range of poetic possibilities
based upon his study of classical Hebrew
poetics and grammar. The following is a short
passage excerpted from one of his poems,
which makes skillful use of Dayenu, a popular
early Hebrew piyyut (medieval Jewish hymn)
sung at Passover.
(1) Ilu natan, natan, (2) Ilu natan natan
lanu (3) Ilu natantan lanu (4) Ilu natantan
(5) Al a!J,at kama (6) kama vekama (7) Al a!J,at
kamama (8) Kama vekammama (9) Dayeinu.
(1) If he gave (2) If he gave us (3) If he gave
us (4) If he gave us (5) How much the more (6)
More and more (7) How much the more (8) More
and the 'more (9) It would be enough for us.
Avidan's experiments uncovered hidden
semantic potentialities in the syntactical and
grammatical rules of Hebrew and in the
ancient poetical forms used by its early poets.
All these he employed in a novel and daring
fashion, continuing poetical processes which
had been halted centuries ago and which
Zach, his followers, and their predecessors
had deliberately neglected. Avidan based a
number of his major poems upon such exact
geometrical structures.
T. Carmi often interlaced elements of
spoken Hebrew with the many layers of
ancient Hebrew drawn from the Bible, the
Midrash, and medieval Hebrew poetry.
Almost every poem by Carmi strives for the
moment of ambiguity where he endows his
modern words and phrases with a different
meaning than in their original context. Thus
ancient words are revived not as citations but
as a living presence. "The Pilot," published
in 1981, is typical of this technique.
(1) Gates of Heaven mixed with fire and water,
(2) On the right-the good hope (3) On the l.eft-
a pacific sea. (4) The sharp earache shall pass.
(5) The noise which you hear (6) Is not the shout
of angels (7) We've wwered the wheels.
The pilot's announcement to his passen-
gers describes the clouds seen through the
airplanes window and refer, for a moment,
to lines used by Benjamin ben Zerah, a
medieval Hebrew poet: "Fashioned of fire and
water, warriors of the lofty city-they stand before
him like walls."
What was the medieval poet's description
of the angels surrounding the throne of God
converts the realistic description of the clouds
at sunset into a metaphysical vision linking
the depiction of a flight to a larger metaphor
for a human existence suspended between
heaven and the deep. This tension is again
made palpable at the close of the stanza:
the noise is not the voice of the angels but
the wheels of an airplane-that is, it signifies
the motion preceding the landing of the
plane (in Capetown?). However, by using
the language of ancient Hebrew mysticism
(and the medieval poem) in which the
wheels are the wheels of the divine chariot,
Carmi projects a true neoclassical tone which
is totally disguised inside the spoken
language. It is only the keen and learned
reader who will apprehend the ancient,
massive underpinning of his phrasing and
discern the tension and the flow which takes
place between the present parol,e and the
ancient langue.
Avot Yeshurun broke the Israeli centrism of
the Hebrew literary idiom. His verse
constantly hovers about the theme of the
traumatic break between the culture of the
Diaspora destroyed by the Holocaust and the
new Hebrew culture which emerged in Israel.
Consequently, he fashioned a broken idiom
by stringing together fragments of Yiddish,
Hebrew, Polish and Arabic and thus
established contact with the mental world
which had been torn to bits. He closes his
poem "Krasnistov," which was dedicated in
memory of his Polish home town, in these
lines: (1) If I could see my father (2) How a
person meets another (3) Vis machste Burech how
do you do Baruch? (4) What's new tate (Pop)?
Yeshurun's diction incorporates the Yiddish-
isms which had entered Sabra Hebrew. His
lines also reflect the linguistic, psychological
and cultural reality of the people who had
migrated to Israel from diverse diaspora
communities in a manner which is not
patronizing and which depicts the milieu of
their native communities. He transmits this
world in a private, distorted and garbled
language forging an aesthetically powerful
idiom. Israel Pinkas, more than any of the
poets of this group, openly demonstrated
his turning back to the past. His poems
are philosophical reflections upon the old
culture and almost all of them are variations
on the well-known "Ubi sunt" (Where are?)
medieval topus. A Pinkas poem is not just
a nostalgic utterance. It is a necromantic
conjuring up of scenes and mythological
fragments from a traditional cultural store-
house that existed before the modernist
rupture. Its purpose is to bare the catastrophe
that occurred after the great images of the
tradition were lost, and to search for a new
and updated link that might give it a new
relevance. The poem which opens Inside the
• 343 •
Home (1978) conveys the characteristic tone of
Pinkas' diction, an exalted, celebrated tone
which seems to be broadcast from the very
heights of the distant past. (I) When /,ove was
here on her rayal visit (2) She brought [with her]
such a dazzling brilliance, (3) So that many of us
as if undergoing internal surgery (4) Sensed it,-
(5) Until it utterly disappeared, like a mist. (6)
Astonished we told others about it. (7) Was it a
miracl,e (8) That so littl,e remained? (g) Can the
soothsayers and sorcerers of our life [our time],
(IO) With so littl,e data, (n) Understand anything
(something) of our ancient scriptures?
A contrary trend, the breaking into the
"ego," was a logical consequence of the
abandoning of high diction and speaker's
stance characteristic of the previous genera-
tion. Poetic diction moved closer to those
experiences and processes into which tradi-
tional lyrical poetry had not previously
penetrated. While admittedly the inner
experiences and psychological processes had
been expressed in the poetry of every ,
generation, nevertheless, the traditional
literary conventions which had served as
instruments to touch upon these unconscious
processes were abandoned for new techni-
ques. These altered the traditional bound-
aries dividing the objective from the
subjective. The poets who now turned inward
were Yona Wallach, Yair Hurvitz, Hedva
Harekhavi, Maya Bejerano and Leah Ayalon.
Wallach did what Alan Ginsberg did to
American romanticism: he turned Hebrew
romanticism in a direction it had not
previously ventured to enter. Sexual freedom
and drug hallucinations are, to be sure, only
a variation of the traditional romantic
approach. However, both Ginsberg and
Wallach went beyond this tradition in a most
fundamental manner. Sexual freedom was
transformed in their poetry into a manifesto
advocating bisexualism. The experience of
freedom through drugs and alcohol was
converted into a representation of states of
madness or of psychotic crises. Their poetry
opened up the intellectual world to psychic
possibilities which were hitherto beyond
its scope.
Wallach elevated trans-sexuality-the hesi-
tancy and the ultimate transition from one
sex to the other-into the arena of her
intellectual world causing both sexual drives
to confront each other as vital forces
operating within a single personality. The
otherness and the strangeness of the
authentic erotic element in human culture
now underwent a process of development and
intimacy. In the realm of mental crisis and
insanity, Wallach also introduced into her
poetry conditions of consciousness and
cognition which might be apprehended only
in mythological terms such as dibbuk.
An excerpt from "A Second Time-A
Second Chance" is an example of such
combined bisexual and psychotic elements:
(1) Someone now passes within my life (2) Putting
footprints on my own (3) Leaving marks (signs)
within my life (4) Something, a scent, a taste, a
sense, a feeling (5) This is not my life (6) / do not
recognize it, this is my life. (7) Someone passes
inside my life like an open-ended all,ey-way (8)
I sense it (him). The well-known idea of "the
double" here is seriously shaken. On the
one hand, it is a precise "doubl,e" ("Putting
footprints on my own"); on the other, it is
quite different from a double, not the same,
but totally other, having other dimensions. It
is smaller (it is found "inside my life"), it
passes through it, but it is also greater (life is
an alleyway to it). It extends from an earlier
time to a time beyond the concept of life.
This stanza converts the idea of "the other"
conceived within the ego into something
palpable, strange yet unthreatening. It is both
invader and a necessary "other." And with all
this, the poem suddenly alters the sex of the
speaker from feminine to masculine (indi-
cated by altering the use of the feminine form
of the verb to the masculine in line eight).
Each one of these phenomena (the
"double," the change of sex) is linked in
the tradition to a radical destruction of the
structure of the personality and alongside it,
• 344 •
the destruction of one's entire consciousness.
When in the 1920s Shlonsky wrote about the
crisis of his personality, he constructed a
nightmarish picture of a "double" who draws
close to him on the street as a "he" and,
in parentheses, asks "Perhaps it is me?" and
does so until "he" touches him. This
touching is depicted as a confused and
terrifying experience:
(1) Is this madness (2) Or a foolish delusion?
(3) / reach out to tear away the covering:
(4) Some blind man carries a pol,e · on his
shoulders. (5) And like two buckets (6) A pair of
skulls swing.
One of these skulls answers the ,speaker's
question. "Here rest in peace all your
yesterdays, may their memories be blessed."
Shlonsky began the portrayal of his double
in an entirely traditional manner, then
continues in his own special way. There are
four figures: an observer (who tears off
the covering), some bl1.nd man, and two
skulls. The double who carries his conscious
and unconscious past ·is a blind man who
does not understand where he is going.
The hidden parts of the personality which
are linked to this double are conceived
as being dead or killed (skulls). The "ego"
does indeed dare to look inside himself
but out of his self he hears a sarcastic voice
which informs him that his past is buried.
The continuation of this picture is one of
total collapse:
(7) And suddenly, everything moves (8) Houses
slide (g) Down the slope. (IO) And their shutters
rattl,e at the enormity of the terror.
So the inner "other," which is called "the
double," is depicted in the tradition of
western romanticism: a threatening partner,
a shadow, .the negation of the ego, the news
of its death, or as in Heine's· well-known
formulation: "You are my double, my pale
friend."
From another point of view, trans-sexuality
has ,been traditionally viewed as a demonic
reflection of personality related to the loss of
one's divine image or a grotesque distortion
of human sexual identity (for example the
androgynous witches in Macbeth). The
literary tradition enjoyed the game of playing
with grammatical gender when it dealt with
castration. The castrated male is made to talk
in an effeminate voice (as in Jean Genet's
homosexual idiom).
The circumstances in which the Wallach
poem cited above was spoken, and many
others of its kind, were very different than
Shlonsky's terror-fraught vision or Genet's
blasphemous plays. Wallach c·ombines the two
great "doubles" of human personality into a
single flowing being which has a two-way
motion. This is no longer a diabolical act.
The speaker views every doubling, be it
sexual, divine, or death-causing, as a presence
which links the "ego" to the possibility of
its perfectibility.
Yair Hurvitz's poetry reflects a visionary
world. The psychological conditions which he
depicts take the form of landscape poems
drawn in large dimensions. The wide
expanses of sea and sky are the broad and
deep areas of a hidden inner ego. His visions
are conveyed by means of impressive sound
chords and a vocabulary which he himself
had called "festive language." He began
publishing in the 1960s almost at the same
time as Wallach and he reached his mature
period in the 1970s. His was a type of in-
depth poetry which contrasted to, yet
completed, Wallach's work. A Wallach poem
documents a condition of a ruptured
consciousness and is to be understood as a
testimony to a nightmarish or dreamlike
psychic world; a Hurvitz poem is closer to an
invocation, to the creation of a visionary
world by means of the word. Its idiom is
therefore exalted (if not theatrical) and
introduces into modem Hebrew mystical
phrases and formulas which are closely
related to prayer and sacred poetry. It is
difficult to give an example of this type of
evocation in a short survey because it involves
long sequences of evolving articulation. I
shall, therefore, only cite an example of
• 345 •
Hurvitz's use of landscape poetry drawn from
the opening poem of Around the Water Beside
the Birds (1973), his first mature work.
(I) The waters stand as though they were waters
of a work], which is wholly sea, (2-3) Blue is the
water-sea and the water-sea grows green and the
grey of the sea goes far off like a broken tear over
the waters, (4) As far as the breaker, as far as the
mountain of water (5) And from there the sea goes
and a dull copper hue stands upon it.
This break into the "ego" by Wallach
and Hurvitz was a trend which was further
developed by three outstanding women
poets: Hedva Harekhavi, Maya Bejerano and
Leah Ayalon.
Beyond their individual achievement, and
the dimension they added to the concept of
the "ego," they, like Wallach, caused a
fundamental change in the image projected
by the Hebrew poet. ·
Wallach had proclaimed and carried out
the feminist revolt in Israeli arts. The
reverberations of her historic call and her
determining role in achieving this sexqal
revolution would have been impossible had
not Wallach been an artist of stature.
Moreover, her perception of the "ego" and
its sexuality became the axis around which
the entire sexualist perception of that
generation revolved.
The women poets who followed her
fundamentally changed the diction of the
feminine voice in both the poetry and the
culture of their generation. It was no longer
the feminine counterpoint to the dominant
masculine voice (as, for example, Lea
Goldberg's voice in an earlier period)
but that of equal partners in the general
cultural enterprise.
The poetry of Harekhavi, Bejerano, and
Ayalon used verbal techniques quite similar
to those used in "stream of consciousness"
style. Wallach's influence is not so much
exerted upon the contents of their works as
upon their free associative mode of address.
In the context of "female" poetry, one must
also refer to Zelda and Dalia Ravikovich,
although they belong to the next grouping.
This poetry preceding Wallach's sexual revolt
was markedly different in style. Nevertheless,
they did much to bring a growing presence
of the female voice to the attention of the
reading public.
The third grouping set out to construct a
new Hebrew "ego," which was to serve as a
kind of juncture where the two previous
trends converged. The poets already men-
tioned have all had a share in establishing the
cultural presence of the unique voice which
was so characteristic of this generation.
However, the poets of this third grouping
fulfilled a different and discernible role in
this generation's psychic-cultural milieu,
namely they combined several components
of the personality: (1) the past, which makes
its demands and to whose cultural archetypes
the members of the first grouping are
consciously linked; and (2) the stormy and
wild presence of a deeply subjective inner
world whose very existence is most passionate
and anarchic and is most forcibly expressed
by poets belonging to the second grouping.
To those we must add a further dimension,
the parallel school of the Hebrew prose
writers of this generation. The heroic
achievement of the new poetry had com-
pletely altered the status of Hebrew poetry
in comparison to that of Hebrew prose.
Hebrew poetry became the spearhead of
artistic consciousness in every area of Hebrew
culture. In contrast, prose writing was very
THE LONGITUDINAL SECTION
The poets who constructed the voice of the
new "ego" are Yehudah Amichai and Nathan
Zach. Zach was the one who discovered the
ego, that is, who formulated its presence.
Zach's poem ''.Just a Minute" (1962) voices
this discovery in its most succinct form:
(1) (Just] a minute, quiet flease, please, I (2)
Wish to say something. He wal,ked (3) And passed
cautious and conservative. This difference
had a blatant political aspect. Prose writing
reflected a closer adherence to the dominant
political point of view, and often agreed with
the goals formulated by the Zionist regime.
Poetry, on the other hand, gave expression to
revolutionary elements and to a profound
criticism of state policy, particularly in ·the
wake of the Six Day War (1967). This
difference also had psychological significance.
Prose was a kind of "super ego" which
continued the art of literary pragmatism
(so characteristic of the poet of the Shlonsky-
Alterman period), while poetry expressed the
individual "ego" and through it joined
elements which were less conscious, stormier
and more problematic in the psyche and the
culture of their generations.
The "ego" is a composite not only of
the parts that make up the personality but
also of the relationship between the
individual and the many; the individual and
his/her time. This grouping had therefore
established a human voice which not only
said "I express," but also "I want," "I
demand," and "I protest."
How tllis voice of the "ego" was formed is
a complex matter because it is also composed
of many contradictions which can be grouped
under two main headings: (1) a longitudinal
section (poems that construct the "ego"
and that continue doing so) and (2) a cross-
section (poems consisting of the inner
contradiction within the "ego").
me by. I could have touched the hem of (4) His
cwak but did not touch (it). Who could have (5)
Known what I did not know. (6) Sand stuck to
his cwthes, to his beard (7) Twigs tangl,ed.
It appears that he sl,ept (8-g) In straw the night
before. Who cou/,d have (IO) Known that in one
more night he would be (II) As empty as a bird,
hard as a rock.
 (12) / cou/,d,n 't know. I do not blame (13) Him.
Sometimes I feel that he rises (14) From [in] his
sl.eep, moon-struck like a sea, passes by me, says
(15) To me my son. (16) My son, I did not know,
that you, were with me to such an extent.
This poem celebrates the magnificent
achievement of Hebrew poetry at the very
moment in which it succeeded in converting
the spoken language not only into a presence
but into a sounding board which now
paralleled the achievement of classical
Hebrew. It marks the beginning of the
juncture of the past with the inner world of
the Hebrew:Jewish person living in this era.
Zach activated the intonation of the voice of
Israeli speech, the true melody of its
sentences, the modes of speech in specific
dialogical situations, without erasing Hebrew
as langue. The break in the opening line
following the word / before the verb reacts,
above all, to the oscillations of the conscious-
ness of the speaker and enables the reader to
discern them as well as the precise
psychological situation in all its fluidity and
intimacy. It impels him to construct, at that
very moment, an appropriate diction which
presents this unclear situation by means of a
specific voice.
The sensitive reader should be able to
discover that a biblical verse is concealed
behind this phrase: "And I, what shall I do"
[lit.: "where can I go"] (Genesis 37:30); this
is only grasped .when the text is read aloud
and with a pause at the end of the line. The
biblical verse itself contains a hidden rise in
tone, a hesitancy and even a fear lurking
behind the utterance of a speaker who is
attempting to say something. And this hesita-
tion confronts the deepest dimensions of the
entire language. Consequently the resonance
is not only doubled (an ancient echo and an
echo of the present) but is redoubled; the
ancient utterance operates within the present
and the contemporary utterance resounds
with the echoes of the ancient past.
This poem is considered to be a proclama-
tion of the new poetry, a conquest of the
• 347 •
most remote continent of Hebrew literature,
the continent of what is alive· and existent.
The simultaneous activation of these two
dimensions of language as well as these two
0
historical perspectives creates a freedom of
action. The lines which follow the opening
stanza of ':Just a Minute" can serve as a
model which demonstrates the constructive
power and phrasing of the new poetry.
The picture the speaker presents through-
out this stanza is one of drawing ever clos~r
until contact is made with the sublime, divine
"He." At its center stands the phrase "the
hem of his cloak," which sounds like a
biblical allusion. However, that phrase is
found nowhere in the Bible. By means of
their connotative echo, each of these words
attains a heavy measure of meaning. "Hem"
appears in the biblical description of the robe
worn by the High Priest (Ex. 28:31-36); and,
particularly, in Isaiah's vision (6: 1); "cloak"
in the Elijah story (I Kings 19:13) and, in its
royal context, in Jonah 3:6. Moreover, the
Hebrew reader would recall the dramatic
scene depicting the confrontation between
Saul and Samuel (I Sam 15:28) "And he
grasped his coat-tail" where neither the words
"cloak" nor "hem" appear.
The structure of this poem is amazingly
complex. The dramatic tension engendered
by the speaker has its source in these two
biblical words and links them to biblical texts
in which they were never used. Thus they
bear with them the full weight of the various
and sublime biblical descriptions of the
Temple cult and raise the biblical narrative to
a more abstract level by discarding those
concrete facts which in the context of the
poem are superfluous, such as Samuel's
hatred of Saul.
This allusion is real and not imagined.
Yet it does not refer in a one-dimensional way
to one or another of the archaic sources
because it rises from a multi-dimensional text
and refers to another which is also multi-
dimensional. This effect is created by the
psychological depth and the tension sensed
by the reader because of the credible verbal
situation inherent in the modern text,
activating areas stretching beyond any defini-
tion of the concept of the "ego" when it is
realized in a living person.
The closure of the poem once again sets
forth the image of the divine "other" as He
is revealed within the consciousness of the
"ego:" "I feel Him rise." Within this con-
sciousness, a new link is forged on another
level: the relationship of the son to his father
and the father to his son is reestablished or
becomes known once again. It is precisely
through the words "my son, my son" which
recall David's lament at the death of Absalom
(II Sam 19:5) that the contact (which is
perhaps beyond life and certainly beyond
material existence) between the great Father
and the son (and also between the great texts
of the past) and the living person defined as
his son, takes place. One can read many
narratives into this poem, ranging from the
story of the earliest beginnings of the Jewish
people to the story of the present generation
of Israelis, a generation which lost the fluid
and living contact with the image of the
Father (whether He be real or metaphysical)
and now reconstructs it out of its new inner
world, to the point that, for a moment, it
blurs the understanding as to who is the
father and who, the son. The situation
portrayed in this poem is again very similar to
that of Orestes, who had striven to find the
spirit and redeem the honor of Agamemnon,
his murdered father.
Zach and Amichai arrived on the literary
scene almost at the same time. (Amichai, who
was older, published his first book with Zach's
support only in 1955). It was by their joining
together that the voice of the new "ego"
acquired its decisive presence.
At the outset of the 1960s, poets who were
destined to continue and further consolidate
the building of the new "ego" and identify
with Zach's critical and poetic views began
publishing: Dalia Ravikovich, Ori Bernstein,
Meir Wieseltier and Dan Pagis. It was
Wieseltier who soon assumed the role of
formulating and expounding the literary theo-
ries of the post-Zachian generation. He sharp-
ened the definition of the modernist nature
of this poetic revolution and served as a guide
to the new poetic "speaker" through the most
difficult crisis of Israel's culture in the wake of
the Six Day War (1967). More than any of his
contemporaries, he gave voice to the political
conclusions which many of the younger poets
drew as a consequence of that war.
At the same time, he updated the
awareness of Hebrew poetry to the crises
faced by modernism itself. With Wieseltier,
Hebrew poetry aligned itself with the cultural
processes of the West. Michel Foucault in his
Les Mots et Les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966)
brought the consciousness of the destruction
of modernism in line with current philo-
sophic thought. The symbols of the past were
being destroyed at a time when the media
were constantly duplicating all the compo-
nents of modern culture, electronically
causing the collapse of the very concept of
man. From the very moment that the network
of mutual relationships between words and
concepts was torn to shreds, symbols became
empty. While the modernism of Zach dealt
with poetry and its language, Wieseltier deals
with poetry as it relates to actual language
and to the worth of man within reality. Zach
tried to create a sort of new humanism but
Wieseltier sensed that all the basic premises
of any kind of "humanism" face the danger
of destruction not only because the moral
certainties of Zionism had collapsed, but also
because of more embracing ''ecological'' pro-
cesses, which relate to secularization, indus-
trialization and universal communication.
(1) Tonight we read poetry, but the worl,d
doesn't (2) Read poetry tonight or on other nights
(3) Doesn't read poetry, not even (4) The most
beautifu~ never (5) Will the worl,d benefit l,y
reading even (6) The most beautiful poem (7)
Even if we pkad with it, even if we very much
pkad with it (8) / will not agree. ("A Summary
of the Sixties")
 "Pile upon· pile," "heaps of forgetfulness"
and ruin are basic metaphors in Wieseltier's
world. They constitute the immense pile-up
of destruction in every existential or cultural
dimension. Opposite these, and within these,
Wieseltier creates a kind of possible location
in which it is possible to preserve the image
of man, the idea of man, which one had
imagined no longer existed.
Wieseltier, the most consciously modernist
poet of the generation, was also the first to
THE CROSS-SECTION OF THE EGO
Paralleling this projection of an "ego" which
blatantly asserts its presence and openly
voices its social protest, yet moving in an
almost opposite direction, is the poetry of
Dan Pagis. The word "I" is almost always
present in a Pagis poem. The construction of
the "ego" is the declared happening in most
of his poems (generally the word "I" comes
at the end of them) but Pagis' "ego" is
perceived as an absence, as a lost presence
whose physical existence is absolutely differ-
ent from its intellectual existence. The
fundamental experience depicted by Pagis is
the Holocaust (which occurred in his
childhood). He is the only poet who has
succeeded in expressing in Hebrew poetry
not only the Holocaust as an experience, but
all its conceptual implications for the lives of
those who survived it. His work was barely
read, let alone understood, during the 1960s
and the 1970s. Most readers discovered his
work only after his death in 1986. The poem
"Written in Pencil in the Sealed Car" (1970)
epitomizes one of the most penetrating
expressions of Pagis' voice as well as his
technique. Reading it, we can sense the basic
psychological situation of the "absent ego"
which is bared only at the close of the poem,
in an unwritten sentence whose most
concentrated expression is silence.
(1) Here is this shipment (2) / am Eve (3)
With Abel my son (4) If you shou/,d, see my
• 349 •
revolt against modernism and has established
during the past thirty years · a new lyrical
option that not only is postmodernist but has
a unique type of high lyrical diction. The
evolution of his poetry has been tortuous and
complex and shall be discussed in the essays
in this anthology which expound his poems.
At this point, however, it is appropriate to
mention Yitzhak Laor, a poet who was directly
influenced by Wieseltier and who openly
acknowledges his debt to him.
o/,d,er son (5) Cain son of Adam (man) (6)
Tell him that I
While the Zach-Wieseltier-Laor line pre-
serves the clear principle of .continuum and
flow, Pagis' verse constitutes a sort of a
counterpointal parallel to it. It is a poetry
which gives expression to the destroyedJewish
"ego" ("/ have become a shadow/I had another
Creator/And He, in His roving kindness, did not
l,eave with me anything that cou/,d, die. ") His was
also a poetry which tended to express itself in
rigid verse forms grounded upon logical
relationships (mainly paradoxical) between
their components, so very different from the
free-flowing, conversational idiom employed
by Zach.
The concept of the "ego" which devel-
oped here had multiple and varying aspects.
Zelda and Aharon Shabbtai, two poets with a
decidedly religious temperament, began
publishing in the 1960s. Zelda stemmed from
an orthodox Jewish family and skillfully
combined the traditional religious ethos with
a modernistic idiom whose intellectual world
ranged far beyond the accepted views of
orthodox Judaism. Shabbtai, especially in the
series of long poems ("Domestic Poems"),
produced a didactic corpus that tried to
formulate a new and all-encompassing ethos
which strove to include all the components of
the personality of the "damaged" Jew
through the contemplative study of the
"lower world"-food, labor, sex and even
excrement. He draws his inspiration from
ancient models of didactic literature (both
Greek and Jewish) and considers his poetry to
be part of a therapeutic process in which the
"head" (the Freudian super-ego) will once
again be rejoined to the "body" ( "To l,earn/to
l,earn and to teach/and in the broadest and most
ekmentary manner actualry enter/inside/your own
ass/in order to l,earn to be a man.")
The poetry of Dalia Ravikovich stands at
the center of this psychological and cultural
process. It is the most concentrated poetic
embodiment of this new "ego," its anima, the
emotional state which precedes one's condi-
tion as a thinking human being. And yet, at
the same time, it preserves the balance
between the past and present, between one's
unconscious, inner world and one's natural
and conscious world. Ravikovich has con-
structed a most complex "ego" in her verse,
composed of a number of inner balances.
Her language is almost biblical yet is still
spoken and natural. Her poems are formal
and classical and yet flow in a most
convincing and flexible style. The emotional
situation of her poetry comes very near to
that of a dream, or nightmare, or even to that
of an emotional crisis in which the
personality disintegrates. And yet these poems
are executed in an evenly balanced and
penetrating diction which raises them from
the level of the unconscious to that of the
conscious. In the main, within the broad
arena of lyrical functions in which the poetry
of the present generation had struggled,
Ravikovich's poetry found the way to express
the "great emotions" of joy and sorrow,
happiness and fear. She preserves the classical
concept of expression and this is perhaps the
secret of her power. One should remember
that expression as the main function (over
and beyond its existence as one of the array
of functions which are to be found in every
poem) had been rather a rarity in this
generation. Where it was indeed dominant
(as it was among the poets of the second
• 350.
trend), it was made up of extremely
emotional phrases that flowed from situations
in which the personality was in crisis, and
these situations were not included within the
scope of the classical emotional norms, with
their ancient conception of the proper
expression of sadness and joy. Zach,
Wieseltier and Laor mustered a great deal
of energy in their quest to capture the new
possibility of expressing such feeling. Raviko-
vich pursued her own path toward this
possibility at the very beginning of her career.
Within the perspective of this generation, her
impressive achievement is even more brilliant.
She experienced the modernist crisis and
voiced it with such mastery that her poems
contain it in unbroken neoclassical forms and
diction which, despite everything, are thor-
oughly convincing: the poem "Clockwork
Doll" (see p. 192), written in 1961, is an
excellent example of her contribution.
The poets of this trend were those who
converted the voice of the lyrical "ego" into
a political "ego": Amichai and Sivan in the
1950s, Wieseltier in the 1960s and in the 1970s
(especially after the Yorn Kippur War in 1973)
together with Zach, Ravikovich, Pagis, Avidan
and Carmi, in the 1980s Yitzhak Laor and
Yosef Sharon. Their political verse includes
not only poetry of protest directed against
Israel's occupation of the West bank, but also
the all-embracing personal reaction of the
single individual within the political arena.
They mark, once more, the border which
divides the individual from the collective
and the State. The process of disrupting
the sequence-human being, the Hebrew
language, the State of Israel as a political
being-was based upon a deep and all-
encompassing experience which in its essence
was ·similar to what psychology calls separa-
tion-individuation.
This is not the place to go into detail about
the severe struggles such an important
process engendered-a process more com-
plex than any we have discussed. Never-
theless, it is important to point out that the
transition from a situation in which the
"ego" identified with the collective "we,"
and related to the state as to a mother or
a bride (so typical in the poetry of the period
of the War of Independence), to a situation
in which the relationship between the "ego"
and the State was more complex-led to a
deep change in the perception of the
individual within the Hebrew language and
culture. In this respect, too, poetry stood in
the forefront of the entire Hebrew cultural
process. The new "ego" led by degrees to
the recognition that the Hebrew lyrical voice
consisted of a collection of voices and was
not bound to a verbal formula dictated
from above as obligatory. This turnabout of
the perspective changed the concept of
the speaker and his point of view in
accord with all the forms of classification
which the cultural reality as it evolves in
Hebrew might suggest.
This process also led Hebrew culture to
discern other Jewish voices which in the past
were not integrated within the earlier
concept of the "ego"-voices like those of
Vogel, Preil, and Yeshurun-as well as voices
which are not even Jewish, like those of
Arabic poets whose cultural and political
center often was not congruent and at times
conflicted with the State of Israel in its
present form.
The concept of the Hebrew "ego" as
formed in this generation has brought about
an open-minded attitude to a true pluralistic
conception of the individual who speaks
Hebrew. The poetry of this generation has
demonstrated that this openness did not
demand any loss of identity. Even if this
identity can no longer be clearly defined
as an unquestionable bond between the
Hebrew language, the Jewish religion, Jewish
nationalism and the Jewish State, Hebrew as
the language of the Arts has not become an
abstract and anonymous vehicle. Indeed it is
precisely today that we understand how
dynamic and profound are the ties which
bind modem Hebrew and its poetry to
ancient Hebrew and its literary tradition.
The parable drawn from Aeschylus might
help us to understand the dramatic moment
in which this generation began, a mom~nt so
bound up with the n_ew existence of the
Hebrew state as an i~dependent entity, and
in which "the generation of the sons" came
home to its birthplace and there met mothers
and fathers embroiled in conflict, striving for
authority and driven by it. The generation of
the sons was compelled to construct its
existence and way of life in a tragic con-
frontation with the parent generation. The
present generation, like Orestes, was fated to
find itself in the midst of a tragic and all-
embracing rift which followed this revolt, like
the vengeful curses of the Orestia which had
pursued Orestes.
However, at this point, the parable ends.
The Israeli crisis of the 1970s did not merely
result from the establishment of the Hebrew
family-state. Global forces of greater scope had
penetrated Hebrew culture via modernism.
The end of the Orestia exists only in the
parable and not in its total application.
Nevertheless the parable is useful because it
enables us not only to understand the essence
of the drama of the present generation but
also, and perhaps in the main, to understand
pluralism, and the structure in which such a
rich array of gifted poets, by a wondrous
process of natural selection, was privileged
to satisfy cultural needs that were so vital
and so complex.
- ARIEL HIRSCHFELD