Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Nash, Stanley

Titel

Reading Hebrew Literature: Critical Discussions of Six Modern Texts

Ist Teil von

• Shofar, 2005, Vol.23 (3), p.192-196

Ort / Verlag

West Lafayette: Purdue University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• "The Red Heifer" is a gruesome tale about a group of butchers in an Eastern European town who epitomize in the most essentialist manner the brutality inherent in their profession. [William Cutter] views the story as part and parcel of Berdyczewski's anti-idealistic debunking of Judaism. Ann Golomb Hoffman expands the rubric of her interpretive hermeneutic to encompass psychoanalytic issues of gender, most notably, the "history of Jewish male feminization" -- a fashionable topic of both psychological and ideological import -- which Hoffman views as being adumbrated boldly in Berdyczewski's story. The third essay on the "Red Heifer" is by Avner Holtzman, one of the world's leading [M. J. Berdyczewski] researchers. Holtzman views the story as connected with Berdyczewski's peculiar declaration of his intent to "memorialize" a Judaic culture that comes across as neo-pagan in a good many of Berdyczewski's stories and in his novel Miriam as well. Holtzman is a bit too quick in giving the appearance of dismissing or minimizing the fact that "for generations of readers, this story was viewed as an expression of belief in the potential powers of earthly life hidden beneath the surface of diasporic meager existence, waiting for their fulfillment." Proto-Zionist or not, the story "The Red Heifer" seems to embody a dynamic re-mythicization of Judaism, which may indeed run counter to Berdyczewski's avowed pessimism about Judaism during this period (1905). It is surprising that none of the authors saw fit to cite Dan Almagor's masterful study of archetypal figures and situations in Berdyczewski's work, one small facet of which is Almagor's illustration of the eroticism implicit in the color red in what he terms "Berdyczewski's personal mythology." (See Almagor's article in Nurit Govrin's edition of "Selected Articles on Berdyczewski's Literary Work.") The haunting poem "Man's House" is a fine example of the poetic genius of Uri Zvi Greenberg, whom Lewis Glinert terms "Hebrew's greatest Expressionist poet." Glinert, a Judaically learned professor of linguistics, provides a brilliantly painstaking linguistic analysis for every line of the poem, highlighting both ideational and linguistic ambiguities. The distinguished Tel Aviv literary scholar, Dan Laor, provides valuable historical context. Like Glinert, Laor points to Greenberg's simultaneous evocation of his specific childhood experience and of a "rather philosophical statement about the human condition." Laor cites from the book by Michael Seidel, "Exile and the Narrative Imagination," to provide a much augmented sweep to his analysis. Laor then pivots to the general assessment by Dan Miron, and others, that following Greenberg's total engagement with the Holocaust, Greenberg began a gradual return to the lyrical and more broadly humanistic scope of his poetry of the 1920s. Hannan Hever, a world-renowned specialist in Greenberg's poetry, contends that the poem focuses not at all on a resolution of the poet's longing -- after the fashion of a Zionist resolution to Diasporic longing -- but rather on the infinitude, the unresolvability, and "the riddle of longing" as man's permanent estate from the time of Adam, "adam harishon." Through the most dazzling, if not totally convincing, exegesis, Hever discovers the seeds of self-destruction in Greenberg's conflicted commitment to the illusory panacea of the Zionist narrative.