The Most Important Word in the World
Sheila T Keiter2022, The Jewish Review of Books
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Abstract
This article offers a hypothesis regarding John Steinbeck's use of the Hebrew word "Timshel" in his novel East of Eden. This article discusses how Steinbeck discovered the Hebrew term that form the spiritual core of his novel and focuses on how Steinbeck came to pronounce the word the way he did in contravention of the conventional Hebrew pronunciation.
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Representations of the other in modern Hebrew literature
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With thanks to my supervisors Professors Y ehoshua Gitay and Ezra Spicehandler for their guidance and help; to my friends scattered everywhere for their inspiration and love, and especially to Linda Mendelsohn for her boundless support. With grateful acknowledgement of the fmancial assistance provided by the Finkelstein Fellowship administered by the University of Judaism, Los Angeles, and the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town. I dedicate this work to the memory of my parents and Swami Nisreyasananda. Representations of the Other in Modern Hebrew Literature This study posits that the concept of the Other is central in modem Hebrew literature. It traces its beginnings in Jewish thought to the Bible, and connects the creation and Eden narratives to contemporary psychoanalytic thought on ego formation and the Other. It considers the importance of the figure of the talush to the focus on the Other in modem Hebrew literature and suggests that the conflicts of the collective versus the individual that are expressed in the early stages of the literature do not disappear as it moves into the present day, but are discernible in different guise and can be seen in the burden of group consciousness which besets Hebrew authors and vitiates their attempts to configure the unique. The feminized Other is seen as especially important in this regard because of the collective textual and thus social repression of women in the tradition. Its presentation is thus taken as a useful measure of the successful resolution of individual as opposed to group narration. The modem Hebrew texts analyzed, beginning with a poem by the late Haskhalah poet, Y.L. Gordon through D. Baron, M.Y. Berdichewski, A. Kahana-Carman, S.Y. Agnon, A Appelfeld and ending with a novel by the contemporary Israeli writer, D. Grossman, support this decision as the collective is subjugated only in Kahana-Carman's text where the feminine is fully realized. The thesis examines the ways the eight narratives grapple with the awareness of the Other, and focuses on the aspects, including body, war and language, that are highlighted variously in each text. The struggles of modem Hebrew writers are also viewed as part of the difficulties entailed in the denotative endeavors of writing itself which strives, towards the always elusive Other that predates ego-formation and thus individuality itself. It is proposed that this intensifies the tensions about the Other in modem Hebrew literature which derive from its specific cultural heritage.
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The reader of The Ontology of Space in Biblical Hebrew Narrative will no doubt find its author, Luke Gärtner-Brereton, conflating his knowledge and insight of philosophy, literary studies, biblical studies, and kindred disciplines into this one book. With that said, if the goal of this work is to prove, as the subtitle suggests, that "'space' itself acts as a 'determining' factor within the Hebrew aesthetic," then the book will ultimately disappoint (p. 25). Let that not deter the reader, however, for Gärtner-Brereton has offered to us a very suggestive work which contributes to the area of narratology in refreshing and unique ways.
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The Phonetic Representation of Spoken Language in Modern Hebrew Literature – Written language normatively transmits the full graphic pattern of a word without deviating from the spelling rules of a particular language. However, when graphic signs are intended to represent the spoken language used in natural conversation, the question of the phonetic imitation of spoken language in written texts arises. The present article deals with the position of spoken language in Hebrew narrative fiction and drama, and the modes of its representation from 1948 on, including both original Hebrew works and those translated from English into Hebrew. This issue is discussed against the background of such relevant broader issues as: the special situation of Hebrew, which had long been used as a written language only, devoid of the varied functions of spoken language; linguistic-stylistic norms in Hebrew literature from 1948 on and the changes they underwent; Hebrew writers' and translators' a...
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One advantage Yiddish writers had in transforming Yiddish into a modern literary language was that the language was already a vehicle for natural speech. In this area, Hebrew literature had to play catch-up during the course of the long twentieth century. The relationship between the spoken word and the written word in Jewish culture is tangled and shifting. That relationship was clarified and inverted with the emergence of the Hebrew Haskalah, at the center of which stood sifrut (literature), which asserted the primacy of the written word. Initially, the maskilim modeled Hebrew dialogue on Biblical examples. This essay examines two early texts in order to analyze their different responses to the problem of representing speech in Hebrew: Abramovitsh's story "Hanisrafim" and Y. H. Brenner's Baḥoref. Abramovitsh opts to employ the mode of Rabbinic Hebrew to render Yiddish conversation, provocatively implying that the two represent equivalent language systems, and that the former provided the original source for some of the latter's essential features. Brenner, on the other hand, through his use of internal monologue, his marked borrowing from Yiddish, and his decontextualized Biblical quotation problematizes the non-spoken essence and isolation of modern Hebrew language and literature. Even today this problem has not been solved; Israeli literature-as well as the society it writes about-is conspicuously non-dialogical. Instead, its writers can be divided into two categories: those who paint word pictures by exploiting the far-reaching resources of the Hebrew language, and those who find reality vividly revealed in the idiolect of individual human voice distilled on the page.
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