The characteristics of this poetic revolution were defined by Natan Zach in his 1959 critical essay on Alterman. Instead of a documentary report, however, he returned with a poem called “In the City of Slaughter,” which demonstrates an ambivalent relationship to the victims and to what the Diaspora embodied (Miron, 2000; Gluzman, 2005). These apparently contradictory views on the secularization of Jewish language, and on Hebrew and Yiddish, reveal further ambiguities in Bialik’s perception of national revival. His poetry resonates with the ongoing Israeli war that goes under different names—mourning friends who have fallen on the battlefields (“Rain on the Battlefield”), interweaving childhood spaces with the sites of war (“Two Poems about the First Battles”), and blaming and calling the existence of God into question (e.g., “God Full of Mercy” and “To My Mother”). In the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion emphasized the inevitable connection between the “Jewish problem” and the necessity of a sovereign land, a homeland in Eretz Israel: “The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State” (Quoted in Artmitage, 2007, p. 238). Capital: Jerusalem (but not recognized by … In her last novella of the story collection, The Empty Place (2007), Hendel returns to the War of 1948, this time to tell about the Arab flight and expulsion from Haifa, by juxtaposing it with the remnants of the German Jewish exile. However, the intimate meeting and the over-identification with the sufferers generate poetic distance and aggressive protest that reflect the anxiety, shame and fascination in complex processes of identity and rejection, resemblance and difference. This poem, which was published in the daily newspaper, Davar, shortly after the United Nations’ decision to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab States and the outbreak of the 1948 War, gave poetic embodiment to the death of young people that enabled the creation of the national Jewish state. Berkeley: University of California Press. Until the 1960s it was mainly poets such as Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky, Abba Kovner, Amir Gilboa, who responded to the events in Europe. The Hebrew literature written in Israel is part of an ongoing project that began in the wake of the European Enlightenment when Jewish writers began to write in Hebrew in addition to their various national languages. The shadows of the past rise up from the void of forgetfulness, breaching the “silence” of 1948. A prominent example of the correspondence between tradition and innovation is the work of Shmuel Yosef Agnon. This is how the Diaspora experience of other places returns in Israel and how the other language—now called “foreign”—returns in the Hebrew. Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature. The fact that Hebrew became the undisputed dominant language in Israel did not prevent writers from writing in their native languages: Arabic (Shimon Ballas), Polish (Ida Fink), Yiddish (Yossl Birstein) and German (Werner Kraft) among others. The Shema Yisrael is the source of Jewish longevity, it links the generations of Jewish life. Brenner’s language reflects the tension between homeland and the countries of exile. In the Old Testament, Israel (who was formerly named Jacob; see Genesis 32:28) wrestles with an angel.The ancient and modern states of Israel took their names from him. Armitage, D. (2007). In exploring the problem of representing this historical event, the author subverts traditional modes of speech and description by merging genres (apprenticeship novel, encyclopedia, biography) and the realms of testimony and fiction, documentation and fantasy. Hebrew Studies: A Journal Devoted to Hebrew Language and Literature. The major works written in Israel, however, including the canonic works, were composed in Hebrew, with the result of a reverberating tension between exile and homeland, a remnant of the polyglot context of the Diaspora, as Hebrew was compelled to emulate, outdo and incorporate linguistic rivals (Alter, 1994). He immigrated to Paris in the 1950s, returned to Israel in the 1960s, participated in the subsequent wars and engaged privately in negotiations with Palestinians. The question of language, of course, was not obvious, and the dispute between Yiddish and Hebrew (also called the “language war” that lasted until the 1940s) is an example of these tensions that were an integral part of political and cultural processes of self-understanding (Halkin, 2002). Forty years later this question revealed other horrific layers. Examples are Moshe Shamir’s novels, He Walked through the Fields (1947) and His Own Hands (1951), which, despite the apparent confirmation of the Zionist narrative, his protagonists —embodiments of Sabras and of the desire to rid themselves of the burden of the Diaspora— cannot be redeemed even in Israel, or on the battlefield. mi. In his talk, Bialik warns against the dismantling of the sacred content of Hebrew by the “New Hebrew.” Not only does Bialik hint at the tension between Jewish tradition and secularism in the process of national revival, but he also raises the question of what the national Jewish language should be. Besides dealing with the question of Jewish survivors, it reveals another layer in the conflict that preoccupied Goldberg throughout her work; namely the gaps between the European literary and aesthetic traditions and the cultural alternatives that have been shaped in the Zionist homeland. It was also Zach, who in 1954 wrote about the “forgotten poet” David Vogel. His famous poem “Sealed Transport,” from the poem collection Transformation (1970), resonates with the problem of representing the “unrepresentable” while seeking a mode of writing about the Holocaust. The primary thread throughout the Bible is the redemption of humanity, and Israel is at the center of that story. What is Jewish Identity (pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP. Hebrew at that time was the language of holy scripture, the Torah and the language of prayer. Brenner’s criticism is not nostalgic; for indeed, the exilic experience imprinted on distorted bodies requires repair. Yeshurun translates the destruction into a poetics of ruin. Representations 45: 72-100. Her novels sketch geographic and territorial borderlines, document movements of immigration, and speak of strangers at home and homelessness as a state of existence. The interference with national, collective values based on heroic norms, confidence in the process of settling and subjugating the land and uncompromising readiness for self-sacrifice in the long process of internalizing the collective social and militaristic agenda is revealed in the work of S. Yizhar. He immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1909 and was killed by Arab rioters in 1921. The issue of a national Jewish language can be traced back to 1879 when Eliezer Ben-Yehuda suggested reinstituting Hebrew as the official spoken language in the Land of Israel.