Poetry
Written without interruption from biblical times
to the present, Hebrew poetry embodies external influences and
internal traditions. The poetry of the past, which incorporates
religious and national themes, also contains motifs of personal
experience which are predominant in the poetry of today. A break with
traditional poetic expression developed during the Jewish
Enlightenment in Europe (1781-1881), when full citizenship for Jews
and secularization of Jewish life were advocated, and from the late
19th century when Zionism, the
movement calling for the restoration of Jewish national life in the
Land of Israel, began to gain momentum. The major poets to emerge
from this period, who themselves immigrated to Palestine early in the
20th century, were Haim Nahman
Bialik (1873-1934) and Saul
Tchernichovsky (1875-1943).
Bialik's works, which reflect his commitment to
the Jewish national renaissance and reject the viability of Jewish
life in Eastern Europe, include both long epic poems recapitulating
chapters in Jewish history as well as pure lyrical poetry dealing
with love and nature. Bialik, often referred to as the 'national
poet' or 'the poet of the Hebrew Renaissance,' forged a new poetic
idiom, free of the overwhelming biblical influence of his
predecessors, while maintaining classical structure and clarity of
expression through rich, learned but contemporary phrasing. His poems
are memorized by generations of Israeli schoolchildren.
Tchernichovsky, who wrote lyric poetry, dramatic
epics, ballads and allegories, sought to rectify the world of the Jew
by injecting a spirit of personal pride and dignity as well as a
heightened awareness of nature and beauty. His sense of language,
which embodied an affinity for rabbinical Hebrew, was different from
Bialik's idiom which integrated the biblical influence with the
emerging conversational mode. Both Bialik and Tchernichovsky
represent the transition from ancient Jewish poetry to the modern
genre.
Avraham
Shlonsky, Natan Alterman, Leah Goldberg, and Uri
Zvi Greenberg headed the next generation of poets, who wrote in
the years which preceded the establishment of the state and during
the early years of statehood. Shlonsky utilized a flood of images
along with linguistic inventions in his poetry as well as in his
prolific translations of classical poetry, especially from Russian.
Alterman's works, many of which are noted for their political
commentary, accompanied every stage of the development of the Jewish
community and are characterized by richness of language and a variety
of poetic forms, tone and rhyme, imagery and metaphor. Goldberg
expanded the spectrum of lyricism in poems which speak of the city,
nature and the human being in search of love, contact and attention.
Greenberg, who wrote a poetry of despair and rage using fierce
imagery and stylistic power, dealt mainly with nationalistic themes
and the impact of the Holocaust.
This group of poets was the first to introduce the rhythms of
everyday speech into Hebrew poetry. They revived old idioms and
coined new ones, giving the ancient language a new flexibility and
richness. The poetry of this period, which was greatly influenced by
Russian futurism and symbolism as well as by German expressionism,
tended towards the classical structure and melodicism of ordered
rhyming. It reflected images and landscapes of the poets' country of
birth and fresh visions of their new country in a heroic mode, as
well as memories from 'there' and the desire to sink roots 'here,'
expressing, as Lea Goldberg wrote, "the pain of two
homelands." Many of the poems were set to music and became an
integral part of the country's national lore.
The first major woman poet in Hebrew was Rachel
Bluwstein (1890-1931), who was known simply as
"Rachel." Her works established the normative foundation of
women's Hebrew poetry as well as the public's expectations of this
poetry. Its lyrical, short, emotional, intellectually unpretentious
and personal style has prevailed, as seen in most of the works of her
contemporaries and of later poets such as Dalia
Ravikovitch and Maya Bejerano.
In the mid-1950s, a new group of younger poets
emerged, with Hebrew as their mother tongue, headed by Yehuda
Amichai, Natan Zach, Dan
Pagis, T. Carmi and David
Avidan. This group, tending towards understatement, a general retreat
from collective experiences, free observation of reality and a
colloquial style, shifted the main poetic influences from Pushkin and
Schiller to modern English and American poetry. The works of Amichai,
who has been extensively translated, are marked by his use of daily
speech, irony and metaphysical metaphors. These became the hallmarks
of much of the poetry written by his younger contemporaries, who
proclaimed the end of ideological poetry and broke completely with
the Alterman-Shlonsky tradition of classical structures and ordered
rhyming. Zach's works elicit innovative near-liturgical and musical
qualities from everyday spoken Hebrew.
The field of Hebrew poetry today is a polyphony
comprised of several generations, placing writers in their twenties
together with poets of middle age. Representative of the latter group
are Meir Wieseltier, whose prosaic, slangy and direct diction
repudiates all romanticism and elevates the image of Tel Aviv as the
symbol of reality; Yair Hurvitz, whose restrained verses express the
gentle sadness of one aware of his own mortality: and Yona Wallach,
who presents herself in colloquial, sarcastic tones, using archetypal
motifs, Freudian symbolism, sometimes brutal sensuality, rhythmic
repetitions and long strings of associations. Other major
contemporary poets include Asher Reich, Arieh Sivan, Ronny Somak and
Moshe Dor.
The poetry of the most recent generation is
dominated by individualism and perplexity, and tends towards short
poems written in colloquial diction, non-rhymed free rhythm. Poetry
in Israel has a large and loyal readership and some volumes of poems,
of all periods, are sold in editions as large as those published in
much more populous Western countries.
Sources: Israeli
Foreign Ministry |