Herbert Howarth, who reports here on current trends in Israeli poetry, speaks from an intimate knowledge of the works and the personalities involved in his subject. A selection of translations from recent Israeli poetry follows Mr. Howarth’s article, beginning on page 148.

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It might be said that a fourth generation of writers is just rising in Israel. There are the old masters who are dead; the old masters who are still alive; then there are men and women who have grown to literary maturity over the last twenty years, but still retain something of the zest of youth; and now the new voices just beginning to make themselves heard.

The character of the first generation, and its stature, are summed up in the names of Tschernichowsky and Bialik. It is the generation that founded the new Hebrew literature in the Russia of the age of the Hovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”), in those days of cultural ferment when so many diverse impulses flowed on Odessa. Tschernichowsky and Bialik were poets of the sort who live long and go on producing fresh and striking poems down to the very end. In passing they left a corpus of work that has become classic and serves as the background of succeeding generations.

Their immediate successors were the men who are still the living old masters. They made for themselves a Hebrew which, if it lacks the liveliness of today, is a consummate and mellow instrument. They are still writing poems in this medium. Only recently one of the foremost of them, Yaakov Fichman, printed a love sonnet:

The heart still trembles, flowers if a spark, The merest spark of unguessed love lights on it . ..

But Fichman and those with him are so much masters as to be almost outside the current of present events. After the changes of the last years, changes in speech, changes in experience, modulations in the attitudes of the young to the problems of living, the older writers are invested with some of the splendor and some of the petrifaction of history. They can scarcely answer the new questions in the new idiom.

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Then come men whose names are met repeatedly in the press and periodicals of Tel Aviv, the writers who have been the spokesmen of Israel through the last ten years.

The literary critic of Haaretz, Y. Zamora, has recently given expression to popular opinion in singling out Uri Zvi Greenberg find Nathan Alterman as the outstanding figures in this group. They are contrasting and complementary. Uri Zvi Greenberg is the laudator temporis acti; he would have the ancient Israel restored in every detail, down to the sacrifice of the kid before the feast; “he dwells night and day in the tents of our past, thence drawing his symbols, thence his steady view. . . .” Alterman is at home in the present and all ages of the past; he treats all periods on their merits, going to each and questioning it, eliciting its help in molding the future. Stylistically there are corresponding differences between these two: in Greenberg an immense creative violence; in Alterman a lucid freedom, skill in handling either a polemical ballad or a piece of private symbolism in free verse. The achievements of these two men, taken together, could serve as a statement of the cultural situation of the last two decades in Israel, though in such a summary there would always remain unaccounted for certain work which lies quite outside the spirit of the time, like Agnon’s.

Now the new voices become audible, attempting new modes of speech. Many new and interesting volumes of poetry are coming from the presses. In the newspapers, which proportionately give perhaps more space to cultural topics than do the dailies of any other country, poetry is being published in some quantity. It is the purpose of this short article to single out some of the characteristics common to the new poems, and to try to sense the direction in which the minds of writers are turning after the trauma of war, the attainment of independence.

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A glance through an assortment of a year’s poetry shows a wide range of forms in use, a sign of the experimental spirit. The Hebrew language has been made flexible. The poet who wants to use free verse can be as free as he likes. Thus a poet like Sando David writes in sequences of short suggestive half-phrases, dispensing with syntax which would close the meaning. Poems in this style—and they are frequent—would scarcely have been possible at one time, before living associations had coalesced round words through popular daily usage: remember how long English poetry took to admit this technique, how long it was before it came into Arabic poetry in Andalusia. Of course medieval Hebrew poetry had relied extensively on the activation of all the memories and history attached to a Biblical phrase, and that technique has been carried through into modern Hebrew poetry, but the tapping of scriptural associations alone would not have produced these poems, which often depend a good deal on personal romanticism. On the other hand, lively ambiguities and the counter-play of associations sometimes come into the new poetry from the joint presence of Biblical and contemporary allusions.

Besides the poets of free form, there are others who, like their European contemporaries, now prefer to harness themselves in tight compact stanzas. Often the consequence of choosing a very close-fitting stanza is obscurity, but also cohesion, force, and irony. Such poems are the hardest to translate, at least if the form is to be preserved, for it is seldom possible to present the double meanings with equal economy. There is, for instance, a poem by Tuvia Gelblum about “Meeting the Commander a Year Later.” The “Commander” is the famous young archeologist and soldier Yigal Yadin. Yigal means literally “he will deliver,” and this literal significance is a pivot of the poem: “We saluted him, friend, commander, eagle of our deliverance.” The energy of these tricks, the cavalier treatment of words, and the rapid shift of ideas, have the effect of producing, even within the tightest of forms, a sensation of freedom.

Energy liberated, active, and free-ranging: that is the first impression given by the literature of today. But this freedom is not the sort you would think of if you heard the word in another context. There is little rapture about it, little joy. Or if joy, not an uncomplicated joy.

The relative absence of oversimplified joy is in fact a sign of the serious quality of the current poetry. Anyone who has watched the formation of images in the soul of Israel during the last troubled decade, observing the delicate and complex struggle between the humane and what was usually called the “chauvinistic,” might have feared the outburst of a certain over-exuberance over the realization of the Jewish state. True, there is amid the whole mass of literature produced since the closing days of the mandate a certain modicum of the banal cliché. Gelblum’s lines to Yigal are not absolutely untinctured by it. Mordechai Temkin has one or two poems about the nation as a bereaved mother. Someone has taken the trouble to turn into Hebrew Tennyson’s jingle about “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” But only a modicum of all this. The notable thing is that often the joy is expressed in startling and ambivalent images; that other tones are mingled with it, enriching it; that there is a groping for a profound humanism; and that emotions are followed beyond the moment of their begetting to speculation about the future and the responsibilities that freedom brings in its train.

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There is the dark side of contemporary feelings, too. The original late-19thcentury Zionism, which produced the literature of the first generation, was the child of light. It opened its arms to all the light and beauty of the world, turned its back on the shadows and wished to leave them behind. Of all the perfectionist visions, it was among the kindest and best, and one cannot wish it to have been otherwise than it was. Yet it may be that the struggle in Israel today between the humane and the selfish has derived in part from this primary fission between light and dark.

One way in which the writer today attempts to emphasize his choice of a dark mood in place of the optimistic idealism of the past is by borrowing and transforming some key phrase from Bialik or Tschernichowsky. For example, it is sometimes said that the modern florescence of Hebrew poetry is typically expressed in Bialik’s lyric “El Ha-Tsippor,” describing the sudden coming to awareness in him of hope and the love of nature when a bird appears at his window. In a poem of today this poem is remembered with all its feelings transposed to another key: the eager spontaneous delight is dramatized and ly dogmatized into apocalypse and tears. This is in Pinchas Sadeh’s “Proverbs of the Virgins”:

The birds above drink blood when sunset
   burns
They will not range far abroad
And my thoughts and dreams also grow dark
   at dusk.

Similarly, Aharon Mirski, writing a poem about his poems, tells how “nature songs have turned to sulphur and burning in my saliva.” He echoes and defies a song that appeared fifty years ago in Tchernichowsky’s first little volume and which the young Jewry of South Russia immediately began singing; the song, “Laugh at All My Dreams,” prophesied how out of the dreams of the Lovers of Zion a new and glorious art would grow in Palestine: “A new song will a new poet sing, Alive to different, distant beauty.” Now that fifty years have uncurtained their terrors—which outnumber, as it may seem to men at war, their lovely growths—Mirski reshapes the message of 1898, making it:

My new song is a curse. I will sing it for-
   ever,
Sweet to my soul as howls to the howling
   mourner. . ..

In his last verse he sounds the knell of the idealist epoch:

Fled are the songs we loved, dashed with
   nocturnal dew
Songs for the flowers, the scented wood, and
   the shadows cool.
Every hill that we loved when young has
   become Mount Azazel. . ..

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In words like these the nation wrote its inner history, reflecting the changes brought about by the last desperate crises before the state was snatched into being.

The image of Mount Azazel in the last fragment provides an illustration of the way the associations work in these poems. It is rough, deserted wilderness—a common image of this war, induced by the actual experience of the grim hills and deserts where the fighting took place. Specifically, it is the frowning wilderness into which the expiatory ram was sent. This also, the idea of expiation, is a common feature of the war psychosis: the young people have gone into the hills to fight and fall as an act of expiation on behalf of the whole people. Further, Azazel is the abode of the evil demons; and it is actually the center of a region from which trouble came to Israel throughout the past.

This binding together of several layers of meaning is normal to poetry and its functioning. But it is to gain a useful fresh angle on this procedure to watch it at work in modern Hebrew. There is a poem by L. Strauss whose tide means literally “Daughter of My Voice.” This carries the ideas of “echo,” of “the inner person speaking,” of “inspiration,” and of “the voice of God heard through His chosen medium.” As a whole the poem is probably secular in principle, an image of the discovery of the self, but many of the allusions used in formulating the image are clearly religious. We are being constantly reminded, by prayer patterns and phrases from the liturgy, that, much as the secular has been brought into present-day Hebrew poetry, the religious past nevertheless strongly persists in it. The reasons, involving the history of Hebrew as a language, are obvious.

But sometimes another world of the past, the Yiddish world, is also there in recent Israeli poetry. And Yiddish effects worked into Hebrew often produce strange and vivid colorations. So it is in a striking piece published last year by Aharon Mirski, which makes up for what it may lack in polish by its strength, indignation, and brilliant clashes of ideas. To reproduce the mood of the verb in the tide, one would have to render it “The Whole Town Went Themselves”—evidently the ironic reflexive of Yiddish—or perhaps “The Whole Town Put Itself Out.” A dead man, fallen in the war, is being buried. Everyone follows the funeral. Everyone rejoices secretly that this man’s death has paid off the expiation due from the rest, and that by attending the funeral each can complete the payment without further expense of life. The poem is full of wilful double meanings, like:

Our doubting souls force us to fable from
   men we know:—
What fable dare I draw for a soul that has
   perished so?

The Hebrew of the final words of the couplet—and the whole poem is in violent satirical rhyming couplets—is “et-nafsho l’hakdish.” It may simply refer to the man who is being buried, for whom Kaddish must be said. It may refer to him in the sense of a “sacrificed soul”—the dead man in his fineness. Or it may mean “a soul that needs Kaddish”—the “dead soul” of the public.

Pain and atonement are the main themes on the darker side. Atonement is a principle deeply embedded in Jewish living, and the emotions surrounding it have been stirred by the war with the Arabs—they have not been lessened by the fact that the war has been fought to a successful conclusion. On the one hand, the anger of a man like Mirski with the mass who have hugged security, letting a youthful few atone for them; on the other, a sometimes overwrought shame, on the part of men who have not died, that they have let others perform this atonement. Mordecai Temkin has a poem that elaborates the consequences of this latter feeling:

Fate did not want me, did not choose me To bleed and fall for the land that forged me. Daily 1 must repay, daily atone. . . . In every death let me divine my own.

It should perhaps be commented here that we are not necessarily to assume that the attitude of this poem will be lived out in its literal terms, any more than we are to take Mirski’s satire on the community at its face value. Is it not a task of poetry to articulate the problems of the group it speaks for, to liberate its makers and readers from an unconscious acting out of tendencies that a situation has induced, to help them to see themselves and so move forward from the situation more consciously?

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These broader considerations should especially be applied to poems which seek to lift the immediate problem to the plane of “eternity.” I am thinking of Pinhas Sadeh’s poem about the “Sad Virgins,” translated in full in the group of poems accompanying this article. There are patches of rhetoric in the poem, patches that are suspect in their use of “eternity” and “God,” but the poem develops a parable of beautiful tone and splendid relevance to Israel’s trauma of self-fulfilment. It strives to be a revelation, and it strives a little too hard and does not become quite that, but in its closing parable it achieves perfection in one of the loveliest and most humane of forms.

At the opposite extreme to an apocalyptic essay like this are the simple direct statements of personal grief, of which there are many today. Esther Rav tells how two parents go to their son’s grave when the spring flowers are coming out. They look for the violets which he loved, as if to make their eyes serve as organs of sight for the dead man’s spirit. But everywhere they see anemones, and are shocked by the profusion of red, looking like spurts of blood over the grass.

Yehoshua Rabinov has published a volume, Mul Ha-Akeda, poems mourning his eighteen-year-old daughter who was killed in the war:

Dividing and dispersing into distance
All paths somewhere meet again.
But no path brings hack your joyful step
And as ever the clouds ride the heavens
Unaware that sounding death has delved
   into me.

In this “fourth generation” of poets I number not only those who are new because they are young, but older writers, too, who because of the changing problems of Israel have begun to speak with new voices, having perhaps never before spoken creatively, or successfully at a creative level. Among these works, the moving product of personal losses, I have long placed Reuven Grossman’s poem on the death of his son, one of the first of the war period. I used to know Reuven Grossman in Tel Aviv as an able and distinguished translator from English to Hebrew, but up till then he had not succeeded equally with work of his own. The poem he wrote for his son Noah is full of dignity, and to that is added something of the delighted exaltation which the young people of Israel felt and which their parents loved in them. It tells, for instance, how he used to go with his friends

Among the evening hills in the nights of
  Judah,
No voice being heard but the bidding of
  the Maccabees of old.

His parents, who were grateful for this gift of youth in him, resolve themselves to the same gladness

—For the death with a kiss
At the mouth of Mathathias the Hasmonean
With which Thou didst favor him
When he ascended the holy ladder. . . .¹

The theme of “the kiss of death” is much used at present, sometimes as beautifully as in the lines just quoted, sometimes with a patriotism of a less healthy kind:

Only by the kiss of death
Completion comes to the living.

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Difficulties, losses, grief are not new in Sharon or Galilee, and the images currently evoked to express them are extensions of images that have been familiar there for three decades. But the emergence of the state, though so long desired and anticipated, came with all the sharp astonishment of a new experience. The mind sought images to carry it. Some have been drawn from the landscapes in which men went to fight—rock-strewn, clefted hills and expanses peculiarly fitted to throw back the projected fantasies of a soul, of man or nation, in parturition. Some are drawn from that old and regular source, the Bible. The images are often energetic, often contorted and ambiguous in a rich sense. In Kamzan’s brilliant fantasy, given in full later (p. 148), the flag of Zion, broken at an embassy masthead, is at once the copper serpent of Sinai, the false God, and also the glory which Ezekiel saw by the river of Kebar.

Kamzan’s poem tells how in a city of the Exile a crowd gathers to watch the flag raised. As it watches a vision is granted to it, a vision based on the great prophetic chariot metaphor of the Bible. In the description of the chariot and charioteer, converted to fit the landscape and properties of Eastern Europe, Kamzan allows himself strokes of comedy, the essentially serious comedy of dream. And out of this comedy the poem derives energy and becomes acceptable as an apostrophe of the birth of the state and the “end of evil days.” The chariot, curving across the horizons, comes to rest in the vicinity of Haifa amid the community known as Kfar Hasidim, a devoutly Mizrachi village deliberately chosen here for the sake of its name and because it is wholly agricultural. The guardians of Elijah’s cave are witnesses of the miracle.

Mirski invokes Elijah at the climax of his funeral satire:

Watch their faces as they chant! Hear their
   responses! If
That man did not lie dead, who could ever
   Believe
That Elijah went to the desert or Jews from
   Poland came
To bring the Messiah down in a chariot of
   souls aflame?

Mirski and Kamzan are men aiming at the highest effects. There is, as always, the alternative extreme, the men who are suddenly prompted to write personal simple accounts of what they saw, how they felt. Shlomo Tanai has published one or two slight, pleasing poems, now document, now marching song, whose content is partly reportage, partly the cliché of triumphant patriotism. An occasional touch of humor in his verses does something to redeem the banality. When he reaches the Gulf of Akaba as one of a fighting column of boys and girls, he writes:

Out of Tanach
King Solomon laughs
At the girls on the shore.
Had he been in Palmach
He’d have stepped up his wives
By a thousand more.

Some of the writers working in this genre have been criticized as more journalists than poets. Uri Avneri, against whom this attack was made, replied, “That’s why I can tell the truth in my poems.” He is worth reading, both in verse and prose, as a typical instance of the sincere man not gifted with immense creative genius but yet free from the vices that often go with genius. In some respects he and those like him still sustain, with a temperate perseverance, the note of hopefulness which characterized early Zionism and which we have seen Mirski and others amend. His soldier, writing a last letter, says:

If, my dear, you must have a last message,
The sort that can sometimes be turned over
   in the mind:
Try to bring up your children complete men
Beautiful, noble, freer than we have been.
Try to act to the best of your power,
To build the world that is advancing. . ..

This lucid trusting note has often been heard before, from the men who fought for the Spanish Republic, for example, and often elsewhere in the 1930’s; something fine, a witness of worthy life, but not quite enough to help life; we go on waiting for the real poet, the Lorca, or perhaps the Auden or Alterman, who throws at us not only that sincerity but with it a quiverful of images original and fierce and disconcerting. Some of the specimens in the earlier paragraphs here may have suggested that there are personalities among the new Hebrew poets capable of fulfilling this task.

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¹ The passages from this poem are translated by L. V. Snowman.