How the Hebrew language was revived is a journey into the past as well as a personal odyssey.
By LIAT COLLINSresurecting hebrew 88 224(photo credit: Courtesy)Resurrecting Hebrew
By Ilan Stavans
Schocken Books
240 pages; $21
Resurrecting Hebrew is almost a biography and and autobiography in one - delving into the life and background of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, credited with being behind the revival of Hebrew and turning it into a modern language - and a record of author Ilan Stavans's own journey from Jewish schoolboy in Mexico to American author and scholar.
He juggles his various identities (much like Ben-Yehuda did from his religious childhood on) and tries to come to terms with a relationship between his life in America, where he is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and where the bonds lie between Diaspora and Israel.
The book takes the form of an odyssey, as Stavans travels around Israel (and elsewhere) seeking answers to questions that go way beyond language and socio-linguistics. The journey - and book - starts with a dream. A sleeping Stavans sees a beautiful, naked woman in the company of rabbis. She is speaking an unknown language that turns out to be Hebrew. The Talmud, Stavans notes, says an uninterpreted dream is like an unread letter. After a friend diagnoses "language withdrawal," Stavans launches his personal quest: weaving a memoir of Ben-Yehuda's efforts to revive Hebrew with his own efforts at understanding modern Israel.
The book is clearly well researched and his journey is obviously a labor of love, but occasionally his travels around Israel run the risk of becoming an ego trip.
The friend to whom he first relates his dream tells Stavans that "losing one's Hebrew is like losing one's soul," leading him to worry: "Had I become soulless?"
As he sets off to find out all he can about Ben-Yehuda, Stavans notes that the man who was a major force in resurrecting Hebrew felt literal and linguistic exile were intertwined, and an almost unbearable torment.
"All my life I have inconsolably grieved about two things," Ben-Yehuda wrote in A Dream Come True. "I was not born in Jerusalem, not even in the Land of Israel. And my speech, from the moment I was able to utter words, was not in Hebrew." It is a sentiment to which this reviewer can relate.
Ben-Yehuda was attracted to Zionism, as Stavans writes, because "he wanted to stop seeing Jewish history as an appendix, an exception to world history. Normality was the key term."
When Stavans travels around Israel, a country he had visited and even lived in years before, it is the normality that seems to both amaze and annoy him.
The scholarly nature of the book is crudely juxtaposed with nitty-gritty writing better suited to a blog. Here he writes about what he ate while sitting on the balcony of this restaurant, there he writes about his hotel.
There is a second dream and even a second naked woman - this one apparently a real person, who accidentally enters the sauna as Stavans lets off steam. Stavans wonders whether the hapless young woman was saying "sliha," "excuse me," as she ran out or "s--t!" Ben-Yehuda might not have approved, but I expect it is the expletive that would come first to most Hebrew-speaking women finding themselves in the same unlikely circumstances.
Elsewhere, he seems upset by the fact that the lady "wearing an Adidas tracksuit that emphasized her hips and protruding belly" who sells newspapers at a Tel Aviv newsstand knows Ben-Yehuda only as the name of a street. It's hard to imagine he would have better luck had he stood on Rehov Zamenhof and asked passersby who was the creator of Esperanto, or even what Esperanto is.
Stavans is, however, impressed to have found a waitress who could recite a Yehuda Amichai poem about death - and who even met the poet when he came to her elementary school.
Stavans reveals that Ben-Yehuda's mission started when he came across the Hebrew translation from German of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and realized the holy tongue could be used also for the mundane and secular.
He does a good job in showing the tragic-heroic nature of Ben-Yehuda's life and endeavors as the Lithuanian-born lexicographer gets caught up in religious-secular tensions and intrigues that at one point result in his imprisonment by the Turkish authorities whose Ottoman Empire still ruled the Holy Land at the turn of the 20th century.
As Stavans points out, there is no museum in his memory, although Ben-Yehuda streets thread their way through almost every large town in the country. His house on Jerusalem's Rehov Ethiopia received a plaque marking its historical significance only in May 2008, replacing the one removed years ago by haredim. The new sign has a verse of the famous Yaron London song about Ben-Yehuda.
Stavans on his journey meets all the right people and travels to all the correct places, sometimes drawing questionable conclusions. Among his travel partners - and friends - is Hillel Halkin, a writer-translator whose columns are familiar to Jerusalem Post readers, who also offers valuable insights on Hebrew and language in general. As they discuss Samuel Johnson and Ben-Yehuda, Halkin says he sees the former as "a bemused observer of life" and the latter as "an engaged actor."
Indeed, Stavans points out that Ben-Yehuda was not the usual compiler of a dictionary. He was not interested so much in defining old words as inventing new ones, some of which flourished, while many failed to thrive.
Stavans's trip, naturally, takes him to the Hebrew Language Academy at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He seems to, at the same time, mock its role as defender of the language - at the Israeli taxpayers' expense - while noting its graceless structure. In an aside, typical of his sometimes cantankerous tone, he says in size it doesn't "even come close" to that of the cafeteria at IDF headquarters. It definitely surpasses those of the bases I served on, where I picked up Hebrew in my early days in the country.
Stavans dedicated his book to his fourth-grade Hebrew teacher at Der Yidishe Shule in Mexico: "gracias and be'ahava," with love. And it is refreshing to look at the Jewish world, in English, through the eyes of someone brought up in a Spanish-speaking country.
We all - Ben-Yehuda, Stavans and the humble and not-so-humble reader - travel through life, after all, carrying our own baggage. Probably more than anything else, that emotional weight will influence how we feel about this book.
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