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  • Unsettling the Land:Ludwig Strauss’s Journey from German Romanticism to Neoclassical Hebrew
  • Rachel Seelig (bio)

Introduction: From Germany to the Bay of Haifa

In 1934, just a few months after immigrating to Palestine, Ludwig Strauss wrote his first poem in Hebrew. The result of a painstaking process of self-translation between his native German and his newly acquired Hebrew, “El ha-mifrats” (To the Bay) was one of two iterations of the poem. The German version appeared shortly after its completion in the volume Land Israel (Land of Israel, 1935), whereas the Hebrew version remained unseen until 1951, the year Strauss’s first and only Hebrew poetry volume, Sha‘ot va-dor (Hours and the Generation), was published.1 Other than one shared poem, these two volumes have strikingly little in common. Whereas Land Israel offers an idealized portrait of the Zionist landscape as imagined from afar, Sha‘ot va-dor responds to the horrors of the Second World War and [End Page 530] Arab-Israeli skirmishes that preceded Israeli independence. The linguistic and thematic shift is matched by a seemingly counter-intuitive progression from unfettered romanticism to restrained neoclassical forms reminiscent of Hebrew poetry from the medieval Spanish Golden Age; as Strauss’s subject matter and language modernized, his engagement with form grew more traditional.

Why was Strauss’s transition from German to Hebrew accompanied by the turn to neoclassicism, an aesthetic choice that was not only a personal departure for the poet but also anachronistic in the context of Modern Hebrew poetry? The most obvious explanation relates to the very fact that Strauss was a German-Jewish immigrant to Palestine—a yekke.2 This biographical detail has significant practical and ideological implications. Strauss arrived in Palestine at the height of the Fifth Aliyah (1929–1939), the predominantly German wave of European migration that reached its height shortly after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Yet he stands apart from the majority of German-Jewish migrant writers, such as Else Lasker-Schüler, who arrived in 1937 at the age of 77 and, despite the “hebraicized” German of her early work, failed to master the vernacular of her new home.3 Notwithstanding his successful transition from German to Hebrew, Strauss likewise occupies an anomalous position among the Hebrew poets of his generation. Avraham Shlonsky, Natan Alterman and Uri Zvi Greenberg, three leading voices in Hebrew poetry of the day, left Eastern Europe in the early 1920s bearing socialistic values and the emotional scars of post-World War I violence.4 These pioneering poets took the reins from the revivalist generation of Hayim Nahman Bialik to write poems about cultivating the land in a Hebrew infused [End Page 531] with new freshness and vitality. While Shlonsky penned earthy poems that sanctified agricultural labor, Uri Zvi Greenberg, taking on the role of modern-day poet-prophet, invoked the terror of pogroms and longing for national redemption with pseudo-apocalyptic urgency and expressionistic explosiveness. Strauss, by contrast, made his Hebrew literary debut in 1951, at a time when the revolutionary Zionist spirit was being quieted by the complex realities of statehood.

Despite the timing of his entry into Hebrew letters, Strauss cannot be counted among the so-called “Statehood Generation,” the younger coterie of poets who began publishing in the 1950s, including German-born Yehuda Amichai and Nathan Zach, who arrived in Palestine as young children, quickly transforming from yekkes into sabras (native Israelis)5 writing highly personal poetry with the facility of native sons.6 Claiming to have “gained fluency” with his fourth Hebrew composition in 1940, Strauss learned Hebrew primarily from the Psalms and the poetry of Yehuda Halevi, which he studied with diligence befitting an assiduous German academic.7 Although he achieved a level of virtuosity reminiscent of the Golden Age of Spain, his bookish precision signals a need to compensate for a general lack of ease with the modern vernacular. Reading Strauss’s Hebrew poetry through a biographical lens suggests that the turn to a pre-modern, predominantly written Hebrew was bound up with the fact that he was a middle-aged German intellectual who learned the language relatively late in life and arrived in Palestine...

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