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20 Chapter One “Make Your School a Nation-State” Pedagogy and the Rise of the New Accent . . . and the Rothstein girl (Brokhoh, her mother called her— while her father the former Hebrew teacher called her Brakhah, with a kamats under the khaf—and the stress on the final syllable) quickly gathered her hair . . . —Devorah Baron, The Exiles A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. —Max Weinreich Devorah Baron’s fictional character Rothstein, father of Brak k khah, gives himself away as a former Hebrew teacher with his hypercorrect pronunciation of his daughter’s name. Baron was born in Lithuania and moved to Palestine as a young woman in 1907, and her stories and novellas draw on details of Jewish life in both locales. In this, her work was not unlike that of her contemporaries whose prose was punctuated by representations of the quotidian from both Eastern Europe (the shtetl, the big city) and Palest k tine (Jaffa, the agricultural settlement). In contrast to many of her contempor k raries, however, Baron problematized the hierarchy of relations between Diaspora and Holy Land. In the novella cited above, first published in 1943, a group of East European Jews arrives in Palestine on the eve of World War I only to be exiled by the Ottoman authorities. Palestine is supposed to offer an antidote to exile; the Jews of Baron’s fiction become exiles only after they have arrived in the homeland. Brakhah’s father introduces this chapter for two reasons. First, in the context of a work that was eventually published under the title The Exiles (ha-Golim), these lines warn against easy equivalences between territory and identity. Schola k “Make your school a nation-state” 21 arship that addresses the new accent most often interprets its rise in poetry as motivated by the Land of Israel itself. Scholars tend to assume a necessary relat k tionship between Palestine and the new accent without accounting for the complexity of interactions between Hebrew speech and literature or identifying a mechanism for poetry’s adoption of the new accent. With one demographic stroke, territory, or the Jewish presence in Palestine, is meant to resolve the question of the relationship between spoken and poetic Hebrew and between land and language. Baron does not rely on such assumptions to explain why Brakhah’s parents pronounce her name differently. The narrator simply states that Brakhah’s father was a former Hebrew teacher. And it is here with the figure of the teacher that I choose to begin; his prof k fession is the second reason Rothstein introduces my narrative of the rise of new-accent poetry. Instead of looking to territory or even the compositions of a strong poet such as Avraham Shlonsky to explain the literary rise of the new accent, as many scholars do, I locate the motivation for the shift in the instit k tutions of the nascent school system. It was the pedagogues who, over the course of about thirty years, presided over Hebrew’s successive integration into the classroom at all levels, from the primary school and the kindergarten to the college and university. With this integration into ever-higher levels of education from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, the status of the spoken Hebrew of the schools rose. This rise in status was responsible for poetry’s eventual adoption of the new accent. Baron’s narrator hints at the role of teachers, their classrooms, and the Hebrew schools more generally in the literary history of the new accent; my narrative of the rise of the new acc k cent has a pedagogic subplot. The teachers inculcated in the minds of the Jews of the New Yishuv the notion that the sound of the new accent corresponded to the territory of Pale k estine. Once scholarship adopted this notion, the implicit and central quest k tion became a retrospective one: why did the integration of the new accent into poetry take so long, between twenty-five and thirty-five years after teache k ers first tried to adopt it in spoken Hebrew? The very first attempts to implem k ment a new accent in the Jewish settlement began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, simultaneous with the first large-scale waves of Jewi k ish emigration from Eastern Europe, but poetry’s definitive switch to the new accent is usually dated thirty years later, in the late 1920s. For the most part, scholars...

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