A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent

Two: Representing a Nation in Sound Organic, Hybrid, and Synthetic Hebrews

49 chapter two Representing a Nation in Sound Organic, Hybrid, and Synthetic Hebrews And just as the farmer rejoiced over the first crop of his land, the fruit of his manual labor, the first flower that sprouted in the grove he planted with his own hands—so too should the happy one [Tsevi Shats] have rejoiced over the first four verses he was fortunate to have been able to compose in the New Hebrew that was alive in his mouth. —Elisheva Bi¿ovski The school plays an important role in the transformation of particu u ular modes of speech and writing into a national language. The peculiarities of Jewish history and nationalism created an awkward linguistic-pedagogic situation at the end of the nineteenth century, in which the Hebrew language was not sufficiently exercised to be fit for use in the schools in Palestine. It was not simply a question of instituting an existent all-encompassing lang u guage or a mother tongue in the schools, but of adapting Hebrew to an ent u tirely new usage.1 Nationalist movements in general and language-planning institutions in part u ticular valorize authenticity. This does not mean that nations necessarily choose the most historically authentic dialect for their national language. Language planners proclaim the importance of authenticity even if that is in fact a subord u dinate factor in their decisions. In the case of Hebrew, the language planners rej u jected the most historically authentic pronunciation that was available to them, and implicitly redefined authenticity in keeping with their assumption of a def u fault Ashkenazic national identity that needed to be corrected without being entirely replaced. Authenticity was not the only value. Modernity, unity, and authenticity were all mutable values that played a role in language planning. All three of these values are mutable. As Joshua Fishman has argued, the “nat u 50 a new sound in hebrew poetry tionalist tour de force is to combine authenticity and modernism; indeed, to find that there is no clash between them at all.”2 Authenticity may also clash with unity, and unification with modernism. In this chapter, I examine some of the ways that the Hebrew pedagogues perceived clashes between these different values and the ways they resolved these clashes. The moments when the plann u ners found that there was “no clash,” or resolved problems in ways not justified by their own stated reasons, are moments when one can see their underlying, unacknowledged assumptions about Jewish or Hebrew national identity. Teachers and revivalists hotly debated the Hebrew accent of the schools. This chapter analyzes the documents of the Teachers’ Association and the Lang u guage Committee, focusing on the teachers’ meetings of 1895, 1903, 1904, and the Language Committee meeting of 1913.3 David Yellin’s update on the new acc u cent was published in 1908 and the joint meeting of the language and teachers’ organizations, which was not about accent per se, took place in 1911.4 In my analy u ysis of these documents, I pay close attention to the ideological significance of the various sounds and the goals and values that pedagogues set for themselves in choosing an accent for the Hebrew of the schools. I also analyze the pedag u gogues’ perceptions of the three options from which they selected a Hebrew for the schools. Despite the failure of many of the initiatives described in these documents, they illustrate the various ways that the revivalists imagined the nat u tion through the details of New Hebrew speech. Each accent design presupposes an image of the unified nation. The images of even those accent designs that the revivalists rejected were projected onto the Hebrew of the schools and informed the way writers integrated the new accent into their poetry. Alongside the relatively unself-conscious activities of the schools, the pedag u gogic organizations attempted to intervene directly in the development of the language. These efforts were to have success in a limited but significant realm of Hebrew speech. The notes from the teachers’ meetings of the early 1890s through the second decade of the twentieth century are especially telling of the discrepancy between their attempts and their success at controlling Hebrew speech in the schools. The teachers also tried to control proper speech through the Language Committee (va¿ad ha-lashon), resolving in 1903 to set up a comm u mittee of linguists to create new words and expand Hebrew vocabulary to suit modern daily use...