Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq

4. The Choice of Language

4 The Choice of Language Everything can change but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb. -Italo Calvino I envy those writers who experience their infancy, kindergarten years, first love and its disappointment, writing their first literary lines and the summing up magnum opus in the same country, in the same language, in the same culture. -Siimi Michael AT THE VERY BASIS OF THE CONDITION OF EXILE IS THE INABILITY TO communicate. The difference between the familiar language of home (the mother tongue) and the new language of exile is one of many the exiled person encounters and at the same time serves as a metaphor for them all. The difference is particularly significant for the writer. Among the Iraqi Jews who came to Israel were writers who had begun their literary careers in Iraq and had written in Arabic. Now, in Israel, they had to choose whether to continue to write in Arabic or to brave the transition to Hebrew. There were those who left the field of literature altogether' and others who entered the academic sector.2 Those who decided to continue writing had to adapt to the new language or remain in exile, using their native tongue in a "foreign" environment . 43 44 EXILE FROM EXILE: ISRAELI WRITERS FROM IRAQ As we have seen, there were periods when the choice of Hebrew as an instrument for literary expression was by no means obvious, and many Jewish writers opted for competing languages-Arabic, Yiddish, or European vernaculars. In the Diaspora, the Jews lived among other peoples and developed a bilingual or multilingual culture. Hebrew was the language of scripture, ritual, and liturgy. Local languages were adopted for daily, bureaucratic, commercial, and other secular functions . In the medieval period, Jews living under Islamic rule were influenced by their hosts and adopted classical Arabic (al-fu~/}(i) for writing prose. It was in many ways a natural choice; the language was already established as a literary medium and was similar enough to spoken Arabic (al-'ammiyyah) to be easily understood. Poetry, however, was written in Hebrew, following the tradition of Jewish liturgical poetry, albeit in metrical patterns and rhyme schemes derived from Arabic poetry. The poets were also inspired by and competed with their Arab counterparts, showcasing the glories of their respective scriptural languages. They made a conscious effort to revive and revitalize the holy tongue;3 the results comprised the "golden age" of Hebrew poetry. The writers of the modem Hebrew revival were also products of bilingual or multilingual backgrounds and traditions. Some of the most important Jewish writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century wrote in both Hebrew and Yiddish. While Hebrew had a rich literary heritage and therefore prestige on its side, it lacked the audience to be found for Yiddish. Neither language was a natural choice; both needed to be f(!created as literary media. One lacked the flexibility of a spoken language, the other the patterns and paradigms of a belletristric language. Each choice had powerful ideological undertones .4 The writers' explanations of their choice of Yiddish in HebrewS are also apologies to their medieval predecessors who earlier lamented the neglect of Hebrew. By the time our group of Iraqi writers arrived in Israel, Hebrew had become well established as a literary (and national) language, and the issues in choosing a language had shifted once more. Arabic was the principal language of the Jews in Iraq. Arabic is often described as existing in a state of diglossia, "where two varieties of a language exist side by side throughout the community, with each having a definite role to play."6 Charles Ferguson stresses the importance of using the appropriate variety of language according to the situation7 and differentiates the condition of diglossia from the more common situation: THE CHOICE OF LANGUAGE Diglossia differs from the more widespread standard-language-withdialects in that no segment of the speech community in diglossia regularly uses H [the literary or written form] as a medium of ordinary conversation, and any attempt to do so is felt to be either pedantic or artificial. ...8 45 In other words, Arabic has an ideal written or literary form (fu~~a) sufficiently distinct from the spoken or colloquial dialect (al- 'ammiyyah). The literary form is more or less standard throughout the Arab world; dialects are many and...