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On May 24,1978,when the Yiddish poet Rukhl Fishman received the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish Literature in Tel Aviv,she noted in her acceptance address, “Before Itzik Manger undertook to settle in Israel, he wrote: Kh’hob zikh yorn gevalgert in der fremd / itst for ikh zikh valgern in der heym” (For Years I have been homeless among strangers / Now I go off to be homeless in my own home).1 Manger, said Fishman, “referred to his own fate and to the fate of his poetry. But that is virtually the fate of the Yiddish language in Israel. It is homeless in its own home.” And yet, in the same breath, Fishman continued, “I choose to write Yiddish in Israel, in Kibbutz Beit-Alfa.”2 Thus, Fishman forcefully posed the question Is a Yiddish poet like herself,living on a kibbutz and writing about Israeli reality, an Israeli poet? Or does she perhaps only become, partially, an Israeli writer when her friend Aryeh Aharoni,who lived in the same kibbutz as she and worked for the publishing house Sifriat Poalim, translates her poetry and publishes it in Hebrew?3 Fishman’s address clearly raises some important issues beyond her own predicament . In the second half of the twentieth century, modernization, migration ,andthe Holocaust drasticallytransformedand displacedYiddish language, literature, and culture. The newly established State of Israel also displaced Yiddish , even as it served as a site for the displacement of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the postwar period. Among these immigrants, many Yiddish writers, such as the renowned poet Itzik Manger, found new homes in Israel. Manger traveled extensively to and around Israel in the late 1950s and 1960s and resided there just before his death in 1969. Rukhl Fishman immigrated in 1954 at the age of nineteen. She served as an active member of the literary group Yung Yisroel and wrote Yiddish poetry until her premature death in 1984. Choosing Yiddish in Israel Yung Yisroel between Home and Exile, the Center and the Margins shachar pinsker 278 S h a c h a r P i n s k e r Yet, what was the status of Yiddish in Israel then, and more specifically, what role did Yiddish play in Israeli literature and culture during the formative years ofthe state fromthe1950stothe1970s?WasYiddish “homeless in its own home” as Fishman asserted in her speech? Perhaps the very fact that Meyer Vaisgal (fundraiser for the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel),along with Zalman Shazar,thethird president of Israel,establishedthe Manger Prize forYiddish Literature in 1968 as well as the fact that some of Manger’s works were hugely popular (albeit mostly in Hebrew translation) point to a slightly different picture?4 The Fishman/Manger anecdote constitutes only one of many examples of the complex question of the place and role of Yiddish in Israel, which proves difficult to answer for at least two interrelated reasons: First, since there is no doubt that the pre-state Yishuv and the young State of Israel neglected and sometimes forcefully rejected Yiddish, this topic elicits strong emotional, psychological , and ideological reactions.5 Second, scholars have, until recently, almost totally neglected the place of Yiddish within Israeli literature and culture. For a long time, scholars either chose not to touch the issue or believed it did not warrant serious study. The prevalent notion among scholars of Jewish and Israeli literature and culture suggested that in the post-Holocaust period—with the notable exception of Avrom Sutskever,whom many consider “the last Great Yiddish Poet” (to use Ruth Wisse’s expression)6 —nothing significant emerged in Yiddish in Israel. In recent years, a pronounced change appears to have occurred , mainly in Israeli academia, and a movement toward probing the place of Yiddish language, literature, and culture in Israel has begun to emerge. Even early research on Yiddish in Israel pointed to the derisive attention the language and its cultural output received. In what remains a pioneering and very important survey of Yiddish in Israel, written in 1973, Joshua and David Fishman (who are, not incidentally, the brother and nephew, respectively, of Rukhl Fishman, living and working in New York City), wrote, The Yiddish book, particularly the serious book . . . still strikes many . . . as an oddity.Yiddish is most firmly established as a vernacular . . . and as such, its association with radio, theatre, and even daily press is not hard to fathom. . . . However, books of modern Yiddish poetry, novels, dramas, short stories, essays, literary criticism...

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