The Tender Guardian: Eliezer Smoli's Nature Teacher

Eliezer Smoli (1901-1985), a celebrated teacher and one of the founding fathers of Israeli children's literature, offered his young readership the character of the "nature teacher," drawing on the lives of real-life teachers and pioneers and fashioning his teacher characters in the tradition of the elder-guardian of the idyllic pastoral. The nature teacher and his pupils formed, in both life and literature, a chain of fraternal guardianship, mentoring, and love and filled a historical role in the revival of the Hebrew language and in establishing the continuity between the Zionist endeavor and biblical themes and terms. They likewise offered a measure of association with select talmudic and rabbinic traditions rooted in the very exilic culture rejected by the yishuv and the "New Hebrew." The traits of the teacher characters, their role in fashioning the youth culture of the yishuv and the enduring power of the nostalgia with which they were embraced are the focus of this paper.