A Dream Come True (review)

Book Reviews 119 agenda which contained close affinities to a civic religion, while Gershom Scholem's commitment to Bildung had a profound impact on his understanding of Zionism. Although Confronting the Nation offers unique insight into the aesthetics of modern nationalism, I have a few misgivings about the book. First, the monograph draws extensively from essays that Professor Mosse has published elsewhere and, consequently, it presents no fresh material. Rather than offering a coherent investigation into the subject of nationalist movements and Jewish responses to them, the thematic connections ofthe book reflect the independent development of each of the chapters. A second· difficulty derives from the author's approach to the subject of nationalism. The assumption that the French Revolution marks the advent of modern nationalism runs counter to recent historiography which demonstrates the importance of industrialization, the secularization of European society, and other phenomena in contributing to the emergence of the nation state. What we are left with, then, is a collection of essays by Professor George Mosse that offer a poignant plea for the preservation of liberal nationalism and provide the reader with significant "food for thought." Keith H. Pickus Department of History & Philosophy Montana State University A Dream Come True, by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, translated by T. Muraoka. Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1993. 127 pp. $29.95. This slender volume of memoirs by Ben-Yehuda, published in 1917/1918, has been made available to the English-speaking public for the first time. It is a significant and welcome addition to the sparse material in English about this seminal figure. Ben-Yehuda was one of the first secular Zionists, and deserves recognition as such, but his main significance to us is in the dominant role he and his family played in the· revival of modern Hebrew as a viable language for the entire range of human expression. The magnitude of his achievement is probably less appreciated now than in past decades,. because of the very success of the Hebrew renaissance. This makes one overlook how doubtful the outcome was of the war for the primacy of Hebrew, fought in Palestine by his small group of fanatics. 120 SHOFAR Summer 1995 Vol. 13, No.4 The present volume is a sketch of Ben-Yehuda's life before the major battles in that war were joined. It describes his development from a yeshiva student to a secular Jew, then to a Russian nationalist, and finally to a political and cultural Zionist. The reader follows him from his Lithuanian village and small-town yeshiva through a stay in Paris as a medical student first, as a student-teacher afterwards, and finally to Jerusalem. The author then describes the state of the Holy Land when he reached it in 1881. The book ends fairly abruptly in the summer of 1882. When we leave the author, he .has still forty years of a productive life ahead of him. This book is thus of limited use as a record of Ben-Yehuda's life and achievement. The only English sources known to me about these are encyclopedia articles and Robert St. John's 1952 biography, "Tongue of the Prophets." What we do have, however, are some fascinating descriptions of personalities, situations, and incidents of the early Jewish nationalist period, written in retrospect by one of its most important protagonists. The actual writing took place while the author was still exiled from Palestine by the Turkish authorities and living in the United States. The Balfour declaration had just been published; it was seen by Ben-Yehuda as the fulfillment of the dream of his youth, and provided the impetus to record his vision and its genesis. Ben-Yehuda is quite generous in acknowledging the help of those who were important in his quest, and about many of them we would like to know much more than what we can find here. Among these are his early teacher, Rabbi Yossi Bloicker, who, behind the false front of a strictly orthodox principal, had the temerity to study Hebrew grammar on the sly, and worse, to read Robinson Crusoe in Hebrew translation. He introduced young Eliezer to these vices, and from there on there was no turning back...