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Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 214 Reviews justifies including a wide range of ancient compositions, and chooses to explain the irregularities of Biblical prose not as stemming from passive reception and editing of oral traditions, but from an author's creative shaping of traditional elements into a typically patterned unity. Given this reading of the book's foundationalist assumptions, it is not surprising that the argument is attractive in the abstract, provided one accepts its givens, but less persuasive in many of the details, where Van Seters sometimes resorts to circular reasoning and appeals to his own authority, including the ventilation of classical scholarship. Since something similar can be said about any sustained construction of Israelite literary activity, it cannot diminish the importance of Van Seters's book. Whether or not his view of the Pentateuch eventually gains a large following, a lasting service to biblical scholars will be the stimulus he gives to question the legacies of Wellhausen and Gunkel and to note what classicists of late have been saying about the texts they habitually study. Burke o. Long Bowdoin College Brunswick. ME 04011 THE MODERNISTIC POEM IN ALTERMAN'S WORK: ON "SIMHAT 'ANIYIM" AND "SHIREI MAKKOT MITZRAYIM." Ziva Shamir and Z. Luz, eds. Critical Horizons 2. Pp. 248. Ramat-Gan: Bar-llan University Press, 1991. Paper. Natan Alterman was one of the creators of Hebrew modernism in poetry. His role in bringing European literary trends into Hebrew has been assessed many times, but this collection affords a different kind of look-especially because of its timing: essays of over twenty years, at first an apparent redundancy , on second glance a statement in its own right. The book under review here is a reminder that were Hebrew the language of a more populous culture , Alterman would be a figure more comparable to Eliot than even his strongest enthusiasts might imagine. Those of us who read Alterman only sporadically may imagine more consistency within his oeuvre than actually exists once we expose his work to the closer scrutiny of these essays. In many ways the theme of this book is Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 215 Reviews larger than its modest title. The theme here has to do with the history of Alterman criticism in particular and Hebrew literary criticism in general. Alterman added a different dimension in each period of his development. To some extent, of course, this is an accident of history, since his nation was becoming "modem" as its three great poets, he along with Lea Goldberg and Avraham Shlonsky, became modem. But in addition, Alterman brought Israel into modernity through his own struggle with "modernism" as a literary style. Like all modernisms, Alterman's meant different things at different times; but clearly he was consistently attuned to poetic developments of his century in France and Russia: symbolism, imagism, a fascination with the gothic. Alterman's work as translator, writer of light verse, and political observer , not to speak of his affmity with his intellectual origins in Eastern Europe, seems to have contributed to his constant growth as an artist. Ziva Shamir's essay is a helpful guide through these developments: both the general trends within his situation and such specifics as "literary cubism," which have a strong specific meaning in Alterman's work. There is a "paradigmatic" quality to this anthology, then, for the history of Alterman criticism says a great deal about developments in modem Israeli criticism in general. The editors note that with each volume of his poetry Alterman attempted to solve another poetic problem, as if his life's work, anthologized, represents the full spectrum of poetic problems faced by the modem poets who were to be called "Israeli" once the state was established. In a similar vein, the essays collected here represent a kind of anthology of modem Hebrew critical concerns, from the more ideological preoccupations of Schweid and Kurzweil to the Holocaust questions which have been so often discussed in this context, to and including the prosodic study of Hrushovski's students. Alterman was born in Warsaw in 1910 and came to Eretz Yisrael in 1925, when he settled in Tel Aviv. In addition to being identified as the "school" that broke the...

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