"Sacred Tongue" or "Foreign Language"?: The American Jewish Student and Contemporary Hebrew Literature

92 SHOFAR "SACRED TONGUE" OR "FOREIGN LANGUAGE"? THE AMERICAN JEWISH STUDENT AND CONTEMPORARY HEBREW LITERATURE1 Yael S. Feldman Yael Feldman is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature at New York University. Among her many publications are: Ben HaKetavim LeKav HaMashveh (1987) and Modernism and Cultural Transfer (1985). She also serves as the literary editor ofHadoar. In the competition between the two separate institutions of education, the general and the Hebrew, the former had the upper hand. Why? Because of its naturalness, the product of social and existential realities, and because of its apparent usefulness in the struggle for survival. -"As youngsters we had understood"-my son told me many years later-"that our general education was of great importance, both socially and economically, so we were serious about it, while Hebrew had only limited relevance for our life." For those young intellectuals, general literature seemed of much higher value than Hebrew. For us, the generation trained in the old world, Hebrew was the center of our life and our mental world; ~ut for the young generation, their place of residence became their center. The speaker is Zvi Scharfstein, a well-known Hebrew educator in New York between the wars, and the father of Professor Ben-Ami Scharfstein of Tel Aviv University, the "son" whose retort is quoted here. This was Scharfstein senior's attempt to rationalize the changes that had taken place already in the forties in the attitude toward Hebrew language and literature: the gap between his own generation, who had emigrated from Europe during the first world war, and their children, the first American-born generation. IAn earlier Hebrew version of this paper was presented as a forum lecture in Jerusalem on August 15, 1989, under the auspices of the International Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, and was published in the periodical i1m vaSefer (Brit Ivrit Olamit, Jerusalem: 1991), pp. 85-96. 2Zvi Scharfstein, i1rba'im Shanah bai1merica (Massada, 1956), p. 287. (My translation-Y. E) Volume 9, No.3 Spring 1991 93 Writing in the fifties, in his memoirs Forty Years in America (published in Israel in Hebrew, of course!), he still did not have a convincing explanation for the difference between the European diaspora and the American one: why was Hebrew relegated to the margins in the life of young American Jews? Was it only because of its uselessness "in the struggle for survival"? Its "unnaturalness "? Its "lower value" in relation to general literature? -So why hadn't the older generation felt all of that in their own youth in Europe? A partial answer to this question was given a couple of years ago, in Robert Alter's study The Invention ofHebrew Prose: [B]ut as anyone can attest who has had the opportunity to know the emigre Hebraists in New York as recently as the 19505, these writers, displaced from their multilingual setting, were doomed to declaim sonorous Hebrew cadences in a historical vacuum. In an essentially monolingual country that offered relatively open access to people of talent, those with literary gifts in the younger generation [...] would of course be drawn to the dominant language. The older Hebraists, then, were 1eft brandishing a literary torch with no one to whom they could pass it on. . Professor Alter's thesis is best demonstrated by his own book: who would have thought it possible, in the not too distant past, to publish such a meticulous analysis of Hebrew style in English? Today, however, Alter's book is not an exception.4 These days, more than ever before, it is language proficiency (rather than mere interest) that is a rare commodity. This can be readily "proven" by the growing translation industry and the relatively wi