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Book Reviews 105 really mean? Were they fluent? Or did they know to repeat. a few memorized phrases? Did they actually use Hebrew in daily life as a matter of course?) The book offers many suggestions for future study, including sources. Eliezer Ben Yehudah's actual contribution to the revival is reassessed. While a failure on one level-his use of Hebrew remained artificial and imposed, and was limited mostly to his family and a few followers-he succeeded as a symbol for the propaganda, and as proof for the possibility of speaking Hebrew. Ben Yehudah's failure is explained by the difficulty of "changing an individual's base language to a language that is not yet the base language ofany society" (p. 138). This was the accomplishment of the second aliyah: creating the necessary public framework to expand the revival beyond the range of a few individuals. Unlike the history of the development of most languages, patterns of Hebrew dialogue were invented by literature, and spelling was stabilized before pronunciation. Harshav also clarifies the choice of "Sephardi" pronunciation, pointing out that Israeli Hebrew is actually based on the lowest common denominator of rival variations: the combination of Ashkenazi consonants and Sephardi vowels. The revival of Hebrew is shown to be intertwined with so many historical and sociological factors, so tenuous that the myth breaking only increases the wonder. The last chapter before the concluding summaries-"the nature of Israeli Hebrew"-offers many topics for future research and, as before, suggestions for source material. After reading this book, one can only hope that these suggestions will be followed by researchers with similarly broad and well-informed perspectives. Nancy E. Berg Jewish & Near Eastern Studies Washington University in St. Louis Hebrew and Modernity, by Robert Alter. Bloomington: Indiana U)liversity Press, 1994. 192 pp. $27.95 (c); $10.95 (P). Zionism not only produced a Jewish state, it established Hebrew as a medium of high literary creativity. In an outstanding collection of essays called Hebrew and Modernity, Robert Alter explains the complex ancestry of modern Hebrew literature, tracing its classical and religious roots as well as its connections to the contemporary political and social struggles waged by Jews across international borders and in their several vernacu- 106 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 lars. Sensitive to the debts owed by Hebrew writers to humanistic developments in the non-Jewish world, Alter, nevertheless, focuses his attention on the process by which Jewish experiences produced a vocabulary and grammar sufficient for imaginative expression and creative narrative. This book is a second-order study, a compilation of essays which examines recent poetry anthologies, important novelists, and significant fiction. Many, but not all, of these essays have already appeared in print, but together they explain how Hebrew literature was self-consciously created. For over a century, Hebrew fiction has probed the characteristics of Jewish identity, the nature of the Jewish family, and the meaning of communal suffering. Its existence and status are taken for granted, certainly a measure of its high achievement but not of the long and difficult struggle such productivity demanded. Although Jews have had the opportunity to confront both radical evil and sublime good in history, the Hebrew literary enterprise was not primarily built by addressing the spiritual questions such awesome encounters provoked. This literature was woven out of an analysis of the mundane and the ordinary. As modernity offeredJews economic opportunities and political rights, it also splintered them into fragments. Through literature, Jews attempted to understand the circumstances of their exile and the consequences of their dispersion. Jews used Hebrew literature to explain their poverty, examine the structure of their faith, and articulate their relationship to each other, to their past, and to the prospects offered by the non-Jewish world. Appreciating, if not worshipping, the values of modernity, Hebrew writers turned idioms drawn from ancient texts into concepts describing their own communal inadequacies and emotional conflicts. Familiar idioms drawn from sacred texts described a turmoil engendered by the great cultural divide between traditional Jewish and modern non-Jewish societies. Not only did the newly published Hebrew books differ from earlier Hebrew literary genres, they were also hostile to many of...

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