Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries

Chapter 11. Eternal Jews and Dead Dogs: The Diasporic Other in Natan Alterman's The Seventh Column

CHAPTER 11 Eternal Jews and Dead Dogs: The Diasporic Other in Natan Alterman’s The Seventh Column Gideon Nevo The Seventh Column comprises Natan Alterman’s main body of journalistic verse.1 It was published regularly on Fridays as the seventh column of the second page of the widespread daily Davar from 1943 to 1967, and was avidly read and received. Dealing with all things public, large or small, written with brilliantly lucid poetic diction, deftly combining wit and pathos, seriousness and jest, empathy and humor, it earned Alterman unprecedented popularity and prestige among the Jewish population in pre-state Palestine (the Yishuv) and in the early decades of the Israeli state. Alterman’s stance vis-à-vis the Diasporic Jew in The Seventh Column is at once representative and unique within the context of Labor Zionism, in which he was deeply entrenched and of which he became the main poetic voice. This stance found expression in two discernible thematic clusters: one dealing with world Jewry and institutionalized world Zionism (and especially with American Jewry and American Zionism); and the other with the Judenrat, the administrative bodies that the Germans required Jews to form in each ghetto on the Nazi-occupied territory of Poland and later in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The two clusters—one embittered and acrimonious, the second unflaggingly compassionate—seem starkly at odds with each other. It is the object of this article to elucidate each individual cluster and to trace the line that might possibly connect them. This will amount to delineating (at 238 Chapter 11 least some aspects of) the moral and spiritual portrait of a writer who, in the realm of Hebrew letters, was the central poetic figure of his time and a major influence on the emergent Israeli poetry and culture of the day. In the years closely preceding the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in May 1948, and during the state’s early years, Natan Alterman, the national poet of the Yishuv, wrote some two dozen poems (and two articles) dealing with the Jewish communities in the Western world and their relation to the newly established state (or state-in-the-making). The poems focus mainly on the Jewish community in America, as this was, and still is, the largest, strongest, most affluent, and most influential of the Jewish communities outside of Israel. The poems concern themselves with both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews in these communities, making for the obliteration of the ideological line dividing these two groups. They were published in Alterman’s widely popular column, The Seventh Column, in the daily newspaper Davar. Some of the poems were carefully selected by Alterman to appear in his second selection of poems from The Seventh Column,2 in a separate thematic section titled (after one of the poems included in the section) ‘‘New Pumbedita .’’ Other poems appeared in other sections of Alterman’s various collections.3 Still others did not appear in any volume during Alterman’s lifetime, and had to wait for the posthumous volumes of The Seventh Column , published after the poet’s death.4 All the poems, without exception, reflect an attitude of critical reproach, of ressentiment. All are imbued with irony and sarcasm, sometimes quite bitter and caustic. They are all cast in the idiom of Alterman’s satirical mode, one of the central modes of his journalistic/political verse; more often than not, however, they shift gears and, disposing of the stinging mock-innocent irony, rise toward the high pathos of the prophetic mode or turn to the discursive/polemical one (or to a combination of the two).5 Alterman’s critical stance is an exemplification of the concept of the negation of the galut, which is one of the constitutive elements of Zionism and one of its deepest and most powerful emotional engines. Eliezer Shweid6 claims that rather than being a uniform version of a generalized and simplistic set of ideas, ‘‘negation of the galut’’ is a complex and involved conceptual conglomerate, a tangled mass of varied and even contrary positions. He goes on to propose a twofold division for the categorization of the panoply of perspectives and standpoints included under this umbrella concept. His principle of differentiation: the attitude adopted Eternal Jews 239 toward ‘‘the Jewish historical legacy in its continuity.’’ On the one side of the demarcation line will be approaches that reject this legacy (or...