Does David Still Play Before You? Israeli Poetry and the Bible (review)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 277 Reviews DOES DAVID STILL PLAY BEFORE YOU? ISRAELI POETRY AND THE BmLE. By David C. Jacobson. pp. 283. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Cloth, $34.95. That modem Hebrew literature is steeped in the Bible is no revelation: the very use, revival, and development of the biblical language and its application to the modem experience of life and the expression of its exhalations and tribulations carries the biblical idiom automatically. One might even say, by default. Likewise. the cultivating and the building of the historical territory marked by biblical names of places and remembered events are naturally laden with biblical reverberations. The questions posed by this study are: What role does the modem poetry of biblical allusion play in the current culture and in what manner is the old text recycled in its modem context? The first two chapters introduce the topic by a discussion of biblical citations in public, official and social contexts as they are used as pretexts and are rhetorically manipulated for the purpose of justification and motivation for creating policies and taking action. These provide the English reader with some of the basic national concerns of Israel, and although they often seem naive and simplified. journalistic rather than scholarly. Jacobson's implied reader might find them informative as an introduction to the problematics involved in the revival of the people as a sovereign state. In the following four main chapters of this study, Jacobson sets out to examine the particular employment of biblical language in fifty modem short lyrical poems which he divided into four themes: Responding to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Those who experienced the Holocaust and those who did not, Men and women in ancient and modem Israel, and Secular Israelis and religious faith. This thematic approach carries an intrinsic difficulty in as much as the selection of the poems is dictated by an a priori inclusion of those illustrating a point, often with disregard for quality or for a better representation of some major poets whose works do not clearly fit into the prescribed categories. One wonders how a central poet such as Yona Wallach, for instance. is omitted from the book, unless, of course, her already canonical poem of biblical allusion, "Yonatan," just did not fit into the "Men and Women" chapter, as the protagonist is both male and female. Ambiguity, whether in gender or in language. as well as irony. which is probably the most obvious characteristic of modem Hebrew poetry. does not lend itself to neat thematic classifications. The interpretation of poems for the purpose of a social-cultural statement confronts the author with an obvious need to juggle the methodologies . Although Jacobson refers to a number of literary critics and theo- Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 278 Reviews retical approaches, none is actually applied to the reading of the texts. The poems are analyzed for the sole purpose of pointing out their declared and obvious relations with the biblical text, and only for their relevance to the theme in question, thus often ignoring other poetic attributes and therefore rendering only partial readings. A case in point is the all-too-known "Iyitshaq" by Arnir Gilboa, a reversal of the Akkeda story, where the allusion to Shir Hashirim in the third line is missing from Jacobson's analysis. This allusion sets the poem into the ironic mood and by missing its significance one is lead to a one-dimensional reading of a very complex poem. The very question of the allusion as a poetic device poses questions of definitions: it seems that a distinction between allusion, metaphor, intertextuality and, even more so, the semiotic definition of hypogram would be prerequisites to this study. Although Jacobson cites M. Riffaterre's theory of the semiotics of poetry, he chose not to adopt this rather appropriate approach , since indeed the book deals with hypograms and not with allusions, which are used here to denote mainly direct references to biblical people and events. The fact that Hebrew poetry is steeped in the biblical language from its very birth should have been addressed from, at least, the viewpoint of the literary tradition. Seeing the modem poetry as leaping over...