II

Successive waves of immigration ensured that the work of Hebraist activists remained necessary. Nevertheless, victories began to mount. While the first revivers of spoken Hebrew told stories about the thin veneer of Hebrew speech breaking under the impact of fever or in a husband's absence, later generations of Zionists increasingly had wondrous tales to recount, especially of the children who had been born and educated in the new Hebrew schools of the yishuv. Anecdotal material about the new generation of Hebrew-speaking children reveals how profoundly the linguistic transformation symbolized a psychosexual one. Whereas the Ben-Yehuda family drama had pitted male against female speech, the new psycholinguistic drama was taking place within the structure of Jewish masculinity. Itamar Even-Zohar, with barely concealed pride in the macho character of Hebrew, in the success of Zionism at "transforming the identity the very nature of the people," relates the well-known story of the visit of two Yiddishists to pre-World War I Tel Aviv who watch the schoolboys leave the Herzliya Gymnasium after classes have been dismissed for the day.

The elder one says to the other: "The Zionists boast that Hebrew is becoming the natural tongue for the children of Palestine. I will show you that they are lying. I will tweak one of the boy's ears, and I promise you that he will not cry out 'Ima' but 'marne' in Yiddish."
So saying, he approached one of the boys and tweaked his ear. The boy turned on him and shouted "hamor" [donkey, in Hebrew]. The Yiddishist turned to his friend and said: "I'm afraid the Zionists are right."^[33]

This anecdote is so similar to others that arose about different figures (usually connected in some way with Yiddish) that one can detect in it a "joke type." The success stories of the Hebrew revival, and this anecdote is of course an example, often involved children, as in the Yiddish poet Yehoash's awed report of the Tel Aviv street urchins playing ball "in Hebrew."^[34]   The awe of older Yiddish-speaking Jews visiting Palestine, either sincere or exaggerated by proud Hebraists, seems to apply equally to the two—presumably related—phenomena: children speaking Hebrew and Jewish children playing ball. The implications of the anecdote about

the two Yiddishists, however, go further than the suggestion that the new generation has succeeded in acquiring a new mother tongue or even that it enjoys sports. Iramar Even-Zohar interprets this joke as suggesting that "a nation cannot be tweaked by the ear and cry 'mother,' that is, run for help to its mother. The 'Jewish mother' thus had become culturally incomprehensible."^[35]   Implicit in all the anecdotes related here is not only the obsolescence of the "Jewish mother" but also the replacement of the despised diaspora "femininity" with a new model for Jewish masculine behavior. Mame-loshn is, literally, the language of "mama's boys," whereas Hebrew is the language of the ferocious, disrespectful young.

Yeshurun Keshet relates another anecdote that circulated somewhat later, after the refugees of Hitler's Europe began to arrive: a refugee child in one of the temporary camps that had been set up beside a kibbutz ran crying home to his mother, "Mame, di hebre'ishe shkotsim'lekh viln mikh shlogn" (Mama, the little Hebrew gentile boys want to hit me).^[36]   Keshet's story captures the difference between the Yiddish-speaking diasporic Jewish male, clinging to his mother in fear and help-lessness, and his fierce Hebrew counterpart, who is associated, in the mind of the Yiddish child, with the non-Jewish hoodlums of Europe. The new Hebrew male, this anecdote seems to be saying, is so different from his diasporic other that recognizing him as Jewish requires a major shift in the Jewish/non-Jewish paradigm. This last story, however, has a pathos lacking in the jokes I related earlier, since the young refugee boy is genuinely afraid, unlike the older Yiddishists. The unadulterated pride with which the earlier anecdotes were repeated is somewhat mixed, in this anecdote, with the bittersweet regret that overtook even the most fervent Hebraists in the wake of the genocide of European Jewry.

It is no coincidence, perhaps, that one of the most notorious acts of hostility by the militant Brigade for the Defense of the Language was its struggle in the autumn of 1930 against the showing of the Yiddish film Di yidishe mame , which Arye Pilovski describes as of "extremely limited aesthetic value" but which was nevertheless the occasion of an international Jewish scandal.^[37]   Pilovski relates that the film was only shown after protests and threats under the protection of the British police, and even then the brigade succeeded in disrupting the event. When additional screenings were canceled, the Yiddish press decried the "pogroin" against Yiddish in Palestine:^[38]   Yosef Klausner, in an article protesting the film when it was first scheduled, explained the Hebraist fervor as implicitly connected with the film, rather than merely finding a convenient scapegoat in it. As Klausner put it, Yiddish was dangerous precisely

because it was the language of "our mothers and the masses."^[39]   The sentimental Yiddish film, with its clear call for loyalty to the Jewish mother and its appeal to a broad audience, represented more than just a linguistic danger to new Hebrew speakers. It also threatened to wear down the emotional barriers that the Hebrew pioneers shored up not only against Yiddish but also against its symbolic attractions.

At least some of what is at stake in these stories transcends the Hebrew revival and the Hebrew-Yiddish conflict. The Zionist embrace of masculinism has derivations other than the Hebrew-Yiddish language conflict. The fin-de-siècle Central European cult of youth and athletics (and in a previous generation, dueling fraternities) certainly contributed to Zionist culture. Theodor Herzl envisioned Zionism as a means by which Jews could "become real men." Michael Berkowitz describes the Zionist agenda as follows:

[Herzl's] attitude, shared by most early Zionists, was an internal and external disavowal of the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish men as unmanly, and it affirmed the European-wide equation of manliness and rightful membership in the nation. The way to a "new Jewish existence" could only be reached through participation in a "society of friends," or "a special type of comradeship" that was possible for Jewish men only through Zionism. This myth reflected the reality of a movement, which, like the larger society, was maledominated. The inaugural assembly of 250 Zionists included only around twelve female delegates, and women were not accorded voting rights until the Second Congress. To be a Zionist was to "take a manly stand" and be a manly man, asserting the Jews' rightful place among the people of the world.^[40]

Max Nordau's influential speech on "Muskeljudentum" (Jewry of Muscle) on the opening of the Zionist sports organization Bar Kokhba is perhaps the clearest statement of the necessity of improving the physical prowess of feminized Jewish men. In a passionate appeal for global Jewish transformation, Nordau contrasts the stereotypical Jewish male with his vision for a new variety of Jewish masculinity, but one that was once the rightful property of Jewish men: "In the narrow Jewish street our poor limbs soon forgot their gay movements; in the dimness of sunless houses our eyes began to blink shyly. . . . Let us take up our oldest traditions; let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men."^[41]

Considering the degree to which Hebraism was intended as a program for the most fundamental self-transformation, it is not surprising that the first step in Hebraization often entailed a name change, or that the Brigade considered it a public service to help people Hebraize their

names. Elon describes the practice of name changing (which appears in a number of biblical stories) as a "magical" act. The Hebraizing of diaspora names can be traced to

the old Jewish custom of changing the name of a very sick man in the hope of cheating the angel of death. Thus, it may be more than accident that so many Jewish refugees from lands of persecution—even more often their sons—have shown a proclivity to redefine themselves with names that denote firmness, toughness, strength, courage, and vigor: Yariv ("antagonist"); Oz ("strength"); Tamir ("towering"); Lahat ("blaze"); Kabiri ("tremendous"); Hod ("splendor," "majesty"); Barak ("lightning"); Tsur ("rock"); Nechushtan ("bronze"); Bar Adon ("son of the master," or "masterful"); or even Bar Shilton ("fit to govern").^[42]

Although the Hebraization of women's family names typically followed that of their husbands or fathers, sometimes women took the opportunity of the widespread name changes to take on their own Hebrew names; these names can reveal something to us about how self-transformation was viewed by women, who could be assumed to be outside the cult of Hebraic masculinism. Among the most prominent examples are writers like Rachel, who dropped her family name altogether. Rachel's use of her first name alone, which is in keeping with her poetics of simplicity, might also signal a newfound freedom from both the European past and her own family history. The name also serves to present the poet as a neobiblical character or as a woman with whom her reading public could feel itself on an intimate first-name basis. The Hebrew poet Yocheved Bat-Miriam (the daughter of Miriam) chose a matronym, as Ilana Pardes calls it, thus adopting her own foremother as a voluntary family affiliation. "Bat-Miriam's choice of a name," Pardes argues, "needs to be seen both as a concrete challenge to the patrilinear naming system and as a critique of culture in which literary tradition, like names, is passed down from father to son."^[43]

In feminine reworkings of Zionist/Hebraist practice such as Bat-Miriam's, the desire to forge a connection with the biblical past often turned out to contain an element of feminist subversion (just as the feminine use of the biblical topos "land = beloved woman" could produce a lesbian rather than a normative heterosexual love poem). In the case of Bat-Miriam's adoption of a name, the reversal of a biblical parent-child relationship—in the Bible Yocheved is the mother of Miriam—in the modern Hebrew name can also be seen in the light of the Zionist reversal of the parent-child hierarchy. Here, the biblical mother becomes the daughter's daughter, or alternatively, the biblical daughter becomes

the mother's mother, so that biological affiliation and the respect and authority traditionally invested in the older generation give way to a fluid model of imaginative and voluntary affiliations.

Other women writers chose names from nature, as did many men. Malka Shechtman, for instance, called herself Bat-Chama, daughter of the sun.^[44]   Again, in cases like these, the feminine version of the Zionist model often contained an additional revolutionary element, since the women were clearly setting up a personal rather than a dynastic or family model of name transmission. A brief perusal of a collection of articles by Zionist women workers published in 1930 suggests how widespread such name changes were among women: of forty-five contributors, ten used only their first names and three used a single initial as a surname. Among these ten, two names are of Yiddish origin while one is European; the others are Hebrew names (it is impossible to decide whether these names were adopted, though names like Carmela and Techiya have a distinctly Zionist ring). Of the family names, one, Bat-Rachel, is a matronym. One woman signs herself Dinah Bat-Chorin (Dinah the Free Woman, or Dinah the Daughter of a Free Person), while another one is called Nechama Bat-Tsiyon (Nechama the Daughter of Zion).^[45]   A woman taking a name like Bat-Chorin or Bat-Tsiyon was doing more than transforming a Yiddish family name into a Hebrew one; she was also rejecting the patriarchal transmission of family names. To adopt a family name with a clear feminine marker, even as a pen name, was to declare independence from husband and father.

In other cases, name changes revealed both the revolutionary discontinuities called for by Hebraism and the submerged continuities that managed to survive even the most extreme attempts at Zionist self-transformation. The Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun, in an interview in the mid-1970s, explained how and why he changed his name from Yechiel Perimutter. The name change was not only from a diasporic name to a Hebrew one but also from a name with a recognizable Yiddish meaning (Pearl-mother, or Mother-of-Pearl), which includes a reference to "mother" rare in a family name, to a Hebrew name that means either "fathers of Jerusalem" or "Fathers are watching us" (Avot, fathers; Yeshurun, "are or will be watching us"). When the interviewer asked Yeshurun about his unusual name, the poet answered that he had chosen the first name, Avot, on his first day in the army, immediately after the founding of the state of Israel. He had long wanted to change his name, but he felt particularly strongly that he should have a Hebrew name for the swearing-in ceremony that was to take place the following day. Yeshurun described

how he had lain awake most of the night, trying to think of a name that would suit him.

At dawn, I said to myself: remember your childhood. Maybe I could come up with something from my childhood. I remembered my mother singing beautiful lullabies to my brothers in her beautiful voice. Once, she bent over the cradle and sang to the youngest one in Yiddish and Ukrainian. But the children wouldn't fall asleep, and my mother stopped singing and instead called out excitedly, "tatelekh, tatelekh " [a common Yiddish endearment meaning "little fathers, little fathers"]. And then the child understood that she wasn't going to sing and he went to sleep himself. From this I took the name "Avot" and was very satisfied with it.^[46]

Yeshurun's story is emblematic in a number of ways. The first of these might be the poet's sense of the importance of finding himself a Hebrew name for the occasion of his induction into the new Israeli army. Any Hebrew name would signify a new masculinity, given the associations of the language with the proud biblical history of Jewish sovereignty; but Yeshurun was not simply translating his name from German or Russian into Hebrew, as many did, but selecting a name that would confer a new identity befitting a Hebrew warrior. In calling himself Avot, he not only chose a name that would signify his belief in a new and powerful connection with his patrilineage, he also erased the old name, with its associations of femininity and its recognizably Yiddish sound. If we read Avot as a replacement of his previous first name Yechiel (God lives or will live), another theme becomes prominent. In this substitution, the modern Hebrew name presents a human—albeit male—history in the place of the traditional Hebrew (or Yiddishized) Jewish name that refers to divine faith. Instead of asserting the existence and authority of God, the new name asserts the human continuities of Jewish history.

Nevertheless, the account Yeshurun gives of his self-transformation also indicates that his name expressed a strong sense of continuity with his past, in the form of his Yiddish-speaking mother. The name Avot, for all its patriarchal grandeur, in fact is a translation of the Yiddish term used for little boys, "little fathers." Translated back into Yiddish, the name means "little boys are watching us," as if Yeshurun were reversing the course of his own history or imagining his present circumstances from the amazed perspective of a little Eastern European child. The disappearance of the diminutive in the move to Hebrew might signal the process of replacing a Yiddish childhood with a Hebrew adulthood, but it might also be a clever concealment of the continuing existence of the Yiddish boy. Yeshurun's memorializing of his mother is also curiously

ambiguous. By having her choose his name, as it were, he admits her continued importance to his new life. But the story of his choice and the name itself also signify her absence, erasure, or silence. The name comes, that is, at the moment when the mother breaks off her lullaby and moves away, just as the young man chose his name at the moment when his youth would be ruptured by his shouldering of the adult burdens of a Zionist soldier. This account, in all its complexity, reveals something of the ways in which radical discontinuity and continuity combine with masculine/feminine models of identity in the Zionist narrative.