Home as Exile
To fully understand a culture one must attend not only to dominant voices but also to the voices that have been silenced, cast out, expelled, or excluded. Although the negation of exile turned out to be the dominant ideology of Hebrew letters, it would be grossly inaccurate to imply that other poetic/ideological positions did not find expression in the textual field we name Hebrew modernism. Indeed almost all Hebrew poets were devout Zionists; but some did voice ambivalence toward or disappointment regarding the "home" they found in Palestine. Since Hebrew criticism demanded full identification with Zionism, poets who continuously expressed ambivalence toward the Zionist project were often rendered minor. Consider, for example, the
poetic/political ambivalence of Noach Shtern. Shtern, who was born in Lithuania in 1912, emigrated to Ottawa when he was seventeen; two years later he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study English literature at Harvard. After graduating, Shtern was offered a scholarship at Columbia University but he decided to emigrate to Palestine. He arrived in Palestine in 1935 but was never at home in his new homeland of choice. Engulfed in ambivalence he describes the orange groves, the emblem of the new land:
The smell of the heavy oranges
comes to give pleasure and to torture
to nurture and strangle as witness
to the life in this homeland.[34]Noach Shtern, Amid Fogs (in Hebrew) (Tel aviv: Hakibuts Hameuchad, 1973), 100.
Another poet who continuously described Palestine as a disappointing homeland is Alexander Penn. Penn, a Russian-born poet, who was, while still in Russia, a friend of Vladimir Mayakovsky, wrote poems in both Russian and Hebrew. Constantly torn between the USSR and Palestine, Penn wrote in 1929 a poem entitled "A New Homeland." This new homeland he describes in astonishingly negative terms:
Without faith and direction
I walk
your sun in my throat—bronzed heartburn.
And all the energy of my soul
You eradicate instantly,
You so-called New Homeland.[35]"A New Homeland," in Alexander Penn, Nights without Roof (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hameuchad, 1985), 54.
But the most intricate—and ambivalent—poetic rendition of Jewish "homelessness" is to be found in the poetry of Leah Goldberg, who continuously questioned and problematized the notions of home and exile. Unlike Shtern or Penn, who were considered marginal, Goldberg was a leading poet in Shlonsky's coterie. Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, and educated at the universities of Kovno, Bonn, and Berlin, Goldberg was thoroughly familiar with Russian and German literature; she attained native or near-native fluency in many European languages, including Russian, German, French, Italian, and English. Although Goldberg's mastery of Russian was far superior to her knowledge of Hebrew, she decided to write poetry in Hebrew and began doing so at age ten. One of her first poems, entitled "exile," reads:
How difficult the word how many memories
of hatred and slavery
and because of it we had shed so many tears:
exile
and yet, I'll rejoice in the fields of exile
which are filled with oats and flax
the hot day and the cool evening
and the dead silence of night
the pale spring and the melting snow
the season which is neither summer nor autumn
when, in the garden, by some miracle
the green turns to gold.[36]Leah Goldberg, "exile," in Tuvya Ruebner, Leah Goldberg: A Monograph (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1980), 10.
The poem's shift from an ideological negation of exile to an unabashed celebration of the exilic landscape is striking. Goldberg focuses here and elsewhere on the gap or rift between ideology and experience. She begins with a textbook rejection of exile only to find out that the negated site is beautifully familiar. Moreover, a close scrutiny of the text reveals that exile for her, at least here, is clearly textual. It is presented as a "difficult word," a concept in Jewish collective memory ("memories of hatred and slavery") rather than as a concrete experience or fact of life. The speaker's shift from the "difficult word" to the happiness aroused by the fields is undoubtedly surprising. As Goldberg's literary career progressed, however, she became increasingly aware of the problematics of "home" and "exile" and thus gave expression to a particularly complex positionality.
With Goldberg, home is often a function of distance and nostalgia, a place always-already beyond one's grasp and longed for. In a cycle entitled "From the Songs of Zion" Goldberg acknowledges—and indeed problematizes—the relationship between poet and land, immigrant and home. The cycle's first section, entitled "Night," reads:
Does the golden tongue of a bell quiver in the uppermost heaven?
Did a drop of dew fall on the top of the tall cypress tree?
Sing to us of the Songs of Zion!
How shall we sing the song of Zion in Zion's land
And we have not even begun to hear.[37]"From the Songs of Zion," in Leah Goldberg, Collected Poems, Vol. 2 (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1970), 219.
Goldberg's poetry becomes increasingly wary of the expectation that Hebrew poetry should be politically committed to Zionism in general and to the negation of exile in particular. The poem echoes the words of the exiles in Psalms 137 who resist their captors' demand that they sing the songs of Zion. Exile, for them, is a state that negates the very possibility of singing. The allusion to Psalms 137, the ur-text on exile in the Jewish
tradition, cannot pass unnoticed by Goldberg's readership. Before considering the meaning of Goldberg's iconoclastic allusion, let us look at Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's reading of the biblical passage:
The theme of exile and homecoming is as old as literature itself, becoming, in its most radical modern readings, virtually synonymous with the literary process. At the source of a long intertextual journey, the 137th Psalm is the canonic moment that generates the poetic vocabulary of exile: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept as we remembered Zion." The pleonastic "there" in the first and third verses calls attention to itself by its very redundancy; syntactically superfluous, "there" defines exile as the place that is elsewhere. Being elsewhere is the pre-text for poetry.[38]
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, "Our Homeland, the Text ... Our Text the Homeland," 465.
Note, however, that the biblical passage presents exile as antithetical to poetry. It is interesting that Goldberg expresses the biblical idea that exile negates the possibility for poetry while she is in Palestine. Unlike the exiles in Babylon, she is, in fact, at "home" in the ever-longed-for Zion. This is, no doubt, a bold reversal of the biblical theme. A question of purpose imposes itself: Why can't the speaker in the poem sing "of the Songs of Zion"? Attempting to listen to the land's unheard voices, Goldberg acknowledges her inability to capture poetically the sounds of this unfamiliar homeland.
In "Tel Aviv 1935" Goldberg describes the arrival of a group of immigrants to Tel Aviv in terms of exile and estrangement:
And the knapsacks of the travelers
walked down the streets
And the language of a foreign land
Was plunged into the hot day
like the cold blade of a knife.[39]"Tel Aviv 1935," in Leah Goldberg, Collected Poems, Vol. 3 (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Yachdav, 1970), 14.
Although the poem is clearly about her own immigration to Palestine (she arrived in Jaffa in 1935), Goldberg describes her "homecoming" in strikingly impersonal terms. The experience is collective rather than personal, and the process as a whole is dehumanizing, for the immigrants in the poem turn from subjects into walking knapsacks. As we read these lines, it becomes clear that Goldberg problematizes the notion of "homecoming." Goldberg's double position, simultaneously insider and outsider in both Europe and Palestine, is expressed in the poem through the speaker's visual perspective. The "detached" modernist eye that looks at the "walking knapsacks" from afar seems to be standing on a roof in Tel Aviv. Goldberg describes the immigrants' arrival to a new land as if she is not implicated in the picture she portrays. By looking at a group of immigrants (of
which she is part) from outside, with no apparent trace of involvement, she gives succinct expression to her sense of detachment from herself as well as from the collective. Goldberg's double perspective informs the poem in many different ways. For example, one disturbing question remains unsolved: Which is the foreign language that is "plunged into the hot day"? Is it the immigrants' Russian or is it the natives' Hebrew? What, in other words, constitutes the "foreign" in the pregnant moment of homecoming? The question remains unresolved. Moreover, as Goldberg arrives in Palestine, a moment of Jewish wish fulfillment, she instantly thematizes her emotional and spiritual longing for her hometown's architecture, figured through a church at the end of the poem.
In another poem Goldberg's double positionality becomes even more explicit as she acknowledges her sense of "elsewhereness."
Here I'll not hear the cuckoo's voice,
Here the tree will not wear a snowy hat
But in the shadow of these pines
My entire childhood is revived.
The sound of the conifers: once upon a time …
Homeland I'll name the snowy planes,
The greenish ice which chains the stream
The language of poetry in a foreign land
Perhaps only the passing birds know—
as they dangle between earth and sky—
this pain of the two homelands.
With you, I was planted twice
With you, pines, I grew,
With my roots in two different landscapes.[40]Leah Goldberg, Collected Poems, Vol. 2 (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Yachdav, 1970), 14.
While Gertrude Stein views the simultaneous affiliation to two countries as a liberating privilege and as a double presence, Goldberg experiences this double affiliation as a tormenting lack or absence. A simple sense of home is untenable for Goldberg, for she perceives her two homelands as mutually exclusive. Having "roots in two different landscapes" is by no means liberating for Goldberg. While contemporary theory advances the idea "that there is an essential virtue and gain in escaping the singularity of one culture into the multiplicity of all, or of all that are available."[41]
Seamus Deane, "Imperialism/Nationalism," 367.
Goldberg stresses her inability to feel fully at home in either of her homelands. The multiplicity is experienced as loss. When Goldberg says "I was planted twice," she brings into focus her sense of having been uprooted. Exploring her double positionality, she defines "homeland" in terms ofthe landscapes she feels close to, as well as in terms of her closeness to texts: thus Russian poetry always remains a homeland.
In 1940 Goldberg expressed herself more fully on the question of exile: "Or perhaps, perhaps only now we have learned to feel that the essence of poetry is not in the combination of harmonies, but in the terrible anxiety which the human heart feels before death, in the human longing for tranquillity and a homeland—which are always beyond our reach?"[42]
Cited in A. B. Yoffe, Leah Goldberg: An Appreciation of the Poet and Her Work (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Reshafim, 1994), 6.
The question mark at the end of this passage tells the entire story, for the desired homeland is always out of reach. Goldberg's sense of "homelessness"—her having two homelands—could grant her entry into constructions of modernism that valorize the exilic condition. But within Hebrew letters, the position Goldberg held vis-à-vis exile was considered "ex-centric." Consider, for example, Abraham Blat's assessment of her poetry: "Leah Goldberg is a humanist poet. This is her great strength and this is her weakness because her national and social uprootedness left her lonely with her single poem, the love poem (alongside her nature poems). … Although we relish great humanist lyrical poetry, we cannot ignore the absence of a specifically Israeli color in her poetry."[43]Abraham Blat, In Writers' Path (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Menora, 1967), 107.
Blat's description of Goldberg's social and national uprootedness is clearly indicative of the limited range of valued literary topics at a specific historical moment. Reading Goldberg's poetry as excessively personal, he gives succinct expression to a collective literary expectation that poetry participate in the nation-building process. Thus A. B. Yoffe writes: "In 1940 Goldberg's second volume of poetry had been published. It was, undoubtedly, a big step forward in comparison to her first book. The poems became not only less personal and more objective, but the poet exhibited a desire to conquer the landscape of Erets Israel ."[44]See A. B. Yoffe, Leah Goldberg, 241.
But the most revealing attack on Goldberg's poems has been advanced by the critic Y. Saaroni, who complains, on reading Goldberg's first book, that "it is hard to believe that this poet lives in our day, in a modern city … and not in a medieval monastery, in a dark and solitary chamber. It seems as if she arranges an exile for herself, flapping in the prison of loneliness without finding the gate that would allow her to get out to the wide world."[45]
See ibid., 228.
Condemning Goldberg's detachment from the "here and now," Saaroni describes Goldberg as uprooted, as too European; in his view, she is too attached not only to Europe but also to Christianity. Culturally and emotionally immersed in the Old World—wrapped up in an exile of choice—she is viewed as not committed enough to either Judaism or Zionism. As these critical remarks suggest, Goldberg's somewhat ambivalent relation to Palestine as homeland is denounced as irresolute. Her overtlonging for the European landscapes of her childhood and her close affiliation with European culture are perceived as evidence of her lack of commitment to the emerging national culture. Although a famous poet who is part of a hegemonic coterie, Goldberg gradually became a liminal figure, an acknowledged poet who was rendered marginal.