Instead, what the Hebraists chose was patrimony—patrimony in the sense of rootedness in a primordial continuum. Though Yiddish too reveres and incorporates the legacy of Hebrew, the Hebraists turned away from Yiddish; despite its evolving high culture and literary achievements, it had its origins in an everyday vernacular, and—in the tumult and bustle of American acculturation—concerned itself less with the empyrean than with the tangles of daily life. Nor could these linguistic patricians be tempted by the powerful elasticity and breadth of English, however swept away they might be by the great English and American poets. Whitman in particular quickly became a kind of model and mentor, as well as a portal to a visionary America. Influences and tutelary spirits abounded, sometimes surprisingly. A case in point: Regelson felt himself so seized and claimed by W. B. Yeats that he composed an “Irish” poem in homage to the friendship of Yeats and Gogarty: Shney barburim v’nahar (“Two Swans and a River”). To experience the dazzlements of Regelson’s own Englishing of this extraordinary narrative ode is to recognize how the choice of Hebrew may have occasioned a genuine loss to American (and Irish) literature.
Nor was it, astonishingly, a gain to Israeli letters. It may be a natural irony of history—natural because inexorable—that the establishment of Israel as a modern Hebrew-speaking nation in possession of an acclaimed and robustly expanding literature should have shut out the American Hebraists. It was not only that they were considered marginal to the Hebrew center, and on that account excluded. Worse yet, their very existence was unknown. Mintz opens his study by citing the dumbfounded observations of Zalman Shazar, Israel’s third president and a literary figure in his own right, when on his first visit to America in the 1930s he discovered, like some Columbus encountering an unsuspected tribe, a Hebrew-intoxicated band of ascetics:
In their isolated nobility, they attached themselves only to the intangible and absolute in the national spirit. They had complete mastery over the Hebrew language as if they lived in the Land of Israel, and they were utterly unreconciled and even oblivious to the surroundings in which they actually lived. In their loneliness, there was the sadness of being the chosen few, and in their sadness there was a marked but unexpressed pride. Just as they were alienated from their surroundings, so were they also separated from each other. . . . Most of them were scattered among various cities, as if no single Jewish community in America could handle them as a group. They appeared like a phalanx of knights loyal to the Hebrew language whose pride forbade them both from admitting the least hint of their difficulties to a Jew from Palestine and from paying the least heed to the seductions of English. . . . In this conscious renunciation of popular attention there was something of the self-gratification that proud artists allow themselves, something of the feeling of superiority enjoyed by monks offering obeisance to a Hebrew Princess and serving her with no expectation of reward either in this world or in the world to come, either in the Diaspora or in the Land of Israel.
The tone of this anthropological survey as seen from the confident center is sympathetic and pitying—and condescending. What the visitor saw was achingly partial, and may have derived from the early Zionist “negation of the Diaspora,” which viewed the continuing presence of Jewish communities elsewhere as poignantly superfluous if not tragically mistaken. And unlike self-denying monks or quixotically deluded knights alienated from their surroundings, these striving newcomers seized on whatever bounty America held out, its public high schools and universities, its landscapes and lore, above all its freedom of self-invention. (What could be more self-invented than, say, a poet residing in Cleveland raptly composing scores of sonnets in Hebrew?) Rejection of English as a literary vehicle did not mean rejection of English as the fulcrum of advancement in the professions. Many, if not most, were engaged in building secular cultural institutions, including teachers’ colleges, for the rigorous study of Hebrew language and literature, though always with a wall of separation between the communal and the transcendent. The poetry was to be kept immaculately apart from the pedagogy, and if the American Hebraists could be defined by a common motif, it might be by the idea of separation. As scholars and intellectuals, they were perforce set apart from the mass of immigrant Jews, whose cultural attitudes and aptitudes they disdained.
Their recoil, and often their satire, was, curiously, not very different from that of Henry James during his 1905 excursion among the streets and cafés of the Lower East Side, where he observed “the hard glitter of Israel,” and predicted, thanks to Jewish linguistic infiltration, the debasement of English. “It was in the light of letters,” he wrote, “that is in the light of our language as literature has hitherto known it, that one stared at all this impudence of the agency of future ravage.” He could not have imagined, as irony has since abundantly noted, that out of those cacophonous streets and cafés would one day arise an army of Jamesian critics and scholars, bringing not ravage but homage. In scorning what he called the New Jerusalem, James saw a fallen nation; assessing the same population, so did the Hebraists. But while James proved to be a poor seer, the poets in their pridefulness may have intuited the heartbreak and hurt to come: the immigrants’ children who became esoteric theorists and interpreters of Henry James (and Emerson and Hawthorne and all the rest) were at the same time Hebrew illiterates. As for the poets themselves, they were a prodigious generational accident, a miracle of literary confluence: who could have foretold an eruption of Hebrew-generative genius on the American continent—which, having no offspring, then came to nothing?
For his ambitious overview of this remarkable period, Mintz has chosen twelve out of the Hebraist cohort to contemplate in the round: the life, the work, the influences on the work, and each poet’s particularized interiority. The twelve are not meant to be taken as representative of the whole: among such fiercely individuated minds, there can be no “type.” Eisig Silberschlag, a professor of Hebrew literature at the University of Texas and a classical scholar who translated Aristophanes into Hebrew, had little in common with Gabriel Preil, an outlier singled out for his forays into modernism—the sole American Hebraist to achieve popular recognition in Israel. Though both wrote short lyric verses, Silberschlag’s mature outlook was formed in Europe, where, in the 1920s, he earned a doctorate from the University of Vienna with a thesis, Mintz tells us, “on the economic relations between England and Russia during the reign of Catherine II.” Israel Efros, a specialist in medieval philosophy and translator of Shakespeare, was consistently associated with universities; he founded Baltimore Hebrew College and was eventually called to be president of Tel Aviv University. As an ordained rabbi, Efros was singular among the Hebraists. Most had left traditional piety behind, no longer observing the punctilios of Jewish practice—a worldliness that brought some to law and medicine, and others to journalism. Like the American poets who were their close contemporaries, Wallace Stevens in his insurance office and William Carlos Williams on his doctor’s rounds, they sought useful livelihoods. Preil alone appeared to cultivate an Emily Dickinsonian isolation.
Mintz illuminates the poets’ biographies, brief as they are, with the skill of a pointillist. But it is in his analysis of the poems themselves that he is most masterly. “Analysis” is Mintz’s word; it is inadequate to the reader’s experience of what he brings off. Each central section of this massive volume is devoted to the body of work of a single poet, and culminates in the close reading of a single poem. Each poem is presented first in Hebrew, followed by Mintz’s lucid English translation. But even “close reading” fails to approximate what is achieved here. A modesty—a felt trustworthiness—inhabits these multiple renderings: the goal is honest replication without embroidery. There is no intent to rival the original musically or sensuously. Mintz means the poem to be understood both for its inwardness and for the air it breathes; his critical vocabulary has the discerning force of insight. Analysis defines. Insight conveys.
And beyond insight is sympathy—sympathy as praise, as homage, and also as the ki
nd of immersion in a writer’s reason-for-being that will deliver him over to us as the writer himself would wish to be delivered. This requires a rare critical confidence that is crucially linked to critical humility. And nowhere is the fusion of confidence and humility more acutely displayed than in an extended preamble titled “The Apotheosis of Hebrew,” which purposefully follows Mintz’s more generalized introduction. Here Mintz concentrates, as he does elsewhere, on one poem by one poet, but with a difference. The poet is Regelson, and the poem is Haquqot otiyotayikh (“Engraved Are Thy Letters”), an intricately crafted paean to the Hebrew language: metaphysical, erotic, hubristic, fanatical. It aspires to steal, in effect, the recondite procreative fire of the Creator of the Universe, if that universe is seen as coequal with Hebrew in its infinite mystical manifestations and its internal morphological permutations. Mintz sets it apart for scrutiny neither as linguistically representative of the American Hebraists nor as aspirationally typical. He intends it, rather, as a touchstone, or what he identifies as “a privileged hermeneutical key,” “the secret spring of American Hebraism,” “a passion that could not speak its name.” In Haquqot otiyotayikh Mintz sees the “repressed religious-libidinal attachment” that underlies the whole of the American Hebraist enterprise. “Yet without predicating this motor of desire,” he writes, “it would be difficult indeed to understand the pertinacity and profusion of American Hebrew poetry. Were it not for the existence of an extraordinary exception to the general lack of self-awareness on this score, it would be presumptuous to ‘psychoanalyze’ a cultural phenomenon.”
Regelson is that exception:
Regelson’s hymn to Hebrew is a dazzling work that is unlike any other poem in the corpus of modern Hebrew literature. It is an extravagant ode to a language offered by a lover in thrall to the object of his desire, which is figured as a beautiful woman. It is a classic anatomy, a literary form that exhaustively inventories the categories and components of its subject. It is a theological treatise on the divinity of Hebrew that advances an argument for linguistic pantheism. Written at the great hinge of the twentieth century, it is a historiosophical work that uses Hebrew as a marker for both the murder of European Jewry and the struggle for Jewish statehood. It is a polemic about the course of the revival of Hebrew and an attack on the purported guardians of its purity. It is an apologia for the life of a poet who, at the time of the writing, was stranded far from Zion. Above all else, the poem is a performance of virtuosity that, in its maximalist poetics, seeks to conjure up and demonstrate the full plastic and arcane resources of the Hebrew language. . . . Its explanatory power is crucial for an understanding of the project of American Hebraism as a whole . . . a way into the inner spiritual and psychological world of American Hebrew poetry.
Mintz’s speculative thesis—that a driven though submerged and surrogate eros accounts for the Hebrew intoxications of these poets—may or may not be true. But rivalry, whether underground or overt, can also be a sustaining engine. Gabriel Preil’s turn to styles of modernism: was it an innate expression or a competitive urge? An unwilled imprint of the Zeitgeist or a shrewdly opportunistic choice? It is tempting to ask why Preil, alone among the Hebraists, was drawn to join the great contemporary wave of imagism and symbolism, the solitary and alienated emblematic “I,” the new formless forms. The winner of an undeclared contest, he remains the only American Hebraist to survive obscurity and to have attained a modicum of ongoing posthumous notice. Surrounded by a culture wherein modernism was supreme, the others, faithful to the idioms of transcendence and eschewing dissonance and brokenness, may, in such an atmosphere, have appeared to be archaists. Preil fit in, and was welcomed. It is rivalry that determines who shall be prince and who pauper.
Shimon Halkin was among the princes. His beginning was as favored as his years of consummation. Mintz describes him at the acme of his repute:
As the occupant of the chair of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 1950s and 1960s, Halkin taught virtually every important writer and critic in the young state until his death at the age of eighty-eight in 1987. The force of his presence compelled attention to the body of his own poetry and fiction in face of the fact that his own writing flouted almost all the norms of the new Israeli literature of the time. Where the younger poets . . . sought to bring the language of poetry closer to everyday speech, Halkin wrote in a high register using extreme figuration and a rarefied lexicon. Where they prized simplicity and the brief lyric, he championed complexity and the ambitious long poem. Where they took for granted that modern man is living in a world after faith, Halkin made the search for God a central preoccupation of his poetic endeavor. . . . Halkin’s poetry was accorded respect as much for the august power of the verse itself as for the influential figure of the poet who wrote it.
But Halkin was long accustomed to acclaim. On his arrival in New York at fifteen, he was already known to be prodigious in Hebrew, a reputation that accelerated even as Tennyson and Browning continued to stir him. His earliest poems were published in prestigious Hebrew journals during his high school years, and soon after college he was offered a stipend for literary translation and, more significantly, for the freedom to concentrate on his poetry. Still later, he won a competition for yet another stipend, this one awarded by Salman Schocken, the publisher of Kafka. He was financially liberated from the start.
He also won a more intimate competition. At William Morris High School in the Bronx he met the young Regelson, a boy three years his senior, who turned out, astonishingly, to be his double: a secret sharer of the elixir of Hebrew. Regelson too had been a prodigy: as a child in the cheder, the rabbi’s schoolroom, he had composed, in fluent Hebrew, an interpretive synopsis of the thought of Rashi, the great medieval biblical annotator. At Morris High, the two teens conversed in Hebrew, and fell into passionate discussions of poetry and philosophy. Both were steeped in the English Romantics, and each early on knew himself destined for poetry: it was an idyll of elective affinities. Where they were most alike was in the style of their mature work, in what Mintz characterizes as “cascading sheets of electrifying figurative writing,” and in the metaphysical/mystical/lyrical cast of their abiding inspirations. Their lives ran parallel in other ways. Both experienced interrupted sojourns in 1930s Palestine before settling there after the formal establishment of the Jewish state. Like Halkin, Regelson translated widely: Shakespeare, Milton, Herrick, Blake, Browning, Whitman, countless canonical others. Halkin, meanwhile, had already conveyed into Hebrew The Merchant of Venice and the whole of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In 1975 Halkin was awarded the Israel Prize for literature. In 1972 Regelson was the recipient of the Chaim Nachman Bialik Prize, given in the name of the most illustrious Hebrew poet of the age.
In the end—rather, toward the middle—the parallels dissolved, the idyll cracked. The first telltale fissure began in boyhood, and came in the guise of an act of magnanimity, indeed an act of youthful noblesse oblige. As Halkin recounted it in a late memoir, he had received a letter from Regelson, written in an elegantly elevated Hebrew, and sent it on to his editor, the publisher of Miqlat, where Halkin’s verses were already appearing. Impressed, the editor solicited and brought into print Regelson’s first published poem. The younger poet had favored the older; but in becoming, through superior influence, Regelson’s patron, he had also bested him.
And what had begun as affinity disintegrated further when the two young men entered City College of New York together. After a year, Regelson dropped out for reasons that remain unrecorded, though he was soon married and sooner yet the father of a son, the first of five children. Halkin went on to advanced degrees and a princely career as a revered professor of literature, while Regelson became, quite literally, a pauper who struggled to live by his pen, hoping to feed his children by the force of his imagination. But here Mintz, identifying Halkin’s magisterial role as “a kind of tribune” in the republic of Hebrew letters, takes quizzical note of a problematic omission. Halkin w
as unstinting in “maintaining relations in person or by letter with writers scattered across several generations and writing about their work out of a sense of responsibility to the larger endeavor. . . . To the best of my knowledge,” Mintz adds, “the only real notice that this prolific critic gave to Regelson and his body of work” was that single passing mention in Halkin’s memoir of his own boyhood benevolence.
A bitter falling out, then. What happened?
Before I supply the answer (Mintz leaves the puzzle unresolved), I am obliged to confess that if I have returned to Regelson time and again, while scanting others among this study’s glittering twelve, it is out of seeming partiality: Abraham Regelson was my uncle, my mother’s brother. I hope before long to show that this apparent predisposition is made of nothing more substantial than air; yet consanguinity’s advantage is ready access to buried knowledge—or call it comic melodrama, or the self-preening misadventures of a pair of contenders. According to Regelson’s daughter, who serves as her father’s archivist, the break erupted out of a volcanic charge of literary theft: Halkin accusing Regelson of plagiarism, Regelson accusing Halkin of plagiarism, each again the double of the other. Mutual recrimination, smoldering, became mutual contempt. Still, hidden in rivalry is its symbiotic secret: all competitiveness grows out of ferocious affinity.
Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays Page 13