As it happens, there was never any real likelihood of a humorless Jewish state. Dov Sadan, the premier collector of Jewish folk speech, observed that the coming together of disparate parts of the Jewish people produced an unprecedented bounty of interethnic humor. (Sadan himself—a small man but a giant of scholarship—became known in Yiddish wordplay as a phenomentshele.)5 Professional humorists who arrived in Israel as immigrants continued to ply their trade. Comedy battened on the perceived disparities between the Zionist hope—Hatikvah—and emergent realities. Political and social satire, censored or self-censored while Jews lived under hostile regimes, acquired a thousand new targets once Jews began running a country of their own.
After an hour of standing in line at the bank, Chaim is furious. “I hate all this waiting!” he shouts to his wife. “I’m leaving. I’m going to kill [Israel’s first prime minister, David] Ben-Gurion.”
An hour later, he returns to the bank. “What happened?” asks his wife, who is still waiting in line.
“Nothing,” says the unhappy husband. “Over there the line was longer.”6
Almost certainly imported from Russia, this joke tells us that Israeli joking started early and aimed right at the top. But it does not yet tell us anything about the Jewishness of Israeli humor.
Agnon, the country’s most acclaimed writer, should have been able to calm from the start concerns over the prospects of Israeli humor. Born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in Buczacz, Galicia, Agnon ascended to the Land of Israel in 1909, left a few years later for a decade’s stay in Germany, and returned to Jerusalem permanently in 1924. Developing an intricately playful way with fiction, he would forever tantalize his readers without actually handing over the key to his humor. His Hebraized name, taken from the title of his first published Hebrew story, “Agunot,” invoked the figure of an agunah, an abandoned wife or unconfirmed widow who by religious law cannot be released from her marriage. Yet what did this name signify? Was he, the loyal Jew, bound to a God who had deserted but never formally divorced him, or had God died (God forbid) but without due notification? Was the resulting indeterminacy to be borne as the existential human condition, or overcome through the return to Zion or some other means? No modern Jewish writer ever drew from Jewish sources as freely or creatively as Agnon, yet as a modern artist he was always doing some mischief behind the assumed role of faithful scribe, passionate Zionist, and dignified Jew.
Shortly after the appointment of Hitler as chancellor of Germany in 1933, Agnon published In the Heart of Seas—a novella that perfectly demonstrates his curious amalgam of the serious and comic. The story charts the journey of a group of pious Jews from Buczacz to the Land of Israel at some unspecified time (identified by an assiduous scholar as circa 1825). Among the travelers, the author includes himself, who serves as resident storyteller to “sweeten” the trip—which may be likened to one of the roles that Agnon designed for himself within the Zionist movement. This anachronism is one of several challenges to the plain, historical-realistic level of the tale, whose characters also include Hananiah, a supernatural figure being conveyed to the homeland not in a ship but rather atop a kerchief. In brief, the voyage of a group of Jews from Europe to the Land of Israel is being accompanied by tradition (the storyteller) and faith (the name Hananiah translates as “favored by God”).
Herzl had responded to the crisis of anti-Semitism in Europe by founding the Zionist movement with the exhortation Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen, “If you will it, it is no fairytale.” In full agreement with Herzl that Jews should reclaim their sovereignty instead of only continuing to imagine it, Agnon was nevertheless not prepared to slight the Märchen, without which the Jews would not have withstood the vicissitudes of exile. The book is Agnon’s tongue-in-cheek rejoinder to the solemnity of Herzlian Zionism, which was in danger of tossing its cultural heritage into the heart of seas. If Jews were going to return to Zion, they would have to bring along the fruits of their exile. And if the Bible and Talmud could no longer be counted on to sustain the Jewish people, the modern writer would have to create the kind of book that would.
Agnon’s answer to the challenge in this multilayered work of fiction fully admits the incongruities of modern Jewish existence as he experienced them: fealty to an inscrutable God, rights to an inaccessible homeland, and proud membership in a people everywhere vilified and threatened. The same twists and inversions that characterize the best Jewish jokes constitute the very texture of the book. Hananiah recounts how Satan, in the guise of a Polish gentleman who invites the Jew into his carriage with the command siadaj, once tricked him into violating the Day of Atonement. Like the traditional Jew in many earlier Jewish satires, Hananiah does not understand the language of the local population and mistakes the Polish “be seated” for the holy name for God—Shaddai. Earlier Yiddish and Hebrew satirists, in mocking such misunderstandings, were deploring the preoccupation of Jews with otherworldly matters and their consequent inability to navigate the real world. But Agnon was no longer persuaded that Polish Jews should accommodate themselves to their Polish surroundings. Hananiah therefore punishes himself for the opposite error: being distracted from the Jewish timetable by an invitation into a nobleman’s coach.
In the Heart of Seas includes every kind of hardship and obstruction: separation from loved ones, storms at sea, sailing off course, material deprivation, and regrets and doubts that impel divorces that then require remarriages. All this is to be expected, however, for Satan is bound to interfere with what the book declares to be the ultimate Jewish commandment:
Our men of good heart sat with their hands in their sleeves and looked out at the sea. When a man sits silent, it is assuredly a very good thing, since he is not sinning. This is particularly true when he is sitting in a ship that is going to the Land of Israel. Not only is he not sinning, but he is actually fulfilling a commandment, since he is going up to the Land of Israel; and that is a deed which is accounted as equal to the fulfillment of all the other commandments.7
Agnon’s childlike and contrarian “proof” for the preeminence of one commandment over all others mimics rabbinic exegesis while being based on rabbinic lore. The stiff English translation tries to capture the faux piety of the style. But the ancient rabbis would hardly have designated as supreme a commandment to sit silent on an Israel-bound ship, while the pioneering Zionists who were Agnon’s first readers would have seen the idealization of such a sedentary “return to Zion” as outrageous. Agnon’s hyperbolic and old-style reasoning for aliyah as the ultimate value is rather like James Joyce’s use of the epic grandeur of Ulysses to parody the mundane affairs of an Irish Jew.
Jewish historical memory makes for similar shipboard comedy when the women try to account for their sense of déjà vu:
“I don’t know what has come over me: for first I think that I have never seen such a lovely night, and then it seems to me, on the contrary, I have already seen such a night, and the very things I hear now I have heard before. I know that is not so, yet I cannot be certain it is not so.”
To which her companion replied, “Perhaps we have already journeyed once before to the Land of Israel, and everything we have heard and seen here we heard and saw before on some other night.”
“In that case,” said the first, “why are we here and not in the Land of Israel?”
“My dear,” said the other, “we have already been there.”
“If we have already been there,” said the first, “how is it we are here?”8
The circularity of this conversation—and there is more to it—may not approach Bud Abbott and Lou Costello’s “Who’s on First?” but its fun invites a less than reverential contemplation of the mysteries of exile and return.
Agnon’s fable on the theme of returning to Zion recalls what his friend, the philosopher and scholar Scholem, said of another of his novels of this period: “Irony permeates the book from beginning to end.”9 Once the travelers settle in Jerusalem, only the fabulous character Hananiah lives and di
es in a state of holiness, while the mortals meet more and less dignified ends, including at the heel of a mule and by the hand of a disgruntled Arab. Unlike Hebrew writers who tried to strip away the older, allusive layers of their language to achieve a fresh, unburdened prose, Agnon exploited the palimpsest of modernity impressed over “tradition” or tradition impressed on modernity to create fiction almost as improbable as Jewish experience.
Agnon challenged the same assumptions of progress and worldliness that his fiction did when he appeared in Stockholm in 1966 to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature from the Swedish king:
It happened when the Swedish chargé d’affaires came and brought me the news that the Swedish Academy had bestowed the Nobel Prize upon me. Then I recited in full the blessing that is enjoined upon one who hears good tidings for himself or others: Blessed be He that is good and doeth good. “Good,” in that the good God put it into the hearts of the sages of the illustrious Academy to bestow that great and esteemed Prize upon an author who writes in the sacred tongue; “that doeth good,” in that He favored me by causing them to choose me. And now that I have come so far, I will recite one blessing more, as enjoined upon him who beholds a monarch: Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, Who hast given of Thy glory to a king of flesh and blood. Over you, too, distinguished sages of the Academy, I say the prescribed blessing: Blessed be He, that has given of His wisdom to flesh and blood.10
In the guise of a pious and humble Jew, Agnon got across in Hebrew (switching later to English “to save the time” of translation) that he, God’s delegate, was there to bestow on the monarch more than it was in the monarch’s power to grant him. No one could have accused him of chutzpah, yet those with understanding would have understood that Agnon was pulling rank in the name of the King of kings, using his littleness to cast a shadow while showering respect on temporal authority as Jews had been doing for centuries.
At the other extreme of Agnon’s subtle and erudite Hebrew humor was the chizbat, identified by the scholar Elliott Oring as the distinctive comic form of the Palmah, the underground army of the Jewish community in Palestine during the last years (1941–48) of the British Mandate. The Palmah (an acronym designating the “strike forces” of the Jewish militia) was made up of youngsters scarcely past adolescence who were charged with responsibility for protecting the country from increasingly violent Arab attacks and unsympathetic British overseers. The chizbat, from the Arabic for “to lie,” were topical tall tales or comic stories traded around a campfire for the entertainment of fellow fighters. Their apparent artlessness may confirm, for some, the notion that the sabra had no sense of humor:
Lulik, the squad commander of Ein ha-Horesh, was not a culture lover, but after the gang nagged him to death he agreed to lecture to them on the evolution of weapons. The fellows gathered in the tent and Lulik began, “The first man ate pistachio nuts. Then came the rifle.”
Or in this alternate version:
They came to one of the instructors, I don’t remember his name, and said, “Listen. It’s not possible that you teach only rifle, rifle, rifle. You need a little history, a little culture, a little sociology. You can’t do with only rifle. Recruits come to you and you start with rifle. Start with something from the Bible …”
He said, “O.K.”
When the recuits came he said, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Then came the rifle. Now this is the rifle.”11
This new self-mockery seems fully aware of its relation to the historically layered culture to which it is opposed—and from which it emerged.
Palmahniks took inverted pride in their distance from the Talmudic scholars and intellectuals who dominated the Jewish hierarchy in bygone days. Their job was to do what Jews, for all their sophistication, were never able to do. Hence their commanders get right to the point—whether of a joke or rifle. Putting distance between themselves and the convolutions of Yiddish humor, they specialized in the kind of aggressive deflation that typifies the humor of many another nation:
After the conquest of Eilat [in the War of Independence], Ben-Gurion arrived in the Aravah [the plain between the Dead Sea and Gulf of Aqaba] to survey the area. In every fortification they honored him with a parade, and he spoke to the soldiers. In one of the fortresses a platoon mustered for him, and Ben-Gurion, who stood on a small rise, began to prophesy: “Do you see this wilderness? There will be a forest here!”
One of the guys added, “And bears will walk in it.”
The cartoon figure of Srulik, diminutive of Israel, became the most recognizable representation of the sabra, the native-born Palestinian Jew, sporting the kova tembel, the Israeli national headgear. Created by Hungarian-born Kariel Gardosh (1921–2000), who signed himself Dosh, Srulik soldiers for the Jewish homeland, but his victories never result in the anticipated peace.
The Hebrew expression lo dubim v’lo ya’ar (no bears and no forest) means something like “there’s nothing to it,” reversing the ostensible point of Ben-Gurion’s forecast. Accorded every honor as head of the country and spearhead of the war, the prime minister is mocked for a suspect species of grandiloquence that smacks of what Oring, who translated these anecdotes, calls Ben-Gurion’s “extravagant prophetic vision.”12
Idealists are not inclined to cultivate irony, and the youngsters of the Palmah were out to prove their zealotry, not their wit. Chizbat sometimes discloses familiarity with local poets (Haim Nahman Bialik or Natan Alterman) or aspects of Jewish tradition, but always in ways that discount their importance. Contrived simplicity and prideful ignorance establish a new cultural ideal, which had come to replace the Diaspora quest for hypercivilized perfection. But this phase of humor didn’t last and didn’t take. Following the rise of the state and establishment of an official military, some Palmahniks became professors, and some became interpreters of Agnon.
Neither Agnon nor chizbat figured in an eleven-part televised history of Israeli humor from before the rise of the state until its jubilee year of 1998. That is because the show covered only the fast-growing professional comedy of those five decades.13 The series describes how the trickle of immigrant humorists who dominated comedy in the 1950s—such as Efraim Kishon and Dan Ben Amotz—became a tidal wave once radio spawned television, and then television as the single national channel multiplied sevenfold. Every local complaint—from the austerity and rationing of the early years to the conspicuous consumption a half century later—would eventually draw ridicule in a country whose first prime minister boasted that he governed a country of prime ministers.
The Hebrew language itself was a mainstay of comedy. Relegated for the duration of the exile to the higher regions of Jewish study, liturgy, and rabbinic correspondence, and replaced in everyday use by Jewish vernaculars that were forged wherever Jews settled for any length of time, Hebrew—the only language that could unite a people so long and so widely dispersed—experienced revival as a spoken tongue once Jews determined to reclaim their national homeland. Jokes circulated about fanatics who would not rescue a drowning person unless and until they shouted for help in the national language—and with the correct pronunciation. (As part of the move back to the East, the new speakers of Hebrew replaced its European-style pronunciation with that of its users in Arab lands.)
In the Land of Israel, German refugee professors learned Hebrew from their native-born students, Yiddish speakers were cowed into switching or silence, and Judeo-Arabic vied with local Arabic as the source of the juiciest invective and slang. On a somber note, Colonel David (Mickey) Marcus, a U.S. volunteer officer at the highest rank in the nascent Israeli army, was killed by a guard when he responded in English because he did not know the Hebrew password. But joking prospered on such misunderstandings and mistakes.
In 1953, the government of Israel established the Academy of the Hebrew Language to serve as the deciding authority on matters of grammar and terminology. If you are not laughing already, you haven’t sufficiently appreciated Ben-Gurion�
�s insight into the extravagant individualism of his fellow Israelis, who were bound to resist regimentation by their fellow Jews as vigorously as their ancestors once complied with authority imposed from without. Jews in their wanderings had already created more languages than Catholics once had children, and in Israel today you can find speakers of an estimated forty different languages. The French Academy in Paris might strive to preserve the French tongue from the inroads of Americanization (and fail even there), but an academic committee trying to influence the development of a Jewish language had as much likelihood of being heeded as an Ashkenazi referee at a soccer match attended by the largely Sephardi fans of Jerusalem Betar, the team originally founded by the Revisionist Zionist youth movement and traditionally associated with its right-wing politics.
This last simile was prompted by a skit, “The Judge and the Referee,” by the most popular comedy team in Israel’s history. If I ask an assortment of Israelis, “What comes to mind when I say, Israeli humor?” almost everyone answers “Hagashash ha-hiver,” though a young man adds, “I don’t know why I said that, since I think I’ve only seen one of their sketches.” Improbably named “The Pale Trackers,” or in shorthand, Hagashashim, the Trackers, the group made its mark in the 1960s through live performances and radio, then in the following decades on television and in films. Thanks to DVDs and YouTube, the group is accessible today at the flick of a finger.
When the Palmah was disbanded, the Israel Defense Forces that replaced it developed entertainment units as part of the military’s educational program. From these dedicated amateur troupes came most of the professional entertainers in the country, including the three Gashashim: Yeshayahu “Shaike” Levi, Yisrael “Poli” Poliakov, and Gavriel “Gavri” Banai, who were tapped and trained by a talented impresario, and supplied with material by some of Israel’s leading writers and lyricists.
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