Alan Mintz, “Viva Voce: Vicissitudes of the Spoken Word in Hebrew Literature,” in Avraham (Alan) Rosen and Jillian Davidson, eds., There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things: Essays in Honor of David Roskies [=In geveb (June 2020] (New York 2020), 1-9 (original) (raw)

One advantage Yiddish writers had in transforming Yiddish into a modern literary language was that the language was already a vehicle for natural speech. In this area, Hebrew literature had to play catch-up during the course of the long twentieth century. The relationship between the spoken word and the written word in Jewish culture is tangled and shifting. That relationship was clarified and inverted with the emergence of the Hebrew Haskalah, at the center of which stood sifrut (literature), which asserted the primacy of the written word. Initially, the maskilim modeled Hebrew dialogue on Biblical examples. This essay examines two early texts in order to analyze their different responses to the problem of representing speech in Hebrew: Abramovitsh's story "Hanisrafim" and Y. H. Brenner's Baḥoref. Abramovitsh opts to employ the mode of Rabbinic Hebrew to render Yiddish conversation, provocatively implying that the two represent equivalent language systems, and that the former provided the original source for some of the latter's essential features. Brenner, on the other hand, through his use of internal monologue, his marked borrowing from Yiddish, and his decontextualized Biblical quotation problematizes the non-spoken essence and isolation of modern Hebrew language and literature. Even today this problem has not been solved; Israeli literature-as well as the society it writes about-is conspicuously non-dialogical. Instead, its writers can be divided into two categories: those who paint word pictures by exploiting the far-reaching resources of the Hebrew language, and those who find reality vividly revealed in the idiolect of individual human voice distilled on the page.