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Giddon Ticotsky. 5/2024. “The Small Synagogue At Heart: On Ruins And History In Yehuda Amichai'S Oeuvre”. In Burkhard Hose, Daniel Osthoff And Yona-Dvir Shalem (Eds.), "Auf Meinem Tisch Liegt Ein Stein..” – Festschrift Zum 100. Geburtstag Von Yehuda Amichai / “On My Desk There Is A Stone..” – Commemorative Publication For The 100Th Birthday Of Yehuda Amichai, Pp. 201-19. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Abstract
In Yehuda Amichai’s writings, recurrent instances of visiting ruins serve to confront individuals with history. This motif appears to engage with the romantic tradition prevalent in literature and art, which typically glorifies the ancient majesty of ruins. However, Amichai’s treatment of ruins diverges from this tradition; Rather than employing ruins to impart a collective–historical lesson, he employs them to underscore the ephemeral nature of human existence. The first sections of this article explore these instances of visiting ruins, while the subsequent sections focus on a specific subset: ruined synagogues. Through depictions of synagogues in the Galilee (in the northern part of Israel) and in Würzburg, both in his poetry and prose, emerges the unique, humanistic ethics of Amichai’s oeuvre.
Can literature be given a concrete home? The story of the establishment of the Gnazim Archive of Modern Hebrew Literature recounts the attempt to institutionalize this body of literature in the context of the founding of the State of Israel—while simultaneously challenging its demands. This book reveals the persistent tension between the “Republic of Letters” and the nation-state, as well as the painful cost of realizing the ideal and embodiment of the metaphor of “a home for literature” within the “national home.” The Stitches of Hebrewness traces the history of the Gnazim Archive both in its own right and as a mirror of the formation of the canon of modern Hebrew literature. Like any mirror, the archive reflects reality as it is—and in reverse: The canon is thus revealed in a new light, with its erasures, rewritings, and repressions. Perhaps more than anything, the book unfolds the story of a culture and society grappling with a moment of crisis between three overlapping yet conflicting temporal frameworks: Jewish time, Hebrew time, and Israeli time.
The ties that bind the Greco-Roman and Hebrew cultures together are strong and convoluted, from as early as their beginnings in ancient times. This chapter deals with the encounter of modern Hebrew poetry with the Greco-Roman classical tradition, situating it in the polarized relations between the two cultures, as well as in their close and symbiotic interactions. Complex historical residues played a role in the relatively belated reception of Greco-Roman classical elements in modern Hebrew literature. And while Greco-Roman elements contributed to the shaping of Hebrew literature as part of modern European culture, they were not integrated deeply into it. It was only after the Second World War that a window of opportunity for a common cross-cultural destiny opened up, when Hebrew writers saw the shared platform of the two cultures as a bulwark against fascism. At the same time, the belatedness in the reception of elements of the Greco-Roman classical tradition in Hebrew poetry prevented them from being “eroded”, as it were, by the Biblical corpus (the main point of reference of Hebrew literature) – by becoming, for example, objects of irony or parody.
The modernist fascination with the Far East is a well-known phenomenon, driven among other things by the “decline of the West” zeitgeist. When adopted by peripheral communities involved in nation building, it often served other needs and, in the process, became distorted or disproportioned. This article focuses on the representation of the Far East in the Hebrew and Yiddish literatures of the interwar years. Its main argument is that the longing for the Far East in these literatures has contributed to their self-fashioning precisely as occidental and modern. Accordingly, this is an intriguing test case that sheds light on how one peripheral culture gazes at another, how one Other gazes at another — as opposed to traditional postcolonial research that tends to examine Self-Other or majority-minority relations. The article proposes the term “second-order modernism” to describe the fertile changes and disruptions inherent to the displacement of any modernist model onto a peripheral culture.
