Of Hebrew and Translations

Hillel Halkin's charming article, The Translator's Paradox, relates the triumph of Hebrew translation in the United Stated. It has a few faults nonetheless. It is improbable that, as he claims, no good Hebrew translators could be found in the United States in the 1960s. There was, after all, a small army of bilingual Hebrew teachers, from whose ranks people could have been recruited and trained. There were also some very gifted Israelis who spoke the king's English, having been educated in the best universities in the United States and England, and who would have offered their services for a pittance.  Prior to 1967 however, Israel was a backwater.  American Jews, and certainly American non-Jews, just weren't interested in anything much that we did here. As soon as there was a market, the product was created.

The assertion that at one time Hebrew was the second language of every educated Jew should not be taken at face value. Every Jew knew the alphabet and could mouth the prayers. But most Jews, even those who were engaged in the Hebrew revival, often could not speak it as a language, second or otherwise. Einstein, Brandeis, Emma Lazarus, Justice Frankfurter and Theodor Herzl to name but a few, were all educated Jews. It is doubtful that they could order a cheese sandwich in Hebrew or comment about the weather. They might have been able to thank the Lord in twenty different ways, without knowing what they were saying exactly.  Even more surprisingly, an essay by Anita Shapira about Joseph Haim Brenner and the Hebrew Yiddish controversy reveals that Brenner and other Hebrew writiers could not speak Hebrew and didn't use it if they could help it. When Brenner got to Palestine he had great difficulty with Hebrew. In the early years, even the stalwarts of the Second Aliya like Ben Gurion preferred Yiddish and Russian to Hebrew if they had something urgent to say.

We can agree with Halkin that it is wonderful that translations bring Hebrew to a wider audience around the world Americans, Germans, Japanese and others can enjoy Efraim Kishon, S.Y. Agnon and Amos Oz as well as the medieval poetry of Yehuda Halevi. But translations can only flourish when there is a native base. They are not a basis for a culture. Translations are not a substitute for the Hebrew culture that the Zionist movement had hoped to establish in the Diaspora, which would energize the Jewish national revival and guarantee the survival of the Jewish people as a cultural unit in the modern world. Yiddish cannot fulfill this role, because the world that created Yiddish is dead or dying, and Yiddish encompasses only Ashkenazy Jews.

Ami Isseroff