David Vogel: A Hebrew Novelist in Vienna

Abstract

The historian of literature is prone to make a rigid distinction between the mainstream and the literary backwaters. But it sometimes happens that along the backroads one may find the most charming wildflowers whose beauty is more intoxicating than that of the houseplants encountered along the main boulevard. Hebrew literature from Mendele up until the last generation of writers focused its attention on Jews and their particular concerns. When it sought to portray people and their actions, it did so in terms of the social processes experienced by Jews as Jews and by Israelis as Israelis. Mendele depicted a perverted Jewish society; Brenner and his contemporaries turned their attention to those who, uprooted from their environment, were as ceaseless wanderers on the earth. Writers in the period of the First and Second Immigration tended to trace the immigrant’s putting down roots in the new country or depicted his rootlessness in the homeland. The first ‘Israeli generation’ of writers concentrated on depicting the new Israeli and the new way of life. The portrayal of characters in Hebrew fiction was ‘particularist’; it addressed itself to familiar social circumstances and tried to probe Jewish and human problems at one and the same time. Though Hebrew literature paid no heed to Aḥad Ha’am, and did not confine itself closely to ‘Jews and Judaism’, nevertheless it related itself to general human concerns from a specifically Jewish point of view. Very few writers turned their attention to situations which were beyond the scope of specifically Jewish experience.