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| Israel Zarchi, 20-th century author, translator and Polish immigrant to Palestine who advocated a blend of political and cultural Zionism, is the subject of a forthcoming book by history professor Nitzan Lebovic. |
The Internet’s search engines are usually more than adequate to the challenge of finding information sources.
Such,
however, is not the case with Israel Zarchi, a writer and translator
who divided his short life between Poland and Palestine in the first
half of the 20th century.
At the top of the Google search results
for “Israel Zarchi” is a Wikipedia article about his daughter, Nurit
Zarchi, an award-winning Israeli poet and journalist. Zarchi himself
merits scant attention. Two sites on the first screen of Google results
list the Hebrew titles to some of his works. An author page in Hebrew is
virtually empty. The last item on the screen links to a brief
discussion about Zarchi in the Romanian translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness by the acclaimed Israeli novelist Amos Oz.
Otherwise
there is nothing—no clue that Zarchi wrote six novels and seven
collections of stories, no hint that he made a major impact on the
literary life of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, no suggestion that
his insights and observations might still be timely, seven decades after
his premature death.
Nitzan Lebovic, assistant professor of history, hopes to give Israel Zarchi his due when his second book, Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi, is published later this year.
Lebovic,
the Helen and Allen Apter ’61 Chair in Holocaust Studies and Ethical
Values, was introduced to Zarchi’s works when a professor at the
University of Tel Aviv recommended that he read the only one of Zarchi’s
novellas that has been reprinted since the 1940s.
“That novella
portrays German-Jewish refugees who escape from Germany and arrive to a
small hostel in Jerusalem during World War II,” says Lebovic. “They are
not able to speak Hebrew and no one around them speaks German. The novel
is an amazing piece of literature.”
“I was curious—why had this amazing author never been explored or analyzed? Why did no one know his name?”
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| Zarchi's final novel, written as he battled depression and cancer near the end of his life, follows a group of Yemenite Jews who hold onto their religious ways after immigrating to Palestine. |
Three
years ago, Lebovic discovered Zarchi’s lost literary archives when the
central literary archive in Israel was moved to a new location. Last
year, with funding from a Humanities Center grant, he spent the summer
examining the archives, which contained letters, diaries and unpublished
manuscripts. The work was completed during a pre-tenure leave Lebovic
took in 2013-14.
“Reading Israel Zarchi,” says Lebovic, who was
born and educated in Israel, “you can gain a window into the life and
culture of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. The Jewish world of that time was
much more varied than we tend to believe. There was an open debate then,
all parties participated.
“Certain ideas that seem really
radical or even treasonous to us now—Jews and Palestinians living
together in the same political structure—were possible, fine, in early
20th-century Palestine.”
A time of tumult and melancholy
Israel
Zarchi was born in Poland in 1909 and immigrated in 1929 to what is now
Israel and was then the British protectorate of Palestine. Like many
Jewish immigrants to Palestine, he made his living doing physical
labor—farming and building roads.
The late 1920s and 1930s were
trying times for Jews: the Great Depression had started and fascism was
ascending in Europe. The countries from which Jews were emigrating were
becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. But in Palestine, says Lebovic, the
hopes of many Jews would be dashed.
“The early settlers arrived
to find a desert. There was no basis to the myth of a land of milk and
honey. The immigrants received very little support from Jewish
communities around the world. Many became desperate and sad. According
to one historian of medicine, 10 to 12 percent of the Jews immigrating
to Palestine committed suicide.
“At this time, Palestine had few
cities. Jerusalem was poor, Jaffa and Haifa were mostly Arabic, and Tel
Aviv was just getting started. There were not many options for the
settlers. Either you worked the land or you lost out.”
Many Jews in Palestine, says Lebovic, suffered from melancholy, which he defines in Freudian terms.
“Freud,
in a 1917 essay, described melancholy as a pathological version of
mourning. Mourning itself is healthy; there are different stages you go
through and you can differentiate yourself from what you have lost.
Melancholy is the inability to separate the self from the lost object,
which can be a person, a past life, something left behind.”
The Zionist demands on the Jewish immigrants to Palestine deepened their sense of melancholy, says Lebovic.
“One
core demand of political Zionism was that immigrants leave behind
traditional Judaism and stop their involvement with the old Jewish
exilic life. Zarchi felt this—he was a Yeshiva student, educated in the
traditional Jewish way. He had to secularize, to negate his past, to
experience Freud’s definition of melancholy: if you cannot mourn the
past and you have to suppress it, this causes a repetition of the
pathological inability to separate from the past.
“At the same time, Zarchi made a major contribution to the creation of modern literature in Hebrew.”
The three sub-schools of Zionism
Complicating
matters for Jews living in Palestine were the conflicting
interpretations of Zionism, and the debates they triggered.
Zionism,
says Lebovic, is defined by its adherents as “an ideology of finding
the Jewish people a home in the historical territory of Palestine that
is identified with the biblical Israel.”
Three “sub-schools” of
Zionists existed in Palestine and persist today, says Lebovic. Political
Zionism “strives to bring together the Jewish people, after 2,000 years
of exile, and give them a national collective identity. The unofficial
discourse claimed to make Israel ‘a nation among the nations,’ or to
normalize Jewish existence on the basis of national, secular identity.
However, that approach—identified with Theodor Herzl and David
Ben-Gurion, the fathers of Zionism—has given way to a reactionary
interpretation of Zionism.”
The second sub-school, says Lebovic,
is a “right-wing revisionist interpretation of Zionism that seeks not
just to bring Jews back to Palestine but also to fulfill the theological
and prophetic promise of living in the Biblical territory of
Israel—thus requiring the expulsion of the Arab population.”
Lebovic
describes the third sub-school—cultural Zionism—as “a peaceful,
peacenik attempt to bring back Jews collectively to Palestine on a
confederative basis, with a binational parliament giving equality to the
Zionists and to the Palestinian people.”
Zarchi, says Lebovic,
advocated a blend of cultural and political Zionism and criticized the
treatment of Arabs by Jews and more so by the British.
“Zarchi
was very critical of any form of colonialism, especially British
colonialism and those British colonial elements that transferred to
political Zionism,” says Lebovic. “In 1946 he wrote a novel, And the Oil Streams Flow into the Mediterranean, that showed how colonialism robbed the indigenous population of its natural habitat and resources.
“The
critics were really baffled by this novel; they didn’t understand what
Zarchi was trying to achieve. I think Zarchi had a sense of the
paradigmatic change—political and economic—that was about to occur. He
foresaw the change as clearly or more so than the politicians of the
time.”
Like Lebovic, who speaks Hebrew, German and English,
Zarchi was a polyglot. He wrote in Polish, German and Hebrew, and he
translated literary works from German and English to Hebrew.
Toward
the end of his life, Zarchi battled both depression and cancer. But his
final novel, which was published posthumously, ends optimistically,
Lebovic says. It follows a group of Jews emigrating from Yemen who
choose to live a life of “pseudo-mythological conditions” in Palestine.
“Their
attitude was ‘love your stories, not your life; live the life of
literary figures, not your actual life.’ According to Zarchi, Yemenite
Jews never assimilated to secular Zionism…They kept their distinct
mythology and their own folklore. For Zarchi, this opened up a new way
to thinking about existence as a whole—you can live in your own literary
mind.”
Story by Kurt Pfitzer
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