The precarious position Poland’s sizable Jewish minority occupied during the interwar period attracted many Jews to Zionism, and it spurred a smaller subset to immigrate to Palestine and participate in a new Jewish society’s construction. Israel Gertler numbered among these Jews. After getting involved in Zionist circles in his teens and learning Hebrew, he immigrated to Palestine in 1929. He assumed the Hebrew surname Zarchi, meaning “shining” or “illuminating” and denoting his affiliation with a pioneering elite. He spent years farming the land, paving roads, and building homes. Ultimately, drawn to intellectual endeavors, he abandoned physical labor to study at the Hebrew University and subsequently pursued a literary career that yielded novels and additional short story collections. While Zarchi’s sizable oeuvre garnered critical attention, no systematic study of his life and work exists. Nitzan Lebovic’s Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi helps fill this gap, and through an exploration of Zarchi’s archive and interviews with family members, it presents previously unknown information about Zarchi’s life and work. Lebovic’s book is noteworthy for this reason alone.
Nonetheless, this is not a work of literary criticism endeavoring to understand Zarchi and his work on its own terms. Instead, Lebovic turns to Zarchi’s life and work to present a critical perspective about Israel which he hopes will address his “own sense of belonging (and nonbelonging)” (xiv), as well as similar feelings felt by other likeminded individuals, spark change, and stimulate a greater sense of belonging among Israel’s citizens.
The title of Lebovic’s book recalls Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (Columbia University Press, 2016), which helps readers understand why Lebovic chose to place a discussion of Zarchi at the heart of a broader examination of Zionism and Israel. In his book, Traverso takes contemporary Marxists’ despair following the seeming disappearance of a clear path towards socialism’s utopian vision as his starting point. He argues that Marxist history is full of defeats and that by reexamining history’s vanquished, one can arrive at a critical perspective capable of stimulating revolutionary change. Taking the despair that he and other likeminded Israelis feel about Israel’s ongoing failure to advance towards Zionism’s utopian vision as his starting point, Lebovic employs Traverso’s methodology. Therefore, Lebovic’s interest in Zarchi derives from his belief that Zarchi constitutes one of the vanquished of Zionist history who offers knowledge which contemporary Israelis can draw on for positive social change. Rather than dismissing the disappointment and melancholy typical of Zarchi’s fiction as manifestations of the author’s failure to adjust to Palestinian reality, Lebovic argues that they animate a productive form of internal Zionist dissent that he finds noteworthy and hopes Israelis will adopt: “Even when the Zionist melancholic agreed that personal or individual sacrifice was necessary, he or she dwelt inordinately on the accompanying pain. Loss and sadness, therefore, were the starting points for any discussion of revival” (xxii).
While viewing Lebovic’s goal sympathetically, his presentation of Zarchi as one of the “forgotten, who challenge consensual norms and ideology” (xi) rests on highly schematic characterizations of Zionism and Modern Hebrew literature that arbitrarily separates Zarchi from his literary contemporaries. Therefore, scholars looking to learn more about Zionism and Hebrew literary history should approach this work with caution.
Scholars of Zionism view the movement as a highly complex movement that was dedicated to Jewish cultural preservation and renaissance. It possessed divergent views about the desirability of Jewish statehood and how Palestinian Jewish settlers would engage with the indigenous Arab population. Lebovic, however, asserts that “an absolute destruction or negation was the Zionist condition par excellence” (106), with the diasporic Jewish past constituting something that needed to be negated and left unmoored. Indeed, as scholar Benjamin Harshav has argued, negation constituted a fundamental aspect of Modern Jewish culture, but an equally powerful positive force always accompanied this negation. While Zionism enabled innovation through abandonment of certain aspects of the Jewish past, it simultaneously selected elements for preservation (Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, University of California Press, 1993). By integrating linguistic, cultural, and historical manifestations of earlier Jewish life, including diasporic Jewish life, into his writing, Zarchi behaved like many other Zionist cultural figures, including a panoply of Palestinian Hebrew writers, who preserved aspects of the past as they paved the way to the future.
Thus, efforts to set Zarchi apart require misrepresentation of Palestinian Hebrew literature. Lebovic tells us that “in its bias towards social realism and efforts to present ‘positive’ heroes and ‘constructive’ themes, this Hebrew literature sought to heighten historical awareness and reinforce social commitment to the formation of a new society in ways reminiscent of Soviet literature” (107). Yet, until the 1940s, when the first native Palestinian-born generation of Hebrew writers emerged, Palestinian Hebrew literature featured almost no positive heroes and constructive themes, especially in works written by Hebrew writers alongside whom Zarchi has traditionally been grouped. In fact, most diaspora-born Hebrew writers of Zarchi’s proximate age who arrived in Palestine during the early 20th century despaired when forced to acknowledge that neither Zionist utopian visions nor Jewish millennial hopes were going to be realized any time soon; they struggled to come to terms with this. While some developed literary techniques to narrow the gap between what existed and what was desired, others like Zarchi offered stylized depictions of the difficulties Palestinian Jewish immigrants endured. Indeed, such literature did not solve the difficulties that it depicted, but such representation expanded Hebrew literature’s range and contributed to a cultural revival integral to the Zionist project.
Presentation of previously unknown information about Zarchi’s life and new analyses of his oeuvre enable this book to meaningfully contribute to Hebrew literary historiography. Yet Lebovic’s depiction of Zarchi as a melancholic whose fiction constitutes a form of internal Zionist dissent setting him off from the Hebrew literary mainstream proves unconvincing. As Palestinian Zionist settlement efforts expanded, critique of how Zionism was being realized grew among Palestinian Hebrew writers. Consequently, the interweaving of a belief in a broader Zionist vision with sharp critique of how this vision was being put into practice characterizes the foremost Palestinian Hebrew writers’ fiction. One can only hope that more researchers turn their attention to this fiction and its authors, so that the relationship between it and Zarchi’s work can be better understood.
Philip Hollander is an instructor of Modern Hebrew in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University.
Philip Hollander
Date Of Review:
February 12, 2022
