Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

JOURNEYS TO A NEW HOMELAND

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 6; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14725880701655037

1472-5894

Michal Tannenbaum, Orly Haim,

Jewish Identity and Society

Abstract Translingual literature, describing the work of writers and poets writing in a language that is not their mother tongue, offers a fascinating meeting point between language, immigration, identity and ideology. This article focuses on the work of Alexander Penn and Nathan Alterman, two writers who, as part of a wave driven mainly by Zionist motivations, emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s to what was then a Jewish society in Palestine. Their endeavour involved a revolutionary linguistic dimension as well: the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. The analysis of their poems deals with issues of homeland and language, relying on Salman Akhtar's model concerning the psychological journeys of immigrants according to four dimensions: affect, space, time and social affiliation. The discussion traces the course of the poets' alternative paths, with Alterman's seemingly reflective consolidation into a reborn identity, and Penn's suggesting a "split self‐representation" expressing conflicting, contradictory and ambivalent attitudes. Acknowledgments We thank Tami Ben Ami‐Miller for her contribution to a previous version of this article, and Anat Hora for her insightful comments. Notes 1. Penn wrote the first version of this poem in 1929, but subsequently revised it several times. According to Halperin (166–171), although Penn had published five other Hebrew poems prior to this one, he presented it as the first poem he wrote in the new country, apparently wishing to present it as his "identity card", with all its emotional ambivalence toward his old and new loyalties (references in this article are to the first version, assumed to represent Penn's original emotions). 2. This poem was first written in Russian at the end of 1928, translated into Hebrew and rewritten many times in the 1930s, and then again in the 1950s, when it was entitled Eretz zavat. In this analysis, we used the version that was published in Bamifneh (1939). 3. In fact, Penn himself had written few ditties before 1934 (when he joined the Marxist group), and most of his more patriotic songs were added to the pool of national songs omitting his name (Halperin 189). Some of these songs reflect a similar optimistic, light and even naive perception of the new land, but Penn tended to disregard them and distinguish them clearly from the rest of his oeuvre (Halperin 190), so we have not placed much emphasis upon them either. 4. Leah Goldberg, who was already a poet of renown by then, wrote soon after a poem entitled Ilanot (Trees) that also uses the "two homelands" image, dealing with the same issues of ambivalence, belonging and nostalgia. 5. E.g., Casement about Beckett; Besemeres on various bilingual or translingual writers; Amati‐Mehler et al. about a range of writers; Lieblich about Dvorah Baron and Leah Goldberg, and Empson, who explored the writings of Marvell, Dryden, Fielding, Yeats, Elliot and Joyce, in Using Biography, as he entitled his book. 6. Indeed, Alterman's father encouraged him to study agronomy, but eventually came to understand his son's choices and encouraged him in his writing. As Miron shows throughout his book, Alterman did go through a long and difficult personal journey of self‐definition, but he broke away from a loving, caring and stable family (see also Dorman 25, 49, 59). His father was a scholar, a lover of literature and a committed Zionist, and, in this context, Alterman followed in his family's path. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichal Tannenbaum Michal Tannenbaum is a lecturer at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University. As a researcher, she is working on sociolinguistic patterns of minority groups, psychological aspects of immigration and models of inter‐group relations. Orly Haim Orly Haim works as an English‐as‐a‐Foreign‐Language (EFL) teacher trainer at Beit‐Berl College and Tel Aviv University. Her particular research interests are second/third language acquisition, teacher cognition, and aspects of foreign language teaching and use.