Eliezer's Obsession

Resurrecting Hebrew By Ilan Stavans Schocken Books 2008, $21.00, pp. 240

Ilan Stavans’ Resurrecting Hebrew is a daring literary adventure, fusing memoir, biography and a study of linguistics, presented with a narrator’s voice that may appropriately be identified as that of a critic. The subject of Stavans’ biography is Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who is credited with bringing Hebrew back to life—a lifelong effort that began at the time of the Jewish national movement in Ottoman Palestine at the turn of the century. Although a heroic figure in Israel, with streets named in his honor, Ben-Yehuda’s linguistic achievements are not immune to Stavans’ sensitive contemporary ear, which weighs the subtle differences between classical Hebrew and the way Israelis use the language today.

The memoir aspects of this remarkable scholarly work echo the author’s fascination with Ben-Yehuda’s obsession. Language seems to be as hauntingly indispensable to Stavans’ identity as it is to Ben-Yehuda’s, as one might expect from the author who himself has written books on the fascination of words and the roots of their meaning.

Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, grew up in Mexico City, where he became aware of the importance of a linguistic legacy through contact with the advocates of Yiddish as the true language of the Jews. He was deeply moved by those who aspired to elevate Sholem Aleichem’s heritage to new heights and who wanted their students to be a link to its future. But with the advent of the British Mandate in Palestine and ultimately Israel, Hebrew—formerly a liturgical and literary language—all but replaced Yiddish as the triumphal symbol of historical aspiration: a mother tongue.

Stavans’ personal odyssey begins when he dreams of a beautiful lady speaking an unknown language that turns out to be Hebrew. A friend diagnoses this as a symptom of “language withdrawal.” And so Stavans is off and running, reading, traveling, interviewing, to weave Ben-Yehuda’s historic mission into his own quest for the lost vernacular of his people.
In A Dream Come True, Ben-Yehuda had written, “All my life I have been inconsolably grieved about two things. I was not born in Jerusalem, not even the land of Israel. And my speech from the moment I was able to utter words was not in Hebrew.” It is a revelation of feeling not unlike Stavans’ sense that “losing one’s” Hebrew is like losing “one’s soul.”

Tracking Ben-Yehuda’s life as a Lithuanian-born lexicographer who went on to become the Samuel Johnson of the Hebrew dictionary, Stavans treats the reader to brilliant discursive passages that are frequently as erudite as they are engaging. He contemplates the order of the Hebrew Alphabet with an old friend, Rabbi Rebecca Krausz. Stavans asks her, “But why does aleph come first? Why not gimmel or tav or yud?”

Rabbi Krausz replies that the question is at the core of Jewish theology. “The aleph is “the opening letter of the Torah,” but Genesis 1:1 starts with bet. That, she implied, creates the Talmudic riddle, because otherwise aleph is so important. The complex shape of the letter, too, makes it distinctive, as well as its placement in Exodus: 20:2, which prominently emphasizes the Decalogue: I am the Lord thy God. It is also the first letter of the names Adam and Abraham.
Stavans elaborates by citing aleph as an important classical reference in poetry, pointing out that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his poem “Kubla Khan,” anointed the secret river that “ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea,” as Alph, a variation of aleph.
Ben-Yehuda’s campaign for spoken Hebrew provides the narrative spine for Resurrecting Hebrew, but his hero’s failures as well as triumphs are recorded with fidelity to text and source. Stavans observes that Ben-Yehuda’s interests lay in recovery. His talent wasn’t in defining old words but in inventing new ones that were etymologically sound. For all his admiration of Ben-Yehuda’s achievements, the author tempers his praise with modest reservations. “It is in the area of neologisms that Ben-Yehuda’s work suffers the most….He coined saj-rajakk for telephone, but Israelis simply say telephone. Likewise with makolit for gramophone, replaced by patifon; and amunot for democracy, replaced by demokratia.”

Resurrecting Hebrew is spiced by accounts of the work of a wide range of poets, critics, scholars and men of letters, who are cast in cameo roles: Gershon Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov and Isaac Bashevis Singer. But it is Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who is the star. At the conclusion of this elegant blend of memoir, biography and linguistic study, Stavans writes, “Legend has it that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda died while working on his great Hebrew dictionary in defining the word nefesh, the Hebrew word for soul.”

That spiritual note evoked for this reader a personal reflection about the Hebrew name that has been close to my heart for the past 56 years. Avodah was defined in the Bible as “slave, service to God, worship.” In modern Hebrew, thanks to the legacy of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, it has come to be synonymous with “work, labor, toil.” As far as I know, there is no woman in Israel or the entire world who is named Avodah, except one—my wife, so named by her mother, Carrie Komito, a New York-born student of Hebrew, whose legacy to me has been the translation of a Hebrew word into a person who has been the grace and muse of my life. Could she have been inspired by the tradition or shape of the letter aleph? Now that I have read and been so enraptured by Ilan Stavans’ jewel of popular scholarship, I am certainly going to think about that.

Sidney Offit is a writer, teacher and curator of the George Polk Journalism Awards. His most recent book is a memoir, Friends, Writers and Other Countrymen.