Back to the Future: The Jewish Bookshelf as Contraband.

AS PART OF THE ONGOING CELEBRATIONS OF THE Jubilee of Jewish Statehood, I have been asked to speak at another conference this spring on "Israeli Literature and the Jewish Past." It came not entirely as a surprise to me, as I was preparing that talk and this one, that the vision of the past I wanted to outline there and the portrait of the future I would try to outline here are largely reflected images of each other. Not so much because, as slaves of memory, we Jews still tend to imagine cultural futures as recycled versions of our past. These are reflected images, rather, because the foreseeable future of Israeli literature will entail a reappropriation of freedoms of the literary imagination that had persisted as contraband in the recesses of recesses of Jewish memory. I do not mean this primarily in the psychoanalytic sense, although it has become something of a truism that what is forgotten or repressed by the founding fathers and mothers is bound to be "recuperated" by those irrepressible agents of nosta lgia, the grandchildren. I am making a claim about the evolving cultural atmospherics of Zionist--and then Israeli--society, about the felt boundaries of what could be thought, said, and written. What is fascinating is the extent to which Zionism's mandate to forge a new future was at the same time a revocation of the license to imagine alternative futures, a revocation, at some profound level, of poetic license itself. Recovering the past is, I submit, nothing less than a reinstatement of the place of the imagination in the Hebrew soul.

Let me clarify why I am taking this opportunity to make what I know is a daring claim. It would have been more tactful, during this celebration, for me to try to provide a prognosis based on a survey of fifty years of Israeli literature rather than try to say something so provocative, and, in some sense, ahistorical, about the cultural environment in which Israeli literature evolves. The more I thought about it, however, the more such a survey made no sense to me apart from the central argument I am advancing here: that the highly inventive forms of imaginative literature which once engendered Zionism were, in principle, at least, illegitimate in Zion. And that this is now changing.

Consider, to start, the most conspicuous early example of that literature, Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland, in which every detail of daily life is cheerfully accounted for, wholly reinvented, and nobody--not even non-Jewish fellow-travelers--can imagine wanting anything else. Herzl unwittingly sounded the death-knell of imaginative literature itself in that novel, especially with his famous epigraph, which became the clarion-call of political Zionism: "if you will it, it is not a dream" ("marchend" in the original German, which is more accurately translated as fable or fairy tale; "aggada" in the Hebrew translation). [1] The point is, Zionism was a dream, or something like a dream, an extravagant act of the imagination, with the utopian novel its perfect vehicle. Prospero taught us a lesson about art and life when he said, "we are such stuff as dreams are made on." But this does not mean that successful revolutionaries will continue to have patience for dreamers. The logic of any utopian project, Zionism in cluded, is that the very realization of the dream abolishes dreaming. By its very nature, that is, utopia realized makes the imagination of alternative worlds not only unnecessary but illegitimate. Plato banished the poets from his republic because they could not be relied upon to represent the presumably perfected values of the unchanging, ideal state. Like the metamorphosing gods, metaphor itself, the building block of the poetic imagination, was a danger because it invited linkages between the given, "perfect," world, and unknown, unexplored-or vaguely remembered-worlds.

So it was with the Yishuv and the early years of the state. Fictions of longing, of restlessness, of wandering, had no obvious legitimacy in the place that was both ground zero and telos of the Jewish journey. There were ambient pressures to exclude all stray, foreign, or subversive matter, especially any literature that harkened back to or suggested the resiliency or authenticity of the diaspora-Tevye's world, or Mr. Sammler's Planet. Instead, the literature that was valued conjured an ideal vision-a vision that was meant to issue in a perfect fit between map and territory, between blueprint and edifice. Think of the poems of UriZvi Greenberg, or Natan Alterman's "Magash Ha-kesef" [The Silver Platter]-as we read it then-or the realism of …