Ken latzippor, shirim ufizmonim ("A Nest for the Bird: Poems and Songs for Children") by Chaim Nachman Bialik, illustrated by Ora Eitan, Carmel Publishing House, 190 pages, NIS 179
The fact that Bialik's poetry stood in the display case like "The Book of Legends" and "The Haganah Book," or the Bible with commentary by Cassuto, or Y.L. Gordon and the Six-Day War album says nothing. Jews always kept nice-
looking books in the living room, without opening them. The habits of the house-proud have changed only insofar as nowadays people no longer keep handsome editions in the living room. And in any event, Bialik isn't returning to the agenda - not only because he is too big for university teachers, but also because culture, any culture, tends to blur the tracks of its production, because being "natural" is a kind of condition for belonging to it "voluntarily," as a creature and not as a product.
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Nevertheless, the hands-off attitude toward Bialik's contribution to our culture sometimes seems like ignorance whose source is in Zionist mythology. What iss missing is precisely that part of the language that not only never died, but was also not "biblical" and not connected to "the land of our forefathers." If it indeed produced our culture, it was thanks to what Bialik and his surroundings brought into the Hebrew culture in Odessa, Warsaw, Berlin and only later here.
Now Bialik's book for children has been reissued, as a splendid volume. The drawings that illustrated the old book, the one "we all grew up on," have been replaced by marvelous and colorful illustrations by Ora Eitan that refer back to the old ones like quotations. The graphic way in which explanations of words, in pale red, are intermingled with the text as though they were proofreader's notes - is also a delightful solution.
Bialik himself was sensitive to the design of children's books in his environment. His correspondence has many references and bits of advice. One such comment, which is perhaps amusing because of the "typeface revolution" that is now blighting all kinds of newspapers, can be found in a letter he wrote in 1921 to Yehoshua H. Ravnitzky (his business partner in publishing) about a book for teaching Hebrew: "'Children's Language' is in the process of being drawn. Quite soon the work of illustration will be completed and we will embark upon setting the type. At the moment it is difficult for me to come to terms with the 'Frank Ruehl' [a font that still dominates Hebrew printing] letters that have infected literature like psoriasis at all of the printing houses and cannot be avoided. So, apparently I shall have to use them despite myself. There being no others."
As a rule, in describing the viscous Zionist past, we forget that Bialik's passion was connected mostly to the Hebrew language and not especially to the land. After he was extricated from Soviet Russia, he went to Germany, even though he had promised to come here, and he continued his activity from there, even writing letters like this: "Don't go to the Land of Israel, at the moment. The situation of teachers there, because of the limitations of the budget and the system of parsimony, is very difficult now. Immeasurably more difficult than that of just plain ordinary people" (1922). Not exactly the Zionist fervor we learned in school with Bialik's help. (Perhaps more obvious is the lowly place allocated to teachers even back then in the income hierarchy).
Bialik did not have children, and it is best not to confuse the role of the father-educator with the matter of parenthood. Education in Hebrew culture, as perhaps in any nationalist culture, had nothing to do with the love of children but was about posing demands for children. It suffices for us, though, that Bialik loved his own childhood. Perhaps this is the necessary condition for writing for young people: that there is something in the poet's or writer's memory that loves his own childhood, so that the educator, in accordance with the advice of the Maggid of Mezirich, can himself become a small child. Here is the effort of Bialik "the Father" to get close to the moments of joy in childhood:
"Who comes knocking at my window?"
"A fellow tiny as a thimble."
?What's your name, my little lad?
"Who's your mother? Who's your dad?"
"I have neither name nor mother,
nor a homeland nor a father."
"Where is it you come from, child?"
"From roaming the forest a while."
Sense of humor led him to "rewrite" the traditional Grace after Meals for children (out of some assumption that Jews would continue to recite Grace after Meals, even when they became secular):
Thanks be to God
and bless Him
for the bowl of milk porridge
full to the brim
and for dessert
an apple too.
To give our thanks,
what can we do?
Blessed be He
And blessed His name.
The ending that is known to every Jew is no doubt supposed to bring the singing child into the tradition. This is a key idea in Bialik's effort: to build a culture out of continuity, not rupture. He also wrote about this in his article "Pangs of the Language":
"Above all, we must therefore ensure that we have in our possession not an 'expanding' dictionary but rather an 'inclusive' dictionary - which will be the linguistic property from all the generations in all of its greatness and development, assembled there in its entirety."
But the poems for children, as they are read, reflect a major historical rupture: Most of them were written in the Ashkenazi stress pattern that tends to emphasize the penultimate syllable in a word and is entirely unmusical in the Sephardi stress pattern we use in contemporary Hebrew.
Here is a good reason for Bialik's persevering fondness for Yiddish, especially once he arrived here. There is also no better explanation for the fact that he did not write poetry here. And there is also no other explanation for his pride in the children's song "The Automobile," which he himself included both in his book of children's poems and in his "canonical" poetry books. In it, he succeeded in writing a poem in the new stress pattern, which tends to throw the accent onto the final syllable.
But it isn't just the melodic meter that is impossible in those poems for children. Even more obvious is that the Hebrew here is not children's Hebrew. Its educational stamp is to be found in very many children's poems and songs here to this day: It is incumbent upon the tots to sing, not to understand. In kindergarten, how many understood the sentence: "And in each egg hush lest it awaken." And of course, we are to believe in the words of this song: "Who will deliver us from starvation? / - Whose is the beatitude? To whom the gratitude? / To labor and to trades pursued." Yes, yes, I too fell into this trap.
The Puritanism is part of the great project of the new Hebrew culture: Since the language is a tool for creating a new, better, educated human being, and since literature is supposed to bestow the language, Hebrew literature has never stopped being responsible, educational and moralistic. Mention has already been made of Bialik's censorship of the Talmud when he did not include the wealth of sexual stories in "The Book of Legends," despite his tremendous knowledge of what appears there, and of what was present in the Hebrew language for many generations (including some very sensitive anatomy descriptions). But still he wrote things in his letters that he would have never conceived of permitting in poems.
For example, to a certain forgotten poet he wrote: "My dear Ginzburg, forgive the delay in my reply. Your two letters found me in a moment of friendship. My partner - may his candle burn brightly, is now carrying out mila [circumcision] and metzitza [sucking] on me, without of course discharge." Now the missing piece in this description of the rite of circumcision includes a double entendre having to do with discharging debts, but Bialik the poet and educator would not have allowed himself or others a play on words like this in literature, even though he knows that Hebrew was "capable" - with no connection to "diglossia" (that magic word among all those who try to write the history of Hebrew as the language of a people with a literature but "no spoken language").
Another letter: "To my dear friend H.P. Bergmann, I reply to you that Moriah [Bialik's publishing house], with God's help, still exists in the world and it is rousing its ruins and it will yet achieve its honor of yore. It was naughty of you to have given your new books to strangers. Don't open your legs to every passerby and don't go astray."
I admit that reading Bialik - including the children's poems, the letters and the essays - makes me happy. There is something in the man's capacious heart, in his ability to do things, not only for himself but also for his Zionist idea, and his collective, and to write and earn his living, that stands in such sharp contrast to the experiences of poets I have known.
And as for education, who is going to give high school students - in a system that insists on conscripting them into the army, with the collaboration of teachers - the beauty of these lines so that they will read them instead of watching "A Star is Born" (the post-modern heir to the torch-lit marches at Nuremberg)?:
Then shall the longings arise,
In the wooden poles, the rot.
Of their own volition they will arise - as stinking fungi spring up
And fill all the apertures and cracks with longings
Like rags fill up with lice.
And a man shall return to his tent to eat his evening bread,
And dip his bread and herring in vinegar - And will long.
And remove his shoes and socks at the bedside - And will long.
And here I sat down intending to write about children's poems, and find myself finishing with this wonderful lyric for adults
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