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On June 10, 2009, Ha’aretz had a cute cartoon on the editorial page. President Obama is looming over the desk of his aide Rahm Emanuel, and scowling: You heard anything from Jerusalem? Emanuel, sitting in his office chair, his hands up, on the defensive, and a nervous look in his eyes: Not at the moment, says Rahm, right now they have Hebrew Book Week. It’s true: Shavua HaSefer is a big deal around here, almost an escape from reality.
Truth to tell, though I have lived 20 years in Israel, and know Hebrew well enough to work as a professional translator, I normally read the English edition of Ha’aretz, but on this special occasions like this, I buy the Hebrew one too. The paper’s exultant editorial was titled Chag LaSefer Ha’ivri, which means “Holiday of the Hebrew Book,” but was translated nicely in the English Ha’aretz as “Celebrating Hebrew Books”:
”Hebrew Book Week, which opens today, is a surprising and joyous celebration. Surprising, because despite endless prophecies of its imminent demise, year after year it turns out that the book is alive and kicking . . . And joyous, because Hebrew literature is our most beautiful export industry, and the only one that is constantly on the rise . . .
Israeli literature has become a superpower: You can find David Grossman and Zeruya Shalev in bookstores in dozens of countries, along with A.B. Yehoshua, Etgar Keret, Yehudit Katzir and Amos Oz. They are providing millions of people with possible answers to the growing question of how it is possible to be an Israeli.”
I’ve translated two of those authors, so let me say a word about translation. It’s all about making choices and finding solutions. To translate that headline literally may not be as elegant, but it may be more faithful: the word “holiday” gives a better sense of something special and unique, of a national Israeli ritual. It also works well because in the lead sentence in Hebrew, the word mesameach – “joyous”—puts the Hebrew reader in mind of chag sameach, which in English means, as even non-Israelis know, gut yuntif.
Translation is a peaceful pipe-and-slippers thing to do, but only up to a point. The Ha’aretz editorial about Book Week overflows with larger implications—“prophecies,” “superpower,” “how it is possible to be an Israeli”—aptly preserved by the anonymous translator. Israel’s finest authors regularly write frank opinions in the newspapers, and Israeli literature, fiction included, is rarely divorceable from the Situation. In a charming move, Ha’aretz celebrated that liberating perquisite of Jewish statehood by choosing 31 leading Hebrew authors, including all the aforementioned, to write news and feature stories for that day’s issue. I’ve saved my copy, for leisurely summer reading.
This year in Jerusalem, the Book Fair was held in Liberty Bell Park, near the Inbal Hotel: inbal is the Hebrew word for a bell’s clapper. (It sounds so much better in Hebrew.) As I browsed the booths, I tried not to think of the Jerusalem legend about the municipal official in charge of the park’s dedication, who freaked out when they opened the crate and discovered that the exact replica of the Liberty Bell, sent as a gift by magnanimous Americans, was cracked.
Actually, that joke is out of date. In our digital age, Israelis are far less provincial than they used to be. When you live in a tiny Jewish country, you need to inhale the whole world. Translations of well-known English books drew many customers, from wildly successful vampire potboilers to a new Hebrew version of Moby Dick. I considered the latter, as it might be fun to see the solutions and imagine the choices of the heroic translator, Gershon Giron. (For me it would be as hard as putting Leviticus into English.) In the end, I bought two Hebrew translations of Polish and Russian classics, stories by tragic Jewish geniuses, victims of Hitler and Stalin, Bruno Schulz and Isaac Babel. How edifying it would be, I imagined, to compare these books with the powerful English translations.
Could reading them possibly take my mind off the front pages, even with Iran in turmoil, Hamas and Hezbollah on our borders, Obama and Netanyahu in a dramatic face-off? Maybe if I just shifted my feet a little bit, and let the Hebrew roll around in my mouth, I’d be so busy mixing metaphors that I’d forget all about the choices and solutions that aren’t merely on the page, but on the big stage of life.
Forget that: won’t work, not here, in these times. Wait, I thought, I’ll go to a couple of academic conferences, which are in high season: what could be less worldly than these? I went to the Van Leer Institute and Yad Ben Zvi, and heard interesting lectures about Nihilism in the Book of Ezekiel, and Nothing versus Nothingness in the kabbalistic worldview of Gershom Scholem, and a rare Sabbatean prayerbook in a Budapest library, and crypto-Jewish burial customs—the Marrano legacy, after five centuries—in Mexico and New Mexico and Brazil. And of course it was all about crisis and change, choices and solutions, throughout Jewish history.
Finally, I arrived at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the tranquil cultural center and guest house overlooking the stony Ottoman walls of the Old City, for a gathering in memory of Isaiah Berlin, the great Oxford philosopher who was born in Riga, Latvia, 100 years ago, in June 1909. The renowned Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri, in a lecture on Berlin’s liberalism and Zionism, spoke of his essay about two very different baptized Jews: Karl Marx, the communist mastermind, and Benjamin Disraeli, the conservative British prime minister. Berlin appreciated them both, and also saw their faults. An American might say that he cut them both some slack, and it occurred to me that if Sir Isaiah were around today, he might counsel his fellow Jews to take a deep breath, and do the same for both Obama and Bibi.
This healthy illumination put me in such an upbeat mood that I decided to go back to the fair and buy the Melville after all. I never made it. En route, I peeked into my local Hebrew bookstore, and found an irresistible two-for-one deal: A handsome new Israeli edition of Pirke Avot – the Mishnaic tractate usually translated as “Ethics of the Fathers”—at 128 shekels (around $32, on a good day), plus a free copy of Moby Dick.
I knew I didn’t need them. As Pirke Avot famously says: “Who is rich? He who is happy with what he has.” In Hebrew, b’khelko: with his lot, his portion. But I opened Moby Dick anyway, and read the three opening words: Kor’im li Yishmael. Call me Ishmael. But is that the right solution? Wouldn’t an Israeli translate it back as “They call me Ishmael,” which is a whole other thing? More literal would be kra li, which is gendered: male. “They call me” sounds like a Western, but maybe that’s the idea. Anyway, would Melville have cared?
So it always goes with translation. You make a choice, and it won’t be ideal, and you live with it—which is harder in real life, especially in a Holy Land. I went home without Yishmael, and took out my well-thumbed Northwestern-Newberry volume of Melville’s travel journals, a fine capper to Hebrew Book Week. Bummed by the poor sales of Moby-Dick (and subsequent flops), Melville was sent by his relatives in 1856 on a recuperative trip to Europe and the Levant, including Palestine. He was all of 37 years old. He arrived here in January 1857, and grew more depressed. He scratched out a few dozen pages of journals, which scholars have been feasting on for generations.
“Jews hate farming,” he declares at one point, which may have been the case in the Old City in 1857, but sure isn’t true in modern Israel. “There is at all times a smell of burning rubbish in Jerusalem”: No longer so, though we would not rank as one of the World’s Ten Cleanest Cities.
And here’s a choice entry, guaranteed to last: “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine—particularly Jerusalem.” All too true, even in Hebrew. The trick, in my professional opinion, is to ratchet down the romantic expectations, and settle for imperfect, realistic solutions.
Stuart Schoffman is a JUF News columnist and editor of Havruta: A Journal of Jewish Conversation. His translations of Israeli literature include Lion's Honey by David Grossman (2006) and Friendly Fire by A. Yehoshua (2008). Comments are welcome at schoffman@shi.org.il.
