Marina Groslerner

Mother Tongue and its Adopted Children

Authors not writing in their Native Language - Israel as a Case Study

Marina Groslerner

Language for writers is not only a tool of craft but also a mental landscape, a motherland, their most intimate home. Writers not writing not in their own language are a rare specimen, of which the most known author, especially for Russian speaking audience, is probably Nabokov. Other known cases are Joseph Conard, A Polish who wrote in English and Samuel Beckett, an Irish who wrote in French, but these cases are numbered. You need to do a real effort to find them.

Hebrew literature, on the other hand, is brimming with examples, starting with our national poet, Chaim Nachman Bailik, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Yoseph Chaim Brener, Nathan Alterman, Avot Yeshurun, Zeev Zhabotinsky ((mother tongue: Russian and Yiddish)), Alexander Pen (Russian), Aaron Appelfeld (Romanian), Meir Vizilter (Russian, Polish, and German), Yehuda Amichay (German), Sami Michael, Eli Amir and Shimon Balass (Arabic), and many many others.

Not only that this list go on and on (it is actually easier to find writes, who are non native Hebrew speakers than native speakers ones), but it is also keep being constantly fed by waves of immigration. Only the last three decades of immigration former U.S.S.R and Ethiopia, for example, produced writers like Alex Epstein, Boris Zeidman, Alona Kimchi, to name just few – all native Russian speakers – or Omri Tagmalek Avera, a writer who was born in Ethiopian whose mother tougne is Amharic.

Knowingly, for thousands of years, Hebrew was for the holy language of the Jewish people, the People of the Book, as they were often called, but Hebrew as an everyday spoken language ceased to exist somewhere between 200 and 400 CE.

the process of Hebrew's return to regular usage is unique; there are no other examples of a natural language without any native speakers acquiring several million such native speakers, and no other examples of a sacred language becoming a national language with millions of ‘first language’ speakers.

Reviving an old language of the nation in order to revive the nation’s vitality is not a new ‘trick’ of Zionism, as you can see nowadays in many parts of the former U.S.S.R. Neither is the attempt of writers to write in their ‘old’ or ‘true’ language from national and political reasons. Most, if not all, of these attempts, had very limited success. None were as successful or were done on such a large scale.

The revival of Hebrew is one of the largest and most successful projects, but it wouldn’t have been made possible without writers and poets, and it would have been even less possible without truly talented writers and poets. Some were and are Zionists. Others were not. Then others were just indifferent for the idea, but one way or another, they all had their own motivations, their own devils, as truly talented writers often do. Luckily for us…