"Once Again, the Same Old Images" Time and History in Yaakov Steinberg's Poetry.

• In Event: Perceptions of Time in Modern Jewish Historiography and Literature

Abstract

As a national literature, Hebrew literature posited a particular temporality projecting a specific Zionist utopia. This utopia, framed as a crisis of secularization remedied through a national revival, was represented through the institution of a temporality negating Jewish Diaspora as a viable present that can be the grounds to any positive future. This paper will argue that the radical negation of the Diaspora was a response to the major political challenge to Zionism: Yiddishism. The Yiddishist utopia was anchored in a different temporality that viewed progress as necessarily leading to a national consciousnesses anchored in Yiddish and the reality of Jews in eastern Europe.
This paper will offer a reading of Yaakov Steinberg's poetry as poetry of the reluctant anticipating consciousness. A consciousness that anticipates the New but views the changes and loss it must entail as catastrophe. Steinberg's work judged and evaluated both political options, offering a nuanced critique of both discourses. This paper will describe Steinberg's unique poetic practice and the ways in which it demonstrated Steinberg's judgement of both political discourses, as well as his own profoundly modernist vision of temporality: Zionism and Yiddishism were both viewed as fictions appeasing the crisis of modernity, in which time is empty and history is nothing but the record of decline and decay. By accepting Zionist temporality in his Yiddish poetry Steinberg criticized the Yiddishist discourse and adhered to a Zionist understanding of Jewish history, of antisemitism and of Jewish future in Europe. At the same time in his poetry in Hebrew Steinberg criticized Zionist temporality and the project anticipated by Hebrew literature. By rejecting the "national" role of Hebrew poetry Steinberg indicated that the Zionist utopia might be just the same, or even worse, unless it takes into account the past as well as the future, not only the New but also the Old and Present.

author

• Elhanan Elazar, city college cuny