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Abstract
Cognitive linguistics has paid much attention to the role of metaphorical patterns in language and thought. Accordingly, this article offers a diachronical view of the role of the house and home metaphors in Jewish and Israeli literary and nonliterary texts. It offers a semantic as well as a sociocultural perspective on the emergence of, and shifts in, the extended symbolic and metaphorical notion of homeland (moledet) as home. Examining this theme in the poetry of Hayim Nahman Bialik, Avraham Shlonsky, Natan Alterman, and Lea Goldberg, the article points to the process of the fading of the collective home symbol and the emergence of the normal expectation for just a home in Israeli popular songs today, while showing how the dormant metaphor can be awakened and exploited in times of threat, as well as for commercial purposes.
Acknowledgments
Translations from poems by Natan Alterman and Lea Goldberg are published with the permission of Hakibbutz Hameuchad-Sifriyat Poalim Publishing House, Israel, the copyright holder of Alterman's and Goldberg's oeuvre. My thanks to Atar Hadari, Ruth Nevo, and Rachel Tzvia Back for their permission to publish excerpts from their translations of poems by Bialik and Goldberg.
Notes
1. CitationBachelard, “The Poetics of Space,” 86, 94.
2. The Israeli clinical psychologist Ya'akov Matri has dealt with the concept of home from a literary as well as a clinical point of view. His book, Bayit la-nefesh [Psyche's home] refers to many eminent child psychiatrists, including Donald Woods Winnicott, especially Winnicott's Home Is Where We Start From (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).
3. CitationLakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh; CitationGibbs, The Poetics of Mind; Citation Turner , The Literary Mind; CitationSovran, Safah u-mashma'ut.
4. CitationLakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh.
5. CitationKövecses, Metaphor in Culture; idem, “A New Look.”
6. Here and elsewhere, the translations of the songs and poems from Hebrew are mine unless otherwise stated.
7. Note that the term “Jewish national home” originated in the Basel program formulated by the First Zionist Congress of 1897. The use of the cautious, somewhat vague German term Jüdische Heimstätte (“publicly and legally assured home in Palestine” in the English translation), instead of the explicit political term “state,” was probably intended to avoid any possible hint of a territorial threat to the Ottoman empire.
8. The issue of the Palestinians' right to return home has been one of the main sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cf. UN General Assembly's December 11, 1948, declaration (available at http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/C758572B78D1CD0085256BCF0077E51A).
9. The Hebrew bayit means both “house” and “home,” but the form habaitah usually indicates the more abstract idea of a warm family unit in which the four walls and roof are only an external framework sheltering the more important emotional facets referred to by the English word “home.”
10. See CitationHirschfeld, Kinor arukh.
11. Ruth Nevo translates the term beit ha-midrash in the poem “Levadi” (Alone) as “house of study” (CitationBialik, Selected Poems, 32), while Atar Hadari translates it as “prayer house” (Songs from Bialik, 23). Note that the Hebrew compound juxtaposes house to learning Torah and Talmud (and praying).
12. At the age of 13 Bialik had such extensive knowledge of the Bible and the commentaries that his grandfather could not find a suitable teacher for him, but he was too young to be sent to a yeshiva – a higher Orthodox educational establishment. So he sat alone in Beit ha-midrash – the house of study. The only other person there was an old rabbi. Each read and studied in solitude from the ancient volumes. See CitationLachover, Bialik, 1:38–39. Beit ha-midrash is thus both a personal memory and a symbol that appears eleven times in his writings.
13. Modern Hebrew speakers normally use the simple transparent beit kvarot (house of graves) or its Aramaic oblique parallel: beit almin (lit. house of worlds, meaning the house of eternity), the place where one rests forever. By using the Hebrew parallel beit olam – Bialik brings this hidden meaning of eternity to the surface.
14. The title refers to the constant noise of the big city, as the poem was written after his only visit to New York.
15. Bialik, Selected Poems, 130.
16. Citation Songs from Bialik , 144–45.
17. Bialik, “Parting,” in idem, Selected Poems, 90.
18. Bialik, “City of the Killings,” in Songs from Bialik, 7.
19. CitationHalperin, Me-agvaniyah ad simfoniyah, 70.
20. CitationInbari, “Mah ra'atah ha-hasidah.” One of the group meetings he describes was devoted to the issue of “love and relations between men and women” and one of the speakers argued that “love between the sexes should not be a dominant issue.” Once again the old order of family and home was rejected in favor of the idea of the group as a collective. The same speaker was against free love, which he defined as a surrender to animal urges in human beings. There is further evidence of debates about collective education and personal possessions such as clothing in testimonies of the early days of the first kibbutzim.
21. Similar to the special night squads under British commander Charles Wingate, Yitzhak Sadeh established the Night Squads (FOSH), which later became the basis for the Strike Companies (Palmah), the brigade of volunteers who formed the national and regional combat reserve units ready for immediate action. They were stationed in kibbutzim and the major cities and combined basic military training with work in the kibbutzim and specific military operations. Sadeh became the founder and commander of the Palmah in 1941.
22. Names of settlements symbolizing Jewish defense and determination. A recording of the song from 1970 can be heard as the background to Fred Dunkel's 1938 film of these squads, which has been restored by Jacob Gross and posted on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = FkfF4B6Q-fc (accessed February 22, 2012).
23. Alterman's very influential book of lyric poetry Kokhavim ba-hutz (Stars outside) was published in 1938. He kept his serious poetry apart from his weekly column of political verse in the newspaper Davar, as well as from his popular romantic and satirical works for the theater.
24. CitationAlterman, Shirim she-mikvar, 51, 56, 68–70, 118.
25. CitationAlterman, Shirim she-mikvar, 168.
26. Alterman, “Ha-holed” (The mole), in CitationAlterman, Shirim she-mikvar, 161.
27. CitationShavit, Lo ha-kol havalim va-hevel, 7, 239.
28. Dan Miron, “Al shirei Lea Goldberg” (On Lea Goldberg's poems), Ha'aretz, January 1, 1960.
29. Natan Zach, “Ra'ita et ha-geshem? Anahnu shketim” (Have you seen the rain? We are calm), Davar, November 6, 1959.
30. “Pine,” in CitationGoldberg, Selected Poetry and Drama, 91.
31. “From the Songs of My Beloved Land,” in ibid., 108–9.
32. The next poem in this collection starts with the verse “In the land of my love the almond tree blossoms,” which Moni Amarilio set to a poignant tune in the 1970s. Sung by an army entertainment group with Ruhama Raz as its soloist in 1974, it led many to believe that the “land of my love” was not Lithuania but rather the Land of Israel – a confusion between the poetess's two homelands.
33. CitationHill, “At Home in the World.”
34. CitationSovran, “Pizmon lashon ve-toda'ah.”
35. See CitationSovran, “Pizmon lashon ve-toda'ah.”; and CitationSovran, “Shirei Naomi Shemer.”
36. This is perhaps a tinge of Orientalist yearnings for the pre-state landscapes of the imaginary land of the fathers as depicted by famous painters of that period such as Nahum Gutman and Reuven Rubin, who depicted Arabs as the natural inhabitants of the land.
37. The use of national symbols in another commercial, of the dairy company Tnuva, will be discussed below.
38. Once again the “typical” Israeli food is perhaps Arab in origin.
39. Dina Shoval, “Tnuvah olah be-kampein hadash le-cottage Tnuvah, tahat ha-meser: ‘ta'am shel bayit yisre'eli’” (Tnuva launches a new campaign for Tnuva cottage, with the message: “taste of an Israeli home”), June 1, 2010, http://www.grey.co.il/pages/item.aspx?id = 15927 (accessed February 29, 2012).
40. Atara Biller, “Ha-pirsomet ‘pikud ha-okhel’ osah et ha-avodah” (The advertisement “the food command” does the job), February 13, 2011, http://www.ice.co.il/article/view/262686 (accessed February 22, 2012).
41. The sense of solidarity in the subsequent “tents protest” of that summer was reflected in the avoidance of any linkage to wider political and social issues in an attempt to enlist the participation and support of all sectors of Israeli society.