Jewish American poet and translator Peter Cole loved Hebrew so much he moved to Israel to more deeply study the language.
Now Cole has edited an anthology of Hebrew writers opining on the state of the language and its literature. It is called, appropriately enough, “Hebrew Writers on Writing.”
All the best-known names are there — David Grossman, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Yehuda Amichai and Haim Nachman Bialik. But Cole insists even if he had skipped those writers, the book would be just as strong.
“I wanted to represent the richness of Modern Hebrew,” he says in an interview, “and not be limited to a national context of Israel as a modern state. I was interested in representing a writer’s eye view of the literature.”
Cole’s anthology stretches back to pioneering European-born figures such as Bialik, Avraham Kook and David Frischmann, who shared a Zionist vision of a Jewish state with Hebrew as its common tongue. Cole says there is little overlap between those young Hebrew writers and the work of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the 19th-century visionary who revived Hebrew as a spoken language.
“Ben-Yehuda doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the early Hebrew literature,” he says. “There is marvelous literature being written in Hebrew in Europe that has nothing to do [with the revival].”
Among the writers included in Cole’s anthology are the poet Zelda, novelist Sami Michael and members of Israel’s contemporary literary vanguard, such as Haviva Pedaya and Sami Shalom Chetrit, born well after 1948.
In addition to providing poems and literary excerpts, Cole mostly included the writers contemplating the writing process itself. Is Hebrew literature synonymous with Israeli or Jewish literature? What does it mean to create new work in the language of the Torah? Can it ever be fully secularized? Or should it?
The collected writers tackle these and other complex questions.
Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem, for example, worried about the language of God and Moses becoming the language of taxi drivers.
“What will be the result of updating the Hebrew language?” Scholem wrote to a colleague in 1926, years before the birth of modern Israel. “Is not the holy language … an abyss that must open up? People here do not know the meaning of what they have done.”
Says Cole, “Hebrew has the challenge of dealing with the various historical registers: biblical, rabbinic, medieval. You also have the influence of Yiddish, in some cases the influence of Arabic. These are unique to Hebrew. As a translator and editor one has to be aware of that, listening for those sorts of echoes, determining what echoes can be preserved and what kinds of things are best left untranslated.”
Born in New Jersey, Cole, like so many Jewish America kids, did not really learn much Hebrew during many years of Hebrew school. But after earning an undergraduate degree in comparative literature, he moved to Jerusalem in 1981 because, he says, “I felt it would be important to learn Hebrew as an American poet and as a Jewish poet. I fell in love with it and learned it very quickly.”
He also became fluent in Arabic, and began translating works from both languages into English. He earned a PEN Translation Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Last year he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Cole also had a one-year stint in the Bay Area, serving as an assistant editor of literature at Tikkun magazine and as a freelance editor and translator. He spends most of his time these days in Israel with his wife, writer Adina Hoffman, though he frequently lectures around the world.
Steeped as he is in Hebrew letters, Cole has strong opinions about the direction of Hebrew today. According to him, it’s headed downhill.
“Over the last 20 years one can feel a kind of decline entering into Hebrew,” Cole says. “In some ways, there’s a kind of emotional quality dropping out of Hebrew. Some say there’s a kind of sloppiness and verbosity, a garrulousness that is antithetical to the language. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a rich near-century of Hebrew literature in the land of Israel.”
With such expertise in all things Hebrew, might Cole try his hand someday at contributing to Hebrew literature himself? What’s the equivalent of “No way, Jose” in Hebrew?
“English is my language,” he says. “I love Hebrew literature, but the language I know best will always remain English.”
“Hebrew Writers on Writing” edited by Peter Cole (322 pages, Trinity University Press, $45)