Hebrew & Modernity

Robert Alter's masterful "Hebrew and Modernity" gives vital insights into the role played in creating a Hebrew literary vernacular in the modern age.There are eleven essays here, and each one explores an aspect of the emerging Hebrew "self" in modern times, and its correlated literature.A paradigmatic example is his exploration of the life and work of the Hebrew poet David Vogel "Fogel and the Forging of a Hebrew Self." Here, Alter combs through Vogel's early diaries, to find the first stirrings of a "modern" sensibility of self expression in the Hebrew language. In one entry from 1912, Vogel claims that "My soul [then] was not flawed, and it left its imprint on all my behavior; I always knew myself, this self of mine [ha'ani sheli], and ever since I left there, I haven't known myself; I am not I"Alter thinks that here, quite rightly, is the first time the article placed in front of "I" in Hebrew is used in a discussion of the "Self" and its fundamental alientation (both from the world, and from itself; a kind of composite self which is at war with itself). David Vogel, in 1912, was tackling, perhaps for the first time in Hebrew, one of the philosophical quandaries of the twentieth century: the fractured or divided self.Examples such as this abound in Alter's volume. He is a meticulous scholar and each of his essays provides brilliant insights into the fascinating emergence of modern literary Hebrew.