Second Time as Tragedy: The Tragic Mode in Second Aliyah Hebrew Literature

Abstract

This project explores modern Hebrew literature’s engagement with the language, worldview and canon of the Western literary tradition of tragedy. It investigates the significance of the tragic mode in three Hebrew modernist novels written about a period commonly known as the Second Aliyah (1904-1914)—the second wave of Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine: Y. H. Brenner’s Breakdown and Bereavement (1920), S. Y. Agnon’s Only Yesterday (1945) and Dov Kimḥi’s The House of Hefets (1951). Set in the second Aliya period, but written after it, these novels offer a retrospective vision of the climate and culture of the Second Aliyah as understood by the generations that succeeded it. This dissertation offers a new interpretation of these novels, arguing that they engage the conventions of Western tragedy and importantly both bolster and unsettle the romanticized historiography and memory of the Second Aliyah in the Zionist cultural imaginary. Between 1904-1914, approximately 35,000 Jews immigrated to Ottoman Palestine. The majority came from Galicia, the Russian Pale of Settlement, and Yemen. Among them was a small but culturally significant group of mostly young, secular immigrants, who journeyed to Palestine in hopes of realizing their ideological dreams of Jewish nation-building through agricultural labor. Known as ḥalutzim—pioneers—this group of immigrants and its image has dominated the historiography of the period. They have become identified with the Zionist movement as a whole and turned into an emblem of the decade. Agnon, Kimḥi, and Brenner set their narratives over and against this historiography. The protagonists of the three novels—all eager young Zionists seeking to take part in the task of nation-building—are undone by their own desires and national aspirations. Rather than offering tales of success and achievement, these novels end in tragedy, with the breakdown and in some cases with the symbolic banishment of their protagonist from the social body of the new Jewish settlement. Ranging from homage to pastiche, the modernist invocations of Western tragedy examined in this dissertation demonstrate a literary engagement that sought to complicate settled narratives of the Second Aliyah, offering an internal critique of Zionism written prior to and shortly following the founding of the State of Israel. Employing close reading of the Hebrew texts, I explore ways in which these writers evoked Western tragedy, including intertextual allusions to Attic and Shakespearean texts and figures; the deployment and manipulation of affective and structural elements such as catharsis, hamartia, anagnorisis; and the evocation of tragic themes (banishment, blindness, madness). I argue that, in their use of tragedy, these authors realize the form’s political power to consolidate the collective around the downfall of a tragic hero. In setting the breakdown of the hero outside the imagined center of the Zionist map—the pioneers’ agricultural collective—these novels challenge narratives that locate the ḥalutz at the heart of the Second Aliyah. This dissertation examines how the mythologization of this period is inextricably tied to the breakdown of the (anti)hero, the naïve, aspiring but failed ḥalutz. It argues that tracing the presence of the tragic mode in fiction that retroactively narrativized the Second Aliyah period reveals a complicated and nuanced relationship between Hebrew literature and the construction of Second Aliyah mythology.