While the connection between the flowering of the new living language and the growth of Zionism and the Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael is too well known to need recounting here, any survey of Zionist and Israeli culture must mention the centrality of Hebrew in the development of a new kind of Jewish life. Its revival came from two different directions. Initiated by the pedantic ideological considerations of a few ‘fanatics’, and perpetuated by a multitude of linguists and academics, it ultimately developed beyond these limitations. It indeed became a living language, nurtured by the people who used it in their daily lives.

It is a commonplace to speak of Hebrew as a dead language that was in need of revival. It seems, however, that an important meaning of this metaphor is often missed. In order for the language to become a vehicle of everyday communication, a constant evolution of vocabulary and speech patterns was necessary. The language had to become more ‘everyday’ – more flexible and natural – allowing for the influence of real life. It would be impossible for a society to develop, speaking only with the grandeur and formality of the great classical texts, however rich they may be. It is in this sense that the ‘dead’ language had to be revived.

It is fascinating to see this process evolving in the development of the literary texts of the modern period. This is exemplified most clearly in poetry. The great poets of the Haskalah and the early Zionist period produced some outstanding poetry. Bialik, Tchernikovsky and Fichman, for example, created powerful and dramatic texts. Despite their greatness as text, however, they sound rather stilted and formal to a modern ear. Although the esthetic experience can be extraordinary, to read these writers the modern Israeli ear has to travel a distance similar to that which an English ear has to travel to read Shakespeare. At first glance, a comparison between the language of Shakespeare and the language of Bialik may seem surprising: Shakespeare lived nearly five hundred years ago while Bialik died only in 1934. Nonetheless, it is apt because the Hebrew language has undergone such revolutionary changes since the period of Bialik’s formative years as a poet, as it has evolved into a truly living language, stripped of its stiffness and formality.

Zionist and Israeli poetry has produced a number of generations, each of which has tended to use the language in a different way. The generation after Bialik – the generation of Natan Alterman, Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg – produced a much more flexible mode of poetic language, tending often towards the playful and the humorous. The ‘third generation’ was that of Amihai, Natan Zach and T. Carmi. Their language continued the trend towards naturalism – a far cry from the rhetoric of the ‘first generation.’ Amihai, in particular, used many everyday expressions in his poetry, sometimes creating a surrealistic air through his use of unusual contemporary speech patterns and images. The tone of the poetry of these writers also changed, emphasizing personal rather than the collective experience, and moving away from the subject of the nation. This tendency will be discussed later in Section 13. Although some of this generation is still writing, younger poets have emerged in the last decades who have taken these tendencies further still. The Hebrew language of much of contemporary poetry is almost unrecognizable as the same language in which poets such as Bialik and Tchernikovsky wrote. Nevertheless, it is, indeed, the same language.

The same tendencies are noticeable in prose. This essay will not note the different ‘generations,’ but rather will focus on a few of the top contemporary Israeli prose writers. There are some excellent authors today whose work has been embraced by the international literary world and the general public. Foremost among these are Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, whose works have been in print in many different languages for decades: their style is modern, their language rich and allusive. In contrast, new writers such as Orly Castel Bloom and Etgar Keret use a very different prose whose everyday character and apparent ‘flatness’ of tone produce a strangely surrealistic effect that is at odds with the richer narrative prose of their predecessors. To a large extent, they come very close to writing in contemporary speech patterns. This significant development is very modern in tone. It remains to be seen whether this type of work will stand the test of time and the fickle tastes of the current generation of readers.