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THE CANADIAN JEWISH REVIEW
APRIL 29, 1966
The Hebrew Language In Colonial America
By Henry W. Levy, of the Jewish Agency, American Section
On the Mayflower, as it sailed across the Atlantic almost 350 years ago with its shipload of Puritans, there was a little known meeting at which the subject of discussion was the choice of an official language for the settlement that was to be made at the unknown American port that was later to be named Plymouth. One of the serious possibilities was Hebrew.
This story was told by Lloyd Haberly, president of the Poetry Society of America at a recent meeting attended by some 150 poets and classical scholars. Declaring that many of the Mayflower group voiced a desire to make Hebrew the official language of the new world settlements, Mr. Haberly said: "We don't appreciate how closely we came to be talking in Hebrew. But Governor Bradford, of the Massachusetts Colony, taught himself the language, nevertheless, in order to have 'access to the fountain of the
spirit.'"
The occasion was a meeting of the Poetry Society of America and the department of Education and Culture of the Jewish Agency for Israel. The subject was, "The Hebrew Renaissance With Particular Reference to Modern Hebrew Poetry." Its site was the New York Genealogical and . Biographical Society on New York's East 58th Street, a hall more accustomed to learned research and discussion on America's first families, the descendants of the Mayflower and other colonial families.
Paralleling the thesis advanced by the noted historian, Lccky, that "Hebrew mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy," President Haberly opened the meeting saying: "As Thebes rose, the monks stopped preaching and teaching to chant the Hebrew psalms. And when that world moved to our own, the psalms were once again the key to the
whole spiritual transformation of time and place."
Other speakers at this unique program devoted to the Hebrew language were Dr. Samuel Blumen-field, director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Jewish Agency for Israel; Dr. Robert Alter, Professor of Literature at Columbia University, a distinguished Hebraist; and Gabriel Preil, foremost Hebrew poet in the UnitedStates.
Dr. Bluraenfield, pointing out that the revival of modernized Hebrew in Israel has helped to lift the sacred tongue out of the category of dead languages, in which Greek and Latin still find themselves, said that he hardly need remind a group of men of letters that Hebrew is the key to a classic literature which records the intimate experiences and memories of an ancient people. He felt that modern Hebrew can also serve as a bond of unity for all men of all
ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN
By Richard J. Needham, of the Toronto Globe and Moil
The wind blowcth where it listetb. John Keats came from a father who cleaned stables and curried horses for a living. Goethe never spent a day in school, neither did Edison. An unsuccessful singer who lived from hand to moulh produced Ludwig von Beethoven. Leonardo da Vinci was born out of wedlock to a notary and a serving-maid. 1 he father and mother of Albert Camus were virtually illiterate peasants.
It's against this background that I find myself brooding over the report on immigration procedures made to the Canadian Government by the distinguished Toronto lawyer, Joseph Sedgwick. Q.C. The tone of his report is indicated by such sentences as these: "The mere ph^ical presence of a person in Canada gives him no special privileges . . . The Act should state clearly that admission to Canada is a privilege and not a right."
Mr. Sedgwick is disturbed over the extent of sponsored immigration, which nins heavily among soch family-conscious people as the Italians, Greeks and Portuguese. They've -been bringing o\er their unskilled fathers, mothers, brothers, uncles, cousins and fiancees. He would let unskilled people come in undet sponsorship only if they were the husband or wife or minor dependent child of the sponsor. The present system. Mr. Sedgwick protests, is letting in 'large numbers of unskilled and functionally flbtetate adults."
That's the case. But unskilled and tottDy,   not   ruoctiooally,   illiterate
people are entering Canada by another movement, and a much larger one. While roughly 150,000 human beings, skilled or unskilled, are brought in by plane or ship every year, roughly 500,000 are brought in by the stork. Some of the half million babies born in Canada annually will turn out to be geniuses, some to be criminals, some to be clods. That's always the chance you take with people. \
The children who grow up in Canada generally get some kind of skill which enables them to make a living; and so do the immigrants who arrive here. Toronto knows this better than any other city. Unskilled people have been piling in here for almost 20 vears now, and what's the result? Massive unemployment? Not at all. The vast majority picked up skills and went to work. Toronto's problem isn't a surplus of labor; it's a continuous shortage of labor, both skilled and unskilled, to sustain the city's exciting growih. Much of the credit for that growth belongs to Greeks, Italians and Portuguese who came here with nothing but a pair of hands.
Speaking for Toronto's Italian community, Victor Bagnato sa>s, "This is a huge country with lots of vacant land.'' It is indeed; and if we're going to fill it up � as we must if we're going to retain any sort of sovereignty� � we can't be too fastidious about the people we bring in here. The United States is rich and powerful today because, during the Nineteenth Century, it took millions up#n mil-
lions of people with little in the way of skills or schooling. It gambled on human beings, and it won.
The Canadian historian, Arthur Ixmer, has often mentioned what he calls the penuriousness toward life of English-speaking Canada; its disposition to view human beings as problems and handicaps rather than opportunities and assets. One gets the feeling of this penuriousness, this anriety about human beings, from Mr. Sedgwick's report; and especially from his proposal that immigrants should be fingerprinted and registered and required to report to the authorities from time to time until they got their citizenship.
This would help to keep out criminals and impostors, he says. Perhaps it would; though I'd suggest there's a bit of the criminal and the impostor in every one of us, whether we were born in Lindsay or Lubeck or Livorno. People are a risk, life itself is a risk; the only safe human beings � safe in themselves, or to society at large � are the dead ones.
Is Canada on the side of life or on the side of death? Is it for people �x against them? What bothers me about all the regulations and restrictions Mr. Sedgwick suggests, what bothers me about all the regulations and restrictions which now exist, is that they're anti people; and yon don't build a nation that way. Canada needs people � all sorts and conditions of men � more than it needs anythjnf else. It needs to put itself on the side of life.
Mr*. Charles lallnsky, OSO Mir* Ko*4, Montreal, left. Is national chairman of the "Scopus Cultural Strict" of the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University. Or. Judah Shapiro, right, of N�w York, an eminent sonologist, and director of the National Foundation for Hebrew Culrvre, In the United States, was tho guest speaker at � Scopus meeting, at the Rlti Carlton Hotel, on "Jowlsh Ptoptehood-. A Modern View". The Series Is a programme aimed at broadening and stimulating Jewish cultural appreciation, to develop Interest In th�  Hebrew   University.
� Pholo Illustrations of Canada
faiths with the State of Israel and world Jewry.
He called it a miracle, indeed, that a land like Israel, with 80 different tongues, could settle upon Hebrew even in vernacular versions. Quoting Golda Meir's famous saying, "He who does not believe in miracles in Israel is not a realist," he showed how the Hebrew renaissance, started in the 1850's in the Holy Land, bridged over fortunately so that by the time poetry and literature generally enjoyed its newborn resurgence, it was usable 'per se.' "
Dr. Blumenfield recalled the interest of early American academicians in Hebrew. He said that Samuel Johnson, the first president of Columbia University, had expressed the belief that "as soon as a lad has learned to speak and read English well, it is best to begin a learned education with Hebrew, the modern of all language and eloquence." Another early college president, Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard, he said, read a chapter of the Old Testament in the College Hall every morning, first in the original Hebrew, and then in English.
This early interest in Hebrew, he also pointed out, was manifested in the fact that the seals of such outstanding universities as Columbia, Dartmouth, and Yale include the college mottos in the original Hebrew, which is still preserved in the seals used today.
In introducing Gabriel Preil, who read his poetry in both Hebrew and English, Dr. Blumenfield said he is a man who has dedicated his life exclusively to poetry. Calling him the. outstanding Hebrew poet now residing in the United States, he said that "his pen moves in New York, but his voice resounds in Israel."
He praised Dr. Alter's rich contributions to the interpretation of Hebrew poetry in the English-speaking world and for his own considerable body of poetry.
In a long and fascinating talk, Dr. Alter paid tribute to the unique attributes of Hebrew as a language for poetry and the great renaissance of poetry in Israel today: "Israel is probably one of the few remaining countries where verse, far from being a dying technique, has managed to stay at the vital center of literary culture. Israel may conceivably have the highest per capita production of poetry in the world, and it is an even safer bet that it has the highest rate anywhere of poetry consumption. In Israel, contemporary verse is read as well as written. A popular book of poetry sells out a first printing of 3,000 copies within a few months. Comparing the population of Israel and the United States, a printing of 3,000 in Israel looms as large perhaps as half a million copies of a book published in America.
"It is absurd to claim that one language is intrinsically more poetic than another, but one can nevertheless say of Hebrew that its unique history makes it a supple instrument for certain species of poetic expression that have never been, or no longer are, available to poets in the major Western languages. More than anything else, what makes Hebrew poetry different is the vital presence of the Bible, through remembered words, phrases and verses. With the Bible always in the background, a skillful Hebrew poet can shift perspective or tone, introduce irony, focus two or three meanings on a single point, with a carefully weighted allusion to a Biblical text.
"Also, because the whole body of ancient and medieval Hebrew literature continually sets man over agaiost God, the creative world over against the void, and time over against eternity, the language is rich in words that express ultimate things. When a contemporary English poet trots ont a world-embracing word, he generally has to do it with an embarrassed grin ot a defensively irrteOecrual
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APRIL 29, 1966
Publication Office
VOL. XLVIII, No. 31
Gardenvole, Quebec
W.J.C. INSTITUTE OF JEWISH AFFAIRS MARKS 25th YEAR OF TRACING NAZI WAR CRIMINALS
When the World Jewish Congress established its research arm, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, in 1941, one of its planned post-war activities was to bring to justice the Nazis responsible for the decimation of European Jewry. Today, twenty-five years later, the Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York is engaged in the task of tracing witnesses, now scattered all over the world, to give evidence in dozens of trials of Nazi criminals in process or in the investigation stage.
A survey of these activities was given at a luncheon marking the 25th anniversary of the Institute in the Americana Hotel, in New York. Dr. Jacob Robinson, who founded the Institute in 1941 and was its director until 1947, outlined the work of the Institute against the background of the international Jewish problems during World War It and in the" postwar period.
Samuel Bronfman, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, and chairman of the North American Executive, who presided, stated that the Institute had succeeded in locating more than five thousand witnesses, of whom about five hundred have given evidence in persou at a number of trials. Through World Jewish Congress offices and affiliated communities, witnesses have been traced in Europe, North and South America, and in Israel.
Dr. Nahum Coldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, who discussed current tasks of the Institute; paid tribute to the memory of the late Nehemiah Robinson who succeeded his brother, Jacob, as director of the Institute in 1947,
Dr. Jacob Robinson, who is now
co-ordiriator of research studies connected with the Jewish catastrophe, said that during the war and throughout the Nazi persecution and physical destruction of the Jews, the Institute had followed the events in occupied Europe by utilizing the press of those areas, as well as the press of the free world, and of such listening posts close to the Nazi realm as Geneva and Lisbon.
Convinced that the Nazis in the* final analysis would be defeated and the future of the world would be in the hands of the Allies, the Institute, Dr. Robinson recalled, "had planned the future activities of the World Jewish Congress not on the basis of obsolete cliches, but bearing in mind the realities of a postwar world: an uprooted Jewry in need of relief and rehabilitation; guarantees for the future of the Jews in the former Axis European satellites; Germany's responsibility vis-a-vis the Jewish people, material, legal, and moral; and the prosecution of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators.
Dr. Robinson stated that these activities, started during the war, were continued in the postwar period, with special emphasis on restitution and compensation on the one hand, and the prosecution of war criminals on the other.
The former director of the Institute said that at present the latter "is the most important operational task of the Institute." Dr. Robinson said it should be noted that the Institute's "judicial assistance in the prosecution of the Nazi war criminals is the only one officially recognized in the totality of the Jewish Diaspora."
EBAN CALLS FOR MORE IMMIGRATION TO ISRAEL
The Israeli Government should play a more active part in encouraging Western immigration, Foreign Minister Abba Eban said at the fifteenth national conference of Hitachdut Olei Britannia, the British Settlers Association, at Netanya, says Israel Digest. Mr. Eban called on British JewT) to
glare. A Hebrew poet can still use such terms with a straight face even with unaffected, colloquial directness.
"The body of good poetry that has been written in Israel is quite impressive and a great deal of this high quality is attributable partly to the poets' success in tapping the distinctive resources of the Hebrew language. What makes poetry important in Israel, is that the sensitive Hebrew reader can find in it a way to responding humanly to his wt>rld, to its beauty as well as to its terror, which is simply not available to him in any other medium.
"Today, there are courses in Hebrew in at least 200 institutions of higher learning throughout the United States. And many high schools, including the New York system, now include Hebrew as a regular curriculum course. This is all very encouraging to us in the field of Hebrew education, and it indicates that the Poetry Society of America's meeting devoted to Hebrew will not long occupy the unique position it holds today."
contribute at least 5,000 of its members to Israel every year. This would not deplete British Jewry and it would transform Israel, he said.
Regarding Israel's position in the Middle East, Mr. Eban said that international support went to those who settle their problems peacefully.
The three basic trends on which Israeli diplomacy depended were: the balance of deterrent power; the opposition of the world community to the use of force; and the development of pluralism in the A'rab world.
"It is a safer bet to put money oq Arab diversity than on unity. Nothing divides them more than the drive for unity," he said.
Mayor Moshe Shaked brought the ^greetings of the Municipality to the conference, which went on nert day to discuss organizational questions, methods of encouraging immigration and the absorption of immigration from Britain. Several newcomers described their experiences and criticized delays and red tape in the work of the Jewish Agency departments responsible for helping immigrants to settle.
Resolutions were passed urging the Jewish Agency to give the immigrants' associations more responsibility In dealing with r>ew arrivals, as suggested by Louis Pincus, chairman of the Agency, at the recent meeting of the Zionist General Council, *nd to furnish its representatives abroad with more accurate information for intending immigrants.