Mendele’s Era: ‘The Poetics of Distance’ from Abramovitsh’s Hebrew Style to Vogel’s Hebrew-Viennese Novel

Abstract

This article seeks to define one of the main challenges of Modern Hebrew literary writing. Many 19th-century Modern Hebrew authors encountered difficulties in writing realistic fiction in a non-spoken language. Mendele Mocher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh) found a solution to this in the form of a fictional spoken language that transformed the historical differences between the written and spoken language into a poetical principle that I suggest calling the ‘poetics of distance’.

The poetics of distance links Abramovitsh, the most recognized author of the Modern Hebrew prose, with David Vogel, one of the period’s most controversial figures. The term ‘Mendele’s era’ begins with Mendele’s Hebrew fiction and ends with the revival of spoken Hebrew in Palestine in the 1930s. The symbolic closure of this era is marked by the literary works of David Vogel, one of the last European-Hebrew writers. In the 1920s and 1930s Vogel insisted on writing European-Hebrew prose based on the poetics of distance because of the need to develop a poetic synthesis between Hebrew literary expression and the socialideological reality of a growing Hebrew speaking community in Palestine.