Manhood Rising beyond its Limits in Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Poems of the 1920s

Abstract

This article focuses on Uri Zvi Greenberg’s second Eretz-Yisrael volume, Manhood on the Rise (1926). The author examines whether Greenberg, an ardently Zionist poet, answered the demand for a national Hebrew poet. Employing Lacan’s three orders the author shows how the speaker in the poems identifies with national elements and through them becomes transformed into an ‘overly large’ unattainable subject.

The topic of masculinity, which is emphasized in the volume’s title and the poems, is consistent with the values of a national movement that made use of masculine images. Be that as it may, the female images of sexuality in the poems should also be examined. As opposed to the accepted opinion in Greenberg research, the author argues that the representations of femininity serve the omnipotent persona rising from the volume, as the speaker fetishistically displaces certain elements of the female body, and thus denies the existence of a complete female subject. This dissonance creates an autonomic, exaggerated ‘manhood that oversteps its limitations.’ The author contends that the poems in the volume overstepped the demand for a subject that served the greater-national idea because they failed to depict a full and relatable subject-figure that was crucial for the establishment of nationalism.