zutot 14 (2017) 112-124 ZUTOT: Perspectives on Jewish Culture brill.com/zuto brill.com/zuto

The Non-Reading Reader: European Hebrew Literature at the Turn of the 20th Century

Lilach Nethanel Bar-Ilan University

Abstract

European Hebrew literature presents a challenge to the study of early-twentieth- century national literature. By the end of the nineteenth century, the reading of mod- ern Hebrew in Europe was neither part of a religious practice, nor did it merely satisfy a purely aesthetic inclination. It mainly functioned as an ideological means used by a minority of Jews to support the linguistic-national Jewish revival. However, some fun- damental contradictions put into question the actual influence of this literature on the political sphere. This article asks a series of questions about this period in the history of Hebrew readership: How did the non-spoken Hebrew language come to produce popular Hebrew writings? How did this literature engage the common Jewish reader? In this article I propose a new consideration of Hebrew reading practices. I argue for the inclusion of the non-reading readers as important contributors to the constitution of the Jewish literary nation.

Keywords modern Hebrew literature – Hebrew readership – history of reading

Non-reading

The study of literacy in Europe, as it was conducted by sociologists, historians and literary scholars who studied the reception of literary texts, has defined the reader as the main figure when it came to the pedagogical, aesthetic and political transformations of modern society.1 The study of modern reading

1 See, for instance, the relationship between print and radical movements in 18th-century England, as described by Wittman: ‘with the multiplication of production and reception

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/18750214-12Downloaded341284 from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:09:28AM via free access The Non-Reading Reader 113 in Europe examines the social conditions that allowed the spread of literacy, while taking into account population growth throughout time.2 The theory of reception underlines the prominent role of the reader in the constitution of the meaning of the text.3 The construct of ‘the ideal or idealized reader,’4 who underlines the construction of textual meaning, turns into a historical com- munity of readers that holds considerable political and economic power. It appears that these definitions have overlooked the contribution of the educated non-reading reader to modern literature’s evolvement into a source of socio-political power. Non-reading was firstly defined by major historians of reading such as Atlick and Chartier. They consistently associated it with the illiterate lower classes and regarded non-reading as a barrier to the spread of literacy.5 In a meaningful contrast with this approach, my argument is that non-reading was developed by and for the sake of the literate. As such it differs from ‘unruly reading,’ ‘indirect literacy’ and other extensive readings which are associated with the illiterate or the ‘common’ reader.6 Non-reading marks a hermeneutic preference for the blank spaces over the black letters on the densely printed pages of the most popular genres of 19th-century literature: the periodical and the novel. Non-reading is sustained by paratextual infor- mation such as covers, titles, editions, woodcuts and other illustrations that

of the novel in late 18th century the mania for reading novels assumed a sociopolitical dimension for the first time.’ R. Wittman, ‘Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?,’ in G. Cavallo and R. Chartier, ed., A History of Reading in the West (tr. Lydia G. Cochrane), (Amherst, MA 1999) 304. 2 R.D. Atlick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800– 1900 (Chicago/London 1957); R. Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la révolution Française (Paris 1990). 3 20th-century reception theory, starting with the work of Hans Robert Jauss including reader- response theory and its different developments in the field of literary studies (Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and others) as in the field of cultural studies (Stuart Hall), is an important refer- ence which demands further development. However, the question of the reader’s constitu- tion of the literary object remains a key concept. 4 S. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA 1980) 48. 5 See for example Atlick’s overview of the conditions of living in Victorian England, from the diffusion of print, to home lighting and the use of spectacles. Atlick, The English Common Reader, 98. 6 Modern changes in reading practices are often defined by the use of the terms ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ readings. Intensive reading refers to a repetitive and thorough reading of a limited collection of texts, while extensive reading could be defined as ‘an eagerness to consume new and varied reading materials for information, and for private entertainment in particular.’ R. Wittemann, ‘Reading Revolution,’ 285.

zutot 14 (2017) 112-124 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:09:28AM via free access 114 Nethanel accompany the text, as well as by the author’s name.7 These elements enabled one to treat a large corpus of printed texts by focusing on white spaces, bold titles, author’s signature and illustrations. The practice of non-reading is a required skill based on a reconstruction of the literary object by its partial manifestations. Hence, in order to fully understand the constitution of the ‘great’ literary oeuvres one should take into account the ‘great’ unread.8 The history of literature must therefore be per- ceived not only in terms of a characterization of its readers, but also by a con- sideration of its non-reading readers. Pierre Bayard already suggested a detailed description of this practice in Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus?9 Most of the time, says Bayard, we discuss books we have not actually, or, at least, completely read. Each of us is, at times, a non-reading reader, when we skip a paragraph in a book, or when we discuss Joyce’s or Balzac’s writing which impressed us though we only read some fragments from their prose. But non-reading demands further reflection, since it suggests that what was not (yet) read is an inseparable part of the formation of literary meaning. Literature is introduced into the political and social spheres not only by being read, but also by the anticipations and expectations it generates. This article focuses on a particular historical case of non-reading, which can be detected in late-19th-century European Hebrew literature. Modern Hebrew literature draws a particular attention to some of the aspects of the non- reading reader, as it illustrates the important role of non-reading in the consti- tution of modern literatures. This article addresses the limited Hebrew literacy of European Jewry while exploring the unprecedented expansion of diverse popular Hebrew writings from the middle of the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th century. It focuses on a key period which combines two historical phenomena: the grow- ing engagement of modern Hebrew literature in the nation-building project,

7 The importance of paratextual information, initially noted by Gerard Genette, was recently developed in Shlomo Berger’s book Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective (Leiden 2013). 8 The ‘great unread,’ a term Margaret Cohen coined in 1999, refers to what she calls ‘the dusty documents neglected in libraries,’ containing the ‘non-canonical and forgotten [pre-realis- tic] novels’; ‘the vast number of books out there.’ M. Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ 1999) 23. This term was further developed by Franco Moretti. See mainly F. Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, in his Distant Reading (London/New York 2015) 43–62. 9 P. Bayard, Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (Paris 2007).

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The Non-reading Hebrew Reader

The 19th-century Hebrew poet Judah Leib Gordon assumed that future genera- tions of European Jewry would not embrace the modernization of Hebrew lan- guage and literature. In his 1871 poem, ‘Le-mi ani ʿamel’ (For whom do I toil?) Gordon claimed that once assimilated Jews gain linguistic access and develop an aesthetic sensibility to European culture, they will prefer to become readers of Russian, German or French literatures.10 In 1892, the year Gordon passed away in St. Petersburg, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, who would come to be known as the national Hebrew poet, published his first Hebrew poem in Odessa. The following decade was perhaps the most fertile period for Hebrew literary production in Europe.11 However, Bialik too expressed doubts regarding the survival of modern Hebrew literature among an emancipated European Jewry despite his ambition to lead a great Hebrew cultural revival.12 In the midst of its national turn and with its aspiration of gaining a meaningful position in the public sphere of European Jewry, modern Hebrew literature had to face perhaps the most complicated fact of its exis- tence: its non-reading readers. European Hebrew readers of the 19th century faced two major difficulties. The first was the difficulty of becoming a modern Hebrew reader. Or in other words, the difficulty of gaining access to Hebrew as the language of understanding and as the language of self-understanding, the language of personal and communal identification. The second difficulty was to understand Hebrew descriptions of the sur- rounding actual world, or to mimetically represent reality in the Hebrew lan- guage. This is the impossibility of narrating the nation in the nation’s own words, according to Anderson. Unlike the languages of other modern national

10 J.L. Gordon, ‘Le-mi ani ʿamel,’ in Y. Fichman, ed., Selected Writings of Yudah Leib Gordon (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv 1950) 27. 11 In that decade, Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote his four major poems and Saul Tchernichowsky his three idylls. The first collections of short stories by Hebrew modern- ists, among them Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Gershon Shofman, Joseph Hayyim Brenner and Uri Nisan Gnessin, were also published by Tushiyah publishers in Warsaw at that time. 12 See Bialik’s poems dedicated to Y.L. Gordon and Ahad Ha-am. See also his three essays on Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh’s life and work, and his essay about the next generation of Hebrew poetry, published in 1907 under the title ‘Shiratenu ha-tzeʿyrah.’

zutot 14 (2017) 112-124 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:09:28AM via free access 116 Nethanel literatures in Europe, modern Hebrew was not a spoken language engaged in writing the nation.13 The mimetic power of Hebrew was a priori restricted. In attempting to represent the actual secular world in Hebrew, this literature met with the inevitable barrier of being a non-spoken, bookish language. Hebrew was a sacred, written language, the language of the sacred Jewish books and of religious ritual, the language of prayer and liturgy, the language of the secret and of the transcendental. It was, one might say, a language of misunderstand- ing: the misunderstanding, misreading, mispronouncing, and misinterpret- ing of those who led a traditional Jewish life and followed the authority of their religious leaders, such as the rabbi or the religious scholar who guided the Jewish community in their religious practice. More than it represents the revolutionary transformation from a sacred to secular society and from a tra- ditional community to a dispersed nation, modern Hebrew literature is to be thought of as a literature which inherited a non-Hebrew reading readership. As early as in 1867, the young Jewish author Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh was concerned by the encounter between the Hebrew author and the Jewish people:

The people wonder about its existence [i.e. of the new Hebrew literature] and ask: What does this literature mean to you? What does it want? What is its point? What difference will the Hebrew writer make? What gain is there in knowing the language? And the writers, unable to come up with a good response, are embarrassed. Woe to the respected writer, one who has written so many books, when he becomes the target of the common people, who ask him this question in their ignorance.14

This imagined encounter between the modern Hebrew author and the poten- tial Jewish reader exposes the ‘common people’s’ misunderstanding, misinter- preting, misreading of Hebrew writing. In Abramovitsh’s time and towards the turn of the 20th century, a new misunderstanding emerged in the new Hebrew writings that reflected modern Jewish nationalism in its romantic and lyric

13 Robert Alter suggested the term ‘realism without vernacular’ as it is expressed in 19th- century Hebrew literature. R. Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism (Seattle, WA 1988). Yael Reshef demonstrates that fact in her linguistic analysis of the literary dialogue in early 20th-century Hebrew prose. See Y. Reshef, ‘“The language that follows speech will not be the same as the one that precedes it”: Spoken Hebrew in the Pre-state Period’, Journal of Jewish Studies LXIV–1 (Spring 2013) 157–186. 14 S.Y. Abramovitsh, ʿEin mishpat (Zhytomyr 1867) 10.

Downloadedzutot from 14 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 112-124 12:09:28AM via free access The Non-Reading Reader 117 interpretations. This new literature demanded the reader’s direct and intimate literacy, no longer relying on traditional religious mediators. It demanded the reader’s personal identification when it presented him with the poetics of social realism and with the modernist sensibility regarding questions of iden- tity. For the generation of writers who started to publish at the turn of the cen- tury, Hebrew literature had become a region in which the nation could gain a potential status. It expressed an inquiry into being which had no political manifestation other than the linguistic one. However, even half a century after Abramovitsh’s essay, in the most promis- ing decade of the Hebrew literary revival, modern Hebrew was read only by a minority of the multilingual Jewish readers in Europe. Beyond its problematic linguistic accessibility, the modernization project of Hebrew literature was not ideologically shared by the majority of European Jewry who did not necessar- ily adopt it as a component of their national identity. A statistic of Jewish readers attending a lending library in the city of Poltava in Ukraine shows that in the years 1904–1905, a mere six percent of the read- ers borrowed Hebrew books only, while 65 percent consulted Russian books exclusively.15 Similar figures appear a decade later, in David Frishman’s speech delivered during the 1913 conference of Hebrew language and culture in Vienna.16 This statistics relate to Hebrew books and do not include the Hebrew press which had the largest reading public during the mid-19th century and the turn of the 20th century. However, the crisis in Hebrew reading affected the press as well: in 1902 Frishman himself was obliged to close his literary periodical Ha-dor for lack of subscribers. Available statistics regarding the diffusion of the Jewish press in Warsaw at the beginning of the 20th century illustrate the considerable gap between the flourishing Yiddish press and the Hebrew press. These data show that in the year 1906 three daily Hebrew newspapers were printed in Warsaw with a total of 12,000 copies in comparison to five daily newspapers in Yiddish, totaling 96,200 copies.17 Although books and jour- nals involve different reading practices, the statistics generally indicate the

15 S. Goldberg, ‘Are There Any Hebrew Readers? A Few Statistics’ (in Hebrew), Ha-shiloah 17 (1908) 417–422. 16 D. Frishman, ‘ʿAl ha-sifrut ha-yafa’, in D. Frishman, Collected Writings, vol. 8 (in Hebrew) (Warsaw/New-York 1932) 52–53. 17 Ch. Shmeruk, Prokim fun der Yiddishe Literatur Geschichte (Tel Aviv 1988) 304. I warmly thank Prof. Nathan Cohen, my teacher and colleague, for introducing me to the statistical data which appears in this book.

zutot 14 (2017) 112-124 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:09:28AM via free access 118 Nethanel considerable gap between the relatively modest Hebrew reading public and the Yiddish one. Another perspective the statistics of Jewish readers do not take into account is the reading Jewish women. In her study Iris Parush provides what can be considered as an alternative history of modern Hebrew reading. The decline of Hebrew readership at the turn of the 20th century, as discussed by Dan Miron in his book When Loners Come Together, is less relevant when it comes to female readership.18 In the case of female readers, there is in fact a rise in the number of readers. As Parush writes, ‘The 1880s mark a shift in Hebrew literacy rates for women, and the gates of Hebrew literature begin to open to them’.19 However, despite this rise, the majority of Jewish women readers read Russian rather than Hebrew: ‘For most of the girls, it was Laaz reading and not the reading of Hebrew literature that shaped their cultural world and social perspectives.’20 A main conclusion to be drawn here is that the question of women readers does not exclusively concern the issue of marginality. It is also a fascinating illustra- tion of a more general problem with modern Hebrew readership: non-reading readers who relate to modern Hebrew literature based on a limited literacy. This short survey of Jewish readership leads to the conclusion that the larger part of the Hebrew literary field was composed by latent participants: Those who did not read Hebrew but approved of the institution of Hebrew literature, supported its linguistic revival project, and recognized the names and pho- tographs of its most important authors. An important, though unintentional, reference to those non-Hebrew reading readers is found in Frishman’s descrip- tion of the Jewish community in Warsaw, at the beginning of the 20th century:

I abhor anything that is merely a kind of ‘sport,’ without any foundation in real life—for everything around us, the whole of life and each and every contact with the outside world or even with home life itself—all rebels against it. People take the most precious thing we own, language, and they turn it into a kind of pastime, a toy with which they amuse themselves a little before us. Here’s some youth who mumbles and stut- ters some fifteen minutes’ worth of mar, shalom and heydad, and this

18 D. Miron, When Loners Come Together: A Portrait of Hebrew Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv 1987). 19 I. Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (Hanover/London 2006) 218. 20 Parush, Reading Jewish Women, 220. And see also the poem ‘Levivot’ by S. Tchernichowsky, with the mention of the small library in Gitl’s house, containing Pushkin’s poetry aside a Tsene rene, a collection of biblical stories in Yiddish.

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mumbling and stuttering is supposed to suffice. This stuttering is the very acme of his ‘kultura,’ his ‘last word.’ Would it not be better if such a young man were to study Hebrew, so as to make it his most proper language rather than letting it flutter half-asleep from his lips? Here’s a young Hebrew girl, who captures my attention for a whole fifteen minutes as her feet move rapidly along the roller skate floor, and much in the same way she capti- vates my attention with the splendid beauty of her . . . Hebrew stuttering. Here’s the teacher, well-versed in all the familiar ‘methods,’ and what he actually teaches is: ‘Zehu diyo, zehu shnei doyim’ [This is ink, this is two inks], ‘zehu shamayim, zehy shnei shmeymim’ [This is one sky, this is two skys; these are obvious mistakes in the Hebrew plural, LN], and he talks to me in his ‘Hebrew’ which is more like Tatar—would such a teacher not have done better studying some of our Torah and our Gemarah and our late literature? Surely he would suddenly realize how wonderful and how rich our language is.21

This description includes two representative members of the potential Hebrew reading public: the young girl and the Hebrew teacher. What stands out right away, but whose importance was ignored by Frishman, is that they both rec- ognize David Frishman as a Hebrew author, as they insist on addressing him by uttering a few sentences in that language. But it is equally clear that none of them can actually read his literary work, since their language is manifestly poor. Frishman deplores their poor Hebrew competence, and thus criticizes Hebrew speech as it was exercised by the Zionist movement in Warsaw. At the same time, however, he disregards the important fact that the Hebrew author is recognized as a public figure and the linguistic project in which he is involved is recognized as a national project.

The True Extent of the Documented Reading Scenes

In Israel in 1953, past the period at the focus of our discussion, Golda Meir offers a clear example of the phenomenon of non-reading. In a personal letter to the bilingual writer Zalman Shneur, she thanks him for sending her a new edition of his collected poems:

I would like to thank you very much for the gift and I very much appreci- ate the dedication. Don’t think, as you suggested during our conversation,

21 D. Frishman, Ba-ʾaretz (Warsaw/Berlin 1913) 19–20.

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that I don’t own your writings. I have always enjoyed them, just like any other Jew who ever took a glance at one of your books.22

Zalman Shneur, born in 1887, was one of the best-known (but not necessar- ily most read!) modern Jewish writers of the first decades of the 20th century. Meir indicates this popularity when she mentions how Jews in general can be expected to have at least ‘glanced’ at his work. Together with its original recipient Zalman Shneur, the reader of Meir’s letter must wonder whether the book was ever opened for more than a glance, and whether the new edition of Shneur’s collected writings ended up merely gracing the future prime min- ister’s study or reception hall. Interestingly, Meir’s remark and her compari- son to ‘any other Jew,’ implies that the literary work here is seen as an aspect of a national identity rather than the basis of intimation between author and reader as presumed by essentialist theories of reception. In its nationalistic association, then, modern Hebrew literature aimed to create a national library instead of a common reader. Here is a detailed scene of reading, much different than the one implied in Meir’s letter. This scene is taken from an essay by the Hebrew author Joseph Hayyim Brenner dedicated to his deceased friend, the author Uri Nissan Gnessin who passed away in 1912, at the age of 33. The year is 1900, and Brenner has just joined Gnessin who lived in Warsaw at that time:

And then one evening, he brought along a new issue of the Luah Achiʾasaf periodical, one that had left the printers just that day, and as it turned out, it was an evening when we had bread, tea, and oil in the lamp as well as a warm stove. We sat down to dinner together and started: ‘On a sum- mer’s day, on a hot day, when the sun from on high burns like the day’s oven, when the heart craves a quiet corner to dream’ and so on,23 a poem by H.N. Bialik! And after some time, by the end of the meal, we could each boast that we knew the poem by heart . . .24

Brenner and Gnessin are described here reading a poem by their elder con- temporary, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, a prominent member of the Odessa circle, who eventually became to be considered the national Hebrew poet. This read-

22 Golda Meir’s letter to Zalman Shneur dating from the 21st of July 1953. The letter is stored in the Genazim Archives in Tel Aviv. ‘ביום קיץ, יום חום, עת השמש ממרום הרקיע תלהט :Bialik’s strophe as cited by Brenner 23 כתנור היום, עת יבקש הלב פינת שקט לחלום.’ 24 J.H. Brenner, ‘Uri Nisan: A Few Words’ (in Hebrew), in A. Beylin, Brenner in London (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv 2006) 74.

Downloadedzutot from 14 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 112-124 12:09:28AM via free access The Non-Reading Reader 121 ing scene, together with the modest dinner and the intimacy of their rented apartment, admirably configures the intersection of Hebrew literature with daily life. It implies contiguity between literature and nourishment; it suggests a semantic association between desire for mutual understanding through lan- guage and through aesthetic experience. Finally, it perfectly defines Brenner and Gnessin’s relationship at that time: the poem cited in the letter was pub- lished under the significant title ‘Friendship and Withdrawal’ (Reʿut ve-hit- bodedut). Implicitly gesturing toward the association of the poem’s theme and the intimate situation in which it was read, Brenner ends his citation of the poem just before the end of the first verse: ‘Come to me, come to me tired friend!’25 Brenner and Gnessin’s Yiddish speech and what seems like the secu- lar ritual of dinner are replaced by the reading of a Hebrew poem and later on by its oral citation. This scene of reading aloud illustrates how written Hebrew was gaining its unique position in speech not by a calculated reconstruction and implementation of spoken Hebrew, but through literature. But could this reading of Bialik’s poem by two prominent Hebrew writers, mark the actual extent of Hebrew reading at the beginning of the 20th century? Looking at the statistics of one of the most important publishing houses, where both Brenner and Gnessin published their works, it seems that modern Hebrew literature was still restricted to a modest circle of readers. This publishing house, Tushiyah, was founded in 1899 in Warsaw by Ben- Avigdor (Abraham Leib Shalkovich). It was to become the most important publishing house of the period, gathering together an exemplary collection of modernist Hebrew prose. However, Ben-Avigdor’s initial project was slightly different: Much like Edward Lloyd, the mid-Victorian editor whose field of expertise was low cost publishing, Ben-Avigdor firstly introduced sifrei Agora (penny books), a series of cheap publications aimed to expand Hebrew reader- ship. In his inaugural manifest published in 1899 Ben-Avigdor wrote:

One feels there is an important lack in our Hebrew literature: it is the lack of belles-lettres. This part, without which no popular literature can exist, is almost completely absent from our literature. (. . .) a literature in which we shall be able to see the life of our people described (. . .) in clear and vivid images, in true pictures taken straight out of life. Such a literature we still don’t have.26

‘בוא אליי, בוא אליי, רע עייף!’ :The missing verse from Bialik’s poem in Hebrew 25 26 Ben-Avigdor, ‘To the Supporters of the Hebrew Language and Literature’ (in Hebrew) [1899], in J. Even and I. Ben-Mordechai, eds., Early Hebrew Realism: Second Volume (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem 1993) 206.

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Ben-Avigdor’s fundamental aspiration was to transform modern Hebrew liter- ature into a literature addressing the common people. He wished to encourage a poetics of representation seeking an optimal correlation with the semiotics of the readers’ life. But Hebrew readership never extended beyond a social minority of engaged Hebrew readers, who for the most part were themselves Hebrew writers, such as Brenner and Gnessin reading Bialik.27 Modern Hebrew literature did not develop along a similar route to that of Lloyd’s popular literature in England, as Ben-Avigdor had wished. In many respects, Ben-Avigdor’s attempt to expand Hebrew readership was a failure. About a decade after he first published his manifest in 1899, Ben-Avigdor wrote to Zalman Shneur about the economic consequences of his unsuccessful effort:

I lived in poverty (. . .) I couldn’t even afford living in a nice apartment and have nice furniture (. . .). Nor do I have a lot of money in the bank. You yourself mention that I have always been steeped in work and wor- ries and surrounded by paperwork and so on—things which shouldn’t be taken to suggest gain and profit, but only that my circumstances were difficult and my material conditions harsh. What all this bears out is how badly the Hebrew readers treat their publishers.28

Ben-Avigdor implies further on that the massive production of Hebrew writ- ings was not at all based on fictional literature. This is in fact a crucial point to

27 In his description of the Hebrew republic of letters, Dan Miron discusses the composition of Hebrew readership (Miron, When Loners Come Together). Miron argues that the eco- nomic and social ground of modern Hebrew literature was established during the last two decades of the 19th century (69). But at this turning point only a small part of European Jewry was involved in this project, and was mainly located in the Jewish settlement of Czarist Russia, as Miron acknowledges himself (77). Furthermore, the Hebrew readership of the turn of the century far from resembled Atlick’s ‘common reader’ in England and other modern readerships of popular literature in Europe, since it was mainly composed of traditional Jewish readers whose Hebrew reading skills were learned and still mostly practiced in a religious context and hence not yet free from religious connotations. See Saul Tchernichowsky’s illustration of the traditional Jewish reader in Brit mila from 1902. 28 Ben-Avigdor’s letter to Zalman Shneur, dating 6 December 1912 (p. 3). The letter is stored in the Genazim Archives in Tel Aviv. It is essential to forming an understanding of Ben- Avigdor’s motivation in describing his economic failure, and any consideration for the context in which it was written. It is a part of an extended correspondence between Shneur and Ben-Avigdor regarding Shneur’s rights in Ben-Avigdor’s publications of his work. This negotiation turned quickly enough into a serious dispute and led to a rupture between the editor and the young writer.

Downloadedzutot from 14 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 112-124 12:09:28AM via free access The Non-Reading Reader 123 the understanding of the non-Hebrew readers at that time. Ben-Avigdor refers to Shneur’s books which he published—his first collection of poems titled At Sunset and his collection of short stories which included ‘From Death,’ and writes the following:

You mention At Sunset. Let’s assume that three thousand copies were sold in the course of seven years. How much money did we make on that? (. . .) And as regards From Life and Death—we didn’t even break even. If any money was made on Hebrew books, it was in exceptional cases like Bialik’s poems or the Sefer ha-Agada which is really a text book.29

Compared to Ben-Avigdor’s initial vision from 1899, only a small part of his publications during the first decade of the century was actually dedicated to Hebrew prose. Only 17 percent of all publications at the Tushiyah publish- ing house were of Hebrew prose, while 43 percent were publications of texts books, Hebrew manuals, and readers destined for children. A similar percent- age is also found at Achiʿasaf publishing, where only 33 percent of publications were of Hebrew prose. In comparison to these two publishers, only Moriah publishing, which was founded by Bialik in Odessa, included higher figures of prose. About 40 percent of Moriah’s publications during the first decade of the century were of belles-lettres, and the rest were dedicated to other genres, such as text books (25 percent) and children’s books (30 percent).30 Hebrew remained an unpopular language for the majority of Jewish read- ers during the late 19th century and the turn of the 20th century. This is why the most popular genres of Hebrew writings at the time were not modernist prose, such as Gnessin’s novellas and Shneur’s poetry. Modern Hebrew litera- ture did not gain its popularity because of its devoted readers; these were a social minority among European Jewry. Rather, its popularity flourished in the new regions of secular national education such as carefully edited text books, linguistic manuals and children’s books. It is therefore remarkable that histo- riographies of this period of Hebrew writing tend to focus exclusively on the production of Hebrew literary prose and poetry, even though these were rela- tively marginal genres at the time.31

29 Ben-Avigdor’s letter to Zalman Shneur, 6 December 1912, 3. 30 My calculations are based on bibliographical data available at the National Library in Jerusalem. 31 Among the rich library of studies dedicated to the period of revival in Hebrew literature, the majority focuses on the description of Hebrew prose and poetry. Among these exten- sive historiographical studies are the works of Joseph Klausner, Gershon Shaked, Shimon Halkin, Nurit Guvrin, Dan Miron, Hanan Hever, Avner Holzman, Michael Gluzman,

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The true origins of the Jewish national revival hardly seem to have been the new poetic forms adapted by Hebrew authors, as they could not be read by the majority of the Jewish readership. In contrast with concurrent European litera- tures, modern Hebrew literature is hardly a celebration of the emancipation of the common reader and the secularization of reading practices. Modern Hebrew literature should not be seen as a project of reading. It is better defined as an attempt to reposition literature as a worldly object to a non-reading audi- ence. This was an audience for whom modernist Hebrew prose and poetry was only secondary to text books and manuals such as those of the now forgot- ten Samuel Leib Gordon, an author whose writings were more popular than those of Brenner and Gnessin together among the non-Hebrew readers of the Hebrew literature. For these readers, representing the majority of the Hebrew readership at the beginning of the 20th century, a glance at the closed book was sufficient and the reading aloud of Hebrew verse in early-20th-century Warsaw was a memorable event.

Shahar Pinsker, and Allison Schachter. In fact it is practically impossible to find a general historiographical description that puts Hebrew text books and linguistic manuals at the center of production of Hebrew writing in the period of national revival. The only excep- tion are studies dedicated to children’s literature such as the canonical research of Uriel Ofek on children’s literature in Hebrew, Ziva Shamir’s studies of Bialik and Adina Bar-El’s research on children’s literature and periodicals in Yiddish.

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