The Nation State and the Promised Land: An American Yiddish Writer in Israel, 1949, by Solomon Simon. English translation, 2024, by David R. Forman. All rights reserved.
Page numbers from Medines Yisroel un Erets Yisroel, 1950, Farlag Matones (NY), are included for those who wish to follow along with the original Yiddish, below.
To begin with the Introduction, click here.
I went into the post office to send a telegram, saying that I am coming home. The employee read the short text and wrinkled his face:
“For shame. A Jew should not send a telegraph to his children from Israel saying, I’m coming home. You are merely returning to your temporary residence. Every Jew’s home is here.”
I did not answer. I did not want to fight with anyone on my last day in the State of Israel.
We spent long weeks in Israel, as we had planned to, and I badly wanted to go home. I missed the children and my own four walls. I wanted to sleep in my own bed already. I missed the streets of Brooklyn, and I wanted to have a look at my America. Is it true, what they say here, that my non-Jewish neighbors on my street look at me with concealed hostility? Is it true that Jews do not feel safe on the streets of New York? They had spent so much time here convincing me that it is impossible for Jews to live among gentiles, that soon I would start to believe them. At least they had gotten me good and scared.
We rode to the airport. My brother and sister-in-law sat next to us, pensive and sad. I stole a look at my…
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brother: A middle-aged man. I tried to compare him to the eight-year-old who I’d left thirty-eight years before in former Russia, and they did not match up. I had been here nearly three months, and it seemed to me that I still had not really talked with him. The eighty-five days had passed like a shadow. Yes, as the Midrash says: “Like a shadow that flies past… Not like the shadow of a wall, but like the shadow of a bird that flies past.”[1]
My brother sighed:
“Will we see each other again?”
I did not answer. I just laid my hand on his shoulder. But I was not sad. I was thinking of home now. I wanted to be there. The joy of going home outweighed the sadness of parting with my brother and sister-in-law. The taxi sped across the Plain of Sharon. It was a cloudy day. It started to rain. My brother said:
“I have been in Israel for twenty-eight years, and it has never rained in the month of Elul. But it is raining now, and the fields look wet and sad, as I feel in my heart.”
My daughter, on the other hand, was happy. “Imagine! In just two days we will be in our home. I want to see what our house looks like.”
My brother asked me: “Do you really miss America that much?”
“What do you think?” I answered. “Do you forget thirty-eight years of life in one three-month spell?”
My sister-in-law wiped her eyes. “It would be good if you stayed here, in Yidn-Land.”
I did not answer. We had talked about America and Israel so often and so long. What good would a declaration in our last minutes do?
We had to wait two hours for our airplane to take off. The time crawled like molasses. When the airplane moved, I felt a weight come off me. I made myself…
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comfortable in my soft chair, leaned my head on the wall, and soon fell fast asleep, as after being deeply shaken.
**
*
A great joy came upon me when we landed in New York, and I saw the dear and happy faces of my children, colleagues, and friends who had come to the airport to welcome us. The Yiddish language sounded strangely sweet in their mouths. The Long Island landscape looked homey and familiar to me.
I lay down in my own bed, listening to the pre-dawn noise. I felt peaceful and secure – I was back home.
I got up early and went into my office. It is not possible to convey the warmth and doyikayt [sense of being at home where you are] that I felt when I saw the familiar furniture, my partner and my dental nurse. Everything sang to me, “Home again!”
But gradually, little-by-little, Israel began to hound me. Now it is Sunday morning. I’m sitting on the green bench next to my house. The street is full of children playing ball. None of them comes up to me. When they see me, they greet me: “Hi, you!” and are soon absorbed by their game. Yes, the orphan twins, Al and Richard, who are being raised by my neighbor McGreevey, come to ask for chewing gum. I am expecting them and give each of them a whole pack. Al asks in a child-like way:
“Where were you all summer”
Out of me pops the answer, “In the Land of the Jews.”
I wonder at myself that I did not say “in Palestine,” or “in the State of Israel,” but “in the Land of the Jews”.
Yidn-Land, Yidn-Land. It is different there. Now I am sitting on my brother’s veranda on Shabbes. A regiment of children led by a young girl runs by. “Shalom!” they all greet me in unison, and look expectantly at the pile of newspapers and magazines…
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lying on the table next to me. Later, they will come and rummage through the magazines. For now, there are only two children with me: my brother’s girl Aviva and the neighbor’s girl Ilona. They have already leafed through all of the “Devar L’yeladim”, the “Hamishmor L’yeladim”, “Hatsufe L’yeladim” and the other children’s magazines. They practice a dance, “Mayim.” They sing the song about water and accompany it with a dance. My wife remarks:
“Oh, if only we could bring them to an evening at our Sholem Aleichem Shul! The audience would go crazy.”
Soon the children will return from their “action”. The leader will come to visit my daughter. They speak very well together. My daughter speaks Yiddish and throws in an English word or two, for which the Sabra will quickly find a Hebrew expression, and the Israeli girl will speak in Hebrew, throwing in a Yiddish word, for which my daughter will find the Hebrew translation. My daughter will talk about the kibbutzim, and the Israeli girl will ask about America. A little later, the rest of the group will come read the newspapers and magazines. It will not take long before they begin to argue. Three or four of them will decide they want the same newspaper at the same time. I will make peace among them.
A ball flies into the window screen of my house with a bang. I wake from my daydream and go off for a walk.
I meet my old neighborhood policeman. He embraces me and begins asking me about the State of Israel. A completely different policeman floats into my mind. It was in Ra’Anana. I was standing in a bookstore. I came to pick up a book that I had ordered. The bookseller made me a little compliment:
“I have only gotten two copies of the Perush hegyoni le-sefer Iyov by Aaron [Armand] Kaminka. One for you and one for our Tanakh teacher in the high school. He can’t help it. He needs the book because this year he is teaching his students the Book of Job. But you, I guess, are a true lover of Tanakh.”
A policeman came into the store, a policeman with a revolver and all the…
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paraphernalia. He asked the bookseller if he had a volume of Isaiah with the commentary by S. L. Gordon. He’d lost his copy of the book. Now his whole set of the Tanakh is broken up.
The bookseller promised to get it for him. Meanwhile, he should meet a Jew from America, who also loves Tanakh. The policemen spoke Hebrew to me at first, then switched to Yiddish:
“So, you come from the diaspora and are interested in Tanakh, you’re probably an expert on “Shvarba”[2] So, how do you interpret verse thirteen in Isaiah, chapter six? No matter how much I look at the interpretations, the passage is not coherent to me.”
It gets worse and worse. Day in, and day out, the reality of home bangs up against corresponding facts from of the State of Israel.
I go to Brooklyn City Hall, and immediately think of the “Bet Hamoetsot” in Ra’Anana. I went to there to meet with the mayor of the city. He was happy to receive me and spoke a hearty Yiddish. He asked about the teachers in the American Yiddish schools. He’d been here in America decades before. Soon he ordered his secretary to clear his desk and bring tea for his guests. After tea, he showed us how you can see all of Ra’Anana from a third floor window. He told us to look and proudly asked us to look out and behold the large Hannukah Menorah, that stood at the top of the tower of the City Hall. He told me, “On Hannukah, when we light the menorah, it can be seen from twelve kilometers away.”
I am unhappy with the Yiddish schools. I compare these garrets with their cramped little rooms to the school buildings in Ra’Anana, Ein Harod, Givat Hen, and other communities in the State of Israel.
There is no sleeping at night. Dozens of ‘whys’ needle my brain:
“Why were they able to break with their old lives, while we all only wanted to make our lives more comfortable?”
“Why do we strive so hard for our children to become careerists, while they strive for their children to be kibbutzniks…
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or moshavniks? Didn’t we and they all come from the same shtetls, where we looked with contempt at people who thought only about their careers?”
The needling goes on:
“Run away. You can easily get into a kibbutz. You have a trade, are a good dental surgeon and you are still not too old. You would live among Jews. You would start to speak Hebrew. It is, after all, a Jewish language. In six months you would be able to write in Hebrew as well as in Yiddish, and absolutely be able to speak it. You could translate your children’s books into Hebrew yourself. What a dear readership you would have!”
But that would mean running away. Running away from a home again, from a people, running away from difficulties and immigrating again. And even more, I do not want to concede by running away that Jews have no hope for their Yiddishkayt here in America. I am not ready to give up on a community of five million so easily. Nor can I tear the Yiddish tongue out of my mouth.
But it is clear to me that we cannot go on with our lives the way they are, here in America. We cannot content ourselves with merely a supplemental[3] Judaism. Such a Judaism is an easy Judaism, but very hard to bear. We need to begin to teach ourselves and the public that we must break with our lives, adapt the old Judaism to our understanding and found Jewish shtetls here. So, we have tried and failed. This does not mean that we ought not to try again.
Certainly, it is a lot harder now to begin a break. We are all old people, and the young generation of Jews is not even antagonistic to us. It is foreign. Nevertheless, there is still a large middle-aged generation and a small youth.
One thing ought to be clear: If the diaspora goes on with its lack of creativity, it means a total rupture in Jewish history. A new Jewish people [folk] will now emerge. A people that will have the outer form of Judaism, but essentially will be a people like all other peoples, a small people in the Middle East. Those who satisfy themselves that this is temporary and hope that this is only a passing tempest will have an easy path. But those who do not want the Jewish people to…
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diminish, to go under everywhere and be left merely in the State of Israel, they must understand that a supplemental Judaism cannot do the job. Either they will break from their present lives and return to building an unique and authentic Judaism in the diaspora or, if not, they will have to agree to concentrate all strength in the building of the State of Israel, even abandoning all local Jewish institutions and Jewish life. They’ll have to support only those organizations that believe we are merely fertilizer for the State of Israel. There is no other way out, except to fool themselves and confuse the population with empty words.
These are harsh words. But they have not been expressed with a light heart. This is the truth as I have seen it. A person ought to speak the truth, even when it hurts him and all his near and dear ones.
END
[1] Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 96:2
[2] Esrim vearbe. Rashi’s commentaries.
[3] Simon used this phrase elsewhere in his writings, to describe a daily life that is essentially the same as that of the larger non-Jewish population, with religious observance on Shabbes and the holidays added on.
The Nation State and the Promised Land 