Genre and the Emergence of Hebrew Modernism in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter offers a description of the late phase of modernization of Hebrew literature, from the 1860s with the rise of the Hebrew press, to fin-de-siècle modernist poetics as expressed namely by the genre of the short story. It holds a double perspective, regarding the development of the infrastructure of both Hebrew print and editorial initiatives (the daily Hebrew press, the feuilliton, the Hebrew “penny books”) and the modernist poetics of representation (the figure of the alienated modern Jew in the early poetics of David Frishman, Reuben Brainin, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Ben-Avigdor and Hayim-Nahman Bialik). Finally, this chapter discusses the cultural positions of influence and imitation in nineteenth-century Hebrew translation (Kalman Shulman, translator of Eugène Sue; Meir Halevy Leteris, translator of Goethe; Eduard Zalkinsohn, translator of Shakespeare; Nahum Slouschz, translator of Emile Zola).