Product Description

Here is the stirring story of how Hebrew was rescued from the fate of a dead language to become the living tongue of a modern nation. Ilan Stavans’s quest begins with a dream featuring a beautiful woman speaking an unknown language. When the language turns out to be Hebrew, a friend diagnoses “language withdrawal,” and Stavans sets out in search of his own forgotten Hebrew as well as the man who helped revive the language at the end of the nineteenth century, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

The search for Ben-Yehuda, who raised his eldest son in linguistic isolation–not even allowing him to hear the songs of birds–so that he would be “the first Hebrew-speaking child,” becomes a journey full of paradox. It was Orthodox anti-Zionists who had Ben-Yehuda arrested for sedition, and, although Ben-Yehuda was devoted to Jewish life in Palestine, it was in Manhattan that he worked on his great dictionary of the Hebrew language.

The resurrection of Hebrew raises urgent questions about the role language plays in Jewish survival, questions that lead Stavans not merely into the roots of modern Hebrew but into the origins of Israel itself. All the tensions between the Diaspora and the idea of a promised land pulse beneath the surface of Stavans’s story, which is a fascinating biography as well as a moving personal journey.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100122 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-16
• Released on: 2008-09-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780805242317
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From School Library Journal
In this short, poignant, and thoroughly engaging memoir, Amherst professor and Latin American literary studies scholar Stavans takes us on his own personal journey to understand the reemergence of Hebrew as a vital and necessary step in his own intellectual and emotional development, as well as an important milestone in the origins of the modern state of Israel. His journey is also a quest to understand better the secularist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who at the end of the 19th century sought to revive Hebrew, engaging in a "linguistic resurrection." Stavans's intellectual journey parallels his search for concrete traces of Ben-Yehuda in Israel, ending with a visit to his gravestone. This personal memoir is supplemented with an informative acknowledgments section that will enable readers to find the sources for Stavans's immense knowledge of Ben-Yehuda's life and the history and development of Hebrew, Zionism, and the interrelationships with other languages and cultures. While an index of terms and names would have been helpful, the abbreviated chronology is a welcome addition. Recommended.—Herbert E. Shapiro, Empire State Coll. of the State Univ. of New York, Rochester
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
This is the eleventh book in the Jewish Encounters series, and 18 more are forthcoming. Stavans, a Mexican Jew, posits that he needed to gain some perspective on the development of Hebrew as an ancient language. His book is both a history of the language and of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who worked to revive the language at the end of the nineteenth century. Stavans reveals that he realized his search for Hebrew was for something more multifarious than a language. “It was an existential condition, a way of being, of establishing contact, with others, with God, and with myself.” His book is both personal journey and a biography of Ben-Yehuda. --George Cohen

Review
"Resurrecting Hebrew is exciting and penetrating. This story will be read with deep interest by all those who are fascinated by the renaissance of an ancient language."
--Elie Wiesel

"Ilan Stavan's personal search to discover his relationship with Hebrew leads him to explore the unlikely quest of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda to revive the language of the Bible, a language not spoken outside of the synagogue for two thousand years, as a spoken language. This quixotic, Borgesian undertaking, as unlikely as reviving Latin as the language of everyday Italians, somehow miraculously succeeded. Resurrecting Hebrew reveals, in a fascinating and informative way, how this impossibility became a reality. Written with commendable clarity and vitality, it is a brief, unforgettable masterpiece."
--Howard Schwartz, author of Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism

"There are fewer than eight thousand distinct words in the Hebrew Bible, yet a lone zealot and ragged refugees from every corner of the globe transformed the ancient Jewish tongue into the spoken language of millions. It is a story too fantastic for fiction, and Ilan Stavans tells it with erudition, charm, and a barely contained sense of astonishment."
--Aaron Lansky, president, National Yiddish Book Center and author of Outwitting History


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

Interesting, but a bit of a slow read
The Hebrew language is perhaps one of the most fascinating tongues in the history of civilization. It is the only language that has officially died and that has experienced a resurrection. Dr. Ilan Stavans, the Chair of Spanish at Amherst College, illustrates the rebirth of this amazing language in Resurrecting Hebrew.

The good professor approaches the rebirth from a pretty weird angle - his recollection of a dream that propels him to reconnect with his lost Hebrew. In his dream, a lady sits next to him at a party and speaks in a language he does not immediately recognize. Conveniently, a group of rabbis are nearby, and one informs him that the mysterious language is Hebrew. His dream haunts him since a Jewish native from Mexico City should recognize the tongue of his youth. To add to the mystery, the lady completely undresses herself during the conversation.

Bothered, the dream propels Dr. Stavans to search out its meaning. After much reflective thought and conversations will well-intended friends, he believes the dream means he is "missing" his Hebrew. This displaced Jewish man is in the midst of a language identity crisis.

To find his language he investigates the life of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a lexicographer who is credited with helping Hebrew to achieve its national status once again. Ardently he searches and passionately he writes. The prose, however, is dreadfully slow in places. The various conversations he alludes to in full quotation do not ordinarily occur in casual circumstances.

Love language? Read this book. Don't read it in bed, however, or the Hebrew language won't be the only thing that needs a resurrection.

Armchair Interviews agrees.

Meandering Book Lacking any True Insight
The redeeming aspect of this book is that it is extremely readable, a trait not usually associated with academic books. On the other hand, the author demonstrate a very low knowledge and understanding of the Hebrew language in its various forms, and an inability to comprehend that "Hebrew" as discussed in the book is actually three distinct notions ideologically amalgamated by him subconsciously: 1. The Classical Hebrew Language, 2. The Modern Hebrew Language, the final and most current version of it which is used in the State of Israel today, and 3. Hebrew as a metaphysical concept and language as theorized by the Jewish, the Christian and other religious traditions, philosophers, authors-of-fiction, and theoreticians. His inability to distinguish between these three notions of "Hebrew" deprives the book's text of serious speculative of contemplative significance. One personal issue that the author is trying to contend with is the notion that he might have "lost his Hebrew" which for him means, literally, an inability to speak the Modern Hebrew he had learned and used when he was involved with the Zionist movement and after that, during his several-year residency in Israel. Again, conceptual confusion abounds: Does "Hebrew" here mean some sort of spiritual meta-language, Jewish or otherwise, embedded in his spirit and then translated in to the other language he uses, or does "Hebrew" here mean, literally, the Modern Hebrew he learned and used during his residency in Israel? I suppose that his own lack-of-clarity and understanding of this question is the principal investigation of this book but since his own discourse on this issues, as expressed in the book, lacks, simultaneously, "Precision and Soul," it really says nothing, concludes nothing, and does not even offer any issues of irresolvable conflict worthy of contemplation.

Lexicographerlust
Savvy Ilan Stavans has here another highly intelligent and artfully constructed book. At heart one finds Stavans' odyssey after traces and the impact of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a Jewish lexicographer whose ideological ambitions for Hebrew may have clouded his appreciation of its true horizons. Although, most of the neologisms that he coined for a modernizing Jewish people fell into disuse within a decade or two of their creation, Hebrew thrives. Also, as in all of Stavans' books that I have read, is a powerful autobiographical current. The reflections, linguistic and otherwise, in seem to have been triggered by a difficult to understand dream, one for which Stavans believes his language withdrawal may account. In the course of his travels and narration of a quite beautiful history of Hebrew, its vernaculars and sages, its vicissitudes in the sea of history and its rescuers from the shoals of Diasporic neglect, the author also comes to understand the significance of his dream and the importance of Hebrew for his acceptance of the ties of tradition in its many manifestations. This book is a gem of historical insight and political provocation as well as a revealing look at the power of Hebrew and the divisions among its speakers concerning its appropriate employment.