“We were obliged to hate whatever we so much loved”: Diasporism and Mourning in the Hebrew Poetry of the 1920s

This paper focuses on the main Hebrew poets of the 1920s in Eretz Israel—Avraham Shlonsky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Isaac Lamdan —and their subversive attitude toward the Zionist ideology known as “the negation of exile.” By describing this ideology in Freudian terms of melancholy (negation of personal and collective loss), I suggest that their willingness and competence to cope with the trauma of immigration could be described as mourning. Furthermore, I argue that their modernist poetry does not consist solely of new poetical norms, in contrast with their predecessors, but also of their ambivalent Zionist discourse. This discourse was nostalgic regarding diasporic Jewish culture, their previous homelands, and even their Yiddish mother tongue, but at the same time it encouraged immigration to the new land of Israel. These poets challenged the dominance of melancholy in Hebrew culture and demanded that mourning—seen as a broader and less unequivocal perspective—should receive a central position in the culture of the 1920s.