Reading for My Life by John Leonard

Author:John Leonard [Leonard, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101561003
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

I study the elusive cunning of the Biblical charm of this landscape: and isn’t all of this charm Arab, through and through? The lodge and the cucumber garden, the watchman’s hut and the cisterns, the shade of the fig tree and the pale silver of the olive, the grape arbors and the flocks of sheep—these picturesque slopes that bewitched from afar the early Zionists like Yehuda Halevi and Abraham Mapu; these primeval glades that reduced the poet Bialik to tears and fired Tchernichowsky’s imagination; the hypnotic shepherds who, from the very beginning of the return to Zion, captured the heart of Moshe Smilansky, who even called himself Hawaja Musa; the tinkle of the goats’ bells which entwined, like magic webs, the hearts of the early Zionist settlers, who came from Russia thirsty for Arab garb and to speed on their horses toward this Arab Biblicality… the tales told around the campfires of the Palmach, the enchanted groves of Amos Kenan and the longed-for cisterns of Naomi Shemer, yearning for the bare-faced stony mountain, for merger into the bosom of these gentle, sleepy scapes so very far removed from shtetl alleyways, so very far from Yiddish and the ghetto, right into the heart of this Oriental rock-strewn tenderness.

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