ANOTHER ONE TO DO AGAIN, ABOUT CULTURAL ZIONISM Poem by Nachoem M. Wijnberg

Going to Palestine to speak and write Hebrew and starting by translating in your head what you heard people say as a child walking on the street,
and leaving their languages to the Germans and the French because they need them so badly, und jeder soll nach seiner Façon selig werden.

Or speaking Yiddish as if it's Arabic,
also as a trick for when you bump into Arabs who are family, who have made such an effort to forget you and you have forgotten them.

Or you want to start by learning Yiddish because people who already speak and write German
hardly need to do their best to understand Yiddish, that's an advantage of Yiddish over all other languages.

But for that very reason it's easy to lose something important when translating from German into Yiddish or vice versa,
so maybe it would be better to speak French in Palestine.

You can easily mix Yiddish and German when speaking, or else you Germanize or Hebraicize your Yiddish, and so on, one language after the other,
around the world in six days and on the seventh you are silent, nodding at another old man you see on the street - why are we all so old?

You want to rediscover the truest feature of your people there where they are the most left behind,
and then search for what differs most from what the rest of your people have or what most resembles what those who have been left behind by other peoples have?

What they have forgotten to get rid of and then no longer dare to get rid of
because it reminds them that they too once asked: but do you want to get rid of me?

If you want to make your writing as true as possible, do you try to make it sound old
or the way someone writes who hasn't thought in advance about how to tell a story and just starts hacking letters into a rock with a chisel?

But the least changeable qualities will surely be the ones that are not lost when they are mixed with those of others,
and they make it possible to scream Jew, Jew at someone who writes in German or French?

What can be said about all Jews, or at least about all the good ones, besides their not believing in God,
or passing through history as the opposite of the Weltgeist that makes clay from shards and houses from clay?

If the Jew wants to have a state, why in Palestine, why not in Europe,
it must be possible to found a state where you already are.

Which state is not also a prison of nations,
a few more added every day?

You have always wanted to found a state in which you could change who you ask for help if you want to flee
just as easily as you change your opinions - and you don't even need to flee.

Yesterday you thought that the Jews would no longer want to have a state if they all got much older,
but today you have a different idea, so new that you don't need to apologize for the old one.

You read the declaration of independence as if you are an actor who wants to make the audience cry, if necessary about how bad his acting is,
because he is not sure he can get them to laugh.

If you say that I am listening to you as if I have promised to die for the state, you are probably right,
and then I would also say what might make me die for the state or the state for me.

In Zion the Jew would be too busy building houses and living in them,
but in Europe it is as if he has been naked from the day of his birth and has never visited a barber, but this morning they dressed him, gave him a shave and cut his hair.

You can always continue longing for Zion like Yehuda Halevi because he thought he would have good neighbors in Jerusalem,
if he had bought a house there the price would have gone up because of the neighbors or perhaps because of just one neighbor.


envoi
What a surprise, Zion being like Sicily,

almonds and laurels.

My dear Jews,

shall we have breakfast first?

There are three possibilities,

but the one on the square is best.

They have tables on the sidewalk,

but if you go down the hall past the kitchen you come into a small courtyard.