Married Life - David Vogel

A review I wrote a few years ago on David's Vogels Hebrew language novel Married Life:

David Vogel was a Hebrew poet and novelist who died at the hands of the Nazis in 1944. Married Life, his only long work in English translation, chronicles the world which Vogel inhabited, seedy Vienna between the World Wars, a place where marginalization was the norm.

Married Life stands on its own legs, but it is all the more amazing when the reader realizes that this novel was written in Hebrew in Europe, by a man who did not speak Hebrew as his daily language or live in Palestine, which had a population of native Hebrew speakers, in some numbers since the end of the 19th century. 

Vogel inserted his Hebrew into situations where it did not belong, plunging it into the kind of normality it would not receive until the full-flowering of Hebrew in British Mandate Palestine and later the State of Israel. So for this reason, but by no means the only or most important, Vogel's work is significant. He was one of the last secular writers of Hebrew to write outside the land of Israel. 

His poems, novels and novellas stand as interesting testaments to a language and people in transition to their own state and culture and language.

There Is a Last Solitary Coach - David Vogel

There is a last, solitary coach about to leave.


Let us get in and go,


For it won’t wait.




I have seen young girls going softly


With sad faces


That looked ashamed and sorry


Like purple sunsets,

 

And chubby, pink children


Who went simply


Because they were called.




And I’ve seen men


Who stepped proud and straight through the world’s streets,


Whose large eyes went ranging


Far and wide,


They too got in calmly


And left.

 

And we are the last.


Day is declining.


The last, solitary coach is about to leave.


Let us too get in quietly


And go,


For it won’t wait.

A Poet Without A Country; Facing the Sea

I have been re-reading David Vogel's (1891-1944) novella Nokah YaHam, Facing the Sea.


In order to fully appreciate Vogel, Hebrew poet, the author of two novels, a novella, and a series of diaries in Hebrew, many poems, you must understand that except for one year of living in Palestine, Vogel never wrote in a Hebrew environment. He was the last of his kind: the Hebrew writer in Europe.


And the setting of his novella, Facing the Sea, is intimately European. Barth and Gina are a young couple taking a vacation in a steamy southern town. They are entinced by the sensualism around them. Barth succumbs with another woman and Gina with Cici, the Dionysian Italian lover of brute, short proportions and powerful passions. The plot line is modernist in the sense we find in D.H. Lawrence. The passions can save us, can be a new religion, but they can tear us apart with their power.


There is nothing particularly new here. The plot line and concerns fit with the 1920s. What is new is that the writing is in Hebrew; the characters speak and write in a Hebrew which for the author were not his native tongue. We can presume that everyone in Facing the Sea would be speaking French.


Vogel created a naturalistic and modernist Hebrew in a place and time where it did not exist. In that sense, he was the precursor of Israeli writers who would take Hebrew into uncharted territories. But for Vogel, Hebrew was, oddly, quintessentially European. It could express the shades and nuances of conflicting impulses in modern life in a Western setting.


Vogel anticipated Hebrew linguistic normality. When he was killed by the Nazis in 1944 he was little known. A later generation of Israeli writers and readers discovered him because his project was a precursor to their own.