The Uncanny Meeting Point of Languages: Hebrew in G. Shofman and David Vogel’s Vienna

Abstract

G. Shofman and David Vogel wrote beautiful literature from the multilingual Vienna in the interwar period. Seemingly, they wrote monolingual Hebrew texts, but this Hebrew encodes all the other languages, and all the gaps, all the places that the chosen language cannot reach. The diverse usage of languages in the Hebrew texts was not (just) a result of a forced lingual situation but also held great poetic values.Reading Shofman and Vogel’s Hebrew prose texts today is not a fluent read, because of gaps that affect the reading: (1) periodical gaps are when the text mentions names, events and situations that were clear to readers at the time of publication, but will not be understood today without context. The second are the (2) spatial gaps: the text describes a space that the reader does not know, and so, if it contains poetic values, they will not be understood. The (3) lingual gaps that can be syntactical but mainly lexical. The most interesting gaps are (4) the unheimlich gaps, the uncanny feeling when the known and the unknown, the safe and the threatening meet in order to create the meta‑lingual meaning of the text, and change its poetic values.This paper demonstrates the presence of these four gaps in one short story by G. Shofman (In time of crisis), and in a novel written by David Vogel (Married life). In particular, to show what impact does the language(s) of the text have on past and current readers, and the way the authors express their attitude regarding the Hebrew language.