Born in an Eastern European stetl, Netanyahu Sr is a noted revisionist writer. Revisionism is the Zionist right-wing movement founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky as opposed to the left-wing Mapay leadered by Meir Dizengoff and Ben Gurion. The pic shows him in the bris (circumcision ceremony) of his great-grandson.
3 comments:
No to quibble, but Wikipedia says that Netanyahu (nee Mileikowsky) was born in Warsaw, which was a major city and no shtetl. All of Poland was not one big shtetl. His father was a writer who made aliyah when Benzion (this was always his first name and not a common Jewish name unless your father was a Zionist activist) was 10. So to paint a picture of him as a shtetl yid is misleading.
My mother was born in the same year (though she always shaved 5 years off her age) in a bona fide shtetl that in many ways was something out of the 19th century (or the 18th or 17th) - no electricity, no telephone, etc. Even now in the year 2010 the local peasants still get around by horse drawn wagon. But Warsaw was another matter.
K
I had no intention of insulting Warshaw and the inhabitants of Warshaw saying that it was a stetl. I met Netanyahu Sr several times at Tel Aviv University, and he always looked like a member of Warshaw Yiddish Writers Club as described by I.Bashevis Singer. He is from another world.
Oddly enough, Ben Zion himself looks a lot like Singer, though perhaps the fact that neither had a single hair left on his head as they got older adds to the resemblance.
Benzion would not have hung around the Warsaw Yiddish Writers Club and schnorred cigarettes from his fellow writers and made passes at their girlfriends since his departed for Tel Aviv at age 10, but I admit he looks the part. How strange it is that the people Singer wrote about, full of vitality, were almost all gone by the time he wrote about them - virtually all wiped away as if by a tsunami, as if he were writing about the inhabitants of Pompeii and not that of his contemporaries a few short years before.
K
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