Robert Alter, now a celebrated scholar and translator of the Hebrew Bible and modern Hebrew literature, tells the story of how leaving New York for the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 led him to look past 18th-century English novels to Jewish subjects:
During my first years in Berkeley, I offered an undergraduate lecture course on contemporary fiction in which I comfortably inserted the Hebrew novelist S. Y. Agnon alongside [Vladimir] Nabokov, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer alongside Saul Bellow and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On the graduate level, I began giving seminars on modern Hebrew literature, conducted in Hebrew, for a very small cohort. As word spread, however, that one could do serious work in modern Hebrew at Berkeley, students began to arrive from across the country and from Israel. Berkeley has had a major program in Hebrew literature ever since. . . .
In the mid-1970s, I became interested in biblical narrative, having had a good grounding in biblical Hebrew as well as in the modern language. . . . I devised . . . a new course—conceivably, the first of its kind anywhere—on the poetics of biblical narrative. I had a relatively large group, about ten students, many of them quite gifted and with serious literary interests, and together we soon developed an excited sense that, even though this was the Bible, we were exploring new territory.
More about: Academia, Arts & Culture, Hebrew Bible, Judaic Studies, Modern Hebrew literature, Translation
