However, contrary to the many similar squares in Masovian towns, surrounded as they are by multi-storied houses with sloping roofs, their dingy plastered façades each in a different colour, the one here in Wyszogród is distinguished by one essential feature. The market square in Wyszogród stands out neither for its size, nor its opulence. Here the boy grew up into the man who later in life negotiated “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” with the pope and the top diplomats of France and the British Empire. In Wyszogród he would spend the first years of his childhood, later moving downriver to nearby Płock.
The story of Nahum Sokolow – a titan of Hebrew-language journalism, co-author of the Balfour Declaration, and chairman of the World Zionist Organization – begins in a tel overlooking the Vistula. It hardly seems a coincidence that the name of this Polish town means tel. And thus the world-famous Israeli city owes its name to Sokolow, who himself was born in… Wyszogród. A stroke of genius, as tel means an ancient settlement on a hill in Hebrew, and Aviv means spring. Sokolow entitled his translation Tel Aviv. The lightning-quick translator was Nahum Sokolow, a Polish Jew then known as the editor-in-chief of the Hebrew-language daily Ha-Tsefirah published in Warsaw.
A Hebrew-language translation came out that very year in Warsaw. He entitled it Altneuland, which literally means “old-new land”. Herzl was already then drafting a Zionist utopia in his head – a book he would publish in 1902. That, at least, is when Herzl “sent a warm letter to promising”, as professor Miriam Eilav-Feldon explains, “to express his appreciation for the utopian novel in his own work”. Theodor Herzl, the author of The Jewish State (1896), learned about Osterberg-Verakoff’s Zionist utopia apparently not until 1899. Petersburg to consult the matter with the Russian foreign minister. Due to his efforts, within just a few months President Benjamin Harrison asked the consul in Jerusalem to draw up a report and the ambassador in St. Blackstone was an American Christian Zionist, who – in real life! – mobilised a significant part of the American establishment in 1891 to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The novel begins with the ceremonious unveiling of a statue of William Blackstone, who is revered as the founder of the kingdom. In 1893 one Max Osterberg-Verakoff published a German-language Zionist utopian novel entitled The Jewish Kingdom in the year 6000 (2241 AD).
0 kommentar(er)
