Poetry
אומרים ישנה ארץ
Not translated into English
Saul Tchernichovsky · 1923
Synopsis
They say there is a land, a land drunk with sunshine, with seven columns, where seven planets bloom on every hill and where everything a man has hoped for comes to pass. The one who speaks asks where this land is and who will show the way to it: deserts and seas have been crossed, and they have walked so long that their strength is spent, without finding it. The first version ends on this doubt. The second, written shortly afterwards, places rabbi Akiva at the entrance to the land, and the traveller asks him where the saints are and where the Maccabee is.
Context
Tchernikovsky had sought in vain a post as a doctor in the Land of Israel as early as 1909, then again in 1922, from Constantinople; he then settled in Berlin. There he wrote the poem in 1923: this first version poses questions without answers and closes on a quotation from the book of Lamentations. For the world conference of the Hehalutz movement, held in Berlin in the spring of 1923, he added stanzas and read the enlarged version, in which the heroic past answers discouragement. The poem appeared in volume form in 1924 in Shirim hadashim. Yoel Engel was the first to set it to music; Shlomo Artzi in 1973 and Naomi Shemer in 1979, who combined the two versions, gave it its best-known tunes.
Who it is for
A short poem, with no published French translation. It is best to know that rabbi Akiva and the Maccabees are, in Jewish tradition, figures of courage and sacrifice.
Prizes and reception
Sung to the tune of Naomi Shemer at the torch-lighting ceremony for Israel's seventieth anniversary, in 2018.