A REMEMBRANCE OF A GREAT ZIONIST-MAX NORDAU
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/feted-on-his-70th-birthday-nordau-s-star-eclipses-herzl-s-1.306101
Feted on his 70th birthday, Nordau’s star eclipses Herzl’s
“Max Nordau celebrates his 70th birthday” was the lead headline the July 29, 1919, edition of Haaretz, then known as the “daily newspaper of life and literature.”
It was not rare at the time to devote articles and sometimes entire pages to milestone birthdays of the elders of the tribe.
But the internationally known Zionist leader and writer Max Nordau received a special tribute: page one featured an article in his praise, a short biography and a birthday message to “our senior leader.” Inside the paper was a feature about Nordau by Ber (Dov ) Borochov.
The edition included Ahad Ha’am’s impressions of Nordau’s appearance at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. His remarks would no doubt have injured Theodor Herzl’s pride: the father of Zionism was known to be a megalomaniac.
“I would be satisfied if I could come to an agreement with the prince of forgetfulness to erase from their hearts everything that those in Basel saw and heard, except for one memory: the memory of a great and sacred hour in the company of all the people, who were as brothers, those [living] far from Israel, and those who came from every corner of the land, their hearts indignant and filled with emotion, their eyes lifted with love and pride toward our big brother, who stood on the stage and preached the wonders of his people like a prophet of ancient times,” Ha’am wrote.
Herzl was also aware that the well-respected Nordau, who grew up in Pest, lived in Paris and was an admired author with an international reputation, was one of the Zionism’s stronger cards at a time when the movement was struggling to get off the ground.
Unlike many Zionist supporters, who came from Eastern Europe, Nordau was a Western European.
Like Herzl, “he lived a worldly life, not the life of Jews.” But this fact, Haaretz explained, did not influence Ahad Ha’am, “not one of the easiest authors to be impressed by outward flashiness, like villagers who come upon the city for the first time.”
Ahad Ha’am “was never captivated for a second by ‘European-ness.'” “Our big brother,” Haaretz revealed dramatically at the end of the quotation from Ahad Ha’am, who “preached the wonders of his people like a prophet of ancient times,” was Nordau, “70 years old today.” Until that congress, “we hardly knew that he was our brother, and he hardly knew we were his … at 50 he returned to his brethren, and ever since we have been fortunate to burden him with our interests.”
Borochov wrote a feuilleton, a short journalistic dispatch, in Nordau’s honor.
“As we have before us the beginnings of a social movement and want to know if it has a future, we must examine its first leaders to see if we can see them offering, on a small scale, the changes that must come about in society.”
Nordau, one of these individuals, was “the sign of things to come.” “If we had been there to see, we would have seen the movement’s strength and future in Nordau more than in any other of the first builders of our future,” Borochov wrote, joining Ahad Ha’am’s challenge to Herzl.
Before turning to Zionism, Borochov wrote, “he was detached … a destroyer and a great opposer.” Nordau the Zionist “ceased to be what he had been,” and became “one of the builders, of the two who began to build the foundation of our state.”
The next day the front page of Haaretz featured a letter to the editor from the builder himself. He advised the Jews to settle the land en masse, dismissed those who argued that the land could not support millions of inhabitants, dismissed excuses and pretexts for not settling, and ended with the words, “What really makes me blush in shame is my inability to say this in Hebrew!” (Lital Levin )
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