Arnold Zweig

Arnold Zweig was one of the most significant writers of the Weimar Republic. He was a critical political spirit who was committed both to progressive Zionism and leftist socialist politics. The sales of his books were extremely high. He left Germany for Palestine in 1933 with his wife Beatrice-a highly talented visual artist. There was no welcoming committee for both of them when they arrived in Erez Yisroel.

The Yishuv had no particular interest in dignitaries from Nazi Germany, not knowing if it was their belief in the Zionist project or their enforced exile which had brought them to Palestine.Within a few short months Arnold Zweig had lost his entire readership. In Germany his books were burnt, and in Palestine they weren’t translated into Hebrew.

He became a significant unread author.

As all new arrivals he was expected to learn Hebrew and to stop speaking German as his first language. But he suffered from a severe eye problem which prevented him from learning a new language ,in a new alphabet. He continued to speak German and to encourage other German speakers to both speak their language and to maintain their sense of German identity and belief in the values of German culture. This position lead to constant conflicts with the majority of Jewish immigrants in Palestine at that time, who mainly came from Russia, Poland and other Eastern European countries. The majority of Jews in the Yishuv had little sympathy for his predicament.

Zweig became more and more critical of political Zionism with its strong anti Arab Bias. Most German Jews were interested in finding a constructive way of communicating and living with the Palestinian Arab population. He became an outsider and had enormous difficulties to maintain himself as a writer. , although it should be noted that during this period he wrote his most important novel, ‘Das Beil von Wandsbek’. His growing doubts about the Zionist idea of creating its own state, inspired him to co-edit The Orient, a leftist journal published in German in 1942/43. The militant Zionist revisionist movement came to see him as their enemy, and the building where the Orient was printed was destroyed by Jewish terrorists in 1943.

On the political level his Germanness had become the mark of Cain. On the other hand, as his son Adam Zweig reported, the family felt very much at home in Palestine. Against their will, Arnold Zweig decided to return to Germany in 1948 where he received high awards from the communist government of the GDR and acted as president of the Academy of Arts while his literary work never again reached the high quality of the prewar years.