Appendix: The Young Abraham Ya'ari

Summary

OTHERS better qualified than I will write about the bibliographer, about the scholar. I should like to write here about the young Abraham Ya'ari, the gentle, lyrical man, who was not widely known.

I met Abraham Ya'ari in Jerusalem within a few weeks of my emigration to Palestine in 1920.At the time he was a young student in the teachers’ seminary directed by David Yellin. This seminary was in the centre of town, not far from Ethiopia Street, the first home of the National Library, of which I was the director. Abraham often visited us to read and borrow books. He was a true pioneer, totally imbued with the concept that building the land signalled a new beginning in the life of the Jewish people. He took the Hebrew surname Ya'ari in place of his former family name,Wald (which means forest in German, as does Ya'ari in Hebrew). The psychoanalyst and graphologist David Feigenbaum, who lived in Jerusalem, pointed out an interesting graphological fact to me.When Abraham Ya'ari wrote in European languages using the Roman alphabet and came to a word beginning with the letter ‘w’, he drew a line from the end of the letter right through it, as if he wished to erase it.‘Don't you see’, Feigenbaum said, ‘this man writes the first letter of his original name as though he wished to erase the entire name—to erase his diaspora past!’

What attracted me so much to Abraham in those early years was his enthusiasm.His brother, my friend the author Judah Ya'ari, was then a member of Kibbutz Beit Alfa in the Hashomer Hatsa'ir movement. I made my first visit to this kibbutz with Abraham (I suppose this was before my friends from Czechoslovakia settled in Heftsibah, a neighbouring kibbutz), and before we passed through its gates he said to me: ‘Remove the shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ The kibbutz was holy ground in Abraham's eyes!

During my initial years in the country I was not fluent in the language, and the student Abraham was always prepared to act as an amanuensis for me. I would read a letter to him in bad Hebrew, and he would rewrite it in good Hebrew (there were as yet no typewriters in the National Library).