Reviving the Hebrew language that revealed the Jerusalem scandals of 1885



The drama series “The Deer” by creator Keren Margalit (creator of “Yellow Peppers” and “Wake Up the Bear”) which aired last night on Kan 11 deals with the journalistic enterprise of Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s revival of the Hebrew language, the newspaper “The Deer”, and the adaptation of the Tzipis family and their three daughters who arrive in Jerusalem The fanatic of 1885 from Russia, following the will of the father. The women in the family, who are not happy with the move, have to deal with the heat, the distance from the relatives who remained in exile, and the daily grind in the old settlement.

Froma, the eldest sister, is sent on the mother’s initiative to work in Ben Yehuda’s newspaper, in order to develop a “sense of belonging to Zion” and to forget her revolutionary lover Pima, who remains in Odessa. During the work, the nurse is exposed to Ben Yehuda’s attempts to visit and expose the scandals on the Jewish street, with the center of the first chapter being the lynching of the girls by the fanatics who accused them of prostitution, and the belief that many women in the community undergo abortions because of them.

Ben Yehuda, starring Or Ben Melech, under pressure from the rabbis and printers not to publish the news, and the determined Prouma encourages him to do so despite everything, which finally gives rise to a creative solution to the problem; In Fromma’s words – “Ben Yehuda, a clever journalist with a trick.”

In the same context, the creator Margalit testified in an interview with the Public Broadcasting Corporation that “Jerusalem of the 19th century is similar to Israel 2024, in terms of political and social disputes, there are capital-government-newspaper relations, struggles between ultra-Orthodox and secularists, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim”, according to her. She further described that the focus on the character of Ben Yehuda, the Hebrew language fanatic who insisted on turning it from a sacred language into a profane language, stemmed from the desire “to understand the price of the ideal and what it is about these people that makes them stand up and do something that affects the world.”

The period drama firmly jumps between the languages ​​Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish, between world affairs and the romantic concerns of the sisters Sonia and Ita, and succeeds in conveying to the viewers, with lots of humor and tongue twisters, a fascinating story about the beginnings of journalism in the Land of Israel and those who made a considerable contribution to it but paid for As mentioned boycott and excommunication.

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