Volume 39, Number 11 · June 11, 1992
The General's Main Chance
By Avishai Margalit
Rosa Cohen, Yitzhak Rabin's mother, was a daughter of the Russian Revolution, a non-Zionist socialist. She arrived in Palestine from Odessa having originally hoped to go to Scandinavia, remained there as a member of Kibbutz Kinneret, and took part in its life with immense revolutionary zeal. She had an uncle in Palestine—the distinguished Zionist publicist Mordechai Ben Hillel Hacohen (1856–1936), who had given the first speech in Hebrew at the founding Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897—a memorable accomplishment, since Hebrew was not a living, spoken language at the time. If Rabin's great-uncle was capable of reviving a dead language, Rabin himself can cause severe injury to a living one. Rabin was brought up speaking Hebrew, but the Hebrew he speaks is wooden and full of embarrassing errors.
Feature, 7276 words
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