SPRING UP, 0 WELL Current Literature
By Dorothy Ruth Kahn Spring Up, 0 Well (Cape, 10s. 6d.) is an impressionistic sketch of life in the new Jewish settlements in Palestine. The author is a journalist who has worked on the Palestine Post for the last two years, but her style shows scarcely any traces of journalistic discipline. It is a mixture of the Psalms, Thomas Wolfe and Gertrude Stein. With a speed that leaves little time for the completion of sentences, we are coaxed, driven and besought to feel something of the urgent, still undirected spirit which has built the new Tel Aviv almost overnight. By repetition of words and phrases, by exclamation and invoca- tion, she keeps the narrative at a high emotional pitch. The strain is too muck A few calm pages of statistics would have been a welcome relief. But, in fairness to Miss Kahn, it must be admitted that her object was to convey a sense of bursting vigour and confused enthusiasm, so perhaps we are supposed to be as deafened by her book as a resident in Tel Aviv is deafened by automatic riveters. And she gives us some brilliant sketches of the various types of immigrant : the visionary, the sentimentalist, the speculator, the exile, the adventurer. She never discusses the political and racial problems involved in the settlement. " r know little of Zionism. But I saw a Chalutz (pioneer). I heard a rivet." The chief value of her book is that it gives an interpretation of the emotional attraction for the assimilated " Jew of a country which neither he nor many generations of ancestors have seen.
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