The Appearance of David Shimoni on the Background of the Second Aliya / הופעתו של דוד שמעוני על רקע תקופת העלייה השנייה (מסת מבוא)

David Shimoni (Shimonovitz), who was born in Russia in 1886, first immigrated to Palestine in 1909, where he remained for less than a year. He then moved to Germany for his university studies, spent the war years in Russia, and returned to Palestine in 1920. As he himself admitted, the one-year stay in Palestine had been a formative experience in his life that decidedly affected his writing. Those were the revolutionary years of Aliya Shniya (the Second Aliya), which was the pioneering avant-garde immigration of the new Jewish settelment in Palestine: the return to the Jewish homeland was linked to the demand to transform Jewish society by creating a community of labourers devoted primarily to cultivating the land. This new ethos made a deep imprint on Jewish life and culture for decades to come. The impact of this new vision is well reflected in some of Shimoni's early writings, most of them produced in the aftermath of his early stay in Palestine. It is also echoed years later in various works written after his second immigration to Palestine in 1920. The call for the return to nature, the identification of Zionism with the 'religion of labour,' the fostering of the agrarian ethos as the core of the Jewish renaissance — all these become of central importance to Shimoni's Weltanschauung as a poet and writer. Following a biographical sketch, this essay seeks to show how the exposure to Palestine of the Second Aliya had been instrumental in shaping Shimoni's world view and how it affected the intellectual as well as the aesthetic development of his literary work.