Barely two years after his emigration to Palestine, the author Arnold Zweig penned these harsh words criticizing his new homeland in a letter to Sigmund Freud. Writing in 1936, the formerly staunch Zionist could now barely contain his disappointment. But what had happened?

The Zionist idea of a Jewish state had fascinated Zweig since around the year 1917. By the beginning of the 1920s he had begun making plans for his future emigration although he remained resident in Germany until the spring of 1933. Zweig emigrated shortly before his works were destroyed as part of the Nazi book burnings and his German citizenship was subsequently revoked. As a result, Zweig invested even greater hope in the then-nascent Jewish state in Palestine. In the winter of 1933, Arnold Zweig and his wife Beatrice set up residence next to the town of Haifa on Mount Carmel. But what Zweig found there contrasted greatly with what he had hoped to find: Jewish settlers, he felt, were devoted to a form of “Hebraic Nationalism”. For Zweig, these people were increasingly cutting themselves off from the region’s Arabic inhabitants and he was disturbed by the prohibition, for official purposes, of languages other than Hebrew. This had far-reaching consequences for Zweig, who saw himself, first and foremost, as a German author. His public appearances mostly suffered from either a lack of attention or they simply ended in chaos. While delivering a speech in May 1942, Zweig was taken away from the podium by radical Zionists after he began to speak in his native tongue. His German-language works were only seldom translated into Hebrew. In a letter to Freud dated 21 March 1937, Zweig noted that his financial situation had become impossible as he was trapped in an interim phase between two large novels. Feeling himself isolated in Palestine, Zweig emigrated once more, this time to the German Democratic Republic in 1948.