Bonus Special By Eli Eshed!

The Hebrew Tarzan * By Eli Eshed 

This article began life as a relatively short article in the edition of the tenth Dimension, the "Magazine of the Amateur Science Fiction Society" in Israel. From there it was drastically extended to a whole book called "Tarzan in the Holy Land" which includes his enormous expansion as an introduction to a huge catalogue with pictures and summaries of all over 1000 stories that appeared on Tarzan in Hebrew, a book that appeared in several editions each more expanded than the previous, as more items and Siporimp on Tarzan in Hebrew. Then this article was translated into English and appeared on the website of Edgar Rice Burroughs on the internet and also to French, and appeared in France in a magazine. His brief appeared on the website of Lynette, and then he served as a major article in the book "from Tarzan to Zbeng". And he recently appeared in an extended and academic version of the children's Literature research magazine "A Small World". And these days he was translated into English and expanded in an academic version that was supposed to appear in a published academic file in 2012 of Tarzan's birthday.

As it may be possible to understand this is one of my favourite articles of all those I have written and perhaps also one of the most important because of what it reveals about the Hebrew culture. In this article, I would review the passage of the Man of the jungle, Tarzan of the American culture in which he was created for the Hebrew culture, in which he gained popularity and wide-ranging influence. In the first part focus in the image of Tarzan in American culture, as it appeared in books, and then in movies and comics, and I will try to meet the changes that the character has undergone in the transition from Burroughs’ books to the other media.

In the second part of the article I will describe the progress of the Tarzan image and other figures close to him among the Israeli public – during the period of the Yishuv and in the state period. As I will see, in Eretz-Israel and later in Israel, the figure of Tarzan has undergone various incarnations over the years to adapt to the Israeli and Israeli public and the various cultural perceptions that were dominant in his cultural world.

What were the reasons for the great popularity of the Tarzan image in the country? What changes have been confrontations in the image of the Hebrew culture? What caused the changes in the image of Tarzan over the years? For these questions, I will try to answer the article.

Burroughs, a creator of Tarzan, published his first story in a cheap Pulp magazine. This story "The Princess of Mars" appeared in 1912 and described the adventures of an American fighter named John Carter on Mars. Burroughs described the planet and life on it in unprecedented detail. This book was the first in a long series of adventure stories, all of which occurred on Mars. Then Burroughs composed another series of science fiction, which took place on the planet Venus or Pellucidar – a prehistoric world in the belly of the earth. In these series, Burroughs created a new kind of adventure literature – heroic tales that occurred in imaginary worlds and other planets. These series have made Burroughs the best known and successful science fiction writer of his time (Ofek 1978, 196).

However, for the greatest success, Burroughs was in a series that was not of the character of science fiction – "Tarzan of the Apes." The first story in the series, "Tarzan of the Apes" (Tarzan of the Apes), appeared in 1912, also in Pulp booklet. In this story, Burroughs described the tale of Tarzan, a member of the British Royal family, trapped in the jungle area. The parents of Tarzan were killed in his infancy, and he grew up among the apes in the jungle, and finally became his leader. In the last part of the story, Tarzan met with white people, but decides to stay in the jungle, since the life of jazz and freedom is preferable, in his opinion, to the cultural life, despite all the benefits and conveniences that they can offer.

In Burroughs's novels, Tarzan was presented with a double-human nature and a beast: The animal aspects of Tarzan were manifested in the supernormal abilities of odour, hearing, and vision, as well as in the physical power, which helped him overcome large and stronger animals from him; His human origins gave Tarzan a high degree of intelligence (and, in fact, the majority of humans). Tarzan incorporated in it, then, the advantages of a person – intelligence and adaptation between the body and mind – with the benefits of an animal, and all without suffering from any of the shortcomings of any of them (Holltsmark 1981, 92).

Tarzan enjoyed, therefore, of all worlds: on one hand, a descendant of British lords, from whom he inherited their beauty, courage, and their minds; On the other hand, the adopted son of the great ape Kala, from which he inherited the power of the great apes and learned to speak in their own language and cope with the dangers of the Jungle. 

However, Burroughs presented in his books a problematic aspect of the double connection to both worlds, since Tarzan did not always know which of the worlds he belonged to – to the world of the people of his parents or to the jungle world of the great apes. The double identity of Tarzan – a sophisticated British Lord who is also a wild man in the jungle – was one of the main foundations in the series books. However, the struggle between the two worlds was presented with explicit presentation only in the first books of the series, because in the end, Tarzan preferred the world of jazz and animals, which had been presented in the books as a matter of no-one in the corrupt world of mankind. However, in spite of the obvious preference for jungle life, Tarzan did not deny himself the pleasures of the British Lordship in the later books of Burroughs.

In the books, Tarzan was once again a "man-ape", and this nickname was the key to understanding his character as Burroughs described it. Tarzan was depicted as having all the traits of mankind before the formation of culture, while he had to fight for his existence in the jungle, that is, as having the courage and strength of the body, which had been lost to the person who began to develop the mechanical culture. In Burroughs's stories, Tarzan represented the return to the ancient days of the human race, which the great apes had succeeded in preserving. However, the position of Burroughs towards the pre-cultural person was not consistent, as Tarzan also had qualities that were the result of a prolonged evolutionary development. For example, Tarzan was depicted as developed and evolutionary advanced from the "Negro savages" who lived in the vicinity of the jungle. His developed intelligence was described as an attribute that was inherited from a long line of British lords who were perceived by the author, apparently, as a record of the person's evolutionary development.

Sometimes Tarzan was depicted as a real Lord living in a huge mansion on the outskirts of the jungle with his wife Jane, and a leader of a major "Negro" tribe called the Waziri, the head of his fellow warriors, and the brave warrior Wagambi. In the fourth book in the series, The Son of Tarzan (son of Tarzan, 1917), Jack or "Korak", was born to Tarzan, and like his father, he also passed repeated incarnations – from a young Lord to a wild man, and repeated. In other books, however, he again controls the presentation of Tarzan the aspect of "the Ape Man," abandoning his Lordship's life and wandering through the jungle, out of every human society, only accompanied by a monkey, N’Kima, and a lion, Jad Bal Ja.

The story about the Lord who grew up among the apes was accepted as a renewal among the lovers of the Adventures of Adventure, and gained great success and many years. The vivid descriptions of Burroughs's animals allowed the audience to flee from the life of the grey reality to the life of the jungle and to the Lost worlds. However, alongside the popular popularity, the series also suffered severe criticism from circles that saw "inferior adventure literature", and even acted to be downloaded from the public libraries in the United States. One of the claims that was heard by the show was that Tarzan and Jane lived a life of sin without marriage, claiming that it was true of the films, but not regarding the books (Ofek 1969 A, 174).

Following their success, the Tarzan books were processed for the cinema, and many films were produced, the first to be released in 1918. The film, starring the muscular actor Elmo Lincoln, gained great success, as did two other Tarzan films in which he starred (Porges 1975, 432). By the end of the silent film, five cinematic versions appeared in the stories of Buroz starring various actors. Although Bourgeois complained that the films did not keep up with the line of his books, they were loyal to his books more than any of the Tarzan films made during the desert film. The silent films meticulously guarded the aspect of the British Lord, who is also a man-ape, a central aspect, as noted, in the work of Burroughs (Behelmer 1987a, 43).