For my Theodor Herzl project we did three journal entries and a collage of photos
Entry 1
As a child, I wanted to be a great writer, my aspirations shifted as I grew older, but not by much. Although I had big dreams about my job, never did I imagine that my family life would be like this. I married my wife, Julie Naschauer, in 1889, and things went well. At the start. Julie and I are always fighting. Why can’t she just realize that I am right and she is wrong? Every time that I tell her that, she snaps back because she is so quick-tempered. Doctors say that she has hysteria and depression, apparently because I neglect her and am always away for work. But my work is important, and I don’t ask to be taken away from my family, but that’s how it is. Julie does not support my work, and I don’t see why not, because my work matters so much to me, and if she loves me, it should matter to her too, right? Wrong, she does not even like my mother, whom I love so much; my mother supports me so much, whereas Julie does not. I wish she could support me, but I can’t make her care.
One of the best things that Julie has ever done for me was giving me my children. My eldest, a daughter, Paulina, was born on March 29th, a year after I betrothed Julie. Paulina was fine as a baby, but she became a little crazy; she has a mental health issue, which causes her to be hospitalized frequently. Julie tells me that it’s serious, but I’m sure she will be fine. My second child, Hans, the boy that I wanted, also apparently has a mental problem. He is quite close to Paulina, and like Paulina, he gets annoyed at me fast, he must take after his mother. My third and youngest, another daughter, Trude, like her siblings, has mental problems, although hers are more severe, she is almost always in an institution, which means I see her very rarely. I swear, with all these family problems, I feel as if I may have a heart attack.
Entry 2
As I last stated, my wife does not care so much about my work. My job is very important to me as I am a writer, and there always seems to be a great new opportunity for me. Because of all these amazing chances, I am always working. To me, working is like an addiction, and I do not know if I could stop, even if I tried. My mother says I work too much and put too much pressure on myself. If I come to think about it, all my work puts a lot of stress on me; doctors say it gives me an irregular heartbeat. But all this stress is only a small problem because I just have to work! Recently, a great offer came up for me, a chance to go to Paris! I told this to my wife, and she just got mad, saying that I clearly didn’t love her enough, or at least not enough to keep me away from my work.
Like I said, this opportunity in Paris is going to be great. I have stayed up late at night working on my other pieces, trying to get them finished fast. But not too fast because they still have to be perfect. I have also been working all day researching background information about Alfred Dreyfus to go more in-depth in my articles. It turns out he is Jewish, I am a Jew myself, although I am not religious, I still feel as if this may be an antisemitic attack on Dreyfus. But it might not be; he could still be guilty. As excited as I may be about this work opportunity, I still have so much work pressing in on me, and I have to finish it, and I leave tomorrow!
Entry 3
In my almost four decades on this earth, I would say that I have experienced antisemitism. Some of these date back to when I was a young boy in Hungary. I had initially studied in a public school, which was more focused on science, but I later transferred to a school with more Jewish students like myself, to escape all the antisemitic harassment. That was my first taste of antisemitism, but it was definitely not my last. When I covered the Dreyfus affair, although the antisemitism was not directed at me, I felt that people chanting that Dreyfus was guilty, solely because he was Jewish, was an attack on me too. Later, and throughout the Dreyfus affair, people would yell, “Death to the Jews” at me in the streets, and that was when something in me just snapped. The Jews needed their own place, and they needed it now.
Palestine, Palistine was the place that we Jews needed. I decided I was going to fight for it. If we are not welcome in other countries, then surely we deserve the right to our own land, the land of Zion, which was promised to us by our god. So I started writing, a book to be exact, on why the Jews deserve the right to Israel. I called it the Jundenstaat, meaning the Jewish state. I proved that antisemitism is inescapable, and I showed the Jews’ determination for a country to call our own. I explained that we would have to organize a mass migration, and I outlined a practical approach for creating the state. I wrote about our Jewish society, and I gave the options of two places, Palestine and Argentina, but I later on led to focus more on Palestine. I finally outlined the idea or plan for our new society. I had decided that I, Theodore Herzl, was a Zionist.
Our collage
Throughout this project, we learned a great deal more about Theodore Herzl than we initially thought. As you may know, it’s different trying to understand everything from someone else’s perspective, but the more we got into the project, the more sense it made. When writing the entries, it took a few sentences to get into, but once we had the writing became easy and it flew by fast. Herzl showed resilience in the face of challenges by persevering, much like we had to do in the project when it got hard. Despite his challenges, Herzl still tried to create a Jewish state because he kept seeing antisemitism in Europe, and he believed that Zionism was the only way to ensure Jewish safety and dignity. Although all the struggles that Herzl faced, his effort was not for nothing, because we now have Israel.
This is what I made for my family crest.