Defiant Muse: Feminist Hebrew Poetry.

HESS, TAMAR ; HASAN-ROKEM, GALIT ; KAUFMAN, SHIRLEY 等

"TEN PORTIONS OF SPEECH CAME DOWN TO THE WORLD--nine of them were women's," according to a Hebrew maxim in one of the texts of the rabbis of Late Antiquity. The opposite, however, seems to be true of writing. Although the Hebrew language takes pride in an uninterrupted written tradition of at least twenty-five hundred years, there are few texts prior to the nineteenth century which are unequivocally attributed to women among the "People of the Book."

Our mapping of women's Hebrew poetry is indebted to the recent expanding contribution of feminist critics, and is based on a thorough bibliographic search of periodicals and archives. The resulting revised map of women's Hebrew poetry indicates that it developed gradually--after its beginnings in antiquity and rare but sometimes very impressive appearances in Andalusia, Kurdistan, North Africa, and Central Europe, until its emergence in Italy in the nineteenth century--rather than erupting in the early twenties of the twentieth century as critics have maintained. [1]

In order to outline this gradual development, we must reconsider the canonized history of modern Hebrew poetry. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Italian Jewish scholars and poets were among the leading figures of the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that Rachel Morpurgo (1790-1871), the first modern woman poet who wrote in Hebrew, was a member of the Italian Jewish community. This community maintained a continuous ancient poetic tradition from the Middle Ages onwards. Haskalah was not perceived there as being in sharp conflict with the traditional way of Jewish life, which in Italy was relatively moderate, especially with regard to women's social and cultural roles. [2] Rachel Morpurgo was descended from a line of great Italian poets and scholars. This talented woman was fortunate to be taught and to master the richness of the Hebrew language from biblical to rabbinic sources. Her deeply religious poetry was written in elaborate patterns, artfully exploiting th e art of allusion and adhering to intricate classic poetic forms, such as the sonnet. Although her poetry was conventional in form, thematically it was innovative and revolutionary.

Morpurgo signed her poems "Rahel Morpurgo Haketana" (Little Rachel Morpurgo) or just with the initials RMH, which in Hebrew constitute the word "rima"--literally "worm"--to which she sometimes added the idiomatic "tola'a" (maggot), creating the idiomatic phrase "rima ve'tola'a," meaning utter worthlessness. Yaffa Berlowitz has argued that Morpurgo was not thereby devaluing herself or her work; the signature was a metaphoric extension of the poems, and a protest against the status of women in Jewish religious culture, as non-persons-as good as dead. The poet was provocatively confronting her readers with the marginality of her status as a woman in Jewish culture and insisting that they read her poems as those of a woman, and not of an aberration that has renounced gender. [3]

Morpurgo's poem "Again I'll Try" culminates in a daring line praising freedom over conventionality.

Again I'll Try [*]

Again I'll try

to offer song,

I've left the kitchen

behind in anger -

I'm tired of vainness

and hope for release

from suffering: for grace

from my Lord I'll linger.

His blessings amass

for the hidden goodness -

I hope for the share to come;

the creator of mountains

and freer of slaves

from bondage will bring me to freedom.

And the day of my death

and in place of dirge

and instead of a sackcloth

and I'll dance

will be my delight

there'll be gladness;

elegant dress,

to his forgiveness

for in my divorce is my marriage...

translated by Peter Cole

Women's poetry in eastern Europe internalized the conventional poetics of the time, like Morpurgo's oeuvre in Italy, but seemingly without any knowledge of her work. In Ashkenazic Europe, women's writing was directed more towards prose--essays and letters--than poetry. Occasionally a woman's poem would be printed in east European Hebrew journals. Later, under the Soviet regime, Hebrew literature was stifled, and many Russian poets were exiled to Siberia, imprisoned and murdered.

Biblical Bedrock. Biblical and post-biblical traditional Jewish texts remain the bedrock of Hebrew poetry, from which women poets derive their own vocabulary, though no longer from a disadvantaged position. Dahlia Ravikovitch appropriates a biblical idiom in creating a powerful, culturally significant, and characteristic poetic language. Shulamith Hareven (1932-), Hedva Harechavi (1941-), Nurit Zarchi (1941-), Bracha Serri (1942-), Galit Hasan-Rokem (1945-), Rivka Miriam (1952-), as well as Ella Bat-Zion (Gavriela Elisha), Nitsa Kann, Haviva Pedaya, and others, all cultivate a complex and fruitful relationship with traditional Hebrew texts, akin to the developments Alicia Ostriker has described as "revisionist mythmaking" in her influential study of women's poetry in America. [4]

Over the years, secular Israeli society has drifted away from the post-biblical Hebrew literary canon, so that poetry which refers to it as an intertext, poses a greater challenge to readers. Previously accessible exclusively to men, these texts are now frequently appropriated in women's poetic language as an indication of empowerment.

Whereas most Hebrew poetry secularizes sacred texts, Zelda (1914-1984) stands out in her religious devotion and pious mysticism. Her poetry is prayer; more than that--a unio mystica, and in that she subverts traditional Jewish gender roles of religious discourse. Zelda, an observant orthodox poet, over fifty when her first book was published, was admiringly embraced by a literary canon which extolled secularism and youth. Her successful reception by diverse audiences has been critically marveled at by her major interpreter, Hamutal Bar-Yosef. [5] Zelda may be seen as a forerunner of pious poetry which has gained greater prominence since the eighties. Women's contribution to this development is clearly manifest in the literary periodical "Dimui" ("Image"), edited by the poet Hava Pinchas-Cohen, and in the feminist religious poetry of such women as Esther Ettinger, Yehudit Mossel-Eliezerov, and Rivka Miriam.

In reviewing the history of women's Hebrew poetry in Eastern Europe one cannot fail to notice the active feminist strategies. Women poets often dropped their father's or husband's name, and some chose new matronyms such as Bat-Hamah and Bat-Miriam. Others decided to use only their first name, as it was given or newly adopted.

The Emergence of Zionism and Israel: Hebrew literature has maintained a closely knit symbiotic relationship with Zionism from the end of the nineteenth century. As writers emigrated to Palestine, initially under the Ottoman Empire, and later under the British mandate, Hebrew literature took root there once again. However, the pioneer society expected literature to promote its values and valorize its achievements. Some poets found these demands burdensome and sometimes even contrary to the intrinsic nature of poetry. Furthermore, these national work values were designated as male. Male-authored literature of the time cast women in supportive, submissive, sometimes destructive, but never in leading roles. Women were portrayed as redundant to the national settlement project. Hebrew poetry was intensely engaged with the Palestinian landscape, and as in many (colonialist) literatures, the landscape was gendered as feminine. Such gender-marking established an erotic relationship between the masculine settler and th e land. [6]

Rahel, who first came to Palestine in 1909, and the Israel-born Esther Raab both contributed significantly to the reversal of this imbalance. [7] Rahel discards "the great deeds of a hero / or the spoils a battle yields" ("To My Country") in favor of the mother-daughter ties she forms with her adopted land. [8] Esther Raab also reverses the male-centered poetic iconography. She communicates an auto-erotic intimacy with the landscape and a familiarity with native Palestinian flora and fauna, as in the poem "She-Fox." [9]

She-Fox

In the night fields a hungry she-fox

blasts, alone.

A single horn-blast -- then silence,

her voice like blood pouring into the night.

She is not one of the visitors and claimants;

sad, she blasts

just once -- then a hush.

Mutely the night's vastness answers.

When the cub suckles the last milk

her voice brims with the world's grief.

A stand of pine trees schemes and threatens,

fences sweep by.

Myrrh from nettles in the open fields

is as heavy as fog.

Chickens are sheltered in the coops,

and a pack of dogs squabbles through the emptiness.

A hungry she-fox lifts her head to the Pleiades,

a cold star mirrored in her eye

could be a tear in her pupil.

The cub will suckle at life's sad marrow --

the howl of foxes splits the night.

translated by Kinereth Gensler

The conflict between personal and collective demands characterizes many national literatures. [10] Freeing a personal voice from the grip of the collective is an ongoing project in Hebrew literature, with women's writing leading the way. Although political and social issues are impossible to ignore, women's writing has persisted in its search for individual identity. Lea Goldberg (1911-1970) daringly asserted that Hebrew poetry need not serve as the nation's "court jester." Although Goldberg participated in the debate over the politicization of poetry, she did not overtly let it encroach on her own work, which was largely devoted to the articulation of beauty and emotion. Goldberg's skillful practice of metrical and rhymed forms which she derived from European and world literature are probably the most accomplished in modern Hebrew poetry. [11] During World War II she launched a direct attack on demands that poetry represent the community. She actively refused to harness her poetry to the service of war and national travail. The living--their joy and their pain--were more important than the dead, even if they had died a hero's death: "A wheat-field will eternally be more precious and more beautiful than a wasteland which the tanks have trampled, even if the cause of those tanks is highly worthy." [12]

Unlike Goldberg, other women writers openly confronted public issues in their poetry. A singular case in point is that of Haya Vered (1922-1998), whose "Zero Hour" (1953) is an exceptional expression of the bitter disillusion that took hold of Israeli society once the Zionist dream had been realized, and a Jewish state had been established in l948. [13] Vered, whose speaker addresses her country as a "wounded five-year-old baby," bluntly parodies Nathan Alterman's canonized poem, Magash Hakesef, "The Silver Platter." [14] Written in 1947, "The Silver Platter" had by the early fifties attained the status of a national emblem. Frequently recited at official memorial services, it is a poem in which the nation expresses its gratitude to its young war dead, laid out as a silver platter on which the state has established its independence. Vered is one of the few writers, most of them women, who, during this period, vehemently denies such justification for the loss of life, using extreme images of amputated bodies and material corruption to make her point. Vered expands the sacrifice, restricted by "The Silver Platter" to combat soldiers alone, to include the Israeli people as a whole, Holocaust survivors, and refugees from all over the world. Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir, Ayin Tur-Malka, Bat-Miriam, and later on Rahel Chalfi, also reject the metaphoric cleansing of death in battle, rendering the position of mourning mothers as valid as that of the masculinized collective, which practically obliterated personal grief and loss. [15]

Although iconoclastic, Vered mourned the decline of idealized pioneer Palestine and the rise of materialism. While she did call them "brothers," she associated these changes in Israeli life with the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Arab and North-African countries, together with European Holocaust survivors. The ethnic stereotypes figured in "Zero Hour" tend to persist in Hebrew poetry, although the complexity of Israeli society as a community of immigrants is reflected in women's poetry today in more diversified modes. Although Jews of Middle Eastern or African Jewish origin comprise half the Israeli population today, their poets are still in a minority; those who explore their ethnic identity within a feminist context, are fewer still. Simcha Zarmati-Atzta (1927-1992), Bracha Serri (1942-), Amira Hess (1943-), and Miri Ben-Simhon (1954-1996) deal with ethnicity as a personal and political issue in Israeli society, and expose and oppose the double oppression which women from Arab and African countries suffer, both as women and as Eastern ("Mizrahi") Jews. Bracha Serri's poem "Illiterate" is a fine example of this mode.

Illiterate

I'm just a poor illi'erate

its really rather sad

at cleanin' up the 'ouse tho'

I'm really not so bad

When I was 10, got married

'ad a kid each year

thank the Lord I managed

but did it cost me dear!

I never got a chance to learn

life was all a fight

now my grandchild mocks me

'cause I don't know to write

I 'ave to ask wot time it is

and wot's the price them goods

strangers burst out laughin'

and give me funny looks

I'm just a poor illi'erate

it really is a shame

I 'ad no chance to learn, see

I'm really not to blame

Shoppin' in the supermarket

gets me in a tizzy

I 'ave to ask wot's in that tin

them labels make me dizzy

on Sunday I got on a bus

that went the other way

turned out the street I wanted

was just a stop away

they cut off me electric

I couldn't read the bill

I threw it in the dustbin

so now I'm in the chill!

All the world is in the know

they seem so wise and clever

only me is in the dark

and there I'll be forever

I'm just a poor illi'erate

it really is a shame

I 'ad no chance to learn, see

I'm really not to blame.

translated by Yaffak Berkovits

Towards the Twenty-First Century: Although the Holocaust had a formative influence in shaping contemporary Israeli society, especially through the impact of thousands of families fleeing Europe before the war and the many survivors who arrived immediately after, we found fewer Holocaust poems than we expected. [16] Few survivors adopted Hebrew as their literary language, with Abba Kovner and Dan Pagis as outstanding exceptions. Even memoirs written by women about the Holocaust are often written in their mother tongue, and only then translated into Hebrew. There are some Israeli women, however, who have written poems about the Holocaust; these range from a commemoration of the dead to laments and bitter accusations. In one of Zelda's early poems published in 1942, "The Girl's Poem," the poet exclaims: "God, how can You command me to bloom? You have planted my life in the river of death-/ Shall I blossom in my brothers' blood? // Answer: Shall I clothe myself in happiness, bear fruit, / in front of amputated bo dies, / in front of faceless corpses? / Answer - - -."

Esther Raab wrote a poem cursing Adolph Eichmann; Bat Miriam published a cycle weighing the possibility and value of poetry after the Holocaust--"Ghetto Poems" [1946]). A more contemplative and elegiac mode distinguishes Lea Goldberg's cycle, "From My Old Home" (1940-1944), which resurrects the charm of Kovno, her lost childhood home town. Ruth Alpern Ben-David is a rare instance of an Israeli-born poet who was trapped on a pre-war visit to Poland yet survived the Holocaust. She has written an admirable poem about coming to terms with Germany and German tourists visiting in Israel today, "Setting Out for Convalescence."

Second and third-generation poetry is beginning to cope with the experience and feelings of survival, and its significance in Israeli society especially in Shulamith Hareven's, Devorah Amir's, and Leah Aini's poems. Leah Aini has written a moving poem about the impact of her father's experience.

Survivor

My father dials the number crucified into his arm

and listens alert

he doesn't listen with his left ear

reminder of a slap from an S. S. hand

in this ear he hears

hears like a mute

uses the good ear as a receiver

for the nightmares

from Dora, Buna, Auschwitz

arriving on the trains

my father screams once a week as if to say

I feel fine

and afterwards he turns his head on the wet pillow

and falls asleep on his right side

turns his dead ear to my crying

crying that walks on tiptoes.

translated by Lisa Katz

The genocide of the Jewish people in World War II, followed by the military struggles of the state of Israel, which continue to take a high toll, are perhaps causes of the importance Israeli society attaches to childbirth. As Lesley Hazleton notes, "Fertility is a national priority in Israel." [17] While the growing influence of feminism has led to seeing motherhood less in the national context and more in a personal light, it nevertheless continues to be viewed from a national perspective; Israeli women's poetry now also focuses on the politics of mothering.

The feminist movement's history in Israelis as old as the history of the Zionist movement.18 However, from the outset, feminist issues have been subordinated to the national interest, and thus marginalized. Many poets who began careers in the late fifties wrote openly feminist poetry only from the late seventies onward. Second-wave feminism, and the civil rights movement which shook women's lives in the United States and Europe in the sixties, left no mark on Israeli women. It took twenty more years for women's issues to gain ground, but now feminist organizations have a lively and productive presence--although still a marginal one. Doubtless, the academic impact of Anglo-American and French feminist theory and literary criticism has contributed to this progress. Curricula in departments of Hebrew literature in the universities have been expanded and now include a variety of approaches to women's literature.

Poetry possibly preceded activism in shaping the feminist agenda. The greatest and most consistent contribution to the construction of a feminist consciousness in Israeli poetry belongs to Dahlia Ravikovitch. Self-reflection led Ravikovitch to expose stereotypical feminine images, carrying them to their utmost extreme and creating an ostensibly passive and submissive persona who finally rages against them (in the famous poem "Clockwork Doll," for example). Ravikovitch highlights and unmasks the conventional gender ascription to women of vulnerability, dependence, seduction, violence, hysteria, witchcraft, and charms. Her early interest in traditional forms and language facilitated her warm reception by male critics and the general reading public from the very start, and probably blinded them to her explicit feminist stand. The young Ravikovitch exhibits a close affinity to Goldberg. But unlike her mentor, Ravikovitch takes a personally involved political stand and confronts the oppression of Palestinians in Lebanon and in the occupied West Bank in feminist terms ("Hovering at a Low Altitude" and "A Mother Walks Around").

With Yona Wallach the unconscious entered the foreground of Israeli poetry, as she gave voice to explicit, detailed, sometimes humorous, often violent, sexual fantasies and practices, and reached deep into the human psyche. Wallach committed herself to the construction and deconstruction of fundamental emotional, ideological, and social attitudes. Often her poetic experiments with gender crossings have a dazzling effect ("A Grizzly She-bear Reared Me" and "Absalom"). Sex in Dahlia Ravikovitch's poetry is highly symbolic; she might mention a nail or a tongue, but never sexual organs. Wallach's blatant exposure of the female (as well as the male) body in her poetry is daring and provocative ("Tefillin").

Israeli women's poetry has turned from the earlier influence of Russian and European models to poets writing in English. Israeli women poets have especially been drawn to American women's poetry (Emily Dickinson, Muriel Rukeyser, and Sylvia Plath). Nurit Zarchi (1941-) acknowledges these and other feminist influences in her essays, as well as in her poetry. Leah Ayalon (c. 1951-) shows a great fondness for popular American culture; anything from Burger King to scenes from recent American films may be found in her poetry. "I'll Speak with You in September" brings together two powerful representatives of the male American literary canon, Faulkner and Hemingway, and disarms them. The speaker adopts the persona of Emily, the heroine of Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily," allotting the silenced and oppressed character a "macho" voice. The poem is set at a lunch counter in Hemingway's story, "The Killers." Instead of silently revering the two masters of prose, Ayalon mixes their two stories together, diffus ing their sharp characteristic lines. If there is a murder in this poem, it is the murder of the authors, a liberating act, that frees writer and reader to create their own new text.

Women's poetry has often been described in male Hebrew criticism as "simple," "transparent," and linguistically flat. [19] It is perhaps in reaction to these accusations that many contemporary poems by women have become elitist, layered with fantastic imagery and inter textual references, placing high demands on readers. Much of this poetry discards reference that is not textual. Contemporary Israeli women's writing challenges the Hebrew language, tearing it at its seams, invading areas formerly restricted to masculine discourse (as Bejerano does in her "Data Processing" poems).

Rahel Chalfi (1945-) first explored a powerful feminist persona in aquatic imagery: in the poem "The Water Queen of Jerusalem" the city is overwhelmed by its cultural baggage, while the protagonist herself is almost drowned. She triumphs, mutating into an ichtyoid in a process of evolution and definition of her subjectivity.

The Water Queen of Jerusalem

The Water Queen of Jerusalem

dives into history

history is hard and she grows fins

there is no air so she invents

gills rowing through memory

the Water Queen of Jerusalem owns

a bathing suit made out of Yiddish

the Water Queen of Jerusalem wallows on a stone beach in

Ladino

is afraid of the rising water level in Arabic

the Water Queen of Jerusalem has no

sea in Jerusalem

she has a history

Jewish

and she holds

just holds her head

above water

translated by Tsipi Keller

Thereafter, Chalfi adopted medieval witch trials as a poetic framework, acting in defense of the falsely accused. Her poetry takes t-o flights of fancy, forever aware of the futile effort to grasp or to define a given moment, yet cherishing the attempt itself.

Maya Bejerano (1949-) has chosen, especially in her early poetry, a technical, seemingly "unpoetic" language. Against the commonplace, she introduces astronomy, computer technology, and science fiction to liberate women as yet unknown beings to whom the future belongs. The poetic voice in these poems unabashedly positions itself at the center of the universe's orbit. Her feminism as a poet is uncompromising. Her later poetry, especially in the cycle "The Hymns of Job," draws on a mythical imagination and confronts existential and political questions. Her most recently published volume (Trying to Touch My Belly-Button) takes a new autobiographical direction.

Poetry

Now that her skin is clean and pierced with essential truths like a

sieve,

poetry can rise,

bend a moment over her make-up table and face the mirror -

any old mirror found in a store, a shop in some bazaar

or other - and leap.

Laughing to herself.

Each gesture, line and color

will be drawn with care

so as not to be misled by masks she'd have to erase

and wipe clean with water and soap-

the mirror a vast arena, a watchful bull

will look into the face of Mrs. Poetry leaning

into her own reflection,

will sneeze will dip horns.

Let's wait and see how far she'll go --

the bull in the mirror and poetry facing it;

the bull may leave the glass and ravage her as she bends over --

a ravaged poetry -- that's what we'll have

if tamed poetry won't face up

to the bull in the glass

translated by Tsipi Keller

Agi Mishol (1947-) pokes fun at the Zionist sanctification of agricultural labor, and establishes a relationship with the land on her own terms. Introducing herself as "the supermarket bard," with a nod to Allen Ginsberg, she demystifies the poetic muse. Like Bejerano, in "Poetry," Mishol establishes an ars poetica which is grounded in a woman's experience. Younger poets such as Miri Ben-Simhon (1954-1996), Efrat Mishori (1964-), and Sharon Hass (1966-) actively forge a Hebrew (M)other tongue, and pursue the possibilities which present themselves when a woman's body meets her language. Efrat Mishori performs her poetry, accentuating the corporeal dimension of language. As womanhood comfortably settles into Hebrew, "compulsory heterosexuality" is also being dissolved, and Hebrew poetry is discovering a lesbian voice in some recent poems by Hedva Harechavi, Sharon Hass, and others.

Poets such as Y. L. Gordon, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Abraham Shlonsky, and Nathan Alterman, were the leading figures in modem Hebrew literature from the turn of the nineteenth century until the late fifties of this century, when the dominance of poetry gave way to prose. As narrative fiction has come to the fore in Israeli literature, and volumes of poetry are more difficult to publish (major poets must now finance the publication of their books), the role of literary periodicals has become crucial. Publications such as Ah'shav and Kesket (from the late fifties), Siman Kri'a, Prosa, Iton 77 (from the seventies), and Hadarim (from the eighties) have provided a continuous platform for women's--and men's--poetry. The theme-centered anthologies issued by Helicon (begun in the early nineties) have become a notably supportive environment for fledgling as well as established poets. Poetry workshops too have proliferated in the last two decades, allowing new poetic voices to surface.

One indication of the change in the position of Israeli women's poetry is their relation to children's literature. Women have played a key role in the creation of literature for children in Hebrew. Their participation in Hebrew literature was recognized in stories and poems for children much earlier than in literature for adults. Many women poets, such as Shulamit Kalugai, Ella Amitan, Miriam Yelan-Shtekelis, and Fanya Bergstein, wrote few poems for adults, but found children's literature more accessible. When Anda Pinkerfeld Amir received the distinguished Israel Prize, it was for her poetry for children and not for adults. Similarly, when Lea Goldberg, whose children's books rank high among Israeli classics, worked as an editor in the publishing house Sifriat Ha'poalim, she edited children's literature. Women poets still write for children, but this no longer marks their marginalization in Hebrew literature. Thus when Nurit Zarchi implements motifs from her children's poetry in her adult poetry, she demons trates a postmodern disregard for generic and canonical hierarchical classification. Here women's Hebrew poetry has come of age.

The last quarter of the twentieth century has witnessed an enormous surge of women's literary creativity, in poetry as well as in prose. Women have now taken their place in Israeli literature and are continuing to develop an open and self-assured feminist outlook. The poets we have gathered into our collection, The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poetry from Antiquity to the Present, have a powerful impact, more perhaps than they might have individually. Their integration into Hebrew literature, within a by now securely rooted feminist tradition, constitutes the fruition of a long and laborious process.

TAMAR HESS teaches at the Hebrew University ofJerusalem, where she is completing her Ph.D. dissertation. She has published articles in Hebrew on images of femininity in Second and Third Aliya literature (1995) and contemporary Israeli women's feminist fiction (1995).

GALIT HASAN-ROKEM, Max and Margarethe Grunwald Professor of Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written and edited several scholarly books and two volumes of Hebrew poetry. She is the literary editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal, a founding member of Women's Peace Net in Israel, and of Bat-Shalom.

SHIRLEY KAUFMAN has published seven volumes of poetry, translations from the Hebrew of the poetry of Amir Gilboa and Abba Kovner, and won numerous prizes. Her Selected Poems, translated by Aharon Shabtai, was published by the Bialik Press in Israel in 1995. Her poem, "Preparations," appeared in the Fall 1998 issue.

Printed by permission of The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, from The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poetry from Antiquity to the Present, A Bilingual Anthology, edited and with an introduction by Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, and Tamar Hess.

Copyright [C] 1998 by Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, and Tamar Hess. Forthcoming from The Feminist Press in fall 1999. For more information, please contact The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, City College, Wingate Hall, Convent Avenue at 138th Street, New York, NY 10031.

NOTES

(1.) Rather than erupting in the early twenties of the twentieth century as critics have maintained. See: Yaffa Berlowitz, "Rachel Morpurgo: The Death Wish, The Poem's Wish: On the First Hebrew Poet in Modem Times, in Ziva Shamir (Ed.), Sadan Vol. 2 (1996): 11-40 (Hebrew).

(2.) There is evidence of women studying the Talmud and appreciating, as well as financially supporting Hebrew literature in Italy, from the sixteenth century. Dan Pagis, Poetry Aptly Explained, Studies and Essays on Medieval Hebrew Poetry, edited by Ezra Fleischer (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1993), p. 161; Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, translated by Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1994); Howard Adelman, "Finding Women's Voices in Italian Jewish Literature," in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, edited by Judith R. Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994) pp. 50-69.

(3.) Berlowitz, pp. 23-26. In addition, Morpurgo signed some of her poems "Stillborn of the wife of Yaakov Morpurgo" ("nefel eshet Yaakov Morpurgo"), which is also an expression of her bitter-ironic view of herself as a wife and poet. The phrase "a woman's stillbirth" ("nefel eshef") appears only once in the Bible (Psalms 58:9), thus exhibiting Morpurgo's erudition, while feigning modesty.

(4.) Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986) Chapter 6, pp. 210-238. For an example of the fertile influence that American feminist criticism has had on Israeli literary criticism see: Tova Cohen, "Within Culture and Without, On the Appropriation of the 'Father's Tongue' as an intellectual shaping of the Feminine 'I,'" in Sadan, Vol. 2, edited by Ziva Shamir (1996): 69-110 (Hebrew) and Lily Rattok, "Like Water She Carves: Motifs in Women's Hebrew Poetry," Sadan, Vol. 2, (1996): 165-202 (Hebrew).

(5.) Hamutal Bar-Yosef, On Zelda's Poetry (Tel-Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuhad, 1988), p. 39.

(6.) Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975).

(7.) Hamutal Tsamir, "Love of the Homeland and a Deaf Dialogue: A Poem by Esther Raab and its Masculine Critical Reception," Theory and Criticism 7(1995): 124-145 (Hebrew); Anne Lapidus Lerner, "The Naked Land: Nature in the Poetry of Esther Raab," in Women of the Word, Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, edited by Judith R. Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 236-257; Hamutal Bar-Yosef, "In the Trap of Equations: 'Woman=Nature, Man=Culture' and Esther Raab's poem 'Holy Grandmothers of Jerusalem'" in A View into the Lives of Women in Jewish Societies: Collected Essays, edited by Yael Azmon (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1995), pp. 337-347.

(8.) Tali Asher, "'I have known how to tell of myself-re-reading Rahel." Paper delivered at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Winter, 1995.

(9.) Israel's history and especially its wars and war poetry have marginalized women, and their personal experience has not been often acknowledged as representative of the collective ethos. Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir's long epic poem of Israel's War of Independence, "Ahat" ("The One"), is groundbreaking in this respect. Based on a true story, "The One" deals with the Holocaust, national revival, and rehabilitation through the story of a mother and her daughter Rachel Zeltser (1927-1948), who died in the battle for the Jewish quarter in the old city of Jerusalem.

The Israeli military have over the years preserved an image of egalitarianism which may be traced back to the War of Independence and might have been enhanced by photographs of women soldiers carrying arms. However, this myth has long been shattered. Today, although women are required to do almost two years of compulsory military service at the age of eighteen (men serve three years), their military contribution remains mostly within conservative gender roles (that is, non-combat units, usually secretarial work). In 1995 Alice Miller, then a twenty-three year old aeronautics engineer, won a precedent setting high court ruling, which has enabled women to enroll as pilot trainees in the Israeli Air Force. Other limits are slowly being challenged in the navy and in other corps.

(10.) Eaven Boland has written about this in a notably poignant memoir, with reference to Irish poetry, in her Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Pa et in Our Time (New York/London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995) especially p. 185".. . given the force of the national tradition and the claim it had made on Irish Literature, the political poem stood in urgent need of a subversive private experience to lend it true perspective and authority. An authority which in my view, could be guaranteed only by an identity--and this included a sexual identity--which the poetic tradition, and the structure of the Irish poem had almost stifled."

(11.) Ruebner describes Goldberg's poetics as inspired by German Neo-romantic poetry Rilke, Stefan George, and Hofmannsthal), among other influences

(12.) Quoted by Tuvia Ruebner, Lea Goldberg:AMonography (Tel-Aviv: Universitat Tel-Aviv, 1980), p. 70. (Hebrew). Cf. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1938).

(13.) Gershon Shahed has discussed the nature of the disillusion in his Hebrew NarrativeFiction 1880- 1980, Vol. 4 (Tel-Aviv/Jerusalem: Haldbbutz Hameuchad and Keter Publishing houses, 1995), pp. 87-92 (Hebrew).

(14.) Hannan Hever, "The Poetry of the National Body, Women Poets in the War of Independence," Theory and Criticism 7 (1995): 99-123 (Hebrew).

(15.) Hever, passim.

(16.) Research has not provided answers yet into the reasons why women survivors did not write poetry in Hebrew. Until the eighties Israelis articulated their relationship to the Holocaust almost exclusively in the public sphere, such as the Eichmann trial, construction of monuments, and the annual memorial day. Collective practice may have discouraged private expression in literary form. Early personal poems by women about the Holocaust are rare. In 1946 an unknown poet, going only by the first name Nurit, published a poem titled "No Address," in which the speaker addresses her infant son, telling him: "To whom will I write a letter? / All the addresses are lost. / Smoke rose on the horizon / And above our heads the cloud / And eternal silence. II // My child, my child do you know / We have no addresses / There is no mother, no father I And in their ruined home / only eternal silence." Among other survivors who have written poetry are Bat-Sheva Dagan and Halina Birenbaum.

(17.) Lesley Hazletan, Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths (New Ynrk: Simon and Schuster, 1977). For an Israeli and more updated survey see also: Dafna N. Israeli, Ariella Friedman, Ruth Schrift, Francis Raday, andJudith Buber-Agassi, eds., The Double Bind: Women in Israel (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1982) (Hebrew).

(18.) Deborah Bernstein, ed., Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

(19.) HayaShaham, "A Wnman Poet in a Crowd of Men Poets: The Acceptance of Lea Goldberg's and Dahlia Ravikovitch's Poetry by the Criticism of Their Period," in Sadan, Studies in Hebrew Literature, Vol. 2, edited by Ziva Shamir and Hanna David (1996): 203-240 (Hebrew).