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It has been a commonplace in the criticism and interpretation of the fiction of Devorah Baron (1887-1956) to refer to her fiction as a form of poetry in prose, or as an \"idyll\" that poetically represents a static shtetl past. This article breaks the idyll, so to speak, showing how Baron's ambitious fiction reshapes the narrative perspective, plot, and motifs of several layers of (male) canonical tradition, specifically. Part of a larger comparative study of the fiction of S. Y. Agnon and Devorah Baron, it focuses on their shared admiration for and common intertextual engagements with Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856-57), as seen in Baron's translation of the classic novel, Agnon's realist novel Sippur pashut (1935) and Baron's \"Fradl\" (1946). A close reading of Baron's later story \"Fradl\" discloses the intertextual traces of both Baron's Madame Bovary and Agnon's novel, references that can be read as overturning elements of Agnon's and Flaubert's masterworks in specifically feminist and non-idyllic ways. The presence in many of her stories, including \"Fradl, \" of a controlling first-person female narrator, one who lives apart from the world being described and employs multilayered intertextuality and ars-poetic reflection, suggests an effort to craft an image of the woman writer capable of intervening in and reconfiguring the literary past.

In this article I wish to examine a specific historical and textual moment embodied in the works of Joseph Perl. The conventional view draws a line separating the Hasidic movement and Hasidic literature from Perl, a maskil who opposed the movement. Nevertheless, some scholars maintain that his works should not be addressed independently of his Hasidic sources of influence. Others have shown that the reciprocal influences of Haskalah and Hasidic literature continue into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this article, we will examine the relationship between Perl's works and Hasidic stories, focusing on Ma asiyyot ve iggerot as a liminal region in between Perl's works and Hasidic stories. Following examination of the work itself, we shall offer a few comments both on Hasidic stories and on Perl's later work (Megalleh temirinj, in order to illuminate the continuity and contiguity between Perl and Hasidism, in contrast to the conflict and fault line that is conventionally emphasized.

This article expands on a poem written by one of the central figures in modern Hebrew literature, Nathan Alterman (1910–1970), entitled “About a Senegalese Soldier” (1945). Providing the first English translation of this poem and its first (academic) discussion in any language, the article analyzes the poem against contemporary geopolitical, historical, and literary backgrounds. The article’s transdisciplinary approach brings together imperial and colonial studies, African studies, and (Hebrew) literature studies. This unexpected combination adds originality to mainstream postcolonial perspectives through which the agency of the Senegalese riflemen [Tirailleurs sénégalais] has been often discussed in scholarly research. By using a rich variety of primary and secondary sources, the article also contributes to a more elaborated interpretation of Alterman’s poetry. This is achieved through embedding the poem on the tirailleur in a tripartite geopolitical context: local (British Mandate Palestine/Eretz-Israel), regional (the Middle East), and international (France-West Africa). The cultural histories and literary traditions in question are not normally cross-referenced in the relevant research literature and are less obvious to the anglophone reader.

The scholarship on Hayyim Nahman Bialik's most canonical Hebrew poem, \"In the City of Killing,\" persistently returns to its origin story in the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. This article turns to the poems Yiddish translations--the first by Bialik's colleague, admirer, and ideological opponent Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, and the second by Bialik himself---and challenges notions of origins, originals, and unfaithful translations. It pays attention to a consistently suppressed fact: parts of the poem in the canonized form known to us today, particularly those that bring the poem's fascination with the gothic and grotesque to new heights, were introduced into the poem through Peretz's Yiddish rendition. Bialik then borrowed these images and tropes and incorporated them into his own Yiddish translation, ultimately translating them into Hebrew and integrating them into the final, canonized version only in 1923. Rather than contesting accusations of Peretz's \"disloyal\" translation or accusing Bialik in turn of plagiarism, this article grapples with the philological impetus to search for definitive originals and the desire for textual stability. An entangled web of bibliographical evidence, unfaithful renditions, and unacknowledged textual relatives exposes translation as a productive and unruly site of literary transfer, as a site of conflict. That conflict should be understood in political terms, as a conflict over the means, character, and grounds for a Jewish national revival. The poems translational history reconstructed in this article summons, finally, a renewed evaluation not only of the ties between Hebrew and Yiddish and between original and translation, but also more broadly of Jewish textual culture in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.

In a draft of a speech for an event called “Israel 85: For Peace and Social Justice,” the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote that he was working hard on completing a doctorate in hope, asserting, “I may not finish it by the end of my life.” This statement, ironic though it may be, attests to Amichai’s ongoing search for hope as a profound poetic project, traceable in the vocabulary of hope replete in his poetry and private writings, as well as in his active commitment to hope in extraliterary realms. Throughout his writing, Amichai questions, challenges, and recasts common conceptions of hope, positioning himself as a seeker of a new hope. In his pursuit of hope, Amichai searches for alternative modes of hoping while stressing hope’s complex, multifaceted nature and paradoxes. His poetics presents hope as both an affective force, channeling the creative process, and as a mode of knowledge. This article explores how Amichai’s project embraces hope as an active commitment to openness to the world and to others, as well as to mundane modes of knowing without mastery. This imbrication of hope and knowledge, I demonstrate, is evident in Amichai’s poetics through his affective pedagogy. This article proposes to see hope in Amichai’s poetics as a method of knowledge that remains open to uncertainty rather than as a fixed object. Rather than coming with a definitive meaning of hope, Amichai’s project instead presents hope as a form of relationality that defies notions of self-sufficiency and self-mastery. This view offers an alternative to readings that apply a hermeneutics of suspicion in understanding Amichai’s poetics.

This article examines the ways in which the desire for nativeness is constructed in Israel Hebrew poetry through several historical episodes: H. N. Bialik's poem 1896 poem \"In the Field\"; the poets as pioneers/immigrants in the 1920s, in contrast to the \"nativist\" poet Esther Raab; and the \"nativist\" poets of the 1950s (Statehood Generation), focusing on Moshe Dor. The desire to be nativeto belong to the land in a way that is natural, self-evident, and therefore absolute and unquestionableis one of the constitutive desires of nationalism in general, and of Zionism in particular. In Bialik's poem written during the formative stage of Zionism, this desire emerges as the desire to be a beloved son o mother-earth, which is an allegory for the universal \"family of nations.\" This desire is realized paradoxically in the form of ownerhip over the land. In the 1920s, the stage of the realization o Zionism, the immigrant pioneers imagine nativeness in the form of their masculine desire of the land as woman--a desire to conquer, fertilize and to own it. The poetry of Raab, being both a biographical nativ< and a woman, exemplifies the \"poetics of nativeness.\" With the foundation of the State of Israel anc the symbolic realization of Zionist desire, nativist poetry (such as the poetry of Moshe Dor) emerges as a poetry of men, who see themselves as the sons of the land, and who are nostalgic about their native position as a lost privilege.

Natan Zach has often been described as the most influential Hebrew poet in the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, the scholar Dan Miron described him as a poet who had \"reached the deepest part within us,\" and as a \"cultural leader\" and \"cultural hero.\" Yet when Miron went on to detail Zach's immense influence on other poets, he described his poetic legacy in exceedingly limiting formal terms such as \"the use of enjambment\" or \"the magic of the unexpected rhyme, seemingly out of place.\" Miron's reading is symptomatic in the way it uses, indeed echoes, Zach's own critical idiom. In this essay I will read Zach's early volume Shirim shonim (Other poems) (1960) by focusing instead on what I term his \"poetics of erasure.\" For in these poems, Zach has left no evident traces of his own biography: his arrival as a young child in Palestine; his parents' emotional breakdown following their immigration; and his own sense of homelessness in a Zionist culture that immersed itself in the \"Negation of Exile.\" In this manner, Zach's \"escape from personality,\" to use Eliot's famous dictum, ultimately provided Israeli culture with a new modality of mourning. For in a national culture that repressed exilic languages and inhibited expressions of social suffering, Zach provided a new form of elegiac writing that had no explicit content, expressing a melancholic sense of loss thorough the breakage of poetic form.

Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay.

This essay offers an economic reading of Y. H. Brenner's In Winter, which marks the emergence of Hebrew modernism. By describing Brenner's shifting articulations of the social/psychological divide, I suggest that his perception of poverty is a hermeneutical key for understanding his literary work in the early twentieth century. Material poverty permeates Brenner's early collection of short stories, Out of a Gloomy Valley (1900), which seems to underscore the social and material underpinnings of Jewish suffering. But, with In Winter (1903), it becomes clear that poverty has changed its significance for Brenner. Poverty becomes not only a material reality but a tenet of the textual fabric itself, signifying the disheveled style of the narrator-protagonist's writing. Moreover, as In Winter draws nearer to its conclusion, poverty gains yet another meaning as impoverishment turns into a key psychological concept that transcends its social foundation, elucidating the empty, inexplicable void the protagonist experiences. The figuration of poverty sheds light on Brenner's gradual modification of the social/psychological binary within In Winter itself. The novel's ending, which is the focal point of my reading, constitutes a powerful departure from the social, marking the unsaid as the text's secret nucleus.

This article offers a queer formulation of the present of Jewish literary history by reading two Yiddish poems by women that speak in a cross-gendered male voice and deploy queer content and poetics. The first poem, “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” (“I Was Once A Boy”), written by Anna Margolin in the interwar period, offers its own vision of history and critique of the powers oppressing Jews, as well as the powers oppressing women. The second poem,” Der Soyne/The Enemy: An Interview in Gaza,” written during the First Palestinian Intifada by Irena Klepfisz, speaks in the marginalized voices of Palestinians and in Yiddish, all in the Israeli context of Jewish power. The article explores how each poem critiques its present moments while activating multiple histories. Poetically disrupting the linear sequence of (hetero) normative temporality, the poems create queer histories that conflate multiple times and transgress categorical boundaries of gender, religion, and national identity. The article shows how both poems play on the irony of shifting powers and perspectives, as their speakers voice an irreverent yet anachronistic challenge to power, powers that be, powers past, or powers to come. At the same time, the poems make all too real the violence of history and the ongoing horrors of their respective presents, pasts, and futures. Looking through these poems, this essay will ask how we might think differently about the poetic politics of language, gender, and power in Jewish literary history and beyond.