![]() ![]() ![]() Bringing together works produced by women in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish from the nineteenth century to the present day, this book advocates for not “only reclaiming and inventing histories, but also generating alternative modes of queer history and temporality alike” (xxii). Enter Zohar Weiman-Kelman’s Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry, newly released in 2018 and more bold and far-reaching in its claims and aims than many of its precursors. Together they reveal a surprisingly rich lineage of Jewish women’s writing across multiple languages. These scholarly works, and others like them, have successfully uncovered histories long hidden from view. In the field of Yiddish literary scholarship, Kathryn Hellerstein’s A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 (2014) offers what may be the most comprehensive alternative to a male dominated Jewish literary history, showing how Jewish women have been producing literary work in Yiddish for many centuries, and how that work not only constitutes a discrete literary tradition but also was instrumental in shaping Yiddish literature more broadly. Wendy Zierler’s And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women’s Writing (2004) establishes a genealogy of Hebrew women’s writing that begins in nineteenth-century Italy, but also stretches further back and finds its roots in the Hebrew bible itself. Thus, for example, in The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry (2003), Michael Gluzman highlights the suppressed voices of poets like Esther Raab and David Fogel and shows how they constitute an alternative poetic lineage, one that operated on the margins of the modern Hebrew canon. Alongside these changes new scholarship has emerged that has sought out alternatives to dominant literary genealogies. In the nearly one hundred years that have elapsed since Raab began to publish her poems, much has changed in the world of Hebrew letters, and Jewish literature more broadly. To put it differently, without the benefit of a female poetic lineage with which to identify, Raab may have believed that in order to be a poet she would have to identify her poetry, and her person, as at least partly “masculine.” Raab’s identification of her poetry as masculine can be understood as simply par for the course for a poet seeking to establish herself within a milieu dominated by men, one whose search for role models would necessarily have led her to a poetic lineage that was almost entirely male. ![]() But in a literary culture composed almost entirely of immigrant writers, nearly all of them male, Raab’s status as a native, female poet inevitably consigned her to the periphery of a nascent Hebrew literary culture, and she remained a marginal figure in Hebrew letters throughout her life. Born in Petah Tikvah in 1894, Raab had the distinction of being the first sabra (or native Hebrew) poet, male or female, something that early critics latched onto, often characterizing her work as authentic, rooted, and true. ![]() Shifra at an event marking Raab’s 100th birthday. The Hebrew writer Esther Raab once said of her poetry that it emanated from the “masculine side within me.” ![]()
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