Subverting Hebrew’s Gender Binary: Grammar, Poetry, and Performance in the Work of Esther Raab Shoshana Olidort Stanford University abstract: This article examines antigrammaticality in the work of the so-called first “native” modern Hebrew poet, Esther Raab, focusing in particular on how Raab deploys the constraints of Hebrew’s highly gendered grammar in her poems. I begin by considering the broad implications of grammatical gender for how we think and act in the world, while also taking into account specific, concrete examples of gender policing that Raab recalled from her own early childhood. I then offer a close reading of a single, untitled poem to demonstrate how, from her position at the intersection of multiple margins, as a native-born female poet in a literary milieu dominated by immi- grants, most of them male, Raab effectively subverts both gender and grammar norms in the construction of a nonconforming gender identity. i like lines that are straight and strong,” the Hebrew poet Esther Raab (1894–1981) once said, while declaring her affinity for biblical Hebrew and the language of Bialik over that of her contemporaries.1 As she went on to explain: “I do not like things that are too “ complicated and that do not grow from a natural foundation: Earth, Water, Air, etc.”2 Scholarly readings of Raab’s work have tended to focus on the poet’s connection with the physical landscape of Eretz Yisrael, and images of the native (or, as it happens, imported) fauna and flora, the latter in particular, abound in Raab’s early work. Though she attributed the inspi- published in 1932, to Baudelaire’s Les fleurs ,(קמשונים) ration for the title of her first book,Thistles 1 Esther Raab and Reuven Shoham, “K’var pigashtikh pa’am: Halifat mikhtavim 1971–1981” [I have met you before: 1971–1981 correspondence], ed. Ehud Ben-Ezer (unpublished manuscript), 34. 2 Ibid., 35. dibur literary journal Issue 9, Fall 2020 Peripheral Modernism 10 dibur du mal (The flowers of evil), thistles were ubiquitous in theyishuv that Raab knew intimately, and Raab herself is often referred to as the firstsabra (meaning both “native Hebrew” and “prickly pear”) poet[ess].3 While Hamutal Tsamir offers a compelling counterargument to the prevalence of terms like “authenticity,” “rootedness,” and “truth” in critical reception of Raab’s early work, the poet seemed to welcome this assessment of her work, and of her person, in relation to both the land and the Hebrew language.4 Despite her claims to a “pure,” unmediated Hebrew, unencumbered by attachments to other languages and cultures, rhetoric that recalls the infamous experiment Eliezer Ben Yehuda conducted with his son (whom he set out to raise in a pure, untainted Hebrew environment), Raab was never monolingual, and Hebrew was not her first language.5 Born to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants who were among the founders of Petah Tikvah, Raab spoke Yiddish, which remained the lingua franca both at home and among her peers for the better part of her childhood. She was likely exposed to her parents’ native Hungarian and most certainly to both Arabic and Russian, which were heard often on the streets of Petah Tikvah. At school, the languages of instruction were French and Hebrew, and Raab taught herself German in order to be able to read works by Heine, Schiller, and Goethe in the original.6 As Adriana Jacobs argues, Raab’s multilingualism would profoundly influence her own poetry. All of this is worth noting, not because it set Raab apart from other poets of her time, but because, as Jacobs makes clear, modern Hebrew poetry was itself born out of a confluence of languages and was shaped by translational practices that were ubiquitous among the poets of Raab’s generation.7 Raab herself would go on to translate poems by Charles Baudelaire and the German writer Walter Cale into Hebrew. The ubiquity of multilingualism among early modern Hebrew poets may explain why Raab, who remained a marginal poet throughout her life, chose to emphasize her status as a native- born poet, something that distinguished her from her fellow poets, many of them (including the three women who, along with Raab, would form the first generation of female poets in modern Hebrew) immigrants from Eastern Europe. As she told the poet Mosheh Dor, “My entire essence, as a sabra, was different.”8 Comparing herself with some of her most notable contemporaries, including Natan Alterman and Avraham Shlonsky, Raab claimed that while those poets were refers to the prickly pear that is native to the Middle Eastern terrain. Its adoption as a צבר The noun sabra 3 metaphor for the “native Israeli” has to do with the fruit’s ubiquitous thorny exterior and luscious sweet interior, which is seen as representative of the kind of “tough on the outside, kind on the inside” new Jew of the Zionist imagination. 4 Hamutal Tsamir, “Ahavat moledet ve-si’ah. h. ershim: Shir eh. ad shel Ester Rab ve-hitqabluto ha-gavrit” [Love of homeland and a deaf conversation: A poem by Esther Raab and its masculine reception], Teoria u-viqoret 7 (1995): 125–45. See also Hamutal Tsamir, “Migdar ve-teritoriah nifgashim: Ha-miqreh shel Ester Rab” [Gender and territory meet: The case of Esther Raab], inBe-shem ha-nof: Le’umiut, migdar, u’sovyektibiyut ba-shira ha- isrealit bi-shenot ha-h. amishim ve-ha-shishi [In the name of the land: Nationalism, subjectivity, and gender in the Israeli poetry of the Statehood Generation] (Jerusalem: Keter Books; Be’er Sheva: Heksherim, 2006), 91–124. For more on Raab as native poet, see Hanan Hever, Nativism, Zionism, and Beyond (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 17–20. 5 See Adriana Jacobs, “Paris or Jerusalem? Esther Raab, Baudelaire, and the Writing of Kimshonim,” in Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 49–96, esp. 53, which cites an interview with Raab on this subject: Ziva Shamir, “Ne‘urei ha-shira be-arets lo zerua‘” [The youth of poetry in an unsowed land],H . adarim 1 (1981): 101–18. See also Ehud Ben-Ezer, Yamim shel la‘ana u-devash [Days of gall and honey] (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘oved, 1998), 461. 6 Ben-Ezer, Yamim shel la‘ana, 130. 7 Jacobs, “Paris or Jerusalem?” 8 Ben-Ezer, Yamim shel la‘ana, 484. olidort | subverting hebrew’s gender binary 11 “stuck in Russianness” and brought to their poetry an element of foreignness, she came to poetry with “essentially no baggage.”9 Fanciful thinking, no doubt, and yet Raab’s insistence on her authentic, supposedly unmediated access to Hebrew is a useful factor in considering the iden- tity that emerges from her early poems, in which subversive grammar is a performative feat that manages to enact gender ambiguity while simultaneously asserting mastery of the still nascent modern Hebrew language. Recalling the transformation of Hebrew into a modern vernacular and her own enchant- ment with the newly formed language, Raab once said, “Every Hebrew word was new and shining with a wealth of colors like a bird’s wings. And I caught it as one catches a bird.”10 If poetry has the capacity to make language new and is often tasked with, to borrow from Viktor Shklovsky, defamiliarizing what is already known, things are necessarily more complicated when one writes in a language that is itself undergoing a process of renewal and rebirth. While the very newness of modern Hebrew would seem to present myriad opportunities for experimentation, the fact that the reinvention of Hebrew was inextricably bound up with the project of nation building meant that such freedom was necessarily undercut by ideological constraints. That Raab was able to sidestep these limitations in her experimental poetry thus has as much to do with the language itself — its glistening newness and pliability — as with her position on the margins of the linguis- tic and national revival. Indeed, as bell hooks has argued, the margins have functioned in society as “both sites of repression and sites of resistance.”11 As a native-born female writer in a literary culture dominated by immigrants, most of them male, Raab fell under the radar of the dominant culture, but this very marginalization made it possible for her to engage with the language unrestrainedly. As Chana Kronfeld points out in a discussion of Raab’s work, “writing from a marginal position can — perhaps must — ­destabilize the norm of the literary and linguistic system by marking the unmarked, charging the neutral, colorizing the colorless, particularizing the universal.”12 Kronfeld further notes that the poet’s particular circumstances as “the first native poet (male or female) in that reborn language . make it impossible for Raab to take anything for granted — syntactically, semantically, pragmatically, and, not least of all, prosodically.”13 Like Kronfeld, I read Raab’s unconventional grammar as a subversive performance aimed at reimagining the symbolic system of language itself. But while Kronfeld points repeatedly to Raab’s ungrammaticality, my argument, borrowing from Roman Jakobson, insists on anti- rather than un-grammaticality as the operative term for understanding 9 Ibid., 295. 10 From an interview with Haim Be’er, as quoted (and translated) by Anne Lapidus Lerner in her essay “‘A Woman’s Song’: The Poetry of Esther Raab,” inGender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, ed. Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 18. 11 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 21. 12 Chana Kronfeld, “The Marginal as Exemplary: The Poetry of Esther Raab,” inOn the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 72.