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238 Lital Levy 238 book reviews Lital Levy Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2014. 337 pp. isbn 978-0-691-16248-5 (hardcover). Poetic Trespass offers an important study of writing that exists between Hebrew and Arabic, and an insightful analysis that separates linguistic from national identity. Through an impressive number of writers Levy introduces her read- ers to this fascinating ‘no-man’s-land’, a term she borrows from a poem by the Palestinian poet Anton Shammas, of Hebrew and Arabic writing. According to Levy, the ‘no-man’s-land’ is ‘at once a space between Hebrew and Arabic and a space outside the ethnocentric domain that equates Hebrew with “Jew- ish,” and Arabic with “Arab”’ (3). Surveying the multiple ways of inhabiting this ‘no-man’s-land’ created in the interstices of nationalist monolingualism, Levy sheds light on what it means to write across and in spite of linguistic bor- ders entrenched by nationalist imaginaries and decades of conflict. In fact, one of the most pertinent undertakings of the book is that it consistently makes the study of language and literature not only relevant but necessary and indis- pensable. With a few asides into ‘Ashdodian’ (a secret language invented by the Moroccan-born poet Sami Shalom Chetrit), Baghdadi Jewish dialect, and Aramaic, the book is mainly concerned with Palestinian Israelis and Arab Jews writing in both Hebrew and Arabic, and first, second, and third generation Arab Jewish and Mizrahi writers who switched to Hebrew or who mobilize the rem- nants of the rapidly disappearing Arab Jewish linguistic reality. Poetic Trespass draws together narratives ranging from the pre-state to the contemporary period in Israel in an attempt to push the boundaries of the trou- bled present and its political realities. The first section revisits the history of the foundation and development of Modern Hebrew language and literature and succinctly describes how Arabic ‘played a central, formative, yet paradox- ical role in the self-definition of Modern Hebrew from the very outset’ (21) while simultaneously explaining, and challenging, the Eurocentric and myopic narratives of the canonization of Modern Hebrew literature. Levy does so by drawing attention to the forgotten history of non-European and often multilin- gual Jewish modernity and literary production from Baghdad to the Balkans. She contends that ‘Modern Hebrew literature was severed from the history and culture of Arabic-speaking Jews, and how the Hebrew cultural establishment became associated with the exclusion of Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Arab Jews’ (102). As such, Poetic Trespass is also ‘a historical counternarrative: an alterna- tive story of the evolution of language and ideology in the Jewish state’ (5). A welcome innovation is that Levy takes language itself, rather than identity, as her primary focus and highlights the influence of language in informing our © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/18739865-00902009 book reviews 239 understanding of Arab, Jewish, and Arab Jewish histories. While language and literature have often been at the center of the conflict, Levy never reduces the texts under study to ‘a prescription for Middle Eastern peace or a plea for rec- onciliation between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews’ (14). Levy’s linguistic no-man’s-land should therefore not be understood as a utopia but rather as a location with the potential to disrupt singular national and linguistic identities. Levy is at her best when she introduces overlooked and neglected writers and a great strength of the book is that she does not restrict herself to the group of writers conventionally invoked in discussions of minority and peripheral writing in Israel/Palestine. A striking example of this is the chapter that uncon- ventionally brings into contact seemingly unrelated writers such as the much- celebrated Emile Habiby and the little known Iraqi Jewish Arabic-language writer Samir Naqqash. This chapter importantly brings together Israel/Pales- tine and Iraq, as well as the two groups who have traditionally written literature in Arabic in Israel, namely Palestinian Israelis and Arab Jews. It also astutely accentuates the mutual and concomitant loss of Palestine and Jewish Baghdad while urging us to question the relationship between linguistic and national identity and belonging. Rethinking translation as something that is not simply applied to a text, but rather as ‘a process that takes place within it’ (107), Levy demonstrates how both Habiby and Naqqash in their Arabic-language works use translation, mistranslation, and what she terms as the ‘poetics of misunder- standing’ as ways to reveal the colonial power structures embedded in language and to ‘reclaim their repressed histories’ (109). A related question is pursued in the chapter entitled ‘Palestinian Midrash,’ which reinterprets Jewish tradi- tion through Palestinian experience in the bilingual poetry of Anton Shammas, Salman Masalha, and Naiʾm ʿAraidi. Adding new ideas about Palestinians writ- ing in Hebrew to scholarship, which has often read this literature as an attempt to make Hebrew less Jewish, Levy suggests that Jewishness be seen as a cultural space ‘open to appropriations and intrusions in much the same way as Hebrew’ (151). In her careful treatment of Palestinian poetic engagements of traditional Jewish texts and myths Levy questions whether, ‘rather than divesting Hebrew of its Jewishness, Shammas and his colleagues may be appropriating that Jew- ishness (and not just Hebrew) toward new ends’ (152). The final section of PoeticTrespass deals with the ambiguous role of language in contemporary Mizrahi poetry and prose. Especially in its discussion of the pain and trauma connected to the loss of Arabic as a Jewish mother tongue in the writings of third generation Mizrahim such as Almog Behar, who have been discussed only superficially outside of Israel, this is one of the strongest sections of the book. As in the chapter on Habiby and Naqqash, Levy brings Palestine and Israel together by reading the works of Behar along side those Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 9 (2016) 235–241.
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