Rachel Tzvia Back, according to her Wikipedia entry, is an English-language Israeli poet, translator and professor of literature. Although born in Buffalo, N.Y., she’s a seventh-generation of a family whose first returnee to the Land of Israel was her great-great-great-grandfather, a Sadigura Hassid, settled in Eretz Yisrael in 1831. She herself returned to the country in 1980. She has lived in the Galilee since 2000.
Back studied at Yale University and Temple University, and received her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a professor of English literature and head of the graduate English track at Oranim Academic College and has published several books of translations from the Hebrew.
Her most recent translation publication is the bilingual anthology This Longing City: Modern Hebrew Poems of Jerusalem (Hebrew Union College Press). A publicity item, in fact, was published on the JNS website. The work is touted as “with its scope, scholarly framing and literary depth, This Longing City is positioned to become an essential resource for readers of poetry.”
Just this past week, the Jewish Review of Books devoted an article that was quite positive of the book. It carries a blurb from the esteemed Robert Alter, who wrote: “The rich and variegated anthology of Hebrew poems Rachel Tzvia Back has assembled captures the arresting reality of the city.”
The book contains 77 Hebrew poems about Jerusalem by 41 Modern Hebrew poets, spanning nearly 100 years of poetic output from the 1930s to today. This, however, is not a book review. I am just interested in which poets are included.
Intrigued, I searched for its contents and found it.
Her choice for a beginning year, for some reason, is 1930. That benchmark excludes Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose “Ir Shalom” (“City of Peace”), was written in 1898 (when he was 18); besides, its language was Russian, translated into Hebrew years later. It did become quite popular after 1973 when Gidi Koren set it to music.
Also not included is Yitzhak Shalev. His poems of a divided Jerusalem are full of longing, and even his son, the late novelist Meir Shalev, appreciated them. So, too, Naomi Shemer with her “Yerushalayim shel Zahav” (”Jerusalem of Gold”), which was selected as a candidate to replace “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”) as Israel’s national anthem. Even Natan Alterman is missing, although his lines devoted to Jerusalem were few. Did the author run out of pages?
Astonishingly, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, who many consider Jerusalem’s preeminent poet of the 20th century—and the recipient of the Israel Prize for Literature in 1957 and the Bialik Prize three times—was not worthy of inclusion. He wrote hundreds of Jerusalem-themed poems. According to Back, the Greenberg family would not give permission to include his work. As far as I could determine, a connection with the publishing house and the Reform Movement several years ago, a siddur anthology, was problematic for the family, and Back just didn’t ask now. Fair enough.
I checked her introduction, but there’s not a word on why some poets were not included—not only in translation, but also why none of their poems were deemed unfit for her volume. Unfortunately, the matter was ignored. I do think that her readers should have been better informed. Her audience deserves to know why Greenberg, Shalev, Shemer and others are not in her book.
Is there anything in Back’s personal background, I wondered, that could provide a hint as to those others not included?
After some online searching, I discovered that back in 2006, in an interview, she stated, “ … children are daily killed in Palestine, in Israel, too. It often feels like that is the greatest tragedy of the Middle East conflict—the sacrifice of children … .” In a 2004 blog post titled “We must disenthrall ourselves,” she wrote: “If we do not, Israel will stay bonded to violence, remaining a nation and a people that live by the sword, forever killing and being killed.”
She then added, “Our warmongering government, led by a prime minister committed only to his own political survival and allowing himself to be controlled by fascist and messianic ministers, has capitalized on this despair and fear.”
That appears to be a very clear political orientation. Fully legitimate, but if one allows one’s prejudices to cancel literature, then one should be up front as to one’s choices.
Could it be that her personal political outlook directed her exclusions? Did she engage in ideological cancellation, having found herself in deep conflict and disagreement with their content and messaging? Even if not, the lack of a few lines of explanation, if not a justification for her non-inclusion choices, is difficult to grasp coming from an academic who is undoubtedly aware of their existence.
Indeed, Israeli literature has recently come under attack and assault. On the other hand, anti-Zionist Jewish authors have been critical of the Jewish Book Council for “bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices.” I would hope that Back is not an indication that even Israeli editors and commentators on Israeli literature are not moving in that direction.
