Woman on the Margin

Woman on the Margin: Selected Poetry and Fiction of Elisheva reintroduces a strong literary and feminist voice into English after a hiatus of almost a century. Russian-born Elisheva Bukhovsky was a Hebrew writer and a Gentile who emigrated to Palestine with her husband and daughter to become a part of the Jewish national revival. Like most Hebrew writers of her generation, she did her creative work in a language not hers by birth. She was one of the first poets to write in the idiomatic language of the Yishuv, the Hebrew-speaking Jewish settlement in Palestine, while also making the poems musical through rhyme and meter.

This book, highly suitable for classroom use, presents her best poems in the original Hebrew and in English translation. In her fiction, she explored relationships between Jews and Gentiles in Russia, told through the lens of male-female relations in courtship and marriage. In her stories and in her novel Byways, excerpted in this book, she adopted the viewpoints of both Gentiles and Jews in a modernizing Russia, where friendly relations between them were possible, but where deep mutual understanding remained absent. In our increasingly multicultural world, we have much to learn from her pioneering work. The arc of her career also offers a fascinating case study of what was generally seen at the time as a secular conversion to the Jewish people. This book should make her work accessible to the disciplines of World Literature, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies and Jewish Studies.