According to Anne Lerner, the poet Esther Raab presented herself to her first readers in 1922 with the lines:

I am under the thornbush

Nimble, menacing,

Laughing [at] its thorns

To greet you I straightened up.

At a time when Hebrew poetry by women was just beginning to be published, these lines introduced many of the themes and poetic devices that came to characterize Raab’s poetry and the way it was read: A stark landscape, an unconventional female central character, a hint of a biblical inter-text, bold color, a linkage between eroticism and nature, and sparse, idiosyncratic punctuation.

Host Marcela Sulak reads Raab’s poems “Holy Grandmothers in Jerusalem” and “Night” (translated by Shirley Kaufman), and “She-fox” (translated by Kinereth Gensler), which ends with these lines:

A hungry she-fox lifts her head to the Pleiades,

a cold star mirrored in her eye

could be a tear in her pupil.

The cub will suckle at life’s sad marrow—

the howl of foxes splits the night.

Text:

The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem and Tamar S. Hess. New York: The Feminist Press, 1999.

Music:

Chava Alberstein – “The Birds Don’t Know”

Limor Oved – “A Woman’s Song.” Melody by Ahuva Ozeri, arranged and produced by Gadi Sari, words by Esther Raab.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb – “A Woman’s Song.” Words by Esther Raab.

Producer: Laragh Widdess
Technical producer: Adam Sher