RAAB, ESTHER
1894 – 1981
The first Palestinian-born woman poet in the modern era to write and publish in Hebrew.
Esther Raab’s childhood in the early years of the first Jewish settlement of Petah Tikvah shaped an intimate connection between her and the wild and primary landscape of Eretz Yisrael (Palestine). Her father, Judah *Raab, had immigrated from Hungary and helped found the first moshavah, where she grew up in poverty and hardship. After a short stay in Deganyah, she worked in Ben Shemen and returned home. In 1921 she married her cousin, the merchant Yitzhak Green and spent five years with him in Cairo and in Paris. Back in Tel Aviv, the couple’s home became a meeting place for writers and painters.
Her first poems appeared in Hedim in the beginning of the 1920s. In 1930, shortly before the publication of her first collection of poems, Kimshonim (Thistles, 2002), her husband died. Two years later, Raab married the painter Arieh Alweil. Her second collection, Shirei Esther Raab, appeared more than 30 years later, in 1964. Her late poems appeared in the volume Tefillah Aḥaronah (“Last Prayer,” 1972). Yalkut Shirim, published in 1982, includes a lengthy introduction by Reuven Shoham. A collection of stories, Gan she-Ḥarav, with stories depicting her childhood and youth in the moshavah and her vivid impressions of her stay in Egypt, appeared in 1983. Her nephew, the writer Ehud Ben Ezer, edited Kol ha-Shirim (1988) and Kol ha-Prozah (2001) and wrote her biography Yamim shel La’anah u-Devash (“Days of Gall and Honey”–including a bibliography, 1998).
This emotional relationship is expressed throughout her poems. In 1923 Raab’s first poem, “Ani Tahat ha-Atad” (I am underneath the bramble bush), was published in the new Hebrew literary periodical Hedim, but it was only in 1930 that her first book, Kimshonim (Thistles) – containing thirty-two poems written between 1920 and 1930 – was published.
Raab was a pioneer in her poetics. As early as the 1920s, Raab’s poems differed markedly from those of her mainstream male contemporaries and from those of other women poets of the time. Her early poetry is striking in its sensuous descriptions of the landscape of Eretz Yisrael and in its rebellious female voice. Moreover, this early work is notable for its rejection of the stanza and meter in favor of free verse and idiosyncratic syntax and word order. These elements of form and content, which set Raab’s poetry apart from the poetic and thematic conventions of her time, may have contributed to her fate as a poet. After the cool and sometimes openly hostile reception of her book, Raab fell into a two-decade-long silence. She started to publish again in the late 1950s.
Raab died in Tiveon and was buried in the city of her birth, Petah Tikvah. She requested that a few lines from her poem be engraved on her tombstone: “Your earth-clods were sweet to me/Homeland – just as the clouds of your sky/Were sweet to me.”
Among Raab’s books of poetry are The Poetry of Esther Raab (1963), As Last Prayer, (1976), Root’s Sound (an anthology; 1976), and Esther Raab, Collected Poems (1988). A second, enlarged edition of her collected poems was published in 1994, the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth.
The landscape of Ereẓ Israel and the Orient, colors, shades, and smells, and particularly the flora of the homeland make up her poetic texture. Raab expresses a genuine love for the country, the soil, the space, and writes passionate lyrical poetry, expressing yearning, pain, disappointment, and loneliness. The growing interest in Hebrew women writers and their oeuvre has also given rise to a rediscovery and re-appreciation of Esther Raab and her poetry. In addition to the English collection Thistles, to which the translator Harold Schimmel added an Introduction, single poems and stories appeared in foreign anthologies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
E. Sharoni, “Edenic Energy: E. Raab’s Unmediated Vision of Nature,” in: Modern Hebrew Literature 8:3–4 (1983), 62–69; D. Melamed, “Requiem for a Landscape,” in: Modern Hebrew Literature, 9:3–4 (1984), 69–72; A. Lerner, “‘A Woman’s Song’: The Poetry of E. Raab,” in: Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (1992), 17–38; idem, “The Naked Land: Nature in the Poetry of E. Raab,” in: Women of the Word (1994), 236–57; B. Mann, “Framing the Native: E. Raab’s Visual Poetics,” in: Israel Studies, 4:1 (1999), 234–57; H. Zamir, “Ahavat Moledet ve-Si’aḥ Ḥershim,” in: Theory and Criticism, 7 (1995), 125–45; E. Ben Ezer, “E. Raab ve-ha-Aravim,” in: Nativ, 9:5 (1996), 72–78; Z. Luz, E. Raab, Monografiyyah (1997); E. Ben Ezer, “Or Ḥadash al E. Raab ve-Y. Luidor,” in: Iton 77, 255 (2001), 17–20; Sh. Zayit, “‘Ani Amarti et Kol ha-Emet, Ani Nishba’at’: Ha-Model ha-Biografi shel E. Raab,” in: Masad, 2 (2004), 21–29.
[Anat Feinberg (2nd ed.)]
Source: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.
