Woman on the Margins

Selected Poetry and Fiction of ElishevaLevine, Herbert J. and Spicehandler, Reena M.  Woman on the Margins 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