In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine by Lital Levy
  • Maurice Ebileeni (bio)
Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine. By Lital Levy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 360 pp. $39.95.

In Poetic Trespass, Lital Levy explores the cultural implications of the Hebrew/Arabic literary encounter in and against the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Levy joins a small group of scholars such as Gil Hochberg, Hannan Hever, and Ami Elad-Bouskila who study the historically vexed, but inextricable and ongoing intertwining of Hebrew and Arabic through the works of both Israeli and Palestinian writers and poets that have not "successfully" conformed to the perimeters of, as Levy [End Page 688] has it, the "ethnocentric domain that equates Hebrew with 'Jewish' and Arabic with 'Arab'" (3).

Reading against the grain, Levy addresses certain sites within the conflict where Jewish authors of Arab or North African descent continue, or return, to write in Arabic, and where Palestinian writers in Israel have chosen to write in Hebrew. These sites occur in "the no-man's land between Hebrew and Arabic" and unsettlingly "outside" the aforementioned ethnocentric division (3). This "no-man's-land," inspired by the title of Palestinian writer, translator, and poet Anton Shammas's second Hebrew-language poetry collection Shetah Hefker (literally, "a territory of abandonment"), is not a utopian space, Levy contends, insofar as it may condemn those who do not know any other language beyond it to a kind of eternal wandering between two, currently, adversarial languages. Nonetheless, as Levy sets out to demonstrate in Poetic Trespass, it is also a space where such wanderings may uncover alternative poetic visions and cultural possibilities—a passage that belongs to no one, but where symbols, motifs, themes, and ideas stream between two languages as a result of individual acts of poetic trespassing that defy the sociopolitical codes of the nation-state.

This pioneering study is divided into three parts. The first, "Historical Visions and Elisions," opens up with excellent readings of the defamiliarizing effects of today's "Israeli Arabic" on the native Israeli Hebrew speaker through the critically acclaimed film Ajami (2009), and the historically suppressed influences of Arabic on Palestinian Hebrew a century earlier through the documented testimonies of the first Zionist settlers whose orientalist fascination with the local Arab culture lead to the phenomenon of the "Hebrew Bedouin." The second part, "Bilingual Entanglements," offers an original reading of Israeli-Palestinian author Emile Habiby's works along with Iraqi-born Israeli writer Samir Naqqash's by way of problematizing the intimate relationship between Arabic in both Arab and Jewish hands. However, the following chapter—the most original in the book—argues through sensitive readings of Shammas's relatively little-known poetry, as well as Salman Masalha's and Na'im 'Araidi's, for the making of "Palestinian Midrash," ultimately challenging the exclusivity of the Hebrew language's Jewish identity. In the third part, "Afterlives of Language," Levy focuses on the problems of Mizrahi literature in the Israeli context, offering readings of, among others, Sami Michael's, Shimon Ballas's, Ronit Matalon's, Sami Chetrit's, and Amira Hess's contributions to this literary branch. A particularly insightful critical intervention is the discussion of the significance and sophistication of the young Israeli poet and novelist Almog Behar's works—a third-generation Israeli of [End Page 689] Iraqi Jewish descent who through his writings both mourns the loss and creatively initiates a linguistic revival of his Arab origins.

Levy's comprehensive knowledge of the historic relationship between Hebrew and Arabic, her familiarity with state-of-the-art theoretical considerations of both language and cultural studies, and her mastery of Hebrew and Arabic come clearly across through her fine English prose. She tells the stories of lingual and literary encounters that have been overshadowed by decades of polarization and politicians' wet fantasies about the degradation or elimination of the other. In this sense, Poetic Trespass is primarily an "optimistic" book, although Levy herself is cautious about pursuing the political implications of the arguments she makes.

I also want to be careful about making certain celebratory statements with regard to the political...

pdf