A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent

Three: “Listening to Her Is Torture”The Menace of a Male Voice in a Woman’s Body

73 chapter three “Listening to Her Is Torture” The Menace of a Male Voice in a Woman’s Body Bat-Miryam reads with an Ashkenazic accent (and speaks too) and listening to her—is torture. —Ra¿el Bluvshtain, in a letter to Sarah Milshtain, 1929 In 1929, Rah·el Bluvshtain would have had many opportunities to hear immi­ grants speak in an Ashkenazic accent, and to read other poets’ recent compositions in Ashkenazic. Why then does Yokheved Bat-Miryam’s accent irritate her so much? It is difficult to imagine Bluvshtain confiding to Milshtain that listening to Bialik or Tchernichovsky—or even Uri Tsevi Greenberg and Avraham Shlonsky only a few years earlier—was torture. Bat-Miryam was certainly not an early adopter of the new accent, but why does that make her Ashkenazic accent so offensive? The 1920s saw the rise of both new-accent poetry and women’s poetry, and in fact the history of the two overlap to a remarkable degree. Bat-Miryam wrote in Ashkenazic Hebrew in Russia before moving to Palestine, but most of the small number of women writing poetry in this period began their careers—in the late teens or early twenties—as new-accent poets. Elisheva Bi¿ovski (writing first in Russia, then in Palestine under the pen name of “Elisheva”), Bluvshtain (writi ing in Palestine under the pen name “Ra¿el”), Andah Amir, and Ester Rab all inaugurated their careers in new-accent Hebrew.1 Malkah Shekhtman (writing under the pen name of “Bat-±amah”) composed most of her poems using a Sephardic stress system although she was less consistent than either Bluvshtain or Bi¿ovski.2 Yits¿ak Lamdan, Greenberg, and Shlonsky, three of the most inf fluential and popular labor poets, did not make a complete switch until the late 1920s (ca. 1928). Given the density of this very literary decade, a gap of four to eight years is significant. Even as the men maintained their Ashkenazic habit, hestitating to make the transition, these women were already publishing exc clusively new-accent poems. 74 a new sound in hebrew poetry Yet their reception was markedly different from that of the men; critics for the most part naturalized women’s early contribution to the literary new accent. The crowning of Shlonsky and Bi¿ovski as the two new-accent poets is telling of that bifurcated reception. Both the response each garnered on account of new-accent usage and the quality of Bi¿ovski’s work compared to that of other women working in the new accent are indicative of the implicit limits within which women’s poetry could be read. Bi¿ovski’s poetry was formally conservat tive and she was praised most of all for the purity of her speech rather than for the quality of her poetry. Rab and Bluvshtain should have been the candidates for the role of new-accent poetess although since Rab composed free rhythmic poems her use of the new accent would have been less apparent to her contemp porary readers—and less dramatic. Among the male writers of the era, then, it was Shlonsky, thought to be the most rhythmically skillful and innovative, who was credited with composing in final-stress Hebrew—and who in the course of his career earned a reputation as a symbol of New Hebrew literature and the rebel-heir to Bialik’s poetics with its distinctly Ashkenazic rhythm. Among the women, it was the poet most associated with the miracle of the revival of Heb brew speech and the one whose biography was that of the ultimate Modern Heb brew speaker whose use of the new accent garnered the most attention, rather than the poet who was most able to do things with words or rhythm. The new accent signified differently for male and female poets. As I will demonstrate, this difference was consistent with the reception of women’s poetry and with the gendering of authenticity itself. The gendered politics of new-accent poetry that still play a role in contempor rary scholarship derive in part from a number of prior assumptions about femin ninity and language. In Hebrew culture the new accent was a metonymy for contemporary spoken Hebrew and was associated with women who, in the critic cism of the period, were most often perceived as verbally rather than textually expressive. Nationalist culture also associated women with the natural or mothe er ’s method of learning Hebrew—although the majority of Hebrew schoolteache ers in...