The Woman’s Voice in Modern Hebrew Poetry from Lea Goldberg to Efrat Mishori

Dr. Rachel Tzvia Back

Rachel Tzvia Back was born in Buffalo, New York, the granddaughter of immigrants from Israel. She studied at Yale University, Temple University, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the 1980s, Back returned to Israel, where she has lived ever since. Her poetry collections include Azimuth (2001), The Buffalo Poems (2003), On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999–2005 (2007), and A Messenger Comes (2012). Her poems have been anthologized in the volume After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (2008). Back’s poetry examines the devastating cycles of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through open, investigative forms. She has described her own work as political “but political always from the most personal of places, from the heart, from the home.”

A noted translator of Hebrew, Back has translated the work of Lea Goldberg in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (2005), which won a PEN Translation Prize, and On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg (2017). She also translated In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (2014), which won the TLS Risa Dobm/Porjes Translation Award in 2016 and was a finalist for the National Translation Award in Poetry. She has translated many important Hebrew writers, including Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Dahlia Ravikovitch, and Haviva Pedaya. She was the primary translator of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (2009). Her critical work includes the monograph Led by Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe (2002). She lives in Galilee and teaches at Oranim Academic College near Haifa.